City for Ransom (18 page)

“We both want what's best for your child.”

She'd worked to shield Gabby from the truth.

All the volcanic negative raging storms self-created within us that make us do and say stupid hurtful dumb self-destructive things,
she thought. And a parent will do anything for a child. Gabby, so much like her, had always and still lived inside her feelings, inside her instincts. Gabby knew. She knew something in addition to Cliffton's murder troubled her mother's soul. It had a name—Nathan Kohler.

“I'm glad to see you're thinking it over,” said Kohler. “That you won't act impulsively.”

Kohler had no idea how impulsively she might act. Staring at the charred remains of this day, she realized all her rampant thoughts ended with setting Kohler afire—images of his suffering flitting by like a series of daguerreotypes on a spindle. They were replaced by Gabby dancing riotously in her head, dancing with the phantoms of what was and is and what might be.

“Our bargain stands then.” He kept calm, smiling, his well-groomed mustache gluey with pomade.

She stared forward, wondering where she might purchase a garrote. “I don't think until this moment that I've ever fully realized just how profoundly different Gabby and I are.”

“Really?”

“My intellect is just a tool, Nathan.”

“Of course, to make sense of experience.”

She agreed, “All things large and small, corporeal and spectral.”

“Intellect helps us communicate.”

“But my intellect, much as it is my ‘cover,' isn't me. So don't put too much faith in its always being there for you to manipulate.”

He was the picture of perplexity now.

“I don't live in my intellect. I live
elsewhere
.”

“Elsewhere?”

“Where the heart lives.” Her gaze remained on the ashes.

“And where is that?” He brushed her hand with his, making another of his crude, awkward passes.

“A place few get to be part of or see, a place that some—like you, Nathan—don't even know exist.”

“
Annnd
…you're saying this is a bad thing?”

“I've been induced to live outside my feelings in this matter, induced by people like you and circumstances.”

“Get control of yourself, Jane! There're reporters all around here. At least pretend interest in the current problem we face, and in what I'm saying.”

“Feelings—source of my strength, why people listen to me, trust my deepest felt senses. My father, God rest him, he used to tell people—”

“Perhaps you should be having this conversation with your daughter, Dr. Tewes?”

“Yes, for once Nathan, you're correct. While I'm at it, I'll tell her everything. That way no one the likes of you can harm her with your dirty reports.”

“Look here,” he began, snatching at her arm.

“Tewes” pulled away from him, making curious reporters even more curious. She stormed off, wondering where Ransom was at this moment, knowing how hurt he must be, wondering if there wasn't some way to help him.

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?”

“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.”

“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. Good-bye.”

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.

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 confirmed by Dr. Fenger—had come apart in the fall due to the severity of a wound sustained to the neck—by a garroting device.

 

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
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.”

“
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 violinist 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
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
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.”