Shadows in the White City (9 page)

“Kohler?” she asked.

“Yes, Christian talked Nathan Kohler into being on hand.”

“Then you've been vindicated?”

“Yes, and a wanted poster's gone out across the land with Denton's mug above the line wanted dead or alive.”

Philo saw the dark humor in this and said, “It might so easily've been me on that poster, Alastair.”

“And you still couldn't level with Nathan?” asked Jane. “After all that's happened; after losing Griffin? After the truth's being dragged into the light?”

“Nathan has not changed his opinion of me, no.”

“And the horse and hansom cab?” asked Gabby. “It was a horse needing relief and a pasture.”

“Belongs to the company. Returned to them. Horse and cab consigned to a new driver. Fischer company reoutfitted the interior as the cushions had blood stains.”

Jane only half heard this as she stared at the photo of Gabby in the recovered locket.

“It'll all have to be returned to evidence lockup,” Ransom explained, gathering all the items up again.

“All but your ring—Polly's ring?” Jane asked.

“That and your locket. Keep it.”

Jane understood the look in his eye; Alastair wanted to keep Gabby's name out of it altogether.

“What's the point of shutting all these items away in a box behind some locked door, Alastair?” asked Philo.

Gabby piped in with, “Against the day when Denton will be brought to justice of course. Evidence in the event it's called, in police parlance.”

Jane frowned. “I still disapprove of this new position of yours, Gabby. You should be concentrating on your medical studies.”

And so began a mother-daughter “discussion” that sent Philo and Alastair in search of the smoking car.

 

On arriving back in the city, before getting out of the station, Inspector Ransom was suddenly surrounded by news hounds, all barking questions at him about the story on page one. Jane wisely whisked Gabby off in another direction, going in search of a carriage, Philo Keane helping with their bags.

Insisting that Alastair pay attention, Thom Carmichael held up a copy of his
Herald
to Ransom's astonished eyes: phantom strikes again!

The headline screamed inside his head even louder than it did on the page. “No, this can't be!” he shouted.

“I tried to tell them it wasn't the work of the Phantom,” began Carmichael, his tone clearly conspiratorial as he took Alastair aside, “but it's papers they want to sell, not truth. I'm on the verge of writing out my resignation again.”

But Ransom was busy reading the details of this latest atrocity. “You're right about one thing, Thom.”

“I know.”

“But you'll never quit the
Herald.
”

“Ohhh…watch me.”

But Ransom continued scanning the story instead. The murder was indeed brutal and might live up to such billing as a result. By the same token, the missing Mr. Waldo Denton did not appear an item for discussion in the press or a concern of the other journalists.

Alastair gripped the copy of the
Herald
and made his way out of the station and into the night. September one and already a nip in the air. Fall was coming. Soon the followers of Burnham, the architect of White City, and the merchants of the World's Fair would have to concede an end to the biggest party the city had ever hosted. But it was not planned anytime soon. Likely only a brutal early frost might curtail the glorious problem that had half the Chicago Police force baby-sitting tourists here.

“Hint of an early winter, I'd say,” said Philo, joining him and Carmichael. Philo had sent off Jane and Gabby.

“Yes, an early clipper outta Canada ought to settle us all in for a long winter,” suggested Alastair.

Philo Keane nodded. “Might even cut down on crime.”

“Still…highly unlikely that icy Chicago conditions will ever cool the passions, heh?”

“May I quote you on that?” asked Carmichael.

“You may.” Alastair gave a fleeting thought to how he'd had the Phantom of the Fair frozen near to death before disposing of him in the deep. A wild, crazed notion flit behind
this thought, that somehow Denton survived his drowning in Lake Michigan. But this was impossible.

“What's got you newsies all up in arms?” Philo asked Carmichael, snatching the copy of the
Herald
from Alastair's grip. They awaited a carriage as Philo got the gist of the article on page one. It read in part,

“How much bloody speculation and latitude do your editors give you, Carmichael?” asked Philo. “Do you know how many butchers work in this city?”

“They call us hog-butcher to the nation, so yeah…I got some notion.”

Philo slammed the rolled newspaper into his palm. “You fools in the press're going to get someone hung before day's end.”

“We don't create the news or mobs, Keane. We can only report the brewing storm. Nature and human nature in particular creates the storm.”

“You fan the damn flames!”

Carmichael only shrugged, then added, “We sell papers. You know that.”

“And this damnable, confounded headline calling it the work of the Phantom?” asked Ransom.

“Yeah,” agreed Philo, poking a finger in Carmichael's chest. “The victim has her head intact and was not set aflame!”

“That's likely no comfort to her loved ones, Philo.” Ransom got into a cab and Philo climbed in beside him.

“Share the cost?” asked Philo.

“Sure, but I'm going to the station house. Still have some contacts there, and these vanishings began some time ago. Need to check some missing persons reports.”

“On other vanished people?”

“On other vanished children, Philo. These poor missing appear to've been snatched off the street at random. Possibly kept like animals until starved. According to cops working the case, the last one turned up like Chapman…dead and gutted. Her name was Millie Edeh, aged eleven.”

“Another little girl?”

“If it is the same monster, he does not discriminate; several boys of the same or close age have also gone missing.”

“Bloody hell, and the papers're just getting it now?”

“Yes, well who's story is it now? Senator Chapman's granddaughter's involved.”

“Are you saying the Chicago press doesn't care if the victims are unknowns, say, homeless children?”

“What rock do you live under, Philo? It's not the press doesn't care if homeless children go away—by any means—but society's wish!”

This silenced Philo for a moment. “And have all these young victims gone missing their entrails?”

“Entrails, organs, fleshy protrusions, eyes—”

“Enough!” said Philo.

Ransom gritted his teeth and shrugged. “We may well have a cannibal-killer on our hands.”

“A man eater?”

“A child eater.”

“You think he's cooking up their entrails?”

“What else does a madman do with entrails than to boil 'em and consume 'em?”

“Like so much sausage?”

“Do you have another theory?”

“Perhaps he feeds his dogs thus.”

“Yeah…there is that possibility.”

“So how're you feeling now, Alastair, now that you've had time to reflect on events?”

“Events?”

“The end of the Phantom, of course. Taking out the garbage, I think you called it.”

“
Ahhh
…you mean, how do I feel about myself?”

The carriage slowed to a standstill over the brick street outside the Des Plaines Street station house.

“Yes, now that you've set the scales right?”

“Set the scales right? I am the scales, Philo, in the end…setting myself up the avenger?”

“I suppose, yes. But you are evading my question: how do you feel?”

“How do I feel?”

“About yourself, my friend?”

“Philo, my father left me with little, but he often said the only material thing you can gain, lose, or possess that is of any consequence is how you feel about yourself.”

“Wise man…and so?”

“In that regard, I've come a long way toward liking myself.”

“A small miracle to hear you say it.”

“Yes, something isn't it? Small miracle. Something to
thank myself for on this fine day. Nonetheless…it would seem that the ugliness of our species intends to keep me pacing if only I were employed.”

“You'll land on your feet, somehow.”

Alastair alighted the carriage and grabbed the copy of the
Herald.
“No doubt I'll be calling on your skills with that Night Hawk all too soon, heh?”

“Whatever are you saying, Rance?”

“Pinkerton Detective Agency has offered me a position as one of their operatives.”

Alastair quickly made for the station-house steps as the carriage, carrying Philo off, pulled away. Philo hung from the window of the hansom, shouting, “Great news! And you've gotten my Night Hawk back?”

“Unofficially confiscated.”

“Alastair, you're a magician and a gentleman, and my knight! I crown thee Sir Alastair Ransom of the Kingdom of Chicago!”

“Do I get a brandy with that?”

From the outside, the old stone structure called
the Des Plaines Police Headquarters looked as cool and peaceful as any mausoleum, bathed as it were in a blue halo of gaslight, its yellow brick exterior reflecting back like gold. Despite the horrors of untold crimes filling the files and murder books inside, the edifice could be taken for a church if only a steeple were added, Alastair thought, pushing through the door, making his way into the mayhem. Clutter and noise hit him. Two uniforms had a wild man on the floor, attempting to cuff the rowdy drunk. The desk sergeant pleaded, at wit's end with some woman, saying “I kin do naught-a-thing to solve yer outhouse plumbing problem, my dear lady—”

“Then what bloody good're you coppers and the taxes I pay?”

“—and had you any sense, you'd know that no one kin turn rock to running water, so without a description down to the length of his nose, or a bloody name'n'address, would you kindly be leavin' now?” Alastair instantly realized how much he'd missed his sour, old second home. Then he realized how little thought he'd actually given it other than the unusual weightlessness over his heart, where his badge used to be.

Other cops whisked from desk to desk, but everyone froze when Jed Logan shouted Alastair's name over the din. A sudden silence descended over the station house as word went around that Alastair had come home. Even the complaining woman at the front desk and the man in cuffs silenced.

Sergeant of the watch came down from his high seat and around his desk, braving any blow that might come his way, and as if seeing the pope, stepped up to Ransom to shake his hand.

“What's this?” asked Ransom. “What're ya all gone daft?”

“Hail, the conquering hero!” Ken Behan was one of two inspectors working on the rash of killings now making headlines.

“Welcome home, Rance!” Jedidiah Logan, Behan's partner, slapped Alastair on the back.

“What's it all for, boys?” Ransom did a clumsy pirouette, hands extended.

“You're a hero, Alastair.”

“For what in the name of God?”

“Indeed.”

Laughter erupted. “Does everyone in the city know?” he whispered to Behan.

“Know what? I know nothing. Logan, whataya know?”

“Nothing.”

“We're as good as the old Know-Nothing party, aren't we boys?” shouted Behan and a roar went up, ending in laughter and a chorus of “naught nothings.”

“See?” asked Behan amid the uproar over the mention of the anti-immigrant movement and party.

Suddenly Chief Nathan Kohler, standing on the second-floor landing, shouted over all, silencing the room with, “What goes on here?”

“Knock it off, all of you!” shouted Ransom. “Some hero. I've lost both my badge and my partner.” He pointed to Drimmer's empty desk facing his own and a feeling of enormous, sick emptiness filled Alastair.

“He were a good man!” declared Sergeant Dolan, shaking his head.

“We raised more'n a pint to Griff's memory.” Ken Behan lowered his head.

“And raised three hundred dollars for his family,” added Logan.

Alastair continued cleaning out his desk. “He was a fine assistant inspector although he had some training yet, getting himself knicked like that.”

“Remember the time we set his report on fire, Behan?” asked Jedidiah Logan.

“And that day someone stole his lunch from the icebox, and he couldn't detect who was behind it?”

They all broke out in good-natured laughter.

The laughs ended abruptly when Chief Nathan Kohler, again shouted, “Ransom! My office, now!”

“Shitty man,” complained Logan under his breath.

“Go get 'im, Alastair,” added Behan. “Now you no longer have to eat his shit.”

“And remember,” said Sergeant Dolan, a skeletal man who stood a head taller than Ransom, “we none of us know a thing, and it's an oath we've taken to your health, Inspector.”

“
Ahhh
…well thanks, Dolan. I didn't know I had so many friends among ye.”

“Aye, you do now.”

Alastair imagined the story must have circulated throughout the force about his having quietly “taken out the garbage,” but he wondered with whom the leak had begun and precisely when and maybe where and perhaps who was on hand. Harry or one of his men perhaps, during a drinking bout? He pondered the notion while making the stairs taking him up to Kohler's closed office.

He hesitated a moment at the turning of the knob, not wishing to get into turmoil with Nathan so soon back, but as he could hardly stand Kohler in the same room, he imagined there was no dodging it. He opened the door and pushed through.

Inside the semi-darkened office, he found Kohler was not alone. In one corner stood Dr. Christian Fenger, a man to whom Alastair owed deference, as Christian had saved his life now twice—once after Haymarket exploded and more recently when Gabby's gun had exploded.

Alastair did not recognize the seated figure who appeared doubled over, so far into himself did he lean. The stranger was white haired and white bearded, a Santa Claus figure, dumpy, doughy, and looking as if he'd slept in his suit. A gold watch fob and a diamond ring marked him as a wealthy man. When he looked up to see Ransom enter, Alastair saw that it was Senator Harold J. Chapman, the grandfather of the deceased girl. Chapman looked a shadow of himself, on the verge of death's endgame. The terrible tragedy had left him a tattered soul.

“Senator Chapman,” began Kohler, “here is our best man for such an assignment. Along with Logan and Behan—introduced to you yesterday—Inspector Ransom here will hunt down this madman who's brought this horror on your family. I assure you that—”

“Shut up, Kohler!” ordered the old man, getting to his feet. He lifted his cane and placed it in Alastair's face. “You find this monster, Ransom, and you turn him over to me.”

“What's this?” Alastair asked Kohler, confused.

“Talk to me,” the senator said sternly. “Understand, this is what I want. You do this thing and the three of you, gentlemen, you will have my fortune. The paperwork is already complete at my lawyer's, all quite in order. All you need is to bring him to me out at my farm in Evanston alive for me to flay. I'll strip him of every inch of his bloody skin while he's yet alive. I want to hear him beg and scream and cry the entire—”

Unfortunately and all too often, Ransom had seen this kind of unrestrained, unconditional hatred born of unmitigated hurt, pain, and a sense of entitlement to justice and order in an unjust and disordered world. For men like Chapman, it amounted to an extreme insult. A shock to the com
fortable existence of an otherwise honorable soul now twisted and confused and filled with a sense of outrage that reached back to an ancestral past: the old eye-for-eye vengeance legitimized by the man's bible. Still, Ransom felt sorry for the man's terrifying loss; he empathized, and being in his position earlier, he, too, had resorted to the same ancient code. But something felt different here, somehow. Most men of Chapman's stature would never know a simple truth: no execution, no amount of punishment, no amount of justice could end the pain or quail the loss of an innocent life.

“Have you agreed to this, Dr. Fenger?” asked Alastair, amazed, lifting his own cane now.

“I have.”

“How so. You, a man of high moral ethics? A surgeon?”

“I know you, of all people,” interrupted the senator, “can and will put a capper on this maniac, and so why not make a bargain of it?” asked the senator, his gold tooth and gold ring and gold watch all lighting him up like a Christmas tree.

“I see my reputation precedes me.”

“Alastair,” said Dr. Fenger, “it means a new wing at Cook County. You've no idea how much it's needed.”

“And you, Chief Kohler?” asked Ransom. “The defender of law in Chicago?”

“No one need know outside this room, Alastair.”

“I see…given it much thought have you?”

“Look, man, we—you and I—civil servants…what becomes of us, Alastair?” Kohler asked. “When retirement comes round? And hell, face it, we don't know from year to year if we even have jobs! Do you stand on principle? We are talking a fortune here.” Nathan Kohler extended Ransom's badge to him.

But Alastair turned from Kohler to Senator Chapman. “I…I have to tell you, sir, that even without your bribe and your hatred, I would do all in my power to bring this fiend to justice.”

Chapman leapt even closer at him. “Justice? I want nothing of justice I haven't a hand in. Do you understand?”

“That much is clear, yes.”

The old senator snatched the badge out of Kohler's hand and pushed it on Alastair. “Get it done. See to this, Kohler, or it
will
be your job!” The senator pushed past Alastair and was out the door, his cane beating a sad rhythm in his wake down the stairs and out the door.

“The old man believes the rumors, Alastair.” Kohler actually grimaced.

“The rumors?”

“That you single-handedly caught and dispatched the Phantom,” added Christian Fenger, who then turned to Kohler and said, “How 'bout we have a drink, the three of us, Nathan. Snatch out that bottle you keep in your desk.”

Kohler did so, placing three small tumblers of whiskey between the others and himself. Fenger lifted and toasted, “To the end of the Phantom, and to a quick end to this new fiend making children vanish.”

Kohler lifted his glass, about to accept the toast, when both men saw that Ransom had not taken hold of his drink. “Come now, Alastair,” began Fenger. “You of all men, reservations? It wasn't so long ago you and I were plotting violence against Dr. Tewes.”

“I'd like to sleep on it…give it some thought. A thing like this…well, it could ruin the three of us sooner than make us rich.”

Fenger gulped his whiskey and slammed the glass down. He abruptly left.

Kohler and Alastair stared across at one another. “Are you trying to figure out a way to gain this treasure that's fallen in our laps all for yourself, Alastair?”

“Don't be a fool, Nathan. A thing like this gets out; people talk.”

“People are already talking about you, Inspector, and some are speculating you had my blessing in murdering Waldo Denton.”

“That's a bald-faced lie.”

“That you had my blessing or that you did it? And how else to explain his sudden disappearance?”

“I don't know. I was in Michigan. I heard about it when I got back, like I am hearing about this mess with the grieving senator for the first time.”

“The press is calling this madman Leather Apron.”

“Why Leather Apron?”

“Who knows. Someone put forth the theory he is a knacker.”

“A horse butcher?”

“Someone says they saw a knacker fellow in a leather apron in the area right before the Chapman girl's body was found.”

“So we are going on hearsay now?”

“The press is.”

“Is the body still at Fenger's morgue?”

“Unrecognizable if it were not for a birthmark. Did you know that some birthmarks go all the way down to the bone? I hadn't known that until Fenger educated me.”

“The senator had to identify his granddaughter by a birthmark?”

“A bell-shaped mark, yes. I tell you, Alastair, the body was scavenged in the manner of…well of a deer carcass hanging from a tree is how Fenger put it.”

Alastair took the drink now and downed it.

“Then you are with us?” asked Kohler, his long-time nemesis.

Alastair tried on the notion, looking at it from all angles, trying to see how Kohler could twist it to get at him. How might it backfire? In how many ways?

“I didn't say that,” he announced.

“You drink my whiskey—a peace offering—and yet you stand against me?”

“I'll need that drink,” he replied, “if I'm to have a look at this little girl's butchered carcass.” Ransom left with his badge in hand as abruptly as had Fenger, hoping to catch
Christian on the street, to talk privately about this matter. He wanted to know how Christian could have gotten in so deep in so short a time.

But Alastair was stopped by Logan and Behan, who had assembled all their notes and files on the case, dumping them onto his desk. “Chief's idea,” said Logan.

Behan added, “Told us we're taking our lead from you now, even before you arrived, Inspector Ransom.”

“Here's a brief on the whole bloody matter.” Logan slapped a file into his hands.

“Shit, boys! This is your case, not mine.” He pushed the file back into Logan's hands. “I'm outta here.”

 

Dr. Fenger moved far too fast for Alastair to catch him outside the Des Plaines house. He must see the body in the morgue anyway, so he would see Christian in private there to ferret out how he came to be in such a fix. Why did he need money? It couldn't just be that he wanted it for the hospital.

At Cook County, he followed the usual route into the bowels of this place where the morgue had been relegated, and as always the stench of death and chemicals proved only the first obstacle here in the basement facilities.

“They should tear down this place and start over,” he muttered to himself. “Now that would require quite the sum.”

The lift door opened on a long corridor that took Alastair to its terminus, Dr. Fenger's second domain here. There were several reasons they placed morgues below ground. The ease of transportation to and from the hospital, the general public's sensibilities, yes, even the coolness, although with crude ice box refrigeration units now in use, the primary concern remained odors. Although it must be fifty degrees down here, the odors cut into the nostrils and brain sharper than Fenger's scalpel.

Prevailing overall, the odor of decay. Hard to maintain any sort of religious fervency here as all seemed lost in this
undeniable odor of putrefaction. Cook County Morgue was the largest in all the Midwest. Its shelves and cold unit were filled with the indigent and unclaimed John and Jane Does, suicides, homicides, twisted corpses of those who died freak deaths. He half expected to see the bloated, water-logged corpse of one Waldo Denton here someday, washed ashore. But for now the odor was the predominant matter. No amount of cleansing fluids or fans could overpower this stench.