Max Collins - Butcher's dozen

And another shrug. "He hurt himself. He tried to kill himself twice-you know that."

"How does a man hurt his eye in a suicide attempt, exactly?"

"The second time he tried to do it was in his cell. He used his shoelaces; they broke and he fell to the cement floor."

"There is an automatic reflex action, Sheriff, which makes anyone falling forward throw his arms out in front of him, to protect his face."

"Maybe he was part unconscious at the time. I don't know. I wasn't there."

"Neither, apparently, was your jailer."

"We increased our watchfulness with the suspect. There haven't been no suicide attempts since."

"That's admirable, Sheriff." Ness picked at a hangnail absently. "What luck have you had with the address book?" he asked, referring to the one found in Dolezal's apartment.

"There were twenty-five names in it, and we're checking them out."

"You announced, with some fanfare to the press last Saturday, that in that book was the California address of a sailor. You implied this sailor might be the tattooed male victim who remains unidentified. What have you found?"

"Our investigation is confidential."

"Is the sailor in the address book still alive?"

The sheriff said nothing.

"Well, is he?"

Reluctantly, O'Connell nodded.

"Sheriff," Ness said, leaning forward, his face expressionless, "your investigation is coming unraveled. Cooperate with my people and maybe you won't wind up looking like a complete horses ass. If Dolezal is the Butcher-and I frankly don't think he is-you're going to lose him on procedural matters."

O'Connell's eyes slitted. "What the hell do you mean by that?"

"It's known you kept Dolezal without food or sleep for the first twenty-four hours he was in your custody. You have held him for six days without charging him, refusing to permit relatives to see him, making no effort to get him an attorney. It's obvious that you've used outrageous third-degree tactics, which will undoubtedly come out when Dolezal does finally get a lawyer, whose first move will be to have his client repudiate those confessions as having been made under duress and without counsel."

"The lie detector-"

"Is inadmissible, as I said. Further, Dolezal is an alcoholic, and you've either kept drink from him or provided him with some, or some combination of the two, to get him to admit to anything you wanted him to. I spoke to him before you arrested him, and my feeling is he's a blackout drunk, and these confessions you've wrung out of him may have convinced him that he is the Butcher, when he isn't. Hence, suicide attempts and positive lie-detector results."

The sheriff swallowed thickly; he seemed a little stunned.

"Today," Ness continued evenly, "I spoke to a representative of the civil liberties committee of the Cleveland Bar Association. They're preparing a report on your conduct of this case. I'm helping them." You self-righteous bastard…

Ness pounded the desk with a fist and the sheriff jerked back with surprise. "You stole my case. Your man followed me around and stole my goddamn case. Now you've loused it up, and you're going to pay. I don't want your job-I don't want to be sheriff. But I can guarantee you one thing: They won't elect you dog catcher after this- even though you did manage to track down one dead dog."

The sheriff was trembling with rage, but he said nothing.

Ness stood. "If you cooperate with my office," he said, "perhaps you can salvage your career-and perhaps I can salvage Dolezal as a suspect, or at least as a witness. If he isn't the Butcher, he undoubtedly knows the Butcher-and that's too important for me to allow you to louse up."

Ness walked to the door, and paused. "And one last thing: Get your man off my tail."

Mild surprise crossed the sheriff's face. "What do you mean?"

"I don't know what purpose you think is being served by keeping me shadowed at this point. But stop it. Or I'll 'confront' the next stooge you send and send him home with the sort of swollen eye and sore ribs you can only get in a suicide attempt. If you catch my meaning."

"Look, Ness, I honestly don't know what the hell you're talking about.

"Take your nap and think it over."

Ness slammed the door and rattled the glass again.

After a session with Chief Matowitz and Merlo at Central headquarters, filling them in on his meeting with the sheriff, Ness walked up the cement ramp into the elevated parking lot where his black Ford waited. It was late evening now, and balmily breezy; it had rained this afternoon. He felt good about having unloaded on the sheriff, but wasn't sure how the man would react. It was, to him, one of the great mysteries of life how a man that corrupt could still be proud.

He stopped at a diner on his way home and had a meat loaf dinner. He ate slowly, using a piece of bread to collect all of the gravy, leaving a plate so spotless there was no evidence a meal had been there. A pretty waitress flirted with him a little, talked him into a piece of pecan pie; the girl reminded him of Viv. It gave him a pang that all the meat loaf and pie in the world couldn't cure. Nonetheless, he ate the pie, drank a second cup of coffee, and read the final edition of the Press, in which the sheriff's handling of the Dolezal case rated a skeptical sidebar.

On the way home he thought he was being followed again. It was after dark, as usual, when the car showed up in his rearview mirror; when he slowed to try to identify the driver or vehicle, the car turned off. Goddamn that O'Connell, anyway.

Just approaching nine o'clock, he reached suburban Lakewood. The booth at the mouth of the private drive was empty; the guard had been fired for drinking last week and hadn't been replaced. Ness had been asked, by the Home-owners Association of the small group of boathouses and cottages clustered along Clifton Lagoon, to find a replacement. He hadn't got around to it. Finding an honest retired cop in the Cleveland area was a job for a detective better than himself, Ness feared.

The boathouse was small but massive, a weathered, gray-stone, two-story castle with turrets and a squat central tower and a short stone fence that walled off the modest yard; the castle had a stark, masculine beauty in the moonlight, and was quite unlike its more conventional frame-building neighbors. One of Mayor Burton's financial angels had provided Ness with this hideaway, as a fringe benefit. He parked the Ford in front, right behind where Viv had parked her car (why, even now, did he leave space for her?), and gazed out on the endless gray-blue of the lagoon and the lake beyond. It was a peaceful moment that he enjoyed just about every night-a moment of feeling smaller than the world around him, a feeling that, for some reason, comforted him.

Inside, he slipped out of his suit coat and tossed it over a chair; he was usually neater than that, but was suddenly quite tired. The investigation of recent weeks had been draining, though this was the first he'd really noticed it. He made himself a Scotch off the liquor cart and collapsed on the couch before the fireplace. He sipped the drink till it was gone, and then stretched out on the sofa and soon he was gone, too.

A noise woke him.

For a moment, just a moment, he thought he was back in the Central Avenue rooming house. He sat up on the couch and listened. What had the noise been? The wind? A car going by? He went to the nearest window and looked out and saw nothing but the narrow band of pavement that was the private drive of the division, and the lagoon beyond. And a moon and a very clear night.

A night that he and Viv might well have enjoyed.

It wasn't as if he hadn't missed her. She hadn't been constantly on his mind by any means, but at night, at least, when he had to go upstairs to that double bed without her, he missed his sweet, sassy society girl.