“We can talk to Dr. Fenger.”
“No! Not him!”
“Then another doctor. Chicago’s full of doctors.”
“A doctor for the soul? How many treat your soul, Alastair?”
“What’re you talking about, baby?”
She went to her bureau drawer and snatched out a piece of soiled, torn paper. She held up the advertisement to his stunned eyes. A frayed flier for the services of Dr. J. Phineas Tewes.
“Tewes . . . why’d it have to be Tewes?”
“I’ve been seeing him.”
“How long? For how bloody long?”
“Two weeks, a little more. He’s helped tremendously!”
“I can see that,” he replied sarcastically. He snatched the flier, ripped it up, and paced the floor boards above the London Royale Arms Tavern like a bull caged in a stall.
Given what he’d gone through today with the quack at the train station, it felt like a blow, this desire of Merielle’s to visit Dr. Tewes for a phrenological exam to determine why she felt mentally scattered. It was as if two people occupied her cranium: Merielle a cultured, educated, and sweet young woman Ransom might take to any cotillion in the city, and Polly, the brash, dirty-talking, crude, uncultured, unread, uneducated poisonous wench who enjoyed dirty money for dirty sex.
“He says you’re just using me, Alastair.”
“Tewes said that?”
“He says a lot of things about you, yes.”
“Bastard. What else?”
“Says you beat people to within an inch of their lives when you interrogate them.”
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“It’s only what everyone on the street says. He knows no more ’bout me than what I want people to think. If they think that way, I get ’em talking, believe me, without laying a hand on ’em.”
“Dr. Tewes says you’re only after one thing from me, Alastair.”
“Really? And what might that be?”
“What lies between my—”
“Why the squirmy little runt quack! What business is it of his to get involved in our affairs? Last time you held me, you called me a comfort, said you loved me, Mere! And I believed you, and I’ve never lied to you, ever, and—” “Dr. Tewes says your attention and help is only trading one kind of bondage for another—”
“Just tell me, who in hell beat your eye to a pulp!”
“Dr. Tewes thought it was you.”
“Who?”
“I ain’t tellin’. I don’t want you going raging off like my—my father to slay the dragon. Merielle might, but I don’t!”
“I’ll just find out another way, Mere.” He refused any longer to call her Polly. “It’s what I do, after all.”
“You won’t get it from me.”
“Stubborn little . . .”
“Bitch? Now that’s the kind of talk I like, Ransom. Call me dirty names and be as rough as you can be, and you’ll please Polly, and with Polly in your bed, you’ll have the buckin’est best time of your—” He grabbed her up in a bear hug and stole her breath away with a passionate kiss. He hurled her onto her back and ripped away the robe she wore, revealing her red lace lin-gerie. He tore away at his own clothes even as he kissed and touched and held her down all at once. “As rough as you want it,” he hoarsely whispered in her ear. “Maybe after this, Dr. Tewes can go to hell, Polly!” “Oh, god, Ransom! Yes, yes! Being Polly for you”—she caught her breath—“that could work . . .”
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And to hell with that creepy little bastard Tewes, he thought, his hatred of the man rising with his passion. He said aloud as she came in multiple orgasms, “Promise you’ll never see that quack again, Polly baby. And give me the name of the blackheart who hurt you! Now or else I will never stop this!” He taunted her with each thrust. “Tell me . . . tell me now . . . now . . . now . . . now!” “Damn fine . . . in-ter-ro-ga-t ion tech-technique! Ran . . .
som . . . style, damn! Said you’d . . . get it outta . . . out of me . . . one way . . . or another . . .”
CHAPTER 9
In a darkened Chicago flophouse, same time In the waking vision, the killer sees the dead unborn eyes alight with a strange preternatural recognition of who has killed him. The unborn one stares into his soul from somewhere the other side of Styx.
The killer sits up, sweating in the dark, a storm of hatred raging inside. He stares at the black eyes in the mirror.
“Have a tumbler of that elixer that Dr. Tewes sold you,” the voice in his brain tells him. He’d purchased the concoction a week ago from the little doctor of phrenology and magnetic healing. He’d wondered now for hours about Dr. Tewes’s having shown up at the train station, wondered at his taking the victim’s head off to the stationmaster’s office and doing a mystical reading of it. Ransom amused him, while Tewes frightened him.
How much did Tewes know of him and his private business?
“God blind me! ’Twas a regular cockfight between the big inspector and the little dandy!”
But what of this strange new science—phrenology? What had Tewes learned from the dead cranium? Did he cross a line into the spectral world, or was he a consummate con CITY FOR RANSOM
81
artist? But suppose . . . just suppose the dead man had revealed something to Dr. James Phineas Tewes? What then?
Dr. James Phineas Tewes knew that one day the mask must go to reveal Dr. Jane Francis-Tewes beneath, so that she could come forward, if for no other than for herself and for Gabby. The balancing act, always difficult for her, was, she believed, even harder for her daughter, Gabrielle, conceived with her French lover and dead common law husband, the real Dr. Tewes. The real Tewes had been her first major heartbreak; finding herself pregnant and alone in a foreign country had been her second. Returning to America as a surgeon unable to work due to her gender, proved Jane’s third major disappointment.
All the same, she refused to cling to remorse or regrets.
Jane Francis-Tewes instinctively knew that an out-of-wedlock pregnancy could end her professional career faster than any preconceived notions of the American public about women practicing medicine. So James Tewes had become Jane Francis-Tewes’s cover, and the phrenological exam and diagnosis his/her unorthodox answer to creating a clientele in her medical practice—a practice that failed when she’d attempted to set up shop in New York, then Philadelphia, then Indianapolis as herself.
Unable to feed Gabby and finally tiring of the world’s idiocy, she traded for a world she would mold instead. Thus, she began dressing as a male doctor of magnetic medicine and phrenology. As a result, her practice here flourished.
On arriving here, as Gabby turned eleven, the widower physician, now “James Phineas Tewes” had gotten himself a bank loan! Something Dr. Jane had never accomplished.
And so it went.
The longer she was Dr. James Phineas Tewes, the better their lives, and the more independent she and Gabby were.
Clients here in Chicago, having come with his fliers in hand, 82
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flocked to Tewes’s promises of relief from all manner of mental and nervous disorder.
And in fact, Dr. Tewes—Jane and James working in tandem—did indeed do good and not harm as people like Inspector Ransom believed. So what if the patient believed J.
Phineas’s hands those of a man touched by God, that his fingertips conveyed some sort of magic that could actually read mental states from mere touch alone?