City for Ransom (29 page)

“In time…in time, Alastair.”

A cloud burst released a silver rain that suddenly began pelting them. Together, they stepped into the nearest cab and trundled in through the swinging door not built for Ransom's size. Once inside, laughing, he reached over and informed her that her makeup had begun to run. She leaned into him, preparing to accept a kiss as his large hand touched her cheek, his gentleness causing her pulse to race. But he patted down her mustache instead, telling her, “I'd kiss you if it weren't for the whiskers.”

He laughed. After a moment, she laughed. Curious of their laughter, the coachman opened his small window on the cab to study his passengers.

Ransom reacted to the sliding door as it opened, staring back at a pair of eyes that he only half recognized, unable to place. The eyes of the coachman proved most certainly familiar but somehow out of place, out of time.

“Ahhh, begging your pardon, sirs, but where're you off
to?” Water dripped in from the open panel that looked out on the coachman's seat. The sound of an unhappy horse up there came through with the rainwater.

“To the Palmer House, my good fellow,” announced Ransom, and to Jane he added, “where we'll drink and dine and—”

“No, no! It's no time for that! Take me straight 'way to my Belmont office. From there, Inspector Ransom can give you his destination.”

She hadn't given the young fellow an address, and Ransom asked her about this.

“He knows where Dr. Tewes lives. Most everyone this far north knows where he lives.”

“I see. Dr. Tewes tips well.”

“True, but this coachman knows you as well.”

“Really now, and who might that high-pitched voice and those beady eyes belong to?”

“Waldo, of course.”

“Denton?”

“Says he hardly makes a scrapping apprenticed to your friend Keane. Says he makes more money on tips. Afraid he calls your friend a skinflint.”

“Skinflint? Philo?” He laughed.

“Waldo says Keane thinks him his indentured servant!”

“OK, he's a skinflint. But at heart, a good man.”

“So we haul Denton into the courtroom as a character witness?”

“Perhaps not. The village idiots might draw a straight line between a skinflint and a murderer, as they've drawn a line from Philo's art to murder.”

“Art some are calling pornography.”

“I've seen it and I tell you it is art.”

“Have you…ever purchased from him?”

“Yes, photos of Merielle when I only knew her as Polly. Later, I bought up his entire inventory.”

“And you still have these,
ahhh
…artistic renderings?”

“I do.”

“I'm sure of their artistic merit,” she teased. “Look, if you want my advice, you will burn them.”

“For you, I will do it.”

“No for me.”

“For myself then.”

“Damn it, man, if Nathan can orchestrate Keane's arrest, and if he turns him over to the right interrogators, men like yourself…your friend Philo can be persuaded to point you out as having an obsession with one or more of the victims, and then
you
give Nathan the kindling to amass this fire under you in the form of these…artistic renderings?”

“Yes, I take your point.”

“I'm sure you would've concluded the same, but even had you…well, I imagine you'd hold on to one or two of the photos.”

“I'll destroy them all.”

“Else turn them over to the care of someone you trust.”

“That is a rare bird indeed.”

“Someone who'd never betray you.”

“I am at a loss for a name.”

“You thick-headed fool.”

“Dr. Fenger perhaps.”

“As he works for the police department—which is a travesty, as his office ought to be a separate entity so as to remain completely objective and above criticism and complaint—you'd be placing him in an awkward position, Alastair.”

“I can think of no one else.”

She gritted her teeth. “What of Dr. Tewes?”

“What of Dr. Tewes?”

“For a detective, you can be demonstratively thick at times.”

He reached out and leaned into her, about to kiss her regardless of the mustache, but he was stopped by a whoosh-slap sound.

The flap to the coachman had slapped open again. “Tewes's residence!”

She got out without responding to his last remark, instead
whispering so as Waldo could not hear, “Any prints of the girl you can't bring yourself to burn, get to me.”

“I'm not so sure there is any reason to fret over—”

“Remember who you're dealing with. Kohler is your worst enemy. If you've shots of Merielle you simply can't destroy, trust them to me.”

“One day…Nathan knows that one day…I'll find the tie that places his hand on the bomb at Haymarket.”

“His greatest fear. You are two men with reason to fear one another.”

“I guess I have not looked at it in quite those terms.”

“Fear is a great motivator, and when a man sucks fear up his nose, it fills his brain. Nathan Kohler will do anything to frame you, and arresting Philo is just his opening salvo.”

“You know a lot about the uncharted territories of the human mind, don't you, Doctor?”

“I have laid hands on a few.”

“Like mine? Did I tell you…”

“I know you like my touch, Ransom.”

“I can ask Waldo to hold if you'll call out Jane…two for the Palmer House.”

“Perhaps another night. I promised Gabby a special dinner. It's her birthday.”

“
Ahhh,
of course…of course. Then bring her along and we'll celebrate together.”

She realized just how deep-seated was his loneliness. Like an oak in a clearing…a lone oak. She couldn't be certain of her feelings for him; she'd not sorted out all of her own fears. He could be so good for her, and she for him, but on the other hand, he could destroy her so easily if he were one of these sorts who preferred the stalking to the catching and the mating. He could leave her as had Tewes in France, again devastating her emotions. “Perhaps if you call round late, you can have coffee and cake on the porch with us.” God, she silently cursed herself for being so cowardly and tentative in such matters—neither adjective something anyone anywhere would ever apply to her.

She quickly rushed onto her front porch, turning in time to see him raise his cane in a little wave. He then tapped his cane against the cab and chortled out “Muldoons!”

Jane was soon watching through a window sash from the safety of her home as the cab carrying Ransom trundled off east for Halsted Street.

It was an awkward passing thought Ransom
had as he rode alone in the cab. If someone were garroted and set aflame tonight, this would prove Kohler's having arrested Philo as sheer folly. But at what price must folly be proved? Someone would pay dearly—with her life—to see Philo freed, and this vendetta of a chess move that Kohler had made would prove a fool's undertaking indeed.
It must go nowhere.

Ransom felt certain that Philo wouldn't last a week in a Chicago cell before going stark raving mad, and that Jane was right: This move against Philo was Nathan's direct assault across his bow.
Damn charges'll go the way of the gutter.
But it might take time.

Still, the thought of mopping up after this murdering fiend wandering the Chicago fair, had no appeal. He tried to imagine the next victim, likely another young innocent—the monster's delicacy now. He didn't want to inhale the odor of burnt flesh or take in the sight of yet another decapitated body.

“Lay a trap for the bastard, you should, Inspector Ransom,” came a voice reading his mind it seemed.

He looked up through the peep window into the unblinking, glassy eyes of Waldo Denton. “A trap?”

“Yes, a trap, sir, is what we'd use on the farm back home. And who knows, if I was Johnny on the spot with that Night Hawk and was to get pictures, I could make my reputation, I could. Not to mention…well, a photo of the killer! Now that'd sell to all the papers in the city at a handsome price, not to mention it'd make us heroes, it would, you and me, coming in with a likeness of the bastard.”

The boy had soaked up more from Philo than Ransom had realized. “You'd need a damn wheelbarrowful of luck to be on hand when this monster slips out his garrote and slices someone's throat.”

“I read your remarks in the
Herald
and you're going to put 'im in a foul mood with words like that—calling 'im a coward and a weakling, fearful of his own shadow. Words like that, why, you might think he'd come straight for you, and if you were to sort of set yourself up as, say, bait…”

“Bait him, heh?” Ransom recalled giving the exclusive to Thom Carmichael.

Waldo kept talking. “Well, sir, I'm no policeman, but I read Mr. Pinkerton's spy book.”

“Hasn't everyone?”

“Pinkerton did a lotta what I'm saying, and you've already laid all the groundwork.”

“Thanks, Waldo. If it comes to a showdown, and I have time, I'll send for you,” Ransom promised, allowing the kid his fantasy. “You bring the Night Hawk. Make your name and fortune on the case.”

Denton cleared his throat at this point. “We've arrived at your destination, sir, Muldoon's.”

“Thanks.” He exited the cab and paid Waldo. “How long've you been driving a hack?”

“Too long and a half. Before apprenticing with Mr. Keane. The day job pays bills.”

“I see.”

“Good way to get to know our city. Learn it fast having a different fare every ten minutes.”

“You keep a close watch on your fares!”

“Personal touch insures they come to me before taking another hack.”

“Clever Waldo, quite.”

“I try to be. It's not easy.”

“Being clever?”

“I mean…it don't come easy is what I mean to say, sir.”

“Never had an opportunity for college, heh?”

“No, sir…not like them born with that silver spoon, what?”

“Ahhh…no chance at college myself either.”

“Oh, I could've gone to college…could've been smart and maybe train for some profession. But…circumstances held out against it.”

“Know what you mean…I do. Guess it was fortunate you took to photography.”

“A godsend really…. A golden opportunity to work with Mr. Keane, I say. And as for the meagerness what comes from Mr. Keane's hand, it did go a long way to help me in burying Mother.”

“I'll give your idea more thought. To lay a trap.” Ransom so wanted his hands on the monster who'd turned his city into a daily nightmare. Wanted five minutes alone with the fiend. Wanted to avenge Merielle and all the victims.

“Be sure to get word to me if you do it, sir,” Waldo kept on nonstop. “I mean…think of it. Even if the Phantom were to give you the slip, which ain't likely to happen to a detective of your stature, sir, but if your trap 'twere foiled, but we still got a shot—e'en of his back as he's running from you, why we'd have him!”

“Dead to rights in the frame.”

“Like Mr. Keane says, if it ain't in the frame, it ain't in the frame, and—”

“—and if it ain't in the frame, it doesn't exist.”

“Ironic…now Mr. Keane is in the frame…so to speak…”

“Yes, indeed.”

“And it's a put-up job, I warrant. When I heard that they'd
put the arm on Mr. Keane, I asked what can the authorities be thinking?” He began a low, curdling laugh rumbling from the diaphragm and escaping nostrils and mouth all at once, a kind of vomiting laugh that Philo had complained about on occasion. Ransom did his best to overlook the torturous sound, but not until Waldo was half a block off, did he feel he could get it out of his head along with the idea of a trap.

“I hope others agree with you about Keane, Waldo,” Alastair said to himself where he stood outside Muldoon's. “All you bloody armchair detectives are alike—spoiling for a fight. If young Waldo were not careful, he would indeed attract the attention of the Phantom. An old saying came to mind:
Be careful of what you wish.

For now a talk with Muldoon was in order.

When he walked into the dark little tavern, Muldoon was waiting for him, a baseball bat extended over his head. “I swear, Ransom, if you've come for trouble—”

“Nothing could be further from my thoughts, Muldoon! What trouble?”

Every rummy and street life in the place mentally braced for a confrontation. Hunched shoulders over the bar stiffened. Men began to move off into shadow, some who owed Ransom in either money or information, scurrying out the back. He had put word on the street that he wanted to know the identity of the infamous Phantom of the Fair, the expert garroter. To date, nothing had come of this effort, and this troubled him immensely, because if the people on the street like Dot'n'Carry could not locate an inchworm's worth of news, then this meant the fellow was not local, not known among the homeless and derelict and deviant street rats.

Such a state made the killer invisible.

But for the moment, Moose Muldoon and the Chicago Bear faced off.

Tension filled the space between Muldoon and Ransom, and everyone could taste the bad blood in the air.

“Muldoon, you stupid cock-sucking motherless swine,
do you know Jim Beckensaw? Your own alderman for this district?”

“'Course I do!”

“The man got the Sunday dry laws rescinded!”

“Again? already again!”

“He's a political genius, but you yourself know that this is what, the twentieth goddamn time? Ya blockheaded excrement brain! They rescind Sunday laws on a yo-yo pork string, and if you bothered ever to read a paper, you'd've some
passing
knowledge to get by on!”

“Look here, now! Are you here to drink or to fight?”

“German Tavern and Brewery Owners Association laid out a fortune at the doorstep of City Hall, and this ward you are smack in the middle of lies within boundaries of the chosen triangle!”

“Chosen triangle?”

“The bloody city blocks that can serve alcoholic beverages on any given Sunday!”

Muldoon looked stricken. “Nobody told me. I missed the last meet—” He almost finished his sentence before Ransom's cane sent Muldoon flat. From behind the bar, lying on the boards, everyone could hear the moose's moaning.

The bear calmly righted his cane and stepped regally to the door and back out onto the streets where he'd grown up.

He knew that Muldoon could appreciate the balance of it all, blow for blow.

 

As day turned to night, Alastair decided he must do something—
anything
—to take action against the killer. To this end, he began planting seeds all over the city. Even before leaving Muldoon's entirely, having stepped back into the black interior, he announced, “Take heed, all of you! This blasted Phantom's a fairy is what he is! If he wishes to prove himself anything other than a pussy, then, by God, stand up to a man! No more boys, no girls, no women, but a man!”

After a stunned moment of silence, a cheer went up for Ransom. Men wanted to buy him a drink, others slapped his back. He slammed the cane against the bar to silence the crowd even as Muldoon found his feet. “Buy me drinks and cheer me, lads,
after
I've cut off this bastard's head and handed it to him!”

Cheers went up.

“Let's see 'im take that pussy weapon of his to my neck!”

More cheers followed, and more drinks were pushed at Ransom. Laughter and jokes ensued, most of the jokes leveled at his characterization of the Phantom as a fairy and a coward. But one man in the room watched Ransom's massive neck from a dark corner and thought what a bloody easy ham it'd be to slice through and silence.

“Come on, you baby killer! You little-girl killer. Try your hand with a man!” Ransom shouted over the noise, succumbing to a toast proposed by Carmichael. Ransom had selected Muldoon's as the newsmen's hangout he knew it to be. He imagined the screaming headlines across every late edition. He meant to repeat the performance again—in every tavern he could manage between here and the great fair. “I'll be wandering the darkest, loneliest pathways of the lagoon at Lake Park, where you murdered those two children the other night. So come for me, you little dickless thing! Try to place your murderous guillotine on me!”

 

So here he was in the lagoon fairgrounds where Trelaine had failed to save Miss Mandor or himself. Ransom strolled one end to the other,
daring
the bastard to leap out from any blackness to slip his bloody wire about Ransom's beefy neck. They had surmised the killer a small man, if a man at all. Ransom was often taken with the fact that many hardened murderers and rapists, once nabbed, turned out to be slight of build and wretched little creatures indeed.

He believed the Phantom would have difficulty just loop
ing the garrote over his head and around his neck, much less slicing through his carotid artery, as he stood six-foot-four, and he had several layers of protective fat that the garroter would likely not figure on. To further complicate any attack on his person, as he paced here, was his cane, his blue steel revolver, and he'd borrowed a pair of specially made horse-hide gloves from a friend working the bovine slaughterhouse at the stockyards. These gloves would slow the cutting power of a garrote if he, like young Purvis, should get his hands between throat and wire. The gloves could slow the expected attack long enough to give him time to wrestle the killer to the ground—if only the bastard would strike!

“Where the devil is the little hellion who obviously has a hard on for me, killing poor Mere in my place?”

Ransom made the return walk from the end of the lagoon, around the water, passing strolling lovers, the occasional homeless who'd be tossed from the park as soon as the first patrolman crossed paths with ragmen, or bums as they were called. How long, he wondered, must he pace in the darkness in this pretense of leisure and calm here in the most poorly lit section of the lagoon, the Ferris wheel high over his shoulder.

In his ears, he heard the faint last death rattle of Miss Mandor out on the water, her boat so near he could leap into it from where he stood. His cop's imagination, his insight, intuition and instinct—
all challenged by this so-called Phantom
—brought the full picture of how the killer had enticed his victims to help out some “poor chap” in a second boat that was listing. Trelaine, in the throes of infatuation with Miss Mandor, perhaps thought he'd impress her with his show of humanity in the form of a dark figure who knew, somehow, enough about the couple to know that she could not scream out. He'd demonstrated on Trelaine what he intended for her. And it had all come to pass so quickly, and seeing Trelaine's head fall forward and into
the second boat, his body floating off and away, she most assuredly screamed her silent screams and fulfilled the killer's sick need to see her eyes bulge with fear and her skin prickle, and her extremities fight for life along with her last gasping breath. He'd leapt agilely from the rocking boat he'd himself scuttled, and into the boat transporting her, even as she attempted to leap out over the side to make the shore where Ransom now stood looking out over the black lagoon.

Silent now, the lagoon reflected back a sliver of moonlight and some nearby gaslight lamps, but this small show of light only made the surface look the more like black oil.
Is this Miss Mandor's last pleasant sight? Had she been mesmerized? Hesitated one second too late to make landfall? Had she got into the water, would she've stood a chance of escape? Alerting someone ashore
.

Sometimes his uncanny ability to recreate the scene of the crime frightened Alastair. Just good police work, he told himself, nothing special…not like the gift of a wonderful stage voice, an ability at acting, a gift of intelligence for science, or a talent for a musical instrument.

He wished to be home playing badly at that piano he kept as a constant challenge to learn. As a child, he'd dreamed once of being a concert pianist. The memory now made him feel foolish. No, he was born to this…to the hunt.

He'd had time to rethink the scene when Philo dropped that camera in utter sorrow over Miss Mandor's unnatural death. He mentally paced to the images of that night, moving on to each murder scene, each impression swelling his mind with a growing hatred of two monsters—one the faceless Phantom, the other himself.