Robert Walker - Shadows in the White City

But Alastair’s full concentration remained on the row of horse-drawn buggies and covered cabs at the cabstand, where Waldo Denton casually awaited the Lincoln Park strollers who weaved about the pathways, amid the greenery, locked in embrace, their eyes interested only in one another. Watching the strolling couples, Ransom realized how easily the Phantom of the Fair operated, using his hansom cab as central headquarters. He’d move about the paths of the park in his black uniform, strike like a shadow, murder with that garrote of his, set the body aflame, and be sitting atop his hack, an invisible man, all in a matter of minutes. Orchestrated murder.

The lakefront Lincoln Park was a killer’s dream, a place where people allowed their common sense and justifiable fears and natural defenses to drop like stones one after another. A place to distract one from the horrors at one’s shoulder. Unlike the fair, this place kissed the senses with solitude and privacy and peace, whereas the fair rang loud with the sound of multiple calliopes, the barkers, and the hawkers, amid which worked the street prostitutes. Here the noises were of nature, squirrels, and chipmunks chasing one another, birds chirping in the trees, leaves rustling a languid whisper.

“What the hell keeps you on your feet?” Philo whispered in Ransom’s ear.

Ransom took a long pull on his flask of whiskey. “I’ve stayed off the opium and cut back on the Quinine. Feel like…like a… ahhh …”

“New man?”

“Feel like a man who’s stepped out of Hell’s furthest jaw.”

“Why don’t you ask more of life for Alastair Ransom?” Philo then drank.

“You ask enough for the both of us, Philo.” Ransom tripped on his own shoe.

“Do you think you can keep your feet? You, my friend, are no longer making any g’damn sense.”

Philo looked all about their surroundings, uneasy. Here was the newly created lagoon. The lovely grand lake ever in the eye, here in this park, which only a few years before had been the cemetery where Alastair’s twin had reposed. The graves had long been relocated in the effort of city fathers to keep pristine all of the lakefront coastal property, purchasing it for the use of the common good- common ground meant common green. Denton had removed his theater of operations to here, thinking that perhaps Ransom could be outdone or outrun or outfoxed; thinking, at least for a night, he had ditched his constant new shadow, a shadow that accosted him with accusation at every turn. A shadow the size of a standing bear.

Some said Denton had gone to Chief Kohler and Prosecutor Kehoe to ask that they muzzle the big man’s mouth, take his gun and badge away, and remove him from the Chicago Police Department.

Some rumors had it that the two men, chief and prosecutor, had hired Denton to continue on as normal, and to report any and all bad conduct of one Inspector Alastair Ransom directly to them. Ransom’s snitch, Bosch, had informed him that “The powers that be’re after you, Ransom; working up a case against you.”

“Don’t hold back, Bosch. Give me the full story,” he’d said.

Stunted Henry Bosch screwed up his features until his face was a dried-up potato. “It’s about that poor harassed citizen, Denton, wrongfully accused, wrongfully jailed, and wrongly hounded after being released for lack of evidence.”

And so here they were, Ransom in full knowledge of this “trap” set for him, but like any dumb bear, he forged straight into the snare. They stood in the snare now, Philo and Ransom observing, watching, studying the hansom cabstand, staring across at the youngest cabbie in the group-Denton-listening to banter and laughter wafting over, under, and through the park leaves.

All the hansom drivers saw to their own stock, feeding bits of cabbage, carrots, and corn to their mares. All stood about a barrel they used for shucking corn and oysters, and for tossing bones and cigarette butts, and a second barrel used as a cooking fire. This pair of barrels created a fulcrum along with a newsstand for the Herald, the Tribune, and other papers-common ground for the common man. The cabbies busily discussed the rising cost of grain feed, cigarettes, beer, wine, coal oil, and whatever else came to mind from a broken horseshoe to a tear in a cloak. Some of them joked with Denton about being the infamous Phantom of the Fair, and he joked back-actually prancing about and using his garrote, making a mock attack on another driver’s horse! Then in a chillingly ironic voice, Denton laughingly asked, “What’d you boys give to know where the Phantom can be found?”

“I hear that is what you asked Inspector Ransom the night he arrested you for the killer!” shouted another, and they all burst into laughter.

“You know the rumor now as to the killer being a prostitute,” said Denton. “It might well be. I can tell you that with a garrote, a woman can take down that fat tub of lard, Ransom!”

“Is that true?” Philo asked Ransom where they stood in the bush.

“Manys-a-prostitute chooses the garrote over the blade. The great equalizer, a way to overpower someone twice your size,” Alastair replied. “And manys-a-poor-bloke’s had his penis sheared off by a whore’s garrote.”

“Ouch! That happens? Damn, but you see some awful things.”

“Can you imagine waking up to your little head being garroted?”

“I can imagine…you’ve no idea how I can imagine.” He protectively crossed his legs.

“Yes, same weapon as Denton carries.”

“But what does Waldo get from…get out of…”

“Murder? It makes Denton feel our equal, Philo-”

“Our equal is it?”

“-you and me, and every man with a larger, ahhh, body, and a rank of some sort in Chicago.”

The men at the cabstand got up an impromptu lottery on the question of whether the true Phantom, once caught, would prove male or female. Denton had named a name they all knew, the infamous Pekinese-faced Chicago madame, Laveeda Grimaldi. They laughed at the notion.

At the World’s Fair, the chaos of hundreds of thousands continued unabated as though nothing untoward had occurred in the least here, and the increased numbers of uniformed police stationed about the fair also went unnoticed, but for some the police presence was much appreciated, especially the monied men backing the fair and the merchants working it for all they might. In fact, the fair had its own private police force, partially reinforced by part-timers moonlighting from the CPD. The fair cops worked independently of city government, however, answering only to their private employers-Chicago’s elite, and this smacked of the old days when private enforcers and police ran amuck in their zeal to please private business interests and put down any strike or talk of strike as in the days of Haymarket. The sense they’d taken two steps back in police enforcement with this untrained crew stuck in Griffin Drimmer’s craw, aside from their namby-pamby uniforms.

In fitting with the fabulous White City, this specialized army wore a light gray uniform, approximating an off-white, with fake mother-of-pearl rather than copper-toned buttons, a far cry from the traditional blues. Even so, there were never enough of the “Pearly Gate coppers,” as some called them, to cover the massive fairgrounds and huge pavilions, each of which looked in scale and appearance like Roman and Greek halls of learning where Euripides and Socrates might appear in heated debate at any moment amid the fountains and the boats and the columns. Each major exhibit hall looked from a distance like some giant dragon that crawled up out of Lake Michigan to curl up and go to sleep here.

Griffin Drimmer had been assigned here, but he’d gotten lucky. He must wear his old CPD uniform as the fair force had run out of grays. On the other hand, he’d been unlucky. He missed working real detective cases. This was, to be sure, his comeuppance for having, in the end, sided with Alastair and in helping clear Philo’s good name, and for not further supporting Chief Nathan Kohler. Busted to rank of a footman is what must be on his horizon, unless…unless he himself could catch the Phantom.