City for Ransom (17 page)

“Damn you, Harry! What's become of her?”

Stratemeyer merely lifted his chin, and Ransom followed his eyes upward. Above, caught on an exposed daggerlike protrusion of steel pipe—part of the upstairs plumbing—her body dangled: a charred disfigured doll, and ghastliest of all, she was headless.

Ransom went to his knees, bellowing like a wounded
beast. All of the hurt, all of the pain she must have felt, he screamed out in her name.

Stratemeyer called for some of his men to escort Alastair out of the devastation.

When Stratemeyer felt confident that Ransom had been put in a cab and sent home, he went around the bar and stooped below the bedsprings to reach in for the other part of the woman he'd only known as Polly Pete, the woman Ransom had made a reputation on with his winnings as a gambler. Harry'd never heard her called anything else. He wondered about the name Merielle. Guessed it Polly's nickname, else the one given her at birth by parents, whoever they were…wherever they might be…if even alive.

One thing he knew was to treat Polly's body with all the respect of a queen, Alastair Ransom's queen. He knew not to assume anything, knew to pass this along to the medical chaps who'd ultimately take her in their care, knew not to willy-nilly bury the remains in Potter's Field, not without consulting Ransom.

An assistant rushed to Stratemeyer's opened arms with a large paper sack to receive the head. This done, Harry pointed to the dangling corpse overhead. “Somebody get a ladder against that wall! Determine if it'll hold! And confound it all…if God willing, snatch that poor woman down.”

“Sir, if I may volunteer for that duty,” replied Rodney McKeon. “Alastair Ransom's been a good friend, sir.”

Harry concurred, nodding firmly, thinking Ransom had done so much for so many. He dropped his gaze and jerked his head to hide a creeping tear. “That man doesn't deserve this.”

“Some bastard's taken her head off,” muttered another fireman.

McKeon added, “Yaaa…looks the same bastard as did the others, but this time…” He paused to bring home his point. “This time, he's gone too far.”

Harry said, “And he's not goin' to get away with it, not after Ransom finds his wits.”

 

Alastair Ransom hadn't gone home in the cab they put him into; instead, he wound up at Muldoon's, unsure how he'd arrived here. He pounded on the door, demanding he be served, until Muldoon pulled it wide. Muldoon argued the law that shut taverns down on any given Saturday midnight not to reopen until Monday noon. Ransom pushed past the giant Muldoon, who snatched out a blackjack and slammed it into Alastair's head, knowing he had the law on his side. This just as Mike O'Malley'd arrived.

O'Malley arrested Muldoon for assaulting an officer, and Ransom was taken into custody for a drunk and disorderly, orders of Chief Kohler himself, and ignobly thrown into the drunk tank. With no beds left, they laid him out on the floor, unconscious.

Muldoon was booked for battery on a police official and told his court date would come round when it came around, despite his continual plea: “I was trying to uphold the drinking laws put forth by authorities!”

It fell on deaf ears. Muldoon's use of the sap to the back of Ransom's head had caused a concussion, and saps were as illegal as drinking on Sunday—which actually changed from one week to the next, depending upon the level of graft. In fact, the drinking laws proved as mercurial as the tides.

“He knows the rules but chose to break 'em! I pay good money to run a business, and this is how you treat me?” complained Muldoon, his gigantean features terrifying even through the bars.

“You daft fool, Muldoon! Have ya no sense? That's Alastair Ransom you knocked cold, and he has friends all over Chicago.”

“I know who he is, but he pushed into my establishment shouting orders!”

“Have you not heard the news, man?”

“What news?”

“Christ man, why news of a black-hearted bastard who's going about the city cutting off heads!”

“Every day it's all I hear!”

“About this morning's victim! Found in the fire on Clark Street?”

“What's it to me?”

“It was Ransom's Polly who was
murrr-durrr-ed
, man!”

It finally hit Muldoon, sinking into the thick walls of his head. “So he decides he'll take it out on me, does he?”

“He needed a drink, and he needed it badly, and you ought've given it up.”

“It's me license I worry about.”

“Aye…like every merchant in this city.”

“You coppers don't make it easy on a man, the way you scratch honest earnings!”

“Honest is it? Your place is a bloody front for every vice known to—”

“—and now they got fees for this, and fees for that, and soon it'll come to having to pay a fee to keep a rooster in your own bloody yard!”

“Dare you now swear at your jailor?”

“Look…is Ransom going to be OK?”

“I dunno. Moans a bit now and again; still outta his head. Didja have to hit him so hard?”

“I didn't want that man getting up after I hit 'im, for sure.”

“Well…you succeeded…least till he comes to. Best think of selling your place and getting out.”

“Ne'er saw a copper so liked by other coppers.”

“He's a good man, a noble man to be sure.”

“And I suppose, O'Malley, you're one of his henchmen?”

Mike O'Malley grimaced at Muldoon. “I shoulda beaned you!”

“All right…I should've thought before I swung on 'im.”

“Inspector Ransom's done more for police and the personal safety of every cop in this city than all the captains, and all the chiefs, and all the commissioners, and all the mayors combined.”

“And I grounded him.”

“And you won't hear the last of it with me or many another copper, I can guarantee you, Muldoon.”

“What're you saying? Huh?”

“I'll say no more.”

“That if he's to die, God forbid, that…that my time's truly up here?”

Michael Shaun O'Malley only turned the key and walked from the lockup, saying not another word.

Griffin Drimmer stumbled amid still smoldering
ashes of the fire that'd killed Alastair Ransom's only dream. Alastair had confided in a word here and there that he had found someone special, someone he'd spoken about in connection with the word
future,
someone who, as he put it, might help him put away all his ghosts. Someone he thought he might devote all the rest of his life to, and in doing so, he could let go of the past, let go of the horror of Haymarket and the lingering questions and suspicions, to end his years-long quest after the phantoms of another time.

Now this.

And it was worse than first he'd heard—that Ransom's woman had died in a terrible fire. Worse by far, as she'd been garroted—beheaded—and set aflame. He could hardly imagine Alastair's grief and suffering. Surely the work of the fiend they'd been tracking. Had the madman turned on the hunters? And if so, how safe was Griffin's own family? He must think of his own loved ones now.

He made his way from the sight of Polly Pete's severed head and the blackness of the fire-charred building and went in search of a messenger to send a hastily scratched note reading: “Pack children—go to mother's in Portage. Stay till you hear from me!”

Everyone in Chicago, it seemed, had come out to see the fire, a mob held back by uniformed coppers. People in mass who needn't be here. People who could contribute nothing. Still, the CPD and CFD had learned something since the days of Haymarket, to circulate plainclothes undercover cops and snitches in among the crowds to feel out the word on the street.

Nathan Kohler had come down to the site to oversee the investigation, barking orders for Griffin to get to the bottom of things. Philo Keane, hearing of the matter, had rushed down to gather what photos he might, not knowing of Polly's murder by garrote and by blaze. He'd arrived just in time to get shots of the body being courageously eased down by a fireman Philo knew only as McKeon.

Despite a hangover, Philo rushed into the midst of the rubble for shot after shot, made to pause only by the surreal sights—the mirror, the bedposts and bedsprings atop the charred bar, and then he saw the head being lifted from a bag to display to Drimmer and Kohler, and Philo's camera caught this, too.

Some of the firemen thought Philo a complete ghoul, but he knew that Alastair Ransom, had he been here and of sound mind, would be barking at him to get all these cuts. He told himself he was doing it for Ransom, although a whispered voice from the deepest reaches of his psyche said otherwise, said he liked it, the stark beauty that fire and charred remains carried into the frame. An artistic-minded man must understand the stark painful reality inherent in the scene—like storm devastation.

“How I would've loved to've been on hand during the Great Fire…to've photographed its majesty, its finality, the uncompromising wasteland,” he said to arson investigator Stratemeyer.

“Yes…I suppose a fine artistic soul such as yourself, Mr. Keane, can find beauty e'en in death. But trust me, you would've wept to see Chicago so crippled as she was then.”

“You must have been—”

“I was a bloody eighteen-year-old at the time. This”—he pointed to the devastation lying before them—“this is something like it only if you multiply the loss of life by hundreds and the property damage by millions.”

“Still, the stark beauty of it. I've seen early photos, but a frame always limits the perspective of reality.”

“Not sure, sir, but would you move just to your left a foot or two, Mr. Keane?”

Philo did so, and the wall and fixture pipe that'd snatched Polly's body while her head had fallen, now came crashing down, sending up a plume of smoke and ash to choke Philo and paint him ashen. He stepped out of the billowing cloud caused when the firemen had intentionally brought down the unsafe wall.

Small fires still flared up around Philo as he moved off. Stratemeyer and his men stayed inside the mushroom cloud of debris, while Philo caught glimpses of these ghostly figures and snapped pictures. Under his breath, between choking bouts, he cursed his young assistant, Waldo Denton, for having not shown up for this.
How was the boy to learn a damn thing?

Then from out of the dust cloud stepped the man with the brown bag stuffed with Polly's head, and following him, two men carrying a reed stretcher on which lay Polly's charred legs, torso, arms, and half her neck. The cooked cadaver did not look real; it looked for all the world, he thought, like a fake rubber blob, something a rubber factory might cast off as damaged molding.

Philo bumped into Griffin, and their eyes spoke, both feeling the torment of grief for their friend and colleague, both knowing they could not possibly feel the depth of pain that Ransom, this moment, must be feeling for his loss.

“Shocking…awful,” Griffin mustered two words.

“Horrible, satanic is what it is,” managed Philo.

Enough said. The body parts were whisked off to Cook County morgue by Shanks and Gwinn, who'd taken direction from Christian Fenger, also on hand. Fenger had re
mained on the periphery, watching from afar. How long he'd been on scene, no one hazarded a guess. Kohler asked it of Drimmer, and when Griffin had no answer, Kohler muttered, “Everyone thinks him a Renaissance man, a Leonardo of the prairie, but I think him rather a ghoul who likes his work too much.”

“Unlike some people,” muttered Philo.

Kohler gave Keane a withering look. “Look here, photographer, just do your job and mind your business. I was speaking to Inspector Drimmer.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“Just get those cuts to us as soon as possible, and if you've not already delivered the others from the train station to Inspector Ransom, then get them to my office as well. And for that matter, where the deuce is Ransom?” he said loudly for all to hear. But he fooled no one. News of Alastair's one-sided run-in with Muldoon, and his lying in a cell at the Harrison Street Lockup on Kohler's orders had spilled onto the street like beer from a busted vat. Chicago's premiere detective, Inspector Ransom, lay unconscious in one of his own cells, locked up with derelicts, drunks, and scavengers of every stripe—some of whom might care to take a daggar to his throat.

Philo just stared at the well-dressed politician cop, and was quickly losing his temper when Waldo Denton stumbled up, the boy's face painted with fire grease and smoke, damp with tears. “I can't do this no more, sir. No 'mount a scratch is worth this…every time somebody is killed like this…” An audible moan rose from Denton's gut. “Damn it, this…this is too hard, Mr. Keane.”

“I ask a lot of a man, agreed.”

“Perhaps too much.”

“Whataya know of hard?” Philo sharply asked. “You ever go hungry, boy? I mean falling down hallucinating hungry?”

“No, sir.”

“Hell, asking too much! Why, you didn't even know Polly, not like I did.”

“I saw her at your studio once, and—and in your photo collection.”

“God, boy…go get yourself straightened out.” He handed Denton fifty cents. “Come by when you're feeling better. You may still have a job! Now get!” Philo threw rocks as Denton ambled off, dejected, apparently in shock, but over his shoulder, he called out, “I stole a picture of her once.”

“From me?”

“She was beautiful.”

Kohler glared at Philo. “How'd you know the victim, Keane? And what sort of
pictures
is this young man referring to?”

“Art.” Philo quickly returned to his work. “Artist and model, and that was the extent of it.” Philo had seen the glint in Kohler's eye as if he'd discovered some gold nugget fallen from the sky. He'd never told anyone of his practice of taking a woman's body for his payment on occasion, and Polly had found it a thrilling proposition.

“Yes, Mr. Keane—I see.” Kohler sometimes hissed.

As Philo worked, he saw Dr. Tewes join Kohler. Likely here was the only man standing who had no idea what'd become of Alastair Ransom this day.

 

Jane could not concentrate on what lay before her as either the man she pretended or the woman she was, as both personae had taken this hard. Polly had been Jane's or rather James's patient, and Ransom's lover, and now this. How angry Ransom had appeared the other night did not connect or make logical sense. Yet, it would be the perfect murder indeed if, in a fit of rage, Ransom had killed Polly and made it look like the work of the killer the press now called the Phantom. How simple to cover her murder. And Ransom, being Ransom, knew how to cover up any mistake that might be made or badly juggled. But, in fact, this hadn't been her notion but rather Kohler had floated the idea past her.

Was it possible? Did it go with what she knew of the man, despite all the dark tales of Alastair's temper and questionable morals? Could his police life have spilled over into his private life, and had he used Dr. Tewes as both his excuse and his alibi?

She then decided it too preposterous and not in Ransom's makeup as she stood here, staring at the ruination of Ransom's life, his goals, his plans. It led to her own epiphany. “Nathan,” she said to Kohler, “I can go no further with our charade.”

“The hell you say!”

“Suppose I were called to testify in a court of law over events? To swear on a Bible as Dr. Tewes? It's preposterous, untenable.”

“Look here! We had a deal. This”—he indicated the fire—“changes nothing.”

“It changes everything. You don't need me to bring Ransom down. He is on his back now; you need but crush him, but I'll be no party to the kill, and no longer part of your web of deceit.”

It'd been Nathan Kohler who'd led Polly directly to Dr. Tewes's for the care she sought, as he had led Fenger to Tewes. “Information gathering,” he'd called it.

“You cross me,
James
, and you'll be exposed for what you are,
Jane
.” Kohler had investigated Dr. Tewes the year before and had learned Jane's every secret.

“Perhaps for the better.”

“Really? You think so?” His half grin curled snakelike on itself.

“I've accomplished so little, nothing meritorious about my time spent here.”

“You can do well here.”

“I am not speaking of Chicago.”

“What then?”

“I shouldn't expect you to understand.”

“Try me, Jane.”

“Accommodate the bloody world so as to fit comfortably
into it is what I've done, when in fact, I should make the world accommodate
me
. It's what good people have been trying to tell me.” She thought of Gabby, Dr. Fenger, her father, and for some odd reason, Alastair.

“Whatever are you trying to say?” Kohler replied. “If you're in control of your senses, then the world makes perfectly good sense.”

“You mean, the sense of the world is what you make of your senses?”

He looked into her eyes, confused.

“Nathan, it is so damnably easy for you with your syllogisms to live by, but it makes no more sense now to me than ever it did as a child, this place.”

“Live with it.”

“I've never understood the people with whom I share this world, why they do what they do—
usually self-sabotage
,” she thought of Polly and Ransom—“it's all a mystery…”

“We're not here to understand every mystery of life.”

“Blindness is no mystery.”

“Blindness?”

“Blindness to the results of our own confounding decisions.”

“So you retreat into your considerable intellect, Doctor? This is your answer?”

“When I can no longer take another single second of the insanity of the world, why not?” She indicated the fire devastation spread before them. “I have this nice dark, under-the-rock place where things are black and white, and where
what has been
rules
what is
right now, where insane behavior is explainable.”

“You're speaking of understanding this madman again? But no one can penetrate the mind of a maniac.”

“Science must someday do so.”

“And in the process of your scientific inquiry, you cut yourself off from your own feelings,” he countered. “How adventurous it'd be to open that Pandora's box you pretend into nonexistence along with your real self, your real gender.”

“We set things in motion, Nathan. You set me a-spying on Alastair Ransom, and I've been dutiful, and now this? This is an unacceptable result. I'm done with it.”

“Done indeed?”

“Think of it, my prying into this woman's life not to help her as a physician, but to learn of Ransom's comings and goings? I did harm. Had I not poisoned her against Ransom as you instructed, then perhaps—”

“She'd be just as dead; Polly asked for this.”

“That's a horrible thing to say; no one asks for this.”

“She lived the life; every day she chanced some awful thing happening.”

Some awful thing like you,
she thought but said, “It's not something I want to be a part of any longer, not for any amount of money.”

“Not even to keep Gabrielle safe from attention?”

Her clenched jaw quivered. She stared into the rubble and curling smoke.

“Not so easy to walk away from me, Dr. Tewes.”

“Damn you, sir.”

“I can make your life hell in Chicago.”

“You said you admired my savvy and determination, and yet you can do this?”

“Think you've too few patients now? Imagine should I put out a single word against you. Besides, that little matter of Gabby's having been born a bastard, all that about her father…all quite nicely locked away for now, sealed in my office.”

There was the rub. Gabby's father, all the terrible reports of how he'd died so ignobly in a prison in Saint-Tropez, France, where he'd been caught cheating at cards in a casino brothel. He'd been beaten to within inches of life and then arrested. Dead of his wounds in that cold cell, uncared for, alone, disgraced. Kohler had dredged it all up from French authorities.