City for Ransom (6 page)

“From perfect alabaster skin to boils and bunions.”

“From paper cuts to falling debris.”

“Unraveled ties and crashing platforms!”

“And safety vaults.”

“From six stories up.”

Griffin kept it going. “Locusts and all manner of insect pestilence.”

“Melancholia and stillbirths, amoebic dysentery and the slats.”

“Gallstones and tumors!”

“Failing hearing.”

“Loss of sight, taste, smell, and touch.”

“Tapeworms and tomato mites.”

“Ships lost at sea.”

“Coal mines collapsing.”

“The sky doth fall.”

“And G'damn satanic bastard bedbugs!” finished Alastair.

Together they laughed at the competition. “All part of God's grand design, and certainly not to be challenged,” finished Ransom. “I think Mr. Darwin may be right. It is a world belonging to parasites.”

“Allowing evils large and minute, no doubt to so bedevil and confuse our souls as to send us leaping into His open arms?”

“No doubt—but, Griff, I wasn't referring to any addiction of mine when you began all this.”

“Then what were you referring to?”

“To my,
ahhh
…my rough handling of Tewes and that little matter of the head. I shouldn't have lost my temper.”

“Lord, Rance, you held your patience longer than anyone ahhh…
expected
. That is among the lads.”

Ransom's laughter filled the clock tower entryway and spilled out the door and into the death corridor as he pushed through. Reinvigorated, he returned to take charge of his investigation. The photographer, Philo Keane, had continued to work from atop his ladder-step tripod, getting himself and his camera into position. He next fitted his bulky camera into a glovelike vise that framed and held it steady. Below lay the uncovered body, the tarp held now by Philo's young assistant, who stared in stark horror at the sight.

“What in the name of St. Elmo's Fire is taking Philo so long?”

“Keane can't finish his work without the head, as Dr. Tewes—”

Ransom marched for the stationmaster's office, shouting, “Then what in St. Elmo's is taking Tewes so damn long?”

Griffin muttered, “Oh, shit.”

Keane, atop the ladder, shouted at Griffin. “Out…out of the frame, please, Inspector! I've got to get a few
headless
depictions.”

Ghoul,
Griffin thought an instant before slipping on a ruler alongside the body. He then righted things and scurried out of the viewfinder's range just as, ahead of him, Ransom disappeared into the stationmaster's office to the sound of the
click-whoosh, click-whoosh
of Philo's master camera.

Meanwhile, timing each shot, Philo's assistant on the ground, having discarded the tarp, now shakily held on to the flashpan and ignited it with each click of the shutter. The two of them soon created enough additional acrid smoke that everyone began to cough.

Stationmaster's Office, Illinois Central, 6:09
A.M
.

The seared, blistered, fire-blackened head told
Dr. James Phineas Tewes how horrid the suffering had been for the young man. The blackened eye sockets now painted in human creosote told Inspector Ransom how the soft tissues of the eye had been boiled and mottled by the flames. Still if one worked at it and stared long enough, the boy's anguished features came forth from this fired negative. The dead young man's rictus smile appeared as an ironic grin, but Ransom knew it for what it was—muscle contraction as with the pulled-tight withered arms—a detail learned attending autopsies conducted by Dr. Fenger.

Still, the grotesque grin, seeming so inappropriate, proved difficult to look at, even for a seasoned veteran with the CPD. For Dr. Tewes—a relatively young fellow—Ransom imagined it a far worse sight than any cadaver he'd worked on in a sanitary medical school in France. For Tewes it must be an excruciating sight, regardless of Tewes's having
asked
for it.

Running gloved hands over the severed head, reading the skull from bumps and indentions, Tewes looked as if in trance. The con man's white gloves came away with grimy
soot. “He was thinking of home, family, his loved ones somewhere beyond Chicago…homesick, he was for…”

Ransom shook his head at the mock reverence in the room, and he audibly groaned on seeing Tewes's eyes roll back in his head, while his hands continued to hover over the scorched hairless cranium. Surprised to see Thom Carmichael of the
Herald
beside Chief Kohler, Ransom tapped Thom and said, “Phrenology—as bogus a science as ever concocted.”

“Yet the chief of detectives of the second largest city in America”—whispered Carmichael in response—“a city on the verge of modernism, wishing to join the ranks of Paris, London, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and New York, approves of this
black art
? dressed in the laurels of science?”

“How the bloody hell did you get in here, Carmichael?”

“Kohler…he insisted. Special invite.”

Carmichael, a cagey, crusty fifty-year-old, hard-drinking, hard-working reporter of Irish and English descent allowed nothing past him. “I loved your handing Tewes the head of John-the-Doe out there—only the platter was missing.”

“Tewes had it coming, so to speak.”

“You do make my life interesting, Rance.”

“Trust me, it wasn't for your benefit or the
Herald
's, and before you print a word of what you've seen, I wanna sit down with you, understood?”

“I am a little short on my rent this month.”

The phrenologist gasped twice in quick succession as if an electric shock had gone through him. The hefty and misshapen, bearded stationmaster, a man named Manfred Parthipans, stood wide-eyed, lashes atwitter in an oversized face, his mouth agape. Ransom imagined him soon at the nearest pub relating all he'd witnessed today. “At least the boy was thinking pleasant thoughts at the end,” Manfred opined.

“Hence the smile,” said Kohler, faking a watery eye.

Ransom could not let it pass. “The constricted smile re
sults from torched muscle—as a good autopsiest will tell you, Nathan.”

“You can as well wait outside, Alastair,” replied Kohler.

Tewes quickly added, “The boy let go of this earthly coil believing himself reunited with loved ones on the other side.”

“I'm glad you think so, Dr. Tewes,” piped in the cynical and equally skeptical Carmichael. “Reunited now in the celestial realms.”

“That is correct.”

“And precisely what part of his skull told you this, Doctor?” asked Ransom.

“I see through touch, Mr. Carmichael, Inspector Ransom.” Tewes addressed the skeptics without looking away from the black orbs that'd once been two distinct human eyes. “I saw what was in his heart moments before death.”

Carmichael vigorously pursued. “And just what sort of
arrangement
do you have with Chief Kohler's CPD?”

“I hired Dr. Tewes for his special talents, Mr. Carmichael!” announced Kohler. “As Ransom has brought me no results!”

Tewes had gone back to
reading
the severed head.

Ransom frowned and thought Tewes a wily con artist indeed—smart. Smart enough to know not to lock verbal horns with Carmichael. Ransom too thought of the corruption in the department, and the sleaze at all levels of city government—politics these days, synonymous with corruption—inviting in every sort of hoax and con game and pork barrel, and hair-brained scheme imaginable, and some not so imaginable like this. He thought of the payoffs he'd himself made over the years to people like Carmichael to keep them in line, and he thought of the bribes he'd himself pocketed over the years—the way of this place called Chicago by the indigenous Indian tribes like the Sauk, the Pottawatomie, and the Blackhawk, all of whom referred to the immense wild onion fields surrounding Fort Dearborn as
Chicago
—“land of mighty stench.” The stench of wild
onion had been replaced by the stench of slaughterhouses and politics, so that
Chicago
remained apropos.

Certainly, the story of any city's development was, after all, a story of crime and corruption, but somehow Chicago had been born in a greater cesspool of greed and on a grander scale of graft than any other before or since. Perhaps it was due to having been reborn in fire in seventy-two in the thick of the Guilded Age.

Still, in all his years in the mud hole, Ransom hadn't a dime to show for it. He had always meant to rectify this with some large-scale land scheme or venture of his own, but nothing of this nature had ever come about.

Ransom's thoughts drifted back now to the victim, and how many other ways the foolishly naive and innocent were routinely plucked in Chicago.

Stationmaster Parthipans said, “Train schedules might indicate when the young man got off an inbound train, or if he were boarding an outgoing train,
if
we had a name.”

“His name is…was Cliffton…Cliffton Purvis of Davenport, Iowa…” said Tewes.

Griffin had stepped into the office at this moment, blinking dumbly, astonished at this assertion. In fact, the room erupted with a collective groan of wonder.

Ransom immediately challenged with, “And just how would you know that?” His mind raced with possible explanations: Tewes must have previous knowledge—as the features were recognizable through the soot and burned portions of flesh, along with portions of clothing, or perhaps some item on the body? Certainly, the dead boy's head hadn't imparted a name!

Tewes lifted his smut-covered white gloves and spread-eagled his fingers. “Phrenology told me so.”

“Yeah, and I believe in the tooth fairy.”

Meanwhile, Parthipans had rushed to his records and had begun flipping through ticket stubs. “Sorry, Dr. Tewes. There's no Purvis purchasing a ticket either inbound or outbound according to records.”

“He must've purchased a roundtrip far in advance. Try earlier dates.”

“I'll give you this much, Dr. Tewes,” began Ransom. “In life, the victim might've looked like a farm boy from Davenport…”

Carmichael erupted in laughter. This was followed by an epidemic of laughter all round the room, Parthipans and Griffin joining in.

Tewes managed to hold his head high, but his face flushed red. Parthipans then came around from behind his cage. No longer laughing, the burly round man quietly extended a file card to Kohler. “Hold on, sirs, l-l-look at this.”

Kohler's eyes lit up as he read the card:

“Is it…is it him?” asked Parthipans. “Homerville is neighbors to Davenport.”

“Coincidence, no doubt,” Kohler said, amazed at the information. “Get on your telegraph and contact Homerville. Find out if this fellow Purvis ever arrived.”

Carmichael and Griffin surveyed the card after Ransom. All three men looked at Tewes as if he were the killer.

“What?” asked Tewes.

Ransom bit his pipe hard and squinted.

The other men continued to stare at Tewes.

Tewes dismissed them all, going back to holding gloved hands within a hair's breadth of the fried cranium. But in a moment, he tore the gloves off and used his bare hands in a show of gaining more information.

For the first time, Ransom noticed how soft and feminine Tewes's hands were.
That's what it is about this man who is so…different. He's bloody effeminate
.

“Registered student…university…” began Tewes, os
tensibly reading the head. “No, no!
Visiting.
Signed on…late summer term…Northwestern University…months ago. Returned for President's tea.”

“This is getting us somewhere!” exclaimed Kohler.

Tewes continued. “Stopped to take in the fair…lost money…barkers and flimflam men…gaming…left him with only his ticket home. Cashed it in, but too late to get a cab back to the dorm. Fell asleep here. Woke up…stepped into the men's room…”

“I think it's time we reunited head and body and get all to Dr. Fenger,” Ransom said, making a play for the head.

“He wants us to know that no one—no one!—can fight off an attack from this fiendish garroter!” Tewes dramatically added. “No one is safe.” Something in the message or perhaps Tewes's resonant voice dredged from the diaphragm, or a combination of the two held Parthipans, Griff, and even the cynical Carmichael suddenly enthralled along with Kohler. Only Ransom remained skeptical.

“To hell in a sailor's dream,” muttered Ransom. “Griff, see to it the head is returned to travel with the rest of young ‘Purvis' or whoever he is. I gotta get out of here.”

Ransom, his cane tapping a kind of personal anthem on the hardwood office floor, left Tewes to mesmerize the others.

Still in the train station, going mad inside his
head, Ransom paced wildly along the corridor outside the stationmaster's office, his crime scene now a circus so far as he was concerned. He toyed with the notion of just immediately shutting the crime scene down, when O'Malley rushed up, panting, holding out a wallet and papers. “It's the boy's student identity card. A freshman at Northwestern, sir.”

Another coincidence? An educated guess? Or a sixth sense?

O'Malley extended the wallet to Ransom, who opened it on the ID, which read: Purvis, Cliffton O., address 194 Blount St., Homerville, Iowa.

“Where? Where was this found, Mike?”

“One of the lads spotted a ragged fellow with burns to his hands.”

“Where?”

“In the food commissary slurping coffee, stuffing ham and eggs, sitting at table pretty as you please.”

“What tipped your men off to him, O'Malley?”

“His clothes were sooty…the hair on his forearms singed. We think it's our man, but—”

“No garrote?”

“Sorry, no sir. That'd cinch it, I know.”

Ransom asked, “Where's he being held?”

“Downstairs in Dr. Fenger's meat wagon, under lock and key to be sure.”

“I don't suppose you found any Cuban cigars on him, O'Malley?” Ransom didn't wait for an answer, going for the “suspect” instead.

Ransom followed O'Malley to where the horse-drawn medical wagon awaited the release of the murder victim. A faded whitewash showed an earlier sign on its side in faint letters:
OSCAR MEYER
. It'd indeed seen an earlier life as a bona fide meat wagon.

“Get the suspect outta there, O'Malley.”

Mike did so, his fingers twitching over his nightstick. Soon Ransom was shaking the dead man's wallet in the homeless drifter's face. The poorly dressed, elderly fellow immediately told his tale.

Alastair felt convinced of the man's version of events, which metamorphosed from having simply found the wallet lying on the floor, to having been awakened in a stall in the men's room where he routinely slept since arriving in Chicago. He'd emigrated along with tens of thousands of others from the prairies and surrounding states. Once in the city, he could find no work. He'd been in town for two days and two nights when he was awakened to the sound of two men conversing.

“Then what?” asked Alastair. “What in blue blazes did they speak of, man?”

“Not too many words passed before it happened. Awful…murder most foul, sir, most foul!”

“Can you recall the tenor of the conversation? Angry, argument, foul words, what?”

“Oh, no, sir, as friendly as you please and the boy spoke of his girlfriend and the fair and how he was so happy, and suddenly the killer lit on him with a horrible attack.”

“Friendly—draws the boy into talking, relaxing, washing his hands in the sink—was he, when the attack came?”

“Yes…but how'd you know?”

Ransom imagined that his own recreation of events must represent as much magic to this homeless vagabond as Tewes's sideshow disclosures had made on brighter fellows like Griff and Carmichael. After all, he had himself imagined the boy a student at a nearby college. Still, Tewes had known the boy's name and where Purvis hailed from. Tewes knew too much—more than enough to incriminate himself but not enough for an arrest! “Did you have a talk with anyone about this at any time before O'Malley and me?”

“No one, I swear.”

“Then you showed the wallet to no one? Spoke to no one named Tewes?”

“I swear…the madman talked to the boy as if he knew him, and then suddenly he is cutting his throat, and next setting his body out on the column and setting him aflame.”

“You saw all this?”

“Yes, God forgive me! All happened so fast…no intervening, sir.”

“Did he say a word over the body? Anything at all, man?”

“He laughed and he sang.”

“Sang?”

“Badly, he sang.”

“What tune?”

“I don't recall. Something familiar.”

So much for Homerville Cliff going out of this world in a pleasant, smiling reunion with his ancestors,
Ransom thought.

“I—I—I wah-wah own-ly—” the drifter stuttered and stank.

“Spit it out, man!” shouted O'Malley, his nightstick raised overhead as if it'd come down of its own volition.

Ransom placed a soft palm against O'Malley's chest. “Easy on the man, Mike. He ain't used to our ways, are you, mister
ahhh
…what'd you say your name was?”

“O-rion…Saville, Orion Saville.”

“All right, Orion. Tell us what you saw. Every detail. You want to help the authorities, don't you?”

“Y-y-yes-sir…only…only got a fleetin' glimpse of the killer's legs and shoes—”

“Through the slit in the stall?”

“Yes. Thought he'd see me, turn on me, and—and kill me.”

“Tell me what was noticeable about the shoes?”

“Shined up nice, fine leather. I know leather. Was a tanner before coming here.”

“Expensive wear.”

“The best quality it was.”

“Go on.”

“And when I escaped the bloody men's room…and—and saw the body aflame, I shouted for help but nobody 'round that time o'morn. I tried to put out the fire. And the whole time this madman was whistling a tune as he rushed off.”

“What sort of tune?”

“Why…I believe it was ‘Listen to the Shepherd'…no, no! Twas ‘Coming Through the Rye.'”

“Hmmm…OK, tell me just how you put out the blasted flames. Exactly how did you accomplish that?”

“Yeah, how'd you do that?” mimicked O'Malley.

“By—by…by dousing it with my own mother's coat—only thing left me in this world.” If true, this made a liar of the watchman, who'd claimed that he'd hosed down the body while yet aflame.

Ransom noted the moth-eaten coat, parts of it showing obvious signs of fire damage. The homeless man's gesture had been successful, and he'd salvaged his coat, along with the boy's wallet. In the process, he'd burned his hands.

“And the name you gave is no alias, sir? What is your given name and where indeed are you from?”

“Orville then…Orville McEachern is my true name. Feels good to say it aloud again.”

“An outstanding warrant out on you from where?” Ransom had seen scores of homeless and hobos, and most had had at least one run-in with the law.

“Boston.”

“So you came here to rid yourself of problems in Boston?”

“I did. You have found me out.”

“And how did you arrive here? By mule, pack train, afoot?”

“I come by the rails.”

“Indeed…in style.”

“A—a stowaway from the Ohio Reserve on the Baltimore and Ohio.”

“You fled Baltimore after leaving Boston then, Mr. Saville?” Ransom was careful to use his alias, and a half wink told McEachern that he'd come to the right city to start over with a new name. “The truth now I'm asking from you.”

Saville-McEachern cleared his throat and scratched himself all over, clearly uncomfortable under Ransom's and O'Malley's combined gaze and in need of a bath. “I
ahhh…ahhh
, hell…I fled…fled Baltimore after robbing a bartender of twenty-four dollars and some change.”

“There's no work in Baltimore, I've heard, no more than in Chicago.”

“Then you have some idea how it is with me. No work for an honest man,” he lamented.

“So desperation creates liars and thieves of us all?”

“I was without choice.”

“You speak like an educated man beneath all that grime, sir.”

“I was schooled in Boston.” He said this as if it were a badge of honor.

“You say you're a tanner?”

“Aye, it's my father's gift passed on.”

“Then it is your gift. We must help Saville here, O'Malley! Get 'im fixed up with the right people all properlike. What do you say, O'Malley?”

“Oh indeed, Inspector Ransom.”

“So's the man can use those hands for honest work and rob no one in my city, what? O'Malley'll see you to a hot
meal at the shelter. Get round then to see me, and I'll introduce you to some friends who can get you solid on your feet.”

Ransom told the wagon driver, “Now Shanks, take Orion here to Cook County! Ask Dr. Fenger to set him right!”

“But, sir, Gwinn and me're only here to transport the dead.”

“So now you do something for the living!”

Shanks began to protest. “But…but…this is an official ambulance.”

“Make it one trip, soon as I can get Purvis all put back together again and out the door.”

O'Malley's nightstick had disappeared into its sheath. “Doctors at County'll patch up your hands, old-timer,” O'Malley agreeably added. “And not to worry. Inspector Ransom's a man of his word.”

Ransom's mind still could not wrap around exactly how Dr. Tewes had gotten the information on the victim. He stared at the boy's ID. Tewes had made some striking hits. It smacked of collusion. To know the name, and so close on the boy's hometown—too odd. Just too odd. And Ransom was supposed to believe all this factual data had been somehow mysteriously “pulled” from the dead cranial matter—“raised” from the silent brain through touch? Nonsense.

Tewes had to've known certain facts beforehand, Ransom reasoned. Prior knowledge of the victim, just as in those bogus spiritualism tents and séances. But how? With whom had he consulted? Had he run into the killer at a local pub? How close was he to the killer? Or had he run into the victim sometime earlier, perhaps casually.

He felt a heart flutter. Instantly interested to learn what else Cliffton carried in his wallet, Ransom searched the billfold. Nothing but stubs from the fair, an old photo, presumably his parents posed before an ivy-covered building, perhaps visiting the campus. It looked like the black stones of Scott Hall. No paper bills—as these the drifter had spent. Only a cache of nickels and dimes in the zippered pouch.

Robbery was no more a motive here than in the previous two deaths. Cliffton had been killed out of some twisted purpose Ransom hoped to determine before the killer might strike again. But just how did Tewes figure in all this?

If the killing motive were personal, he must find answers among Cliffton's acquaintances. The
answer
would lie in a handful of small details, perhaps a falling out, perhaps a lover's quarrel, perhaps a debt, or a building jealousy or misguided revenge, but how could it be personal since the previous victims appeared, on the surface, to have had no contact with Cliffton whatsoever unless young Cliff had partaken of the services of one or both of the previous victims—one a known prostitute, the other perhaps destitute and desperate as she was with child. They were from entirely different worlds, one a Polish girl living alone, and another a seasoned prostitute known by police to ply her trade near the gambling dens of the Harrison Street Levee. Was Cliffton a lost soul who wandered Chicago's Levee as well, addicted to gambling or whoring or something worse?

Somehow he doubted this.

The three victims must have something or someone in common. Their paths must have crossed at some juncture somewhere. In this he agreed with Tewes, who had likely picked up this tidbit of police science from having hung about enough police houses to know how detectives talk and operate. He likely also read Pinkerton accounts, Conan Doyle, and dime novels.

Certainly, many traditional investigative tools and measures
did not
apply here. Still, what other choice had he but to look for a tenuous pattern?

These thoughts filtered through his mind as Ransom returned to the station interior.
And if no pattern existed?
he silently asked himself.
Then the bastard remains faceless and free to roam my city.

Three bodies…mutilated throats
fed
to a garrote, each set aflame…each left in high-profile areas—one, the prostitute, left on a well-worn path in Jackson Park, used by the
fairgoers and police patrolling the area; the Polish girl, barely twenty-three, left on the steps of the world's fair Natural History Pavilion—her unborn child found during autopsy by Dr. Christian Fenger. The killer may have honed his garroting skills on the other two, so that stabbing to subdue his latest victim was unnecessary—three times the charm.

From the evidence in the bathroom here, the struggle was quick and the attack overwhelming; over within seconds—certainly no more than fifteen to twenty seconds before Purvis succumbed to blood loss and a deathly euphoria. Ransom had seen the results of the garrote from time to time—a weapon of choice by the weak and cowardly and usually those without recourse to a direct attack. A cheap weapon, cheaply made, it proved deadly in its simplicity, and frankly speaking, Alastair wondered why it was not used more often. After all, it was an easily concealed weapon, not so noisy as a derringer nor so messy as a blade. Tidy it was. Despite the blood, little could spill onto the killer, as the victim's own body shielded him from the pumping major artery—the one Dr. Fenger called the carotid.

In Cliffton Purvis's case, his death was delayed only long enough for him to see his killer in that mirror at the public basin—such a modern convenience!—when the attack took place. Dying away in a matter of seconds…dying away like a pulse.

The sweltering summer heat and humidity had earlier plagued Alastair beside the stuffy odorous horse-drawn coroner's wagon sitting idle on 12th Street where he'd held the impromptu interrogation, but this same heat could not penetrate the cool stones of the train station. With the perspiration on his brow chilling, Ransom guessed that room temperature here would keep a bottle of ale a perfect seventy-two degrees. He renegotiated the marble stairwell, his cane tapping out a rhythm. He hoped against hope that the body and head had by now been reunited, that Philo had finished, and that the resurrection man, Gwinn, was wrapping the body, preparing it for Christian Fenger's morgue—
characterized once by Carmichael as an “eerie cadaver dump for every unclaimed body in the city.”