wheel, so high above the fair, she remained the focus of his attention.
He’d placed his fist up her skirt and dug his fingers into her, making her laugh. He claimed never to’ve touched a woman there before. Claimed himself a virgin.
She’d assured him, “I’ll be gentle.”
She said so again now that they’d returned from the fair, as she teasingly dropped her dress about her feet.
While she tied hair from her eyes, he seductively sidled up, one thing on his mind, Polly’d surmised and giggled.
She leaned back into him, as Stumpf slid something thin and fragile about her throat, a fine wire-width bauble, she thought, when she gasped at her mirrored image on seeing the blood necklace.
Stumpf took his time cutting into her soft flesh. An eighth of an inch at a time, whispering, “In truth, dear Polly, this bow tie’s a gift from Alastair.”
She sputtered, her words choked by blood.
“His vile blessings on it, Polly girl.”
She coughed up the sumptuous meal he’d bought her at the exquisite Palmer House downtown. It came up with blood as she succumbed to death. Blood and bile her last earthly memories. She neither felt nor smelled the kerosene doused over her, nor the fire that lit up her body.
Her dress still about her ankles had soaked up the kerosene too, and it quickly caught flame, and the fire took on a wild life of its own, jumping to the curtains as if alive.
A killing acrid smoke filled Ransom’s love nest.
In a panic, the garroter swept from the place, rushing just ahead of the fingers of fire chasing him out the door of this CITY FOR RANSOM
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tinderbox. A final glance back as he slammed the door was like looking into the fiery maw of Hades. In minutes, the entire second story was feeding flames; a handful of minutes more, and the growing fire began consuming the ground floor from above.
From a safe distance outside, where Clark met Halsted, the killer stood watching the flames devour Ransom’s home away from home. A giddy laugh wanted escape, but now he realized his vulnerability as an oddly curious odor of burnt hair rose to his nostrils. He lifted the cuffs of his overcoat to find hair on his arms curled into miniature bits of brittle bush—entirely singed.
They strolled the gas-lit street toward Muldoon’s.
“I’ll admit, I didn’t know that Polly was a Merielle until late in our sessions,” began Tewes, who’d pulled forth his own pipe and had accepted a light from Ransom. “Nor . . .
nor that it was you she was—had an arrangement with. Odd coincidence that.”
“I’m not a big one for coincidence, Tewes.”
“Does it so kill you to call me Doctor?”
Ransom only grunted.
Tewes struggled to keep pace with his gait. “Things in Polly’s case . . . they just came to a head recently, and only recently did you come up, sir.”
“What do you mean things came to a head?”
“What
“An epiphany?”
“The unexamined life is not worth living, Inspector.”
“Is that an epiphany?”
“Epiphany comes of self-awareness, a realization of one’s own needs or weaknesses, or source of power, or . . . well, you get the idea—Greeks knew of it.”
“I see.”
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ROBERT W. WALKER
“Good.”
“I’m sure that you’re . . . beneath it all, Tewes, a relatively . . .
“As my title is so hard to get over your tongue, Inspector, it’s James. Or if you prefer Phineas, Inspector ahhh . . .
Alastair . . . may I call you Alastair?”
“I suppose it can do no harm.”
“God, man, you can be infuriating. May I or mayn’t I? Or shall we carry on with Inspector and your mix of snipe-and-grumble-and-mutter for doctor?”
“You’re likely the most difficult man to accept an apology that I’ve ever met,
“Ahhh . . . so your answer comes out,
They continued in silence. The heartthrob of the city buzzed, all the drays, the cabs, the clopping of horse shoes against earth here, cobblestone there, the more distant sounds of the train yards, the stockyards, ships in the great harbor that was the lakeshore, down to the sound of the gas lamps that lit their way.
“There’s talk of getting electric lampposts, or so I hear,”
said Tewes, looking at a lamp that sputtered on and off. “To replace these old things.”
“We’re rushing into a new century with all our fine inventions, aren’t we?” he calmly replied.
“So much progress . . . and so much loss.”
“Ahhh . . . something we agree on.”
“I suspect you a bit old-fashioned, Alastair.”
“Aye . . . I’ll admit to a touch of it.”
They arrived at Muldoon’s door, and Ransom held it wide. His newfound manners made her suspicious. “Your talk with Dr. Fenger has improved our relations, I’d say.”
“Some, yes.”
“Some . . .” She wondered what
“Gave me a general dressing-down, he did. He has a far higher opinion of you than I’d imagined possible. Says your CITY FOR RANSOM
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techniques may be somewhat experimental, ahead of times, even extraordinary—”
“Said that did he?”
“OK, he said you were eccentric.”
“I see.”
They found a seat in the dimly lit, wild saloon, replete with gunmen at the bar, spittoons lining the dirty floor littered with the leavings of the day—mostly bones thrown to prowling dogs, Muldoon’s more obvious friends. Muldoon stood an enormous man behind the bar, slack-jawed giant that he was, and according to a whispered remark into Tewes’s ear, “Muldoon’ll truck no undo criminal activity on the premises unless he gets a cut, so don’t go plying your trade here, James.” Jane decided her disguise as Tewes remained intact, as Ransom’s body language, speech, and swagger, all but the added politeness, remained the same toward Tewes.
They ordered two pints of ale and a pitcher besides, Tewes putting up a hand at the suggestion they could drink so much.
“I need steady hands for my practice when the door opens tomorrow.”
“Oh, come, by then you’ll be steady again.”
Tewes nodded, accepting Ransom’s generosity. “All right, but I don’t intend to stagger home.”
“Ahhh . . . then you are a better man than I.” Ransom laughed at his own remark.
Tewes raised his ale to Ransom’s toast, accepting her plight for the moment. While Dr. Tewes liked ale, Jane did not.
