The Best Paranormal Crime Stories Ever Told

were missing. So was damn near every drop of blood from each victim’s jigsaw-puzzle corpse.

Because the butcher’s prey was the faceless, homeless rabble washed up on the shores of this Depression, it took a long time for the city to give a damn. But the Slaughter Run Butcher was approaching an even dozen now, and that was enough to interest not just the police, but the press and the public.

The mission at Fourth and Freemont was always crowded-unlike a lot of soup kitchens, they didn’t require you to pay for your supper by sitting through a hell-and-damnation sermon. In fact, I never saw anybody seated in the pews of the little chapel room off the dining hall, although occasionally you saw somebody sleeping it off in there; the minister was a mousy guy with white hair and a thin black mustache. He didn’t seem to do much beside mill around, touching bums on the shoulder, saying, “Bless you my son.”

The person who really seemed to be in charge was this dark-haired society dame-Rebecca Radclau. If the gossip columns were correct, Miss Radclau was funding the Fourth Street Mission. Though schooled in America, she was said to be of European blood-her late father was royalty, a count it was rumored-and the family fortune was made in munitions.

Or so the society sob sisters said. They also followed the moviestar lovely Miss Radclau to various social functions-balls, ballet, theater, opera, particularly fund-raisers for the local Relief Association. She was the queen of local night life, on the weekends.

But on weeknights, this socially conscious socialite spent her time dressed in a gray nurse’s-type uniform with a white apron, her long black hair up in a bun, standing behind the table ladling bowls of soup for the unfortunate faceless men who paraded before her.

Even in the dowdy, matronly attire, she was a knockout. The soup was good-tomato and rice, delicately spiced-but her slender, topheavy shape, and her delicate, catlike features, were the draw. Men would hold out their soup bowls and stare at her pale face, hypnotized by its beauty, and grin like schoolboys when she bestowed her thin red smile like a blessing.

“I’d like a piece of that,” the guy in front of me in line said. He was rail thin with a white stubbly beard and rheumy eyes.

“She seems friendly enough,” I said. “Why not give it a try?”

“She don’t fraternize,” the guy behind me said. He was short, skinny, and bright-eyed, with a full beard.

“Bull,” the first guy said, “shit.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “I seen her and Harry Toomis get in her fancy limo out back… it comes and picks her up, you know, midnight on the dot, every night, uniformed driver and the works.”

“Yeah?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Anyway, I seen the night Harry Toomis got in the limo with her, and she was hanging on ’em like a cheap suit of clothes.”

The other guy’s expression turned puzzled in the maze of his beard. “Say-whatever happened to Harry? I ain’t seen him in weeks!”

Somebody behind him said, “I heard he hopped the rails, over to Philly. Steel mills out there are hiring again, word is.”

We were close to the food table, where I picked up a generous hunk of bread and took an empty wooden bowl; soon I was handing it toward the dark-haired vision in white apron and gray dress, and she smiled like a madonna as she filled it.

“You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said. Her voice was low, warm; no accent.

“I feel I’ve known you forever.”

She looked at me hard; her almond-shaped eyes were a deep brown that approached black-it was as if she had only pupils, no irises.

“You seem familiar to me as well,” she said melodically.

“Hey, come on!” the guy behind me said. “Other people want to eat, too, ya know!”

Others joined in. “Yeah! This goddamn Depression’ll be over before we get fed!” I smiled at her and shrugged, and she smiled warmly and shrugged, too, and I moved on.

I sat at a bench at one of the long tables and sipped my soup. When I was finished, I waited until the food line had been shut down for the evening, then found my way back to her.

“Need some help in the kitchen?” I asked, helping her with one handle of the big metal soup basin.

“We have some volunteers already,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow night?”

“Any night you like,” I said, and tried to layer it with as much meaning as possible.

Then I touched her hand as it gripped the basin; hers was cool, mine was hot.

“I wasn’t always a tramp,” I said. “I was somebody you might have danced with, at a cotillion. Maybe we did dance. Under the stars one night? Maybe that’s where I know you from.”

“Please… ” she began. Her brow was knit. Confusion? Embarrassment?

Interest?

“I’m sorry to be so forward,” I said. “It’s just… I haven’t seen a woman so beautiful, so cultured, in a very long time. Forgive me.”

And I silently helped her into the kitchen with the basin, turned, and went out of the mission.

The night sky was brilliant with stars; a full moon cast an ivory glow upon skid row, giving it an unreal beauty. An arty photograph, or perhaps a watercolor or an oil in a gallery, might have captured this landscape of abstract beauty and abject poverty. Rebecca Radclau might have admired such a work of art, on her social travels.

From around a corner, I watched as her dark-windowed limousine arrived at midnight, pulling into the alleyway where an impossibly tall, improbably burly chauffeur stepped out and opened the door for her. She was still wearing the dowdy gray uniform of her missionary duties. A sister of mercy.

She was alone.

She slipped into the back of the limo, her uniformed gorilla of a driver shut her inside, and they backed out into the street and glided away into the ivory-washed night.

Perhaps I’d misjudged her.

Or perhaps tonight she just wasn’t thirsty…

For the next two nights I worked in the kitchen, washing the wooden soup bowls the first night, drying them the next-and there were a lot of goddamn bowls to wash and dry. She would move through the small, steamy kitchen as if floating, attending to the next night’s menu with the portly little man who was the cook for the mission, and in her employ.

Rumor had it he’d been the chef at a top local hotel that had gone under in ’29. Certainly the delicately seasoned soups we’d been eating indicated a finer hand than you might expect at a skid-row soup kitchen.

I would catch her eye, if possible. She would hesitate, our gazes would lock, and I would smile, just a little. She remained impassive. I didn’t want to push it: I didn’t repeat my soliloquy of the first night, nor did I add to it, or present a variation, either. I tried to talk to her with my eyes. That was a language I felt sure she was easily fluent in.

The next night, as I went through the soup line, she said, “We won’t need you in the kitchen tonight,” rather coldly I thought, and I went to one of the long tables, sat, sipped my soup, thinking. Damn! I screwed up. Came on too strong. She needed to think she was selecting me.

And just as this thought had passed, I felt a hand on my shoulder: hers.

I looked up and she was barely smiling; her catlike eyes sparkled.

“How was your soup?”

I turned sideways and she loomed over me. “Dandy,” I said. “I never see you trying any. Don’t you like the company?”

“I never eat… soup.”

“It’s pretty good, you know. Rich enough even for your blood, I’d think. Want to sit down?”

“No. No. I never fraternize.”

“I’ve heard that.”

“I just wanted to thank you for your help.” And she smiled in a tight, businesslike way. Others were watching us, and when she extended her slender fingers toward me, and I took them, we seemed to be shaking hands in an equally businesslike way.