Shadows in the White City

by Robert W. Walker

  Ransom was immediately suspicious, his near assassination still fresh in his mind. “Why, then, are all of you here? Why would you set up hiding so close to these Aprons?”

  “We came to draw straws,” said Robin.

  “Draw straws?”

  “Give Zoroaster a sacrifice.”

  The facts hit Ransom between the eyes like a blow from Muldoon’s sap. “Are you kids crazy?”

  “If our gang gives up one member,” said Robin, “then…well then Zoroaster and Bloody Mary will leave us alone.”

  Pagan shit, Ransom thought but said, “I see, and this was your idea, King Robin?”

  “Actually it was Audra’s idea. I just put it in motion.”

  “Hmmm…and where is Audra?”

  “She’s a crybaby, so I sent her away.”

  “Banished her? Isn’t that kinda like a death sentence these days?”

  “She’s always moping around and crying; got on everyone’s nerves.”

  Ransom considered this. Any show of weakness and you were reprimanded, and if it persisted, you were cut loose by King and Court. He dropped it, asking, “So who drew the short straw?”

  “I did,” said Samuel, holding it up to the light.

  “What? Wait…hold on. I didn’t know you belonged to this band, Sam.”

  “I joined for safety. Just two days ago.”

  “Hmmm…some irony, then, the newest member of the group drawing that straw.” Ransom knew the truth of it. They recruited Sam for this purpose, and Robin had seen to it that Sam got the short straw. It was about that time that Samuel had somehow bought some time and gone hunting for Alastair.

  “OK, Sam, let’s go meet your fate, the two of us together along with Blue.”

  “Blue?” asked Sam.

  Alastair displayed his blue steel weapon. “I got it from the Blue Lady,” he lied.

  Alastair pushed ahead of Sam and Robin’s band, telling them to hang back. As he moved from the fire, the darkness ahead of Alastair was near complete, only a small slither of light filtering from somewhere above at street level.

  “Blood Mary’s coming for us!” shouted one of the kids in blackness.

  “You gotta hide me, copper! Else I’m dead like Danielle!” shouted Noel in tears. King Robin was also now blubbering, terrified and hanging back near the fire. He’d seen what they’d done to Danielle, so Ransom could hardly blame him for blubbering, but arranging for Sam to go in as his goat, this was indefensible. “Zoroaster is gonna do me next!” Robin shouted.

  The youngest of them, his face streaked with tears, shouted out now. “Don’t let Bloody Mary get us!”

  The lanky, older boy named Hector added, “She’s killing us one by one until there are no more children left in the world, so all humankind will die off! That’s her plan.”

  Alastair rushed toward the end of the tunnel where the so-called Apron gang were supposedly this moment assembled, awaiting the sacrificial lamb—Samuel. They would get Ransom instead.

  Alastair half expected to be set upon by this gang awaiting him, and he pictured the poor abducted ones who’d vanished as having been attacked by a knife-wielding gang of murderous cultists. This made sense and fit with what Dr. Christian Fenger’s autopsy had supported. This could well be the end of the investigation. He knew these killers, whatever age, to be dangerous and well trained in wielding cleavers and knives. He recalled the “animals” he’d seen in the park after talking to Sara.

  “Hang back, Sam,” he told the boy, but Samuel now displayed a bowie knife all his own, almost the size of his leg. The thing shone like ice in the darkness here, and in a moment of fright, Alastair wondered if the boy might not be one of them—one of the killing gang.

  “I’ll not go down without a fight,” Sam whispered, “and I’ll not let you go it alone, Inspector.”

  Ransom looked anew at the boy, studying Sam’s eyes and finding truth there; a feeling of pride for the boy welled up. “If ever had I a son, Sam…I’d have wanted him to be as brave as you.”

  Sam choked out, “Thank you, sir.”

  They moved on, inching forward.

  Knives could come flying at them at any moment from any number of directions. Ransom extended his blue burnished .38 and was about to fire on seeing a large figure of a man in a group ahead bathed in weak light. Alastair’s night vision had cleared, and he recognized faces. The faces of Danielle’s followers, the one’s who’d gone into hiding on learning of her murder. None of them were holding knives so far as Alastair could see.

  Some eleven children had followed the paths to here in their effort to locate a safe place in the city. Learning it’d been their leader—their queen—who’d been brutally murdered, they hadn’t time to grieve when fear had gripped them.

  He put his gun away, making a show of it, realizing the large shadow he’d seen earlier had merely been a projection of the huddled group. “I’ve come to find you all,” he lied. “Come to take you to a safe house.”

  One of the children grabbed hold of his huge leg and held on, and Alastair could feel the shivering little body against him. Like a modern retelling of the Pied Piper, all the others, like so many mice, scampered to the Bear and hung on. Sam stood back, put his knife away, and shook his head.

  Alastair began guiding them from the underworld with a mantra: “I gotcha…you’re going to be all right…all right…all right.”

  Alastair felt like Moses at having led the children and frightened young adults who wished to follow from the underground area around Wacker and Michigan. It had taken him another twenty-four hours to find places for them all. Most every shelter in the city was full to capacity. No one wanted to be on the streets with this madman on the loose, including homeless adults. So the Salvation Army and what few shelters existed bulged and were turning people away. Ransom had learned that Robin had led his followers out of Hull House, but these kids before him now had been Danielle’s followers. Without a leader, they’d stay put.

  Ransom wound up accommodating his more adult charges like Robin at the Des Plaines lockup, called the Bridewell, an old English term meaning that the man locked up here was well shackled to this bride. The jails were, as usual, jam-packed as well, every inch of stone floor covered in a sea of bodies where they slept, but there were the stairwells and hallways. Even City Hall was full with the indigent, the homeless, and the runaways.

  Once he had settled all his charges, he realized that Samuel had simply disappeared again and no telling where. No one had seen him go.

  Later, arriving home, Alastair found Sam on his doorstep, tearful and pleading to be taken in.

  Alastair could not turn the boy away, and so he found a pillow and blanket and put him on his settee for the night. Sam’s information had been wrong, and it had almost cost lives, had almost ended horribly in fact, had Alastair used his weapon down in that dungeon. Such an accident, involving the death of children, would most assuredly have given Chief Nathan Kohler all the ammunition he needed to end Alastair’s career in Chicago. Sure it was an error, a serious one for a paid informant to make, but Sam was, after all, just a boy. Alastair had forgiven him, but the boy fell asleep blubbering apologies.

  Asleep, he looked the angel indeed, Alastair thought, and his cherubic features made Alastair wonder anew over the various interpretations of the “Angels’ War” and the whereabouts of little Audra about now.

  The following morning, Sam had gone before Alastair rose from bed. “Vanished of his own accord,” Alastair mumbled when someone banged loudly at his door.

  He stumbled to the source and opened it wide, shading his eyes from a bright sunlit morning. Philo stormed past and into the room.

  “Alastair, they’ve made an arrest in the Leather Apron killings.”

  “When will people stop calling it that? And who have they arrested?”

  “That old crone, Bloody Mary!”

  “Indeed…does not surprise me. In fact, it follows…as inevitable as the sun coming up and the moon go
ing down.”

  “But in either case, the sun does not actually come up and the moon does not actually go down; science has us going up and down, or rather around, spinning through the cosmos, so it only looks to our limited perspective—”

  “All right, I get it.” Ransom covered his ears in a mocking gesture.

  “Still, your point is well taken. Bloody Mary may well be a scapegoat in all this.”

  “To be sure, she may know something, but she’s batty, and besides that, she has been here since the first brick was laid so—”

  “So why now does she suddenly become a menace? Good question, one I’m sure that Chief Kohler is not asking.”

  “Kohler is behind the arrest?” Alastair was instantly alert.

  “Well…actually it was your friends, Logan and Behan, who dragged her in kicking and screaming, I’m told.”

  “I don’t envy them their duty, and I know those men well…well enough to realize it was not their idea.”

  “A smokescreen? A bone to throw press and public?”

  “To make it appear we are hot on the trail of Leather Apron, would be my guess.”

  “What will you do, Alastair? How can you stop this maniac with so many obstacles thrown in your path, and…and with your hands continually tied behind your back by bureaucratic fools like—”

  “Please, Philo!” he stopped him with an upraised hand. “Allow me to dress. Sit, listen to music, be patient.”

  “Of course, of course.”

  Alastair felt an attack coming on and tried to determine which sort of attack it might be; it felt more like panic than pain, so he decided it was withdrawal pains as he had abstained from any morphine or opium for the past two days while chasing leads, and with the boy in his home the night before, he’d opted to remain sober, although he’d dosed himself the night before with quinine and antimony to fend off a threatening fever.

  “While I dress,” he called over his shoulder, “tell me, how is your photographic study of the street children coming along?”

  “Not well!” Philo’s pent up energy kept pace with Alastair, and he stood at his bedroom door now. “Too many paying jobs ahead of it, I’m afraid. Matter of finding time. But Alastair, there is something I brought to show you. It struck me anew when I’d returned to the notion of doing such an exhibit.”

  “Oh? And what is that?” Alastair had reemerged with most of his clothes intact but buttons yet in need of latching, tie dangling over his shoulder, shoes in hand.

  “Well, have a look.” Philo laid out a large photo that was grim and peculiar, and beautifully rendered.

  Ransom gasped at the sight of a family in a smoky fog standing in an alley entranceway—all sullen-eyed, sunken-featured, gaunt, and looking like a family of starved wolves. It was a heart-wrenching shot, this “cut” of Keane’s, tearing at the soul until you looked more closely.

  Mother held an infant in her arms while three others, ranging in ages that appeared between four and eleven, hung on to her dress, save the older boy who stood opposite, alongside his father. The older boy held a dead cat by the tail, a curled smile on his lips. In his other hand, he held a deboning knife. On closer inspection, the father, too had a blade in a scabbard protruding from beneath his moth-eaten coat.

  “The happy family,” said Philo in dark jest. “Something about the whole picture is horribly disturbing, in light of developments.”

  “Funny thing is…last night, I was stalking what I have become convinced is our killer—a family described to me just like this—but a family of cannibalistic butchers.”

  “Too hideous to contemplate.”

  “And so long as it is not contemplated, evil triumphs, Philo.”

  “Agreed. And so it goes among us invisible, as the Phantom so recently proved.”

  “Invisibility is effective.”

  Philo nodded. “Requiring only our complacency.”

  “Look, I must get down to the station house, see what Logan and Behan are up to, and if I feel I can trust them, I’ll share your photo and my new theory with them, and we can all proceed from there.”

  “Understood. The photo is yours to do with as needed, my friend.”

  Alastair snapped the last of his shoe buttons in place, stood and made for the door, where he grabbed his cane. “Good day, Philo.”

  “Alastair!” The tone of Philo’s voice stopped him at the door.

  “What is it?”

  “Be…be careful out there!”

  Alastair breathed deeply, tipped his hat, and replied, “Always…always,” as he ushered Philo out and bid him a final adieu.

  CHAPTER 16

  Alastair made all due haste to the Des Plaines station house where he assumed Bloody Mary was being held, but once there, he learned that she was already being arraigned before Judge Grimes. He spoke to the desk sergeant, discovering that Logan and Behan were at the arraignment. He rushed to join them.

  A large crowd had gathered outside the courthouse downtown, and feelings were running high. Most assuredly, the old crone was being thrown to the proverbial dogs, Alastair reasoned, as Chief Kohler most assuredly would’ve secreted her off to Senator Chapman’s farmstead outside the city for the reward if he really thought her in any way guilty or implicated in the death of Anne Chapman.

  Hooting and cheers and “atta-boy”s trailed Alastair all the way up the steps through the crowd. On the inside, he went for Judge Grimes’s courtroom. He quietly pushed through a door on hearing Bloody Mary cursing at the beefy, morose Judge Grimes.

  Ransom immediately recognized the tall, stoop-shouldered, scraggly-haired, wild-eyed, feral looking woman who could easily pass for a stevedore down at the wharves. Bloody Mary was being gaveled down by the judge, and she suddenly fell silent, her curses on judge and court at an abrupt end; and so fascinated had she become with the judge’s pounding gavel, which sounded like a series of angry gunshots. Grunting and cursing under her breath in animal fashion, her gaze taking in everything while in a pretense of blindness, drool came over her lips in globs that fell to the floor or splatted onto her curled, aged shoes.

  Alastair noticed Behan and Logan sitting up front. The two looked as if they’d had a rough night’s sleep, their clothes filthy, hair wild, but Alastair knew the cause: transporting Mary.

  Alastair found a wall and leaned against it, watching, listening, and realizing here was a woman who represented everything that the city leaders and merchants most loathed and feared. She was a walking billboard for the underbelly of the city, and she lived by instinct alone.

  Bloody Mary, under the harsh courtroom lights, was as out of place as any fish tossed ashore or any bird with a hole in its wing.

  Ransom felt a wave of empathy and sadness wash over him for the ugly old woman—the penultimate outcast—the social excommunicant.

  The judge held a handkerchief over his nose, so rancid was the odor rising off Mary. Keeping a safe distance from the accused, Grimes asked his bailiff to escort her to Room 148.

  Her hands were cuffed to chains attached to ankle bracelets, all of it rattling like ship’s rigging as she stomped, heavy footed, from the room, head slumped forward like some new species of captive animal with a strange curve to its spine, a species yet to be given a name. As she filed past, Alastair’s eyes met hers, but there was no light and no recognition there. Only an emptiness.

  Her chains rattled along the floor all the way through the door, the sound like sandpaper over the spine.

  “It may well be a dead end,” said Behan who, on seeing Alastair enter, had joined him at the rear.

  Logan came next, adding, “But we won’t know that till we get’er talking and to trust us—now will we?”

  “I got an instinct about her,” Ransom replied.

  “We all know she’s addled in the head.”

  “Exactly, so…”

  “So what, Rance?”

  “Damn it, man, so how can we trust a word she tells us?”

  Behan raised his hands. �
�We’ll never know unless she opens up.”

  “So I say we ‘open’ her head for her,” joked Logan, deadpan.

  Behan put in, “You can wait outside if you wish.”

  “I’m in the room for as long as I can stand it,” Ransom said.

  They located 148.

  “We hadda wrestle her in cuffs and chains, and I can tell you,” said Behan, “it was no fun.”

  “The woman needs a good delousing and bathing,” said Logan.

  “You two can draws straws, but I’m outta that one,” said Ransom.

  A light laugh accompanied the three of them into 148. Once inside, and with the bailiff stepping out, Behan sat across the table from Bloody Mary. He introduced himself with his title, and added, “And you know Inspector Logan and everyone knows Inspector Ransom.”

  Ransom remained standing and imposing nearby, nodding perfunctorily when introduced.

  “Aye, the Big Bear they call ’im these days.”

  “Mary and me,” began Ransom, “we go way back, don’t we, my lovely girl?”

  “I need my medicines,” the woman replied. “Did yous two bring me my mendications? I got a magic blanket, you know, one I can spread out on command and ask it to fly. A flying carpet. Give it to you for some medicines. You want my magic blanket?”

  “Mary, we’re not interested in magic or bloody flying carpets.” Alastair held a handkerchief over his nose. “We’ve come to ask you questions.” The odor exuding off the woman was preternaturally powerful. Something akin to a fetid over-ripe melon. If there was such a thing, Bloody Mary seemed a walking candidate for spontaneous human combustion.

  “Finally, somebody wants me for something,” she pathetically replied.

  Behan stalwartly held his own against the assault on his senses from this homeless wretch. The judge had been right. Even cleaned up, her skin appeared dusky and covered with a gray patina. She appeared Spanish or Black or a mix of both, but it was impossible to say with any certainty. Her accent sounded Mexican.

  “Let’s make a deal.” A mantra for her. “Let’s make a deal. Anything you want,” she toothlessly muttered and spread her legs as far as her ankle chains allowed. “Let’s deal. I’ll take care-a-all three of yous!”