Ness nodded.
"Don't let it get to you," Wild said with a dismissive wave. "What's the harm in it?"
"The harm," Ness said tightly, the rage bubbling under his apparent placidity suddenly evident, "is that good cops like Merlo are going to keep working this case, for months, possibly years, wasting their time and the taxpayers' money, when their safety director knows they are on a fool's errand. The harm is that a good cop like Albert Curry has to live with looking the other way on something that bothers him morally."
"It's called being a grown-up," Wild said with a smirk. "Curry will get over it."
"It will change him. Not for the better."
"Is it going to change you, Eliot?"
Ness said nothing. His jaw muscles clenched and unclenched. His eyes seemed cold, yet haunted, eyes that had seen too much. He sipped his Scotch and said pleasantly, "Of course maybe Sergeant Merlo will find out about Lloyd Watterson."
"You think so?"
"He's dedicated and he's obsessive. Someday, a week from now, a month from now, a year from now… Merlo may come lay Lloyd Watterson at the city's doorstep. I don't think Merlo gives a good goddamn about social standing and politics and such assorted bullshit."
Wild drank some beer. "You might be right. Does it worry you?"
"No," Ness said. Then he smiled. "It's kind of nice knowing your conscience is out there somewhere, working for you."
"Better your conscience at large than the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run."
They drank in silence for a while.
"Sam… are you still seeing Viv?"
"Yeah," he said, firing up another Lucky. "I don't know if it's going to amount to anything serious or not… we're not exactly from the same side of the tracks, you know."
Ness studied his Scotch. "One of us is going to have to tell her."
"About Lloyd escaping to the madhouse, you mean?"
"Yes. Do you want me to?"
"No," Wild said. "That's a cross I can bear."
"Think she'll keep quiet about it?"
"Oh, yeah. She's from that world. She understands it."
"I'm glad somebody does," Ness said.
And he ordered another double.
Outside, the sun was shining, on rich and poor alike-even over Kingsbury Run, where the ashes of two shantytown settlements were smoldering still; but it was dark by the time Wild and Ness stumbled out of Mickey's. Wild caught a cab. Detective Curry was waiting at the curb in an unmarked car, waiting to drive his chief home to the castlelike boathouse on Clifton Lagoon.
A Tip of the Fedora
As was the case with my previous Eliot Ness novel, The Dark City (1987), I could not have written this book without the support and advice of my friend and research associate George Hagenauer. George and I made a research trip to Cleveland, where we visited many of the sites of the action in this novel and stopped in for a session at the Western Reserve Historical Society, where the Ness papers are kept. George made several additional trips alone and visited (and took reference photos of) virtually all of the death sites in the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run case.
We are both grateful to the helpful staffs at the Historical Society, City Hall municipal reference library, and Cleveland Public Library, and we wish to especially thank Karen Martines and Joe Novak.
While much of the research for this book was culled from the files of various Cleveland newspapers of the day, several remarkable in-depth articles provided valuable background material and insight into the Kingsbury Run slayings. These include "The Mad Butcher of Queensbury Run" by A. W. Pezet and Bradford Chambers in their book, Greatest Crimes of the Century (1954); "The Head Hunter of Kingsbury Run' by William Ritt in Oliver Weld Bayer's book, Cleveland Murders (1947); and "The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run" by James Purvis in his book Great Unsolved Mysteries (1978). Also helpful was the "Mad Butcher" entry in Open Files (1983) by Jay Robert Nash, and an article in Daring Detective (December 1949), "Cleveland's Jack the Ripper," by Seymour J. Ettman. Useful, too, was a 1960, ten-part Cleveland News series, "Where is the Mad Butcher?" by Howard Beaufait.
The most detailed nonfiction account of the Ness role in the Mad Butcher case is a twelve-page chapter in Four Against the Mob (1961) by Oscar Fraley, coauthor (with Ness) of The Untouchables (1957). Unfortunately, Fraley was asked by his publishers to fictionalize names and dates, and, apparently at the behest of Ness's widow, he tended to present Ness only in the most favorable light. All of this has made his book as frustrating as it is valuable as a research tool.
However, I have increasingly found in my research that Fraley s book is a dependable source. There have been those who doubted Fraley's claim that Ness solved the Butcher case (which remains officially unsolved in Cleve-land police records); and I was one of the doubters myself, until I examined the Ness papers and scrapbooks and held in my own hands the various crank postcards and letters apparently sent to Ness over a period of years by the institutionalized Butcher, just as reported by Fraley in his book. The apparent Butcher signs himself as "your paranoidal nemesis" and as an M. D., and addresses the cards to Ness variously as "Eliot Direct-Um Ness" and "Eliot (Head Man) Ness." Vague but distinct death threats characterize the postcards; strange clippings are pasted to them: "Handbook for Poisoners," one says; another is an ad with a "pansy" plant whose petals seem to form a skull-like shape. Another shows a man in a cowboy hat sticking out his tongue, and yet another is a scene from the film Riot in Cell Block 11 in which two prisoners clutch prison bars in crazed anger (one of the actors shown in the clipping, oddly enough, is Neville Brand, who would later play Al Capone in The Untouchables TV series).
I did not know what these items were, at first, as I examined them in the safe confines of the library like Western Reserve Historical Society. But when I realized I was holding missives likely written by the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run to Eliot Ness (and saved by him!), I dropped them as if they were on fire; and I did not sleep worth a damn that night in my room at the Hollenden House hotel.
Incidentally, if Fraley is to be believed, a Hollenden meeting between the Butcher and Ness, not unlike the one described here, did take place-right down to the backup men in the adjoining room going down for lunch and leaving Ness unwittingly alone with the dangerous suspect and his steak knife. (It is my assumption-and the indication of other sources-that the meeting involved someone else other than just Ness and the suspect; my speculation, of course, is that that someone was the suspect's prominent father.)
According to Fraley, the Butcher died while institutionalized-apparently in the mid-1950s.
Despite its extensive basis in history, this is a work of fiction, and some liberties have been taken with the facts; the remarkably eventful life of Eliot Ness defies the necessarily tidy shape of a novel, and for that reason I have again compressed time and used composite characters.
Some characters, such as Sam Wild and Albert Curry, are wholly fictional, although they do have real-life counterparts. Wild represents the many reporter friends of Ness, particularly Clayton Fritchey of the Press (who, like the fictional Wild, was assigned to cover Ness full-time) and Ralph Kelly of the Plain Dealer. Sheriff O'Connell and his deputy Robert McFarlin are fictional, but the rivalry between the sheriff's department and the safety director's police is not-including the sheriff's unwanted intrusion into the Mad Butcher case. The depiction herein of the suspicious circumstances surrounding the possible "third-degree" questioning, and alleged suicide, of Frank Dolezal (his real name) is based on fact.