Shadows in the White City

by Robert W. Walker

  Did Denton intend to use the weapon as a weapon or as a mere tool, as he’d calmly explained. “I raise chickens on a rooftop, and when things become particularly bleak and there’s no food, I’ll kill a chicken.”

  “Using a garrote? On chickens?”

  “It works wonderfully well—quick and painless. I cannot abide seeing an animal suffer.”

  Griff thought, My God, if there’s any truth in it, then we have no case. Denton next quoted chapter and verse of the recently inaugurated law governing deadly intent and weapons use. If there could be shown any doubt whatsoever that Denton indeed used the garrote in the manner described, then the garrote found in his pocket—with what he claimed to be chicken blood adhering to it—was no longer a weapon but rather a tool used in a fowl business rather than a foul business, and must be treated as such. There was no science on earth that could separate and identify animal from human blood. Reasonable doubt had begun to spring up like so many freckles turning to boils.

  Thus went the smoking evidence—the bloody garrote found on Waldo Denton.

  A good lawyer like McCumbler would tear their case to shreds if Denton could afford him, but even with a court-appointed lawyer, the result might be the same. What did they have alongside the suspicions and assumptions held by Inspector Ransom? If asked to back Alastair Ransom a hundred percent, or if asked to swear to it in a court of law, Griff knew he’d have to do so, but that it would be at great peril to his job. However, it might never come to that. Sad as it might be, the law did not allow for tenuous connections made in the mind of a detective or policeman as evidence in a case—certainly not since Haymarket. There was a time—Alastair’s time—when a cop’s word alone could send a man to prison or to the gallows, but the “good old golden days,” as many a cop called them, were long gone by 1893.

  Already the city prosecutor’s office disliked the “thinness” of the case, characterizing it as a “helluva stretch in credulity” to think that they must prosecute Denton—a mere boy without a criminal record, and without the least athletic appearance as a multiple killer. How could Denton possibly be the Phantom of the Fair? To parade Denton before the public as the infamous monster? This could turn them all into laughingstocks, God forbid! Given the lack of physical evidence, and the lack of catching the killer in the act—rather he was at tea with his supposed next victim—did not help Ransom’s cause. Still, Griffin tried as best he could to stand in for Alastair and to argue Ransom’s reasoning.

  Unfortunately, by now Griff had little belief in it himself, and this likely showed as Prosecutor Hiram Kehoe had stopped at one point in his questioning of Griffin on the particulars to ask point blank, “Inspector Drimmer, are you convinced of the boy’s guilt?”

  “I…I well not at first, but…”

  “Go on.”

  “—but Inspector Ransom has an uncanny ability at sniffing out the truth and tracking down felons—a thing proven many times over.”

  “I’m not asking your opinion on Ransom. God knows we all have an opinion on Ransom. I am asking for your conviction.”

  “The evidence points to Denton. He’d decoyed Inspector Ransom, you see.”

  “Decoyed?” asked Kehoe.

  “Ahhh…led him astray—to the lagoon in the park—while Denton went straight for the Tewes’s home.”

  “Led Ransom on a wild-goose chase? That could be construed as a prank, a joke.”

  “Yes, sir, but, but—”

  “Was anyone in the Tewes home harmed?”

  “None but Alastair, no. But you see, Inspector Ransom’s emotions…ahhh…that is, as he has affections for Dr. Tewes’s sister and daughter, and fearing for their safety, he rushed headlong—”

  “Precisely…all this I’ve heard from the ladies and bystanders nearly run over by the coach you two shared!”

  “Haste was of the utmost—”

  “The city is having to replace a Chinaman’s hand lorry, a vegetable kiosk, and a broken axle!”

  “I am sorry for all inconven—”

  “I think all concur,” Kehoe stated while jotting notes in a small book he kept, “including you, from your words that Inspector Ransom acted rashly, foolishly!” He stopped to jot more notes on this. “Embarrassing not only himself but the Chicago Police Department. Being led astray on a prank amid the most horrific case the city has known…his emotions swaying in the proverbial wind…a fear gripping him—and he literally broke into the Tewes residence without a warrant, without provocation.”

  Griff kept his silence.

  Kehoe finished the interview, saying, “I’ll have to examine the case in light of all that Inspector Griffin has said.”

  A fear gripped Drimmer now. His words, meant to uphold Ransom had somehow permutated in Kehoe’s hands, each becoming twisted around. What’ve I said? What has Kehoe heard me say? Damn it, I’d meant everything in support of Ransom. Now I’ll be leading the Ransom defense fund.

  Griffin did not want to be around when Alastair Ransom learned of all this. If they allowed Waldo Denton to go merrily on his way, and should Alastair survive his wound, the operation, and recuperation to one day sit up in his hospital bed, what would the inspector’s rage do?

  Cook County Hospital emergency surgery recovery room, same night

  Anesthetized Alastair Ransom dreams of being under Jane Francis’s touch, once again, sitting in her curing chair below that pyramidal scaffold of “healing magnetized brass,” which she designed herself in order to maximize the magnetic power of Earth to body.

  “You’re here about the case, aren’t you?” asks Jane Francis, a ghostly apparition in Dr. Tewes’s clothes.

  “Brilliant deduction, Dr. Tewes,” Alastair’s dream self replies, as smug as his corporeal self, a certainty, a swagger, an arrogance that comes with confidence and skill.

  “My God, Inspector, you must try to relax.” Jane Francis’s voice comes out of Tewes’s now. “Allow the magnetism of my hands and the pyramid, and the magnetic rivers of your own arteries and veins to flow freely through you.”

  “I thought we’d agreed you’d call me Alastair.”

  “Concentrate on what is important.” She’s in a dress now.

  “I really don’t think this is going to work on me. I’m a…a…”

  “Non-believer, I know. But your hat’s off now, and you’re in my hands. Relax. It won’t hurt a bit, and who knows, you might actually learn something useful.”

  “Useful? About magnetic and phrenological practice?”

  “God, man, relax. You’re as stiff as the walls.”

  “I’d like to relax. I’d like my opium pipe!”

  “Imagine you are elsewhere and not in the hands of a fraud.” She’s in her ladies’ fineries now, her petticoat and bustier. She looks to him so touchable, so like a prize.

  “A detective without an imagination is as useless as a bird without wings.”

  “Well, then, use it. Picture yourself in the most exotic, most pleasant place you’ve ever known.”

  Under Tewes’s soothing guidance and hand, Ransom releases all his pent up anger, rage, and tension. He feels it draining from him, replaced by Jane’s touch and a calm that Alastair has not known since before Haymarket. Ransom recalls an island at the northern tip of Michigan, a place called Mackinac across from Sault Ste. Marie and Canada. He’d gone there in his youth at a time when he’d thought working with his hands a good idea; perhaps the life of a fisherman on the Great Lakes. The life of a sailor held out great romantic possibilities.

  He felt the warmth of a summer rain on his body, and he looked down to find himself nude and young and virile as he was before they nearly blew his leg off with a bomb. He felt the cool green grass of this place beneath him, and the bluest blue sky and the whitest white clouds overhead, and on a distant shore, he saw people fishing and laughing and lounging, picnicking and dancing. Lots of dancing. Among the partying throng, he saw himself. As if he belonged. As if in fact he were welcome and known, and it was all righ
t that everyone knew his name. Then she was alongside him. Jane.

  Jane reaches for both his hands. She no longer has underclothes on. Like him, her body is bathed in warm sunlight, warm rain, warm air, warmness of every kind. He feels as though he could never be cold again, not in his bones cold, not in his gut cold, not in his head. Neither cold nor evil could cross the warm waters here. Nothing untoward could get at them in his childhood hideaway.

  Still, off in the distant shore, far from the warm lights and laughter and dancers, shadowed by the shadows of the dancers, something lurks. A kind of beastie…a bestial man, yes, low to the earth, near crawling, nearly on all fours, bear-like, it arms limp at its sides as if the thing’s brain could get no message to limbs, while its paws and hairy legs carry its crooked body about with a godawful misshapen head likened only to a gargoyle that Ransom must study to determine the specifics of—bloody hell! He realizes how easily his cop’s mind slips into being Inspector Alastair Ransom. He wants to fight it. He begins a torturous struggle to return to the peace and beauty and warmth, of what Jane offers on this long-ago shore among the willows, upon a carpet of grass.

  “Damn you, Alastair Ransom. Stay with us…stay with me,” he hears her say as if from afar, as if he were the beast across the water in the deepest shadow of this place, and she was looking at just how far away he’d gone. How out of reach her warm touch he is. Yet somehow he feels her warmth, her touch, her breath, even her tears dropping on him. It feels real.

  At the same time, he feels removed from all the dancers, the warm rain, and sunrays, the light, and the feel of green and blue and white—all gone from this place so deeply hidden within him. A place hidden from him, although he’s carried it about in his head since boyhood. The only new addition is Jane’s and Gabby’s features. Although there’d always been a woman in this place—in fact a loving woman, and a daughter and son, all without definition. Still these people existed somewhere, people who cared about him, and a lost part of Alastair had always resided here in this place—hiding out. Jane now awaits him on a well-lit, sparkling shore; waits for him to come for her out of the darkness.

  Is it clear? he asks. Is it Heaven?

  Dr. Jane Francis had changed into the clothes of a proper lady, an outfit that her daughter had secreted to her here at the hospital. Should Alastair at any time regain consciousness, she did not want him to see her with mustache, ascot, and men’s clothing. She sat at his bedside, occasionally running her hand through his thinning hair, at times crying, at times certain he must live, at times certain he would die like so many dreams she’d lost in the past, but in all of her thoughts and fears and hopes, she never stopped talking to him as if he heard and could talk back, as if their invisible dialogue—as he may well be talking back to her in his head—might be the only lifeline left to Alastair.

  Dr. Christian Fenger placed a hand on Jane’s shoulder. Fenger was one of a handful of people who knew that she was James Phineas Tewes. “One hope Ransom has left.”

  Jane weighed Fenger’s cryptic words. “And what is that, Doctor?”

  “The man’s renown stubbornness, and he has unfinished business.”

  “And should St. Peter challenge him at the gate?” She attempted humor.

  “Then it’s a difficult time for St. Peter, who may want to postpone dealing with Ransom.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it, but you’re right. He indeed has unfinished business—much of it with me, so St. Peter’ll just have to get in line.”

  Together they laughed at the image of Ransom deciding who to argue with—her or St. Peter. Christian then hugged her. “Good to see you—the real you again, Jane. If you will end this Tewes charade, I’ll pull every string to get you on at Rush Medical.”

  “I can’t think of that now.”

  Dr. Fenger then left her alone with the patient. Gabrielle stepped in with a cup of lukewarm coffee she’d scrounged from someplace in the hospital.

  “You should get some sleep, Mother.”

  “There’ll be time for sleep later. I don’t want him alone when he comes round.”

  “Then I’m staying, too.”

  “You should go home…to your own bed.”

  “I’ll not be in comfort and leave you alone here.”

  Cook County’s cold institutional walls and bare room reflected Jane’s mood as she watched Gabby curl up in a chair on the other side of Ransom’s bed.

  “Ok, sweetheart. Whatever you think best.” Jane sensed her daughter simply didn’t want to be alone, and Jane had felt alone until Gabby’s arrival. She now sipped at the coffee, glad for the small offering.

  She replaced one hand on Alastair’s forehead. He’d survived the surgery; however, a high fever had set in, and infection, a killer of the ages held Ransom in its awful grasp.

  Two days later

  Ransom felt a surge of emotion welling up inside when he awoke to a room full of people, his best friends. Jane Francis as herself held his hand, Gabby sat in a chair where she’d fallen asleep. Griffin stood on the other side of the bed, nervously looking at the door as if about to make a break for it. Dr. Christian Fenger smiled down from the foot of his bed.

  “Alastair, you’ve come back to us,” Christian said, his normally sad eyes smiling now.

  “Thank God! You’d slipped into a coma,” Jane said, squeezing his hand.

  Gabby awoke in a start amid the commotion. Tentative about speaking to the man she’d laid low, one eye still shut with sleepiness, she quietly said, “Mother never left your side, and she never gave up.”

  “Is-sat righ’, Jane?” Alastair managed to croak, dry-mouthed.

  “Nothing anyone else wouldn’t do,” Jane replied.

  Gabby spoke for Jane. “She’s talked to you in the last days more than she’s talked to me in a month!”

  “Welcome back to Chicago, Rance,” added Griffin.

  Ransom could hardly swallow, let alone speak, as his mouth felt stuffed with a combination of cotton and glue. Jane helped him with a glass of water. Finally, he could swallow, and he said, “Thank you all for…for being here. Either I’m in some sort of purgatory or this is Cook County?”

  “You’re going to take a few days to heal, Alastair,” said a stern Christian Fenger. “Do you understand? No more of these acrobatics of yours.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Gabby, “and certainly not in our parlor!”

  “If you want acrobatics, go to the Chinese pavilion at the fair,” agreed Griffin.

  “I hear the French acrobats are on strike,” Alastair replied with a smirk, recalling how he had literally dived—after being shot—to flatten Waldo Denton, and how he’d broken Jane’s furniture.

  “If there’s a labor strike at the fair, you’d be the man to know it,” teased Griff.

  Everyone laughed at this.

  “And Waldo Denton?” asked Alastair. “Will he be spending the rest of his miserable life behind bars, or will Kehoe go for a hanging? Perhaps they’ll build a gallows for him at the bleeding fair! Or does Hiram think the poor unfortunate, misguided murdering youth far too sweet for a public hanging?”

  Everyone had silenced at the mention of Denton. Griffin Drimmer had filled the others in on the recent decision to release the suspect, due to a lack of evidence against him.

  Alastair looked queerly round the room, his eyes questioning. “What’s become of Denton? Suicide? A cell-room drama? Did you have to shoot him? An escape attempt, Griff, what?”

  “He’s not, ahhh…Alastair…we failed to ahhh…that is Prosecutor Kehoe, that is to say that Hiram…he would not—”

  “Confound it, man, spit it out!”

  “Hiram refused to take it to a judge, and Denton was—”

  “Released?” Alastair pulled himself up with every intention of getting out of bed, but Fenger and Drimmer sat on him, Christian calling for his attendants, Shanks and Gwinn, just outside the door, to help restrain Alastair, who kept repeating the single word, “Released? Released! But how? How in the world
?”

  When Gwinn and Shanks grabbed hold of Ransom, they did so with glee. Shoved away, the two women watched the attendants strap Alastair down. The big man on the bed hadn’t a chance, but even so, he lashed out, kicked, and shouted, “Get your grubby, dirty grave-robbing ghouls off me, Christian! Christian!”

  “You’re damned determined to rip your stitches!” Fenger countered. “Now settle down or we’ll have to keep those restraints on you!”

  Alastair replied with his angry eyes that went from side to side, staring at his hands locked now in horse-hide straps. “You got me in one of your nutcase wards, Christian? Like I’m a candidate for your asylum?”

  “Not at all, you fool! The restraints are on every bed in emergency recovery. To keep you still, and to protect you from your worst enemy.”

  “Some friend you turned out to be. And you, Griffin! How could you let this happen? You and that idiot Kehoe? And just how much input came from Nathan Kohler? This has got to be another of his nasty games to make me look incompetent.”

  Griffin nervously said, “In fact, Alastair, they’re holding hearings about your competence right now, and I stood up for you, gave you good marks!”

  Ransom stared at his partner. “My comeuppence hearings, heh?”

  “The jury’s still out on you,” he warned.

  Alastair raged. “Do you hear it, Jane?”

  Jane pleaded for calm. “Your stitches.”

  “Hang the stitches!”

  “Your constitution, then, your stomach and peace of mind.”

  “Hang it all! I catch a multiple murderer, and they let him go so that Nathan can nail me to the cross? The bastard!”

  “I’m sorry, Rance,” countered Griff. “Did all I could, I tell you. I pleaded with Hiram Kehoe not to let Denton go, but in truth, there’s very little to tie him to the killings save what is inside your head, Rance.”

  “Did you search him for the weapon? The garrote?”

  “Yes, and one was found but—”

  “But what? What else does Hiram want, damn it?”

  “He said every criminal and prostitute in the city owns a garrote.”