Robert Walker - Shadows in the White City

“Gabby?” He looked up from where he sat on the hot steps of the museum pavilion. His face telegraphed how stunned he was to see her. “I thought you were in the carriage with your mother. I asked Philo to get the two of you out of the city for a few days while…until there’s an end to this madness.”

“I’m not going anywhere, and I doubt my mother would agree to it either. She called me at the Des Plaines station house-”

“Called for you at my station house?”

“Yes, I’ve a job there now.” She handed him one manila file while holding back a second.

“Wait, hold on…what…Just what’re you doing with an official police report?” He waved the papers she’d handed him. “And what’re you doing here?”

“Look…look at the report, Inspector.”

Ransom read the official police report. It was a list of aliases for a name he had hoped never to see again, Campaneua.

“Who put you up to this?” His voice startled her.

“I told you. Inspector Drimmer. He requested it last night over the phone.”

“And since when do you take police calls and-”

“Chief Nathan Kohler hired me on the spot when I went to talk to him about working for the Chicago Police Department while I get my degree in pathology through Rush Medical College, working with Dr. Fenger. Dr. Fenger provided me with a wonderful recommendation.”

“Christian sent you into that lair of Kohler’s?”

“If you mean the man’s office, yes. Dr. Fenger believes in me.”

“OK, OK.” He began studying the list. “There’s an arrest here of a year ago of a Campaneua, just south of the city, Joliet, but he was sent on his way.”

“To Chicago…or so he told Joliet authorities.”

A gasp escaped Ransom. “The alias they have on him. Walter Dunston.”

“Yes, not far from Waldo Denton.”

“And if he is really a Campaneua, then he has come to kill me.”

Gabby looked curiously at him when he said this. “If so, he’s botched the job like a poor marksman.”

“Agreed…killing everyone around me, purposefully missing me, dragging it out.”

“He’s decided you should suffer.”

“Suffer long and hard before he kills me.”

“It would appear so.”

“Does Kohler know about this?” He indicated the police report.

“No.”

“Anyone? Did you tell anyone of it?”

“No, but I will tell Mother. You know Jane and I share everything.”

He nodded, understanding. “Get to her. Make her promise as you promise to me now that you tell no one of this. I will handle things from here.”

“It-it has to do with Haymarket…has from the start, hasn’t it?”

“I killed a man, or rather a number of us coppers killed a man named Campaneua while attempting to get information from him.”

She looked stricken. “Then the rumors are true?”

“It was in order to save lives, I thought at the time.”

“But if Denton is Campaneua’s relative and out to get you…why’d he kill Cliffton Purvis, who had no connection to you…not to mention other victims with no connection to you? People you didn’t even know. Why?”

Purvis had been Gabby’s one-time boyfriend.

“The others were intended less to wound me personally than to wound my pride, my confidence, the public trust in my reputation.”

“Yes, to…to wound you professionally.”

“Denton has succeeded on both counts. And as for Purvis, I suspect it had to do with you, Gabby.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“He’s pervertedly infatuated with you, and the Purvis boy showed an interest in you, Gabby.”

Tears welled up unbidden as Gabby’s eyes traced the top-sail of a merchant ship out on Lake Michigan making its approach to the city. She swallowed hard. “I hardly knew Cliffton. We’d just met in fact, yet I feel some small measure of how you must be feeling right now. And it makes for more understanding of this report from France, the Sûreté police-your response to the measurements taken of one Dr. James Phineas Tewes, sir. The night you’d gotten mother intoxicated.”

“I do apologize for the suspicion and chicanery on my part, but with her Tewes part played so well, she brought suspicion on herself.”

“But it took you to get her stewed!”

“Frankly, she managed to get herself stewed.”

“The report details exactly who Dr. Tewes was.”

“Was?” He took the report and began studying it.

“It details my father’s crimes-a true con artist indeed-and his death in a prison. It’s why Mother has hidden him from me all these years. Allain Tewes.”

“I’m sorry, Gabrielle. I believed that…I thought it the right thing at the time.”

“You have nothing to apologize for. You were onto a fraud, and you were right in a sense. You are a good detective, after all. Both my parents have now lived false lives.”

She stood as if to go but lingered, awkwardly shaking.

He stood and held her to him. “It’s all right,” he muttered.

They held in a moment of silence. “I was so shocked to learn of Inspector Drimmer’s murder.”

“Think what is in Denton’s mind now, Gabby. You. So you must leave the city. I am sending you and your mother to a safe place.”

“I won’t go.”

“Yes, you will, young lady. You’ll do as I say.”

She smiled up at him.

“Think now as Denton is thinking, Gabby.”

“Think like a killer?”

“Precisely, if you are to survive.”

“Or if you are to catch him?”

“Now you have it.”

“It’s difficult…to think such dark thoughts.”

“Denton means to celebrate when all this vengeance he’s taken out on me is over, when finally it is my body burned and garroted and laid low in my grave.”

“So this’s been the plan hatched by the younger Campaneua-”

“Denton-he means to be with you, Gabby Tewes, to have you-possess you.”

She shakily repeated it. “Possess me?”

“He has set his mind for you.”

“The purpose of his returning my umbrella that night was to gain entry to our home?”

“You tell me, Inspector Tewes.”

She sniffed and blew her nose and looked terribly young doing it.

“Gabrielle, you now have some idea how close you and your mother came to dying that night.”

“And how you sacrificed for us.”

He shrugged this off. “One slight, one offense can set a deviant like him off.”

“All of this you know, and yet Denton freely roams the streets of Chicago right this moment.”

“All of this the two of us know as a matter of a cop’s innate intuition. We have that edge, and yet we can’t touch the man, not legally at any rate.”

“All this we know, yet a mystery remains. How a person like Denton can bring on himself so much black-hearted dementia in the first place?”

“And why? Why -the question all this time that I’ve been blind to comes clear at last. Why this sick boy holds such an enormous hatred for me. Jane was right on that score.”

“It has to do with who you are, the stories about you, sir, your own black reputation.”

“My stock and trade, but I’d thought the incident with Campaneua long buried.”

“ Cremated perhaps. Look, it has all to do with your being called the ‘hero’ of Haymarket. Mother held suspicions of it all along.”

“You and your mother have formidable minds, young lady.”

“ Ahhh… thank you. Formidable…” Gabby giggled at the word no one had ever leveled at her before.

“Waldo Denton…an alias,” Ransom mused. “And Griff was onto it.”

“He was indeed.”

“But Denton’s entire bloody plan must’ve been hatched years ago, perhaps as a child.”