ghostly figures and snapped pictures. Under his breath, between choking bouts, he cursed his young assistant, Waldo Denton, for having not shown up for this.
Then from out of the dust cloud stepped the man with the brown bag stuffed with Polly’s head, and following him, two men carrying a reed stretcher on which lay Polly’s charred legs, torso, arms, and half her neck. The cooked cadaver did not look real; it looked for all the world, he thought, like a fake rubber blob, something a rubber factory might cast off as damaged molding.
Philo bumped into Griffin, and their eyes spoke, both feeling the torment of grief for their friend and colleague, both knowing they could not possibly feel the depth of pain that Ransom, this moment, must be feeling for his loss.
“Shocking . . . awful,” Griffin mustered two words.
“Horrible, satanic is what it is,” managed Philo.
Enough said. The body parts were whisked off to Cook County morgue by Shanks and Gwinn, who’d taken direction from Christian Fenger, also on hand. Fenger had re
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mained on the periphery, watching from afar. How long he’d been on scene, no one hazarded a guess. Kohler asked it of Drimmer, and when Griffin had no answer, Kohler muttered,
“Everyone thinks him a Renaissance man, a Leonardo of the prairie, but I think him rather a ghoul who likes his work too much.”
“Unlike some people,” muttered Philo.
Kohler gave Keane a withering look. “Look here, photographer, just do your job and mind your business. I was speaking to Inspector Drimmer.”
“Sorry, sir.”
“Just get those cuts to us as soon as possible, and if you’ve not already delivered the others from the train station to Inspector Ransom, then get them to my office as well. And for that matter, where the deuce is Ransom?” he said loudly for all to hear. But he fooled no one. News of Alastair’s one-sided run-in with Muldoon, and his lying in a cell at the Harrison Street Lockup on Kohler’s orders had spilled onto the street like beer from a busted vat. Chicago’s premiere detective, Inspector Ransom, lay unconscious in one of his own cells, locked up with derelicts, drunks, and scavengers of every stripe—some of whom might care to take a daggar to his throat.
Philo just stared at the well-dressed politician cop, and was quickly losing his temper when Waldo Denton stumbled up, the boy’s face painted with fire grease and smoke, damp with tears. “I can’t do this no more, sir. No ’mount a scratch is worth this . . . every time somebody is killed like this . . .” An audible moan rose from Denton’s gut. “Damn it, this . . .
this is too hard, Mr. Keane.”
“I ask a lot of a man, agreed.”
“Perhaps too much.”
“Whataya know of hard?” Philo sharply asked. “You ever go hungry, boy? I mean falling down hallucinating hungry?”
“No, sir.”
“Hell, asking too much! Why, you didn’t even know Polly, not like I did.”
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“I saw her at your studio once, and—and in your photo collection.”
“God, boy . . . go get yourself straightened out.” He handed Denton fifty cents. “Come by when you’re feeling better. You may still have a job! Now get!” Philo threw rocks as Denton ambled off, dejected, apparently in shock, but over his shoulder, he called out, “I stole a picture of her once.” “From me?”
“She was beautiful.”
Kohler glared at Philo. “How’d you know the victim, Keane? And what sort of
“Art.” Philo quickly returned to his work. “Artist and model, and that was the extent of it.” Philo had seen the glint in Kohler’s eye as if he’d discovered some gold nugget fallen from the sky. He’d never told anyone of his practice of taking a woman’s body for his payment on occasion, and Polly had found it a thrilling proposition.
“Yes, Mr. Keane—I see.” Kohler sometimes hissed.
As Philo worked, he saw Dr. Tewes join Kohler. Likely here was the only man standing who had no idea what’d become of Alastair Ransom this day.
Jane could not concentrate on what lay before her as either the man she pretended or the woman she was, as both per-sonae had taken this hard. Polly had been Jane’s or rather James’s patient, and Ransom’s lover, and now this. How angry Ransom had appeared the other night did not connect or make logical sense. Yet, it would be the perfect murder indeed if, in a fit of rage, Ransom had killed Polly and made it look like the work of the killer the press now called the Phantom. How simple to cover her murder. And Ransom, being Ransom, knew how to cover up any mistake that might be made or badly juggled. But, in fact, this hadn’t been her notion but rather Kohler had floated the idea past her.
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Was it possible? Did it go with what she knew of the man, despite all the dark tales of Alastair’s temper and questionable morals? Could his police life have spilled over into his private life, and had he used Dr. Tewes as both his excuse and his alibi?
She then decided it too preposterous and not in Ransom’s makeup as she stood here, staring at the ruination of Ransom’s life, his goals, his plans. It led to her own epiphany.
“Nathan,” she said to Kohler, “I can go no further with our charade.”
“The hell you say!”
“Suppose I were called to testify in a court of law over events? To swear on a Bible as Dr. Tewes? It’s preposterous, untenable.”
“Look here! We had a deal. This”—he indicated the fire—
“changes nothing.”
“It changes everything. You don’t need me to bring Ransom down. He is on his back now; you need but crush him, but I’ll be no party to the kill, and no longer part of your web of deceit.”
It’d been Nathan Kohler who’d led Polly directly to Dr.
Tewes’s for the care she sought, as he had led Fenger to Tewes. “Information gathering,” he’d called it.
“You cross me,
“Perhaps for the better.”
“Really? You think so?” His half grin curled snakelike on itself.
“I’ve accomplished so little, nothing meritorious about my time spent here.”
“You can do well here.”
“I am not speaking of Chicago.”
“What then?”
“I shouldn’t expect you to understand.”
“Try me, Jane.”
“Accommodate the bloody world so as to fit comfortably CITY FOR RANSOM
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into it is what I’ve done, when in fact, I should make the world accommodate
“Whatever are you trying to say?” Kohler replied. “If you’re in control of your senses, then the world makes
