Matthew Pearl - The Dante Club

“A horsecar station! He could have been coming from anywhere.”

Rey did not disagree and did not argue. Deputy Chief Savage, who had been listening, said noncommittally, “We also have his likeness, Chief, from just before the show-up.”

“Listen close,” Kurtz said. “Both of you: The old Healey hen will have me by the ears if she’s not happy. And she won’t be happy, not till we give her a day as hangman. Rey, I don’t want you poking around about that leaper, you hear? We’ve got enough trouble without calling the world down on our head for a man that died at our feet.”

The windows of the Wide Oaks mansion were draped in heavy black cloth, permitting only faint stripes of daylight along the sides. Widow Healey lifted her head from a mound of lotus-leaf pillows. “You have found the murderer, Chief Kurtz,” she stated rather than asked when Kurtz entered.

“My dear madam,” Chief Kurtz removed his hat and placed it on a table at the foot of her bed. “We have men on every lead. The inquiry is still in its early morning stages…” Kurtz explained the possibilities: There were two men who owed Healey money and a notorious criminal whose sentence had been upheld five years earlier by the chief justice.

The widow held her head steadily enough to maintain a hot compress balanced on the white peaks of her brows. Since the funeral and the various memorial services for the chief justice, Ednah Healey had refused to leave her chamber and had turned away all callers outside her immediate family. From her neck hung the crystal brooch imprisoning the judge’s tangled lock of hair, an ornament the widow had asked Nell Ranney to string onto a necklace.

Her two sons, as big around the shoulders and heads as Chief Justice Healey but nowhere near as massive, sat slumped on armchairs flanking the door like two granite bulldogs.

Roland Healey interrupted Kurtz: “I don’t understand why you have advanced so slowly, Chief Kurtz.”

“If only we’d offer a reward!” the older son, Richard, added to his brother’s complaint. “We’d be sure to nab someone with enough money put up! Demonish greed, that’s all that drives the public to help.”

The deputy chief heard this with professional patience. “My good Mr. Healey, if we reveal the true circumstances of your father’s decease, you would be flooded with false reports from those looking only to turn a dollar. You must keep the entire matter dark to the public and let us continue.”

“Trust when I say, my friends,” he added, “that you would not like what should come from wide knowledge of this.”

The widow spoke up. “The man who died at your show-up. Have you discovered anything of his identity?”

Kurtz put up his hands. “So many of our good citizens belong to the same family when brought in to show themselves to the police,” he said, and smiled wryly. “Smith or Jones.”

“And this one,” said Mrs. Healey. “What family was he?”

“He did not give us any name, madam,” said Kurtz, penitently tucking his smile under the uncombed overhang of his mustache. “But we have no reason to believe he had any information on Judge Healey’s murder. He was merely cracked in the head, and a bit cup-shot, as well.”

“Potentially deaf and dumb,” added Savage.

“Why would he be so desperate to get away, Chief Kurtz?” asked Richard Healey.

This was an excellent question, though Kurtz did not want to show it. “I cannot begin to tell you how many men we find on the street who believe themselves chased by demons and report to us their pursuers’ descriptions, horns included.”

Mrs. Healey leaned forward and squinted. “Chief Kurtz, your porter?”

Kurtz motioned Rey in from the hall. “Madam, may I make you acquainted with Patrolman Nicholas Rey. You requested that we bring him with us today, regarding the man who passed away at the show-up.”

“A Negro police officer?” she asked with visible discomfort.

“Mulatto, in actuality, madam,” Savage announced proudly. “Patrolman Rey’s the Commonwealth’s very first. The first in all New England, they say.” He held out his hand and made Rey shake it.

Mrs. Healey managed to twist and crane her neck enough to view the mulatto to her apparent satisfaction. “You are the officer who had charge of the vagrant, the one who died there?”

Rey nodded.

“Tell me then, Officer. What do you think made him act in such a way?”

Chief Kurtz coughed nervously in Rey’s direction.

“I cannot say positively, madam,” replied Rey honestly. “I cannot say that he understood or considered any danger to his physical being at the time.”

“Did he speak to you?” asked Roland.

“He did, Mr. Healey. At least he tried. But I fear nothing in his whisper could be comprehended,” said Rey.

“Ha! You cannot even discover the identity of an idler who dies on your own floor! I trust you think my husband deserved to meet his end, Chief Kurtz!”

“I?” Kurtz looked back helplessly at his deputy chief. “Madam!”

“I am a sick woman, before God, but shan’t be deceived! You think us fools and villains and wish us all go to the devil!”

“Madam!” Savage echoed the chief.

“I shan’t give you the pleasure of seeing me dead in this world, Chief Kurtz! You and your ungrateful nigger police! He did everything he knew to do and we haven’t shame for any of it!” The compress crashed to the floor as she raked her neck with her nails. This was a new compulsion, shown by the fresh scabs and red marks covering her skin. She tore her neck, digging into her flesh, scratching at a cluster of invisible insects that were lying in wait in the crevices of her mind.

Her sons jumped from their chairs but could only back away toward the door, where Kurtz and Savage had also helplessly receded, as though the widow might burst into flames at any second.

Rey waited another moment, then calmly took a step toward the side of her bed.

“Madam Healey.” Her scratching had loosened the strings of her nightdress. Rey reached over and dimmed the flame of the lamp until she could be seen only in silhouette. “Madam, I wish you to know that your husband helped me once.”

She was stilled.

Kurtz and Savage traded surprised glances in the doorway. Rey spoke too quietly for them to hear every word from the other end of the room and they were too frightened of renewing the widow’s mania to move forward. But they could sense, even in the dark, how tranquil she had become, how still and silent but for her troubled breathing.

“Tell me please,” she said.

“I was brought to Boston as a child by a Virginia woman traveling here on a holiday. Some abolitionists took me away from her to bring me before the chief justice. The chief justice ruled that a slave became emancipated by law once crossing into a free state. He assigned me to the care of a colored blacksmith, Rey, and his family.”

“Before that wretched Fugitive Slave Act did us all in.” Mrs. Healey’s lids snapped shut and she sighed, her mouth curling strangely. “I know what friends of your race think, because of that Sims boy. The chief justice did not like me to attend court, but I went—there was so much talk then. Sims was like you, a handsome Negro, but dark as the blackness in some people’s heads. The chief justice would have never sent him back if he didn’t have to. He had no choice, you understand that. But he gave you a family. A family that made you happy?”

He nodded.

“Why must mistakes only be made up for afterwards? Can’t they sometimes be mended by what came before? It is so tiring. So tiring.”

Some sense returned to her, and she knew now what had to be done once the officers were gone. But she needed one more thing from Rey. “Pray, did he speak to you when you were a boy? Judge Healey always liked talking with children more than anyone.” She remembered Healey with their own children.