the basement of which Watterson had kept his so-called “murder lab.” Decapitating living humans was messy, after all, what with the jugular vein spurting blood: privacy was needed to dispatch victims and tidy up after.
Lloyd’s basement-painted a blinding hospital-white, open beams, block walls, concrete floor, white enamel examination table, white medical storage cabinets, counter arrayed with vials and tubes and beakers, including a jug ominously marked FORMALDEHYDE — was where he had tied me up, before coming at me with a cleaver that he had assured me was not used for butchery, for but amputation. Lloyd, you see, preferred the term “Mad Doctor of Kingsbury Run” to the less dignified, vaguely insulting “Mad Butcher.”
I had insulted Lloyd more directly, kicking him in the balls-he had neglected to tie my legs to the chair-at about which time an associate of Eliot’s, who’d been waiting outside, had the sense to barge in with a gun and make the capture.
“How did you manage to get Lloyd into your office closet?” Eliot asked, pausing to catch his breath on a landing, moonlight spilling down on us from the greenhouse-like skylight. My old friend-who had always been an avid tennis and handball player and jujitsu enthusiast-had a slightly paunchy, out-of-shape look that surprised me.
“Nothing too dramatic,” I said. “I waited for him to leave the doctor’s office-luckily, it was just late enough that no one else was around-stepped behind him, put a gun in his back, and walked him inside.”
We started climbing again.
Eliot, somewhat winded, said, “I thought your nine-millimeter was in your suitcase.”
“It is.” On the next landing, I reached my hand in my sportcoat pocket and lifted the. 38 snub-nose by the grip. “The A-1 is a full-service detective agency-Fred has a small arsenal in his bottom desk drawer.”
“Fred know about about this?”
I was still glancing around, checking for any unwanted after-hours company in the surrounding offices. “No- he’d already gone home for the day, when I hauled in my guest.”
“It’s kidnapping, you know.”
We were on the fifth floor now, just a few feet away from the A-1 door. Shadows cast by the ornate elevator spread across the polished tile floor and rust-brick wall like a spider’s web.
“That’s right, Eliot-and you’re aiding and abetting.”
He thought about that, momentarily, then shrugged. “Returning a mental patient to a concerned relative-that doesn’t seem like much of a crime.”
“Eliot, I abducted the son of a bitch at gunpoint.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “How are you planning to get him back to Ohio with you?”
His reply was matter-of-fact. “On the train.”
“On the train. And how will you get him on the train?”
“When I explain his options, Lloyd will do it voluntarily.”
I shook my head. “This is no Boy Scout expedition, Eliot. You’re in my world, now-where bad people sometimes just go away. Do you understand?”
Here in the open corridor, our voices echoed less; but my words hung in the air, just the same.
Finally he said, “That’s one of the options.”
As we approached the office, a muffled thumping seemed to be coming from behind the wood-and-frosted- glass door.
Working the key in the lock, I said, “Sounds like my guest is trying to order up some room service.”
The thumping escalated into banging as I ushered Eliot into the barely illuminated outer office, not turning on the light. The noise clearly emanated from the secretarial supply closet, the door of which pulsed with each whump, almost as if the closet were breathing.
When I opened the door of the supply closet, a seated Lloyd Watterson-his ice-blue eyes wide and wild above the makeshift gag of sticky brown mailing tape-was scooting back on the casters of the walnut stenographic chair into which he was tied, rearing back like a bull about to charge a matador.
I’d cuffed his hands behind him and looped the cuffs through a rung of the chair, into which I’d tied him with heavy brown wrapping twine. Though I’d lashed his ankles together and looped the thick twine around the back of the chair, he’d been able to get enough traction with his feet to take a few hopeless runs against the heavy closet door.
Veins standing out on his forehead, cords taut in his neck, the blond, broad-shouldered, almost-handsome Watterson-a blizzard of a man in his male-nurse white pants and white shirt and white tennis oxfords with white socks, the heavy brown twine cocooning around him-had the expression of a kid caught masturbating.
“Oh, do you want out of there, Lloyd?” I asked obsequiously. “Sure thing.”
I grabbed the front of his shirt and yanked him forward-the chair on its casters followed-and then pitched him careening across the office, where he crashed into the secretary’s desk, whacking his back against its edge, and came to a stop. The chair, with him in it, almost toppled, wobbling on its rollers.
Watterson was trying to talk or cry out or protest or something, under the packing-tape gag.
“Oh, do you want to be heard, Lloyd?” I asked. “We can make that happen.”
As if his face were a package I was trying to unwrap, I twisted the tape around his head, the final pass of the sticky stuff making itself known to Lloyd, who yowled at the hair-pulling, flesh-searing exercise.
“Kinda like taking off a bandage,” I said sympathetically. “Fast is better.”
I wheeled him around to face me. I had not turned on the lights in the office, and Eliot was just a figure in the shadowy darkness.
“Recognize me yet, Lloyd?” I asked.
The ice-blue eyes narrowed. He shook his head. His voice was oddly soft, gentle. “You… you were in Dr. Dailey’s office… today.”
“Think back, Lloyd… Notice I’m not calling you ‘Floyd.’ That’s a hint. Here’s another: the last time you saw me, you had me in this position.”
The eyes widened again, but the rest of his boyish face tightened. “Wait a minute… wait a minute… I do know you…”
“Hit the lights, would you?” I said to Eliot. “Just to the left of where we came in?”
The overhead light snapped on, flooding the office with illumination, and the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run saw Eliot Ness moving toward him.
“Oh shit…” Lloyd said.
“You and your daddy really fooled me, Lloyd,” Eliot said pleasantly. He planted himself in front of Watterson, arms folded, his expression bland, even benign. “Really put one over.”
A sickly smile formed on the perpetually immature face, the disturbingly sensual lips quivering. “I got help from the doctors, Mr. Ness! I’m better now.”
“Is that right? From what I gather, you’re back to your old bad habits.”
Looking up at Eliot the way a child seated in the corner looks up at an approaching razor-strop-wielding parent, Watterson shook his head, and kept shaking it as he said, “No… no. I’m well. I’m cured of that sickness. I had therapy, Mr. Ness. I worked with the doctors. I don’t have those urges anymore. I’m helping people now.”
Eliot’s eyes frowned and his lips smiled. “Performing abortions is helping people?”
Watterson nodded emphatically. “The women who want them, who need them, think so.” Then he frowned at the unfairness of it all. “What other kind of work can I find? I’m not licensed.”
It was damn near what Eliot himself had said.
Standing off to one side, I put in, “How did you wind up working for Dr. Dailey, Lloyd?”
Watterson turned his head to look at me, the rest of his body motionless, strapped to the chair. “He and Papa both went to Harvard. They were in the same class. After Papa died, I came out here and asked Dr. Dailey if he would take me in… let me be his physician’s assistant. I went to medical school, you know.”
Eliot said, “You flunked out, Lloyd.”
Watterson looked up at Eliot again; his expression seemed almost embarrassed. “I had good grades till I started drinking too much. It made my hands shake. I don’t drink at work.”
“But you still drink?”
“I drink-I drink at night with friends, in bars, like everybody. But Mr. Ness, I don’t have those unnatural urges, anymore. I don’t get out of control.”
Eliot leaned in nearly nose to nose with Watterson. “Cutting a woman in half, Lloyd, that isn’t losing control?”
