Shadows in the White City

by Robert W. Walker

  “That’s so…so sad. And when you were out of your head with fever, you said something about a stillborn child.”

  “My twin at birth. One of us died, one lived.”

  “I am so terribly sorry.”

  “It’s really quite all right now. I tell people my parents attempted to drown me at birth because I was not the other one.” He lightly laughed at this. “Other times, I tell people that no one in the family knew which of us died in the womb, but it sure as hell wasn’t me.” He laughed again.

  She realized his laughter and jokes covered his true feelings of guilt. She hugged him to her. “Do you ever…”

  “Visit his grave?” He avoided her eyes.

  “Yes.”

  “No…not since it was moved.”

  “The grave was moved?”

  “Along with hundreds to make way for Lincoln Park.”

  “Still…perhaps you should make an effort. I’d go with.”

  Instead of answering, he whispered, “Undo me.”

  “I thought I had.”

  “I am speaking of the cuffs.”

  “All right, if you promise to do nothing foolish, and remember your promise to Dr. Fenger.”

  “You were on hand when he operated, weren’t you?”

  “I was.” She loosed his left hand, and it went to her cheek, caressing her. They again kissed. A long, lazy, dreamy, indolent kiss, fully alive with passion on both sides. She was petite enough that he hefted her atop him again with one hand. But even as he held her, his left hand went about her waist to the second strap, and he undid himself while they continued kissing.

  In an instant, she felt both his hands wrap round her and squeeze her into him. “It feels so good, so right.

  “You feel good atop me.” He smoothed her cheek with his hand.

  “And you feel good below me.”

  “But I have to go now.”

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  “To work?”

  “To work.”

  “Despite doctor’s orders?”

  “Despite, yes.”

  “You will be careful?”

  “Yes…I will. I have a reason to take care now.”

  She kissed him again. “Yes, you do, so be careful and watch your back.”

  “Where Chief Kohler stands ever present?”

  “I should say so.”

  “As you once said, he fears me.”

  “Passionately so. It is eating him alive.”

  “Which says he does indeed have something to hide.”

  “R-regarding the Haymarket bomb?”

  He eased Jane over the edge of the bed now and stood her up like a child’s toy. She acquiesced, sensing his need. He remained true to form. Like a bear, he might hibernate best in his own lair, and he felt most uncomfortable here. She kissed him good-bye with a slight admonition. “Do not—please do not overexert yourself, and please kill no one, and please, if for any unforeseen reason that something should happen, I had nothing whatsoever to do with loosening your bonds.”

  “A bargain it is.”

  “A bargain with Ransom, I fear, may be a bargain with the Devil.”

  “Then kiss the Devil once more.”

  She did so. “Promise me you will see me regularly to treat you.”

  “Absolutely. I promise.”

  Jane watched him dress, and she winced each time he gasped in pain. She knew he’d not heed any further warnings. With mixed feelings, she watched him disappear from the room, fearing she’d made a terrible mistake in allowing Alastair his freedom. But the man was, after all, all about freedom.

  Two weeks later…

  Alastair Ransom stood on the corner of Lincoln Avenue where it met Lake Michigan, where an entire cemetery had been uprooted and moved for the common good, to make way for the sprawling Lincoln Park, now a common green stretching out before the oceanlike vistas of Lake Michigan. In fact, Alastair stood very near to where his brother’s grave had once been. Beyond the point where the rocks had been laid as a breaker, in the distance beyond, stood the world’s largest lit-up amusement wheel—Mr. Ferris’s wheel rising hundreds of feet into the night sky, a beacon and a marker for the northernmost section of the great fair where the crowds continued to flock daily and nightly. South along the lakefront stood the grand fairway running down the center of the World’s Columbian Exposition like a concrete spine.

  All trains, all carriages, all foot traffic—or very nearly all—made for the fair. All save a killer and the man who pursued him.

  It had been two weeks since the operation, and Ransom felt and looked exhausted from his vigil to be on hand when Waldo Denton slipped up. Ransom’s presence wherever Denton showed up had led the young killer to change his routes, to change his times, and now to change his main location with his hack and horse from the fair to here. No more deaths had occurred since the double murder at the lagoon inside the World’s Fair grounds, and this had led some to speculate that the real Phantom of the Fair had left the area altogether, while it only led Ransom to a sense of vindication; instinct told him that he was correct about Denton. And he had the deaths of seven victims—one an unborn child—to avenge.

  Alastair’s driving new obsession, then, was Denton, and no one could dissuade him from his crusade. In fact, all attempts had failed. He’d tried without success to order Denton to come in to again test his hand against the two bloody handprints. This time with a print expert, Theopolis Harris.

  Ransom’s harassing of Denton now had continued daily. It might cost him his job, and it had already cost him friends and colleagues like Griffin Drimmer and even Dr. Fenger—the only family he had ever known. The chase had in fact eclipsed Ransom’s previous obsession, his years-long search for the truth surrounding the mystery of who bombed Haymarket Square in 1886.

  Philo Keane, police photographer, artist, and friend had come along with Ransom tonight, and now the two stood in a juniper thicket mid-park, shadowing a man Ransom believed to be a repeat killer. Philo had come for fear of leaving his friend Alastair alone, a strange feeling having gripped Philo. This faith and cocksureness Ransom felt in his own cunning in the matter of the Phantom overtook all else. They had argued about it only an hour earlier at Philo’s studio, and Keane kept up his steady barrage of concern even now.

  “Give this madness up, at least long enough to take some sleep, man, and remind yourself what is good in life! Look at you!”

  “I won’t rest until I have my hands around that punk’s throat and can justifiably choke a confession out of him.”

  “Some people would call you cunning, a master detective, but not anymore. Here you are…on the verge of hallucination from fatigue. Come back to my place. Just lie down on my sofa to catch some rest. I’ll wake you in an hour or two.”

  “Cunning…yes, I can be cunning, but this boy killer now he is cunning.”

  “To think him so near me all those weeks he apprenticed with me,” began the pencil-thin Philo, his knitted brow twitching. “And he still has my Night Hawk, you know. Weird thing is…I never once considered him a threat of any sort, much less a camera thief and a murderer. Still, he did leave me with an uneasy feeling the time I caught him with his hands where they oughtn’t’ve been.”

  “As when he dropped a victim’s ring in your pocket just to frame you?”

  “Ironic, I was in jail when Griffin drags him in. And Griff so damned sure at the time you two had your man. He even had the damn garrote in his hand; held it up to me as proof positive.”

  “Griff is like a reed in the wind. Whatever the prevailing winds.”

  “At least Chief Kohler didn’t come back after me for the killings.”

  “Don’t be so sure he won’t.”

  “What’ve you heard?” Philo gasped.

  “He’s working closely with the city prosecutor to charge you again, while everyone else—including the mayor—is content to leave it alone.”

  “Leave it alone?”

  “Gl
ad simply that the killings’ve ended, and that their precious White City boondoggle continues without further stain.”

  “Then I say the mayor is a rational man.”

  “Quite.”

  “Afraid I can’t say the same for you. Have you considered all that you’ve forfeited for this business with Denton? How others’ve distanced themselves from you? That woman I ran into at the hospital who sat at your bedside night and day, and her niece, is it?—whom you claim as your friend despite the fact it was she who shot you? And your partner, Griffin, to whom you refuse to speak. Not to mention Dr. Fenger? Who next will abandon you?”

  “You. I am sure of it. So good-bye. Make haste!”

  “I’ll not leave you here in the darkness contemplating murder.”

  “You’ll miss your booze.”

  Philo held up a flask of whiskey. “Portable. Have some! You need it more’n I.”

  Ransom’s limp and need for the cane was now even more pronounced. His fatigue only added to his leaning on the new one, which Philo had gifted him at his hospital bed when he was still in a coma—and the steady thumping of that cane now felt like some sort of Chinese water torture to Philo.

  “Why’re we standing in the drizzle, Ransom?”

  “Bosch got word on where Denton has relocated his carriage.”

  “How much did that bit cost you?”

  “Denton’s picked out a new killing ground, Lincoln Park. I’m sure of it.”

  “And you’re going to catch him in the act?”

  “I have my own flask to keep me company. You needn’t’ve come, Philo.”

  “You’ve a strange sense of duty, Alastair. Duty to yourself.”

  “Duty to Polly, to Purvis, Trelaine, Chesley, all the victims, even that unborn child that Denton killed.”

  They had earlier climbed from a hansom cab a block away from the park’s cabstand, and now cautiously approached, in a roundabout fashion, through the dense woods of Lincoln Park, named for the fallen president.

  The park, Ransom said at one point, reminded him of a place he’d dreamed about while in the hospital fighting for his life. A place ever reminiscent of a somewhereland in Michigan where his parents had taken him as a child. “You’re not going to get all maudlin on me, are you, Rance?”

  “Just something about the two shores of the lagoon here…just like in the dream. Only in the dream, I was with a beautiful woman.”

  “Well, don’t look for me to help you out there, old friend.”

  Again Philo Keane thought of the terrible price a man like Ransom paid to the public at large. This determination to catch the Phantom for the safety of all Chicagoans had become a personal affair, a single-minded obsession to be sure, and yet if he were to succeed, it benefited all of the city. Benefited the lowliest street person to the Potter Palmers and the Marshal Fields. But at what price to Ransom? To his peace of mind? To his sleep? It had already cost Ransom dearly in so many ways. Worst of all, it could eventually cost him Jane Francis and any opportunity along those lines. It had cost Alastair friends as well, but Philo understood obsessions, and he understood his friend’s need for vengeance.

  In fact, Philo guessed it’d been vengeance that kept him alive.

  Philo wondered now if he and Alastair would be arrested at any moment for loitering and lurking, or worse if a copper came along and saw them amid the trees, two grown men playing hide-and-seek. Philo could ill-afford being arrested again. “If we’re arrested for pandering,” he complained, “it’s on you, Alastair.”

  But Alastair’s full concentration remained on the row of horse-drawn buggies and covered cabs at the cabstand, where Waldo Denton casually awaited the Lincoln Park strollers who weaved about the pathways, amid the greenery, locked in embrace, their eyes interested only in one another. Watching the strolling couples, Ransom realized how easily the Phantom of the Fair operated, using his hansom cab as central headquarters. He’d move about the paths of the park in his black uniform, strike like a shadow, murder with that garrote of his, set the body aflame, and be sitting atop his hack, an invisible man, all in a matter of minutes. Orchestrated murder.

  The lakefront Lincoln Park was a killer’s dream, a place where people allowed their common sense and justifiable fears and natural defenses to drop like stones one after another. A place to distract one from the horrors at one’s shoulder. Unlike the fair, this place kissed the senses with solitude and privacy and peace, whereas the fair rang loud with the sound of multiple calliopes, the barkers, and the hawkers, amid which worked the street prostitutes. Here the noises were of nature, squirrels, and chipmunks chasing one another, birds chirping in the trees, leaves rustling a languid whisper.

  “What the hell keeps you on your feet?” Philo whispered in Ransom’s ear.

  Ransom took a long pull on his flask of whiskey. “I’ve stayed off the opium and cut back on the Quinine. Feel like…like a…ahhh…”

  “New man?”

  “Feel like a man who’s stepped out of Hell’s furthest jaw.”

  “Why don’t you ask more of life for Alastair Ransom?” Philo then drank.

  “You ask enough for the both of us, Philo.” Ransom tripped on his own shoe.

  “Do you think you can keep your feet? You, my friend, are no longer making any g’damn sense.”

  Philo looked all about their surroundings, uneasy. Here was the newly created lagoon. The lovely grand lake ever in the eye, here in this park, which only a few years before had been the cemetery where Alastair’s twin had reposed. The graves had long been relocated in the effort of city fathers to keep pristine all of the lakefront coastal property, purchasing it for the use of the common good—common ground meant common green. Denton had removed his theater of operations to here, thinking that perhaps Ransom could be outdone or outrun or outfoxed; thinking, at least for a night, he had ditched his constant new shadow, a shadow that accosted him with accusation at every turn. A shadow the size of a standing bear.

  Some said Denton had gone to Chief Kohler and Prosecutor Kehoe to ask that they muzzle the big man’s mouth, take his gun and badge away, and remove him from the Chicago Police Department.

  Some rumors had it that the two men, chief and prosecutor, had hired Denton to continue on as normal, and to report any and all bad conduct of one Inspector Alastair Ransom directly to them. Ransom’s snitch, Bosch, had informed him that “The powers that be’re after you, Ransom; working up a case against you.”

  “Don’t hold back, Bosch. Give me the full story,” he’d said.

  Stunted Henry Bosch screwed up his features until his face was a dried-up potato. “It’s about that poor harassed citizen, Denton, wrongfully accused, wrongfully jailed, and wrongly hounded after being released for lack of evidence.”

  And so here they were, Ransom in full knowledge of this “trap” set for him, but like any dumb bear, he forged straight into the snare. They stood in the snare now, Philo and Ransom observing, watching, studying the hansom cabstand, staring across at the youngest cabbie in the group—Denton—listening to banter and laughter wafting over, under, and through the park leaves.

  All the hansom drivers saw to their own stock, feeding bits of cabbage, carrots, and corn to their mares. All stood about a barrel they used for shucking corn and oysters, and for tossing bones and cigarette butts, and a second barrel used as a cooking fire. This pair of barrels created a fulcrum along with a newsstand for the Herald, the Tribune, and other papers—common ground for the common man. The cabbies busily discussed the rising cost of grain feed, cigarettes, beer, wine, coal oil, and whatever else came to mind from a broken horseshoe to a tear in a cloak. Some of them joked with Denton about being the infamous Phantom of the Fair, and he joked back—actually prancing about and using his garrote, making a mock attack on another driver’s horse! Then in a chillingly ironic voice, Denton laughingly asked, “What’d you boys give to know where the Phantom can be found?”

  “I hear that is what you asked Inspector Ransom the night h
e arrested you for the killer!” shouted another, and they all burst into laughter.

  “You know the rumor now as to the killer being a prostitute,” said Denton. “It might well be. I can tell you that with a garrote, a woman can take down that fat tub of lard, Ransom!”

  “Is that true?” Philo asked Ransom where they stood in the bush.

  “Manys-a-prostitute chooses the garrote over the blade. The great equalizer, a way to overpower someone twice your size,” Alastair replied. “And manys-a-poor-bloke’s had his penis sheared off by a whore’s garrote.”

  “Ouch! That happens? Damn, but you see some awful things.”

  “Can you imagine waking up to your little head being garroted?”

  “I can imagine…you’ve no idea how I can imagine.” He protectively crossed his legs.

  “Yes, same weapon as Denton carries.”

  “But what does Waldo get from…get out of…”

  “Murder? It makes Denton feel our equal, Philo—”

  “Our equal is it?”

  “—you and me, and every man with a larger, ahhh, body, and a rank of some sort in Chicago.”

  The men at the cabstand got up an impromptu lottery on the question of whether the true Phantom, once caught, would prove male or female. Denton had named a name they all knew, the infamous Pekinese-faced Chicago madame, Laveeda Grimaldi. They laughed at the notion.

  CHAPTER 4

  At the World’s Fair, the chaos of hundreds of thousands continued unabated as though nothing untoward had occurred in the least here, and the increased numbers of uniformed police stationed about the fair also went unnoticed, but for some the police presence was much appreciated, especially the monied men backing the fair and the merchants working it for all they might. In fact, the fair had its own private police force, partially reinforced by part-timers moonlighting from the CPD. The fair cops worked independently of city government, however, answering only to their private employers—Chicago’s elite, and this smacked of the old days when private enforcers and police ran amuck in their zeal to please private business interests and put down any strike or talk of strike as in the days of Haymarket. The sense they’d taken two steps back in police enforcement with this untrained crew stuck in Griffin Drimmer’s craw, aside from their namby-pamby uniforms.