“He’s out?” asked Sam, eyes wide.
“How’d Rolsky get set free?” asked Bosch.
“Find out for me, Henry,” replied Alastair. “Who stood his bail.”
“It’ll be anonymous.”
“Find out! Someone’s got to know.”
Ransom wondered if the answer might not lead to Rolsky’s boss, the one who held his chain. All he knew was what O’Malley had told him over the phone: “When I got back to the station house from 400 Atgeld with evidence that could nail the bastard for murder and ghoulish activities, I learned he made bail.”
Ransom had been flabbergasted and angry to learn of Rolsky having gone free. He’d asked O’Malley about the nature of the items he found in the apartment. Mike had itemized and logged in the evidence, now safely in lockup. It pointed to Philander as the man behind Dodge’s disappearance and perhaps Nell Hartigan’s murder. The level of involvement on the retarded brother’s part remained in question. And now this awful turn of events—Ransom’s two ladies gone to Rolsky’s lair.
“You going to get over to 1400 Atgeld?” asked Bosch.
“Fool, it’s the 400 block of Atgeld! I had O’Malley search the place. On a warrant, he found specimen jars, wrapping sheets stained with blood, a Persian rug, jewelry, and a box of cash.”
“Then why wasn’t the man rearrested?”
“This has all occurred within the hour. I just learned the miscreant is roaming free.”
“Four hundred block’s pretty near where I had a run-in with ’em, sir,” added Sam.
Ransom found a police call box, opened it with his key, and studied the dial. What should he press? Murder, rape, abduction? There was a button for each and for every sort of crime known to these streets. He opted for abducted as it was as close to “missing” as he could find. By pressing the abducted lever, and winding the phone, and getting the closest precinct, he was guaranteed a police wagon and some two dozen uniformed men who’d answer to him. He and his army of twenty-four could fan out and cover every entry and exit where the Rolsky brothers might choose to crawl.
“You, Samuel!” Ransom called out. “You come with me! We’ve got some palavering to do.”
“What ’bout me, boss?” asked Bosch.
“This doesn’t concern you any further, Henry. Besides, I need you to learn the identity of the man who posted Rolsky’s bail.”
Bosch frowned and put out a hand for money. Ransom dropped two dollars into his palm. “There’ll be more, but at the moment it’s all I’ve got!” Then he snatched Sam, and together they rushed to find a cab. They’d meet the police wagon at the Atgeld address.
In the meantime, Alastair prayed that nothing bad had happened to Jane or Gabby or both.
On the cab ride to Atgeld, Ransom began explaining what he had not done to Father Jurgen, and he felt that his plea of innocence had been accepted by Samuel. Finally, someone who knew the details and facts as he knew them, and believed. He then suggested that another young person aboard the ship had done the actual operation after Alastair had left Jurgen in one piece. “Still, Sam, you’re the only person in this city who can finger me for it, son, and so I’m at your mercy. So how much do you want for the file?”
“How much for the file?”
“The dossier that Hake dropped off at my house that night he rapped on the bedroom window.”
“I almost wasn’t going to open the window, ’cause I thought him a desperate-looking fellow, but he made promises that he was your friend and that I was to give this file to you.”
“All right, so you took the file through the window.”
The boy swallowed hard. “Laid it across the bed, and a photo of you holding a dead man’s head in your hands fell out.”
Ransom recalled the photo taken by Philo at the train station the past spring while he was investigating the third garroting murder in the Phantom of the Fair case. “Then you read the file?”
“I did and I’m sorry.”
“Sorry you did it, or sorry over what you learned about me?”
“Sorry I did it.”
“Well now you know the half-truths and lies my enemies are willing to tell to put me away at any cost.”
“I didn’t understand it all. I don’t read so good.”
“Do you think me a heartless murderer now, Sam?”
“They couldn’t prove it by me.”
“What’d you do with the file?”
“Burned it, I did.”
“Burned it? Yet Bosch is trying to make a buck on it anyway?”
“He’s an enterprising duffer.”
Ransom smiled at this.
“Burned it as lies, I did, and—and I scattered the ashes over your partner’s grave.”
“My partner’s grave? Griffin Drimmer?”
“May he rest in peace. The file said you got him killed.”
“Another lie…or rather, half-truth. If I’d had stayed with him that night, who knows.” Ransom thought of the grave site in Mount Carmel, the headstone he’d personally paid for, and he gave a thought to Drimmer’s little family, the wife and children somewhere now back East near Boston—a civilized place, she’d called it between sobs as Ransom had held her close.
“I thought burning the file the right thing, Inspector.”
“Did the reports have the eye on them?”
“The big eye of the Pinkerton Agency, yes, sir. That is, most pages did.”
“Then it’s true. Pinkerton’s joined forces with Kohler.”
“They didn’t have nothing that they could prove, lotta words about suppose this and maybe that and perhaps here and could be’s and would be’s and such.”
“Surrounding what?”
“Your interrogation of a man who got burned to death, for one.”
“Haymarket days. Old news, and it wasn’t me torched the man.”
“I never believed it, as many times as I’ve heard it told.”
“What else?”
“Something about a shootout, you killing a man.”
“Self-defense pure and simple, and a setup to boot.”
“Bosch told me ’bout that one.”
“What else?”
“Some notion you may’ve killed some lady named Polly Pete. Said you may’ve made it look like the work of the Phantom.”
“Fairy tales. Nonsense. What else?”
“Something about dropping a man kicking and screaming to the bottom of the lake.”
“They’re reaching.”
“Still, I’d be careful of who you call a friend at the firehouse.”
“Meaning?”
“They had a statement from Mr. Harry Stratemeyer, the fire investigator…”
“Harry, no. What must they have on Harry?”
“Says he helped you dispose of a body out on the lake, the body of the supposed Phantom of the Fair.”
“Sounds like you read well enough, Sam.”
“Is it true?”
“What?”
“Is it true you dropped him alive into the lake?”
“Samuel, you saw what he did to Griffin, to Polly, to others, and the law—Kohler—let him go for lack of evidence.”
“Mostly heard secondhand about it. Met you sometime later…on the Leather Apron case, sir.”
“What else did you see in the file?”
“They had statements against you for what happened to both your partners, Drimmer and another you worked with on Leather Apron…Logan.”
“Bastards blame me for Logan’s death, as if I don’t blame myself.”
“And another thing they’re keen on what wasn’t in the file, but Bosch says it’s so.”
“What’s that, Sam?”
“Getting you for what happened to Father Jurgen.”
“Father indeed, the man doesn’t deserve the title, so let’s just call ’im the pervert he is. They can’t make that stick.”
“They’re on the lookout for me,” Sam replied.
“You?”
&
nbsp; “Figure to shake me down, pay me off, do whatever’s necessary to break me and make me talk ill of you, to stand in witness ’gainst ya.”
“And if it came to that, Sam?”
“I didn’t witness nothing, and you never told me nothing, so I won’t make a witness for ’im.”
“That’s easier said than done. If these men get you in their hands and sweat you, Samuel, they’re professionals; they know how to break grown men.”
“They won’t break me!” he determinedly said.
“That leaves Philo, then,” muttered Ransom. “Anything in the file on Philo Keane as…as a known associate?”
“Tons, sir…just loads.”
Pinkerton’s targeted Philo. This is not good, Ransom thought. “Look, Sam, I’m going to ask you to leave the city for a while, and here’re the funds to do it with.” He held out two fifty dollar bills.
“Leave Chicago?”
“Just for a month or so, till I know which way the wind is blowing.”
“Wind’s always blowing off the lake, south-southeast.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I got no place to go.”
“Go to the Dunes in Indiana, the Dells in Wisconsin, to a hunting lodge, I don’t care, but get out of the city till this nonsense blows over. Can’t imagine why they’re defending a sicko-deviant pervert in the first place, from O’Bannion down, and disappoints me that Bill Pinkerton’s been taken in by guile or money or both.”
“Somebody stamped in big letters across most everything in the file the words: ‘Questionable as Evidence.’”
“Take the money and get on a train, Sam.”
Sam took the bills.
“When we get to our destination on Atgeld, Sam, stay back.”
“But I wanna stay with you, sir.” He pushed the money back on Ransom.
Ransom refused to take it. “No, you can’t! Please, take the cab a block off. Kohler has spies among the coppers I’m meeting, for sure. And if they’ve been told to get hold of you, well…I don’t want to think of you in one of their interrogation rooms or lockup.”
“I still want to stay with you.”
“Damn it, son. If one of Kohler’s men sees you, you’ll be run to ground, Sam, like a dog.”
“I know every squirrel hole and burrow in the city, Inspector. There’s not a copper who can catch me ’less I want ’im to.”
“Ahhh…the Artful Dodger! Still, my young friend, take the hundred and leave this city, and if you never come back, Sam, it may well be in your stars to find happiness elsewhere.”
“Then tell me the truth before I go.”
“What truth is that, Sam?”
“Did you really not do it to the priest?”
“I swear on my mother’s grave, Samuel, that I’ve never lied to you in the past, and I am telling the truth now. Did you lie to me when you said you accepted my plea of innocence in the Jurgen affair?”
“Guess I did, but I believe you now, Inspector.”
“Means a great deal that you do, Samuel.”
CHAPTER 36
Alastair had immediately climbed from the cab with his cane in hand and quickly closed the door to conceal Samuel, and then he tipped the driver to move on. The commandeered hansom cab hurried away, giving Ransom breathing room but not much. In fact, he’d alighted from his cab to find the paddy wagon he’d called careening around the final corner.
Then Ransom realized that a second paddy wagon followed on the wheels of the first. But who were these men? Who’d called out a second wagon?
The bells and whistles of two paddy wagons were a common enough occurrence all across Chicago these days, but Alastair feared the Rolsky brothers had been alerted, despite the fact that brothels, taverns, gambling dens, and opium dens peppered this part of the city. Locals had come to expect periodic raids in the area.
All the same, Ransom knew that Rolsky could be at any window and could be drawing a bead—either his eye or his gun—on him at this moment where he stood in the street, attempting to choreograph this raid. Alastair made a large target, waving down the noisy others, gesticulating for them to cut the bells and whistles while at it. But no one aboard either wagon read his hand signals properly, as instead they ratcheted up the noise.
A crowd began immediately to gather about the commotion even before the cops had a chance to climb down from the two wagons. The sudden appearance of this forty-eight man swarm of uniformed cops had surely alerted Philander. Ransom imagined one thing on the criminal’s mind—escape; it could also cause him to panic and kill Jane and Gabby, if they were indeed in his clutches yet alive. At this point anything might be true. Anything could happen. Or not. The possibilities, Ransom realized, all walked a high wire strung by Rolsky, but he, too, had hold of one end of that wire, as did the mystery person who’d bailed Philander out—possibly the surgeon who most benefited from the grim work of the Rolsky brothers.
In the back of his mind, along with his fear for Jane and Gabby, Alastair dreaded the mystery surgeon, a man who ordered up death as others might an omelet. He feared this nameless, faceless monster might well escape any form of justice should the brothers be shot and killed in an altercation with police. Clever, cunning bastard. Perhaps the mystery doctor counted on this scenario playing out. That he knew that police would descend on Vander and Philander like locusts out for blood.
And again, who called for the second paddy wagon?
He considered how orchestrated the whole unsteady untenable affair appeared—and how much Chief Nathan Kohler knew and when he knew it. Kohler was known for being cold and calculating. Furthermore, the men climbing from the second wagon had come prepared with high-powered scoped rifles; snipers.
“Need I even ask who called in police sharpshooters?” Alastair questioned himself.
To get him at all cost, Ransom knew that Nathan would sell his soul. And could William Pinkerton have unwittingly provided ammunition for Kohler? Could Nathan Kohler have worked a deal with the deadly doctor or doctors behind the ghouls? Had they ties to Senator Chapman? Are all the principal players in a bloody conspiracy or am I reaching? Alastair wondered. If it were so—and he could put nothing past Chapman and Kohler—this was larger and more insidious than any secrets the two harbored about the Haymarket bomb or the Leather Apron case.
It all had come to a head here and now outside the building where two Rolskys lived. All culminating in this standoff today instead of a courtroom into which Alastair might have been led in chains had Nathan gotten his way.
If fate is the hunter, Ransom now thought, it had hunted him in his tracks, and fate now threatened Jane and Gabby as well.
As the first police wagon came to a halt before Ransom and the suspect building, and officers in blue leapt off the horse-drawn, covered wagon, some shouted, “Where’s the fire?”
Others shouted, “Are we too late?”
“Lads! I need you one and all!” replied Ransom in his most commanding voice, but those in wagon number two fanned out and located positions from which they might fire their deadly and accurate weapons. “There may be two ladies of Chicago being held against their will inside here! Hold your fire!”
“Ladies?”
“Womenfolk?”
“To be saved?”
Ransom realized it was every man’s fantasy to rescue a damsel in distress, be kissed by the saved angel, fall in love, marry, and live happily ever after. He intentionally turned loose the fuel that stoked this fire of adolescent dream.
The captain in charge of the wagon Ransom had called for, a barrel-chested man named Benjamin Shorendorf, wore a crestfallen face that looked the part of an angry bulldog that’d lost a fight over a bone. Shorendorf shouted back, “Who precisely are we arresting? Who’s been murdered?”
Ransom gathered the uniformed men to him. “We’re looking for a pair of brothers,” he began, “one a giant of a man and slow-witted to be sure, and the other his keeper! The names are Vander and Philander Rolsky, which may b
e an alias.”
“It’s that Italian ferret-faced guy we had in lockup over at Des Plaines, isn’t it?” asked Shorendorf. “Why was he let go in the first damn place?”
“Not sure he’s Italian, more likely Polish, but yes, same man.”
“Why’d you let him go?”
“Bailed out! But I’ve secured a warrant for his rearrest,” Ransom lied, though O’Malley was at the courthouse at that moment seeking the arrest warrant.
“Why’d you ever let him outta your sight then, Inspector?” Captain Shorendorf sounded angry at Alastair. “Now you say he’s holding two women inside?”
“Rolsky was released on bond put up by someone I have as yet to identify, Ben. No one consulted me!”
“But he is Italian, right?”
“If it helps you to take him down, yes, he’s Italian. But we need these two brothers alive to sweat information outta them, understood? And look, I fear Rolsky may have hostages.”
“Hostages?”
“Miss Jane Francis and our Gabby Tewes.”
“You don’t say! Those kind ladies! The bastards! Hear that boys?” Shorendorf asked his men. “These Rolsky fiends who killed Nell Hartigan ’ave snatched two more of our women!”
“For the carvers?” asked an astonished young copper.
“The surgeons, yes,” replied Ransom.
“I don’t care if you break down every door!” shouted Captain Shorendorf. “Get into position and shoot to kill.”
“Whoa, hold on!” shouted Ransom.
“What is it?”
“I want these monsters apprehended, Ben! For questioning! And I don’t want the women harmed.”
“I have me orders, Alastair.”
“Whatya mean? You’re called out by me, you take orders from me!”
“My orders come from a higher power! Now shove off or help, either one, Inspector, but let go’a my arm!”
“Who gave you a shoot order?”
“Chief Kohler!”
“How’d he hear of it?”
“Dunno, but he called just after you and give me the order, shoot to kill any armed and dangerous, and that means these ghouls!”
“But I want to learn who’s behind it all! I want to interrogate these men! Learn who is paying for bodies! Who bailed Rolsky out. All of it!” If so, Ransom reasoned, he might even implicate Kohler in a conspiracy here. Was Nathan covering up for others in high society?
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