City for Ransom

CHAPTER 25

The hansom coach nearly toppled over as it came around the corner at Broadway and Belmont, and then it came to a screeching halt before the newly chiseled and painted overhanging shingle that announced the residence and infirmary of Dr. J. P. Tewes.

Ransom leapt from the cab, shouting, “Mark me, Griff, that idle carriage over there tied to the lamppost! It’ll be Denton’s hack!”

Griff stuck his head from the cab into the rain, and he saw the single horse hansom standing idle under the downpour.

Could Ransom be more right? He was also surprised at how agile the big man could be when circumstances dictated sup-pleness. But just as he made this conclusion, Alastair slipped on Tewes’s stairs and tumbled into a puddle of mud. With cane in hand, Ransom pushed upward and stood, his suit doused and dripping of mud, his face splotched with it, making him into a creature out of H. G. Wells’s books. But the big man allowed nothing to slow him, and like a raging animal, he rushed for the front door, his revolver drawn.

Griffin lifted his collar against the wind-driven rain as he rushed for the rear of the house. “I pray we’re in time!” he shouted against the night. “I have the back covered!”

“Good man, Griff!”

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Ransom began taking the door down with his boot, chop-ping directly at the lock. Two kicks, shoulders pulled in-ward, Ransom crashed through, no warrant sworn out, no caution taken, no thought of anything beyond saving Jane and Gabby from tragedy. The sheer explosion of his entrance sounded like lightning had hit.

Griff found the rear door and hesitating only a moment, he followed Inspector Ransom’s example and lifted his foot and kicked out viciously at the lock. The door came way on the second kick, flying open. Just as he kicked open the back door, Griff heard the gunshot—a single huge explosion crackling at the front of the house. Griff had whipped out his own weapon, a Winchester muzzle-loading six-shooter his father had given him the day he’d joined the force. Griff inched toward the gunfire, cautious, prepared for anything, and certain Inspector Ransom needed his help.

He came on the scene in the parlor late. What he found startled him.

Young Gabby held an enormous revolver extended and pointed at a wounded Alastair Ransom whose blood had discolored both the Oriental rug and Waldo Denton, who lay trapped below what appeared a dead Alastair Ransom.

“God, Rance’s been killed!”

But Ransom’s death was not, for the moment, complete.

He moaned and shouted, with his face buried in Denton’s chest, “Damn you, girl! You’ve shot me!”

“What do you expect, breaking in here on us!” shouted Jane Francis, tears streaming, on knees over Ransom, doing all in her power to staunch the wound to his side where the bullet had exited, mud from his filthy clothes commingling with blood.

“Get this ape the bloody hell off me!” screamed Denton from below Ransom.

“Do not . . . let him up . . .” Ransom painfully muttered,

“till someone shoots him!”

“Shut up and save your energy,” Jane shouted. “This is a serious wound!”

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Griffin’s gun now pointed at Gabrielle, a fleeting thought of Gabrielle Tewes’s being the monster with the garrote instead of Denton flitting through his mind—and how awful the revelation would be—an attempt at justifiable homicide to stop Ransom’s gaining on the truth. “Drop the weapon!

Now!” he shouted.

Gabby and Jane both looked at Griffin, both startled. From the look of the room, the items on the parlor table, the overturned, broken dishware and teapot, it appeared that Jane Francis and Gabrielle had simply been entertaining—entertaining a multiple murderer in their parlor, asking young Denton, no doubt questions regarding his plans to become a photographer.

No doubt asking what Waldo thought of his employer’s arrest.

Whether he thought the man guilty or wrongly accused. No doubt, offering Denton tea and cake between inquiries.

The big cabbie who’d gotten them here in record speed without running over a single stray cat or dog, stepped through the torn-open front door and was mumbling something about having been stiffed by coppers again. “I’ll not put up with it this time!” he called out but froze when Gabby’s long-barreled cannon turned in his direction.

“I said put the gun down, Miss Tewes! This fellow and myself mean you no harm, Miss Tewes . . . Miss Tewes . . .”

Griffin calmly cautioned in his most authoritarian voice, imagining the horror of it, should she call his bluff. But her eyes met Griffin’s and he saw no malice or rancor there so much as a dazed horror that she’d actually shot Ransom. Griff had seen the look before. A look that, in a sense, acquitted her of having had any more sinister plan or thought than simply the reaction that’d resulted in defending her hearth and home and self from a mud-painted man brandishing a huge blue gun.

Still, she held the gun, albeit limply, in her hand.

“Drop the weapon,” he repeated coldly, his gun still pointed.

The huge, dark figure of the cabbie stood dripping water below him in puddles, asking, “What the devil is going on here, Inspector?”

Jane Francis shouted, “Get on my phone! Get a medical CITY FOR RANSOM

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wagon here for Inspector Ransom. He could bleed to death if we don’t act quickly.”

“Where is Dr. Tewes? Surely, he can—”

“He’s out of town,” she lied. “Besides, Ransom’s best chances are with Dr. Fenger. He’s got to be carefully transported to Cook County.”

“I’m not ready for that bloody coroner yet!” shouted Ransom.

“Just get the ambulance!” Francis shouted. “I’ve done all I can for him, but it is a nasty wound.”

“Yes, to Dr. Fenger,” agreed Griffin.

“And quickly, man! Do it, now! Use my phone.”

“Who me?” asked the cabbie.

“I’ll make the call,” said Griffin, “but you—what’s your name?” he asked the giant-sized cabbie.

“Lincoln Hardesty.”

“Take the gun from Miss Tewes and hold everyone here, and especially the one under Ransom. He’s under arrest.”

“Under arrest—I get it.” Hardesty laughed at this.

“Just watch him. He’s the bloody Phantom.”

“Him, that shrimp Denton, the Phantom?” Hardesty laughed. He knew Denton from the various cab stands. He now stood disbelieving, while the two women erupted.

“Impossible!”

“This boy?”

“You must be wrong.”

“Alastair, are you mad?”

“You cops have a sense of humor,” added the cabbie.

“Just hold him here whatever you do, and do not allow him a moment’s chance to ditch anything from his pockets.”

“He’s no more the Phantom than I am,” said Jane.

“You coppers trying to railroad Waldo?” asked Hardesty.

“I’ve seen it happen time and again in Chicago.” He then spoke to the ladies. “Cops’ll do that. Arrest an innocent man to make him out guilty.”

“But they’ve already arrested Mr. Keane for the killings,”

said Gabby.

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“Makes my point,” replied Hardesty.

Griffin had stopped listening to the civilians, but he imagined their conversation would likely be repeated throughout the city once the news of police arresting a hard-working, clean cut, good Christian boy for the Phantom’s deeds, only to release a pervert. Everyone in the city would be looking for the next victim still, and Chief Kohler will have gotten what he wanted, a humiliated and broken and demoted Alastair Ransom.

The weapon and jewelry would be crucial. Griffin knew this. After making the phone call, he returned to hold everyone at bay. With Denton, that proved quite easy. From below Ransom’s inert body, they heard Denton laboring to breathe.

“Can’t you get the inspector off Waldo?” pleaded Gabby.

“No! No, we must not move Ransom until necessary,”

said Jane Francis, “and even then with great care as to cause no more bleeding. We should leave the moving to those trained in doing the least harm.”

“Oh, that’s damned great!” shouted a still conscious Ransom. “That’d be those dirty-nailed devils, Shanks and Gwinn. Take me in Hardesty’s cab, Griff! I beg you!”

The exertion made Ransom pass out as Shanks and Gwinn started out from Cook County. Soon on hand as they waved an emergency bell overhead when acting as an ambulance, the duo handled Ransom easily, having trained under Dr. Fenger’s care, and in the meantime, Dr. Fenger had been located and was said to be prepping for a major operation.

When they’d lifted the bloody Inspector, Denton climbed to his knees under the gun of Griffin Drimmer.

They’ve come for me . . . only matter of time now . . . smells like death . . . blood and decay and death . . . Angel of Death himself will be right at home wherever I am . . .

A huge pothole sent Ransom’s body over with the stretcher in back of the meat wagon. The jolt opened his wound and Ransom awoke in the stench-filled darkness. He imagined CITY FOR RANSOM

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himself in Hades itself, and rightly so for the mistakes he’d made and the bad judgment that’d gotten him killed.

His thoughts only added to the flame of punishment in this acrid, ambling elephant gut he found himself alone in.

After an initial moment of horror and acceptance of both his death and damnation, Ransom realized precisely where he lay. The same wagon that retained the charred flesh odors of Polly and Purvis before her. The back of Shanks and Gwinn’s horse-drawn death carrier. The two coroner’s men had never heard of soap and water. The interior of the wagon shut out all light and sealed in all rot.

“Get me the bloody hell out of here!” he shouted, raised up and kicked out at the boards of the wagon. He’d chosen the spot where he guessed the buckboard seat holding Shanks and Gwinn must be. He kicked again and again like a bucking angry mustang.

Each kick sent a searing pain through his side where he’d been wrapped mummy fashion by Jane, and he could feel the bandages filling with wetness—his blood.

The wagon bucked back, and Alastair was thrown into the very wall he kicked when the wagon came to a sudden halt.

Ransom lay silent, bleeding profusely, passed out on the flatbed below the overturned stretcher just as Gwinn tore open the doors, cursing.

Gwinn sucked in the acrid air without coughing, used to it. Seeing that Ransom had silenced and lay as dead as a stump, he slammed the doors closed again. Taking his squat little body back to the front, he climbed aboard and shouted to Shanks. “Hurry on before that damned maniac wakes again! He’s put a hole through the boards!” “Is he passed out for now?” Shanks needed no second telling as he lit into the horses with a whip.

“Passed out, maybe . . . maybe better than passed out.”

“Dead?”

“We can only hope.”

In the inky black rear, the patient bounced like a huge sack of potatoes with every pothole and mislaid brick.

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“Gawd forgive me,” said Shanks. “I hafta hope the bugger dies.”

“He’s never been no friend of ours,” agreed Gwinn.

After locking Waldo Denton behind bars in a cell alongside Philo Keane, Griffin Drimmer looked long and hard at the puny prisoner.

Drimmer still could not believe that this pipsqueak fellow hardly out of his teens might possibly be the infamous Phantom. However, once Ransom was lifted off him by Shanks and Gwinn, Griffin had done precisely what Alastair wanted.

He yanked the kid up off the floor, and in quick fashion began to cuff Denton to loud disagreement not only from Denton, but from the ladies.

The only saving grace was that the boy—one hand yet free—put up a fight and tried to go for Griffin’s throat when he broke loose. Then he pulled a fancy twirling move to grind about Griffin’s body in an attempt to get behind him—a concealed garrote pulled from somewhere. Griffin knew a few Far East combat moves of his own. Realizing the danger if this bony little fellow should get that wire noose around his neck, he upended a parlor table and used it to bash Denton in the temple. As a result of a final blow from Griffin’s gun slashing across Denton’s face, the supposed Phantom fell hard against a brick fireplace, knocking him senseless.

With no more resistance, over the next hour the suspect, and now assailant, was handcuffed and hauled off to the Des Plaines Street Bridewell. But by the time Griffin turned the key on Denton, his doubts had returned.

The garrote notwithstanding.

When Waldo had come to, he’d told this nonstop tale of how, seeing the success of the Phantom in bringing down his prey, he thought a garrote a good weapon for himself, and so he’d taken to carrying one at all times. “A hackman can’t be too careful these days, not with the sort running about this CITY FOR RANSOM

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city, I can tell you. I’ll tell the judge the same. You’ve gotta believe me! You’ve got the wrong man, and that crazy Alastair Ransom—may he die of his wounds, God—he oughta be brought up on charges for breaking and entering. He spoiled me with Gabby, you know. Spoiled the moment, any chance I may’ve had to please her dear, dear auntie and to impress on Gabrielle my undying love for her! But no—in charges this raging bull, shouting I’m a danger, and making mad accusations. Why, if he does live beyond the bullet that sweet Gabrielle put in him on my behalf, why then he ought to be investigated for being a madman and a maniac, and who’s to say that Ransom himself ain’t the mad Phantom?

Much time as he spends prowling the streets; seeing so much of the gutter trash, living among the rats of this city . . . the man sees shit every day until . . . until all he sees is to kill, kill, kill! What’s to say he ain’t the Phantom?” Meanwhile, Philo Keane shouted over his one-time apprentice at Griffin, “It all makes sense now! This creepy little sot here under our noses the whole bloody time! He’s the one set me up, isn’t it true, Drimmer? Didn’t he put the notion of my being the Phantom in your ear? And now he’s shifting it to Alastair! Don’t you see? Don’t you?” “I know the little rat came at me with this wire in front of witnesses, in front of his little sugar, that daughter of Tewes.”

“Then you have him dead to rights! Congratulations! Now release me the bloody hell out of here!”

“Ransom’s the one figured it out; he’s the mastermind behind the arrest.”

“And Rance, is he shot like Denton said?”

“Wounded ’bout here and here.” He indicated entry and exit wounds on his own body.

“But he’s been spared his life?”

“So far.”

“Thank God! Where is he?”

“Cook County Hospital. It’d be the morgue but for his cane—or so said the midwife who patched him up.”

“Midwife?”

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“Tewes’s sister Jane.”

“Sister? Look, how so, his cane?”

“I found the cane splintered by the bullet from a Sharps

.44, I’m afraid. Could’ve done a hell of a lot more damage had the bullet not been deflected by the bone handle of Ransom’s cane.”

“The wolf’s-head cane. I give it to him years ago. Carries it everywhere . . .” mused Philo. “That is a wonder indeed.”

“Surgeon Fenger is working on Rance as we speak, and from accounts I got over the phone, well . . . only time’ll tell if eternity wants the big man or no.”

“I gotta get over there. You’ve got my word, Drimmer.

Release me just until I can be sure Rance is all right, and I promise I’ll return.”

Drimmer’s mind raced with what Kohler might do to him in the event he should honor such a deal without either authority or formal paperwork.

“Com’on, man! What’s there to think about?” pressed Philo.

“This isn’t a Sunday school we’re running here. You think for one moment Kohler’d just let you step outta that cell on a promise you’ll come waltzing back?”

Philo raised both hands to the bars. “Despite all the evil that’s passed through these hands, I am a man of my word.”

“Bedrock honest, heh?” Griffin half joked. He then stared into Philo’s eyes. “One bloody hour, and you’re back, do you understand? No one’s to detain you.”

“Deal and thank you, Griff.”

Griffin signaled the bored turnkey to let the prisoner out.

The Bridewell cage door swung wide and Philo made a dramatic exit, sucking in the air of freedom on the other side of the bars.

“Find a phone and call me here at the station every fifteen minutes. I want to know your whereabouts at all times, Keane.”

“Bullshit, you want to know how Alastair is faring under the knife.”

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“Dr. Fenger’s the best in the city.”

“The state.”

“Perhaps the country.”

“Touché!”

“Leave out the basement rear, this way. And call in like I said.”

“You’ve my word, and again, thank you.”

“Just don’t make a mess of it, Philo. Don’t make me come searching for you at Muldoon’s or—”

“I’ve not had a drink in forty-eight hours.”

“Then bloody come back here, and I’ll see to it you have your drink, but you cannot go running about the city.”

“As Oscar Wilde says, ‘I can resist everything save temptation.’ ”

“God, I know I’m going to regret this! Don’t be a sot, man! You could be the best photographer in Chicago, the top of your chosen profession—”

“Art, my friend. It is art.”

“I know nothing about that, but if you applied yourself a sober man set on a goal, what with your talent, and your contracts with Montgomery Ward and all—”

“What contracts? We never had nothing in writing, Trelaine and I.”

“Ohhh . . . mistake.”

“Besides, they’re not likely to hire a former ‘felon’ even if innocent, not since the papers carried on how I murdered all those women, and their own account executive!”

“Well look, for the moment, we’ve . . . we’ve got Ransom near dead, so think of someone other than your bloody self, heh?”

“Aye . . . you’re cut of good cloth after all, Griff. I’ll ne’er forget this kindness.”

Griffin pushed him out the basement door. “Just go and try to be inconspicuous.”

“Yes, yes, of course!” Philo was off, a bounce in his step that Griffin had never seen before, like a man who’d just been satisfied by a woman, but this had to do with freedom.

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Given a taste of it, would the man be capable of honoring his bargain? Griff doubted it, and in the back of his mind began to plot where he’d have to hide when Kohler learned of this

“early release program” instituted by a second-rank inspector. Then it dawned on him how to handle it no matter what.

Claim it by order of Inspector Alastair Ransom, his last order before passing out, and quite possibly a man’s dying wish. Pass the bloody buck to a man near death.

The wound sustained by Ransom proved a nasty one. The entry point the size of a silver dollar, and the exit wound a gaping fist-sized explosion of flesh and tissue. If Dr. Christian Fenger couldn’t keep Ransom alive, no one could; if Fenger could save him, it’d be a testament to genius and skill.

Either way, it remained the will of their unknowable God.

How was one to know, Jane wondered as she watched, fascinated, at Fenger’s side in the operating theater, dressed as Dr. James Francis Tewes. What was most excruciating was the interminable waiting—filling Jane with grief and pain.

Jane realized how much she’d learned from Alastair, and just how much he meant to her after all.

Perhaps and hopefully, the Almighty had yet to finish with Ransom, Jane thought while watching the surgeon’s scalpel flit over his flesh. But then again, perhaps God was absolutely done molding this man.

Surgeon Fenger’s work was that of an artist. Jane became mesmerized, focusing on the surgery. A voice in her head kept repeating the prayer: Save him, save him for me, Christian.

Another voice in her head answered: Ransom’s fate lies in the hands of his Maker, not Christian. Still, it seemed a tug-o-war between God and surgeon.

In which case, Jane Francis feared that Ransom’s life ended here.