That last word gets some emphasis, being an insult my companion is particularly sensitive to. But I don’t overplay it. It’s a remark designed not so much to pierce as to sting, and it succeeds: Mr. Moore doesn’t say anything for a few seconds, and when he does open his mouth again, I know it’s going to be something to equal or outdo my slap. Like two dogs in a pit down in my old neighborhood, we’ve barked and nipped and sized each other up enough—it’s time to go for an ear.
“The cowardice and stupidity of New York publishers and the American reading public have nothing to do with any lack of ability on my part in telling the tale,” Mr. Moore seethes firmly. “And when the day comes that I can learn something about writing, about Kreizler’s work, or, for that matter, about anything other than tobacco leaves from you, Taggert, I’ll be happy to put on an apron and work your counter for one solid week!”
Now, you need to know something here: Mr. Moore and me, we are both betting men. I ran my first faro racket when I was eight, for other kids in my neighborhood, and Mr. Moore’s always been one to take a flutter on just about any interesting game of chance. Why, it was gambling that formed the first basis of our friendship: the man taught me everything I know about the ponies, and I’ll acknowledge as much, even with all his patronizing. So when he makes that last challenge, I don’t laugh; I don’t shrug it off; I don’t do anything but stare him in the eye and say: “Done.”
And we spit on the wager, which I taught him, and we shake on the wager, which he taught me. And we both know that’s that. He stands, takes a last drag off his butt, and says, “Good night, Stevie,” pretty near pleasantly, like none of our earlier conversation ever happened. The whole thing’s moved to another level: it’s not what he’d call an intellectual exercise anymore, it’s a wager, and further talk would only desecrate it. From this point on there’ll just be the playing out of the game, the run to the wire, with one of us ending up a winner and the other a loser; and likely I won’t see him much or at all ’til we know which of us is going to be what.
Which leaves me alone for tonight (and, I’m guessing, for many nights to come) with my memories of the Hatch case: of the people what gave us a hand and what got in our way, of the friends (and more than friends) what were lost to us during the pursuit, of the peculiar places we were led to—and of Libby Hatch herself. And I don’t mind saying, now that Mr. Moore’s gone and I’ve had a chance to think it over some, that most of his statements were square on the mark: in many ways, the tale of Libby Hatch was more frightening and disturbing than anything we ran across in our hunt for the butcher John Beecham. Under ordinary circumstances, in fact, the bumps on my skin and the shivers in my soul that are right now multiplying with my memories might even tempt me to concede the wager.
But then the hack starts in: out of nowhere, rough, racking, shooting bits of blood and God-knows-what-all onto the page before me. And funnily enough, I realize it’s the hack that’ll keep me writing, no matter what mental jitters I get. Dr. Kreizler’s told me what this cough probably means; I’m not sure how many more years or even months I’ve got left on this earth. So let Libby Hatch come after me for trying to tell her story. Let her strange, sorry ghost take the breath out of me for daring to reveal this tale. Most likely she’d be doing me a favor—for along with the hack, the memories would end, too….
But Fate would never be so merciful, and neither would Libby. The only place her memory will haunt are the sheets of paper before me, which will serve not the purposes of a publisher but to settle a bet. After that, I’ll leave them behind for whoever happens across them after I’m gone and cares to take a look. It may horrify you, Reader, and it may strike you as too unnatural a story to have ever really happened. That was a word that came up an awful lot during the days the case went on: unnatural. But my memory hasn’t faded with my lungs, and you can take this from me: if the story of Libby Hatch teaches us anything at all, it’s that Nature’s domain includes every form of what society calls “unnatural” behavior; that in fact, just as Dr. Kreizler has always said, there’s nothing truly natural or unnatural under the sun.
CHAPTER 2
It was a scratching sound that started it all: the light scrape of a boot against the stone-and-brick face of Dr. Kreizler’s house at 283 East Seventeenth Street The noise—familiar to any boy who’d had a childhood like mine—drifted through the window of my room late on the night of Sunday, June 20, 1897: twenty-two years ago, almost to the day. I was lying on my small bed trying to study, but without much luck. That evening, too, was far too charged with the breezes and smells of spring and too bathed in moonlight to let serious thinking (or even sleeping) be an option. As was and is too often the case in New York, early spring had been wet and cold, making it fairly certain that we’d get only a week or two of tolerable weather before the serious heat set in. That particular Sunday had been a rainy one earlier on, but the night was beginning to clear and seemed to promise the onset of those few precious balmy days. So if you say that I caught the sound outside my window partly because I was just waiting for some excuse to get outside, I won’t deny it; but the larger truth is that, ever since I can remember, I’ve kept careful track of night noises in whatever place I happen to find myself.
My room in the Doctor’s house was up top on the fourth floor, two stories and a half a world away from his splendid parlor and dining room below and another twelve vertical feet from his stately but somehow spare bedroom and overstuffed study on the third floor. Up on the dormered plainness of the top story (what most folks would write off as “the servants’ quarters”), Cyrus Montrose—who split the Doctor’s driving and other household duties with me—had the big room at the back, and off of that was a smaller room what we used for storage. My room was at the front, and not near as big as the rear one; but then, I wasn’t near as big as Cyrus, who stood well over six feet tall. And the front space was still plenty plush by the standards of a thirteen-year-old boy who’d been used to, in order since birth, sharing a one-room rear tenement flat near Five Points with his mother and her string of men, sleeping on whatever patches of sidewalk or alleyway offered a few hours’ peace (having first left said mother and men at age three, and for good at age eight), and then fighting his way out of a cell in what the bulls laughingly liked to call the “barracks” of the Boys’ House of Refuge on Randalls Island.
Speaking of that miserable place, I might as well get one thing straight right now, being as it may make a few other things clearer as we go along. Some of you might’ve read in the papers that I near killed a guard what tried to bugger me while I was confined on the island; and don’t think me coldhearted when I say that in some respects I still wish I had killed him, for he’d done the same to other boys and, I’m certain, went on doing it after my case was swept under the rug and he was reinstated. Maybe that makes me sound bitter, I don’t know; I wouldn’t like to think of myself as a bitter man. But I do find that the things what angered me as a boy still rankle all these years later. So if it seems that some of what I’ll have to say in the pages to come doesn’t reflect the mellowing of age, that’s only because I’ve never found that life and memories respond to time the way that tobacco does.
There was only one other room on the top floor of Dr. Kreizler’s residence, though for all the practical purposes of the household the chamber had long since ceased to exist. Removed from Cyrus’s and my rooms by its own short hallway, it was usually occupied by the maid of the house; but for a full year it had been uninhabited by any living soul. I say “by any living soul” because it was, in fact, still occupied by the few sad possessions and the even sadder memory of Mary Palmer, whose death during the Beecham case had broken the Doctor’s heart. Since that time we in the house had been served by a number of cooks and maids who came before breakfast and left after dinner, some of them capable, some of them downright disastrous; but neither Cyrus nor I ever complained about the turnover, for we had no more interest than the Doctor did in taking on somebody perman
ent. You see, the both of us—though in very different ways from the Doctor, of course—had loved Mary, too….
Anyway, at about eleven P.M. on that June 20th I was in my room attempting to read some of the lessons Dr. Kreizler had assigned to me for that week—exercises in numbers and readings in history—when I heard the front door downstairs close. I felt my body tense the way it always did and still does when I hear the sound of a door at night; and then, listening, I made out one heavy, strong set of footsteps on the blue-and-green Persian carpet of the stairway. I relaxed: Cyrus’s gait was as recognizable as the deep breathing and gentle humming that always accompanied it. I fell back onto my bed and held my book at arm’s length above me, knowing that my friend would soon poke his broad black head in to check on me and waiting for him to do so.
“Everything quiet, Stevie?” he asked when he reached my room, in that low rumble that was at once powerful and gentle.
I nodded, then looked over at him. “He’s staying at the Institute, I guess.”
Cyrus returned my nod. “His last night for a while. Wants to make use of what time he’s got…” There was a quiet, worried pause, and then Cyrus yawned. “Don’t be up too late, now—he wants you to fetch him in the morning. I brought the barouche back—you’ll want to take the calash and give one of the horses a rest.”
“Right.”
Then I heard those heavy feet and legs lumber off toward the back of the house and the sound of Cyrus’s door closing. I set my book down and took to staring blankly, first at the simple blue-and-white-striped wallpaper around me, then at the small dormered window at the foot of my bed, out of which I could see the rustling, leafy tops of the trees in Stuyvesant Park across the street.
It didn’t make any more sense to me then than it does now, how life can pile troubles up on a man what don’t deserve them, while letting some of the biggest jackasses and scoundrels alive waltz their way through long, untroubled existences. I could see the Doctor at that moment clear as if I was standing next to him down at the Institute (that being the Kreizler Institute for Children on East Broadway): he’d long since have made sure the kids were all bedded down safe, as well as given late-night instructions to the staff about any new arrivals or troublesome cases, and by now he’d be at the big secretary in his consulting room working on a mountain of papers, partly out of necessity and partly to avoid the thought that it all might be coming to an end. He’d stay there under the glow of his green-and-gold Tiffany lamp, pulling at his mustache and the small patch of beard under his mouth and occasionally rubbing his bad left arm, which seemed to bother him at night worse than other times. But it’d likely be many hours before weariness began to show in those sharp black eyes, and if he did manage to get some sleep it would only be when he laid his long black hair on the papers before him and dozed off fitfully.
You see, it bad been a year of tragedy and controversy for the Doctor, beginning, as I’ve said, with the death of the only woman he’d ever truly loved and coming to a head with the recent unexplained suicide of one of his young charges at the Institute. A court hearing to discuss the general state of affairs at the Institute had followed this last incident, resulting in an injunction. For sixty days the Doctor was to keep clear of the place while the police investigated the matter, and those sixty days were set to start the next morning—however, I’ll have much more to say about all that later.
It was while I was lying there counting the Doctor’s troubles that I heard the small, sudden scraping noise I’ve mentioned coming from outside my window. Like I say, I made the sound right away—my own feet had produced it too many times for me not to. As my heart began to race with a little nervousness but even more excitement, I thought for a second of fetching Cyrus; but then a quick succession of amateur slips in the climbing steps outside made me realize I wasn’t about to get a visit from anybody I couldn’t handle. So I just set my book aside, slid over to the window, and poked the top of my head out.
It makes me smile, sometimes, to think back on those days—and even more on those nights—and realize just how much time we all spent crawling around rooftops and into and out of other people’s windows while most of the city was sound asleep. It wasn’t a surprising or new activity for me, of course: my mother’d put me to work breaking into houses and lifting fenceable goods as soon as I could walk. But the image of the Doctor’s respectable young society friends jimmying windows and cramming themselves through them like a batch of garden-variety second-story men—well, I did and do find it amusing. And nothing ever gave me a bigger smile than what I saw that night:
It was Miss Sara Howard, busting just about every rule in the housebreaker’s bible, if there ever was such a thing, and cursing heaven like a sailor all the while. She had on her usual daytime rig—a simple dark dress without a lot of fussy, fashionable undergarments—but uncomplicated as her clothes were, she was having a hell of a time keeping a grip on the rain gutter and the protruding cornerstones of the house, and was a rat’s ass away from falling into the Doctor’s front yard and breaking what would most likely have been every bone in her body. Her hair’d obviously started out in a tight bun, but it was coming undone along with the rest of her; and her pretty if somewhat plain face was a picture of heated frustration.
“You’re lucky I’m not the cops, Miss Howard,” I said, crawling out onto the windowsill. That brought a quick turn of her head and a burning light into her green eyes that any emerald would’ve envied. “They’d have you out at the Octagon Tower before breakfast.” The Octagon Tower was an evil-looking, domed structure on Blackwells Island in the East River, one what, along with two wings that branched off of it, made up the city’s notorious women’s prison and madhouse.
Miss Howard only frowned and nodded at her feet. “It’s these blasted boots,” she said, and, looking down at them with her, I could see what the problem was: instead of wearing a sensible, light pair of shoes or slippers that would have let her get her toes into the gaps in the masonry, she—being a novice—had put on a pair of heavy, nail-studded climber’s boots. They weren’t unlike the ones the murderer John Beecham had used to climb walls, and I figured that that was where she’d got the idea.
“You need rope and gear for those,” I said, grabbing hold of the window frame with my right hand and extending my left arm to her. “Remember, Beecham was climbing sheer brick walls. And,” I added with a smile, as I pulled her onto the windowsill with me, “he knew what he was doing.”
She settled in, caught her breath, and just barely glanced at me sideways. “That’s a low blow, Stevie,” she said. But then the irritated face turned amused, in the way that her looks and moods always changed: suddenly, with the speed of a doused cat. She smiled back at me. “Got a cigarette?”
“Like a dog has fleas,” I said, reaching inside the room for a packet and handing her one. I took one for myself, struck a match on the windowsill, and we both lit up. “Life must be getting boring over on Broadway.”
“Just the opposite,” she said, blowing smoke out toward the park and producing a pair of more conventional shoes from a satchel that was hanging around her neck. “I think I’ve finally got a case that doesn’t involve an unfaithful husband or a rich brat gone bad.”
A word of explanation, here: after the Beecham case, all the members of our little band of investigators besides Miss Howard had gone back to their usual pursuits. Mr. Moore’d gotten his old job back, doing criminal reporting for the Times, though he continued to butt heads with his editors as often as ever. Lucius and Marcus Isaacson, meanwhile, had gone back to the Police Department, where, having been promoted by Commissioner Roosevelt, they were promptly demoted back to detective sergeants when Mr. Roosevelt left for Washington to become assistant secretary of the Navy and the New York Police Department fell back into its old ways. Dr. Kreizler had returned to the Institute and his consultation work on criminal cases, and Cyrus and me had gone back to running the Doctor’s house. But Miss Howard couldn’t face returning
to the life of a secretary, even if it was at Police Headquarters. So she’d taken over the lease at our former headquarters at Number 808 Broadway and opened her own private investigation service. She limited her clients to women, who generally had a hard time securing such services in those days (not that it’s any easy trick for them now). The problem was that, as she’d just said, about the only ladies who could afford to hire her tended to be biddies from uptown who wanted to know if their husbands were cheating on them (the answer generally being yes) or what the wayward heirs to their family fortunes were doing with their private time. In a year of business Miss Howard hadn’t been involved in a single juicy murder case or even a nice, sordid bit of blackmailing, and I think she’d begun to get disenchanted with the whole detecting business. Tonight, though, her face reflected her statement that something genuinely racy might’ve come her way.
“Well,” I said, “if it’s so important you could’ve tried the front door. Would’ve saved you some time. Lot less chance of breaking your neck, too.”
Now, if any grown man had made a crack like that to Sara Howard, she’d have whipped out the derringer that was always hidden somewhere on her person and situated it uncomfortably close to his nose; but, probably because I was so much younger, she’d always been different with me, and we could talk straight. “I know,” she answered, laughing a bit at herself as she took off the nail-studded boots, shoved them into her satchel, and put on the more sensible footwear. “I just thought I could use the practice. If you’re going to catch criminals, you’ve got to be a bit of one yourself, I’ve found.”
“Ain’t that so.”
Miss Howard finished tying her laces, rubbed out her cigarette, and scattered the tobacco in the butt on the wind. Then rolled the remaining paper into a tight little ball and flicked it away. “Now, then—Dr. Kreizler’s not here, is he, Stevie?”