Robert Walker - Shadows in the White City

Elias Jervis was Polly “Merielle” Pete’s former boyfriend and, when the need arose, pimp. Watching the bottom-feeder die brought back images of the spoiled dove, whom Alastair had for a time loved. He’d desperately tried to clean her up after he’d cheated and “won” her in a card game during which he goaded Jervis to wager her “contract.” After “winning her over,” he’d made a show of burning the contract before witnesses, and his bravado intrigued Polly, a vivacious and wild woman. Alastair had then set himself the task of helping her get clean and clearheaded, so she might make something of herself. Meanwhile, he used her and she used him until he lost her to the murdering Phantom-that weasel, Denton.

Alastair now wondered if Jervis’s motive for taking Ransom’s life had to do with jealousy and Polly, or that Elias harbored the belief that Alastair’s dangerous lifestyle had created a target of her, that Ransom had gotten her killed-and perhaps this was closer to the truth than Ranson wanted to admit. Or perhaps Elias Jervis acted true to form here, working as a paid assassin. Bosch had shouted the single name, Kohler. Had Kohler financed Elias? Was Jervis’s motive a combination of all his pent up anger pushed to the edge by the right sum?

Ransom bodily lifted the wounded Jervis and began shaking it from him, causing two burly uniformed cops to pull Alastair off. Elias Jervis fell back like an empty gunnysack into the black hole painted now with his blood, looking purple in the CPD lantern light.

“Bastard took three or four shots at me before I laid him out!” shouted Ransom, tearing away from the cops holding him back. “An ambush! I was set up for a killing!” Alastair rushed Jervis’s prone body and kicked it several times before he was again pulled away and advised to cool down. The man giving him the advice was his young friend, Mike O’Malley, with whom he’d lifted many a pint of ale. It was good to see a friendly face among this district’s cops, someone he felt he could trust.

“Mikey, when did you get sent to this shithole to work?”

“I asked for it.”

“Asked to work Hair Trigger?”

“I asked for it by getting smart with Chief Kohler.”

“ Ahhh …I see. You weren’t by chance defending me at the time, were you?”

“You are such a great detective, Rance.”

“And you? When do you take your exams?”

“I have, but since I was disciplined…well, that’s by the wayside for now.”

“That bastard, Kohler. One day…”

“Careful what you say. He has friends among these lads.” O’Malley indicated the others in uniform. “And down here your name’s poison, Rance.”

“He just set me up for murder. I won’t stand quiet for that! Search that bastard Jervis, and you’ll find a wad of cash payment, you will.”

“Everyone knows Elias Jervis had it in for you, Inspector,” said another uniformed cop. “This looks like a personal matter to me.”

“It’s personal, all right!” Alastair stormed off but was stopped by a pair of brawny coppers standing in his way.

“Your gun, sir! We’ll need it,” said the cop who appeared in charge.

“What’s your name, Officer?”

“Tenny, sir. Dane Tenny.”

“You think you can take my gun, Tenny?”

Mike stepped in. “Rance, it’s standard procedure now in a police shooting down here in the Alley.”

“Your boss doesn’t want my gun, Tenn,” replied Alastair. “He wants my badge and my hide. Isn’t that right, Mike?”

“Whatever your suspicions, Inspector,” said Tenny, standing in military pose, feet set for a fight, “my job’s to do the right thing here.” Tenny held out his hand for the gun, one eye warily awaiting Ransom’s cane coming up. Once again, Alastair’s reputation preceded him.

Frowning, with a nod to Mike, he lifted his blue gun out and handed it to O’Malley. Alastair then started off. He had a houseful of guns at home, including another exactly like the one confiscated.

While all of this was transpiring, Ransom had also swallowed the fact that there never was any daughter of the riot with a mother’s diary, that this was vintage baiting. Next Ransom became angry with himself for being so easily led into a trap that almost cost him his life here in this mud-hole.

“I’m aware that there’ll be a review of the shooting,” Ransom said. “Let me know when and where, will you, Mike?” He refused to acknowledge Tenny.

“Sure…sure, Rance. You go on home, get cleaned up. You smell of mud and slop.”

“Thanks…I think.”

Ransom made his way out of the alley and onto the street where he hailed a hansom cab. All the way home, he sat angry as hell with himself, with Bosch, with Jervis for being such an easy mark, but he reserved his lethal hatred for Chief Nathan Kohler, and the incident only increased his suspicion that Kohler had a hand in all that had gone wrong in 1886 during the Haymarket Riot.

“And one day, by God, I’ll prove it and put the bastard on trial for it.”

The cabbie thought he’d barked some new order, and he shouted through the slot, “Sir? Another destination, sir?”

“No! One twenty-nine Des Plaines!”

Shaken from just having killed a man, and angry over circumstances that’d led him into a trap, Ransom felt the fool-Nathan Kohler’s fool. A stronger emotion gripped him however. One he could not fend off. Alastair felt a cold grim vulnerability overtaking him, and he realized this naked raw feeling had all to do with his empty shoulder holster. It was brought on by his confiscated blue gun, which normally pressed against his heart.

The following night

“Yes, spirits appear as you remember them,” Dr. James Phineas Tewes was saying when Ransom quietly entered Jane Francis’s parlor, and as quietly stood in the entry, listening to the spiel of this new con. He felt a disappointment not so much in Tewes but in Jane, and it felt like a lump of calcified stone in his gut.

Jane as Tewes in trance was unaware of Gabby’s having answered the doorbell. Tewes was saying, “Yes, the dearly departed come to us just as they looked when alive, even wearing favorite clothes, but they are surrounded by faint, colored light. And while the newly dead speak, it is difficult to make out. While the spirit’s lips move, no sound is heard. But I have perfected the art of reading lips, you see.”

The séance was in full swing when Alastair rested on his cane, thinking, Jane’s got to’ve heard the doorbell ring, must know the law is on hand, and that everyone else in the room had begun to fidget-séance-interruptis.

Dr. Tewes had advertised that he could contact the dead, and this “new assertion” in all of Dr. Tewes’s most recent flyers, was bringing in business and money for Dr. Tewes’s bank account. Alastair wondered when and how Jane planned to empty Tewes’s account and put it into her name. While women did not have the vote, and while most married women had no bank account whatsoever, some businesswomen and independent singles held bank accounts. Banks would take anyone’s money regardless of sex, unless a husband forbade it.

Ransom had seen the new flyer tacked to a police phone box, and had read the new promises of contacting a loved one from the other side. The notion alone would typically outrage Alastair, but he’d not think of raiding such a party of fools who deserved what they got. Still, this being Jane in her getup as Tewes proved a double disappointment.

He’d come to demand to know what was going on in her head to make such outrageous claims in the name of Tewes or anyone else.

When Gabby had cautiously answered the door, her fingers to her lips, he’d allowed her to guide him by the hand into the darkened parlor.