Chicago Lightning by Max Allan Collins

Author:Max Allan Collins
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: AmazonEncore
Published: 2011-10-03T19:00:00+00:00

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I wish to acknowledge the true-crime article “Joseph Bolton, the Almost Indestructible Husband” by Nellise Child. Also helpful was the Mildred Bolton entry in Find the Woman by Jay Robert Nash. Most names in the preceding fact-based story have been changed or at least altered (exceptions include the Boltons and Captain Stege); fact, speculation, and fiction are freely mixed therein.

In a garbage dump on East Ninth Street near Shore Drive, in Cleveland, Ohio, on August 17, 1938, a woman’s body was discovered by a cop walking his morning beat.

I got there before anything much had been moved. Not that I was a plainclothes dick—I used to be, but not in Cleveland; I was just along for the ride. I’d been sitting in the office of Cleveland’s Public Safety Director, having coffee, when the call came through. The Safety Director was in charge of both the police and fire department, and one would think that a routine murder wouldn’t rate a call to such a high muckey-muck.

One would be wrong.

Because this was the latest in a series of anything-but-routine, brutal murders—the unlucky thirteenth, to be exact, not that the thirteenth victim would seem any more unlucky than the preceding twelve. The so-called “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run” had been exercising his ghastly art sporadically since the fall of ’35, in Cleveland—or so I understood. I was an out-of-towner, myself.

So was the woman.

Or she used to be, before she became so many dismembered parts flung across this rock-and-garbage strewn dump. Her nude torso was slashed and the blood, splashed here, streaked there, was turning dark, almost black, though the sun caught scarlet glints and tossed them at us. Her head was gone, but maybe it would turn up. The Butcher wasn’t known for that, though. The twelve preceding victims had been found headless, and had stayed that way. Somewhere in Cleveland, perhaps, a guy had a collection in his attic. In this weather it wouldn’t smell too nice.

It’s not a good sign when the Medical Examiner gets sick; and the half dozen cops, and the police photographer, were looking green around the gills themselves. Only my friend, the Safety Director, seemed in no danger of losing his breakfast. He was a ruddy-cheeked six-footer in a coat and tie and vest, despite the heat; hatless, his hair brushed back and pomaded, he still seemed—years after I’d met him—boyish. And he was only in his mid-thirties, just a few years older than me.

I’d met him in Chicago, seven or eight years ago, when I wasn’t yet president (and everything else) of the A-I Detective Agency, but still a cop; and he was still a Prohibition Agent. Hell, the Prohibition agent. He’d considered me one of the more or less honest cops in Chicago—emphasis on the less, I guess—and I made a good contact for him, as a lot of the cops didn’t like him much. Honesty doesn’t go over real big in Chicago, you know.

Eliot Ness said, “Despite the slashing, there’s a certain skill displayed, here.

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