City for Ransom (22 page)

His friends remained in the lagoon far below. One in the water, at least in part, the other in a now flaming rowboat; both dispatched by the Phantom.

Through the trees, flames winked, and Stumpf watched authorities hook and drag the fiery craft ashore. Desperately, men doused his latest victim.

The killer saw from this moving position, every second another perspective. Interesting altogether, each separate moment of the ride as if sitting inside one of those hand-held daguerreotype machines people paid to watch at the 3 Penny Opera on Lincoln and Fullerton.

Around him, he heard others speculating from the safety of their perch on the excitement below. A series of gasps, whispers, cooing like pigeons, and the sound of giggling and kissing.

A slight scent of kerosene adhered to him, and his nails had become ragged at having scaled the bridge abuttment from the lagoon. But he had soaked a handkerchief before then to swipe at the larger, noticeable blood splotches on his boots, pants leg, and cape.

He gave more thought to the girl in the flaming boat. Most assuredly as lurid an image as anything created by Edgar Allan Poe. It must garner front-page attention and eclipse the Columbian Exposition. As the giant wheel lifted up and up again, he braced himself and watched the activity he'd set in motion below. When the wheel stopped with him atop it, he stood to open a small window. He shouted into the wind as he had that night with Polly Pete, perhaps in this very gondola, crying against the wind, “I'm King of the Fair!”

 

The Ferris wheel continued its rise and fall. Above the killer in black, Ransom and Jane Francis peered out over their gondola to get a look at the noisy fellow some six or seven cars below. Ransom stood, giving the gondola a start backward in reaction to his weight. Jane gasped, but in a moment she, too, was standing to see the man who'd been shouting from below, now coming round, lifting as they descended. “He looks like Dr. Jeykll, I think,” she commented.

“You mean Hyde, don't you?” They faintly heard the wheel operator at the bottom shouting up. “In your seats! Sit the bloody hell down!” They did so and rocked the gondola more as a result. Then Alastair again craned to see all he might, and she thought him so childlike in his enthusiasm, and so she began rocking and rocking the gondola in a madcap fashion she believed he'd enjoy, when suddenly the suspended car holding them began to sway too dangerously for comfort.

He threw his arms round her, pulled her into his chest, and she felt safe there, no matter what, while below them in rotation, the single man's rantings had only increased with maniacal laughter.

“You bitch, you've just laughed your last,” the killer shouted and backhanded the spectral image of Polly Pete whose eyes opened on him despite her head wobbling near off. His erection came with her pain even if she wasn't really present.

Still she sat here bleeding and whimpering, and the more she bled out, the tighter the garrote and the more sexually excited he became.
Who on this planet could possibly understand this,
he wondered.
Sherlock Holmes perhaps, but the man was himself a fiction. Perhaps Stumpf and I oughta submit to Tewes's magnetic therapy—witchcraft he calls phrenology.
But a part of Stumpf feared the idea that Tewes might see right through him, to know his innermost thoughts.

“We should make love right here!” Polly's ghost whispered in his ear.

“There isn't time…or space!” As beautiful and wild as
Polly'd been, he knew he could not keep her. He could not keep any of them.

She persisted, grabbing his crotch. “What? Are you afraid? You're not one of those who can't get hard in a woman?”

“Shut up! You don't know what you're bleedin' talking about! Shut up!”

“What are you in real life, heh? A lawyer, a professor, a doctor, perhaps?”

“I'm none. Now, Polly, be a good girl, least till we're at your place.”

She pouted. “You're as boorish as Ransom, wantin' me to be a cultured lady till we're in bed!”

In the end, the gondola and Polly both settled down, and they sat safe and secure in their seats, and he stared at her, thinking she had a death wish. She needed Stumpf to kill her. She wanted it; begged it.
Right, right?

“Yes and I want it again,” her spirit said in his ear.

He regained himself—in the here and now place—and watched the building excitement he'd created below. Stumpf had given him a quota, and he always demanded more blood; always from the back of his head came Stumpf's voice. Not even lively Polly had been able to drown out that voice.

With their ride over, he and Stumpf and the ghost of Polly stepped from the gondola to an angry operator who failed to appreciate his antics. A tip shut him up, and as the killer joined the maddening crowd on the fairway, he heard the operator also shake down Ransom for a tip.

He soon sat on a bench deep in shadow, nerves raw and exhilarated at once. Polly had been right. He'd never enjoyed normal relations with a woman. Born incapable. Withered testicles and deformed penis. Nothing whatever doctors could do. Despite the efforts of his mother to take him to the best surgeons on two continents, including Christian Fenger. They opened his urinary tract, but they couldn't produce a
miracle any more than God himself might. No one could induce
feeling
in the lump of flesh he carried between his legs. That came only with the kill, only in
taking
life. What defense would he and Sleepeck Stumpf have if ever they were apprehended and tried?

He'd spent countless years in and out of hospitals, as Mother refused to accept his condition as irreversible. How many silent nights he'd spent with Stumpf—as his mother insisted on calling it, a name from his nursery, from his sleep murmurings. Mother was the only one on the planet who'd unconditionally loved him. When she'd died, penniless, he'd had to bury her in that damned Potter's Field. Although starving, he'd refused to sell her body to the medical men. After that something snapped inside him. He ran. Only months after this, he killed that first prostitute at the fair.

Polly made three, Chesley four.
Four
Chicago women, and now
two
young men, as well as
one
unborn child made the total seven. Chesley had proven a quite humorless thing compared to the vivacious Polly. And as for Purvis and now Trelaine…each beautiful in his way and so filled with life and love and happiness as it spilled from them with their blood. “Have all to live for,” Trelaine had once confided to the very man who had, this night, taken his life.

He'd shut Trelaine's joy down with a delight of his own. As he'd felt with Polly and the others…and again with young Chesley Mandor, who'd so wanted to ride in that boat with Trelaine on her arm here at the fair…and 'twas a flaming good time she had….

Guiding Jane Francis by the hand, Ransom
rushed from the Ferris wheel the moment the gondola stopped. His cane beating an anthem, Alastair shouted over the noise of the fairway. “We need to find a cab stand, get you home! Something's amiss at the lagoon, and I fear the worst.”

“God, not another murder!”

“I pray I'm wrong. But to be safe, you must be off.”

“But Alastair—”

“I don't want you seeing anything upsetting.”

“I'm no shrinking violet! I'm a midwife; perhaps I can help.”

They failed to notice a man in shadow across from them watching their every move, reading their lips as best he could.

“I will not allow it, Jane.”

“Did you not hear a word I said?”

He relented. “OK, if you're quite sure. I must get there as quickly as possible.”

“Then why are we wasting time?”

 

The boat lay half in, half out of the lagoon, the charred remains of the corpse partially covered in the waterlogged
bottom. As Jane began to see the truth of it, the eerily fired body like a discarded heap of trash along the keel of the rowboat, seared clothing did a
danse macabre
along the surface. She only half heard Ransom's order: “Jane, stay back…do not move from this spot. Promise me.”

She held herself in check, saying nothing, her body trembling at the sight that he tried to shield using his frame.
Stop trying to spare me, damn you!

Someone foolishly shouted, “Is're a doctor here?”

Jane wondered at the emotional cost of being Ransom. And what of being
with
Ransom as Polly'd been? Still, she instinctively remained close to Alastair, seeing him take charge, ordering reluctant men into the water to grab the gunwales on each side and guide what remained of the boat onto firmer ground. “Easy! Easy! Don't lose her!” came Ransom's encouragement to the younger men.

One last thrust grounded the boat, and the waterlogged, burnt bottom split apart.

“Get her outta the muck! Lift below the arms and at the ankles. Use your gloves if you must, but do it.” The uniformed police obeyed, but they seemed Ransom's children in need of chastising and scolding. “I'll take a stick to every last one of ya! Do it, do it now.”

Together, the younger men lifted her out.

Jane wondered how many killings he'd seen and overseen, and who this latest victim might be.

 

“Outta the tunnel aflame all on its own, I tell yous,” the shaken attendant kept shouting.

Alastair grabbed the ride attendant by each shoulder, holding him like a plow. “But going out on the water, man! Who'd she get in the boat with?”

“Fine-looking gent, but he didn't come back.”

“What'd he look like?”

His description fit the Phantom, but the attendant ended with, “But they looked so in love.”

“Allow me to help the man with his memory,” came a feminine voice from behind Ransom. He turned to find Jane beside him.

“I told you to stay put.”

“But I'm trained in hypnosis, and we…I mean you…you could greatly enhance someone's memory if—”

“I hardly believe a parlor trick is going to be of any—”

“Give it a chance. No one's come forward with any useful information. No witnesses beyond this rum-soaked attendant.” She near whispered, “The killer has declared war on us all, Alastair. That could as well be Gabby or me in that flambéed condition!”

Even on quinine and opium gotten from Dr. McKinnette, Alastair feels Jane's sincerity, her genuine desire to help. Here stands a woman who understands the complexities and vagaries of a cop's life and work and is accepting of them. Not only accepting but supporting.

It was a new and odd thing for Ransom.

He felt unsure what to do with it. With her.

What to do with the feelings she imbued in him.

Just how to behave.

Just what to say.

Should I kiss her?

Thank her?

Hold her?

All three?

Say nothing, do nothing, oaf
, Jane thought but said, “I'll get that cab now.” To herself, she muttered, “Had you shown one sign, I'd've told you—confessed everything. Men!”

“Y-yes…get home. Tomorrow, I'll call 'round.”

“Whether you know it or not, you've just lost the best thing you never had,” she shouted back.

“Griffin!” he shouted over her on seeing his young partner push through the crowd. “See that my lady gets home by cab.” He forced a silver dollar into Griffin Drimmer's palm. Griffin stared from coin to Alastair to the woman he didn't know.

“I came as quickly as—”

“Get the lady to a cab and safely off.” Ransom remained adamant.

“Sure…sure…”

“I'll come 'round tomorrow,” Ransom repeated to her. “Now please, go along with Griff—my right-hand—”

“Dismissed like a pet!” her anger surfaced further.

She went out of view on Griff's arm, swallowed by the crowds, as Ransom watched, rapt in thoughts of her, a vague idea of life with a woman of substance, but this notion lost out to the moment. Over his shoulder the murder victim stared at him, an obvious connection to the ones before.
Maniac's stepped up his timetable.

Like a man shackled, he studied the victim's features—not so mangled as to be unrecognizable. He called out to the crowd, “Anyone know her?”

“Here sir, a purse,” offered one uniformed officer dripping from the waist down.

Ransom pulled out papers, letters. Love letters addressed to a Chesley Mandor, from a suitor named Joseph Trelaine. “Chicago address. Where is he now?”
Is he our Phantom? And if not and she got into a boat with a man…
” Then it occurred to him.
What if Trelaine were still out there in the black lagoon?
“You fellows, get a useable boat and some gas lamps and go up in the tunnel there and look for anything…unusual.”

 

Ransom's latest homicide became a double-homicide as he watched a second body float just beyond the tunnel entrance, facedown if he had one—for as the weak lamplight played over the corpse, searchers could not tell. Using an oar to bring the body, like a lost vessel, into the gunwale of his boat, Alastair found it difficult to get a fix on the man, his size, weight, cut of his jib; impossible with his body floating half under, waterlogged. Ransom and the uniformed policeman on the oars worked to turn the floater in the water, almost flipping the drift boat in which they knelt. The corpse
rolled like a log, and the soggy three-piece suit and best shoes tugged heavily back, as if some submerged creature held sway. Then the body hit the boat—hard—and both oarsman and inspector gasped to find it a headless torso.

“Did it fall off—the head, I mean—when we turned him?” asked the oarsman.

“I think not. Likely separated sometime earlier.”

“In the depths of the lagoon is it?”

“I suspect so.”

Ransom lashed the body to the side with hemp, not wanting to haul it aboard or scuttle the boat. “Fodder for Shanks and Gwinn he is,” said the cop turned oarsman.

“Not before we bag all personal effects, do you understand? Your name, Officer?”

“Callahan, sir.”

“Callahan, I'm personally holding you responsible for Trelaine's effects, if this be Trelaine—and Mandor's. Understood?”

“Ahhh…yes, sir. Yes sir.”

After securing Trelaine, they started to shore with the body. Young Callahan, his blond hair lifting with each stroke, perspired until his hair flattened.

“Bastard this one is…a true black-hearted monster,” commented Ransom.

“Aye, sir, indeed.”

Trelaine, like the woman, had tasted of the killer's favorite weapon, but how, here out on the water? Was the monster telling them no place in the city was safe? Nothing sacred? Ransom must know how. How had the killer gotten so near a courting couple out here on the lagoon? The entire crime must be recreated to make sense of it.

Soon, Griffin had rowed out to join them. Ransom put him in charge of the re-enactment, awkward as it was in boats to re-create. He himself played the killer, each of the others playing a part. The one playing Chesley cursed, disgruntled that he'd drawn a woman's role. By now they began in earnest to get it done. And as they walked—or rather
boated—through it, Ransom looked for opportunity, imagining himself the killer up to mischief here, and he looked to locate clues, when Griff pointed out a strange mark against the tunnel wall. It turned out to be a black-gray smoky bloody handprint.

“The bastard's teasing us!” said Griff.

“It's sure his hand again, his mark as it were.”

“But why would he—”

“Wants us to choke on it.”

“Give 'im credit in the papers.”

“Wants us to know it's his work?” added Alastair. “Like a bloody artist signing a painting.”

“Aye. Still, we must compare it to the one we found at the train station.”

“If we can find a sober Philo Keane, get him and his camera on a boat, and to this point.”

“With daylight…he might do best getting this,” replied Griff, sounding optimistic.

“Body set aflame, shoved through the tunnel while the killer grabbed hold of the grating here and climbed the fieldstone overpass. Crowds coming and going, someone had to've seen the bastard come o'er the top.”

“People're wrapped up in their own lives, but sure sixty good citizens'll be lining up with perfect descriptions.”

Ransom frowned at Griff. “Sarcasm in the young, Griff, is not a pretty thing. Look, we'll get Thom's help, get the papers to claim we have several eyewitnesses who saw the killer exit the water at this point.”

“What good would it do?”

“You tell me.”

Griff pondered a moment. “Sell papers?”

“It'll serve
our
purposes. To put him on notice, keep him on guard, make him more cautious! All of that, and it may make him take more risks. And hopefully Thom's story will draw some real witnesses as well.”

“Actual witnesses. Sounds too good to be true.”

“I'm 'sposed to be the old cynic here, Griff.”

From all they'd pieced together, the killer had somehow enticed the young couple over to his boat, likely with some pretense of his having trouble with a leak or steerage, anything to lure them close. Perhaps one of the victims or both knew the killer, or at least knew him by sight. He must surely look harmless indeed.
Invisible…blends
, Tewes had insisted.

Ransom summed it up for Griff. “As the victim affably attempted to look over the problem, he lost his life, garroted in a matter of seconds, dead and dropped into the water. The killer then leapt into her boat and secured the garrote about her neck. No telling how long he made her suffer. At least this is how I see it unfolding.”

Griff swallowed hard. “Then there's a second boat drifting free out here unless…”

“Unless all three had disembarked in the same boat.”

“And the attendant is of no help on that score?”

“None whatever. Look, if there is a second boat floating in the darkness, it may contain clues, gentlemen,” he told the others. “Find that boat and get it to me and touch nothing. Do you understand?”

The young officers concurred, excited over the prospect of contributing to locating and bringing this madman to justice, and having their names associated with the famous Alastair Ransom.

They fanned out, searching for the missing, phantom boat. A pair of the fools singing out, “
Row-row-row your boat, gently down the stream…
”

“Trelaine's head could well be lying in that boat, so be prepared, lads!” Ransom's words silenced the chorus of
“Merrily, merrily, merrily.”

Again it was Griffin who'd made the gruesome discovery, alerting the others to the empty boat. When Ransom's boat came alongside, he stared into Griffin's eyes, and he said, “Quite the bloodhound you've become.”

“A compliment from you, Rance?”

Ransom lifted his lantern to search the drifting boat, its oars having been secured by Callahan, who now held his head over the side and noisily retched.

Ransom looked into a stranger's eyes, wide and questioning, a man named Trelaine, whose head alone lay at the rear of the boat where he'd been enticed by a killer apparently capable of talking another man into abandoning his boat and a beautiful woman for the privilege of helping out.

How does a soul rest in peace under such circumstances
, Ransom silently wondered.

“What next, Rance?” asked Griffin.

Ransom failed to answer, still lost in Trelaine's accusing gaze; a gaze that asked why hadn't the collective “they” stopped this madman before he could do this horror?

Griffin spoke. “Callahan, get into the boat with the head and—”

“Me, sir?”

“—and row it into the dock, Callahan. Inspector Ransom can use the exercise it'll take to get himself ashore.”

This reference to Ransom's weight caused only cautious laughter as other search boats had gathered in close for a look at the severed head.

Callahan, tall, angular and fair-skinned blanched whiter, but he shakily made his way into the boat, where the head lay staring up at him. Given its proximity, it lay between his legs where he sat the oars. He could count on its rocking side to side, touching his ankles.

Around him, he heard the nervous twittering and mutterings of others, but Ransom looked him in the eye and said, “Callahan, use your coat.”

Callahan nodded and quickly removed his coat and blotted out the staring head. Earlier, Ransom had judged the dead man from his clothes as upper crust. He wore Marshall Field shoes, and his clothes appeared tailored, but the inspector had been surprised on reading the lapel:
MONT
GOMERY WARD
. No sign of Carson, Pirie, Scott buttons on the man.