The Unknown Beloved(80)
She didn’t feel “just fine” today. She couldn’t bear the thimble on her thumb or thread a needle with her sore fingers, but worse than that was the bone-deep weariness and the throbbing in her head. So she slept, and no one complained. Michael checked on her, the aunts too, but then the aunts went to Mass—it was Palm Sunday after all—and Michael went back to his old ways.
In the days that followed, he was watchful and grim and careful not to get too close. She’d seen something in his face when he’d asked to hold on to her, the way she’d asked to hold on to him. But the next morning the look was gone. Or shuttered. He was good at setting aside his feelings. He boxed them up tight and labeled them neatly, the way he made his lists and organized his details.
She’d tried to catch his scent on her sheets and see his thoughts by pressing her palm into the indentation of his head on her pillow, but the longing she felt was inseparable from her own.
The Easter rush continued at the shop, and Michael accompanied her to the morgue twice, but he was stiff and short on conversation, and when she pressed him again about seeing the evidence, he avoided setting a firm date.
“I have a few other ideas we will try first,” he hedged. “I need Eliot’s help to get into the evidence room at headquarters, and he’s being hounded at the moment. I thought we might visit the rooms Flo Polillo and Rose Wallace rented and see if their landlords still have any of their things. Clothing and the like. You could go through that, see if you catch a hint of something. Though . . . you are forbidden from touching the drapes.”
She’d smiled at his attempt to jest, but the quirk of his lips didn’t reach his eyes.
“And maybe something more will be found of the woman—Victim Number Ten—and there will be something new for you to examine,” he added. “Something that hasn’t been combed over and handled and mislabeled. I don’t have much confidence that you’ll learn anything we can use from old evidence.”
“Are you sure? Because I think that’s exactly what you’re afraid of,” she broached gently. “I will be fine, Malone. You must believe me.”
He’d simply grunted and turned back to his morning newspaper, and she let it go.
All week long, search parties dragged the river and walked the banks, their eyes on the ground, looking for bits of flesh the way the children scoured the grass in Euclid Beach Park for colored eggs. But Easter came and went without a single find. No flesh. No matching leg or severed feet. No head or bisected torso, and no clues about who was dead and who had done it.
Michael must have told Ness about Emil Fronek and the apartment above the clinic because detectives came and searched the premises, interviewing Dr. Peterka and the whole staff. Sybil had come to the shop in a huff looking for Malone and had left with a new hat and a pair of gloves, slightly mollified by her purchases and the chance to spill every morsel of gossip she’d collected. Dani had listened raptly to the office intrigue: the doctors were offended by the detectives’ questions, Peterka had provided police with a list of renters for the last ten years, and they had to close the office for the rest of the week to deal with the upheaval.
The couch had been carried out, the drapes too, and workmen had come in to begin Dr. Peterka’s remodel of the space and change the locks on the door. Malone had made good and sure she wouldn’t be tangling with the curtains again or catching the scent of a killer.
Eliot didn’t know anything more two weeks after the discovery of the woman’s calf than Malone had learned from Coroner Gerber’s press conference the night it was found. But the papers led with the story of the left leg and the latest “work of the Butcher” every single day, rehashing the previous cases, and castigating everyone from President Roosevelt to railroad security for turning their backs on “Cleveland’s most vulnerable.” Cleveland’s Plain Dealer ran a sprawling front page letter to the editor penned by none other than Martin L. Sweeney, congressman of the Twentieth District. He claimed Eliot Ness was more interested in traffic control and courting the press than protecting Clevelanders from madmen.
“He’s playing with his police radio, wasting taxpayer dollars, and organizing wayward boys while the people of this city cower in their homes, wondering who will be next. Cleveland deserves better,” he wrote.
Cleveland did deserve better—nobody deserved what the Butcher did to them—but Malone knew people rarely got what they deserved, good or bad, and Eliot was neither Cleveland’s problem nor Cleveland’s solution, though he’d been hailed as one. Maybe that was the rub. Everyone wanted the man who took down Al Capone, and the Butcher was an entirely different beast. Capone had also been in the government’s crosshairs. This time, there was no target. The Butcher was a phantom nobody wanted to name.
Malone and Ness had a sit-down with David Cowles on Friday, April 22, in Eliot’s office at city hall. It wasn’t the most private of locations, especially going in and out, but Eliot had picked up some persistent tagalongs in the last week and told Malone he better come to him until the storm passed. Malone hadn’t yet told Ness about the “big guy’s” interest or Irey’s ultimatum. Ness didn’t need the added pressure, but at the rate it was going, the storm wasn’t going to pass without a major break.
Cowles was consulting with crime labs and criminologists all over the country, and he brought Malone up to speed on their mostly unhelpful assessments. Eliot listened to the conversation with bruised eyes and slumped shoulders but added little. There was simply no real news and no developments.