The Alienist - Caleb Carr [181]
“We’ve read that there was gossip,” I answered. “But the police said that they never—”
“Believed it? Not much, they didn’t. Only enough to send two of their men all the way over here to harass my wife and myself for three days!”
“You’re married, Mr. Dury?” Kreizler asked quietly.
For just a second or two, Dury eyed Laszlo, again resentfully. “I am. Nineteen years, not that it’s any business of yours.”
“Children?” Kreizler asked, in the same cautious tone.
“No,” came the hard answer. “We—that is, my wife—I—no. We have no children.”
“But I take it,” I said, “that your wife was able to attest to your being here when the—the terrible incident occurred?”
“That didn’t mean much to those idiots,” Dury answered. “A wife’s testimony counts for little or nothing in a court of law. I had to ask a neighbor of mine, a man who lives nearly ten miles away, to come and verify that we were pulling a stump together on the very day my parents were murdered.”
“Do you know why the police should have been so hard to convince?” Kreizler asked.
Dury slammed his mallet down on the ground. “I’m sure you read about that, too. Doctor. It was no secret. There’d been bad blood between my parents and myself for many years.”
I held a hand up to Kreizler. “Yes, we saw some mention of such,” I said, trying to coax more details out of Dury. “But the police accounts were very vague and confused, and it was difficult to draw any conclusions. Which seems remarkable, given that the question was vital to the investigation. Maybe you could make it a little clearer for us?”
Lifting the manure spreader’s wheel onto a workbench, Dury began to pound at it again. “My parents were hard people, Mr. Moore. They had to be, to make the trip to this country and survive the life they chose for themselves. But while I can say that now, such explanations are quite beyond a small boy who—” A blast of passionate language seemed about to escape the man, but he held it down with obvious effort. “Who only hears a cold voice. And only feels a thick strap.”
“Then you were beaten,” I said, thinking back to Kreizler’s and my original speculations after first reading of the Dury murders in Washington.
“I wasn’t referring to myself, Mr. Moore,” Dury answered. “Though God knows neither my father nor my mother ever shrank from punishing me when I misbehaved. But that was not what caused our—estrangement.” He looked out a small, filthy window for a moment, then pounded at the wheel again. “I had a brother. Japheth.”
Kreizler nodded as I said, “Yes, we read about him. Tragic. You have our sympathy.”
“Sympathy? I suppose. But I’ll tell you this, Mr. Moore—whatever those savages did to him was no more tragic than what he endured at the hands of his own parents.”
“He suffered cruelties?”
Dury shrugged. “Some might not call them such. But I did, and do still. Oh, he was a strange lad, in some respects, and the ways in which my parents reacted to his behavior might have seemed—natural, to an outsider. But it wasn’t. No, sir, there was the devil in it all, somewhere…” Dury’s attention wandered for a moment, but then he shook it off. “I’m sorry. You wanted to know about the case.”
I spent the next half hour asking Dury some obvious questions about what had happened on that day in 1880, requesting clarification of details that we were not, in fact, confused about, as a method of concealing our true interests. Then I managed, by asking him why any Indians should have wanted to kill his parents, to lead him into a more detailed discussion of what life in his home during the Minnesota years had been like. From there, it was no great job to expand the discussion to a history of the family’s private dealings more generally. As Dury related these, Laszlo stealthily withdrew his small notebook and began to silently scribble a record of the account:
Though born in New Paltz in 1856, Adam Dury’s earliest memories dated back only as far as his fourth year, when his family had relocated to Fort Ridgely, Minnesota, a military post inside that state’s Lower Sioux Agency.