City for Ransom

by Robert W. Walker

  It’d taken him a long time, but finally Ransom had gotten some useful information out of Merielle. She came across with what the “gent” called himself—“Mr. Sleepeck Stumpf” which sounded ridiculous to Ransom’s ear, but she insisted on it.

  He’d passed the name along to Dot ’n’ Carry and other of his streetwise friends to hunt him down—he wanted a word with Mr. Stumpf. The result so far pointed to a fictitious name.

  Alastair placed his cane with the wolf’s-head bone handle at ease alongside him as he leaned back into the cushioned seat of the hansom cab. This particular cab was indeed plush and the burgundy seats rich and warm. The interior, no doubt, had been done by the Pullman Company or Fischer. The Studebaker carriage company had lost out repeatedly to the other two for large contracts; Ransom had read as much in the papers. He tried to recall a time when he’d had a moment to read a paper, fatigue washing over him.

  Alastair closed his eyes as the cab made for the destination suggested by the handsome petite woman whose features were surprisingly memorable, although he’d given her scarcely a nod. He wondered if she had any idea of the Levee district’s reputation. Surely no, or she wouldn’t’ve pointed out that her brother, the good doctor, frequented the area.

  Or had she wantonly wished for an officer of the law to know of her brother’s questionable proclivities? How much did this woman know of Dr. Tewes, or of his comings and goings? Perhaps, in the future, she could prove useful?

  CHAPTER 10

  Philo Keane had fallen asleep to the sound of a Strauss waltz on his phonograph while thinking of Miss Chesley Mandor. Philo had one other vice than drink, and this was his prurient interest in the curvaceous body of a woman—as he’d all his life engaged in the search for the perfectly formed female, a dream that possessed him. He purely loved and respected the feminine form, from the tender half flush along the nape of the neck to the luscious ripe oval of the breasts, the deep valley of the cleavage, the enrapturing triangle of the crotch—a magnet to his eye and camera lens.

  He loved the species, fussing with her lips, her eyebrows, her lashes, her ears and adornments, and her neck and necklaces and chokers and lacy things from items on a bonnet to items on her privates. The way she tossed back her hair; the way she tossed back a pint of ale; the way she stood hands on hips when angry. Yes, he loved this vivacious creature called woman. He loved this ideal in his mind’s eye, but he also loved the flawed ones, the fallen ones, the sad and swollen ones, but most of all, he loved any woman—prude or prostitute—who’d had the decency to retain the beauty given her early in life.

  Philo wanted more than anything to combine his interest and love of the female form with his art. To make money with these two interests simultaneously had become his driving obsession. He had to be careful, however, as the Victorian prudishness of many if not most of his prospective clients in such a venture reared its ugly head and suddenly some fool is calling a cop, shouting “pornography” when in fact, Philo created art.

  All round him, Philo saw the most god-awful advertising. Fliers created by fools. No use of negative space. No visual component. As an artist with a camera, he found the advertising people settled for appalling and garish and foolish and redundant and boring and pedestrian and on and on…Not a whit of thought in it and no wit besides! But he had plans for Chicago advertisers. He had now a library of photos of beautiful women in various poses in Grecian and Roman dress, some quite suggestive, and should he find a backer, someone with gumption and capital—why then, look out. And should he superimpose the lady with a farm implement or a tin of snuff, a soft drink or hard liquor, or that new contraption invented by Thomas Crapper called indoor plumbing? What limits remained? If only he could squeeze money out of some of these old duffers like Sears, Roebuck or Field, there was a fortune to be made in advertising.

  It all seemed God’s plan for him.

  Born in Canada, Philo Keane had immigrated to Chicago in search of work like so many before him, except that he was a skilled lithographer. But he gave up this career for what appeared a far more lucrative one—photography—which he’d grown to love, and which he suspected would supplant all lithography someday, making his older profession obsolete.

  Philo had studied with a fellow Canadian, the famous Napoleon Sarony, himself apprenticed to the celebrated lithographers Currier & Ives. Napoleon, now near death in a New York hospital, had made history when he sued a clothier who expropriated a photograph of none other than Oscar Wilde posed by Sarony in an artistic rendering—as Sarony had pioneered the celebrity portraiture business.

  The case was the Burrows-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, and its roots went back to an advertisement for hats that’d used 85,000 reproductions of Sarony’s print, while ignoring Sarony’s copyright!

  Sarony, on learning of the outrage, took his case to court and won, but his opponents appealed to the Supreme Court where they argued that since the technology of photographs hadn’t existed in 1790, then photographs could not be covered under the copyright laws framed in a 1790 Act of Congress.

  The Supreme Court disagreed, citing that the founding fathers had anticipated all manner of futuristic discoveries in both patent and copyright law. Justice Samuel Miller, who wrote the ruling, added that an author is simply the one “to whom anything owes its origin.” As Sarony’s #18 Oscar Wilde was ruled a work of art and the “product of plaintiff’s intellectual invention, and as a class of invention for which the Constitution intended to secure to the author for exclusive right to use, publish, and sell…” and so it went.

  The ruling made Sarony and his company a household name.

  And while men with vision like Sarony had gone full tilt into the photographic portraiture business with a passion, and their reward was great, Philo disliked portraiture as ironically “lacking in art.” At least he could not make art of it, but he could make art of a beautiful body.

  He’d gone broke filming naked women—prostitutes on the whole, but women to whom he’d paid homage and greenbacks. His collection of feminine beauty was, in discreet gentlemen’s circles, legend, and Philo’d begun to turn a profit on some of this trade, as clients—quite specific in their demands—had grown.

  “—a redhead fully nude, a redhead partially nude bent over a barrel, a nude blonde doing a pirouette, nude brunette in a tutu doing a pirouette, a nude from the waist up, a nude from the waist down with a cigar in one hand, a brandy snifter in another…”

  He gulped down another drink. Surprisingly, he did his best work, when either angry or tipsy. Regardless of client and demand, Philo always carefully posed his models in an artistic manner with attention to detail and decorum, using his extensive collection of luxurious sheer nightwear in a pose reminiscent of sculptured goddesses, sometimes…never always and never for certain…but on some rare occasions, he did reach a pinnacle of stellar art, like the piece that Ransom had purchased for three bottles of rye and two of whiskey for a likeness of Polly Pete. Polly was spectacular, as close to Philo’s ideal as he ever hoped to come, but Polly was Ransom’s woman now. Now there was a beautifully rendered piece of art if ever there was—Polly…real name Merielle Spears. She’d gone rough-hewn and hard-edged early in life, and yet under the right conditions and upbringing, she may well have been a lady of high society. But even Polly was eclipsed by Chesley.

  Philo returned to the darkroom to examine cuts taken at the train station. Gruesome. But the impromptu one of Ransom handing that charlatan Tewes the head proved priceless. Philo laughed anew at the incident. How like Ransom to lose it like a rattler without a rattle, so suddenly and without warning.

  Keane ogled the developed photographs, hanging each now to dry and talked to himself. “Must make more prints. Limfkins, Haldermott, and Janklow pay well for photos of the dead, and this series of ‘head’ and ‘headless’ shots’ll go dearly. As for the photo of Alastair in all his raging glory—what a bull of a man he is—well that one any newsman in the city’ll pay a premium for.”

/>   But he pulled up short in his enthusiasm, remembering that Alastair was the only friend he had.

  “Damn bloody dilemma, what old man?” he asked himself. “Bloody friendship.” The Canadian accent he’d worked years to conceal filtered in whenever he was alone.

  The phonograph record in the other room had continued a rhythmic irking as it had come to the end of the music and repeatedly ran in the final groove.

  He stumbled toward the phonograph, anxious to put on another Strauss and dance with himself. As he did so, he gulped down another drink.

  Along State Street the same day

  The killer lifted what had been Purvis’s handkerchief—or more likely his girlfriend’s, as it smelled of perfume. The smell quickened his pulse as he relived the bloodletting. Stumpf could do that, imagine it all as if happening over again, even here, standing below an awning to avoid the late-afternoon shower. Nearby carriage horses slick with rain stood silent vigil amid the bustle of Chicago commerce. He stared at his reflection in a Field’s window and saw the four mirrored eyes—his and Purvis’s. Saw the right hand fingers popping off like so many escaping tadpoles. Then blood spurting from his victim’s neck, painted both mirror and basin. Young Cliffton had instinctively covered the leaking dyke of his carotid artery with his left hand, but by now every vein and artery in the neck had been severed. No holding back the flood.

  Even here in broad daylight on Chicago’s hard-packed streets, the killer felt a sexual release beneath his clothes, so clearly had Sleepeck Stumpf recreated the killing, reimagining the event by simply sniffing repeatedly at the purloined handkerchief—a souvenir of achievement. His first male. It’d been interesting the way the boy’s legs had buckled; how like a marionette he’d become, giving way to the gravity of death…like a stone sinking. The feel of it…his power over life at that moment of death’s weight taking the boy down to his knees—it all held such absolute charm for the assassin.

  How the victim slid so easily over the marble floor as I dragged him along in his own blood. A wondrous emotion welling up. Something never imagined. How like the slaughter animal, the way his carcass gave itself up to my control.

  Firing of the bodies held no excitement for him. It was merely for show…something extra for Inspector Ransom.

  Cliffton had died of massive blood loss. Traumatic, hemorrhagic shock due to the neck wound. He hadn’t felt a thing after that, certainly not the fire. In fact, he was so suddenly dead that he hadn’t time to think of anything but the enveloping arms of death. No time for questions of why or of eternity, heaven or hell; nothing normal or natural in the way he went.

  Young Cliffton—at the point of attack—in Illinois Central Station, second-floor concourse men’s room no longer gave a rat’s ass about examining the architecture, or studying under the finest architects, or recalling how sweet his girl’s kiss was beneath the Ferris wheel. He had been jabbering and washing his hands—just as his mother, no doubt, had taught him—when the garrote leapt round his neck.

  Quick efficient silent death slipped from a coat pocket.

  Again he covered his nostrils with the aroma of the stolen handkerchief—Cliffton’s possession. It conjured up another aroma, the last odor Cliffton smelled—his own blood. He sucked it in, and his brain filled with the images of holding life in his hands.

  Not only had Cliffton been the first male he’d ever killed, but the only victim he hadn’t assiduously stalked. Opportunity had simply presented itself there in the train station. His third killing since arriving in Chicago. He’d only killed small animals until now, practicing on them with the garrote. But he’d never been found out or arrested. So he wasn’t in their various card files.

  Another of his victims had been a tender, lovely, young milk-skinned little family girl, a Polish princess named Milka Kaimeski—Cliffton’s female counterpart. He liked killing the innocent and unblemished.

  Friends of Milka’s had left her in the company of a gentleman the night she lost her life. Descriptions of the phantom gentleman were as varied as those of Christ himself and so rendered useless, but all were in agreement that he carried a cane, wore a top hat, expensive leather shoes, coat and tails, and that he was smitten by the beautiful young Milka. Most accounts put the man at thirty or thirty-five, the age he effected when prowling for prey. In point of fact, he carried no cane. Canes were for crippled old men like that fanciful copper, Inspector Ransom. He didn’t himself need a stinking cane to take down that fat screw, as he was young and strong, having just turned twenty. Sure, the old hero of Haymarket had a hundred pounds on him, but the great equalizer lay silent in his pocket, the mini-guillotine.

  As for his first Chicago victim, she too, had gone to the fair. But she’d been a tough, gaunt, hard-edged, leather-skinned cigar-smoking working girl named Hannah O’Doul, a red-light district prostitute. She’d gone to the fair on a lark with friends, but having run short of funds, Hannah separated, intending to acquire more funds by picking up a John at the fair. She’d found him. Or rather, he’d been stalking her.

  She wanted most of all to ride the Ferris wheel, and while frightened of its enormity, she remained fascinated at the idea of reaching out to touch a bird in flight. He’d dumped her body along the forested lane where police routinely patrolled, mimicking the playful taunts of old Jack the Ripper himself. Hannah’s death only made a few sentences, buried on the obit pages.

  Killing prostitutes got no play in the press, and little had been made of the Polish girl in the Chicago press either. It disturbed both him and Sleepeck Stumpf that these heinous murders had been given so little attention. They’d both expected outrage. They’d expected a flood of ink devoted to the killer. But surely now they’d see results in the dailies; they must give it front-page mention now, thanks to his having upgraded to the murders of an unborn along with the Polish girl and now a fresh off-the-farm school lad—all in a matter of weeks. The response must now be outrage.

  He imagined the morning newspaper accounts in the Chicago Tribune and the Daily Herald: POLICE STYMIED BY PHANTOM GARROTER, AT A LOSS FOR CLUES.

  News of the killings on the street ran ahead of the reporters, outstripping their efforts and accounts. News had also spread wide about the Polish girl’s pregnancy. He hadn’t known it at the time; not that it’d’ve mattered a whit to Stumpf. Apparently, no one else had known she was a spoiled dove, left to fend for herself. That is until the autopsiest, a Dr. Christian Fenger, declared it so. This news spurred belated outrage. Authorities had arrested the boy Milka had been seeing—father of the child being their prime suspect.

  Afterwards, Sleepeck Stumpf called her another Hannah O’Doul in the making, a street tramp—no better. Getting herself knocked up in such fashion. A sign of the times, end of century coming on—the end time! And as for the unborn child, what bloody chance might it’ve had at a future anyway?

  “When the Twentieth Century does arrive, God means to destroy all the Earth and Sky overhead, and to begin all over again anyway,” Stumpf assured him just as Mother had on her death bed. “This according to Revelation and Stumpf—spirit of the spirit. So what matters? Naught…naught matters.” All the same, if the unborn counted as a life, he’d taken in four souls, each saved from the horrors of the end time.

  Four souls…three of which he’d felt enter him as he drained each life. But not knowing of the child, he hadn’t felt the child’s spirit enter, and this led to a doubt of Stumpf and his purpose in all this killing. Stumpf promised power and knowledge of the universe, familiarity with the Creator beyond that of normal men—and a sense of well-being to override the chaos of this world. All the same…whether Stumpf was just talking or not, the taking of lives did have a profound effect. He felt it religiously—a deep, abiding, and contented feeling—especially when twisting the garrote to hear death and to breathe it into his nostrils.

  He imagined an orderly or nurse standing beside an autopsy slab at the Cook County morgue, arms extended with the linen winding sheet, the wr
apping held wide and open to receive the dead fetus from Milka’s womb. Imagined Dr. Fenger’s cold forceps lifting out the four-month-old child from the burned girl’s charred abdomen, and handing the lump of flesh over to the tearful nurse. And as the child is being transferred from the doctor’s hands to the linen hammock, the child’s eyes open and fill with an awe that speaks of life and death entwined.

  “When are we not with death?” he asked aloud. Passersby below umbrellas stared dumbly, but a nearby horse whinnied as if agreeing.

  CHAPTER 11

  Dr. Tewes had rejoined the world, and as quickly as Jane could become James again, she got her other self over to Cook County Hospital. She’d been weary, but with that bull detective on Tewes’s tail, she’d suddenly become energized, taking a carriage for Dr. Fenger’s. Should Inspector Ransom now seek out and find Dr. Tewes, he’d be in one of the two places spoken of. In fact, sending him to the South Levee district was a stroke of genius. He’d likely want to catch the good doctor there in a questionable or compromising position, she reasoned, so he’d go there first. Unable to find him there, he’d come looking at Cook County Hospital. Perfectly played, she reasoned.

  On arriving, she—as Tewes—learned that Dr. Fenger was still in the autopsy and inquest phase. Having a number of living patients to see to, Dr. Fenger had only now gotten round to a full autopsy of the Purvis corpse.

  She stepped into his operating theater. Rows of male students filled each aisle in the area built for this man. He’d become a legend in Chicago, indeed in Illinois, and in Europe. Fenger belonged to all the medical associations in the city and the state, and some abroad. As a surgeon and a pathologist, as well as a medical school professor, Christian was the first to join the latest specialized medical groups. In fact, he’d spearheaded the Chicago Pathological Society that’d come into being immediately after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.