Trail of Blood (8 page)

“It’s here.” Theresa pointed out the stone structure’s miniature copy. It looked better in the model than in real life—tidy and still alive.

Frank raised an eyebrow to let her know she was being less than helpful. “Can we check for the photographs, please?”

“Certainly. You have to excuse me, I don’t get many opportunities to show it off. My neighbor is a fan, but other than him…” Edward Corliss handed Theresa a rag for her fingers, switched off his tiny city with obvious regret, carefully replaced the plastic dust cover, and took them to a much smaller room off the back of the house. Bookshelves covered nearly every inch of wall space except for framed prints and drawings of trains, and it smelled of dust and pipe tobacco.

“They’re not in an album, I’m afraid, only loose in a box,” Corliss warned them as he dug through one of the lower cabinets. “Father didn’t always have my sense of order. Or Mother’s.”

“Where is your mother?” Frank asked.

“She passed away, oh, must be more than forty years now. Before father did. Let’s see what we have here.” He sat at a wooden desk that would have required six bodybuilders to lift and flipped the top of a box that had once held Audubon Society note cards. The other three people in the room watched over his shoulder, Theresa leaning close enough to pick up the scent of Old Spice. She loathed Old Spice because her first boyfriend had worn it. She decided not to hold that against Edward Corliss.

After donning a pair of reading glasses, he turned the photos over, one by one, gently but methodically. “This is my baptism, you don’t need to see that…those were our neighbors, they’ve since moved…my flat in England, I still regret selling that, the prices have shot up in the past few years…my graduation…ah, here’s one. It’s the outside of the building, though.”

Theresa peered at the black-and-white image, still sharp after so many years. “Which one is your father?”

He tapped a lean finger on the man in the center, who was wearing creased trousers and a white shirt with a tie. He bore some resemblance to his son, mainly in the deep-set eyes, but seemed taller. He carried his suit coat tossed over one shoulder, and a rounded hat had been pushed back from his forehead. He posed in front of the same entrance Theresa had passed through yesterday morning; his clothing and the shadow behind him told her the picture had been taken in summertime, when the sun hung to the north.

“Who are the other people?” Frank asked.

On Arthur’s right stood a gaunt man in similar clothing and a young woman in a long black skirt and a coat festooned with chiffon scarves. She had wavy dark hair and smiled. The man didn’t. On the other side of the owner, two young men seemed to be jostling with each other and their images had blurred. Behind them and off to the side sat a man with less-neat clothing and a ruined expression.

Corliss said, “I’m only guessing, you understand, but I’m sure my father told me at some point that these two young men are the architects I spoke of. And—again, I’m not sure—this man could be that doctor.”

“The nutritionist?” Theresa asked.

“The dietician, yes.”

“Who’s the woman? Is that your mother?”

“No.” Edward Corliss brought the photo closer to his face and then backed it away again, as if that might help jog his memory. “I have no idea. She could be the medium. Father always described her as an outlandish dresser.”

“What about this man, in the background?”

Corliss shrugged. “Again, no idea. He could be anyone, someone working for the other tenants, a passerby. He could have been a bum, I mean, a hobo. My father used to try to help them during the Depression, give them a meal, let them sleep there a night or two if he had any vacant units. I said he had a soft heart, and during those years there were plenty of men who needed one.”

“When was this photo taken?” she asked.

Corliss turned it over, showed them the
May 5, 1936,
printed in block letters. “The man could have been a messenger for the railroads or one of the other businesses, I suppose, or he could have spent the night on the front stoop and hadn’t left before they snapped the picture. As I said, a common occurrence then as now, the poor souls sleeping on the sidewalk. Sometimes I think not much has changed.”

Jablonski spoke, startling Theresa. He had moved to just behind her left shoulder. “Who took the picture?”

All four people peered at the snap with new interest.

“Your mother?” Theresa suggested.

“No, they didn’t meet until after the war. I really don’t know. A friend, I suppose, or another tenant.”

Frank asked, “Did he ever mention someone disappearing from his building? A tenant? A client? Even a hobo?”

Corliss considered the question, shook his head. “I’m sure I would remember something like that.”

“Did he ever mention a James Miller?”

“Not that I recall.”

“So you have no idea who this dead man we found could be?”

“I’ve been thinking of nothing else since you called this morning. No.

I have no idea.” His eyelids fluttered suddenly. “Surely you don’t think my father had something to do with that.”

“We don’t have any theories at present. Do you mind if we borrow this picture?”

Corliss pulled it away, toward his own chest. “My father wouldn’t kill anyone. No one.”

“I understand,” Theresa said.

“Unless they deserved it,” he added, and turned over the picture. The sentiment did not seem too odd; Theresa had heard it before. Corliss continued to sort through the photos but the only other find, from an investigator’s point of view, came near the bottom of the box.

“This is my father’s office at the Pullman building,” Corliss told them.

Corliss Sr.’s office bore a great resemblance to Corliss Jr.’s study, aside from the color of the walls—white in the photo, pale caramel in the room in which they currently stood. Plenty of bookshelves supporting model trains instead of books, and framed pictures of same. Arthur Corliss stood by himself, facing the camera with crossed arms and a self-satisfied expression. A notation at the bottom read:
November 1935
.

“This is the same desk,” Theresa said.

Edward patted the worn surface as if pleased she had noticed. “Solid cherry. An unusual design for the time, the flat top. Office desks were always rolltops, with all those little cubbies for storing things, but as office work increased in the new century, efficiency experts decided that a plain top minimized clutter and backlog. The pigeonholes made it too easy for workers to stash their work and forget it.”

“Interesting,” Theresa said.

Frank didn’t find the historical trivia quite as fascinating. “There’s a door.”

“Door?” Corliss asked.

“Door?” Jablonski asked.

Theresa noted the opening, framed by wooden molding, in the wall behind the desk. “Is that the bathroom? Did you ever visit your father’s office, Mr. Corliss? Do you remember its arrangement?”

He frowned in concentration, peering at the photograph. “Vaguely. I would have been only seven or eight, you understand.”

“Did it have a small lavatory?”

“It had a sink. I remember how old the fixtures seemed. And a bit rusty.”

“Anything else? A closet? A storage space?”

“I don’t think so, but I really can’t be sure. I had just turned nine when he sold the place.” He handed the photo to Frank and went through the rest of the box but did not find any more of the building at 4950 Pullman.

With the interview winding down, Jablonski the stringer came to life.

“Did you work for your father’s railroad, Mr. Corliss?”

“A bit, in my younger days. I ran the dispatch office for a few years, but then decided to break away to the more sophisticated climes in Europe and England. Silly, as it turned out, but not entirely unproductive: I read mechanics and chemistry at Oxford and then settled down to a respectable job as a civil engineer.”

“Buildings?”

“No, roads. Traffic patterns were our main concern.” He stood up, visibly stretching his legs, and plucked a four-inch-long locomotive carved from ivory from a shelf. He pressed it into Theresa’s hands, guiding her fingers over the glossy surface. His eyes, she noticed, were blue with blue-gray flecks, like bubbles in champagne. “I bought that from a pipe maker in Bath…remarkably smooth, don’t you think? Anyway, then my father died and I returned to manage his estate. I also took over his position in the preservation society.”

Jablonski pounced on this. “The what?”

Frank’s pager buzzed, that angry-bee sound.

Corliss answered without looking away from Theresa. She had not been a tactile person for many years but somehow didn’t mind the warmth of his hands wrapping hers around the ivory train. “The American Railroad History Preservation Society. I’m the vice president. We’re hosting a cocktail party–slash–fund-raiser at the art museum next month. You should come.”

Was this older man hitting on her?

Of course as her officially ancient birthday loomed, sixty-one no longer seemed too far out of line, especially a well-spoken and interesting sixty-one, so perhaps she should consider—

Then she thought of her fiancé, dead for fifteen months now, and it all seemed absurd. Her, her job, a seventy-four-year-old corpse.

“All of you,” Corliss added.

“It’s beautiful,” she said of the train, and placed it back on the shelf.

“Thank you for showing us around.”

“Any time. I’m only too happy to share my collection. See this gear? It’s from an original Union Pacific steam locomotive.”

“We have to go,” Frank said.

“Mr. Corliss, did your father ever mention the Torso Murders?” Jablonski asked.

“The what? Oh, those, the bodies in the river. I’m not
that
old, young man. Those things happened long before I was born.”

“
Now,
” Frank added.

Both host and reporter seemed disappointed as the party moved back to the front door, their voices echoing slightly against the foyer’s high ceiling. Corliss said, “Do come back if I can help in any other way. Take my card, Detective—there’s my phone number. It’s been a pleasure to meet you.”

“Thanks,” Frank said.

Jablonski asked if he could come back with follow-up questions, perhaps in the next day or two, and Corliss agreed.

“Thank you,” Theresa told him. He responded by touching her elbow as she made her way over the threshold, a courteous gesture, gentlemanly, except for the way his thumb caressed her forearm as he did it.

As she slid into the passenger seat, she noticed Corliss still watching from the open door. “That was interesting.”

Frank mumbled under his breath.

“Did you get a call?”

“I’m going to drop you off at your car, Mr. Jablonski,” he said by way of response, and nosed the car out onto the boulevard.

“Your boss said I could stay with you two all afternoon, following the investigation….”

“Only the cold case. Not a current one.”

The grim way he said it convinced Theresa that the rest of her day had just been claimed as well.

Jablonski sprang forward like a pointer catching a whiff of quail. “You mean there’s been a homicide?”

“No comment.”

“Oh, come
on
!” he protested. Theresa could hear real frustration bubbling up from his carefully maintained persona.

“No.”

The reporter threw himself back in the seat. “We’ll see about that.”

The Cleveland Air Show began as national air races, an idea brought to the United States from Europe by Joseph Pulitzer, the man for whom those prizes are named. The purpose in 1920, as now, was to encourage interest in aviation. The show rotated through several cities until Cleveland hosted the largest and most (indeed
only,
to that point) financially successful show in 1929. Fully three times larger and longer than today’s shows, the 1929 show established Cleveland’s ownership of the event.

Particularly in these early days, the work could be dangerous. Occasionally a pilot would be lost. But in 1949 a racer banked his Mustang too sharply at one turn and crashed into a house in Berea, killing a young mother and her baby son. The air show shut down for the next fifteen years.

Today, the usual commercial and air taxi services at Burke Lakefront Airport are suspended every Labor Day weekend as citizens pack the bleachers to watch pilots, wing walkers, and parachutists defy the law of gravity. Nearly all of them would remain unaware of this year’s tragedy, but then, this death had nothing to do with airplanes.

When Clevelanders say “lakefront airport,” they mean it. Walk north one hundred and some feet from the runway and your shoes will get wet. The edge is built up with piled rock to keep the grassy buffer from washing away, though the Port Authority officers patrolling this Labor Day were not concerned about natural predators. Only human ones. Cleveland did not have a large number of possible terrorist targets (much to the relief of its citizenry), but the air show, with its large military presence, had to qualify.

And so the Port Authority officer had been policing the perimeter on foot when he discovered the girl’s body. Or rather, part of it. He stared at it for a long time, that completely obvious yet somehow indecipherable object. Then the officer took out his radio, called his supervisor, and said a silent prayer of thanks that the piled stones sloped downward to the water and therefore the body or part of a body lay just below the line of sight from the bleachers. There were a hundred thousand spectators on the south side of the tarmac. At least half of them carried binoculars.

Theresa had attended the show in exactly two of her (almost) forty years. She wondered if this visit counted as number three, though they didn’t enter the show, only skirted around it down a small access road between the runways and the water.

A marked patrol vehicle led the way, without activating his lights or sirens—the air show organizers wanted only scripted drama for the customers. Theresa did not feel discretion to be the better part of valor while on such an active tarmac and tried to look in all directions at once as she drove. Did someone tell the pilots that they were coming? Around her were biplanes, fighter jets, and one massive thing that had to be some kind of military transport. What if one landed on her?