Shadows in the White City Page 10

  Sergeant of the watch came down from his high seat and around his desk, braving any blow that might come his way, and as if seeing the pope, stepped up to Ransom to shake his hand.

  “What’s this?” asked Ransom. “What’re ya all gone daft?”

  “Hail, the conquering hero!” Ken Behan was one of two inspectors working on the rash of killings now making headlines.

  “Welcome home, Rance!” Jedidiah Logan, Behan’s partner, slapped Alastair on the back.

  “What’s it all for, boys?” Ransom did a clumsy pirouette, hands extended.

  “You’re a hero, Alastair.”

  “For what in the name of God?”

  “Indeed.”

  Laughter erupted. “Does everyone in the city know?” he whispered to Behan.

  “Know what? I know nothing. Logan, whataya know?”

  “Nothing.”

  “We’re as good as the old Know-Nothing party, aren’t we boys?” shouted Behan and a roar went up, ending in laughter and a chorus of “naught nothings.”

  “See?” asked Behan amid the uproar over the mention of the anti-immigrant movement and party.

  Suddenly Chief Nathan Kohler, standing on the second-floor landing, shouted over all, silencing the room with, “What goes on here?”

  “Knock it off, all of you!” shouted Ransom. “Some hero. I’ve lost both my badge and my partner.” He pointed to Drimmer’s empty desk facing his own and a feeling of enormous, sick emptiness filled Alastair.

  “He were a good man!” declared Sergeant Dolan, shaking his head.

  “We raised more’n a pint to Griff’s memory.” Ken Behan lowered his head.

  “And raised three hundred dollars for his family,” added Logan.

  Alastair continued cleaning out his desk. “He was a fine assistant inspector although he had some training yet, getting himself knicked like that.”

  “Remember the time we set his report on fire, Behan?” asked Jedidiah Logan.

  “And that day someone stole his lunch from the icebox, and he couldn’t detect who was behind it?”

  They all broke out in good-natured laughter.

  The laughs ended abruptly when Chief Nathan Kohler, again shouted, “Ransom! My office, now!”

  “Shitty man,” complained Logan under his breath.

  “Go get ’im, Alastair,” added Behan. “Now you no longer have to eat his shit.”

  “And remember,” said Sergeant Dolan, a skeletal man who stood a head taller than Ransom, “we none of us know a thing, and it’s an oath we’ve taken to your health, Inspector.”

  “Ahhh…well thanks, Dolan. I didn’t know I had so many friends among ye.”

  “Aye, you do now.”

  Alastair imagined the story must have circulated throughout the force about his having quietly “taken out the garbage,” but he wondered with whom the leak had begun and precisely when and maybe where and perhaps who was on hand. Harry or one of his men perhaps, during a drinking bout? He pondered the notion while making the stairs taking him up to Kohler’s closed office.

  He hesitated a moment at the turning of the knob, not wishing to get into turmoil with Nathan so soon back, but as he could hardly stand Kohler in the same room, he imagined there was no dodging it. He opened the door and pushed through.

  Inside the semi-darkened office, he found Kohler was not alone. In one corner stood Dr. Christian Fenger, a man to whom Alastair owed deference, as Christian had saved his life now twice—once after Haymarket exploded and more recently when Gabby’s gun had exploded.

  Alastair did not recognize the seated figure who appeared doubled over, so far into himself did he lean. The stranger was white haired and white bearded, a Santa Claus figure, dumpy, doughy, and looking as if he’d slept in his suit. A gold watch fob and a diamond ring marked him as a wealthy man. When he looked up to see Ransom enter, Alastair saw that it was Senator Harold J. Chapman, the grandfather of the deceased girl. Chapman looked a shadow of himself, on the verge of death’s endgame. The terrible tragedy had left him a tattered soul.

  “Senator Chapman,” began Kohler, “here is our best man for such an assignment. Along with Logan and Behan—introduced to you yesterday—Inspector Ransom here will hunt down this madman who’s brought this horror on your family. I assure you that—”

  “Shut up, Kohler!” ordered the old man, getting to his feet. He lifted his cane and placed it in Alastair’s face. “You find this monster, Ransom, and you turn him over to me.”

  “What’s this?” Alastair asked Kohler, confused.

  “Talk to me,” the senator said sternly. “Understand, this is what I want. You do this thing and the three of you, gentlemen, you will have my fortune. The paperwork is already complete at my lawyer’s, all quite in order. All you need is to bring him to me out at my farm in Evanston alive for me to flay. I’ll strip him of every inch of his bloody skin while he’s yet alive. I want to hear him beg and scream and cry the entire—”

  Unfortunately and all too often, Ransom had seen this kind of unrestrained, unconditional hatred born of unmitigated hurt, pain, and a sense of entitlement to justice and order in an unjust and disordered world. For men like Chapman, it amounted to an extreme insult. A shock to the comfortable existence of an otherwise honorable soul now twisted and confused and filled with a sense of outrage that reached back to an ancestral past: the old eye-for-eye vengeance legitimized by the man’s bible. Still, Ransom felt sorry for the man’s terrifying loss; he empathized, and being in his position earlier, he, too, had resorted to the same ancient code. But something felt different here, somehow. Most men of Chapman’s stature would never know a simple truth: no execution, no amount of punishment, no amount of justice could end the pain or quail the loss of an innocent life.

  “Have you agreed to this, Dr. Fenger?” asked Alastair, amazed, lifting his own cane now.

  “I have.”

  “How so. You, a man of high moral ethics? A surgeon?”

  “I know you, of all people,” interrupted the senator, “can and will put a capper on this maniac, and so why not make a bargain of it?” asked the senator, his gold tooth and gold ring and gold watch all lighting him up like a Christmas tree.

  “I see my reputation precedes me.”

  “Alastair,” said Dr. Fenger, “it means a new wing at Cook County. You’ve no idea how much it’s needed.”

  “And you, Chief Kohler?” asked Ransom. “The defender of law in Chicago?”

  “No one need know outside this room, Alastair.”

  “I see…given it much thought have you?”

  “Look, man, we—you and I—civil servants…what becomes of us, Alastair?” Kohler asked. “When retirement comes round? And hell, face it, we don’t know from year to year if we even have jobs! Do you stand on principle? We are talking a fortune here.” Nathan Kohler extended Ransom’s badge to him.

  But Alastair turned from Kohler to Senator Chapman. “I…I have to tell you, sir, that even without your bribe and your hatred, I would do all in my power to bring this fiend to justice.”

  Chapman leapt even closer at him. “Justice? I want nothing of justice I haven’t a hand in. Do you understand?”

  “That much is clear, yes.”

  The old senator snatched the badge out of Kohler’s hand and pushed it on Alastair. “Get it done. See to this, Kohler, or it will be your job!” The senator pushed past Alastair and was out the door, his cane beating a sad rhythm in his wake down the stairs and out the door.

  “The old man believes the rumors, Alastair.” Kohler actually grimaced.

  “The rumors?”

  “That you single-handedly caught and dispatched the Phantom,” added Christian Fenger, who then turned to Kohler and said, “How ’bout we have a drink, the three of us, Nathan. Snatch out that bottle you keep in your desk.”

  Kohler did so, placing three small tumblers of whiskey between the others and himself. Fenger lifted and toasted, “To the end of the Phantom, and to a quick end
to this new fiend making children vanish.”

  Kohler lifted his glass, about to accept the toast, when both men saw that Ransom had not taken hold of his drink. “Come now, Alastair,” began Fenger. “You of all men, reservations? It wasn’t so long ago you and I were plotting violence against Dr. Tewes.”

  “I’d like to sleep on it…give it some thought. A thing like this…well, it could ruin the three of us sooner than make us rich.”

  Fenger gulped his whiskey and slammed the glass down. He abruptly left.

  Kohler and Alastair stared across at one another. “Are you trying to figure out a way to gain this treasure that’s fallen in our laps all for yourself, Alastair?”

  “Don’t be a fool, Nathan. A thing like this gets out; people talk.”

  “People are already talking about you, Inspector, and some are speculating you had my blessing in murdering Waldo Denton.”

  “That’s a bald-faced lie.”

  “That you had my blessing or that you did it? And how else to explain his sudden disappearance?”

  “I don’t know. I was in Michigan. I heard about it when I got back, like I am hearing about this mess with the grieving senator for the first time.”

  “The press is calling this madman Leather Apron.”

  “Why Leather Apron?”

  “Who knows. Someone put forth the theory he is a knacker.”

  “A horse butcher?”

  “Someone says they saw a knacker fellow in a leather apron in the area right before the Chapman girl’s body was found.”

  “So we are going on hearsay now?”

  “The press is.”

  “Is the body still at Fenger’s morgue?”

  “Unrecognizable if it were not for a birthmark. Did you know that some birthmarks go all the way down to the bone? I hadn’t known that until Fenger educated me.”

  “The senator had to identify his granddaughter by a birthmark?”

  “A bell-shaped mark, yes. I tell you, Alastair, the body was scavenged in the manner of…well of a deer carcass hanging from a tree is how Fenger put it.”

  Alastair took the drink now and downed it.

  “Then you are with us?” asked Kohler, his long-time nemesis.

  Alastair tried on the notion, looking at it from all angles, trying to see how Kohler could twist it to get at him. How might it backfire? In how many ways?

  “I didn’t say that,” he announced.

  “You drink my whiskey—a peace offering—and yet you stand against me?”

  “I’ll need that drink,” he replied, “if I’m to have a look at this little girl’s butchered carcass.” Ransom left with his badge in hand as abruptly as had Fenger, hoping to catch Christian on the street, to talk privately about this matter. He wanted to know how Christian could have gotten in so deep in so short a time.

  But Alastair was stopped by Logan and Behan, who had assembled all their notes and files on the case, dumping them onto his desk. “Chief’s idea,” said Logan.

  Behan added, “Told us we’re taking our lead from you now, even before you arrived, Inspector Ransom.”

  “Here’s a brief on the whole bloody matter.” Logan slapped a file into his hands.

  “Shit, boys! This is your case, not mine.” He pushed the file back into Logan’s hands. “I’m outta here.”

  Dr. Fenger moved far too fast for Alastair to catch him outside the Des Plaines house. He must see the body in the morgue anyway, so he would see Christian in private there to ferret out how he came to be in such a fix. Why did he need money? It couldn’t just be that he wanted it for the hospital.

  At Cook County, he followed the usual route into the bowels of this place where the morgue had been relegated, and as always the stench of death and chemicals proved only the first obstacle here in the basement facilities.

  “They should tear down this place and start over,” he muttered to himself. “Now that would require quite the sum.”

  The lift door opened on a long corridor that took Alastair to its terminus, Dr. Fenger’s second domain here. There were several reasons they placed morgues below ground. The ease of transportation to and from the hospital, the general public’s sensibilities, yes, even the coolness, although with crude ice box refrigeration units now in use, the primary concern remained odors. Although it must be fifty degrees down here, the odors cut into the nostrils and brain sharper than Fenger’s scalpel.

  Prevailing overall, the odor of decay. Hard to maintain any sort of religious fervency here as all seemed lost in this undeniable odor of putrefaction. Cook County Morgue was the largest in all the Midwest. Its shelves and cold unit were filled with the indigent and unclaimed John and Jane Does, suicides, homicides, twisted corpses of those who died freak deaths. He half expected to see the bloated, water-logged corpse of one Waldo Denton here someday, washed ashore. But for now the odor was the predominant matter. No amount of cleansing fluids or fans could overpower this stench.

  Ransom moved onward toward the source.

  Aboveground and in his operating theater, Dr. Christian Fenger reigned as the surgeon of the century, well regarded and respected, even canonized by everyone in the hospital—a hero in his own “home.” But not belowground in his morgue. Here there was no heroic life-saving measures; here there was no life to save, and his surgical skills did not repair so much as they deconstructed the “patient” if he could be called a patient; certainly he was “patient” to a fault, the corpse.

  Down in the depths of the morgue, then, Christian put on another hat, and he performed something closer to the butcher, meatball surgery it was called in some circles—the work of the pathologist who spent all his time “reading” the corpse of anyone who may have met with foul play, committed suicide, or was victim of a freak accident. Here Christian determined cause of death, an act at opposite poles from being the savior upstairs.

  Acting as city coroner had to take its toll on a man, reasoned Alastair as he pushed through the double doors, his cane against the stone floor along the corridor having announced him before his barging in. Ransom was so often in and out of here that few paid any special attention to him. He’d come on the occasion of every victim of the Phantom. Dr. Fenger’s medical assistants paid him no heed now, save a nod before going back to their various tasks.

  “I thought I’d find Dr. Fenger here,” he said to the room.

  “He’s had to see to Dr. Tewes,” replied one of the men, his once white apron a rainbow of florid and dull colors.

  “Tewes? Tewes was here?”

  “They carried him out on a gurney,” explained the man.

  “Fell out like a girl when he looked at the Chapman child’s corpse; the mutilation was that horrid.”

  “The child…her body.”

  “Have you come for a look yourself?” came the obvious question.

  “I have, but what bloody business has Tewes in all this? Damn him!”

  “I suspect he’s just out to make a name for himself,” came the reply as the attendant wheeled a death gurney before Alastair.

  “Oh, he’ll be talked about in the pubs tonight, he will,” chimed in the other man from behind his mask. “How he fell out.”

  “Morgan, it’s a normal reaction for most people!” shouted the first attendant. “Not everyone’s got the constitution of a knacker.” He then casually pulled away the sheet that had covered a misshapen lump of flesh beneath.

  Alastair audibly gasped. Only the long flowing curling red tresses of her hair looked human. He had now laid eyes on every conceivable horror done a human being. Beheadings of the Phantom did not compare; fire victims did not compare. Nothing in all his career had prepared him for this. “It’s…are you sure it’s human?” he asked.

  “Dr. Fenger and a team of us have determined not only is it human but that it is Senator Chapman’s missing grandchild.”

  “There’s no face left. No nose…ears…not even eyes.”

  “Nor cheek, nor forehead.”

  The bir
thmark alone they had said in Kohler’s office. Ransom saw that whole chunks of flesh had been carved away. It brought to mind an evening at Berghoff’s where the chef stood behind his roast or ham and carved off slices for your plate.

  “Cover it…cover it now!” Alastair raced from the room.

  Behind him, he heard the man called Morgan snicker and say, “And him the man of the hour.”

  “Shut up, Morgan,” said the other.

  Alastair went searching the building for Fenger and Jane Francis, who had said she would end Dr. Tewes’s career in Chicago, and now this. She had come as Tewes to view the remains of the Chapman girl. Whatever possessed her to do so?

  He went for Christian’s surgery. From there he went to the surgeon’s office, and here he cornered him. “I understand you allowed Jane in to see that awful mess your men are trying to put back together again.”

  The senator’s already held a wake without a body; they—he—wants the funeral to come off tonight and the coffin into hallowed ground at the family’s church tomorrow.”

  “Look, it’s awful, the whole thing, but Christian, how did you get sucked into this business of accepting money from Chapman for your services? Think what might happen if it got out?”

  “I have gambling debts about to eat me alive, Alastair, and…besides, we need a lot of things here at the hospital, and he mentioned a wing in her name.”

  “The Anne Chapman wing, heh?”

  “Why not?”

  “And a trust or a charitable fund set up?”

  “Precisely.”

  “One that you alone will control?”

  “Someone must administer the—” he paused, seeing Ransom’s smirk. “Look, here! Someone’s going to do it, so why shouldn’t those funds come to Rush Medical and Cook County?”

  “Ahhh…it comes down to your age-old rivalry with Northwestern, does it?”

  “Regardless, Rance, why shouldn’t something good come of this horror? Why shouldn’t decent people benefit in some manner if we do our jobs right?”

  “You have no qualms about it in the least?”

  “None! Did you see that child’s body?” Christian’s eyes and jaw were firmly set. “What I’d give for a retirement home and a volume of Kipling right now.”