The Alienist - Caleb Carr [172]
Sara answered in a very edgy voice: Apparently there’d been a lot of interest displayed in our headquarters during the previous forty-eight hours by a variety of unsavory characters. Sara herself had been followed fairly constantly, she was certain of that; and even though she never went out unarmed, such close scrutiny was nerve-racking. Boredom only worsened things: Because Sara had had little to do since our departure, her mind was free to focus all the more on her spectral stalkers. For this reason the thought of activity, even if it was only research at the Times, acted as a tonic on her spirits, and she devoured the details of our latest theory with relish. I then asked her how long she thought it would be before Cyrus would be able to accompany her around town, to which she answered that although the big fellow had been released from the hospital, he was still too weak to leave his bed at Kreizler’s house.
“I’ll be all right, John,” she insisted to me, though her words lacked some of their usual conviction.
“Of course you will,” I answered. “I doubt if half the criminals in New York are as well armed. Or cops, for that matter. All the same, get Stevie to stick with you. He’s quite the item in a brawl, even at his size.”
“Yes,” Sara answered, with a calming laugh. “He’s already been very helpful—sees me home every night. We smoke cigarettes together, though you needn’t tell Dr. Kreizler that.” I wondered for a moment why she persisted in calling him “Dr. Kreizler,” but there was more pressing business at hand.
“I’ve got to go, Sara. Telephone as soon as you have anything.”
“All right. Watch out for yourselves, John.”
I rang off and went to find Kreizler.
He was still in the cable office, putting the last words to a wire that he proceeded to send to Roosevelt. Phrasing his sentences vaguely (and putting no signature to the message), Laszlo asked Theodore to contact first the office of the mayor of New Paltz, in an attempt to ascertain whether a family or person named Beecham had lived in that town at any point during the last twenty years, and second the authorities in Newton, Massachusetts, to see if one Adam Dury still resided there. Anxious as we both were to get replies to these questions, we knew that they would take time, and that we still had plenty of work to do at St. Elizabeth’s and the Interior Department. Somewhat reluctantly, we left the cable office and went out into another magnificent spring morning.
Even though there were many details to be attended to that day, it was impossible for me to keep my mind from wandering back to the larger mysteries surrounding John Beecham and Victor Dury, and I’m sure Kreizler experienced much the same thing. Several questions became particularly persistent: If the story about Indian assassins was, in fact, false, who had concocted it? Who had actually committed the murder, and what had happened to the younger Dury boy? Why was there so little discussion, in the hospital records, of John Beecham’s early life, and no mention at all of his mother? And where was that obviously troubled man now?
The day’s work brought no answers to these questions: neither the Interior nor the War Department could supply further details of either the Dury murder or John Beecham’s life before his commitment to St. Elizabeth’s. Kreizler fared no better at said hospital, which, he told me that evening, was neither required nor empowered to find out where a patient was going once he had secured his release through a writ of habeas corpus. In addition, none of the few members of the nonmedical staff who had been at the hospital at the time of Beecham’s commitment could remember anything about the man other