City for Ransom ar-1

by Robert Harris Walker

“Don’t interrupt, Gabby.”

  “But, Mother, he’s asleep, otherwise I’d not call you mother.”

  “Asleep?” She came around and stared. “He must’ve needed it badly. Tough guy. Doesn’t listen to his own body CITY FOR RANSOM

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  screaming for mercy. Poor man carries a great deal on those big shoulders.”

  “But why’d he come here to break down?”

  “Had to stove in somewhere, so why not my chair?”

  “But what’s to happen tomorrow when he wakes? Are you going to sleep in that getup?”

  “Let tomorrow take care of itself. For now, we leave Ransom to whatever dreams he may find.”

  “Fine . . . but are you going to stick to your resolution?”

  “In time, yes.”

  “Please, Mother, he’s falling for you!”

  “Whatever do you mean?”

  “He came here to see Jane again, not Tewes.”

  “You think so?”

  “It’s time he knows Dr. Jane Francis. Time he knows who he’s got eyes for.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Awaking in Dr. Tewes’s chair, half on, half off and below a huge metal pyramid of brass, Ransom thought this reality yet another disturbing dream. But this was real.

  Tewes had put him under, but how? What’d the doctor use?

  Some sort of gas? An injection? He recalled nothing. Blinking, he realized the distinct absence of a headache, and in the inner coils of his ear, he heard Tewes’s voice saying the single word— heal—over and over, only the voice coalesced into a woman’s soothing voice, a voice that sounded vaguely like Gabrielle’s but not quite . . . a voice that came with a visual image of a woman deep in a darkened mental portal—a doorway—and she’d waved him toward her, asking, “Why don’t you ask for more?” He straightened and stood, trying to brush away the wrin-kles of the suit he’d worn for Jane. No doubt she knew of his being here, succumbing to her brother’s touch. Only the sweet, tangy odor of frying bacon dislodged the terror of being under Tewes’s absolute control. Jane’s out there preparing the doctor’s breakfast. The perfect opportunity to slip away before anyone should see.

  Carefully, quietly he made his escape from the clinic, the pungent odors of Tewes’s various cures filling his nostrils.

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  Someone’d loosed his shirt and tie and had taken his shoes off. He prayed Jane hadn’t seen him so vulnerable. Another thought struck him: Tewes’s hands should be registered as a lethal weapon.

  Whatever else might be said of Tewes’s methods, Ransom could not argue with results. His head, even the nasty lump, no longer plagued him, plus he’d gotten through an entire night without interruption or medication—so far as he knew.

  He picked up his shoes and tiptoed down the hallway, toward the outer foyer running alongside the parlor. Here he had some vague memory of nearly collapsing as much from fatigue, he realized, as from the steady headache.

  He eased the door open. One part of his mind said stay, say hello to Jane, and thank Gabby and her father for not throwing him out the night before, while another part of his mind played tug-o-war with embarrassment at having caved in under this man’s touch, even if it were called therapy of a kind, because there was an undeniable attraction to have those hands on him again, and this disturbed Ransom. An attraction for another man’s touch. He imagined what his friends around the poker barrel, at the tavern, at the station house and the firehouse would say if they should ever hear of it.

  Yet he wanted to make successive visits to Tewes’s unusual chair, to again take the cure—to be healed . . . even if temporarily. But mostly, he wanted to feel the man’s hands again against his temples, over the crown, behind the ear.

  One foot in, one out the door, hip-deep in indecision, Ransom felt like an unlikely, over-the-hill, misplaced Hamlet unable to decide. Meanwhile, a flood of sunlight raced into the foyer and down the hall, which must announce him. He quickly closed the door and realized some movement in the nearby bushes. “Who is it? Who’s there?” “It’s me . . . Bosch!” came the whisper.

  “Bosch? Why the deuce’re you hiding in Tewes’s shrub-bery?”

  “Your orders—get what I can on the doctor.”

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  ROBERT W. WALKER

  Bosch was his best snitch, known on the street as Dot’n’Carry for the noise resulting from the point-counterpoint between a wooden foot and cane. A decorated veteran of two wars, one of them being the War of the Rebellion, Bosch had previously traveled abroad and had signed up in the British Army and had fought in the Crimean War until he’d had a bellyful of death, and so had deserted, swearing never again.

  Then came the Civil War, and being destitute, a suit of clothes, hardtack and beans, and a government-issue Sharps rifle ended all horror of war.

  “I enlisted for all the reasons that scuttle a man,” Bosch told anyone stopping at his tin cup. He sold stories for meager coin. He slavered and spewed forth through missing teeth the entire war and all the reasons for it save the glory of it. Down to how he’d gotten out when his left foot had been amputated in a field hospital while some man with a camera took photos to send off to Washington. He would joke that Old Abe Lincoln, in order never to forget the atrocities of the war, hung Bosch’s severed foot in his White House bedroom to contemplate each night, and how this was the chief cause of Mary Lincoln’s having gone mad.

  Bosch had a lot of stories in his head, many told so often people no longer listened. He had many yet to be told, and many that would never be told, but Ransom knew one thing certain about Bosch, and that was his birthright, his gift, which was the theater and storytelling. His ability with words had never been adequately put to proper use. He ought to’ve been on the Lyceum circuit, on stage beside the humorists like Twain and Brett Harte and the fellow who told Uncle Remus tales—Joel Chandler Harris. Most certainly, Bosch proved a man in need of a much larger audience, but failing all his life, he now made a scant living at a game requiring a lively imagination along with forked tongue—working for Ransom on the one hand, outlaws on the other. It gave Bosch his only stage, and with his quick wit, he’d managed to survive for a long time on Chicago streets where—should he tell the wrong story to the wrong man at the wrong time—it could be his last.

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  On the whole, Ransom liked the little ferret-faced mole, and was probably the only one left alive who called him Bosch and not Dot’n’Carry for the sport of it.

  Ransom slipped his shoes on and followed the weasel into the bush, and together they found a cow path that took them a safe distance. Below a livery stable sign reading Phillips & Son they talked.

  “So what can you tell me of Tewes?”

  “He’s no kind of man.”

  “I’m aware he’s effeminate. What else?”

  “The doctor is a woman.”

  “Tewes? A woman? What’re you saying?”

  “I’ve only me word, but I saw him—-errr . . . her dressing down, and I tell you Dr. Tewes has breasts, nice ones in fact.”

  “Damn you for a fool, Bosch! You saw Miss Ayers! His sister!” Alastair raised his cane for effect. “Get ’way from me now or I’ll bash your head.”

  “I tell you what I see, and this is me reward? Where’s me two dollars?”

  “I don’t pay for nonsense or fiction, Bosch!”

  “All right, all right, have it your way, the doctor’s a man and keep it that way, but you’ll want to know about your friend Kohler and what he’s about.”

  “What is your addled brain spewing forth now?”

  “You wanted to know what your Dr. Tewes has on Kohler, so I kicked around, and I tell you, dirt falls away from your chief. If he has secrets, you can’t pry it loose on the street, but there is something.” “So what have you, damn it?”

  “Confound it, Ransom, you got it backward from the start!” He lifted his own cane, jabbing it at Alastair.

 
; Using his cane sword-fashion, Ransom batted Bosch’s off. From Jane Francis’s window, they looked like two schoolboys playing pirate, crossing swords.

  “So go on, say it, man! Must you be so damnably irritating, Bosch?”

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  With dramatic flourish, Bosch said, “Kohler ain’t the one being blackmailed.”

  “What?”

  “Kohler has something on Tewes, and I done told you what it is!”

  “Mark me, if this turns out to be one of your silly fabrications,” began Ransom, fuming even as he thrust two silver dollars at the man, the coins falling to the dirt, “I’ll find you and skin you alive.” “I’d expect so from a man of your repute, Inspector.”

  “Now be gone and no more peeking into any bloody windows.”

  “But ’twas on your say-so! How else to see a lady in Tewes’s bedroom?”

  “Scat as fast as that stump and cane will allow. Go!”

  He made off with his coins, an habitual look back over his gnarled shoulder—a ratlike habit he’d picked up over years on the streets after his medical discharge from the Union Army.

  “Damn fool . . . damn old fool,” Ransom muttered as he turned and started back toward the busier Belmont Street out front of Tewes’s home where he might more readily hail a carriage. He wanted to get home, bathe, shave, get spruced up, look in on Philo, and see Jane again.

  He dismissed Bosch’s contention that Jane and Dr. Tewes were one and the same as ridiculous. No way he wouldn’t’ve known. He’d spent time with both, hadn’t he? He had downed beer with Tewes, drank him under the table, which had been no surprise, and then he’d carried him home. So light he was, yes. And then when measuring the man, he came out even slighter in all lengths than Ransom would have guessed, and the man’s ankle had been so thin and fragile, and his waist nonexistent, and on occasion his voice cracked like a youth.

  What if Bosch had not seen Jane Francis Ayers disrobing but had watched Tewes disrobe instead? Was he a woman posing as a man, or a man posing as a woman? Jesus! The CITY FOR RANSOM

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  thought electrified him. Bosch’s second contention, that Tewes was being blackmailed by Nathan Kohler seemed unimportant to the first mystery.

  It boggled the mind . . . boggled the imagination. If any of it were true, then who had shared a kiss in the gondola on the Ferris wheel with Alastair Ransom? Dr. Tewes or Jane or both?

  And then he thought anew of the touch of Tewes’s hands, how he’d reacted to that touch, and how his every instinct had recoiled at the thought of a man capable of creating such feelings in him. But suppose . . . it made better sense that . . .

  possibly . . . but then how could he have been so damnably blind if it were so?

  He stood on the street down from Tewes’s shingle, recently repaired and rehung, as it’d been hit by a clean bolt of lightning during a storm, he’d been told. Someone stood on Tewes’s porch, trying to gain his attention. It was Jane, waving him to return. He had so liked her, but now his head had begun to swim with the sharks of doubt and suspicion. If Jane were Tewes, and Tewes were Jane, what possibly could he do with this information? How to react?

  He must respond to Jane now. Must return to the home and see the doctor and his sister side-by-side, something he’d not seen in all their association. And as he moved back toward the home, he looked for the third bedroom. He could make out the windows of only one bedroom this side of the house, and Gabrielle’s room he’d surmised was on the other side of the house. So where did Jane keep? Which window had Bosch been staring through when he saw a woman disrobing? And could it simply have been Gabby that the little pervert had seen?

  “Jane!” he called out.

  “I was preparing a breakfast for you, and next I know, you’re gone!” she said, all smiles. “Besides, I must talk to you this morning.”

  “Actually, I really need to speak to your brother. Is he having breakfast with us?”

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  “I . . . I can arrange it, yes, if . . .”

  “If he’s not slipped from the house?”

  “F-for Cook County.”

  “Ahhh . . . to view the bodies of the two unfortunates found in the park last night?”

  “Unless he’s still in.”

  “Shall we find out if the doctor is in? Does he have any appointments today?”

  “I think not in clinic; perhaps a house call or two.”

  “His work for Chief Kohler has been a help, no doubt. I’m sure the chief can be a generous man.”

  “Not with Dr. Tewes, I fear.”

  “I see.”

  “Shall we go inside?” A horse-drawn trolley went by, a man shouting about rags and bottles to buy and sell—the noise of Chicago awakening. Ransom followed her to the kitchen, where Jane sat him before a sumptuous breakfast.

  “Eat,” she commanded. “Dr. Tewes says you work too hard, you’re not getting enough sleep, and that your eating habits are abominable.”

  “Once again, your brother’s right.” He ate while Jane watched, pleased, her smiling eyes not at all like Tewes, yet similar. “You and James, Jane . . . you weren’t . . . I mean, were you born twins? Your features, particularly the eyes are so strikingly similar.” “Born a year apart.”

  “Really, a year apart. Seems it’ll be a year before I see the two of you not apart.”

  “You mean together, don’t you? He acts my guardian, and it is stifling at times, ’though he has my best interests at heart.”

  “So now, where is your older brother, is it?”

  “I think you’re being coy with me, Alastair, and I don’t appreciate it. Either say what is on your mind regarding myself and the doctor, or get off the subject.”

  “Where is this coming from?” he asked, dropping his fork.

  “I saw you with that ratty little man who’s been on our CITY FOR RANSOM

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  back stair, not to beg food but to peek through windows. You hired him to spy on us, didn’t you?”

  “I did not authorize him to come to your home and beat about your windows, no!”

  “Oh, wonderful, nice consolation, but he came, and he saw, and he told you what you wanted to learn, that I am Dr.

  Tewes!”

  “I did not . . . that is . . . I failed to believe Bosch.”

  “But you’re here to corroborate—” she began, affecting Tewes’s mannerisms now. “Well perhaps it is all for the better that you know.”

  “I wanted to believe in . . . in you, in some future we might have, but this . . . this . . .”

  “Changes things, I know. You should go now, Alastair.”

  “Go? Go? I have this boulder drop on me, and all you can say is go? Ha!” He near whispered, “What’ll the lads make of it? Chicago’s greatest detective, Inspector Ransom, could not decipher a woman in drag!” “The sum total of your concern? What other cops’ll think?”

  “If the press got wind of—”

  “Kohler’d have a good day.”

  “—and what hooks has Kohler in you, anyway? What goes on between you two? He knows, right? God, he must be having a laugh. Is this all that he has on you?” “It is enough . . . along with the story of how Gabby’s father died, but last night, I told Gabby everything, so I’m done with lies,” she lied, “finished, and I intend, sir, to end all ties with Nathan, this case, and most of all you, sir.” “I see . . . I see . . .”

  “I . . . hope you understand.”

  “It becomes apparent. Right between the eyes, in fact.

  What a fool I’ve been. All the things I said to you at the wheel, all the thoughts I had for—”

  “For us? You came for Jane only to gather information on James!”

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  “Will that be your excuse then?” he asked. “To keep us apart? Well, I see you’ve no need of my . . . of me.”

  “That’s not entirely—”

 
; “But how is it a woman of your caliber can affect such a ruse?”

  “How not when a doctor of my caliber is treated as a leper?”

  “Act the leper, you become the leper,” he shot back, knocking over a chair as he stood. The sound of it, like a gunshot, sent Gabby running headlong to them with her Sharps pointed.

  “Out, out! Inspector!” Gabby shouted.

  “Fiercely loyal to your mother, aren’t you, Gabby? A good thing. She’ll need all your support—”

  “I’ll not have you shouting at or harming my . . . my—”

  “It’s all right. She is your mother now; no need of pretense, Gabby, and please no need pointing a weapon. I am going.”

  “I understand your anger, Alastair.” Jane placed a hand on his, but now her touch didn’t feel like the soothing fingers she’d used the night before.

  He pulled from her touch. “How ironic that in the most intimate moment I shared with you, you were Dr. Tewes.”

  “You should come back for more treatments, Alastair, but for now, I think it must be as patient and doctor and nothing more.”

  “Do you believe I want anything more?”

  “Then you will seek help . . . with the headaches?”

  He stood silent a moment, considering this. “I can go to any number of phrenologists in this city for my head, and any number of brothels for all else I need, Dr. what is it?

  Ayers?”

  He rushed out to her saying, “Francis . . . Dr. Jane Francis.”

  Gabby stared across at her, an accusatory look in her eye.

  “What?”

  “You did not do right by Alastair, Mother.”

  “And I suppose holding him at gunpoint is all right?

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  Look, I’m doing the best I can! And I’m not about to apologize for my choices. Hell, I tell the truth and what does it earn me?”

  “It will earn you scorn and my ridicule. I knew the chickens’d come home to roost.”

  “Not now, Gabby. I do not need this.” Jane rushed to her room and locked the door, where Gabby listened to her sobs.

  Gabby almost knocked, wanting to go to her mother, but some inner strength told her no, not this time. This time her mother must face her decision alone.