City of the Absent

by Robert W. Walker

  But such was, although mere months ago, ancient history to such a mind as Philo’s, Ransom decided, as obviously he was up to his old tricks. Ransom loved Philo as much as one man might another, and he’d do anything for him, but he also knew how fickle and short Keane’s memory and alliances with women were. His professing love and passion for this soul mate now dead was more drama at this point than anything Alastair had ever seen off the Lyceum stage. Philo changed women as he did socks.

  Philo quickly changed the subject on Ransom. “What’ve you uncovered in the Nell Hartigan case?”

  “Precious little.”

  “Nothing more come of Dr. Fenger’s autopsy?”

  “She took a huge, nasty knife to the gut, which he’s sure was the first blow. By all accounts, she was taken by surprise, else she knew her attacker and didn’t expect or see it coming.”

  “I didn’t know her personally, but her reputation makes her out both sharp and tough.”

  “She was both.”

  “Odd that she’d be working for Pinkerton.”

  “Not really. Women prove excellent spies, and basically what Pinkerton agents do is infiltrate and report. They learn the lay of the land and who the players are, as in who is heading up a proposed strike and where dynamite or nitro or the bodies are buried, or all three.”

  “I see.”

  “It’s how countless strikes were put to bed before they began. Pinkerton, hired by the company, learned who the leaders were, and this information was handed over to police, and we made all manner of excuse, but we took them off the street.”

  “Isn’t that somewhat illegal? Unconstitutional even?”

  Ransom rubbed the bridge of his nose and forehead. “The labor wars got us all bending rules.”

  “Is that your term for the Constitution? Rules? Don’t answer that, just tell me, you ever feel like a hired gun?”

  Ransom dropped his gaze. “I did often, yes, back then.”

  “During Haymarket, sure. Whataya got lately to fatten your dossier on Haymarket?”

  “Lost…all gone…a burglary.”

  “This is the first I’ve heard!”

  “It’s OK…it’s my cover for where my files are kept—nowhere, Nothingville.”

  “Ahhh…I see.” And little more than nothing in ’em, Philo imagined.

  “It’s the bloody truth.”

  “Sorry if I am having trouble determining what is and what is not the truth coming from your direction,” Philo said with a frown.

  Alastair cleared his throat. “All of us in uniform were, in essence, working for the establishment. It’s how the Chicago PD was formed—to protect the interest of big business.”

  “Civic lessons I got never touched on it,” Philo said, smirking. “Hasn’t changed much either, has it?”

  “Some…we’ve had some important labor laws enacted, for instance.”

  “So you’ve skirted my question about the dead Pinkerton lady.”

  “Got damn little to go on in Nell’s murder, but I have feelers out.”

  “Your little army of snitches?”

  “My own operatives, yes.”

  “And so far? Nothing?”

  “Nothing.” Ransom stood and paced, fidgeting with his cane, shining the wolf’s head with a handkerchief, and next toying with his pipe while staring out the window. He next tugged on his pocket watch, the gold fob shinning, checked the time, and then let it slip back into his vest pocket.

  Finally, Keane asked, “Why do you think her organs were harvested?”

  “Some medical purpose, I suspect.”

  “Ghouls! Do you mean to say…harvesting the living now? Not enough bodies in the cemeteries?”

  “That or else someone is making a strange bisque somewhere.”

  “I wonder which of the two possibilities is worse?”

  “Ghouls, I think the worse by far.”

  “How do you make that assessment?”

  “Ghouls barter in bodies and body parts, while a cannibal at least is feeding a need.”

  “A perverse joke, Alastair.”

  “Doing it for money is the more perverse.”

  “You’ve known a few cannibals and ghouls,” replied Philo. “You ought to know.”

  “A few cannibals, yes.” He stopped to consider the horrid memory of having been attacked by a family of such fiends. “Shanks and Gwinn are supposedly reformed ghouls, a perfect pair to run that meat wagon of Fenger’s up and down the street.”

  “The ambulance chaps? Once ghouls?”

  “No one’s ever proven it, and somehow Dr. Fenger got them off and employed them. Part of their deal is that they answer to Dr. Fenger.”

  “I see. I had no idea.”

  “Few do…believe me, and perhaps they have associates still active in their old profession.”

  “But will they be cooperative…with you in particular?”

  “No. For some unaccountable reason, they dislike me.”

  “I can’t imagine why.”

  The men laughed together. Each thought of the time when a wounded Alastair had kicked out the boards from the inside, locked as he was in the closed wagon they’d thrown him into, the wagon used to transport the injured and the dead to Cook County Hospital and Morgue.

  “I must go see Pinkerton about those records. Thank you for the brandy, not sure about the music. You listen long enough to that dirge, Philo, and you’ll become a sot.”

  Philo stopped the music, stood and walked Alastair to the door, where they warmly parted. After Ransom had gone, Philo toasted the air, chanting Miss Mandor’s Christian name, Chesley…Chesley. He switched the dirge back on and sat in the grim aloneness within himself.

  “I can’t do this,” he said aloud after long moments of reflection. He’d visited Chesley’s grave every opportunity since she’d been so horribly mutilated. She was the only dead person he talked to, or ever had talked to. He got up and returned to his photographs and quickly, compulsively, forced his entire being to focus on the work and not his dead lover.

  CHAPTER 20

  Once again on the street, Alastair made his rounds. He was not foolish enough to keep regular or meticulous rounds, but rather, to mix them up so no one knew he had a routine. No one knew better than he that a routine could get a cop—even a detective—killed.

  He caught a ride to an area of the city where, at this time of morning, he imagined Henry Bosch was sitting about a cracker barrel, pontificating on the virtues and vices of the Civil War generals Grant and Sherman, both of whom he’d formed lasting and firm opinions of during his days as a private in the big blue monster called the Federal Army.

  When Alastair arrived, he was not disappointed, finding Bosch at Reach’s corner grocery, bait and tackle, laundry and bathhouse. Old Mr. Bowman was known as Reach, as there was nothing that exceeded his reach in the city should it be requested of him. Reach Bowman said once of his clapboard establishment with his apartments overhead that a man could find everything but liquor and loose women on the premises, and he meant to keep it that way. He’d been among the teetotalers who’d marched on Little Chicago and helped burn out “that rabble” a decade before. Now he hobbled about with one hand on his back, the other on his Shalala, the crooked cane as gnarled as the crusty old shopkeeper. Reach and others huddled around the storyteller Bosch politely acknowledged Alastair as he came through the door, but Bosch paid no heed, continuing with his tale of Sherman.

  “Swear…never seen a pair of eyes more striking.”

  “Striking in what manner?”

  “Mad…fierce as flame…burn right through a man. He couldn’t find a uniform to suit his scrawny, sickly frame, that General Sherman, and being as he was a general in the Federalist Army, he saw to having a tailor come to his tent to fashion a perfect uniform for his build and peculiar measurements, ’cause fellas, I am here to tell youse there was nothing on the man that matched its counterpart. One arm seemed longer’n the other, one hand bigger. Sure his face was cockeyed
and off center, but so was his whole body.”

  “So he got himself a custom outfit at the army’s expense?” asked one old duffer, tamping his pipe, his face as puckered and wrinkled as a raisin.

  “He did indeed, and ordered several so as he could keep a cleaner appearance than Grant, which in fact was not hard for any soldier to do.” Bosch paused, awaiting a laugh from his audience, but it did not come. “You see, when Grant saw himself in the mirror or in a photograph, he only saw what he wanted to see, and was pretty satisfied with the results, but ol’ William Tecumseh Sherman, he’d seen a photograph of himself, taken with one collar up, one down, his stern face turned to an odd angle, and those wild unsettled eyes cut him to the quick. The image scared even him!” This got a laugh. “He looked every bit the reincarnated madman John Brown, he did.”

  Ransom leaned against the counter alongside Reach Bowman, taking a moment to hear Bosch out.

  Bosch didn’t skip a beat. “Sherman, he liked to tell folks he was a nice fella, a good fella.”

  “Was he affable off the battlefield?” asked one of the men.

  “Oh, yes! An affable man, but a practical man as well. It was him put the bug in Grant’s ear that this prisoner exchange business must stop!”

  “Is’at so?”

  “I never knowed that!”

  “Thought it was Grant’s idée.”

  “Thought it was Abe Lincoln’s notion.”

  “They mighta said it was them,” continued Bosch, “but it first come from Sherman. I tell you, the man was tough like a Jack Bull terrier, and smart like a fox. Some say that if he’d been in charge instead of Grant, the war woulda been won a year ahead.”

  “Think so?”

  “I know so!” finished Bosch, turning in his seat to face Ransom. “Sherman was a lot like Inspector Ransom here. He generally got exactly what he wanted when he wanted.”

  “Like a set of custom uniforms,” commented Bowman.

  “Every one of his uniforms were shot to hell soon enough, though, smudged, torn, creased by gunfire. Why, once his coat was smoking, and then by cracky, he damn sure looked the part of Satan, just like the Georgians say.”

  This made them all laugh, and even Alastair joined in. “No one got a picture of that, heh, Bosch?” Alastair pushed off the counter.

  “Not for lack of trying!” countered Bosch, standing and jamming his peg leg in tight and snug. “Sherman-the-German didn’t take to the camera at all. Not many photos of ’im to be found, to my knowing, no.”

  “We need to talk privately,” Alastair finally said, indicating a back room. Bowman nodded, and the general store crowd thinned, each man deciding he had something to attend to or somewhere to be. The bell on the door rang out repeatedly as Bosch’s audience filed out.

  “You sure can clear a room,” Bosch said a little sadly.

  “What? Those loafers? Bowman, did a man jack of them buy a single item this morning?”

  Reach frowned and slowly shook his head to say no.

  “Then I’d say the place needed a good clearing out!” Ransom indicated with a single finger that Bosch was to follow him.

  In a moment Alastair was alone with Bosch. He got right to the point. “What news have you about Nell Hartigan’s murder?”

  “None that I can strictly attest to, just rumors.”

  “Then rumor away.”

  Money exchanged hands.

  “Rumor has it there’s a medical man who’s working with Madam DuQuasi. She liquors a man up, the doctor arranges for his disappearance, and it’s all a totem pole. Everyone being paid off to keep mum.”

  “How then did you come by the information?”

  “One of Maude DuQuasi’s girls.”

  “Why did she tell you this?”

  “That old bitch DuQuasi put her out on the street for reasons she would not say.”

  “Then your informant has reason to lie, now, doesn’t she?”

  “I know when a common whore is telling me the truth and when she’s lying, Inspector.”

  “Do you now?”

  “She’d be wringing her petticoat or her hands if she were lying, and she’d be unable to look me long in the eye.”

  All techniques Alastair himself used in questioning a suspect. “All right then, let’s assume she is telling the truth. Who is the doctor in question?”

  “She didn’t know his name, but she knows ’im by sight.”

  “I see.” Alastair considered how he could use this information and possibly the prostitute to uncover the identity of this phantom doctor said to be harvesting people for his clinic. “There’re hundreds of surgeons in the city.”

  “Your man, he’s one of ’em, sure.”

  The ghoul theory was taking firmer shape in Alastair’s head, as much as he wanted it to be untrue. “When and where did you meet with this lady of the night?”

  “Early this A.M. She was wandering my alleyway just outside my window. She was in tears. I inquired from my basement window, and she dropped to sit, to get a better look at me and my place before agreeing to come down my stairwell and inside for warm bread and coffee.”

  “So you’re now keeping a woman?”

  “I am.” Bosch beamed with pride in being able to convey this fact to Ransom. “I am.” He thrust out his chest like a bandy rooster.

  “You are some fool, Bosch! She likely’s told you precisely what she thought you wanted to hear.” Ransom snatched for the bill he’d handed Bosch, but Dot ’n’ Carry, as he was called, reared back on his peg leg and jabbed Ransom in the gut with his cane. “I tell ya, the lass knows what she’s talking about.”

  “The lass? How old is she?”

  “No telling, maybe forty.”

  “Forty?”

  “A good sight younger than myself, and so she’s a lass. A spoiled dove, to be sure, but my spoiled dove.”

  For a half second Ransom gave a thought to his Polly, a reformed prostitute, dead now because she’d become his woman, a ready target for the Phantom killer of the fair, a maniac who’d do anything to hurt him. The bastard had succeeded at it, too.

  “I’ll want to talk to this spoiled dove of yours direct.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Bosch!”

  “She’s not going under no interrogation by the likes of you, Inspector.”

  “I’ll be gentle with her.”

  “You mean you’ll only singe her fingers and you won’t burn off her eyebrows?”

  “You know damn well I’ll not harm her.”

  “People learn she’s talked to you, she could wind up dead.”

  “What of you, Bosch? Why isn’t that a worry for you, then?”

  “It is a worry for me!”

  “Oh? I hadn’t noticed. I pay you, and you’re at the races again, chasing a four-legged dream.”

  “One of these days, a six-legged horse, a creature of beauty like some flying unicorn, is gonna be born! That’d take the race, wouldn’t it?” Bosch’s eyes sparkled and his broken teeth shone whenever he spoke of the ponies.

  “You ought to save up for the day they run a six-legged animal!” Ransom chuckled.

  “But it’s true, Inspector. I gotta be looking over my shoulder every second, even out at the racing meadow.”

  “Set up a meeting with the woman, Bosch.”

  “Where?”

  “Where no one’ll know or see or overhear.”

  “It’ll cost you double, for her and for me.”

  “Done, just do it.”

  “All right, you needn’t yell.”

  “You deaf old codger, how else am I to be heard?”

  From Reach Bowman’s place, Alastair made his way to the downtown headquarters of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, where he meant to locate William Pinkerton, son of the now famous Eye that Never Sleeps, now in perpetual sleep—Alan Pinkerton. Brothers William and Robert Pinkerton had inherited the old man’s business on Alan’s death in the spring of ’84. These Chicago offices were housed in an old brownstone
off Michigan Avenue in what amounted to a discreet building that might be taken for a bank except that a huge sign overhead shouted: the pinkerton agency: we never sleep. The trademark eye stared down from the center of the wording.

  In the 1880s, bank robberies were normally the work of what Ransom and Pinkerton called “yeggs.” These yeggs hadn’t the sense or ingenuity or finesse of criminals that gained the headlines, like Charley Bullard or Max Shinburn. They came out of hobo yards, the jungle of the disenchanted and the disenfranchised. Tramps often in desperate circumstances, they moved at night, selecting banks in small communities with few police if any. They used nitroglycerine or black powder on safes, and often with no criminal associates, they disappeared into the grim bleak world they’d stepped from. They proved near impossible to trace.

  As a result of the rash of bank robberies popping up everywhere, Alan Pinkerton and his sons began their notion of charging banks for protection and placing their Eye Never Sleeps seal prominently in the window of any bank that paid for their services. Their guarantee of a centralized agency acting for all banks proved a powerful persuader. They took out ads and made it clear that they would run to ground anyone foolish enough to rob a Pinkerton Agency protected bank. And they had lived up to their word, their record most impressive. They were so successful, in fact, that soon banks without Pinkerton Agency representation became the softer targets and were robbed at a far more alarming rate. There were even stories of thieves returning money after the fact on learning the bank they stole from was a Pinkerton associated bank.

  Ransom entered the Pinkerton building and found the elevator going up. He continued his reverie of Pinkerton accomplishments as he did so. Another profit business for the most famous private eye firm in the world was supplying watchmen for strikebound plants, rail yards, mines, and corporations like Pullman City. The notion longstanding was that in such matters as labor disputes, the law and government protect the lives and property of the owners and nonunion workers against the “anarchist” horde. If local law failed to do so, owners called in private armies for protection. Since 1859 the Pinkertons had hired men at an enticing five dollars a day to stand and protect property and people, and depending on the size of the plant, this could range from twenty to three hundred hired guards. In seventy-seven strikes in all those years, only three strikers were killed by Pinkerton agents.