The Alienist - Caleb Carr [144]
“It doesn’t seem much,” Lucius said. “Measured against a boy’s life.”
A few minutes later Sara finally telephoned again. The body of Ernst Lohmann was on its way to the morgue at Bellevue. The guard who’d found it, naturally, had witnessed no part of the killing, but had heard a sound just before he spotted the dead boy that could have been a steam launch drawing away from the island. Roosevelt had told Sara that he needed some time to get rid of the police officers that were with him; he thought that if we were to meet him at Bellevue at six-thirty he could make sure that we would be allowed to examine the body without interference. That left just over an hour; I decided to go home, bathe, and change my clothes before joining the others at the morgue.
I arrived at Washington Square to find my grandmother, thankfully and remarkably, still asleep. Harriet was up and about, though, and she offered to draw my bath. As she scurried up the stairs, I remarked on my grandmother’s sound slumber.
“Yes, sir,” Harriet said. “Ever since the news came she’s been much easier in her mind.”
“The news?” I said, in tired confusion.
“Sure you’ve heard, sir? About that horrible Dr. Holmes—it was in all the papers yesterday. I believe we still have the Times in the nook, if you’d like me to—”
“No, no,” I said, stopping her as she came back down the stairs. “I’ll get it. If you’ll just draw the bath, Harriet, I’ll be your servant for a lifetime.”
“Hardly necessary, Mr. John,” she answered, going up again.
I found the previous day’s Times in the copper and glass nook next to my grandmother’s favorite chair. The story was blazoned across the front page: HOLMES COOL TO THE END. The infamous “torture doctor” had been dispatched on a Philadelphia gallows, after confessing without remorse to the murder of twenty-seven additional people, mostly women he’d romanced and robbed. The drop had fallen at 10:12 A.M., and twenty minutes later he’d been pronounced dead. As added precautions—against what, the paper did not say—Holmes’s coffin had been filled with cement after he’d been laid in it, and then, when the box had been deposited in a ten-foot hole in an unnamed cemetery, another ton of cement had been poured in over it.
My grandmother still had not stirred when I left the house again for Bellevue; in fact, I later learned from Harriet that she slept until well past ten.
CHAPTER 27
* * *
As it turned out, the greatest difficulty with our trip to the morgue early Monday morning did not result from a confrontation with any member of that institution’s staff. They were all quite new on the job (having recently replaced a group who’d been fired for selling bodies to anatomists at $150 a head) and too unsure of their authority to go up against Roosevelt. No, our problem was simply getting into the building, for by the time we arrived, another angry mob of Lower East Side residents had formed to demand an explanation as to why their children were still being slaughtered without so much as one suspect being taken into custody. The general air among this crowd was not only angrier than that of the group that’d assembled at Castle Garden, it was also far more indignant. Absent was any mention of Ernst Lohmann’s profession or living arrangements (he turned out to have no family that we could ever locate); the youth was pictured as an abandoned innocent left to the mercy of a police department, a city government, and an upper class that did not care how he lived—or, if he died, who was responsible. This much more systematic, not to mention political, representation of Lohmann’s plight—and that of the immigrant communities generally—may have been due to the fact that there were a good number of Germans in the crowd; but I suspected that it had far more to do with the ongoing influence of Paul Kelly, although I did not see either him or his brougham anywhere near the morgue as we moved through the crowd around it.
We entered the dreary red-brick building through a black iron door in the back, Sara,