City for Ransom

by Robert W. Walker

  “Thanks, Waldo. If it comes to a showdown, and I have time, I’ll send for you,” Ransom promised, allowing the kid his fantasy. “You bring the Night Hawk. Make your name and fortune on the case.”

  Denton cleared his throat at this point. “We’ve arrived at your destination, sir, Muldoon’s.”

  “Thanks.” He exited the cab and paid Waldo. “How long’ve you been driving a hack?”

  “Too long and a half. Before apprenticing with Mr. Keane. The day job pays bills.”

  “I see.”

  “Good way to get to know our city. Learn it fast having a different fare every ten minutes.”

  “You keep a close watch on your fares!”

  “Personal touch insures they come to me before taking another hack.”

  “Clever Waldo, quite.”

  “I try to be. It’s not easy.”

  “Being clever?”

  “I mean…it don’t come easy is what I mean to say, sir.”

  “Never had an opportunity for college, heh?”

  “No, sir…not like them born with that silver spoon, what?”

  “Ahhh…no chance at college myself either.”

  “Oh, I could’ve gone to college…could’ve been smart and maybe train for some profession. But…circumstances held out against it.”

  “Know what you mean…I do. Guess it was fortunate you took to photography.”

  “A godsend really…. A golden opportunity to work with Mr. Keane, I say. And as for the meagerness what comes from Mr. Keane’s hand, it did go a long way to help me in burying Mother.”

  “I’ll give your idea more thought. To lay a trap.” Ransom so wanted his hands on the monster who’d turned his city into a daily nightmare. Wanted five minutes alone with the fiend. Wanted to avenge Merielle and all the victims.

  “Be sure to get word to me if you do it, sir,” Waldo kept on nonstop. “I mean…think of it. Even if the Phantom were to give you the slip, which ain’t likely to happen to a detective of your stature, sir, but if your trap ’twere foiled, but we still got a shot—e’en of his back as he’s running from you, why we’d have him!”

  “Dead to rights in the frame.”

  “Like Mr. Keane says, if it ain’t in the frame, it ain’t in the frame, and—”

  “—and if it ain’t in the frame, it doesn’t exist.”

  “Ironic…now Mr. Keane is in the frame…so to speak…”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “And it’s a put-up job, I warrant. When I heard that they’d put the arm on Mr. Keane, I asked what can the authorities be thinking?” He began a low, curdling laugh rumbling from the diaphragm and escaping nostrils and mouth all at once, a kind of vomiting laugh that Philo had complained about on occasion. Ransom did his best to overlook the torturous sound, but not until Waldo was half a block off, did he feel he could get it out of his head along with the idea of a trap.

  “I hope others agree with you about Keane, Waldo,” Alastair said to himself where he stood outside Muldoon’s. “All you bloody armchair detectives are alike—spoiling for a fight. If young Waldo were not careful, he would indeed attract the attention of the Phantom. An old saying came to mind: Be careful of what you wish.

  For now a talk with Muldoon was in order.

  When he walked into the dark little tavern, Muldoon was waiting for him, a baseball bat extended over his head. “I swear, Ransom, if you’ve come for trouble—”

  “Nothing could be further from my thoughts, Muldoon! What trouble?”

  Every rummy and street life in the place mentally braced for a confrontation. Hunched shoulders over the bar stiffened. Men began to move off into shadow, some who owed Ransom in either money or information, scurrying out the back. He had put word on the street that he wanted to know the identity of the infamous Phantom of the Fair, the expert garroter. To date, nothing had come of this effort, and this troubled him immensely, because if the people on the street like Dot’n’Carry could not locate an inchworm’s worth of news, then this meant the fellow was not local, not known among the homeless and derelict and deviant street rats.

  Such a state made the killer invisible.

  But for the moment, Moose Muldoon and the Chicago Bear faced off.

  Tension filled the space between Muldoon and Ransom, and everyone could taste the bad blood in the air.

  “Muldoon, you stupid cock-sucking motherless swine, do you know Jim Beckensaw? Your own alderman for this district?”

  “’Course I do!”

  “The man got the Sunday dry laws rescinded!”

  “Again? already again!”

  “He’s a political genius, but you yourself know that this is what, the twentieth goddamn time? Ya blockheaded excrement brain! They rescind Sunday laws on a yo-yo pork string, and if you bothered ever to read a paper, you’d’ve some passing knowledge to get by on!”

  “Look here, now! Are you here to drink or to fight?”

  “German Tavern and Brewery Owners Association laid out a fortune at the doorstep of City Hall, and this ward you are smack in the middle of lies within boundaries of the chosen triangle!”

  “Chosen triangle?”

  “The bloody city blocks that can serve alcoholic beverages on any given Sunday!”

  Muldoon looked stricken. “Nobody told me. I missed the last meet—” He almost finished his sentence before Ransom’s cane sent Muldoon flat. From behind the bar, lying on the boards, everyone could hear the moose’s moaning.

  The bear calmly righted his cane and stepped regally to the door and back out onto the streets where he’d grown up.

  He knew that Muldoon could appreciate the balance of it all, blow for blow.

  As day turned to night, Alastair decided he must do something—anything—to take action against the killer. To this end, he began planting seeds all over the city. Even before leaving Muldoon’s entirely, having stepped back into the black interior, he announced, “Take heed, all of you! This blasted Phantom’s a fairy is what he is! If he wishes to prove himself anything other than a pussy, then, by God, stand up to a man! No more boys, no girls, no women, but a man!”

  After a stunned moment of silence, a cheer went up for Ransom. Men wanted to buy him a drink, others slapped his back. He slammed the cane against the bar to silence the crowd even as Muldoon found his feet. “Buy me drinks and cheer me, lads, after I’ve cut off this bastard’s head and handed it to him!”

  Cheers went up.

  “Let’s see ’im take that pussy weapon of his to my neck!”

  More cheers followed, and more drinks were pushed at Ransom. Laughter and jokes ensued, most of the jokes leveled at his characterization of the Phantom as a fairy and a coward. But one man in the room watched Ransom’s massive neck from a dark corner and thought what a bloody easy ham it’d be to slice through and silence.

  “Come on, you baby killer! You little-girl killer. Try your hand with a man!” Ransom shouted over the noise, succumbing to a toast proposed by Carmichael. Ransom had selected Muldoon’s as the newsmen’s hangout he knew it to be. He imagined the screaming headlines across every late edition. He meant to repeat the performance again—in every tavern he could manage between here and the great fair. “I’ll be wandering the darkest, loneliest pathways of the lagoon at Lake Park, where you murdered those two children the other night. So come for me, you little dickless thing! Try to place your murderous guillotine on me!”

  So here he was in the lagoon fairgrounds where Trelaine had failed to save Miss Mandor or himself. Ransom strolled one end to the other, daring the bastard to leap out from any blackness to slip his bloody wire about Ransom’s beefy neck. They had surmised the killer a small man, if a man at all. Ransom was often taken with the fact that many hardened murderers and rapists, once nabbed, turned out to be slight of build and wretched little creatures indeed.

  He believed the Phantom would have difficulty just looping the garrote over his head and around his neck, much less slicing through his carotid artery, as h
e stood six-foot-four, and he had several layers of protective fat that the garroter would likely not figure on. To further complicate any attack on his person, as he paced here, was his cane, his blue steel revolver, and he’d borrowed a pair of specially made horse-hide gloves from a friend working the bovine slaughterhouse at the stockyards. These gloves would slow the cutting power of a garrote if he, like young Purvis, should get his hands between throat and wire. The gloves could slow the expected attack long enough to give him time to wrestle the killer to the ground—if only the bastard would strike!

  “Where the devil is the little hellion who obviously has a hard on for me, killing poor Mere in my place?”

  Ransom made the return walk from the end of the lagoon, around the water, passing strolling lovers, the occasional homeless who’d be tossed from the park as soon as the first patrolman crossed paths with ragmen, or bums as they were called. How long, he wondered, must he pace in the darkness in this pretense of leisure and calm here in the most poorly lit section of the lagoon, the Ferris wheel high over his shoulder.

  In his ears, he heard the faint last death rattle of Miss Mandor out on the water, her boat so near he could leap into it from where he stood. His cop’s imagination, his insight, intuition and instinct—all challenged by this so-called Phantom—brought the full picture of how the killer had enticed his victims to help out some “poor chap” in a second boat that was listing. Trelaine, in the throes of infatuation with Miss Mandor, perhaps thought he’d impress her with his show of humanity in the form of a dark figure who knew, somehow, enough about the couple to know that she could not scream out. He’d demonstrated on Trelaine what he intended for her. And it had all come to pass so quickly, and seeing Trelaine’s head fall forward and into the second boat, his body floating off and away, she most assuredly screamed her silent screams and fulfilled the killer’s sick need to see her eyes bulge with fear and her skin prickle, and her extremities fight for life along with her last gasping breath. He’d leapt agilely from the rocking boat he’d himself scuttled, and into the boat transporting her, even as she attempted to leap out over the side to make the shore where Ransom now stood looking out over the black lagoon.

  Silent now, the lagoon reflected back a sliver of moonlight and some nearby gaslight lamps, but this small show of light only made the surface look the more like black oil. Is this Miss Mandor’s last pleasant sight? Had she been mesmerized? Hesitated one second too late to make landfall? Had she got into the water, would she’ve stood a chance of escape? Alerting someone ashore.

  Sometimes his uncanny ability to recreate the scene of the crime frightened Alastair. Just good police work, he told himself, nothing special…not like the gift of a wonderful stage voice, an ability at acting, a gift of intelligence for science, or a talent for a musical instrument.

  He wished to be home playing badly at that piano he kept as a constant challenge to learn. As a child, he’d dreamed once of being a concert pianist. The memory now made him feel foolish. No, he was born to this…to the hunt.

  He’d had time to rethink the scene when Philo dropped that camera in utter sorrow over Miss Mandor’s unnatural death. He mentally paced to the images of that night, moving on to each murder scene, each impression swelling his mind with a growing hatred of two monsters—one the faceless Phantom, the other himself.

  “Where did Griffin get the notion to go after Philo’s studio? To uncover evidence there?” he asked himself aloud. “Griffin, you disappointment.”

  He recalled how Drimmer had so quickly taken up Philo’s Night Hawk, handing it to Denton to get the photo of the handprint on the overpass. Dr. Fenger had studied this print from the photo that Denton had taken, and it’d been compared to the one Philo had taken at the train station, and according to Christian, the prints had indeed come from the same man. But neither matched Philo’s hand. But what of Griffin’s hand?

  Again the evidence pointed to a man small in stature…a man hardly larger than Dr. Tewes. Griffin was hardly larger than Jane Francis.

  “I thought I’d find you here,” said Griffin Drimmer who seemed to’ve stepped from out of Ransom’s thought! “Word’s all over the city.”

  “Word?”

  “That you’ve challenged the Phantom to some sort of duel.”

  “Reckless, I know.”

  “Foolish…to roam about here alone, without me at your back?”

  “I assumed your back’s still up over my ranting and my ring.”

  Griff held a seething anger just below boiling. “You ought to’ve come to me first with this plan. We ought to’ve coordinated on it.”

  “By the book, is it, Griff?”

  “By the book, hell, by the notion we are a team!”

  “As when you put Philo behind bars?”

  “At the very least, he knows something.”

  “Were we a team on that solo act?”

  Over Alastair’s shoulder in the sky, the massive Ferris wheel sent colored lights flitting across Griffin’s features, which took on a separate life—as if another man altogether resided within. Possibly a man who felt a deep-seated hatred not only for his mentor, Alastair, and not only for authority and society and rules and regulations, but all the comforts and familiarity of normalcy. A kind of Beowulf in sheep’s clothing, loose on the world. Even his name, Griffin, spoke of a changeling.

  What if Griffin, stymied at every turn, felt that Ransom’s confusion represented some sort of prize? What if the killer felt weak, ineffectual, and in fact invisible in the company of other men, especially bulls like Ransom?

  While not invisible, suppose Griffin felt invisible? Suppose he had pent-up notions, mad goals, secret anger that’d gone unchecked for so long that it’d all suddenly burst in pure venom in a kill spree? Suppose he’d had a sudden loss of faith, of charity, of humanity, of relations…a loss of a loved one, a mainstay…someone who’d kept him stable and sane all this time? Hadn’t he lost his mother recently?

  What did he really know of Griff? He never spoke of his parents, only his wife and children on occasion, and Ransom had never seen them—not in the flesh. So much chicanery went on these days with photographs. Suppose…just suppose Griffin Drimmer had created the Phantom in order to make himself visible on two fronts? Visible as the new, young, virile detective who comes on to solve the case, and visible indeed as the Phantom, a killer on page one of the Tribune, the Times, the Herald? And suppose…just suppose it was all a way to strike out at Ransom for perceived wrongs?

  Ransom wondered how he could live with such a development, that a detective he’d treated as his gopher—snubbed one day, ignored the next, or spoken harshly to—had some larger vendetta to act on? Jekyll and Hyde was now showing at the Lyceum Theater. Could Stevenson’s character be alive in the form of Drimmer? Had the killer stood coldly at his side—in each frame—from the beginning? Watching his every move?

  The Phantom’s first two victims included a prostitute that Ransom had known and had a soft spot for, one too old to ply her trade much longer. He’d not known the Polish girl or Purvis, but the next victim was his Merielle. Suppose it was all working up to Merielle? Suppose it’d been Griffin who had blackened Merielle’s eye one day and cut her throat and fired her body the next?

  The next two victims—Mandor and Trelaine—implicated Philo, Alastair’s best friend, sending the photographer into a deep depression. It could all very well be about me, Ransom determined. All the killings designed to destroy me.

  And who stood in the best position to know what Ransom held dearest? Who but Griffin? All this rain of suspicion flash-flooded through Ransom’s consciousness in a matter of seconds.

  “It’s not wise, Rance, acting as bait for a madman, one who strikes sudden as a viper, no matter your size or strength or reputation!”

  “I appreciate your concern after all the bad blood between us, thanks to your kowtowing, taking Kohler’s lead.”

  “Like it or not, Ransom, I never worked for you. I work for Kohler. A
lways have, and if you’d bother to check, so do you.”

  “Yeah…right…” Ransom purposefully turned his back on his only suspect. Come ahead, you weasel; make your play…attack me from behind and we’ll see what happens. But Griffin made no move. Still, Alastair kept his back to him.

  He next laid his bone-handled cane on a park bench, bothered with his pipe, lighting it. Puffing away, his back still to Griffin. Teasing him, disregarding the rawhide gloves. Do it, you wimp! Do it now! Dare attack!

  Still no supposed attack.

  Ransom complained of a shoe button coming unlatched. He cursed the bother and sat down, and he exaggeratedly leaned over his shoes like a Falstaff, complaining of being unable to reach his shoes. This tease must have Griffin’s killing urge, this cure to his invisibility, salivating. The attack will come now!

  Instead, Griffin started talking about his Lucinda while pointing down the lane. “Asked her to marry me under that box elder there.”

  “What the hell’re you talking about?”

  “My wife, Lucinda.” He launched on a reverie of how feminine and lovely she was. He produced a photo. “An anniversary shot below that same tree. Ran into Denton with that camera.”

  Alastair saw some elements of the fair in the backdrop. “Denton’s taking photos at the fair?”

  “Why not so long’s he has possession of—”

  “Keane’s Night Hawk, while Keane is in lockup…”

  “What’s going through your mind now?”

  “A payment for services.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Griffin, tell me, who first led you to believe that Philo could be our killer?”

  “No one led me—”

  “You needn’t answer!” Alastair grabbed his cane, began running and shouting. “We’ve got to find a phone box and a cab now!”

  Griffin gave chase. He’d never seen Alastair move so fast; he hadn’t thought him capable of it. He hadn’t thought it possible that any man with a cane and a limp could out-distance him, but Ransom was doing just that.