“Let me dig about,” and as she did so, Ransom dropped the ring into Dr. Tewes’s coat pocket.
Griffin showed up just as Ransom was draining a dry headache powder from a folded wrapper, choking it down.
“All right, Alastair, where the deuce is the ring?”
Alastair continued to choke, pointing to his throat.
“My God, man, are you saying you swallowed it?”
“That’s right, and to get it from my excrement, you’ll need a warrant for search and seizure, and a pair of gloves.”
Tewes had seen no ring and attested to the fact the stubborn inspector had indeed swallowed it whole. How he did any of it without a cup of water, Jane could not fathom. But then he had the neck and throat of a bear.
“Dr. Tewes, I want you to stay on Ransom till I get my warrant, and should he pass anything, I want you to still his hand from any flushing away of the evidence.”
She stared, her mouth dropping.
“Will you do it?” asked Griffin.
“Do your own dirty work, Inspector Griffin.” A smirk on her face, Jane rushed off, unaware of the ring in her pocket.
“Guess, old partner, it’ll have to be you sifting through my shit then,” Ransom said, pounding Griffin on the back.
He then pointed to the streets. “I’m going out there to find the real killer. Keep up if you can.”
Ransom rushed out, leaving Griff to his quandary. Ransom imagined what must be going through Griff’s mind:
Griffin decided to first return to Kohler to tell him the news that Ransom had swallowed the ring. When he entered, the lawyer was taking Kohler through the evidence 280
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again, and Philo Keane lay sprawled out over the table, snoring.
“Trelaine employed Keane?” asked Philo’s lawyer now.
“And he personally knew three, possibly four of the victims.”
“And had nude photos of several victims in a hidden box in his studio?” Defense attorney Malachi Q. McCumbler spoke solemnly, in polite tone. He did so while glancing from the nudes to his snoring client. “Well, on the surface of it, gentlemen, it would appear you have
“Why so long?”
“Ask the court, not me.”
“I’ll send a man round with fresh clothing. See to it he has uninterrupted sleep and a shower, and any further questioning you do, you do so with me present. I will myself call round this evening to have a word with my client.” “We don’t Molly-coddle murderers here, sir,” Kohler coldly replied.
“No, I daresay not from the condition of the innocent!”
Malachi’s voice rose an octave and held in dramatic pause . . . “As, gentlemen, my client is presumed innocent until
“Trust me, he is guilty of multiple murder and does not deserve your time!” said Kohler.
“And you chaps, officers of the court that you are, you have some distance to go before that is a reality, sir.” Even as McCumbler said this, he knew it true only in some fantasy world. Certainly, the notion of innocent until proven guilty—the reversal of the British Legal system in which a man was guilty till proven innocent—was in itself an ideal to which the American legal system aspired, but the notion could never be wholly attained, not when dealing with human nature. Men condemned first, apologized—if at all—later. Many a man in America and the world over had been lynched by a mob thanks to human nature. It was by no coCITY FOR RANSOM
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incidence that every other hamlet dotting the American landscape was named Lynchburg. Malachi had practiced law for almost twenty-five years now in Chicago, and he’d seen a lot of men beaten and broken and convinced of their own guilt by brutal treatment. Torturing a suspect as they had Philo Keane, in Chicago police circles, had a name—routine questioning. Most certainly human nature was well at work here in the Des Plaines Street police house. Well and good and intact, unfortunately.
Griffin waited for McCumbler to leave before he dared tell Chief Kohler of the ring’s being lost to the big man’s stomach.
From just outside the door, as McCumbler stopped to ad-just his glasses before negotiating the stairs, he heard Kohler’s gargantuan bellow, a stretched-out
He wondered what it might be about when he heard Kohler repeatedly shout the name
“I had thought, and happily so, that you were finished with this . . . this disguise of yours,” Ransom said on catching up to Dr. Tewes at a cabstand. Several well-fed horses stood harnessed at Union Station.
“Come now, Inspector. Certainly, at times you must use disguises in your line of work—when it suits your purpose?”
Concentrating on her eyes and trying to ignore her mustache, Ransom replied, “Yes, I’ve used disguises in my work, but Jane . . . what more purpose can this serve you now?”
She backed to within inches of a horse at the cabstand.
The horse reacted instinctively, nuzzling her into Ransom’s arms. They had a laugh over this when Alastair caught her.
To passersby and to anyone standing nearby, they seemed a pair of men quite infatuated with one another. Realizing this, Alastair quickly pulled away.
“Do you know how it’s going to look when all comes to light?”
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“It might begin to chip away at that brute image you’ve maintained.”
“That image has saved my life on occasion.”
“I’m sure I’d faint to hear just how.”
“You failed to answer my question.”
“The horse did not like the question.”
He repeated it. “What more purpose can your disguise serve you? A beautiful woman like you?”
“Thank you for the compliment.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Deflect the question.”
She stepped away from him and sat on a street bench. Busy people passed in and out of the train station. Ransom hovered and, out of one eye, he saw the cab at the front of the line begin its journey. This set off a domino effect, as each horse-drawn cab moved up one space in the line of seven, the exchange creating a soothing cadence of hooves against brick-laid road.
He wanted to hold her hand, but not like this . . . not so long as she looked the part of a man.
“Do you have any idea how long it would’ve taken me, as a woman, to interest Mr. Malachi McCumbler in taking Philo’s case? So, being Dr. Tewes, he hopped right out of his seat and came.”
“OK, point taken.”
“And walking into a police station, a lone woman? I’d likely have been taken for a prostitute complaining of being robbed by my—”
“All right, point taken. Now I’ll be needing my ring back.”
“Your ring? What ring?”
“In your pocket.”
She reached in, found the ring, and lifted it to the light.
