Imagine Tewes alongside a man like Christian Fenger.
“Hanrahan’s . . . far more likely.” The South Levee was the den of lowlife in the city. As a cop, he knew every section of town and its character, and the Levee maintained the deadliest reputation, even above Hair Trigger block. Called by many the Old Tenderloin district, the South Levee had become firmly entrenched twenty-odd years before any thought of a Columbian Exposition. Now there existed
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like icy fingers toward the world’s fair, close enough to the Loop office buildings as to be within view from the Union League Club windows. A horror and an abomination to the gentry.
Ransom climbed into a waiting cab he found a few blocks from Tewes’s place and shouted up through the window at the driver to take him to Hanrahan’s in the South Levee. The cabbie hesitated and stared down at his fare as if seeing him for the first time.
“Official business,” said Ransom, displaying his inspector’s badge.
The man’s face sank like stone turning to dough. He knew to get his fare he’d have an hour’s headache just filling out the paperwork, and the wait for the reimbursement would take months.
Ransom heard the driver’s guarded curses as the cab lurched forward without grace. As the carriage made its journey through busy, crowded streets for the south Loop area, Ransom thought of this turn of events with Merielle.
She’d made him promise to not harm Dr. Tewes or his hands.
“The man’s hands’re unbelievable!” she’d exclaimed.
“Drink your absinthe,” he’d shouted back.
“But Alastair, he possesses some sort of
But his foul mood against Tewes and against the bastard who’d beaten Mere, fueled by each rhythmic
Perhaps she was incapable of such a love. She did indeed seem “shut up” in sin. She had let him down. Disappointed him. Falling back into old habits, and going to this snake-oil salesman when he should suffice. And then the nerve of the little creep. Giving bad advice to Merielle, warning her off CITY FOR RANSOM
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him! All this had come about
Just when he’d begun to feel that all was well. That he had control of his life. That he had the woman he loved. That she loved him. Now this.
Plus Merielle had taken to lying to him, something he expected and saw every day on the job. But not from her. It infuriated him. She swore that it’d not been Elias Jervis who’d blackened her eye. Swore on her mother’s memory that Jervis had left for Milwaukee as certain friends of Ransom’s—toughs on the force, she’d called them —had made life in Chicago too “hot” for Jervis, the worst sort of pimp, to continue in “Ransomland,” as she’d put it. Merielle added, “l don’t know the man’s name, only that he wore a black cape, a top hat, boots all shined. A real gent,” she’d finished.
“Some bloody gent! Strikes you ’cross the face?” he replied.
Where Hanrahan’s sat, square between these two levee districts, was the southern tip of the Loop, bounded on the east by Dearborn, Clark on the west, and Harrison on the north. This had more recently come to be called the wicked Custom House Place Levee. The “Gem” of the prairie continued its reputation as America’s wickedest city, its reputation that of a bacchanal the likes of which must make Rome blush.
High-minded temperance leaders and aldermen who didn’t care about getting reelected blathered on about one day burning out the cancer of the entire South Levee—both new and old—in the name of the Lord, as done with other areas in the early days. Some nights a parade of angry citizens marched through the South Levee with torches held at the ready, but unlike The Sands and Hair Trigger Block, an actual burn-out hadn’t come to pass. Still an uneasy tension between the so-called socially conscious and the vice merchants always hung over Chicago like a pall. Thirty-seven to forty houses of prostitution squatted within the confines of 92
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the new levee alone. Forty-six saloons and growing. Eleven or twelve pawnbroker houses. A shooting gallery or two, and an obscene bookstore. Many a dipping house operated here, in which a closet-sized room was opened on a waiting prostitute, the John mugged and robbed, girl and pimp splitting the proceeds.
It’d taken him a long time, but finally Ransom had gotten some useful information out of Merielle. She came across with what the “gent” called himself—“Mr. Sleepeck Stumpf”
which sounded ridiculous to Ransom’s ear, but she insisted on it.
He’d passed the name along to Dot ’n’ Carry and other of his streetwise friends to hunt him down—he wanted a word with Mr. Stumpf. The result so far pointed to a ficti-tious name.
Alastair placed his cane with the wolf’s-head bone handle at ease alongside him as he leaned back into the cushioned seat of the hansom cab. This particular cab was indeed plush and the burgundy seats rich and warm. The interior, no doubt, had been done by the Pullman Company or Fischer.
The Studebaker carriage company had lost out repeatedly to the other two for large contracts; Ransom had read as much in the papers. He tried to recall a time when he’d had a moment to read a paper, fatigue washing over him.
Alastair closed his eyes as the cab made for the destination suggested by the handsome petite woman whose features were surprisingly memorable, although he’d given her scarcely a nod. He wondered if she had any idea of the Levee district’s reputation. Surely no, or she wouldn’t’ve pointed out that her brother, the good doctor, frequented the area.
Or had she wantonly wished for an officer of the law to know of her brother’s questionable proclivities? How much did this woman know of Dr. Tewes, or of his comings and goings? Perhaps, in the future, she could prove useful?
CHAPTER 10
Philo Keane had fallen asleep to the sound of a Strauss waltz on his phonograph while thinking of Miss Chesley Mandor. Philo had one other vice than drink, and this was his prurient interest in the curvaceous body of a woman—as he’d all his life engaged in the search for the perfectly formed female, a dream that possessed him. He purely loved and respected the feminine form, from the tender half flush along the nape of the neck to the luscious ripe oval of the breasts, the deep valley of the cleavage, the enrapturing triangle of the crotch—a magnet to his eye and camera lens.
He loved the species, fussing with her lips, her eyebrows, her lashes, her ears and adornments, and her neck and necklaces and chokers and lacy things from items on a bonnet to items on her privates. The way she tossed back her hair; the way she tossed back a pint of ale; the way she stood hands on hips when angry. Yes, he loved this vivacious creature called woman. He loved this ideal in his mind’s eye, but he also loved the flawed ones, the fallen ones, the sad and swollen ones, but most of all, he loved any woman—prude or prostitute—who’d had the decency to retain the beauty given her early in life.
Philo wanted more than anything to combine his interest and love of the female form with his art. To make money with these two interests simultaneously had become his 94
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driving obsession. He had to be careful, however, as the Victorian prudishness of many if not most of his prospective clients in such a venture reared its ugly head and suddenly some fool is calling a cop, shouting “pornography” when in fact, Philo created art.
All round him, Philo saw the most god-awful advertising.
