Trail of Blood (7 page)

She didn’t let him. “Now, these girls weren’t med students, and they certainly weren’t doctors.”

“Still,” Jablonski said, his attention pinging back and forth between them, “it can’t be easy to cut someone’s head off. So how do you learn to do it without nicking a bone if you’re not a doctor or a surgeon, or a butcher?”

“Same way you learn anything else. Practice. And,” she added, “he practiced a
lot.
”

“We’re here,” Frank said.

Edward Corliss lived in the smallest house on a very expensive street, with nothing on the other side of the structure but Lake Erie. The home had stained glass in the front door, marble steps, and a modest but expensive dark sedan in the drive, but Theresa considered its prettiest asset to be the sweeping maple tree in the center of the yard, its leaves ablaze in red, yellow, and orange. The private cocoon of fall foliage nearly hid the neighboring drives, but she could just glimpse a man in a white lab coat stepping into a Mercedes.

She stepped out of the car and sucked in the smell of autumn.

Frank walked beside her and Jablonski took up the rear, following too closely for comfort. She sidled over a bit, uncomfortable with a man both flirtatious and too young for her. She had not encountered one before this. Most men flirting with her these days were in the midst of retirement planning.

Their peal went unanswered. Frank, never one for patience, suggested they look around back.

“It might take him a while to get to the door,” Theresa pointed out. How old is he?”

Already walking away, Frank said, “Sixty-one. And he sounded hearty enough on the phone.”

Theresa followed her cousin and Jablonski followed her. “Tell me about your grandfather. He was a cop?”

“Forty years,” she replied. Ivy covered the wall on her left and shrubs lined up to her right. She brushed her hand along their piney branches as they filed to the back. There, the blue expanse of water with the sun reflecting from each wave both greeted and blinded them.

A single dock jutted from the shore, with a small sailboat tied up at its end. Frank had been right; a man made his surefooted way along the bow as he wrapped the sail—though Theresa doubted this could be Edward Corliss. Perhaps he had a son.

When Frank reached the dock and kept going, Theresa followed eagerly. Like any Clevelander, she never needed an excuse to go near the water and breathe in that familiar scent of gasoline and dead fish that meant family vacations on Catawba Island and that feeling of peace a body of water always conferred.

The man on the boat heard them and turned. Wearing a plain burgundy sweatshirt and jeans, he had blue eyes and silvered hair and appeared delighted to see them. “Hello! You must be the detectives.”

He leapt to the dock, causing only a minor tremor in the wood, and Frank completed the introductions. Edward Corliss shook hands with each of them, pressing Theresa’s gently in his firm fingers. He had an easy smile and the trimness of one who had long ago embraced whole wheat tortillas.

“I’m sorry if you waited at the front—I didn’t expect you to get here so quickly.”

“Are you getting it ready for winter?” Frank asked, nodding at the sailboat.

“No! It’s too early yet. I don’t put Jenny away until the lake threatens to freeze. Let’s go inside and see if I can help you, shall we?”

He took up the rear, guiding them off the dock like a good captain, and they followed him inside. Theresa ran her fingers through her hair to repair whatever damage the lake’s gusty winds had done to it.

Corliss ushered them into an oversize front room done up in russet and gold tones, the colors splashing against the white walls. Windows made up most of the north wall, from which every whitecap on the lake could be seen in frothing clarity. Scarlet carpeting, jacquard sofas, a vast fireplace.

And trains. Lots of trains.

They collected on every surface, end tables, the high mantel, and circled the room on three high shelves. A mahogany table that could have seated twelve had been given over to a mountaintop village with miniature houses and farms and more train tracks than any real mountaintop village would have. Two engines with several cars wound through it, occasionally passing but not colliding with each other. She swore she could smell the evergreens.

“Wow,” Theresa said.

“Yes,” Corliss said. “I went a little overboard in here. One of the hazards of bachelorhood, not having a wife to stop me. But you’re here about my father’s building, right? Would you like to sit down?”

Theresa would rather have studied the snow-covered village and its trains but followed her cousin to the crisp settee. Jablonski perched on the edge of a wing chair, pulling a tiny camcorder from one of his two camera bags. He clicked it on and aimed it at Theresa.

“Your father constructed the building at 4950 Pullman?” Frank began.

“Yes. I mean, he contracted for it to be built.”

“Did he have any other buildings in Cleveland?”

“No, no. My father was a railroad man; he only dabbled in landlord-ship that one time, and only as an investment. My father—his name was Arthur—”

“We know.”

Corliss spoke of the large train systems with the same enthusiasm he showed for his miniature ones. “He started working in the rail yards as a boy, moving through every job they had, from loading to shoveling coal to coupler, eventually to detective—like you—with a small railroad company in Pennsylvania. By the time the line’s owner began to fall into ill health, my father had enough saved to buy the line. You see, around the turn of the century there were hundreds of small, limited-span lines. In the 1910s and ’20s, bigger companies began to buy up the mom-and-pop lines and turned into conglomerates like the Pennsylvania Railroad and the B&O.”

Theresa fingered a pair of binoculars on the end table, wondering how close they would bring the whitecaps and seagulls. But she didn’t pick them up. They looked too heavy and too expensive.

“Oh,” Frank said. Jablonski finally switched the camcorder’s gaze from Theresa to Corliss.

“My point is, Pennsylvania bought my father’s company and made him one of their vice presidents, as well as a very wealthy man. Rich enough that he could have retired right then, but he loved the trains too much, and besides, the Depression had arrived. He needed a safe investment for his money and figured real estate would be as safe as any.”

Frank made a note. Jablonski, the camera perched on one knee, plucked a gold figurine of a steam engine off the coffee table in front of him. Corliss looked askance, and the researcher put it back with the gentlest
clink
.

Frank went on. “He kept an office there for himself?”

“I believe so, yes. He’d take me around there during my younger days, before he sold the place. He also had a desk at the rail yard station—big brick place right on the river, they tore it down in the sixties—and he’d spend a lot of time there, too. He used the office on Pullman more for managing his personal affairs, the building, other investments, and as a place to store his growing collection.” The man waved his hand to take in the room. One of the moving trains gave a toot and released a puff of smoke into the air. The not-terrifically-pleasant smell of burned oil reached Theresa’s nose. “He passed a lot of these pieces down to me. Could I serve you some coffee, or tea? Ms. MacLean? You look a bit chilly.”

“No, thank you. I’m fine.”

He seemed to glow a bit at her smile, though it could have simply been from talking about trains. Or his father.

Frank got him back on topic. “Do you remember the building’s tenants? From the 1930s?”

“Oh, my, let’s see. I remember the architects most, I guess. They rented a unit nearly the entire time my dad owned it. They were always very late or very early with the rent, depending on how their contracts came along. He also had an artist, just after the Second World War—until the guy ran out of canvases one day and painted all over the walls; then my dad kicked him out. Didn’t care for the man’s taste, he said, nor his judgment.” Corliss chuckled over that until Theresa laughed with him.

Frank asked, “How were the units numbered? One through four were the ground floor?”

Jablonski pulled a camera from the second bag. An older digital model, it had double the bulk of the camcorder.

“Yes, and five through eight the second story. He had a medium for a couple of years—a woman who said she could communicate with the dead. My father loved stuff like that. And, as he always said,
she
paid the rent on time. Unlike the doctor.”

“Doctor?”

“In the office next to his. Every month my father would have to threaten him with eviction to get the rent, but he’d cough it up at the last minute and buy himself another thirty days.”

“What kind of medicine did this man practice?” Frank asked ever so casually. Theresa wished she could hide so much with her voice.

The model train let out another toot. Jablonski took a few quick snaps, all of Theresa. When she frowned at him, he aimed the lens at Corliss.

“Some sort of dietary therapist.”

“A nutritionist?”

“I suppose. A bit of a quack, according to my father—there were plenty of them around in those days. You have to remember that antibiotics hadn’t been discovered yet and people would try anything. But my dad must have liked the man, or he wouldn’t have put up with the rent always being late. He could be very softhearted.”

“Must have been a lot of people late with the rent then,” Jablonski put in. “Unemployment in Cleveland reached twenty-three percent during the Depression, and most households had a single wage earner. That’s why there were so many homeless and transients for the Torso killer to choose from.”

“Torso killer?” Edward Corliss blinked at the younger man.

“Would you have any records from your father’s ownership of the building?” Frank asked before Jablonski could expound upon the infamous murderer and all his crimes.

Now the silver-haired man blinked at him. “Any receipts from his tenants? Leases? Tax returns?”

“Oh, I see what you mean. No, no, I’m sure I don’t. He sold that building in—um…”

“Nineteen fifty-nine.”

“Yes. I cleaned this house from end to end after he died, when I moved back from England. My father was not a pack rat, all the trains notwithstanding. I don’t recall finding anything related to the building. He had tax returns, but supposedly you only have to keep those for seven years, so I destroyed them.”

“What about photographs?” Theresa suggested. “Did your father have any pictures of his building, especially from the 1930s?”

He considered this, hand to chin. “I don’t believe so. People didn’t take photos of every single thing the way they do now. But we could look.” He stood up with the energy of a man half his age and held out his hand to her.

After being helped to her feet in such a courtly manner, she followed him from the room, past the mountaintop village.

“This must have taken years to build,” she told her host.

“Oh, this is merely an introduction to my world,” Edward Corliss told her. “Let me show you my real pride and joy.”

They passed through a white-on-white hallway and into a completely changed environment from the front room. No carpets interrupted the light hardwood floor and no draperies blocked the high windows. No furniture save for a waist-high platform in the center of the room, which had to measure ten feet by fifteen.

Corliss stood at one end and turned a crank to roll up the clear plastic sheet that floated on the top, supported by metal rods placed in strategic locations.

No quaint village here. Highways, skyscrapers, and houses upon houses, through which the trains flowed, met, separated, and looped around again on the shores of a blue—“It’s Cleveland,” Theresa exclaimed. “You’ve modeled Cleveland.”

“From Rocky River to Shaker Heights.” Corliss bent over one corner of the platform, opened an electrical box, and flipped several switches. Tiny bulbs lit up in the windows of the office buildings, the airport, gas stations. Trains chugged to life.

“You even have the rapid transit cars.” Theresa watched one of the electric commuter vehicles, on which she’d spent so many hours over the years, glide along beside a locomotive. Both at 1:64 scale, of course.

Even Jablonski seemed impressed. He took some stills, then switched back to the camcorder, its lens sweeping the model city from end to end.

Frank said nothing but circled the tableau as if he expected to witness the model citizenry engaging in various crimes. He needn’t have worried. The replicated city had every accoutrement down to park benches but not one citizen. Theresa did not find that surprising—they’d have had to be the size of ants and number in the hundreds to populate this metropolis.

“Here’s the Medical Examiner’s Office.” Theresa could have spent an hour noting every detail to the display. “How long did this take you to build?”

“About a year, I suppose. But I’m never really done. I’m always tinkering with it—I spent three days on the swing bridge this past week after its motor decided to quit. Then I decided to make it winter—at least in part of the city. Here, let me show you.”

He picked up a pint-sized plastic container and popped off the lid. Before she could react, he scooped up her hand and immersed her fingers into the white goo. “Brush it on the trees like this, lightly, so it sort of frosts them but not completely.”

It had been a long time since a man held her hand. The white stuff felt like cottage cheese but drier, the tiny plastic limbs rough but flexible. Under her fingers, Christmas came to Cleveland.

“Do you ever crash them?” Jablonski asked, tapping one engine as it went by.

“Of course not!” its creator snapped. “And don’t touch that!”

“Sorry.”

“I could stand here all day.” Frank’s voice sounded patently unconvincing, but perhaps only to someone who’d known him since her birth.

“But we really do need to learn more about your father’s building.”