Shadows in the White City (25 page)

Once he had settled all his charges, he realized that Samuel had simply disappeared again and no telling where. No one had seen him go.

Later, arriving home, Alastair found Sam on his doorstep, tearful and pleading to be taken in.

Alastair could not turn the boy away, and so he found a pillow and blanket and put him on his settee for the night. Sam's information had been wrong, and it had almost cost lives, had almost ended horribly in fact, had Alastair used his weapon down in that dungeon. Such an accident, involving the death of children, would most assuredly have given Chief Nathan Kohler all the ammunition he needed to end Alastair's career in Chicago. Sure it was an error, a serious one for a paid informant to make, but Sam was, after all, just a boy. Alastair had forgiven him, but the boy fell asleep blubbering apologies.

Asleep, he looked the angel indeed, Alastair thought, and his cherubic features made Alastair wonder anew over the
various interpretations of the “Angels' War” and the whereabouts of little Audra about now.

 

The following morning, Sam had gone before Alastair rose from bed. “Vanished of his own accord,” Alastair mumbled when someone banged loudly at his door.

He stumbled to the source and opened it wide, shading his eyes from a bright sunlit morning. Philo stormed past and into the room.

“Alastair, they've made an arrest in the Leather Apron killings.”

“When will people stop calling it that? And who have they arrested?”

“That old crone, Bloody Mary!”

“Indeed…does not surprise me. In fact, it follows…as inevitable as the sun coming up and the moon going down.”

“But in either case, the sun does not actually come up and the moon does not actually go down; science has
us
going up and down, or rather around, spinning through the cosmos, so it only looks to our limited perspective—”

“All right, I get it.” Ransom covered his ears in a mocking gesture.

“Still, your point is well taken. Bloody Mary may well be a scapegoat in all this.”

“To be sure, she may know
something,
but she's batty, and besides that, she has been here since the first brick was laid so—”

“So why now does she suddenly become a menace? Good question, one I'm sure that Chief Kohler is
not
asking.”

“Kohler is behind the arrest?” Alastair was instantly alert.

“Well…actually it was your friends, Logan and Behan, who dragged her in kicking and screaming, I'm told.”

“I don't envy them their duty, and I know those men well…well enough to realize it was not their idea.”

“A smokescreen? A bone to throw press and public?”

“To make it appear we are hot on the trail of Leather Apron, would be my guess.”

“What will you do, Alastair? How can you stop this maniac with so many obstacles thrown in your path, and…and with your hands continually tied behind your back by bureaucratic fools like—”

“Please, Philo!” he stopped him with an upraised hand. “Allow me to dress. Sit, listen to music, be patient.”

“Of course, of course.”

Alastair felt an attack coming on and tried to determine which sort of attack it might be; it felt more like panic than pain, so he decided it was withdrawal pains as he had abstained from any morphine or opium for the past two days while chasing leads, and with the boy in his home the night before, he'd opted to remain sober, although he'd dosed himself the night before with quinine and antimony to fend off a threatening fever.

“While I dress,” he called over his shoulder, “tell me, how is your photographic study of the street children coming along?”

“Not well!” Philo's pent up energy kept pace with Alastair, and he stood at his bedroom door now. “Too many paying jobs ahead of it, I'm afraid. Matter of finding time. But Alastair, there is something I brought to show you. It struck me anew when I'd returned to the notion of doing such an exhibit.”

“Oh? And what is that?” Alastair had reemerged with most of his clothes intact but buttons yet in need of latching, tie dangling over his shoulder, shoes in hand.

“Well, have a look.” Philo laid out a large photo that was grim and peculiar, and beautifully rendered.

Ransom gasped at the sight of a family in a smoky fog standing in an alley entranceway—all sullen-eyed, sunken-featured, gaunt, and looking like a family of starved wolves. It was a heart-wrenching shot, this “cut” of Keane's, tearing at the soul until you looked more closely.

Mother held an infant in her arms while three others,
ranging in ages that appeared between four and eleven, hung on to her dress, save the older boy who stood opposite, alongside his father. The older boy held a dead cat by the tail, a curled smile on his lips. In his other hand, he held a deboning knife. On closer inspection, the father, too had a blade in a scabbard protruding from beneath his moth-eaten coat.

“The happy family,” said Philo in dark jest. “Something about the whole picture is horribly disturbing, in light of developments.”

“Funny thing is…last night, I was stalking what I have become convinced is our killer—a family described to me just like this—but a family of cannibalistic butchers.”

“Too hideous to contemplate.”

“And so long as it is not contemplated, evil triumphs, Philo.”

“Agreed. And so it goes among us invisible, as the Phantom so recently proved.”

“Invisibility is effective.”

Philo nodded. “Requiring only our complacency.”

“Look, I must get down to the station house, see what Logan and Behan are up to, and if I feel I can trust them, I'll share your photo and my new theory with them, and we can all proceed from there.”

“Understood. The photo is yours to do with as needed, my friend.”

Alastair snapped the last of his shoe buttons in place, stood and made for the door, where he grabbed his cane. “Good day, Philo.”

“Alastair!” The tone of Philo's voice stopped him at the door.

“What is it?”

“Be…be careful out there!”

Alastair breathed deeply, tipped his hat, and replied, “Always…always,” as he ushered Philo out and bid him a final adieu.

Alastair made all due haste to the Des Plaines
station house where he assumed Bloody Mary was being held, but once there, he learned that she was already being arraigned before Judge Grimes. He spoke to the desk sergeant, discovering that Logan and Behan were at the arraignment. He rushed to join them.

A large crowd had gathered outside the courthouse downtown, and feelings were running high. Most assuredly, the old crone was being thrown to the proverbial dogs, Alastair reasoned, as Chief Kohler
most assuredly
would've secreted her off to Senator Chapman's farmstead outside the city for the reward if he
really
thought her in any way guilty or implicated in the death of Anne Chapman.

Hooting and cheers and “atta-boy”s trailed Alastair all the way up the steps through the crowd. On the inside, he went for Judge Grimes's courtroom. He quietly pushed through a door on hearing Bloody Mary cursing at the beefy, morose Judge Grimes.

Ransom immediately recognized the tall, stoop-shouldered, scraggly-haired, wild-eyed, feral looking woman who could easily pass for a stevedore down at the wharves. Bloody Mary was being gaveled down by the judge, and she suddenly
fell silent, her curses on judge and court at an abrupt end; and so fascinated had she become with the judge's pounding gavel, which sounded like a series of angry gunshots. Grunting and cursing under her breath in animal fashion, her gaze taking in everything while in a pretense of blindness, drool came over her lips in globs that fell to the floor or splatted onto her curled, aged shoes.

Alastair noticed Behan and Logan sitting up front. The two looked as if they'd had a rough night's sleep, their clothes filthy, hair wild, but Alastair knew the cause: transporting Mary.

Alastair found a wall and leaned against it, watching, listening, and realizing here was a woman who represented everything that the city leaders and merchants most loathed and feared. She was a walking billboard for the underbelly of the city, and she lived by instinct alone.

Bloody Mary, under the harsh courtroom lights, was as out of place as any fish tossed ashore or any bird with a hole in its wing.

Ransom felt a wave of empathy and sadness wash over him for the ugly old woman—the penultimate outcast—the social excommunicant.

The judge held a handkerchief over his nose, so rancid was the odor rising off Mary. Keeping a safe distance from the accused, Grimes asked his bailiff to escort her to Room 148.

Her hands were cuffed to chains attached to ankle bracelets, all of it rattling like ship's rigging as she stomped, heavy footed, from the room, head slumped forward like some new species of captive animal with a strange curve to its spine, a species yet to be given a name. As she filed past, Alastair's eyes met hers, but there was no light and no recognition there. Only an emptiness.

Her chains rattled along the floor all the way through the door, the sound like sandpaper over the spine.

“It may well be a dead end,” said Behan who, on seeing Alastair enter, had joined him at the rear.

Logan came next, adding, “But we won't know that till we get'er talking and to trust us—now will we?”

“I got an instinct about her,” Ransom replied.

“We all know she's addled in the head.”

“Exactly, so…”

“So what, Rance?”

“Damn it, man, so how can we trust a word she tells us?”

Behan raised his hands. “We'll never know unless she opens up.”

“So I say we ‘open' her head for her,” joked Logan, deadpan.

Behan put in, “You can wait outside if you wish.”

“I'm in the room for as long as I can stand it,” Ransom said.

They located 148.

“We hadda wrestle her in cuffs and chains, and I can tell you,” said Behan, “it was no fun.”

“The woman needs a good delousing and bathing,” said Logan.

“You two can draws straws, but I'm outta that one,” said Ransom.

A light laugh accompanied the three of them into 148. Once inside, and with the bailiff stepping out, Behan sat across the table from Bloody Mary. He introduced himself with his title, and added, “And you know Inspector Logan and everyone knows Inspector Ransom.”

Ransom remained standing and imposing nearby, nodding perfunctorily when introduced.

“Aye, the Big Bear they call 'im these days.”

“Mary and me,” began Ransom, “we go way back, don't we, my lovely girl?”

“I need my medicines,” the woman replied. “Did yous two bring me my mendications? I got a magic blanket, you know, one I can spread out on command and ask it to fly. A flying carpet. Give it to you for some medicines. You want my magic blanket?”

“Mary, we're not interested in magic or bloody flying
carpets.” Alastair held a handkerchief over his nose. “We've come to ask you questions.” The odor exuding off the woman was preternaturally powerful. Something akin to a fetid over-ripe melon. If there was such a thing, Bloody Mary seemed a walking candidate for spontaneous human combustion.

“Finally, somebody wants me for something,” she pathetically replied.

Behan stalwartly held his own against the assault on his senses from this homeless wretch. The judge had been right. Even cleaned up, her skin appeared dusky and covered with a gray patina. She appeared Spanish or Black or a mix of both, but it was impossible to say with any certainty. Her accent sounded Mexican.

“Let's make a deal.” A mantra for her. “Let's make a deal. Anything you want,” she toothlessly muttered and spread her legs as far as her ankle chains allowed. “Let's deal. I'll take care-a-all three of yous!”

Obviously, she'd fallen back on her usual method of relating to men. “Look at her teeth,” said Ransom.

“God save us,” muttered Behan.

Logan joked, “You want some time alone with her, Ken?”

“Let's make a deal,” she repeated.

“Mary…we
do not
want a magic carpet ride,” Ransom assured her.

“What teeth are you talking about, Rance?” asked Behan, talking over him. “She's got none.”

“That's just the point. If she did barter with this Leather Apron devil in these vanishings, what did he pay her? She have any cash on her?”

“Not a nickel.”

“And boys, I tell ya, she wasn't tearing at human flesh, not with her gums, so what motive has she?”

Twenty minutes and they learned nothing from Mary. She kept wanting to talk about an amusement park and a ride she had once taken, presumably as a child, deep in the bowels of a haunted castle. Then she slipped back into barter mode,
her eyes lighting up with a cackling laugh. All her words came out of her toothless, cryptlike mouth along with spittle and froth that both sickened and amazed the three Chicago inspectors.

Finally, unable to take her voice—like a nail through the head, or her stench—like a spike of sewage through each nostril, or her frothy mouth—like a rabid dog—Behan pleaded that Alastair take over.

“There's nothing but mayhem inside your head, right, Mary? You don't know why you're here, do you, Mary?” asked Alastair, replacing Behan at the “front.” “If she knows anything at all,” he said to Logan and Behan, “about the Vanishings, she's likely forgotten it. Or it's locked away in her sponge.” Alastair indicated his head.

But Mary exploded at the word Vanishings. “It's the work of the Anti-Christ himself! Nothing I had a hand in; nothing I could do anything about.”

“Where do I find this Anti-Christ, Mary? Where?”

“Under the water…under the lake, under the fair.”

“Under the fire?”

“Fair…I said fair! Under the bleedin' fair!”

“Now we know for sure she's batty,” said Logan.

“I already knew that before you two nabbed her.” Alastair turned his attention back to Mary. “Is there anything else you wish to tell us, Mary?”

“No.”

“Nothing you wish to say in your defense?”

“No.”

“What's your real name, Mary?”

She stared at him but said nothing.

“Your secret name?”

“I'll not tell.”

“Is it full of Grace, as in Hail Mary, full of Grace?”

“I am full of Grace. My name…my real name is Grace. Grace Sheffield, originally from Shrewsbury, England.”

Ransom jotted this down. He'd recalled it from arrests ten years prior.

“Whatya doing with that?” she asked, fixated on the moving pen over the notepad.

“Just going to check to see if it's true.”

“Ohhh…'tis true enough.”

Alastair stood and slipped from the room, the other two inspectors doing likewise. Outside, they began a group coughing-sneezing-hacking-snorting jag, filling their white handkerchiefs with the result of their combined interrogation.

Alastair said, “I believe she's a dead end, and that we're railroading a mindless old crone.”

Behan shrugged, his mustache bobbing with his tie. “We're just following orders.”

Frustrated, Logan blurted out, “We oughta take a g'damn club to the old witch and beat it outta her.”

“That kinda talk in the face of what you just saw in there? Now, I can just imagine where the orders came from, but fellas, this old girl…she's got nothing but loose marbles and bird fodder for brains.”

From where they stood out in the hallway, they heard Mary being Bloody Mary, shouting lunacies at some invisible demons in her head and inside Room 148. “My goddamn real name is Grace! You know 'cause I have a friend who digs earthworms in the cemetery! She ties 'em tail to head, head to tail and makes jewelry outta worms—living worms! Living jewelry! Says it's eatable jewels and the idea will sell in the thousands! Won't make her any less mad, but it will make her rich and mad! But she damn well ate 'em all! Now that's sick! Her name is Grace, but she's got none! Same as me. I had an accident with her, an accident with Grace…just like she had an accident with me. Her accident with Grace was with me!”

“The woman is battling the DTs,” declared Ransom. “She's sick in too many ways to count—not unlike the charge brought against her.”

Even as he said this, Alastair thought,
How fitting that she, like the Mother of God—according to the street chil
dren—had fallen so far from “Grace”
…Perhaps there was some small truth in the street beliefs after all. But it all seemed so tenuous.

Behan and Logan reluctantly followed Alastair back into 148, returning to the scolding Bloody Mary in her chains. Alastair asked, “When you were Grace, Mary, did you ever have a child?”

“Yes…yes, several.”

“Whatever happened to your children?”

“Dead, all dead.”

“All dead?”

“Cruel world.”

“Not one survived?”

“Well…all that I knew of.”

“Meaning?”

She began crying. “'Cept one I left with the sisters.”

“The sisters? What sisters?”

“The Sisters of the Holy Cross Convent.”

“On South Michigan Avenue?”

“Yes, but Grace was just a child then.”

“And how old would your son be today if alive?”

“I dunno. How should I know? Can't keep my head round numbers.”

“Take a wild guess then.”

“'B-bout your age, I suspect.”

“
Ahhh
…and have you seen him, Mary Grace, recently?”

She thought long and hard on this. “No…not 'im…that could not be
him
. Not that evil thing!”

“The street children say that you're the mother of Zoroaster's child. Any truth to it, Mary Grace?”

She smiled wide at this. “If I spawned a demon from me womb…I'm penitent sorry.” A smirk on her face said otherwise. “And I've asked God's blessin' and forgiveness at the church's back door, 'cause the likes of
you
won't have me come through the
front
! And as I've God's forgiveness, I don't need none from murderers like
you
!”

“Well now, Mary, now we know where you stand,” Logan said and chuckled.

“Don't hold back,” added Behan.

But Alastair was intrigued by this and the image of her at the back door of a church, perhaps the same as Samuel had said where holy water was being sold; he imagined the same fellow could sell forgiveness to a fallen angel such as Mary Grace for the right price as well. He'd filed this away for a time when he could visit St. Alexis. Have a chat with the priests there. But for now, he wondered what connection Bloody Mary had with this man the children called Zoroaster—or the son of Zoroaster—and whether he was her son or not, and then she'd have motive…
if
she believed Leather Apron was indeed her son.

Alastair needed a clear idea who this mystery man and his mystery family might be, and what proof he'd used to convince Mary that he was in fact her evil spawn. Or was it all a fiction from her addled mind, a cunning one to create and build her own dangerous reputation, to ward off evil befalling her? Who in his right mind, man, woman or child would attack Satan's mother?

Alastair now manipulated the other two inspectors from the room without the least difficulty before he showed Mary the photo that he'd been given by Philo Keane that morning. He must assume either Behan or Logan or both were working in consort with Nathan Kohler.

When he laid the photo before Bloody Mary, she gasped and said, “How? How did you get the demon and his demon brood and his damned wife in a picture?”

“Have you seen your grandchildren, Mary Grace?”

“I…he said he was my son…that he'd been born of Satan, and that his offspring were the grandsons of Satan, and that I laid with Satan to begin the bloodline between human and Devil.”

“And you've told children this?”

“They need to know. It's the truth. Only the strongest survive.”