City for Ransom

177

Angry, hurt, in pain, hardly able to blink out the sun, Alastair watched as Dr. Tewes came toward him. Tewes abruptly stopped when the big man lashed out. “Get the G’damn hell outta here, Tewes. I’m in no mood.” But Tewes kept coming on, entering the ashes, the little bow-tied, mustached fellow unmindful of smudging his newly pressed white suit.

“Whataya want here, Tewes? To gloat over your success with Polly? To see the results of your therapy? How good of you to follow up!” He grabbed his throbbing head, shouting only increasing the painful stabbing.

“I want to offer my sincere—”

“Keep ’em!”

“But I am so truly sorry, Ransom . . . really, I am. I couldn’t’ve foreseen this. No one could. Not even Alastair Ransom.”

“I should’ve been with her. Should’ve hunted down that bastard she called Stumpf. And you, Mr. Psychic. Why couldn’t you’ve seen this coming?”

Neither Tewes nor Jane Francis had an answer.

“Your crystal ball out for repairs?”

“Get it back tomorrow.”

“Day late . . . dollar short . . .” Alastair muttered and leaned on a table that collapsed, sending him into the ash, throwing up a cloud. The image of the broken man completed.

As he fought to his feet, he said, “ ’Spose you come to read Mere’s head like you did Purvis’s? G’luck. It’s with your friend, Fenger.”

“I came to help you, Inspector.” Tewes helped Ransom find his cane, taking charge, telling him, “We’ll get a search party down here to scour through the rubble for Polly’s ring.

I promise.”

“Merielle’s ring . . . her name was Merielle.”

“Yes, of course . . . Merielle’s ring.”

“Fenger told you?”

“He did.” Tewes led the dejected inspector down the street and to a table in the Bull Terrier Pub on Clark near Lincoln 178

ROBERT W. WALKER

where early patrons drank dark ale and talked of nothing but the fire and the rumor that Polly’d been beheaded and set aflame.

Ransom sat now, head bowed, sipping at hot coffee in one hand, a tall Pabst beer in another. Tewes was soon on his second glass of heady Krueger dark ale, Jane having acquired a taste for it. Ransom wondered if it were for show, to demonstrate his masculinity to the detective. Tewes also appeared absorbed in the busy pub’s clientele, fascinated in fact. He examined people nonstop, telling Ransom a bit of history on each that he merely surmised from the size of their foreheads, ears, noses, arched brows.

“You can’t really believe you can read people from the shapes of their heads and features. That this phrenology con of yours actually has any merit.”

“You’re ignorant of the science of phrenology.”

“And you’re gonna educate me?”

“The magnetic energy of our bodies flows strongest at the head, and it gives me, a licensed medical practitioner, Inspector, a picture of the mental state. Besides having a calming effect.”

“To what end?”

“Talk. In the best tradition of the family doctor, even the homeopaths with whom I do not always agree, believe in talk.”

Ransom remained skeptical, sipping his coffee. Tewes read skepticism in his frown, but merely pointed out another guest in the pub, saying, “See the fellow with the bowler hat at the bar?”

Ransom saw a man with narrow eyes staring into his food, occasionally sniffing at what dripped from his fork. “What about him?” Ransom knew the street tough and petty criminal from repeated arrests.

“He’s plotting some mischief as we speak.”

“That does not surprise me, Dr. Tewes. He’s an habitual criminal, one you likely know as well from careful reading of the Police Gazette your daughter has subscribed to.”

CITY FOR RANSOM

179

“Police Gazette? Gabby?”

“I saw it in her possession at your home the other night when I put you to bed.”

“So that explains my nightmare regarding you.”

“Just as you knew something of Purvis, and just as you knew something of Merielle, you know something of Darby over there.”

“I can’t say that I knew Purvis or even Merielle in any true sense of—”

“Your daughter was seeing the boy, and you counseled Merielle.”

“You don’t seriously think I had anything to do with either death, do you?”

“I’m saying you know how to milk information. It is, for all its sprawling largeness, a small city made up of a series of ethnically divided communities, and you know a smattering of several languages, yes?” “Rummaging in search of suckers in seven languages,”

Jane said. “I resent the implication, and as for Merielle, you still remain blind to her inner turmoil.”

“Yes, I admit to blindness, but . . . convinced myself she was . . . that she, she . . .”

“That she could find salvation in making you the center of her universe? That she loved you more than she loved her addictions . . . the life?”

“Something like that, yes, confound you, Tewes!”

A silence settled over their table. Jane realized that each in turn had come to suspect the other of evil. A man with a violin began to play a soft melody imported from some far corner of the world, perhaps Prague or St. Petersburg. The sounds he manipulated from the strings reached into Ransom’s deepest sorrow and spoke of his own wrongdoing in all this: his part in Merielle’s death. It felt to him as if the vi-olinist had been paid and sent here just to torment him.

“Nothing you might’ve done or said, no amount of money you may’ve thrown at her would’ve saved her from this madman,” Tewes counseled. “She wanted to break away from 180

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Chicago and you, Ransom, making her an easy target for—”

He flinched even as he shouted, “Lie!”

“She saw you as a problem, Ransom, a major problem.”

“You give a man no quarter, Tewes. Careful over thin ice.”

“She liked you better’n others who’d kept her, yes, but she resented the economic bondage you repre—”

His fist slamming onto the table silenced Tewes. Ransom sat seething, unhappy, silent. Jane feared he might explode and strike out with both fists, or with that cane he carried.

But he did neither. He sat brooding instead. A bear whose meat’s withheld, she thought, but then Dr. Tewes abruptly returned with, “Look, to prove a point—I’ve seen this fellow at the bar many times but do not know him. Not even so much as to say hello.” “Name is Charles Darby, alias Anthony Guardi, known as Tug.”

“Why Tug?”

“Short for Tugboat.”

“OK, why Tugboat then?”

“For his size and ability, he can push around men twice his size, and if they disobey, he runs them aground . . . beats

’em to a pulp.”

“Tugboat? Quite handy with his Irish fists?”

“But he can pass as Italian. He’s done some prizefighting.

The man is a poster boy for Lombroso’s method of detecting the criminal mind among us, I think, don’t you?”