City for Ransom

CHAPTER 1

Illinois Central Train Station, Chicago, June 1, 1893

Yanked from a heated card game to investigate another murder, the third garroting in as many weeks, Inspector Alastair Ransom arrived angry. The rhythm his cane beat across the marble floor stopped when he hit a wall of odors—the winner: charred flesh. The smell dredged up memories of the Haymarket Riot and bombing, some seven years ago. The odors brought up another memory as well—one of a particularly grueling botched interrogation he’d conducted just before the infamous riot in Haymarket Square, a memory he’d hoped to have forgotten even more so than the labor riot itself.

But here it sat upon his mind, full-blown as if yesterday, thanks to this victim’s fetid demise.

In an irritatingly gruff voice that made Inspector Alastair Ransom’s hair stand on end, Dr. James Phineas Tewes shouted, “Inspector Ransom, finally, someone in charge.”

“Can I help you?”

“I insist on a scientifically accurate, thorough phrenological diagnosis on the dead boy’s cranium to determine his magnetic levels at the time of death.”

“Phrenological what?”

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“I’m conducting a study, you see and—”

“Magnetic levels? What nonsense! Read the dead boy’s charred cranium? What possible good could your questionable art of reading skulls do either him or my investigation?

He’s dead, for God’s—”

“But Chief Kohler approved and a—”

“His head’s smoldering yet from being torched! G’damn you, Tewes! This is a murder investigation. You’ve no busi—”

“And your superiors, sir, sent me to examine—” Tewes stopped to catch another glimpse of the body, now half hidden by Ransom’s considerable girth. Despite the black, smoldering lump of flesh leaning against the column, Dr.

Tewes forged on. “I will make my observations and complete my mission here, Inspector! We’re conducting an experiment.”

Ransom tightened his teeth around an unlit pipe and tapped the floor with his cane. He scratched at his day-old stubble and stared long at the scrawny, parasitic scavenger everyone called a doctor, James Phineas Tewes—a little man of whom he thought little. He turned his back on Tewes to shout instead for his second in command. “Griff!

Griffin.”

“Yes, Inspector!” Griffin Drimmer called back.

“Get Keane in here to do the photographic work, so we can mop up this mess.” Ransom indicated a blackened, charred faceless body propped against a pillar at the Baltimore and Ohio side of the building, second-floor balustrade.

The marble floor around the body, also charred and blackened, told a tale in blood as it trailed from the men’s room to the pillar.

The corpse’s still smoldering head flopped forward, a quiet but echoing snap telegraphing a bone-cracking eruption at the terminus of the spine, incrementally giving way to the weight of the skull. The head had very nearly been cut off.

“You may ignore me, Inspector, but you can’t ignore this!” Tewes, a dapper man in topcoat, suit ascot, his mustache twitching, claimed to psychically read people’s heads CITY FOR RANSOM

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as Gypsies read tea leaves or palms. But Tewes went to the extreme, claiming to diagnose illnesses and render cures to melancholia and other mental maladies with some sort of magnetic mumbo-jumbo in association with laying-on-of-hands. Little more than a snake-oil salesman.

Despite Ransom’s attempts to stifle Tewes, the so-called phrenologist continued to wave a note. The note had the expensive watermark representing Kohler’s office.

“Don’t be a fool, Ransom,” Tewes warned.

“Never, sir.”

“Don’t dare stand in my way. Not with this in my hand!

An express order from your superior.”

“You use the term superior too loosely, sir, and I don’t react well to threats, Doctor.” Ransom made the word doctor sound like quack.

“I know about you. Every law-abiding citizen in Chicago wants Kohler to give you the boot for your extravagant interpretations of the law,” Tewes began in a more sour tone.

“Your ill-treatment of prisoners, your questionable interrogation techniques.”

“Really now?”

“The stuff of dark legend. Everyone fearing you!”

“Makes my job easier.” Ransom gave a moment’s thought to his ill-gotten, half-deserved reputation—the half that remained in people’s minds. Tewes had kindly left out his addiction to gambling, tobacco, whiskey, quinine, and women.

“You can’t stop the march of science or progress, Inspector!”

“Science? Progress?”

“Police science, yes.”

“Really now?”

“I represent the hope that police operations improve evidence-gathering tech—”

“By paying out a handsome fee to the likes of you, Doctor?”

“You’re as rough a fellow as I was warned!”

“Aye, I am that.”

“And stubborn! Knowing that Kohler himself wishes my 4

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participation on this case!” Tewes again waved the note in Alastair’s face. “For God’s sake, man. Read it!”

“Why? You’ve already revealed its content.” Ransom punctuated his words with the unlit pipe, jabbing at Tewes.

“Look here, my patience is in short supply, and you’ve no business here, mister!”

“This says otherwise!”

“You’re not affiliated with the Chicago Police force or Dr.

Christian Fenger’s Coroner’s Office. And if you dare get in my way again, I’ll have you arrested for obstructing an ongoing investigation.”

Tewes’s curled handlebar mustache twitched anew like a tadpole under the muted train station gaslight.

Ransom saw a uniformed copper and shouted, “O’Malley! Take Dr. Tewes here out of my sight.” Ransom turned his back on Tewes’s raised hand, the note still flourishing birdlike over his head as O’Malley gently guided Tewes off.

“You damned, daft fool!” Tewes shouted to no avail.

Inspector Ransom returned to the still-smoldering body that’d been doused with either petrol or kerosene, and then with water. In two previous such cases, the fire investigator had determined kerosene the accelerant.

Ransom immediately noticed a bloody handprint, left on the marble floor; the trail of blood led him to inspect the men’s room. Drimmer pointed out the sliced off digits in the sink. Ransom went over to the body again, studying the handprint more closely. “The print has all its fingers. It isn’t the boy’s, unless the killer snipped off his fingers here and returned to the men’s room to deposit each digit in the sink, but that feels counterintuitive.” Griffin Drimmer replied, “Then the print belongs to the killer!”

“If so, it needs to be photographically recorded, preserved. For should a suspect come about—distinguishable from the city’s hundreds of likely vermin—then we can match said murderer to something tangible. How is that for scientific progress in police work?”

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“Yeah, I overheard what Dr. Tewes said to you, Inspector.”

Ransom continued to study the bloody handprint as if it recalled some secret memory.

A short, gaunt, angular-and grim-faced Griffin Drimmer, in a three-piece suit, fond of showing pictures of his children, looked more the part of Ransom’s coachman than his partner. Their ages stood a generation apart as did their choice of clothing. His energy and diligence that of a river otter, while Alastair might more appropriately be called a pachyderm. Alastair believed his partner more enthusiastic than clever, more excitable than analytical, but he was young yet. There appeared much to recommend the new man, despite that Nathan Kohler had pushed Drimmer on Ransom.

“When we get the boy to the morgue,” Alastair said to Griffin, “we’ll stamp his palm and place it against Philo’s photo.”

“Easier than ripping up the floor tile and hauling it off.”

“That’d upset people in high places.”

“You mean along with Chief Kohler?”

Drimmer hadn’t once had words with his partner about Kohler, but Ransom knew he was dying to do so—preferably after getting Ransom drunk enough to tell the whole sordid story as to why he and Kohler so intently hated one another from the inside out. Alastair considered Drimmer’s position, its delicateness, working under him but ultimately for Kohler.

“According to our good Dr. Tewes, Griff, we’ve already managed to piss Nathan.” Alastair stared anew at the inexplicable mystery lying at his feet; three times the mystery now. It represented a third body that the coroner, Fenger, would have to separate from itself—like disentangling a melted sculpture created of limbs by the intense heat.

Both detectives staring at the bloody handprint felt a new aura surrounding it. “Could be the bastard’s gone and got sloppy, Griff?”

“It must be his,” Griff sounded hopeful. “You’ll prove it so.”

“Caution. It could as well belong to the night watchman who doused the body with water, or some careless copper got his hand bloody and kneeled here.”

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“But O’Malley’s hands are too large to make a fit.”

“Aye, it’s a man no larger than the victim, from the look of it.”

“Small hands for certain.” Griffin placed his own small hands over the print, creating a shadow fit.

“Keep this between us, Griff. No one else is to know. Do you understand?”

“Absolutely, between us.”

“When Philo gets here with that blasted photographic equipment of his, we’ll have to stay on him, Griff.”

“Stay on him?”

“He’s coming off a drunk, and he can be a slacker when he’s hung over.”

“I’ll stay on him.” Griffin winked.

Ransom imagined Griff thought him on the same drinking binge as Philo, and he wasn’t wrong. “Judging from the size of the handprint—if indeed it belongs to the monster we seek—our killer is hardly larger than the two women he’s killed.” “About the size of that fella waving the note in O’Malley’s face?”

“Tewes? Yes . . . yes . . . in that neighborhood. Doesn’t take much to overpower a man from behind with a garrote.”

Ransom looked from the print to Dr. Tewes, who now waved Kohler’s damnable note at Big Mike O’Malley. O’Malley’s blue uniform looked purple under the haze of light from a lamppost that flooded in from an overhead window in the semidarkened stairwell—a stairwell down which Ransom would like to throw Tewes. He hoped O’Malley would escort Tewes to the door.

Tewes’s silver tongue had gotten him Kohler’s blessing and had gotten him past the police barricade, but Ransom’s attention returned to the bloody handprint. He toyed with the cruel idea of getting a stonemason to lift it from the marble floor. To intentionally provoke Kohler.

Ransom’s thoughts strayed to the so-called new and in-genious art of fingerprint and handprint evidence that was hardly new in other parts of the world. “Everything worth CITY FOR RANSOM

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knowing comes out of the East,” the taciturn medical examiner for Cook County, Dr. Fenger, once told Ransom. Then the spry old doctor added, “Of course, your chief of detectives thinks it’s all mumbo-jumbo. Been trying for years to get the Chicago Police Department to invest in fingerprint-gathering techniques and devices.” Being the holdout of an old vanguard, Chief Nathan Kohler looked the part of Poe’s most stolid raven: stocky, short, wrapped in a black coat the way a bird wrapped itself in its wings—indicative of how close he played his cards to his chest. A most secretive man, Kohler had been skeptical and resistant to the idea, as his custom dictated, distrusting anything new. Kohler finally put his opinions aside when the scientific evidence became too overwhelming to ignore—in large part due to Ransom’s and Dr. Fenger’s combined persistence and faith in the new science. In another part, due to the coroner’s push for modern techniques and devices, and to wrangling a much larger budget out of the city. Dr.

Fenger, one of the founding members of Cook County Hospital and the city’s preeminent medical examiner, lent credence to Alastair’s war. And what is Kohler’s answer? To hire on a mentalist?

The newsmen, held in check at the stairwell, shouted for comments. Ransom counted on big O’Malley to keep the dogs of the press off his back, and while Alastair liked some reporters, and in fact knew a couple who proved better investigators than cops, today he’d immediately cordoned off the crime scene, and thanks to a Chicago miracle—greased with green—the sensational stories of two earlier garrote victims hadn’t been reported in any major paper. All this, ostensibly to safeguard the “integrity of the ongoing world’s fair.” Ransom cared little for such concerns, but he did want to preserve what Dr. Fenger called the “amalgamate area wherein murderer and victim danced” or “the killer’s parlor.” Fenger wrote poetry in moments of relaxation, good poetry in fact. And his poetical nature came through in his work. But Ransom took his meaning—keep undisturbed the 8

ROBERT W. WALKER

space around the victim in order to do a thorough investigation. A common sense, scientific approach.

So today it was off limits even to his best friends in the press, those he drank with from the Tribune, Herald, and Sun. Reporters had gotten out of control in previous months.

In fact, the sheer number of reporters in Chicago rivaled the vermin and rats. As many as forty-odd newspapers were vying for dominance within the city limits alone.

Naturally, the reporters clamored for a better view of the crime scene now—a closer look for photographs and drawings—but decorum in an investigation of a crime as heinous as this must, in Ransom’s opinion, be maintained even at the risk of the public’s so-called “right to know”—a card the Chicago press played like a two-dollar whore.

When Ransom could, he gave the newsies far more access to the crime scene than Dr. Fenger thought prudent. He in-gratiated himself with the press to gain access to their secrets—how they worked a source, how they got information. The lifeblood of an investigator. But he also nurtured a relationship with good newsmen who held doubts about official details of the city’s investigation of the Haymarket Riot.

Ransom saw that some enterprising newsmen had found another way up to the third-floor promenade, and they now looked down over the kill scene. One or two photographs were taken from the odd angle, most likely useless.

O’Malley, in his nervous stutter, stood beside Ransom, sputtering, “In-in-insp-spec-tor . . . I think you’ve gotta deal with D-d-d-doc-doctor Tewes, sir.”

Ransom rubbed his grizzled chin and fought the redness of eyes that’d seen too much horror and too little sleep, eyes now staring through O’Malley and Dr. Tewes, who’d joined them.

“You must take a moment to read this or—” began Tewes, the huge signature ascot bobbing with each speech.

“Dr. Tewes, we have standards that must be rigorously adhered to and scrupulously upheld to conduct a proper investigation, and they don’t include the likes of—”

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“Sir, I respect the vigor and integrity of your investigative procedure, and your long experience in police work.

However . . .”

“Why must every review end in a however?”

“However, Inspector, every new idea to drag police science into keeping with modern knowledge of—”

Ransom dismissed Tewes—this time with the upraised bone-handled wolf’s-head cane, a gift from his close friend, Philo Keane. He’d carried it since Haymarket, the riot that had ended in the deaths of seven of Ransom’s fellow officers. The cane had become Ransom’s trademark. Stories circulated all about Chicago of how Ransom put down any man who showed the least resistance by pummeling him with that cane. Tewes saw that the filigreed bone handle was cracked down one side.

Ignoring Tewes, Alastair called out to Griffin.

“Where’s Philo?”

“I suspect he’s on his way.”

“Have him take pictures of the blood splatters in the men’s room, the trail to here, and close-ups of that lone handprint. Using the modified identification-records kit, we can attempt to match the palm print to our records of known perverts and felons. How is that for modern, Dr. Tewes?” The ID kit he referred to was a modified French police idea. The French believed a simple record of measurements of body parts kept on arrested felons proved as reliable as any eyewitness report. Many a man had been sent to the gallows via such matchmaking.

Ransom’s examination of a crime scene took longer than any man on the force; he had a reputation for thoroughness but a kind of monkish quality of intense meditation as well.

“Zenlike isn’t he?” Tewes, admiration in his voice, asked Drimmer.

“Not sure what that means,” replied Griffin. “All I know is that Inspector Ransom is the man who modified the modern French Bertillon method of cross-identification cards to include fingerprints on known felons and repeat offenders.”

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Griffin Drimmer took the now infamous note from Dr.

Tewes to examine it.

“The Chicago Police have put to use the Bertillon system?” asked Dr. Tewes. “I’m impressed.”

“As I said, with modifications.”

“Still, you won’t find this killer in your card files.”

“Now look, Dr. Toes is it? We know what we’re doing here, and we need no additional help, I can assure you.”

“Tewes,” the small man corrected. “James, sir, James Phineas Murdoch Tewes.”

Ransom erupted again, shouting for the missing photographer, startling everyone.

“His bark as bad as his bite?” asked Tewes, forcing a squint from Griffin.

Meanwhile, Ransom watched Chicago Police civilian photographer Philo Keane, and his new assistant, young Waldo Denton, struggle through the crowd of reporters on the stairwell, their hands full with the remarkable scientific tools of their trade. Ransom found the new art and science of photography—an invention catapulted to prominence during the Civil War—a godsend to police investigators. It’d become another new source of applied science in police detection. But the jaded crowd of reporters and curious on-lookers rudely shouted at the inconvenience Philo and his assistant caused.

Keane and assistant together had hold of a long-legged specialized enormous tripod, which—once the carriage was assembled—stood twelve feet high on three giant legs. An entire ladder attached to it led to the top. This monster, once upright, allowed Keane special vantage point overtop the prone corpse, so as to photograph from above—the end result creating an effect like the eye of God looking in on death.

Ransom knew Keane’s work and thought him an artist, and his equipment state-of-the-art, but the giant ladder-equipped tripod was the size and bulk of a giraffe. Still, the results—if Philo were not rushed and left to his own CITY FOR RANSOM

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devises—often proved remarkable, if not uncanny. Ransom had known grown men on the force who did not care to be alone in a room with Philo’s photos.

When Ransom reviewed such photographic evidence, he sometimes felt the hair on the back of his neck rise in response to the eerie appearance of a strange-looking halo effect around the depicted corpse—as if Philo had somehow caught a fleeting glimpse of the departing souls. Regardless of race, creed, religion, character or gender, Philo’s glow—or Philo’s halo as it had come to be known—was never seen on anyone else’s film plates.

Of course, when called on this phenomena over a pint at Moose Muldoon’s, Philo chalked it up to a reflection—flash of gunpowder in the pan—caught at the moment of squeezing off the shot, “Or just a dirty lens,” he’d add.

Philo exchanged a grunt of salutation with Alastair, a glint of knowledge and bonding in each bloodshot eye. What these two men knew and shared of violent, unholy and unhappy endings culminated in a silent array of artistically rendered death photos. Sober, they seldom spoke beyond the necessary. So, Philo immediately began his normal routine of taking “cuts,” confident that he knew precisely what Ransom must have.

Meanwhile, Ransom saw that Drimmer had gotten himself embroiled in a three-way conversation with O’Malley and Tewes; O’Malley quietly reading Kohler’s letter aloud, his lips moving like a fish gaping for air.

“JesusLordGodAlmighty . . . if you want something done right . . .” Ransom muttered.

“Gotta do it yourself,” replied the sloppily dressed police photographer. “I believe in old adages.”

“Too bad you don’t believe in lye soap.”

“Unless I can afford Field’s best perfume, I’ll keep me stench.” Philo’s assistant stifled a laugh, while Philo laughed from the gut. “You’re one to talk, old man.”

“I want plenty of close-ups of the handprint to the side, Philo—see, right here?”

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“Yah, yah, why’re you badgering today . . . why? I’m way ahead of you.”

“And, Philo, any blood splatters you see, and close-ups on the neck. Three hundred and eighty degrees. Do you understand?”

“You mean three hundred and sixty degrees, don’t you?”

“Testing, Philo, to see how sharp you are this time of the equinox.”

“Badgering is what it is, and I don’t care for it.”

Ransom whispered, “You ever think of getting off the sauce?”

“You’re one to talk. What about that Chi-nee shit you smoke?”

“Keep it down, Philo.”

Keane returned to work, placing a ruler beside the bloody handprint for scale. Escaping from him came an odd series of sound effects: “Aha, ya-aha, mmm . . . uh-huh . . . ohhh . . . uhhh . . . bugger’at . . . gore-blimeyboy, whoa . . . ohhh-sheee-it . . .”