Trail of Blood
me around there during my younger days, before he sold the place. He also had a desk at the rail yard station—big brick place right on the river, they tore it down in the sixties—and he’d spend a lot of time there, too. He used the office on Pullman more for managing his personal affairs, the building, other investments, and as a place to store his growing collection.” The man waved his hand to take in the room. One of the moving trains gave a toot and released a puff of smoke into the air. The not-terrifically-pleasant smell of burned oil reached Theresa’s nose. “He passed a lot of these pieces down to me. Could I serve you some coffee, or tea? Ms. MacLean? You look a bit chilly.”
    “No, thank you. I’m fine.”
    He seemed to glow a bit at her smile, though it could have simply been from talking about trains. Or his father.
    Frank got him back on topic. “Do you remember the building’s tenants? From the 1930s?”
    “Oh, my, let’s see. I remember the architects most, I guess. They rented a unit nearly the entire time my dad owned it. They were always very late or very early with the rent, depending on how their contracts came along. He also had an artist, just after the Second World War—until the guy ran out of canvases one day and painted all over the walls; then my dad kicked him out. Didn’t care for the man’s taste, he said, nor his judgment.” Corliss chuckled over that until Theresa laughed with him.
    Frank asked, “How were the units numbered? One through four were the ground floor?”
    Jablonski pulled a camera from the second bag. An older digital model, it had double the bulk of the camcorder.
    “Yes, and five through eight the second story. He had a medium for a couple of years—a woman who said she could communicate with the dead. My father loved stuff like that. And, as he always said,
she
paid the rent on time. Unlike the doctor.”
    “Doctor?”
    “In the office next to his. Every month my father would have to threaten him with eviction to get the rent, but he’d cough it up at the last minute and buy himself another thirty days.”
    “What kind of medicine did this man practice?” Frank asked ever so casually. Theresa wished she could hide so much with her voice.
    The model train let out another toot. Jablonski took a few quick snaps, all of Theresa. When she frowned at him, he aimed the lens at Corliss.
    “Some sort of dietary therapist.”
    “A nutritionist?”
    “I suppose. A bit of a quack, according to my father—there were plenty of them around in those days. You have to remember that antibiotics hadn’t been discovered yet and people would try anything. But my dad must have liked the man, or he wouldn’t have put up with the rent always being late. He could be very softhearted.”
    “Must have been a lot of people late with the rent then,” Jablonski put in. “Unemployment in Cleveland reached twenty-three percent during the Depression, and most households had a single wage earner. That’s why there were so many homeless and transients for the Torso killer to choose from.”
    “Torso killer?” Edward Corliss blinked at the younger man.
    “Would you have any records from your father’s ownership of the building?” Frank asked before Jablonski could expound upon the infamous murderer and all his crimes.
    Now the silver-haired man blinked at him. “Any receipts from his tenants? Leases? Tax returns?”
    “Oh, I see what you mean. No, no, I’m sure I don’t. He sold that building in—um…”
    “Nineteen fifty-nine.”
    “Yes. I cleaned this house from end to end after he died, when I moved back from England. My father was not a pack rat, all the trains notwithstanding. I don’t recall finding anything related to the building. He had tax returns, but supposedly you only have to keep those for seven years, so I destroyed them.”
    “What about photographs?” Theresa suggested. “Did your father have any pictures of his building, especially from the

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