Shadows in the White City by Robert W. Walker Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    â€œWhat 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 …”
    â€œNew man?”
    â€œFeel like a man who’s stepped out of Hell’s furthest jaw.”
    â€œWhy don’t you ask more of life for Alastair Ransom?” Philo then drank.
    â€œYou ask enough for the both of us, Philo.” Ransom tripped on his own shoe.
    â€œDo 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.”
    â€œDon’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?”
    â€œI hear that is what you asked Inspector Ransom the night he arrested you for the killer!” shouted another, and they all burst into