by Lisa Black
Theresa fingered a pair of binoculars on the end table, wondering how close they would bring the whitecaps and seagulls. But she didn’t pick them up. They looked too heavy and too expensive.
“Oh,” Frank said. Jablonski finally switched the camcorder’s gaze from Theresa to Corliss.
“My point is, Pennsylvania bought my father’s company and made him one of their vice presidents, as well as a very wealthy man. Rich enough that he could have retired right then, but he loved the trains too much, and besides, the Depression had arrived. He needed a safe investment for his money and figured real estate would be as safe as any.”
Frank made a note. Jablonski, the camera perched on one knee, plucked a gold figurine of a steam engine off the coffee table in front of him. Corliss looked askance, and the researcher put it back with the gentlest clink.
Frank went on. “He kept an office there for himself?”
“I believe so, yes. He’d take me around there during my younger days, before he sold the place. He also had a desk at the rail yard station—big brick place right on the river, they tore it down in the sixties—and he’d spend a lot of time there, too. He used the office on Pullman more for managing his personal affairs, the building, other investments, and as a place to store his growing collection.” The man waved his hand to take in the room. One of the moving trains gave a toot and released a puff of smoke into the air. The not-terrifically-pleasant smell of burned oil reached Theresa’s nose. “He passed a lot of these pieces down to me. Could I serve you some coffee, or tea? Ms. MacLean? You look a bit chilly.”
“No, thank you. I’m fine.”
He seemed to glow a bit at her smile, though it could have simply been from talking about trains. Or his father.
Frank got him back on topic. “Do you remember the building’s tenants? From the 1930s?”
“Oh, my, let’s see. I remember the architects most, I guess. They rented a unit nearly the entire time my dad owned it. They were always very late or very early with the rent, depending on how their contracts came along. He also had an artist, just after the Second World War—until the guy ran out of canvases one day and painted all over the walls; then my dad kicked him out. Didn’t care for the man’s taste, he said, nor his judgment.” Corliss chuckled over that until Theresa laughed with him.
Frank asked, “How were the units numbered? One through four were the ground floor?”
Jablonski pulled a camera from the second bag. An older digital model, it had double the bulk of the camcorder.
“Yes, and five through eight the second story. He had a medium for a couple of years—a woman who said she could communicate with the dead. My father loved stuff like that. And, as he always said, she paid the rent on time. Unlike the doctor.”
“Doctor?”
“In the office next to his. Every month my father would have to threaten him with eviction to get the rent, but he’d cough it up at the last minute and buy himself another thirty days.”
“What kind of medicine did this man practice?” Frank asked ever so casually. Theresa wished she could hide so much with her voice.
The model train let out another toot. Jablonski took a few quick snaps, all of Theresa. When she frowned at him, he aimed the lens at Corliss.
“Some sort of dietary therapist.”
“A nutritionist?”
“I suppose. A bit of a quack, according to my father—there were plenty of them around in those days. You have to remember that antibiotics hadn’t been discovered yet and people would try anything. But my dad must have liked the man, or he wouldn’t have put up with the rent always being late. He could be very softhearted.”
“Must have been a lot of people late with the rent then,” Jablonski put in. “Unemployment in Cleveland reached twenty-three percent during the Depression, and most households had a single wage earner. That’s why there were so many homeless and transients for the Torso killer to choose from.”
“Torso killer?” Edward Corliss blinked at the younger man.
“Would you have any records from your father’s ownership of the building?” Frank asked before Jablonski could expound upon the infamous murderer and all his crimes.
Now the silver-haired man blinked at him. “Any receipts from his tenants? Leases? Tax returns?”
“Oh, I see what you mean. No, no, I’m sure I don’t. He sold that building in—um…”
“Nineteen fifty-nine.”
“Yes. I cleaned this house from end to end after he died, when I moved back from England. My father was not a pack rat, all the trains notwithstanding. I don’t recall finding anything related to the building. He had tax returns, but supposedly you only have to keep those for seven years, so I destroyed them.”
“What about photographs?” Theresa suggested. “Did your father have any pictures of his building, especially from the 1930s?”
He considered this, hand to chin. “I don’t believe so. People didn’t take photos of every single thing the way they do now. But we could look.” He stood up with the energy of a man half his age and held out his hand to her.
After being helped to her feet in such a courtly manner, she followed him from the room, past the mountaintop village.
“This must have taken years to build,” she told her host.
“Oh, this is merely an introduction to my world,” Edward Corliss told her. “Let me show you my real pride and joy.”
CHAPTER 8
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 6
PRESENT DAY
They passed through a white-on-white hallway and into a completely changed environment from the front room. No carpets interrupted the light hardwood floor and no draperies blocked the high windows. No furniture save for a waist-high platform in the center of the room, which had to measure ten feet by fifteen.
Corliss stood at one end and turned a crank to roll up the clear plastic sheet that floated on the top, supported by metal rods placed in strategic locations.
No quaint village here. Highways, skyscrapers, and houses upon houses, through which the trains flowed, met, separated, and looped around again on the shores of a blue—“It’s Cleveland,” Theresa exclaimed. “You’ve modeled Cleveland.”
“From Rocky River to Shaker Heights.” Corliss bent over one corner of the platform, opened an electrical box, and flipped several switches. Tiny bulbs lit up in the windows of the office buildings, the airport, gas stations. Trains chugged to life.
“You even have the rapid transit cars.” Theresa watched one of the electric commuter vehicles, on which she’d spent so many hours over the years, glide along beside a locomotive. Both at 1:64 scale, of course.
Even Jablonski seemed impressed. He took some stills, then switched back to the camcorder, its lens sweeping the model city from end to end.
Frank said nothing but circled the tableau as if he expected to witness the model citizenry engaging in various crimes. He needn’t have worried. The replicated city had every accoutrement down to park benches but not one citizen. Theresa did not find that surprising—they’d have had to be the size of ants and number in the hundreds to populate this metropolis.
“Here’s the Medical Examiner’s Office.” Theresa could have spent an hour noting every detail to the display. “How long did this take you to build?”
“About a year, I suppose. But I’m never really done. I’m always tinkering with it—I spent three days on the swing bridge this past week after its motor decided to quit. Then I decided to make it winter—at least in part of the city. Here, let me show you.”
He picked up a pint-sized plastic container and popped off the lid. Before she could react, he scooped up her hand and immersed her fingers into the white goo. “Brush it on the trees like this, lightly, so it sort of frosts them but not completely.”
It had been a long time since a man held her hand. The white stuff felt like cottage cheese but drier, the tiny plastic limbs rough but flexible. Under her fingers, Christmas came to Cleveland.
“Do you
ever crash them?” Jablonski asked, tapping one engine as it went by.
“Of course not!” its creator snapped. “And don’t touch that!”
“Sorry.”
“I could stand here all day.” Frank’s voice sounded patently unconvincing, but perhaps only to someone who’d known him since her birth.
“But we really do need to learn more about your father’s building.”
“It’s here.” Theresa pointed out the stone structure’s miniature copy. It looked better in the model than in real life—tidy and still alive.
Frank raised an eyebrow to let her know she was being less than helpful. “Can we check for the photographs, please?”
“Certainly. You have to excuse me, I don’t get many opportunities to show it off. My neighbor is a fan, but other than him…” Edward Corliss handed Theresa a rag for her fingers, switched off his tiny city with obvious regret, carefully replaced the plastic dust cover, and took them to a much smaller room off the back of the house. Bookshelves covered nearly every inch of wall space except for framed prints and drawings of trains, and it smelled of dust and pipe tobacco.
“They’re not in an album, I’m afraid, only loose in a box,” Corliss warned them as he dug through one of the lower cabinets. “Father didn’t always have my sense of order. Or Mother’s.”
“Where is your mother?” Frank asked.
“She passed away, oh, must be more than forty years now. Before father did. Let’s see what we have here.” He sat at a wooden desk that would have required six bodybuilders to lift and flipped the top of a box that had once held Audubon Society note cards. The other three people in the room watched over his shoulder, Theresa leaning close enough to pick up the scent of Old Spice. She loathed Old Spice because her first boyfriend had worn it. She decided not to hold that against Edward Corliss.
After donning a pair of reading glasses, he turned the photos over, one by one, gently but methodically. “This is my baptism, you don’t need to see that…those were our neighbors, they’ve since moved…my flat in England, I still regret selling that, the prices have shot up in the past few years…my graduation…ah, here’s one. It’s the outside of the building, though.”
Theresa peered at the black-and-white image, still sharp after so many years. “Which one is your father?”
He tapped a lean finger on the man in the center, who was wearing creased trousers and a white shirt with a tie. He bore some resemblance to his son, mainly in the deep-set eyes, but seemed taller. He carried his suit coat tossed over one shoulder, and a rounded hat had been pushed back from his forehead. He posed in front of the same entrance Theresa had passed through yesterday morning; his clothing and the shadow behind him told her the picture had been taken in summertime, when the sun hung to the north.
“Who are the other people?” Frank asked.
On Arthur’s right stood a gaunt man in similar clothing and a young woman in a long black skirt and a coat festooned with chiffon scarves. She had wavy dark hair and smiled. The man didn’t. On the other side of the owner, two young men seemed to be jostling with each other and their images had blurred. Behind them and off to the side sat a man with less-neat clothing and a ruined expression.
Corliss said, “I’m only guessing, you understand, but I’m sure my father told me at some point that these two young men are the architects I spoke of. And—again, I’m not sure—this man could be that doctor.”
“The nutritionist?” Theresa asked.
“The dietician, yes.”
“Who’s the woman? Is that your mother?”
“No.” Edward Corliss brought the photo closer to his face and then backed it away again, as if that might help jog his memory. “I have no idea. She could be the medium. Father always described her as an outlandish dresser.”
“What about this man, in the background?”
Corliss shrugged. “Again, no idea. He could be anyone, someone working for the other tenants, a passerby. He could have been a bum, I mean, a hobo. My father used to try to help them during the Depression, give them a meal, let them sleep there a night or two if he had any vacant units. I said he had a soft heart, and during those years there were plenty of men who needed one.”
“When was this photo taken?” she asked.
Corliss turned it over, showed them the May 5, 1936, printed in block letters. “The man could have been a messenger for the railroads or one of the other businesses, I suppose, or he could have spent the night on the front stoop and hadn’t left before they snapped the picture. As I said, a common occurrence then as now, the poor souls sleeping on the sidewalk. Sometimes I think not much has changed.”
Jablonski spoke, startling Theresa. He had moved to just behind her left shoulder. “Who took the picture?”
All four people peered at the snap with new interest.
“Your mother?” Theresa suggested.
“No, they didn’t meet until after the war. I really don’t know. A friend, I suppose, or another tenant.”
Frank asked, “Did he ever mention someone disappearing from his building? A tenant? A client? Even a hobo?”
Corliss considered the question, shook his head. “I’m sure I would remember something like that.”
“Did he ever mention a James Miller?”
“Not that I recall.”
“So you have no idea who this dead man we found could be?”
“I’ve been thinking of nothing else since you called this morning. No.
I have no idea.” His eyelids fluttered suddenly. “Surely you don’t think my father had something to do with that.”
“We don’t have any theories at present. Do you mind if we borrow this picture?”
Corliss pulled it away, toward his own chest. “My father wouldn’t kill anyone. No one.”
“I understand,” Theresa said.
“Unless they deserved it,” he added, and turned over the picture. The sentiment did not seem too odd; Theresa had heard it before. Corliss continued to sort through the photos but the only other find, from an investigator’s point of view, came near the bottom of the box.
“This is my father’s office at the Pullman building,” Corliss told them.
Corliss Sr.’s office bore a great resemblance to Corliss Jr.’s study, aside from the color of the walls—white in the photo, pale caramel in the room in which they currently stood. Plenty of bookshelves supporting model trains instead of books, and framed pictures of same. Arthur Corliss stood by himself, facing the camera with crossed arms and a self-satisfied expression. A notation at the bottom read: November 1935.
“This is the same desk,” Theresa said.
Edward patted the worn surface as if pleased she had noticed. “Solid cherry. An unusual design for the time, the flat top. Office desks were always rolltops, with all those little cubbies for storing things, but as office work increased in the new century, efficiency experts decided that a plain top minimized clutter and backlog. The pigeonholes made it too easy for workers to stash their work and forget it.”
“Interesting,” Theresa said.
Frank didn’t find the historical trivia quite as fascinating. “There’s a door.”
“Door?” Corliss asked.
“Door?” Jablonski asked.
Theresa noted the opening, framed by wooden molding, in the wall behind the desk. “Is that the bathroom? Did you ever visit your father’s office, Mr. Corliss? Do you remember its arrangement?”
He frowned in concentration, peering at the photograph. “Vaguely. I would have been only seven or eight, you understand.”
“Did it have a small lavatory?”
“It had a sink. I remember how old the fixtures seemed. And a bit rusty.”
“Anything else? A closet? A storage space?”
“I don’t think so, but I really can’t be sure. I had just turned nine when he sold the place.” He handed the photo to Frank and went through the rest of the box but did not find any more of the building at 4950 Pullman.
>
With the interview winding down, Jablonski the stringer came to life.
“Did you work for your father’s railroad, Mr. Corliss?”
“A bit, in my younger days. I ran the dispatch office for a few years, but then decided to break away to the more sophisticated climes in Europe and England. Silly, as it turned out, but not entirely unproductive: I read mechanics and chemistry at Oxford and then settled down to a respectable job as a civil engineer.”
“Buildings?”
“No, roads. Traffic patterns were our main concern.” He stood up, visibly stretching his legs, and plucked a four-inch-long locomotive carved from ivory from a shelf. He pressed it into Theresa’s hands, guiding her fingers over the glossy surface. His eyes, she noticed, were blue with blue-gray flecks, like bubbles in champagne. “I bought that from a pipe maker in Bath…remarkably smooth, don’t you think? Anyway, then my father died and I returned to manage his estate. I also took over his position in the preservation society.”
Jablonski pounced on this. “The what?”
Frank’s pager buzzed, that angry-bee sound.
Corliss answered without looking away from Theresa. She had not been a tactile person for many years but somehow didn’t mind the warmth of his hands wrapping hers around the ivory train. “The American Railroad History Preservation Society. I’m the vice president. We’re hosting a cocktail party–slash–fund-raiser at the art museum next month. You should come.”
Was this older man hitting on her?
Of course as her officially ancient birthday loomed, sixty-one no longer seemed too far out of line, especially a well-spoken and interesting sixty-one, so perhaps she should consider—
