“It’s time he knows Dr. Jane Francis. Time he knows who he’s got eyes for.”
CHAPTER 22
Awaking in Dr. Tewes’s chair, half on, half off and below a huge metal pyramid of brass, Ransom thought this reality yet another disturbing dream. But this was real.
Tewes had put him under, but how? What’d the doctor use?
Some sort of gas? An injection? He recalled nothing. Blinking, he realized the distinct absence of a headache, and in the inner coils of his ear, he heard Tewes’s voice saying the single word— heal—over and over, only the voice coalesced into a woman’s soothing voice, a voice that sounded vaguely like Gabrielle’s but not quite . . . a voice that came with a visual image of a woman deep in a darkened mental portal—a doorway—and she’d waved him toward her, asking, “Why don’t you ask for more?” He straightened and stood, trying to brush away the wrin-kles of the suit he’d worn for Jane. No doubt she knew of his being here, succumbing to her brother’s touch. Only the sweet, tangy odor of frying bacon dislodged the terror of being under Tewes’s absolute control. Jane’s out there preparing the doctor’s breakfast. The perfect opportunity to slip away before anyone should see.
Carefully, quietly he made his escape from the clinic, the pungent odors of Tewes’s various cures filling his nostrils.
CITY FOR RANSOM
253
Someone’d loosed his shirt and tie and had taken his shoes off. He prayed Jane hadn’t seen him so vulnerable. Another thought struck him: Tewes’s hands should be registered as a lethal weapon.
Whatever else might be said of Tewes’s methods, Ransom could not argue with results. His head, even the nasty lump, no longer plagued him, plus he’d gotten through an entire night without interruption or medication—so far as he knew.
He picked up his shoes and tiptoed down the hallway, toward the outer foyer running alongside the parlor. Here he had some vague memory of nearly collapsing as much from fatigue, he realized, as from the steady headache.
He eased the door open. One part of his mind said stay, say hello to Jane, and thank Gabby and her father for not throwing him out the night before, while another part of his mind played tug-o-war with embarrassment at having caved in under this man’s touch, even if it were called therapy of a kind, because there was an undeniable attraction to have those hands on him again, and this disturbed Ransom. An attraction for another man’s touch. He imagined what his friends around the poker barrel, at the tavern, at the station house and the firehouse would say if they should ever hear of it.
Yet he wanted to make successive visits to Tewes’s unusual chair, to again take the cure—to be healed . . . even if temporarily. But mostly, he wanted to feel the man’s hands again against his temples, over the crown, behind the ear.
One foot in, one out the door, hip-deep in indecision, Ransom felt like an unlikely, over-the-hill, misplaced Hamlet unable to decide. Meanwhile, a flood of sunlight raced into the foyer and down the hall, which must announce him. He quickly closed the door and realized some movement in the nearby bushes. “Who is it? Who’s there?” “It’s me . . . Bosch!” came the whisper.
“Bosch? Why the deuce’re you hiding in Tewes’s shrub-bery?”
“Your orders—get what I can on the doctor.”
254
ROBERT W. WALKER
Bosch was his best snitch, known on the street as Dot’n’Carry for the noise resulting from the point-counterpoint between a wooden foot and cane. A decorated veteran of two wars, one of them being the War of the Rebellion, Bosch had previously traveled abroad and had signed up in the British Army and had fought in the Crimean War until he’d had a bellyful of death, and so had deserted, swearing never again.
Then came the Civil War, and being destitute, a suit of clothes, hardtack and beans, and a government-issue Sharps rifle ended all horror of war.
“I enlisted for all the reasons that scuttle a man,” Bosch told anyone stopping at his tin cup. He sold stories for meager coin. He slavered and spewed forth through missing teeth the entire war and all the reasons for it save the glory of it. Down to how he’d gotten out when his left foot had been amputated in a field hospital while some man with a camera took photos to send off to Washington. He would joke that Old Abe Lincoln, in order never to forget the atrocities of the war, hung Bosch’s severed foot in his White House bedroom to contemplate each night, and how this was the chief cause of Mary Lincoln’s having gone mad.
Bosch had a lot of stories in his head, many told so often people no longer listened. He had many yet to be told, and many that would never be told, but Ransom knew one thing certain about Bosch, and that was his birthright, his gift, which was the theater and storytelling. His ability with words had never been adequately put to proper use. He ought to’ve been on the Lyceum circuit, on stage beside the humorists like Twain and Brett Harte and the fellow who told Uncle Remus tales—Joel Chandler Harris. Most certainly, Bosch proved a man in need of a much larger audience, but failing all his life, he now made a scant living at a game requiring a lively imagination along with forked tongue—working for Ransom on the one hand, outlaws on the other. It gave Bosch his only stage, and with his quick wit, he’d managed to survive for a long time on Chicago streets where—should he tell the wrong story to the wrong man at the wrong time—it could be his last.
CITY FOR RANSOM
255
On the whole, Ransom liked the little ferret-faced mole, and was probably the only one left alive who called him Bosch and not Dot’n’Carry for the sport of it.
Ransom slipped his shoes on and followed the weasel into the bush, and together they found a cow path that took them a safe distance. Below a livery stable sign reading Phillips & Son they talked.
“So what can you tell me of Tewes?”
“He’s no kind of man.”
“I’m aware he’s effeminate. What else?”
“The doctor is a woman.”
“Tewes? A woman? What’re you saying?”
“I’ve only me word, but I saw him—-errr . . . her dressing down, and I tell you Dr. Tewes has breasts, nice ones in fact.”
“Damn you for a fool, Bosch! You saw Miss Ayers! His sister!” Alastair raised his cane for effect. “Get ’way from me now or I’ll bash your head.”
“I tell you what I see, and this is me reward? Where’s me two dollars?”
“I don’t pay for nonsense or fiction, Bosch!”
“All right, all right, have it your way, the doctor’s a man and keep it that way, but you’ll want to know about your friend Kohler and what he’s about.”
“What is your addled brain spewing forth now?”
“You wanted to know what your Dr. Tewes has on Kohler, so I kicked around, and I tell you, dirt falls away from your chief. If he has secrets, you can’t pry it loose on the street, but there is something.” “So what have you, damn it?”
“Confound it, Ransom, you got it backward from the start!” He lifted his own cane, jabbing it at Alastair.
Using his cane sword-fashion, Ransom batted Bosch’s off. From Jane Francis’s window, they looked like two schoolboys playing pirate, crossing swords.
“So go on, say it, man! Must you be so damnably irritating, Bosch?”
256
ROBERT W. WALKER
With dramatic flourish, Bosch said, “Kohler ain’t the one being blackmailed.”
“What?”
“Kohler has something on Tewes, and I done told you what it is!”
“Mark me, if this turns out to be one of your silly fabrications,” began Ransom, fuming even as he thrust two silver dollars at the man, the coins falling to the dirt, “I’ll find you and skin you alive.” “I’d expect so from a man of your repute, Inspector.”