City for Ransom Page 2

  Ransom saw that some enterprising newsmen had found another way up to the third-floor promenade, and they now looked down over the kill scene. One or two photographs were taken from the odd angle, most likely useless.

  O’Malley, in his nervous stutter, stood beside Ransom, sputtering, “In-in-insp-spec-tor…I think you’ve gotta deal with D-d-d-doc-doctor Tewes, sir.”

  Ransom rubbed his grizzled chin and fought the redness of eyes that’d seen too much horror and too little sleep, eyes now staring through O’Malley and Dr. Tewes, who’d joined them.

  “You must take a moment to read this or—” began Tewes, the huge signature ascot bobbing with each speech.

  “Dr. Tewes, we have standards that must be rigorously adhered to and scrupulously upheld to conduct a proper investigation, and they don’t include the likes of—”

  “Sir, I respect the vigor and integrity of your investigative procedure, and your long experience in police work. However…”

  “Why must every review end in a however?”

  “However, Inspector, every new idea to drag police science into keeping with modern knowledge of—”

  Ransom dismissed Tewes—this time with the upraised bone-handled wolf’s-head cane, a gift from his close friend, Philo Keane. He’d carried it since Haymarket, the riot that had ended in the deaths of seven of Ransom’s fellow officers. The cane had become Ransom’s trademark. Stories circulated all about Chicago of how Ransom put down any man who showed the least resistance by pummeling him with that cane. Tewes saw that the filigreed bone handle was cracked down one side.

  Ignoring Tewes, Alastair called out to Griffin.

  “Where’s Philo?”

  “I suspect he’s on his way.”

  “Have him take pictures of the blood splatters in the men’s room, the trail to here, and close-ups of that lone handprint. Using the modified identification-records kit, we can attempt to match the palm print to our records of known perverts and felons. How is that for modern, Dr. Tewes?”

  The ID kit he referred to was a modified French police idea. The French believed a simple record of measurements of body parts kept on arrested felons proved as reliable as any eyewitness report. Many a man had been sent to the gallows via such matchmaking.

  Ransom’s examination of a crime scene took longer than any man on the force; he had a reputation for thoroughness but a kind of monkish quality of intense meditation as well.

  “Zenlike isn’t he?” Tewes, admiration in his voice, asked Drimmer.

  “Not sure what that means,” replied Griffin. “All I know is that Inspector Ransom is the man who modified the modern French Bertillon method of cross-identification cards to include fingerprints on known felons and repeat offenders.” Griffin Drimmer took the now infamous note from Dr. Tewes to examine it.

  “The Chicago Police have put to use the Bertillon system?” asked Dr. Tewes. “I’m impressed.”

  “As I said, with modifications.”

  “Still, you won’t find this killer in your card files.”

  “Now look, Dr. Toes is it? We know what we’re doing here, and we need no additional help, I can assure you.”

  “Tewes,” the small man corrected. “James, sir, James Phineas Murdoch Tewes.”

  Ransom erupted again, shouting for the missing photographer, startling everyone.

  “His bark as bad as his bite?” asked Tewes, forcing a squint from Griffin.

  Meanwhile, Ransom watched Chicago Police civilian photographer Philo Keane, and his new assistant, young Waldo Denton, struggle through the crowd of reporters on the stairwell, their hands full with the remarkable scientific tools of their trade. Ransom found the new art and science of photography—an invention catapulted to prominence during the Civil War—a godsend to police investigators. It’d become another new source of applied science in police detection. But the jaded crowd of reporters and curious onlookers rudely shouted at the inconvenience Philo and his assistant caused.

  Keane and assistant together had hold of a long-legged specialized enormous tripod, which—once the carriage was assembled—stood twelve feet high on three giant legs. An entire ladder attached to it led to the top. This monster, once upright, allowed Keane special vantage point overtop the prone corpse, so as to photograph from above—the end result creating an effect like the eye of God looking in on death.

  Ransom knew Keane’s work and thought him an artist, and his equipment state-of-the-art, but the giant ladder-equipped tripod was the size and bulk of a giraffe. Still, the results—if Philo were not rushed and left to his own devises—often proved remarkable, if not uncanny. Ransom had known grown men on the force who did not care to be alone in a room with Philo’s photos.

  When Ransom reviewed such photographic evidence, he sometimes felt the hair on the back of his neck rise in response to the eerie appearance of a strange-looking halo effect around the depicted corpse—as if Philo had somehow caught a fleeting glimpse of the departing souls. Regardless of race, creed, religion, character or gender, Philo’s glow—or Philo’s halo as it had come to be known—was never seen on anyone else’s film plates.

  Of course, when called on this phenomena over a pint at Moose Muldoon’s, Philo chalked it up to a reflection—flash of gunpowder in the pan—caught at the moment of squeezing off the shot, “Or just a dirty lens,” he’d add.

  Philo exchanged a grunt of salutation with Alastair, a glint of knowledge and bonding in each bloodshot eye. What these two men knew and shared of violent, unholy and unhappy endings culminated in a silent array of artistically rendered death photos. Sober, they seldom spoke beyond the necessary. So, Philo immediately began his normal routine of taking “cuts,” confident that he knew precisely what Ransom must have.

  Meanwhile, Ransom saw that Drimmer had gotten himself embroiled in a three-way conversation with O’Malley and Tewes; O’Malley quietly reading Kohler’s letter aloud, his lips moving like a fish gaping for air.

  “JesusLordGodAlmighty…if you want something done right…” Ransom muttered.

  “Gotta do it yourself,” replied the sloppily dressed police photographer. “I believe in old adages.”

  “Too bad you don’t believe in lye soap.”

  “Unless I can afford Field’s best perfume, I’ll keep me stench.” Philo’s assistant stifled a laugh, while Philo laughed from the gut. “You’re one to talk, old man.”

  “I want plenty of close-ups of the handprint to the side, Philo—see, right here?”

  “Yah, yah, why’re you badgering today…why? I’m way ahead of you.”

  “And, Philo, any blood splatters you see, and close-ups on the neck. Three hundred and eighty degrees. Do you understand?”

  “You mean three hundred and sixty degrees, don’t you?”

  “Testing, Philo, to see how sharp you are this time of the equinox.”

  “Badgering is what it is, and I don’t care for it.”

  Ransom whispered, “You ever think of getting off the sauce?”

  “You’re one to talk. What about that Chi-nee shit you smoke?”

  “Keep it down, Philo.”

  Keane returned to work, placing a ruler beside the bloody handprint for scale. Escaping from him came an odd series of sound effects: “Aha, ya-aha, mmm…uh-huh…ohhh…uhhh…bugger’at…gore-blimeyboy, whoa…ohhh-sheee-it…”

  CHAPTER 2

  Ransom recalled how an army of stone masons had worked for over a year to build this massive Illinois Central Station, and how the marble had come out of the earth from a quarry near the Indiana state line. By contrast, the more recently completed World’s Columbian Exposition train terminal had been constructed of wood and covered over with staff—a form of stucco. Where the solid gray-stone Illinois Central was built to last, the Expo terminal was intended only as a temporary structure—as with almost all the world’s fair buildings.

  Griff returned to stand alongside Ransom, now with Tewes’s note in hand. “Tewes playing musical brains with you fellows? S
tuff that damn letter. It’s bloody three-forty A.M., Griff, don’t-cha see?”

  “See what?”

  “It’s a put-up job. Kohler’s put this Tewes on to spy on us. He had to’ve called him in; how else would Tewes know to be here?”

  “It’s that dirty, is it?”

  “Once Philo Keane’s finished, Griff, call in the meat wagon. Get the corpse to Cook County morgue, ’way from all these vultures.”

  “Where is Dr. Fenger? Did he send word? An assistant?”

  “Christian’s facing several operations today.”

  Griff nodded. “And his classes are so full.”

  “Busiest man in the city,” Alastair replied. “Sure, Kohler will forgive him. After all, he can do his job from his morgue as well as here, so long as we cover the territory.”

  “Autopsy, inquest—still, strange he didn’t make an appearance. Not like him.”

  “Let’s just say the good doctor is adept and not eager to enter a crossfire between the chief and me.”

  “You were warned about Dr. Tewes’s coming onto the case?”

  “You’re catching on, Griff.”

  “Nothing gets by you, does it, Ransom?”

  “This is my city.”

  “I’ve heard that. So, Dr. Fenger’s playing it safe? Wouldn’t have anything to do with that Herald cartoon?”

  “Damn fools…calling him a ‘Resurrection Man’!”

  “Was kinda funny, putting a shovel in his hand beside a picture of a gold-filled coffin.” Griffin’s grin annoyed Alastair.

  “The man received a raise! What’s wrong with that? Christian Fenger deserves all he can get outta this city.”

  “Did you cook this up with Dr. Fenger? Just to get the body away from…you know who that much sooner?”

  They both glanced at Tewes, standing with O’Malley. “How ’bout you, Griff? You think it’s right, what Kohler’s proposing?”

  “Right?”

  “A guy dies a brutal death, then along comes some bastard calls himself a wizard with magnetic hands. Just wants to turn a buck, pretending to read messages from the dead…from the contours of the skull. If it weren’t so sad, it’d be laughable.”

  “Now that’s an editorial cartoon.”

  “That Tewes guy just rubs me the wrong way. Makes my skin literally creep!”

  “Me too. Same as you, Rance.”

  Ransom hesitated at this. Griff had never called him Rance. Why the sudden chumminess?

  Griff pushed on while rocking on the balls of his feet. “All the same, it could be construed as an order, and if so, if you disobey—”

  “Something’s just not right about Tewes.”

  “All the same”—Griffin held up the note—“this note from Kohler is authentic, Rance.”

  “Leave it be, Griff.”

  “But Kohler’s just hoping you’ll foul up.”

  “It’s all carefully orchestrated.”

  “Like I said, a setup. You make a stink over this, it’s all he needs. So why not just let Dr. Tewes go through the motions?”

  “Don’t you get it, Griff? It’s politics.”

  “Not everything in the department is about politics.”

  Ransom’s laughter filled the train station. “Griff, this is the Chicago PD we’re talking about. Everything in Chicago is about politics, especially the police force.”

  “You sure you’re not being a little ahhh…overly ahhh suspicious?”

  “Doc Fenger asked the same, except he called it ‘unreasonably mistrustful.’ Look, Drimmer…my friend and colleague…if I give in to Tewes, even if there is a note from my superior suggesting I do so, what happens to my investigation, one I am solely responsible for?”

  “I don’t follow you, Inspector.”

  “The bloody investigation turns into a circus.”

  “I see, a circus.”

  “A three-ring one as only Chicago papers can conjure, and as for me? I get the ax for my part in it.”

  “And if you should refuse that phrenologist?”

  “Ahhh…a fine name for a charlatan, isn’t it? So scientific and such a magnetic personality he has, too.”

  “Kohler’s already declared you uncooperative. Seems he has it in for you. Like it’s—”

  “Personal, yes, but personal is political, Griff. Lotta water’s flowed ’neath the bridge for me and Kohler.”

  “Goes back to Haymarket, doesn’t it?”

  He raised one eye to Griff. No secrets in a police department. “Your interrogative technique has improved markedly since working with me, Inspector. But hell, Griff, what in this city doesn’t go back to Haymarket?”

  “Where you got your leg busted up, isn’t it? But they say a lotta good’s come of it, too. Better labor relations, best labor laws in the country bar none.”

  “You’ve been reading old papers?”

  “You and the chief see the Haymarket Square bombing quite differently.”

  “Aye, he wants it—”

  “Buried, I know, while you…some might say you’ve obsessed over it since eighty-seven.”

  “Call me a student of history. And ’twas eighty-six, son, but enough down memory lane. We’ve plenty on our hands in the here-and-now.”

  The flash of explosive gunpowder from Philo’s magic show now went off nearby, the acrid smell of the corpse’s burnt flesh meshing with the sulfur cloud. All of it conjured up unwanted memories of that day at Haymarket.

  “This boy’s murder’s connected to the other two, isn’t it, Rance?” whispered Griffin, not wishing anyone else to hear.

  Aside from the afflictions in his back and legs from that awful day in 1886, Alastair suffered from bad digestion, nosebleeds, headaches, and a low tolerance for administrative boobs who knew less than he did. And for the injustices abounding in Chicago from homelessness and joblessness to the inequities of political pork-barreling. He also had a low tolerance for the ignorance and tranquillity of youth. He secretly bemoaned his own lost youth, and he detested seeing youth wasted. And he worried about Griff’s doing just that. “Of course, the killings are related.”

  Ransom saw Dr. Tewes disappear into the stationmaster’s office, grateful to witness this obvious retreat until realizing that Tewes had gone in search of a telephone. Phones had been installed in many public places. No doubt the good doctor of phrenology meant to complain to Nathan Kohler about Ransom’s rank insubordination, and this counterfeit doctor’s inability to get past the inspector of record.

  “Brace yourself, Griff, for a visit from the chief.”

  “Count on it, I should think. The uniforms are taking odds, and Rance—did I mention that the note is more than a suggestion, but a direct order?”

  “No, you didn’t, and let’s keep it that way, shall we, Griff?”

  Later Ransom found the wide corner concourse windows overlooking a black sky lit by thousands of lights creating a brilliance across The White City—the term everyone used for the temporary wood-and-stucco wonderland of Grecian and Roman edifices and architectural wonders of the astoundingly huge Chicago world’s fair. This was the newly erected city within Ransom’s city—Burnham’s city, created almost single-handedly by the famous Chicago architect Daniel Hudson Burnham.

  From the Illinois Central windows, Ransom saw a great deal more of the dark alleyways and shanties and the cutthroat Levee district than the extravagant fair. The two cities stood at odds—Burnham’s idyllic dreamland lit like a many-tiered chandelier seemed to float over the lake. Chicago was a city of beauty and deeply cut cynical currents, its bedrock. Not even White City could hide the political expedience that formed her core darkness. Like a blinding chandelier, Ransom thought.

  White City looked the dream, yes. Truth be told, however, it proved so much gilded illusion: a mirror of man’s highest achievements, yes, that—so well presented—lulled one into Burnham’s faith. One might for a brief moment, while walking the gas-lit stone paths garnished with flowers on either side and the lovely Lake Mich
igan as promenade, begin to believe in his fellow man, to believe naught a one of them capable of evil or murdering one another. That a man could never again do a harsh act against his fellows. Not even in the wee hours of the night when so much crime took place in the shadows as God slept.

  “Not bloody likely in this or the next century, I warrant,” he muttered to himself. “Lights or no lights, Mr. Edison.”

  In the distance stood the spinning lights of Mr. Ferris’s giant wheel that dared take people soaring to a height of 176 feet—gaiety and light and a kind of euphoric madness all framed in a Romanesque window from which Ransom gawked and shook his head and chewed on a tooth-scarred pipe. If he tried hard, he could hear the unclear but separate German, Polish, Ukrainian, and Irish music welling up from the countless beer gardens. Something of a Babel indeed, he thought. In fact, the sound of lakefront revelers penetrated the vaulted waiting room ceiling here, bounced off and reverberated. By contrast, immediately behind Ransom, Keane’s little photographic explosions created a too familiar, melancholic drama of its own: click-whoosh, click-whoosh, click-whoosh.

  Ransom turned from the window to face Dr. Tewes, a smug look creasing the features below the little dapper’s curled mustache. He stood rocking on his heels, flapping Kohler’s letter. “I am a determined man, Inspector.”

  “Good for you, Dr. Tewes, but I have the dignity of the deceased to consider. Your questionable magic is unheard of. What do you think reporters’ll make of it—your absurd play?” Ransom pushed past the smaller man.

  CHAPTER 3

  His work required Ransom’s mind, but the old shrapnel wound to his leg, and ailments that’d plagued since the anarchist’s bomb—the cause of his most grueling physical and mental pain—threatened always to break him. Today, seeing this horror perpetrated on a third victim threatened to break his resolve to remain aloof and in charge. More than once, his thoughts wandered to his opium pipe and his bed. It represented what little solace he knew—opium—any way he could get it. But here he stood in Illinois Central, all eyes on him with the damnable Dr. Tewes and his equally damnable “order” from Kohler. The best he might do here would be his rolled cigarette laced with hemp.