The Alienist - Caleb Carr [184]
Kreizler leaned forward, offering a match that Dury took only reluctantly. “What do you mean by ‘everything,’ Mr. Dury?” Laszlo asked.
“You’re a medical man, Doctor,” Dury answered. “I think you can guess.” Smoking for a few seconds to get a good coal going in his pipe, Dury finally shook his head and grunted angrily. “The cruel bitch! Hard words, I know, for a man to assign to his own dead mother. But if you could have seen her, gentlemen—at him, always at him. And when he complained, or cried, or went into a rage over it, she’d say things so despicable that I would’ve thought them beyond even her.” Dury stood up and continued shoveling. “That he wasn’t her son. That he was the child of red Indians—dirty, man-eating savages who’d left him in a bundle at our door. The poor little fellow half-believed it, too.”
Pieces were falling into place with every passing minute; and as they did, it became steadily more difficult for me to control a profound, swelling sense of discovery and triumph. I almost wished that Dury would end his account, just so I could run outside and scream to the heavens that, all opposition be damned, Kreizler and I were going to catch our man. But I knew that self-control was more important now than it had ever been, and I tried to follow Kreizler’s self-composed example.
“And what happened,” Laszlo asked, “when your brother got a bit older? Old enough, that is, to—”
With savage, terrifying suddenness, Adam Dury screamed incomprehensibly and threw his shovel against the rear wall of the barn. The chickens in the adjacent coop sent up a flurry of frightened clucks and feathers, and, hearing them, Dury wrenched his pipe from his mouth and attempted to regain control over himself. Kreizler and I made no move, though I know my own eyes had gone quite wide with shock.
“I think,” Dury seethed, “that we had all best be honest with each other. Gentlemen.”
Kreizler said nothing, and my own voice quavered badly as I asked, “Honest, Mr. Dury? But I assure you—”
“Damn it!” Dury shouted, slamming a foot to the earth. Then he waited a few more seconds, until he could speak more calmly again. “Don’t you think there was talk of it at the time? Do you imagine that simply because I’m a farmer I’m also an idiot? I know what it is you’re here to find out!”
I was about to offer further protests, but Kreizler touched my arm. “Mr. Dury has been exceptionally forthright with us, Moore. I believe we owe him the same courtesy.” Dury nodded, and his breathing became something like regular as Kreizler went on: “Yes, Mr. Dury. We believe there is every chance that your brother murdered your parents.”
A pitiable sound, half-sob and half-gasp, got out of our host. “And is alive?” he said, almost all traces of anger gone from his voice.
Kreizler nodded slowly, and Dury held his arms up helplessly. “But why should it matter now? So long ago—it’s over, done. If my brother is alive, he’s never contacted me. Why should it matter?”
“Then you suspected it yourself?” Kreizler said, avoiding the question as he produced a flask of whiskey and held it out to Dury.
Dury nodded again and took a drink, no longer displaying the resentment toward Laszlo that he’d shown earlier. I had thought that attitude the result of Kreizler’s accent; I could see now that it had been spawned by Dury’s suspicion that this visit—from what he must have thought a very strange sort of doctor—might reach just such a pass.
“Yes,” Dury said at length. “You must remember, Doctor, that I’d lived among the Sioux, as a boy. I had several friends, in their villages. And I’d witnessed the uprising in ’62. I knew that the explanation the police finally accepted of my parents’ death was almost certainly a lie. And more than that, I knew—my brother.”
“You knew that he was capable of such an act,” Kreizler said softly. He was maneuvering very carefully, now, just