The only hint Father ever gave that he took some pride in Lloyd was the casual comment he would make, to family and friends, that his boy would "one day be a finer surgeon than I." This comment, which his father began to state as a fact as early as Lloyd's junior-high years, meant the world to the boy.
Appropriately, science was his favorite subject. He had begun to experiment on animals, on his own, while in grade school. He had found a cat in the street that had apparently been struck by a car; the cat was half-dead, so surgical experimentation couldn't do any harm. He had set up a little lab, a little workshop, in the garage, which was a freestanding building away from the large main house. Here he dissected living animals for the pure science of it. For the educational value.
He'd been fascinated by Kingsbury Run since he was a kid; he would see the lovely desolation of it out the window of the Rapid Transit train, which he and Mother occasionally took from Shaker Heights into the city, for a day of shopping together. An an older boy, in the Scouts, he would sometimes take the train and get off at Seventy-ninth or Fifty-fifth Street and explore the Run by himself, catch animals and experiment on them, right out there in nature.
The younger of the two sisters once caught him carving up a small dog and told their mother, and he explained that he was experimenting scientifically and she understood, though she asked him not to operate on living things again. Henceforth, out of deference to his mother, he would kill the animals first-though it limited the range of his experimentation, and the sense of power he so enjoyed.
Unlike Father, his mother had never struck him a physical blow, though she had hurt him once, in another way. She had walked in on him, when he was masturbating in his room, and had reacted with shock, with horror, and then tears. She later told him she had never been so disappointed in anyone in her life.
She had been pregnant at the time, and even now Lloyd could see her, standing in the doorway, a fat silhouette, choking with horror.
She died trying to have that fourth child. While his father had not been the attending physician, Lloyd was filled with anger toward Father. Not because his father had caused the pregnancy, no; but because medicine, surgery, had failed her. This exhalted profession to which his father gave so much time and energy, to which his father expected him to give his own life, had not been able to save the one person on the face of the earth worth saving.
He'd been thirteen when she died, and his father-whom he never saw cry over his mother's death, what a cold, cold bastard he was! — had responded to the change in the household by sending Lloyd off to military school. His oldest sister was married, and the other sister was off at college, so Lloyd-out at last from under the spell of his "sensitive" mother (that was how Father would often describe his late wife, giving the word a distasteful ring) — would finally be made a man.
And the academy was where Lloyd had been made a man, all right. He had learned that the feelings of tenderness he'd had for other males, feelings he'd tried to repress until now, were welcomed by other horny young men whose sexual awakenings were taking place in an all-male world. And while he was haunted by vague memories of his father having contempt for "queers," Lloyd enjoyed, in his first year, being the favorite of an older cadet, a loving son to a loving father, so to speak. And upon that older cadet's graduation, Lloyd became loving father to several young sons.
Did Father sense something in his manner? Home for the summer, Lloyd felt his father's eyes on him, suspicious eyes that seemed to strip him naked. His military bearing, his crisp politeness, somehow did not fool Father. Father seemed to know-though of course nothing was said-that the rifles and bayonets Lloyd had been drilling with were not always made of steel.
So on his sixteenth birthday, Father gave him one of two very special gifts that Lloyd would receive in an upbringing characterized by little fatherly attention. In the dead of one memorable night, his father took him to a brothel in the Flats, where a heavily made-up whore of perhaps twenty-two literal years and a hundred figurative wound up bringing him off with her mouth, because he couldn't do it otherwise. When Lloyd returned to his father-who was waiting in a chauffeured Lincoln out front-the old man had said, "Well?"
Lloyd, stiffly military, had said, "Thank you, Father. It was a perfect birthday."
And, as the boy climbed in, his father had bestowed a rare smile on his son and an even rarer pat on the shoulder.
For reasons Lloyd never knew, his father had pulled him out of the academy and put him back into public school for the senior year of high school. And the summer before his senior year, on his birthday, his father gave him the other memorable gift.
In the chauffeured Lincoln once more, they had driven in the dead of night, not to the Flats this time, but to Western Reserve University, where his father taught anatomy. In a vast, white, but dimly-lit classroom littered with lab benches, his father walked him to a wall of refrigerated drawers and pulled one out. Father flipped back the sheet and revealed the gray corpse of a man of perhaps forty.
"For you," he told his son.
"For… me?" Lloyd began to smile; his eyes began to tear. "My own… my very own ca… daver?"
"Your own." And again Father bestowed a smile and a hand on the shoulder. "This will be our secret."
Father had even given him a set of shining stainless-steel surgical tools in a leather pouch.
And throughout the school year ahead, at least one night a week, his father would take him to Western, and while Father prepared lesson plans and corrected papers, Lloyd practiced on his cadaver. To have power over the living, Father told him, one must first learn the secrets of the dead.
It was the most time that father and son ever spent together.
Lloyd never forgot those two gifts, those two thoughtful, personal gifts his father had given him: the live female body and the dead male one.
Even now, that rare tenderness on his father's part brought tears to Lloyd's eyes. It made him feel all the more ashamed that he had let Father down.
He hadn't at first. He'd gotten in at Harvard, no problem; between his grades and Fathers connections, it had been a snap. But he hadn't exactly been an honor student-the drinking, the carousing with his fraternity brothers had taken a toll; he also had several affairs, with boys and girls, and was confused about who he was, exactly.
Sex with girls was something he could manage-like a duty; it required affection and care and time. Sex with a guy was animal, basic, in a hurry. He didn't think it was sissified conduct-he felt more a man with a man. Like the Greeks. He was a fraternity brother, wasn't he?
Anyway, his grades were good enough to get him into med school, and that was when disaster struck. He found himself drinking more and more, and his hands began to shake-it was from the drinking obviously, but how could he tell his instructors that? How could he explain to them that the lack of dexterity was temporary?
And how could he explain to his father that this temporary lack of dexterity, and this alone, had caused him to flunk out?
For several months his father said nothing to him. Literally nothing. Any communication between the two men in the large dark house was done through hand gestures or the servants. Finally Lloyd threw himself on his knees before Father, in his study, and begged forgiveness.
Father hadn't granted forgiveness, exactly, but he did say he would find "something constructive" for his son to do.
And what Father had done was, gradually, turn his investments and business dealings over to Lloyd, who found he had a complete and immediate knack for it. At first just a bookkeeper, he soon began doing some of the actual investing and, even in these hard times, made money for his father. Of course Father said nothing by way of approval, but he eventually turned virtually everything of a business nature over to Lloyd for his managing. Father and son began to speak. Civilly. Hardly warm. But if the war would never be over, at least there was a truce of sorts.
Among the matters Lloyd managed were various rental properties. These included a number
of rooming houses in some rather unsavory parts of the city, as well as the bungalow where his father had begun his career, years ago, over on Central Avenue. Father-supported by his own father, whose money was in oil-had set up a practice in that neighborhood, an office/surgery, and abandoned it as he became more established and the neighborhood declined.
In dealing with these properties, Lloyd-who had been suppressing certain of his desires-began to mingle with the lowlife scum who dwelled there. He found that for a few dollars, sometimes less than one dollar, sometimes for a beer or some smokes, he could get those desires satisfied.
But he did not want to go down that road anymore. He wanted to please his father, who after all hated queers. Lloyd began to date females of his own social class. He had been engaged to Jennifer Wainright for a year now. She was a lovely girl and innocent; very religious; steel money. She agreed with him that they should wait until after they were married to "consummate their love."
The engagement seemed to make his father very happy. He had smiled several times, touched Lloyd's shoulder once.
Lloyd's life had really come together in the last few years. His father was accepting him, in a limited way admittedly, as the family business manager. He was engaged to be married. He had been seeing a psychiatrist- something his father had insisted upon about the time he turned over the business affairs to his son (had somebody at college said something to Father?)-and his doctor told him he could, with therapy, overcome his "homosexual tendencies."
And, of course, the truly satisfying thing, the most wonderful thing, was his return to surgery.
It had begun as a disaster. It had begun with one of the lowlife sex partners attempting to blackmail him-a woman he'd had various kinds of unnatural acts with. Lloyd had made the mistake of using his real name, and this lowlife bitch had tried to turn a buck because of it. Lloyd had pretended not to be upset by the demand, and drove the woman to the bungalow on Central Avenue, which was going unrented at the moment. On the pretense of getting the money for her, he led the cheap whore down into the cellar, where his father's surgery had been, and stabbed her in the chest repeatedly with one of the scalpels from the surgical gift set.
There was a lot of blood, but, oddly, he'd had an orgasm-the most intense he'd ever had with a woman.
Maybe he wasn't queer after all.
He had laid her on the dusty, dented white-enamel examining table his father had left behind and decided the best way to get rid of the evidence was in pieces. And, for the first time in a long time, he performed surgery.
He found it very satisfying.
Late that night he drove the pieces-some of them wrapped in newspaper, some packed away in an old suitcase-up to Euclid beach and tossed them out into the water. When they washed up on shore, they would (he assumed, correctly) be thought to have washed in from the lake.
And, so, simply, elegantly, it had begun: his return to surgery, and a second sexual awakening. Sometimes the sex would be with men, but he was moving away from that; he would turn them into women sometimes, and that would make it better. He felt there was nothing at all wrong with dispatching these human derelicts-they were just so much flotsam and jetsam, after all. Faggots and whores who could serve mankind best as lab specimens.
He would keep the bodies, at least parts of the bodies, and practice both surgery and sex on them-surgery to make his father proud, and sex to improve his performance with Jennifer, when they eventually married.
He was not a "butcher." He was a surgeon. Hadn't his father said so, at the Torso Clinic? "No layman could have attempted such meticulous incisions." His father was proud of him! "We are dealing with an intelligent human being-most likely not a denizen of the lower strata." Yes! Father recognized breeding when he saw it!
In addition to its medical import, he saw his adventuring in the Flats, in the Third precinct, as another kind of research-sociological and psychological. In fact, that was how he maintained a "cover" (he did so enjoy the true-detective magazines); he told the landladies of the various rooming houses he oversaw that he would be keeping one room for himself and using a pseudonym. He was doing scientific research and it was crucial they not reveal to any of the other tenants that he was anything but another worker (or out-of-worker) in the neighborhood.
He had become "Andy," and it was a tribute to his intelligence and social skills that he could blend in with this rabble so effortlessly. They trusted him. They became his friends. For as worldly as they were, they were naive fools.
Like Frank Dolezal. Had Frankie mentioned his friend "Andy" to the cops, he wondered? Lloyd doubted it. Knowing Frankie, the poor bastard had spent most of his time begging for a drink, and thinking he'd committed the murders himself. That was a laugh! Frankie Dolezal, bricklayer, blackout drunk, and onetime slaughterhouse stooge, pulling off "meticulous incisions. Not in this lifetime, Frankie!
But the sheriff (and Ness) now made Frankie for the "Butcher." Which presented Lloyd with a dilemma.
Should he at this point wish to give up surgical and sexual experimentation, he could; the blame, the "Butcher" title, would forever be Frank Dolezal's. Part of him hated the idea of that-that such an untalented lowlife should get credit for his brilliance-but there was much to be said for quitting while you were ahead.
That was where shadowing Ness came in. But Lloyd had a problem with killing Ness. First, doing so would tip to the world that Dolezal was not their "Butcher"; and second, Lloyd was not a murderer. He was a surgeon, a sociologist, a psychologist, a bold and creative experimenter in the laboratory of life; but not a murderer. He did not kill to protect himsef, but for science, and for love.
Killing Ness would be neither scientific, nor sexual, and Lloyd wasn't sure he was up to that. Even if Ness had been spouting off in the papers.
Oh, if it were a matter of self-defense, if Ness came at him with a gun or something, Lloyd would not hesitate to kill. This had begun when he had killed that blackmailing whore, after all, which was self-defense of a sort. But cold-blooded murder? And of someone more or less from Lloyds own social class? That was not Lloyd's style; he was no fiend, after all. He had standards.
Perhaps it was time to end all experiments. He would be married soon.
He wondered if, by now, he could perform adequately with a woman-a live woman, a whole woman. He thought so. Practice, as they said, made perfect.
Now, as he finished his third bowl of Wheaties, he approached the counter, where the slim, pretty brunette waitress was leaning against one elbow, fooling absently with the gold filigree ring on her right pinkie.
"You look tired, beautiful," he said, and smiled.
She smiled back at him. "Been a long day."
"When's your shift end?"
"About ten minutes, thank God."
"Doing anything after?"
"Just collapsing somewhere."
"How about collapsing at my place?"
She studied him. He knew he looked good: he was not in scummy attire tonight, but wore a light-blue Arrow shirt and black slacks. He imagined he looked rather like an Arrow shirt ad come to life.
"I don't think so," she said unconvincingly, playing nervously with the gold filigree ring.
"Aw, come on. What's the harm? I got a nice bottle at home."
"Maybe… maybe we could go to a bar or something."
"Well, sure."
"I'm not that kind of girl, you know."
"Oh, I know."
"I'm not some easy pickup."
"I'm sure you aren't!"
They went to two bars and ended up back at his place, the reconverted surgery on Central. She was a pretty girl, and he hoped he could do the deed with her. They drank some more, especially her, and finally she passed out, probably due to the morphine he slipped in her Scotch. Having her pass out made it easier. He took her clothes off and did it to her while she was passed out. She didn't move at all while he was on her. That helped him do it. She was snoring a little when he climbed off and put his clothes o
n.
He was whistling when he went downstairs, flipping the light switch, illuminating the very white room below. The examining room cum surgery was spotless, probably cleaner than when his father had been practicing here. Lloyd had gone over the floor with a scrub brush to make it surgically disinfected as well as to destroy any evidence. He went to the large steel refrigerator and got out the lower torso of a woman and set it down upon the white-enamel examining table. He took from the lab bench his leather pouch of surgical tools that Father had given him and began to cut.
He didn't hear her on the steps.
The first thing he heard was her saying, in a slurred voice, "What are you up…"
Then he turned, scapel in hand, and she was standing there, on the stairs, slim and nude, with her eyes and mouth open very wide.
"… to," she finished. Breathlessly. Frozen there.
He sighed, and moved quickly toward her.
INTERLUDE
April 8, 1938
CHAPTER 14
Nine months had passed since the discovery of victim number nine-or victim number ten, if you counted (and Ness did) the 1934 torso that had washed up, half of it in a suitcase, on Euclid beach. Nine months since that startled tender in his tower on the Third Street Bridge had seen a dressmaker's dummy float by, only it hadn't been a dressmaker's dummy.
With the death of Frank Dolezal, and the apparent halt in killings, Eliot Ness had handed the Butcher case over to Merlo and Curry and returned to his duties as safety director. It had not been his idea: the Mayor had suggested that he "distance himself" from the investigation, what with the waters muddied by the sheriff's involvement.
Still, the Butcher remained a major concern of his, and he kept close tabs on his two detectives, who were (among other things) trying to track several suspects, including the hobo named Ben, the beggar called One-Armed Willie, and the nameless tramp who'd attacked Curry with a jackknife in the shanty town on the Run.
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