They sat atop the Ferris wheel once more, staring down at the dizzying lights of Chicagoland from the spiraling buildings of downtown along the waterfront and Michigan Avenue to the rustic old homes and the worst, lowliest hovels of the South Levee district. The multitude of lights and burning fires blinked like stars aground. It was made the more magnificent by the gas-lit street lamps.
He began pointing out the tallest downtown structures, giving each a name. “There is the Studebaker Building. Four hundred ten South Michigan. Built by Mr. Beman in eighteen eighty-five.”
“Where they make all the fine carriages?” she asked.
“That’d be it, yes, and there, see the Auditorium?”
“Yes, but what is going up beside it?”
“Across Congress Street, an annex hotel to the Auditorium.”
“Yes, yes . . . so amazing from up here.”
“Bit farther south is the Richelieu Hotel, also built in
’eighty-five.”
“And the trim building beyond?”
“Chicago Athletic Association—just gone up this year.
Beyond that the Smith, Gaylord & Cross Building—old at
’eighty-two.”
“I suppose every inch of Michigan Avenue will have been cleared and sold and a building put up to reach to the stars.”
“So-called progress. Land speculation and real estate development.”
“You disapprove?”
“Ahhh . . . it’s not all to the good, no.”
“Larger isn’t necessarily better, you mean?”
“I know I’m in the wrong business, but the sorta money worship that’s swept the city . . . it’s just not for me.”
“Still, way up here it all looks beautiful. The lights at the Art Institute and along the boulevard.”
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ROBERT W. WALKER
“I warrant it’s the best way to see the city—day or night.”
“And the pavilions of our magnificent White City.”
“The city spared no expense on the fair.”
“Mind-boggling, how huge it is,” she agreed.
“A nightmare for a small police force to cover.”
Despite the wheel’s having filled with people as it made its 270-foot arch above the city and lake, the couple felt alone, unable to see any other passengers from their gondola cocoon.
Below, the fair crowds moved like schools of fish: coming and going, darting here, chasing there, the fairways teeming.
Alone yet every gondola occupied, and in one of them sat a killer, a killer who with eyes closed relived his murders, particularly his last two life-taking adventures. In his mind’s eye he again killed Polly Pete, tightening his fists around the garrote that now dangled between his knees.
As if happening this moment, he brings the garrote to its full cutting power through his hands, the daydream so vivid, so real, so fulfilling—made the more so by holding tight to Polly’s ring while riding the Ferris wheel he’d shared with her so recently. He smiled, eyes closed, as he calmly reminisced about this night . . . a 270-foot above-ground dream.
Just as he feels Polly’s life in his hands, under his complete dominion, slipping away, just as he becomes the god who decides she dies, on that eclipse of time during which he might’ve allowed her sorry life continuance, or not . . .
Stumpf too had had a good time with Polly—he and Stumpf—as when Polly had taken her last gasp, tasted her blood spewing from both sides of her mouth, deepening that faint provocative tincture painted in her cleavage. It’d all made Stumpf and him giddy and wet.
From high atop the Ferris wheel, the killer stared down at the gathering crowd around the lagoon boat rides. Uniformed police’d converged on the Lover’s Lane Canal.
Appears Stumpf’s been a bad boy again, he thought, knowing that he and Stumpf were one and the same—like two men inside one brain.
CITY FOR RANSOM
207
Other passengers on Mr. Ferris’s wheel noticed all the to-do at the lagoon, seeing a strange fire on the water. While Stumpf appeared a gentleman alone on the wheel, he’d in fact begun the evening with two lovely companions. They’d taken two boats out on the lagoon—double the pleasure.
His friends remained in the lagoon far below. One in the water, at least in part, the other in a now flaming rowboat; both dispatched by the Phantom.
Through the trees, flames winked, and Stumpf watched authorities hook and drag the fiery craft ashore. Desperately, men doused his latest victim.
The killer saw from this moving position, every second another perspective. Interesting altogether, each separate moment of the ride as if sitting inside one of those handheld daguerreotype machines people paid to watch at the 3
Penny Opera on Lincoln and Fullerton.
Around him, he heard others speculating from the safety of their perch on the excitement below. A series of gasps, whispers, cooing like pigeons, and the sound of giggling and kissing.
A slight scent of kerosene adhered to him, and his nails had become ragged at having scaled the bridge abuttment from the lagoon. But he had soaked a handkerchief before then to swipe at the larger, noticeable blood splotches on his boots, pants leg, and cape.
He gave more thought to the girl in the flaming boat.
Most assuredly as lurid an image as anything created by Edgar Allan Poe. It must garner front-page attention and eclipse the Columbian Exposition. As the giant wheel lifted up and up again, he braced himself and watched the activity he’d set in motion below. When the wheel stopped with him atop it, he stood to open a small window. He shouted into the wind as he had that night with Polly Pete, perhaps in this very gondola, crying against the wind, “I’m King of the Fair!”
*
208
ROBERT W. WALKER
The Ferris wheel continued its rise and fall. Above the killer in black, Ransom and Jane Francis peered out over their gondola to get a look at the noisy fellow some six or seven cars below. Ransom stood, giving the gondola a start backward in reaction to his weight. Jane gasped, but in a moment she, too, was standing to see the man who’d been shouting from below, now coming round, lifting as they descended. “He looks like Dr. Jeykll, I think,” she commented.
“You mean Hyde, don’t you?” They faintly heard the wheel operator at the bottom shouting up. “In your seats! Sit the bloody hell down!” They did so and rocked the gondola more as a result. Then Alastair again craned to see all he might, and she thought him so childlike in his enthusiasm, and so she began rocking and rocking the gondola in a madcap fashion she believed he’d enjoy, when suddenly the suspended car holding them began to sway too dangerously for comfort.
He threw his arms round her, pulled her into his chest, and she felt safe there, no matter what, while below them in rotation, the single man’s rantings had only increased with maniacal laughter.
“You bitch, you’ve just laughed your last,” the killer shouted and backhanded the spectral image of Polly Pete whose eyes opened on him despite her head wobbling near off. His erection came with her pain even if she wasn’t really present.
Still she sat here bleeding and whimpering, and the more she bled out, the tighter the garrote and the more sexually excited he became. Who on this planet could possibly understand this, he wondered. Sherlock Holmes perhaps, but the man was himself a fiction. Perhaps Stumpf and I oughta submit to Tewes’s magnetic therapy—witchcraft he calls phrenology. But a part of Stumpf feared the idea that Tewes might see right through him, to know his innermost thoughts.
“We should make love right here!” Polly’s ghost whispered in his ear.
“There isn’t time . . . or space!” As beautiful and wild as CITY FOR RANSOM