Blood & Rust

by S. A. Swiniarski

  “Look, the nigger bastard attacked me, look!” He jerked his hands and ended up shrugging his shoulder at the bandage on the side of his head.

  “The man’s dead, Mr. Alessandro. Show him some respect.”

  Larry Alessandro spat at Stefan’s feet. “I ain’t got to show respect for no nigger living or dead.”

  Stefan looked at the spot of moisture on the floor. “Spitting in public is a misdemeanor, Mr. Alessandro.” He looked up and said, “It spreads TB.”

  Larry opened his mouth and Stefan said, “Shut that trap for a moment and let me explain something to you. We have a dead body, and as long as I have someone to hang for it, all the paperwork comes out nice and tidy. I like nice and tidy paperwork.”

  “But—”

  “You have to give me a reason not to shove you into a hole where everyone can forget your ugly mug ever existed.” Stefan walked up and leaned over Larry and said, “Like what happened. Tell me.”

  “He attacked me—”

  “You keep saying that. I want details, Larry. I want your life story from the point you first saw this man.”

  “Goddamn it,” Larry muttered. “You want to know what happened? I’ll tell you what the fuck happened. Me and a bunch of other guys were minding our own business down in the flats. Under the bridge, passing the bottle around, and something starts screaming at us—”

  “Who was screaming?”

  Larry ignored the question. He had started the story, and the words were tumbling out. “It was the worst noise I’d ever heard. The sound of an animal in pain, like a dog that’d had its back broke. But you could tell a man was making the sound. Didn’t end, it just kept getting closer and closer. Before we could tell what direction that sound was coming from, this blood-soaked jig jumps out of the darkness at me.”

  “He was already covered with blood?”

  “He screamed something about the devil in me, or the devil in him. How he had to get it out. Then he proceeds to bite my fucking ear off. That boy just wasn’t right in the head. The others pushed him off of me, and if you saw the way he was looking at all of us, you’d have started picking up pipes and bricks yourself. But we never touched him. We circled around each other, none of us wanted close to the bastard, the way he looked.”

  Stefan looked at Larry and decided he believed him. What he said matched the scene he had come upon last night, and it matched up with what the doctor had said about the death of his John Doe.

  “Had you ever seen this man before last night?”

  “No.”

  “Where did he come from, what direction?”

  “What the fuck does that matter?”

  “It matters to me, and I think that’s all you have to worry about right now.”

  Larry shook his head and shrugged. “From the south I think, back toward where the tracks feed into the tower.”

  Stefan went over the story a few more times with Larry, then he had an ambulance come to the Central Station and pick him up. Larry wasn’t too enthusiastic about going. He was even less enthusiastic when Stefan told him that the man who had bitten him had been deathly sick. But Stefan managed to package him for the trip to St. Vincent’s despite his objections. Even if what John Doe had wasn’t something as contagious as TB, Larry needed his ear fixed.

  Stefan found himself hoping it was TB, even though he’d been exposed to all that blood. TB or some other unexceptional, earthly sickness. John Doe’s pronouncements about the Devil made Stefan uneasy.

  When he went back up to his desk, he saw Nuri Lapidos there, talking on the phone.

  “I thought you went home already—”

  Nuri held up a hand and spoke into the phone, “Yes. Yes. I’m sorry, honey. Something came up, on the trip home in fact. Well, it’s sort of gruesome. These two bodies—okay, I won’t tell you any more.” Nuri looked up at Stefan and shrugged. “Maybe another time. Love you, too, bye.” Nuri hung up the phone, and looked up at Stefan. “I did start home. Missed a date, too.”

  Stefan looked and saw that Nuri’s normally impeccable suit was splattered with mud, and his trouser legs were covered with burrs. “Where’ve you been?”

  “I’ve had a thorough introduction to a new part of town, Kingsbury Run, searching for body parts.”

  “What?”

  “You haven’t heard? I thought the story’d be all over the station by now.”

  “I’ve been busy,” Stefan said, “questioning a witness about a death last night.”

  “Well, we have two pretty mysterious deaths down by the railroad tracks. Two men, heads and privates cut off, the bodies cleaned of blood and laid out neatly as you please by the tracks.”

  “Lord save us.” Stefan sat down at his desk.

  “The coroner has the bodies now.” Nuri shook his head and pulled a package of cigarettes out of his pocket. He offered one to Stefan.

  Stefan shook his head, and Nuri took out a cigarette for himself. He lit it, and took a deep drag. “Why do that to someone?” Nuri muttered, more to himself than to Stefan. “Why mutilate a corpse?”

  “There is evil in the world.” Stefan looked down at his desk. There was a note slipped in at the corner of his blotter. Stefan pulled it out.

  “Yes, I know,” Nuri said. “But evil usually has some rationale behind it. Someone has a reason.”

  Stefan nodded, reading the note. There’d been a phone message for him while he was questioning Alessandro. It took him a second to place the name, “Sean McCutcheon.” Fatigue had eroded some of his memory. Then it came to him, the youngish doctor last night, Errol Flynn mustache. It hadn’t registered at first because the note omitted the “Doctor.” The note was vague, just a name and phone number. Stefan wondered if it meant that Doctor McCutcheon had identified the cause of death.

  Nuri was still talking, watching the smoke collect above his head. “It’s the work of a crazy man. That’s the obvious conclusion.”

  Stefan picked up the phone and started dialing. “You don’t think it is?”

  Nuri shook his head. “When it comes down to it, it ain’t my case. It’s just that I have an eerie feeling. There was a methodical, almost ritualistic feeling to the scene, like it was some sort of warning.”

  The phone started ringing, and after a few moments Stefan heard a muffled, “Hello?”

  “Doctor McCutcheon?” Stefan said.

  There was a mumble and a rustling on the other end, and Stefan could picture the doctor crawling out of bed. What time was it anyway?

  After a few minutes the doctor spoke, “Yes, yes. Detective Ryzard?”

  “Yes.” Obviously he’d been expecting the call. “I’m sorry if I woke you up.”

  “No matter. Just came off of a long shift, that’s all.” He yawned, “But I thought you should know what happened.”

  Something in the way the doctor phrased that made Stefan uneasy. It must have shown on his face because Nuri sat up and looked at him. “What’s the matter?”

  Stefan waited a few moments before he said, “What happened, Doctor?”

  “The man you brought in last night. His body is gone.”

  There was a minute or so of silence before the doctor said, “Detective? Are you still there?”

  “Yes,” Stefan took a few more moments to let the words sink in. “What do you mean gone?”

  “The body’s gone missing. Somehow the hospital lost it.”

  “How do you lose a body?”

  Nuri leaned over and asked, “Who lost a body?”

  “I’m as mad as you are,” Doctor McCutcheon said. “I don’t know. But the fact is, the body is gone. The guard down in the morgue swears that someone from the coroner’s office came by with all the right paperwork and signed out the cadaver. But the coroner’s office says they didn’t, and no one can find the paperwork.”

  “So someone stole it?” Stefan asked. Who would steal a body?

  “Someone stole a body?” Nuri asked, his voice taking on a layer of incredulity.

&nbs
p; “I don’t know,” the doctor said. “Who knows if the guard’s telling the truth? He’s lying about the paperwork; he could be trying to cover up some sort of administrative incompetence. The hospital’s put him on leave until they straighten this out.”

  “What’s the guard’s name?” Stefan asked.

  “Mullen, Edward Mullen. You can contact him through the hospital if you need to.” The doctor yawned. “That’s all I have for you. Sorry about the mess up.”

  “Thank you, Doctor.” Stefan slowly hung up the telephone.

  5

  Thursday, September 26

  Stefan Ryzard sat in the upper deck of Municipal Stadium, among a crowd of 150,000 people, trying not to think of death or Edward Mullen. The crowd was a strange mix, men in suits and hats next to men in overalls, young women in flowery hats, old women with beaded veils and black dresses. It was a random mix of everyone in the city, everyone linked only by the common gestures, the common responses, standing and sitting as one.

  Below him, lit by electric arcs, sat the altar, tiny with distance.

  The words of the mass echoed throughout the stadium, the priest’s Latin distorted by the public address system. Midnight mass was supposed to be the culminating religious event of the Seventh National Eucharist Congress.

  Stefan had wanted to reaffirm part of his crumbling faith. He had thought of going to St. John’s, seeing his old pastor, Piotr Gerwazek, but he had never managed it. He hadn’t been to a mass since Mary’s funeral, and it had been so long now that he was afraid to see people he knew, afraid of the questions that Father Gerwazek might ask.

  When he heard of the great mass here, he thought he might slip back into his faith anonymously, in the midst of a crowd of strangers. Somehow it didn’t work like that.

  He sat with thousands of people, here for the mass, and couldn’t help thinking of them as spectators rather than worshipers. The setting was dissonant, too. This wasn’t God’s house, at least not the God to whom the wine below was being raised. The religion practiced here had Mel Harder pitching, and Earl Averill playing center field.

  He sat and watched the ceremony, trying and failing to gain any sort of connection with what was going on down on the field. The effort left him feeling, more than ever, that God had walked away from him, and from everything around him.

  He left before they began communion.

  Absent the thronging crowd, the parking lot was desolate. As Stefan walked away, he could still hear the words of God, amplified and reechoing, with no one out here to listen.

  Stefan got into his blue Ford V-8, shutting the door on the sound. He drove slowly, as if he were sneaking away.

  Almost inevitably his thoughts turned to death. The bodies that had been found in Kingsbury Run had distracted the city from thoughts of faith. The day the Congress had opened, people talked about how close the city had seemed to come toward God. It had taken a mere twenty-four hours for the mood to shift. The Plain Dealer was calling it the most bizarre double murder in Cleveland’s history.

  It was almost as if the bodies had been left as a warning against the arrogance of believing oneself so close to God.

  Stefan turned east, away from home. He wasn’t quite ready to face his empty apartment yet. His thoughts were too dark. He wove through the east side of downtown, passing the nightclubs and the lights of Short Vincent. He thought of stopping, but he didn’t. Someone would recognize him, and because he was a cop, they would ask him about the murders in the Run.

  He had no answers for them.

  And no one cares about the man who died in the back of my car.

  It was an evil irony that the man he had taken to the hospital had died the same evening as the headless men in the Run. The more spectacular murders had stolen any eulogy that the anonymous man might have had. Despite the disappearance of the body, it wasn’t even an official police investigation. He was a nameless colored tramp—none thought him worth the trouble.

  Even Edward Mullen the guard that had lost the corpse, seemed incredulous that Stefan was making such a fuss about the missing corpse. Stefan had taken him to the Central Station, and questioned him, and got nothing more than the repeated story that the coroner’s office had picked the body up. In the end, he’d gotten nowhere and had let the man go.

  Even so, Stefan had felt something dark had touched the man, something he was hiding. But it wasn’t something Stefan could put a finger on, much less prove.

  It was another fragment of evil that Stefan couldn’t do anything about. Another empty case that would go nowhere. Another mystery ignored and filed away. Another victim who would be forever mute—

  Almost out of some sense of predestination, Stefan found himself driving toward the dead end of East Forty-Ninth. Up ahead, beyond the end of the street, was the gully of Kingsbury Run.

  He parked the car and stepped out into the cool night air.

  He stepped over the barrier at the end of the street and began walking along the top of the bluffs on the southern side of the run. After a while he stopped. He stood on top of a hill overlooking the bottom of the Run, sixty feet or so below him. The scene below was inky black, except for where a lone railroad signal tower cast an eerie glow around the tracks below him.

  Stefan had lived in Cleveland all his life, but he’d never known that this plot of ground overlooking the waste of Kingsbury Run was worthy of a name. However, in the last three days, Jackass Hill had attained a measure of fame. The bodies had been uncovered just below where he stood, discovered by a pair of teenage boys playing in the rugged terrain.

  Stefan stood there a long time, letting thoughts of futility drain from him. He stared into the impenetrable darkness, as if there were some insight to be found there, some relief. If he had been younger, he might have prayed.

  Clouds above him erased every feature of the sky, the only light in heaven the reflection of the city’s electric glow.

  A voice emerged from the darkness. “Troubled, aren’t you?”

  The sudden break of the stillness startled Stefan. He whirled upon the voice, his hand darting toward the holster at his shoulder. “Who’s there?” he called out. His voice, at least, was firm, not revealing his sudden startlement.

  A figure stepped from the shadow of a twisted elm, so close that Stefan found it unbelievable that the man could have approached him without being heard.

  “A fellow wanderer in the darkness,” the man said, spreading his hands. “Nothing more.”

  In the distance a train whistle screamed into the night.

  Seeing the man, Stefan stopped reaching for his holster and changed the movement of his hand into a brushing of his jacket. “This isn’t the safest place to wander,” Stefan said. At first, Stefan thought the man might be a tramp, here to catch a ride on the passing freight. But there was something in the man’s manner that seemed to run counter to that impression.

  It wasn’t his clothes. He had the overalls of a laborer, and a dark porkpie set far back on his brow. But there was something in his bearing that set him apart from any of the unemployed army that the times had loosed upon the city. Hard times had beaten itself into the posture of such men, but the man facing him had a confident stance that bordered on arrogance.

  “Then why do you wander here?” the man asked him. He spoke with a sly smile that Stefan didn’t trust. It was a smile that changed into something else by the time it reached his eyes, eyes that were cold, remote, nearly colorless in the dimness.

  “Unease,” Stefan said, more of an answer than the stranger merited. He turned around, finding the stranger’s gaze uncomfortable.

  The man placed his hands in his pockets and stepped up next to Stefan. “This is an uneasy place.”

  Below them, the sound of a train grew louder, a screech and a roar in the darkness. Its light began to wash the eastern distance, preceding it.

  Stefan doubted many tramps would try and hop this train here. This was an uneasy place now. “What do you know of what happened here
?”

  “Murder,” the man said. “Murder most foul, as in the best it is, but this most foul, strange, and unnatural.”

  Stefan looked across at the man.

  He shook his head, “I was an actor once, a long time ago. Ah, that things have come to this.”

  “What things?” Stefan asked. He had a feeling that he had run across someone who knew about the murders. Instinct tensed him, readying him for a fight, or a chase.

  The train’s whistle screamed again, close enough that Stefan could hear motion in the sound. He turned to face his companion again, memorizing the profile as the other spoke.

  “Things I cannot discuss with you.” There was an ironic smile on the man’s face. As the train shuddered by below them, its lamps washed them in a white light. For a moment Stefan had a complete unobscured view of his companion.

  His brows, and small pointed beard were black, like holes cut into his face. His mustache was fading to gray at the sides. His flesh was a perfect, even white, no marks, no scars, not even a shadow of a beard beyond the edges of his goatee. His eyes were a deep gray.

  “If you know anything about the murders, I think you should tell me.” Stefan had to raise his voice above the sound of the train passing below them. Boxcar after boxcar rolled by, each of them mute and remote.

  The man was laughing, a soft chuckle that somehow cut through the rumble of the passing train. “So typical of the police, so little subtlety, so little heed of the consequences the truth might bring.”

  “If you ...” Stefan’s words stopped in his throat when he realized that he had not told this man he was a detective. His hand began reaching for his gun again. The train below seemed to have found the rhythm of his heart, the rachet of the rails marking the time of his pulse. “You’d better explain yourself, or we’re going to take a trip to the station.”

  Something akin to panic gripped Stefan. He felt sweat in the small of his back, and he tasted fear, like blood, in the back of his throat. There was no accounting for it; the man he faced had made no threatening moves.