“Out, out! Inspector!” Gabby shouted.
“Fiercely loyal to your mother, aren’t you, Gabby? A good thing. She’ll need all your support—”
“I’ll not have you shouting at or harming my . . . my—”
“It’s all right. She is your mother now; no need of pretense, Gabby, and please no need pointing a weapon. I am going.”
“I understand your anger, Alastair.” Jane placed a hand on his, but now her touch didn’t feel like the soothing fingers she’d used the night before.
He pulled from her touch. “How ironic that in the most intimate moment I shared with you, you were Dr. Tewes.”
“You should come back for more treatments, Alastair, but for now, I think it must be as patient and doctor and nothing more.”
“Do you believe I want anything more?”
“Then you will seek help . . . with the headaches?”
He stood silent a moment, considering this. “I can go to any number of phrenologists in this city for my head, and any number of brothels for all else I need, Dr. what is it?
Ayers?”
He rushed out to her saying, “Francis . . . Dr. Jane Francis.”
Gabby stared across at her, an accusatory look in her eye.
“What?”
“You did not do right by Alastair, Mother.”
“And I suppose holding him at gunpoint is all right?
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Look, I’m doing the best I can! And I’m not about to apologize for my choices. Hell, I tell the truth and what does it earn me?”
“It will earn you scorn and my ridicule. I knew the chickens’d come home to roost.”
“Not now, Gabby. I do not need this.” Jane rushed to her room and locked the door, where Gabby listened to her sobs.
Gabby almost knocked, wanting to go to her mother, but some inner strength told her no, not this time. This time her mother must face her decision alone.
Gabby wondered how she might somehow maintain contact with Alastair. She wanted so to learn from him and from his connections all about police work and police science and police medicine, and to end her own lies with her mother about how her studies at NU were going so well.
Mother can be such a fool, but Gabby saw in Alastair far more than all the stories that orbited around him. She saw so much vulnerability in him, so much hurt and pain and the years of service and misery and professionalism and results.
He was so much more than the story of a killing before Haymarket, a killing that may or may not have precipitated the bomb that had killed his mates.
Ransom fumed all the way home. He’d finally been cornered to sit for Tewes’s phrenology and magnetic therapy, had placed his misshapen, suffering head unknowingly in Jane Francis’s hands, to “take the cure” and not only had Dr.
Tewes’s touch— her touch—cured his recurrent headaches and the localized pain Muldoon had put on him, but the session proved instructive. There might well be something to this magnetism stuff after all. Maybe.
The session had been, he privately confessed, decidedly and strangely appealing and intriguing, and perhaps for Jane as well—for both partners in this unusual coupling of “detectives” searching amid chaos. In her way, she, too, searched for form and structure in a world devoid of shape 262
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or sense. Alastair continued to feel a pull toward Jane Francis and their topsy-turvy, fascinating if bizarre relationship.
Now that Ransom had learned the truth, a whole new dy-namic between them might naturally arise. So much made sense to him now. From the beginning there’d been a sexual tension, as when he’d become so outrageous in the train station, planting that head against Tewes’s— her clean white suit, even then there’d been a layer of conflict at work that he’d not fully understood—until now! The wonders of hindsight, and at the back of his head—a head that felt so much better, and a head yearning for her touch again, and filled with a sad truth: If ever she touches me again, and me knowing it’s her touch, how much more wonderful?
Alastair must work to overcome anger both at the deception and an inability to’ve discovered it, when all along, it’d been staring him in the face—as all the clues had been there.
“Open and shut case,” Ransom told himself now, arriving at home. “What in hell was I thinking?”
This made the cabbie and his horse each look back at Ransom. “Begging your pardon, sir?” asked the cabbie.
“Something amiss?”
Ransom looked at the man for the first time, a noticeably striking pair of black eyes like olive-sized grapes without seeds. The man’s forehead was large as well, his hairy single brow a ledge over the eyes. The man looked like one of Lombroso’s supposed villainous types—a real Cro-Magnon.
In the old days, and sometimes even now, under conditions of ignorance, police arrested men for their brutish looks, and the stains on their teeth and on their aprons—even if they were butchers—many for brutal rapes, murders, assassinations, and anarchy, like the man Ransom had once killed while hog-tied to a chair. Yes, the cabbie could easily be arrested for a multiple murderer with a garrote and a can of kerosene on his ugly looks alone, and when his picture was splashed across every neighborhood paper in every conceivable language across the city, everyone could sleep better, knowing the Chicago PD had their man under lock and key.
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Yes, a man like this fellow would do fine for the Phantom of the Fair; he’d be so easily inked-in by Thom Carmichael’s sketch artist. The cabbie even had the attire of a gent, decked in high boots, black cape, and top hat. But then his horse was an ugly creature, too, so maybe the horse would do just as well for the killer. But then, should a horse be arrested for looking suspicious? Should a man?
How anyone could use facial features as an indicator, or the size of a man, or the fact he made a living with an axe or a blade, was beyond Ransom.
“Was it something else you wanted, sir?” again asked the cabbie. “I can hold here for you, if it’s your wish, Captain.”
“No . . . no, nothing more, my friend. Feed your horse well.” He tipped the man an additional two bits.
Ransom opened the door on his flat on Des Plaines Street to the tune of the horse’s hooves against cobblestones. He liked his private life, liked the place here, what he had surrounded himself with, his collection of books, paintings, his gramophone on which he played operatic symphonies. He liked being surrounded by his collection of guns and rifles, most hanging on walls or lying under glass. His furnishings had been his father’s, mostly heavy oak and leather. His place was warm and brown, and his shelves had daguerreotypes of his mother and father. The neighborhood was pleasant, tree-lined, green, and well kept. He liked the people in the area, mostly Germans—“Dunkers”—who kept pretty much to themselves, were industrious, opened businesses like food kiosks and beer gardens, and Ransom liked their music and the colorful steins they served their beer in, not to mention the great wienersnitzel prepared at the Frauhouse or Mirabella’s.
All close to the Des Plaines police station where he worked.
Once inside, Ransom found his soap and indoor shower.
Not everyone enjoyed such luxuries, certainly not in Chicago, but Ransom had long ago had the shower installed and more recently the indoor toilet, a Thomas Crapper invention.
A shower and a shave and what was nowadays being called a crap all in the privacy of one’s own home.
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In the shower, Ransom soaked up and rinsed down, and he thought of nothing but Jane Francis, and he wondered why life is as it is, follows a straight path to disappointment and misadventure. Why’d she feel compelled to lie all this time, passing herself off as Tewes? Why’d she get herself into such a quandary with Nathan—to lie for him. Why he hadn’t met Jane far sooner, to’ve been there when she needed him most? He struggled against a knee-jerk reaction of anger toward her; all anger reserved now for the real fool here—himself! “And that little creep Bosch . . . right all along,” he said to the shower stall.