City for Ransom Page 7

  “Not so loud. Keep this between us, see…”

  “—and ought himself to be detained and interrogated.” Ransom brought it down a few octaves. “How else to explain his knowledge of Purvis down to his studies? That’s not even in the billfold.”

  “Perhaps the man is psychic after all.”

  “Phrenologically gifted I suppose,” Ransom mocked.

  “Look, Tewes makes a good point. Predicted we’d find papers on the boy. Said our killer cares not a wit that authorities identify his chosen victims.”

  “What has that to do with—”

  Kohler held a finger in Ransom’s face. “Other than torching his earlier victims, he took nothing away save a few items of jewelry. Tewes asked a sound question. What does this portend? What does it say about this phantom?”

  “I suppose your leaving means the séance is over? And I can have my crime scene back?”

  “Yes, the doctor is finished.”

  “Thank God.”

  “Once again this madman threatens the peace of the fair and our city,” said Kohler, his eyes scanning the enormous station. “Sad place to die, don’t you think?” Kohler’s question surprised Alastair.

  “We’ve both seen far worse.”

  “That flop house on Monroe?”

  “Try that warehouse on Kingsbury a hundred years ago.”

  Kohler shot him a look of utter disdain. “Let it go, Ransom. The dead bury the dead.” Nathan then stormed off.

  Ransom guessed that Kohler, for a moment, was touched by a feeling of disconnection he himself felt here in the train station. “Place does make a big man feel small,” he muttered to Griffin, who now stood alongside him, watching Kohler disappear, a trail of newsmen on his tail.

  “Small, you mean? Insignificant?” Griffin’s eye had fixed on the vaulted ceiling above the main concourse.

  “The place is designed to do just that, to architecturally turn working stiffs like you and me into ants. Nathan’s reacted predictably—exactly as the city fathers and the railroad tycoons want us to.”

  Griff smiled and fired back, “But not you, right, Alastair? How could anything make you feel small?”

  Ransom scratched at his mustache, turned to his partner and wondered at this question. “We don’t need towering columns, vaulted ceilings, and massive Ferris wheels to make us feel small. Police work alone’ll do that for us, Griff. Seeing what we see on the job—enough this day alone to make a man feel helpless and disposable.” They’d been here now for three hours, from three to six A.M.—through morning’s darkness, dawn, and sunrise.

  “Disposable? That raises the question: How’re we going to explain to Dr. Fenger how the head came off the body, Rance?”

  “He’s the medical genius. Let him tell us. And as for that matter, I have a few choice questions for Dr. Tewes. Where is the man?”

  “Oh, he left in rather a huff down the opposite stairwell, avoiding you, I think, with a stop, that is, in the men’s room where the boy was garroted. Seemed quite shaken afterward. Hey, Rance, do you ever think this new contraption, the phone, will ever replace the telegraph?”

  But Ransom was looking down on Randolph Street, watching the strange Dr. Tewes where he awaited a carriage this busy morning. “I suspect that man of more collusion in all this than I can prove, but I will.”

  “What sort of collusion, Rance?”

  He shared the wallet with Griffin, watching his eyes for a response. With the shock still on Griff, Ransom said, “I suspect skullduggery. Tewes recognized Purvis before I handed the kid’s head to him.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Philo Keane had packed up what he could carry, leaving his young assistant, Waldo Denton, to arrange transportation for the bulk of the photographic equipment from the crime scene. Philo had one single desire for now—hide away in his darkroom. To bid the annoying world and his assistant good-bye. To be alone with his creations and his music.

  He dearly loved sleeping to the sound of a symphony playing on his newly purchased phonograph—his only expensive indulgence, this awe-inspiring invention that placed the decision of a musical score into his hands. He loved live theater, opera, almost as much as a good beer garden. And now he could afford the next best thing! He’d placed on a favorite, Wagner’s “Rides of the Valkyries.” The sound of the orchestra wafted throughout the cramped apartment, and the beauty of it mesmerized and relaxed Keane. Accompaniment to his art and passion that he now wished to immerse himself in. The sooner he was done with the crime-scene cuts for Ransom, the sooner he could sit down to contemplate the photographic art he’d created from his most recent model, Miss Mandor. God, she was gorgeous, and as she was a mute, so perfectly manageable.

  For now, he must concern himself with commerce. Aside from what Ransom needed, which he did purely for the money, he did shoots for area merchants. Another passion, his camera, was the specially designed 1893 Hetherington magazine camera. Sealed in leather with no projecting points, it had a continuous rotary shutter requiring no attention and could be set on slow, medium, or rapid speed. The lens was a beautiful Darlot #1 hemispherical with a lovely revolving diaphragm working between the lenses. Aside from a focusing dial, the camera was outfitted with a tally that kept a record of the number of exposures made. Finally, it had a rack-and-pinion focusing movement, and a back-and-forth double swing back, as well as a side-to-side swivel. Everything in one camera! And it had set him back sixty dollars—a fortune. Purchased through Montgomery Ward & Company, along with his oversized tripod that’d cost another $9.98, his outlay for equipment had put him in the hole. However, he’d talked Ward & Company into barter for partial payment through a commission to create a photo array accompanying a line of veterinary instruments.

  Philo was in the process of fulfilling this agreement on the side, but the angst involved, the frustration, the sheer hatred of the project had grown like a cancer inside. A ruddy little account executive named Trelaine kept turning down his concepts for selling, with some attempt at flourish, such items as stricture cutters for cow teats, French poultry killing knives, Whisson’s improved pig forceps, de-horning saws, Farmer Miles’s castrating ecraseur, and, worst of all, the disgusting Gape Worm Extractor for worm disease in fowl. This terrible looking instrument, essentially a brass probe with barbed fishing hooks, Trelaine billed as the only sure way to pluck out the offending worm and dead matter from the windpipe to save a chick from a gasping death.

  Men like Trelaine infuriated Philo. So did all the prudes at Ward & Co., as they’d turned away his best, most imaginative solution to selling such god-awful products—a lovely bonneted model playing the part of farm maiden, holding a precious chick in one hand, the chicken-torturing device in another, while smiling at the camera. Their alternative? A boring full-page add made up of words. Words that spilled over the edge of the page; words without let-up, no visual counterpoint, like looking at a page in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

  Still he had to pay the piper, to defer to his patron, to swallow his artistic integrity. To abolish his perfectly rendered ad for the milksop they proposed—a simple picture of each probe, each extractor, each bailing iron and plier.

  But first to CPD business, make some money by developing 8-by-10 cuts of dead people. Another side business, an underground market catering to the bizarre and gruesome, would pay handsomely for a shot of Ransom shoving that severed head into Tewes’s hands—not to mention headless, crispy-fried torso shots.

  He slipped a small silver-coated flask from his coat pocket and swallowed its contents. With Denton still not back, he’d had to mix the chemicals and float the cuts himself. By now, he hoped the death shots from the train station—submerged in a brackish solution that told him he needed to clean his tray—ought to be taking form.

  In his darkroom, he found it so. The results made his rent, and a sumptuous meal and bottle besides. “Where in hell is Denton?” he wondered aloud. His new apprentice was a glutton for punishment. In fact, Waldo brought it on himself.
“But like God, I never put more on the boy than he can bear.” Helplessly, Philo always took the tone of a British lord engaging his lowliest subject with Denton—lord to peasant; he did so only because Denton invited it, seemed actually to expect it. “It’s as if comforting to the boy,” he’d once told Alastair when Ransom had pointed it out.

  Philo stared into the watery solution as the prints below the surface began a hazy, formless chemical dance. The term solution seemed apropos. Unfortunate that his friend Ransom had no easy solution to this bizarre series of garroting murders.

  Waldo Denton noisily pushed open the door to Philo’s residence, his clatter at odds with the stirring sound of Wagner’s valkyries down in the deep interior of the lower level apartment. Over the musical rendering of the twelve handmaidens of Odin riding their horses over the field of battle to escort the souls of the slain heroes to Valhalla came Denton’s complaints as he placed the monster tripod in its corner. Too large to stand straight up, the tripod—used only in photographing murder and suspected murder victims—reached out to trip even the cat, Kronos, a tom that came and went of his own accord.

  Philo slipped from the darkroom, his hands waving, mimicking a maestro. Waldo stared at his mentor’s antics. Philo’s orchestrating left hand continued, while his right swooped rhythmically down, dipping into his pocket, and returning with a bank note dangling before Waldo.

  “The equivalent of U.S. currency, my boy!” he assured his apprentice, handing him the note instead of the promised dollar bill. Denton stared at the bank note from the Prussian Bank of Chicago as if it were a hundred dollar bill, his eyes wide with wonder. “I’ve never seen a bank note with this kind of pale pink color, and my…the Roman Caesar’s got such a strange scepter, and usually his nose is a whole lot bigger, isn’t it, Mr. Keane? I mean don’t get me wrong. It’s quite lovely in its detail.”

  “It’s a new bank just opened off Lake Park Avenue…you know, Adams Street. So you know it’s legitimate.”

  Philo himself made little in the way of payment from the CPD, but he’d wisely catered to not one but all seven district station houses, and the work was beginning to pick up.

  Philo’s darkroom amounted to a section of the apartment he’d covered in black material purchased from a mortuary. In what little space remained of his apartment, one corner was filled by a bed shoved against the wall, while another wall held up his bookshelf and desk, cluttered with all manner of photographic paraphernalia and books. Philo had studied the new and amazing science of photography since its inception and even before: the various stages of man’s desire to reproduce reality in his own hands—through his own eyes—from cave art to present…the Matthew Brady deluxe camera and tripod now available in any Sears Roebuck store and catalog across the country. Photography had taken off like a brushfire in a tornado, and sadly he knew the only ones getting rich from it were the manufacturer and the merchant. At times, he’d cursed himself for having turned down that job to sell cameras at Fields Department Store, turning his back on a normal life, a regular paycheck, and perhaps some friends he’d have encountered among those who loved the new science. But sales was sales and he was no salesman, and he had always shunned what others called normal.

  Perhaps for the same reason the science of photography had captivated Philo as a child. The history of reproducing and depicting the world around mankind, all of it fascinated him. Even as a child, he watched in awe as a Civil War photographer named Clemmens displayed battlefield shots and spoke of his adventures in the war. This man inspired him, giving Philo a wartime print that he’d signed.

  Philo now ushered Denton out of his front door, chastising him for being late getting back. “Come round when I send a messenger for you, Waldo, and not before.”

  “Right, sir, but are you sure, sir?”

  “Out Waldo, now!”

  The sound of Waldos closing the door came as a gift just as Wagner ended. “Sometimes silence and aloneness is all that will do,” he said and raised his empty gin flask. “But this will not do.”

  Inspector Alastair Ransom had left the Illinois Central train station and waved down a city hansom cab, one of a fleet of horse-drawn carriages that collectively beat a rhythm against the brick and cobblestone streets. Once seated inside, Ransom called out to the cabbie through a small portal that slid open and closed as needed, shouting, “One forty-one Clark Street.”

  Clark Street was the center of a great deal of activity, shops and taverns lined its way along with bawdy houses and gambling dens. In order to remain open and operating, Ransom knew that every pub, inn, tavern, bar, brothel and flophouse paid a tribute to the beat cops patrolling the area. Rent in the area had remained low.

  The quiet interior of the cab and its plush cushions had an instant effect on Ransom, whose recurring headaches, stiff right leg, and frayed nerves did battle with him. He hated having to deal with people he thought belligerent—like Tewes and Kohler. This placed him in a foul mood that only Merielle might render neutral.

  Not even Merielle’s lithe body and experienced hands could end his suffering altogether. In her arms, beneath her warmth and her strong massaging hands, with her lips on him, with her giving herself entirely over to his needs without judgment, without harangue, allowing him to indulge his most secret desires, Ransom at least had the illusion that someone loved him unconditionally and without reservation. Merielle did not recoil at his burned flesh where the bomb had mauled him; she didn’t recoil at the size of him, as did many a woman. She did not recoil at his often lurid, often horrific stories of things he’d seen on the street as a cop, tales more terrifying than anything penned by her favorite author from Harper’s Illustrated, Edgar Allan Poe. Once, during an all-night session after they’d made love, he’d shared tales he thought would send her running from him. He’d confided the truth behind his reputation. Instead of leaving him, she leapt into his arms. He learned her real name that night. Before this he’d known her only as Polly Pete. Ever after, he’d called her Mere. Still, she’d withheld the details of what had led her into prostitution.

  Alastair believed himself in love with Merielle, and he nowadays paid her a salary to be on call exclusively, setting her up in an apartment. She no longer needed to sell herself to men, he’d told her, and she’d tearfully accepted the arrangement. With his generosity and what she made modeling for Philo Keane, she needn’t make a whore of herself ever again.

  She had come to love him, and to love him unreservedly, despite the disparity in their ages. He was old enough to be her father. In fact, of late, she’d begun to treat him like a father, and this made him uncomfortable, but not so uncomfortable that he did not go to her for comfort.

  She was a balm to his mind—body and soul. His working day was spent amid a dismal, depressing landscape; amid the poor and homeless, the wretched and out of work, the abandoned and orphaned—all ignored and given not the least human tolerance by city fathers whose god was money. The city he loved, the city he had always called his, had disappointed Ransom in cascading fashion.

  An English reporter who’d recently pleaded persuasively to gain entry into the Harrison and Des Plaines streets’ lockups was a close friend of Alastair Ransom’s. The man wanted to publish a sensational exposé of conditions in Chicago, along its South Levee district and in its corrupt political scene, and in its treatment of the poor and indigent; to get at this, he wanted to see firsthand how people in the jails were treated, and he wanted Ransom’s input. While it had yet to be published, author William T. Stead had confided in Ransom, over ale one night, the title: If Christ Came to Chicago. Ransom had laughed, finding it both fitting and hilarious at once.

  “You can’t be serious,” he’d cautioned Stead.

  “I am deadly serious, my friend.”

  “But you will scandalize the gentry, the wigs on Michigan Avenue, the merchants on State Street.”

  “As it should be!” Stead raised his glass and loudly exclaimed, “If Christ himself came in on a box car,
he’d be pummeled and dragged off to a cell the likes of which I’ve not seen the world over, gentlemen. I tell you, I have seen more Christian charity in China, nay even Russia. Ransom here has shown me that Chicago’s got the deepest holes other than Calcutta.”

  He’d gone on that night, adding that Chicago had no equal for squalor on the planet, thanks to the cruelty of the guards and the city fathers who’d created the dungeons here. “Your city, Ransom, allows it,” he’d said.

  Ransom felt the stinging truth in Stead’s words. Any visit to the Harrison Street jail, which Stead characterized as worse than the prisons of St. Petersburg, proved this truth. Gaslight and shoulder-to-shoulder prisoners and makeshift areas for the homeless, so many sleeping in one place. All conspired to create a thick warmth and an atmosphere that strangled the man who dared inhale. The floor a carpet of humanity, the fetid atmosphere choking, the bars sweating with condensation, the lockup proved the picture of Hades—straight out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting of Paradise and Hell. While actual prisoners slept behind the barred gates, homeless tramps slept in the corridors between barred cage and wall, there on the stone floor. “Pigged together like herrings in a barrel,” Stead had written. “A pavement of human bodies.” As the reporter finished each chapter of his proposed book, he’d asked Ransom to read it for authenticity and detail. All this on the promise he’d help Ransom research Haymarket for his next exposé. The man missed nothing.

  But unlike Stead, Ransom had to work under these conditions and to live with them. Stead could write his book and feel good about himself, feel he’d served man and reportage gods, and could be on his way…onto the next social problem or issue in another city in another part of the world. Stead had left his manuscript with Laird and Lee, a small Chicago publishing concern likely to go bankrupt, while he’d returned to England. Ransom held out little hope his friend would ever work on Haymarket, and he imagined that Stead’s book on political corruption would likely never see light of day. But even were it published, Alastair predicted the sum total would be a mere ripple effect; certainly not enough to embarrass Chicago’s elitists. Nothing substantive came of Reform with a capital R, of new laws, new resolutions, of cleaning house, and all the clichés of politicians caught hands down. That only happened when someone died, as in the Haymarket reforms.