“Well, I don’t like what’s been in the papers, lately,” he admitted, brushing the stray comma of hair off his forehead, for what good it did him. “You know I’ve made traffic safety a priority.”
“Sure. Can’t jaywalk in this burg without getting a ticket.”
When Eliot came into office, Cleveland was ranked the second un-safest city in America, after Los Angeles. By 1938, Cleveland was ranked the safest big city, and by 1939 the safest city, period. This reflected Eliot instituting a public safety campaign through education and “warning” tickets, and reorganizing the traffic division, putting in two-way radios in patrol cars and creating a fleet of motorcycle cops.
“Well, we’re in no danger of receiving any ‘safest city’ honors this year,” he said, dryly. He settled into the wooden chair next to mine, folded his hands prayerfully. “We’ve already had thirty-two traffic fatalities this year. That’s more than double where we stood, this time last year.”
“What’s the reason for it?”
“We thought it had to do with increased industrial activity.”
“You mean, companies are hiring again, and more people are driving to work.”
“Right. We’ve had employers insert ‘drive carefully’ cards in pay envelopes, we’ve made elaborate safety presentations…. There’s also an increase in teenage drivers, you know, kids driving to high school.”
“More parents working, more kids with cars. Follows.”
“Yes. And we stepped up educational efforts, at schools, accordingly. Plus, we’ve cracked down on traffic violators of all stripe-four times as many speeding arrests; traffic violations arrests up twenty-five-percent, intoxication arrests almost double.”
“What sort of results are you having?”
“In these specific areas-industrial drivers, teenage drivers-very positive. These are efforts that went into effect around the middle of last year-and yet this year, the statistics are far worse.”
“You wouldn’t be sending me undercover if you didn’t have the problem pinpointed.”
He nodded. “My Traffic Analysis Bureau came up with several interesting stats: seventy-two percent of our traffic fatalities this year are age forty-five or older. But only twenty percent of our population falls in that category. And thirty-six percent of those fatalities are sixty-five or up…a category that comprises only four percent of Cleveland’s population.”
“So more older people are getting hit by cars than younger people,” I said with a shrug. “Is that a surprise? The elderly don’t have the reflexes of young bucks like us.”
“Forty-five isn’t ‘elderly,’” Eliot said, “as we’ll both find out sooner than we’d like.”
The intercom on Eliot’s nearby rolltop desk buzzed and he rose and responded to it. His secretary’s voice informed us that Dr. Jeffers was here to see him.
“Send her in,” Eliot said.
The woman who entered was small and wore a white shirt and matching trousers, baggy oversize apparel that gave little hint of anyshape beneath; though her heart-shaped face was attractive, she wore no make-up and her dark hair was cut mannishly short, clunky thick-lensed tortoise-shell glasses distorting dark almond-shaped eyes.
“Alice, thank you for coming,” Eliot said, rising, shaking her hand. “Nate Heller, this is Dr. Alice Jeffers, assistant county coroner.”
“A pleasure, Dr. Jeffers,” I said, rising, shaking her cool, dry hand, as she twitched me a smile.
Eliot pulled out a chair for her opposite me at the conference table, telling her, “I’ve been filling Nate in. I’m just up to your part in this investigation.”
With no further prompting, Dr. Jeffers said, “I was alerted by a morgue attendant, actually. It seemed we’d had an unusual number of hit-and-skip fatalities in the last six months, particularly in January, from a certain part of the city, and a certain part of community.”
“Alice is referring to a part of Cleveland called the Angles,” Eliot explained, “which is just across the Detroit Bridge, opposite the factory and warehouse district.”
“I’ve been there,” I said. The Angles was a classic waterfront area, where bars and whorehouses and cheap rooming houses serviced a clientele of workingmen and longshoremen. It was also an area rife with derelicts, particularly since Eliot burned out the Hoovervilles nestling in Kingsbury Run and under various bridges.
“These hit-and-skip victims were vagrants,” Dr. Jeffers said, her eyes unblinking and intelligent behind the thick lenses, “and tended to be in their fifties or sixties, though they looked much older.”
“Rummies,” I said.
“Yes. With Director Ness’s blessing, and Coroner Gerber’s permission, I conducted several autopsies, and encountered individuals in advanced stages of alcoholism. Cirrhosis of the liver, kidney disease, general debilitation. Had they not been struck by cars, they would surely have died within a matter of years or possibly months or even weeks.”
“Walking dead men.”
“Poetic but apt. My contact at the morgue began keeping me alerted when vagrant ‘customers’ came through, and I soon realized that automobile fatalities were only part of the story.”
“How so?” I asked.
“We had several fatal falls-down-stairs, and a surprising number of fatalities by exposure to the cold weather, death by freezing, by pneumonia. Again, I performed autopsies where normally we would not. These victims were invariably intoxicated at the times of their deaths, and in advanced stages of acute alcoholism.”
I was thoroughly confused. “What’s the percentage in bumping off bums? You got another psychopath at large, Eliot? Or is the Butcher back, changing his style?”
I was referring to the so-called Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, who had cut up a number of indigents here in Cleveland, Jack the Ripper style; but the killings had stopped, long ago.
“This isn’t the Butcher,” Eliot confidently. “And it isn’t psychosis…it’s commerce.”
“There’s money in killing bums?”
“If they’re insured, there is.”
“Okay, okay,” I said, nodding, getting it, or starting to. “But if you overinsure some worthless derelict, surely it’s going to attract the attention of the adjusters for the insurance company.”
“This is more subtle than that,” Eliot said. “When Alice informed me of this, I contacted the State Insurance Division. Their chief investigator, Gaspar Corso-who we’ll meet with later this afternoon, Nate-dug through our ‘drunk cards’ on file at the Central Police Station, some twenty thousand of them. He came up with information that corroborated Alice’s, and confirmed suspicions of mine.”
Corso had an office in the Standard Building-no name on the door, no listing in the building directory. Eliot, Dr. Jeffers and I met with Corso in the latter’s small, spare office, wooden chairs pulled up around a wooden desk that faced the wall, so that Corso was swung around facing us.
He was small and compactly muscular-a former high school football star, according to Eliot-bald with calm blue eyes under black beetle eyebrows. A gold watch chain crossed the vest of his three-piece tweed.
“A majority of the drunks dying either by accident or ‘natural causes,’” he said in a mellow baritone, “come from the West Side-the Angles.”
“And they were over-insured?” I asked.
“Yes, but not in the way you might expect. Do you know what industrial insurance is, Mr. Heller?”
“You mean, burial insurance?”
“That’s right. Small policies designed to pay funeral expenses and the like.”
“Is that what these bums are being bumped off for? Pennies?”
A tiny half smile formed on the impassive investigator’s thin lips. “Hardly. Multiple policies have been taken out on these individuals, dozens in some cases…each small policy with a different insurance company.”
“No wonder no alarms went off,” I said. “Each company got hit for peanuts.”
“Some of these policies are for two-hundred-and-fifty dollars, never higher than a thousand. But I have one victim here…” He turned to his desk, riffled through some papers. “…who I determined, by crosschecking with various companies, racked up a $24,000 payout.”