City for Ransom

by Robert W. Walker

  To the untrained eye, it might appear the flames had begun on the bottom floor, but not so with Chief Harold Stratemeyer, whose experience told him just the opposite, and this belief was given more credence when all the upper stairways caved in from the center. And now after this small explosion of debris amid the flames, Stratemeyer could see the result after the smoke cleared a bit.

  Ransom stood alongside Stratemeyer unbelieving. Sitting atop the charred bar…like a mockery of Alastair’s former love nest, the bedsprings and still burning mattress precariously balanced. This was art of the devil.

  Harry Stratemeyer was acting as the new fire marshal—old Warrick having been found floating in the Chicago River’s north branch. Death by what was being called an accidental drowning helped along by alcohol, but there remained the curious part—no wallet or money in his pockets. At any rate, Stratemeyer, who’d been Warrick’s second in command, ordered men to water down surrounding buildings, having long since given up on the clapboard two-story and its surrounding outhouses. Chicago firefighters had in fact evolved greatly since the devastating fire in 1871. While still in need of more and better equipment, they did have far better access to water, as sewers now carried needed supplies to hydrants throughout the network of streets. And their tanks were larger and their horses faster and generally—but not always—better trained on chaos. His men were also better trained and outfitted.

  Strateymeyer grabbed Ransom the moment he saw the big inspector wandering in a daze toward the flames, pointing and shouting about someone he called Merielle. But it was no easy grab; Stratemeyer had had to subdue Ransom with the help of several of his men. Otherwise, Alastair would’ve surely rushed into the flames—flames in their acme, rabid, licking, unstoppable.

  Stratemeyer, a large man himself, had thrown a massive bear-hug onto Ransom, and with the two others, had wrestled his friend Alastair into a sitting position below the cinders that rained down around them all like searing fireflies discovering freedom.

  Finally, two large firemen now sat on Ransom where he beat the earth with both fists.

  Alastair Ransom had sat all night on the street corner, feeling his life going off into the night sky with the smoke that discolored the moon. Head in hands, eyes arched and watching, Alastair said a prayer for Merielle as the final boards caught flame, only to fall into the center of the gutted two-story. The place had housed the old London Royale Arms Tavern, a pretentious title for a pub, and his Merielle’s rooms above, now no longer above.

  Stratemeyer would not let him set foot onto the scene until one hundred percent certain that first the fire was under control, and until he could determine if it were arson or an unfortunate accidental occurrence. Two burly firemen stood guard over Ransom where he sat while Harry kicked through the rubble in a methodical going over.

  As it’d been a large, sprawling thing that went far back of the yards, a number of other apartments rented by the owner of the Arms had also burned. But everyone living in the building was accounted for, all but Polly Pete.

  Now at daybreak, the fire under control, Ransom stood to shake off the weary firemen guarding him. He began a strange tiptoe amid the squalor and fumes and blackness of the gutted house, working to remain in Harry’s footsteps so as to disturb as little as possible of Stratemeyer’s possible arson investigation, and he thought of the last time he’d spoken to Merielle.

  The second floor had caved in on the bar below, and all of Polly Pete’s frilly adornments had gone up in smoke, along with her trunk, her bureau drawer, the mirror blackened with smutty, grimy smoke now atop chairs and tables in one corner—somehow miraculously intact, a still-life painted in fire meant to mock Ransom, to rend his heart. Peering into her eerily intact mirror was a look into a bottomless abyss of smut. Nothing reflected from it save a single eye—his eye, reflecting where a single dewy quarter-sized square remained somehow unblemished. Satan winking at him. Then he saw the bed again—their bed—straddled atop what was left of the bar, the mattress gone save for the seared, hoary black tufts of it. Black spider webs clung to rails, to exposed conduits for the gas burners, pipes, leftover standing boards, leftover standing glasses half melted, to an array of exploded bottles of rye, rum, whiskey, gin, vodka and other spirits. Only the bedsprings remained of their bed, and the coiled springs, like the mirror, painted in satanic abandon.

  “Where is she? If not here…where?” he asked. A glimmer, like a fleeting bird from his deepest recesses of—hope for Merielle—rose in him.

  A completely ash-covered Stratemeyer looked him in the eye. “Alastair, you should go home…go home, now.”

  “Where the bloody hell is she?”

  Stratemeyer gritted his teeth. “You’re a hard man to stay liking, Alastair. You should take a friend’s advice!”

  He pushed past Harry, searching, tearing at boards, cutting hands on debris in his mad hunt for Merielle, but he found nothing when he came around a wall on his right side that’d somehow grotesquely remained standing, as a magician’s trick…like the trick of the intact mirror. Still, no body.

  “Damn you, Harry! What’s become of her?”

  Stratemeyer merely lifted his chin, and Ransom followed his eyes upward. Above, caught on an exposed daggerlike protrusion of steel pipe—part of the upstairs plumbing—her body dangled: a charred disfigured doll, and ghastliest of all, she was headless.

  Ransom went to his knees, bellowing like a wounded beast. All of the hurt, all of the pain she must have felt, he screamed out in her name.

  Stratemeyer called for some of his men to escort Alastair out of the devastation.

  When Stratemeyer felt confident that Ransom had been put in a cab and sent home, he went around the bar and stooped below the bedsprings to reach in for the other part of the woman he’d only known as Polly Pete, the woman Ransom had made a reputation on with his winnings as a gambler. Harry’d never heard her called anything else. He wondered about the name Merielle. Guessed it Polly’s nickname, else the one given her at birth by parents, whoever they were…wherever they might be…if even alive.

  One thing he knew was to treat Polly’s body with all the respect of a queen, Alastair Ransom’s queen. He knew not to assume anything, knew to pass this along to the medical chaps who’d ultimately take her in their care, knew not to willy-nilly bury the remains in Potter’s Field, not without consulting Ransom.

  An assistant rushed to Stratemeyer’s opened arms with a large paper sack to receive the head. This done, Harry pointed to the dangling corpse overhead. “Somebody get a ladder against that wall! Determine if it’ll hold! And confound it all…if God willing, snatch that poor woman down.”

  “Sir, if I may volunteer for that duty,” replied Rodney McKeon. “Alastair Ransom’s been a good friend, sir.”

  Harry concurred, nodding firmly, thinking Ransom had done so much for so many. He dropped his gaze and jerked his head to hide a creeping tear. “That man doesn’t deserve this.”

  “Some bastard’s taken her head off,” muttered another fireman.

  McKeon added, “Yaaa…looks the same bastard as did the others, but this time…” He paused to bring home his point. “This time, he’s gone too far.”

  Harry said, “And he’s not goin’ to get away with it, not after Ransom finds his wits.”

  Alastair Ransom hadn’t gone home in the cab they put him into; instead, he wound up at Muldoon’s, unsure how he’d arrived here. He pounded on the door, demanding he be served, until Muldoon pulled it wide. Muldoon argued the law that shut taverns down on any given Saturday midnight not to reopen until Monday noon. Ransom pushed past the giant Muldoon, who snatched out a blackjack and slammed it into Alastair’s head, knowing he had the law on his side. This just as Mike O’Malley’d arrived.

  O’Malley arrested Muldoon for assaulting an officer, and Ransom was taken into custody for a drunk and disorderly, orders of Chief Kohler himself, and ignobly thrown into the drunk tank. With no beds left, they laid him out on the floor, unconsciou
s.

  Muldoon was booked for battery on a police official and told his court date would come round when it came around, despite his continual plea: “I was trying to uphold the drinking laws put forth by authorities!”

  It fell on deaf ears. Muldoon’s use of the sap to the back of Ransom’s head had caused a concussion, and saps were as illegal as drinking on Sunday—which actually changed from one week to the next, depending upon the level of graft. In fact, the drinking laws proved as mercurial as the tides.

  “He knows the rules but chose to break ’em! I pay good money to run a business, and this is how you treat me?” complained Muldoon, his gigantean features terrifying even through the bars.

  “You daft fool, Muldoon! Have ya no sense? That’s Alastair Ransom you knocked cold, and he has friends all over Chicago.”

  “I know who he is, but he pushed into my establishment shouting orders!”

  “Have you not heard the news, man?”

  “What news?”

  “Christ man, why news of a black-hearted bastard who’s going about the city cutting off heads!”

  “Every day it’s all I hear!”

  “About this morning’s victim! Found in the fire on Clark Street?”

  “What’s it to me?”

  “It was Ransom’s Polly who was murrr-durrr-ed, man!”

  It finally hit Muldoon, sinking into the thick walls of his head. “So he decides he’ll take it out on me, does he?”

  “He needed a drink, and he needed it badly, and you ought’ve given it up.”

  “It’s me license I worry about.”

  “Aye…like every merchant in this city.”

  “You coppers don’t make it easy on a man, the way you scratch honest earnings!”

  “Honest is it? Your place is a bloody front for every vice known to—”

  “—and now they got fees for this, and fees for that, and soon it’ll come to having to pay a fee to keep a rooster in your own bloody yard!”

  “Dare you now swear at your jailor?”

  “Look…is Ransom going to be OK?”

  “I dunno. Moans a bit now and again; still outta his head. Didja have to hit him so hard?”

  “I didn’t want that man getting up after I hit ’im, for sure.”

  “Well…you succeeded…least till he comes to. Best think of selling your place and getting out.”

  “Ne’er saw a copper so liked by other coppers.”

  “He’s a good man, a noble man to be sure.”

  “And I suppose, O’Malley, you’re one of his henchmen?”

  Mike O’Malley grimaced at Muldoon. “I shoulda beaned you!”

  “All right…I should’ve thought before I swung on ’im.”

  “Inspector Ransom’s done more for police and the personal safety of every cop in this city than all the captains, and all the chiefs, and all the commissioners, and all the mayors combined.”

  “And I grounded him.”

  “And you won’t hear the last of it with me or many another copper, I can guarantee you, Muldoon.”

  “What’re you saying? Huh?”

  “I’ll say no more.”

  “That if he’s to die, God forbid, that…that my time’s truly up here?”

  Michael Shaun O’Malley only turned the key and walked from the lockup, saying not another word.

  CHAPTER 16

  Griffin Drimmer stumbled amid still smoldering ashes of the fire that’d killed Alastair Ransom’s only dream. Alastair had confided in a word here and there that he had found someone special, someone he’d spoken about in connection with the word future, someone who, as he put it, might help him put away all his ghosts. Someone he thought he might devote all the rest of his life to, and in doing so, he could let go of the past, let go of the horror of Haymarket and the lingering questions and suspicions, to end his years-long quest after the phantoms of another time.

  Now this.

  And it was worse than first he’d heard—that Ransom’s woman had died in a terrible fire. Worse by far, as she’d been garroted—beheaded—and set aflame. He could hardly imagine Alastair’s grief and suffering. Surely the work of the fiend they’d been tracking. Had the madman turned on the hunters? And if so, how safe was Griffin’s own family? He must think of his own loved ones now.

  He made his way from the sight of Polly Pete’s severed head and the blackness of the fire-charred building and went in search of a messenger to send a hastily scratched note reading: “Pack children—go to mother’s in Portage. Stay till you hear from me!”

  Everyone in Chicago, it seemed, had come out to see the fire, a mob held back by uniformed coppers. People in mass who needn’t be here. People who could contribute nothing. Still, the CPD and CFD had learned something since the days of Haymarket, to circulate plainclothes undercover cops and snitches in among the crowds to feel out the word on the street.

  Nathan Kohler had come down to the site to oversee the investigation, barking orders for Griffin to get to the bottom of things. Philo Keane, hearing of the matter, had rushed down to gather what photos he might, not knowing of Polly’s murder by garrote and by blaze. He’d arrived just in time to get shots of the body being courageously eased down by a fireman Philo knew only as McKeon.

  Despite a hangover, Philo rushed into the midst of the rubble for shot after shot, made to pause only by the surreal sights—the mirror, the bedposts and bedsprings atop the charred bar, and then he saw the head being lifted from a bag to display to Drimmer and Kohler, and Philo’s camera caught this, too.

  Some of the firemen thought Philo a complete ghoul, but he knew that Alastair Ransom, had he been here and of sound mind, would be barking at him to get all these cuts. He told himself he was doing it for Ransom, although a whispered voice from the deepest reaches of his psyche said otherwise, said he liked it, the stark beauty that fire and charred remains carried into the frame. An artistic-minded man must understand the stark painful reality inherent in the scene—like storm devastation.

  “How I would’ve loved to’ve been on hand during the Great Fire…to’ve photographed its majesty, its finality, the uncompromising wasteland,” he said to arson investigator Stratemeyer.

  “Yes…I suppose a fine artistic soul such as yourself, Mr. Keane, can find beauty e’en in death. But trust me, you would’ve wept to see Chicago so crippled as she was then.”

  “You must have been—”

  “I was a bloody eighteen-year-old at the time. This”—he pointed to the devastation lying before them—“this is something like it only if you multiply the loss of life by hundreds and the property damage by millions.”

  “Still, the stark beauty of it. I’ve seen early photos, but a frame always limits the perspective of reality.”

  “Not sure, sir, but would you move just to your left a foot or two, Mr. Keane?”

  Philo did so, and the wall and fixture pipe that’d snatched Polly’s body while her head had fallen, now came crashing down, sending up a plume of smoke and ash to choke Philo and paint him ashen. He stepped out of the billowing cloud caused when the firemen had intentionally brought down the unsafe wall.

  Small fires still flared up around Philo as he moved off. Stratemeyer and his men stayed inside the mushroom cloud of debris, while Philo caught glimpses of these ghostly figures and snapped pictures. Under his breath, between choking bouts, he cursed his young assistant, Waldo Denton, for having not shown up for this. How was the boy to learn a damn thing?

  Then from out of the dust cloud stepped the man with the brown bag stuffed with Polly’s head, and following him, two men carrying a reed stretcher on which lay Polly’s charred legs, torso, arms, and half her neck. The cooked cadaver did not look real; it looked for all the world, he thought, like a fake rubber blob, something a rubber factory might cast off as damaged molding.

  Philo bumped into Griffin, and their eyes spoke, both feeling the torment of grief for their friend and colleague, both knowing they could not possibly feel the depth of
pain that Ransom, this moment, must be feeling for his loss.

  “Shocking…awful,” Griffin mustered two words.

  “Horrible, satanic is what it is,” managed Philo.

  Enough said. The body parts were whisked off to Cook County morgue by Shanks and Gwinn, who’d taken direction from Christian Fenger, also on hand. Fenger had remained on the periphery, watching from afar. How long he’d been on scene, no one hazarded a guess. Kohler asked it of Drimmer, and when Griffin had no answer, Kohler muttered, “Everyone thinks him a Renaissance man, a Leonardo of the prairie, but I think him rather a ghoul who likes his work too much.”

  “Unlike some people,” muttered Philo.

  Kohler gave Keane a withering look. “Look here, photographer, just do your job and mind your business. I was speaking to Inspector Drimmer.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “Just get those cuts to us as soon as possible, and if you’ve not already delivered the others from the train station to Inspector Ransom, then get them to my office as well. And for that matter, where the deuce is Ransom?” he said loudly for all to hear. But he fooled no one. News of Alastair’s one-sided run-in with Muldoon, and his lying in a cell at the Harrison Street Lockup on Kohler’s orders had spilled onto the street like beer from a busted vat. Chicago’s premiere detective, Inspector Ransom, lay unconscious in one of his own cells, locked up with derelicts, drunks, and scavengers of every stripe—some of whom might care to take a daggar to his throat.

  Philo just stared at the well-dressed politician cop, and was quickly losing his temper when Waldo Denton stumbled up, the boy’s face painted with fire grease and smoke, damp with tears. “I can’t do this no more, sir. No ’mount a scratch is worth this…every time somebody is killed like this…” An audible moan rose from Denton’s gut. “Damn it, this…this is too hard, Mr. Keane.”