The Gilded Hour

  They rode along in silence for a while. Jack glanced at his partner and said, “Lia is calling me uncle and Anna auntie.”

  “And Rosa?”

  “Don’t know if she is even talking to us,” Jack said. “Remains to be seen.”

  • • •

  ANNA WOKE IN stages, like a swimmer drifting toward land until the water itself pushed her out into the waking world.

  Three things came to her all at once: she was alone in bed in a quiet house, which meant that Jack had left for Mulberry Street without waking her, the rotter; the winds that had battered them all Saturday had subsided, but left behind a hypnotic rain as soft and warm as new milk; and she had a cold.

  She barely got the handkerchief out from beneath her pillow before she produced a triplet of wet sneezes.

  After a day of travel in damp clothes the head cold was no surprise, but it was something of a catastrophe in purely practical terms. Until her symptoms had gone, she could not see patients or even step foot in the hospital. A head cold was not a real threat to an otherwise healthy, well-nourished person, but it could be the end of someone whose health was already compromised. And she hated colds, the fuzziness of mind and head, the impertinence of a body that would not obey simple commands. The oddest thoughts came to her when she had a cold.

  She hoped the girls had escaped this, and somehow knew that she needn’t worry about Jack. Lying in the bed they shared, half-asleep, sniffling, she willed him healthy and untouched while he did whatever detective sergeants did on a Sunday morning.

  Now she had to get up and talk to the girls. To pretend yesterday was just a bad dream would only make things worse. But it would not be easy.

  Dressed and armed with three fresh handkerchiefs, she made her way through the quiet house toward the kitchen and heard the distinct rhythm of Mrs. Cabot’s Down East accent: clipped in some places, r-sounds swallowed whole, while in others words were stretched to the breaking point and tacked back together. There was some debate going on about Skidder’s breakfast.

  “Lia, my dear, no honey for Skidder.”

  “Why?” Lia, sincerely curious, as ever.

  “Because he’s already sweet enough.”

  Anna smiled, imagining the look on Lia’s face as she puzzled this through. Then she got right to the crux of the matter.

  “Am I sweet enough?”

  “You are mighty sweet but maybe you could do with a little more honey. Wipe your nose, dear—but on your hankie.”

  The girls sneezed, one after the other. Anna supposed it was inevitable.

  Mrs. Cabot was saying, “Now, what were you telling me about that priest fella on the island?”

  Rosa said, “I don’t want to talk about him.”

  “I do,” said Lia, sniffing. “He has a red face, and white hair, and he smiles a lot but he’s mean. He didn’t like us. He wouldn’t tell us where he hid our little brother.”

  Anna opened the door and all three of them turned toward her. Lia’s thoughtful expression gave away to something else, comfort or relief or some combination of the two. Anna’s throat constricted, but she forced herself to breathe and then to smile.

  Rosa’s expression was far more solemn, but yesterday’s open hostility was gone.

  “Welcome to my infirmary,” Mrs. Cabot said. “Dr. Savard, your nose is as red as a lobster.”

  “Lob-stah!” Lia echoed, and sneezed.

  “Sit down, I’ve got dry toast and my special fever tea with honey and lemon.”

  It took some time to negotiate breakfast—Anna gave up on the idea of coffee in the face of Mrs. Cabot’s stern disapproval—but in the end she sat across from the girls with a cup of tea in her hands and a plate of dry toast between them. She had wanted Jack here for this conversation, but now it seemed that this was the better way. It was something she needed to do on her own, without worry about what he was hearing or what he thought about it.

  “We should talk about Vittorio,” she said. “And about Tonino, too, and your parents. We have to tell stories about the people we love who go away. It’s the best way to hold on to them. Don’t you think, Mrs. Cabot?”

  “A-yuh,” Mrs. Cabot said with a quiet smile. “No better way.”

  “You don’t talk about your people,” Rosa said. “Auntie Margaret says you never do.”

  “I didn’t, that’s true. But I think it was a mistake not to. We should tell the stories and then write them down.”

  “I don’t know where to start,” Lia said.

  “We can take turns,” Anna said. “I’ll tell you first about the summer I was three years old, when my parents died.”

  “Three is too little to remember,” Rosa said, with a certain disdain.

  “It is too little,” Anna agreed. “And I can’t say what I really remember and what I only remember because Aunt Quinlan told me the story. But I remember how I felt, and that’s the important part.”

  Her voice was calm and without tremor, but Lia got up from playing with Skidder to crawl into her lap. With the little girl’s solid weight in her arms, Anna sent herself back to the summer when everything changed.

  • • •

  DR. LAMBERT WAS in the middle of a postmortem when they got to Bellevue, so they went outside to wait in air that smelled of recent rain and the sea.

  Jack had almost gotten used to the smells that clung to Anna’s clothes when she came home from the New Amsterdam—strong soap and carbolic, denatured alcohol, all with an undercurrent of blood and bile. Bellevue had all that times ten because they took anyone who came to them, men and women and children, the sickest and poorest and least likely to survive. The outdoor poor.

  Outside, leaning against a wall warmed by the sun, Jack watched as people came and went out a side entrance favored by staff. A crowd of younger men, students or interns, appeared, looking like a company of soldiers fresh from the battlefield. Jack caught sight of a familiar face just as Oscar saw him too.

  “Dr. Graham!”

  Neill Graham’s head jerked around toward them, his expression less than friendly.

  “He doesn’t recognize us,” Jack said.

  “Sure he does. Look at him trying to make a pretty face. He may just manage it by the time he gets over here.”

  Jack studied the younger man, seeing exhaustion and irritation. Medical students worked impossible hours for little pay; in the same situation Jack knew that he would be less than sociable. He could tolerate a bad mood, but there was something sour in Graham’s expression.

  “Detective Sergeants.” Graham stood in front of them but left his hands in the pockets of his very grimy tunic, and rocked back on his heels. “I don’t think you want to be shaking my hand today. Not until I’ve soaked it in carbolic for a couple hours.”

  “Hard shift?” Oscar asked

  He blew out a breath. “Long. Forty-eight hours, and maybe two hours’ sleep. Only two surgeries I was allowed in on because in case you didn’t know, this place”—he jerked his chin toward the hospital—“is staffed to the roof with students who can buy preference. Today there was a Caesarean—only three done last year in the whole city, but instead of that I was stuck dealing with the usual garbage that comes through this place. People who don’t have the sense God gave an ant, real deviants.”

  Oscar said, “That bad. Did you lose a patient?”

  “No. The work stinks, but I could handle it with my eyes closed. Some of the patients would be better off dead, to my way of thinking. You two know what it’s like dealing with whores.”

  You couldn’t be a cop and take offense at plain speech, not if you wanted to get anything done. Conversation in the station house was often far worse, but there was something in the way Graham used the word whore with a lip-curling disgust.

  He was saying, “I’ll be glad to see the last of this place.” He turned his head to s
can the hospital windows.

  “You headed someplace else?” Oscar’s tone was light, friendly, encouraging.

  “There’s a surgery position opening up at Women’s. That place is like a palace compared to this cesspool.”

  Oscar said, “Competition must be stiff.”

  Graham’s whole face contorted. “That doesn’t worry me. You know I’ve got twice as many hours in the operating room as anybody else who’s applying. They know what I’m worth at Women’s. Somebody from the staff—I won’t name names—told me. He said I had a brilliant career ahead of me. Women’s is my next stop, and then who knows? London, Paris, Rome.” His smile broadened, full of satisfaction.

  “And no poor people at Women’s,” Jack observed.

  “They’ve got a charity ward,” Graham said, a little insulted. “But there are only so many beds and that means you can pick and choose among the ones who come begging and only take the interesting cases. This place—” He glanced up at the hospital. “The scum of the earth.”

  “And still you managed to get good training,” Oscar said.

  Graham shot him a suspicious look but relaxed when he saw nothing but mild curiosity in Oscar’s expression.

  “There’s work enough, but I hate having my time wasted on the cases that come in here. Truth be told, I don’t much like examining any woman—any honest surgeon will tell you that. But with whores, it’s like rooting around in a bucket of filth, up to the wrist in sludge. The last one I saw today, she looked forty but I doubt she was more than twenty, the worst case of the clap I’ve ever seen, and she was still working, still spreading her legs for coin. Imagine the degenerate who would pay for the privilege.”

  “Huh,” Jack said. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but you’ll be examining females at Women’s Hospital too.”

  He jerked a shoulder. “They won’t be crawling with lice and crabs. It’s the best place in the country—maybe in the world—for the kind of surgery that interests me. The only thing that interests me. And mostly I’ll be operating, anyway. And doing research. Some of the most important advances in the field come out of Women’s. I’ve got a few ideas. You never know, I may end up revolutionizing surgery.”

  Jack said, “Sounds like you’ve got your career planned.”

  Graham gave a soft laugh, his mouth working like a twist of gristle. “There’s always room at the top, as my mother used to say. I put in forty-eight hours here without sleep, easy as falling off a log.”

  His head swung toward Jack and the expression he normally wore—alert, sharply observant, constrained by respect and convention—was back in place.

  “So what brings the best of the New York Police Department detective squad to Bellevue on a damp Sunday morning?”

  Oscar produced his widest, least sincere smile. “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.”

  “Not another case like the Campbell woman.”

  “Why would you think that?” Jack said.

  He shrugged. “Can’t think of much other than murder that would bring you up here. It’s not like you have room in the jails for all the rutting drunkards we see here. Inbred idiots.” Graham hesitated, waited for some kind of response, and then cleared his throat.

  “Nice to see you again, I’ve got some sleeping to catch up on.”

  “Give Mrs. Jennings our regards,” Oscar said.

  Neill Graham studied Oscar for a moment, nodded, and walked away.

  • • •

  ON THE WAY to Nicholas Lambert’s office Oscar said, “The little shit. And there he’s been under our noses the whole time.”

  Jack was thinking the same thing. “He made my skin crawl. You like him for the Campbell case, then.”

  “To my mind it was as good as a confession.”

  “There’s still the pesky matter of evidence.”

  Oscar shrugged that fact away. “He hates women. Hates examining them but he wants to spend a career cutting them open. He’s a braggart of the first order, the kind who thinks he can do anything. To listen to him there was never a more talented doctor put on earth and everybody recognizes him for a genius, except when they’re duping him out of surgeries that should be his. He can work two days without a nap and he’s put out that he couldn’t get more than two hours last night. He can’t keep track of his lies. And don’t forget, Jack my boy, he assisted in the emergency surgery on Janine Campbell. He works an ambulance a couple days a week. That’s worth looking into, at least.”

  Jack remembered Anna talking about that at the inquest, and he remembered the way Campbell had described her when he testified. In sober but complimentary terms. Now he wondered if that had all been an act.

  “If it was him who did Campbell, he found an unusual way to return to the scene of the crime without raising suspicions,” Jack said.

  “We should have thought of it,” Oscar said. “Mrs. Stone wasn’t in the bedroom when he went in to examine Janine Campbell. Maybe she recognized him, but we’ll never know now. And who but a surgeon can take a knife to a woman, do his worst, and get away with it?”

  “He was sizing us up,” Jack said. “We’ll have to be careful not to scare him off. He could disappear and start all over someplace else.”

  “Oh, no,” Oscar said. “I’m not having that. I won’t be happy until he steps on that trapdoor and falls straight into Satan’s loving arms.”

  • • •

  AS THEY HEADED downstairs to Lambert’s office, it was like walking through an invisible curtain into a swamp, the air both cooler and almost dense enough to eat.

  “Neill Graham,” Oscar muttered. “Putting his hands on women.” He shook his head in disgust.

  Nicholas Lambert was a wiry, athletic fifty-year-old with a full head of dark hair and a short-cropped beard to match. In stark contrast his complexion was very pale and as fine as a child’s. Like Anna’s, his hands were red and swollen.

  “More than one good surgeon has given up practice because of dermatitis,” Lambert said, with the slightest trace of an accent. He had been aware of Jack’s study of his hands, but he hadn’t taken offense. “An unfortunate but unavoidable side effect of the antiseptic method.”

  Oscar huffed, surprised. “Why antiseptic when you’re cutting on the dead? What harm can you do?”

  “That’s not the issue,” Lambert said. “Some diseases outlast death. The microorganisms that cause smallpox, for example.”

  “A dead man can give you smallpox?”

  “Or cholera, or hepatitis. Other diseases too. The antiseptic methods are the first line of defense, and that’s why my hands looked like boiled crabs. The odd thing is, I grew up on a dairy farm, and my father and brothers have hands that look only slightly more swollen and red than mine.”

  “My wife has the same problem,” Jack said.

  Lambert paused, a lifted brow indicating curiosity but an unwillingness to ask intrusive questions.

  Maroney hooked a thumb in Jack’s direction. “He married Anna Savard of the New Amsterdam.”

  “Ah.” Lambert smiled, started to speak, and stopped. Started again, and cleared his throat. “Congratulations. Best wishes.”

  Jack nodded. “You haven’t found a way around the dermatitis?”

  “Fifty years ago they were experimenting with gloves made of sheep’s cecum in Germany, but nothing came of that. Now with the vulcanization of rubber, things might move more quickly. Dr. Savard’s hands are sensitive to carbolic, I take it. Before you leave, remind me to give you something for her to try. But I don’t think you’ve come here to talk about dermatitis.”

  Jack said, “You did the Liljeström postmortem. Did you read about the Campbell case in the papers?”

  Lambert leaned back, half sitting on the edge of his desk, his arms folded. “I did. And I wondered about the similarities. You’ve got more cases like those two?”
br />   “More than a few, maybe,” Oscar said. “But we need a forensic specialist to look at all the bodies. We’re hoping you would be willing to do repeat postmortems on all of them, and right away, as soon as we get them exhumed.”

  Lambert bent over slightly, as if to study his shoes. When he looked up again his expression was somber.

  “It’s hard to imagine a lot of women dying like that.”

  “What we’re hoping,” Jack said, “is to keep it from happening again.”

  Lambert nodded. “I’ll talk to the director and get permission. How much can I tell him?”

  “Nothing,” said Jack. “Except we’ve requested your help on some difficult cases. Nothing about any possible connection to the Campbell or Liljeström deaths.”

  “Who suggested me, if I may ask?”

  Oscar shifted uncomfortably, but Jack liked the question, and the man who had thought to ask it.

  “Anna. She considers you the best forensic specialist in the city.”

  “Very good of her. But if these cases are connected you’ll want an alienist to go over the evidence. A physician who can speak to the mind of the man who would act on such impulses.”

  Oscar said, “That would be our next step, after the postmortem reports. Can you start right away?”

  “It would go faster if I had some assistance. I’ve got a couple of students who would be glad of the work.”

  Oscar frowned. “Better not to involve anybody else, if it can be avoided.”

  Thirty seconds passed by while Lambert continued to study his shoes. When he looked up, Jack saw that he was far too intelligent to be so easily misdirected.

  “You’ve got a suspect here, at Bellevue?”

  “No suspects yet,” Jack said. “That’s why we’re in a hurry. Whoever’s behind this, he won’t stop until he’s made to stop.”

  “I see your point. Most likely I can manage on my own, but if things do get out of hand, could I call on Dr. Savard?”

  “Sure,” Jack said. “I don’t know what she’ll say, but you can ask.”

  At the door Lambert hesitated. “May I ask a personal question?”