The Alienist

  “John, you ass!” she said with a smile. “I don’t care if it is spring—you know what happened the last time you were fresh with me!”

  “Oh, no,” I said, dropping her quickly. “Once in that river is enough for any lifetime. Well? Has Laszlo brought you up to date?”

  “Yes,” Sara answered, tightening the bun on the back of her head and flashing defiance in her green eyes. “You two have had all the fun, and I’ve just told Dr. Kreizler that if you think I’m going to sit around here for one more minute while you barrel off to yet another adventure, you’re very much mistaken.”

  I brightened up a bit. “You’re coming to Newton?”

  “I said I wanted adventure,” she answered, swiping at my nose with a sheet of paper. “And being locked up on a train with you two does not, I’m afraid, fill that bill. No, Dr. Kreizler says someone’s got to go to New Paltz.”

  “Roosevelt telephoned a few minutes ago,” Laszlo said to me. “Apparently the name Beecham does appear in various records in that town.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Then it would appear that Japheth Dury did not become John Beecham.”

  Kreizler shrugged. “It’s a further complication, that’s all we can be sure of, and it requires investigation. You and I, however, must get to Newton as soon as possible. And with the detective sergeants still gone, that leaves Sara. It’s her territory, after all—she grew up in the region and doubtless knows how to ingratiate herself with the local officials.”

  “Oh, doubtless,” I said. “What about coordinating things here?”

  “An overrated job, if ever there was one,” Sara answered. “Let Stevie do it, until Cyrus is out of bed. Besides, I shouldn’t be gone more than a day.”

  I turned a lecherous glance on the girl. “And how valuable is my support in this scheme?”

  Sara spun away. “John, you really are a pig. Dr. Kreizler’s already agreed.”

  “I see,” I answered. “Well, then—that’s that, I suppose. My opinion not being worth the air it takes to express it.”

  And in such fashion was Stevie Taggert set loose to ransack our headquarters for cigarettes. As of high noon that day the youth was left in charge of the place, his face as we departed giving me the impression that he’d smoke the upholstery from the Marchese Carcano’s chairs if he couldn’t find anything better. Stevie paid careful attention to Laszlo’s instructions about how to contact us while we were gone, but when those instructions led into a warning speech concerning the evils of nicotine addiction, the boy seemed suddenly to go deaf. Laszlo, Sara, and I had barely started downstairs in the elevator when the sounds of drawers and cupboards opening and closing became audible from above. Kreizler only sighed, aware that for the moment we had bigger fish to fry; but I knew that once our case was settled there would be many long lectures on clean living to be heard at the house on Seventeenth Street.

  The three of us stopped briefly at Gramercy Park so that Sara could pick up a few things (in case her visit to New Paltz lasted longer than anticipated), following which we engaged in another bit of subterfuge with the same set of decoys that Laszlo had hired prior to our trip to Washington. Then it was back to the Grand Central Depot. Sara split off to buy a ticket for the Hudson River Line, while Kreizler and I made purchases at the New Haven Line windows. Goodbyes were, as they had been on Monday, brief and unrevealing of any connection between Sara and Kreizler; I was beginning to think I was as wrong about them as I’d been about a rogue priest being responsible for the murders. Our Boston train departed on time, and before long we’d passed through the eastern portions of Westchester County and into Connecticut.

  The difference between Laszlo’s and my trip to Washington earlier in the week and our present journey to Boston, on Saturday afternoon, was roughly the difference between the two respective landscapes surrounding us, as well as that between the kinds of people who inhabited the regions. Gone, on Saturday, were the verdant, rolling fields of New Jersey and Maryland: all around us the scraggly countryside of Connecticut and Massachusetts crept awkwardly down to Long Island Sound and the sea beyond, bringing to mind the hard life that had made such mean, contentious people out of the farmers and merchants of New England. Not that one needed such an indirect indication of what life in that quarter of the country was like; human exemplars were sitting all around us. Kreizler hadn’t purchased first-class seats, a mistake whose gravity only became fully evident when the train reached top speed and our fellow travelers raised their grating, complaining drawls to overcome the rattle of the cars. For hours Kreizler and I endured loud conversations about fishing, local politics, and the shameful economic condition of the United States. Despite the din, however, we did manage to formulate a sound plan for dealing with Adam Dury if and when we found him.

  We detrained at Boston’s Back Bay Station, outside of which were collected a group of drivers who had rigs for hire. One man in the group, a tall, gaunt fellow with vicious little eyes, stepped toward us as we approached with our bags.

  “Newton?” Laszlo said to him.

  The man cocked his head and stuck out his lower lip. “Good ten miles,” he judged. “I won’t be back ’fore midnight.”

  “Then double your price,” Laszlo answered peremptorily, throwing his bag into the front seat of the man’s rather battered old surrey. Although the driver looked a bit disappointed at losing the chance to quibble over the cost of the trip, he responded to Laszlo’s offer with alacrity, jumping up onto the rig and grabbing his whip. I rushed to climb aboard, and then we drove off to the sound of the other rig drivers groaning about what kind of interloping fool would offer double the going rate for a ride to Newton. After that, all was silence for quite a while.

  A troubled sunset that seemed to promise rain reached out over eastern Massachusetts, as the fringes of Boston slowly gave way to mile after mile of monotonous, rocky farmland. We didn’t reach Newton until well past dark, whereupon our driver offered to take us to an inn that he said was the best in town. Both Kreizler and I knew that this probably meant the place was operated by some member of the man’s family, but we were tired, hungry, and on terra incognita: there was little to do but acquiesce. Rolling through the impossibly quaint streets of Newton, as numbingly picturesque a community as one could hope to find even in New England, I began to get the disturbingly familiar feeling of being trapped by narrow lanes and narrow minds, a kind of anxiety that had often consumed me during my time at Harvard. The “best inn in Newton” did nothing to relieve this uneasiness: sure enough, it was a loosely clapboarded building, with spare furnishings and a menu that ran to things boiled. The only bright moment occurred during supper, when the innkeeper (our driver’s second cousin) said that he could provide directions to the farm of Adam Dury; and, hearing that Kreizler and I would need a ride in the morning, the man who’d brought us offered to spend the night and perform the service. Such details taken care of, we retired to our low, dark rooms and hard little beds to allow our stomachs to do their best with the boiled mutton and potatoes we’d dined on.

  Rising early the next day, Laszlo and I tried but failed to avoid the innkeeper’s breakfast offering of thick, tough flapjacks and coffee. The sky had cleared, evidently without shedding any rain, and outside the inn stood the old surrey, with our driver aboard and ready to depart. Traveling north, we saw little sign of any human activity for nearly half an hour; then a herd of dairy cattle came into view, grazing in a pitted, rock-strewn pasture, beyond which a small group of buildings stood amid a stand of oaks. As we approached these structures—a farmhouse and two barns—I made out the figure of a man standing ankle deep in barnyard manure and trying with difficulty to shoe a tired old horse.

  The man, I noted quickly, had thinning hair, and his scalp glistened in the morning sun.

  CHAPTER 34

  * * *

  To judge by the dilapidated state of his barns, fences, and wagons, as well as the absence of any assistants or particularly healthy-looking animals, Adam Dury
had not made much of a go of his little dairy cattle enterprise. Few people live in closer proximity to life’s grimmer realities than do poor farmers, and the atmosphere of such places is inevitably sobering: Kreizler’s and my excitement at actually laying eyes on the man we’d traveled a fairly long way to find was immediately tempered by appreciation of his circumstances, and after getting down from the surrey and telling our driver to wait, we approached him slowly and carefully.

  “Excuse me—Mr. Dury?” I said, as the fellow continued to struggle with the old horse’s left foreleg. The fly-ridden brown beast, its hide bare in several spots where a yolk would have rested, appeared to have absolutely no interest in making its master’s task any easier.

  “Yes,” the man answered sharply, still showing us nothing more than the back of his balding head.

  “Mr. Adam Dury?” I inquired further, trying to induce him to turn around.

  “You must know that, if you’ve come to see me,” Dury answered, finally dropping the horse’s leg with a grunt. He stood up, rising to a height of well over six feet and then slapped the horse’s neck, half in anger and half affectionately. “This one thinks he’ll die before me, anyway,” he mumbled, still facing the horse, “so why should he be cooperative? But we’ve both got many more years of this to go, you old…” Dury finally turned round, revealing a head whose skin was so tightly drawn that it appeared little more than a flesh-colored skull. Large yellow teeth filled the mouth, and the almond-shaped eyes were of a lifeless blue tint. His arms were powerfully developed, and the fingers of his hands as he wiped them on his worn overalls seemed remarkably long and thick. He took our measures with a squinting grimace that was neither friendly nor hostile. “Well? What can I do for you two gentlemen?”

  I moved directly—and, if I may say so, gracefully—into the bit of subterfuge that Laszlo and I had worked out on the Boston train. “This is Dr. Laszlo Kreizler,” I said, “and my name is John Schuyler Moore. I’m a reporter for The New York Times.” I found my billfold and revealed some professional identification. “A police reporter, actually. My editors have assigned me to investigate some of the more—well, to come to the point, some of the more outstanding unsolved cases of recent decades.”

  Dury nodded, a bit suspiciously. “You’ve come to ask about my parents.”

  “Indeed,” I answered. “You’ve no doubt heard, Mr. Dury, of the recent investigations into the conduct of the New York City Police Department.”

  Dury’s thin eyes went even thinner. “The case was none of their affair.”

  “True. But my editors are concerned with the fact that so many noteworthy cases are never pursued or solved by law enforcement agencies throughout the state of New York. We’ve decided to review several and see what’s happened in the years since their occurrence. I wonder if you’d mind just going over the basic facts of your parents’ death with us?”

  All the features of Dury’s face seemed to shift and resettle in a kind of wave, as if a shudder of pain had rippled through him quickly. When he spoke again, the tone of distrust had vanished from his voice, to be replaced only by resignation and sorrow. “Who could have any interest now? It’s been more than fifteen years.”

  I attempted sympathy, as well as moral indignation: “Does time justify the lack of a solution, Mr. Dury? And you are not alone, remember—others have seen murderous acts go unsolved and unavenged, and they’d like to know why.”

  Dury weighed the matter for another moment, then shook his head. “That’s their business. I’ve got no desire to talk about it.”

  He began to move away; knowing New Englanders as well as I did, however, I’d anticipated this reaction. “There would, of course,” I announced calmly, “be a fee.”

  That got him: he paused, turned, and eyed me again. “Fee?”

  I gave him a friendly smile. “A consulting fee,” I said. “Nothing excessive, mind you—say, one hundred dollars?”

  Aware that such a sum would, in fact, mean a great deal to a man in his straits, I was not surprised to see Dury’s almond eyes jump. “One hundred dollars?” he echoed in quiet disbelief. “For talking?”

  “That’s right, sir,” I answered, producing the sum from my billfold.

  Thinking it all over just a bit more, Dury finally took the money. Then he turned to his horse, swatted its rump, and sent it off to graze on a few patches of grass that grew near the edge of the yard. “We’ll talk in the barn,” he said. “I’ve got work to do, and I can’t ignore it for the sake of”—he took heavy steps away from us through the sea of manure—“ghost stories.”

  Kreizler and I followed, much relieved at the apparent success of the bribe. Concern returned, however, when Dury spun round at the barn door.

  “Just a minute,” he said. “You say this man’s a doctor? What’s his interest?”

  “I make a study of criminal behavior, Mr. Dury,” Laszlo answered smoothly, “as well as of police methods. Mr. Moore has asked me to provide expert advice for his article.”

  Dury accepted that, though it seemed that he didn’t much like Kreizler’s accent. “You’re German,” he said. “Or maybe Swiss.”

  “My father was German,” Kreizler answered. “But I was raised in this country.”

  Dury seemed ill satisfied by Kreizler’s explanation, and silently walked on into the barn.

  Inside that creaky structure the stench of manure grew stronger, softened only by the sweet aroma of hay, a store of which was visible in the loft above us. The bare plank walls of the building had once been whitewashed, but most of the paint had fallen away to reveal roughly grained wood. A chicken coop was visible through one four-foot doorway, the gurgles and clucks of its occupants floating out toward us. Harnesses, scythes, shovels, picks, mauls, and buckets were everywhere, hanging from the walls and the low roof or lying on the earthen floor. Dury went directly over to a very old manure spreader, the axle of which was propped up on a pile of rocks. Taking up a mallet and slamming away at the wheel that faced us, our host eventually forced it from its mount. Dury then hissed in disgust and began to fuss with the end of the axle.

  “All right,” he said, grabbing a bucket of heavy grease and never looking our way. “Ask your questions.”

  Kreizler nodded to me, indicating that it might be best if I took the lead in the questioning. “We’ve read the newspaper accounts that appeared at the time,” I said. “I wonder if you might tell us—”

  “Newspaper accounts!” Dury grunted. “I suppose you’ve also read, then, that the fools suspected me for a time.”

  “We’ve read that there was gossip,” I answered. “But the police said that they never—”

  “Believed it? Not much, they didn’t. Only enough to send two of their men all the way over here to harass my wife and myself for three days!”

  “You’re married, Mr. Dury?” Kreizler asked quietly.

  For just a second or two, Dury eyed Laszlo, again resentfully. “I am. Nineteen years, not that it’s any business of yours.”

  “Children?” Kreizler asked, in the same cautious tone.

  “No,” came the hard answer. “We—that is, my wife—I—no. We have no children.”

  “But I take it,” I said, “that your wife was able to attest to your being here when the—the terrible incident occurred?”

  “That didn’t mean much to those idiots,” Dury answered. “A wife’s testimony counts for little or nothing in a court of law. I had to ask a neighbor of mine, a man who lives nearly ten miles away, to come and verify that we were pulling a stump together on the very day my parents were murdered.”

  “Do you know why the police should have been so hard to convince?” Kreizler asked.

  Dury slammed his mallet down on the ground. “I’m sure you read about that, too. Doctor. It was no secret. There’d been bad blood between my parents and myself for many years.”

  I held a hand up to Kreizler. “Yes, we saw some mention of such,” I said, trying to coax more details out of Du
ry. “But the police accounts were very vague and confused, and it was difficult to draw any conclusions. Which seems remarkable, given that the question was vital to the investigation. Maybe you could make it a little clearer for us?”

  Lifting the manure spreader’s wheel onto a workbench, Dury began to pound at it again. “My parents were hard people, Mr. Moore. They had to be, to make the trip to this country and survive the life they chose for themselves. But while I can say that now, such explanations are quite beyond a small boy who—” A blast of passionate language seemed about to escape the man, but he held it down with obvious effort. “Who only hears a cold voice. And only feels a thick strap.”

  “Then you were beaten,” I said, thinking back to Kreizler’s and my original speculations after first reading of the Dury murders in Washington.

  “I wasn’t referring to myself, Mr. Moore,” Dury answered. “Though God knows neither my father nor my mother ever shrank from punishing me when I misbehaved. But that was not what caused our—estrangement.” He looked out a small, filthy window for a moment, then pounded at the wheel again. “I had a brother. Japheth.”

  Kreizler nodded as I said, “Yes, we read about him. Tragic. You have our sympathy.”

  “Sympathy? I suppose. But I’ll tell you this, Mr. Moore—whatever those savages did to him was no more tragic than what he endured at the hands of his own parents.”

  “He suffered cruelties?”

  Dury shrugged. “Some might not call them such. But I did, and do still. Oh, he was a strange lad, in some respects, and the ways in which my parents reacted to his behavior might have seemed—natural, to an outsider. But it wasn’t. No, sir, there was the devil in it all, somewhere…” Dury’s attention wandered for a moment, but then he shook it off. “I’m sorry. You wanted to know about the case.”