City for Ransom ar-1

by Robert Harris Walker

  “Until now, I thought Shanks and Gwinn were getting rich off these deaths, but Dr. Fenger assures me otherwise.”

  Griff and Fenger acknowledged one another.

  “Ransom, so far as the chief goes, I only let him know what I want him to know when I want him to know. Tell ’im, Dr. Fenger.”

  Fenger cast his eyes in another direction, but Ransom saw the guilt. “Not you, too, Christian?”

  “Kohler runs the man’s budget, Rance,” said Griff.

  “Whataya expect?”

  Fenger said nothing.

  “Let’s just work this case, the three of us, and when it’s concluded, we can reassess where we stand with one another, gentlemen!”

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  “Sure, a chance is all I ask . . . a chance to prove myself,”

  said Griff but Fenger remained silent.

  “Although I’ve none left, Griff, I do understand ambition.

  But mark me, young friend, the prize won can leave a man alone with ambition.”

  “As may be said of your blind ambition to open the books on Haymarket!” Fenger fired back as if struck.

  “Aye . . . touché. You have me there, but who does one trust, Christian, who?”

  A deep, painful silence rose among them like an evil child at play. Griffin blasted him. “Alastair, you never put trust in me. Not once’ve you confided a single dirty secret you’ve learned about Haymarket. Just a few drunk stories at the bar, yet you expect sympathy and—” “You’re right, Griff. So much I’ve not confided in anyone for fear it’d get back to Kohler. Nathan has a way of getting at people, controlling ’em.”

  “I want to understand your side of things, Alastair. I do.”

  “Perhaps one day soon . . . after we apprehend this fiend.”

  “I’ll hold you to it.”

  Dr. Fenger said, “As to the case at hand . . . I can tell you fellows it’s definitely the work of the same garroter. Down to the diamond shape at the neck here”—he paused to point at his own Adam’s apple—“about here, on both male and female victims. What utter nerve and swiftness in killing he’s perfected . . . practicing his technique over and over to get this efficient.” “What do you suppose he practices on, Doctor?” asked Griffin.

  “Melons, fence posts, small animals, who can say, perhaps all and more.”

  “Or cadavers in a morgue?” asked Nathan Kohler, who joined them. “Gentlemen, whoever this perverted, twisted bastard is, he destroys the peace and happiness of the fair.

  This kind of thing, four deaths now on fairgrounds, two similar deaths within a cab’s ride! It has to stop and stop immediately.”

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  “Not to be contrary,” began Ransom, “but it’s seven deaths all toll, sir, and I’ve seen no evidence these killings’ve made any dent in the number of hotdogs, ham-burgers, or trinkets sold, or a decrease in fair attendance.” “In fact, the numbers have increased!” added Fenger.

  “Where the deuce’re your Resurrection Men, Fenger?”

  Kohler barked. “Get these unseemly bodies and heads out of here now, now!”

  Fenger took great exception to Shanks and Gwinn being called his Resurrection Men, and he stood face-to-face with Kohler on the issue. “Look here, we do not rob cadavers from their sanctified graves!” “You chest cutters’re never satisfied.”

  “Whatever you’re talking about—”

  “Potter’s Field! A recent disturbance,” countered Kohler.

  “I was sent to investigate,” Griff added. “A woman’s body . . . taken without a trace.”

  “How sick is that?” asked Kohler.

  “I recall the incident,” said Ransom.

  “Who was she, and what end came of it?” Fenger asked.

  “No end, open case still, Drimmer!” complained Nathan.

  “Remains a mystery, even her identity,” said Griff. “She was a numbered grave—an elderly Jane Doe.”

  “And the body in question never turned up?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “Someone likely made a stew of her,” suggested Ransom.

  Fenger nodded. “Not farfetched, given how swollen our streets are with the homeless, and the city doing nothing to relieve the problem.”

  “Now they’re calling him the Phantom of the Fair over at the Tribune, ” said Kohler in disgust. “Flood gates’ve opened! Imagine all the ink devoted to this deviant! From what Christian tells me, he doesn’t rape his victims—alive or dead! How deviant is that?” “My God, Nathan, do you think raping his victims might make him a better chap?” asked Fenger. “Somehow more like us and less a monster, somehow less sadistic?”

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  “Somehow, yes, in my mind.”

  “Somehow? In your mind.” Ransom, his cane beating the pavement here, controlled the urge to reach out and strangle Kohler. Throw in rape with your murderous act and it somehow made murder more palatable? Normal? Ransom had to walk off in a circle to not explode.

  “At least if he raped them first, we might understand his motive is my point. It’d point to a clear purpose in these senseless attacks.” Nathan straightened and stood taller. “At the moment, what possible motive have we for his bloodletting?” “He likes blood . . . likes the smell of it, the consistency of it, likes to wash his hands in it,” suggested Fenger.

  “Likes the garrote,” added Griff, “likes the heft of it, the cunning of it, the handiness of it, the genius behind it.

  Maybe the history of it.”

  Ransom shouted, “Come on, he likes the feel of the kill, same as you and I when we hunt deer with a Winchester. He likes the process of the hunt itself . . . the hooking of the bait, the lure, all of it.” “To gain the moment in which his prey is under absolute control,” added Fenger.

  “Yes, you would understand him, wouldn’t you,” Kohler coldly replied to Alastair’s summing up. “Takes a killer to catch one, or at least to know how one will behave.”

  “Prove me a murderer, Nathan, and I’ll willingly sit for shackles. Until such time, I’d appreciate your not characterizing me as this evil bastard’s counterpart.”

  “But you just did so yourself!”

  “Aye . . . I did, but I’ve not given you carte blanche to do so.” Ransom knew Kohler guilty of at least as much evil as himself, but in a time of war, men did evil for a greater good, or at least what they perceive a greater good. During the “war” with labor, Alastair had interrogated an arsonist and anarchist, a known killer of men who set bombs off to make a political point, a refugee of such activities in France. He’d transplanted to America and had drifted to Chicago when news got out about the labor dissidents at Pullman. All this, CITY FOR RANSOM

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  days before Haymarket and the riot and the bomb that exploded in the square, killing Ransom’s fellow officers and doing its best to kill him.

  Ransom meant to get information out of the man, and in a warehouse owned by a friend of the police, he’d sweated and beaten the fellow for information. Rumor abounded of a bomb having been planted somewhere in the city. He’d taken extreme measures to get the information he wanted out of Oleander, the man’s code name, and the only name he’d disclosed until he screamed his real name from within the flames.

  The matchstick slowly burned toward Ransom’s fingers as he’d held it to the man’s half-opened eyes, blood in his pupils making focusing impossible. No doubt, from the blows to the head. Alastair and the other cops present had pummeled the man’s cranium. His bloodied features might’ve told Ransom that Oleander was, by this time, unable to formulate words much less inform on his comrades.

  Then Kohler tossed his lit cigar into the fumes rising off the man. While Alastair’s eyebrows and the hair on his hands curled and blackened, Oleander went up like a rag doll tossed into the hearth. As much as Alastair attempted to kill the flames and stop the death, the flames fought harder than he, claiming what was theirs.<
br />
  Irony of it, he and not Kohler had earned a reputation that night. No one had seen Kohler’s action. Ransom’s reputation had remained intact since then, and word on the street, spread by the grapevine of lowlifes, toughs, snitches like his own Dot’n’Carry, all had him down as a cold-blooded bastard who’d do anything— anything—to gain what he wanted. As Dot’n’Carry put it: “If a man finds himself in custody of Alastair, then the only ransom worth talking about was payment in full.” Interrogation meant beatings as a matter of course, routine, expected by those arrested. Certain indigents in particular, when taken into custody and not questioned on the latest atrocities in the city, demanded it of their jailers. They demanded a beating regardless, as a beating behind jail walls 236

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  proved a badge of honor. Further, to leave a Chicago jail without a beating marked a man as a snitch. But in the case of one Inspector Alastair Ransom, the word beating had taken on new meaning in a mix of myth and legend.

  “Alastair . . . I think you’re so right about this,” said Dr.

  Fenger, bringing him out of his reverie. “The kill . . . the kill being anticlimactic, our boy sets them ablaze for one final rush of excitement. Theoretically, the kill’s not enough.” Kohler loudly pandered to the press. “So, Inspector, you have no clue as to why a man would set a dead body aflame?”

  The pointedness of aflame used by the chief made everyone within hearing squirm. It addressed the rumors about Ransom as much as the killer. Alastair’s fists clenched, and he took a threatening step toward Kohler.

  Griffin, hand raised, stepped between the two larger men, while hazarding a reply, “Fire has always held significance to people . . .”

  Fenger agreed as if on cue, “Full of symbolism and mysticism.”

  “Hmmm . . . Tewes said something similar in his report,”

  began Kohler. “That fire is or may have some weighty import in his head, in a symbolic sense, say of victory or some such . . .” Nathan stepped back from the threat in Ransom’s eyes.

  “More likely he holds us all in contempt,” weighed in Dr. Fenger. “It is the act of a contemptuous man, an angry man. I believe Tewes said it best in a brief discussion I had with him.” “Go on,” said Kohler.

  “Dr. Tewes believes the killer has a fire fetish.”

  “A fire fetish.”

  “A fire bug, yes,” added Griffin.

  “Pyromania is how he put it, a deep-seated insatiable need.

  Damn, I’m inadequate to the task. Tewes knows the jargon of mental disorder far better than I. I’m, after all, a surgeon.”

  “Well, if it is some aberration of the brain, a disorder in here,” Kohler pointed to his wide forehead, “then he cer

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  tainly has given into it, carrying about his own portable vial of kerosene.”

  “He takes their lives and utterly disfigures them. He not only wants them dead, but to control what happens to them afterward—”

  “Afterward?” Kohler’s features crinkled in confusion.

  “After they’re dead. A form of necrophilia, Dr. Tewes calls it, but rather than have his way with the dead body, ahhh, in a sexual sense, like you earlier spoke of, having some sort of perversion there, you see, he may be getting his sexual excitement from the fire as much as from the garroting and holding another’s life in his hands.” “Tewes said all that?” asked Ransom, impressed.

  “That way no one, not even the best surgeon—”

  “Not even you, Dr. Fenger,” added Griffin.

  “—can put them peacefully at rest for all eternity. No amount of cosmetics or preservation can help, you see? A burned, dehydrated body cannot e’en be given a proper wake.”

  “I see,” replied Kohler.

  Fenger absently added, “Given that every artery, every vein is collapsed by the heat of fire, the body can’t receive formaldehydes, and stuffing rags soaked in formaldehyde into body cavities is not really effective.” “It’s a sick desire to destroy the remains,” suggested Ransom. “By decapitation, then fire. Yet he preserves their features as if they are significant.”

  “Like photographs,” Griff added.

  Dr. Fenger lit a slim cigar and smoke encircled them.

  Kohler coughed, Griff rocked on his heels, and Ransom chewed on his unlit pipe. Fenger said, “You fellows could be on to something. But it’s what besets the man . . . the ghosts of his past—according to Tewes—ones gone unfulfilled, ones ne’er put to rest, that have a way of rising from the grave.” Kohler nodded, his mind racing with Fenger’s reply.

  “Then, by God, Ransom, get on to this madman’s trail. Find the ghosts that beset him! But first, I need on my desk tomorrow morning a full report for Mayor Harrison!”

  CHAPTER 21

  The same night at the Tewes residence

  “I’m done with it! No more James Phineas Murdock Tewes, no more hiding behind this disguise!” Jane Francis announced when she stormed in. She’d just returned from the fair, walking out on Kohler’s conspiracy against Alastair and on any hope of helping find a killer. “Who am I kidding? They don’t want my help—either of them!” “Who, Mother?”

  “Ransom and Nathan! Alastair at least is honest; he never expected anything of me, Tewes that is. Nathan, on the other hand, lied just to use me. He never believed in the idea of profiling the killer. It was all just part of his ruse.” “Whatever are you talking about, Mother?” Gabby followed her as she stormed about the clinic.

  “Only wanted information on Ransom. And to grind Ransom into the ground ’til he can stand no more. Damnable man wants my affections, too!”

  “Isn’t Chief Kohler married?”

  “Yes, but in a Chicago minute, he’d set me up as his mis-tress.”

  “Mother! Really!” Gabby tried keeping up as Jane stormed each room, lifted something, banged it or tossed it CITY FOR RANSOM

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  and continued on. “Slow down, Mother, my God. What has happened?”

  She told Gabby of the new horror at the fair. Gabby reacted in sullen silence, a pained look creasing her features.

  “You were at the fair with Ransom?”

  When Jane had left Ransom the first time to come home, Gabby had been away with a study group. It was then that Jane had changed to Dr. Tewes and returned to the scene of the double homicide in Lake Park.

  “Never again will I be sucked into doing anything that goes ’gainst my better judgment.”

  Gabby clapped. “That’s wonderful news!”

  “I blame these men ’round me! Kohler, Ransom, Fenger, all of ’em.”

  “I like the sound of this.”

  “I used to blame your grandfather, for not forcing me to look at reality for what it is! Instead, he taught me to spit in its eye. But too often comes its mocking face, making me the fool!”

  “Go ahead, let it all out, dear Mother. You’ve taken on so much, and you’ve sacrificed for my—”

  “No, I’ve made my own bed . . . nightmare really. ’Tisn’t any of your doing, child.”

  “Please, you’re far too harsh on yourself.”

  She paced the foyer, wandered the living room to the kitchen again, still fuming. Gabby remained near, recognizing a pivotal moment.

  Finally Jane said, “This is it . . . tonight. I make a resolution.”

  “What resolution, Mother?”

  “I resolve to end this damnable charade and any further involvement with Nathan and Alastair’s feud.” She thought of Kohler’s final words to her: “String ’im along, Jane . . .

  sleep with him if it’ll get ’im talking. . . . One confession of overstepping the law, and by God, we ’ave the bastard!”

  Kohler acted in the cold certainty of righteousness, weeding out anyone who had anything whatever to do with Hay

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  market. And what of Alastair? Ransom brought scrutiny on himself like a man who, at least secretively, wante
d to confess to someone, anyone, and if she were in the right place at the right time, during a vulnerable moment, then perhaps it would be to her that he’d confess his sins. She’d be terrified by it, and she was terrified at the idea of standing in a court docket to testify against Alastair.

  Gabby’s excited voice snatched Jane from her thoughts.

  “Good for you, Mother. I agree, and I support your action, whatever you decide, you know that.” Gabby hugged Jane, still in Tewes’s clothing.

  Jane snatched off the mustache and ascot. “Safer to listen to the fairies in my head! The ones that spoke to me as a child.”

  “Mother, I’ll help you if you’ll help me.”

  “Help you how?”

  “Define the problem in its particulars, and to your own satisfaction, but I cannot engage in another round of emotional tug-o-war.”

  Mother and daughter stared into one another’s eyes, each seeking answers. Gabrielle nervously laughed.

  “Don’t laugh. I believe the problem is surmountable, but I’m concerned you hide nothing from me, and that I do like-wise, that I should never hide anything, even disturbing, from you if you’ve a right to know, and I am afraid that . . . I am guilty of this, my sweet.” “Guilty how? What’re you talking about, Mother?”

  “Tewes.”

  “My father? But you have told me all about him. How handsome he was, how romantic, how courageously he died for his country in the war.”

  “I-I’ve lied.”

  “Lied?”

  “All save that he was devilishly handsome.”

  “But—”

  “Let me now tell you the truth about your father, and I do this not to hurt you but to strengthen you. If I’m exposed CITY FOR RANSOM

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  here in Chicago as a fraud . . . well, within that exposure all manner of things will come to light.”

  “But how would you be exposed? By whom?”

  “Promise to be patient. I will tell you all. In the end, we will regain who we are.”

  “Then you plan to expose yourself? Before this other party can?”

  “Yes.”

  “Inspector Ransom finally onto you, isn’t he?”