“Yes. She.”
“A tailor, you say?”
“A tailor. A seamstress. Whatever you want to call it.”
“This seamstress . . . she wouldn’t happen to be Daniela Kos, would she?” Eliot asked. The man was no dummy. Malone had to give him that. And he also shared his sandwiches.
“Yes. Daniela Kos,” he said.
“Your concerned landlady?”
“Yes. The same. She’s very . . . skilled. I think she can help.”
“Well, I’ll be,” Eliot marveled. “You’ve got me curious. I’ll talk to Cowles. We’ll figure something out.”
“Good. You do that,” Malone said.
“She was very concerned about you, old boy.” Ness winked at him. “I thought it was sweet.”
“She’s a very . . . nice . . . woman. I wish she hadn’t called you, but . . .” He shrugged, staring out the window. It was too warm in the car.
“She knows you well then?”
“I told you she did,” Malone said, guarded. “I told you about her on day one.”
“Is she nice looking? She sounded nice looking.” Eliot was grinning. Malone could hear it without even looking at him. But he was reluctant to answer. Yes, Dani was nice looking. Beautiful, in fact. Perfectly, imperfectly, beautiful. And he could not say so without making it seem too important. Or all important. And as much as he liked Eliot Ness, and as innocent a question as it was, Malone couldn’t talk about the way Dani looked. He could not . . . reduce her . . . to that. He met Eliot’s gaze.
“No. She isn’t,” Malone said, tone terse, though his voice rang with truth. The lie comforted him immediately, as if he’d defended her virtue, and Ness blushed. It was endearing, his boyish ability to still be shamed.
Ness’s grin flipped even as his brows rose, tugging his face in opposite directions. “Well, then. I almost feel sorry for the old girl now. You sure don’t mince words, Mike.”
Malone grunted.
Eliot started the car, his lunch break over. The speaker mounted above the windshield crackled and hissed.
“Calling Director Ness,” a male voice insisted, and Eliot reached for the handset with the curling cord and flipped a switch.
“This is Ness,” he said, a trifle too loud, like he was excited to finally be using his new contraption.
“We just got a call from the bridge tender at the end of Superior Avenue in the Flats. A severed leg has reportedly been found on the bank of the river not far from the storm drain. Sergeant Hogan and Chief Matowitz have been advised. Search teams are en route. Scientific Bureau already on scene.”
“Son of a gun,” Malone cursed beneath his breath.
“I’m not far,” Eliot barked into the mouthpiece. “Five minutes out.”
He hung up the gadget, squealed out of the parking lot, and headed north, eyes grim, both hands on the wheel.
“Nine months. Nine months and nothing. I had hoped that he was through,” Malone said.
“Yeah. Me too. But we found a bundle of clothes in January, right around the time you got into town. Women’s clothing, all neatly packaged in newsprint . . . kinda like Flo Polillo in the produce baskets. No body parts, though. Just bloody clothing. We’ve been holding our breath. What do you want to bet the leg belongs to a woman?”
“What? When were you going to tell me about that?” Malone asked, incredulous. A bundle of clothing. His thoughts instantly went to Dani.
“I didn’t purposely not tell you, Mike. There just wasn’t much to go on. It got added to the long list of things we don’t know.”
“Let me out here,” Malone demanded as they neared their destination. “I don’t want people seeing me with you. And keep me in the goddamn loop,” he snarled. “I want everything you know, the minute you know it.”
Ness dropped him off about a block from the already gathering crowd and proceeded down the street without him.
16
By the time Malone worked his way into a position where he could see the water and the police presence, he’d heard several versions of what had happened and what had been discovered.
“It’s a woman’s calf. Severed below the knee and above the ankle. No foot,” someone said. “Joe said Steve poked at it with a stick thinking it might be a fish.”
The waterway where the leg had been spotted was not much more than a big ditch with steep embankments and a bad bridge. A storm drain fed into it, and men were already in waders trying to see if other “pieces” had been caught in the grate. No efforts were being made to keep the crowd back, and people swarmed the banks looking for the rest of the woman. It was no way to conduct a thorough—or clean—investigation.