The Unknown Beloved(106)

“Are you the man they call the Butcher of Kingsbury Run?” Keeler intoned, undeterred.

“Am I the Butcher? I’m nobody, who are you?” he chortled. “Are you nobody too? Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell! They’d banish us, you know.”



“We’ve got nothing, Eliot,” Cowles said. David’s hair stood out in little tufts above his ears, and discouragement rimmed his eyes and bowed his shoulders.

“We’ll get a warrant to search his residence,” Eliot said, jaw set.

“His current residence is listed as Congressman Sweeney’s house,” Cowles reminded him. “And if we do that . . . what’s the point of all this? We’ve gone to great lengths to keep this quiet. You want to storm the congressman’s house now?”

“My professional assessment is that he’s suffering from psychosis. But . . . I can’t tell you whether he’s a killer,” Grossman said.

Eliot frowned. “Keeler? What’s the ruling?”

Leonarde sat back in his chair. “He’s not being truthful.”

Cowles moaned. “That’s not especially helpful, Leonarde.”

“I couldn’t get a good baseline, David. If I don’t know what the truth looks like with a subject, I can’t very well assess when they are lying.”

“And he lied on almost every single question we asked him. He even lied about his own name,” Ness added.

“Did he kill those people, Leonarde?” Malone pressed Keeler. “Yes or no?”

“According to the polygraph . . . yes. He did. If he didn’t, I might as well throw my machine out the window. But I agree with Dr. Grossman. He’s psychotic. And that makes the test a whole lot more unreliable. It makes his responses more unreliable. He is severely unwell.”

“We’ve got to shut this down, guys,” Cowles worried. “We’ve got to shut this whole thing down.”



Malone went for a walk. He just needed a little air. Some time away from Sweeney and the sweat-soaked suite. What a mess. Keeler was packing up his machine. Grossman was talking forced confinement in a mental institution. Malone supposed if a suite in the Cleveland could be finagled for almost a week, forced institutionalization might not be out of the realm of possibility. Sweeney was demanding to be released, and Ness wasn’t talking.

What a mess.

He wasn’t surprised. He always expected the worst. He planned for it. For that reason, he was always the most capable guy in the room and the most unassuming. He did not look on the bright side, because in his experience, there wasn’t one. You could always make the best of things, but most of the time, that wasn’t saying much. He was actually comforted by bad news, because he could go about making things better. When he got good news, all he could do was wait for the tides to turn.

The tides were turning.

The point was driven home when a kid, running at full speed and looking over his shoulder like he was being chased, barreled into him, driving them both back around the corner Malone had just turned.

Malone recognized his hat before he recognized the bundle of sticks in his arms. Steve Jeziorski still wore Malone’s fedora. It made him look even younger than he was. He tried to dart left, but Malone saw the feint and moved right, and backed the kid up into the wall in three steps.

“Who you running from?” He scanned the large square and the streets that fed into it. The Cleveland was a high-rise hotel that sat on the south corner of the diamond-shaped thoroughfare. It anchored the upscale shops and restaurants on every side, and it was rife with pickpockets. It was also a long way from Broadway and East Fifty-Fifth and a considerable distance from Hart Manufacturing, where Steve supposedly still lived and worked.

“Not running from anybody. Need to catch the streetcar,” the kid panted.

“You’re running the wrong way.”

“Huh. Yeah. Well. I know a shortcut.”

“Where you been, Steve?”

“I go by Jez now. Jazzy Jez.”

“That’s a stupid name, kid.”

“What would you know, Lepito?” Jeziorski spat, trying to wriggle away.

Malone frowned down at him, and the kid wilted.

“What did you just call me?” he hissed.

“That’s your name, right? Lepito? That’s what the guy told me.”

“What guy?”

“Your tail. He came around again. He asked me some questions, gave me some money, and told me you were a gangster named Lepito.”

“A gangster named Lepito,” Malone repeated. “Are you lying to me, Jazzy?”

“About what part?”

Malone was too tired to play word games with a punk kid.

“When was this? And why didn’t you tell me?”

“You told me you didn’t want my information. Remember? But if you want it now, I might know something . . . for a price.”

“How much money we talking?” Malone opened the billfold he’d lifted from the kid’s pocket.

“Hey!” Steve yelled, patting at his baggy trousers.

Malone raised his arms out of reach. “How about I don’t drag you out into the square and flag down a patrolman, and we’ll call it even?”

“I told you what I know, Mike,” the kid whined, but Malone was no longer listening. His eyes were drawn across the square to the entrance of the hotel. Elmer Irey was climbing out of a long black car. As he watched, two more cars pulled up. Both long, both black, both filled with people he didn’t know but immediately recognized.