Trying to get himself fully composed, Mr. Picton looked anxiously to the door and then to Sheriff Dunning, who only shrugged once. “Actually, Your Honor,” Mr. Picton replied, “the state’s next witness has apparently not arrived yet. He was due to be escorted to town by two of Sheriff Dunning’s deputies, but I don’t know—”
Just then a young boy slipped through the mahogany doors. He was wearing the uniform of the Western Union company, and in his hand he was clutching an envelope. After asking the guard at the door a question, he was directed toward Mr. Picton’s table, and made his way down the aisle.
Seeing him, Mr. Picton said, “This may be word of the witness now, Your Honor—if I may have just a moment.”
“A moment, Mr. Picton,” the judge said, sitting back.
The delivery boy passed by our two rows of seats, then handed the envelope to Mr. Picton and asked him to sign for it. Doing so quickly, Mr. Picton tore the telegram open and read it quickly; then he read it again, as if its contents made no sense to him. Finally, on the third reading, his face lost all its color, and he sank into the chair behind him.
“Picton,” the Doctor whispered, watching him, “what is it?”
Judge Brown leaned forward in his chair, looking both concerned and a little irritated. “Mr. Picton? Are you well, sir?”
“Your—Your Honor,” Mr. Picton breathed, struggling to get back to his feet. “I—” Staring at the floor underneath him without really seeming to see it, Mr. Picton finally caught his breath, cleared his throat, and looked up. “I’m sorry, Your Honor. At this time the state was to have called the Reverend Clayton Parker. He was due to take the early train this morning in the company of two of Sheriff Dunning’s deputies. Apparently there was an—accident—”
“An accident?” the judge echoed. “What kind of an accident?”
Pausing and looking at the telegram again, Mr. Picton said slowly, “Apparently Reverend Parker fell under the wheels of an approaching train at the Grand Central Terminal this morning. He was severely injured and taken to a nearby hospital. He died there forty-five minutes ago.”
The news hit the room as hard as the train must’ve hit the reverend. The people in the galleries—some of who’d been members of Parker’s congregation—broke into open commotion, and a few were moved to tears. As for our group, we were all too stunned to say or do anything at all. There was no confusion among us, of course: we all knew that there was no chance that the death had actually been an accident. Getting killed by a train at Grand Central was almost impossible, unless somebody was helping you: somebody experienced at such things, somebody strong, somebody crazy enough to pull such a job in the middle of a large crowd, and somebody who wasn’t worried about the presence of two sheriff’s deputies. Somebody wound up on burny, for instance; somebody like a Hudson Duster.
As for Libby Hatch, she erupted with a short, loud sound that I could’ve sworn was a laugh; but when I looked over, she had her face buried in her hands, and seemed to be crying.
Judge Brown went to work restoring order, though he did so more gently than usual. As the crowd started to quiet down, he looked around the room with a somber face.
“The court is indeed sorry to receive this news,” he said. “Reverend Parker was well known and respected in this community, despite any allegations that have been made in this room. Under the circumstances, I would suggest that we call a recess until two o’clock—at which hour, Mr. Picton, you can call your next witness. Or, if you need more time—”
Still looking very shaken, Mr. Picton began to shake his head. “No, Your Honor. Thank you. The state will be ready at two o’clock. With its next witness …”
The judge banged away, and as soon as he’d left the courtroom the place came alive again. Mr. Picton collapsed back into his chair, and none of us made any move toward him, not really knowing what we could possibly say. Once again, things were not going the way he’d planned, and the future of our case looked like it was in doubt—especially in light of the way Mr. Darrow had handled Louisa Wright, a witness whose testimony wouldn’t ever receive corroboration now. Knowing all this, Mr. Picton just sat there in his chair for what seemed a long time, staring at the telegram in his hand; finally, he lifted his face and looked over to the rest of us—and to one of us in particular.
“Well, Doctor,” he said, very quietly. “I hope you can be ready by two, because I can’t let the jury sleep on what they’ve heard today.” He paused, raising an eyebrow. “You’re all we’ve got left.”
The Doctor nodded, realizing, it seemed, just what a tight spot he was now in. But his voice when he spoke was very controlled—calm, even. “That’s all right, Mr. Picton,” he said, touching the hair under his lower lip. “I may have learned a thing or two from our friend Darrow …”
CHAPTER 47
Coming back into the courtroom that afternoon, I took note of a change in the positioning of the guards in the place, one what didn’t make much of an impression on me at the time. The big man who’d usually stood behind Iphegeneia Blaylock was now at the door, while Henry, our old friend with the narrow head and the slow brain, was standing inside the oak railing, near the defense table. Writing the switch off to each man wanting a change of pace, I didn’t, like I say, think much of it; but now, looking back, I can see that it was the first indication of something much, more sinister, something that would eventually result in an unexpected and terrible conclusion to the trial. It would’ve saved a lot of heartache if I could’ve seen what the shift really signaled, if any of our group could have; but the only one who might’ve logically been expected to read it correctly was the Doctor, and he was much too focused on his coming showdown with Mr. Darrow to pay attention to those kind of seemingly small details.
Taking the stand at just past two, the Doctor spent most of the next hour answering Mr. Picton’s questions about the work he’d done with Clara Hatch, proceeding from there into a discussion of his assessment of Libby Hatch’s mental condition. The jury, like the people in the galleries around them, were pretty obviously disposed to view the Doctor’s statements with what you might call skepticism, when he first began to speak; but as was so often the case when he appeared in court, he slowly began to win at least some of them over with his clear and compassionate statements, especially when it came to the subject of Clara. Making it clear that while treating the girl he’d simply followed his standard procedure for dealing with such cases—and also making it clear just how many similar cases he had dealt with—the Doctor painted a picture of a very bright, very sensitive girl, one whose mind had been terribly jumbled but not broken by the events what’d occurred on the night of May 31st, 1894. His description of Clara had the effect of softening the jury up to the point where they became interested in the details of his medical diagnosis, instead of being put off by them; and as he talked about spending long days sitting and drawing with her, making it clear that he’d neither tried to force her to speak nor put words in her mouth once she did begin to communicate, those twelve men became more and more what you might call receptive so that by the time Mr. Picton began to inquire about Libby Hatch, they were ready to hear whatever the Doctor had to say. There was no clever maneuvering involved in all this: the simple fact was that for all the Doctor’s unusual appearance, his accent, and the strange nature of much of his work, when he talked about children his attitude was so honest and caring that even the most skeptical types couldn’t question that he honestly cared about what was best for his young charges.
Mr. Picton’s queries about Libby Hatch were all designed for one basic purpose: to show that the woman was calculating, not insane, and that she was very capable of using a variety of methods to get what she wanted. The Doctor told about the three different approaches she’d employed to try to gain his sympathy—playing the victim, the seductress, and finally the wrathful punisher—and he explained how hone of them was what he called “pathological” by nature. They were, in fact, methods what were very commonly
used by many different sorts of women when they were trying to get the upper hand in a given situation—especially a situation what involved men. Playing Devil’s advocate for a moment, Mr. Picton asked if a woman’s murdering her own kids could really be included as part of such efforts—if it could actually be looked at as her trying to gain greater control over her life and her world. Here the Doctor launched into a long recital of similar cases he’d seen and read about over the years, cases where women had indeed done away with their offspring when said kids stood in the way of what their mothers perceived as their own basic needs.
Part of this conversation was a long examination of a case we’d all come to know well: the life and killings of Lydia Sherman, “Queen Poisoner.” The Doctor noted some very interesting similarities between that murderess and Libby Hatch: Lydia Sherman had been what the Doctor referred to as “temperamentally as well as constitutionally unsuited to either marriage or motherhood,” but that hadn’t stopped her from going hunting for husbands and bearing children over and over. Whenever things’d gotten intolerable—as they were always bound to do, given her personality—she just killed each family off, instead of accepting that the problem might lie inside herself. The same sort of “dynamic,” the Doctor said, controlled Libby Hatch’s behavior: for whatever reason (and he made sure to mention the fact that Libby never would discuss her childhood with him) the defendant just couldn’t tolerate the gap between what she wanted and what she thought society expected of a woman. Headstrong and absorbed with her own needs and desires as she was, Libby couldn’t let even children stand in the way of her plans; but she also felt a desperate need to have people perceive her as a good woman, a caring mother, a loving wife. Looked at from this angle, the strange story about the phantom Negro on the Charlton road really wasn’t so odd: only a tale so fantastic could make her look like a hero to the people in her town, instead of a woman who’d murdered three kids what were in her way. But there was nothing, the Doctor emphasized, insane in any of this: members of the male sex very often went to the gallows for similar crimes, without anybody ever suggesting that they were crazy.
But weren’t there differences, Mr. Picton asked, between women and men, so far as these things went? Only in the eyes of society, the Doctor answered. The world at large didn’t want to accept the idea that what most people considered the only truly reliable blood relationship in the world—that between a mother and her children—was in fact anything but sacred. Not done giving voice to the questions he was sure were in the jury’s minds, Mr. Picton proceeded to ask why Libby hadn’t just abandoned the kids and disappeared to start a new existence somewhere else, the way other women often did. Was it just the money that she expected to get from her husband’s estate when they died that’d driven her to bloodshed? These questions were designed to let the Doctor repeat the main theme of his testimony, to hammer it into the jury’s thinking—and the Doctor took the opportunity to pound away. Stronger even than Libby’s desire for wealth, he said, was the desire to be accepted by the world as a good mother. Every human being, he explained, wants to believe—and wants the rest of the world to believe—that he (or she) can perform life’s most primitive functions. For women trained by American society, this was especially true—the message to young girls (and here the Doctor borrowed from Miss Howard, who had, after all, been responsible for his own realization of the fact) was that if you couldn’t attend to the propagation of the species, nothing else you did would really make up for the failure. Libby Hatch had been especially “indoctrinated” with this belief, probably by her own family. She just could not tolerate being seen as the sort of person who wouldn’t or couldn’t care for her children adequately; in her mind, it was better that they die than that she be tarred with that particular brush. But, said Mr. Picton, such thinking might be interpreted by some people as insanity—and wasn’t it insanity, really, of some kind? No, answered the Doctor, it was intolerance. Of a raging, vengeful variety, true; but intolerance had not yet—and, to his way of thinking, never would be—classified as a mental disorder.
Those of us in the first two rows had, of course, heard all this many times, in recent weeks; but the Doctor and Mr. Picton managed to pump enough new blood into the discussion so that even we became wrapped up in the talk. The effect that it had on the jury was even stronger, from the look of them—and that, I guess, is why Mr. Darrow went straight for the throat once Mr. Picton sat down.
“Dr. Kreizler,” he said, moving toward the witness box with a hard look on his face, “isn’t it true that you and your associates have recently been trying to prove that the defendant is responsible for the unexplained deaths of a number of children in New York City?”
Mr. Picton didn’t even need to get up: before he could register an objection, Judge Brown slammed down his gavel, silencing the loud chatter that the question had sparked in both the galleries and the jury box. “Mr. Darrow!” he hollered. “I’ve had just about enough of this kind of irresponsible questioning, from both sides! I want to see you and Mr. Picton in my chambers—now!” As he got up, the judge turned to the jury box. “And you gentlemen will ignore that last question, which will be stricken from the record!” Turning again, the judge looked down at the Doctor. “The witness may feel free to move about—but you’ll still be under oath, Doctor, when we get back under way. Let’s go, gentlemen!”
Moving so fast that he didn’t look like much more than a black blur, Judge Brown disappeared through the back door of the courtroom, followed quickly by Mr. Darrow and Mr. Picton. As soon as they’d gone, the crowd came alive with animated conversation. The Doctor, not wanting to look shocked, slowly rose and drifted over to where we were all sitting.
“So, Doctor,” Lucius said. “I guess this is when the real trial begins.”
“He’s laying the groundwork for his experts,” Marcus added, looking across the room to Mrs. Cady Stanton, Dr. White, and “Dr.” Hamilton. “He knows he can’t come at you with incompetence, so he’ll go for the ulterior motive. But I didn’t think he’d do it so fast.”
“It was his only choice,” the Doctor answered. “If he’d gradually led up to the accusation, the judge never would have allowed him to reach it. This way, he at least makes sure that the jury hears his charge. It’s worth a lecture in chambers.”
“Speaking of his witnesses, it looks like there’s more bad doings over there,” Cyrus said, pointing to the defense table. Libby Hatch had gotten up to introduce herself to Mrs. Cady Stanton, and as they shook hands I could make out the old girl saying, “Thank you, thank you,” in answer to what were almost certainly some very flattering comments from the defendant—the same sort of comments she’d made to the Doctor on first meeting him.
“Maybe I should try to break that up,” Miss Howard said, as she watched the pair continue to chat. “Now that the subject’s been broached, so to speak, I’m sure Mrs. Cady Stanton will understand—”
“I wouldn’t, Sara,” the Doctor said. “Let’s not give Darrow any more ammunition by attempting to fraternize with his witnesses.” His black eyes wandered to the back door of the courtroom, and he smiled as he said, “I can only imagine what’s going on in there …”
What was going on in there, we later learned from Mr. Picton, was a full accounting to the judge by the assistant district attorney of just what had brought all of us to Ballston Spa. It seemed that Mr. Darrow’s private detectives (who, it turned out, were actually Mr. Vanderbilt’s private detectives), with help from the Bureau of Detectives in New York and various employees of both the Lying-in and St. Luke’s Hospitals, had put together a pretty good picture of our recent moves with regard to Libby Hatch. The only thing that Mr. Darrow didn’t seem to know about was the Linares case, and Mr. Picton made sure he didn’t let any information slip, on that score. Judge Brown received all this news in an air of exasperation, and though it didn’t make him any better disposed toward Mr. Picton or the rest of us, it did make him all the more determined to keep any unrelat
ed matters out of the record of the case currently being tried. He was very firm with Mr. Darrow about that: the defense could say whatever it wanted to about the Doctor’s personal or professional motives and methods, but it could not bring up the subject of other allegations or investigations. Mr. Darrow argued that it would be tough to paint an accurate picture of the Doctor’s true motivations without bringing up those other investigations, but the judge stuck to his guns, as Mr. Picton had predicted he would, and said that the Hatch case had to be tried on its own merits. He warned Mr. Darrow against trying to poison the jury’s ears with any more surprise questions what would have to be stricken from the record (but could never, of course, truly be stricken from the jury’s memories), and then the three men returned to the courtroom, where the defense’s examination of the Doctor continued.
“Dr. Kreizler,” Mr. Darrow said, once the galleries had gotten themselves resettled. “What exactly is your occupation, sir?”
“I am an alienist and a psychologist,” the Doctor answered. “I work in most of the hospitals in New York in that capacity. In addition, I perform mental competency assessments for the city, when asked, and I appear as an expert witness at trials such as this one. Most of my time, however, is spent at an institute for children which I founded several years ago.” Mr. Darrow, looking eager, was about to ask another question, when the Doctor showed just what he’d meant when he said he’d learned a few lessons from the counsel for the defense: “I should add, however, that I am not currently serving as the active director of the Institute, due to a court investigation into its affairs which was initiated following the suicide of a young boy we recently took in.”
Looking disappointed at not getting a chance to force this last information out of the Doctor, Mr. Darrow asked, “You were, in fact, ordered not to return to your Institute for a period of sixty days, were you not?”