Stefan nodded, and raised a hand toward his nose as the near subliminal smell began sinking in from the remains. It smelled of the lake, but there was an odor of corruption that turned his stomach.
He bent to look at what Lake Erie had disgorged onto Euclid Beach. It was discolored and wrapped in seaweed, so at first it was hard to make the mind perceive it for what it was. From a distance it could have been a twisted piece of driftwood. This close, the texture of the purpled flesh made it hard to make that mistake. Even this close—Stefan took out a handkerchief and raised it to his mouth, bending until he was barely a foot away from the surface of the skin—it was hard to tell what this had once been. The mind was used to seeing the human body as a whole; if it saw disjointed pieces, it was as functional units, arms, legs, head.
It took nearly a minute for Stefan to see the remains as part of a human body, even though he had some idea what to expect before he drove down here.
“Who found it?” he asked, unable to turn away. He could see it now, the curve of a thigh, the bend of a hip. His mind finally acknowledged that he was looking at the lower half of a woman’s torso, severed at the abdomen and at mid thigh. He could now mentally place the bones and muscles in their proper relationships.
It was the most appalling mutilation he’d ever seen.
“A gentleman named Frank La Grossie,” someone answered his question. “He was out for a walk this morning and almost tripped over it.”
Stefan slowly unbent and turned to Cody. “How often do things wash up from the lake like this?”
Cody shrugged. “More often than I’d like. Who knows, it could be some med school’s cadaver.”
Stefan looked up at him and said, “Half a cadaver?”
He shrugged. “The cuts struck me as awful neat.”
Stefan looked at the body again, at the wounds where it had been separated from the rest of itself. It did seem that the wounds were too neat.
This body had not been torn. The separation had been done deliberately with some sort of blade. That much was obvious, even as corrupted as the corpse was. “No idea how old it is?”
“We have to wait for the coroner to look at it.”
Stefan nodded and walked around the remains, stepping aside occasionally for the photographer. After a while, Stefan asked, “Have you noticed it?”
“Noticed what?”
“Fish, something, should have eaten pieces of this while it was in the water. And it looks to’ve been in the water a long time.”
A uniformed cop spoke up, “Maybe it’s burned? The color looks like someone messed up burning the body.”
Yes, if the color’s charring instead of decay, that’d explain that. But it didn’t smell like someone’s fresh attempt to dispose of a body.
“There’s another thing,” Stefan added. He waved a hand over the corpse. “No flies.”
Cody shook his head and muttered something that sounded like, “Christ.”
The flash of a bulb came from behind him, and Stefan turned to look at the photographer. “What’s over there?” he asked.
The photographer took the stub of an unlit cigar out of the corner of his mouth and pointed at the sand midway between him and Stefan. “Dead bird,” he said, “probably nothing.”
It was a seagull, partly buried in sand the lake had washed in. There was no indication of what had killed it. Stefan looked up and saw the seagull’s fellows massed far down the beach, awaiting the coming storm. For a moment, Stefan had the oddest sensation that every gull’s back was turned to their fallen comrade, as if the dead one had committed some unpardonable sin that even death could not forgive.
Stefan turned back to the thing that used to be part of a human body and wondered if its presence seemed as ominous to the others as it did to him.
He had seen lots of bodies. He had thought that such scenes had lost the ability to disturb him. They hadn’t.
Looking at the body, Stefan felt threatened. His faith had been shaken in a way he hadn’t felt before. For a moment it seemed that the light of God had abandoned this stretch of Euclid Beach, and his own presence made him a participant in some unholy sacrament.
“Who would do this to someone?” he whispered to himself.
Cody waved at the lake, a slightly darker shade than the sky, and said, “Like I said, most likely something a medical school disposed of. Second most likely, some Capone type chopping up the victim to make it hard to identify. Who knows how long it’s been floating out there? It could have drifted all the way from Chicago.”
Stefan nodded, though it seemed more likely that the body floated out of their own Cuyahoga River.
Eventually the coroner’s wagon showed up for the body, and there was little left for them to do but walk up and down the beach and look for more pieces. No more showed up.
Not there.
3
Thursday, September 6
The discovery of the lower part of a human torso on Euclid Beach was exceptional enough to be printed in one form or another in the Plain Dealer, the Press, and the News. Out in North Perry, halfway on the other side of Lake County from Cleveland, a gentleman named Joseph Hejduk came to the Central Station to tell them about some remains buried on his property.
On the drive out there, with a couple of uniformed cops, two detectives, and two shovels, Stefan listened to Hejduk explain how a nearly indescribable carcass had washed up on his property, how he had called the sheriffs office, and how a deputy had told him—on the phone, without ever seeing the remains—it was probably a dead animal and that Mr. Hejduk should bury it.
Mr. Hejduk wasn’t someone to argue with the sheriff’s department. But he’d been having nightmares about the thing he buried for the past two weeks. When he had read about what they’d found on Euclid Beach, he knew, he said, “That I bury no animal there.”
Darkness and rain slammed into them as Mr. Hejduk drove his ten-year-old Studebaker to a stop next to his property. The uniformed cops grabbed the shovels as Mr. Hejduk led them out into the storm, and to the remains of a small mound of earth at the edge of a wooded area.
Stefan helped the uniformed police dig, trading places as people took breaks from digging in the cramped space. Inspector Cody continued to question Mr. Hejduk about what happened, making the occasional unkind observation about the Lake County Sheriffs Department.
The digging was hellish in the wind and rain. They only had the light from flashlights shining above them. The scant light seemed to do nothing but make the shadows even more impenetrable. Mud pulled at Stefan’s feet, and water weighed his coat down on his shoulders. Everything smelled of damp earth, and after about an hour and a half of digging, a familiar decayed odor.
By the time they found what Mr. Hejduk had buried, Stefan had stopped breathing through his nose.
One of the uniformed cops called out, “I’ve found something.”
He was standing in the far end of a hole that had taken on the proportions of a grave. Stefan was at the other end, and when the flashlight beams swept over to shine at that cop’s feet, Stefan realized that end of the hole was a foot or two shallower than his.
The cop was scraping mud away from something with the blade of his shovel, and Stefan could tell that the remains couldn’t be more than three feet long. If it had been a human-sized corpse, Stefan would’ve been standing on part of it.
He leaned over, hoping that the deputy had been right, but knowing, from the smell, that he hadn’t.
The blade of the shovel scraped black clumps of earth off of something that looked even blacker. Like the thing on the beach, it took a while for Stefan to perceive the unearthed object for what it was.
The uniformed cop reached a point where he was satisfied, or had seen enough, and backed away, letting the rain wash the rest of the mud off the carcass. He tossed the shovel up on the ground next to the hole and climbed out, calling for the stretcher.
Stefan kept staring at what the cop had unearthed. He felt the same sense of unholiness here,
a sense of God’s abandonment.
In the hole was another piece of a woman’s body, the upper torso this time, missing the head and the arms at the shoulders. It suffered the same discoloration, but looked oddly preserved for having spent the last two weeks or so in the earth.
Stefan pulled himself up out of the hole when they came for the body. He emerged just in time to hear Mr. Hejduk tell Cody about the dead birds he’d found around the remains on the beach.
The next day Coroner Pearce fitted the remains together and declared them a match. He also ruled out the body coming from a medical lab. From the muscular contractions in the neck area, he concluded that decapitation was the cause of death. The discoloration wasn’t from someone trying to burn the corpse; it seemed to be, in fact, the result of some sort of chemical preservative impregnating the victim’s flesh. The coroner couldn’t identify the chemical, but it explained the odd preservation of the body after what was estimated as six months in the lake and perhaps a month or two before that for the actual time of death.
The coroner described the woman as having been more or less average height and build, thirty-five years old or so, whose only unique distinguishing feature was having had her uterus surgically removed some years prior to death.
The lake was dredged, but no more pieces of the “Lady of the Lake” were found. Detective Stefan Ryzard spent much of his time over the next three months combing missing person’s records for someone matching the Lady’s remains. Despite following leads as far as Canada, the Lady was never officially identified, and it would be over two years before Stefan would know her name.
BOOK ONE
September 1935-June 1936
THE KINGDOM
OF HEAVEN
1935
1
Monday, September 2
Stefan Ryzard paced in an alley behind a drugstore in his old neighborhood around East Fifty-Fifth and St. Clair. He didn’t like being here. It brought back too many memories. It had been years since he lost Mary and Jacob, and every time he came near the place where he’d spent the first thirty years of his life, he was reminded of the loss. Reminded of God’s infinite indifference.
Being here with a body whose murder had little hope of being solved did little to relieve Stefan’s sense of abandonment.
The body lay in the midst of half a dozen ashcans. He’d been finished off with a single high-caliber round in the forehead. The body had been dumped here, Ryzard suspected, as a warning to someone in the neighborhood—bumped off by one of the criminal mobs that had been running amok in this town since Prohibition. Stefan might find out who the triggerman was, might even discover why it happened, but as for evidence, or an arrest—
It wasn’t going to happen.
So far, after sending uniforms out to canvass the area for three buildings in every direction, they hadn’t a single witness who even thought they’d seen anything useful.
All he was doing here was marking time until the wagon showed up for the body. He hoped they’d get here soon; he wanted to get out of here. He didn’t like the way the past seemed to stick to this place, sucking him in. In another few hours he might start walking back to St. John’s, where he hadn’t been since the funeral.
If they’d show up, he could get all of this out of his mind, get the report on this written up before lunch, and then maybe he could move on to some productive police work. If there was any such thing in this town.
“Detective Ryzard?”
Stefan turned to face the voice, which came from the entrance of the alley. A young man was there, giving him a quizzical look. Stefan’s first thought was: federal agent. He looked like one of Hoover’s boys, too damn neat.
Stefan nodded.
“Pleased to meet you.” He walked over to Stefan and extended his hand, and for a moment Stefan thought: lawyer.
Stefan didn’t take the offered hand. “Who in blazes are you?” Another thought crossed his mind, this one the most annoying: reporter.
“This is a crime scene, son. Are you supposed to be here?”
The young man looked crestfallen and lowered his hand. “I think so, sir. You are Detective Ryzard? They sent me here to meet you from the Central Station.”
Last thought: trainee. They’ve assigned me a goddamn trainee. Stefan shook his head. “You have a name?”
“Nuri,” he said after a moment of apparent confusion. “Nuri Lapidos. Sorry, I’m new here and—”
“They assigned you to me so I can show you the ropes, right?”
“I guess that’s more or less it.”
Stefan shook his head. “They could have warned me,” he muttered to himself.
There was an oddly fatalistic sigh from Nuri, and he said, “If there’s a problem, I can wait by the car.”
“No, there’s no problem.”
Nuri Lapidos took a few steps around Stefan and looked down at the end of the alley where the corpse lay. “So what have you got here?”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
Nuri looked up at him, then crouched by the body where it was sprawled. “He was dumped here, wasn’t he?”
“Why do you say that?” Stefan prodded him.
“Position of the body, and no sign of blood from the wound on anything but his clothes.” He kept staring at the body. “An execution. They had the poor bastard on his knees when they shot him—a garage or a parking lot from the oil stains.” He pointed at the guy’s pants where some dark stains peeked from beneath the blood.
He pushed back a sleeve and looked at the guy’s right wrist. “He was tied or handcuffed. There’s signs of abrasion.”
Stefan nodded, “That’s not bad.”
Nuri stood up. “He was on his side long enough for lividity to set in, probably the trunk of a car.” He stepped back next to Stefan. “He looks like a boxer. The fella’s got heavy scarring on his hands, and on what’s left of his face. You can see his nose’s been broken more than once.”
“Yeah,” Stefan said with a touch of irony in his voice, “a boxer.”
Nuri shrugged. “Well, someone who beat people up for a living.”
Stefan nodded. The victim was some hood’s pet gorilla, and someone had more than likely plugged him to get at his employer. Stefan looked Nuri up and down and revised his initial impression of the man. He was young, but not as young as he looked. The neat clothes and the overly open expression distracted from his gaze, which bore an intelligence that most of Stefan’s colleagues lacked.
Stefan extended his hand and said, “When the wagon gets here, let me buy you lunch.”
Sol’s Diner was a little hole-in-the-wall place on East Ninth, a stone’s throw from the nightclubs on Short Vincent. The proximity to all the glitz made the place seem that much darker, even in midday. Stefan didn’t care; at times he preferred the dimness, and it was a small price to pay for Sol’s corned-beef sandwiches.
He sat across from Nuri in one of the booths near the back. As they waited for their order, Stefan asked, “So what brings you to my little corner of Cleveland?”
Nuri gave him a quick grin. “I hitched a ride in a squad car.”
“Yeah.” Stefan leaned back and loosened his tie. “You know that’s not what I mean. College educated, aren’t you?”
“The damage shows?” Nuri chuckled. “Mama really wanted a lawyer.” He pinched his fingers and held them up. “Mrs. Lapidos’ little boy came this close. Somehow I drifted from criminal law to criminology, and here I am, degree and all.”
Stefan shook his head. “A cop with a Bachelors—”
“Masters.”
“You know, when I first saw you, I had you pegged for a federal agent. Why aren’t you one of Hoover’s boys? It probably pays better.”
Nuri chuckled. “Oh, yeah, I can see the newsreels now, ‘Nuri Lapidos, the Jewish G-man.’ No, I don’t think I’m what J. Edgar is looking for.”
“Oh, sorry.”
Nuri shook his head. “Don’t be. I wanted to be part of a real poli
ce department anyway.”
The waitress came and slid plates in front of them.
“Well, the department’s real, all right,” Stefan said, picking up his sandwich and taking a bite out of it.
Nuri had only ordered toast and coffee. He took a triangular slice and dipped it in his cup. “That sounds a little bitter.”
Stefan set down his sandwich. “It is bitter. Some days I just pray for a little shame in this city. I swear, sometimes it seems that half the department is taking payoffs from someone.”
“You’re exaggerating.”
Stefan shook his head. “Just wait until you collar someone with connections and see him walk out of the building before you finish the paperwork. Officers, detectives, judges—”
“You weren’t kidding when you said the investigation on the guy in the alley wasn’t going to go anywhere?”
Stefan nodded. “There’s no way we’re ever going to get something like that prosecuted in this county, maybe nowhere in the whole state. Assuming we even find out who killed him.” Stefan took a sip of his own coffee. It went down like molten lead, solidifying into a weight in his stomach. “Whatever happens in this town, someone in the department is being paid to look the other way. Hard to believe, but I think it’s gotten worse since they repealed Prohibition.”
Nuri shook his head.
“You think I’m kidding? When we were dry, a hell of a lot of people made a lot of money in liquor. A lot. Regular cops got used to looking the other way. One bad law corrupted this whole city, decivilized us until law itself became devalued. Now we don’t even have the excuse of a bad law.”
Nuri shrugged. “So Prohibition was a bad idea. I doubt anyone’d argue with you there. You make it sound as if Cleveland was the reincarnation of Gomorrah.”
Stefan sipped his coffee. “Sometimes I wonder.”
2
Saturday, September 21
Blood & Rust Page 29
