Caleb Carr - The Angel Of Darkness

Such may have been true, too-for them. For Mr. Moore and me, though, there would always be questions, questions about whether we’d been right in getting people we cared deeply about involved in a case what ended up costing them their lives. Such questions seldom come with easy answers, and they never go away: as I sit here writing these words, I can’t say as I’m any closer to quieting those doubts than I was at three P.M.that morning, when everyone finally went their separate ways and I sat for an hour in my windowsill, tearfully smoking cigarettes and seeing Kat’s eyes all over the starry sky.

There were, of course, the funerals to attend to, and after a simple ceremony for Kat at Calvary Cemetery on Wednesday afternoon-one what I was grateful to every member of our group for attending-we all boarded a train early Thursday morning to head back up to Ballston Spa and watch Mr. Picton get planted in the ground of the same cemetery on Ballston Avenue what we had, only weeks earlier, violated. It was sadness, affection, and respect, of course, what drew us so far to say our last good-byes to the agitated little man with the ever-blasting pipe who’d refused to let the case of the murders on the Charlton road die, and who, in death, had given us the legal leverage we’d needed to openly pursue Libby Hatch in New York. But curiosity pulled us north, too: curiosity about what Mr. Picton’s final words about “a clue” in the cemetery had meant.

Standing by his open grave as his casket was lowered in, each of us sneaked a peek at the headstones of the other members of his family; and we were all slightly shocked to find that every person in that plot-not only Mr. Picton’s parents, but a younger sister and brother, as well-had died on exactly the same day. This led the Doctor to put some gentle questions to Mrs. Hastings after the ceremony, which she answered by saying that indeed, Mr. Picton’s family had all been killed one night as they slept, by a gas leak in the big house at the end of High Street. Mr. Picton had been away at law school when it’d happened, and he’d never spoken of the matter in later years; and while Mrs. Hastings wouldn’t comment on the odd coincidence of gas leaking in so many rooms of the Picton house at one and the same time, she did say that it was after the tragedy that Mr. Picton’d decided to pursue a career in prosecution. This was enough for the Doctor, who knew-as did, I think, Mrs. Hastings-that the “coincidence” of the several gas leaks was so incredible as to be dismissible. Someone had deliberately done away with the family, and the fact that all the doors of the house had been bolted when it’d happened indicated that it’d been one of the Pictons themselves.

Beyond that, though, neither the Doctor nor anyone else could do more than speculate. Had Mr. Picton’s mother, in a fit of some kind of despondency, done away with her husband, her offspring, and herself by means of gas-not an uncommon practice, according to the Doctor, among lethally melancholic women? Had Mr. Picton suspected the truth about the matter, and had that suspicion not only made him endlessly anxious for the rest of his days, but driven him for so many years to convict Libby Hatch? We would never know. But just the possibility, combined with the sad occasion of the funeral itself, was enough to keep us all very quiet during the train ride back to New York.

Things calmed down eerily around Seventeenth Street in the days what immediately followed-the case was over, but there was no possibility of returning to a normal routine, being as, even if our spirits had been strong enough to bounce back so quickly, we were still waiting to find out the results of the court investigation into affairs at the Doctor’s Institute. On Friday morning the Isaacsons-who’d put off giving their testimony ever since we’d gotten back to town-finally went before the closed court and told their tale. That same afternoon the Reverend Bancroft was called to give his opinion about how the Institute was set up, whether the staff were up to snuff, and if, in general, the place was a sound proposition. The court waited until Monday to hand down its decision, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that those two days were among the longest of my life. The weather turned foully humid, coating every person in the city in the kind of thin sheet of heavy sweat what seems impossible to get off and always sends tempers flaring. Monday was no better: the thermometer’d already climbed into the high eighties by ten, and when Cyrus, the Doctor, and I boarded the calash to head down to the Tweed court house at two I wasn’t sure that either Frederick-whose weeks of boarding had made him a touch lazy-or any of the rest of us was going to make it.

But make it we did, in every sense of the word. Not only did Judge Samuel Welles surprise us by declaring that the affairs of the Institute were in order and the case of Paulie McPherson was “an obvious aberration,” but he went on to shock the entire courtroom by giving those city fathers what had brought on the investigation a tongue-lashing. Dr. Kreizler’s methods might be unorthodox, Judge Welles said, and some people might not be comfortable with them; in fact, he wasn’t so sure that he was comfortable with all of them himself. But you couldn’t argue with results, and the plain fact was that in all his years of operation the Doctor had lost exactly one kid, one who, as the detective sergeants’ investigation had plainly revealed, had been at least thinking about suicide before coming to the Institute, and who’d brought the instrument of the “crime” with him when he was enrolled. Reminding the Doctor’s critics that New York’s courts had better things to do than pursue unwarranted investigations, Judge Welles declared the whole matter dismissed.

We’d known that Welles was an unpredictable character; but no public official had ever made that kind of statement in support of the Doctor’s work, and the event was enough to make you think that maybe there was some kind of justice in the world, after all. Mr. Moore’d taken the hopeful chance of engaging a private room at Mr. Delmonico’s restaurant for after the hearing (such rooms being the only places in the joint where Cyrus and I were allowed to eat), and during the meal that followed the adults stuffed themselves on more kinds of strangely named French food than I could possibly rattle off all these years later. As for me, I made do with a steak and fried potatoes, and Mr. Delmonico even rounded me up a bottle of root beer (though I think he had to send one of his boys out to fetch it from a local grocer). But even if I can’t remember just what it was that everybody ate, I can remember that it was an evening of a type what was rare for us: there’d been no killings or kidnappings, and no great mystery was the main topic of conversation. In fact, crime didn’t come up much at all-it was just a time to be happy in each other’s company, and remember that terrible events were not the only things that bonded us together.

Being as the rest of the day had gone so well, we probably should’ve known that some unpleasant or at least disturbing surprise would be waiting for us at its end. The Doctor invited everyone back to his house after the meal at Delmonico’s, and when we arrived we discovered a very handsome brougham sitting at the curb in front of the front yard. But the two men sitting up on the driving seat didn’t exactly match the rig: wearing rough sailor’s jackets what indicated a familiarity with the seamier parts of the waterfront, they had the kind of deep brown features, thin, drooping mustaches, and large, dark eyes what immediately suggested they were from India, or that general part of the world. I was riding in a cab with Detective Sergeant Lucius, whose face-always jolly and rosy after a big meal and lots of red wine at Mr. Delmonico’s-suddenly went straight, even a little pale, when he saw the carriage and the men.