by Lisa Black
The room appeared much as he had last seen it, bottles of pills and herbs with handwritten labels, a short stack of towels, and a supply of writing paper. No dark spots stained the rough wooden walls or floor. Two spots appeared on the edge of the cot frame, and James could only pray they did not belong to some poor girl with less luck than Irene. But he saw no signs of Flo Polillo’s body having been brutally dismembered in that small space.
And yet he swore he could smell it, that damp and rotting odor of blood. Murder, war, it all smelled the same.
“Satisfied, Officer?” Odessa asked when he emerged.
“Detective.”
The man came close to rolling his eyes. “Detective. Then I will bid you good day. I have a client due to arrive in a few minutes. Take a look at her, and you will see why I would not waste time with the Flo Polillos of the city.”
“You know our victim’s name,” James pointed out.
“The papers have written of nothing else. Everyone in Cleveland knows her name.”
They emerged into the hallway as he said this, and a woman unlocking the door across the hallway said, “Whose name? Mine?”
“Sorry, Auralina. The detectives were speaking of that woman found so brutally murdered.”
The glass in the door read AURALINA DE MORELLI—MEDIUM and the woman dressed the part in an outlandish getup of flowing purple and crimson that did not even resemble a dress, per se, and yet still managed to hint at a perfectly feminine figure. Her face, while coated in too many colored powders, had a similarly pleasant shape. “I read all about it. You need my help, gentlemen. I can contact the dead woman and ask her who tore her limb from limb.”
“Really,” Walter said with a less-than-convinced air. James didn’t bother to respond but surveyed the rest of the hallway. A burst of laughter sounded from the architect’s firm. The door to the railroad man’s office remained closed, with no light behind the glass.
But de Morelli knew her business and qualified her statement. “That is, if she wants to tell us, if she even knows. But you can’t be sure until you ask. It could solve the whole case for you.”
Walter’s gaze did not budge from her bosom. “Just like that.”
She braced her back against her open doorjamb, the better to display herself. Auralina de Morelli had become schooled in the finer arts of salesmanship, James could see. “As I said, you can’t know until you try. The spirit of this troubled woman will be straining to find expression in this world.”
“Thank you anyway, ma’am,” James said. “Let’s go, Detective McKenna.”
“Sure.” Walter did not move, however, still captivated by the straining breasts of the de Morelli woman, and meanwhile the front door opened to allow in a burst of arctic air.
The medium smiled at Odessa in a way that made James think the man did not have to drug all his partners. “A client comes for you, Louis, or perhaps for me.”
But only Arthur Corliss entered. He carried a paper parcel that smelled good. “Hullo. Are we having a meeting in the hallway?”
Odessa introduced the two cops, as if they were his guests at a party. Corliss’s gaze rested with more recognition on James, but he said only, “I’ve been out getting provisions. Would you gentlemen be needing some lunch? It’s the best corned beef in the city.”
“From where?” Walter asked, of course. Only food could get his attention from a female body.
“Mike’s.”
“Oh, yeah. Good stuff.”
“No, th—” James began to say. Then he stopped himself. “Actually, that would be great.”
Walter stared. “You don’t even like—”
“Always thinking of you, partner. Let me help you with that, Mr.—Corliss, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
James left the other three people in the hallway and followed Arthur Corliss back to his office. In the time since James had seen it last, the man had accumulated more items: more papers, more books, more newspapers in separate stacks (apparently he read all three: the News, the Press, and the Plain Dealer), a good supply of Mission Orange soda pop in their signature black bottles, a large table now crowding the desk and scattered with reports and diagrams. Unlike his fellow tenant, Arthur Corliss did more with his office than rape young girls and sell pills to society ladies.
The dog remained. He opened one eye at James’s entrance but chose not to leave his spot in front of the radiator.
“Well, Detective, what brings you by?” Corliss asked as he unwrapped his parcel.
“Just keeping an eye on your neighbor, that’s all, making sure the good doctor’s lady friends are all of legal age.”
“The ones I see are well above that, I can assure you. Louis never lacks for lady friends.”
James did not press this. “I had a question for you as well. If a man wanted to work for the railroad, would he come here to talk to you or go to the station?”
Corliss straightened from his task as if both astounded and delighted by the prospect. “Are you considering the railroad police? Excellent! We can always use experienced men. I used to be one, you know, a detective like you are.”
“With the railroad?”
“In my younger years. I wasn’t much good at it. I felt too sorry for the unfortunates in this country who couldn’t afford a ticket—and there’s so many more now.” Corliss found a knife in a drawer and sliced one of the sandwiches with an agitated whack! “Of course too many of them can afford it; they simply don’t want to part with the cash, and the railroads have to protect themselves. Once I grew into a man I learned that it takes a great deal of money to establish a railroad and even more to run it, and I can’t let that all fly away because criminals think a depression is an excuse to appropriate my property for their own uses. It’s a battle out there every day, you know. Practically a war. Sandwich?”
“No, thank you, but I’ll take a slice for my partner.” The man’s face fell, so James explained, “I’ve never cared for cured beef. My father cured everything when I was a boy. He considered it the only trustworthy way to preserve food.”
“Your partner doesn’t understand, does he?”
“Curing?”
“War.” His gaze lingered on the worn hem of James’s coat, on the practically threadbare thighs of his trousers. “And fighting it on one’s own terms.”
In that instant James wanted nothing more than to pull up a chair and talk, to this man or even to his dog, about the difficulty of coming up with excuses to get out of working protection for a gambling joint or collecting the department’s take from a cathouse, about Helen and baby John, about the cold seeping up through the tape around his shoe.
He didn’t, of course. He could not bare his soul to another; men didn’t do that. And he had some concerns about the tenants of 4950 Pullman. The first two bodies had been found on the slope outside, only a few hundred feet to the west of this building. The man in the blue coat might have come to Corliss looking for work. And Flo Polillo had tended bar at Mike’s. “About a job with the railroad, I didn’t ask for myself. I am trying to retrace the steps of a man who might have come here looking for work as a mechanic.”
A young man with tousled dark locks and a pencil behind one ear bounced in through the door behind James. “Got the grub?”
Corliss held out a sandwich. “Here you go, Mr. Metetsky. Though you know it’s a crime to eat corned beef on anything but rye.”
“So you say. Did your housekeeper send any biscuits today? No? What a pity.” The architect plucked the wrapped food from the man’s hand. Then he bounced back out, but not before taking in James’s form from the softened hat to the shoelaces mended in three spots. He said nothing, though, and merely added over his shoulder to Corliss, “I’ll settle up later, okay?”
“I doubt I’ll ever see it,” Corliss said to James. “He’s a bit of a chizz, that one. Hasn’t learned that those who fail to contribute their share fail in their very humanity.”
“Young men are often carel
ess.” James pulled out his notebook. “The man I’m tr—”
“But there’s no excuse, in his case. He earns a good amount of money at his trade. What I paid them in design fees for this building alone could buy a year of sandwiches.” Corliss continued to stare at the door as if waiting for the young man to return, and with sufficient coinage this time.
The dog decided to scratch, sending a shower of its yellow hairs onto the floor beneath the radiator. The sound distracted his master.
“Well, young men, as you say.” Corliss sliced part of the meal off for himself. “They thrill at nothing so much as getting away with something. Who did you say you were looking for?”
James explained about the man in the blue coat. “He may have come here inquiring about work as a mechanic. It would have been late spring, early summer. June, probably, perhaps July.”
“Six months ago? Detective, I get ten men a week begging for work, any work. And those are the skilled ones—the rest apply at the station and never get to me. I’m sorry, but I can’t possibly remember—”
“He did have skill—he might have been a mechanical supervisor. And this is the coat.” James pulled out the color photograph he had hounded the Bertillon unit into making for him, insisting that the style of the coat would not stick in people’s minds, that it became memorable only with the color.
Corliss took the photo with one hand, holding his sandwich in the other. He peered at the blue coat. He set down the sandwich. The hand holding the photo began to quake, very slightly, yet his expression did not change, the helpful curve of his lips still in place.
Louis Odessa appeared in the doorway. “I forgot to get my lunch. You still here, Detective?”
James made no reply, and Odessa didn’t seem to care. He picked up his parcel and, unlike the young architect, left his share of the bill on Corliss’s desk blotter. Corliss watched him approach, take, and leave, without saying a word.
Then he held the photo out to James. “I’ve never seen this. Nor do I recall the man you describe. I’m sorry I can’t help you, Detective.”
“Are you sure?”
“Quite sure, I’m afraid. I have a fairly good memory for people—not perfect, of course, but good.” He held out the wrapped corned beef.
“Here, give this to your partner. You’ll need it to lure him from Auralina’s charms.”
Still stuffed from their restaurant rounds, Walter showed a rare indifference to the food but willingly departed from the medium. Apparently she had a habit of talking money more than sweet flirtations, and Walter didn’t care for conquests with an entrepreneurial bent. “Did you show him your little picture?”
“Yep.”
“What’d he say?”
“Didn’t ring a bell.”
“Big surprise there. Nobody would remember some bum’s coat from six months ago. Well, you would, but nobody else.” They got in the car and began its sliding ascent toward East Fifty-fifth.
“He’s lying.”
“Huh?”
“He recognized that coat. It startled him. But after his buddy Dr. Louis walks in and out, then he’s never seen the coat before. We always wondered how one guy carried two full-grown men down a steep hill. Do you think there could be two of them, working together?”
“I think your imagination is working overtime, that’s what I think.”
James wrote Corliss lying in his notebook and circled the second word in heavy pencil.
CHAPTER 35
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 10
PRESENT DAY
They drove separately. Frank might have to leave the crime scene at some point to chase down a witness or a lead and Theresa hoped to need the supply of equipment she kept in her trunk. But it also forestalled any conversation.
Perhaps this was just as well. There was nothing she could think of to say that would not sound condescending. She could not tell Frank that their grandfather had loved him as well, because he knew that. She could not tell him that their grandfather had beamed for days after Frank’s graduation from the academy, because he knew that. She could not tell him that Theresa had not been the favorite grandchild, because that was not true.
So she would say nothing at all.
Now she drove through the dying light, leaving the Cuyahoga River behind, following the access road to the RTA station and administrative offices. The task force would meet up there, the only place in the valley where cars coming and going would not seem like unusual activity, and it had parking to boot. Frank had suggested they use the building at 4950 Pullman, but Theresa had vetoed him in the hope that their copycat might consider it some sort of shrine and stop in to pay his respects. Cops were secreted in the woods and at the electrical station to keep an eye on it.
She drove past the slope where she had found the two dead men, starting for a moment when her headlights caught a pair of glowing eyes. Raccoon. She patted her chest, drove under the East Fifty-fifth bridge, and found the employee parking lot.
RTA had loaned them a conference room and set up a number of monitors with feeds from their station platform cameras. All three transit lines—Red, Blue, and Green—passed through the East Fifty-fifth station. This might make a getaway easier, or it might not, as the Red Line boarded from the west end of the building and the other two lines at the opposite. At this time of day a train left at least every fifteen minutes. To use them as transportation with cops in pursuit, the killer would have to employ split-second timing and the driver could easily be radioed to stop the train at any point. Theresa figured their killer was smarter than that.
Frank went over the facts of the original case. Angela Sanchez had Theresa use a map to point out the locations of the original body.
“This is guesswork to a large degree,” she warned the men. “But I believe they found the head—wrapped in pants, so it might not be immediately obvious—south of the tracks roughly between Fifty-fifth and Kinsman. Directly across from this building, in fact. They found the head just east of the Fifty-fifth bridge, but between the sets of tracks. Those are my calculations, made with case studies and Google Earth. The killer might come to different conclusions, so we need sharp eyes at least a half mile west of Fifty-fifth as well, level with the building on Pullman.”
The fifteen or so uniformed and plainclothes cops in the room stared at her without expression. This did not mean they were not listening—she had spent enough time around cops to know that—only that they could not appear impressed by anything except themselves. But she felt good about them. Even the ones who didn’t look old enough to drive seemed bright, fit, and a hell of a lot more awake than she was. This killer would be caught tonight, webbed in by his own obsessions.
Angela said: “And don’t forget about the trains, even the rapid transit. He might use them to arrive or escape. It’s unlikely since he needs to bring an abducted male with him. Whether the victim’s conscious or unconscious, it would be difficult.”
Frank added, “We expect a lot of rubberneckers and reporters. Anyone who’s been reading the papers could reach the same conclusions Theresa has and come out to watch the action, so there may be people in the valley tonight who wear dark clothing and don’t stop when you shout at them. Go for your Taser first. Picture the headline ‘Cop Shoots Innocent Teen in Botched Police Operation’ splashed across tomorrow’s Plain Dealer.”
Angela muttered, “I bet Brandon Jablonski shows up, rain or shine.”
“Who?” one cop asked.
Frank explained about the Web-news reporter and his interest in the case.
“So if he does come around, just escort him out of the area?”
“No,” Frank said. “Let’s consider him a suspect for now.”
Theresa bit her lip before remembering that Jablonski made an ideal suspect. If anyone knew where to leave all the bodies, he did.
The officers all filtered out to their assigned places to make themselves inconspicuous.
She pointed out a spot on the map to Frank. “We should w
ait here, between what used to be the Nickel Plate Railroad and is now Norfolk Southern, and the RTA rapid tracks, which used to be the New York Central Railroad.”
“If he’s reading the same books as you, and if he doesn’t decide to call it off because he’s smart enough to know we’re going to be here, or because it’s raining out and he likes the idea of us running around like wet idiots. And when did you become such a railroad historian?”
“Since I met Edward Corliss. Come on, we’d better get out there before it gets completely dark.”
“What do you mean we? You’re going to stay right here.”
“Why?”
“Because you have neither a gun nor an S on your chest and I’m not going to have you running around a dark valley with a bunch of trigger-happy cops, not that I don’t feel a little itchy-fingered myself.”
“But—”
“Besides,” he continued, “if you find one more body I’m going to have to bring you in for questioning.”
“But—”
“There are no coincidences, isn’t that what you’re always telling me? Cheer up, cuz. At least you’ll stay dry and close to the coffeemaker.”
And then she was left alone on the white linoleum of the RTA conference room. Theresa exhaled sharply enough to fluff up her bangs, got a fresh cup of coffee, and turned out all the lights in the room so that she could watch the activity outside.
The room at the east end of the building gave her a wide view of the tracks on both sides and the station platform. The south side of the tracks turned into a steep hill of dense brush, unlit and apparently empty. To the north of her position, at least ten people milled about on the station platform, waiting for either the 8:41 or the 8:42, depending on whether they wanted to head downtown or toward the eastern suburbs. Overhead lights clearly outlined their body language. A girl stood between two pillars, facing Theresa with either a bag or a pile of books clutched tightly in both arms. She did not turn to look at the three young men twenty feet away no matter how much fun they seemed to be having, no matter how boisterous their horseplay seemed to get. A weary soul leaned forward on the bench, feet splayed. Two other men of similar height and weight shifted around, hands in their pockets. They did not speak to anyone and moved slowly but constantly. Everyone else on the platform shrank from them, ever so slightly, whenever they approached. They would be the cops.
