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Firing of the bodies held no excitement for him. It was merely for show . . . something extra for Inspector Ransom.
Cliffton had died of massive blood loss. Traumatic, hem-orrhagic shock due to the neck wound. He hadn’t felt a thing after that, certainly not the fire. In fact, he was so suddenly dead that he hadn’t time to think of anything but the enveloping arms of death. No time for questions of why or of eternity, heaven or hell; nothing normal or natural in the way he went.
Young Cliffton—at the point of attack—in Illinois Central Station, second-floor concourse men’s room no longer gave a rat’s ass about examining the architecture, or studying under the finest architects, or recalling how sweet his girl’s kiss was beneath the Ferris wheel. He had been jabbering and washing his hands—just as his mother, no doubt, had taught him—when the garrote leapt round his neck.
Quick efficient silent death slipped from a coat pocket.
Again he covered his nostrils with the aroma of the stolen handkerchief—Cliffton’s possession. It conjured up another aroma, the last odor Cliffton smelled—his own blood. He sucked it in, and his brain filled with the images of holding life in his hands.
Not only had Cliffton been the first male he’d ever killed, but the only victim he hadn’t assiduously stalked. Opportunity had simply presented itself there in the train station. His third killing since arriving in Chicago. He’d only killed small animals until now, practicing on them with the garrote.
But he’d never been found out or arrested. So he wasn’t in their various card files.
Another of his victims had been a tender, lovely, young milk-skinned little family girl, a Polish princess named Milka Kaimeski—Cliffton’s female counterpart. He liked killing the innocent and unblemished.
Friends of Milka’s had left her in the company of a gentleman the night she lost her life. Descriptions of the phantom gentleman were as varied as those of Christ himself and so rendered useless, but all were in agreement that he carried CITY FOR RANSOM
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a cane, wore a top hat, expensive leather shoes, coat and tails, and that he was smitten by the beautiful young Milka.
Most accounts put the man at thirty or thirty-five, the age he effected when prowling for prey. In point of fact, he carried no cane. Canes were for crippled old men like that fanciful copper, Inspector Ransom. He didn’t himself need a stinking cane to take down that fat screw, as he was young and strong, having just turned twenty. Sure, the old hero of Haymarket had a hundred pounds on him, but the great equalizer lay silent in his pocket, the mini-guillotine.
As for his first Chicago victim, she too, had gone to the fair. But she’d been a tough, gaunt, hard-edged, leather-skinned cigar-smoking working girl named Hannah O’Doul, a red-light district prostitute. She’d gone to the fair on a lark with friends, but having run short of funds, Hannah separated, intending to acquire more funds by picking up a John at the fair. She’d found him. Or rather, he’d been stalking her.
She wanted most of all to ride the Ferris wheel, and while frightened of its enormity, she remained fascinated at the idea of reaching out to touch a bird in flight. He’d dumped her body along the forested lane where police routinely patrolled, mimicking the playful taunts of old Jack the Ripper himself. Hannah’s death only made a few sentences, buried on the obit pages.
Killing prostitutes got no play in the press, and little had been made of the Polish girl in the Chicago press either. It disturbed both him and Sleepeck Stumpf that these heinous murders had been given so little attention. They’d both expected outrage. They’d expected a flood of ink devoted to the killer. But surely now they’d see results in the dailies; they must give it front-page mention now, thanks to his having upgraded to the murders of an unborn along with the Polish girl and now a fresh off-the-farm school lad—all in a matter of weeks. The response must now be outrage.
He imagined the morning newspaper accounts in the Chicago Tribune and the Daily Herald: police stymied by phantom garroter, at a loss for clues.
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News of the killings on the street ran ahead of the reporters, outstripping their efforts and accounts. News had also spread wide about the Polish girl’s pregnancy. He hadn’t known it at the time; not that it’d’ve mattered a whit to Stumpf. Apparently, no one else had known she was a spoiled dove, left to fend for herself. That is until the autopsiest, a Dr. Christian Fenger, declared it so. This news spurred belated outrage. Authorities had arrested the boy Milka had been seeing—father of the child being their prime suspect.
Afterwards, Sleepeck Stumpf called her another Hannah O’Doul in the making, a street tramp—no better. Getting herself knocked up in such fashion. A sign of the times, end of century coming on—the end time! And as for the unborn child, what bloody chance might it’ve had at a future anyway?
“When the Twentieth Century does arrive, God means to destroy all the Earth and Sky overhead, and to begin all over again anyway,” Stumpf assured him just as Mother had on her death bed. “This according to Revelation and Stumpf—spirit of the spirit. So what matters? Naught . . . naught matters.” All the same, if the unborn counted as a life, he’d taken in four souls, each saved from the horrors of the end time.
Four souls . . . three of which he’d felt enter him as he drained each life. But not knowing of the child, he hadn’t felt the child’s spirit enter, and this led to a doubt of Stumpf and his purpose in all this killing. Stumpf promised power and knowledge of the universe, familiarity with the Creator beyond that of normal men—and a sense of well-being to override the chaos of this world. All the same . . . whether Stumpf was just talking or not, the taking of lives did have a profound effect. He felt it religiously—a deep, abiding, and contented feeling—especially when twisting the garrote to hear death and to breathe it into his nostrils.
He imagined an orderly or nurse standing beside an autopsy slab at the Cook County morgue, arms extended with the linen winding sheet, the wrapping held wide and open to receive the dead fetus from Milka’s womb. Imagined Dr.
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Fenger’s cold forceps lifting out the four-month-old child from the burned girl’s charred abdomen, and handing the lump of flesh over to the tearful nurse. And as the child is being transferred from the doctor’s hands to the linen ham-mock, the child’s eyes open and fill with an awe that speaks of life and death entwined.
“When are we not with death?” he asked aloud. Passersby below umbrellas stared dumbly, but a nearby horse whinnied as if agreeing.
CHAPTER 11
Dr. Tewes had rejoined the world, and as quickly as Jane could become James again, she got her other self over to Cook County Hospital. She’d been weary, but with that bull detective on Tewes’s tail, she’d suddenly become energized, taking a carriage for Dr. Fenger’s. Should Inspector Ransom now seek out and find Dr. Tewes, he’d be in one of the two places spoken of. In fact, sending him to the South Levee district was a stroke of genius. He’d likely want to catch the good doctor there in a questionable or compromising position, she reasoned, so he’d go there first. Unable to find him there, he’d come looking at Cook County Hospital. Perfectly played, she reasoned.
On arriving, she—as Tewes—learned that Dr. Fenger was still in the autopsy and inquest phase. Having a number of living patients to see to, Dr. Fenger had only now gotten round to a full autopsy of the Purvis corpse.