City for Ransom Page 9

  They’d arrived in Chicago at the outbreak of Haymarket, when the papers were filled with those arrested and on trial for killing seven policemen. Jane paid little heed to the papers then, set on her new stratagem and determined on success. A lot of fliers had been printed and circulated since 1886, but her patience had paid off.

  She’d had a patient today under her touch who’d reminded her how fragile was her ruse. A strange young fellow she’d seen at the train station, assisting the photographer. Denton was his name and he’d commented how lithe and sweet the doctor’s fingers had felt over his scalp. He’d almost fallen asleep in the chair as Jane probed the calming centers just behind each ear where a bit of pressure and rhythmic action could put a grown man to sleep. She’d curtailed the diagnosis and provided him with some particulars of his condition—after gleaning some anecdotal information about what precisely had been troubling him, where his aches and pains lie, and how long he’d been suffering. Denton happily allowed Tewes to place “his” hand on the area of his abdomen where the real complaint might be diagnosed.

  Before it was over, Dr. Tewes told Denton, “Sir, your mental malaise has a quite physical and banal cause—”

  “Really?”

  “A hernia from lifting that huge tripod.”

  “What do you propose?”

  “Find other work.”

  “But I wish to learn photography from the best.”

  “I can give you an elixir for the pulled muscle, but you really must see a surgeon like Dr. Fenger.”

  “A surgeon! But I fear going under the knife.”

  “It is a simple procedure.” She could perform the surgery herself, but to do so would end her ruse as a man. Any new surgeon coming to Chicago was instantly spotlighted by the medical establishment, his credentials gruelingly questioned. And not without good reason. Many a cruel hoax was perpetrated in the name of surgery these days.

  She now sat at her elaborate makeup mirror. The bright lights were the same as those any actress required for makeup. In a sense, she’d become the consummate actress. She began wiping away the makeup. Gabby would soon be home, and office hours were over. She gave a moment’s feeling of pride in Gabby. The promise of children, to see one’s love come radiant, full-bloom, and for her to become Jane’s closest, dearest friend…all a blessing. My greatest accomplishment, she thought. Gabby, along with her professional success, pleased her greatly.

  This new direction Jane’d taken—getting work in police circles as some sort of mentalist—this her father would condemn completely, wholly, royally as far too risky and nervy, a fool’s show of bravado. How ultimate was this, she silently asked herself of the subject…to step into the world of police detection in this guise and walk out with not a one of them recognizing a ruse? How wicked to pull it off before the disturbed eyes of Inspector Ransom, and he once a childhood sweetheart? They had gone to the same schools together in those far ago early years of their lives in the Prairie City.

  As a child, she’d loved him unreservedly. But what’d he become? Jane knew well that reputation, however blown out of proportion, was based on a core reality. Perhaps he didn’t beat people he arrested with quite the gusto or vigor depicted in the lurid street tales, but he did engender fear in all who thought Ransom interested in talking to them. He seemed also desperately lonely—hence Polly-Merielle, who’d confided far more in Dr. Tewes than Jane’d wished. Polly, addicted to a need deeply imbedded, had in fact begun a heavy petting session with Dr. Tewes, who blocked her overtures and had insisted on a purely professional relationship. Taken aback, Polly actually showed signs of rehabilitation after all sexual advances had been refused.

  Jane now stepped to her bed and pulled forth a black valise, one that’d been her father’s. She spread out the tools of her buried trade—most of her father’s surgical instruments. She ritualistically handled each surgical instrument in turn. She did so swearing to her image in the mirror, “One day…one day I’ll again hang out a shingle as Dr. Jane Francis—Surgeon.” Some day when Chicago—and the rest of the world—might accept a female surgeon without reservation. In the meantime, poor Gabby’d had to memorize a pack of lies associated with being the daughter of Dr. Tewes as Dr. Tewes’s “wife” had died giving birth to Gabrielle. It proved increasingly maddening for the child.

  Perhaps we should’ve stayed in Paris was a phrase that’d become a mantra. So often did she say this to Gabby as a child that Gabby had made up a lyrical song around the phrase. Perhaps…oh, perhaps…we Pariii…we Pariii. Perhaps.

  For now, she remained the mysterious Doctor Tewes. “What would Father say about all this waste of talent?” she asked the empty room.

  She heard his resonant bass voice now saying, “Take heart, Jane.”

  Her father’d had to deal with his own generation and problems endemic to it…or rather epidemic to it. Ailments like malaria, typhoid fever, and digestive malaise when Chicago had been Fort Dearborn. The military base, finally unnecessary, evacuated in 1836, four years after the Black Hawk War but not the threat of disease. And so Dr. William Francis stayed on and started a private practice. How crude medicine and surgery were then. The diseases that laid men low in those days—all across the continent—such as pneumonia and “graveyard” malarial fevers, sometimes called miasmatic fevers wiped out 80 percent of one Illinois county in the 1820s. Attacks from these fever diseases continued almost unabated for decades after. Her father had once told her that in each case where a doctor could not determine the cause of the disease, he invoked the word malaise.

  In Chicago, cholera and small pox inspired the greatest dread. Even rumor of such pestilence roused officials to pay heed to her father and other medical men to make sanitary reforms, appropriate money for the neglected Board of Health, and to enact laws designed to reduce the incidence of fever diseases. No one else in the country believed Chicago a safe place for his wallet, but worse yet, no one on the continent believed it a place for one’s good health. No sewage system worthy of the name existed before 1851. Garbage and refuse continued to be tossed willy-nilly into the Chicago River or allowed to accumulate in filthy alleyways. Drinking water came either from shallow wells or from the lakeshore. Her father had himself succumbed to pneumonia during a ravaging epidemic.

  Jane had grown up self-reliant, as her mother had died of a brain tumor when Jane was only six, and her father, William Francis, left Chicago for Europe in a fit of self-doubt, wishing to learn far more. Death and pestilence in Chicago had frustrated all his efforts. When he returned, Jane, living with her aunt, was four years older. By now she’d been estranged from her father, which suited his needs, as he was a workaholic and as she was a painful reminder of Charlotte, her mother.

  William had returned with plans for a serviceable system of sewers to rid Chicago of pestilence. He’d studied with Dr. Xavier Bichat, the man who’d demonstrated that tissues and not organs were the seat of disease. A decisive step in the localized pathology movement. The concept of disease invading the solid parts of the body implied a revolution in medical theory and practice. But even now, 1893, many a medical professor clung to the mad notion that blood was the carrier as well as the starting point of disease—thus a lot of old fools calling themselves doctors still insisted on leeches and bleeding a patient to “remove bad blood.”

  When Jane had gone through medical school, she’d been taught that to combat disease, she must “treat the blood” either withdrawing it through venesection, or by purifying the “life’s blood” with medicine.

  Thanks to the new pathology, what men like Bichat and her father insisted upon challenged this classical, centuries-upon-centuries held notion. The French medical community also began the meaningful application of statistical techniques to clinical data. The value of postmortem records, vital statistical studies, and using clinical tests in the diagnosis of illness had been embraced by forward-thinking men and women. Her father’s return to Chicago to reacquaint himself with Jane was also to acquaint the e
stablished medical community with Bichat’s methods. With the acceptance of the localized concept of disease, and with modern surgery just coming into being in the second half of the century, surgeons began doing far more than setting fractures, treating flesh wounds, abscesses, bladder stones, and hernias, as the idea of surgery as a last resort faded.

  As far as Jane Francis-Tewes was concerned, this new belief in Bichat’s localized pathology of disease had, even more than the discovery of anesthesia, marked the turning point of modern surgery. It initiated the kind of surgery the now famous Dr. Christian Fenger performed daily at Cook County Hospital, where he also took charge of the dissection of the murdered and the victims of questionable deaths for the CPD as chief coroner. Working through Kohler, Jane as Tewes, had made it her business to get something on Dr. Fenger, to blackmail him, so as to get a close look at the reports on the first two victims and a firsthand look at the next victim—who happened to be the Purvis boy.

  She felt badly at having gotten Fenger’s cooperation in the manner she had. He’d come to see Dr. Tewes on Nathan Kohler’s urging, but even more out of desperation. He’d come with a brain full of racing circuitry and stress and recurrent headache and depression, and Dr. Tewes being who he is, could not be expected to disregard an opportunity to leverage a small favor from the infamous Dr. Fenger. One word of Fenger’s level of intense mental stress, and Cook County Hospital would put him out to pasture, as might the CPD.

  It was not a thing she’d relished doing, as she respected and admired her one-time instructor in surgery, a brilliant man and a wonderful mentor, and her father’s friend. He’d been one of the few instructors she’d had this side of the Atlantic who had trained her as he might a man. Few men were as ahead of their time as Dr. Christian Fenger, and he so reminded her of her father, and Jane believed that his fine reputation brought more thousands to the operating table than did the use of ether and chloroform. She hated using him, but there seemed no other choice.

  A noise came from without. Gabby had come home, and she was talking to someone. Jane Francis cursed under her breath. How often must she tell Gabby she simply must tell her friends that her doctor father can’t abide anyone in his clinic or his house as he had a morbid fear of the microbial world?

  She peeked out to the next room, her forceps still in hand, to see Inspector Ransom standing in her parlor. “Jesus!” she gasped. The man stood nervously rocking on his heels, looking about, as Gabrielle explained, “But Father is not here.”

  Jane looked for some out. The bedroom window, but that was a drop into the bushes and neighbors already kept a prying eye on Tewes. Then she saw an apron hanging on the back of the door. She snatched it down and tied it on, and in an instant, stepped into the parlor and asked, “Can I be of any service? I’m the doctor’s caretaker, maid, fix-it person, and sister, Jane. Can I help you, sir?”

  “I’m looking for your…ahhh brother.” The bull shoved his weight from side to side. “I have a bone to pick with him.”

  “I see. I’m sorry, sir, but he is not at home.”

  “Then I’ll wait.”

  “Aren’t you Inspector Ransom, sir?”

  “Oh, oh, yes…Ransom. Sorry…thought I’d said so.” He held up his inspector’s badge—a gold-plated shield.

  “And I am Miss Ayers.”

  “Really? Jane Erye like in the book?”

  “No…no…A-Y-E-R-S…quite different. Jane Francis ahhh…Ayres.”

  “So is there a convenient place for me to wait?”

  “Outside perhaps…”

  “Outside?”

  Merielle-Polly is right about him, she thought. He is a bit thick-headed. “Yes, please, outside. We are two women in the house, and doctor would not be pleased if he returned to find us alone with you, sir. Only polite to wait outside.”

  “Not in the study?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Not in the doctor’s office?”

  “No, sir, now please…outside. There’s an ample porch, a swing.”

  Gabrielle erupted in a laugh she stifled.

  Ransom frowned, placed on his bowler hat, gave a fleeting glance at the spinster sister, turned, and stepped through the door. From the door, Miss Jane Francis ‘Ayres’ shouted behind him, “I do hope it is not too important. If so, you might find doctor at Cook County. And if not there, Hanrahan’s on Archer near—”

  “I know the place.” Ransom tipped his hat at the woman. Odd, he thought, how her eyes and those of young Gabby—who’d introduced herself as Dr. Tewes’s daughter—had looked so much alike, aunt and niece, but then rumor had it the child was adopted for usury by Tewes. Perhaps Jane was the actual mother?

  The afternoon shadows were lengthening, and in the distance, a thick roiling cascade of clouds threatened to invade from the lake to Chicago’s downtown, the army of storm clouds forming like a regiment over skyscrapers in the distance, no doubt worrisome for the fairgoers and merchants. Nature had no business cutting into profits, Ransom imagined on the lips of every Chicago merchant.

  He stepped off the porch and into a thin, surprisingly chilly silver downpour, having decided to go in search of Dr. Tewes at Hanrahan’s. Not likely he was at Cook County. Most likely he told people that he was on staff at Cook County along with most all the luminaries of the medical profession in Chicago, and the thought made him laugh. Imagine Tewes alongside a man like Christian Fenger.

  “Hanrahan’s…far more likely.” The South Levee was the den of lowlife in the city. As a cop, he knew every section of town and its character, and the Levee maintained the deadliest reputation, even above Hair Trigger block. Called by many the Old Tenderloin district, the South Levee had become firmly entrenched twenty-odd years before any thought of a Columbian Exposition. Now there existed two South Levee districts—a new extension of the old reaching like icy fingers toward the world’s fair, close enough to the Loop office buildings as to be within view from the Union League Club windows. A horror and an abomination to the gentry.

  Ransom climbed into a waiting cab he found a few blocks from Tewes’s place and shouted up through the window at the driver to take him to Hanrahan’s in the South Levee. The cabbie hesitated and stared down at his fare as if seeing him for the first time.

  “Official business,” said Ransom, displaying his inspector’s badge.

  The man’s face sank like stone turning to dough. He knew to get his fare he’d have an hour’s headache just filling out the paperwork, and the wait for the reimbursement would take months. Police business, it was termed.

  Ransom heard the driver’s guarded curses as the cab lurched forward without grace. As the carriage made its journey through busy, crowded streets for the south Loop area, Ransom thought of this turn of events with Merielle. She’d made him promise to not harm Dr. Tewes or his hands.

  “The man’s hands’re unbelievable!” she’d exclaimed.

  “Drink your absinthe,” he’d shouted back.

  “But Alastair, he possesses some sort of Rasputin-like ability, totally relaxing you while reading you like a book.”

  But his foul mood against Tewes and against the bastard who’d beaten Mere, fueled by each rhythmic clop-clop-clop of the carriage horse, was further fueled by having to go near the area not far from where he’d been born and raised, now an area of indecent trades. God, he felt like thrashing Polly from out of his Merielle, or in some way combining the two, and somehow making both sides of her love him unreservedly.

  Perhaps she was incapable of such a love. She did indeed seem “shut up” in sin. She had let him down. Disappointed him. Falling back into old habits, and going to this snake-oil salesman when he should suffice. And then the nerve of the little creep. Giving bad advice to Merielle, warning her off him! All this had come about before Ransom had shoved the dead boy’s head into Tewes’s hands! How galling.

  Just when he’d begun to feel that all was well. That he had control of his life. That he had the woman he loved. That she loved him. Now this.
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  Plus Merielle had taken to lying to him, something he expected and saw every day on the job. But not from her. It infuriated him. She swore that it’d not been Elias Jervis who’d blackened her eye. Swore on her mother’s memory that Jervis had left for Milwaukee as certain friends of Ransom’s—toughs on the force, she’d called them—had made life in Chicago too “hot” for Jervis, the worst sort of pimp, to continue in “Ransomland,” as she’d put it. Merielle added, “l don’t know the man’s name, only that he wore a black cape, a top hat, boots all shined. A real gent,” she’d finished.

  “Some bloody gent! Strikes you ’cross the face?” he replied.

  Where Hanrahan’s sat, square between these two levee districts, was the southern tip of the Loop, bounded on the east by Dearborn, Clark on the west, and Harrison on the north. This had more recently come to be called the wicked Custom House Place Levee. The “Gem” of the prairie continued its reputation as America’s wickedest city, its reputation that of a bacchanal the likes of which must make Rome blush.

  High-minded temperance leaders and aldermen who didn’t care about getting reelected blathered on about one day burning out the cancer of the entire South Levee—both new and old—in the name of the Lord, as done with other areas in the early days. Some nights a parade of angry citizens marched through the South Levee with torches held at the ready, but unlike The Sands and Hair Trigger Block, an actual burn-out hadn’t come to pass. Still an uneasy tension between the so-called socially conscious and the vice merchants always hung over Chicago like a pall. Thirty-seven to forty houses of prostitution squatted within the confines of the new levee alone. Forty-six saloons and growing. Eleven or twelve pawnbroker houses. A shooting gallery or two, and an obscene bookstore. Many a dipping house operated here, in which a closet-sized room was opened on a waiting prostitute, the John mugged and robbed, girl and pimp splitting the proceeds.