But this fellow at the other end must be reported as derelict or drunk on duty, as again he hung up!
Griffin raced from the box, forgetting to close it, as a storm began to break around him, lightning streaking the black backdrop of sky against the Ferris wheel and the mas
CITY FOR RANSOM
303
sive buildings of the fair, all the White City bathed in sudden downpour. Griffin knew if he were to make the same coach before Ransom completely disappeared, he’d have to hustle as never before.
Ahead of him, Griff saw the cabstand, some of the horses reacting to the sudden thunder and lightning, raising hooves skyward and in need of gentling. He saw Ransom had stumbled and was now slowed, limping, with the cane working harder for him than ever.
Griffin sprinted now, confident he could catch Ransom.
But Alastair was not going to like the news of his failure to get a message to Dr. Tewes.
“Do you think Tewes’s life is in danger? Both he and his daughter? Or have you concluded that the phrenologist is the Phantom and may harm the child?”
“You could not be further from the truth, Griff.”
“Then who are we chasing amid the storm?”
But Ransom did not answer, instead shouting to the first cab he came to, “To Tewes’s—the dispensary and residence of Dr. James Phineas Tewes, now!”
“Address, sir?” asked the cabbie, the same thick-browed Cro-Magnon that Ransom had noticed on an earlier occasion.
“Three-forty Belmont, two doors north of the Episcopal church, and you are paid twice your rate, sir, if you lose a wheel getting me there!”
Something in Ransom feared for Jane Francis and her Gabby. Something deep within whispered a horror, and Alastair imagined a scene of carnage awaiting him at what most in the city knew as the Tewes’s residence. He imagined the worst, and at the same time as the carriage pulled away and Griffin slipped through the open door, he recalled how Waldo Denton had seen to it that Alastair would be chasing phantoms of the wrong kind while Waldo, apprentice photographer, sometime cabbie, sometime fair photographer, garroted Gabrielle and Jane Francis in their home!
The cab driver used his whip, and the hansom wheeled 304
ROBERT W. WALKER
around street corners and clattered insanely over the cobblestones, the sound of the two whinnying horses mimicking the pitiable sounds that Gabby and Jane may be releasing at this same moment. To add to the thunderous assault of hooves beating wildly against stone and the bullwhip cracking, a series of thunderclaps struck as if crashing symbols to this macabre dance they found themselves in.
“What the deuce is going on, Ransom? It’s time you treated me as your equal! I demand to know what the—”
The coach lurched, sending Griffin into a corner, pinning him, while Ransom extended his cane at the crucial moment, using it like a wedge against his own tumbling.
“Slow down! You’ll get us all killed!” Griffin grabbed Ransom’s cane and rammed it against the box overhead and shouted at the driver successively. “Slow up!”
The slot through which the driver communicated shot open and again Ransom saw only the man’s eyes, filled with blood rage and ecstatic joy. Loving this, his coachman’s fantasy come true: an order to open her full-throttle, and taking two Chicago gents on a ride to terrify and delight. “Beggin’ your pardon, sirs, but did ya’ not ask that I run the horses?” “Run them! Run them!” shouted Ransom.
“Whoaaa!” shouted Griffin.
“Hold onto the handrail overhead, Griff!” Ransom said, reclaiming his cane.
“Just tell me what is all the hurry?”
“It’s Jane . . . ahhh, Dr. Tewes’s sister, and the daughter, Gabby! I fear they may be in terrible danger.”
“How can you know?”
“Denton.”
“Denton? Waldo? What about him?”
“Damn it, man, he is our bloody Phantom!”
“That harmless fellow? He’s hardly more than a boy!”
“A warped one, I wager. Look here, he is the one set me thinking of lolling about the damnable lagoon for the Phantom, and that just after dropping Jane . . . ahhh, at the Tewes residence.”
CITY FOR RANSOM
305
“Since when do you listen to civilians on matters of investigation, and one so young?”
“He set my mind on it and did it rather subtly. Cunning fellow as it happens.”
“I would not have put Denton and the word cunning in the same sentence, Alastair.”
“Behind those boyish eyes and goofy grin—designed to make him harmless seeming—there lurks a deadly mind, I tell you.”
“It just seems so out of the blue, sooo farfetched.”
“Precisely as he wants you to believe. But more than cunning and deception is at work here, something even more insidious and poisonous. I mean—”
“What do you mean?” Griff’s brow creased in consternation. He pulled forth a pipe identical to Ransom’s and lit up.
“Suppose he’s a bugger who’s never once gotten a bloody thing he’s ever wanted.”
“You mean like not the mother nor father, not the sister nor brother he wanted?”
“Not the circumstances, not the woman of his dreams, for instance.”
“Nor the money, nor the education he’s chased all his life?
Not the profession nor career.”
“Not the erection, not the joy, not the release, nor the satisfactions we take for granted as with your life with Lucinda.”
“And you think this accumulation of failures leads to deviance and murder?”
Ransom gritted his teeth and held back the immediate word he had for Griffin’s thick-headedness. “Put yourself in his shoes. Scrubbing up and about for the likes of Philo, having to push a hack about the city, cleaning up after his horse, seeing every fare he picks up with a woman on the arm. How many times he drove Merielle and me from corner to corner, God only knows!” “It’s still a stretch. Denton’s hardly more than a boy.”
“We’ve suspected small all along; a weak person, woman-ish if not a woman.”
306
ROBERT W. WALKER
“But Denton . . . Waldo is . . .” Griffin seemed unable to wrap his mind around this idea. He’s so . . . so innocuous, so slight and so . . . so . . .”
For half a moment’s flash, Ransom wished for a time when he could be so naïve and trusting as Griffin Drimmer, a time before he’d become so bloody suspicious of everything on two legs. Finally, he placed a hand on Griff’s and calmly said, “Invisible . . . is what he is, Griff . . . simply invisible, and even more so in that black get-up worn for the hansom cab company, black boot, cape, top hat, down to the Carson, Pirie, Scott buttons.” Drimmer considered this. “A gentleman’s attire in any venue.”
“And him sneaking looks, eavesdropping, studying each fare in his hack up close, through there.” He pointed out the coach hatch.
“Creepy when you think of it.”
“And him sitting up on his high seat, looking all about the streets from behind that nag of his?”
The cab thundered down the street, tossing them from side to side. Griffin shouted over the thunderous noise, “No one’s going to believe Denton physically capable of killing two people out on that lagoon, unless we catch him in the act, with the tools of death!” “Press has made of him some sort of Grendel-sized ogre, haven’t they?”
“Perhaps the press has overstated the—”
“Overstated? Even Carmichael’s taken with the gall and élan of this bastard.”
“No one’s expecting a Waldo Denton!”
“As for walking on water at the lagoon, you and I know how it was done!”