Robert Walker - Shadows in the White City

“Have you agreed to this, Dr. Fenger?” asked Alastair, amazed, lifting his own cane now.

“I have.”

“How so. You, a man of high moral ethics? A surgeon?”

“I know you, of all people,” interrupted the senator, “can and will put a capper on this maniac, and so why not make a bargain of it?” asked the senator, his gold tooth and gold ring and gold watch all lighting him up like a Christmas tree.

“I see my reputation precedes me.”

“Alastair,” said Dr. Fenger, “it means a new wing at Cook County. You’ve no idea how much it’s needed.”

“And you, Chief Kohler?” asked Ransom. “The defender of law in Chicago?”

“No one need know outside this room, Alastair.”

“I see…given it much thought have you?”

“Look, man, we-you and I-civil servants…what becomes of us, Alastair?” Kohler asked. “When retirement comes round? And hell, face it, we don’t know from year to year if we even have jobs! Do you stand on principle? We are talking a fortune here.” Nathan Kohler extended Ransom’s badge to him.

But Alastair turned from Kohler to Senator Chapman. “I…I have to tell you, sir, that even without your bribe and your hatred, I would do all in my power to bring this fiend to justice.”

Chapman leapt even closer at him. “Justice? I want nothing of justice I haven’t a hand in. Do you understand?”

“That much is clear, yes.”

The old senator snatched the badge out of Kohler’s hand and pushed it on Alastair. “Get it done. See to this, Kohler, or it will be your job!” The senator pushed past Alastair and was out the door, his cane beating a sad rhythm in his wake down the stairs and out the door.

“The old man believes the rumors, Alastair.” Kohler actually grimaced.

“The rumors?”

“That you single-handedly caught and dispatched the Phantom,” added Christian Fenger, who then turned to Kohler and said, “How ’bout we have a drink, the three of us, Nathan. Snatch out that bottle you keep in your desk.”

Kohler did so, placing three small tumblers of whiskey between the others and himself. Fenger lifted and toasted, “To the end of the Phantom, and to a quick end to this new fiend making children vanish.”

Kohler lifted his glass, about to accept the toast, when both men saw that Ransom had not taken hold of his drink. “Come now, Alastair,” began Fenger. “You of all men, reservations? It wasn’t so long ago you and I were plotting violence against Dr. Tewes.”

“I’d like to sleep on it…give it some thought. A thing like this…well, it could ruin the three of us sooner than make us rich.”

Fenger gulped his whiskey and slammed the glass down. He abruptly left.

Kohler and Alastair stared across at one another. “Are you trying to figure out a way to gain this treasure that’s fallen in our laps all for yourself, Alastair?”

“Don’t be a fool, Nathan. A thing like this gets out; people talk.”

“People are already talking about you, Inspector, and some are speculating you had my blessing in murdering Waldo Denton.”

“That’s a bald-faced lie.”

“That you had my blessing or that you did it? And how else to explain his sudden disappearance?”

“I don’t know. I was in Michigan. I heard about it when I got back, like I am hearing about this mess with the grieving senator for the first time.”

“The press is calling this madman Leather Apron.”

“Why Leather Apron?”

“Who knows. Someone put forth the theory he is a knacker.”

“A horse butcher?”

“Someone says they saw a knacker fellow in a leather apron in the area right before the Chapman girl’s body was found.”

“So we are going on hearsay now?”

“The press is.”

“Is the body still at Fenger’s morgue?”

“Unrecognizable if it were not for a birthmark. Did you know that some birthmarks go all the way down to the bone? I hadn’t known that until Fenger educated me.”

“The senator had to identify his granddaughter by a birthmark?”

“A bell-shaped mark, yes. I tell you, Alastair, the body was scavenged in the manner of…well of a deer carcass hanging from a tree is how Fenger put it.”

Alastair took the drink now and downed it.

“Then you are with us?” asked Kohler, his long-time nemesis.

Alastair tried on the notion, looking at it from all angles, trying to see how Kohler could twist it to get at him. How might it backfire? In how many ways?

“I didn’t say that,” he announced.

“You drink my whiskey-a peace offering-and yet you stand against me?”

“I’ll need that drink,” he replied, “if I’m to have a look at this little girl’s butchered carcass.” Ransom left with his badge in hand as abruptly as had Fenger, hoping to catch Christian on the street, to talk privately about this matter. He wanted to know how Christian could have gotten in so deep in so short a time.

But Alastair was stopped by Logan and Behan, who had assembled all their notes and files on the case, dumping them onto his desk. “Chief’s idea,” said Logan.

Behan added, “Told us we’re taking our lead from you now, even before you arrived, Inspector Ransom.”

“Here’s a brief on the whole bloody matter.” Logan slapped a file into his hands.

“Shit, boys! This is your case, not mine.” He pushed the file back into Logan’s hands. “I’m outta here.”

Dr. Fenger moved far too fast for Alastair to catch him outside the Des Plaines house. He must see the body in the morgue anyway, so he would see Christian in private there to ferret out how he came to be in such a fix. Why did he need money? It couldn’t just be that he wanted it for the hospital.

At Cook County, he followed the usual route into the bowels of this place where the morgue had been relegated, and as always the stench of death and chemicals proved only the first obstacle here in the basement facilities.

“They should tear down this place and start over,” he muttered to himself. “Now that would require quite the sum.”

The lift door opened on a long corridor that took Alastair to its terminus, Dr. Fenger’s second domain here. There were several reasons they placed morgues below ground. The ease of transportation to and from the hospital, the general public’s sensibilities, yes, even the coolness, although with crude ice box refrigeration units now in use, the primary concern remained odors. Although it must be fifty degrees down here, the odors cut into the nostrils and brain sharper than Fenger’s scalpel.

Prevailing overall, the odor of decay. Hard to maintain any sort of religious fervency here as all seemed lost in this undeniable odor of putrefaction. Cook County Morgue was the largest in all the Midwest. Its shelves and cold unit were filled with the indigent and unclaimed John and Jane Does, suicides, homicides, twisted corpses of those who died freak deaths. He half expected to see the bloated, water-logged corpse of one Waldo Denton here someday, washed ashore. But for now the odor was the predominant matter. No amount of cleansing fluids or fans could overpower this stench.

Ransom moved onward toward the source.

Aboveground and in his operating theater, Dr. Christian Fenger reigned as the surgeon of the century, well regarded and respected, even canonized by everyone in the hospital-a hero in his own “home.” But not belowground in his morgue. Here there was no heroic life-saving measures; here there was no life to save, and his surgical skills did not repair so much as they deconstructed the “patient” if he could be called a patient; certainly he was “patient” to a fault, the corpse.

Down in the depths of the morgue, then, Christian put on another hat, and he performed something closer to the butcher, meatball surgery it was called in some circles-the work of the pathologist who spent all his time “reading” the corpse of anyone who may have met with foul play, committed suicide, or was victim of a freak accident. Here Christian determined cause of death, an act at opposite poles from being the savior upstairs.