'I'd say the older one was about forty-five,' Merlo said to Curry as they stared down at the reconstructed corpse. 'About five six. Dark hair. Some decomposition. Killed before the other, I'd say. Coroner will fix that, soon enough.'
They walked to the other, younger corpse. Night had overtaken dusk, but the black sky was lit somewhat by the glow of the open-hearth furnaces of the steel mills.
'This poor bastard,' said Merlo, flashing the light on the white body, 'looks younger than you, Curry.'
Curry said, 'Flash that on his hands.'
Merlo did, one hand at a time.
'See that?' Curry asked, kneeling, pointing to the dead man's wrists.
Merlo nodded. 'Rope burns.'
Soon the boys from the county morgue were placing the torsos on stretchers and the body parts in separate wicker baskets and began hauling them away. Curry and Merlo watched from a distance, atop the incline of Kingsbury Run, near their parked unmarked car.
'How do you read this, Detective Curry?'
'A madman did this.'
'Could be a crime of passion,' Merlo suggested. 'Love triangle gone awry.'
'What, a woman did this?'
Merlo smiled patiently. 'No. I think this is a man's work, all right.'
Curry thought about that.
Then he asked, 'Why am I here, sir?'
'Call me Martin, or Marty. All right, Al?'
'Okay,' Curry said, smiling a little. 'But why me?'
'Don't you know?' Merlo asked with his own wry smile. 'You're a he-ro.'
That embarrassed Curry. He knew what Merlo was referring to: traffic cop Curry had pulled several people, including a small child, from a burning car; he got good press in a city where the cops seldom got good press and was promoted to detective.
'You didn't buy your badge,' Merlo said. 'That's a rarity in Cleveland, these days. I wanted an honest cop to work with-that meant a new cop, a fresh, young one. An apple that hadn't got spoiled yet.'
'Oh,' said Curry. He didn't know whether to feel complimented or in-sulted. 'The force is in a bad way, isn't it?'
'There are good people,' Merlo said, looking down into the darkness of the Run, 'and bad ones, and those in between. We start out good, most of us, and drift into that in-between place. With you at my side, my boy, perhaps I can help us both from drifting all the way to that other place.'
They stood silently for a while.
Then Curry blurted: 'I believe there are evil people in the world.'
'Do tell,' Merlo said, watching the morgue boys climb the incline with wicker baskets in hand. They might have been carrying their laundry.
'We'll have a new mayor soon,' said Curry. 'Things may change.'
'Don't hold your breath,' Merlo said, 'unless it's just to keep the smell of the Run out of your nostrils.'
In less than three months, the new mayor would appoint Eliot Ness safety director of the city of Cleveland, and the young former T-man would indeed begin cleaning up Cleveland's corrupt department. And both Curry and Merlo would benefit.
But right now, detectives Curry and Merlo were wrapped in the darkness of the night and the Run and the evil that man was so obviously capable of; and the only light in this night was from the steel mills.
Not far away, standing in the darkness of the backyard of a run-down rooming house, a big almost-handsome blond man in a red and black plaid shirt was watching the two detectives and smiling.
ONE
CHAPTER 2
Searchlights stroked the night sky in alternating shades of red, white, and blue; a blimp glided into their cross fire, hovering above modernistic buildings poised along the lakefront, like the set of some fantastic science-fiction film. Moving beams of light rose from behind the lagoon theater and fanned out, painting the dark clouds with an aurora borealis.
On this cool if humid Saturday evening, wide-eyed visitors wandered a world that seemed quite apart from both Cleveland and the depression that racked it. Just two blocks from Public Square, citizens fleeing reality were greeted by seven seventy-foot pylons whose flat surfaces were rendered red, white, and blue by lighting. Beyond, for fifty cents admission, one could stroll, or take an open-air bus or grab a rickshaw to ride upon, freshly paved lanes through the immaculately landscaped gardens of the sprawling one hundred and fifty acres of the Great Lakes Exposition. Divided by its terrain into an upper and lower level, the expo's gifts to Clevelanders on the occasion of the city's hundredth birthday included starkly modern exhibition halls, where one might experience, via dioramas, models, and wall-size photographs, 'The Romance of Iron and Steel'; an 'International Village,' where sidewalk cafes and shops sold authentic foods, drinks, and curios from forty countries; and a vast midway, where Spook Street, the 'Strange as It Seems' museum, and the Midget Circus vied for attention.
It all seemed overly familiar to one patron this muggy evening, and not just because this was the expo's second year. Eliot Ness was a Chicago boy, and the Great Lakes Exposition was, he knew all too well, a rehashing of the even larger Century of Progress back home, in '33 and '34.
Many of the exhibits were the same, and even those that were new to the expo shared the severe, futuristic building designs that marked the World's Fair, though the pastel lighting effects there were replaced by brighter colors here. The Firestone Building again had its 'Singing Fountains,' colorful cascades of illuminated water with continuous classical music. Even Sally Rand was booked in-at the Streets of the World, a pale imitation of the Chicago fair's Streets of Paris where the famed fan dancer had first feathered her nest.
Not that Ness looked down upon this project. He was a city official, after all-safety director, in charge of both the police and fire departments-and as such, considered the expo a fine idea. It brought in much-needed jobs, even if only for a limited time, pumped in plenty of cash from expo-goers, and provided good publicity for a city too often dismissed as dull.
He had found Cleveland anything but dull. As a prohibition agent in Chicago, first as a Justice Department man and then moving over to Treasury, he'd waged a successful war against the likes of Al Capone and Frank Nitti. Later he'd battled moonshiners as a 'revenooer' in the mountains of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio. Cleveland should have been restful by comparison, but what he found in this 'dull' city were enough crooked cops, corrupt politicians, and prevailing gangsters to make a Chicago boy feel right at home.
Which was how the World's Fair-like expo should have made him feel, as well, but it didn't. It seemed a ghost town version of the Century of Progress-perhaps because tonight's attendance was so meager. Way down from last year's huge crowds. Well, the Fourth of July was around the corner, he thought; that should be a record-breaking day.
Ness walked the paved midway, passing the 'Pantheon de la Guerre,' a war exhibit that had been at the fair, heading for 'The Front Page,' a concession that was new to this expo. Most expo-goers were dressed in casual summer clothes, but Ness wore a gray and black tie and a slash of white handkerchief in the breast pocket of his expensively tailored gray lightweight suit. He was a six-footer and slim, his features boyish, his expression shy, his gray eyes calm.
You would not guess, looking at him, that he was physically powerful, but he was. Despite a certain collegiate look, he had not earned his physique on a playing field, but in the Pullman plant on Chicago's South Side
