City for Ransom

CHAPTER 14

Later the same night

Jane gasped, startled to find Alastair Ransom on Dr. Tewes’s doorstep, wearily smoking. In a cornice window, she saw Gabby staring from behind curtains, that damnable pistol—an ancient old breach-loading Sharp’s longer than Gabby’s forearm—poised. Jane had removed the firing cap, rendering the thing useless whether loaded or not.

Apparently, Gabby found Alastair not only an exotic fellow, but at least as frightening as if a bear had wandered up onto the porch.

She wondered momentarily at the strangeness of life in its permutation through the aging process; how such a handsome, bright-eyed, intelligent, soft-spoken, pleasant, sweethearted, concerned, giving creature as Alastair’d been as a child could be so different now. How had he become such a clod, a sot, a womanizer, and a fool?

“What are you doing here, Inspector?” she asked as Tewes. “Surely, you’ve not come to beat me senseless or to shoot me?” She said it loudly enough for neighbors to hear, but primarily, she wanted Gabrielle to calm down.

“Here to offer my apologies.”

“Really? This comes as a surprise,” she lied.

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“I know you mean well.”

“And what has brought you round to this startling conclusion?”

“I’m trying to apologize for what occurred at the train station.”

“You’re here about Polly . . . Merielle.”

He glared. “Yes, was ’round earlier on that errand. Look, you had no right browbeating my Merielle and—”

“Browbeating?”

“—and running me down, using dubious methods to de-moralize her and—”

“Dubious? Demoralize?”

“—to set her against the only man who’s been good for her, and who has her best interest at heart. If you’d bothered learning the nature of our relationship, you’d know—despite my shortcomings—I bring a certain stabilizing force into her life, a certain, ahhh . . .” “Normalcy?”

Tension palpitated between them.

“Yes, damn you, normalcy.”

“I doubt, sir, you’ve any acquaintance with normality.”

“And you do, I suppose, you the magician of Belmont Street, espousing magnetism and this . . . this bogus science of phrenology, no better than reading the stars or tea leaves.”

“If the tea leaves fit.”

“Look, I did not come here to argue—”

“But that is all you’ve done!”

“I want you to advise Merielle of my strengths, the list of reasons why she should remain mine.”

“You men—” she stopped herself. “Fellows like you, I mean—police and others in authority . . . you really do believe you can own someone, don’t you? Body and soul.”

Their voices had risen and there came a tapping on the windowpane. Both men stared at Gabrielle. Finally, Ransom asked, “She any good with that hog leg?”

“She’s quite good with it,” Jane again lied.

“I suppose you taught her at an early age to point guns?”

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“In this environment, is that so wrong? Seems the norm, in fact. Hair Trigger Block is a short stroll.”

“Then you value your daughter well.”

“That I do . . . yes.”

“Perhaps then we should continue elsewhere, say Muldoon’s end of the block?”

Jane feared going off with this man anywhere, but as Tewes, she must show no flinching—just as she’d not failed the test of manliness at the railway station. “Give me a moment to settle Gabby then,” she calmly replied.

“Agreed.”

“Then we’ll reconnoiter how to civilly work together.”

“Work together?”

“On how best to help Polly.”

“Ahhh . . . yes.”

“And on how best to pursue a killer?”

“Hold on. My being here’s in no way a conciliatory gesture in that direction.”

“Fair enough. Only a moment then.” Tewes disappeared into the house. Alastair could hear the daughter giving Tewes hell about going off into the night with Inspector Ransom.

The young thing was wise. Tewes must’ve told her what had transpired at the train station. Ransom relit his pipe beneath the gaslight and paced the sidewalk, his cop’s eye reading the night street. A ragged little Italian family searched through discarded items in an alleyway. Two desperate-looking men stepped from a darkened doorway, perhaps engaged in a shady deal. Along the packed Clark Street, a hansom cab rolled by, pulled by a weary horse favoring its right front hoof. “Likely your mare’s thrown a shoe!” he called after the driver, but the warning went unheeded.

Merielle let him in again. He seemed harmless, and he’d been so complimentary when she really needed complimenting, and he’d apologized for striking her, after all. So she let him back inside, or perhaps she did so, just so she’d CITY FOR RANSOM

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have something to tell Dr. Tewes. She’d tell Tewes, “Yes, I opened the door because he struck me.” She knew that Ransom wouldn’t return tonight. How devilish to conduct an affair behind Alastair’s back. How devilish indeed to have two men in one night handle her as roughly as Polly preferred.

The gentleman calling himself Mr. Stumpf had asked if she’d seen any of the fair. He spoke of the Ferris wheel, how glorious the lake and the land and the town looked from the sky. “Like a blanket of stars fallen to earth,” he’d said, adding, “what with the lights below instead of above!” How marvelous it’d sounded, and so she’d gone out with the man in cape and top hat to feel for once like a lady, to allow Merielle an opportunity to play herself. Merielle did not disappoint either Polly or the gentleman. She held on his arm like a proper lady, just like her mum had done for her dah.

So they had gone out and taken a carriage ride, something Alastair had never done for her. The gentleman spoke of the great art treasures from around the world housed in the various pavilions of the fair. He spoke of sculpture and artifacts from Asia and beyond. He spoke of it as another world she must see before she died.

“Silly,” she twittered, “I won’t be doing that for some time.”

“Of course not,” he’d replied.

Twice more he apologized about the moment of anger in which he’d blackened her eye. He’d brought a cosmetic just for her to cover it.

To further make up, he’d paid her admission to the fair.

He’d showed her a magnificent night of extraordinary sights, sounds, odors, tastes, and touch. She’d had a popcorn-peanuts-molasses confection called Cracker Jack, and she’d seen how they made saltwater taffy, and she’d seen farm animals and amazing new inventions, all amid a Grecian world of fake white marble.

Polly’d felt stirrings that she’d never felt with any man.

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she, and sure his manhood was small—the reason he’d hit her when she’d laughed—but here was a fellow who didn’t just talk of improving her lot, of keeping her from boredom, but a man who actually followed through on promises, unlike the too busy Ransom.

This little man was Alistair’s opposite in so many ways, except for his roaming hands. Even on the Ferris wheel, so high above the fair, she remained the focus of his attention.

He’d placed his fist up her skirt and dug his fingers into her, making her laugh. He claimed never to’ve touched a woman there before. Claimed himself a virgin.

She’d assured him, “I’ll be gentle.”

She said so again now that they’d returned from the fair, as she teasingly dropped her dress about her feet.

While she tied hair from her eyes, he seductively sidled up, one thing on his mind, Polly’d surmised and giggled.

She leaned back into him, as Stumpf slid something thin and fragile about her throat, a fine wire-width bauble, she thought, when she gasped at her mirrored image on seeing the blood necklace.

Stumpf took his time cutting into her soft flesh. An eighth of an inch at a time, whispering, “In truth, dear Polly, this bow tie’s a gift from Alastair.”

She sputtered, her words choked by blood.

“His vile blessings on it, Polly girl.”

She coughed up the sumptuous meal he’d bought her at the exquisite Palmer House downtown. It came up with blood as she succumbed to death. Blood and bile her last earthly memories. She neither felt nor smelled the kerosene doused over her, nor the fire that lit up her body.

Her dress still about her ankles had soaked up the kerosene too, and it quickly caught flame, and the fire took on a wild life of its own, jumping to the curtains as if alive.

A killing acrid smoke filled Ransom’s love nest.

In a panic, the garroter swept from the place, rushing just ahead of the fingers of fire chasing him out the door of this CITY FOR RANSOM

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tinderbox. A final glance back as he slammed the door was like looking into the fiery maw of Hades. In minutes, the entire second story was feeding flames; a handful of minutes more, and the growing fire began consuming the ground floor from above.

From a safe distance outside, where Clark met Halsted, the killer stood watching the flames devour Ransom’s home away from home. A giddy laugh wanted escape, but now he realized his vulnerability as an oddly curious odor of burnt hair rose to his nostrils. He lifted the cuffs of his overcoat to find hair on his arms curled into miniature bits of brittle bush—entirely singed.

They strolled the gas-lit street toward Muldoon’s.

“I’ll admit, I didn’t know that Polly was a Merielle until late in our sessions,” began Tewes, who’d pulled forth his own pipe and had accepted a light from Ransom. “Nor . . .

nor that it was you she was—had an arrangement with. Odd coincidence that.”

“I’m not a big one for coincidence, Tewes.”

“Does it so kill you to call me Doctor?”

Ransom only grunted.

Tewes struggled to keep pace with his gait. “Things in Polly’s case . . . they just came to a head recently, and only recently did you come up, sir.”

“What do you mean things came to a head?”

“What doctors who deal with emotional and psychological matters call an epiphany, Inspector.”

“An epiphany?”

“The unexamined life is not worth living, Inspector.”

“Is that an epiphany?”

“Epiphany comes of self-awareness, a realization of one’s own needs or weaknesses, or source of power, or . . . well, you get the idea—Greeks knew of it.”

“I see.”

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“Good.”

“I’m sure that you’re . . . beneath it all, Tewes, a relatively . . . ahhh . . . ahhh, normal fellow yourself.”

“As my title is so hard to get over your tongue, Inspector, it’s James. Or if you prefer Phineas, Inspector ahhh . . .

Alastair . . . may I call you Alastair?”

“I suppose it can do no harm.”

“God, man, you can be infuriating. May I or mayn’t I? Or shall we carry on with Inspector and your mix of snipe-and-grumble-and-mutter for doctor?”

“You’re likely the most difficult man to accept an apology that I’ve ever met, James. ”

“Ahhh . . . so your answer comes out, Alastair. ”

They continued in silence. The heartthrob of the city buzzed, all the drays, the cabs, the clopping of horse shoes against earth here, cobblestone there, the more distant sounds of the train yards, the stockyards, ships in the great harbor that was the lakeshore, down to the sound of the gas lamps that lit their way.

“There’s talk of getting electric lampposts, or so I hear,”

said Tewes, looking at a lamp that sputtered on and off. “To replace these old things.”

“We’re rushing into a new century with all our fine inventions, aren’t we?” he calmly replied.

“So much progress . . . and so much loss.”

“Ahhh . . . something we agree on.”

“I suspect you a bit old-fashioned, Alastair.”

“Aye . . . I’ll admit to a touch of it.”

They arrived at Muldoon’s door, and Ransom held it wide. His newfound manners made her suspicious. “Your talk with Dr. Fenger has improved our relations, I’d say.”

“Some, yes.”

“Some . . .” She wondered what some meant. Wondered if Fenger had somehow contacted him, perhaps by phone, and if so, how much Christian had confided.

“Gave me a general dressing-down, he did. He has a far higher opinion of you than I’d imagined possible. Says your CITY FOR RANSOM

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techniques may be somewhat experimental, ahead of times, even extraordinary—”

“Said that did he?”

“OK, he said you were eccentric.”

“I see.”

They found a seat in the dimly lit, wild saloon, replete with gunmen at the bar, spittoons lining the dirty floor littered with the leavings of the day—mostly bones thrown to prowling dogs, Muldoon’s more obvious friends. Muldoon stood an enormous man behind the bar, slack-jawed giant that he was, and according to a whispered remark into Tewes’s ear, “Muldoon’ll truck no undo criminal activity on the premises unless he gets a cut, so don’t go plying your trade here, James.” Jane decided her disguise as Tewes remained intact, as Ransom’s body language, speech, and swagger, all but the added politeness, remained the same toward Tewes.

They ordered two pints of ale and a pitcher besides, Tewes putting up a hand at the suggestion they could drink so much.

“I need steady hands for my practice when the door opens tomorrow.”

“Oh, come, by then you’ll be steady again.”

Tewes nodded, accepting Ransom’s generosity. “All right, but I don’t intend to stagger home.”

“Ahhh . . . then you are a better man than I.” Ransom laughed at his own remark.

Tewes raised his ale to Ransom’s toast, accepting her plight for the moment. While Dr. Tewes liked ale, Jane did not.

“To a new beginning between us, Doctor Tewes.”

“Why, thank you, Alastair. Coming from you, I’m most pleased.”

“As you should be. Drink up!”

After a moment of awkward silence, Ransom said with open palms, “Oh, I shouldn’t’ve been so hard on you to begin with, really . . . I mean, when you look around . . .

there’re so many ahhh . . . unusual new methods and tech

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niques, just as Christian says, and your magnetic healing is really mild by . . . say compared to—”

“Mysticism, séances, hypnotism, spiritualism—raising the dead at a cotillion party?”

“Balancing sieves on a fork, or divining by Quija board?”

She raised Tewes’s glass in a gesture that said touché.

“I’m trying to say that you’re almost within the realm of . . .” began Ransom. “That is to say at least close to . . . I mean at least scientific sounding . . . and something natural about magnetic fields. So, I’m just saying—” “That you accept me as somewhat less than eccentric?

Perhaps normal?” She laughed at this.

“What’s so—”

“Funny? You might care to know I’ve never been called normal by anyone’s standard.”

“Are you saying you’ve never been normal?”

“Normal . . . what is the norm, Inspector? If normal means staid, stodgy, keeping in one’s place . . . I am afraid not.”

“Seldom does an officer of the law see normal, as I saw it today at your home.”

“At my home?”

“That sister of yours you use as maid, Jane, and your daughter, one who works your books. Both I’d characterize as normal as normal gets.”

“Normal is as normal does? I’m glad you approve, and that you found my . . . my Jane and Gabby so . . . presentable.”

He lifted his glass as if to the memory. “A pleasant, comely woman she is, your sister.”

“Not when in her ill-temper, I assure you.”

“She seems a woman of . . . of—”

“Yes, spit it out, man.”

“Of obvious good character. A woman apart.”

“Struck you as a woman of substance, did she?”

“Aye.”

“After all, she is my sister.” Some detective, she thought.

“And you, Doctor . . . so . . . so . . .”

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“Different, say it, man! Different as night from day, indeed . . . I am quite different. ”

Lifting the pitcher of room temperature rich red ale, Ransom poured Tewes’s glass full again. This done, he asked,

“How so? I mean . . . how do you mean, different?”

“Damn different, man! Friendly, fascinating, strange, odd, weird, gifted, bright, charming, delightful, intellectual, in-sightful, all of it.”

“Curt, abrupt, intense, too direct,” added Alastair.

She answered between sips, the taste of ale growing on her, “Don’t leave out funny, hedonistic, artistic, expressive!”

“Expressive, yes, agreed!”

She pushed on. “Creative, self-absorbed, spirited, sincere, straightforward, lively, both patient and impatient, loyal, sad, depressed in turns . . . at times lonely, waaay too sensitive, sarcastic, can’t keep my mouth shut when angry or irritated, or around stupidity—especially stupidity that costs me in time, energy, or money, and—” “Like now?” he finally interrupted the flood of words.

She ignored this, continuing with “—and inhibited at times, fearful at times, as I know too damn much for my own good, but I don’t trust anyone, which makes me distant.”

“And I suspect you are a challenge for any woman.”

“Do you see that too? It’s me . . . in my own mind, I’m larger than life, despite my height.”

“Really? I could introduce you ’round to some women.”

“So that I can be like you—loud, obnoxious, a skirt-chaser?”

“You really have me wrong, sir.”

“I’ve misread you? You are actually curious, thoughtful, meditative—at least Christian says so.”

“Fenger says that?”

“Especially about medicine, the human body and the mind.”

He snickered. “Whatever helps me solve a crime. Strange that Christian’s never said as much to me!”

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She looked at him as if for the first time. “What started this conversation off?” She was beginning to feel the effects of the amaretto and ale mix in her system. “Ahhh, yes, well, I know no one who’d use ‘normal’ in describing me, no.

Would you?” Tewes stood, a bit tipsy, even as Alastair poured the phrenologist another glass of ale. Tewes declined another sip. “It is home for me. Have to look in on my little girl. Had liquor with Dr. Fenger, you see atop this.” “Your Gabrielle is a beautiful young woman, Dr. Tewes, and we should have a toast to her at the very least.” Ransom held up another full ale to Tewes.

Determined, Jane gulped down the tribute to, as Ransom put it, “the fairest lass in all the city,” and she did so in manly fashion.

Unable to hold his liquor, Tewes had played into Alastair’s plan too well, as he could not find the door out of Muldoon’s.

Muldoon and Ransom exchanged a look of knowing, and so Ransom must help Tewes home. The entire way—having to hold Tewes up. What at first he found disturbing soon became curiosity. How is this fellow so slight? He imagined lifting Tewes over his shoulder. It’d certainly make getting him home a simpler proposition as Ransom himself had a buzz on. But the sight of her father slung over Ransom’s shoulder might set off Gabby with the gun. And soft. The man’s shoulders and arms soft and hardly a tincture of sweat.

A strange fellow indeed, he concluded as he rang the bell.

Gabrielle rushed out, gun in hand. “What’ve you done to him?”

“Afraid, young miss, he’s sotted.”

“Drunk?”

“On ale. Do apologize. Hadn’t the slightest inkling he was gone until . . . well, he was gone.”

“Bring the doctor inside, please.”

He threw Tewes over his shoulder, the doctor’s pants leg revealing as small an ankle as he’d ever seen on a man. It made him think of the Bertillon method, the fact no two men CITY FOR RANSOM

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had the same measurements, and he wondered if he were to

“take the measure” of this man, and send it to contacts at the Suréte in France, if he might not get a match to a wanted fugitive or fraud under another name.

Ransom always carried a tailor’s measuring strip in his pocket. Normally, his subject was awake and frightened or beaten into complying with having his measurements taken.

But he’d also performed it on a few with whom he’d struggled and knocked senseless, and he found measuring the unconscious a great deal faster and easier. Thirty seconds alone with Tewes now was all he required.

“Get him some water, and I’ll get him into bed,” Ransom now barked orders at Gabby.

“I won’t leave you alone with him under any circumstances.”

“I mean your father no harm, child! Now go! Get water or better yet, black coffee!”

Gabrielle waved the gun before his eyes. “All right, but you just lay him out on the bed, and don’t touch him in any other way!”

“I’ve no desire to touch him in any way, child. Now, please as I say!”

She acquiesced, backing out the door, gun weighing down her hand like a pipe.

As soon as she disappeared, Ransom whipped out his measuring tape and gave Tewes the Bertillon once over, memorizing each figure in his head as he measured forehead, distance between eyes, nose to chin, eyes to chin. Cir-cumference of neck; shoulder to shoulder. Chest. Again the sponginess of Tewes’s body struck him. He then measured the waistline. The man had none! He noticed how the man’s belt looped one and a half times around the waist. He hadn’t time to contemplate this more, as he now measured length of leg from crotch to knee, then knee to ankle, finally tearing off his shoes to measuring foot size.

But he failed to finish as Gabrielle was returning; he pock

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eted the unraveled tailor’s tape. What’d alerted him to her quick return, he realized only when seeing her enter, was her gun clinking against the glass on the crowded tray she carried. She had a pot of coffee on the tray alongside the water.

“I’d made coffee earlier,” she explained. “Father never stays out so late, ever.”

“And you were worried.”

“And rightly so, it appears.”

“He tells me that you knew the victim at the train station.”

Fenger had told him this.

“I had only known him for a few days at Northwestern when we met quite by accident at the fair, you see. I was playing hooky from my studies. Gabby’s eyes had filled with tears. “We were to meet at the fair again next eve . . .” “He was quite taken with you, then?”

“He was sweet . . . smitten, I’m afraid.” She teared up and he offered her a handkerchief that she accepted.

“I had no idea your father couldn’t, you know, hold his liquor. I do apologize.”

“I’ve never seen him this way, ever.”

“You take good care of your father. Admirable.”

“I do my best.”

“He is not always making wise decisions, I would hazard a guess.”

“Certainly not tonight! Going off with you! No . . . I mean, yes. He is not always showing the best judgment, but he is my father, and I . . . I love him dearly.”

“That much is obvious.” Ransom poured himself a cup of coffee and sipped at it before asking, “What about your aunt, his sister?”

“His sister?”

“Your aunt . . . who I met earlier?”

“Ahhh . . . Mrs. Ayers . . . Jane Francis.”

“You do not call her Auntie?”

“I’ve not known her long.”

“Ahhh . . . I see.”

“She’s only recently joined us.”

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“From France?”

“Ahhh . . . I believe by way of New York.”

All facts he could check later, he told himself. The young one seemed absolutely befuddled. She’d not gone near the gun in all this time. Perhaps she was getting used to Alastair.

He could only hope. “It’s a fine gun you carry about.”

“It is mother’s,” she blurted out. “I mean . . . was my mother’s. The . . . the only thing she bequeathed me.”

“Interesting heirloom then. But I was given to understand she died in labor, giving birth to you, so how was it she bequeathed you a gun? Or is that mere street talk, rumor I’m repeating?”

“She set it out in a letter in the event anything should happen to her during her pregnancy.”

“Ahhh . . . foresight she had, perhaps a premonition?”

“I am told she was sickly . . . always.”

“Difficult pregnancy?”

“Hard labor came as no surprise.”

“I see. Your father here, being a doctor . . . he must’ve known the risks . . .”

“Aye . . . I mean, I should think so, as he’s a medical man.”

“But they had not consummated their wedding? He then had to legally adopt you, his own child is how I heard it.”

“No . . . common street talk is that, sir!”

Was Gabby embarrassed by this? Her clenched hands spoke of discomfort, perhaps a lie. He lifted the gun, and her allowing this felt like a new, fresh start between them. They smiled across at one another, the gun held up between them while Tewes mildly snored.

Ransom examined the gun for the missing cap that Tewes had mentioned. The firing pin was in place, and the cap in the caplock. Either Tewes failed to tell the truth about the gun, in an attempt to ease Ransom’s fears at having it pointed at the back of his head, or Gabby knew as much about guns as her father’d intimated. Likely the latter.

“Whataya think of my gun?”

“It belongs in a museum.”

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She looked indignant. “That gun is in fine working order.

I keep it clean.”

“It’s a cannon, not a gun. Blow a hole the size of a medicine ball in a man.”

She threw her hands up to cover her laughter. “Now you exaggerate.”

“Not by much.”

“My . . . my family wants me to pursue a medical degree, but I’m so fascinated with what men like you do, Inspector Ransom.”

“Really?”

“I’ve read Alan Pinkerton’s accounts of heroic deeds during the late war, about his army of spies— We never sleep! —what a motto and that evil eye they use to signify themselves, it’s all so . . . so adventurous and . . . and . . .” “Romantic it is not, I can assure you.”

“Oh, but it is . . . what you and other Chicago detectives must see daily! I bet no two of your days are alike! Can I tell you that medical school is a bore down to my . . . well, to my core!”

“But isn’t medicine in your makeup?”

“I hate it. Hate that it’s in my blood, too!”

“It should come easily to you, following in your father’s—”

“The last thing in the world I want to become is . . . is my father.”

He stared grimly across at her as if taking this blow for Tewes. “Does your father know your feelings?”

“He’s rather wrapped up . . . busy with patients. Hasn’t seen me . . . not the real me in . . . in . . . well, in forever.”

“But all that tuition going to Northwestern . . .”

“If I could figure out a way to use it . . . my studies . . . in tracking down and catching killers . . . what you do . . . then it might be worthwhile, but just dealing with sick and depressed and grim people all day as Father does. I know I’d rather be a copper like you, working with the dead!”

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“Hmmm . . . perhaps you should talk to Dr. Christian Fenger then.”

“Dr. Fenger? The famous surgeon?”

“And pathologist. Does work for the police . . . helps us identify victims of foul play, and determines just who is and who is not a homicide victim, and how precisely their lives ended.”

“I . . . I’ve not given this area of medicine a thought, not a single thought.”

“It’s not entirely new. Been with us since King William ordered a medical man to investigate suspicious deaths.”

“The first coroner? I wonder who he was.”

“Physicians working for the crown, only now you work for a municipality like Cook County.”

“Coroner . . . I rather like the sound of it.”

“Call on Dr. Fenger sometime, and tell him of your interest.”

“It’d be behind Father’s back.”

A way to get back at Tewes, Ransom thought. “Ahhh . . .

once you’ve established yourself with Dr. Fenger, how can your father balk? No one has a greater reputation as a surgeon.” Complicate Tewes’s blackmailing effort.

“I’ll visit him at his office tomorrow!”

“You’ll never catch him in an office. Does everything afoot. Go by County Hospital at exactly ten a.m. He’ll be there. Tell him two things.”

“Yes?”

“That Inspector Ransom sent you, and that your father is Dr. Tewes.”

“But with my father’s reputation as a mentalist, Dr.

Fenger’ll toss me out.”

“Not so. Your father enjoys a good relationship with Dr.

Fenger,” he lied, “and I am sure that if Christian finds you as determined a pupil as you seem, why then he’ll side with you.”

“Imagine it . . . Dr. Christian Fenger in my corner.”

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“Stranger things’ve happened.”

She looked at the prone figure of Tewes, who was out and had no need of water or coffee.

“Will you have more coffee and stay longer, to tell me harrowing tales of cases you’ve worked on, Inspector?”

“It grows late, and I fear we’ll wake your aunt.”

“Oh, poooh on her! She sleeps like a stone a way off in the other part of the house. You must tell me of your cases!”

“Really, it is late.”

“But the coffee, and I made cookies earlier.”

“Hmmm . . . you can be persuasive, young lady.”

“Then you’ll stay awhile?”

“One cup of coffee, two cookies—”

“And three lurid tales?”

“Let’s make it my most lurid case.”