They fanned out, searching for the missing, phantom boat. A pair of the fools singing out, “Row-row-row your boat, gently down the stream…”
“Trelaine’s head could well be lying in that boat, so be prepared, lads!” Ransom’s words silenced the chorus of “Merrily, merrily, merrily.”
Again it was Griffin who’d made the gruesome discovery, alerting the others to the empty boat. When Ransom’s boat came alongside, he stared into Griffin’s eyes, and he said, “Quite the bloodhound you’ve become.”
“A compliment from you, Rance?”
Ransom lifted his lantern to search the drifting boat, its oars having been secured by Callahan, who now held his head over the side and noisily retched.
Ransom looked into a stranger’s eyes, wide and questioning, a man named Trelaine, whose head alone lay at the rear of the boat where he’d been enticed by a killer apparently capable of talking another man into abandoning his boat and a beautiful woman for the privilege of helping out.
How does a soul rest in peace under such circumstances, Ransom silently wondered.
“What next, Rance?” asked Griffin.
Ransom failed to answer, still lost in Trelaine’s accusing gaze; a gaze that asked why hadn’t the collective “they” stopped this madman before he could do this horror?
Griffin spoke. “Callahan, get into the boat with the head and—”
“Me, sir?”
“—and row it into the dock, Callahan. Inspector Ransom can use the exercise it’ll take to get himself ashore.”
This reference to Ransom’s weight caused only cautious laughter as other search boats had gathered in close for a look at the severed head.
Callahan, tall, angular and fair-skinned blanched whiter, but he shakily made his way into the boat, where the head lay staring up at him. Given its proximity, it lay between his legs where he sat the oars. He could count on its rocking side to side, touching his ankles.
Around him, he heard the nervous twittering and mutterings of others, but Ransom looked him in the eye and said, “Callahan, use your coat.”
Callahan nodded and quickly removed his coat and blotted out the staring head. Earlier, Ransom had judged the dead man from his clothes as upper crust. He wore Marshall Field shoes, and his clothes appeared tailored, but the inspector had been surprised on reading the lapel: MONTGOMERY WARD. No sign of Carson, Pirie, Scott buttons on the man.
“Griff, did you send for Philo?”
“Sent our biggest lads to fetch him, yes.”
“He’s likely talked them into a drink.”
“Damn, they’ll be all night.”
“I’m confident they’ll have ’im back and waiting for us at the dock.”
“We’ll have to row him out to the tunnel entrance.”
“I can manage that.”
“Thanks, Griff, and for earlier…for walking my lady friend to a cab.”
“Do you know the address she gave the cabbie, Alastair?”
“I do.”
“And?”
“She’s Dr. Tewes’s sister.”
“Really?”
“Yes, keeps house for Tewes, perhaps a bit of nursing…looks after his daughter.”
“Ahhh…I see, working the relatives, pumping her for information. Smart police work!”
Ransom bristled but also thought of his having measured Tewes. “Old-fashioned foot-to-heel police work. Which reminds me: Did you send those measurements off?”
“Telegraphed. Marvelous invention. Phoned New York, too, just to ask around about Tewes. Didn’t he say he spent some time there? But nothing’s come of it, not so far anyway.”
Back now through the tunnel, where they bobbed beneath the concrete and fieldstone overpass each eyeing the bloody print marking the killer’s escape. Then they were back with Trelaine’s parts. His remains were laid out near Chesley Mandor’s.
Philo showed up, a brawny cop on each side of him. He’d not brought his usual equipment, carrying instead a hefty handheld camera like a small accordion, no doubt his latest acquisition.
“Hello, my friend,” Ransom’s weary voice reached Philo. “We’ve sad work aplenty for you.”
“As I heard, but look here, Alastair.” He held up his new camera. “Isn’t she lovely? It’s the latest, a Kombi Night-Hawk detective camera, created for just such work as we engage in, you see?”
“Well and good, so long as you get the cuts, Philo. One’s gonna require a boat ride and a bit of balancing, so I’m glad you brought the smaller camera.”
“It possesses all the latest improvements known to modern photography, man.”
“I’ll take your word for it. It’s a beauty.”
“Morocco leather, my friend, and further, it’s fitted with the new rapid rectilinear lens.”
The man speaks his own language, Ransom thought. “Let’s just get started, Philo.”
“It’s fitted with a new regulation timer and instantaneous shutter, Alastair, with bulb attachment and—”
Philo, who’d followed Ransom to the corpse, suddenly fell silent, staring, shaking. On seeing the woman’s charred remains, he gasped and dropped his camera, and went to his knees.
The victim has a familiar face, Alastair guessed from Philo’s contrition, and now apologetic words spewed from the photographer, his hands clasped in the universal gesture of prayer, his body wracked with sobbing. “Chesley! OhGodno-please-notmysweet Chesley! Please forgive me! Please forgive…ahhhh-haaa.”
“My God,” said Nathan Kohler now on scene.
Ransom whispered in Philo’s ear, a hand on him, trying to get him away and composed, “Tell me she was not one of your models, Philo.”
Philo shook off Ransom’s touch; he refused help, refused getting up from his kneeling position over the charred body and still lovely face, his hands extended, hovering over the torso and garroted head.
Reporters on scene snapped pictures. Others jotted notes, trying to transcribe Philo Keane’s litany of apologies. Ransom knew from experience that a man displaying such vulnerability—beaten and broken in spirit—soon learned how few friends he actually had in this life. Ransom smelled sharks in the water. “Get Philo outta here, Griff,” Alastair barked.
“But the photograph of the handprint?”
“Get one of the reporters, anyone. Just get Philo away.”
Philo stumbled to his feet, dizzy with death and drink, shouting, “It’s Trelaine’s doing! That scrawny prick is the garroter! All the while pretending to love her!”
“Youyouyou knew both victims?” asked Griffin, but Philo was hearing nothing and understanding less.
“A vile, greedy little man! Joseph Trelaine. I’ll swear out a warrant here, now, Ransom! They must’ve quarreled. He…he must’ve thought after killing her to make it look the work of this Phantom. Dear Ches rejected the prig for me after all, and it…I got her killed. No doubt of it!”
Each blathering word another nail in his coffin as Ransom read the feeding frenzy among the press and possibly in both Griffin’s and Kohler’s heads. Philo had few friends in the press and fewer on the force.
“Here is Trelaine lying dead and headless himself, Philo!” shouted Alastair. “Someone meant to drown ’im after beheading him!”
Kohler added, “He’s hardly the cause of her death and his own.”
Even young Callahan noticed the triangle here. Philo and Trelaine both vying for Miss Mandor. Philo’s reputation for bedding his models, and she sitting for him, rejecting his advances, and Trelaine learning of the sordidness. This is how it played out this moment in curious, disparate interpretations.
Alastair grabbed Philo and marched him off to stand below an enormous tree that’d escaped leveling as the perfect herald of the Agricultural Exhibit. Below the sign of the exhibit, Alastair put it to him. “From where do you know Miss Mandor and this Trelaine chap? Tell me the whole story, and leave nothing out.”
“He brought her round after a while.”
“After a w
hile?
“He’s my accountant for Ward’s Department Store, oversees all advertising.”
“Ahhh…you worked for him.”
“Indirectly…OK, yes. Insipid man without imagination, turning back all my best ideas. I tell you, Alastair, there were times when I’d’ve beheaded him, had I an axe.”
“Quiet such talk, man!”
“I met privately with Ches, having slipped her a note. I felt…thought this was the answer. A way around Trelaine.”
“The answer?”
Griffin joined them at the tree.
“You see, he made me test every product before doing a photographic ad. This meant visits to his uncle’s farm to test some vet tools. I did all he asked and, God, finally a plumb assignment was offered.”
“Which was?”
“Ladies’ corsets and bloomers.”
“And this is where Miss Mandor came in?” asked Griff.
“Precisely.”
“She wanted to do some modeling…wanted it badly, I believed at the time.”
Ransom gritted his teeth. “I see…and you were just the man to initiate her into ahhh…modeling.”
“I posed her in artistic and tasteful displays, showing her incredible beauty and the corsets and stockings and—”
“And made advances,” said Griff.
“No, no, no…not like that…not in that way.”
“You mean not like you did with all the others, Polly included?” asked Ransom.
“This is…was a lady. I confess love in the air, such beauty and form, and so malleable and willing. I took countless shots, but I ne’er sullied her. She was special…laughed at my jokes, and we…we talked, Ransom, all night we—”
“Talked?”
“Of hopes, dreams, plans. It felt so…so right.”
“So what happened?”
“Her body was so expressive. The way she moved.”
“Get to the point, Philo!”
“Well, I mean when she put her clothes back on, it was as if…well…she became a completely different person. Cold and reserved. She made it clear she meant to marry Trelaine for position and wealth—both things she did not dream of, did not pray for, did not speak of when…when she lay there before me naked.”
“Damn…so when did Trelaine discover the nude photos? Did she show them to him?”
“She did not. He never knew.”
“But he told you to stay away from her, and you argued.”
“I merely told him she was a grown woman, fully capable of making her own decisions, despite her…silence on the matter as a whole.”
“You mean you showed him the photos?”
“Are you kidding? They’ve made a small fortune.”
“You mean you sold the photos? to Trelaine?”
“Lock, stock, and barrel…save the few I kept in a secret place.”
“Do you know how all this looks, Philo? Do you know how this might play in the newspapers should it come out? How it might play in a courtroom?”
“I’ve never given one goddamn how things appear. Appearances are for fools and are always wrong, right?”
“The appearance of impropriety in the minds of most is impropriety, and the appearance of jealousy, anger, murder…is in the mind of the beholder truth, fact, whether it makes sense or no. And once in the mind, damn hard to disprove.”
“What’re you saying, Ransom? That I look guilty for murder? For garroting Chesley and—and Trelaine? That’s…why it’s preposterous, an outright lie.”
“Philo, I want you to go home.”
“What? I have cuts yet to make.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” A reporter had drifted toward them, and his ear alerted like a hunting dog at Philo’s last words: I have cuts yet to make.
“I’m putting another photographer on the case.”
“What? Why that’s—”
“Standard practice! You’re far too personally involved. You obviously loved her, as much as you can love. Now make yourself scarce. You’re fired tonight! Go home.”
He searched Ransom’s eyes and cast a glance at Griff. “I can’t believe you…that this…this is gone so…so strangely for us.”
“I know you would never do this, Philo. Others who don’t know you may perceive otherwise. Now go. Trust me!”
He turned and walked dejectedly off, passing Callahan, who held out his new Wards wonder camera, saying, “You don’t wanna forget this, Mr. Keane.”
Philo looked at it as if he’d never seen it before. He said to Ransom, “This was what he gave me, free and clear, Alastair, if I’d never see Chesley again…and believing she meant what she’d said…I took the damn thing.”
Ransom didn’t know what to say to this. “Take your prize home then, Philo, and either get drunk or get sober, but do it privately.”
“Alastair, this is none of my doing, no more than Polly’s murder was any of your doing.” He threw the camera at Ransom’s feet. “Give it to my replacement.”
“I can’t take your camera, Philo.”
“The other man will. Just do it.”
Philo rushed away on shaky legs, a dazed stork.
“Poor bastard,” muttered Griffin, “but then he always did rush into walls, didn’t he? What do you think of his knowing both victims?”
“I knew the last victim. Does that make me a suspect?” Ransom knew the general thinking, that Philo courted problems, but he couldn’t be called a murderer on the basis of character defects or bad judgment! He marched off with the camera, Griffin following, saying, “I’ve a ready replacement for Keane.”
“Trust me, Griff, you’ll never replace Keane’s attention to detail and care in his work.”
“Perhaps…when he’s sober.”
“Just get the cuts of the handprint and the bodies. Who’s doing the work?”
“Philo’s apprentice has volunteered.”
“Ahhh…Denton.”
“He’s at the ready…came when he heard the news.”
“I’m sure he’ll do then.”
“He’s Philo’s able assistant, as I am your able assistant, Alastair.”
“All right, get the assistant on it if he can keep from puking.”
“He’ll do fine.”
“Stay with him then, and give him this to work with.” He handed over Philo’s ill-gotten camera.
“Nathan Kohler seems to be studying your handling of matters, Rance. Go carefully, I daresay. Watch your back.”
Ransom noticed something new in Griffin’s demeanor and tone; something intangible yet cool wafting ghostlike between them. Had Kohler gotten to Griffin? But he was too worried at Kohler’s assessment of Philo’s show of emotion to pay close attention. “You get Waldo set up at the tunnel. I’ll see to Nathan Kohler.”
Griffin became stiff, his eyes filling with a fire. “You’re not a man easy to like, Alastair…”
“What?”
“…never giving, never offering a hand, or to buy a cup of coffee, to ask after my day, my family’s health, my take on things, life…”
“And you think this is the time?”
Griffin marched off with Philo’s camera, shouting, “Denton! Come with me!”
Ransom realized that the young detective was right about his having made little time for him, and that he should treat Griffin with more deference and respect. Worrisome. But he hadn’t time at the moment. He had enough on his plate. Gotta worry about Philo now, he thought, seeing young Denton salivating over the damned new camera handed him.
“Gawd…its morocco leather,” Waldo wailed.
CHAPTER 20
Ransom found a park bench where he’d collapsed, fully expecting Nathan Kohler to join him, and he expected a fight, at least an argument. He expected Kohler to tell him that an infusion of fresh perspective was sorely needed as he, Ransom, had gotten not a grain closer.
So when he sensed someone drop onto the bench beside him, he didn’t look up until he heard the irritating voice of Dr. Tewes. “I cal
led Dr. Fenger…pleaded with him to come to the scene…to examine the bodies immediately, but I fear, he’s exhausted and burnt out on murder.”
“Dr. Tewes…how good of you to come.” Ransom’s sarcasm sounded harsher than he’d meant.
“Take out all your frustration on me…if it gets you onto what you do best.”
“Drinking.”
“No, tracking…focus on your gift for the hunt, and trust your instincts.”
“Until recently, that is how I managed, but lately…the headaches have become non-stop, the worse since Muldoon’s sap.”
Tewes ran a hand through Ransom’s hair until he found the knot.
“Ouch! Damn!”
“You’re not kidding. No wonder you’ve a headache.”
“Reduce another man to tears.” Ransom gave in to Tewes’s fingers—both hands now caressing his cranium. Tewes’s touch felt light, his hands caring. Alastair gave in further, submitting, too tired to protest. Strangely, he didn’t wish it to end.
“I could help you.” Ransom only half heard as Tewes continued a light massage, careful not to strike the palpitating bulge. “Left you unconscious. Hope they throw the book at Muldoon.”
“For striking down a cop?”
“You’re the most cynical man I’ve ever met.”
“Cynical or realistic?”
“Do you think everyone is out to get you?”
“Aren’t you?”
“I’m not your enemy, Inspector.”
“No, you’re only spyin’ for Nathan Kohler?”
“I…I’ve read your record. You’re a fine detective.”
“What’ve you got on Kohler?”
“I’ll not say.”
“He expects you to muck up my case.”
“There is that, yes. But Alastair, I’ve not sold you out.”
“How heartening. You only spy for him; you don’t tell him anything.”
“The other day, at the fire scene, I told him I was done with collusion.”
“But you’re here now.”
“I only want to help.”
“To help me?” He began laughing. “Like at the train station?”
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