Ness ignored the khaki-clad fellow at the desk in the outer office and went right into the sheriff's sanctuary. Sheriff O'Connell was a whale beached on a leather sofa pushed against a wall decorated with various civic awards from the suburbs he serviced. The sheriff was snoring and a copy of the Police Gazette was draped open across his stomach.
Ness slammed the door, rattling its glass, keeping the secretary or deputy or whatever-the-hell he was back out in the outer office, and waking up the sheriff of Cuyahoga County.
O'Connell's tiny dark eyes were wide as he gazed up at the safety director, surprised and disoriented for a moment; then he sat up on the sofa, his eyes turning hard and his face red with anger.
"Even God needs an appointment to see me," he said, getting up on his feet, looking down at the six-foot Ness.
Ness looked back at him, making no attempt to hide his disgust. "Well, I'm sure the devil can walk right in," he told the sheriff. "So I took the same liberty. Now why don't you sit down. We have to talk."
O'Connell glared at Ness, though the red was fading from his face as he said, "All right. But I think I'd like one of my deputies as a witness. To make some notes."
"I don't think you will." Ness gestured to the sheriff's tidy desk. "Sit down, Sheriff."
Sighing out his nose, the sheriff moved behind the desk with an agility that belied his size and folded his hands on a green desk blotter. His fingers were thick, the hands massive. His eyes were lidded with contempt.
It was the Wednesday after Frank Dolezal's arrest. Dolezal, who had made two suicide attempts, was alive and somewhere in this building, in this jail. In all that time Ness had not been able to arrange a meeting with the suspect-or sheriff, for that matter.
"You have a prisoner I'd like to see," Ness told him.
"We have a suspect in the Kingsbury Run investigation," O'Connel said blandly, "if that's what you mean."
"That's what I mean."
"Nobody sees this suspect but my people."
"Including a lawyer?" Ness asked with mock innocence.
They both knew that if the suspect had seen a lawyer, Dolezal would have been released by now, on a writ of habeas corpus.
"He hasn't been indicted yet," the sheriff said.
"And the court isn't allowed to appoint an attorney until after he's been indicted. Of course. But a suspect is supposed to be indicted within seventy-two hours. You've had Mr. Dolezal in custody for six days now."
"It's an unusual case. Now I'm a busy man, Mr. Ness. If you don't mind…"
"I do mind, and I've only begun. Your nap and the Police Gazette are just going to have wait."
The sheriff's mouth curled into a sneer, but he said nothing.
"Yesterday you hauled Mr. Dolezal over to the East Cleveland police department," Ness said, "for a lie detector test. Why did you bother driving over there when just across the way we have a modern facility which Chief Matowitz and I would have been glad to make available to you?"
"I prefer to keep my investigation of this case separate from yours."
Ness smiled. "Ah, but Sheriff, there are no rivalries between good men in the pursuit of justice. I haven't been unkind to you in the press, have I?"
"The hell you haven't. Your detectives have been smearing me from-"
"My detectives are men with their own minds and their own way of seeing things and expressing themselves. They have a right to say what they wish, to the press or anyone else. There's a document called the Constitution of the United States, with which you apparently aren't familiar, that guarantees them that right."
The sheriff's mouth twitched. "I have work to do. If you're here to get information about the Dolezal case, I'm afraid I can't give you any. It's confidential."
"Oh, but I'm here to share some information with you."
The sheriff arched an eyebrow. "Such as?"
"Certain scientific findings. As Deputy McFarlin may have told you, I was up in Dolezal's 'murder den,' as you've been referring to it in the papers, the very day you arrested the suspect. I took some scrapings from the bathroom floor."
"So what? We had a chemist check that for us. He found human blood. On a butcher knife, too. Everybody knows that."
"Yes, and I understand the chemist is Deputy McFarlin's brother-in-law. He works for a couple of M.D.'s, I understand."
"That's right."
"Well, I had my scrapings checked as well. Dr. Eckert, a pathologist at Western Reserve University, a completely objective third party, tested them for me. I just got his findings this afternoon."
The sheriff snorted derisively. "What took him so long?"
"He said the high iron content of the deposits around the bathtub feet complicated the tests, made it take days to get accurate results. I have his analysis right here, if you'd like to see it." Ness made a show of reaching for something in his pocket, then abandoned the effort with a wave of one hand, saying, "Actually, it's not complex. I think I can remember exactly the composition of the material, in Dr. Eckert's own scientific phraseology… 'just plain dirt.'"
The sheriff's tiny eyes bugged and he half-rose from his seat. "What?"
"Dirt, Sheriff. No blood, human or animal, present."
O'Connell clearly did not know what to say. Slowly he sat back down.
Ness gestured with an open hand. "Of course, experts on such matters do disagree."
The sheriff put on a tight smile and said, "Mr. Ness. All due respect. With or without bloodstains, we got the Butcher, right here in this jail. You may not like it. It may not help your reputation any
… it may not help you get my job for yourself, for instance… but justice, like you said, is gonna be served."
"Do tell."
"Yeah, I do. Those lie detector tests were positive."
"They're not admissible."
"They point to Dolezal's guilt, nevertheless." The sheriff began counting off items on his fingers. "Andrassy, Wallace, and Polillo frequented his room; he admits it, and his neighbors confirm. They all frequented that bar at Twentieth and Central. He's an admitted sexual pervert. He's given to fits of violence and rage during drinkin' bouts. He lived in proximity of where some of the body parts was found. He was fixing to move out of a place where his rent was paid up a month in advance, because the neighborhood was being searched by fire wardens. Most important, he's confessed."
Ness smiled and raised a forefinger. "Ah. His confession. Like when he confessed throwing the Polillo head, arms, and legs in the lake."
The sheriff shifted in his chair.
"Unfortunately," Ness continued, "after you released the confession to the press, some bad sport pointed out to a certain reporter that Dolezal doing that in January was… unlikely. Unless he sawed a hole in the ice."
The sheriff sighed heavily. "We checked the records and found the lake was ice-covered at that time, yes."
"From the shore out to beyond the breakwall," Ness said. "Somebody must've got their facts mixed up-perhaps whoever was questioning the suspect-because the arms and legs of Flo Polillo were among the body parts that turned up behind that manufacturing plant."
The sheriff shrugged. "We confronted the suspect with those facts."
Ness smiled pleasantly. "And lo and behold-he changed his story. He remembered leaving the arms and legs in that alley. He remembered it was only the head he'd disposed of eleswhere, and not in the lake."
Another shrug. "Well, he mighta got confused about which victim was which. Body parts of two of the woman victims did turn up in Lake Erie, you know."
"But after you 'confronted' him, he sorted it out. Said he burned Polillo's head and buried the skull."
"Never mind all that," O'Connell said, mouth pursed with irritation, eyes moving.
On Monday the sheriff had taken Dolezal, manacled and surrounded by deputies, to Kingsbury Run, so that he might lead them to where he buried Flo Polillo's skull. A few reporters, among them Sam Wild, had been allowed to trail along, at a distance. The suspect had led them up and down, through the sumac bushes and sunflowers, past the infamous stagnant pool where body parts had once floated, but he just couldn't remember where he'd buried Flo's skull. Then under the East Thirty-fourth Street bridge, a deputy spotted a pile of bones.
Dolezal had become hysterical upon sight of them and began babbling that he was sorry for what he'd done. O'Connell gloatingly displayed the discovery to the accompanying press, who took pictures of the sheriff with his prize pile of bones, which weren't the Polillo skull but sufficed-at least until the embarrassed sheriff had to reveal to the press the next day that the bones were those of a dog.
"What really interests me about your excursion into the Run," Ness said, "was that Dolezal was heard, by the reporters, to complain his ribs were hurting him. And he had an ugly shiner as well, I understand."
And another shrug. "He hurt himself. He tried to kill himself twice-you know that."
"How does a man hurt his eye in a suicide attempt, exactly?"
"The second time he tried to do it was in his cell. He used his shoelaces; they broke and he fell to the cement floor."
"There is an automatic reflex action, Sheriff, which makes anyone falling forward throw his arms out in front of him, to protect his face."
"Maybe he was part unconscious at the time. I don't know. I wasn't there."
"Neither, apparently, was your jailer."
"We increased our watchfulness with the suspect. There haven't been no suicide attempts since."
"That's admirable, Sheriff." Ness picked at a hangnail absently. "What luck have you had with the address book?" he asked, referring to the one found in Dolezal's apartment.
"There were twenty-five names in it, and we're checking them out."
"You announced, with some fanfare to the press last Saturday, that in that book was the California address of a sailor. You implied this sailor might be the tattooed male victim who remains unidentified. What have you found?"
"Our investigation is confidential."
"Is the sailor in the address book still alive?"
The sheriff said nothing.
"Well, is he?"
Reluctantly, O'Connell nodded.
"Sheriff," Ness said, leaning forward, his face expressionless, "your investigation is coming unraveled. Cooperate with my people and maybe you won't wind up looking like a complete horses ass. If Dolezal is the Butcher-and I frankly don't think he is-you're going to lose him on procedural matters."
O'Connell's eyes slitted. "What the hell do you mean by that?"
"It's known you kept Dolezal without food or sleep for the first twenty-four hours he was in your custody. You have held him for six days without charging him, refusing to permit relatives to see him, making no effort to get him an attorney. It's obvious that you've used outrageous third-degree tactics, which will undoubtedly come out when Dolezal does finally get a lawyer, whose first move will be to have his client repudiate those confessions as having been made under duress and without counsel."
"The lie detector-"
"Is inadmissible, as I said. Further, Dolezal is an alcoholic, and you've either kept drink from him or provided him with some, or some combination of the two, to get him to admit to anything you wanted him to. I spoke to him before you arrested him, and my feeling is he's a blackout drunk, and these confessions you've wrung out of him may have convinced him that he is the Butcher, when he isn't. Hence, suicide attempts and positive lie-detector results."
The sheriff swallowed thickly; he seemed a little stunned.
"Today," Ness continued evenly, "I spoke to a representative of the civil liberties committee of the Cleveland Bar Association. They're preparing a report on your conduct of this case. I'm helping them." You self-righteous bastard…
Ness pounded the desk with a fist and the sheriff jerked back with surprise. "You stole my case. Your man followed me around and stole my goddamn case. Now you've loused it up, and you're going to pay. I don't want your job-I don't want to be sheriff. But I can guarantee you one thing: They won't elect you dog catcher after this- even though you did manage to track down one dead dog."
The sheriff was trembling with rage, but he said nothing.
Ness stood. "If you cooperate with my office," he said, "perhaps you can salvage your career-and perhaps I can salvage Dolezal as a suspect, or at least as a witness. If he isn't the Butcher, he undoubtedly knows the Butcher-and that's too important for me to allow you to louse up."
Ness walked to the door, and paused. "And one last thing: Get your man off my tail."
Mild surprise crossed the sheriff's face. "What do you mean?"
"I don't know what purpose you think is being served by keeping me shadowed at this point. But stop it. Or I'll 'confront' the next stooge you send and send him home with the sort of swollen eye and sore ribs you can only get in a suicide attempt. If you catch my meaning."
"Look, Ness, I honestly don't know what the hell you're talking about.
"Take your nap and think it over."
Ness slammed the door and rattled the glass again.
After a session with Chief Matowitz and Merlo at Central headquarters, filling them in on his meeting with the sheriff, Ness walked up the cement ramp into the elevated parking lot where his black Ford waited. It was late evening now, and balmily breezy; it had rained this afternoon. He felt good about having unloaded on the sheriff, but wasn't sure how the man would react. It was, to him, one of the great mysteries of life how a man that corrupt could still be proud.
He stopped at a diner on his way home and had a meat loaf dinner. He ate slowly, using a piece of bread to collect all of the gravy, leaving a plate so spotless there was no evidence a meal had been there. A pretty waitress flirted with him a little, talked him into a piece of pecan pie; the girl reminded him of Viv. It gave him a pang that all the meat loaf and pie in the world couldn't cure. Nonetheless, he ate the pie, drank a second cup of coffee, and read the final edition of the Press, in which the sheriff's handling of the Dolezal case rated a skeptical sidebar.
On the way home he thought he was being followed again. It was after dark, as usual, when the car showed up in his rearview mirror; when he slowed to try to identify the driver or vehicle, the car turned off. Goddamn that O'Connell, anyway.
Just approaching nine o'clock, he reached suburban Lakewood. The booth at the mouth of the private drive was empty; the guard had been fired for drinking last week and hadn't been replaced. Ness had been asked, by the Home-owners Association of the small group of boathouses and cottages clustered along Clifton Lagoon, to find a replacement. He hadn't got around to it. Finding an honest retired cop in the Cleveland area was a job for a detective better than himself, Ness feared.
The boathouse was small but massive, a weathered, gray-stone, two-story castle with turrets and a squat central tower and a short stone fence that walled off the modest yard; the castle had a stark, masculine beauty in the moonlight, and was quite unlike its more conventional frame-building neighbors. One of Mayor Burton's financial angels had provided Ness with this hideaway, as a fringe benefit. He parked the Ford in front, right behind where Viv had parked her car (why, even now, did he leave space for her?), and gazed out on the endless gray-blue of the lagoon and the lake beyond. It was a peaceful moment that he enjoyed just about every night-a moment of feeling smaller than the world around him, a feeling that, for some reason, comforted him.
Inside, he slipped out of his suit coat and tossed it over a chair; he was usually neater than that, but was suddenly quite tired. The investigation of recent weeks had been draining, though this was the first he'd really noticed it. He made himself a Scotch off the liquor cart and collapsed on the couch before the fireplace. He sipped the drink till it was gone, and then stretched out on the sofa and soon he was gone, too.
A noise woke him.
For a moment, just a moment, he thought he was back in the Central Avenue rooming house. He sat up on the couch and listened. What had the noise been? The wind? A car going by? He went to the nearest window and looked out and saw nothing but the narrow band of pavement that was the private drive of the division, and the lagoon beyond. And a moon and a very clear night.
A night that he and Viv might well have enjoyed.
It wasn't as if he hadn't missed her. She hadn't been constantly on his mind by any means, but at night, at least, when he had to go upstairs to that double bed without her, he missed his sweet, sassy society girl.
And it wasn't only in bed that he missed her. She was wonderful, crazy company, and smart, so smart. He went up the stairs and sat on the bed and checked his watch. Not quite ten-thirty. She'd be up. He could call her. But did he want to? Did he want her back in his life?
He got up and went to the window. He looked out at the moon. At the lake. Someone was down there.
Standing. On the small space of ground, between the private drive and the lake.
A man. He was tall and looked massive, but Ness couldn't make out a single feature or even what his apparel might be. He was just a dark male shape against the lake.
Ness's mouth tightened; so did his hands, into fists.
That goddamn sheriff had not called off his shadow. Who was it down there? McFarlin?
He rushed down the stairs and was out the front door, ready to challenge the son of a bitch.
But no one was there.
He backed against the door. Listened carefully. He could hear a car; at left, on the winding pavement going up the hill, was the twin glow of taillights. The sheriff's man?
He walked across the paved drive to where the man had been standing. The earth was damp enough from the rain earlier to leave an impression of rather large feet. Ness could see where his shadow had walked to this one spot and stayed put. On the other side of the road were more footprints and a tire track that indicated a car had been parked there.
Back inside, he got himself another Scotch and sat studying the unlit fireplace, wondering why the back of his neck was so prickly. Something-nothing rational, he'd be the first to admit-said to him that the man out there had not been a sheriff's deputy.
He was stretched back out again, on the sofa, just barely asleep, when the phone rang. It was on a stand not far from him, but he had to rise to reach it and was fully awake by the time he said, "Ness," into the mouthpiece.
"This is Merlo."
The voice sounded depressed. Earlier, the usually somber, professorly Merlo had seemed damn near cheerful, when Ness had told him about reading off the sheriff.
"What's up?"
"Dolezal's time," Merlo said glumly. "He got the job done tonight."
"What do you mean?"
"Prisoner requested some cleaning rags, to tidy up his cell."
"So?"
"The sheriff gave them to him and then left him alone there. Third time was the charm."
"Hung himself?"
"How did you guess?"
Ness sighed. Closed his eyes. "I'm a detective."
But it didn't take a detective to figure that the Butcher had, in an oblique way, taken another victim.
With the help, that is, of the sheriff of Cuyahoga County and, Ness bitterly knew, the safety director of the city of Cleveland.