Caleb Carr - The Angel Of Darkness

“I created nothing!” the Doctor protested, grabbing at his left arm without realizing it.

“Are you so sure, Doctor?” Mr. Darrow asked, his own voice rising. “Are you certain that you didn’t plant the idea in Clara Hatch’s mind, as only a clever alienist could, that it was her mother, not some lunatic who’d disappeared and could never be caught, who was responsible-all so that she can talk and enjoy a happy life again?!”

“Your Honor!” Mr. Picton called out. “This is blatant badgering of the witness!”

But Judge Brown only waved him off.

Seeing that, Mr. Darrow kept going: “There’s just one problem, though, Doctor, one thing that gets in the way. For your scheme, your and the state’s scheme, to work, my client has to go to the electrical chair! But then, what does that matter to you? You’ll be vindicated-in your own mind and in the eyes of your colleagues, the McPherson case will be more than balanced out by the Hatch case! Your precious integrity will be restored, and the state can close the books on an unsolved murder! Well, forgive me, Doctor, but I’m not willing to make that trade. There are tragedies in this life that don’t have answers!”

Suddenly, in a move what caused Miss Howard, Mr. Moore, Cyrus, and me to gasp, Mr. Darrow grabbed his own left arm, mirroring what the Doctor was doing; then he held it out, making it clear that he knew, he somehow knew , the secret of the Doctor’s past.

“Yes-tragedies without answers, Doctor, as you well know! And trying to balance the books isn’t going to change that! Tying the guilt for this case around my client’s neck won’t put movement back into Clara Hatch’s paralyzed arm, and it won’t bring Paul McPherson back to life. Things just aren’t that neat, Doctor, not that explicable . A madman committed a crime and disappeared. A boy walked into a washroom and hanged himself. Horrifying, inexplicable events-but I won’t let you and the state nail my client to the cross, just because you can’t live without explanations! No, sir-I will not do it!” Turning to the jury, Mr. Darrow lifted a thick finger toward the heavens, then let it fall, as if he were suddenly completely exhausted. “And I hope-maybe I even pray -that you gentlemen won’t do it, either.” He took a deep breath and wandered back to his seat. “I have no further questions.”

It seemed like a very long time since Mr. Darrow had started talking, and I don’t think I ever felt more sympathy for the Doctor than I did when he was excused from the witness stand and had to make the long walk back over to where the rest of us were sitting. I knew how he felt, how deeply Mr. Darrow’s words had cut into him; and so when he didn’t pause at his seat, but just kept moving on toward the mahogany doors, I wasn’t at all surprised. I didn’t make any move to follow just yet, knowing he’d want to be alone for a few minutes; but as soon as the judge had ordered court recessed until ten o’clock the next morning I bolted for the exit, Cyrus and Mr. Moore following close behind me.

We found the Doctor across the street, standing under a tree and smoking a cigarette. He made no move at all when we approached, just kept staring at the court house with narrow, squinting eyes. Cyrus and I each stood to one side, while Mr. Moore faced him head-on.

“Well, Laszlo,” he said, gently but with a smile. “I guess you’ve got more to learn from him than you thought.”

The Doctor just blew out a smoky sigh, and smiled ever-so-slightly back at his childhood friend. “Yes, John. I suppose so…”

Then we heard Mr. Picton’s voice calling and saw him appear on the court house steps with Miss Howard, the Isaacsons, and El Niño. When they caught sight of us, they rushed on over, Mr. Picton smoking his pipe and swinging one fist at empty air.

“Damn the man!” he said, once he was sure that the Doctor was okay. “Of all the blasted cheek! I am sorry, Doctor. He was wrong-terribly wrong.”

The Doctor’s eyes moved to Mr. Picton, while his head remained still. “Wrong?” he said quietly. “Yes, he was wrong-about Libby Hatch. And this case. But about me?”

Shrugging just once, the Doctor threw his cigarette into the gutter and began to walk down High Street alone.

By midnight on that Thursday the odds against our convicting Libby Hatch had risen to a hundred to one at Canfield’s Casino, and it wasn’t hard to understand why: Mr. Darrow’d managed to plant doubts in the jury’s minds about Lucius’s ballistic testimony even before his own “expert,” Albert Hamilton, had taken the stand, while Mrs. Louisa Wright’s thoughts about a possible romantic motive for the killings had been reduced to unprovable by the sudden and shocking “accident” what had befallen the Reverend Clayton Parker that morning at Grand Central. Mr. Darrow’s very effective questions about the Doctor’s motivations and techniques had been the icing on this bleak cake, and it was plain to all of us that if things kept going the way they were, defeat was just around the corner.

It was no wonder, then, that the atmosphere at Mr. Picton’s house that night moved past gloomy, until it almost seemed like there was a wake going on. Feeling what you might call resigned about the legal case as such, we began to focus our energies not on what remained to be done in court (which was just about nothing, so far as our side was concerned, except for Mr. Picton’s official announcement that the state was resting its case) but on what steps we’d need to take to try to get Ana Linares out of the Dusters’ place before Libby made her way back to New York. This meant getting word to Kat by way of the go-between Mr. Moore’d engaged: Kat’s pal Betty, who was supposedly waiting for us to send a wire to Frankie’s joint as soon as we knew it was time for Kat to make her move. Just talking about this possibility played hell with my nerves again, and for a few minutes I actually toyed with the idea of heading down to New York and making sure everything was set and in place; but the sight of me hanging around would, I knew, only make Kat’s situation even more dicey. So I stayed put, waiting with the others for what looked like it was going to be the dismal end of our business in Ballston Spa.

“And so the new century will bring a new kind of law,” was how Mr. Picton summed things up, as we all sat out on the front porch of his house late that night. “Proceedings where victims and witnesses are put on trial instead of defendants, where a murderer is identified as ‘a woman’ instead of an individual… ah, Doctor, it’s no step forward, that I can tell you, and I don’t think I want to be party to it. If things go on like this, we’ll find ourselves in some shadow world, where lawyers use the ignorance of the average citizen to manipulate justice the way priests did in the Middle Ages. No, if we lose this case- when we lose this case-it’ll be my last, I suspect.”

“I wish I could find some aspect of the affair that might offer you solace,” the Doctor answered quietly. “But I’m afraid I see none. Darrow is the legal man of the future, that much is indeed clear.”

“And I’m a relic,” Mr. Picton agreed with a nod; then he laughed once. “A relic at forty-one! Hardly seems fair, does it? Ah, well-such are the fortunes of the new age.”

You had to hand it to the man: unlike many other sporting bloods I’ve known, he was a genuinely graceful loser, and I don’t think there was one of us who failed to appreciate his ability to receive the head what’d been handed to him (his own) in court and still come up philosophical-except, of course, for Miss Howard, who was always the last member of our company to accept failure or defeat of any kind.