'Plenty trips?'
'Two or three trips, carrying stuff out.'
'What did you carry it in?'
'Uh… in basket?'
'A basket,' the deputy said, smiling. He was taking notes, Dolezal noticed.
The sheriff said, 'What did you do with the torso?'
'Torso?'
'The trunk.'
'I no use trunk. I use basket.'
'No, you imbecile. What did you do with the trunk?' And the sheriff gestured to his body from neck to upper legs.
'You left it behind Hart Manufacturing, didn't you?' the deputy said, pencil poised.
'That near where I live,' Dolezal said.
'Yes,' the sheriff said smugly. 'Two hundred and thirty-five yards from your rooming-house doorstep.'
Dolezal nodded. 'Okay, I leave trunk in alley behind where you said.'
'What about the rest?'
'What rest?'
'Arms, legs, head…'
'Arms, legs, head. Okay, I dump them in lake.'
'Whereabouts?'
'Oh. Uh… foot of East Forty-ninth Street. I threw them in lake. Breeze carry them away. Can I have drink now?'
The deputy was smiling; he closed his little notepad and drummed on it with his pencil. The sheriff was smiling, too. They were smiling at each other, like Dolezal wasn't there.
So he reminded them that he was: 'Can I have drink please?'
'No, Frank,' the sheriff said. 'No drinks for a while. You just sit here. We'll have another go-round a little later.'
'I tell you everything you want!'
'You didn't tell us about Rose Wallace or Eddie Andrassy.'
'I drink with her, I fuck with him! Okay? Drink now?'
'Later,' the sheriff said, smiling, tapping his palm with the rubber hose.
The two men left.
Dolezal sat in the bright cone of light.
He sat there and sweated and the two drinks began to wear off. His stomach began to clutch again. His hands and feet could not stop moving; he was on stage alone, dancing in the spotlight of the overhead lamp, performing to an empty house.
He had told them what they wanted, but was it the truth? Had he killed Flo? Had he cut her up?
He could have. He'd seen her ghost in his room, after all. He knew-he shuddered at the thought-he knew he had done bad things during blackout drunks. People had told him. Oh, how they had told him.
Was he the Butcher?
He stood and kicked the chair. He kicked the chair out of the light and into the corner and began kicking it savagely, mercilessly, like he was the brutal sheriff and the chair a suspect he was grilling. But the chair was tougher than he was. It remained intact, except for where the sheriff's rubber hose had chipped it.
Dolezal stood, shaking, waiting for someone to come in from outside and beat him or something. But the noise of his attack on the chair had attracted no one. The cement room, with its heavy door shut, was apparently soundproof.
He sat in the darkness, on the floor, against the cold cement wall, and thought.
I'm the Butcher, he told himself.
Again and again.
I kill all those people. Grotesque images of animal carnage from his slaughterhouse days flashed through his mind. His stomach clutched.
He stood. Shaking. He took off his shirt and tore it into wide strips and tied the strips together with heavy knots, like a sailor might make. Then he went and got the chair and stood on it and tried to reach the barred window. Couldn't.
He was, however, able to reach up above the fairly low-hanging conical lamp, squinting up into the brightness as he tied the rope he'd made from his shirt to the thin shaft of steel from which the lamp hung, and then he tied the shirt-rope around his neck and stepped off the chair.
CHAPTER 12
Ness ignored the khaki-clad fellow at the desk in the outer office and went right into the sheriff's sanctuary. Sheriff O'Connell was a whale beached on a leather sofa pushed against a wall decorated with various civic awards from the suburbs he serviced. The sheriff was snoring and a copy of the Police Gazette was draped open across his stomach.
Ness slammed the door, rattling its glass, keeping the secretary or deputy or whatever-the-hell he was back out in the outer office, and waking up the sheriff of Cuyahoga County.
O'Connell's tiny dark eyes were wide as he gazed up at the safety director, surprised and disoriented for a moment; then he sat up on the sofa, his eyes turning hard and his face red with anger.
'Even God needs an appointment to see me,' he said, getting up on his feet, looking down at the six-foot Ness.
Ness looked back at him, making no attempt to hide his disgust. 'Well, I'm sure the devil can walk right in,' he told the sheriff. 'So I took the same liberty. Now why don't you sit down. We have to talk.'
O'Connell glared at Ness, though the red was fading from his face as he said, 'All right. But I think I'd like one of my deputies as a witness. To make some notes.'
'I don't think you will.' Ness gestured to the sheriff's tidy desk. 'Sit down, Sheriff.'
Sighing out his nose, the sheriff moved behind the desk with an agility that belied his size and folded his hands on a green desk blotter. His fingers were thick, the hands massive. His eyes were lidded with contempt.
It was the Wednesday after Frank Dolezal's arrest. Dolezal, who had made two suicide attempts, was alive and somewhere in this building, in this jail. In all that time Ness had not been able to arrange a meeting with the suspect-or sheriff, for that matter.
'You have a prisoner I'd like to see,' Ness told him.
'We have a suspect in the Kingsbury Run investigation,' O'Connel said blandly, 'if that's what you mean.'
'That's what I mean.'
'Nobody sees this suspect but my people.'
'Including a lawyer?' Ness asked with mock innocence.
They both knew that if the suspect had seen a lawyer, Dolezal would have been released by now, on a writ of habeas corpus.
'He hasn't been indicted yet,' the sheriff said.
'And the court isn't allowed to appoint an attorney until after he's been indicted. Of course. But a suspect is supposed to be indicted within seventy-two hours. You've had Mr. Dolezal in custody for six days now.'
'It's an unusual case. Now I'm a busy man, Mr. Ness. If you don't mind…'
'I do mind, and I've only begun. Your nap and the Police Gazette are just going to have wait.'
The sheriff's mouth curled into a sneer, but he said nothing.
'Yesterday you hauled Mr. Dolezal over to the East Cleveland police department,' Ness said, 'for a lie detector test. Why did you bother driving over there when just across the way we have a modern facility which Chief Matowitz and I would have been glad to make available to you?'
'I prefer to keep my investigation of this case separate from yours.'
