A small-time racketeer is found dead in his rented rooms in an old hotel-no electricity, liquor bottles corked with candle stubs on the windowsills, a coat hanger twisted up for making toast over one of the burners of the gas stove. A local character, who leaves behind a collection of garbage bags filled with dryer lint and his gangster tales of liquor runs and bawdy houses, fixed fights and doped-up ponies and bought-off baseball players. Karl Neidhardt, alias Steve Bowman, The Orchid Man.