City for Ransom, page 11
part #1 of Alastair Ransom Series
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Firing of the bodies held no excitement for him. It was merely for show . . . something extra for Inspector Ransom.
Cliffton had died of massive blood loss. Traumatic, hem-orrhagic shock due to the neck wound. He hadn’t felt a thing after that, certainly not the fire. In fact, he was so suddenly dead that he hadn’t time to think of anything but the enveloping arms of death. No time for questions of why or of eternity, heaven or hell; nothing normal or natural in the way he went.
Young Cliffton—at the point of attack—in Illinois Central Station, second-floor concourse men’s room no longer gave a rat’s ass about examining the architecture, or studying under the finest architects, or recalling how sweet his girl’s kiss was beneath the Ferris wheel. He had been jabbering and washing his hands—just as his mother, no doubt, had taught him—when the garrote leapt round his neck.
Quick efficient silent death slipped from a coat pocket.
Again he covered his nostrils with the aroma of the stolen handkerchief—Cliffton’s possession. It conjured up another aroma, the last odor Cliffton smelled—his own blood. He sucked it in, and his brain filled with the images of holding life in his hands.
Not only had Cliffton been the first male he’d ever killed, but the only victim he hadn’t assiduously stalked. Opportunity had simply presented itself there in the train station. His third killing since arriving in Chicago. He’d only killed small animals until now, practicing on them with the garrote.
But he’d never been found out or arrested. So he wasn’t in their various card files.
Another of his victims had been a tender, lovely, young milk-skinned little family girl, a Polish princess named Milka Kaimeski—Cliffton’s female counterpart. He liked killing the innocent and unblemished.
Friends of Milka’s had left her in the company of a gentleman the night she lost her life. Descriptions of the phantom gentleman were as varied as those of Christ himself and so rendered useless, but all were in agreement that he carried CITY FOR RANSOM
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a cane, wore a top hat, expensive leather shoes, coat and tails, and that he was smitten by the beautiful young Milka.
Most accounts put the man at thirty or thirty-five, the age he effected when prowling for prey. In point of fact, he carried no cane. Canes were for crippled old men like that fanciful copper, Inspector Ransom. He didn’t himself need a stinking cane to take down that fat screw, as he was young and strong, having just turned twenty. Sure, the old hero of Haymarket had a hundred pounds on him, but the great equalizer lay silent in his pocket, the mini-guillotine.
As for his first Chicago victim, she too, had gone to the fair. But she’d been a tough, gaunt, hard-edged, leather-skinned cigar-smoking working girl named Hannah O’Doul, a red-light district prostitute. She’d gone to the fair on a lark with friends, but having run short of funds, Hannah separated, intending to acquire more funds by picking up a John at the fair. She’d found him. Or rather, he’d been stalking her.
She wanted most of all to ride the Ferris wheel, and while frightened of its enormity, she remained fascinated at the idea of reaching out to touch a bird in flight. He’d dumped her body along the forested lane where police routinely patrolled, mimicking the playful taunts of old Jack the Ripper himself. Hannah’s death only made a few sentences, buried on the obit pages.
Killing prostitutes got no play in the press, and little had been made of the Polish girl in the Chicago press either. It disturbed both him and Sleepeck Stumpf that these heinous murders had been given so little attention. They’d both expected outrage. They’d expected a flood of ink devoted to the killer. But surely now they’d see results in the dailies; they must give it front-page mention now, thanks to his having upgraded to the murders of an unborn along with the Polish girl and now a fresh off-the-farm school lad—all in a matter of weeks. The response must now be outrage.
He imagined the morning newspaper accounts in the Chicago Tribune and the Daily Herald: police stymied by phantom garroter, at a loss for clues.
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News of the killings on the street ran ahead of the reporters, outstripping their efforts and accounts. News had also spread wide about the Polish girl’s pregnancy. He hadn’t known it at the time; not that it’d’ve mattered a whit to Stumpf. Apparently, no one else had known she was a spoiled dove, left to fend for herself. That is until the autopsiest, a Dr. Christian Fenger, declared it so. This news spurred belated outrage. Authorities had arrested the boy Milka had been seeing—father of the child being their prime suspect.
Afterwards, Sleepeck Stumpf called her another Hannah O’Doul in the making, a street tramp—no better. Getting herself knocked up in such fashion. A sign of the times, end of century coming on—the end time! And as for the unborn child, what bloody chance might it’ve had at a future anyway?
“When the Twentieth Century does arrive, God means to destroy all the Earth and Sky overhead, and to begin all over again anyway,” Stumpf assured him just as Mother had on her death bed. “This according to Revelation and Stumpf—spirit of the spirit. So what matters? Naught . . . naught matters.” All the same, if the unborn counted as a life, he’d taken in four souls, each saved from the horrors of the end time.
Four souls . . . three of which he’d felt enter him as he drained each life. But not knowing of the child, he hadn’t felt the child’s spirit enter, and this led to a doubt of Stumpf and his purpose in all this killing. Stumpf promised power and knowledge of the universe, familiarity with the Creator beyond that of normal men—and a sense of well-being to override the chaos of this world. All the same . . . whether Stumpf was just talking or not, the taking of lives did have a profound effect. He felt it religiously—a deep, abiding, and contented feeling—especially when twisting the garrote to hear death and to breathe it into his nostrils.
He imagined an orderly or nurse standing beside an autopsy slab at the Cook County morgue, arms extended with the linen winding sheet, the wrapping held wide and open to receive the dead fetus from Milka’s womb. Imagined Dr.
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Fenger’s cold forceps lifting out the four-month-old child from the burned girl’s charred abdomen, and handing the lump of flesh over to the tearful nurse. And as the child is being transferred from the doctor’s hands to the linen ham-mock, the child’s eyes open and fill with an awe that speaks of life and death entwined.
“When are we not with death?” he asked aloud. Passersby below umbrellas stared dumbly, but a nearby horse whinnied as if agreeing.
CHAPTER 11
Dr. Tewes had rejoined the world, and as quickly as Jane could become James again, she got her other self over to Cook County Hospital. She’d been weary, but with that bull detective on Tewes’s tail, she’d suddenly become energized, taking a carriage for Dr. Fenger’s. Should Inspector Ransom now seek out and find Dr. Tewes, he’d be in one of the two places spoken of. In fact, sending him to the South Levee district was a stroke of genius. He’d likely want to catch the good doctor there in a questionable or compromising position, she reasoned, so he’d go there first. Unable to find him there, he’d come looking at Cook County Hospital. Perfectly played, she reasoned.
On arriving, she—as Tewes—learned that Dr. Fenger was still in the autopsy and inquest phase. Having a number of living patients to see to, Dr. Fenger had only now gotten round to a full autopsy of the Purvis corpse.
She stepped into his operating theater. Rows of male students filled each aisle in the area built for this man. He’d become a legend in Chicago, indeed in Illinois, and in Europe.
Fenger belonged to all the medical associations in the city and the state, and some abroad. As a surgeon and a pathologist, as well as a medical school professor, Christian was the first to join the latest specialized medical groups. In fact, CITY FOR RANSOM
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he’d spearheaded the Chicago Pathological Society that’d come into being immediately after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
For most of Fenger’s professional life, he was called a
“curator of the deadhouse” but this medical genius was far more. He’d come on at Cook County in 1873 when the famous pioneer bacteriologists Drs. Isaac Danforth and Robert Koch paved the way for Christian Fenger’s inspiring and educational medical demonstrations—demonstrations that Jane’s father had insisted she see at age fourteen and fifteen. Fenger’s fascination in the evolving neurological sciences and neuropsychiatry, an infant science only hinted at in individual case reports, came out of an interest in neurosurgery. It was this area that a young Jane found fascinating—what explained the mind of humankind? To encourage her, Fenger insisted she take home copies of Northwestern Medical and Surgical Journal, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, and the Chicago Medical Journal and Examiner.
Her father had seen to it that she study German and French so that she could read journals and reports coming out of Europe. But when it came time for her to complete her studies under Dr. Fenger at the Rush Medical College of Chicago, she found all medical reference libraries in the city inadequate to the task. In Chicago, no more than two sets of the great German yearbook, Schmidt’s Jahrbücher or the Virchow-Hirsch Jahresbericht could be found. In fact, these volumes could only be had at the abeyance of the founders of Rush Medical’s chief rival for students and publicity—Northwestern—and only by personal favor of the chiefs of medicine there. A long-standing feud between the leaders of the two institutions kept this from becoming a reality for Jane.
This and a general lack of concern for developments in Europe, especially with regard to neurosciences, sent her off to Washington, D.C., to complete her dissertation for her Ph.D., but even in Washington, the competition to gain ac-104
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cess to such journals proved impossible. This led her abroad to finish her studies toward her medical degree.
However, she failed to heed her own internal advice against getting emotionally involved with a silver-tongued Frenchman with a probing eye and a soft caress. François Tewes derailed her up-till-now obsessive love affair with medicine. She found herself alone in France and pregnant.
Still, determined to finish what little remained to accomplish her medical degree while hiding her pregnancy, she forged on to Germany, where she gained acceptance as a doctor.
Her having had to leave Chicago due to a lack of books had outraged Dr. Fenger, who had, since her father’s death, become like a father to her, certainly a benefactor. She believed him secretly in love with her, but their age difference prevented him ever to broach the subject, and the sad creases about his eyes had only increased and deepened with each day. Seeing her off for D.C., he looked stricken there at the train station. She could only imagine how he felt when she’d wired him that being unsuccessful in Washington, she’d booked passage for France and eventually Germany. Using his recommendation, which she still cherished, she felt certain that a major medical facility in Paris or Berlin would accept and attach her, a woman, to a medical program in which she could attain her final goal—to practice surgery and eventually neurosurgery. However, such a position never materialized.
These memories flooded in alongside the moment here in the surgical theater. Jane had learned only recently that after she’d left Dr. Fenger’s care and Chicago, that Christian had spearheaded a campaign to create a ten-thousand-volume surgical-medical library to be housed in the Newberry Library in the heart of the city. Later, in 1890, the John Crerar Library was founded by the wealthy railroad magnate, willing two million dollars to launch his medical library. By this time, when all the medical books at the Newberry had multiplied to well beyond thirty thousand, Dr. Fenger swore that CITY FOR RANSOM
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no more promising medical students would have to leave America for Europe.
Christian had loved her, had taken her under his wing, but he’d lost her to the same intolerance she faced daily as a woman in medicine. She’d stopped corresponding on learning of the pregnancy. And when she saw him nowadays, she saw the depth of his hurt smoldering as coals in a hearth. As much as it pained them both, Jane still could not tell him of her return, or her deception, not now . . . perhaps never.
Fenger absolutely hated Dr. J. Phineas Tewes almost as much as he’d loved Jane Francis. And since Gabrielle looked so much like her in her youth, Jane had sent her to the rival school instead, out to Northwestern where Gabrielle had known the murdered boy—Cliffton—only too briefly. It’d been Gabrielle who’d been with Cliffton the night he died, and Gabby had pleaded with her mother that they go to the train station and offer him a place to sleep so that he’d not be in that cold and lonely place by himself without a dime.
They’d argued, and then came the middle-of-the-night call from Nathan Kohler saying, “Our opportunity for your experiment has come.”
She learned that a garroted body had been discovered at the train station. She’d prayed it would not be Purvis—and she feared that if it were and Gabby learned of it, she would never forgive her mother.
Chief Nathan Kohler was the only one in authority who knew that she and Tewes were one and the same. She’d confessed it to him when he’d detected her utter discomfort in having to follow him into the stationhouse men’s room during their discussion over allowing Tewes access to the crime scene and victim. She’d lost composure as Kohler and others used the wall-length trough urinal.
Nathan Kohler had read her well and had cruelly turned her scam on herself, threatening exposure if she failed him.
At least Dr. Tewes had gotten into the crime scene even if it was as Nathan’s spy. So much drama in the horrid wake of 106
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the garroter. She sadly imagined the night of magic the victim and her Gabrielle had had at the world’s fair, and how the boy had depleted his last dime on Gabby to please her with ice cream and carved animals.
And now the boy was a specimen for a room full of medical students to see what fire did to flesh and how an autopsy around the charred flesh was done.
Dr. Fenger proved his usual able genius, making the autopsy look easy. He somehow remained above it all while his hands worked busily over the body as an artist’s hands might paint in oils.
Fenger’s appointment to Cook County had indeed marked the coming of age of pathological specialization in Chicago in 1878, and now it was fifteen years later, and he showed no sign of slowing down, not superficially anyway. But Jane—as Tewes—knew better.
Christian Fenger had come to Tewes out of a sense of desperation, having tried Spiritualism atop his Catholic upbringing, had even attempted the new fad of graveyard séances in a failing hope of reaching out to his dead parents, and he’d sunk to the level of looking for solace in the bottle, in various drugs such as opium and heroine, and finally searching for that elusive answer to all he sought in the arms of a series of philosophizing prostitutes. Something to do with having struck his father during an argument, and the elder Fenger dying of a heart attack hours later, and Christian, late in life, had become obsessed with making amends.
Fenger had seen the guru of phrenology several times before breaking down and detailing the depth and longevity of his search for this personal Holy Grail, and the salvation of a tortured soul he showed to no one.
As she watched his deft hands now from the gallery, she wondered what kind of surgery he’d seen during the Civil War as a field surgeon. He’d never spoken of it, not to her or her father. He’d come for dinner in those days, the only time she’d ever seen him relaxed, smiling, laughing. Most of the CITY FOR RANSOM
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time, he complained of a morgue sorely lacking in rudimen-tary supplies and elementary equipment—from microscopes and alcohol to specimen jars and burners. He was ever searching for benefactors to improve the circumstances for all medicine in Chicago, and today there was seldom a medical professional who’d not learned from this man who read and spoke some twelve languages so that he could keep abreast of all medical breakthroughs the world over.
The autopsy and teaching session came to an abrupt end.
Fenger, exhausted but daring not show it, looked his age when he turned to find Dr. Tewes watching over his shoulder from the gallery.
Their eyes met. If silence could kill, she thought. God . . .
how he hates what I’ve done. His initial fear had been that someone might discover he’d come to a phrenologist for help, but he’d left Tewes’s apothecary and consulting room with a great more dread than when he’d entered, having divulged all to Tewes in a flood of confession sorely needed, a confession he could not make to his priest.
She knew how easily he could strangle her to death, he was that angry and filled with venom for Tewes. At the same time that Tewes had made this proud man a victim, Jane’s heart bled for Christian.
“Dr. Tewes . . .” Fenger found his voice. “My office, please.”
All of their dealings behind closed doors.
Others no doubt wondered what a man of Fenger’s caliber had to do with the likes of a Dr. Tewes.
She followed him down an institutional gray corridor to his office.
Alone with Tewes, fresh from the Purvis autopsy, Dr. Christian Fenger liberally washed his hands even though he’d been wearing rubber gloves during the autopsy. He splashed about at the sink in his office, taking his time, in no hurry to 108
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learn what Tewes wanted next. He toweled off and tossed the towel over his left shoulder, went to his desk and yanked a drawer open.
For a moment, she feared he’d pull out a pistol and shoot her. Instead, Fenger pulled out a large bottle of whiskey and two glasses. She couldn’t blame him, as Tewes held sway over him even here in his own office; a continuing threat, seated vulturelike, wanting more of him. He must think the demands on him would never end.
