1936
15
Friday, January 24
The city was cold, the night air biting into Florence Polillo’s face. It felt worse because it was after nightfall, and she had been avoiding the sun for so long. Her coat was too thin for the weather, and the cold she felt in her veins made her feel like she was a moving pillar of ice.
She had been meeting with Iago, and he’d been telling her of the society that existed in the night, beyond the control of the creature that would be her master. Iago had taught her a valuable lesson, even though His blood was in her veins now, even though His domination was irresistible in His presence, her mind was still bound more by fear than by Eric Dietrich’s will.
She was able to shut him out, keep the Master from her own private thoughts. Enough will and she could become her own... She had a chance to escape His notice, maybe slip into that other world Iago was showing her. Slip into a world without Him.
She maneuvered through dark, snowbound streets toward the bar where she was to meet with Iago. For once she was focused on the future with some optimism. For once it felt as if the path she had chosen wasn’t irrevocable. For once it felt as if the ice inside her might melt.
She cut through an alley between two tenements, and she didn’t see the shadow before it was upon her. A pall dropped over her vision, turning the world black and empty. Before she felt consciousness slip away, she heard His voice say, “Florence.”
His manner was that of a chastising parent, and it became even colder before Flo lost her sense of the world.
Iago looked up from his drink. Nothing visible had changed in the bar, and until a few seconds ago, Flo had just been late. But he was aware enough to feel a shift. It was almost as if some of his blood rode in Florence Polillo now. She was close enough for him to feel something through it. Close enough to know that the worst had happened.
Iago stood up and left. No one stood in his way, or noticed him leave. He walked as if he had partially left the world. He walked as if the Devil himself was after him.
When Florence Polillo regained her consciousness, she was chained to a metal table in a long narrow room. Her mind was fogged, blurring her vision, turning the faces in her view into distorted monstrosities. She saw Him. He spoke to the assembly, those He had already brought over.
Most of the audience Flo had known for nearly a year. At the moment she couldn’t recognize any of them. The speech He made was all about her betrayal, her unfitness for the new order, her ungratefulness, her rejection....
She could feel the sense, even though the words were lost to her in the fog clouding her mind.
The ruddy light was dim, only revealing herself and those immediately next to her. She couldn’t see to the end of the narrow room, and she could barely see to the ceiling.
They had stripped her, and the iron holding her was cold against her skin, almost as if her flesh had bound fast to the metal. Then He touched her, and what warmth she still felt inside her was drained away at His touch. The hand rested on her shoulder, and through the contact she could feel all the contempt, and the anger.
She could also feel the prod of His mind, trying to unfold hers. She resisted it. It would have been a final violation. In His touch she felt the frustration and the anger, and she knew she had managed to keep Iago’s identity, if not her betrayal, to herself.
You will never be with us now.
He spoke, but she felt the words rather than heard them. She could feel Him withdrawing His influence, taking back all His blood had given her. The isolation was devastating. When He finally drew the blade, she welcomed its bite into her neck.
16
Sunday, January 26—Thursday, February 7
Wind carved through the alleys around East Twentieth, slicing away any heat it found. As the morning dawned, little moved outside except that wind. Zero temperatures for a second week kept everyone inside, near some source of heat. Some never even left their beds. Many churches stood empty.
As dawn broke, a dog began howling over the wind. The howls were almost painful, as if the cold were killing it. It howled, straining at its leash as if to break it. Its claws scraped for purchase on the ice-covered ground, and it would occasionally leap, to have its lunge snapped short by the chain that held it captive.
The dog’s tongue lolled, and occasionally only the whites of its eyes would show. Where the collar bit into its neck, there were flecks of frozen blood marring its black coat. It appeared as if the cold had driven it mad.
It hadn’t.
The animal’s straining, its howls, its abortive lunges, all had the same object at their focus. A few yards away from the extent of the leash, across the alley, a bushel basket lay against a factory wall. Across the top of the basket was a burlap sack, its weave slowly turning white with frost. Slightly visible underneath the burlap sack was part of a human hand.
Stefan and Nuri were one of the first homicide teams to visit the scene. The call had been put in by a local butcher who thought the basket had been filled with hams stolen from his shop, at least until he had a decent look at its contents.
When he and Nuri arrived, Stefan thought that the scene was more appropriate to a Hieronymus Bosch depiction of Hell than of a police investigation. A man held a howling dog back from the police clustered in the alley. A photographer was taking pictures while the detectives and the coroner’s people took an inventory of the basket’s contents.
Stefan watched the inventory as if in a dream; right arm, both thighs, the lower half of a female torso. All were neatly dismembered, the cuts too clean to seem real. It was as if the victim were little more than a disassembled mannequin.
Stefan couldn’t help but remember the time on Euclid Beach, finding the body that had been so insulted that it ceased to be perceived as a body. The feeling was reinforced when the police spread out to search for more remains.
He, Nuri, and the other detectives questioned the local residents, but the bitter cold had kept them all inside. The most anyone had heard was the dog. As the Sunday progressed, Stefan felt more and more that something evil had fallen over the city.
The cold continued as the police tried to reconstruct the life of the victim. Her identity was quickly discovered through the fingerprints of the one arm. Florence Polillo had a six-year-old record in Cleveland for soliciting and occupying rooms for immoral purposes.
Stefan and Nuri were part of the investigation, questioning Flo’s associates, acquaintances, visiting the bars she frequented in the Third Precinct. Little clearly emerged about her past. She wasn’t someone that people knew.
They found three possible marriages, but only one of the husbands was found. They found no trace of the first. Andrew Polillo was her second husband, but he’d been abandoned by Flo six years ago, and hadn’t even known where she’d been staying. The third called himself Harry Martin, a tall blond man she had apparently brought back from Washington, D.C. The most solid sign of Mr. Martin was a hotel manager who said he’d given rooms to Flo and her husband, and that her husband seemed to be rough on her. Harry Martin himself, couldn’t be found.
Added to that was a rat’s nest of tangled lovers, aliases, jobs, and arrest records out of which nothing concrete emerged.
A week into the murder investigation, Stefan heard of another ephemeral lead, but one that disturbed him. It disturbed him all the more because there was nothing he could do to follow up on it.
There were literally dozens of people that the detectives wanted to find; old madams who had employed Flo, people who provided her with drugs, a long list of Italians who had associated with her, a seaman who had visited her, a black woman who had visited her in jail, a gambler, several black men who might have been her lovers—and one gentleman, possibly Italian, who matched the description of someone who had been seen with Edward Andrassy.
It was the last that disturbed Stefan, because the description of this man also matched that of Iago.
By Thursday the seventh, more of Flo’s body was found
, preserved by the cold, close by to where the basket had been found. The new pieces included Flo’s upper torso, which was enough for the coroner to pronounce decapitation as the cause of death.
Despite this, and a possible link to Andrassy, the newly appointed head of Homicide, Detective Sergeant James T. Hogan, told the press that the Flo Polillo murder was to be treated as totally unrelated to the Andrassy case.
Stefan wasn’t the only one who didn’t believe Detective Hogan’s pronouncement.
17
Wednesday, February 13
Stefan and Nuri left the Central Station at eleven in the morning. The day was as cold as any yet. Their breath fogged in the car, even with the heater going.
“What a day,” Nuri said in a puff of fog. He rubbed his hands together. “Do we have to go out in this?”
Stefan pumped the brakes to stop his Ford at the corner, allowing some of the insane Cleveland drivers to barrel past the intersection in front of him. He looked at Nuri. “We’re supposed to follow up this call.”
“Another anonymous call—Am I the only one who thinks the Polillo case isn’t going anywhere?”
Stefan shook his head as he watched a Lincoln shoot by in front of him. Watching it, he thought that Clevelanders drove as if their cars were weapons. The light changed, and Stefan paused to make sure that the cross traffic had actually stopped.
During that pause, the rear passenger-side door opened, letting in howling wind and snow. Stefan turned with Nuri to see what had happened. Behind them, someone’s horn blared at them.
A young man pulled himself into the back seat of Stefan’s Ford, pulling the door shut behind him. Stefan reached for his gun and began to ask, “What the hell do you—”
“What the—” Nuri said, apparently achieving recognition about the same time that Stefan did.
The horn blared again, as Eliot Ness shook snow out of his hair.
Ness looked at both of them from the back seat and said, “I think you better start moving again.”
Stefan turned away from the chief law enforcement officer in the city, and pumped the gas. The V-8 sprang through the intersection, tires squealing.
“Detectives Ryzard, Lapidos,” Ness said.
“Yes,” Nuri responded. “Sir, what are you doing here?” Nuri echoed Stefan’s thought.
“I’m not here,” Ness said. “And you can forget the tip, it won’t pan out.”
“You know that?” Stefan asked.
“Yes. I made the call.”
Stefan squeezed the wheel and felt his knuckles pop. “What the hell are you doing, meddling in a murder investigation?” Stefan looked at Ness in the rearview mirror. He looked younger than Nuri, with a face that belonged on a college campus, not a police force. This was the man the papers made such a fuss about, the man who was going to clean up this city. Stefan didn’t like him.
“I want you to drive to City Hall—”
“Am I a chauffeur now?” Stefan said.
Stefan saw Ness frown in the rear-view mirror. He didn’t care. He’d never liked what he’d seen of the Safety Director’s grandstanding, and his first meeting with the man wasn’t improving the impression.
“What are you doing here, sir?” Nuri repeated. His voice carried the tone of someone stepping between two men throwing punches at each other, carrying equal parts reassurance and fear at being drawn into the melee.
“I’m here because you two are being assigned to something that can’t be dealt with through normal channels.” He stared at Stefan through the mirror. “I need an investigation that won’t ripple the political waters.”
Timid attitude for the centurion who’s supposed to deliver the city from the barbarians.
“What investigation?” Nuri asked.
“The same one you’re on now, the Polillo murder—”
“Everyone and their brother is on that already,” Stefan said.
Ness nodded and began pulling folders from a briefcase he carried, leaving them on the seat next to him. “You two are no longer on the official list of investigators. You’re now reporting directly to me.” He patted the folders next to him. “No one else is to know about your investigation.”
Stefan started to say something, but a burning feeling in his gut stopped him.
“Why?” Nuri asked.
“Your investigation will include powerful men that the rest of the force don’t even know are part of the investigation. The evidence is too slim to make this public even inside the administration—”
“There’s a connection,” Stefan said. “Hogan’s denying it, but there’s a connection to the Andrassy murder.”
Ness nodded. “I’ve ordered that there be no official connection between those murders. That’s what you’re going to do. Connect them, Polillo, Andrassy and his John Doe companion, and the Jane Doe that washed up on Euclid Beach in September ‘34.”
They were pulling up on City Hall. “Why the secrecy?” Stefan asked.
“I’ve left you some notes on it. There’re also some numbers that you’ll report to. Go back to the station and type out a report about how this lead never panned out. You’ll find orders reassigning you. I have to go now, I’m meeting the press upstairs.”
Ness left the rear of the car, slipping up the snowbound steps of City Hall. “I’ll bet,” Stefan muttered.
In the rear seat were a pile of papers. Stefan looked at Nuri as he turned back to the road. “Get those, would you?”
Nuri pulled the stack of folders on to his lap. He opened the top folder. “It seems to be the immigration records for someone named Eric Dietrich.”
Stefan led Nuri up to his apartment. Nuri followed him up the stairs, carrying the pile of folders Ness had left them. Stefan had decided that, with the secrecy involved, it would be better to go over everything somewhere private. He distrusted the publicity-minded Ness, but he was also drawn to the assignment, the same way he’d been drawn to the nondeath of Samson Fairfax.
Behind him on the stairs, Nuri said, “I keep wondering, why us two? Wouldn’t Musil and May make more sense?”
Stefan shook his head, “Not if there’s supposed to be a secret investigation.” He stopped in front of his door and pulled out his keys. “Whatever Detective Sergeant Hogan says is ‘official,’ everyone is making a connection between Andrassy and Polillo. If Musil and May were suddenly reassigned off of both cases, someone would notice. You and me, we’re only part of the Polillo case.”
The door swung open into Stefan’s sparse apartment. A sense of social unease struck him. Stefan couldn’t remember the last time he had invited someone into his apartment. He was suddenly conscious of how empty it seemed.
Blinds cut off the rest of the world, and as Stefan turned the switch, the living room seemed to shrink under the light. The only furniture here were a few cane-backed chairs and a table. There wasn’t even a carpet to moderate the sound of their footsteps.
Nuri walked in and unloaded his burden on the table as Stefan took away a coffee cup and plate left over from breakfast. Thankfully, Nuri made no comments about his apartment. Though he did glance up at a crucifix, the only decoration on the wall.
“What is this about a Jane Doe?” Nuri called to him as Stefan put the dishes in the sink.
“Two years ago, part of a body washed up on Euclid Beach. I was there.”
“Part of a body?”
Stefan started putting a coffeepot together. “Yes, the lower part of a female torso. We found the upper part later on. Cause of death was probably decapitation.”
Nuri whistled. “That makes all of them, then,” he rustled through the files, “All killed by decapitation. Something of a signature.”
Stefan made coffee while Nuri perused the files. When Stefan returned with two cups, Nuri said, “I don’t see any connection to this Eric Dietrich, other than that he seems to have arrived in the country the April before Jane Doe washed up.”
Stefan took the other chair. “As far as I’m concerned, we’re
investigating the murders, not Dietrich—”
“But—”
“Eric Dietrich is just a hunch on Ness’ part,” Stefan sipped his coffee. “First, I want to look at all four of these deaths and see everything that ties them together.”
Outside, the winter wind rattled the windows. A radiator hissed in the corner. Nuri cradled the mug as if using the coffee to warm his hands. “Other than the decapitation?”
“What else?”
The folders for four murders were spread on the table. “They were all moved. None were killed where they were found. All the blood ended up somewhere else.” He tapped on the file for Andrassy and his John Doe companion. “These bodies were actually cleaned off.”
“Think there’s any question that we’re dealing with a maniac?”
Nuri nodded. “It looks like that, though...”
“Though what?”
“I get an odd feeling looking at these bodies.” He picked up a picture of the basket where Polillo’s remains were found. “Don’t you get the sense that there’s some ritual involved?”
“Doesn’t mean we’re not dealing with someone’s private madness.”
“I guess not.”
Stefan looked at Nuri, whose expression was cast down at the files before them. “But you think differently?”
“What if we’re dealing with a group here?”
The idea made Stefan shudder. “Let’s concentrate on what we have, what we know. We can speculate later.”
Nuri nodded and added, “Have you noticed the really odd thing?”
“This whole case is odd.”
“No, I mean it might be coincidence, but according to this, both unidentified bodies were preserved in some sort of chemical. The body that washed up on Euclid Beach, and the body next to Andrassy, both had some odd chemical reaction with the skin.”
Blood & Rust Page 38
