Shadows in the White City

by Robert W. Walker

  After this ugly business, Ransom must, by every means at his disposal, turn up Leather Apron, the culprit behind the Vanishings—whether one man or many as Bloody Mary had indicated.

  Alastair began searching his city, going to every location he thought plausible and mining every street snitch he knew in search of any news regarding Bosch and/or the lunatic the press called Leather Apron. As he did so, he garnered information that told him Bosch was already in hiding, that he somehow knew of the man who’d taken his place as the supposed guilty Leather Apron. It made Alastair wonder if Bosch himself had not set up the anonymous fellow now fed to Senator Harold Chapman’s voracious hogs, sows, and piglets.

  As luck would have it, Alastair turned up Samuel instead of Bosch, and they found a small, isolated area in a neighborhood park and talked. The boy was shaking the entire time, terrified. He had seen something.

  “What is it, Sam?” asked Alastair. “You must tell me if it can save one life, you must.”

  “S-s-sir, yes…it’s to do with Leather Apron. I’ve done like you said, kept my eyes and ears open.”

  “And you’ve seen something?”

  “Heard something.”

  “What is it you heard?”

  “Heard a homeless child tell another one where they could be fed.”

  “I don’t follow you, son.”

  “No homeless who has been on the street invites another homeless for food. Homeless find food, they ain’t sharing it with no one but their family.”

  “What about friends? They may’ve been friends.”

  “That’s just it. She didn’t know the other one.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “She introduced herself. Said her name was Alice…Alice Cadin, but it was really Audra pretendin’, you see.”

  “That’s impossible, Sam. Alice Cadin is the name of one of the dead girls.”

  “It’s what Audra said, and Audra gave the other girl a piece of bread like…like a lure.”

  “Audra? The same as in Robin’s band?” Alastair recalled that it’d been Audra who wanted to sacrifice young Sam to the Leather Aprons, the little manipulator.

  “I followed ’em as far as I could, and it ended with screams, but I dared go no farther. Didn’t see nothing, but I heard.”

  “Can you take me to this place?”

  “You got your blue gun?”

  “Always.”

  “All right. Then let’s go.”

  “Brave lad. Lead on.”

  Samuel guided Alastair through several back alleyways, some so narrow his shoulders touched the clapboard houses on each side of him. They followed a winding, wending path below the raised platform of the electric train until finally it was clear that Sam was leading him toward the river where black, silent warehouses sat idle this time of night.

  Sam stopped abruptly, saying, “This is as far as I went the other night.”

  “Why didn’t you find me then? Why did you keep this to yourself?”

  “I was afraid for one. Second, I tried but I couldn’t find you. Third, I couldn’t tell no one else.”

  “You’re sure now it was the same Audra?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wait here, Sam, and I’ll go ahead…investigate, see if there’s anything in the way of evidence.”

  Ransom inched forward in the deep shadow of the warehouse district. The smell of dead fish heads, the creeping skittering sound of wharf rats, and the glowing eyes of the occasional slinking cat added to the mix of whirring wind and tinkling ropes against mastheads. The river by day was alive with boat and ship traffic of all manner, delivering cargo of every sort to an insatiable, gluttonous city, but by night, the river and the wharf seemed a haunted world with ships whispering to one another, their rigging determining the strength of each voice. It was enough to make even a large man with both a gun and experience on his side quake deep within to think that Leather Apron could be awaiting him at every recessed doorway, every crevice and cranny that made up this black center of commerce.

  The deeper he moved into the shadows of this place, the more he worried over Sam’s safety behind him. The farther from the boy he got, the more he feared Sam’s sudden disappearance, not of his own accord but as Leather Apron’s next victim. If Leather Apron somehow knew of Danielle, then why not Samuel?

  Given this fear for Sam, Ransom felt an overwhelming urge to shout a challenge to the killer. Show yourself and stand and face a man, and fight face-to-face, and to the death like a man. But given this fiend’s usual target—size, age, innocence—it was highly unlikely he’d stand and show himself.

  Ransom wanted his hands on this fiend, and he wanted it tonight, now; Sam would have to fend for himself just as he had been doing long before Alastair had met him that day outside the grocery.

  Alastair sniffed the air around a locked warehouse door and came away with an odor dissimilar to any he’d already swallowed here on the wharf, a smell branded in his mind since Senator Chapman’s stables—blood, human blood.

  Inspector Alastair Ransom stepped slowly back and read the warehouse sign almost invisible in the purple darkness here. An overcast sky, no stars, no moon conspired to hide the letters. When he made them out, they read Overton & Hampstead Bookbindery and Storage. The sign had fallen in disrepair, the lettering long since peeled away. It was one of a number of empty hulking, dead businesses that had come and gone, leaving its carcass—like some bone-picked pachyderm. This place proved large and sprawling along the city wharf.

  While locked against entry by the unhappy owners, there must be several entry points. If homeless people could find a way in, so could Alastair. He motioned for Samuel somewhere in the gloom of a thick fog that’d swept in to engulf wharf and river. Somehow Sam saw his signal and joined him at the book warehouse. “Is this where the screams were coming from?”

  “I—I—I think so, yes.”

  “OK, look, I suggest you get going.” He paid the boy handsomely.

  “Get going, sir?”

  “Yeah, go back the same way we came and get outta here.”

  “I like police work, sir. I think I may be suited to it.”

  “That’s well and good, but for now you’re to go to a safe place.”

  “What’s a safe place?”

  Ransom gritted his teeth at the bit of wisdom. “Go to the shelter called Hull House, and tell no one about this.”

  “What’re you going to do?” Sam asked.

  “I’m going to find a way inside.”

  Sam breathed deeply and said, “I don’t wanna seem no chicken around you, Inspector, and going off, leaving you alone is—”

  “Is the wisest move at this point, so go!” He shooed Sam off this final time, and the boy disappeared into the gloom of night.

  Alone, Ransom began searching for loose boards, broken windows, back doors, torn siding—anything that a killer might use to gain entry into the depths of the warehouse. With Sam gone, he could concentrate on burglarizing the place.

  Ransom located a window at street level back of the warehouse, a window that had been broken. He instantly realized that whoever came and went at this portal must be slight of build, and he also knew he’d never fit, not without some renovation to the window. He’d brought a flint lighter of the sort used for lighting cigars and pipes, one he’d purchased at Sears Roebuck downtown, but he hesitated using it for light until certain he was alone and no one was inside.

  So he felt about the windowsill with his bare hands in the pitch dark. The sill itself was old and worn and loose from years of rainwater and weather. Ransom grabbed hold of the loose frame in each hand. He then tore away the entire framework until nothing but stone and cement remained, along with a gaping hole large enough to accommodate Ransom’s size. If anyone were inside and if Ransom had hoped to have surprise on his side, he could forget about it now.

  Alastair eased himself down into the basement of the warehouse, this side of the building facing a paved road over which wagons trave
rsed, and where men loaded and unloaded goods. His eyes came to street level as he dropped into the pit. It felt good to plant his feet firmly on the ground below, as it made him less susceptible to attack.

  Ransom now used his flint lighter, and it was immediately refracted by the damp stone walls that seemed to bleed in the weak illumination. Ransom moved along, and as he did so, the light moved with him. Darkness filled the spaces behind Alastair just as light filled the spaces ahead. He was painfully aware that his own features and body stood outlined by the light like a man standing before a campfire. All that lay beyond him was a potential fright, a potential attack.

  However, with the stillness so complete as it felt both outside him and deep within, Alastair guessed himself alone here…alone save for the source of the blood odor. He turned a corner and filled it with his light and all at once got the full shock of what he’d so fatefully come to find.

  Rats.

  A horde of them.

  Feeding on something dead.

  The industrious little beasts having created a kind of vertical bridge of one another’s bodies so as to climb several feet up to their prize, the discarded remains of yet another child that had been carved on like a Thanksgiving turkey.

  Ransom’s boot sent rats flying, and he stomped and shouted and sent the rats skittering in every direction, leaving what appeared to be a bloody ham hock dangling from an overhead pipe. Little wonder he’d seen so many river rats gnawing and clawing their way in from the other side of the building.

  “Nobody here but the dead,” Ransom announced to himself just to hear the sound of his own voice, and just to break the spell of horror.

  Alastair didn’t know what to do; if he left to call for help, he must leave the body to the rats again, and he was not prepared to do that. He instead took off his coat and wrapped it about the body, and working with shaking hands, he unhooked the small body from a stevedore’s tenterhook. He next wrapped his arms around what was left of the carcass. He refused to leave it alone again.

  He went out through the front doors, unlatching them and kicking them open. He made his way out into the night air and for the first time since he could recall, he allowed himself a deep breath of oxygen. He made his way out toward the gaslit street, shouted down a cab. He then laid the precious cargo onto the cushion over the coachman’s protests, and climbed in. “Cook County Morgue!” he shouted to the driver. “Now.”

  “With haste, yes sir!” the man replied.

  “No…no rush. She’s long dead.”

  “My God! It’s the work of Leather Apron, isn’t it, sir?”

  “Aye…aye, it is that.”

  “Then he’s still afoot, despite what the papers’ve said about it being that madwoman, Bloody Mary?”

  “Afraid so.”

  The driver climbed back onto his seat and Ransom rode with the body, quietly speaking to the unknown victim. “This is probably the only time you’ve ever ridden in a hansom cab, and it’s your hearse.”

  Ransom banged his cane on the top of the hansom cab, shouting for the driver to stop. He alighted from the cab at a police phone booth and made a call into the regional district headquarters, pressing the key designating murder. After a brief explanation, he was assured of twenty-four police officers in uniform, a paddy wagon, and all the equipment he might need to collect evidence on the scene.

  “I’m to await the wagon here,” he told the cabbie.

  “But what am I to do with what’s in me cab?” asked the driver.

  “Continue on to Cook County and deliver it to Dr. Christian Fenger or his stand-in.”

  “Are you sure they won’t take me for the killer? I hear rumors you killed a hackman once you believed to be a killer.”

  “That hackman was killed because he failed to follow orders!”

  “Yes, sir…yes, indeed.”

  With that the cabman and the decaying body continued on for the morgue.

  Out of the silent darkness and fog, a noisy police wagon arrived at the call booth. Ransom clambered aboard with his cane. Soon after, the police had cordoned off the book warehouse, Ransom giving them jobs to do—most canvassing the wharf as Chicago awoke and workers began filtering into the area and boats and wagons and people began their duties—Chicago stretching and awakening to dawn.

  Difficult as it was, after hot coffee, Ransom returned to where he’d discovered the body. He asked the uniformed men remaining to fan out and search for anything whatsoever that looked out of order or out of place. The search for clues was on as light from outside began filtering through the dingy book repository. The row upon row of books collecting dust here gave silent testimony to the popularly held belief that the Threepenny Opera, the Lyceum stage, and sports events had made the bound book dead as diversions go.

  Behan and Logan showed up, getting word of the discovery, and they were followed by Philo Keane who had come to take photographs. Soon after, Chief Kohler arrived to “take charge” and to “oversee” the investigation.

  “Where is the body I’m to photograph?” asked Philo.

  “You’ll find her at the morgue.”

  “Sent off?”

  “I sent her to the morgue, yes. You can photograph her there.”

  “Sure…sure, Alastair.”

  “You have any idea how long ago…that is when this butchery happened, Inspector?” asked Chief Kohler.

  “About the same time as you and Chapman murdered that homeless fellow along with Bloody Mary is my guess.”

  “Hold your voice down!”

  “My source heard her screams only last night. Sometime after that, the rats got to her, and I refused to allow them a single ’nother nibble. They’d got to the bone as it was. So I sent her off to Christian’s care.”

  “So the work of Leather Apron continues,” said Thom Carmichael, standing now behind them. “I’d like to hear your take on all this, Alastair, and about the mysterious disappearance of Bloody Mary and Dot ’n’ Carry—Bosch.”

  Alastair took the reporter aside. “In time, Thom…in time.”

  A uniformed copper cried out from the second floor of the warehouse, “Up here! Up here!”

  Everyone rushed the stairs and made their way to where the officer stood staring down at an obvious “living and sleeping area” for a number of homeless. Amid the usual debris of bedding and filth, there lay a horrid knife with a protective hilt and a curved blade like a pirate’s dagger. Scattered pieces of flesh—small but noticeable—were also found about the dirty bedding, a ratty tick mattress, bits and pieces of a destroyed teddy bear, a top, marbles, ball ’n’ jacks, a yo-yo, and a broken wooden doll, alongside scattered cigar and cigarette butts, ripped out pages of the Herald and the Tribune—stories about Leather Apron. A large part of the horrid odor proved to be filthy cans used for toilets.

  “My God,” cried out Ken Behan from a dark corner, his lantern light revealing a discarded leather apron, beside a small human skull denuded of all but a few stringy swatches of flesh.

  “More than one person was using this area,” said Ransom, his cane picking about the debris, “and that’s not fish pieces we’re looking at but cannibalized human flesh. This is the lair of the beast…or rather beasts.”

  “Then Leather Apron ought rather be called Leather Aprons?” asked Carmichael who’d stopped in his note-taking long enough to gasp.

  “Philo, get this covered,” said Ransom. “Take shots from—”

  “Every angle, I know…I know if I can take the stench. Thanks for your concern.” Keane lifted his camera and began firing off shots with his Night Hawk, a camera built for just such work.

  Ransom gave a quick thought to how photography preserved the crime scene forever, or until the photos were destroyed or doctored. “Get us some paper bags, you fellows, and gather all this into the bags, and…” he took a moment to keep from getting ill. “A-and get those bags to Dr. Fenger at the morgue. If anyone can do anything with this mess, it’ll be the coroner.”

  �
�You mean we gotta handle this shit?” asked one cop, pointing to the buckets.

  “I’m speaking of the leftovers—the meat!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Use gloves but get it done.”

  Ransom had no clue whatsoever whether Fenger could or could not learn anything from the meager human remains and bone, but he knew the teeth in a single skull would reveal approximate age as a child’s teeth spoke volumes. It was one of the few truisms in nature.

  Another shout, another discovery. Ransom followed the crowd and had to fight his way past others to see what the hullabaloo was over. When others parted for him, he saw that they had cornered an aged old rat, too slow-moving to get off in time. The sight brought back what Alastair had witnessed in the darkness below hours earlier. “Why is he hanging about this location, alone?” Ransom wondered aloud.

  Logan pulled out his .38 and fired, killing the rat. The explosion of the gunshot in the empty warehouse resounded over the entire wharf just as the owners of the place arrived. Stopping Overton and Hamptead at the door, uniformed officers asked their business. The gunshot had caused every cop to drop and pull his weapon. Meanwhile, Alastair poked about where the rat had chosen to hover, and in a moment, he found a small chest amid the boxes.

  He opened the small cedar chest and peered inside, others over his shoulder doing likewise. Doilies, knitted items, caps, mostly small, mostly children’s items. As Alastair picked through the chest, Kohler said, “My God, the cretin has kept items from his victims, kept them as…as souvenirs of the murders.”

  The others gasped at this conclusion.

  “It’s worse than that, I fear,” said Alastair, now lifting out baby booties, infant hats, and infant clothing. A set of old tintypes, old tins—pictures created from a process predating photography.

  Philo, always the interested artist and historian of photography, automatically grabbed for the tins, as he wanted simply to handle the old metal depictions and to closely examine the features as well as the quality of the work. As an artist, he found the tintypes of boundless interest. But Ransom withheld one of the tins and held it up to the weak light, a depiction of a comely if hefty young woman with features burned into Alastair’s brain. “It’s her…it’s her when she was Grace.”