The Alienist - Caleb Carr [100]
“Mr. Moore, sir—about the man you’re looking for. I heard Dr. Kreizler say the other day that none of the dead boys had been—well, you know, sir, ‘assaulted.’ Is that right?”
“Yes, that’s been true so far, Stevie. Why?”
“It’s just that it makes me wonder, sir. Does that mean he ain’t a fag?”
I sat up at the frankness of the query—sometimes you had to work very hard to remember that Stevie was only twelve. “No, that doesn’t mean that he’s not a—a fag, Stevie. But the fact that his victims do the work they do doesn’t mean that he is one, either.”
“You figure maybe he just hates fags?”
“That may have something to do with it.”
We fought our way through the traffic on Houston Street, Stevie struggling with his emerging line of reasoning and seemingly oblivious to the whores, drug fiends, peddlers, and beggars that swarmed around us. “What I’m thinking, Mr. Moore, is that maybe he is a fag, and maybe he hates fags, too. Kinda like that guard who gimme such a hard time out on Randalls Island.”
“I’m afraid I don’t get you,” I said.
“Well, you know, in court, when I was up for cracking that guy’s skull, they tried to make me out for crazy, saying the guy had a wife and kids and all, so how could he be a fag? And in the Refuge House, if he caught two boys going at each other like that, brother, would he lay into ’em. But all the same, I wasn’t the first kid he tried it with. No, sir. So I figure maybe that’s why he had such a mean disposition—he never really knew, deep down, just what he was. Know what I mean, Mr. Moore?”
Remarkably enough, I did know what he meant. We’d had many long discussions at our headquarters concerning the sexual proclivities of our killer, and we would have many more before our work was done; yet Stevie had come close to crystallizing all our conclusions in that one statement.
There really wasn’t one of us whose brain wasn’t working overtime to come up with ideas and theories that would propel our investigation forward; but, as might be expected, no one was working harder than Kreizler. In fact, his exertions grew so continuous, and at times so excessive, that I began to worry about his physical and nervous health. After one twenty-four-hour period when he stayed at his desk with a stack of almanacs and a large sheet of paper bearing the four dates of the recent murders (January 1st, February 2nd, March 3rd, and April 3rd), trying to unlock the mystery of when our man chose to kill, Laszlo’s face became so pale and haggard that I ordered Cyrus to remove him to his home for some rest. I remembered Sara’s statement that Kreizler seemed to have some sort of personal stake in the work we were doing; and though I wanted to ask her for elaboration, I feared that such a conversation would only revive my tendency to speculate about their personal relationship, which was neither any of my business nor conducive to productive work on the case.
But a discussion became inevitable one morning, when Kreizler—fresh from a long night at his Institute, where there’d been trouble concerning a new student and her parents—set off without a break to do a mental competency assessment of a man who’d dismembered his wife on a homemade altar. Laszlo had lately been gathering evidence to support the theory that our murders were