City for Ransom Page 5

  At the top, he stood and stared down from the window the killer may’ve gazed from; may even have watched his young victim’s approach from. What kind of internal slings and arrows and horrors beset the madman? How much did the killer hate God, mankind, society, people, Ransom’s city, and in the end himself—his own horrid soul? And how bloody similar were they, this phantom and Ransom’s own shadow self? The one that crawled up out of him during his most private moments?

  From below, young Griffin Drimmer banged clumsily up the first few steps, his voice spiraling up to Alastair. “Rance? You all right?”

  “Just catching the view!” he shouted back. “Preparing for the Ferris wheel!” he joked.

  “Ahhh, not a bad idea. It’d take an act of God to get me that high off the ground!” Griff’s voice grew louder with each footstep. “If God meant for us to fly, he’d’ve given us the equipment.”

  “Give me time for a smoke, Griff. Wanted to see where they found the cigar butts.”

  “Yeah, sure, Rance…sure.”

  With Griff sufficiently persuaded to leave him in peace, Inspector Ransom stared from this six-story-high vantage point at the grand new buildings of the Columbian Exposition lining the coast of the largest lake in the Midwest. Most prominent was the Ferris wheel. Everyone asked these days, ‘Have you dared ride the wheel?’ and few people had for fear of its dizzying heights. Ransom had as yet to brave it. A marvel to behold, a symbol of what mankind had accomplished, along with all the other wonders of the fair, which had given law enforcement officials special headaches, as every day people were mugged by hoodlums and pickpocketed by street children. The complaints had kept the CPD understaffed for over a month now, and for Alastair the fair could not come to a close soon enough, but not before he rode the wheel—perhaps while under the influence of his opiate.

  But he had time, as the fair was slated to run through summer’s end. Everyone in Chicago—including off-duty police—had flocked to the exposition, the crowds enormous, just as they were this morning. Food vendors, merchants, and manufacturers showing their wares could not be more content. But rumors, reports, and leaks about a “Chicago Ripper” had begun to filter through, and people at the top like the governor, the mayor, his people, the architects of the fair feared the worst. No doubt, this new killing would alarm the entire city, and everyone would hear the fanciful epithet cops’d begun to whisper: The Phantom of the Fair—who wielded a garrote like a butcher with a de-boning knife.

  Alastair pulled on the tobacco blend he’d mixed with marijuana. He’d given some thought to marketing it as a healing smoke known to the ancients and rediscovered—make a buck or so on the side like that Tewes fellow. Food no longer tasted as good, but winters in Chicago seemed shorter. Fact of the matter, Alastair liked Chicago cold—more human hibernation and less crime in the cold.

  Griffin had quietly come up the stairs after all, and he called out from the landing below. “Thought…you gave up ta-ta”—he fought for breath, panting—“ta-bacco…for lent.”

  “Lent? No…rent. I gave it up so I could pay my rent.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Griffin made the final landing. He fell silent at the sunrise coming over the fair. “Weird paradox. They build this station so more people might come in for the fair, and now this.”

  “We’re going to catch this son of Hades, but until we do, the bosses want us to somehow keep it out of the papers. So it won’t affect their precious fair.”

  “But the reporters’re all over this.”

  “The dyke will hold a bit longer, Griffin. Mayor Carter Harrison has his thumb on every publisher in the city.”

  “All the English language papers’re going to go wild for sure.”

  “No, they won’t. Any city editor stupid enough to print a word of it, and he’ll be handed his hat—unless they all wise up and decide to simultaneously print it in every paper at once.”

  “What about Thomas Carmichael at the Herald? He was downstairs in the crowd, Rance.”

  “Carmichael, I’ll deal with Thom personally.” Ransom was beginning to like Griff’s calling him Rance.

  “Whataya going to do? How can you stop his mouth?”

  “The old-fashion way—”

  “Politics!” They said it in unison. Then they laughed, the sound of it spiraling down the stairwell. Ransom took a long pull on the pipe.

  Sniffing, Drimmer said, “Unusual odor that blend you’re smoking.”

  The smoke created a halo over his head. He pointed to the fair. “At the moment, the party is all that matters. It’s the largest, most expensive blowout in history, Griff, rivaling Rome, twice the size of the Paris World’s Fair, and it will be protected at all costs.”

  “Three killings, the work of the same lunatic…can’t be hushed up for long.”

  “You’re smart, but you’re new to Chicago politics. If the mayor and commissioner want it kept out of the papers, it’ll be kept out of the papers.”

  “But the papers’re so critical of Commissioner McDonoughue.”

  “All for show. Keep the population believing they have a voice.”

  “God, Rance, you’re cynical.”

  “I’ve earned my cynicism, every poisonous drop of it.” He tapped his cane against his injured leg. “Not like I can escape it.”

  “When is your injury not with you?”

  “Rarely…rarely…”

  “When you’re using opium or hemp, or both?”

  “Ahhh, so you do know my secrets.”

  “It’s no secret, my friend. Kohler has wind of it. Asked me to report on duty use.”

  “He did indeed?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “And will you? Report me, that is?” He indicated his pipe.

  Griffin hesitated a moment. “I’ve only seen you smoke tobacco.”

  “Good man.”

  “A lot of people want to see you go the way of this Willard Birmingham fellow. You must take care.”

  “I’m always careful, Griff, and not to worry unduly. You’ll only get warts worrying o’er the likes of me.”

  They watched the sunrise stream through the thousands of taut wires and metal slats making up Mr. Ferris’s giant wheel. Griff finally said, “You ever going to tell me exactly what happened at Haymarket Square that day in eighty-six?”

  “Maybe…one day.”

  “This year?”

  “Perhaps when all the evidence is in….”

  “But Kohler says there was a thorough investigation, inquests into the deaths, everything that could be done…”

  “Let’s just say it was an official investigation—and all that entails.”

  “Inquests are supposed to finish a thing.”

  “Yes, inquests were done, but I would not use the word thorough. Thorough might include the truth.”

  Griffin studied the older man’s features while Ransom stared off into the distance, his eyes again drawn to the big wheel, its splendid synchronicity, its scientific perfection.

  Of a sudden, Alastair had enough of the ornate clock tower window, feeling calmed. He and Griffin made their way back down the spiraling stairwell. “I want to thank you, Griff,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “For your kindness in not judging me too harshly. Gracious of you, actually.”

  “Oh, not at all. I understand your addiction to the opiates, Rance, I do. We’ve all some bloody crutch or other.”

  “What’re you talking about? Alastair Ransom? A crutch? To hell with you, Griffin Drimmer.” He grabbed the other man by the scruff of the neck and kiddingly shook him.

  Griff laughed and pulled away. “Part of the human condition, I’d say, like decaying teeth. God giveth teeth and he taketh ’em away.”

  “From perfect alabaster skin to boils and bunions.”

  “From paper cuts to falling debris.”

  “Unraveled ties and crashing platforms!”

  “And safety vaults.”

  “From six stories up.”


  Griffin kept it going. “Locusts and all manner of insect pestilence.”

  “Melancholia and stillbirths, amoebic dysentery and the slats.”

  “Gallstones and tumors!”

  “Failing hearing.”

  “Loss of sight, taste, smell, and touch.”

  “Tapeworms and tomato mites.”

  “Ships lost at sea.”

  “Coal mines collapsing.”

  “The sky doth fall.”

  “And G’damn satanic bastard bedbugs!” finished Alastair.

  Together they laughed at the competition. “All part of God’s grand design, and certainly not to be challenged,” finished Ransom. “I think Mr. Darwin may be right. It is a world belonging to parasites.”

  “Allowing evils large and minute, no doubt to so bedevil and confuse our souls as to send us leaping into His open arms?”

  “No doubt—but, Griff, I wasn’t referring to any addiction of mine when you began all this.”

  “Then what were you referring to?”

  “To my, ahhh…my rough handling of Tewes and that little matter of the head. I shouldn’t have lost my temper.”

  “Lord, Rance, you held your patience longer than anyone ahhh…expected. That is among the lads.”

  Ransom’s laughter filled the clock tower entryway and spilled out the door and into the death corridor as he pushed through. Reinvigorated, he returned to take charge of his investigation. The photographer, Philo Keane, had continued to work from atop his ladder-step tripod, getting himself and his camera into position. He next fitted his bulky camera into a glovelike vise that framed and held it steady. Below lay the uncovered body, the tarp held now by Philo’s young assistant, who stared in stark horror at the sight.

  “What in the name of St. Elmo’s Fire is taking Philo so long?”

  “Keane can’t finish his work without the head, as Dr. Tewes—”

  Ransom marched for the stationmaster’s office, shouting, “Then what in St. Elmo’s is taking Tewes so damn long?”

  Griffin muttered, “Oh, shit.”

  Keane, atop the ladder, shouted at Griffin. “Out…out of the frame, please, Inspector! I’ve got to get a few headless depictions.”

  Ghoul, Griffin thought an instant before slipping on a ruler alongside the body. He then righted things and scurried out of the viewfinder’s range just as, ahead of him, Ransom disappeared into the stationmaster’s office to the sound of the click-whoosh, click-whoosh of Philo’s master camera.

  Meanwhile, timing each shot, Philo’s assistant on the ground, having discarded the tarp, now shakily held on to the flashpan and ignited it with each click of the shutter. The two of them soon created enough additional acrid smoke that everyone began to cough.

  CHAPTER 6

  Stationmaster’s Office, Illinois Central, 6:09 A.M.

  The seared, blistered, fire-blackened head told Dr. James Phineas Tewes how horrid the suffering had been for the young man. The blackened eye sockets now painted in human creosote told Inspector Ransom how the soft tissues of the eye had been boiled and mottled by the flames. Still if one worked at it and stared long enough, the boy’s anguished features came forth from this fired negative. The dead young man’s rictus smile appeared as an ironic grin, but Ransom knew it for what it was—muscle contraction as with the pulled-tight withered arms—a detail learned attending autopsies conducted by Dr. Fenger.

  Still, the grotesque grin, seeming so inappropriate, proved difficult to look at, even for a seasoned veteran with the CPD. For Dr. Tewes—a relatively young fellow—Ransom imagined it a far worse sight than any cadaver he’d worked on in a sanitary medical school in France. For Tewes it must be an excruciating sight, regardless of Tewes’s having asked for it.

  Running gloved hands over the severed head, reading the skull from bumps and indentions, Tewes looked as if in trance. The con man’s white gloves came away with grimy soot. “He was thinking of home, family, his loved ones somewhere beyond Chicago…homesick, he was for…”

  Ransom shook his head at the mock reverence in the room, and he audibly groaned on seeing Tewes’s eyes roll back in his head, while his hands continued to hover over the scorched hairless cranium. Surprised to see Thom Carmichael of the Herald beside Chief Kohler, Ransom tapped Thom and said, “Phrenology—as bogus a science as ever concocted.”

  “Yet the chief of detectives of the second largest city in America”—whispered Carmichael in response—“a city on the verge of modernism, wishing to join the ranks of Paris, London, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and New York, approves of this black art? dressed in the laurels of science?”

  “How the bloody hell did you get in here, Carmichael?”

  “Kohler…he insisted. Special invite.”

  Carmichael, a cagey, crusty fifty-year-old, hard-drinking, hard-working reporter of Irish and English descent allowed nothing past him. “I loved your handing Tewes the head of John-the-Doe out there—only the platter was missing.”

  “Tewes had it coming, so to speak.”

  “You do make my life interesting, Rance.”

  “Trust me, it wasn’t for your benefit or the Herald’s, and before you print a word of what you’ve seen, I wanna sit down with you, understood?”

  “I am a little short on my rent this month.”

  The phrenologist gasped twice in quick succession as if an electric shock had gone through him. The hefty and misshapen, bearded stationmaster, a man named Manfred Parthipans, stood wide-eyed, lashes atwitter in an oversized face, his mouth agape. Ransom imagined him soon at the nearest pub relating all he’d witnessed today. “At least the boy was thinking pleasant thoughts at the end,” Manfred opined.

  “Hence the smile,” said Kohler, faking a watery eye.

  Ransom could not let it pass. “The constricted smile results from torched muscle—as a good autopsiest will tell you, Nathan.”

  “You can as well wait outside, Alastair,” replied Kohler.

  Tewes quickly added, “The boy let go of this earthly coil believing himself reunited with loved ones on the other side.”

  “I’m glad you think so, Dr. Tewes,” piped in the cynical and equally skeptical Carmichael. “Reunited now in the celestial realms.”

  “That is correct.”

  “And precisely what part of his skull told you this, Doctor?” asked Ransom.

  “I see through touch, Mr. Carmichael, Inspector Ransom.” Tewes addressed the skeptics without looking away from the black orbs that’d once been two distinct human eyes. “I saw what was in his heart moments before death.”

  Carmichael vigorously pursued. “And just what sort of arrangement do you have with Chief Kohler’s CPD?”

  “I hired Dr. Tewes for his special talents, Mr. Carmichael!” announced Kohler. “As Ransom has brought me no results!”

  Tewes had gone back to reading the severed head.

  Ransom frowned and thought Tewes a wily con artist indeed—smart. Smart enough to know not to lock verbal horns with Carmichael. Ransom too thought of the corruption in the department, and the sleaze at all levels of city government—politics these days, synonymous with corruption—inviting in every sort of hoax and con game and pork barrel, and hair-brained scheme imaginable, and some not so imaginable like this. He thought of the payoffs he’d himself made over the years to people like Carmichael to keep them in line, and he thought of the bribes he’d himself pocketed over the years—the way of this place called Chicago by the indigenous Indian tribes like the Sauk, the Pottawatomie, and the Blackhawk, all of whom referred to the immense wild onion fields surrounding Fort Dearborn as Chicago—“land of mighty stench.” The stench of wild onion had been replaced by the stench of slaughterhouses and politics, so that Chicago remained apropos.

  Certainly, the story of any city’s development was, after all, a story of crime and corruption, but somehow Chicago had been born in a greater cesspool of greed and on a grander scale of graft than any other before or since. Perhaps it was due to having been rebor
n in fire in seventy-two in the thick of the Guilded Age.

  Still, in all his years in the mud hole, Ransom hadn’t a dime to show for it. He had always meant to rectify this with some large-scale land scheme or venture of his own, but nothing of this nature had ever come about.

  Ransom’s thoughts drifted back now to the victim, and how many other ways the foolishly naive and innocent were routinely plucked in Chicago.

  Stationmaster Parthipans said, “Train schedules might indicate when the young man got off an inbound train, or if he were boarding an outgoing train, if we had a name.”

  “His name is…was Cliffton…Cliffton Purvis of Davenport, Iowa…” said Tewes.

  Griffin had stepped into the office at this moment, blinking dumbly, astonished at this assertion. In fact, the room erupted with a collective groan of wonder.

  Ransom immediately challenged with, “And just how would you know that?” His mind raced with possible explanations: Tewes must have previous knowledge—as the features were recognizable through the soot and burned portions of flesh, along with portions of clothing, or perhaps some item on the body? Certainly, the dead boy’s head hadn’t imparted a name!

  Tewes lifted his smut-covered white gloves and spread-eagled his fingers. “Phrenology told me so.”

  “Yeah, and I believe in the tooth fairy.”

  Meanwhile, Parthipans had rushed to his records and had begun flipping through ticket stubs. “Sorry, Dr. Tewes. There’s no Purvis purchasing a ticket either inbound or outbound according to records.”

  “He must’ve purchased a roundtrip far in advance. Try earlier dates.”

  “I’ll give you this much, Dr. Tewes,” began Ransom. “In life, the victim might’ve looked like a farm boy from Davenport…”

  Carmichael erupted in laughter. This was followed by an epidemic of laughter all round the room, Parthipans and Griffin joining in.

  Tewes managed to hold his head high, but his face flushed red. Parthipans then came around from behind his cage. No longer laughing, the burly round man quietly extended a file card to Kohler. “Hold on, sirs, l-l-look at this.”