City of the Absent

by Robert W. Walker

  He pushed a rolled stack of bills into Ransom’s hand. Alastair did not decline or balk, realizing he must go along to ingratiate himself with the good doctor, who now expected him to disappear.

  “I’d like to see your morgue, sir. Where you keep the cadavers.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s like any other morgue.”

  “You’ve taken to refrigeration compartments? How adequate is your space? Are you being careful that disease cannot be spread here? What precautions are you taking to safeguard the health of your students, not to mention staff and yourself, Doctor?”

  “You really are an inspector, aren’t you, sir?”

  “That I am.”

  He went for deeper pockets, bringing out his wallet.

  “No, no more money…not now,” said Ransom. “Part of my report has to be on your facilities. It’s necessary that I see everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “The kitchen sink, everything, yes.”

  “You realize we’ve not been in business long.”

  “I’m not interested in shutting you down, Doc. I shut you down, I get no more scratch, right?”

  “Of course, of course.”

  “Besides, I am not an unreasonable, unfeeling chap. I know I’ve got to give a thought to your lads.”

  “Lads?”

  “Your students, that is. All things considered, what I’ve seen so far has impressed me.”

  “Really?”

  “As have you, sir.”

  “I see.”

  “Now how’s about a look at the morgue, and where do you keep the spare parts, you know, organs and such?”

  “Ahhh…this way.”

  The doctor led him into the bowels of the labyrinthine brownstone that’d been converted into Oaklawn-Holyhoke Hospital and the Insbruckton Institute for the Advancement of Surgical Medicine on Holyhoke Street. Ransom could smell the decay long before they arrived at the morgue.

  “You really ought to keep it cooler down here,” he calmly remarked while his mind screamed. Finally, he added, “A bit rancid, wouldn’t you say, Doc?”

  “We’ve had some problems with the refrigeration unit, but that’s been repaired. How…how often do you intend on inspecting, Inspector?”

  “Once, maybe twice a month. My family hasn’t had a vacation in some time,” lied Ransom.

  “I see.” Ransom thought he heard the man gulp.

  Inside the morgue, Ransom looked at each face on each cadaver. All of them had been surgically worked over far too many times. Not one face was recognizable as a result; in fact, each looked as if made of caked mud, straw, and leather. No eyes remained in the blackened pruney-looking faces that’d fallen in on themselves like spoilt fruit. Only empty eye sockets filled with the void of death looked back at Ransom. These corpses had not an inch of suppleness remaining of the skin and frame. If it were not for the skeletal centers, they would not be intact at all. Each felt to the touch like long dried tobacco leaves and as brittle as ancient parchment. Limbs were set in all manner of impossible poses, as time after time each cadaver had been used up by successive waves of surgical students.

  “Have you not one or two fresh corpses to work with?”

  “No one wants to donate his corpse to science. Getting raw material is our most difficult task.”

  “The slaughterhouse doesn’t lack for raw materials.”

  “It’s not the same, dissecting a sheep or a goat,” Insbruckton complained. “That’s child’s play.”

  “Hmmm…yeah, seem to remember cutting up a chicken myself once to see what made it tick—when I was a kid, that is.”

  “From what I hear of your reputation, sir, you’ve carved up a few men in your day, too.”

  “Gossip, idle talk,” but he said it in such a tone that the doctor had to believe it or else. Ransom then erupted with, “Look, you must be in need here of fresher meat.” He put it on the table. “How much would you pay for say one or two bodies no one’ll miss?”

  “Can you do that? Do you have access?”

  “We load bodies to Cook County every day and night,” Ransom replied. “I see no reason they should get all the rejects.”

  “I’d pay top dollar to get my hands on some…some fresh ahhh…meat,” the doctor confessed.

  “But I’m not going into competition with anyone. If you’ve got a procurer already, I’m out.”

  “But I don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Have a procurer.”

  “No? Really? Tell me no lies, man. I want to help you, but I have to know the entire extent of your current operation.”

  “Operation?”

  “Business. Do you do business say with Shanks and Gwinn from time to time?”

  “Only in the past. They’re out of the business.”

  “Then who is it you are currently working with? Who brought you these specimens?” Ransom pointed to the three desiccated bodies on the slabs here.

  “Why, these were purchased at auction, bought at fair price from the pool of John and Jane Does that go unclaimed.”

  “All those go direct to Rush College and Cook County now.”

  “Precisely why we haven’t a single fresh cadaver! Short of digging up a fresh grave, what am I to do?”

  “You’ve made no other arrangement with anyone, then?”

  “None whatever.”

  “Can I trust you are telling the truth?” Oddly, Ransom believed the man. Something in his manner. Cagey, yes, but his body and features hid nothing. In fact, he’d proven far more forthcoming than had Pinkerton, who seemed bent on his beginning with Insbruckton before moving on to the mysterious Dr. Tewes. But if this were so, why was Nell targeting Insbruckton?

  “I tell you, I am destitute, and I fear my school doomed,” Insbruckton was saying as if to himself, walking about in a small circle.

  “Doc, show me what you have in the way of organs in jars.”

  Insbruckton’s rabbitlike manner and demeanor annoyed Ransom. His little pinched nose, bifocals perched there, the beady eyes so rodentlike, the demure and unmoving lips as he spoke, all conspired to irritate Ransom. The man simply annoyed, and he tried to picture him before a class explaining the intricacies of a surgical maneuver. He imagined the boredom of the man’s students. Then he began to suspect that perhaps it was not Insbruckton at all Nell shadowed but one or more of the surgeon’s students, who, out of sheer hellish boredom and frustration over the lack of a good cadaver to work on, simply began their own side studies by helping themselves to a citizen or two. He imagined a number of such bored lads. Boredom led to crime as surely as a river fed its banks.

  Was it possible? After what he had seen in his city, the perversions and cannibalism and blood-taking, anything could happen here, he told himself.

  Insbruckton showed him a collection of withered limbs and organs in jars, the most powerful to assault Ransom’s senses being an unborn child.

  “How is it you came by this?”

  “An abortion. Mother’s life was in jeopardy, and if you look closely at the head, you’ll see the child had encephalitis.”

  The head looked normal to Ransom. All the same, there were no fresh hearts, lungs, kidneys, or livers. The whole of the place seemed a sad museum of lost souls, and nowhere could the word “vital” or “fresh” be found.

  “You have no other rooms down here?”

  “None. You’ve seen all save my private quarters and the half-dozen rooms for the surgical students.”

  “Have you a half-dozen students?”

  “I have five using the residence hall. One left me. Others arrive from off campus.”

  “I’d like to see any records kept on the five on hand.”

  “Records?”

  “Yes, including the one that got ’way.”

  “I keep them in my office.”

  “I will be discreet.”

  “But why do you need to know about our young men?”
>
  Ransom handed Insbruckton back his money. Startled, the man looked into Alastair’s eyes, his amazement like an enormous question mark sitting atop his head. “I’m not interested in working for you, Dr. Insbruckton.”

  “But the bodies you promised!”

  “I came here as a police detective, Doctor, in search of—”

  “Murdered men!”

  “And now a woman, yes.”

  “My God, and you…you suspect me?”

  “Your name came up in conversations.”

  “Horrible to think that someone could imagine that I…I could be any part of what I’m reading about in the papers! The very idea that someone was murdered in order to provide a cadaver for study appalls me.”

  “It’s why I must see your records, rule out your boys, sir.”

  “Rule out, yes. There is not a lad among them who’d stoop so low, I can attest.”

  “Including the one who left you?”

  “Including Michael, yes.”

  “Let me at the records, and I will be the judge of it, sir.”

  He nodded and led Ransom back up the winding stairs, Alastair glad to escape the odors here. They passed the doctor’s operating theater where yet another overripe, overcut cadaver lay in wait for the a.m. class.

  Somehow Ransom’s nose, pores, and brain became frozen against the musty odors of this so-called surgical school and Dr. White Insbruckton’s river of endless words. The man blabbed nonstop as to his reasons for “setting up shop,” as he put it, in the “Prairie City,” as there could be nothing but growth in its future. No doubt the man’s palaver covered for an inward nervousness, almost to distraction. Tewes’s hands, that’s what the man needs, if there was any hope for him at all. Certainly, he had a rubber mouth and mind as each continuously flexed, and neither had a shut off valve.

  The entire time Insbruckton talked, Ransom tried to determine if there was an inkling whatsoever that any of his current students could be construed as a murderer. The doctor talked ceaselessly without the ability to edit or come to the end of a thought without leaping to another and another.

  When Ransom finally left Insbruckton, who stood waving from the top stair like a grandmother saying good-bye to a child she’d never again see, Alastair filled his lungs with a Chicago breeze. He’d been too long inside there, and he felt as if he’d been through a bizarre nightmarish sauna of sorts in that place over his shoulder. In fact, he’d been saturated with meaningless words that’d rained down in an incessant storm. Besides this, he’d had to deal with his own perspiration over a useless effort, alongside a clinging decay.

  “God damn Bill Pinkerton…sending me to this caterwauling idiot, thinking I’d be kept busy, sidetracked. Sending me on a wild goose chase! But why? What reason had he? You’d think him guilty of killing Nell.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Alastair hadn’t time to get back to Pinkerton before reporting into headquarters on Des Plaines Street, as it had been a long while since last he reported in. However, the moment he stepped inside the noisy, bustling station house, he had to rush out again, as Hogan, the desk sergeant, advised him, “Chief Kohler wants you at the home of Calvin Dodge, 178 Belmont.”

  This was close to Jane’s place, and Dodge was a local character Ransom knew well enough to avoid. Alastair’s alarm only showed in a quick flare of the eyes and a tick about the jaw. “What’s happened?”

  “Dodge’s son says he’s gone missing.”

  “Missing?”

  “Vanished.”

  “Damn…perhaps he hurt himself, became disoriented, and wandered off.”

  “There’s that possibility,” replied Hogan, nodding. “Still, what with all that’s been going on, maybe there’s more to it. Enough to get the chief out.”

  Ransom wondered why the chief had so quickly gotten involved in so low level a matter, until he recalled that old Dodge’s son, who went by his real name, Jared Killough, was a politico with some clout.

  “So Kohler’s personal touch, this is…”

  “Payback.” Hogan was born and raised a cop.

  Ransom tried to picture the scene. Nathan Kohler couldn’t ignore Dodge’s disappearing from his bed if the son had called, distraught.

  “I’ll get right over there. If the chief calls, tell ’im I’m on my way.”

  “Will do, Inspector.”

  When Ransom arrived at the supposed scene of the crime, he felt an immediate sense of violation—some voice deep within telling him that whoever had come and gone with the old man didn’t have the best interest of the “Colonel” at heart. Most glaring, aside from the bright blood against the pillowcasing and sheets, were the turned out drawers and opened cabinets. A botched robbery, was Ransom’s first impulse. A second story man working catlike around the old duffer as he slept, but something awoke Dodge, perhaps an opened music box, a single clumsy move on the part of the burglar? Awake now, Dodge posed a threat. He might’ve reached for a gun kept at his bedside, but no reports of gunshots had been made.

  The odor of blood wafted to Alastair’s nostrils, and the blood on the old man’s pillow was an unmistakable giveaway of some violence having occurred here. This was no nosebleed. Most certainly, Dodge had met with a bad end.

  Ransom took immediate charge, saying, “Alderman Killough, your father didn’t walk off of his own volition.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “The blood on the pillowcase and sheets tells me so, and for my money, the old man wouldn’t’ve left without his slippers or shoes, not if some benign fellow lifted him to a carriage and made off to hospital.”

  Killough gasped at the unspoken suggestion from Ransom. Kohler shook his head, frowning. “We can’t know it was foul play. He may’ve cut himself shaving for all we—”

  But Ransom pointed to the neatly placed slippers and shoes tucked at the foot of the bed as if awaiting the old man.

  “He’s a tidy old fellow, so?” asked Kohler, his doughy face pinched in thought.

  “In addition,” continued Ransom, “there’s no bloody tracks whatsoever. If he harmed himself, why he’d be going to the lavatory, and it’s odd but there’s no blood trail anywhere in the room.” He pointed to the rug at his feet, a dark paisley. The others hadn’t noticed the stain against the burgundy. Ransom dropped a white handkerchief over it, and they watched the white cloth turn to a brackish red wine stain. “Felt it the moment I entered,” he said.

  “My God, Nathan,” said Killough, “we’ve been standing in his blood the whole time! And Father was keen on cleanliness next to godliness, all that.”

  Chief Kohler assured Killough, “It’s most likely your father’s simply wandered off, perhaps in a daze. I have officers canvassing the neighborhood for any sign.”

  Never make a promise you can’t keep to a politician and a grieving family member all rolled into one, thought Ransom, but he kept his mouth shut and his thoughts to himself.

  “We’ve got our best man on it now, just as you requested,” Nathan told the son, indicating Alastair.

  “Word’s been sent all ’round the neighborhood for people to be on the lookout for Mr. Dodge,” added Mike O’Malley, who’d come in from the hallway and into the bedroom to assume a position beside Ransom, “but no one’s seen him since last evening.”

  “We’ll find him,” Kohler chanted. “With any luck at all, we’ll find him.”

  Ransom exchanged a look with O’Malley, both men fearing otherwise. “Has anything been touched in here, Mike?” Alastair asked him.

  “Everything was left just as we found it, Rance, till you could get here.”

  “You call for Philo Keane? Dr. Fenger?”

  “Mr. Keane, yes, Dr. Fenger, no.”

  “Really?”

  “With no body to look over, we figured Dr. Fenger wouldn’t take too kindly to—”

  “To his being called out. So, we call for a neighborhood doctor instead.”

  “Already done so, Rance.”

  “So where is the son
ofa—”

  “That’d be me,” said Dr. James Phineas Tewes, now standing in the doorway. “Came as soon’s I got word.”

  “All of us have changed since that train station murder, the Phantom’s doing,” said Nathan Kohler, trying to smooth over the moment as Ransom glared at Tewes. “I mean Mike here is out of the blue uniform, now a full inspector. Our good Dr. Tewes has earned a reputation as a caring medical professional, and Inspector Ransom has…has…”

  “Has defied evolution and change,” said Tewes.

  This made Mike and even Kohler laugh, while Killough didn’t find anything funny.

  “All right, enough with the niceties,” said a frowning Alastair. “Take a good look at your neighbor’s bedside and floor, and you tell me, Dr. Tewes, what you think has gone on here.”

  “A man was abducted from his bed…or rather, forced.”

  Dodge’s son gasped and Kohler frowned at this pronouncement.

  “How very astute,” Ransom said with a shake of the head. “If he’d wandered off as you suggest, Chief,” Ransom muttered, “he’d have left footprints in blood from the throw rug.”

  “Makes sense,” said O’Malley.

  Dr. Tewes had kneeled to examine the wine-colored handkerchief that’d revealed the blood soaked into the carpet.

  “There was a second rug,” said the son. “A larger one at the foot of the bed.”

  “Gone?” asked Kohler.

  “What’s it mean, Inspector?” Killough turned to Ransom for an answer.

  “Means the man didn’t walk out of here, but was rolled up in the larger rug and carried out through the balcony window and down the fire escape.”

  “Good God! Then you think he’s dead?”

  “Met with foul play, sir, yes. My best estimate.”

  “And you, Dr. Tewes?” asked Killough. “Do you concur?”

  “If the man walked out of here, you’d’ve bloody prints to follow, but if a rug soaked up the blood…”

  No one said another word. There was a long silence as each mind summed up what might’ve happened. Dodge’s habitual brandy toddy remained intact alongside a half-eaten slice of zucchini bread. Nothing on the nightstand was a-kilter, making the scene all the more disturbing.