City for Ransom

by Robert W. Walker

  “Where the bloody hell is a phone box? Griffin, we must find a phone box and now!” Alastair was beside himself with agitation, looking the lunatic as the first drops of rain began to fall.

  “To call headquarters? Reinforcements? There’s a phone a block off the fairway!” Griffin’s words stopped Alastair from rushing farther in the wrong direction. “This way, Rance!”

  Mayor Carter Harrison in 1880 appointed William McGarigle as superintendent of police, and McGarigle started the patrol telephone and signal system in Chicago—the most important police innovation of its day. The system—375 hexagonal pine boxes—supported lampposts in each police district. Inside one of these locker-sized wood booths, an alarm box dial awaited Alastair, who opened it with his departmental key. He knew that he could not call directly to Jane Francis to warn her, and he did not have direct access to a Bell operator. Nor could he reach Christian Fenger or any individual. The system frustrated such desires, as all he could dial was the local station. This meant, he could not even ring up the station closest to Jane and Gabby, as he believed the two of them in serious danger. However, if he got the right dispatcher, he could conceivably relay the message from station to station.

  How long might that take? He could be losing valuable time without result.

  He feared risking it, and he feared not risking it.

  “What to do,” he said aloud.

  “How should I know?” replied Griffin. “As usual, I’ve not the slightest clue what you’re doing or thinking!”

  Ransom hit a single number on the phone that signaled murder to a dispatcher. “I’ve got to get this message to the home of Dr. James Phineas Tewes, immediately!”

  Ransom listened intently to the dispatcher. “Please identify yourself, Officer, by name and badge number, and verify the nature of your emergency.”

  He lost the connection due to his not having ground the monkey organ mechanism required to keep the connection. He shouted at the dead receiver, pounding it several times into the box. He hated it that he must keep monkey-grinding the damn newly invented thing like he must his gramophone. Why couldn’t they make one that worked without all the effort?

  And then he erupted when he got the dispatcher back. “What difference does it make who is making the request? Only an officer of the law can call on this bloody phone, so just do what the bloody hell I’m asking!”

  Whoever it might be at dispatch, this time switched Alastair off, leaving only a sickening silence on the line.

  “Idiot! He didn’t even ask what the message was!”

  “Try again! But use a bit of civility.” Griffin had not as yet seen the interior of a phone box, and so he jammed in at the entryway, examining every corner. He wanted to see the technology in action.

  “If it takes civility, then damn it, you make the call! I am off for a cab!”

  “But what do I say?”

  “Tell them to tell Dr. Tewes to get himself and his daughter out of that house and to a public place, preferably to Dr. Christian Fenger’s!”

  “But why?” he shouted as Ransom and his cane rushed off.

  Griffin monkey-grinded the phone and looked at the series of buttons, each coded number standing for a category of offense: accident, drunkards, violation of city ordinance, fire, theft, forgery, riot, rape, and murder in that order. But he did not know which to press. Hesitating for a moment, he reasoned since they were chasing the Phantom that murder was on the bill. He hit the appropriate dial number. This supposedly instantly summoned between five and twenty uniformed officers to his location, depending on the nature of the emergency.

  But when the dispatcher came on, the gruff man, still angry with Ransom’s swagger, shouted, “Stop muckity-mucking with the call line!”

  This did not make sense to Griffin, who’d read statistics on the call boxes. It usually sent out a five-man team of officers in a patrol wagon that carried a stretcher, cuffs, blankets, and their obligatory clubs. Each box cost the city twenty-five dollars! And over the past two years alone some 879, 548 distress calls to the various stations had been made. But this fellow at the other end must be reported as derelict or drunk on duty, as again he hung up!

  Griffin raced from the box, forgetting to close it, as a storm began to break around him, lightning streaking the black backdrop of sky against the Ferris wheel and the massive buildings of the fair, all the White City bathed in sudden downpour. Griffin knew if he were to make the same coach before Ransom completely disappeared, he’d have to hustle as never before.

  Ahead of him, Griff saw the cabstand, some of the horses reacting to the sudden thunder and lightning, raising hooves skyward and in need of gentling. He saw Ransom had stumbled and was now slowed, limping, with the cane working harder for him than ever.

  Griffin sprinted now, confident he could catch Ransom. But Alastair was not going to like the news of his failure to get a message to Dr. Tewes.

  “Do you think Tewes’s life is in danger? Both he and his daughter? Or have you concluded that the phrenologist is the Phantom and may harm the child?”

  “You could not be further from the truth, Griff.”

  “Then who are we chasing amid the storm?”

  But Ransom did not answer, instead shouting to the first cab he came to, “To Tewes’s—the dispensary and residence of Dr. James Phineas Tewes, now!”

  “Address, sir?” asked the cabbie, the same thick-browed Cro-Magnon that Ransom had noticed on an earlier occasion.

  “Three-forty Belmont, two doors north of the Episcopal church, and you are paid twice your rate, sir, if you lose a wheel getting me there!”

  Something in Ransom feared for Jane Francis and her Gabby. Something deep within whispered a horror, and Alastair imagined a scene of carnage awaiting him at what most in the city knew as the Tewes’s residence. He imagined the worst, and at the same time as the carriage pulled away and Griffin slipped through the open door, he recalled how Waldo Denton had seen to it that Alastair would be chasing phantoms of the wrong kind while Waldo, apprentice photographer, sometime cabbie, sometime fair photographer, garroted Gabrielle and Jane Francis in their home!

  The cab driver used his whip, and the hansom wheeled around street corners and clattered insanely over the cobblestones, the sound of the two whinnying horses mimicking the pitiable sounds that Gabby and Jane may be releasing at this same moment. To add to the thunderous assault of hooves beating wildly against stone and the bullwhip cracking, a series of thunderclaps struck as if crashing symbols to this macabre dance they found themselves in.

  “What the deuce is going on, Ransom? It’s time you treated me as your equal! I demand to know what the—”

  The coach lurched, sending Griffin into a corner, pinning him, while Ransom extended his cane at the crucial moment, using it like a wedge against his own tumbling.

  “Slow down! You’ll get us all killed!” Griffin grabbed Ransom’s cane and rammed it against the box overhead and shouted at the driver successively. “Slow up!”

  The slot through which the driver communicated shot open and again Ransom saw only the man’s eyes, filled with blood rage and ecstatic joy. Loving this, his coachman’s fantasy come true: an order to open her full-throttle, and taking two Chicago gents on a ride to terrify and delight. “Beggin’ your pardon, sirs, but did ya’ not ask that I run the horses?”

  “Run them! Run them!” shouted Ransom.

  “Whoaaa!” shouted Griffin.

  “Hold onto the handrail overhead, Griff!” Ransom said, reclaiming his cane.

  “Just tell me what is all the hurry?”

  “It’s Jane…ahhh, Dr. Tewes’s sister, and the daughter, Gabby! I fear they may be in terrible danger.”

  “How can you know?”

  “Denton.”

  “Denton? Waldo? What about him?”

  “Damn it, man, he is our bloody Phantom!”

  “That harmless fellow? He’s hardly more than a boy!”

  “A warped one, I wager. Look here, h
e is the one set me thinking of lolling about the damnable lagoon for the Phantom, and that just after dropping Jane…ahhh, at the Tewes residence.”

  “Since when do you listen to civilians on matters of investigation, and one so young?”

  “He set my mind on it and did it rather subtly. Cunning fellow as it happens.”

  “I would not have put Denton and the word cunning in the same sentence, Alastair.”

  “Behind those boyish eyes and goofy grin—designed to make him harmless seeming—there lurks a deadly mind, I tell you.”

  “It just seems so out of the blue, sooo farfetched.”

  “Precisely as he wants you to believe. But more than cunning and deception is at work here, something even more insidious and poisonous. I mean—”

  “What do you mean?” Griff’s brow creased in consternation. He pulled forth a pipe identical to Ransom’s and lit up.

  “Suppose he’s a bugger who’s never once gotten a bloody thing he’s ever wanted.”

  “You mean like not the mother nor father, not the sister nor brother he wanted?”

  “Not the circumstances, not the woman of his dreams, for instance.”

  “Nor the money, nor the education he’s chased all his life? Not the profession nor career.”

  “Not the erection, not the joy, not the release, nor the satisfactions we take for granted as with your life with Lucinda.”

  “And you think this accumulation of failures leads to deviance and murder?”

  Ransom gritted his teeth and held back the immediate word he had for Griffin’s thick-headedness. “Put yourself in his shoes. Scrubbing up and about for the likes of Philo, having to push a hack about the city, cleaning up after his horse, seeing every fare he picks up with a woman on the arm. How many times he drove Merielle and me from corner to corner, God only knows!”

  “It’s still a stretch. Denton’s hardly more than a boy.”

  “We’ve suspected small all along; a weak person, womanish if not a woman.”

  “But Denton…Waldo is…” Griffin seemed unable to wrap his mind around this idea. He’s so…so innocuous, so slight and so…so…”

  For half a moment’s flash, Ransom wished for a time when he could be so naïve and trusting as Griffin Drimmer, a time before he’d become so bloody suspicious of everything on two legs. Finally, he placed a hand on Griff’s and calmly said, “Invisible…is what he is, Griff…simply invisible, and even more so in that black get-up worn for the hansom cab company, black boot, cape, top hat, down to the Carson, Pirie, Scott buttons.”

  Drimmer considered this. “A gentleman’s attire in any venue.”

  “And him sneaking looks, eavesdropping, studying each fare in his hack up close, through there.” He pointed out the coach hatch.

  “Creepy when you think of it.”

  “And him sitting up on his high seat, looking all about the streets from behind that nag of his?”

  The cab thundered down the street, tossing them from side to side. Griffin shouted over the thunderous noise, “No one’s going to believe Denton physically capable of killing two people out on that lagoon, unless we catch him in the act, with the tools of death!”

  “Press has made of him some sort of Grendel-sized ogre, haven’t they?”

  “Perhaps the press has overstated the—”

  “Overstated? Even Carmichael’s taken with the gall and élan of this bastard.”

  “No one’s expecting a Waldo Denton!”

  “As for walking on water at the lagoon, you and I know how it was done!”

  “But people will equate it with the supernatural, that Satan can walk on water as well as Christ.”

  “Don’t attribute satanic powers to him yourself then, Griff.”

  “But then, they say the Devil doth take a pleasing form.”

  “This particular devil has chosen an invisible form.”

  “He is that.”

  “Don’t hold back. Tell me what you think.”

  “Gut feelings, first impression?” asked Griff. “I thought him harmless, but I soon learned he had no allegiance to Keane.”

  “Are you saying he’s a back-stabbing cock-sucker?”

  “OK…”

  “And why so?”

  “At each scene, he laid a seed of doubt about his employer—quietly, mind you.”

  “Yes, this is his way, and being a small man…one you are so much more likely to let your guard down around…”

  “Yes, many a deadly viper is—”

  “Indeed! A small man with a garrote, a man about your own size, Grif—”

  “Can do a helluva lotta damage in a matter of seconds.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Hey…hold on. You thought…back there at the lagoon…when I came up on you, and you started fooling with your shoe buttons and bending over…do you mean to tell me that—”

  “I had a loose lace is all.”

  “You thought me the Phantom, didn’t you? Damn you!”

  Alastair hesitated, mired in silence, unsure what to say.

  “Out with it, big man! The truth!” Griff laughed and muttered, “Wait till O’Malley and some of the lads hear this.”

  Alastair realized that rather than taking it badly, somehow Griffin found a strange mix of humor and pride in it, somehow still impressed by the notoriety given the Phantom by the newsies. “Imagine…thinking me the Phantom of the Fair.”

  “Will you quit bloody calling him that, please? He deserves no title, no crown, no ink in the damned press; he deserves no ‘sir’ or ‘gentleman’ before his name. He deserves none of our respect or misguided ballads written about him, and he certainly merits no admiration.”

  “Waldo Denton…my God, Alastair, how did you figure it out?”

  “The ring.”

  “The one in your bowels?”

  “This ring!” he produced his pinky with the ring upon it. “How do you suppose it went from Merielle’s hand to Philo’s pocket and the killer counting on it’s still being there?”

  “Philo admitted to taking it in trade.”

  “How better to implicate his mentor than to lead you and Kohler to Philo’s coat pocket or the frock in which you found the ring?”

  Griff gave this a moment to sink in as if revisiting the moment. “’Twas Denton who first identified the disembodied ring as having belonged to—”

  “Precisely, yes…led you to suspect wrongdoing at the studio. Was he also helpful in uncovering Philo’s collection of nudes?” asked Ransom as the cab walls and wheels whined and strained under the whip, the speed, and the angles.

  “Yes, and now, tonight,” began Griff, “he leads you off on a wild goose chase to stand bait at the park.”

  “To rid himself of my being on hand tonight at Gabby’s birthday celebration. I just know he heard Jane—Tewes and I—speaking of it.”

  “He’s cunning enough to know it’d take an elephant gun or Moose Muldoon to bring you down.”

  “Well…Muldoon’s been set straight.”

  For a moment, they thought the carriage would go over on its side.

  “Do you think he’d really dare strike the ladies in their home with Tewes present?”

  “He’s likely planning to kill them in their beds.”

  “Why do you think so?”

  “Sensationalism, to strike a deeper fear in us.”

  “To say we’re unsafe when snug in our own beds?”

  “And he’s reaching higher along the scale of respectability, money, and social standing.”

  “He really is a hatter, isn’t he?”

  “A mad hatter.”

  “But why? Just because he can?”

  “He alone holds the answer to that.”

  “Faster!” Griff now shouted even as he tumbled about the cab, banging into every wall and door.

  “Get what you can from the whip!” shouted Ransom.

  The wheels spun madly beneath them, screaming, and on sharp turns now left the ground.


  Stumpf did it…he did it all. All the killing, that is.

  Waldo didn’t even feel he was inside his body when Stumpf, at that moment of taking life—willed the essence of the dying into him. It was why Stumpf liked mirrors, liked killing them before mirrors.

  He’d done it both ways of course, but the thrill and satisfaction became so much more heightened if he could stare into both their eyes and those of Stumpf at the moment of knowing. The moment of crossing over. From behind the garrote, before a mirror, he could watch all the eyes!

  Stumpf could more readily act at the instant of death to net and catch the soul within his web of wanton lust if he knew the very instant of the soul’s leap toward the next dimension. Wanton lust—part and parcel of it—as Stumpf so enjoyed what Waldo Denton’s body felt at the death leap. Stumpf got Waldo an erection—that true insignia, emblem of corporeal lust.

  “All of life becomes more pronounced and clear and worth the discovery if a man is in his right spirit,” Waldo Denton was telling Jane Francis Ayers and Gabby—as he’d come to know their names. He’d first been attracted to them and their home that night he’d killed Purvis at the train station. The same night he’d seen Gabby and Cliffton kissing below the lights near the lagoon. He’d been kicking around the fair, wandering, exploring, one side of him determining good locations for murder as he scouted for Stumpf, while another side looked and hungered for precisely what that college boy had—a future, yes, but also a future with a beautiful young thing. A promise at a fulfilling life of happiness, warmth, camaraderie, mutual respect, admiration…mutual pleasure. All things denied him.

  How was it Shakespeare put it in the performance he’d seen at the theater? “If I cannot prove a hero, I shall prove a villain….” Words to take heart in. Words that indicated to Waldo that he might be considered important by everyone he came into contact with, that he could affect their lives. But even more, the play was the thing that informed Waldo that deviant thoughts belonged to others as well—even to the most famous author on the planet, William Shakespeare. Giving hope that he perhaps was not so absolutely alone and craven as he’d felt since childhood.

  Stumpf and Waldo had wormed past the Tewes threshold to allow Stumpf his chance. That was what Waldo had become—a pimp to the base Stumpf inside, who didn’t even want to spare Gabrielle, the most beautiful and innocent and pleasant and most kind person ever to address Waldo. She, and the idea of a future relationship with Gabby, remained the only thought in his head that held Stumpf back now.