City for Ransom (5 page)

Just after Haymarket, Chief Nathan Kohler's intelligent predecessor had made a deal for space at Cook County Hospital for police morgue work. What Dr. Fenger got in return was an endless and steady supply of John and Jane Does—cadavers. Christian's operating theater, where he taught surgery to a generation of doctors, never lacked for cadavers, not like the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and many other surgeries and medical schools. Before this arrangement between Cook County and the CPD, the earlier police coroner had been a former barber turned pathologist named Louie Fountenay who knew little to nothing about police science and investigation. A man without imagination as well.

“Be sure to point out the situation with the head and fingers to Doc Fenger when you accompany the body to the morgue, O'Malley.”

“Yes, of course, Inspector.” O'Malley jotted a note and mouthed, “Fingers…give fingers to Fenger.”

Chicago had almost as many train terminals as
police districts, but the Illinois Central Station had just opened this year as the busiest terminus for Columbian Exposition fairgoers. Designed as a through station—as many of the suburban trains used tracks that went through the terminal and on to Randolph and Lake streets—New York architect Bradford L. Gilbert patterned it on a Monet painting of the Paris train station. Opened to serve the tourist traffic to and from the great fair, Illinois Central stood a sight to behold with its towering, gangly turreted clock tower, gaudy Romanesque exterior, and its ponderous Richardsonian office wing extending outward from one side of the tower. Spindly iron columns that appeared ready to collapse at any moment under the weight of the massive masonry supported this penitent-looking wing. The whole an ugly symbol of the city's progress, felt awkward, a hodge-podge of random, hastily got-up gore, so far as Ransom could see.

Still, trains of every size and stripe bellowed and roared and whistled in and out, some suburban lines only slowing, going on to their next destination, while the huge engines of the Illinois Central and the Baltimore and Ohio sat at opposite ends like two bulls sizing one another up.

The interior of the building featured an enormous ellipti
cally vaulted waiting room straddling the tracks, and a grand staircase leading up to where Ransom stood. The marble steps opened wide, butterfly-fashion on two sides, going up to the second concourse. It was from up here one found stairs going to the top of the clock tower.

Two uniformed officers who Ransom had sent up to the clock tower and roof to investigate returned now with a brown paper bag in which they'd gathered six cigar butts, all the same brand, their bands proclaiming them Cuban Valenzas. Could the killer be so foolish? Had he staked out his victims over a period of days from the clock tower? Looking down over the panorama of the world's fair from that vaulted position?

“None of the workmen here claim the habit or the brand, sir,” said the officer in charge of the tower hunt.

Ransom's partner added, “A costly brand—Valenzas—not sold everywhere in the city. I smoke them myself on occasion.”

Ransom nodded, taking this all in, mentally picturing the killer dousing the young man with kerosene and lighting the corpse with his cigar. “Should I put you on my suspect list, Griff?” joked Alastair. He also made a mental note to call Stratemeyer, Chicago's foremost fire investigator. Get him down to Fenger's morgue to help determine the exact nature of the accelerant, and if it might've been touched off by a cigar. If any man could find residue of cigar in the ashes of the boy's clothing, it was Harry Stratemeyer. Ransom had already drawn on Harry in connection with the previously torched garrote victims, and Stratemeyer assured him that neither had been torched
while
alive. Alastair imagined it so in this case as well, as the fire had remained stationary, the grime and creosote trail going nowhere. People afire who are alive tended to spread it around.

Ransom had taken no notice that Drimmer had stiffened, rankling at the suggestion he could be a killer.

Instead Alastair was watching the trains come and go below, like herding elephants in India, recalling his time there
a few years ago while on holiday. Just outside the huge, marble-columned, marble-floored concourse, just outside the west and south windows, lay the infamous red-light Levee district and beyond, a slum wasteland. Closer to hand, directly below the window where he stood, Ransom studied the warm but limited glow of the gaslights that lined the little “cow paths”—so-called by students coming and going from the University of Chicago campus. The same lanes once led cattle to the slaughter at the Chicago Stock Yards—a standing joke with the students, but now rail lines hauled the cattle to slaughter, and the slaughter paths had been left for the students going to exams.

The paths also led people from the locomotive engines of the Illinois Central to the Alley L—the first elevated train line in the city. The Alley L journeyed folks on toward the South Side and the Hyde Park campus, but not without the stench of the infamous Chicago Stock Yards filling the cars. The odor of slaughter wafted for six city blocks in every direction. On a bad day with the wind blowing in from the lake, this foul odor blanketed the entire city.

From the second-floor balustrade, Ransom looked out over the solemn main concourse where uniformed officers, with little enthusiasm and smaller hope, questioned people, asking if anyone had seen anything out of the ordinary. The sound of steam-powered trains wafting up to him, Ransom returned to stare out the window at a growing and often troubled metropolis, reflected here in the terminal district where so many different rail lines crisscrossed as to boggle the mind.

He'd been on the scene for an hour and a half now, and his bad leg and back were conspiring with stomach pains from having not eaten. Having had to deal with Tewes atop the gruesome remains had left his nerves in disarray. The sheer cowardice of the killer infuriated him, so evilly Machiavellian down to the instrument of murder: its street name the
Devil's bow tie
. In a sense, a garrote was a hand-held guillotine, also created and perfected by the French—purveyors of culture and horror at once, as with all mankind, Ransom thought.

His skin-crawling need for an opium hit kicking up, his maimed left leg aching, and dry heaves threatening, Ransom—perspiring heavily now—excused himself and walked away from Griff and the others. He bypassed the men's room when he looked inside at the floor still polished in blood. Swallowing hard, he pushed through the doorway to the stairs leading to the clock tower. He wanted no one to see his fevered restlessness as the opium addiction withdrawal of mere hours now grapple-hooked his insides and crept along the epidermal layers of his skin.

Alone in the clock tower stairwell, Alastair struggled to regain control. He pulled forth a flask and emptied its contents—Bourbon whiskey—swallowing in rhinoceros fashion. Light filtered down from the top of the tower, which looked a thousand steps away. Ransom took the stairs, struggling against his own heft and body to wind his way up the spiraling steps like those in a lighthouse.

At the top, he stood and stared down from the window the killer may've gazed from; may even have watched his young victim's approach from. What kind of internal slings and arrows and horrors beset the madman? How much did the killer hate God, mankind, society, people, Ransom's city, and in the end himself—his own horrid soul? And how bloody similar were they, this phantom and Ransom's own shadow self? The one that crawled up out of him during his most private moments?

From below, young Griffin Drimmer banged clumsily up the first few steps, his voice spiraling up to Alastair. “Rance? You all right?”

“Just catching the view!” he shouted back. “Preparing for the Ferris wheel!” he joked.

“Ahhh, not a bad idea. It'd take an act of God to get me that high off the ground!” Griff's voice grew louder with each footstep. “If God meant for us to fly, he'd've given us the equipment.”

“Give me time for a smoke, Griff. Wanted to see where they found the cigar butts.”

“Yeah, sure, Rance…sure.”

With Griff sufficiently persuaded to leave him in peace, Inspector Ransom stared from this six-story-high vantage point at the grand new buildings of the Columbian Exposition lining the coast of the largest lake in the Midwest. Most prominent was the Ferris wheel. Everyone asked these days, ‘Have you dared ride the wheel?' and few people had for fear of its dizzying heights. Ransom had as yet to brave it. A marvel to behold, a symbol of what mankind had accomplished, along with all the other wonders of the fair, which had given law enforcement officials special headaches, as every day people were mugged by hoodlums and pickpocketed by street children. The complaints had kept the CPD understaffed for over a month now, and for Alastair the fair could not come to a close soon enough, but not before he rode the wheel—perhaps while under the influence of his opiate.

But he had time, as the fair was slated to run through summer's end. Everyone in Chicago—including off-duty police—had flocked to the exposition, the crowds enormous, just as they were this morning. Food vendors, merchants, and manufacturers showing their wares could not be more content. But rumors, reports, and leaks about a “Chicago Ripper” had begun to filter through, and people at the top like the governor, the mayor, his people, the architects of the fair feared the worst. No doubt, this new killing would alarm the entire city, and everyone would hear the fanciful epithet cops'd begun to whisper: The Phantom of the Fair—who wielded a garrote like a butcher with a de-boning knife.

Alastair pulled on the tobacco blend he'd mixed with marijuana. He'd given some thought to marketing it as a healing smoke known to the ancients and rediscovered—make a buck or so on the side like that Tewes fellow. Food no longer tasted as good, but winters in Chicago seemed shorter. Fact of the matter, Alastair liked Chicago cold—more human hibernation and less crime in the cold.

Griffin had quietly come up the stairs after all, and he
called out from the landing below. “Thought…you gave up ta-ta”—he fought for breath, panting—“ta-bacco…for lent.”

“Lent? No…
rent.
I gave it up so I could pay my rent.”

“Oh, yeah.” Griffin made the final landing. He fell silent at the sunrise coming over the fair. “Weird paradox. They build this station so more people might come in for the fair, and now this.”

“We're going to catch this son of Hades, but until we do, the bosses want us to somehow keep it out of the papers. So it won't affect their precious fair.”

“But the reporters're all over this.”

“The dyke will hold a bit longer, Griffin. Mayor Carter Harrison has his thumb on every publisher in the city.”

“All the English language papers're going to go wild for sure.”

“No, they won't. Any city editor stupid enough to print a word of it, and he'll be handed his hat—unless they all wise up and decide to simultaneously print it in every paper at once.”

“What about Thomas Carmichael at the
Herald
? He was downstairs in the crowd, Rance.”

“Carmichael, I'll deal with Thom personally.” Ransom was beginning to like Griff's calling him Rance.

“Whataya going to do? How can you stop his mouth?”

“The old-fashion way—”

“Politics!” They said it in unison. Then they laughed, the sound of it spiraling down the stairwell. Ransom took a long pull on the pipe.

Sniffing, Drimmer said, “Unusual odor that blend you're smoking.”

The smoke created a halo over his head. He pointed to the fair. “At the moment, the party is all that matters. It's the largest, most expensive blowout in history, Griff, rivaling Rome, twice the size of the Paris World's Fair, and it will be protected at all costs.”

“Three killings, the work of the same lunatic…can't be hushed up for long.”

“You're smart, but you're new to Chicago politics. If the mayor and commissioner want it kept out of the papers, it'll be kept out of the papers.”

“But the papers're so critical of Commissioner McDonoughue.”

“All for show. Keep the population believing they have a voice.”

“God, Rance, you're cynical.”

“I've earned my cynicism, every poisonous drop of it.” He tapped his cane against his injured leg. “Not like I can escape it.”

“When is your injury not with you?”

“Rarely…rarely…”

“When you're using opium or hemp, or both?”

“Ahhh, so you do know my secrets.”

“It's no secret, my friend. Kohler has wind of it. Asked me to report on duty use.”

“He did indeed?”

“Yes, he did.”

“And will you? Report me, that is?” He indicated his pipe.

Griffin hesitated a moment. “I've only seen you smoke tobacco.”

“Good man.”

“A lot of people want to see you go the way of this Willard Birmingham fellow. You must take care.”

“I'm always careful, Griff, and not to worry unduly. You'll only get warts worrying o'er the likes of me.”

They watched the sunrise stream through the thousands of taut wires and metal slats making up Mr. Ferris's giant wheel. Griff finally said, “You ever going to tell me exactly what happened at Haymarket Square that day in eighty-six?”

“Maybe…one day.”

“This year?”

“Perhaps when all the evidence is in….”

“But Kohler says there was a thorough investigation, inquests into the deaths, everything that could be done…”

“Let's just say it was an official investigation—and all that entails.”

“Inquests are supposed to finish a thing.”

“Yes, inquests were done, but I would not use the word
thorough
. Thorough might include the truth.”

Griffin studied the older man's features while Ransom stared off into the distance, his eyes again drawn to the big wheel, its splendid synchronicity, its scientific perfection.

Of a sudden, Alastair had enough of the ornate clock tower window, feeling calmed. He and Griffin made their way back down the spiraling stairwell. “I want to thank you, Griff,” he said.

“For what?”

“For your kindness in not judging me too harshly. Gracious of you, actually.”

“Oh, not at all. I understand your addiction to the opiates, Rance, I do. We've all some bloody crutch or other.”

“What're you talking about? Alastair Ransom? A crutch? To hell with you, Griffin Drimmer.” He grabbed the other man by the scruff of the neck and kiddingly shook him.

Griff laughed and pulled away. “Part of the human condition, I'd say, like decaying teeth. God giveth teeth and he taketh 'em away.”