When I opened the door of the supply closet, a seated Lloyd Watterson-his ice-blue eyes wide and wild above the makeshift gag of sticky brown mailing tape-was scooting back on the casters of the walnut stenographic chair into which he was tied, rearing back like a bull about to charge a matador.
I’d cuffed his hands behind him and looped the cuffs through a rung of the chair, into which I’d tied him with heavy brown wrapping twine. Though I’d lashed his ankles together and looped the thick twine around the back of the chair, he’d been able to get enough traction with his feet to take a few hopeless runs against the heavy closet door.
Veins standing out on his forehead, cords taut in his neck, the blond, broad-shouldered, almost-handsome Watterson-a blizzard of a man in his male-nurse white pants and white shirt and white tennis oxfords with white socks, the heavy brown twine cocooning around him-had the expression of a kid caught masturbating.
“Oh, do you want out of there, Lloyd?” I asked obsequiously. “Sure thing.”
I grabbed the front of his shirt and yanked him forward-the chair on its casters followed-and then pitched him careening across the office, where he crashed into the secretary’s desk, whacking his back against its edge, and came to a stop. The chair, with him in it, almost toppled, wobbling on its rollers.
Watterson was trying to talk or cry out or protest or something, under the packing-tape gag.
“Oh, do you want to be heard, Lloyd?” I asked. “We can make that happen.”
As if his face were a package I was trying to unwrap, I twisted the tape around his head, the final pass of the sticky stuff making itself known to Lloyd, who yowled at the hair-pulling, flesh-searing exercise.
“Kinda like taking off a bandage,” I said sympathetically. “Fast is better.”
I wheeled him around to face me. I had not turned on the lights in the office, and Eliot was just a figure in the shadowy darkness.
“Recognize me yet, Lloyd?” I asked.
The ice-blue eyes narrowed. He shook his head. His voice was oddly soft, gentle. “You… you were in Dr. Dailey’s office… today.”
“Think back, Lloyd… Notice I’m not calling you ‘Floyd.’ That’s a hint. Here’s another: the last time you saw me, you had me in this position.”
The eyes widened again, but the rest of his boyish face tightened. “Wait a minute… wait a minute… I do know you…”
“Hit the lights, would you?” I said to Eliot. “Just to the left of where we came in?”
The overhead light snapped on, flooding the office with illumination, and the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run saw Eliot Ness moving toward him.
“Oh shit…” Lloyd said.
“You and your daddy really fooled me, Lloyd,” Eliot said pleasantly. He planted himself in front of Watterson, arms folded, his expression bland, even benign. “Really put one over.”
A sickly smile formed on the perpetually immature face, the disturbingly sensual lips quivering. “I got help from the doctors, Mr. Ness! I’m better now.”
“Is that right? From what I gather, you’re back to your old bad habits.”
Looking up at Eliot the way a child seated in the corner looks up at an approaching razor-strop-wielding parent, Watterson shook his head, and kept shaking it as he said, “No… no. I’m well. I’m cured of that sickness. I had therapy, Mr. Ness. I worked with the doctors. I don’t have those urges anymore. I’m helping people now.”
Eliot’s eyes frowned and his lips smiled. “Performing abortions is helping people?”
Watterson nodded emphatically. “The women who want them, who need them, think so.” Then he frowned at the unfairness of it all. “What other kind of work can I find? I’m not licensed.”
It was damn near what Eliot himself had said.
Standing off to one side, I put in, “How did you wind up working for Dr. Dailey, Lloyd?”
Watterson turned his head to look at me, the rest of his body motionless, strapped to the chair. “He and Papa both went to Harvard. They were in the same class. After Papa died, I came out here and asked Dr. Dailey if he would take me in… let me be his physician’s assistant. I went to medical school, you know.”
Eliot said, “You flunked out, Lloyd.”
Watterson looked up at Eliot again; his expression seemed almost embarrassed. “I had good grades till I started drinking too much. It made my hands shake. I don’t drink at work.”
“But you still drink?”
“I drink-I drink at night with friends, in bars, like everybody. But Mr. Ness, I don’t have those unnatural urges, anymore. I don’t get out of control.”
Eliot leaned in nearly nose to nose with Watterson. “Cutting a woman in half, Lloyd, that isn’t losing control?”
Watterson turned his head away, as if Eliot had bad breath. “I didn’t do that.”
“Do what, Lloyd?”
Now he looked at Eliot. “Kill that woman in the papers-that ‘Blue Dahlia’ woman.”
Eliot sighed, stood straight again, rocking on his heels. “ Black Dahlia, Lloyd. That kill has your fingerprints all over it-severed torso, body drained of blood, washed clean…”
Watterson’s expression was one of wounded indignation. “But she had her head on! The papers said she had her head on. That’s not my style.”
Eliot reached out and grabbed Watterson by the shirt, catching some of the twine. “Isn’t it, Lloyd? Or did you leave that poor girl’s head on her shoulders and carve that grin in her face so you could laugh at me, through her?”
“No!”
“Wasn’t that death grin you cut in her face just the latest smart-ass postcard you sent me, Lloyd?”
“No! I didn’t do that crime-you know it didn’t fit my… what do you call it… modus operandi!”
Eliot let go of him, and began to pace slowly, in a very small area right in front of Watterson in his chair. “You never had a consistent M.O., Lloyd. Sometimes you left the bodies whole, after decapitation.”
Watterson managed to shrug, despite his bonds. “That was the men.”
“Yes, the men-who you also emasculated. It was the women you cut in two.”
“And dismembered them, remember! Mr. Ness, that Dahlia woman was only cut in half-she still had all her arms and legs! And you know that’s just not my style.”
The surrealism of this discussion-Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run arguing over the finer points of mass murder-triggered images of Welles’ bizarre Crazy House set with its dismembered mannequin limbs.
I moved in front of Watterson and Eliot stepped aside. “Lloyd, I can tell you something that is your style. One of your victims, in early ’37, was a woman, never identified, her torso bisected… She was probably around twenty-five with a nice figure, and a fair complexion and brown hair.”
Eliot, wondering what I was getting at, asked, “The partial torso that washed up on the beach at 136th Street, you mean?”
“Yes,” I said to him. Then to Watterson I said: “That victim on the beach had another one of your special, whimsical touches-you stuffed an object up the woman’s ass… a pants pocket.”
“I was sick, then,” Lloyd said, with quiet dignity. “I’m well now.”
“Happy to hear that,” I said. “By the way, here’s something that hasn’t appeared in the newspapers, Lloyd: Elizabeth Short had something stuffed inside her, too-a scrap of flesh cut from her thigh, bearing a rose tattoo.”
I stepped aside as Eliot moved in and pointed a finger at Watterson like a gun. “You did this crime, didn’t you, you miserable son of a bitch!”
“No! I swear I didn’t. I’m well. I’m better!”
I said to Eliot, “Get the door for me, would you?”
“The door?”
“Yeah, the door, Eliot. Open it.”
Again, though he didn’t follow what I was up to, Eliot went along for the ride. “All right,” he said, went over and opened it and stepped aside.
I grabbed Lloyd by the blond hair on the top of his head and I dragged him by it out into the hallway-only it wasn’t a hallway, really, but a relatively narrow corridor that bordered a five-story drop to the lobby floor. Casters screeching, the chair bearing the twine-tied Butcher did my bidding as I dragged it over to the central staircase and dragged his ass down the iron stairs, eight of them, jarring him, jolting him, shaking him, rattling him, thump, whump, thump. His wails of terror and pain echoed through the cavernous building, like memories of the cries of mercy he had ignored from his victims.