“No, Philo paid them for posing.”
“Intimates, he took more than their picture according to—”
“Bloody Carmichael will write anything if he thinks it’d sell a paper. I first met Merielle from one of Philo’s photos, and it was Philo who set me on a path of having her.”
“She had a very different version of events. Alastair, she felt as indentured to you as she did to Jervis. She had a problem with men.”
“But I tell you, Philo would never harm a woman.”
“Perhaps.”
“Nathan Kohler is trying to bait me and using people I care about to do it, and he’s doing a fine job of it. He used you, now Philo. Who’s next? Who is safe? Only those who distance themselves from me as Griffin has done.” “Drimmer?”
“According to the paper, Drimmer assisted Kohler in the arrest.”
While further scanning the newspaper, she said, “They must’ve had some provocation, some proof to move on the man . . . I mean police act only if they have something to go on. I mean to raid his home and arrest him.” “I know of many a case where men’ve been sent off to prison on flimsy evidence, foolish assumptions, prejudices, 268
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wrong conclusions, nonsense beaten out of a suspect when all else fails. I also know of cases in which a man was put to death on eyewitness accounts that later proved false.”
“If you believe in Mr. Keane’s innocence, then you must fight for him.”
“Have to see what they have concluded. Why they targeted Philo.”
“He’ll need a lawyer.”
“A good Chicago lawyer, one who knows every loophole.”
“I know just the man. Malachi Quintin McCumbler.”
“Then hire him on Philo’s behalf, and I’ll go find where they’ve got Philo. I fear incarceration alone will kill him. He is an artist, after all.”
“I quite understand. Go to him. Tell him others believe in him and are working on his behalf.”
She started up the stairwell, but he grabbed her hand and held on. “Why are you doing this? You hardly know Philo.”
“But I know
“How could I’ve been so confounded blind?”
As if to answer himself, Alastair added, “You mean like the one in Nathan’s dreams? So not right. . . .”
CHAPTER 23
Dr. Tewes’s daughter’s infatuation with the burgeoning police sciences—from fingerprinting to use of first communications between U.S. cities like New York and Chicago—had not set well with Jane. Not anymore than when Gabrielle confessed a desire to go into a program at Rush Medical under Dr. Christian Fenger to become a pathologist and eventually a coroner rather than a general practitioner or surgeon.
Much to her mother’s chagrin, Inspector Ransom had taken it upon himself to instruct Gabby in such matters. Her mother’s response only meant a new reason to distance herself from Inspector Ransom. Jane had tried to dissuade her daughter from such prurient interests as she exhibited for pathological medicine, and she’d started out this morning on a major plan to nip it in the bud.
“Why would you trade a medical practice that dealt with health and life for one dealing entirely with cadavers?” she pleaded with Gabby.
“Cadavers don’t talk back?” she quipped.
“Give it up, this notion! Along with the insufferable suffragettes.”
Finally, Gabby had lost her patience, shouting she’d do 270
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neither. Her mother followed her into her room. “You’ll finish your studies at NU, young lady.”
“No! I’ll either work with Dr. Fenger or I’ll quit medicine altogether!”
“And do what?”
“Help the cause of women’s suffrage!”
This only heightened the tension. Mother and daughter glared at one another—Jane having just left Alastair, and having again dressed as Tewes. Gabby, losing all patience, shouted, “I do not intend going through life as a man! And what good’ve you done, Mother, for women in medicine or—” “What are you saying?”
“—or for women’s suffrage in living a lie like this?”
Her voice shaking, hurt, Jane said, “If you’re going to throw away your chance at NU . . . and you believe you would prefer working under Dr. Fenger’s tutelage, then I—
I’ll not stand in your way. But—”
“Naturally, there’s a but—”
“But this is the deal: You do not parade about this city in a show of bras, breasts, bloomers, and buttocks in public. Is that understood?”
Gabby frowned. “Really, Mother, you understand so little of public opinion, and you’ve fallen for the popular view against us.”
“Do we have a deal?”
“But, Mother, you make it sound as if we’ll be stoned as prostitutes in biblical times.”
“Do we have a deal?”
“Iiii-yyyeah, I guess . . .”
“Then I guess I’d best get out and drum up some work for Dr. Tewes.”
“But I thought . . . I mean, with a police inspector knowing, and Chief Kohler knowing . . . that you’d be arrested if you went back to impersonating a male doctor.”
“I’ve checked. There is no law on the books to stop me, as I am not impersonating a doctor, as I am a doctor, and I have a lawyer now who tells me that in fact, a legal suit against CITY FOR RANSOM
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me could bring publicity, and publicity could be made to work for me. So for now, Dr. Tewes is a fixture, my corporate figurehead if you will, and that makes it all quite legal.”
“But why?”
“Foolish child, how else can I afford the famous Dr.
Fenger and Rush Medical School?”
That is how they’d ended it. Now Gabby crept out while Dr.
Tewes was on errand. Gabby’d made a beeline for the suffrage meeting. The group intended a march straight through the fairway at the Columbian Exposition. Their leader had made a stirring speech a few days before, printed in two papers daring to support a woman’s right to the vote—one in Ukrainian, one in Polish. The speech spoke of the irony of Chicago’s hosting a world’s fair when women in Chicago, and all across America, were denied equality and equal voting rights. “And how barbaric it all is,” Gabby confided to a sympathetic cabbie who’d gotten her to the meeting on time.
Gabby felt strongly about suffrage. Nothing—not her word, not her deal, not her chances of working with Dr.
Fenger, and not even her mother—could keep her from her appointed destiny.
“Philo, what the hell’ve you done? Get up!” Ransom slammed his cane into the bars to wake the sleeping man.
“An innocent man doesn’t sleep in a holding cell, Philo! Get up and at least act agitated and appalled and outraged!” But it wasn’t Philo who turned over in the bunk, but a derelict, in fact the man from the train station who’d been their only eyewitness. “Orion Saville, right? It’s you!” “They run me down, said I was a material witness. Said I should cooperate. Had me up all night. Told me I must’ve seen this here fella.”
