City for Ransom (31 page)

“Slow down! You'll get us all killed!” Griffin grabbed Ransom's cane and rammed it against the box overhead and shouted at the driver successively. “Slow up!”

The slot through which the driver communicated shot open and again Ransom saw only the man's eyes, filled with blood rage and ecstatic joy. Loving this, his coachman's fantasy come true: an order to open her full-throttle, and taking two Chicago gents on a ride to terrify and delight. “Beggin' your pardon, sirs, but did ya' not ask that I run the horses?”

“Run them! Run them!” shouted Ransom.

“Whoaaa!”
shouted Griffin.

“Hold onto the handrail overhead, Griff!” Ransom said, reclaiming his cane.

“Just tell me what is all the hurry?”

“It's Jane…
ahhh
, Dr. Tewes's sister, and the daughter, Gabby! I fear they may be in terrible danger.”

“How can you know?”

“Denton.”

“Denton? Waldo? What about him?”

“Damn it, man, he is our bloody Phantom!”

“That harmless fellow? He's hardly more than a boy!”

“A warped one, I wager. Look here, he is the one set me thinking of lolling about the damnable lagoon for the Phantom, and that just after dropping Jane…
ahhh
, at the Tewes residence.”

“Since when do you listen to civilians on matters of investigation, and one so young?”

“He set my mind on it and did it rather subtly. Cunning fellow as it happens.”

“I would not have put Denton and the word
cunning
in the same sentence, Alastair.”

“Behind those boyish eyes and goofy grin—designed to make him harmless seeming—there lurks a deadly mind, I tell you.”

“It just seems so out of the blue,
sooo
farfetched.”

“Precisely as he wants you to believe. But more than cunning and deception is at work here, something even more insidious and poisonous. I mean—”

“What do you mean?” Griff's brow creased in consternation. He pulled forth a pipe identical to Ransom's and lit up.

“Suppose he's a bugger who's never once gotten a bloody thing he's ever wanted.”

“You mean like not the mother nor father, not the sister nor brother he wanted?”

“Not the circumstances, not the woman of his dreams, for instance.”

“Nor the money, nor the education he's chased all his life? Not the profession nor career.”

“Not the erection, not the joy, not the release, nor the satisfactions we take for granted as with your life with Lucinda.”

“And you think this accumulation of failures leads to deviance and murder?”

Ransom gritted his teeth and held back the immediate word he had for Griffin's thick-headedness. “Put yourself in his shoes. Scrubbing up and about for the likes of Philo, having to push a hack about the city, cleaning up after his horse, seeing every fare he picks up with a woman on the arm. How many times he drove Merielle and me from corner to corner, God only knows!”

“It's still a stretch. Denton's hardly more than a boy.”

“We've suspected
small
all along; a weak person, womanish if not a woman.”

“But Denton…Waldo is…” Griffin seemed unable to wrap his mind around this idea. He's so…so innocuous, so slight and so…so…”

For half a moment's flash, Ransom wished for a time when he could be so naïve and trusting as Griffin Drimmer, a time before he'd become so bloody suspicious of everything on two legs. Finally, he placed a hand on Griff's and calmly said, “Invisible…is what he is, Griff…simply
invisible,
and even more so in that black get-up worn for the hansom cab company, black boot, cape, top hat, down to the Carson, Pirie, Scott buttons.”

Drimmer considered this. “A gentleman's attire in any venue.”

“And him sneaking looks, eavesdropping, studying each fare in his hack up close, through there.” He pointed out the coach hatch.

“Creepy when you think of it.”

“And him sitting up on his high seat, looking all about the streets from behind that nag of his?”

The cab thundered down the street, tossing them from side to side. Griffin shouted over the thunderous noise, “No one's going to believe Denton physically capable of killing two people out on that lagoon, unless we catch him in the act, with the tools of death!”

“Press has made of him some sort of Grendel-sized ogre, haven't they?”

“Perhaps the press has overstated the—”

“Overstated? Even Carmichael's taken with the gall and élan of this bastard.”

“No one's expecting a Waldo Denton!”

“As for walking on water at the lagoon, you and I know how it was done!”

“But people will equate it with the supernatural, that Satan can walk on water as well as Christ.”

“Don't attribute satanic powers to him yourself then, Griff.”

“But then, they say the Devil doth take a pleasing form.”

“This particular devil has chosen an invisible form.”

“He is that.”

“Don't hold back. Tell me what you think.”

“Gut feelings, first impression?” asked Griff. “I thought him harmless, but I soon learned he had no allegiance to Keane.”

“Are you saying he's a back-stabbing cock-sucker?”

“OK…”

“And why so?”

“At each scene, he laid a seed of doubt about his employer—quietly, mind you.”

“Yes, this is his way, and being a small man…one you are so much more likely to let your guard down around…”

“Yes, many a deadly viper is—”

“Indeed! A small man with a garrote, a man about your own size, Grif—”

“Can do a helluva lotta damage in a matter of seconds.”

“Precisely.”

“Hey…hold on. You thought…back there at the lagoon…when I came up on you, and you started fooling with your shoe buttons and bending over…do you mean to tell me that—”

“I had a loose lace is all.”

“You thought me the Phantom, didn't you? Damn you!”

Alastair hesitated, mired in silence, unsure what to say.

“Out with it, big man! The truth!” Griff laughed and muttered, “Wait till O'Malley and some of the lads hear this.”

Alastair realized that rather than taking it badly, somehow Griffin found a strange mix of humor and pride in it, somehow still impressed by the notoriety given the Phantom by the newsies. “Imagine…thinking me the Phantom of the Fair.”

“Will you quit bloody calling him that, please? He deserves no title, no crown, no ink in the damned press; he deserves no ‘sir' or ‘gentleman' before his name. He deserves none of our respect or misguided ballads written about him, and he certainly merits no admiration.”

“Waldo Denton…my God, Alastair, how did you figure it out?”

“The ring.”

“The one in your bowels?”

“This ring!” he produced his pinky with the ring upon it. “How do you suppose it went from Merielle's hand to Philo's pocket and the killer counting on it's still being there?”

“Philo admitted to taking it in trade.”

“How better to implicate his mentor than to lead you and Kohler to Philo's coat pocket or the frock in which you found the ring?”

Griff gave this a moment to sink in as if revisiting the moment. “'Twas Denton who first identified the disembodied ring as having belonged to—”

“Precisely, yes…led you to suspect wrongdoing at the studio. Was he also helpful in uncovering Philo's collection of nudes?” asked Ransom as the cab walls and wheels whined and strained under the whip, the speed, and the angles.

“Yes, and now, tonight,” began Griff, “he leads you off on a wild goose chase to stand bait at the park.”

“To rid himself of my being on hand tonight at Gabby's birthday celebration. I just know he heard Jane—Tewes and I—speaking of it.”

“He's cunning enough to know it'd take an elephant gun or Moose Muldoon to bring you down.”

“Well…Muldoon's been set straight.”

For a moment, they thought the carriage would go over on its side.

“Do you think he'd really dare strike the ladies in their home with Tewes present?”

“He's likely planning to kill them in their beds.”

“Why do you think so?”

“Sensationalism, to strike a deeper fear in us.”

“To say we're unsafe when snug in our own beds?”

“And he's reaching higher along the scale of respectability, money, and social standing.”

“He really is a hatter, isn't he?”

“A mad hatter.”

“But why? Just because he can?”

“He alone holds the answer to that.”

“Faster!” Griff now shouted even as he tumbled about the cab, banging into every wall and door.

“Get what you can from the whip!” shouted Ransom.

The wheels spun madly beneath them, screaming, and on sharp turns now left the ground.

 

Stumpf did it…he did it all. All the killing, that is.

Waldo didn't even feel he was inside his body when Stumpf, at that moment of taking life—willed the essence of the dying into him. It was why Stumpf liked mirrors, liked killing them before mirrors.

He'd done it both ways of course, but the thrill and satisfaction became so much more heightened if he could stare into both their eyes and those of Stumpf at the moment of knowing. The moment of crossing over. From behind the garrote, before a mirror, he could watch all the eyes!

Stumpf could more readily act at the instant of death to net and catch the soul within his web of wanton lust if he knew the very instant of the soul's leap toward the next dimension. Wanton lust—part and parcel of it—as Stumpf so enjoyed what Waldo Denton's body felt at the death leap. Stumpf got Waldo an erection—that true insignia, emblem of corporeal lust.

“All of life becomes more pronounced and clear and worth the discovery if a man is in his right spirit,” Waldo Denton was telling Jane Francis Ayers and Gabby—as he'd come to know their names. He'd first been attracted to them and their home that night he'd killed Purvis at the train station. The same night he'd seen Gabby and Cliffton kissing below the lights near the lagoon. He'd been kicking around the fair, wandering, exploring, one side of him determining good locations for murder as he scouted for Stumpf, while
another side looked and hungered for precisely what that college boy had—a future, yes, but also a future with a beautiful young thing. A promise at a fulfilling life of happiness, warmth, camaraderie, mutual respect, admiration…mutual pleasure. All things denied him.

How was it Shakespeare put it in the performance he'd seen at the theater?
“If I cannot prove a hero, I shall prove a villain….”
Words to take heart in. Words that indicated to Waldo that he might be considered important by everyone he came into contact with, that he could affect their lives. But even more, the play was the thing that informed Waldo that deviant thoughts belonged to others as well—even to the most famous author on the planet, William Shakespeare. Giving hope that he perhaps was not so absolutely alone and craven as he'd felt since childhood.

Stumpf and Waldo had wormed past the Tewes threshold to allow Stumpf his chance. That was what Waldo had become—a pimp to the base Stumpf inside, who didn't even want to spare Gabrielle, the most beautiful and innocent and pleasant and most kind person ever to address Waldo. She, and the idea of a future relationship with Gabby, remained the only thought in his head that held Stumpf back now.

So far as the older woman was concerned, Waldo had no compunction about turning Stumpf loose. When he did let Sleepeck Stumpf have his way, however, it would destroy any hairsbreadth of a chance to make Gabby
see
him…
really see him
and eventually
see into him
and eventually somehow
understand
the so-called Phantom of the Fair. Enough to eventually accept his past ill behavior and forgive his transgressions as only unconditional love could free the beast within to slink off elsewhere, back to its den to hibernate and hopefully die of its own loneliness and suffering, which, in the end, Waldo Denton had no part of and had never had any part of—and so his mind raced at the moment of sipping tea and chewing birthday cake.

She had invited Waldo in—dear, sweet angelic Gabrielle,
with the smiling assent of the woman Gabrielle called Aunt Jane.

Earlier…it seemed moments earlier, he'd watched Gabby as her aunt called out to her, something about being out alone after dark, that a girl of her social position, being the daughter of Dr. Tewes, she must not give the gossip columnists a scrap to chew on, not even an appearance of impropriety. It had made him, sitting atop the coach, impulsively call back, “Oh, no ma'am, no one could think ill of Miss Gabrielle, never!”

That's when Gabby smiled at him, her attention like a balm. Each time he drove her home from the university, where he intentionally waited, turning away other fares, Gabby gave him all her attentiveness while he spoke of one day owning his own farm and farm animals. No one had ever given him what she offered—attentiveness.

At that moment when she'd smiled up at him, what he saw in her was so amazing. She'd alighted from the cab like a floating princess with hidden wand and invisible wings. She'd forgotten her umbrella in his cab, a memory lapse or an invitation? Of course, she wanted him to return. She
liked
men like him. Cliffton hadn't been so different from him, not really? Save his prospects…save his dreams. But even in their dreams, especially their secret desires, to have this angel of earth caress their bodies and touch their trapped souls…even in this, he was no different from Purvis. The two of them clinging on Gabrielle, wanting the honor of being possessed by her, and wanting the honor of being able to address her as an enduring love, as her closest intimate on earth, to call Gabby
his.
And if he could not have her, surely…surely Stumpf would.