The Angel of Darkness

  Once up in his office Mr. Picton told the rest of us that his main concern at that point in the affair was to figure out just what kind of citizens would make the best jurors for the case, and to assemble a set of questions what would separate such people from the rest of the candidates who would be called in. He asked the Doctor’s opinion on this matter, and got a quick answer: poor men, the Doctor advised, preferably farmers, would be the best prospects—men who led tough lives, and whose families were well acquainted with hard times. Such characters would best know just how easily personal conflicts and money concerns can lead to violence, even in a family what seems happy and peaceful on the outside: they likely would’ve seen or at least heard of women going after their own kids when things got especially discouraging or frustrating, and wouldn’t have your more well-to-do man’s opinions about the purity of female motives and actions. Mr. Picton said that he was relieved to hear all this, as it matched his own opinions perfectly; the trick now would be to find ways to identify such men without tipping Mr. Darrow off to the fact that he was doing it.

  As for the Doctor, his main concern was still preparing Clara Hatch for what was to come: now that we’d actually met Mr. Darrow, it was easy to see that he’d be clever enough to find many ways to trip Clara up and make her seem not so much a liar as a confused little girl who didn’t actually remember the real facts of what’d happened to her, but had been fed a story by the prosecution. It was likely, the Doctor said, that Mr. Darrow would make this attempt in the kindest and friendliest manner possible, and that Clara would be tempted to play along with him as a result. So she would have to be carefully taught that even a person who seems pleasant and respectful might be out to lay traps for you: a fact what she certainly knew from experience, but might not have fully developed in what the Doctor called her “conscious mind.”

  The Doctor would be doing double duty through the weekend and on into Monday, for while he’d spend his days getting Clara ready, he’d spend his nights interviewing Libby Hatch and assessing her mental condition. Having been through this procedure with the Doctor myself, and having watched him perform it on others, I knew generally what would take place in Libby’s basement cell: there’d be few or no straight inquiries about the murders, just a series of random questions about the woman’s childhood, her family, and her personal life. Libby was required by law to cooperate with him, though such didn’t mean that she couldn’t at least try to manipulate her answers so as to confuse the Doctor. But I’d seen much more hardened criminals try the same thing with him and fail pretty badly: it didn’t seem that Libby’d stand much of a chance, even with all her cleverness. Still, I knew it would be a pretty interesting little set of encounters, and I hoped that I’d have time to listen in on some of it.

  Such seemed unlikely, though, seeing as the rest of us weren’t going to be exactly idle in the few days left before the start of the trial. The Isaacsons—joined, now, by Mr. Moore, who’d use any excuse to get back up to the gaming tables in Saratoga—put themselves to the job of finding out what witnesses and experts Mr. Darrow was planning on calling, along with trying to predict as much of his trial strategy as they could. Miss Howard was still determined to find somebody who, if not actually related to Libby Hatch, knew about her childhood, and it looked like I’d have to continue to give her a hand with the search, at least until Tuesday. This fact didn’t exactly set me up, as it seemed to me that by now we were definitely chasing ghosts. I would’ve much preferred to go along to Saratoga with Mr. Moore; but I knew how important Miss Howard’s task was, and I tried to accept the assignment with as much good humor as El Niño showed at the prospect of continuing to play bodyguard to “the lady” who’d been his original benefactor in our group.

  But good intentions and keeping your nose to the grindstone don’t always pay off, and by the weekend we hadn’t turned up anything what would’ve passed for useful information. It began to look almost as if there’d been some deliberate attempt to wipe away any trace of Libby’s existence. Our travels eventually took us pretty far north, around the southern shores of Lake George and into the edge of the Adirondack forest; and though the countryside got nothing but more beautiful, the towns also got nothing but smaller and less frequent, until it took the better part of the day just to reach them and most of the evening to get back home. One thing, at least, was for sure: if Libby Hatch had truly been born and raised in a town in Washington County, then neither she nor her family had gotten out and around much—assuming, of course, that she hadn’t killed the lot of them off years ago, an idea what began to haunt my thoughts more and more on those long, useless trips from village to village. For her part, Miss Howard didn’t seem to like the idea of continuing to look for a needle what might not even be in our assigned haystack any more than I did; and I knew that she also shared my desire to sit in on some of the Doctor’s interviews with Libby Hatch. But she kept me and El Niño on the job, knowing that any clue to Libby’s past what might be used in court would mean a lot more than our being entertained by the battle of wits what was taking place under the Ballston court house.

  We did get nightly reports about those meetings, though, as we sat around Mr. Picton’s dining room table for what, given all our activities, usually turned out to be very late suppers. During the first of these meals the Doctor explained that Libby’s attitude toward him had been typically changeable: she’d started with expressions of deep injury, as if the Doctor—someone whom Libby’d expressed admiration for when they first met—had done her some kind of deliberate hurt by trying to lay not just the Linares kidnapping but the deaths of the kids she’d had care of in New York and the murders of her own children at her door. Such was a smart position for her to start from, the Doctor told us: whether consciously or unconsciously, Libby was trading on every person’s secret horror of accusing a mother of horrible crimes toward the children she is supposed to watch over, and on society’s hopeful belief that what Miss Howard called the “myth of maternal nurturing” was in fact as solid and reliable as the Rocky Mountains. But once it became clear that the Doctor wasn’t going to let his own uneasiness overrule his intellect, Libby had quickly moved on to what was, for her, an equally familiar role: the seducer. She’d begun to coyly tease the Doctor about what secret longings and desires must be hidden underneath his detached, disciplined exterior. This, of course, also got her nowhere, and so in the end she’d been forced to rely on the last of her most accustomed behaviors: anger. Throwing the victim and temptress acts aside, she’d become the punisher, and sat petulantly in her cell, giving the Doctor short, resentful answers to his questions—many of them, he could tell, outright lies—and punctuating the statements by telling him how sorry he’d be one day for ever tangling with her. But what she didn’t realize was that this change in attitude itself gave the Doctor just what he was looking for: Libby’s ability to analyze what he was trying to do and come up with a series of different but carefully planned responses was evidence that, as he’d always suspected, no serious mental disease or brain disorder was dominating her behavior. The very fact that she knew enough to come up with wily, dishonest answers to his inquiries—all of them designed to serve a larger purpose—was proof that she was as sane as anyone.

  This was all very interesting stuff, and Miss Howard and I continued to wish that we could’ve been there to see some of it; but no one envied the Doctor’s becoming the specific object of Libby’s hatred, given how many examples we’d uncovered of how she dealt with people—young or old—who frustrated her designs. I’ll confess that the more I heard about the assessment process, the more I began to worry about the Doctor, until I finally asked him if he was making sure that there was somebody present during the interviews who could prevent the woman from doing him any sudden, unexpected physical harm. He answered that yes, the guard Henry was outside Libby’s cell every minute that he was inside it, paying careful attention to all what went on.

  As for the detective sergeants and Mr. Moore,
their attempts to find out what Mr. Darrow was up to in Saratoga were about as fruitful as our group’s efforts to learn about Libby’s past—until Saturday, that is. That night, as the rest of us sat in Mr. Picton’s dining room listening to the Doctor talk about his most recent interview with Libby, the three of them showed up later than usual, their mood considerably better than it had been when they’d left the house that morning. It seemed that they’d finally gotten a break, in the form of a private investigator who’d been working for Mr. Darrow in New York: Lucius knew the investigator, and when the man had shown up at the Grand Union Hotel to give his report to Mr. Darrow, the detective sergeant had intercepted him and pumped him for quite a bit of information—without, of course, saying that he was working for the opposing side. Though the investigator hadn’t offered a lot of specifics, his general comments had been enough to confirm that Mr. Darrow was indeed trying to find out everything he could about the Doctor’s current activities and situation in the city, including the troubles he’d run into after Paulie McPherson’s suicide. None of this was all that shocking: we’d guessed from the beginning that Mr. Darrow would use the Doctor as his way of attacking our case against Libby Hatch. But what you might call a passing reference what Lucius made to something else that the investigator’d told him caused the Doctor considerably more concern.

  “Oh, by the way,” Lucius said, smiling up at Mrs. Hastings as she put a big plate of food down in front of him. “He’s got an alienist of his own coming to do an assessment of Libby.”

  Mr. Picton suddenly looked puzzled. “Really? I wonder why. He’s already made it fairly clear that he doesn’t intend to pursue an insanity defense.”

  “True,” the Doctor said, “but when the prosecution plans to bring in testimony about someone’s mental condition in a case like this, the defense generally feels the need to answer in some way. In all likelihood Darrow will use the opportunity to show just how distressing the deaths of the children were to Libby, while at the same time demonstrating that she’s a fully competent person, balanced enough to look after not only her own children, but those of strangers, as well. Your colleague didn’t happen to mention the alienist’s name, did he, Lucius?”

  “Mmm, yes,” Lucius answered, as he attacked the home cooking what we’d all grown very devoted to since our arrival in Ballston Spa. He began to search his pockets with one hand, refusing to put down his fork. “I wrote it down somewhere … ah.” He pulled a small piece of paper from his inside his jacket. “Here—White. William White.”

  The Doctor stopped chewing his food suddenly, and looked up at Lucius with concern. “William Alanson White?” he asked.

  Lucius checked the paper again. “Yes, that’s right.”

  “What’s the matter, Kreizler?” Mr. Moore said. “Do you know the man?”

  “Indeed,” the Doctor answered, pushing his plate aside. Then he slowly got to his feet and picked up a glass of wine.

  “A problem?” Mr. Picton asked.

  The Doctor’s black eyes turned to the window and stared out into the night. “A mystery, certainly. White …” Giving the matter a few more seconds thought, the Doctor finally shook himself and came back to the conversation. “He’s one of the best of the younger generation—a brilliant mind, and highly imaginative. He’s been working at the State Hospital at Binghamton and has done some fascinating work concerning the criminal mind—the criminal unconscious, in particular. He’s become a skilled expert witness, too, despite his comparative youth.”

  “Is he an enemy of yours?” Marcus asked.

  “Quite the contrary,” the Doctor replied. “We’ve met many times, and correspond frequently.”

  “That’s strange,” Miss Howard said. “You’d think that Darrow would want to get someone openly hostile to your theories, if he’s bothering to bring in anybody at all.”

  “Yes,” the Doctor answered with a nod, “but that’s not the strangest part, Sara. White and I do tend to share low opinions about this country’s penal system and its methods of discouraging crime and caring for the mentally diseased. But we generally disagree on the definition of mental disease itself. His classifications tend to be far broader than mine, and he includes more criminal behavior in his categorization of ‘insane acts’ than I could ever do. Because of this, when he serves as an expert witness it is almost always for the purpose of demonstrating that a given defendant is somehow unbalanced, and therefore not legally responsible for his—or her—actions.”

  “Hmm,” Mr. Picton noised. “Which would seem to lead back to the idea that Darrow may be holding on to some sort of an insanity card, in case he needs to play it later. Although I wouldn’t think him so stupid.”

  “Nor would I,” the Doctor agreed. “The insanity defense, when introduced midway through a trial, is rarely effective—few juries fail to recognize a change in plea as an act of desperation.”

  “Well, then,” Mr. Moore said, looking blankly from the Doctor to Mr. Picton, “what do you suppose Darrow’s up to?”

  The Doctor just shook his head slowly. “I don’t know—and that fact disturbs me. Indeed, there is much about our opponent that disturbs me.” Pacing by the window, the Doctor rolled his wineglass in his hands. “Did you discover when White is to arrive?”

  “Tuesday night,” Lucius said. “After the trial’s begun.”

  “Leaving me little time to confer with him,” the Doctor answered, nodding again. “Yes, it’s the smart move. But what in God’s name is it that Darrow wants him to say?”

  We’d learn the answer to that question soon enough; and it, like almost everything else about Mr. Darrow, made it easy to understand just why he would one day become the greatest criminal defense lawyer the country has ever seen.

  CHAPTER 43

  Our education began on Tuesday morning, when men called in from fields, shop counters, and parlor rooms all over Saratoga County crowded into the Ballston Spa court house to find out whether they’d spend the next couple of weeks as jury members in what was becoming popularly known as “the Hatch trial.”

  From the beginning of this process, Mr. Darrow showed that he knew exactly what Mr. Picton was up to, and that he intended to frustrate him at every turn. Both sides were given twenty of what they called “peremptory challenges”—the right to refuse a jury candidate for no stated reason—and the first ten of Mr. Darrow’s were exercised on men who couldn’t have fit the Doctor’s and Mr. Picton’s description of an ideal juror any better. Each man was poor but sharp, with a kind of wisdom about the world what didn’t seem to fit with the fact that most of them had never been out of the county, much less the state. When his turn came to question these fellows, Mr. Darrow was nice enough to them—he cared too much about working the crowd in the galleries not to be. He’d strike up a pleasant conversation about the state of business in town or about how the wet, cool weather that summer was affecting the local crops; but the minute any man mentioned, say, the fact that he’d grown up in a one-room farmhouse or, worse yet, that his mother, grandmother, aunt, or sister had on occasion been given to violent behavior, he found himself dismissed with a friendly “Thank you” (but no word of explanation) from the counsel for the defense.

  Mr. Picton, for his part, wasn’t fooled by the seemingly innocent, humble way that Mr. Darrow questioned the better-off, more educated jury candidates about the “natural state” of men and women, and whether or not human society could’ve deteriorated to the point where the most basic attachments between members of the species—“the natural law of human society,” as Mr. Darrow put it—might be broken without any cause. Mr. Darrow didn’t say outright that the bond between a mother and her children was part of said “natural law”; he didn’t have to. It was clear that most of the people in the courtroom silently believed such to be the case. But in the same way that Mr. Darrow had dismissed any potential juror who spoke openly about female violence, so did Mr. Picton give the axe to any man who voiced a belief in such “natural” or “fundamenta
l” attachments. Mr. Darrow eventually protested that Mr. Picton seemed to be throwing out the “entire concept of natural law,” a notion what he declared was the foundation of the American Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Mr. Picton answered that it wasn’t the business of the court to get into such philosophical discussions—they were concerned with criminal, not natural, law. It was an attitude that, while it didn’t earn him any affection from Judge Brown, was perfectly proper and within his rights, and many candidates what Mr. Darrow clearly preferred were duly sent packing.

  By noon each man had used up the better portion of his peremptory challenges, and had rejected a few jurors for specific cause, to boot, so that when the midday recess was called only half the jury had been selected. It looked like the afternoon session might get a little testier than the morning had been, for when one or the other of the lawyers ran out of peremptories it meant that he’d have to start coming up with full sets of reasons for rejecting a given candidate. By three o’clock the peremptories on both sides were gone, with five jurors still to be selected; and while Mr. Picton figured that most of the men already in the box were characters that he could probably persuade to see things his way, he also suspected that Judge Brown was a lot more likely to be sympathetic to Mr. Darrow’s stated reasons for rejecting candidates than he would be to the prosecution’s. This suspicion proved justified. Mr. Darrow just kept repeating the idea that “natural law” was the mainstay of all of American government and society: if any man accepted the idea that the “bonds of nature” could be “capriciously broken,” Mr. Darrow said, he was basically saying that the United States itself was a seriously flawed concept—and if he felt that way, said man had no business serving on an American jury.