Max Collins - Butcher's dozen

"Something simple that we can do," Ness said, "is place advertisements and posters around the city asking for information-particularly the discovery of any large quantity of blood."

"That's been done to death," Wild said disgustedly.

"Not in forty-four languages it hasn't, which is what I'm having worked up. We're a city of just under a million people, Mr. Wild, of which seventy percent are foreign born or the sons and daughters of at least one foreign-born parent."

Chamberlin smiled, and so, finally, did Merlo. Curry looked intense. Wild just smirked, sitting in a cloud of Lucky smoke.

Merlo said, "These are good ideas, Director Ness. But I keep coming back to a basic limitation. Take our most recent victim-the fellow who floated by that bridge the other day, like a human jigsaw puzzle we had to try and put together. Even with his hands turning up, we haven't been, able to I.D. him. In a murder case, you talk to the friends, you talk to the relatives. But how can you get a lead when you don't know who the hell's murder it is you're trying to solve?"

Ness pointed a finger at the rumpled detective, as if accusing him. "You've hit it on the head. We have to go back to square one. We have to concentrate on the victims we've identified."

"Andrassy and Polillo," Merlo said. Then he sighed. "But we've been over and over that."

"Not lately," Ness said. "Subsequent murders have a way of taking precedence. Let's start back at Jackass Hill. What do we know about Edward Andrassy?"

Merlo said, without checking any notes, "Well, he lived with his parents on the near West Side. Rooming-house neighborhood. Police record as a drunk, petty brawler, jailed once for carrying a gun. He worked at several hospitals as an orderly, had medical books on gynecology and some of those nudist magazines in his room. He was seen in various saloons with various women, but was known to pick up men, too. He was a minor-league con man-sold toilet articles, peddled aphrodisiacs. The oddest incident we came across was when Andrassy told a friend of his, who'd complained that he and his wife hadn't been able to have a child, that he, Andrassy, was a 'female' doctor. Andrassy offered to examine the wife, and the friend agreed. During the 'exam,' Andrassy committed sodomy on her, with the husband in the room."

"It's like something out of Krafft-Ebing," Ness said, filling the room's shocked silence, shaking his head.

"Who?" Wild asked.

Ness said to Merlo, "You've talked to Andrassy's various girlfriends and boyfriends, obviously?"

"They all check out," Merlo said glumly. "Though we got the runaround from time to time-not all of them are nuts about cooperating with cops."

"That's the problem that runs throughout this case," Ness said with a tight, humorless smile. "We're dealing with vagrants and perverts and petty criminals-none of whom are terribly civic-minded."

Curry said, "But it's their own kind who are being struck down."

"They're individualists," Ness said. "They all think they can take care of themselves. We're the enemy."

Ness buzzed for Wanda, who brought the men coffee; Ness joined them at the conference table and they probed various aspects of the Andrassy killing.

"If Andrassy was an orderly," Chamberlin said, "he may well have met his eventual murderer at one of those hospitals-a doctor or an intern."

"We've checked," Merlo said, wearily matter-of-fact. "And double-checked."

"Tell us about the second victim to be I.D.'ed," Ness said. "Tell us what we know about Florence Polillo."

"Well," Merlo said, again without checking notes of any kind, "she lived in a rooming house at Thirty-two oh five Carnegie Avenue. She paid her rent by relief checks; her landlady reported she was no trouble, other than getting pesky when she drank, which was often. She'd apparently been sterilized in a botched abortion years ago and was all sentimental about children-she played with her landlady's kids and let them use her dolls. She had a big collection of dolls."

Curry said, "She sounds a little nicer than Andrassy."

"Who doesn't?" Merlo said. "But she was, to put it bluntly, a fat, drunken whore. Frequent arrests for street soliciting. She left behind a notebook of addresses, mostly relatives. We talked to taxi drivers, tavern pals, and so on, but got nowhere."

"You had one good suspect, though," Ness prompted.

"Well, yes," Merlo said. "'One-Armed Willie.' A bogus beggar. She lived with him for a while-not long before she got it. They used to hang around together at a seedy saloon near Central and Twentieth. They fought, over what we couldn't ascertain, and he's supposed to have threatened to 'cut her up in little pieces.' Thought we had a live one, but when we looked into it, Willie seemed innocent-of murder that is."

"Those are the two killings we're going to work," Ness said. "Andrassy and Polillo."

Merlo looked frustrated.

"And I want specifically to explore the angle that Andrassy and Polillo may have been acquainted. If we can prove that, if we can show that the Butcher is working the same 'social circle,' if you will, gaining their confidence and slaying them, one by one, we may be on our way to nailing him."

Merlo's eyes narrowed; grudgingly, he nodded his head.

"What I want you to do," Ness said to Merlo, "is work with the fire wardens in the search for the lab, as well as do follow-up interviews on all the upstanding citizens involved in the Andrassy and Polillo cases. Relatives and such."

"What about those citizens who aren't so upstanding?" Merlo asked. "Hobos and barflies?"

"That's not your department." Ness walked over to Curry and said, "Find yourself some smelly, dirty old clothes and lose your razor. You're going undercover."

Curry's eyes were wide. "In shantytown?"

"Exactly. Cops grilling the denizens of that community does no good at all."

"Like pissing in the wind," Wild said.

"Who's going with him?" Merlo asked.

"Nobody," Ness said.

Chamberlin spoke up. "But isn't it standard procedure for detectives to work in pairs?"

"Yes." Ness looked at Curry. "And that's why you're going in alone. Or almost alone-you'll wear a thirty-eight in an ankle holster. You'll work both settlements-the one at Commerce and Canal, and the one near the Thirty-seventh Street Bridge."

Curry raised his eyebrows, let out some air, and put the eyebrows back down. "Whatever you say, Chief."

"I want you to take a blackjack and a sharp jackknife, as well."

"No argument," Curry said.

Ness sipped his coffee. "I'll be going undercover myself," he said matter-of-factly. "I'm going to canvass the saloons around Kingsbury Run, and in the Flats."

"You'll risk being recognized," Merlo said. "You've had a lot of press."

"Thanks to me," Wild said.

"I'm a very ordinary-looking fella," Ness said with a wicked little smile. "And with some stubble on my face, and in some ratty old overalls, I'll just be another guy bellying up to the bar."

"Are you going alone, too?" Wild said.

"No," Ness said. "You're going with me."

"Oh," said Wild, flatly. Then with his usual archness: "Whatever you say… just don't expect me to call you 'Chief.'"

Ness turned back to Merlo. "Do we have a shot at identifying any of the other victims?"

"I thought we had a shot at the colored woman," Merlo said, "whose bones were found under the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge."

"Her bones, including her bridgework," Ness said, nodding. "You've been checking with dentists?"

"Yes. Everyone in the city."

"How many colored dentists are there in Cleveland?"

"Two. We've checked them both."

"She should be there. She should be in their records."

"I know," Merlo said, shrugging, frustrated. "She isn't."

Again Ness pointed at Merlo, his finger a gun. "Get a list of all the colored dentists in the state. There can't be too many. Approach them all. If that doesn't work, go national."