City for Ransom

Fliers created by fools. No use of negative space. No visual component. As an artist with a camera, he found the advertising people settled for appalling and garish and foolish and redundant and boring and pedestrian and on and on . . . Not a whit of thought in it and no wit besides! But he had plans for Chicago advertisers. He had now a library of photos of beautiful women in various poses in Grecian and Roman dress, some quite suggestive, and should he find a backer, someone with gumption and capital—why then, look out.

And should he superimpose the lady with a farm implement or a tin of snuff, a soft drink or hard liquor, or that new contraption invented by Thomas Crapper called indoor plumbing? What limits remained? If only he could squeeze money out of some of these old duffers like Sears, Roebuck or Field, there was a fortune to be made in advertising.

It all seemed God’s plan for him.

Born in Canada, Philo Keane had immigrated to Chicago in search of work like so many before him, except that he was a skilled lithographer. But he gave up this career for what appeared a far more lucrative one— photography—which he’d grown to love, and which he suspected would supplant all li-thography someday, making his older profession obsolete.

Philo had studied with a fellow Canadian, the famous Napoleon Sarony, himself apprenticed to the celebrated lithographers Currier & Ives. Napoleon, now near death in a New York hospital, had made history when he sued a clothier who expropriated a photograph of none other than Oscar Wilde posed by Sarony in an artistic rendering—as Sarony had pioneered the celebrity portraiture business.

The case was the Burrows-Giles Lithographic Co. v.

Sarony, and its roots went back to an advertisement for hats CITY FOR RANSOM

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that’d used 85,000 reproductions of Sarony’s print, while ignoring Sarony’s copyright!

Sarony, on learning of the outrage, took his case to court and won, but his opponents appealed to the Supreme Court where they argued that since the technology of photographs hadn’t existed in 1790, then photographs could not be covered under the copyright laws framed in a 1790 Act of Congress.

The Supreme Court disagreed, citing that the founding fathers had anticipated all manner of futuristic discoveries in both patent and copyright law. Justice Samuel Miller, who wrote the ruling, added that an author is simply the one “to whom anything owes its origin.” As Sarony’s #18 Oscar Wilde was ruled a work of art and the “product of plaintiff’s intellectual invention, and as a class of invention for which the Constitution intended to secure to the author for exclusive right to use, publish, and sell . . .” and so it went.

The ruling made Sarony and his company a household name.

And while men with vision like Sarony had gone full tilt into the photographic portraiture business with a passion, and their reward was great, Philo disliked portraiture as iron-ically “lacking in art.” At least he could not make art of it, but he could make art of a beautiful body.

He’d gone broke filming naked women—prostitutes on the whole, but women to whom he’d paid homage and greenbacks. His collection of feminine beauty was, in dis-creet gentlemen’s circles, legend, and Philo’d begun to turn a profit on some of this trade, as clients—quite specific in their demands—had grown.

“—a redhead fully nude, a redhead partially nude bent over a barrel, a nude blonde doing a pirouette, nude brunette in a tutu doing a pirouette, a nude from the waist up, a nude from the waist down with a cigar in one hand, a brandy snifter in another . . .”

He gulped down another drink. Surprisingly, he did his best work, when either angry or tipsy. Regardless of client and demand, Philo always carefully posed his models in an 96

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artistic manner with attention to detail and decorum, using his extensive collection of luxurious sheer nightwear in a pose reminiscent of sculptured goddesses, sometimes . . .

never always and never for certain . . . but on some rare occasions, he did reach a pinnacle of stellar art, like the piece that Ransom had purchased for three bottles of rye and two of whiskey for a likeness of Polly Pete. Polly was spectacular, as close to Philo’s ideal as he ever hoped to come, but Polly was Ransom’s woman now. Now there was a beautifully rendered piece of art if ever there was—Polly . . . real name Merielle Spears. She’d gone rough-hewn and hard-edged early in life, and yet under the right conditions and upbringing, she may well have been a lady of high society.

But even Polly was eclipsed by Chesley.

Philo returned to the darkroom to examine cuts taken at the train station. Gruesome. But the impromptu one of Ransom handing that charlatan Tewes the head proved priceless.

Philo laughed anew at the incident. How like Ransom to lose it like a rattler without a rattle, so suddenly and without warning.

Keane ogled the developed photographs, hanging each now to dry and talked to himself. “Must make more prints.

Limfkins, Haldermott, and Janklow pay well for photos of the dead, and this series of ‘head’ and ‘headless’ shots’ll go dearly. As for the photo of Alastair in all his raging glory—

what a bull of a man he is—well that one any newsman in the city’ll pay a premium for.”

But he pulled up short in his enthusiasm, remembering that Alastair was the only friend he had.

“Damn bloody dilemma, what old man?” he asked himself. “Bloody friendship.” The Canadian accent he’d worked years to conceal filtered in whenever he was alone.

The phonograph record in the other room had continued a rhythmic irking as it had come to the end of the music and repeatedly ran in the final groove.

He stumbled toward the phonograph, anxious to put on CITY FOR RANSOM

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another Strauss and dance with himself. As he did so, he gulped down another drink.

Along State Street the same day

The killer lifted what had been Purvis’s handkerchief—or more likely his girlfriend’s, as it smelled of perfume. The smell quickened his pulse as he relived the bloodletting.

Stumpf could do that, imagine it all as if happening over again, even here, standing below an awning to avoid the late-afternoon shower. Nearby carriage horses slick with rain stood silent vigil amid the bustle of Chicago commerce. He stared at his reflection in a Field’s window and saw the four mirrored eyes—his and Purvis’s. Saw the right hand fingers popping off like so many escaping tadpoles. Then blood spurting from his victim’s neck, painted both mirror and basin. Young Cliffton had instinctively covered the leaking dyke of his carotid artery with his left hand, but by now every vein and artery in the neck had been severed. No holding back the flood.

Even here in broad daylight on Chicago’s hard-packed streets, the killer felt a sexual release beneath his clothes, so clearly had Sleepeck Stumpf recreated the killing, reimagining the event by simply sniffing repeatedly at the purloined handkerchief—a souvenir of achievement. His first male.

It’d been interesting the way the boy’s legs had buckled; how like a marionette he’d become, giving way to the gravity of death . . . like a stone sinking. The feel of it . . . his power over life at that moment of death’s weight taking the boy down to his knees—it all held such absolute charm for the assassin.

How the victim slid so easily over the marble floor as I dragged him along in his own blood. A wondrous emotion welling up. Something never imagined. How like the slaughter animal, the way his carcass gave itself up to my control.

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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