City for Ransom (10 page)

It was not a thing she'd relished doing, as she respected and admired her one-time instructor in surgery, a brilliant man and a wonderful mentor, and her father's friend. He'd been one of the few instructors she'd had this side of the Atlantic who had trained her as he might a man. Few men were as ahead of their time as Dr. Christian Fenger, and he so reminded her of her father, and Jane believed that his fine reputation brought more thousands to the operating table than did the use of ether and chloroform. She hated using him, but there seemed no other choice.

A noise came from without. Gabby had come home, and she was talking to someone. Jane Francis cursed under her breath. How often must she tell Gabby she simply must tell
her friends that her doctor father can't abide anyone in his clinic or his house as he had a morbid fear of the microbial world?

She peeked out to the next room, her forceps still in hand, to see Inspector Ransom standing in her parlor. “Jesus!” she gasped. The man stood nervously rocking on his heels, looking about, as Gabrielle explained, “But Father is not here.”

Jane looked for some out. The bedroom window, but that was a drop into the bushes and neighbors already kept a prying eye on Tewes. Then she saw an apron hanging on the back of the door. She snatched it down and tied it on, and in an instant, stepped into the parlor and asked, “Can I be of any service? I'm the doctor's caretaker, maid, fix-it person, and sister, Jane. Can I help you, sir?”

“I'm looking for your…ahhh brother.” The bull shoved his weight from side to side. “I have a bone to pick with him.”

“I see. I'm sorry, sir, but he is not at home.”

“Then I'll wait.”

“Aren't you Inspector Ransom, sir?”

“Oh, oh, yes…Ransom. Sorry…thought I'd said so.” He held up his inspector's badge—a gold-plated shield.

“And I am Miss Ayers.”

“Really? Jane Erye like in the book?”

“No…no…A-Y-E-R-S…quite different. Jane Francis ahhh…Ayres.”

“So is there a convenient place for me to wait?”

“Outside perhaps…”

“Outside?”

Merielle-Polly is right about him
, she thought.
He is a bit thick-headed.
“Yes, please, outside. We are two women in the house, and doctor would not be pleased if he returned to find us alone with you, sir. Only polite to wait outside.”

“Not in the study?”

“Sorry.”

“Not in the doctor's office?”

“No, sir, now please…outside. There's an ample porch, a swing.”

Gabrielle erupted in a laugh she stifled.

Ransom frowned, placed on his bowler hat, gave a fleeting glance at the spinster sister, turned, and stepped through the door. From the door, Miss Jane Francis ‘Ayres' shouted behind him, “I do hope it is not too important. If so, you might find doctor at Cook County. And if not there, Hanrahan's on Archer near—”

“I know the place.” Ransom tipped his hat at the woman. Odd, he thought, how her eyes and those of young Gabby—who'd introduced herself as Dr. Tewes's daughter—had looked so much alike, aunt and niece, but then rumor had it the child was adopted for usury by Tewes. Perhaps Jane was the actual mother?

The afternoon shadows were lengthening, and in the distance, a thick roiling cascade of clouds threatened to invade from the lake to Chicago's downtown, the army of storm clouds forming like a regiment over skyscrapers in the distance, no doubt worrisome for the fairgoers and merchants.
Nature had no business cutting into profits,
Ransom imagined on the lips of every Chicago merchant.

He stepped off the porch and into a thin, surprisingly chilly silver downpour, having decided to go in search of Dr. Tewes at Hanrahan's. Not likely he was at Cook County. Most likely he told people that he was on staff at Cook County along with most all the luminaries of the medical profession in Chicago, and the thought made him laugh. Imagine Tewes alongside a man like Christian Fenger.

“Hanrahan's…far more likely.” The South Levee was the den of lowlife in the city. As a cop, he knew every section of town and its character, and the Levee maintained the deadliest reputation, even above Hair Trigger block. Called by many the Old Tenderloin district, the South Levee had become firmly entrenched twenty-odd years before any thought of a Columbian Exposition. Now there existed
two
South Levee districts—a new extension of the old reaching
like icy fingers toward the world's fair, close enough to the Loop office buildings as to be within view from the Union League Club windows. A horror and an abomination to the gentry.

Ransom climbed into a waiting cab he found a few blocks from Tewes's place and shouted up through the window at the driver to take him to Hanrahan's in the South Levee. The cabbie hesitated and stared down at his fare as if seeing him for the first time.

“Official business,” said Ransom, displaying his inspector's badge.

The man's face sank like stone turning to dough. He knew to get his fare he'd have an hour's headache just filling out the paperwork, and the wait for the reimbursement would take months.
Police business
, it was termed.

Ransom heard the driver's guarded curses as the cab lurched forward without grace. As the carriage made its journey through busy, crowded streets for the south Loop area, Ransom thought of this turn of events with Merielle. She'd made him promise to not harm Dr. Tewes or his hands.

“The man's hands're unbelievable!” she'd exclaimed.

“Drink your absinthe,” he'd shouted back.

“But Alastair, he possesses some sort of
Rasputin-like
ability, totally relaxing you while reading you like a book.”

But his foul mood against Tewes and against the bastard who'd beaten Mere, fueled by each rhythmic
clop-clop-clop
of the carriage horse, was further fueled by having to go near the area not far from where he'd been born and raised, now an area of indecent trades. God, he felt like thrashing Polly from out of his Merielle, or in some way combining the two, and somehow making both sides of her love him unreservedly.

Perhaps she was incapable of such a love. She did indeed seem “shut up” in sin. She had let him down. Disappointed him. Falling back into old habits, and going to this snake-oil salesman when he should suffice. And then the nerve of the little creep. Giving bad advice to Merielle, warning her off
him! All this had come about
before
Ransom had shoved the dead boy's head into Tewes's hands! How galling.

Just when he'd begun to feel that all was well. That he had control of his life. That he had the woman he loved. That she loved him. Now this.

Plus Merielle had taken to lying to him, something he expected and saw every day on the job. But not from her. It infuriated him. She swore that it'd not been Elias Jervis who'd blackened her eye. Swore on her mother's memory that Jervis had left for Milwaukee as certain friends of Ransom's—toughs on the force, she'd called them—had made life in Chicago too “hot” for Jervis, the worst sort of pimp, to continue in “Ransomland,” as she'd put it. Merielle added, “l don't know the man's name, only that he wore a black cape, a top hat, boots all shined. A real gent,” she'd finished.

“Some bloody gent! Strikes you 'cross the face?” he replied.

Where Hanrahan's sat, square between these two levee districts, was the southern tip of the Loop, bounded on the east by Dearborn, Clark on the west, and Harrison on the north. This had more recently come to be called the wicked Custom House Place Levee. The “Gem” of the prairie continued its reputation as America's wickedest city, its reputation that of a bacchanal the likes of which must make Rome blush.

High-minded temperance leaders and aldermen who didn't care about getting reelected blathered on about one day burning out the cancer of the entire South Levee—both new and old—in the name of the Lord, as done with other areas in the early days. Some nights a parade of angry citizens marched through the South Levee with torches held at the ready, but unlike The Sands and Hair Trigger Block, an actual burn-out hadn't come to pass. Still an uneasy tension between the so-called socially conscious and the vice merchants always hung over Chicago like a pall. Thirty-seven to forty houses of prostitution squatted within the confines of
the new levee alone. Forty-six saloons and growing. Eleven or twelve pawnbroker houses. A shooting gallery or two, and an obscene bookstore. Many a dipping house operated here, in which a closet-sized room was opened on a waiting prostitute, the John mugged and robbed, girl and pimp splitting the proceeds.

It'd taken him a long time, but finally Ransom had gotten some useful information out of Merielle. She came across with what the “gent” called himself—“Mr. Sleepeck Stumpf” which sounded ridiculous to Ransom's ear, but she insisted on it.

He'd passed the name along to Dot 'n' Carry and other of his streetwise friends to hunt him down—he wanted a word with Mr. Stumpf. The result so far pointed to a fictitious name.

Alastair placed his cane with the wolf's-head bone handle at ease alongside him as he leaned back into the cushioned seat of the hansom cab. This particular cab was indeed plush and the burgundy seats rich and warm. The interior, no doubt, had been done by the Pullman Company or Fischer. The Studebaker carriage company had lost out repeatedly to the other two for large contracts; Ransom had read as much in the papers. He tried to recall a time when he'd had a moment to read a paper, fatigue washing over him.

Alastair closed his eyes as the cab made for the destination suggested by the handsome petite woman whose features were surprisingly memorable, although he'd given her scarcely a nod. He wondered if she had any idea of the Levee district's reputation. Surely no, or she wouldn't've pointed out that her brother, the good doctor, frequented the area.

Or had she wantonly wished for an officer of the law to know of her brother's questionable proclivities? How much did this woman know of Dr. Tewes, or of his comings and goings? Perhaps, in the future, she could prove useful?

Philo Keane had fallen asleep to the sound of a
Strauss waltz on his phonograph while thinking of Miss Chesley Mandor. Philo had one other vice than drink, and this was his prurient interest in the curvaceous body of a woman—as he'd all his life engaged in the search for the perfectly formed female, a dream that possessed him. He purely loved and respected the feminine form, from the tender half flush along the nape of the neck to the luscious ripe oval of the breasts, the deep valley of the cleavage, the enrapturing triangle of the crotch—a magnet to his eye and camera lens.

He loved the species, fussing with her lips, her eyebrows, her lashes, her ears and adornments, and her neck and necklaces and chokers and lacy things from items on a bonnet to items on her privates. The way she tossed back her hair; the way she tossed back a pint of ale; the way she stood hands on hips when angry. Yes, he loved this vivacious creature called woman. He loved this ideal in his mind's eye, but he also loved the flawed ones, the fallen ones, the sad and swollen ones, but most of all, he loved any woman—prude or prostitute—who'd had the decency to retain the beauty given her early in life.

Philo wanted more than anything to combine his interest and love of the female form with his art. To make money with these two interests simultaneously had become his
driving obsession. He had to be careful, however, as the Victorian prudishness of many if not most of his prospective clients in such a venture reared its ugly head and suddenly some fool is calling a cop, shouting “pornography” when in fact, Philo created art.

All round him, Philo saw the most god-awful advertising. Fliers created by fools. No use of negative space. No visual component. As an artist with a camera, he found the advertising people settled for appalling and garish and foolish and redundant and boring and pedestrian and on and on…Not a
whit
of thought in it and no
wit
besides! But he had plans for Chicago advertisers. He had now a library of photos of beautiful women in various poses in Grecian and Roman dress, some quite suggestive, and should he find a backer, someone with gumption and capital—why then, look out. And should he superimpose the lady with a farm implement or a tin of snuff, a soft drink or hard liquor, or that new contraption invented by Thomas Crapper called indoor plumbing? What limits remained? If only he could squeeze money out of some of these old duffers like Sears, Roebuck or Field, there was a fortune to be made in advertising.

It all seemed God's plan for him.

Born in Canada, Philo Keane had immigrated to Chicago in search of work like so many before him, except that he was a skilled lithographer. But he gave up this career for what appeared a far more lucrative one—photography—which he'd grown to love, and which he suspected would supplant all lithography someday, making his older profession obsolete.

Philo had studied with a fellow Canadian, the famous Napoleon Sarony, himself apprenticed to the celebrated lithographers Currier & Ives. Napoleon, now near death in a New York hospital, had made history when he sued a clothier who expropriated a photograph of none other than Oscar Wilde posed by Sarony in an artistic rendering—as Sarony had pioneered the celebrity portraiture business.

The case was the
Burrows-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony
, and its roots went back to an advertisement for hats
that'd used 85,000 reproductions of Sarony's print, while ignoring Sarony's copyright!

Sarony, on learning of the outrage, took his case to court and won, but his opponents appealed to the Supreme Court where they argued that since the technology of photographs hadn't existed in 1790, then photographs could not be covered under the copyright laws framed in a 1790 Act of Congress.

The Supreme Court disagreed, citing that the founding fathers had anticipated all manner of futuristic discoveries in both patent and copyright law. Justice Samuel Miller, who wrote the ruling, added that an author is simply the one “to whom anything owes its origin.” As Sarony's #18 Oscar Wilde was ruled a work of art and the “product of plaintiff's intellectual invention, and as a class of invention for which the Constitution intended to secure to the author for exclusive right to use, publish, and sell…” and so it went.

The ruling made Sarony and his company a household name.

And while men with vision like Sarony had gone full tilt into the photographic portraiture business with a passion, and their reward was great, Philo disliked portraiture as ironically “lacking in art.” At least he could not make art of it, but he could make art of a beautiful body.

He'd gone broke filming naked women—prostitutes on the whole, but women to whom he'd paid homage and greenbacks. His collection of feminine beauty was, in discreet gentlemen's circles, legend, and Philo'd begun to turn a profit on some of this trade, as clients—quite specific in their demands—had grown.

“—a redhead fully nude, a redhead partially nude bent over a barrel, a nude blonde doing a pirouette, nude brunette in a tutu doing a pirouette, a nude from the waist up, a nude from the waist down with a cigar in one hand, a brandy snifter in another…”

He gulped down another drink. Surprisingly, he did his best work, when either angry or tipsy. Regardless of client and demand, Philo always carefully posed his models in an
artistic manner with attention to detail and decorum, using his extensive collection of luxurious sheer nightwear in a pose reminiscent of sculptured goddesses, sometimes…never always and never for certain…but on some rare occasions, he did reach a pinnacle of stellar art, like the piece that Ransom had purchased for three bottles of rye and two of whiskey for a likeness of Polly Pete. Polly was spectacular, as close to Philo's ideal as he ever hoped to come, but Polly was Ransom's woman now. Now there was a beautifully rendered piece of art if ever there was—Polly…real name Merielle Spears. She'd gone rough-hewn and hard-edged early in life, and yet under the right conditions and upbringing, she may well have been a lady of high society. But even Polly was eclipsed by Chesley.

Philo returned to the darkroom to examine cuts taken at the train station. Gruesome. But the impromptu one of Ransom handing that charlatan Tewes the head proved priceless. Philo laughed anew at the incident. How like Ransom to lose it like a rattler without a rattle, so suddenly and without warning.

Keane ogled the developed photographs, hanging each now to dry and talked to himself. “Must make more prints. Limfkins, Haldermott, and Janklow pay well for photos of the dead, and this series of ‘head' and ‘headless' shots'll go dearly. As for the photo of Alastair in all his raging glory—
what a bull of a man he is
—well that one any newsman in the city'll pay a premium for.”

But he pulled up short in his enthusiasm, remembering that Alastair was the only friend he had.

“Damn bloody dilemma, what old man?” he asked himself. “Bloody friendship.” The Canadian accent he'd worked years to conceal filtered in whenever he was alone.

The phonograph record in the other room had continued a rhythmic irking as it had come to the end of the music and repeatedly ran in the final groove.

He stumbled toward the phonograph, anxious to put on
another Strauss and dance with himself. As he did so, he gulped down another drink.

Along State Street the same day

The killer lifted what had been Purvis's handkerchief—or more likely his girlfriend's, as it smelled of perfume. The smell quickened his pulse as he relived the bloodletting. Stumpf could do that, imagine it all as if happening over again, even here, standing below an awning to avoid the late-afternoon shower. Nearby carriage horses slick with rain stood silent vigil amid the bustle of Chicago commerce. He stared at his reflection in a Field's window and saw the four mirrored eyes—his and Purvis's. Saw the right hand fingers popping off like so many escaping tadpoles. Then blood spurting from his victim's neck, painted both mirror and basin. Young Cliffton had instinctively covered the leaking dyke of his carotid artery with his left hand, but by now every vein and artery in the neck had been severed. No holding back the flood.

Even here in broad daylight on Chicago's hard-packed streets, the killer felt a sexual release beneath his clothes, so clearly had Sleepeck Stumpf recreated the killing, reimagining the event by simply sniffing repeatedly at the purloined handkerchief—a souvenir of achievement. His first male. It'd been interesting the way the boy's legs had buckled; how like a marionette he'd become, giving way to the gravity of death…like a stone sinking. The feel of it…his power over life at that moment of death's weight taking the boy down to his knees—it all held such absolute charm for the assassin.

How the victim slid so easily over the marble floor as I dragged him along in his own blood. A wondrous emotion welling up. Something never imagined. How like the slaughter animal, the way his carcass gave itself up to my control.

Firing of the bodies held no excitement for him. It was merely for show…something extra for Inspector Ransom.

Cliffton had died of massive blood loss. Traumatic, hemorrhagic shock due to the neck wound. He hadn't felt a thing after that, certainly not the fire. In fact, he was so suddenly dead that he hadn't time to think of anything but the enveloping arms of death. No time for questions of why or of eternity, heaven or hell; nothing normal or natural in the way he went.

Young Cliffton—at the point of attack—in Illinois Central Station, second-floor concourse men's room no longer gave a rat's ass about examining the architecture, or studying under the finest architects, or recalling how sweet his girl's kiss was beneath the Ferris wheel. He had been jabbering and washing his hands—just as his mother, no doubt, had taught him—when the garrote leapt round his neck.

Quick efficient silent death slipped from a coat pocket.

Again he covered his nostrils with the aroma of the stolen handkerchief—Cliffton's possession. It conjured up another aroma, the last odor Cliffton smelled—his own blood. He sucked it in, and his brain filled with the images of holding life in his hands.

Not only had Cliffton been the first male he'd ever killed, but the only victim he hadn't assiduously stalked. Opportunity had simply presented itself there in the train station. His third killing since arriving in Chicago. He'd only killed small animals until now, practicing on them with the garrote. But he'd never been found out or arrested. So he wasn't in their various card files.

Another of his victims had been a tender, lovely, young milk-skinned little family girl, a Polish princess named Milka Kaimeski—Cliffton's female counterpart. He liked killing the innocent and unblemished.

Friends of Milka's had left her in the company of a gentleman the night she lost her life. Descriptions of the phantom gentleman were as varied as those of Christ himself and so rendered useless, but all were in agreement that he carried
a cane, wore a top hat, expensive leather shoes, coat and tails, and that he was smitten by the beautiful young Milka. Most accounts put the man at thirty or thirty-five, the age he effected when prowling for prey. In point of fact, he carried no cane. Canes were for crippled old men like that fanciful copper, Inspector Ransom. He didn't himself need a stinking cane to take down that fat screw, as he was young and strong, having just turned twenty. Sure, the old hero of Haymarket had a hundred pounds on him, but the great equalizer lay silent in his pocket, the mini-guillotine.

As for his first Chicago victim, she too, had gone to the fair. But she'd been a tough, gaunt, hard-edged, leather-skinned cigar-smoking working girl named Hannah O'Doul, a red-light district prostitute. She'd gone to the fair on a lark with friends, but having run short of funds, Hannah separated, intending to acquire more funds by picking up a John at the fair. She'd found him. Or rather, he'd been stalking her.

She wanted most of all to ride the Ferris wheel, and while frightened of its enormity, she remained fascinated at the idea of reaching out to touch a bird in flight. He'd dumped her body along the forested lane where police routinely patrolled, mimicking the playful taunts of old Jack the Ripper himself. Hannah's death only made a few sentences, buried on the obit pages.

Killing prostitutes got no play in the press, and little had been made of the Polish girl in the Chicago press either. It disturbed both him and Sleepeck Stumpf that these heinous murders had been given so little attention. They'd both expected outrage. They'd expected a flood of ink devoted to the killer. But surely now they'd see results in the dailies; they must give it front-page mention now, thanks to his having upgraded to the murders of an unborn along with the Polish girl and now a fresh off-the-farm school lad—all in a matter of weeks. The response must now be outrage.

He imagined the morning newspaper accounts in the
Chicago Tribune
and the
Daily Herald
:
POLICE STYMIED BY PHANTOM GARROTER, AT A LOSS FOR CLUES
.

News of the killings on the street ran ahead of the reporters, outstripping their efforts and accounts. News had also spread wide about the Polish girl's pregnancy. He hadn't known it at the time; not that it'd've mattered a whit to Stumpf. Apparently, no one else had known she was a spoiled dove, left to fend for herself. That is until the autopsiest, a Dr. Christian Fenger, declared it so. This news spurred belated outrage. Authorities had arrested the boy Milka had been seeing—father of the child being their prime suspect.

Afterwards, Sleepeck Stumpf called her another Hannah O'Doul in the making, a street tramp—no better. Getting herself knocked up in such fashion. A sign of the times, end of century coming on—the
end time
! And as for the unborn child, what bloody chance might it've had at a future anyway?