City for Ransom

by Robert W. Walker

  “I’m trying to apologize for what occurred at the train station.”

  “You’re here about Polly…Merielle.”

  He glared. “Yes, was ’round earlier on that errand. Look, you had no right browbeating my Merielle and—”

  “Browbeating?”

  “—and running me down, using dubious methods to demoralize her and—”

  “Dubious? Demoralize?”

  “—to set her against the only man who’s been good for her, and who has her best interest at heart. If you’d bothered learning the nature of our relationship, you’d know—despite my shortcomings—I bring a certain stabilizing force into her life, a certain, ahhh…”

  “Normalcy?”

  Tension palpitated between them.

  “Yes, damn you, normalcy.”

  “I doubt, sir, you’ve any acquaintance with normality.”

  “And you do, I suppose, you the magician of Belmont Street, espousing magnetism and this…this bogus science of phrenology, no better than reading the stars or tea leaves.”

  “If the tea leaves fit.”

  “Look, I did not come here to argue—”

  “But that is all you’ve done!”

  “I want you to advise Merielle of my strengths, the list of reasons why she should remain mine.”

  “You men—” she stopped herself. “Fellows like you, I mean—police and others in authority…you really do believe you can own someone, don’t you? Body and soul.”

  Their voices had risen and there came a tapping on the windowpane. Both men stared at Gabrielle. Finally, Ransom asked, “She any good with that hog leg?”

  “She’s quite good with it,” Jane again lied.

  “I suppose you taught her at an early age to point guns?”

  “In this environment, is that so wrong? Seems the norm, in fact. Hair Trigger Block is a short stroll.”

  “Then you value your daughter well.”

  “That I do…yes.”

  “Perhaps then we should continue elsewhere, say Muldoon’s end of the block?”

  Jane feared going off with this man anywhere, but as Tewes, she must show no flinching—just as she’d not failed the test of manliness at the railway station. “Give me a moment to settle Gabby then,” she calmly replied.

  “Agreed.”

  “Then we’ll reconnoiter how to civilly work together.”

  “Work together?”

  “On how best to help Polly.”

  “Ahhh…yes.”

  “And on how best to pursue a killer?”

  “Hold on. My being here’s in no way a conciliatory gesture in that direction.”

  “Fair enough. Only a moment then.” Tewes disappeared into the house. Alastair could hear the daughter giving Tewes hell about going off into the night with Inspector Ransom. The young thing was wise. Tewes must’ve told her what had transpired at the train station. Ransom relit his pipe beneath the gaslight and paced the sidewalk, his cop’s eye reading the night street. A ragged little Italian family searched through discarded items in an alleyway. Two desperate-looking men stepped from a darkened doorway, perhaps engaged in a shady deal. Along the packed Clark Street, a hansom cab rolled by, pulled by a weary horse favoring its right front hoof. “Likely your mare’s thrown a shoe!” he called after the driver, but the warning went unheeded.

  Merielle let him in again. He seemed harmless, and he’d been so complimentary when she really needed complimenting, and he’d apologized for striking her, after all. So she let him back inside, or perhaps she did so, just so she’d have something to tell Dr. Tewes. She’d tell Tewes, “Yes, I opened the door because he struck me.” She knew that Ransom wouldn’t return tonight. How devilish to conduct an affair behind Alastair’s back. How devilish indeed to have two men in one night handle her as roughly as Polly preferred.

  The gentleman calling himself Mr. Stumpf had asked if she’d seen any of the fair. He spoke of the Ferris wheel, how glorious the lake and the land and the town looked from the sky. “Like a blanket of stars fallen to earth,” he’d said, adding, “what with the lights below instead of above!”

  How marvelous it’d sounded, and so she’d gone out with the man in cape and top hat to feel for once like a lady, to allow Merielle an opportunity to play herself. Merielle did not disappoint either Polly or the gentleman. She held on his arm like a proper lady, just like her mum had done for her dah.

  So they had gone out and taken a carriage ride, something Alastair had never done for her. The gentleman spoke of the great art treasures from around the world housed in the various pavilions of the fair. He spoke of sculpture and artifacts from Asia and beyond. He spoke of it as another world she must see before she died.

  “Silly,” she twittered, “I won’t be doing that for some time.”

  “Of course not,” he’d replied.

  Twice more he apologized about the moment of anger in which he’d blackened her eye. He’d brought a cosmetic just for her to cover it.

  To further make up, he’d paid her admission to the fair. He’d showed her a magnificent night of extraordinary sights, sounds, odors, tastes, and touch. She’d had a 3-molasses confection called Cracker Jack, and she’d seen how they made saltwater taffy, and she’d seen farm animals and amazing new inventions, all amid a Grecian world of fake white marble.

  Polly’d felt stirrings that she’d never felt with any man. Here was a man who’d not just talked about showing her the world but showed her the world! Sure, he was younger than she, and sure his manhood was small—the reason he’d hit her when she’d laughed—but here was a fellow who didn’t just talk of improving her lot, of keeping her from boredom, but a man who actually followed through on promises, unlike the too busy Ransom.

  This little man was Alistair’s opposite in so many ways, except for his roaming hands. Even on the Ferris wheel, so high above the fair, she remained the focus of his attention. He’d placed his fist up her skirt and dug his fingers into her, making her laugh. He claimed never to’ve touched a woman there before. Claimed himself a virgin.

  She’d assured him, “I’ll be gentle.”

  She said so again now that they’d returned from the fair, as she teasingly dropped her dress about her feet.

  While she tied hair from her eyes, he seductively sidled up, one thing on his mind, Polly’d surmised and giggled. She leaned back into him, as Stumpf slid something thin and fragile about her throat, a fine wire-width bauble, she thought, when she gasped at her mirrored image on seeing the blood necklace.

  Stumpf took his time cutting into her soft flesh. An eighth of an inch at a time, whispering, “In truth, dear Polly, this bow tie’s a gift from Alastair.”

  She sputtered, her words choked by blood.

  “His vile blessings on it, Polly girl.”

  She coughed up the sumptuous meal he’d bought her at the exquisite Palmer House downtown. It came up with blood as she succumbed to death. Blood and bile her last earthly memories. She neither felt nor smelled the kerosene doused over her, nor the fire that lit up her body.

  Her dress still about her ankles had soaked up the kerosene too, and it quickly caught flame, and the fire took on a wild life of its own, jumping to the curtains as if alive. A killing acrid smoke filled Ransom’s love nest.

  In a panic, the garroter swept from the place, rushing just ahead of the fingers of fire chasing him out the door of this tinderbox. A final glance back as he slammed the door was like looking into the fiery maw of Hades. In minutes, the entire second story was feeding flames; a handful of minutes more, and the growing fire began consuming the ground floor from above.

  From a safe distance outside, where Clark met Halsted, the killer stood watching the flames devour Ransom’s home away from home. A giddy laugh wanted escape, but now he realized his vulnerability as an oddly curious odor of burnt hair rose to his nostrils. He lifted the cuffs of his overcoat to find hair on his arms curled into miniature bits of brittle bush—entirely singed.

 
; They strolled the gas-lit street toward Muldoon’s.

  “I’ll admit, I didn’t know that Polly was a Merielle until late in our sessions,” began Tewes, who’d pulled forth his own pipe and had accepted a light from Ransom. “Nor…nor that it was you she was—had an arrangement with. Odd coincidence that.”

  “I’m not a big one for coincidence, Tewes.”

  “Does it so kill you to call me Doctor?”

  Ransom only grunted.

  Tewes struggled to keep pace with his gait. “Things in Polly’s case…they just came to a head recently, and only recently did you come up, sir.”

  “What do you mean things came to a head?”

  “What doctors who deal with emotional and psychological matters call an epiphany, Inspector.”

  “An epiphany?”

  “The unexamined life is not worth living, Inspector.”

  “Is that an epiphany?”

  “Epiphany comes of self-awareness, a realization of one’s own needs or weaknesses, or source of power, or…well, you get the idea—Greeks knew of it.”

  “I see.”

  “Good.”

  “I’m sure that you’re…beneath it all, Tewes, a relatively…ahhh…ahhh, normal fellow yourself.”

  “As my title is so hard to get over your tongue, Inspector, it’s James. Or if you prefer Phineas, Inspector ahhh…Alastair…may I call you Alastair?”

  “I suppose it can do no harm.”

  “God, man, you can be infuriating. May I or mayn’t I? Or shall we carry on with Inspector and your mix of snipe-and-grumble-and-mutter for doctor?”

  “You’re likely the most difficult man to accept an apology that I’ve ever met, James.”

  “Ahhh…so your answer comes out, Alastair.”

  They continued in silence. The heartthrob of the city buzzed, all the drays, the cabs, the clopping of horse shoes against earth here, cobblestone there, the more distant sounds of the train yards, the stockyards, ships in the great harbor that was the lakeshore, down to the sound of the gas lamps that lit their way.

  “There’s talk of getting electric lampposts, or so I hear,” said Tewes, looking at a lamp that sputtered on and off. “To replace these old things.”

  “We’re rushing into a new century with all our fine inventions, aren’t we?” he calmly replied.

  “So much progress…and so much loss.”

  “Ahhh…something we agree on.”

  “I suspect you a bit old-fashioned, Alastair.”

  “Aye…I’ll admit to a touch of it.”

  They arrived at Muldoon’s door, and Ransom held it wide. His newfound manners made her suspicious. “Your talk with Dr. Fenger has improved our relations, I’d say.”

  “Some, yes.”

  “Some…” She wondered what some meant. Wondered if Fenger had somehow contacted him, perhaps by phone, and if so, how much Christian had confided.

  “Gave me a general dressing-down, he did. He has a far higher opinion of you than I’d imagined possible. Says your techniques may be somewhat experimental, ahead of times, even extraordinary—”

  “Said that did he?”

  “OK, he said you were eccentric.”

  “I see.”

  They found a seat in the dimly lit, wild saloon, replete with gunmen at the bar, spittoons lining the dirty floor littered with the leavings of the day—mostly bones thrown to prowling dogs, Muldoon’s more obvious friends. Muldoon stood an enormous man behind the bar, slack-jawed giant that he was, and according to a whispered remark into Tewes’s ear, “Muldoon’ll truck no undo criminal activity on the premises unless he gets a cut, so don’t go plying your trade here, James.”

  Jane decided her disguise as Tewes remained intact, as Ransom’s body language, speech, and swagger, all but the added politeness, remained the same toward Tewes.

  They ordered two pints of ale and a pitcher besides, Tewes putting up a hand at the suggestion they could drink so much.

  “I need steady hands for my practice when the door opens tomorrow.”

  “Oh, come, by then you’ll be steady again.”

  Tewes nodded, accepting Ransom’s generosity. “All right, but I don’t intend to stagger home.”

  “Ahhh…then you are a better man than I.” Ransom laughed at his own remark.

  Tewes raised his ale to Ransom’s toast, accepting her plight for the moment. While Dr. Tewes liked ale, Jane did not.

  “To a new beginning between us, Doctor Tewes.”

  “Why, thank you, Alastair. Coming from you, I’m most pleased.”

  “As you should be. Drink up!”

  After a moment of awkward silence, Ransom said with open palms, “Oh, I shouldn’t’ve been so hard on you to begin with, really…I mean, when you look around…there’re so many ahhh…unusual new methods and techniques, just as Christian says, and your magnetic healing is really mild by…say compared to—”

  “Mysticism, séances, hypnotism, spiritualism—raising the dead at a cotillion party?”

  “Balancing sieves on a fork, or divining by Quija board?”

  She raised Tewes’s glass in a gesture that said touché.

  “I’m trying to say that you’re almost within the realm of…” began Ransom. “That is to say at least close to…I mean at least scientific sounding…and something natural about magnetic fields. So, I’m just saying—”

  “That you accept me as somewhat less than eccentric? Perhaps normal?” She laughed at this.

  “What’s so—”

  “Funny? You might care to know I’ve never been called normal by anyone’s standard.”

  “Are you saying you’ve never been normal?”

  “Normal…what is the norm, Inspector? If normal means staid, stodgy, keeping in one’s place…I am afraid not.”

  “Seldom does an officer of the law see normal, as I saw it today at your home.”

  “At my home?”

  “That sister of yours you use as maid, Jane, and your daughter, one who works your books. Both I’d characterize as normal as normal gets.”

  “Normal is as normal does? I’m glad you approve, and that you found my…my Jane and Gabby so…presentable.”

  He lifted his glass as if to the memory. “A pleasant, comely woman she is, your sister.”

  “Not when in her ill-temper, I assure you.”

  “She seems a woman of…of—”

  “Yes, spit it out, man.”

  “Of obvious good character. A woman apart.”

  “Struck you as a woman of substance, did she?”

  “Aye.”

  “After all, she is my sister.” Some detective, she thought.

  “And you, Doctor…so…so…”

  “Different, say it, man! Different as night from day, indeed…I am quite different.”

  Lifting the pitcher of room temperature rich red ale, Ransom poured Tewes’s glass full again. This done, he asked, “How so? I mean…how do you mean, different?”

  “Damn different, man! Friendly, fascinating, strange, odd, weird, gifted, bright, charming, delightful, intellectual, insightful, all of it.”

  “Curt, abrupt, intense, too direct,” added Alastair.

  She answered between sips, the taste of ale growing on her, “Don’t leave out funny, hedonistic, artistic, expressive!”

  “Expressive, yes, agreed!”

  She pushed on. “Creative, self-absorbed, spirited, sincere, straightforward, lively, both patient and impatient, loyal, sad, depressed in turns…at times lonely, waaay too sensitive, sarcastic, can’t keep my mouth shut when angry or irritated, or around stupidity—especially stupidity that costs me in time, energy, or money, and—”

  “Like now?” he finally interrupted the flood of words.

  She ignored this, continuing with “—and inhibited at times, fearful at times, as I know too damn much for my own good, but I don’t trust anyone, which makes me distant.”

  “And I suspect you are a challenge for any woman.”

  “
Do you see that too? It’s me…in my own mind, I’m larger than life, despite my height.”

  “Really? I could introduce you ’round to some women.”

  “So that I can be like you—loud, obnoxious, a skirt-chaser?”

  “You really have me wrong, sir.”

  “I’ve misread you? You are actually curious, thoughtful, meditative—at least Christian says so.”

  “Fenger says that?”

  “Especially about medicine, the human body and the mind.”

  He snickered. “Whatever helps me solve a crime. Strange that Christian’s never said as much to me!”

  She looked at him as if for the first time. “What started this conversation off?” She was beginning to feel the effects of the amaretto and ale mix in her system. “Ahhh, yes, well, I know no one who’d use ‘normal’ in describing me, no. Would you?” Tewes stood, a bit tipsy, even as Alastair poured the phrenologist another glass of ale. Tewes declined another sip. “It is home for me. Have to look in on my little girl. Had liquor with Dr. Fenger, you see atop this.”

  “Your Gabrielle is a beautiful young woman, Dr. Tewes, and we should have a toast to her at the very least.” Ransom held up another full ale to Tewes.

  Determined, Jane gulped down the tribute to, as Ransom put it, “the fairest lass in all the city,” and she did so in manly fashion.

  Unable to hold his liquor, Tewes had played into Alastair’s plan too well, as he could not find the door out of Muldoon’s. Muldoon and Ransom exchanged a look of knowing, and so Ransom must help Tewes home. The entire way—having to hold Tewes up. What at first he found disturbing soon became curiosity. How is this fellow so slight? He imagined lifting Tewes over his shoulder. It’d certainly make getting him home a simpler proposition as Ransom himself had a buzz on. But the sight of her father slung over Ransom’s shoulder might set off Gabby with the gun. And soft. The man’s shoulders and arms soft and hardly a tincture of sweat.

  A strange fellow indeed, he concluded as he rang the bell.

  Gabrielle rushed out, gun in hand. “What’ve you done to him?”

  “Afraid, young miss, he’s sotted.”

  “Drunk?”

  “On ale. Do apologize. Hadn’t the slightest inkling he was gone until…well, he was gone.”