City for Ransom

“What’re you talking about? Alastair Ransom? A crutch?

To hell with you, Griffin Drimmer.” He grabbed the other man by the scruff of the neck and kiddingly shook him.

Griff laughed and pulled away. “Part of the human condition, I’d say, like decaying teeth. God giveth teeth and he taketh ’em away.”

“From perfect alabaster skin to boils and bunions.”

“From paper cuts to falling debris.”

“Unraveled ties and crashing platforms!”

“And safety vaults.”

“From six stories up.”

Griffin kept it going. “Locusts and all manner of insect pestilence.”

“Melancholia and stillbirths, amoebic dysentery and the slats.”

“Gallstones and tumors!”

“Failing hearing.”

“Loss of sight, taste, smell, and touch.”

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“Tapeworms and tomato mites.”

“Ships lost at sea.”

“Coal mines collapsing.”

“The sky doth fall.”

“And G’damn satanic bastard bedbugs!” finished Alastair.

Together they laughed at the competition. “All part of God’s grand design, and certainly not to be challenged,” finished Ransom. “I think Mr. Darwin may be right. It is a world belonging to parasites.” “Allowing evils large and minute, no doubt to so bedevil and confuse our souls as to send us leaping into His open arms?”

“No doubt—but, Griff, I wasn’t referring to any addiction of mine when you began all this.”

“Then what were you referring to?”

“To my, ahhh . . . my rough handling of Tewes and that little matter of the head. I shouldn’t have lost my temper.”

“Lord, Rance, you held your patience longer than anyone ahhh . . . expected. That is among the lads.”

Ransom’s laughter filled the clock tower entryway and spilled out the door and into the death corridor as he pushed through. Reinvigorated, he returned to take charge of his investigation. The photographer, Philo Keane, had continued to work from atop his ladder-step tripod, getting himself and his camera into position. He next fitted his bulky camera into a glovelike vise that framed and held it steady. Below lay the uncovered body, the tarp held now by Philo’s young assistant, who stared in stark horror at the sight.

“What in the name of St. Elmo’s Fire is taking Philo so long?”

“Keane can’t finish his work without the head, as Dr.

Tewes—”

Ransom marched for the stationmaster’s office, shouting,

“Then what in St. Elmo’s is taking Tewes so damn long?”

Griffin muttered, “Oh, shit.”

Keane, atop the ladder, shouted at Griffin. “Out . . . out of the frame, please, Inspector! I’ve got to get a few headless depictions.”

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Ghoul, Griffin thought an instant before slipping on a ruler alongside the body. He then righted things and scurried out of the viewfinder’s range just as, ahead of him, Ransom disappeared into the stationmaster’s office to the sound of the click-whoosh, click-whoosh of Philo’s master camera.

Meanwhile, timing each shot, Philo’s assistant on the ground, having discarded the tarp, now shakily held on to the flashpan and ignited it with each click of the shutter. The two of them soon created enough additional acrid smoke that everyone began to cough.

CHAPTER 6

Stationmaster’s Office, Illinois Central, 6:09a.m.

The seared, blistered, fire-blackened head told Dr. James Phineas Tewes how horrid the suffering had been for the young man. The blackened eye sockets now painted in human creosote told Inspector Ransom how the soft tissues of the eye had been boiled and mottled by the flames.

Still if one worked at it and stared long enough, the boy’s an-guished features came forth from this fired negative. The dead young man’s rictus smile appeared as an ironic grin, but Ransom knew it for what it was— muscle contraction as with the pulled-tight withered arms—a detail learned attending autopsies conducted by Dr. Fenger.

Still, the grotesque grin, seeming so inappropriate, proved difficult to look at, even for a seasoned veteran with the CPD. For Dr. Tewes—a relatively young fellow—Ransom imagined it a far worse sight than any cadaver he’d worked on in a sanitary medical school in France. For Tewes it must be an excruciating sight, regardless of Tewes’s having asked for it.

Running gloved hands over the severed head, reading the skull from bumps and indentions, Tewes looked as if in trance. The con man’s white gloves came away with grimy 48

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soot. “He was thinking of home, family, his loved ones somewhere beyond Chicago . . . homesick, he was for . . .”

Ransom shook his head at the mock reverence in the room, and he audibly groaned on seeing Tewes’s eyes roll back in his head, while his hands continued to hover over the scorched hairless cranium. Surprised to see Thom Carmichael of the Herald beside Chief Kohler, Ransom tapped Thom and said, “Phrenology—as bogus a science as ever concocted.” “Yet the chief of detectives of the second largest city in America”—whispered Carmichael in response—“a city on the verge of modernism, wishing to join the ranks of Paris, London, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and New York, approves of this black art? dressed in the laurels of science?” “How the bloody hell did you get in here, Carmichael?”

“Kohler . . . he insisted. Special invite.”

Carmichael, a cagey, crusty fifty-year-old, hard-drinking, hard-working reporter of Irish and English descent allowed nothing past him. “I loved your handing Tewes the head of John-the-Doe out there—only the platter was missing.” “Tewes had it coming, so to speak.”

“You do make my life interesting, Rance.”

“Trust me, it wasn’t for your benefit or the Herald’s, and before you print a word of what you’ve seen, I wanna sit down with you, understood?”

“I am a little short on my rent this month.”

The phrenologist gasped twice in quick succession as if an electric shock had gone through him. The hefty and misshapen, bearded stationmaster, a man named Manfred Parthipans, stood wide-eyed, lashes atwitter in an oversized face, his mouth agape. Ransom imagined him soon at the nearest pub relating all he’d witnessed today. “At least the boy was thinking pleasant thoughts at the end,” Manfred opined.

“Hence the smile,” said Kohler, faking a watery eye.

Ransom could not let it pass. “The constricted smile re

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