The Alienist - Caleb Carr [221]
“Jib,” I answered, wiping my face again with my handkerchief.
Sara’s face screwed up. “Jib? The cat? What in the world are you talking about?”
“Let me put it this way,” I said, taking her arm and starting the walk back toward Broadway. “Regardless of what Mrs. Piedmont may say, cats do not just disappear.”
CHAPTER 40
* * *
Sara and I got back to Number 808 Broadway just a few minutes ahead of the Isaacsons, whose mood on entering was little better than ours had been several hours earlier. In a flurry we told the detective sergeants of our adventures that evening, as Sara wrote the details of the encounters up on the chalkboard. Both Lucius and Marcus were profoundly encouraged at our having been able to trace at least some of John Beecham’s movements, even though the trips to the Census Bureau and Mrs. Piedmont’s house had—to my way of thinking, at any rate—left us in effectively the same position we’d been in that morning: with no idea where Beecham was now living or what he was now doing.
“True, John,” Lucius said, “but we do know much more about what he’s not doing. Our idea that he might’ve been inclined to make use of the knowledge he got from having a minister for a father appears to have been wrong—and there’s probably a reason for that.”
“Maybe the bitterness is just too powerful,” Marcus said, considering the question. “Maybe he can’t so much as pay lip service to what his father stood for, even for the purposes of finding a job.”
“Because of the hypocrisy within his family?” Sara asked, still scratching away at the board.
“That’s right,” Marcus answered. “The whole notion of church and missionary work may just make him instinctively too violent—he can’t pursue it, because he wouldn’t be able to trust himself to keep up appearances.”
“Good,” Lucius said, bobbing his head. “So he takes the job at the Census Bureau, which doesn’t seem to put him in any danger of revealing himself, accidentally or otherwise. After all, a lot of the men who got jobs as enumerators lied on their applications, without anyone discovering it.”
“The job also satisfies a big craving for him,” I added. “It gets him into people’s houses, and close to their children, whom he can learn about without seeming to be interested—which eventually poses a problem for him.”
Marcus took over: “Because after a while he starts having urges that he can’t control. But what about the boys? He didn’t meet them at their homes—they didn’t live with their families, and he’d already been fired, anyway.”
“True,” I said. “That’s an open question. But wherever he went after the Census Bureau, he’d want to have continued access to people’s private affairs—and hopefully go on visiting families in their homes—in order to do research on his victims. That way, even though the boys are living in the disorderly houses, he’d be able to sympathize and commiserate with their specific situations—which would be a very effective way of getting them to trust him.”
“And which is also the element that’s been missing from the charity workers we’ve interviewed,” Sara said, standing away from the chalkboard.
“Exactly,” I said, opening windows to let the evening air into our slightly stuffy headquarters.
“I’m still not sure, though,” Marcus said, “how this helps us figure out where he is now. I don’t want to sound anxious, friends, but we’re six days away from the next attack.”
That prompted a few minutes of silence, during which all our eyes wandered toward the pile of photographs that sat on Marcus’s desk. That pile would grow, each of us knew, if we failed now. Eventually, Lucius spoke up in a grimly determined voice:
“We’ve got to stay with what got us here—follow his confident, aggressive side. He didn’t show fear or panic, in his dealings with the Census Bureau and Mrs. Piedmont. He made up elaborate lies and lived within them for extended periods of time without