City for Ransom

“To a new beginning between us, Doctor Tewes.”

“Why, thank you, Alastair. Coming from you, I’m most pleased.”

“As you should be. Drink up!”

After a moment of awkward silence, Ransom said with open palms, “Oh, I shouldn’t’ve been so hard on you to begin with, really . . . I mean, when you look around . . .

there’re so many ahhh . . . unusual new methods and tech

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niques, just as Christian says, and your magnetic healing is really mild by . . . say compared to—”

“Mysticism, seances, hypnotism, spiritualism—raising the dead at a cotillion party?”

“Balancing sieves on a fork, or divining by Quija board?”

She raised Tewes’s glass in a gesture that said touche.

“I’m trying to say that you’re almost within the realm of . . .” began Ransom. “That is to say at least close to . . . I mean at least scientific sounding . . . and something natural about magnetic fields. So, I’m just saying—” “That you accept me as somewhat less than eccentric?

Perhaps normal?” She laughed at this.

“What’s so—”

“Funny? You might care to know I’ve never been called normal by anyone’s standard.”

“Are you saying you’ve never been normal?”

“Normal . . . what is the norm, Inspector? If normal means staid, stodgy, keeping in one’s place . . . I am afraid not.”

“Seldom does an officer of the law see normal, as I saw it today at your home.”

“At my home?”

“That sister of yours you use as maid, Jane, and your daughter, one who works your books. Both I’d characterize as normal as normal gets.”

“Normal is as normal does? I’m glad you approve, and that you found my . . . my Jane and Gabby so . . . presentable.”

He lifted his glass as if to the memory. “A pleasant, comely woman she is, your sister.”

“Not when in her ill-temper, I assure you.”

“She seems a woman of . . . of—”

“Yes, spit it out, man.”

“Of obvious good character. A woman apart.”

“Struck you as a woman of substance, did she?”

“Aye.”

“After all, she is my sister.” Some detective, she thought.

“And you, Doctor . . . so . . . so . . .”

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“Different, say it, man! Different as night from day, indeed . . . I am quite different. ”

Lifting the pitcher of room temperature rich red ale, Ransom poured Tewes’s glass full again. This done, he asked,

“How so? I mean . . . how do you mean, different?”

“Damn different, man! Friendly, fascinating, strange, odd, weird, gifted, bright, charming, delightful, intellectual, in-sightful, all of it.”

“Curt, abrupt, intense, too direct,” added Alastair.

She answered between sips, the taste of ale growing on her, “Don’t leave out funny, hedonistic, artistic, expressive!”

“Expressive, yes, agreed!”

She pushed on. “Creative, self-absorbed, spirited, sincere, straightforward, lively, both patient and impatient, loyal, sad, depressed in turns . . . at times lonely, waaay too sensitive, sarcastic, can’t keep my mouth shut when angry or irritated, or around stupidity—especially stupidity that costs me in time, energy, or money, and—” “Like now?” he finally interrupted the flood of words.

She ignored this, continuing with “—and inhibited at times, fearful at times, as I know too damn much for my own good, but I don’t trust anyone, which makes me distant.”

“And I suspect you are a challenge for any woman.”

“Do you see that too? It’s me . . . in my own mind, I’m larger than life, despite my height.”

“Really? I could introduce you ’round to some women.”

“So that I can be like you—loud, obnoxious, a skirt-chaser?”

“You really have me wrong, sir.”

“I’ve misread you? You are actually curious, thoughtful, meditative—at least Christian says so.”

“Fenger says that?”

“Especially about medicine, the human body and the mind.”

He snickered. “Whatever helps me solve a crime. Strange that Christian’s never said as much to me!”

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She looked at him as if for the first time. “What started this conversation off?” She was beginning to feel the effects of the amaretto and ale mix in her system. “Ahhh, yes, well, I know no one who’d use ‘normal’ in describing me, no.

Would you?” Tewes stood, a bit tipsy, even as Alastair poured the phrenologist another glass of ale. Tewes declined another sip. “It is home for me. Have to look in on my little girl. Had liquor with Dr. Fenger, you see atop this.” “Your Gabrielle is a beautiful young woman, Dr. Tewes, and we should have a toast to her at the very least.” Ransom held up another full ale to Tewes.

Determined, Jane gulped down the tribute to, as Ransom put it, “the fairest lass in all the city,” and she did so in manly fashion.

Unable to hold his liquor, Tewes had played into Alastair’s plan too well, as he could not find the door out of Muldoon’s.

Muldoon and Ransom exchanged a look of knowing, and so Ransom must help Tewes home. The entire way—having to hold Tewes up. What at first he found disturbing soon became curiosity. How is this fellow so slight? He imagined lifting Tewes over his shoulder. It’d certainly make getting him home a simpler proposition as Ransom himself had a buzz on. But the sight of her father slung over Ransom’s shoulder might set off Gabby with the gun. And soft. The man’s shoulders and arms soft and hardly a tincture of sweat.

A strange fellow indeed, he concluded as he rang the bell.

Gabrielle rushed out, gun in hand. “What’ve you done to him?”

“Afraid, young miss, he’s sotted.”

“Drunk?”

“On ale. Do apologize. Hadn’t the slightest inkling he was gone until . . . well, he was gone.”

“Bring the doctor inside, please.”

He threw Tewes over his shoulder, the doctor’s pants leg revealing as small an ankle as he’d ever seen on a man. It made him think of the Bertillon method, the fact no two men CITY FOR RANSOM

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had the same measurements, and he wondered if he were to

“take the measure” of this man, and send it to contacts at the Surete in France, if he might not get a match to a wanted fugitive or fraud under another name.

Ransom always carried a tailor’s measuring strip in his pocket. Normally, his subject was awake and