Or she used to be, before she became so many dismembered parts flung across this rock-and-garbage strewn dump. Her nude torso was slashed and the blood, splashed here, streaked there, was turning dark, almost black, though the sun caught scarlet glints and tossed them at us. Her head was gone, but maybe it would turn up. The Butcher wasn’t known for that, though. The twelve preceding victims had been found headless, and had stayed that way. Somewhere in Cleveland, perhaps, a guy had a collection in his attic. In this weather it wouldn’t smell too nice.
It’s not a good sign when the Medical Examiner gets sick; and the half dozen cops, and the police photographer, were looking green around the gills themselves. Only my friend, the Safety Director, seemed in no danger of losing his breakfast. He was a ruddy-cheeked six-footer in a coat and tie and vest, despite the heat; hatless, his hair brushed back and pomaded, he still seemed-years after I’d met him-boyish. And he was only in his mid-thirties, just a few years older than me.
I’d met him in Chicago, seven or eight years ago, when I wasn’t yet president (and everything else) of the A-I Detective Agency, but still a cop; and he was still a Prohibition Agent. Hell,
Eliot Ness said, “Despite the slashing, there’s a certain skill displayed, here.”
“Yeah, right,” I said. “A regular ballet dancer did this.”
“No, really,” he said, and bent over the headless torso, pointing. He seemed to be pointing at the gathering flies, but he wasn’t. “There’s an unmistakable precision about this. Maybe even indicating surgical training.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But I think the doctor lost this patient.”
He stood and glanced at me and smiled, just a little; he understood me: he knew my wise-guy remarks were just my way of holding onto my own breakfast.
“You ought to come to Cleveland more often,” he said.
“You know how to show a guy a good time, I’ll give you that, Eliot.”
He walked over and glanced at a forearm, which seemed to reach for an empty soap box, fingers stretched toward the Gold Dust twins. He knelt and studied it.
I wasn’t here on a vacation, by any means. Cleveland didn’t strike me as a vacation city, even before I heard about the Butcher of Kingsbury Run (so called because a number of the bodies, including the first several, were found in that Cleveland gully). This was strictly business. I was here trying to trace the missing daughter of a guy in Evanston who owned a dozen diners around Chicago. He was one of those self-made men, who started out in the greasy kitchen of his own first diner, fifteen or so years ago; and now he had a fancy brick house in Evanston and plenty of money, considering the times. But not much else. His wife had died four or five years ago, of consumption; and his daughter-who he claimed to be a good girl and by all other accounts was pretty wild-had wandered off a few months ago, with a taxi dancer from the North Side named Tony.
Well, I’d found Tony in Toledo-he was doing a floor show in a roadhouse with a dark-haired girl named FiFi; he’d grown a little pencil mustache and they did an apache routine-he was calling himself Antoine now. And Tony/Antoine said Ginger (which was the Evanston restauranteur’s daughter’s nickname) had taken up with somebody named Ray, who owned (get this) a diner in Cleveland.
I’d gotten here yesterday, and had talked to Ray, and without tipping I was looking for her, asked where was the pretty waitress, the one called Ginger, I think her name is. Ray, a skinny balding guy of about thirty with a silver front tooth, leered and winked and made it obvious that not only was Ginger working as a waitress here, she was also a side dish, where Ray was concerned. Further casual conversation revealed that it was Ginger’s night off-she was at the movies with some girl friends-and she’d be in tomorrow, around five.
I didn’t push it further, figuring to catch up with her at the diner the next evening, after wasting a day seeing Cleveland and bothering my old friend Eliot. And now I was in a city dump with him, watching him study the severed forearm of a woman.
“Look at this,” Eliot said, pointing at the outstretched fingers of the hand.
I went over to him and it-not quickly, but I went over.
“What, Eliot? Do you want to challenge my powers of deduction, or just make me sick?”
“Just a lucky break,” he said. “Most of the victims have gone unidentified; too mutilated. And a lot of ’em have been prostitutes or vagrants. But we’ve got a break, here. Two breaks, actually.”
He pointed to the hand’s little finger. To the small gold filigree band with a green stone.
“A nice specific piece of jewelry to try to trace,” he said, with a dry smile. “And even better…”
He pointed to a strawberry birthmark, the shape of a teardrop, just below the wrist.
I took a close look; then stood. Put a hand on my stomach.
Walked away and dropped to my knees and lost my breakfast.
I felt Eliot’s hand patting my back.
“Nate,” he said. “What’s the matter? You’ve seen homicides before…even grisly ones like this…brace up, boy.”
He eased me to my feet.
My tongue felt thick in my mouth, thick and restless.
“What is it?” he said.
“I think I just found my client’s daughter,” I said.
Both the strawberry birthmark and the filigree ring with the green stone had been part of my basic description of the girl; the photographs I had showed her to be a pretty but average-looking young woman-slim, brunette-who resembled every third girl you saw on the street. So I was counting on those two specifics to help me identify her. I hadn’t counted on those specifics helping me in just this fashion.
I sat in Eliot’s inner office in the Cleveland city hall; the mayor’s office was next door. We were having coffee with some rum in it-Eliot kept a bottle in a bottom drawer of his rolltop desk. I promised him not to tell Capone.
“I think we should call the father,” Eliot said. “Ask him to come and make the identification.”
I thought about it. “I’d like to argue with you, but I don’t see how I can. Maybe if we waited till…Christ. Till the head turns up…”
Eliot shrugged. “It isn’t likely to. The ring and the birthmark are enough to warrant notifying the father.”
“I can make the call.”
“No. I’ll let you talk to him when I’m done, but that’s something I should do.”
And he did. With quiet tact. After a few minutes he handed me the phone; if I’d thought him cold at the scene of the crime, I erased that thought when I saw the dampness in the gray eyes.
“Is it my little girl?” the deep voice said, sounding tinny out of the phone.
“I think so, Mr. Jensen. I’m afraid so.”
I could hear him weeping.
Then he said: “Mr. Ness said her body was…dismembered. How can you say it’s her? How…how can you know it’s her?”
And I told him of the ring and the strawberry teardrop.
“I should come there,” he said.
“Maybe that won’t be necessary.” I covered the phone. “Eliot, will my identification be enough?”
He nodded. “We’ll stretch it.”
I had to argue with Jensen, but finally he agreed for his daughter’s remains to be shipped back via train; I said I’d contact a funeral home this afternoon, and accompany her home.
I handed the phone to Eliot to hang up.
We looked at each other and Eliot, not given to swearing, said, “I’d give ten years of my life to nail that butchering bastard.”
“How long will your people need the body?”
“I’ll speak to the coroner’s office. I’m sure we can send her home with you in a day or two. Where are you staying?”
“The Stadium Hotel.”
