“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.
“We both want what’s best for your child.”
She’d worked to shield Gabby from the truth.
All the volcanic negative raging storms self-created within us that make us do and say stupid hurtful dumb self-destructive things, she thought. And a parent will do anything for a child. Gabby, so much like her, had always and still lived inside her feelings, inside her instincts. Gabby knew. She knew something in addition to Cliffton’s murder troubled her mother’s soul. It had a name—Nathan Kohler.
“I’m glad
to see you’re thinking it over,” said Kohler. “That you won’t act impulsively.”
Kohler had no idea how impulsively she might act. Staring at the charred remains of this day, she realized all her rampant thoughts ended with setting Kohler afire—images of his suffering flitting by like a series of daguerreotypes on a spindle. They were replaced by Gabby dancing riotously in her head, dancing with the phantoms of what was and is and what might be.
“Our bargain stands then.” He kept calm, smiling, his well-groomed mustache gluey with pomade.
She stared forward, wondering where she might purchase a garrote. “I don’t think until this moment that I’ve ever fully realized just how profoundly different Gabby and I are.”
“Really?”
“My intellect is just a tool, Nathan.”
“Of course, to make sense of experience.”
She agreed, “All things large and small, corporeal and spectral.”
“Intellect helps us communicate.”
“But my intellect, much as it is my ‘cover,’ isn’t me. So don’t put too much faith in its always being there for you to manipulate.”
He was the picture of perplexity now.
“I don’t live in my intellect. I live elsewhere.”
“Elsewhere?”
“Where the heart lives.” Her gaze remained on the ashes.
“And where is that?” He brushed her hand with his, making another of his crude, awkward passes.
“A place few get to be part of or see, a place that some—like you, Nathan—don’t even know exist.”
“Annnd…you’re saying this is a bad thing?”
“I’ve been induced to live outside my feelings in this matter, induced by people like you and circumstances.”
“Get control of yourself, Jane! There’re reporters all around here. At least pretend interest in the current problem we face, and in what I’m saying.”
“Feelings—source of my strength, why people listen to me, trust my deepest felt senses. My father, God rest him, he used to tell people—”
“Perhaps you should be having this conversation with your daughter, Dr. Tewes?”
“Yes, for once Nathan, you’re correct. While I’m at it, I’ll tell her everything. That way no one the likes of you can harm her with your dirty reports.”
“Look here,” he began, snatching at her arm.
“Tewes” pulled away from him, making curious reporters even more curious. She stormed off, wondering where Ransom was at this moment, knowing how hurt he must be, wondering if there wasn’t some way to help him.
CHAPTER 17
The following day at the cold site of the fire…
Some anonymous benefactor had paid his bail, but for now Ransom’s concern rested on an enormous egg protruding from the back of his head where that damn fool Muldoon had struck him, sending him into a blinding black light. He gave a fleeting thought to having to face Judge Grimes for misbehaving on a Sunday. Jacob Grimes brooked no chicanery but his own.
As for now, Ransom made a beeline for Cook County morgue and Dr. Christian Fenger. When Fenger heard he was outside his autopsy room, he sent assistants to keep him out. They did so and forcefully, but Ransom hadn’t the heart to put up much of a fight. Aside from his head killing him, and the back pain from lying so long on a stone cell floor, he felt like one of those bulls in the arena, stabbed full with swords, knives, and lances, bleeding from multiple wounds. Whoever this madman running about the city was, he’d brought police to a standstill, and Alastair Ransom to his knees.
When Fenger came out, his lab coat discolored not with the hues of a blood rainbow but rather soot of Polly’s remains, he asked, “What can I do for you, Alastair? Why’re you here?”
“Her ring.”
“What ring?”
“One I gave her. I want it.”
“Ring? There was no ring…no jewelry whatsoever.”
“Thanks to your men, no doubt.”
“I hate to think—”
“Give those ghouls a clear message: If I don’t have her ring, they’re going to lose something of far more—”
“Look here, Alastair, this is not the wild prairie town of your youth! And you’re not a law unto yourself. If I find Shanks or Gwinn’ve engaged in theft of a body then, by God, they’ll be arrested!”
“I want to hear punished, fired.”
“Any inquiry will follow a civilized course.”
“Civilized course?” Ransom laughed.
“You don’t know that they did this. The killer may’ve taken the ring. Canvass the pawn shops.”
“Why…why her, Christian? Just a sweet kid beneath it all…for what purpose?”
“Perhaps Tewes can profess to understand the mind of a killer,” said Christian, “but I’ll not attempt it.”
“You talk to Shanks and Gwinn.”
“I personally trained those two, and they know better, Ransom.”
“Human nature being what it is…sometimes no amount of training’s going to overcome a theft of opportunity.”
“You’re upset, favoring your head. Let’s have a look.”
Ransom submitted to his impromptu examination. “You’ve a considerable lump back here.”
“Astute of you, Doctor.”
“God, you can be a surly bastard.”
“I’ve gotta run. Give you the day to locate that ring. I know your men have it.”
“Go home. Rest, and Alastair, I’m truly sorry about your Merielle, and given the circumstances, I’m going to overlook it today, but don’t ever come back to my hospital making threats, or again stretch our friendship to its bounds.”
“What, no balm for my head?”
“Ground aspirin in water three times a day for the pain. Nothing else I can do. If you want any further help with it, go to Tewes.”
“Tewes really?”
“Submit to Tewes.”
“Submit?”
“Under his hands, you just might get some relief for that lump, and more importantly, you may get some long-term help with your temper and your suspicious nature and those recurrent headaches.”
“I am gone. Good-bye.”
Fenger called after his retreating figure, “Home, rest, Alastair!” Under his breath, he cursed Shanks and Gwinn, the two who’d transported Merielle’s remains. “Wouldn’t put it past the two of ’em to pawn items from a cadaver. Scavengers…first come, first served.” Fenger went in search of Shanks and Gwinn.
Ransom had no intention of going home, despite the pain in his head, shoulders, and back. He’d caught a cab for the scene of the crime. The ride across the city on a crisp, clear morning, a hint of promise in the air, a hint of the goodness of life just out of reach, and Alastair cursed the illusion—this intangible called happiness. How many years now had he cajoled himself with jokes about it, comforted himself with rationalizations about it. Happiness for him remained a kind of cloud toward which he aspired, but once inside, the thing dissipated. Some old Gypsy woman at the fair would likely tell him he caused his own bad luck, his own suffering, and maybe she’d be right.
Ransom now paid the driver through the slot and painfully climbed from the carriage. He stood before the stark remains of the old tavern and apartment house, made starker by the sunlight beating down on smoldering blackened beams still crackling with heat.
He went into it, like walking into a grim Rembrandt, filled with odd light and an enormous sadness. Wandering about the ashes, kicking about the debris field for the ring that Fenger said wasn’t on the body, he lamented the loss. It’d been a special gift, an heirloom, once his mother’s. He knew Shanks and Gwinn’s police records. A couple in more ways than he cared to give thought to; their in-tandem, small-time larceny had landed them in jail on frequent occasions. Dr. Fenger had come to the jail, bailed them out, insisted on their good behavior, and gave the miscreants employment. They took to the work of coroner’s men like rats to cheese, and on the side, they remained larcenous. Only now, their v
ictims couldn’t report them. And the two deemed anything left on the body, once they got hold of it, fair game, a tip from the dead. Until now, Ransom had cared little about such petty theft. But this was personal.
His relationship to the killer had also become personal in the deepest way—hunter and hunted now joined by victim on an entirely new level.
From a distance, on the street corner, Jane watched Ransom, looking a ghost of himself, going amid the rubble. She’d guessed that he’d return to where Polly’d died once Dr. Tewes bailed him out. He hadn’t disappointed her.
She sensed the truth of one conviction: the murders had come home to Ransom. It’d suddenly, dramatically become personal for Alastair, having seen Polly’s blackened, headless torso…having seen her hideous death. Torn from his life. She wondered if in some strange, twisted way if he’d somehow brought it on himself.
Body and head—according to Stratemeyer and confirmed by Dr. Fenger—had come apart in the fall due to the severity of a wound sustained to the neck—by a garroting device.
Angry, hurt, in pain, hardly able to blink out the sun, Alastair watched as Dr. Tewes came toward him. Tewes abruptly stopped when the big man lashed out. “Get the G’damn hell outta here, Tewes. I’m in no mood.”
But Tewes kept coming on, entering the ashes, the little bow-tied, mustached fellow unmindful of smudging his newly pressed white suit.
“Whataya want here, Tewes? To gloat over your success with Polly? To see the results of your therapy? How good of you to follow up!” He grabbed his throbbing head, shouting only increasing the painful stabbing.
“I want to offer my sincere—”
“Keep ’em!”
“But I am so truly sorry, Ransom…really, I am. I couldn’t’ve foreseen this. No one could. Not even Alastair Ransom.”
“I should’ve been with her. Should’ve hunted down that bastard she called Stumpf. And you, Mr. Psychic. Why couldn’t you’ve seen this coming?”
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