Butcher's dozen
( Eliot Ness - 2 )
Max Allan Collins
Max Allan Collins
Butcher's dozen
PROLOGUE
September 23, 1935
CHAPTER 1
If the face of Cleveland had been cut by a knife, Kingsbury Run would have been the scar. A rank, sooty gulley just southeast of downtown, the Run was barren but for brown patches of weeds and brush and the occasional rusting tin can or broken bottle. And, of course, rails and switches and motionless freight cars, as here was where the city's trains made their escape to the suburbs and beyond, to Youngstown and Pittsburg and points east.
While commuters were carried home by rapid transit lines to the comfort of tree-shaded streets and landscaped lawns and ritzy residences, less affluent, nonpaying passengers also traveled by rail to and from this dirty, desolate ravine, bordered by the prisonlike walls of factories and warehouses. Whether hobos by choice or circumstance, the men in tattered clothing who walked through this vale of tears were constantly reminded of who they were (and weren't) and what they had (and had not) by the industry that surrounded the Run, the same industry that had created wealth for some and livelihoods for others and ugliness for everyone.
The air in the bone-dry creek bed that was the Run was an affront to eyes and nose alike; beneath the dried-up bed, water still flowed, diverted underneath into sewers, surfacing as a foul, stagnant pool atop the channel flowing into the Cuyahoga River. Nearby, near the train tracks, scattered about the hillside, was the shantytown where so many of the nameless, out-of-work men had made a pathetic home on a stench-fouled stretch of real estate no one could begrudge them.
On this chilly fall afternoon, darting through brownish-gray weeds and scrub brush that clung to the craggy earth like clumps of hair stubbornly gripping a balding scalp, two boys from a nearby low-income neighborhood were using the Run as a playground. Prospecting for treasure amongst the refuse, running back and forth across the railroad tracks, plucking the occasional incongruous sunflower, the boys in their aimless adventuring led themselves to the rubble-strewn sixty-foot promontory known as Jackass Hill.
Jimmy, laughing, charged down the steep, weedy hill, knowing the younger boy couldn't catch him. The boys were not brothers, but each was wearing his own brother's threadbare clothes. They'd been playing tag, fifteen-year-old James Waggner and thirteen-year-old Peter Kester, and Jimmy, small for his age, was enjoying the natural superiority of being the oldest. Scrambling, stumbling, Jimmy careened into a bush at the foot of the hill and, twisting as he fell, found himself suddenly sitting down. The bush had cushioned him, but his pride was wounded. Above him, hands on hips, atop Jackass Hill, Petey was laughing.
"Nice play, Shakespeare!" the kid called. Jimmy felt his face burn and he began to push himself up.
But his hand settled on something cold; at first he thought it was a tree limb, but his eyes told him it was another sort of limb altogether.
Jimmy shot to his feet; his heart was pounding; he tried to swallow.
Two legs extended from under the thicket. Their flesh was white, very white, above black shoes. The brush overtook the legs just above the knees, but everything you could see of this guy (and it seemed to Jimmy to be a man) was bare.
"Petey, get down here!"
"What is it? Ya tear your trousers or somethin'?"
"Get down here, I said!"
The younger boy made a face, then came scuffing down the hillside.
"What's the big deal, anyway?"
"That," Jimmy said, and pointed.
"What is it?" The boy was backing up; he stood somewhat behind Jim-my, peeking around.
"I think it's a dead guy," Jimmy said. "I'm takin' a closer look."
"Yeah. Good idea." But Petey stayed put, while Jimmy moved forward.
"Maybe he's just sleeping," Petey offered.
"Mister!" Jimmy said as he began brushing the branches of the bush aside. "Mister, wake-"
But he didn't bother finishing his suggestion.
He was looking at the rest of the man with the black socks-or anyway, as much of him as there was to look at.
Stepping back as if he'd been burned, the branches snapping back, Jimmy swallowed thickly, his mouth dry, eyes popping.
"What's wrong, Jimmy?"
"He ain't got no head," Jimmy said.
"What?"
Jimmy swallowed again. "And that ain't all."
"Huh?"
"He ain't got no thing, either."
"No thing?"
"No dick.'
"No dick?"
"No dick."
The younger boy touched his groin and grimaced. "I'm not gonna look."
"You better not," Jimmy agreed. "You might puke or something."
"Y-you didn't."
"I'm older."
"Maybe… maybe I will look."
"Don't."
Petey thought about it. Still planted in the same spot, he said, "You think somebody cut the guy's head off?"
Jimmy nodded. "And his dick."
"Is there blood all over?"
"I don't see any."
"I–I wonder where they are."
"Who?"
"Not who, stupid… where they are-his head and his thing."
"Well, I'm not looking for 'em."
"Me either," Petey said, shivering. "We oughta do something. We oughta get help."
"I don't think anything's gonna help that guy."
"We better find somebody and tell them."
Jimmy agreed, and skirting the hill, they trudged up the incline at the edge of the Run, which was as steep as Jackass Hill itself, glancing behind them as they went, as if the corpse might get up and follow.
Panting, they stopped at the run-down frame building on the corner of Forty-ninth and Praha; a man was sitting on the wooden steps in front of the sagging gray rooming house. He was a big almost-handsome blond man in a red and black plaid shirt and gray pants, clothing that was not at all fancy, but neither did it have the frayed, ill-fitting look of what the two boys were wearing. The man seemed to Jimmy to be almost as pale as the headless, thingless corpse.
"Where's the fire, fellas?" the man asked pleasantly; his teeth were very white in a wide smile; his light blue eyes seemed to smile, too.
"There's a guy down there," Jimmy said.
"And he doesn't have no thing," Petey said.
"Really," the man said. He rose, smiled, stretched, as if awaking from a nap. "Well, why don't I call somebody for you, then?"
"Would you, mister?" Jimmy asked. He looked toward the ramshackle house. "They got a phone in there?"
"Sure," the man said. He patted the boy on the shoulder. "I'll call the railroad dicks."
Petey winced at the word "dicks."
"Now," the man said, smiling back at them as he climbed the rickety steps, "why don't you go on back and stand guard, till help comes?"
Jimmy looked at Petey.
Petey looked at Jimmy.
"Do we got to, mister?" Jimmy asked.
"Yes," the man said. He smiled like something was funny, but his voice was somber: "It's your civic duty."
And the boys went back to the Run. They stood at the edge of Jackass Hill, looking mutely toward the black socks extending from the brown bushes.
Hardly fifteen minutes had gone by when two railroad detectives arrived, and within half an hour sirens announced the arrival of Cleveland city cops-several uniformed men and a pair of detectives.
The uniformed men stayed up at the top of the incline, keeping sightseers away. The pair of detectives descended; neither man wore a topcoat, but it was cold enough for their breaths to smoke.
One of the detectives looked so young he
might have been the other detective’s son; his name was Albert Curry, and he was a pasty-faced, cherubic man of twenty-seven who looked twenty. The man he was following down the step incline into the ravine was Martin Merlo, a tall, thin, serious-looking individual with glasses. He might have been a school teacher. He was, instead, one of the best homicide detectives in the bureau-partnered, at his own request, with Curry, the city's youngest detective.
Curry, whose first assignment was to partner with Merlo, and who this late Monday afternoon was going out on a murder case for the first time, had no idea why the older, well-respected cop had requested him. But he was not complaining; he felt lucky to be here.
Lucky, that is, until he saw the man with no head and black socks.
"Judas priest," Curry said, and he turned away and threw up in a nearby bush.
Merlo came over and put his hand on Curry's shoulder as the younger cop bent forward, hands on his knees, staring whitely at what had been in his stomach.
"I'm okay, Detective Merlo," Curry said.
"Try not to puke on any body parts," Merlo said, not unkindly, slapping him on the back.
Merlo, notepad in hand, pearl-gray fedora tilted back on his head expos-ing his professorial brow, began questioning the two boys. The two railroad dicks, a middle-aged stocky guy and a slim guy about thirty, both in rumpled brown suits, got them dirty by kneeling in sandy earth perhaps twenty feet from the bush under which the corpse lay. They began digging with their hands, as if rooting for truffles.
Curry, feeling dizzy but better, approached them. "What are you men doing?" he asked.
"Looked disturbed here," the stocky one said. He had a face as rumpled as his suit.
"Looked disturbed?" Curry asked.
"The ground," said the slim one. "I think something's buried here
… hell-oh!"
And he withdrew from the ground his harvest: a human head, which he grasped by its long dark hair. The eyes were half-lidded, staring at Curry blankly, out of a round, jug-eared face.
Curry didn't feel so good.
But he'd be all right; Christ knew there was nothing left in his stomach to puke up.
"Bingo," the stocky one said, and withdrew his hand from the sand and held up his palm; in it was what might have been a turnip but was in fact a severed human penis.
And Curry stumbled back to his bush and found that something had remained in his stomach, after all.
Merlo was in the process of dismissing the young boys; they had been helpful, but (Merlo told Curry, as the latter stumbled over, wiping his mouth) rounding up these body parts was nothing a kid should see. Curry couldn't have agreed more.
Meanwhile, back at the corpse, the railroad dicks were trying to put the puzzle together.
"I tell you it ain't his," the stocky one was saying.
"The dick?" the other dick asked.
"No, you moron. The head. The head belongs to a guy in his late forties, early fifties maybe. Looks like he'd be kinda heavyset. That body is a young guy's body."
Merlo joined them. The head had been placed on the ground above the neck of the corpse. The penis had been placed in the correct general area as well.
"The genitals don't match, either," Merlo said dispassionately. "Torso is white as snow, head and penis have a peculiar discoloration."
"So would yours," said the slim one skeptically, "if somebody hadda whacked 'em off without so much as a howdy-do."
"Yeah, and where's the goddamn blood?" asked the stocky one.
"Not here," Merlo admitted.
Curry approached, tentatively. "Detective Merlo… if that head doesn't match the body, doesn't that mean we have two homicides?"
Merlo nodded. He gestured toward nothing in particular. "Scout the area, why don't you. Maybe you'll turn something up."
Curry nodded back and began a reluctant search. Not thirty feet away, under more brush, was the other headless corpse. This oak-colored, stocky, emasculated body seemed a match for the items the railroad dicks had dug up in the sand.
Also under the brush was a dark blue suit coat with a B.R. Baker Com-pany label, and a white shirt and underwear. All three garments were stiff as cardboard in places where they were stained a reddish brown.
"Finally found some blood," Curry told Merlo, handing him the pile of clothes.
"They weren't killed here, then," Merlo said, eyes narrowing. "These look like they belong to the older, heavier guy's clothes; he was killed wearing them, but not here. Both bodies were drained of blood, somewhere else, and in the case of the older man possibly treated with some chemical, God knows why."
"Preservation?"
"Good guess, but why? A murderer should want his victim to decom-pose. Why preserve evidence?"
"Decay attracts attention; preservation might delay the bodies being found."
"Maybe," Merlo shrugged, his expression like that of a math teacher pondering a problem. "But in Kingsbury Run, who'd notice the smell?"
"Sir, how could somebody haul these bodies here without being seen?"
"He may have done it after dark; or maybe he was seen. Only who could see him, but some 'bo?"
"Is that who these men are? Were? Hobos?"
Merlo looked in the direction of the shantytown. "It's our job to find out, isn't it?"
About seventy-five feet from the second body was more earth that looked "disturbed." Curry (now wearing gloves) found the second head and the second penis buried there. He had nothing left in his stomach, by this point, and was getting numb to the horror of the afternoon. Dusk was settling in, threatening evening, and the dimness gave less reality to the round head he cupped in his palm. It had a young, curiously innocent face, male but with feminine lips.
"Who's that you have there?" Merlo asked with a thin smile. "Yorick?"
"Who?"
"Never mind. Let's put the puzzle together."
The body parts all matched up now, but at this hour it took flashlights to prove it.
"I'd say the older one was about forty-five," Merlo said to Curry as they stared down at the reconstructed corpse. "About five six. Dark hair. Some decomposition. Killed before the other, I'd say. Coroner will fix that, soon enough."
They walked to the other, younger corpse. Night had overtaken dusk, but the black sky was lit somewhat by the glow of the open-hearth furnaces of the steel mills.
"This poor bastard," said Merlo, flashing the light on the white body, "looks younger than you, Curry."
Curry said, "Flash that on his hands."
Merlo did, one hand at a time.
"See that?" Curry asked, kneeling, pointing to the dead man's wrists.
Merlo nodded. "Rope burns."
Soon the boys from the county morgue were placing the torsos on stretchers and the body parts in separate wicker baskets and began hauling them away. Curry and Merlo watched from a distance, atop the incline of Kingsbury Run, near their parked unmarked car.
"How do you read this, Detective Curry?"
"A madman did this."
"Could be a crime of passion," Merlo suggested. "Love triangle gone awry."
"What, a woman did this?"
Merlo smiled patiently. "No. I think this is a man's work, all right."
Curry thought about that.
Then he asked, "Why am I here, sir?"
"Call me Martin, or Marty. All right, Al?"
"Okay," Curry said, smiling a little. "But why me?"
"Don't you know?" Merlo asked with his own wry smile. "You're a he-ro."
That embarrassed Curry. He knew what Merlo was referring to: traffic cop Curry had pulled several people, including a small child, from a burning car; he got good press in a city where the cops seldom got good press and was promoted to detective.
"You didn't buy your badge," Merlo said. "That's a rarity in Cleveland, these days. I wanted an honest cop to work with-that meant a new cop, a fresh, young one. An apple that hadn't got spoiled yet."
"Oh," said Curry. He didn't know whether to
feel complimented or in-sulted. "The force is in a bad way, isn't it?"
"There are good people," Merlo said, looking down into the darkness of the Run, "and bad ones, and those in between. We start out good, most of us, and drift into that in-between place. With you at my side, my boy, perhaps I can help us both from drifting all the way to that other place."
They stood silently for a while.
Then Curry blurted: "I believe there are evil people in the world."
"Do tell," Merlo said, watching the morgue boys climb the incline with wicker baskets in hand. They might have been carrying their laundry.
"We'll have a new mayor soon," said Curry. "Things may change."
"Don't hold your breath," Merlo said, "unless it's just to keep the smell of the Run out of your nostrils."
In less than three months, the new mayor would appoint Eliot Ness safety director of the city of Cleveland, and the young former T-man would indeed begin cleaning up Cleveland's corrupt department. And both Curry and Merlo would benefit.
But right now, detectives Curry and Merlo were wrapped in the darkness of the night and the Run and the evil that man was so obviously capable of; and the only light in this night was from the steel mills.
Not far away, standing in the darkness of the backyard of a run-down rooming house, a big almost-handsome blond man in a red and black plaid shirt was watching the two detectives and smiling.
ONE
July 1-26, 1937
CHAPTER 2
Searchlights stroked the night sky in alternating shades of red, white, and blue; a blimp glided into their cross fire, hovering above modernistic buildings poised along the lakefront, like the set of some fantastic science-fiction film. Moving beams of light rose from behind the lagoon theater and fanned out, painting the dark clouds with an aurora borealis.
On this cool if humid Saturday evening, wide-eyed visitors wandered a world that seemed quite apart from both Cleveland and the depression that racked it. Just two blocks from Public Square, citizens fleeing reality were greeted by seven seventy-foot pylons whose flat surfaces were rendered red, white, and blue by lighting. Beyond, for fifty cents admission, one could stroll, or take an open-air bus or grab a rickshaw to ride upon, freshly paved lanes through the immaculately landscaped gardens of the sprawling one hundred and fifty acres of the Great Lakes Exposition. Divided by its terrain into an upper and lower level, the expo's gifts to Clevelanders on the occasion of the city's hundredth birthday included starkly modern exhibition halls, where one might experience, via dioramas, models, and wall-size photographs, "The Romance of Iron and Steel"; an "International Village," where sidewalk cafes and shops sold authentic foods, drinks, and curios from forty countries; and a vast midway, where Spook Street, the "Strange as It Seems" museum, and the Midget Circus vied for attention.
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