“And you felt bliss?” Malone interjected, his tone wry.
“Yes. Especially on the first bite.”
“An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” Lenka said. “What else makes you happy, dear?”
“Socks,” Dani said.
“Socks?” Malone repeated.
“Warm socks on needy feet.”
“Socks make you feel crazed?” Malone asked, droll.
She laughed. Surely he knew which socks in particular had made her happy.
“Can you imagine life without socks?” she challenged.
He picked up his napkin and wiped his mouth. “No.”
“Your turn, Mr. Malone.” Lenka was not going to give up, and Malone sat back in his chair.
“I like a good cigar,” he said slowly. “The first drag. The way it smells, the way it feels in my mouth. If I smoke too often, I don’t appreciate it as much. So I savor them and only indulge once in a while.”
Lenka was beaming at him like he was a prized pupil. “Go on,” she urged. He thought for a few seconds, and his list got much longer.
“I hate being cold, but I like sunshine in January. When it’s so frigid it bites, yet the sun shines off the snow and warms the top of your hat and the tip of your nose.
“I like the smell of the sea on my sheets and bacon on the stove. I like a close shave and a hot towel around my face. A good pair of socks”—he glanced at Dani—“and peppermint drops. I have a sweet tooth. I don’t think about food all that much. I’m not picky. But if you buy me a bag of candy, I’ll eat it all.”
“Noted,” Lenka said.
“I don’t care for John Philip Sousa or marching bands, but I get excited when I hear a storm. God’s cymbals, my father used to say,” Malone added.
“Excellent!” Lenka clapped. “Anything else?”
“I like an empty church and big dogs. I don’t like small ones. They look too much like rats, and I don’t like rats. And I prefer brown eyes to blue, though if you can have one of each, that’s even better.”
“Oh my,” Lenka said, and Dani felt the heat rise in her cheeks. He was just being kind, but his face was completely serious. He didn’t wink at her or even smile, but stood, signaling he was finished, and began clearing his dishes.
“Oh my,” Lenka said again. “That was wonderful.” But her gaze had grown speculative.
9
Malone spent the morning at the morgue with Dani, who had five bodies to tidy, dress, and write eulogies for. It took them three hours from the moment they left the house, pulling the wagon, until they were back again, mission accomplished. He bathed because it all made his skin crawl, and then spent the rest of the day poring over the files behind his locked door.
Between his long walks and his late nights, he’d begun to chip away at the list of “suspicious professions” in the surrounding areas. There were hundreds of them. He started at St. Alexis Hospital, just because it was nearby, and began putting faces to names and personalities to people. He sat in waiting rooms and roamed corridors and ate in the dining hall, listening to gossip and gathering data.
But today he went back to the files, searching for crumbs and taking notes.
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.