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.
And it wasn't only in bed that he missed her. She was wonderful, crazy company, and smart, so smart. He went up the stairs and sat on the bed and checked his watch. Not quite ten-thirty. She'd be up. He could call her. But did he want to? Did he want her back in his life?
He got up and went to the window. He looked out at the moon. At the lake. Someone was down there.
Standing. On the small space of ground, between the private drive and the lake.
A man. He was tall and looked massive, but Ness couldn't make out a single feature or even what his apparel might be. He was just a dark male shape against the lake.
Ness's mouth tightened; so did his hands, into fists.
That goddamn sheriff had not called off his shadow. Who was it down there? McFarlin?
He rushed down the stairs and was out the front door, ready to challenge the son of a bitch.
But no one was there.
He backed against the door. Listened carefully. He could hear a car; at left, on the winding pavement going up the hill, was the twin glow of taillights. The sheriff's man?
He walked across the paved drive to where the man had been standing. The earth was damp enough from the rain earlier to leave an impression of rather large feet. Ness could see where his shadow had walked to this one spot and stayed put. On the other side of the road were more footprints and a tire track that indicated a car had been parked there.
Back inside, he got himself another Scotch and sat studying the unlit fireplace, wondering why the back of his neck was so prickly. Something-nothing rational, he'd be the first to admit-said to him that the man out there had not been a sheriff's deputy.
He was stretched back out again, on the sofa, just barely asleep, when the phone rang. It was on a stand not far from him, but he had to rise to reach it and was fully awake by the time he said, "Ness," into the mouthpiece.
"This is Merlo."
The voice sounded depressed. Earlier, the usually somber, professorly Merlo had seemed damn near cheerful, when Ness had told him about reading off the sheriff.
"What's up?"
"Dolezal's time," Merlo said glumly. "He got the job done tonight."
"What do you mean?"
"Prisoner requested some cleaning rags, to tidy up his cell."
"So?"
"The sheriff gave them to him and then left him alone there. Third time was the charm."
"Hung himself?"
"How did you guess?"
Ness sighed. Closed his eyes. "I'm a detective."
But it didn't take a detective to figure that the Butcher had, in an oblique way, taken another victim.
With the help, that is, of the sheriff of Cuyahoga County and, Ness bitterly knew, the safety director of the city of Cleveland.
CHAPTER 13
Stalking Ness was fun.
It had been something of a challenge for Lloyd. Something different. He was tickled by the idea of following-or "shadowing," as the detective magazines called it- this supposed great sleuth who had made such a show in the papers about "tracking down the Butcher." Oh, really? Well, maybe Lloyd would just have to track him down.
For days now Lloyd had followed Ness around, on foot-from City Hall to various public buildings and restaurants-and by car, "tailing" him (another good detective magazine term!) back to Lakewood. Tonight Lloyd had even followed Ness down into the private development of cottages and boathouses where the King Detective lived in his little stone castle. Lloyd had parked the car on Ness's side and crossed the road and stood with the lake at his back, looking up at the turreted roof of the tiny fortress.
He stood, his hands in the pockets of his raincoat, one hand grasping the handle of the jackknife, its long blade out. He had practiced last night, practiced withdrawing the knife in one swift motion, without tearing the coat. There was a breeze and the faintest mist in the air; Lloyd wasn't sure if it was from the lake or a bit of rain. When he glanced behind him, at the lake, it was a beautiful thing: an expanse of ripply gray-blue with ivory overtones from the full moon. He liked to kill in the moonlight, though sometimes he had to settle for indoors.
Then he glanced up and saw a shape in the window- Ness! — and for some reason (which now, upon reflection, eluded him) he ran to the car and raced away. As if frightened! Frightened… him! Lloyd. The Mad Doctor of Kingsbury Run.
That was how he thought of himself: he rejected, resented, the appellation "Butcher." Butcher! With his skill? "Mad" he could accept-loosely, that might just mean "daring" or even "creative," and after all, he was seeing a psychiatrist, so the other meaning of "mad" did have some bearing, being objective about it. But "Butcher," hardly!
That was the newspapers for you. Those hack news-hounds had no pride in their own work; how could you expect them to understand the pride another person had in his?
He kept their clippings nonetheless. He liked getting press, getting credit where due. He could easily have disposed of the bodies without a trace. Instead he left them where they'd be found, eventually, to thumb his nose at the world in general and the police in particular.
It made him smile to think of the public praise his father had heaped upon him. The smile quivered on his face and his eyes brimmed with tears. It was an approval he had sought for so long.
Right now Lloyd was sitting in the same downtown diner to which he'd earlier followed Eliot Ness. He'd sat just two stools down from the great, meat-loaf-eating safety director, in fact. Had restrained laughter at the thought of how stupid the safety director was, sitting two stools down from the prey he sought so avidly but whose presence his bloodhound nose could not begin to detect.
Now, several hours later, Lloyd was back in the diner again, sitting at one of the small tables along the row of windows, with only a narrow aisle separating him from the counter, where the pretty young brunette waitress who had made eyes at Ness earlier was still at work.
What did she see in him? Lloyd knew, from society gossip, that Ness was something of a ladies' man. He used to date Viv Chalmers, for Christ's sake! What did they see in him? Ness was just a nondescript, almost Milquetoast of a paper pusher.
That's how Lloyd saw it. Lloyd saw himself as handsome, and some people would have agreed, while others would have found the six-three, blue-eyed blond to have oddly babyish features for a man of twenty-six. As a matter of fact, Lloyd was eating a bowl of cereal right now-Wheaties-though it was nearly midnight.
Lloyd associated breakfast with his mother. It was a meal they would share together-his father always had a quick cup of coffee and skipped the morning meal and was gone. Mother would pour the milk gently from a white pitcher, and her smile would be as white as the pitcher and her beautiful complexion as pale as the milk itself. Her hair had been blond-as blond as Lloyd's-and she wore it in a bun. She was very beautiful. She was very kind.
Father had been less kind. Lloyd's dark, severely handsome father believed in education above all else, and he believed that punishment was a form of education. The strop had taught Lloyd many lessons as a child.
One of the lessons had been that where punishment is concerned, it is better to give than receive.
He had two sisters, both older than him. He was the baby, to his mother; the son, to his father. He had been very ill with rheumatic fever as a young boy, and his mother would not allow him to play at sports. He'd taken some ribbing over this, at school, because he was a big, strapping kid and should have been a natural for baseball and football.