Shadows in the White City

by Robert W. Walker

  “He just set me up for murder. I won’t stand quiet for that! Search that bastard Jervis, and you’ll find a wad of cash payment, you will.”

  “Everyone knows Elias Jervis had it in for you, Inspector,” said another uniformed cop. “This looks like a personal matter to me.”

  “It’s personal, all right!” Alastair stormed off but was stopped by a pair of brawny coppers standing in his way.

  “Your gun, sir! We’ll need it,” said the cop who appeared in charge.

  “What’s your name, Officer?”

  “Tenny, sir. Dane Tenny.”

  “You think you can take my gun, Tenny?”

  Mike stepped in. “Rance, it’s standard procedure now in a police shooting down here in the Alley.”

  “Your boss doesn’t want my gun, Tenn,” replied Alastair. “He wants my badge and my hide. Isn’t that right, Mike?”

  “Whatever your suspicions, Inspector,” said Tenny, standing in military pose, feet set for a fight, “my job’s to do the right thing here.” Tenny held out his hand for the gun, one eye warily awaiting Ransom’s cane coming up. Once again, Alastair’s reputation preceded him.

  Frowning, with a nod to Mike, he lifted his blue gun out and handed it to O’Malley. Alastair then started off. He had a houseful of guns at home, including another exactly like the one confiscated.

  While all of this was transpiring, Ransom had also swallowed the fact that there never was any daughter of the riot with a mother’s diary, that this was vintage baiting. Next Ransom became angry with himself for being so easily led into a trap that almost cost him his life here in this mud-hole.

  “I’m aware that there’ll be a review of the shooting,” Ransom said. “Let me know when and where, will you, Mike?” He refused to acknowledge Tenny.

  “Sure…sure, Rance. You go on home, get cleaned up. You smell of mud and slop.”

  “Thanks…I think.”

  Ransom made his way out of the alley and onto the street where he hailed a hansom cab. All the way home, he sat angry as hell with himself, with Bosch, with Jervis for being such an easy mark, but he reserved his lethal hatred for Chief Nathan Kohler, and the incident only increased his suspicion that Kohler had a hand in all that had gone wrong in 1886 during the Haymarket Riot.

  “And one day, by God, I’ll prove it and put the bastard on trial for it.”

  The cabbie thought he’d barked some new order, and he shouted through the slot, “Sir? Another destination, sir?”

  “No! One twenty-nine Des Plaines!”

  Shaken from just having killed a man, and angry over circumstances that’d led him into a trap, Ransom felt the fool—Nathan Kohler’s fool. A stronger emotion gripped him however. One he could not fend off. Alastair felt a cold grim vulnerability overtaking him, and he realized this naked raw feeling had all to do with his empty shoulder holster. It was brought on by his confiscated blue gun, which normally pressed against his heart.

  The following night

  “Yes, spirits appear as you remember them,” Dr. James Phineas Tewes was saying when Ransom quietly entered Jane Francis’s parlor, and as quietly stood in the entry, listening to the spiel of this new con. He felt a disappointment not so much in Tewes but in Jane, and it felt like a lump of calcified stone in his gut.

  Jane as Tewes in trance was unaware of Gabby’s having answered the doorbell. Tewes was saying, “Yes, the dearly departed come to us just as they looked when alive, even wearing favorite clothes, but they are surrounded by faint, colored light. And while the newly dead speak, it is difficult to make out. While the spirit’s lips move, no sound is heard. But I have perfected the art of reading lips, you see.”

  The séance was in full swing when Alastair rested on his cane, thinking, Jane’s got to’ve heard the doorbell ring, must know the law is on hand, and that everyone else in the room had begun to fidget—séance-interruptis.

  Dr. Tewes had advertised that he could contact the dead, and this “new assertion” in all of Dr. Tewes’s most recent flyers, was bringing in business and money for Dr. Tewes’s bank account. Alastair wondered when and how Jane planned to empty Tewes’s account and put it into her name. While women did not have the vote, and while most married women had no bank account whatsoever, some businesswomen and independent singles held bank accounts. Banks would take anyone’s money regardless of sex, unless a husband forbade it.

  Ransom had seen the new flyer tacked to a police phone box, and had read the new promises of contacting a loved one from the other side. The notion alone would typically outrage Alastair, but he’d not think of raiding such a party of fools who deserved what they got. Still, this being Jane in her getup as Tewes proved a double disappointment.

  He’d come to demand to know what was going on in her head to make such outrageous claims in the name of Tewes or anyone else.

  When Gabby had cautiously answered the door, her fingers to her lips, he’d allowed her to guide him by the hand into the darkened parlor.

  Once in the darkened room, Ransom had immediately begun studying the faces to ID the family members sitting about a rippling candle throwing off shadows across the center table. Jane’s bejeweled glass chandelier dangled low over this same center, creating a mesmerizing effect like none Ransom had ever seen.

  Meanwhile, Dr. James Phineas Tewes held court. In gruff voice, “he” pontificated on the nature of the dead, launched into a sprig of philosophy followed by theology. Before Alastair had arrived, Tewes had undoubtedly insisted that everyone join hands in harmony and unity, so as together they might create a bridge and a bond with the other side, and so that Tewes had the energy to ask help of “his” spirit guide—a lost and wandering soul named Mariah, who had nothing better to do than make continued contact with Dr. Tewes. And today, this moment in fact, Mariah was going to bring Grandfather Nichodemus Pelham to his assembled heirs and assigns.

  They were chanting this request of Mariah in no time at all.

  Jane did not acknowledge Alastair as she was in a trance—or rather wanted the others to believe Dr. Tewes was in a deep trancelike state.

  Alastair remained standing beside Gabby, his stare a study in disbelief. At the same instant that Alastair cleared his throat, one of the ladies in the group around the table swooned and said, “That’s him! I’d know that snort anywhere. He was a tobacco man, you know. Chewed Red Man.”

  Jane as Tewes now said, “The spirits must learn to speak across the chasm between the living and the dead. Grunts, snorts…coughing is a simple matter for them, but words…words are as difficult for them as for any animal.”

  “Grandfather spoke in grunts and snorts; he never used words,” said a young fellow at the table. “It’s him, all right.”

  “Spirits have a unique function,” Dr. Tewes informed his guests. “They provide dispatches from the other side. In fact, I met one once who was a fighting angel in a war for God and his throne. And like demons, once spirits have seen your face, they can always find you. So beware…be careful, vigilant at all times.”

  “That’s precisely what the old bastard said he’d do,” chimed in the older man at the table. “That he’d haunt me from the grave.”

  “But he is at peace now and holds no animosity toward anyone,” said Tewes.

  “He said that?” asked the elder son.

  “He wants you all to be at peace as he is at peace.”

  “You mean dead?” asked the younger man.

  “You’ve got it all wrong Tewes,” said the elder son. “What he’s saying is he’d as soon see us all dead as to find that will of his!”

  “Charles! You’ll frighten his spirit off!” chastised the woman.

  “I’m afraid it is too late,” announced Tewes, breaking the chain of hands and standing. “I have lost his presence. He is gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Just like that?”

  “Afraid we will have to try again, perhaps at another time,” said Tewes as Gabby lit a gas lamp, and the disgruntled f
amily began leaving, accusing one another of lousing up the reading and getting them nowhere.

  Some of the family members recognized Ransom as they filed out, one asking if he were here to arrest “that charlatan Tewes.”

  “Oh, but we can appeal to the spirits again, Mr. Pelham, Mrs. Pelham?” said Dr. Tewes to his clients. “Do not despair. Call again.”

  With a good deal of grumbling, the Pelhams were gone. Jane dropped back into the cushioned chair and let out a long breath of air as she pulled away her mustache, ascot, and wig.

  “Are you mad?” Alastair asked her.

  “Whatever do you mean?”

  “Jane…spiritualism? Atop phrenology and magnetic healing?”

  “Hey, my therapy worked on you, didn’t it?”

  “Don’t change the subject. You seem bent on getting yourself thrown into jail or shot as a flimflam artist.”

  “Oh, please! You can be as dramatic as Mrs. Pelham!”

  “And how long do you think your disguise would fool anyone behind bars? Ever hear of a strip search?”

  “Tewes serves a purpose, Alastair, both for me and the community.”

  “Yes, to line your pockets while revealing lost wills of testament for ingrates.”

  “I don’t know that they are ingrates, or that they won’t use newfound wealth to, say, contribute to Hull House or the Salvation Army, now do I?”

  “Either way Tewes gets his fee?”

  “Yes, and why not? He performs a service.”

  “It’s fraud, Jane, pure and simple.”

  “I don’t see it that way.”

  “Are you a mentalist now, a medium, a gifted who speaks to the dead? No, you are a highly educated woman taking advantage of the less educated.”

  Gabby had vacated the moment voices were raised, but now she’d returned with steeping hot tea. “There’s no arguing with her, Inspector. I’ve tired of trying.” Gabby poured tea into cups as she spoke. “She means to have the capital at all cost.”

  “It’s the only way to see you through Rush, young lady. They don’t give women scholarship funds, I assure you.”

  “All I have…all you’ve given me, Mother, since…well, since meeting Audra and her street family, I feel guilty.”

  “For what?”

  “For all we have, and all they will never have.”

  “And it is my avowed purpose in life, Gabrielle Tewes, to make sure you never become one of them! Do you understand? Do both of you understand?”

  “Noble reasons for duping others out of their money, Jane.”

  “I carefully screen my clients in the séance end of things, Alastair, and those who get this far, as you saw, deserve a good fleecing.”

  “Then you admit to fraud?”

  “What merchant in the city isn’t a fraud? Have you seen the costs of medical insurance recently?”

  “Call it what you will, it appears very bad.”

  “We are at a crossroads, and we’re not to discuss it since none of us will agree,” said Jane. “Besides, I’m exhausted.”

  “I’m sure after a long day, and now this business with Grandfather Pelham.”

  Gabby piped in. “It takes a great deal out of one to hold a séance, results or no.”

  They sipped at tea in silence, each lost in thought.

  “I’ve spoken to Philo Keane about what we learned from the street children,” Ransom said to the ladies between sips.

  “Oh? And did he find it amusing?” Jane asked.

  “On the contrary. He is and has been planning an unusual move with regard to the sheltered and homeless children. Contemplating it for some time, in fact.”

  “Would you care to give us some details?” Jane asked.

  “Yes, do,” added Gabby, curious.

  Alastair related all that had transpired between Philo Keane and himself on the subject. The ladies were duly impressed with Keane’s insights and his desire to help the children through his art.

  “It’s this sort of thing that restores my faith in the human heart,” said Jane. She then stood and began pacing before turning to the others. “All right, I have a confession to make regarding the séances.”

  “What is it, Mother?”

  “Go on, Jane.”

  “I’m setting aside all proceeds from Dr. Tewes’s forays into the supernatural for a sizable donation, I hope, to Jane Addams’s settlement community.”

  Gabby smiled wide. “For the shelter children, oh, Mother, how wonderful.”

  Ransom dropped his head and shook it from side to side as Gabby embraced her mother. “Isn’t she wonderful, Alastair?” Gabby said.

  “Aye, she is that and bravo, Jane. I’ll have to come in and have you contact my uncle Faraday sometime so’s I can contribute.”

  “Do that, Alastair. You do that.” She toasted his health with an upraised teacup.

  CHAPTER 13

  The following day

  A phone call awakened Alastair after a long night of drinking and swapping stories with others on the police force and a few hangers-on at Muldoon’s where Ransom held court at his back booth. Alastair had decided to take Muldoon up on his “generous” offer. After all, there was nothing in Chicago that was not for sale, not even a man’s reputation. Part of his decision had to do with his having had no effect on changing Jane’s decision to continue to work as Dr. Tewes and to her having added séances to the doctor’s repertoire of diagnostic tools. If a highly educated surgeon could behave in such a manner, then why not a Chicago police inspector—if it were for a good and righteous cause? Why not bank on his infamy and reputation if it was for another means to an end—a way to help kids like Audra, Sam, and countless others? But no one must know.

  As a result, people had bought him beer and whiskey shots all night. As added result, this a.m. ringing phone sounded like a fire alarm in his head. He rolled from bed and had to cross the room and go out into the front room to get the phone. It felt like a journey to India by foot.

  Each time the phone rang, his headache throbbed at a lower decimal. He finally clutched the receiver in his paw and growled, “What is it?”

  Alastair was stunned at what Inspector Logan conveyed. He’d hoped with the news of Thomas Crutcheon’s death by pitchfork that the Leather Apron killings had ended. Even if Crutcheon wasn’t the butcher, Ransom hoped the killer would take this opportunity to become “Crutcheon” to end his murderous attacks. Not so, as Logan related the fact of another child’s body turning up. This time in an alleyway back of Loomis and Jackson, an area infested with tinderbox clapboard one-room shacks in which whole families lived atop one another. The entire area was slated for clearing and rebuilding—a thing they called beautifying in political speeches and in higher circles.

  “I’m on my way.”

  “Sorry to bring such news, Alastair, but there it is. I’ve sent a police wagon for you.”

  “Well done, Logan. I’ll be as quick as I can be.”

  Alastair drank down a concoction of juices and whiskey to fight the hangover, swallowed some pills that Jane’d prescribed for headache, and dressed at once. He was soon going across the city in an official horse-drawn police carriage. When he arrived at the scene, a large, ugly crowd had already gathered. A threatening atmosphere was evident, palpable. The police proved an easy target to the people’s collective fear and frustration.

  Alastair waved his cane and shouted over the jeers, “What’ve ya in mind here, people? Are you going to hang me to a tree and burn me in effigy?”

  “Not you, Ransom!” shouted one.

  “Hang ’em all!” shouted another.

  “Do you have enough fellas to lift me?” replied Alastair, drawing a laugh and defusing the anger somewhat. “And can you afford enough petro to burn me?” His last words sent up more laughter among the crowd.

  Logan and Behan signaled for him to join them. Alastair had to pick his way through the overbearing crowd. More uniformed cops arrived to hold the concerned neighbors at bay so that the insp
ectors could do their job.

  Alastair also had to pick his way through a minefield of discarded trash, bottles, castoff bedsprings, mattresses, boards, and scattered debris. Among all the trash one child’s body, whole strips of flesh torn away from the fleshiest sections. Nude, the child had gone an ashen bluish color under the elements.

  “Despite the butchering, Rance,” began a jittery Behan, “the bastard who did this left her face pretty much intact and didn’t take the eyes this time. Not sure why….”

  Logan added, “She’s not been dead so long as the others, Alastair.”

  “Is that right?” he asked.

  “Dr. Fenger’s come and gone, leaving his opinion,” added Logan, a cigar hanging from his mouth. Using the cigar to point, he indicated the meat wagon and Dr. Fenger’s body snatchers, as some called Shanks and Gwinn. Ransom openly gritted his teeth at the two death mongers. While they filled a need, transporting the dead, they did so with an enthusiasm far outdistancing their professional acumen. Dr. Fenger, for some odd, unknown reason kept them on as a kind of pet project, as he had bailed them out of jail when under suspicion of actual body-snatching to sell bodies unearthed from cemeteries to local medical schools. Alastair never quite understood Fenger’s involvement, but the appearance was not good—bailing out two men accused of such a heinous crime and making them legitimate ambulance attendants while they awaited the fury of Judge Grimes. Then the charges just dissipated, became watered down, and Grimes had turned the pair of ghouls over to Dr. Fenger’s care to keep them on at Cook County Hospital and its adjacent asylum, and to keep them out of Cook County cemeteries, where they had been nabbed in the first place. They claimed not to be unearthing a body at the time but burying some beloved dog named Cecil. As outrageous as it all was, something going on behind the scenes, even in the judge’s chambers, between Dr. Fenger and Grimes—two men normally thought of as enjoying the highest moral character—had agreed on the new state of affairs with regard to Shanks and Gwinn.

  No matter, Alastair could not stand the pair, and not because they were homosexuals but because they undoubtedly scavenged bodies for jewelry and tickets and cash and coin and any shiny object, like a pair of vultures. Dr. Fenger insisted that he had broken the two of any such habits, and that he had trained them well, and that Cook County paid them a good wage, so they need not rob bodies they were put in charge of.