City of the Absent

by Robert W. Walker

  “I must agree,” said O’Malley, who’d come now to unconsciously stand with Ransom and Tewes on the subject. “We have to begin our investigation as practical men here.”

  “Meaning?” asked Killough, standing alongside Kohler.

  Tewes cleared his throat and added, “Not likely old Dodge slid down to the end of the bed without leaving a second trail of blood.”

  “And it is strange,” continued Ransom, “an entire carpet gone along with him.”

  An eerie breeze lifted a sash in the room, as if a spirit revisited the bed. The soft contours of the shadowy wind sifting through the sash and hovering about the bed, a shy whisper of an echo, made a shiver run down their collective spines. It was as if Dodge’s spirit cried out, I am dead! You may leave it at that, and damn you all!

  “Was he in the habit of sleeping with his windows cast open?” asked Ransom.

  “No…it is another mystery atop the mystery that the balcony window was open when we got here.”

  Ransom considered the younger man’s pain. It was evident in his face that he felt great regret over the loss of his father.

  “Put it to me straight, Inspector Ransom. What is your truthful assessment of this room?”

  “The man’s bedroom was routinely locked, his windows routinely locked, and yet someone entered and attacked him.”

  “But who?”

  “Did your father have any enemies?” pressed Ransom.

  “A city full, yes, an absolute city full.”

  “That narrows it down considerably.”

  “His company left him poor, but it also left a lot of others poorer still.”

  “Shareholders? You think one could have killed him?” Ransom kept at the younger man.

  “No…none I know would murder him and rob his body.”

  “I think the operative questions here might well be,” began Tewes in that irritatingly high-pitched voice of his, “who would rob his body? Who would have need of it? Who’d consider it worth anything?”

  “There’ll surface a ransom note,” Kohler suggested. “Killough here has money, and whoever’s behind this, they know it!”

  “A ransom note’s not going to surface,” countered Ransom.

  “You’ve no way to know that.”

  “Did we see a note left on Nell Hartigan’s eyes?” asked Ransom. “For her organs?”

  “What’s this got to do with that Pinkerton woman?” asked Killough, panic in his voice.

  Tewes, Mike, Ransom, and Kohler all exchanged a knowing glance. Ransom finally said, “I fear there’ll be no ransom notes!”

  “Why do you say so?” Killough grew frantic now.

  “People don’t as a rule ransom the dead except to medical men.”

  “Please tell me it can’t be! My father on a dissecting table? No, neveeer, neveeeer.”

  “Dodge couldn’t’ve—of his own volition and will—gotten up and stepped off from this much blood loss, gone out to that balcony and down a fire escape, and not left evidence of his having wandered off.”

  “If you’ll allow me to finish,” said Tewes, putting a hand up to Ransom. “He, Dodge, attempted to fight off his attackers, but he took a nasty wound, obviously.”

  “Perhaps stabbed like Nell Hartigan,” suggested O’Malley.

  “Bled out until…until…”

  “Until they wrapped him in that missing carpet,” said Ransom. “And carried him out through the balcony and down to the street.”

  “And my father…dead or dying inside that Persian carpet.”

  “Persian was it?” asked O’Malley, jotting the detail in his notes.

  “Authentic, yes. Bought it at the Istanbul exhibit at the fair.”

  “We’re all very sorry, sir, but yes, this is essentially how I read it. There are the pillows thrown asunder, as if an attempt to suffocate the man was made; when that failed, he was stabbed—most likely fatally.”

  “If it’s any consolation, sir,” added Tewes, “I’d say your father put up a worthy fight, forcing his way up to a standing position here when the blade found him.”

  “Father was strong for his age,” said Killough.

  “I warrant it’s the work of the same man who murdered Nell,” said O’Malley.

  “On the surface that might look the case,” began Ransom, “but that makes a helluva leap, Mike, as we have no proof of it.”

  “Whoever’s responsible, I want him caught, and I want to sit front row at his execution,” said Killough. “Do you understand? All of you? And there’s a handsome profit in it for you all if you do a thorough and speedy job of it. I want this monster who creeps into an old man’s home and kills him in his bed caught and punished!”

  “We will do everything in our power, Jared, to take steps to do exactly that,” said Kohler, placing an arm over his political friend’s shoulder. “You can count on my people. Right, Inspector Ransom?”

  “Absolutely, Mr. Killough. Even if we must go by instinct alone, you may rely on the Chicago Police Department.”

  “But not a one of you holds a hope, not a sliver of it, that my father is yet of this earth?”

  At that moment, Philo Keane came nosily up the stairs and through the door, asking, “Where’s the body? I’m here to photograph a body, so where’ve they taken it?”

  “That we’d all like to know,” Ransom replied.

  “No body?”

  “None.”

  “So what am I here for?”

  “Photograph the condition of the room, particularly the bedside area and the blood splatters,” instructed Ransom. “And the pillows where they lay. And the open window. And the broken lock, necessary to get into the room, and this.” Ransom held up the now saturated red handkerchief, and Philo, using his quick flash Night Hawk, shot it.

  “Anything else, Inspector?”

  “Yes, take a shot from the balcony to the alleyway below, bottom of the fire escape,” suggested Tewes.

  Ransom exchanged a glance with Jane. “Yeah, what he said, Philo, add to your repertoire.”

  “Why am I shooting a dirty alleyway?”

  “Just do it.” Ransom looked around like a bear in search of its next meal but saw only expectant faces staring back at him. Oddly enough, everyone had gone along with Jane’s alias as Tewes. Big Mike O’Malley and Jared Killough proved the only two in the room who didn’t know of it.

  Jane had stepped out on the balcony to take in the view of the fair in the distance, where men worked day and night under harsh lights to disassemble the monster buildings and pavilions, Grecian statues, and Mr. Ferris’s two-hundred-and-sixty-foot-high wheel.

  “Seems a sad end to the fair,” she said in Ransom’s ear.

  “Good riddance, I say. That fair took the life of Mayor Harrison, and how many others?”

  “It’s not the fair that killed anyone, not even progress or science or industry, you big oaf. It’s like blaming our woes on God. God doesn’t build shabby houses that burn or crumble under the wind, and God does not tell us to stand on a precipice and fall. We humans do a fine job of getting ourselves killed without God’s interference one way or the other.”

  “Jane…I want to come back to you…back to your bed.”

  She said nothing.

  “Tonight…now. I need you.”

  “Well…I don’t need you. I don’t need any man!”

  “Alastair!” It was O’Malley below them in the alley entrance off the fire escape. “I’ve found something!”

  “What have you, Mike?”

  “A pair of spectacles, broken and bloodstained, I think.”

  “Did Dodge wear glasses?” asked Ransom of his son.

  “For reading in bed at night, yes.”

  Again Mike shouted from the street. “And a book, Ransom, a holy book.”

  “Bible?”

  “No but close enough.”

  “God hadn’t a hand in it, heh?” Ransom quietly said to Tewes.

  CHAPTER 25

  Little else remaine
d to be done at the Dodge home, and while the man’s son had become increasingly on edge and apparently guilt-ridden over what had happened, Ransom felt a need to flee and to take Tewes with him. With Nathan escorting Killough home, with Mike O’Malley taking what little evidence they had to lock up, and with Philo long gone to develop the photographs, Alastair escorted Jane Francis to street level, to peer down the alleyway where Mike had discovered pieces of the puzzle.

  “A sure place for a waiting wagon or other transport,” said Jane, speaking in her own voice and dropping Tewes’s.

  “I’m thinking it’s the same creeps who got Nell, the ghouls.”

  “Only this time they had the privacy and time to get the whole body and not piecemeal.”

  “There’re still other possibilities. You heard the son. The man had angered a lot of people. It could be a simple matter of murder.”

  “Nothing about murder strikes me as simple,” Jane said.

  “Straightforward, then. Poor choice of words. I meant mundane, usual, typical murder coming out of a typical motive like love, hate, vengeance, money, greed, food.”

  “Ahhh…look for the white elephant or pink alligator, you mean?”

  “At least rule out the usual and obvious first.”

  “Or jump on it and foolishly ignore the unusual? Isn’t that how you’ve cracked your most bizarre and satanic crimes? The weird and unthinkable gets ignored until enough bodies are racked up that—”

  “OK…I take your meaning.”

  “Besides, Alastair, how many simple murders have you investigated where the body is disposed of?”

  “A few. True, not many, but some.”

  “Mafioso hits most likely.”

  “They know how to cover their tracks, yes.”

  “Apparently you do, too.”

  “You give me too much credit.”

  “This city ought to erect a statue to you!”

  He laughed at this. “Not enough brass.”

  They’d begun to stroll toward her house below the gaslights of Belmont. “But Alastair, the old man had no dealing with the Italian gangs.”

  “Anyone can hire an Italian assassin.”

  “All the same, Alastair, just last night on my way home…”

  “Yes? Go on.”

  “Take me to Muldoon’s. Buy me a pint of ale,” she countered.

  “If it’ll help, sure.”

  They walked to Muldoon’s instead of Jane going home. For a moment outside the tavern, under the dull light of lamps, the last line of this day’s horizon blinked and died forever. They’d been in and around Dodge’s home for over an hour and a half, a long time to stand over a bloodstain.

  Over red ale, Jane told Alastair of the strange pair she’d seen standing on the street outside Dodge’s home the night before. “And I had such an odd, inexplicable feeling come over me.”

  “An odd feeling? Really.”

  “Don’t mock!”

  “You know very well I can’t arrest and interrogate two men on a feeling.”

  “The hell you say! You do it all the time!”

  “On my cop’s sense, yes, but not on a feeling you or Dr. Tewes might have.”

  “Where is the difference?”

  “Experience, know-how, instinct.”

  “I tell you, these two did not belong on that street. I tell you, they were up to no good.”

  “But you never saw them before?”

  “Never,” she lied now, thinking he’d get no more from her with his attitude of superiority.

  “Do you think you might recognize them if you encountered them again?”

  “I do.”

  “Then come down to the Des Plaines station house.”

  “What for?”

  “To examine our rogues gallery of rats that’ve taken up residence here.”

  “Photos?”

  “Yes.”

  “It could be a waste of time if you don’t have them in your books.”

  “Yes, but on the other hand, you might be surprised.”

  “I’ll try to get around.”

  “Don’t try. Do it.”

  “All right, sometime soon.”

  “Yes, soon.”

  They drank a second round, and he walked her back to her place, where, standing on the porch, he said good night while hoping she’d invite him in, but she failed to do so; still stinging from their previous disagreement over Samuel, he imagined.

  When Ransom rounded his block, having decided to walk from Jane’s to his residence, a goodly distance and a brisk exercise, he saw a man in shadow up ahead. Shadows along Kingsbury Street fell into the category of black holes, and when the figure stepped in and out of each cut of light made by the lamppost, Ransom made out a lanky, sinewy, tall man with bones for a frame: Hake.

  Although Alastair had hoped to see Frederick Hake, and by all rights ought to’ve expected him, he felt such an uneasiness with the entire Pinkerton organization by now that it still came as a surprise to find Hake at his doorstep. Just how closely am I being watched? he wondered.

  Did Hake come bearing information or a wild-hair notion to get back at him? Was he a courier of news that might help, or had he come with a knife or a gun in hand?

  Ransom immediately let the dangerous, nervous fellow know that he’d seen him at a distance, calling out his name, “Hake! Is it you there? Step out where I can see you, man! And show me your hands are empty!”

  Ransom had already torn his .38 from its sheath—a shoulder holster beneath his coat. Hake hesitated only a moment before stepping back out into the light.

  “We need to agree not to use my name,” he said, coming closer. “Don’t want nobody to know I’m working for you, do you?”

  “Probably a good plan. So how shall I refer to you?”

  “Ohhh…dunno…have always fancied the name Reginald, though.”

  “So it is, Reginald. What’ve you got for me?”

  “I dared not carry it with me, but I know you’ll want to pay well for it.”

  “What is it?”

  “It is a dossier.”

  “Nell’s notes?”

  “Forget about Nell’s notes. She kept no notes, and if you ever see Nell’s notes, know that they’re phony.”

  “Well then, what is this dossier?”

  “It’s on you.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I am indeed. They’re building a case for your having murdered that fellow you suspected of being the Phantom of the Fair.”

  “Suspected? Has there been a single garroting murder since the bloody suspect disappeared?”

  “You needn’t convince me of it.”

  “A jury’d laugh ’em outta the courtroom. Don’t know a Chicago judge who’d entertain the notion either.”

  “That might change if they get to someone, someone talks…least that’s what Kohler has Pinkerton chipping away at—your friends, so-called.”

  “How’d you come by the file?”

  “How do you imagine?”

  “I imagine Pinkerton hired you in the first place because of your felicity with locks and your history as a second-story man.”

  “I’ve given up burglary, Inspector, except as a means to an end, as in this end, to work for you.”

  “Be sure then that you keep your nose clean. Look here, when Pinkerton learns this file on me has been stolen, he’s likely to become a bit upset. Make yourself scarce for a while but not before you place the dossier in my hands.”

  “I’ll need some travelin’ funds. Wouldn’t mind going to see my sister in Cincy.”

  “I didn’t know you had a sister.”

  “Everybody needs one.”

  Ransom doled out twenty dollars to Hake. “When can you get it to me?”

  “Twenty won’t get me far.”

  “You’ll have twenty more when you turn over this so-called file.”

  “Ahhh…it’s a careful man you are, Inspector. Good. I am a careful man as well.”

  “The file?
”

  Hake looked about, as if expecting to be shot at any moment. “Caught a fellow following me earlier. Could be a Pinkerton operative…”

  “Or the man you owe money to?”

  “Or him, yeah…”

  “Get the file to me.”

  “I’ll come ’round three in the morning. Have that twenty ready.”

  “Knock three times on my window,” suggested Ransom. “So I know it is you and not someone else.”

  “Window?”

  “Back of the place, my sleeping quarters.”

  “See you then.”

  “Don’t come back empty-handed, Hake.”

  “You have me word.”

  Hake slipped back from sight into the deep cut blackness of an alleyway as sure-footed as one of the cat-sized river rats Ransom had often seen along the wharves. He could not help but wonder if this man was not working both sides, accepting payment from Pinkerton as well as him. He had no doubt that Hake had ransomed his soul more than once. Three a.m. was a time of dark consequences. What was it Twain said of the hour? That we are all a little crazy at three in the morning.

  Ransom knew he must expect a setup and a possible attack either from Hake or others.

  CHAPTER 26

  Jane Francis Tewes could not sit still, her mind racing with questions swirling about her ears, questions about the two men she’d seen outside old Dodge’s place two nights before, and now Dodge was missing, blood spatters discoloring the rug beside the old man’s bed. Something untoward had happened, and it appeared his place had been ransacked for jewels, money, bonds, and keepsakes. The intruder or intruders had gotten away with it during the night, and Jane could not get those two faces out of her head. She instinctively knew that these “associates” of Shanks and Gwinn had had something, if not all, to do with her missing neighbor and items from that house.

  For this reason, she went slumming as Dr. Tewes. She’d grown to like red ale, and it had become Dr. James Tewes’s favorite libation. She had gone first to Cook County Hospital, certain she must do this on her own and tell no one, not Dr. Fenger, and certainly not Alastair. Either or both would put an immediate stop to her plan.

  It was a simple plan: closely watch the off-duty activities of Shanks and Gwinn. See if they might lead her to the strange pair she’d spied from the coach the other night. Her reasoning was neither heroic nor intelligent, she knew. Her motivation was, in fact, money. Everyone had heard what Alderman Killough said about remuneration to those who solved his father’s murder and who determined where his body might be. Why shouldn’t Dr. Tewes benefit from this situation? She could certainly use the money toward Gabby’s education, and perhaps with some left over for another donation to Hull House, her pet charity.