The Unclaimed Victim Read online

  “You ever take a drink from Eddie?”

  She shot him a glare. “I buy my own drinks, okay? But you spend enough time around here, you get to know people.”

  “What about Flo Polillo? Did you know her?”

  Fat, gray, black eyed, and brawling—Flo was the dead end Ethel knew she had coming. Flo was what happened to girls too stupid to get out of the game. Flo was what happened when you drank up all the money and forgot to make a plan. Pieces of Flo had been found behind a warehouse back in the freezing winter of 1936. Back before the Mad Butcher had a flashy name and anybody gave a damn.

  “Everybody knew Flo. You had a nickel and some booze, you could’ve known her too.”

  “Was she friends with Eddie?”

  Ethel shook her head. It weighed fifty pounds. “Nobody was friends with Eddie.”

  “We got lots of people on record saying they talked.”

  “That don’t mean nothin’. Eddie liked to talk. He knew people. People with money. You needed to make a bunch of dough fast, you talked to Eddie.”

  “You know of anybody that wanted to kill him?”

  Ethel breathed out a small laugh. “Yeah. Anybody that ever worked for him.”

  The detective furrowed his brow. “I thought you said he helped people get money.”

  “Yeah. You’d find out too late that no money’s worth the sort of work he’d get you.”

  “So he specialized in rough trade?”

  The stories she’d heard came back to her in an unwelcome wave. Rumor had it that a girl down the hall had overdosed herself the day after she’d turned one of Eddie’s tricks. She was dead before anyone noticed. “You could say that.”

  “Flo ever work for him?”

  Ethel shrugged. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she had.”

  “What about Rose Wallace? She work for him too?”

  The name tightened Ethel’s jaw. “She might’ve.”

  Poor Rose. Born broke, black, and skinny, the old girl never had a chance. But man, she was funny. She’d have the whole bar rolling, mimicking the last pervert she’d met. You wouldn’t believe what this fool wanted. Ethel’d be sitting there contemplating jumping off a bridge, when Rose would wander into the bar with some story that could even make Flo blush. Rose had been a rare friend right up until the day she’d vanished from her house a few blocks away. Her bones had been found in a burlap sack under the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge about a year ago. Quicklime had eaten the rest of her.

  The detective pulled out a notebook and flipped through the pages, but his eyes didn’t move. He was stalling. After a few drawn-out moments, he put the notes away, but his foot stayed wedged in her door frame.

  The buzz of wine and weed in her ears dulled to a low hum. In the sobering silence left behind, an alarm began to clang. She’d said too much, and to a cop no less. “I gotta go.”

  “Just one more thing, Ethel.”

  She flinched at the sound of her real name. Did I tell him that? “What?”

  “What can you tell me about Eddie’s clients?”

  “Nothin’. I didn’t know ’em.”

  “You’re going to have to do better than that.” He leveled his eyes at her.

  Ethel swallowed hard. “I really don’t know.”

  “See, it’s my job to know when someone’s lying to me, and I’m very good at my job. Now you can answer my question or I can haul you, your naked friend in there, and Ma Pratchett all down to Central. Now try again. You said that Eddie knew people with money. Were any of his clients doctors?”

  She didn’t speak for a moment and squeezed her eyes shut, hoping as she often did that she would vanish into the shadows behind her lids, never to be seen again. But the red hallway, the electric-yellow light bulb hanging overhead, and the detective were all still there when she opened them.

  He shoved another photo of hacked-up arms and legs under her nose. “This is Flo Polillo. See what happened to her? Now I want you to think real hard. Don’t help me, help yourself. You could be next . . . Now who did this? Who was he?”

  She closed her eyes to block out the bits of Flo. “I dunno.”

  “Was he made? Italian?” he prodded, knowing full well that the mob protected Ma Pratchett’s house and got a heavy cut of all its earnings. Knowing full well that implicating Mayfield Road would be signing her own death warrant.

  She bit her lips together and shook her head.

  “Was he a devil worshiper?”

  Ethel rubbed her forehead and shrugged. Rumors had been flying about witchcraft and the devil ever since Eddie’s headless corpse had been found down in Kingsbury Run. Mutilated bodies kept turning up, and now the drunks and tramps were all convinced the Run was haunted.

  “You don’t get it, do you? A madman is loose on the streets of Cleveland. Some pervert is killing your friends.” The detective brandished the pictures again. Flo’s arms and legs. Eddie’s tattooed boy. Now a new one of Eddie’s severed head. Then Eddie’s naked body. The Butcher had left nothing between his legs but a gash. “Now I know you know something, and I’m not leaving here empty-handed.”

  The look on Rose’s face the day before she disappeared still haunted the darker corners of Ethel’s mind. “Rose had some trouble before she went . . .”

  “What sort of trouble?”

  Ethel paused. She knew she was on dangerous ground and dropped her voice to a whisper. “I don’t know, but it looked like somebody had messed her up pretty good.”

  The detective looked up from his notepad and eyeballed the doors down the hallway. “Did she go to the hospital?”

  “No. She didn’t,” Ethel said flatly. A trip to the hospital was an invitation for arrest, and he knew it.

  “Why didn’t she report him?”

  “Like you’d take a two-bit whore’s word over some rich guy’s,” Ethel hissed. “Doesn’t matter anyways. She never saw his face.”

  CHAPTER 5

  The ragged pain between her legs jolted her out of a dream. Hot putrid breath steamed against her ear. Teeth on her neck. For a bleary moment, Ethel was fourteen years old again and back in the one-room apartment. Back before her father left them for good. Billy, she thought, bracing herself as the pain came again and again. Don’t let him see you, Billy. Stay under the bed.

  Ethel squeezed back tears and forced out a moan then an arch, knowing it would make it all end quicker. The hard buttons of her back crushed against the cold brick wall behind her. The fat man grinding himself into her pulled her hair and shuddered a low growl like a dying dog.

  She opened her eyes to find herself twenty-four years old again and her brother dead for over five years. She scanned the unfamiliar fire escapes overhead and tried to remember how she had gotten there. And, more importantly, if the beast shrinking from her had already paid.

  The tinkling of quarters hitting the ground was her answer as he hitched up his trousers and stumbled away, dead drunk. She steadied herself against the bricks as he left. Glancing at the coins, she quickly calculated how many drinks they would buy.

  What day is it? Tuesday? The muted orange of the night sky told her nothing. At least it wasn’t too cold. But the warm snap wouldn’t last. The last solid memory she could conjure was Ma Pratchett throwing her things onto the brick street. I’m sorry, honey. There ain’t nothin’ I can do about it. The old wench had puffed on the end of her cigarette before slamming the door. I can’t have my girls snitchin’ to the police about the clients. And what was all this bull about rich men, huh? Old quiff like you’d be lucky to fetch two bucks from a dockworker.

  The hunched old man lurched his way out of the alley, and she waited until he’d rounded the corner to collect her fee and straighten her skirt. She eased her grip off the steak knife she kept buried in her pocket and studied the half-moon imprints on her palm where her fingernails had dug in. The photographs the detective had shoved under her nose rifled through her mind again in their rotating wheel. You could be next.

  She couldn’t re
member the last time she’d slept.

  “Hey.” The toe of an old shoe nudged Ethel’s arm. “Get the hell outta my house.”

  Ethel opened her eyes to see the shadow of a large man hovering over her. The sun had dropped over the edge of the bluff, and the sky had turned sulfur yellow. As she pulled herself up, the dull ache in her head told her she’d slept the entire day away. The chill in her bones told her the temperature had dropped while she slept. She could barely feel her toes. The tin and cardboard roofs of hobo shanties dotted the steep hillside. The rusted steel web of the East 55th Street Bridge stretched out over her head. Kingsbury Run, she realized, looking down at the train tracks at the bottom of the gully. What the hell am I doing down here?

  The face in front of her came into focus—dark skin and black sunken eyes bent into a permanent frown. A knit cap hid a mop of wiry hair and oversized ears. “Willie?”

  “Amber? That you?” he crouched down to take a better look at her. Amber was the name she’d been using since her last stint in Mansfield. Like a guidepost, it told her where she was. Cleveland, 1935 or later.

  The stump of a left arm peeked out of his torn shirt, ending abruptly above the elbow. Willie had lost it years ago, but the story of how it happened kept changing. The latest legend involved a knife fight with a mobster. “What the hell you doin’ down here?”

  “What the hell’s it look like?” she spat back, sitting up. Her head pounded its hungover drum harder than usual. A vague memory circled her head. She’d picked her way down a steep hill into the Run to find a place to sleep. It wasn’t a good sign. “Where you been?”

  “Catched out on a freighter for a while. Been keepin’ real low. Ever since they found Rose, cops been after me.”

  Ethel nodded. The police were looking to pin all those dead bodies on anybody they could. Not that any of them really cared about the likes of Flo or Rose or Eddie, but all the unsolved murders were making people nervous.

  She scanned the empty shanties along the hillside while blowing warm air into her cold hands. None of the fires were burning. A heavy silence hung in the grass where voices should be. It was a ghost town. “Why’d you come back?”

  Willie’s frown creased deeper. “I’d promised Rose I’d keep an eye on her little girl. You know, last time she went out? And well . . .”

  Ethel shook her head at him. “And you lost her.” If he’d even tried at all. If he hadn’t sold her off to some pervert.

  “You could say that . . . You seen her?”

  Rose’s youngest couldn’t have been more than eight years old. Ethel had only seen the girl once when she was hardly bigger than a baby. A little black girl would hardly last a day on her own. Ethel didn’t want to imagine where she’d ended up. The shake playing in her hands told her it had been too long since her last drink. “No. I haven’t heard nothin’ about her either.”

  She studied his pained expression. At least he feels guilty, the bastard. Willie fell back onto his ass and hung his head between his knees. “I been lookin’ for months. Shit just ain’t right . . . Look, you can’t stay here. Cops toss the Run twice a month lookin’ for their Torso Butcher Man. I’m catching out again tonight.”

  Ethel nodded and stared out at the empty tracks, cursing the ham-fisted detective that had kicked in her door. How many men had she been with since then? How many butchers? “You know who they’re lookin’ for?”

  “Nope. Alls I know is they lookin’ in the wrong places.”

  “One of them dicks visited me the other day.” Yesterday? Last week? “Askin’ about Eddie’s tricks. Son of a bitch got me thrown out on my ass.”

  Willie raised an eyebrow. “What’d you say?”

  “What could I say? Nothin’.” She lied and held up her hands in mock surrender. “I never met any of them rich perverts. Did you?”

  He held out his hands and motioned to his lanky black frame. “What you think? I ain’t their flavor.”

  Ethel fished the near-empty flask out of her hem and drained it so she could think. “Rose ever say anything to you? Anything strange happen before she disappeared?”

  Willie slanted his eyes back at her. “She seemed sorta jumpy. Needed money. I think Eddie might’ve got her a bad gig or two.”

  Ethel didn’t say anything for a moment, waiting for the liquor to do its job. The sky had gone from jaundice to fever pink, and the train tracks were slipping away into the lengthening shadows. They didn’t have much time until the railroad bulls came through. Or worse.

  “Any idea who got Eddie?” she asked, even though she knew the answer. Enough people wanted Eddie dead they could’ve filled a directory.

  “Shit.” Willie threw a rock down at the tracks. “Whoever it was made damn sure we all saw it, though, right? Laid him out like a warning to the rest of us trash down here. Like they was tryin’ real hard to tell us somethin’. And it worked too. Can’t find a dead drunk down here after dark. Only ones here anymore is cops made up like hobos . . . Now who’s all this helpin’? That’s what I wonder.”

  Ethel didn’t respond. The flashlights of two Nickel Plate Railroad security guards traced along the tracks in the distance.

  “I ain’t waitin’ around for some phantom killer to come and take my head, boy. I’m outta here.” The rumble of a slow-moving train brought Willie to his feet. “You comin’?”

  Ethel gazed out at the tracks. It was tempting, but she knew better than to jump a train to nowhere with Willie and his one feeble arm. The old pimp would run her ragged just for scraps. She curled her fingers around the knife hidden in her pocket and braced for a fight. You never could tell with Willie. “Not yet.”

  “Suit yourself. You best stay out the Run, though. If Ma kicked you out, it ain’t just the Butcher that wants you dead. I’d lay real low if I was you.” Willie headed down the embankment but stopped at the tracks. “Do me a favor?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Keep your eye out for Rose’s girl.”

  CHAPTER 6

  “Good morning, Sister. Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?”

  Ethel turned toward the sunny voice that sounded just a little too pleased with itself. The girl attached to it walked over, holding a banjo in one hand and a piece of paper in the other. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old. The odd thing wore a smile too big to be trusted, a straw boater hat, and an ugly blue dress.

  Every day since she’d been thrown out of Ma’s, someone had shooed her away from their storefront or threatened to call the police. Every day other women judged her with their eyes. She was going to hell, and everyone knew it. Ethel blew a cloud of cigarette smoke in her face. “What do you care? I ain’t your sister.”

  “We are all sisters in the eyes of the Lord. The prophet Matthew said, ‘For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.’”

  “Oh, really?” Ethel sucked on her smoke and gave the girl a slow and sleazy up and down just as thorough as all the appraisals she’d endured. Thin. Plain. Young. Stupid. Five dollars a throw. Tops. Ten if she were younger. “What’s your name, sugar?”

  The girl shifted her weight in the clunky black farmer’s boots tied to her feet. “Mary Alice Eberly. And you?”

  “Ambrosia,” Ethel said. It was the name she used for the churchgoing johns. They ate it up.

  “It’s wonderful to meet you, Ambrosia.” The girl beamed like they were now best friends. “Do you attend church?”

  Ethel smirked at this. “Not regularly, but my knees are bruised from prayin’. What the hell are you supposed to be with the banjo and the clothes?”

  The girl stiffened her chin and handed Ethel her leaflet. “I am here to spread the word of God to those that are seeking a better life. Do you want to be condemned to misery and suffering for all eternity? Do you want to go through life blind to His love? Or do you want something more?”

  Ethel knew all about wanting more. Countless days of sleeping with her eyes open in burned-o
ut buildings, trying not to freeze to death, had made her keenly aware of the emotion. “So what do you want? Money?”

  “No, of course not. I want to help you find your way.”

  “Yeah. Sure you do. So who you out here hustlin’ for, hon?”

  “Who am I what?”

  “I’ve seen you girls around. Someone dressed you girls up like this and turned you out. Who was it? And don’t say, ‘Jesus,’ honey. Who’s your boss?”

  The girl smiled like she welcomed the question. “I answered a call from God himself. He came to me and commanded me to devote my life to serving—”

  Ethel held up a hand. “Fine. If you don’t want to tell me, don’t tell me.”

  She puffed her cigarette down to the nub and turned her eyes down the redbrick road toward the factory chimneys and exhaust stacks. The workers would be getting out soon. In the distance, the bells of three Catholic churches began to chime.

  Ethel could feel their clocks ticking every minute of every day. Every ten minutes she endured in the back of a car or in an alley was another few dollars. The minutes she stood alone, waiting and watching for the next dollar, were worse. Every day on the calendar brought her closer to the warmth of summer. Even in the April cold, she could feel it coming. That’s what she told herself, standing there in the slush, trying to keep warm. Only a few more weeks left and the pain would end. She needed to find a roof, but none of the brothels would touch her. The Italians wouldn’t have her in their cathouses, not after she’d sung to that cop. Not even on the west side of town.

  “Answering the call is not easy. But it’s better than this,” the girl said softly.

  Ethel leveled her eyes at Mary Alice. “What do you know about this?”

  “I know you’re not happy.”

  “Who is? You? If you’re so damned happy, why are you out here botherin’ me? Huh? You don’t look happy. You look stupid.”

  “I am happier than you. If you let me, I can help.” She put a soft hand on Ethel’s arm.