City for Ransom

CHAPTER 17

The following day at the cold site of the fire . . .

Some anonymous benefactor had paid his bail, but for now Ransom’s concern rested on an enormous egg protruding from the back of his head where that damn fool Muldoon had struck him, sending him into a blinding black light. He gave a fleeting thought to having to face Judge Grimes for misbehaving on a Sunday. Jacob Grimes brooked no chicanery but his own.

As for now, Ransom made a beeline for Cook County morgue and Dr. Christian Fenger. When Fenger heard he was outside his autopsy room, he sent assistants to keep him out.

They did so and forcefully, but Ransom hadn’t the heart to put up much of a fight. Aside from his head killing him, and the back pain from lying so long on a stone cell floor, he felt like one of those bulls in the arena, stabbed full with swords, knives, and lances, bleeding from multiple wounds. Whoever this madman running about the city was, he’d brought police to a standstill, and Alastair Ransom to his knees.

When Fenger came out, his lab coat discolored not with the hues of a blood rainbow but rather soot of Polly’s remains, he asked, “What can I do for you, Alastair? Why’re you here?”

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“Her ring.”

“What ring?”

“One I gave her. I want it.”

“Ring? There was no ring . . . no jewelry whatsoever.”

“Thanks to your men, no doubt.”

“I hate to think—”

“Give those ghouls a clear message: If I don’t have her ring, they’re going to lose something of far more—”

“Look here, Alastair, this is not the wild prairie town of your youth! And you’re not a law unto yourself. If I find Shanks or Gwinn’ve engaged in theft of a body then, by God, they’ll be arrested!”

“I want to hear punished, fired.”

“Any inquiry will follow a civilized course.”

“Civilized course?” Ransom laughed.

“You don’t know that they did this. The killer may’ve taken the ring. Canvass the pawn shops.”

“Why . . . why her, Christian? Just a sweet kid beneath it all . . . for what purpose?”

“Perhaps Tewes can profess to understand the mind of a killer,” said Christian, “but I’ll not attempt it.”

“You talk to Shanks and Gwinn.”

“I personally trained those two, and they know better, Ransom.”

“Human nature being what it is . . . sometimes no amount of training’s going to overcome a theft of opportunity.”

“You’re upset, favoring your head. Let’s have a look.”

Ransom submitted to his impromptu examination.

“You’ve a considerable lump back here.”

“Astute of you, Doctor.”

“God, you can be a surly bastard.”

“I’ve gotta run. Give you the day to locate that ring. I know your men have it.”

“Go home. Rest, and Alastair, I’m truly sorry about your Merielle, and given the circumstances, I’m going to overlook it today, but don’t ever come back to my hospital making threats, or again stretch our friendship to its bounds.”

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“What, no balm for my head?”

“Ground aspirin in water three times a day for the pain.

Nothing else I can do. If you want any further help with it, go to Tewes.”

“Tewes really?”

“Submit to Tewes.”

“Submit?”

“Under his hands, you just might get some relief for that lump, and more importantly, you may get some long-term help with your temper and your suspicious nature and those recurrent headaches.”

“I am gone. Goodbye.”

Fenger called after his retreating figure, “Home, rest, Alastair!” Under his breath, he cursed Shanks and Gwinn, the two who’d transported Merielle’s remains. “Wouldn’t put it past the two of ’em to pawn items from a cadaver.

Scavengers . . . first come, first served.” Fenger went in search of Shanks and Gwinn.

Ransom had no intention of going home, despite the pain in his head, shoulders, and back. He’d caught a cab for the scene of the crime. The ride across the city on a crisp, clear morning, a hint of promise in the air, a hint of the goodness of life just out of reach, and Alastair cursed the illusion—this intangible called happiness. How many years now had he cajoled himself with jokes about it, comforted himself with rationalizations about it. Happiness for him remained a kind of cloud toward which he aspired, but once inside, the thing dissipated. Some old Gypsy woman at the fair would likely tell him he caused his own bad luck, his own suffering, and maybe she’d be right.

Ransom now paid the driver through the slot and painfully climbed from the carriage. He stood before the stark remains of the old tavern and apartment house, made starker by the sunlight beating down on smoldering blackened beams still crackling with heat.

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He went into it, like walking into a grim Rembrandt, filled with odd light and an enormous sadness. Wandering about the ashes, kicking about the debris field for the ring that Fenger said wasn’t on the body, he lamented the loss. It’d been a special gift, an heirloom, once his mother’s. He knew Shanks and Gwinn’s police records. A couple in more ways than he cared to give thought to; their in-tandem, small-time larceny had landed them in jail on frequent occasions. Dr.

Fenger had come to the jail, bailed them out, insisted on their good behavior, and gave the miscreants employment.

They took to the work of coroner’s men like rats to cheese, and on the side, they remained larcenous. Only now, their victims couldn’t report them. And the two deemed anything left on the body, once they got hold of it, fair game, a tip from the dead. Until now, Ransom had cared little about such petty theft. But this was personal.

His relationship to the killer had also become personal in the deepest way—hunter and hunted now joined by victim on an entirely new level.

From a distance, on the street corner, Jane watched Ransom, looking a ghost of himself, going amid the rubble. She’d guessed that he’d return to where Polly’d died once Dr.

Tewes bailed him out. He hadn’t disappointed her.

She sensed the truth of one conviction: the murders had come home to Ransom. It’d suddenly, dramatically become personal for Alastair, having seen Polly’s blackened, headless torso . . . having seen her hideous death. Torn from his life. She wondered if in some strange, twisted way if he’d somehow brought it on himself.

Body and head—according to Stratemeyer and con-firmed by Dr. Fenger—had come apart in the fall due to the severity of a wound sustained to the neck—by a garroting device.

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Angry, hurt, in pain, hardly able to blink out the sun, Alastair watched as Dr. Tewes came toward him. Tewes abruptly stopped when the big man lashed out. “Get the G’damn hell outta here, Tewes. I’m in no mood.” But Tewes kept coming on, entering the ashes, the little bow-tied, mustached fellow unmindful of smudging his newly pressed white suit.

“Whataya want here, Tewes? To gloat over your success with Polly? To see the results of your therapy? How good of you to follow up!” He grabbed his throbbing head, shouting only increasing the painful stabbing.

“I want to offer my sincere—”

“Keep ’em!”

“But I am so truly sorry, Ransom . . . really, I am. I couldn’t’ve foreseen this. No one could. Not even Alastair Ransom.”

“I should’ve been with her. Should’ve hunted down that bastard she called Stumpf. And you, Mr. Psychic. Why couldn’t you’ve seen this coming?”

Neither Tewes nor Jane Francis had an answer.

“Your crystal ball out for repairs?”

“Get it back tomorrow.”

“Day late . . . dollar short . . .” Alastair muttered and leaned on a table that collapsed, sending him into the ash, throwing up a cloud. The image of the broken man completed.

As he fought to his feet, he said, “ ’Spose you come to read Mere’s head like you did Purvis’s? G’luck. It’s with your friend, Fenger.”

“I came to help you, Inspector.” Tewes helped Ransom find his cane, taking charge, telling him, “We’ll get a search party down here to scour through the rubble for Polly’s ring.

I promise.”

“Merielle’s ring . . . her name was Merielle.”

“Yes, of course . . . Merielle’s ring.”

“Fenger told you?”

“He did.” Tewes led the dejected inspector down the street and to a table in the Bull Terrier Pub on Clark near Lincoln 178

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where early patrons drank dark ale and talked of nothing but the fire and the rumor that Polly’d been beheaded and set aflame.

Ransom sat now, head bowed, sipping at hot coffee in one hand, a tall Pabst beer in another. Tewes was soon on his second glass of heady Krueger dark ale, Jane having acquired a taste for it. Ransom wondered if it were for show, to demonstrate his masculinity to the detective. Tewes also appeared absorbed in the busy pub’s clientele, fascinated in fact. He examined people nonstop, telling Ransom a bit of history on each that he merely surmised from the size of their foreheads, ears, noses, arched brows.

“You can’t really believe you can read people from the shapes of their heads and features. That this phrenology con of yours actually has any merit.”

“You’re ignorant of the science of phrenology.”

“And you’re gonna educate me?”

“The magnetic energy of our bodies flows strongest at the head, and it gives me, a licensed medical practitioner, Inspector, a picture of the mental state. Besides having a calming effect.”

“To what end?”

“Talk. In the best tradition of the family doctor, even the homeopaths with whom I do not always agree, believe in talk.”

Ransom remained skeptical, sipping his coffee. Tewes read skepticism in his frown, but merely pointed out another guest in the pub, saying, “See the fellow with the bowler hat at the bar?”

Ransom saw a man with narrow eyes staring into his food, occasionally sniffing at what dripped from his fork. “What about him?” Ransom knew the street tough and petty criminal from repeated arrests.

“He’s plotting some mischief as we speak.”

“That does not surprise me, Dr. Tewes. He’s an habitual criminal, one you likely know as well from careful reading of the Police Gazette your daughter has subscribed to.”

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“Police Gazette? Gabby?”

“I saw it in her possession at your home the other night when I put you to bed.”

“So that explains my nightmare regarding you.”

“Just as you knew something of Purvis, and just as you knew something of Merielle, you know something of Darby over there.”

“I can’t say that I knew Purvis or even Merielle in any true sense of—”

“Your daughter was seeing the boy, and you counseled Merielle.”

“You don’t seriously think I had anything to do with either death, do you?”

“I’m saying you know how to milk information. It is, for all its sprawling largeness, a small city made up of a series of ethnically divided communities, and you know a smattering of several languages, yes?” “Rummaging in search of suckers in seven languages,”

Jane said. “I resent the implication, and as for Merielle, you still remain blind to her inner turmoil.”

“Yes, I admit to blindness, but . . . convinced myself she was . . . that she, she . . .”

“That she could find salvation in making you the center of her universe? That she loved you more than she loved her addictions . . . the life?”

“Something like that, yes, confound you, Tewes!”

A silence settled over their table. Jane realized that each in turn had come to suspect the other of evil. A man with a violin began to play a soft melody imported from some far corner of the world, perhaps Prague or St. Petersburg. The sounds he manipulated from the strings reached into Ransom’s deepest sorrow and spoke of his own wrongdoing in all this: his part in Merielle’s death. It felt to him as if the vi-olinist had been paid and sent here just to torment him.

“Nothing you might’ve done or said, no amount of money you may’ve thrown at her would’ve saved her from this madman,” Tewes counseled. “She wanted to break away from 180

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Chicago and you, Ransom, making her an easy target for—”

He flinched even as he shouted, “Lie!”

“She saw you as a problem, Ransom, a major problem.”

“You give a man no quarter, Tewes. Careful over thin ice.”

“She liked you better’n others who’d kept her, yes, but she resented the economic bondage you repre—”

His fist slamming onto the table silenced Tewes. Ransom sat seething, unhappy, silent. Jane feared he might explode and strike out with both fists, or with that cane he carried.

But he did neither. He sat brooding instead. A bear whose meat’s withheld, she thought, but then Dr. Tewes abruptly returned with, “Look, to prove a point—I’ve seen this fellow at the bar many times but do not know him. Not even so much as to say hello.” “Name is Charles Darby, alias Anthony Guardi, known as Tug.”

“Why Tug?”

“Short for Tugboat.”

“OK, why Tugboat then?”

“For his size and ability, he can push around men twice his size, and if they disobey, he runs them aground . . . beats

’em to a pulp.”

“Tugboat? Quite handy with his Irish fists?”

“But he can pass as Italian. He’s done some prizefighting.

The man is a poster boy for Lombroso’s method of detecting the criminal mind among us, I think, don’t you?” Ransom referred to the now famous Dr. Cesare Lombroso, the Italian psychiatrist and criminalist who’d studied hundreds of thousands of convicted felons, taking measurements of their heads and facial features in an attempt to prove all criminals were evolutionary throwbacks—Cro-Magnons among civilized society.

“He does have a sizable pair of ears and that brow is as deep as a canyon, hiding menacing eyes,” Tewes said.

“Not exactly the most reliable method of identifying a criminal, Doctor.”

“No, I am sure of that. Still, I’ve read Dr. Lombroso’s CITY FOR RANSOM

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work, his L’uomo delinquente. ” The book created a stir among scientists the world over. “Even if he is wrong, Lombroso has created more interest in criminal science than anyone living.” “Well, give it time. Science in detection will mature, but I remain skeptical of body measurement identification techniques.”

“Really? Then that tape measure my daughter saw hanging from your coat pocket the other night was what, for show?” Tewes put up a hand to curtail rebuttal. “Look, we can agree, Lombroso’s evidence is riddled with suppositions, as is Bertillon’s method.” “You mean, what else do we have to work with? Shall we arrest Darby there for the Phantom, here and now, on his looks?”

“Lombroso is a first mewling step, and others with even less to go on have only cataloged known offenders, stating no two men can possibly exist with the same physical measurements outside the phenomena of twins.” Ransom began listening more intently. Apparently, Tewes was a serious student of Dr. Lombroso and the first criminal identification system in history, and why not? It lent credence to the study of phrenology. “To be sure,” Tewes continued, “his studies remain extremely controversial, as—” “As well his theories should!” he countered.

“—as his theories are based on measurements and statistics derived from insane asylums across Europe, but Lombroso used the science of phrenology—skull reading—to determine whether or not a true criminal was under his thumb or not.” “That’s funny.” Ransom downed the final half of his second Pabst.

“Lombroso measured the forehead and skull, and his findings said that a certain percentage of the population remain nihilistic cave men in heredity—where it counts! Here.”

Tewes pointed to his brain. “That evolution is not so tidy a business as it is haphazard, random even. De-evolution may play a major part.”

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“And others say we’re all descended from a meat-eating killer ape. Ever e’t raw meat, Doctor?”

“Regardless of mad notions that we’re all descended from murderous apes, Lombroso’s theories and statistics say that criminals are born—often with telltale knots on their cranial bones.” “My God, that would not include me.” Ransom gingerly touched the knot left by Muldoon. “So we put away anyone with a knot on his head? Please, Dr. Tewes, I was just beginning to take you seriously, and now this. You can’t honestly subscribe to the theory that killers are born and not nurtured?” “I do and I don’t. I think it a bit of both.”

“Then you can’t seriously go by Lombroso!”

“Only one technique of many I use. I combine a number of approaches to reach my conclusions.”

“But deciding a man is guilty by the size of his brow, how deep set the eyes? How many bumps on the head? Isn’t that extreme . . . like stepping back in time, say to . . . to the Salem witchcraft trials and spectral evidence?” “It’s only a starting point to jump off. We’re all of us working in the dark, and thank God for the microscope, so that one day in the not too distant future—in the early 1900s I predict—we’ll be capable of distinguishing animal from human blood.” “To separate the murderer from the neighborhood butcher, yes. That would be a boon. You’ve no idea how many guilty blokes’ve got off claiming chicken blood!”

Tewes stopped short, realizing Ransom was engaged with the man at the bar, their eyes locked. Jane watched the small drama unfold: Ransom raises a glass to Tug, and Tug offers his up and drains it. Each sizing up the other, each knowing their paths will cross again in a less amiable setting. Tug tosses down a coin and stalks out. Ransom’s eyes never leave him until he is completely gone, but he continues to speak. “If a man is apelike in appearance, perhaps he is a gentle giant. But not your man Tug.”

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“But suppose others who react to your gentle giant have treated him like an ape all of his life due to his very appearance? Doesn’t it make sense for him to commit a crime to get back at a society that condemns him for his deformities?” “He who is treated like an animal becomes one?”

“Yes.”

“Like that elephant man in London?”

“All right, there is an example. When treated with respect and dignity, he became a gentleman, but treated as a sideshow freak, he lived life as a carnival animal.”

“Hmmm . . . point taken.” Ransom finished his coffee and then downed another beer that’d appeared. “Sounds as if we agree more than we disagree on Lombroso, Doctor. But tell me, why’d you get involved in this case?” “I thought it a quick way to build a reputation, to use my phrenology in a manner . . . well as a way to—”

“Bombast the public? Scam, hoax?”

“All right. I was getting desperate, and it does not speak well of me, but I saw or rather felt I must do it, not for myself but for Gabby. Tuition and clothes and all her medical books.”

“And the whole show with the head, a freak show?”

“Not entirely. I’ve had more people coming to me for help, and I’ve helped more than I’ve harmed.”

“Yes . . . well, your dubious services did not take with my Merielle, now in her grave.”

“She’s not the first patient who’s come to me in a state of deep emotional distress and depression that has lingered for years without relief. Sometimes I don’t get them soon enough.

Sometimes they come as last resort, when only if they’d come sooner, then perhaps . . . well . . . it’s all supposition.”

“I’ve some notion of this killer myself. I’ve feelings that are like his, feelings of wanting to kill someone or some thing. And I feel him near.”

“That’s . . . well frankly . . . frightening.”

“As well it should be, Doctor. I glimpse only small snatches of Merielle’s attacker. The fellow who once 184

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pimped her out, Jervis, I hear from my snitch, that he’s left the city fearful I’m coming for ’im.”

“Do you think this fellow Jervis killed her?”

“He’d never have the guts. So afraid now, according to O’Malley, that he ran on the assumption I’d be coming for him.”

“What sense then do you have of this multiple killer, Ransom?”

“What sense do you have of this killer?”

“Vague . . . a dark presence at her back, a fleeting glimpse of a cape. Expensive, well-polished boots, something out of a State Street window.”

“You talked to the homeless fellow who grabbed the wallet, didn’t you, Tewes?”

Jane confessed she had. “It may not’ve been a coincidence that mirror coming down with her head.”

“Meaning?”

“Her place was no larger than the men’s room at the train station.”

Ransom considered this. “She spent a lot of time before that mirror.”

“She’d’ve been held against the mirror in the same manner as the boy.”

“Blind me . . . looking into her eyes as she died.”

“In top hat and cape, he’d pass for a real gent in Polly’s eyes.”

“And he whistles tunes.” Ransom held out a small coin but it was no coin. It was a silvery metal button with the letters CPS stamped on it.

“What is it?”

“Found in the rubble.”

“But what does it mean?”

“It may mean our killer shops at Carson, Pirie, Scott, the department store.”

“He shops at Carson’s?” She sounded incredulous.

“Speak of State Street windows. He may perhaps work there.”

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“What’s next? How do you proceed to interrogate everyone who walks in and out of a department store on the busiest street in the city?”

“Maybe . . . just maybe she ripped this from his coat in the hope I’d find it.”

Jane gave him this fantasy. “Yes . . . most likely.”

“You think so?”

“In one fashion or another we’re all interconnected. Her last thoughts were likely of you crashing the door down, saving her.”

“Connected. Sounds right.”

Tewes leaned in toward Ransom, sensing he needed to hear more. “Call me a fraud if you like, a spiritualist, a necromancer, but I believe images we retain in our minds that become our personal ghosts are electromagnetic in nature. And I believe that we’re all intertwined with magnetic rays that live in and around us.” “Magnetic rays that live inside us?” He sounded both skeptical and curious.

“In our minds, yes, and our bodies. We’re made up of millions of atoms. This much science tells us, and how are these atoms held together but by a magical magnetism of soul and miniature telepathy between these atoms? They hold our very cells in harmonious bondage.” “I suppose you’re writing a book on all this”—he stopped short of calling it nonsense—“I mean how it all relates to your phrenology, your visions.”

“Do not tempt me. In this magnetic field I refer to, we all touch upon one another’s thoughts, feelings, aspirations in an empathic field that God wants us one and all to acknowledge but most . . . well most of us are blind to it, blind in sight and touch.” “And I suppose you’re more attuned and open to this field than anyone else?”

“Than the average, yes. It’s a biochemical connection that holds our thoughts in place and creates the miracle of 186

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thought leaping across time and space just as there are necessary interstices between cells in the body.”

“Inter-what?”

“Damn it, Detective, have you never seen living human tissue below the microscope?”

“I have . . . at the morgue . . . on occasion, yes.”

“Tissue in a dead man living on, yes.”

“I never thought of it quite like that.”

“And that life can be sustained in a Petri dish indefinitely.”

“It can? I had no idea.”

“The magnetism inherent in all life, sir. You’ve seen it with your own eyes. And the human brain, that marvel of nature . . . it’s the single most complex organism in the universe. An electrochemical device not unlike Philo Keane’s camera in that regard, powered by electrochemical energy.” “You’re losing me, Doctor.”

“I believe the brain somehow stores messages, even after death, in some strange way only the future or God might reveal.”

“Stores images like a camera, as in memories—even after death? Philo Keane know about this?”

“Memory lives on . . . at least at the cellular level, the level too miniature for the human eye. Cells living on, functioning for a time even after all activity ceases in the body.”

“Cells living on after . . . continuing to store messages?

Do you know what this sounds like, Dr. Tewes?”

“I know what it sounds like, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, the fantastic ravings of some lunatic storyteller, but science has always lagged behind the prophets. Look, if you pluck a leaf from a tree and place it below the microscope, the cells are still alive and active.” “And you think the same is true of the brain?”

“Yes, on a cellular level, absolutely. Look, I know you could have me committed, but I’m trusting you with my innermost beliefs here. Do you see this table before you, Alastair?”

“Of course, I do. Why?”

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“At the microscopic level, the atoms in this tabletop’re spinning about, bombarding one another, electrically charged both positively and negatively, in a constant state of flux—movement, but not to the naked eye! We only see—” “A solid, a cold dead block of wood.”

“Cut from a long dead tree.”

“So in a sense . . . it remains alive although in appearance dead.”

“Take comfort that your Merielle’s soul is at least as active now as this tabletop.”

He’d meant to entrap this phrenological medium by encouraging him to “read” his sore head, but he hadn’t counted on such talk.

“Your killer is a man no one suspects; like the table, superficially apparent yet not so apparent.”

“Taken for granted, you mean. . . . I could go to Carson, Pirie, Scott, stake out the store all day, see him more than once come and go and still not see him?”

“Precisely. Dead perhaps on the surface, comes alive only when he kills. A man with well-polished boots and his clothing tailored, a cloak, a cane, a top hat.”

“A description fitting thousands going about our streets.

It’s not a great help, Doctor.”

“But it tells you not to focus on the usual suspects like Tug.”

“Agreed, it’d only be a waste of time.”

“Comparatively speaking, the Tugs of Chicago’re mere muggers to this monster deviant.”

“This creep is no known entity.”

“No anarchist, second-story man, or habitual wife beater, no. This madman is unique, clever, educated, possibly upper crust.”

“Or plays it well?”

“He’s interested in shocking us all, Inspector, from the police to the citizen at the fair. It’s a bloody game to ’im.”

“A game? Of course it’s a game. But what is the goal?

Why does he kill? Just to shock us? There must be more.”

“As mundane a motive as it may seem, you must accept it.

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There’s a strong possibility he’s only interested in the hide-and-seek, the hunt, his mind in some manner captivated . . .

in rapt awe with the idea of controlling when and where death occurs.”

“A twisted angel of death.”

Dr. Tewes finished another lager.

“Is there any more? Are you withholding anything?”

“If Fenger’s not told you, you should know that Polly passed out after the carotid artery was compromised. The same moment that the garrote sliced a three hundred and sixty-degree cut around the neck, she was gone. Mercifully, she’d’ve felt no lingering pain from the garrote or the fire.” “Thank you, Doctor.”

“Trauma of the attack itself would’ve been like an attack of chills to the system, but I suspect her last thoughts were of you.”

Ransom held back a tear.

“All guesswork, but I believe we must try to understand both the victim and him—our killer—in order to prevent future killings.”

They sat in silence, imagining the horror this monster had brought to Chicago. A pair of warriors fighting a ghostly plague they didn’t understand. And they felt alone against the enemy. “What next indeed,” Ransom muttered.

“The killer is mobile. Moves ’bout the city effortlessly.

Likely means money, well-to-do family, I fear and so—”

“Yes, has his own carriage and driver.” Ransom brightened. “They theorized old Jack the Ripper did it that way.”

“Blends.”

“And is well versed on our city terrain.”

“He’s cunning and quite possibly enjoys working with his hands. Perhaps likes to make things . . . as with his garrote.

It is unique to him. He loves his weapon. It grants him power.”

“Ahhh . . . but it’s not so unique after all.” Ransom held up the same garrote—crisscrossed with a diamond center.

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“There is then something unique about this man’s relationship with the weapon, I tell you. It’s that twisted.”

“All right, perhaps he talks to it. I won’t argue the point.”

“And one more thing.”

“Yes?”

“While he may be as well off as Mr. Field himself, he is small in stature.”

“How can you possibly know his stature, Doctor?”

“The angle of the garrote—the force—pulling downward.

Polly was as tall as you, yet—”

“Yes, he’d pulled downward even on Purvis. It appears the killer is rather short. Clever of you to’ve noticed, and right.”

“I find the so-called investigation full of holes.”

“Ahhh . . . you would. Look, we’ll soon have a break in the case. I get reports daily from Dot’n’Carry.”

“Dot and who?”

“My street snitch. My most reliable spy. If ever I write my memoir, my homeless friend will have to be acknowledged.

The poor wretched gimp.”

“Gimp?”

“He has been with you for days, Doctor, so unobtrusive you’ve not noticed. Blends as you put it.”

Jane did a 360-degree turn, taking in everyone here and on the street through the window where Chicago’s teeming life passed by. Commerce continued unabated. Vendors rolled portable carts, selling anything imaginable. A number of people with canes limped by, along with black hansom cabs rolling in and out of the window frame.

The fiddler in the corner had stopped to swill his ale, halving the glass before starting up a lively rendition of “Comin’

Through the Rye.” The tune livened up the patrons all round, and even Ransom’s toe began to tap, although he seemed unaware of this, as his thoughts remained on the killings, how the only witness they had said the killer was whistling this same popular tune.

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Dr. Tewes was not unaware of Ransom’s toe-tapping, as he was tapping on Tewes’s shoe—a man’s size seven, stuffed at the toes. A man with a harmonica joined in with the fiddler. Patrons began to clap as if clawing their way from a dull hell.

Young Waldo Denton entered and ordered up a bucket of beer. “Fetchin’ for Philo, no doubt,” said Ransom to Tewes.

Waldo gave a glance in Ransom’s direction and nodded at him and Tewes, grinned before rushing out again, the bucket of beer slopping along his pants leg. “Boy acts as if Philo might beat him if he dallies.” Ransom then looked with a mix of disdain and admiration at those having fun.

“Garroting’s a cowardly method of dispatching someone, catching ’im from behind, not facing your victim, eye to eye,” he began. “And yet twice now he’s killed victims before a mirror.”

“If you’re right . . . he likes to watch ’em die—”

“And to see himself in the act.”

“Behavior says something about who he is,” Jane explained.

“I believe a lot of what you say about the makeup of this monster is well . . . useful information.”

“Almost sounded like a compliment in there somewhere.

Now . . . with whom do I speak about recompense?”

“Recompense?”

“Yes, I’m sure you’ve heard the word before. I expect pay as an independent consultant to you, Inspector.”

“Aha . . . like any other leech on the Chicago payroll.”

“Have you seen the cost of bread lately? Been to the fair?”

“I’ve no time for such trivialities.”

“Perhaps had you taken time . . .”

“Go on.”

“. . . you’d’ve been on that wheel in the sky with Merielle last night instead of pumping me for information.”

“Damn your hide, Doctor! What about your daughter, Gabrielle? Have you given a moment’s thought to the possibility that she, rather than Purvis, could’ve been killed that night they were at the fair?”

CITY FOR RANSOM

191

“It has indeed kept me awake nights.”

“Perhaps had you bothered taking Gabby to the fair, she’d not’ve been with Purvis that night! And what about your sister, the one you treat like a housemaid?”

“Leave Jane out of this, and Gabby as well. They’re none of your affair.” Jane sensed her ruse was finally up with him, but she could not be certain. She held her silence. She wanted so much to reveal her true self to Alastair, as she had Dr. Fenger, before he read about it in one of Chicago’s twenty-six newspapers, or heard it from Fenger, or got it between the eyes from Kohler, or his snitch!

As if taking up a challenge, Ransom boldly replied, “I just may call on your sister, Dr. Tewes.”

“What?” Tewes was clearly stunned by this.

“She’s new to the city. She must be curious about the fair.”

“Is this some sort of threat, Alastair?”

“Threat?”

“Worm information out of my sister to get—”

“I’m merely wondering if she’s curious about the wheel, the fair, the pavilions?”

“Of course she is but—”

“But you’ve had no time to show Jane the city or the fair?”

“Yes . . . I mean, no, but—”

“Someone should.”

“She is seeing a fellow who intends just that,” Jane lied.

“Ahhh . . . that’s good.”

“I will take my leave of you now, sir,” said a more composed Dr. Tewes.

Ransom watched the funny little doctor saunter from the tavern as if a sudden fear had overtaken him.