City for Ransom, page 13
part #1 of Alastair Ransom Series
“Blackmailing little weasel.” Ransom downed the re-mainder of his ale. “Certainly enough reason to plot a man’s demise.”
“You could, I suppose, arrest me for all I’ve said.”
“Yes, I could, but I won’t.” Stepping up his drinks, Ransom signaled Hinky for another red Irish.
“You’re a good friend, Alastair.”
“I need you precisely where you are, close to the Haymarket records.”
“Damn it, Alastair, are you now blackmailing me for those damnable records?”
“Hey, a favor for a favor.”
“The Chicago way, yes.”
“Hardly blackmail.”
“Ahhh . . . a euphemism for it? How deep or shallow runs our friendship, Alastair, and how many men can you call your equal in this city? Do you wish to die a man apart as you’ve lived since Haymarket?” Ransom tapped the wall with his cane. “I still have physi
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cal problems from that day, and I’ll likely have problems with the official cover-up till the day I die.”
“Your friends’re dead. You can’t bring ’em back, Alastair, and pursuing Haymarket can only end in your becoming an even bigger target than you already are. There are vested interests in keeping Haymarket in its grave.” “Like it never happened.”
“Like it never happened.”
They sat in gloomy silence.
“Besides, your hands’re a bit full with this mad garroter.”
“Damn press is calling the bastard the Phantom of the Fair.”
“Do you have any idea how many people are attracted to the fair on the off chance of seeing some shred of this maniac’s handiwork? And then you, juggling that boy’s head at the train station? My God, man. You must do something about your public persona and that bloody temper.” “Not to worry about me, Doc.”
“Who then worries for you, Ransom? Polly Pete?”
“Leave Polly outta this.”
Fenger threw hands up in defeat. “All right, all right . . .”
A silence engulfed them, and they listened to some traveling minstrel switching from a whaling tune to a ballad of a lover who’d lost all sense of the world, lost in the arms of a woman.
“Are you still getting the headaches?”
“Stop with it, Doc.”
“Then the answer is yes. You try the elixir I concocted for you? You using the brace on your neck each night?”
“Don’t always sleep at home, and I don’t carry the damn brace with me, Christian.”
“Of course . . . I see . . .” Fenger laughed and finished his beer. “Maybe you should go to Tewes for a phrenological examination. Find out all you can about him. I’ve checked through my contacts in Washington, New York, even Europe, and no one knows anything about him; it’s as if he simply hung his shingle out one day.”
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“Should I fall off my chair with the revelation he’s a fraud?” Ransom’s hearty laugh interfered with the balladeer’s music. Several grunts and catcalls escaped from patrons listening intently and crying in their foam.
Christian whispered, “Hold on the matter of Tewes.”
“What? I thought—”
“If we can learn more, then perhaps we can trump him with his own bloody past. That way, we don’t leave this world as assassins.”
“At least you don’t.”
“I only believe half your boast and none of your bark, Alastair.”
“I could tell you stories, Doctor.”
Fenger matched Ransom’s stare, and in the man’s eye, Christian indeed saw a pair of burning coals from the hearth of Hades when a bent shadow crept across their table. A fast-moving, athletic, well-dressed man in black cape, carrying a gentleman’s cane, obviously just for show, and the cane had a glistening, metallic head—a wolf’s head like Ransom’s own but not scrimshaw. Ransom instinctively felt as if evil had passed by, and he followed the shadowy figure, leaning to glance at what sort of footwear he had. High boots. Ransom could only make out a pair of shining black heels as the door closed on the man. His mind flooded with what the homeless witness had described of the killer’s clothing and boots; this drove him to his feet, wanting to tail the man . . .
senseless, futile act. For how many men in Chicago carried a cane and wore boots and cape? But even as he started up, he realized a new shadow split the table. Dr. Tewes now stood before them.
“So this is where the three of us talk?” Tewes challenged.
“How did you know we were here?”
“I tailed Dr. Fenger.”
“You’ve a helluva nerve, Tewes, and you disgust me,” began Ransom. “D-I-G-U-S—”
“I know how to spell it, Inspector.”
“What more do you want from me, Tewes?” asked Chris
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tian, his forehead creased in pain, eyes drooping. “What more could you possibly need tonight?”
“I appreciate all your help, Doctor, but I also’d hoped that you and I, and perhaps Ransom here, could put our differences aside for the good of this case.”
“You ask too much.”
“You think you are such a cunning bastard, Tewes,” added Alastair, sitting again.
“I know that you two’d as soon plot my death, gentlemen . . . than share a drink, and yet . . .” Jane for a moment came to the forefront, a tear threatening to expose her. She worked to regain her composure.
“Take a seat, by all means, as I’ll be going,” said Alastair.
“Seems I’ve got some patchwork to do with my woman, thanks to your muckraking in my personal affairs.”
“Polly’s my patient now, one with serious mental problems, which I’ve discussed with no one but you, Inspector, as I suspect your misguided feelings for her are genuine if not—”
“What the deuce would you know of what goes on between a man and a woman!” The place silenced at this.
Tewes spoke through grinding teeth. “Look, Inspector, just because you’re nice to her . . . well, this doesn’t mean you or this city’s good for her.”
“She’s been wanting me to take her to the fair, to ride that damned wheel in the sky and—”
“By all means, indulge her, but in the end, her best hope is a young man her own age who’ll take her far away from here.”
“Who gives you the authority to make her decisions?”
“I cannot make decisions for her; I can only advise, and I advise you to come back to my office some day by appointment and allow me to help you with those headaches and what is troubling your mind, Inspector.” Ransom shot to his feet, towering over Tewes, wondering how long he’d been in the tavern and eavesdropping. “God, but you have balls for such a puny fellow.”
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makes a man strong and what makes a woman brave. Polly knows now what is at the root of her troubled mind—her father . . . a man about your age when he raped her. She ever tell you that, sir?”
Ransom, like an elephant shot through the eyes, dropped back into his seat.
“That she is the victim of incest by not a stranger, not a stepfather, but by her own blood father? You, sir, are a sick standin for a father she is still trying to please, though he’s in the grave . . . to make sense of and to—” “Enough! Shut your mouth. Polly loves me, and I’ll be the one takes her outta the cesspool she’s made of her life! Not some fool who tells people’s fortunes by the knots on their flaming heads.”
“—and to understand herself, independent of you and your nightmares.” Tewes settled back as if resting his case.
Ransom gritted his teeth, shot Fenger a glaring look, exchanged a dark thought with Christian, then rushed from Hinky’s, pushing out the door so hard it creaked on its hinges, threatening to come off.
Hinky shouted at the big cop, “Hey! Keep such brutishness outta my place, copper!”
“I could help that man to calm down to a much needed catlike mental state of serenity if he’d let me.” She once again sat before Fenger as James Tewes. She so wanted to reveal herself to him at this point, to end the dark ties that bound them in this pretense, and the awful way that things had developed. She feared his reaction, and yet, she wanted his warmth, his renowned caring, his respect, but how?
“I thought I’d seen the last of you tonight. What else’ve you come to milk me of?”
“I would like to tell you something important . . . and it is difficult to broach, Dr. Fenger.”
“What is it? You want my blessings? Want to address me as Christian? Want chumminess from me?” Fenger’s scowl could not be masked.
“Damn . . . this is so hard. You only led me to believe you CITY FOR RANSOM
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thought my idea of creating a mental picture of the killer a good one. I took you at your word when—”
“I am a master of facetiousness. Even Ransom knows this.
But now what on earth are you driving at, man?”
She pulled away her neckerchief, revealing her throat.
She needn’t say a word. Her fingers trailed a faint red glow that died along her milky white neck. No protrusion of Adam’s apple, and a makeup line gave Tewes’s face and neck a darker hue. “You’re not a man! My God, woman, who are you and why? Why this elaborate ruse?” “It is me, Christian, Dr. Jane Francis.”
He squinted and blinked all at once.
“You once loved me, respected my father . . . and you . . .
and . . .”
“. . . and you left me.”
“Not you. I left Washington for Europe to further my studies, to gain access to—”
“Your future.”
“—a true medical library, recall?”
“Yes but you stopped writing, and all these years I had no idea. I thought some awful fate’d befallen, that you were . . .
dead. Now look at you.”
“I can explain.”
“What have you done to yourself?”
CHAPTER 13
They had brought their voices down and spoke under the minstrel’s songs, and the muffled conversations of Hinky Dink’s.
“I’ve a daughter in medical school. Can’t do that on what a woman makes—not in any womanly profession or in my chosen profession.”
“But you’re a gifted physician with surgical skills touting phrenology and nonsense and selling snake oils! And doing it as a man. A waste on more levels than I can say.”
Hinky interrupted, asking if the young Dr. Tewes would care to partake of a drink. She ordered Amaretto liquor.
“My God . . .” Christian moaned, “Ransom—”
“What of ’im?”
“—has the wrong idea about . . . and—”
“No one else is to know, Dr. Fenger. No one! You must promise. You must reveal my secret to no one, and especially not to Alastair Ransom.”
“But the blackmail and the—”
“I’d never’ve gone through with it, sir, never.”
“But Tewes may’ve?”
“A means to an end.”
“To gain access to Alastair’s case?”
Jane nodded. “I can explain why.”
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“You don’t understand. As angry as I am at Tewes, you must know—”
“I can sense Ransom wants to hurt me . . . ahhh, Dr.
Tewes, that is.”
“Hurt you? He wants to drown you in Lake Michigan, and I just handed him all the justification.”
“That’s his knee-jerk reaction? Kill Tewes?”
“He could be lurking in the shadows of the alleyway just outside right now.”
“Then the two of you . . . you really were plotting—”
“Dr. Tewes’s demise, yes.”
“My God . . . perhaps I play my part too well.”
“I’d say . . . yes.”
“How can we stop him without telling him the truth?”
“There mayn’t be any stopping him short of his discovering you wear knickers!”
“Shhh! Please.” She looked around but no one heard above the lament being sung of unrequited love. “But Ransom’s a law enforcement official, a police officer, an inspector in the—”
“All the more reason to fear him.”
She gulped and Hinky handed her the Amaretto at the same instant. She threw it back and swallowed. “I needed that.”
“We have to tell him something.”
“No!”
“I . . . we left it with his calling on you at your office . . .
asking for a miracle cure for those recurring headaches he’s suffered since the bomb.”
They sat in silence. The balladeer song changed to a mother’s child lost to war. Finally, Jane said, “All right . . .
when he comes to see me . . . do you think him foolish enough to . . . in my own home . . . that he’d—”
“No, actually, I think he’ll gather information on you—
Dr. Tewes—for now.”
“Clumsy . . . comes ’round ostensibly for an examination? For the headaches?”
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“A phrenological exam, during which he’ll interrogate you—Tewes that is. We agreed at the last only to get some dirt to counteract Tewes, but . . .”
“But what?”
“For one, he’s bloody unpredictable, and I didn’t like that look in his eyes when—”
“Far from pleasant, agreed. Funny . . . as children, I admired him so, but he’s so changed . . . and I rather doubt he has any memory of—”
“As children?”
“I have the dubious honor of having gone to the same school when I was four, before Father moved us to the far north side.”
“Can’t imagine Ransom ever having been a child.”
“But in so many ways . . . he still is.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“This new science of the mind and neurosurgery fascinates the child in me, I suppose.”
“I insist on walking you home, Dr. Tewes. In the event you should encounter any unpleasantness.”
“A big unpleasantness named Ransom, you mean? That won’t be necessary, Doctor.”
Christian released a twenty-year-old sigh. “My God, so it’s now Dr. Jane Francis. Had you not gone off—”
“Believe me, sir. I learned more from watching you work than anything in all my studies, both here and abroad.”
“And now you’re back. Declare yourself, Jane, and I’ll do all in my power to get you an appointment at Cook County.”
“As what? I would be put to work doing nursing and scut work, and we both know that, dear, sweet Christian.”
He stared into her knowing eyes.
“Don’t look that way at me. You know it’s true. You, sir . . . you live in a world of your own making, but the rest of us . . . we live in this world.”
“In the end, we all of us create our own reality. You’re foolish to’ve created yours as Tewes!”
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“You say that . . . that it is up to me, yet you know why I had to leave Chicago, and why I had to return as Tewes.”
“A woman asking for a look at a private collection of medical books to fulfill her dissertation so she might graduate on to medical school, yes.”
“And I was turned down.”
“You ought to’ve fought them!”
“With what?”
“With the strength your father instilled in you!”
“You sound like my Gabrielle.”
“Your girl . . . now in medical school?”
“Yes, and she is such a dreamer.”
“Dreamers are needed in this life.”
“Perhaps . . . but my dreams were done in by reality.”
“But reality is what you create of it, my dear.”
“You and Gabby will love one another.”
“You . . . daughter.”
“Sadly, the young man murdered at the train station was seeing Gabrielle, and God forgive me, I’d forbidden their seeing one another, and now this.”
“Poor child.”
“She can’t be distracted from her studies—not by anyone or anything, not if she’s to succeed.”
“Succeed like her mother or like Dr. Tewes?”
She bridled at this. “We’ve had disagreements . . . over not allowing anything to distract her from her goals.”
“Her goals?”
“Yes, her goals.”
“Well, Jane . . . I am an outsider here, but—”
“The young man who was killed, he’d walked her home from the fair. It was to be the last time she’d see him! That’s what I told her . . . and prophetically and sadly . . .”
“And how is she taking it?”
“Too calmly . . . too well. Going about . . . my God, as if nothing of the sort could possibly’ve happened.”
“A holding pattern; in order to deal with it. Grief must 128
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manifest itself in some form or other. Keep her close; keep a watch on your daughter, Jane.”
“I have.”
“To lose someone close is difficult enough, but to lose someone to this madman afoot in Chicago?” Dr. Fenger looked profoundly sad for Gabrielle.
“Yes, so here again is reality. Like a hurdle everywhere.”
“Still . . . inside here,” he said, pointing to his head, “you can and will one day turn a corner, and when you do, you’ll be living your dream, as Dr. Jane Francis.”
“Discouraged, disillusioned, hurt. How do I ever dream again?”
“You find a way.”
“Hell, Christian, you’ve heard the views held by Dr.
McKinnette and the great Dr. Banefield Jones and Dr. Stille.
That women haven’t the disposition or the stomach for medicine, and especially surgery.”
“They harp the belief of the general population.”
