“Hasn’t everyone?”
“Pinkerton did a lotta what I’m saying, and you’ve already laid all the groundwork.”
“Thanks, Waldo. If it comes to a showdown, and I have time, I’ll send for you,” Ransom promised, allowing the kid his fantasy. “You bring the Night Hawk. Make your name and fortune on the case.”
Denton cleared his throat at this point. “We’ve arrived at your destination, sir, Muldoon’s.”
“Thanks.” He exited the cab and paid Waldo. “How long’ve you been driving a hack?”
“Too long and a half. Before apprenticing with Mr. Keane.
The day job pays bills.”
“I see.”
“Good way to get to know our city. Learn it fast having a different fare every ten minutes.”
“You keep a close watch on your fares!”
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“Personal touch insures they come to me before taking another hack.”
“Clever Waldo, quite.”
“I try to be. It’s not easy.”
“Being clever?”
“I mean . . . it don’t come easy is what I mean to say, sir.”
“Never had an opportunity for college, heh?”
“No, sir . . . not like them born with that silver spoon, what?”
“Ahhh . . . no chance at college myself either.”
“Oh, I could’ve gone to college . . . could’ve been smart and maybe train for some profession. But . . . circumstances held out against it.”
“Know what you mean . . . I do. Guess it was fortunate you took to photography.”
“A godsend really. . . . A golden opportunity to work with Mr. Keane, I say. And as for the meagerness what comes from Mr. Keane’s hand, it did go a long way to help me in burying Mother.”
“I’ll give your idea more thought. To lay a trap.” Ransom so wanted his hands on the monster who’d turned his city into a daily nightmare. Wanted five minutes alone with the fiend. Wanted to avenge Merielle and all the victims.
“Be sure to get word to me if you do it, sir,” Waldo kept on nonstop. “I mean . . . think of it. Even if the Phantom were to give you the slip, which ain’t likely to happen to a detective of your stature, sir, but if your trap ’twere foiled, but we still got a shot—e’en of his back as he’s running from you, why we’d have him!” “Dead to rights in the frame.”
“Like Mr. Keane says, if it ain’t in the frame, it ain’t in the frame, and—”
“—and if it ain’t in the frame, it doesn’t exist.”
“Ironic . . . now Mr. Keane is in the frame . . . so to speak . . .”
“Yes, indeed.”
“And it’s a put-up job, I warrant. When I heard that they’d 292
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put the arm on Mr. Keane, I asked what can the authorities be thinking?” He began a low, curdling laugh rumbling from the diaphragm and escaping nostrils and mouth all at once, a kind of vomiting laugh that Philo had complained about on occasion. Ransom did his best to overlook the torturous sound, but not until Waldo was half a block off, did he feel he could get it out of his head along with the idea of a trap.
“I hope others agree with you about Keane, Waldo,” Alastair said to himself where he stood outside Muldoon’s. “All you bloody armchair detectives are alike—spoiling for a fight. If young Waldo were not careful, he would indeed attract the attention of the Phantom. An old saying came to mind: Be careful of what you wish.
For now a talk with Muldoon was in order.
When he walked into the dark little tavern, Muldoon was waiting for him, a baseball bat extended over his head. “I swear, Ransom, if you’ve come for trouble—”
“Nothing could be further from my thoughts, Muldoon!
What trouble?”
Every rummy and street life in the place mentally braced for a confrontation. Hunched shoulders over the bar stiffened. Men began to move off into shadow, some who owed Ransom in either money or information, scurrying out the back. He had put word on the street that he wanted to know the identity of the infamous Phantom of the Fair, the expert garroter. To date, nothing had come of this effort, and this troubled him immensely, because if the people on the street like Dot’n’Carry could not locate an inchworm’s worth of news, then this meant the fellow was not local, not known among the homeless and derelict and deviant street rats.
Such a state made the killer invisible.
But for the moment, Moose Muldoon and the Chicago Bear faced off.
Tension filled the space between Muldoon and Ransom, and everyone could taste the bad blood in the air.
“Muldoon, you stupid cock-sucking motherless swine, CITY FOR RANSOM
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do you know Jim Beckensaw? Your own alderman for this district?”
“ ’Course I do!”
“The man got the Sunday dry laws rescinded!”
“Again? already again!”
“He’s a political genius, but you yourself know that this is what, the twentieth goddamn time? Ya blockheaded excrement brain! They rescind Sunday laws on a yo-yo pork string, and if you bothered ever to read a paper, you’d’ve some passing knowledge to get by on!” “Look here, now! Are you here to drink or to fight?”
“German Tavern and Brewery Owners Association laid out a fortune at the doorstep of City Hall, and this ward you are smack in the middle of lies within boundaries of the chosen triangle!”
“Chosen triangle?”
“The bloody city blocks that can serve alcoholic bever-ages on any given Sunday!”
Muldoon looked stricken. “Nobody told me. I missed the last meet—” He almost finished his sentence before Ransom’s cane sent Muldoon flat. From behind the bar, lying on the boards, everyone could hear the moose’s moaning.
The bear calmly righted his cane and stepped regally to the door and back out onto the streets where he’d grown up.
He knew that Muldoon could appreciate the balance of it all, blow for blow.
As day turned to night, Alastair decided he must do something— anything—to take action against the killer. To this end, he began planting seeds all over the city. Even before leaving Muldoon’s entirely, having stepped back into the black interior, he announced, “Take heed, all of you! This blasted Phantom’s a fairy is what he is! If he wishes to prove himself anything other than a pussy, then, by God, stand up to a man! No more boys, no girls, no women, but a man!”
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After a stunned moment of silence, a cheer went up for Ransom. Men wanted to buy him a drink, others slapped his back. He slammed the cane against the bar to silence the crowd even as Muldoon found his feet. “Buy me drinks and cheer me, lads, after I’ve cut off this bastard’s head and handed it to him!” Cheers went up.
“Let’s see ’im take that pussy weapon of his to my neck!”
More cheers followed, and more drinks were pushed at Ransom. Laughter and jokes ensued, most of the jokes leveled at his characterization of the Phantom as a fairy and a coward. But one man in the room watched Ransom’s massive neck from a dark corner and thought what a bloody easy ham it’d be to slice through and silence.
“Come on, you baby killer! You little-girl killer. Try your hand with a man!” Ransom shouted over the noise, succumbing to a toast proposed by Carmichael. Ransom had selected Muldoon’s as the newsmen’s hangout he knew it to be. He imagined the screaming headlines across every late edition. He meant to repeat the performance again—in every tavern he could manage between here and the great fair. “I’ll be wandering the darkest, loneliest pathways of the lagoon at Lake Park, where you murdered those two children the other night. So come for me, you little dickless thing! Try to place your murderous guillotine on me!” So here he was in the lagoon fairgrounds where Trelaine had failed to save Miss Mandor or himself. Ransom strolled one end to the other, daring the bastard to leap out from any blackness to slip his bloody wire about Ransom’s beefy neck. They had surmised the killer a small man, if a man at all. Ransom was often taken with the fact that many hardened murderers and rapists, once nabbed, turned out to be slight of build and wretched little creatures indeed.