City for Ransom

by Robert W. Walker

  Neither Tewes nor Jane Francis had an answer.

  “Your crystal ball out for repairs?”

  “Get it back tomorrow.”

  “Day late…dollar short…” Alastair muttered and leaned on a table that collapsed, sending him into the ash, throwing up a cloud. The image of the broken man completed.

  As he fought to his feet, he said, “’Spose you come to read Mere’s head like you did Purvis’s? G’luck. It’s with your friend, Fenger.”

  “I came to help you, Inspector.” Tewes helped Ransom find his cane, taking charge, telling him, “We’ll get a search party down here to scour through the rubble for Polly’s ring. I promise.”

  “Merielle’s ring…her name was Merielle.”

  “Yes, of course…Merielle’s ring.”

  “Fenger told you?”

  “He did.” Tewes led the dejected inspector down the street and to a table in the Bull Terrier Pub on Clark near Lincoln where early patrons drank dark ale and talked of nothing but the fire and the rumor that Polly’d been beheaded and set aflame.

  Ransom sat now, head bowed, sipping at hot coffee in one hand, a tall Pabst beer in another. Tewes was soon on his second glass of heady Krueger dark ale, Jane having acquired a taste for it. Ransom wondered if it were for show, to demonstrate his masculinity to the detective. Tewes also appeared absorbed in the busy pub’s clientele, fascinated in fact. He examined people nonstop, telling Ransom a bit of history on each that he merely surmised from the size of their foreheads, ears, noses, arched brows.

  “You can’t really believe you can read people from the shapes of their heads and features. That this phrenology con of yours actually has any merit.”

  “You’re ignorant of the science of phrenology.”

  “And you’re gonna educate me?”

  “The magnetic energy of our bodies flows strongest at the head, and it gives me, a licensed medical practitioner, Inspector, a picture of the mental state. Besides having a calming effect.”

  “To what end?”

  “Talk. In the best tradition of the family doctor, even the homeopaths with whom I do not always agree, believe in talk.”

  Ransom remained skeptical, sipping his coffee. Tewes read skepticism in his frown, but merely pointed out another guest in the pub, saying, “See the fellow with the bowler hat at the bar?”

  Ransom saw a man with narrow eyes staring into his food, occasionally sniffing at what dripped from his fork. “What about him?” Ransom knew the street tough and petty criminal from repeated arrests.

  “He’s plotting some mischief as we speak.”

  “That does not surprise me, Dr. Tewes. He’s an habitual criminal, one you likely know as well from careful reading of the Police Gazette your daughter has subscribed to.”

  “Police Gazette? Gabby?”

  “I saw it in her possession at your home the other night when I put you to bed.”

  “So that explains my nightmare regarding you.”

  “Just as you knew something of Purvis, and just as you knew something of Merielle, you know something of Darby over there.”

  “I can’t say that I knew Purvis or even Merielle in any true sense of—”

  “Your daughter was seeing the boy, and you counseled Merielle.”

  “You don’t seriously think I had anything to do with either death, do you?”

  “I’m saying you know how to milk information. It is, for all its sprawling largeness, a small city made up of a series of ethnically divided communities, and you know a smattering of several languages, yes?”

  “Rummaging in search of suckers in seven languages,” Jane said. “I resent the implication, and as for Merielle, you still remain blind to her inner turmoil.”

  “Yes, I admit to blindness, but…convinced myself she was…that she, she…”

  “That she could find salvation in making you the center of her universe? That she loved you more than she loved her addictions…the life?”

  “Something like that, yes, confound you, Tewes!”

  A silence settled over their table. Jane realized that each in turn had come to suspect the other of evil. A man with a violin began to play a soft melody imported from some far corner of the world, perhaps Prague or St. Petersburg. The sounds he manipulated from the strings reached into Ransom’s deepest sorrow and spoke of his own wrongdoing in all this: his part in Merielle’s death. It felt to him as if the violinist had been paid and sent here just to torment him.

  “Nothing you might’ve done or said, no amount of money you may’ve thrown at her would’ve saved her from this madman,” Tewes counseled. “She wanted to break away from Chicago and you, Ransom, making her an easy target for—”

  He flinched even as he shouted, “Lie!”

  “She saw you as a problem, Ransom, a major problem.”

  “You give a man no quarter, Tewes. Careful over thin ice.”

  “She liked you better’n others who’d kept her, yes, but she resented the economic bondage you repre—”

  His fist slamming onto the table silenced Tewes. Ransom sat seething, unhappy, silent. Jane feared he might explode and strike out with both fists, or with that cane he carried.

  But he did neither. He sat brooding instead. A bear whose meat’s withheld, she thought, but then Dr. Tewes abruptly returned with, “Look, to prove a point—I’ve seen this fellow at the bar many times but do not know him. Not even so much as to say hello.”

  “Name is Charles Darby, alias Anthony Guardi, known as Tug.”

  “Why Tug?”

  “Short for Tugboat.”

  “OK, why Tugboat then?”

  “For his size and ability, he can push around men twice his size, and if they disobey, he runs them aground…beats ’em to a pulp.”

  “Tugboat? Quite handy with his Irish fists?”

  “But he can pass as Italian. He’s done some prizefighting. The man is a poster boy for Lombroso’s method of detecting the criminal mind among us, I think, don’t you?” Ransom referred to the now famous Dr. Cesare Lombroso, the Italian psychiatrist and criminalist who’d studied hundreds of thousands of convicted felons, taking measurements of their heads and facial features in an attempt to prove all criminals were evolutionary throwbacks—Cro-Magnons among civilized society.

  “He does have a sizable pair of ears and that brow is as deep as a canyon, hiding menacing eyes,” Tewes said.

  “Not exactly the most reliable method of identifying a criminal, Doctor.”

  “No, I am sure of that. Still, I’ve read Dr. Lombroso’s work, his L’uomo delinquente.” The book created a stir among scientists the world over. “Even if he is wrong, Lombroso has created more interest in criminal science than anyone living.”

  “Well, give it time. Science in detection will mature, but I remain skeptical of body measurement identification techniques.”

  “Really? Then that tape measure my daughter saw hanging from your coat pocket the other night was what, for show?” Tewes put up a hand to curtail rebuttal. “Look, we can agree, Lombroso’s evidence is riddled with suppositions, as is Bertillon’s method.”

  “You mean, what else do we have to work with? Shall we arrest Darby there for the Phantom, here and now, on his looks?”

  “Lombroso is a first mewling step, and others with even less to go on have only cataloged known offenders, stating no two men can possibly exist with the same physical measurements outside the phenomena of twins.”

  Ransom began listening more intently. Apparently, Tewes was a serious student of Dr. Lombroso and the first criminal identification system in history, and why not? It lent credence to the study of phrenology. “To be sure,” Tewes continued, “his studies remain extremely controversial, as—”

  “As well his theories should!” he countered.

  “—as his theories are based on measurements and statistics derived from insane asylums across Europe, but Lombroso used the science of phrenology—skull reading—to determine whether or not a true crim
inal was under his thumb or not.”

  “That’s funny.” Ransom downed the final half of his second Pabst.

  “Lombroso measured the forehead and skull, and his findings said that a certain percentage of the population remain nihilistic cave men in heredity—where it counts! Here.” Tewes pointed to his brain. “That evolution is not so tidy a business as it is haphazard, random even. De-evolution may play a major part.”

  “And others say we’re all descended from a meat-eating killer ape. Ever e’t raw meat, Doctor?”

  “Regardless of mad notions that we’re all descended from murderous apes, Lombroso’s theories and statistics say that criminals are born—often with telltale knots on their cranial bones.”

  “My God, that would not include me.” Ransom gingerly touched the knot left by Muldoon. “So we put away anyone with a knot on his head? Please, Dr. Tewes, I was just beginning to take you seriously, and now this. You can’t honestly subscribe to the theory that killers are born and not nurtured?”

  “I do and I don’t. I think it a bit of both.”

  “Then you can’t seriously go by Lombroso!”

  “Only one technique of many I use. I combine a number of approaches to reach my conclusions.”

  “But deciding a man is guilty by the size of his brow, how deep set the eyes? How many bumps on the head? Isn’t that extreme…like stepping back in time, say to…to the Salem witchcraft trials and spectral evidence?”

  “It’s only a starting point to jump off. We’re all of us working in the dark, and thank God for the microscope, so that one day in the not too distant future—in the early 1900s I predict—we’ll be capable of distinguishing animal from human blood.”

  “To separate the murderer from the neighborhood butcher, yes. That would be a boon. You’ve no idea how many guilty blokes’ve got off claiming chicken blood!”

  Tewes stopped short, realizing Ransom was engaged with the man at the bar, their eyes locked. Jane watched the small drama unfold: Ransom raises a glass to Tug, and Tug offers his up and drains it. Each sizing up the other, each knowing their paths will cross again in a less amiable setting. Tug tosses down a coin and stalks out. Ransom’s eyes never leave him until he is completely gone, but he continues to speak. “If a man is apelike in appearance, perhaps he is a gentle giant. But not your man Tug.”

  “But suppose others who react to your gentle giant have treated him like an ape all of his life due to his very appearance? Doesn’t it make sense for him to commit a crime to get back at a society that condemns him for his deformities?”

  “He who is treated like an animal becomes one?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like that elephant man in London?”

  “All right, there is an example. When treated with respect and dignity, he became a gentleman, but treated as a sideshow freak, he lived life as a carnival animal.”

  “Hmmm…point taken.” Ransom finished his coffee and then downed another beer that’d appeared. “Sounds as if we agree more than we disagree on Lombroso, Doctor. But tell me, why’d you get involved in this case?”

  “I thought it a quick way to build a reputation, to use my phrenology in a manner…well as a way to—”

  “Bombast the public? Scam, hoax?”

  “All right. I was getting desperate, and it does not speak well of me, but I saw or rather felt I must do it, not for myself but for Gabby. Tuition and clothes and all her medical books.”

  “And the whole show with the head, a freak show?”

  “Not entirely. I’ve had more people coming to me for help, and I’ve helped more than I’ve harmed.”

  “Yes…well, your dubious services did not take with my Merielle, now in her grave.”

  “She’s not the first patient who’s come to me in a state of deep emotional distress and depression that has lingered for years without relief. Sometimes I don’t get them soon enough. Sometimes they come as last resort, when only if they’d come sooner, then perhaps…well…it’s all supposition.”

  “I’ve some notion of this killer myself. I’ve feelings that are like his, feelings of wanting to kill someone or some thing. And I feel him near.”

  “That’s…well frankly…frightening.”

  “As well it should be, Doctor. I glimpse only small snatches of Merielle’s attacker. The fellow who once pimped her out, Jervis, I hear from my snitch, that he’s left the city fearful I’m coming for ’im.”

  “Do you think this fellow Jervis killed her?”

  “He’d never have the guts. So afraid now, according to O’Malley, that he ran on the assumption I’d be coming for him.”

  “What sense then do you have of this multiple killer, Ransom?”

  “What sense do you have of this killer?”

  “Vague…a dark presence at her back, a fleeting glimpse of a cape. Expensive, well-polished boots, something out of a State Street window.”

  “You talked to the homeless fellow who grabbed the wallet, didn’t you, Tewes?”

  Jane confessed she had. “It may not’ve been a coincidence that mirror coming down with her head.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Her place was no larger than the men’s room at the train station.”

  Ransom considered this. “She spent a lot of time before that mirror.”

  “She’d’ve been held against the mirror in the same manner as the boy.”

  “Blind me…looking into her eyes as she died.”

  “In top hat and cape, he’d pass for a real gent in Polly’s eyes.”

  “And he whistles tunes.” Ransom held out a small coin but it was no coin. It was a silvery metal button with the letters CPS stamped on it.

  “What is it?”

  “Found in the rubble.”

  “But what does it mean?”

  “It may mean our killer shops at Carson, Pirie, Scott, the department store.”

  “He shops at Carson’s?” She sounded incredulous.

  “Speak of State Street windows. He may perhaps work there.”

  “What’s next? How do you proceed to interrogate everyone who walks in and out of a department store on the busiest street in the city?”

  “Maybe…just maybe she ripped this from his coat in the hope I’d find it.”

  Jane gave him this fantasy. “Yes…most likely.”

  “You think so?”

  “In one fashion or another we’re all interconnected. Her last thoughts were likely of you crashing the door down, saving her.”

  “Connected. Sounds right.”

  Tewes leaned in toward Ransom, sensing he needed to hear more. “Call me a fraud if you like, a spiritualist, a necromancer, but I believe images we retain in our minds that become our personal ghosts are electromagnetic in nature. And I believe that we’re all intertwined with magnetic rays that live in and around us.”

  “Magnetic rays that live inside us?” He sounded both skeptical and curious.

  “In our minds, yes, and our bodies. We’re made up of millions of atoms. This much science tells us, and how are these atoms held together but by a magical magnetism of soul and miniature telepathy between these atoms? They hold our very cells in harmonious bondage.”

  “I suppose you’re writing a book on all this”—he stopped short of calling it nonsense—“I mean how it all relates to your phrenology, your visions.”

  “Do not tempt me. In this magnetic field I refer to, we all touch upon one another’s thoughts, feelings, aspirations in an empathic field that God wants us one and all to acknowledge but most…well most ofus are blind to it, blind in sight and touch.”

  “And I suppose you’re more attuned and open to this field than anyone else?”

  “Than the average, yes. It’s a biochemical connection that holds our thoughts in place and creates the miracle of thought leaping across time and space just as there are necessary interstices between cells in the body.”

  “Inter-what?”

  “Damn it, Detective, have you never seen l
iving human tissue below the microscope?”

  “I have…at the morgue…on occasion, yes.”

  “Tissue in a dead man living on, yes.”

  “I never thought of it quite like that.”

  “And that life can be sustained in a Petri dish indefinitely.”

  “It can? I had no idea.”

  “The magnetism inherent in all life, sir. You’ve seen it with your own eyes. And the human brain, that marvel of nature…it’s the single most complex organism in the universe. An electrochemical device not unlike Philo Keane’s camera in that regard, powered by electrochemical energy.”

  “You’re losing me, Doctor.”

  “I believe the brain somehow stores messages, even after death, in some strange way only the future or God might reveal.”

  “Stores images like a camera, as in memories—even after death? Philo Keane know about this?”

  “Memory lives on…at least at the cellular level, the level too miniature for the human eye. Cells living on, functioning for a time even after all activity ceases in the body.”

  “Cells living on after…continuing to store messages? Do you know what this sounds like, Dr. Tewes?”

  “I know what it sounds like, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, the fantastic ravings of some lunatic storyteller, but science has always lagged behind the prophets. Look, if you pluck a leaf from a tree and place it below the microscope, the cells are still alive and active.”

  “And you think the same is true of the brain?”

  “Yes, on a cellular level, absolutely. Look, I know you could have me committed, but I’m trusting you with my innermost beliefs here. Do you see this table before you, Alastair?”

  “Of course, I do. Why?”

  “At the microscopic level, the atoms in this tabletop’re spinning about, bombarding one another, electrically charged both positively and negatively, in a constant state of flux—movement, but not to the naked eye! We only see—”

  “A solid, a cold dead block of wood.”

  “Cut from a long dead tree.”

  “So in a sense…it remains alive although in appearance dead.”

  “Take comfort that your Merielle’s soul is at least as active now as this tabletop.”