By midmorning Thursday, Ness had tied up the loose administrative ends, which would allow him to go out in the field, and was explaining to his executive assistant, Robert Chamberlin, what the setup would be over the coming weeks.
"I'll be in every Monday morning," Ness said, sitting with his back to his scarred rolltop desk that was against one wall of his roomy wood-and-pebbled-glass office at City Hall. "I'll sign whatever I have to sign from the week before, make a few phone calls to people we've had to put off, and then we'll go over whatever needs going over for the week ahead."
Chamberlin, who sat nearby with his back to one of the several conference tables that filled the central area of the room, nodded and said, "Other than that you'll be unavailable?"
"I may be in and out," Ness said, and shrugged, "but I'd say probably your best bet would be trying me at the boathouse, evenings. And even then it will be catch-as-catch-can."
"Understood," Chamberlin said with a confident twitch of a smile that made his small black mustache curl up at the ends. He was a tall, rangy man of thirty-seven with an oblong, sharp-featured face set off by a strong round jaw, his dark hair slicked back off a high forehead. Like Ness, he was impeccably dressed, wearing a three-piece suit and snappy tie.
Ness was saying, "If I haven't come up with anything in a month, well…"
"We should both start looking for other work, I'd imagine," Chamberlin finished wryly.
"Not a bad idea," Ness said with a half-smile. "I guess if my job goes down in flames, I take you with me. Sorry."
"Don't give that a thought," Chamberlin said with another twitch of a smile. "I'll land on my feet. Lawyers always do."
Ness was grateful for his friends attitude-and Chamberlin was more than just his assistant, was indeed a friend, who'd been handpicked by the safety director when his previous executive assistant had played politics. Oddly, the former holder of that position-John Flynt-physically resembled Chamberlin; they both had the look and manner of British military officers out of Kipling.
Chamberlin checked his watch. "I'd better be getting back to my own office-you have a meeting in a few minutes."
"I'd like you to stick around for that. I don't want you cut off from this investigation."
"Well, thanks. I'll just keep my mouth shut and listen."
"You do, and you're fired."
Before long, Ness's secretary, redheaded, bespectacled Wanda, an efficient, attractive young woman he'd stolen away from the Clerk of Public Service office, ushered in Curry and Merlo. Merlo's brown suit was typically rumpled, his face haggard, haunted. Boyish, bashful Curry seemed intimidated by the older man, staying behind him, deferring to his every breath.
"Sit down, gentlemen," Ness said, gesturing to one of the conference tables, and they did. Chamberlin joined them.
There was a discreet knock at the door, the one that opened on to the hall and said SAFETY DIRECTOR'S OFFICE backward on its pebbled-glass. This door was kept locked, and Ness used a key on his vest chain to open it.
Sam Wild, bow-tied and bright-eyed, shambled in, in his loose-limbed way. He grinned wolfishly at Ness, saying, "You usually don't wait on me hand and foot like this," as the safety director closed and locked the door behind him.
Ness turned to Merlo, Curry, and Chamberlin, their expressions reflecting displeasure at the intrusion, Merlo looking the most annoyed. "I asked Sam to stop by, and to slip in the side door, away from the office staff. I wanted him in on this.
Merlo thought for a moment, his professorly brow creasing, then said, "Director Ness, I don't think it's advisable to have the press present at what you've described as a 'key briefing.'"
Ness gestured for Wild to sit but remained standing himself. "As you all know, I've worked with Sam on several cases, and he's been very helpful. He practically cracked the cemetery-scam racket single-handedly. And he's covering the Safety Director's office full-time for the Plain Dealer — and now that this investigation is coming under the wing of this office, well, I think it's appropriate for him to be here."
"Don't worry, gents," Wild said as he propped a Lucky Strike between his lips, "I'm under strict orders from your chief here not to write anything up till you've got something solid."
"Eliot," Chamberlin said, eyes narrowing, "I really don't think we should be tipping our hand to the opposition."
"We won't be," Ness said. "But keep in mind that the 'opposition' is a homicidal maniac who has the city in a state of panic, under a reign of terror. Part of our function is public relations."
Merlo was wide-eyed. "Public relations?"
"Yes," Ness said calmly. "We need to assure our citizens that their police force is on top of the problem. Doing everything it can to remove this madman from their midst. Mr. Wild's function will be to be a part of the investigation-and his investigative skills are considerable-which will lend his eventual reporting an insider's depth and authority."
Chamberlin said, "You may alienate the other papers."
"I'm keeping that in mind," Ness said. "I'll be monitoring Sam's output, and we'll be holding periodic press conferences and issuing press releases."
Chamberlin shrugged and leaned back in his chair; Merlo had an expression of pained skepticism, while Curry-caught between Merlo and Ness, two men he respected-stayed blank.
"We have ten victims, gentlemen," Ness said. "Nine are white, all were apparently healthy, able-bodied individuals, in the prime of life-between twenty-five and forty-five years. Six are males. Six were found within two to eight days after death. One was not found for two months."
Ness sat on the edge of the conference table.
"There was, Coroner Gerber tells me, relatively little hacking of the tissues," Ness continued, "and relatively few hesitation marks-but the direction of what marks there were indicates we have a right-handed individual."
"Hey, that narrows the field," Wild said cheerfully.
Merlo glanced at him coldly.
"I have spent a good deal of time going over the files in this case," Ness said. "I feel the police have done good work-particularly you, Detective Merlo-but we need to explore new ways of going about this investigation. Any ideas?"
Curry cleared his throat and said, "I think we should assign shifts of men to guard the approaches to the Run and perhaps patrol it."
"Not a good use of manpower, I'm afraid," Ness said. "Of the last five corpses, only one has turned up at the Run."
"What new ideas do you have?" Merlo asked, doing his best to keep impatience out of his voice.
"Well," Ness said, smiling pleasantly, "let's look at the facts. We have most of the bodies turning up in a given area of the city; and we have dismemberments that experts agree show a certain surgical skill. I think somewhere within or very near the Kingsbury Run area there is a well-equipped 'surgery' or 'workshop' or 'laboratory.'"
"A laboratory, in Kingsbury Run?" Merlo said.
"Yes." Ness gestured openhandedly. "It has to be soundproofed, easily cleaned, and there must be storage facilities of some sort-probably refrigeration."
Chamberlin lifted an eyebrow. "There couldn't be many places like that in the Kingsbury Run area."
"If such a workshop exists," Curry said thoughtfully, "we should be able to find and identify it."
"How do we do that, exactly?" Merlo said. "You can't see this lab or workshop or whatever from the outside-and there are hundreds upon hundreds of buildings in that area. Homes, shacks, industrial buildings, warehouses, butcher shops…"
"You go inside," Ness said.
"Without search warrants?" Merlo asked.
Ness smiled smugly. "Have you forgotten I'm in charge of the fire department, as well as the police? That's a rundown ratty section of town-I think it would be prudent to send fire wardens down there to check for building violations. Don't you?"
Merlo began to smile, too. "Yes. Yes. Very good, Mr. Ness."
"Something simple that we can do," Ness said, "is place advertisements and posters around the city asking for information-particularly the discovery of any large quantity of blood."
"That's been done to death," Wild said disgustedly.
"Not in forty-four languages it hasn't, which is what I'm having worked up. We're a city of just under a million people, Mr. Wild, of which seventy percent are foreign born or the sons and daughters of at least one foreign-born parent."
Chamberlin smiled, and so, finally, did Merlo. Curry looked intense. Wild just smirked, sitting in a cloud of Lucky smoke.
Merlo said, "These are good ideas, Director Ness. But I keep coming back to a basic limitation. Take our most recent victim-the fellow who floated by that bridge the other day, like a human jigsaw puzzle we had to try and put together. Even with his hands turning up, we haven't been, able to I.D. him. In a murder case, you talk to the friends, you talk to the relatives. But how can you get a lead when you don't know who the hell's murder it is you're trying to solve?"
Ness pointed a finger at the rumpled detective, as if accusing him. "You've hit it on the head. We have to go back to square one. We have to concentrate on the victims we've identified."
"Andrassy and Polillo," Merlo said. Then he sighed. "But we've been over and over that."
"Not lately," Ness said. "Subsequent murders have a way of taking precedence. Let's start back at Jackass Hill. What do we know about Edward Andrassy?"
Merlo said, without checking any notes, "Well, he lived with his parents on the near West Side. Rooming-house neighborhood. Police record as a drunk, petty brawler, jailed once for carrying a gun. He worked at several hospitals as an orderly, had medical books on gynecology and some of those nudist magazines in his room. He was seen in various saloons with various women, but was known to pick up men, too. He was a minor-league con man-sold toilet articles, peddled aphrodisiacs. The oddest incident we came across was when Andrassy told a friend of his, who'd complained that he and his wife hadn't been able to have a child, that he, Andrassy, was a 'female' doctor. Andrassy offered to examine the wife, and the friend agreed. During the 'exam,' Andrassy committed sodomy on her, with the husband in the room."
"It's like something out of Krafft-Ebing," Ness said, filling the room's shocked silence, shaking his head.
"Who?" Wild asked.
Ness said to Merlo, "You've talked to Andrassy's various girlfriends and boyfriends, obviously?"
"They all check out," Merlo said glumly. "Though we got the runaround from time to time-not all of them are nuts about cooperating with cops."
"That's the problem that runs throughout this case," Ness said with a tight, humorless smile. "We're dealing with vagrants and perverts and petty criminals-none of whom are terribly civic-minded."
Curry said, "But it's their own kind who are being struck down."
"They're individualists," Ness said. "They all think they can take care of themselves. We're the enemy."
Ness buzzed for Wanda, who brought the men coffee; Ness joined them at the conference table and they probed various aspects of the Andrassy killing.
"If Andrassy was an orderly," Chamberlin said, "he may well have met his eventual murderer at one of those hospitals-a doctor or an intern."
"We've checked," Merlo said, wearily matter-of-fact. "And double-checked."
"Tell us about the second victim to be I.D.'ed," Ness said. "Tell us what we know about Florence Polillo."
"Well," Merlo said, again without checking notes of any kind, "she lived in a rooming house at Thirty-two oh five Carnegie Avenue. She paid her rent by relief checks; her landlady reported she was no trouble, other than getting pesky when she drank, which was often. She'd apparently been sterilized in a botched abortion years ago and was all sentimental about children-she played with her landlady's kids and let them use her dolls. She had a big collection of dolls."
Curry said, "She sounds a little nicer than Andrassy."
"Who doesn't?" Merlo said. "But she was, to put it bluntly, a fat, drunken whore. Frequent arrests for street soliciting. She left behind a notebook of addresses, mostly relatives. We talked to taxi drivers, tavern pals, and so on, but got nowhere."
"You had one good suspect, though," Ness prompted.
"Well, yes," Merlo said. "'One-Armed Willie.' A bogus beggar. She lived with him for a while-not long before she got it. They used to hang around together at a seedy saloon near Central and Twentieth. They fought, over what we couldn't ascertain, and he's supposed to have threatened to 'cut her up in little pieces.' Thought we had a live one, but when we looked into it, Willie seemed innocent-of murder that is."
"Those are the two killings we're going to work," Ness said. "Andrassy and Polillo."
Merlo looked frustrated.
"And I want specifically to explore the angle that Andrassy and Polillo may have been acquainted. If we can prove that, if we can show that the Butcher is working the same 'social circle,' if you will, gaining their confidence and slaying them, one by one, we may be on our way to nailing him."
Merlo's eyes narrowed; grudgingly, he nodded his head.
"What I want you to do," Ness said to Merlo, "is work with the fire wardens in the search for the lab, as well as do follow-up interviews on all the upstanding citizens involved in the Andrassy and Polillo cases. Relatives and such."
"What about those citizens who aren't so upstanding?" Merlo asked. "Hobos and barflies?"
"That's not your department." Ness walked over to Curry and said, "Find yourself some smelly, dirty old clothes and lose your razor. You're going undercover."
Curry's eyes were wide. "In shantytown?"
"Exactly. Cops grilling the denizens of that community does no good at all."
"Like pissing in the wind," Wild said.
"Who's going with him?" Merlo asked.
"Nobody," Ness said.
Chamberlin spoke up. "But isn't it standard procedure for detectives to work in pairs?"
"Yes." Ness looked at Curry. "And that's why you're going in alone. Or almost alone-you'll wear a thirty-eight in an ankle holster. You'll work both settlements-the one at Commerce and Canal, and the one near the Thirty-seventh Street Bridge."
Curry raised his eyebrows, let out some air, and put the eyebrows back down. "Whatever you say, Chief."
"I want you to take a blackjack and a sharp jackknife, as well."
"No argument," Curry said.
Ness sipped his coffee. "I'll be going undercover myself," he said matter-of-factly. "I'm going to canvass the saloons around Kingsbury Run, and in the Flats."
"You'll risk being recognized," Merlo said. "You've had a lot of press."
"Thanks to me," Wild said.
"I'm a very ordinary-looking fella," Ness said with a wicked little smile. "And with some stubble on my face, and in some ratty old overalls, I'll just be another guy bellying up to the bar."
"Are you going alone, too?" Wild said.
"No," Ness said. "You're going with me."
"Oh," said Wild, flatly. Then with his usual archness: "Whatever you say… just don't expect me to call you 'Chief.'"
Ness turned back to Merlo. "Do we have a shot at identifying any of the other victims?"
"I thought we had a shot at the colored woman," Merlo said, "whose bones were found under the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge."
"Her bones, including her bridgework," Ness said, nodding. "You've been checking with dentists?"
"Yes. Everyone in the city."
"How many colored dentists are there in Cleveland?"
"Two. We've checked them both."
"She should be there. She should be in their records."
"I know," Merlo said, shrugging, frustrated. "She isn't."
Again Ness pointed at Merlo, his finger a gun. "Get a list of all the colored dentists in the state. There can't be too many. Approach them all. If that doesn't work, go national."
"It's a thought," Merlo granted him. "You know, there was a third colored dentist in town, but he died two years ago."_
"Do his records exist?"
"Listings of patients, yes. X-rays and dental charts, no. They were transferred to other dentists."
Ness thought. "Tell you what. Take those patient listings and check them against any colored women whose names turn up on the local Missing Persons Bureau sheets. If you get a match, you may have our girl."
"That's a damned good idea," Merlo admitted. "But without dental records…"
"A relative may be able to identify the bridgework. I could identify my mother's bridgework at fifty paces."
Merlo shrugged, smiled humorlessly, said, "I'll give it a try. If we dead-end there?"
"We try something else." Ness turned back to Curry. "I want to be frank with you, Albert. I'm not sending you into shantytown just because you're a good investigator, which you are. And I certainly want you to worm your way into that sorry community and ingratiate yourself into some information. But I've also chosen you for this because, well… you may make a good Butcher bait."
"Butcher bait?" Curry said.
"Our man is homosexual, or bisexual, or… something. You may look good to him."
"Swell," Curry said.
"You'll need to be very careful. Trust no one, except your gun, blackjack, and knife. We have here, remember, a murderer who emasculated three of his male victims, while dismembering two of the female victims in such a way that the pelvic region remained attached to the upper thighs- fairly framing the victims vulva. He has sex with both sexes, possibly after killing them."
Curry's face was white. "Mr. Ness, how can you discuss this so calmly?"
"Because it's the only way such things can be discussed."
Curry looked very white. "I… I don't know how we go about this, finding a madman. You're dealing with this like it's… a normal case. But he's a fiend… he's inhuman…"
"No," Ness said. "That's the awful part. He's as human as any of us. If he were a monster, we could pick him right out of the crowd. But we have an intelligent, possibly charming murderer who fits right in. Who may lead a perfectly normal life, except in this one little area."
"Having sex with the dead, you mean," Wild said with a sick smirk.
"What happens to the dead doesn't concern me," Ness said. "What I'm interested in, what we all are interested in, is the living-and keeping them that way."
"He should be killed," Curry said.
"He should be stopped," Ness said. "He's the Butcher, remember-we're the police."