The Unknown Beloved(38)
He read and reread, setting the files aside and writing pages of ideas before reading again. Writing wasn’t something he was particularly skilled at, not in the literary sense. He would never be a Shakespeare or a Dickens. But he found that the process of writing down what he thought he knew—facts, impressions, even the order of events—revealed what he didn’t know and guided his steps.
When he was finished writing, he checked himself, going back into the files to see if what he’d written was there, in the pages, or if it was something he’d misunderstood or misremembered. What you thought you knew could lead you down paths that led to nowhere fast or, worse, to somewhere you never should have gone.
He was good at making lists. Even the kind that Lenka seemed to appreciate.
When he began feeling lost in the details, he backed up and started again, paring his lists to the bare bones. He took out a fresh pad of paper and limited himself to one-dimensional descriptions, no speculation allowed. He wrote only what was known and documented, and he did his best to keep it brief.
He started with Victim #1, Edward Andrassy, the man detectives kept circling back around to. Andrassy was a good-looking twenty-nine-year-old with a tall, lean build, brown hair, and blue eyes. He was the son of working-class Hungarian immigrants, and was well-known in the Roaring Third, a rough stretch of bars and tenements sandwiched between the Run and East Fifty-Fifth that extended up to Prospect Avenue. No one went to the Third if they wanted to stay out of trouble.
Andrassy hadn’t stayed out of trouble. He had a criminal record, a reputation with the local cops, and a spotty employment history.
He’d been emasculated and beheaded, but not at the foot of Jackass Hill, where his remains were found. His body had been left—posed even—on his side, naked but for his black socks. His head was buried so his hair sprouted above the ground, and his genitals were found nearby. Both he and Victim #2 were discovered on September 23, 1935. He’d been dead between two or three days when he was found. Last seen getting into a long black car on September 19 near his parents’ home on Fulton Road.
Malone ripped off the page and set it aside and started a new list for the second victim.
Victim #2: Short, stocky, age thirty-five to forty, emasculated. Headless. Both his buried head and his unburied genitals—found in a pile with Andrassy’s—had been recovered in the area. His left testicle was missing.
Victim #2 had died at least a week (reports set the range to as many as thirty days) before Andrassy but was found approximately thirty feet from him. He, like Andrassy, had been killed somewhere else, but unlike Andrassy, his skin had been treated with something, giving it the appearance of red leather. A later report found that the second corpse had been braised, most likely with the railroad torch and the oil found in a two-gallon bucket at the scene. A pair of white trousers and a white shirt thought to be the second victim’s had also been recovered in the vicinity. His identity was still unknown.
Malone set the second list aside and started another.
Flo Polillo, identified by the fingerprints on her severed right hand, was labeled Victim #3. She was in her early forties and roughly 160 pounds. She’d been arrested a few times for selling booze from her residence and selling herself in both Cleveland and Washington, DC.
A mugshot was included with her file. She looked tired but smiled slightly, incongruously, which made the picture seem more an awkward portrait than a mugshot. She did not look as if the arrest upset her at all; in his own experience there were two types of criminals: those who enjoyed it, and those who felt they had no other choice. Flo Polillo seemed the latter, but Malone didn’t write that down on his current list. Instead, he added the produce baskets that held some of her dismembered pieces, and where and when she was found, which was behind Hart Manufacturing on January 26, 1936. Hart Manufacturing, the place where the kid Steve Jeziorski worked along with his father and his brother.
It was an interesting connection, but likely coincidental. The remarkable thing was that the kid had been wearing “Eddie’s” cap. Malone could almost guarantee that Eddie was Edward Andrassy, Victim #1. Malone hadn’t decided what to make of that, but if Dani’s impressions were correct, the kid hadn’t done anything criminal. He’d just failed to speak up and turn over the cap when he should have. Still, Malone would be swinging back to the neighborhood and having another conversation with Steve Jeziorski.
Half of Flo Polillo’s headless torso, along with legs and her left arm, had been dumped at a different location, behind an empty house on Orange Avenue, and discovered on February 7, 1936. Her head had not yet been found.
That made it all the more interesting that only the head of Victim #4 was discovered on June 5, 1936, by two young boys. It’d been wrapped in a pair of trousers, and when they’d checked the pockets for change, it had rolled out. The rest of the man had been found, fully intact, genitals and all, the following day just east of the Fifty-Fifth Street bridge. The blood at the scene indicated he lay where he’d died. Why the killer had carried his head—and clothing—to a different location was anybody’s guess.
Victim #4 was known only as the tattooed man. He was handsome, and that was saying something, considering the only pictures they had of him were of his severed head. Eyelashes like a child’s, strong face, even features, and thick ruddy-brown hair. The coroner had made a diagram of the man’s six tattoos, and the papers had distributed it widely. But still . . . nobody had come forward to claim him.