City for Ransom

by Robert W. Walker

  “No one wants reminding of Haymarket, old stick,” said Philo at the end of the bar. “No heroes that day.”

  “Those men gave their lives,” said Ransom. “And now they’re stickin’ it to old Birmingham.”

  “Birmingham, sir?” O’Malley had asked.

  “Oh, Jesus, don’t get ’em started on Birmingham!” Philo shouted.

  Ransom gathered O’Malley and other young coppers to him. “I was aged thirty-two in eighty-six. Birmingham, he’d been a veteran forever.”

  Philo, ever the artist, added, “Birmingham posed for the statue commemorating those killed at Haymarket.”

  “A good man working toward a pension till they got something on him,” continued Ransom. “Some nonsense ’bout dereliction of duty. You know what he does today?”

  “No sir, what?”

  “He guides folks from the White City fair yonder to Haymarket Square; shows ’em sites of the running battle and riot. Gives ’em a firsthand account.”

  “Makes most of it up as he goes in that sotted mind of his and—”

  “Philo!”

  Philo raised a glass. Laughter erupted, but Ransom didn’t join in. “And study the man well, Ransom,” Philo kiddingly warned, again toasting, “because you’ll be guiding the tour one day if you keep at things so stubborn!”

  Ransom ignored these remarks. Too much truth therein. Instead, he’d continued talking to Mike and Griff and the younger men. “Old Willard Birmingham’s come a long journey from Liverpool to Chicago. A bloody good man, but he’s sure on his way to pennilessness in his old age. We’re getting up a fund for him, boys, so pony up—come along, every one of yous.”

  Griffin Drimmer gave up a silver dollar to begin the pool and curry favor. As Griff then worked the crowd for Willard’s pitiful pension, he asked Ransom, “How well did you know the men killed at Haymarket, Inspector?”

  “We were all of us two-year men. Of the seven killed, only Thomas Redden was more than two year on. None of the killed held supervisory positions, that’s sure. Degan had hold of me, helped me from the blast when he collapsed and died, poor bugger—a severed artery killed ’im. A good patrolman of the Lake Street district, he was, a fixture…and the first to go.”

  Philo, as old as Ransom, piped in. “Got some great shots, but all were confiscated during the drawn out inquest. Never got them back.”

  “Part of the cover-up, I warrant,” said Ransom, beginning to slur his words.

  “Cover-up indeed?” asked Griff.

  “I tell you, boys! Maybe those pictures show something they don’t want no one to see. After the bomb hit…over the next twelve days in hospital I was. Cook County, where George Miller succumbed to his wounds, then John Barrett with his family looking on, and next Timothy Flavian, Nels Hansen, and Nicholas Sheehan. Degan and another of our men died on the street.”

  “Must’ve been hell losing so many comrades,” said O’Malley, Griffin agreeing to a chorus of other cops.

  “And a helluva big Irish wake,” added Philo.

  “Boys, I don’t want to talk about it, not without sufficient drink.” And then they all became sufficiently drunk.

  Now a sober Inspector Alastair Ransom, leaning on his cane, contemplated a baffling murder spree. Three dead. All since the opening of the fair on May first. The fingers found lying about the men’s room in a pool of blood, two in the porcelain basin, Philo had photographed. Griff held them up in a glass vial to Ransom’s eyes.

  “You know, Griff…O’Malley,” he quietly said. “I once knew a fellow who’d auction off items like these.”

  “What kind of a ghoul was this guy?” Griff erupted.

  “A cop…. Unfortunately, all too human. We called him The Reaper.”

  “Jesus God.”

  Griffin shook his head, hardly believing.

  “You know, famous case and all, souvenirs, relics.”

  “You’d never do anything like that, sir,” said young O’Malley, his boyish eyes filled with anxious curiosity about the infamous Inspector Ransom, anxious anew to tell his friends on the force what he’d witnessed here—how Ransom had literally handed Tewes a handful of what he’d deserved! And to brag that for a few pints the other night that he could now call himself Alastair Ransom’s drinking comrade—the Alastair Ransom, a man famous for tracking down all manner of muggers, burglars, rapists, maniacs, killers, and anarchists.

  “You really ought to keep a safe distance from the likes of me, Mike,” Ransom whispered in his ear. “I go down, they’ll likely go head-hunting for what few friends I have.”

  “I’ll not be a fair-weather friend, sir.”

  “But you will likely be fearful one day at having to explain our connection to your superiors.”

  “Not at all, sir.”

  “You’re a good cop, Michael Shaun O’Malley, but you ought to be more careful. And why aren’t you using your head instead of that nightstick?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m going to put in to take the detective’s exam like you said.”

  “Good…good for you, O’Malley,” said Griff, slapping his back. “How did this fella you spoke of who took the valuables, sir,” continued Griff, “just how’d he ever get away with it?”

  “Promoted.”

  “What?”

  The department got ’im off the street and behind a desk, and today…well, today there he stands.” Ransom’s segue pointed to the chief of police, who rushed for the stationmaster’s office.

  “No! Kohler himself, is it?”

  “That’s me story, and I’d not lie about a thing like that.”

  “You two go way back then,” said O’Malley.

  “For a time, he was my training officer. Till I could stomach him no more.”

  “How could the department let a thing like that go on and then promote someone so lacking in morals?” asked Griff.

  Ransom smiled at his young partner. “You’ve still a lot to learn about the department, Griff.”

  “Did things differently in those days, hey?”

  “It still goes on, Griff. For Kohler at a higher level. Things don’t reform in Chicago so much as they permutate.”

  “They didn’t have evidence manifests in those early days?” asked O’Malley.

  “Oh, sure, but they could be doctored, you see, palms greased. Didn’t have photography on every case either, not like they do now. The eyes of the brass are upon you, son.”

  “If it’s in Keane’s photos,” added Griff, “it’d better be in a lab or in lockup.”

  Alastair laughed. “But if it ain’t in the frame…well, then it don’t exist, boys.”

  “The fingers…” began O’Malley. “None can be mislaid or lost or else, sure, but tell me, what good are they?”

  “If our boy here,” he punctuated with his cane, “if he dug his nails in during the struggle, even got hold of the killer‘s wrist or pinky finger and laid a bite on him…well, I’ve solved cases by matching a scratch line to the size of a victim’s nails or his dental impression. Fenger claims there’re no two alike.”

  Griffin objected. “That’s not very scientific. Sounds impossible to prove.”

  “Not if the killer thinks it can be proved. Call it voodoo detection.”

  “Voodoo?”

  “Hell, I tell ’em we’re in the new scientific age…I show ’em a vial of animal blood and a vial of human blood…I declare which is which by running ’em through a series of tubes and whamo! The guilty fellow confesses, because he is found out.”

  “But there’s no such science separates animal from human blood, sir.”

  “No…not anywhere but in my head, but when I shove the evidence down their throats, they confess, I tell you.”

  “You think the scientists will ever learn to determine animal from human blood?”

  “Perhaps…some day.”

  “In the next century perhaps?”

  “Time will tell, but I know there are men in the universities working on it. Just imagine it, lads,
a case in which we can get a blood-type match to prove it is indeed human blood on the man’s shoe or apron and not some slaughtered animal.”

  Griff shook his head. “I still have no clue how they intend ever to do blood typing.”

  “Trust me, nobody knows,” replied Ransom. He took a long drag on his pipe. “Now, Michael Shaun, how’d you like to do some detective work under Inspector Drimmer’s guidance?”

  “’Twould be an honor, sir.”

  “Have O’Malley here help you go through the Bertillon cards for a match on that handprint, and boys, go at it with a vengeance.”

  O’Malley’s eyes rolled as he realized that Ransom and Griffin had snookered him into doing the most tedious time-consuming, brain-numbing police detection work on the force, going through the Bertillon cards. He silently mouthed a string of curses.

  “If he’s never been arrested in our city, Ransom, he won’t be in our card files,” cautioned Griff.

  “If not, we try New York’s—with O’Malley’s help.”

  “Then you think Tewes was telling the truth about New York?”

  “Who knows?”

  O’Malley mildly protested. “Sir, I—I’ve me own duties, and with the I-ID cards, we’re talking hours, possibly days, and—and me duty sergeant, he—he ain’t likely to OK—”

  “And your duty sergeant’s name?”

  “P. J. O’Hurley, sir.”

  “I’ll smooth it over with the man, Mike. We all want you to make junior grade, and I’m sure O’Hurley, too, has your best interest at heart.”

  Griff took Ransom aside. “Do you give any credence to Dr. Tewes’s claims?”

  “Sure and why not, Griff? Tewes is as psychic as that Jack terrier of yours.”

  “Now you’re getting personal.”

  “Our guy, whoever he is, certainly likes playing with fire.”

  “So we gotta check for all firebugs in the system first.”

  Ransom nodded. “I suspect it’s just his way of adding one more element of the spectacular to his crime.”

  “After headlines?”

  “That or he plain bloody likes to watch ’em burn. Maybe something symbolic in it for the bastard. Shakespeare used fire as a symbol, and Plutarch before him, so why not our killer?”

  “Whataya thinking? He’s a gentleman of refinery, knows Shakespeare?”

  “Did I say that now?” Ransom scowled across.

  “I was just—”

  “—thinkin’ aloud? Some sort of evil genius? Evil yes, genius no. Find it odd, though, that the faces in every instance have been spared.”

  Ransom thought the victim himself far too young and innocent to have a criminal record. In fact, he looked, beneath all the smut, like a child in a Rembrandt depiction of a Dutch peasant family. A fingerprint from the severed fingers would in all likelihood prove valueless. Still, that tedious chore of doing something useful in a scientific method with the fingers would be left to the coroner, the now famous, indefatigable Dr. Christian Fenger.

  Just after Haymarket, Chief Nathan Kohler’s intelligent predecessor had made a deal for space at Cook County Hospital for police morgue work. What Dr. Fenger got in return was an endless and steady supply of John and Jane Does—cadavers. Christian’s operating theater, where he taught surgery to a generation of doctors, never lacked for cadavers, not like the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and many other surgeries and medical schools. Before this arrangement between Cook County and the CPD, the earlier police coroner had been a former barber turned pathologist named Louie Fountenay who knew little to nothing about police science and investigation. A man without imagination as well.

  “Be sure to point out the situation with the head and fingers to Doc Fenger when you accompany the body to the morgue, O’Malley.”

  “Yes, of course, Inspector.” O’Malley jotted a note and mouthed, “Fingers…give fingers to Fenger.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Chicago had almost as many train terminals as police districts, but the Illinois Central Station had just opened this year as the busiest terminus for Columbian Exposition fairgoers. Designed as a through station—as many of the suburban trains used tracks that went through the terminal and on to Randolph and Lake streets—New York architect Bradford L. Gilbert patterned it on a Monet painting of the Paris train station. Opened to serve the tourist traffic to and from the great fair, Illinois Central stood a sight to behold with its towering, gangly turreted clock tower, gaudy Romanesque exterior, and its ponderous Richardsonian office wing extending outward from one side of the tower. Spindly iron columns that appeared ready to collapse at any moment under the weight of the massive masonry supported this penitent-looking wing. The whole an ugly symbol of the city’s progress, felt awkward, a hodge-podge of random, hastily got-up gore, so far as Ransom could see.

  Still, trains of every size and stripe bellowed and roared and whistled in and out, some suburban lines only slowing, going on to their next destination, while the huge engines of the Illinois Central and the Baltimore and Ohio sat at opposite ends like two bulls sizing one another up.

  The interior of the building featured an enormous elliptically vaulted waiting room straddling the tracks, and a grand staircase leading up to where Ransom stood. The marble steps opened wide, butterfly-fashion on two sides, going up to the second concourse. It was from up here one found stairs going to the top of the clock tower.

  Two uniformed officers who Ransom had sent up to the clock tower and roof to investigate returned now with a brown paper bag in which they’d gathered six cigar butts, all the same brand, their bands proclaiming them Cuban Valenzas. Could the killer be so foolish? Had he staked out his victims over a period of days from the clock tower? Looking down over the panorama of the world’s fair from that vaulted position?

  “None of the workmen here claim the habit or the brand, sir,” said the officer in charge of the tower hunt.

  Ransom’s partner added, “A costly brand—Valenzas—not sold everywhere in the city. I smoke them myself on occasion.”

  Ransom nodded, taking this all in, mentally picturing the killer dousing the young man with kerosene and lighting the corpse with his cigar. “Should I put you on my suspect list, Griff?” joked Alastair. He also made a mental note to call Stratemeyer, Chicago’s foremost fire investigator. Get him down to Fenger’s morgue to help determine the exact nature of the accelerant, and if it might’ve been touched off by a cigar. If any man could find residue of cigar in the ashes of the boy’s clothing, it was Harry Stratemeyer. Ransom had already drawn on Harry in connection with the previously torched garrote victims, and Stratemeyer assured him that neither had been torched while alive. Alastair imagined it so in this case as well, as the fire had remained stationary, the grime and creosote trail going nowhere. People afire who are alive tended to spread it around.

  Ransom had taken no notice that Drimmer had stiffened, rankling at the suggestion he could be a killer.

  Instead Alastair was watching the trains come and go below, like herding elephants in India, recalling his time there a few years ago while on holiday. Just outside the huge, marble-columned, marble-floored concourse, just outside the west and south windows, lay the infamous red-light Levee district and beyond, a slum wasteland. Closer to hand, directly below the window where he stood, Ransom studied the warm but limited glow of the gaslights that lined the little “cow paths”—so-called by students coming and going from the University of Chicago campus. The same lanes once led cattle to the slaughter at the Chicago Stock Yards—a standing joke with the students, but now rail lines hauled the cattle to slaughter, and the slaughter paths had been left for the students going to exams.

  The paths also led people from the locomotive engines of the Illinois Central to the Alley L—the first elevated train line in the city. The Alley L journeyed folks on toward the South Side and the Hyde Park campus, but not without the stench of the infamous Chicago Stock Yards filling the cars. The odor of slaughter wafted for six
city blocks in every direction. On a bad day with the wind blowing in from the lake, this foul odor blanketed the entire city.

  From the second-floor balustrade, Ransom looked out over the solemn main concourse where uniformed officers, with little enthusiasm and smaller hope, questioned people, asking if anyone had seen anything out of the ordinary. The sound of steam-powered trains wafting up to him, Ransom returned to stare out the window at a growing and often troubled metropolis, reflected here in the terminal district where so many different rail lines crisscrossed as to boggle the mind.

  He’d been on the scene for an hour and a half now, and his bad leg and back were conspiring with stomach pains from having not eaten. Having had to deal with Tewes atop the gruesome remains had left his nerves in disarray. The sheer cowardice of the killer infuriated him, so evilly Machiavellian down to the instrument of murder: its street name the Devil’s bow tie. In a sense, a garrote was a hand-held guillotine, also created and perfected by the French—purveyors of culture and horror at once, as with all mankind, Ransom thought.

  His skin-crawling need for an opium hit kicking up, his maimed left leg aching, and dry heaves threatening, Ransom—perspiring heavily now—excused himself and walked away from Griff and the others. He bypassed the men’s room when he looked inside at the floor still polished in blood. Swallowing hard, he pushed through the doorway to the stairs leading to the clock tower. He wanted no one to see his fevered restlessness as the opium addiction withdrawal of mere hours now grapple-hooked his insides and crept along the epidermal layers of his skin.

  Alone in the clock tower stairwell, Alastair struggled to regain control. He pulled forth a flask and emptied its contents—Bourbon whiskey—swallowing in rhinoceros fashion. Light filtered down from the top of the tower, which looked a thousand steps away. Ransom took the stairs, struggling against his own heft and body to wind his way up the spiraling steps like those in a lighthouse.