Shadows in the White City (11 page)

Alastair banged with his cane for the cabbie to stop and fetch a paper. The paper was deposited through the window and Alastair scanned it for the reasons he always scanned news accounts: to take the pulse of the people, to gauge the
mood. He did not expect to find any evidence floating about the story. Nor did the
Tribune
disappoint him in this any more than the
Herald
had.

Rumors mostly. Eyewitness accounts to nothing. A source quoted as saying, “I saw ol' Leather Apron nab the lil' nicker, but I could see no face on the man.”

Another “eyewitness” added, “It was pitch that night, but I heard a noise as I come out of O'Dhule's and of a sudden, I heard a scream like a little kid, but it was silenced soon as it sounded. I followed a shadow into the alleyway there, but he disappeared like smoke. Some others, a little family of homeless, stood there staring at me and swore they saw no one come that way.”

Alastair cast the paper aside, its pages covering the floor-board. “Another invisible killer who turns into the very darkness surrounding him.”

He wondered if in the future, if in the twentieth century, if there'd ever come a time when men like him would be an anachronism, a thing of the past, unnecessary, as science will have found a way to end the lives of men born into evil, born with the mark of Caine permanently on their foreheads.

For now, he wanted to go home. In the cab that he'd ordered to wait for him, his bag brought back from Mackinac remained. He wanted a shower, a shave, a moment's respite, and some time alone to sort things.

“As to the victim, a well-known, proper lady is her mother,” Jed Logan had said back at the station.

“Lives at the Chapman family home, north shore, with her husband, a banker.”

“How did they lose sight of the little girl?”

“Fourteen-year-old. You ever try keeping up with a kid that age, Ransom?” asked Behan. “I didn't think so.”

“The mother and Anne were out for a day in the park when Anne went missing,” added Logan, who took a moment to burp out a gas bubble. “Hell man, read the report.”

Alastair did not know the details of how the girl had gone missing that day. It had gone to Logan and Behan as a miss
ing-persons case for a week and a half before Dr. Fenger was called to the river at Wabash to identify remains there. Called to the scene by Logan and Behan, who'd been notified by uniformed police, who'd been aware that the detectives had been chasing down the missing grandchild of an important man.

How the first police on scene discerned that what they had was human at all, Alastair could not say. The mutilated body had been in the water for days, ropes clinging to the small bloated package of flesh. The ropes and its discovery clearly indicated that Anne's remains had been poorly weighted down.

“Whoever did it, dropped her into the river, we are guessing around the Michigan Avenue Bridge, given the current,” Logan had added.

“We think likely in a weed patch just west of the bridge,” Behan had said.

“Even so, we could not identify her as Anne. The mother refused to believe it and could not be made to really look at the remains.”

“So the senator showed up to do the job,” Alastair had said.

“Dr. Fenger was preparing to have the body buried in the Potter's Field as a little Jane Doe, as there was nothing identifying her, until he asked Chapman about the mark he'd found on the buttocks—which had also been carved into.”

“The birthmark, I see.”

“That and her lovely red curls.”

Yes…red curls,
he said to himself here in the back of the cab,
curls which curiously enough, appeared the only feature on her body that did not meet the knife.

“You can't eat hair,” Behan had commented.

“If you're hungry enough, you'll eat anything,” countered Logan.

Ransom had replied, “But when you have flesh, why eat hair?”

Ransom felt privileged to own one of the first
indoor plumbing facilities in the city, where he could shower and shave in peace, as well as relieve himself without having to go down a flight of stairs to an outdoor privy.

After cleaning up, he listened to a Bach symphony on his phonograph while perusing the paperwork that he'd had a messenger bring to him from the station house.

He learned little from the information save that Logan and Behan had padded their murder book with a great deal of useless anecdotal testimony and a lot of pointing fingers, most of them pointing in the direction of the slaughterhouses along Market Street and farther south at the Chicago Stock Yards. There was no lack of suspicious characters in the bovine and hog-slaughtering business or among the horse knackers—all of whom wore the obligatory leather apron. Once a hue and cry had gone up that the killer was a leather-apron man, there was no stopping the flood of informers and invectives.

There also came the typical outcry against foreigners. At once fear the “other tribe,” particularly the Jews among them. Arm in arm with accusation came the usual bigotry and outlandish charges that even seeped into the newspapers. It was well known that Jews routinely sacrificed children to their
god, so why not abduct gentile children with red and blond curls and blue eyes and cut them to ribbons to appease a Jewish custom and to feed their sadistic cannibalistic needs? Yes, a Jewish knacker would do nicely…wouldn't raise an eyebrow. Alastair had heard it in many permutations and in every venue at every level of society since his return.

Actually anyone unable to succinctly speak English had become suspect to his neighbors. There had already been mob attacks on individuals who were thought to be the one and only Leather Apron. One hefty Austrian fellow had bloodied the noses and bruised the eyes of twenty men when he was attacked, but he was himself hospitalized with multiple contusions at Cook County before police could end the violence.

Another theory had it that a now dead—
killed
—horse butcher by the name of Timothy Crutcheon was the man behind the Vanishings. Crutcheon sold rags and bottles when he could not find a dead horse in need of butchering. Most knackers were independent, and if they did not work at the yards, then they must drum up their own business by finding someone wanting to rid the farm of a useless aged animal. A lot of locals suspected Crutcheon of many a local crime, especially when a horse came up lame or too suddenly off his feet. People suspected this particular Leather Apron of poisoning a horse in order to generate revenue. A knacker normally purchased a sick or aged animal for a scant price and butchered it for parts, hide, and flesh, which he then turned around and sold at a handy profit. It was grueling, cruel work indeed; not the sort of career path people wanted for their children.

Aside from his unfortunate profession, Crutcheon traded on his unfortunate looks, having boils all over his body and face. It was rumored he'd once been a sideshow attraction. People called him a cunning man, a male witch of the black arts, and to make a living, he traded on his notoriety. Possibly another offshoot victim of the real killer, Crutcheon had turned up dead. Logan and Behan had investigated and declared that old Crutcheon had died of multiple stab wounds with a pitchfork where he lay sleeping in a barn well within
the city limits, a barn owning to a family with ten children afoot. The pitchfork also belonged to the farmer, and it'd somehow become buried in Crutcheon's chest, discovered when the eldest son had come out to feed stock and milk the family cow.

No one knew why Crutcheon chose this place to sleep; he'd come in the night, uninvited. Most likely, if pursued, the case of Crutcheon would unravel quickly and surround the fears a mother and father had for their children on seeing the boil-infested wizard waddle into their barn. Alastair imagined the man waking with a scream due to a sharp three-pronged pain in his aged chest.

Other such outbreaks of fear would continue citywide until the killer was caught and the Vanishings ended.

His phone rang. He'd finally taken the step to have one installed since the fiasco of being unable to contact Jane and Gabby at the moment they were in the most danger from the Phantom, the night he and Griff had had to navigate the city in a hansom cab going full tilt during a thunderstorm as the only means of getting to Jane's in time. He now lifted the phone to learn it was Nathan Kohler calling.

“You have had time to think it over. What do you say? Think of it as an opportunity for the two of us to work toward a common goal and to bury old hatchets, Alastair.”

Alastair said nothing.

“Alastair?”

Since when has Nathan my best interest at heart?”

“Alastair?”

And when did I become Alastair instead of Inspector or simply Ransom to this man?

“Are you there?”

“I said I wanted to sleep on it.”

“Make the right decision, man.” Kohler hung up.

“Now that's the Nathan I know,” he said to the silent phone.

 

“You can 'ave no kinna self-worth in such a business, even though it keeps bread on ye table,” the horse knacker named Houston told Alastair as he kept moving about the Chicago Stock Yards, pulling on his leather gloves and apron, snatching for his tools. “Bloody truth of it is, even round here there's a hexarchy.”

“What do you mean, Jack, a hexarchy?” Alastair, while not a friend knew Jack Houston from the pubs.

“Six levels of men atop you!”

“A pecking order?”

“Aye…even in the yards.” He stopped in his tracks long enough to give a shake of the head, then launched into butchering a dead horse at his feet. “The ones doing beef, now they're at the top, then comes swine—the real money-makers, you see.” He'd already removed the horse's head. “Then it trickles down to your lamb and chicken and veal, down to goat meat, you see, but horse meat…” He paused, lifting his bloody mallet-sized hatchet and using it to punctuate his words, blood dribbling from it as he did so. “Well, now you see horse meat's tough as hell, and it's not so savory nor wanted, and as most of the cutting we do ends in food for other animals—dogs, cats, and then there's the soap-makers buying a ton of it. You see, then, we knackers, we're the bottom of the rung 'round here, so I say again, you can't have no opinion of yourself in this business.”

Ransom asked Jack if he knew anyone around the yards who was strange or eccentric, and he immediately knew it was a ridiculous question to ask under the circumstances.

“You mean someone capable of taking one of these”—he held up the cleaver this time—“to a human being?”

“Yes, I believe it's what I'm asking.”

Jack thought long and hard about this as he continued to butcher the dead horse, working off the limbs one joint at a time. “There's old Hatch, maybe Quinn…even Sharkey, but I gotta tell you, even those fellows, bloody crazy as they are…even they'd have to be pushed to considerable limit to chop up a senator's lass.”

Jack never stopped talking, even as Alastair started away, unable to take the stench of the yards any longer. Alastair understood Jack's excitement. It was most assuredly the first time anyone had ever come asking questions of his profession or the men in it.

Ransom could still hear Jack talking as he closed the last gate on the last stall he must pass through to get clear of this place. It would take a carriage ride of several blocks to get clear of the odors that daily hovered over the entire area of the Southside Stock Yards. Even so, the stench in his nostrils and throat remained.

He had the cabbie pull over at a neighborhood grocery and got out. He went inside and purchased a sarsaparilla to wash down the clinging odors in his throat. The label on the drink made amazing claims, that it could settle the mind and provide a mental state for making enormous sums of money among other things. The label had three paragraphs of text touting the wonderful properties of cocaine, which made up two thirds of the drink's marvelous ingredients, and the rest was sugar. But the label made no claim of effectiveness against horrid odors, and it did nothing for odors clinging to his clothes.

He stepped from the store, having drained half the bottle, when he saw a homeless street urchin, dirty and hungry-looking, staring up at him. The boy was missing his front teeth, and Ransom hoped this was due to natural causes. The boy appeared perhaps eight or nine—same age as some of the Vanished.

“Say, Mister, you got a penny?”

Alastair saw such children about the streets of Chicago every day; the number of homeless families and the growing population of children on the street like this boy represented a staggering problem that seemed without answer. The city fathers had begun talking about it, but no one had done anything about it.

“Mind drinking after me, son?” Alastair asked, handing him the remainder of his soft drink.

“No, sir! Thank you, sir!” The boy took hold of the bottle as if it were a lifeline, and before Ransom could ask his name, he'd scurried off with the drink as if to find a secret place to relax and enjoy its contents.

Alastair had intentionally gone to work on the Vanishings case by hitting the streets, in an effort to avoid going into the station house, to avoid another confrontation with Chief Kohler and to buy time. He'd earlier arranged to meet with his street snitch, and he did not have a long wait before Bosch—otherwise known as Dot 'n' Carry—showed up. They got into the cab, and the driver was told to drift about the area.

“It's the Vanishings, isn't it?” Bosch asked. “They put you onto the case, didn't they? I'm not surprised. Told me mates the other night they gotta put Ransom onto the case.”

“Never mind butterin' me up, Bosch. What've you got?”

“Got?”

“Your ear's always to the ground. So, what've you got?” Alastair repeated.

“Sometimes an ear to the ground ain't enough.”

Ransom pulled forth a dollar bill, dangling it before Bosch's sad eyes. “This help your ears out? What can you tell me about these disappearances?”

“I tell you true,
nothing.
”

“You don't get paid for
nothings,
old-timer. Tell me what you hear.”

“I tell you, the street is moot. And oh, by the way, glad to hear that the Phantom is no more. I like to think I played a small part in it.”

“Get me something, Bosch…get me something soon.”

“I'll keep me eyes and ears open. You know that. In the meantime…you know how scarce money is for me now?”

“I'm not a charity, Bosch.”

“All right, then I got something for you on Haymarket.”

Ransom sat up straight. “Haymarket?”

“Someone who was on the other side.”

“A worker?”

“One who was there, yes.”

“I've interviewed every living survivor already, Bosch. This is old ground.”

“Not this survivor.”

“What's his name.”

“
Her
name. She was a seamstress, but she got all balled up in the movement.”

“What's her name?”

“Josephine Lister.”

“Where do I find her?”

“Well…that's the problem. She's dead.”

“Get outta my coach, Bosch.”

“No, but you don't understand.”

“Out!”

“Her daughter's got a diary Josephine kept.”

“A diary?”

“And there's a section on the riot and the bomb.”

“How do I get in touch with the daughter?”

“She wants to sell the diary to you, and I'm to broker the deal.”

“I see. And how do I know it isn't pure fiction, Bosch?”

“Would I fabricate such a thing?”

“Yes, you would if you thought you could get away with it.”

“You hurt a man to the quick, Inspector.”

“I want to meet with the woman.”

“But that cuts me outta the deal.”

“If I find her credible, you'll be paid handsomely.”

“Ten percent is what she agreed on.”

“Agreed.”

“Till then…what about an advance?” He snatched at the dollar bill, but Ransom was too fast, pulling it out of reach.

“Come on, man! How do you expect me to live?”

Frowning, Ransom put the bill away. As Bosch's features fell, Alastair reached deep into a coat pocket and dragged out his reluctance in the form of two bits.

“Thanks, Inspector.” He said it sourly, but he knew better than to complain.

“Ten dollars if you bring me something I can use.”

“Ten dollars? On the Haymarket deal, you mean?”

“Haymarket, yes, but also the Vanishings.”

“Lor' blind me! Twenty dollars. Imagine what I could do with twenty? Have not had hold of that much money in forever.”

“Now get out. My coach is beginning to take on your odor.”

“Hmmm…smells of the stockyards to me.” He sniffed the air like a rodent.

The cab had come full circle to the same corner drugstore. As the crooked, arthritic Henry Bosch climbed from the cab, Alastair saw the same little boy on the street panhandling someone else out front of the store. He called the boy over to the cab.

“Yes, sir?”

“Two dollars for you, son, if you learn anything about the Vanishings,” he told the boy, handing him a nickel. “Any news at all that might help.”

“You're a copper, sir?”

“You'd best hone your powers of observation, son, if you're going to work for Inspector Ransom.”

The boy's eyes went wide. Everyone in Chicago knew the name Ransom. “Yes, sir. I will indeed, Inspector, sir.”

“And your name, son?”

“Sam…Samuel, sir. Everybody knows me as Sam.”

“All right, then, Sam. Put your ear to the ground, nose to the stone.”