The Alienist - Caleb Carr [222]
It was hard to watch a streak of creative thinking and good luck die, but die ours did at just that moment. Perhaps we all needed to distance ourselves from the problem for a few hours, or perhaps we’d been overly intimidated by the reminder that we were less than a week away from our literal deadline; whatever the case, our minds and mouths ground to a collective halt. True, we still had one more card to play at the Census Bureau: Marcus and Lucius would visit Charles Murray the following morning, and try to get a better idea of what had prompted Beecham’s dismissal in December. Other than that, however, our next steps were difficult to discern; and it was in a mood of extreme uncertainty that we finally let the long day end at about ten o’clock.
During their interview with Murray on Tuesday, the Isaacsons did indeed discover (as they told Sara and me when they returned to Number 808 in the evening) that Beecham had been fired for paying excessive and disturbing attention to a child: a young girl named Ellie Leshka, who lived in a tenement on Orchard Street just above Canal. The address was within the Thirteenth Ward, and not far from where the Zweig children had lived; none of which changed the fact that stalking a young girl who wasn’t a prostitute (if such was indeed what Beecham had been doing with Ellie Leshka) was an activity he hadn’t engaged in since killing Sofia Zweig, to the best of our knowledge. Marcus and Lucius had hoped to shed further light on this subject by way of a visit to young Ellie and her parents, but as luck would have it the family had recently left New York—for, of all places, Chicago.
According to Murray, the Leshkas had never mentioned anything about violence when they made their complaint about Beecham. Apparently he’d never menaced Ellie—in fact, he’d been kind to her. But the girl had recently turned twelve, and her father and mother had developed perfectly understandable concerns about their daughter spending a lot of time with an unknown, solitary man at such an age. Charles Murray told the Isaacsons that he wouldn’t necessarily have fired Beecham, except that the latter had gained access to the Leshkas’ home by saying he was on official Census Bureau business, when the family had not, in fact, been scheduled for an interview. Murray’s experiences had been such that he was determined to avoid anything that even smelled like scandal.
Sara noted that, in addition to Ellie Leshka’s being a girl of good reputation, there was another unusual aspect to her case: she’d survived her association with Beecham. Given these circumstances, Sara thought it possible that Beecham never intended to kill her. Perhaps this was an example of a genuine attempt on his part to form an attachment to another human being; if so, it was the first in his adult life that we’d heard anything about, save for his shadowy behavior in the Chicago orphanages. Perhaps, too, the Leshkas’ insistence that he not approach their daughter, coupled with the family’s departure from the city, had contributed to Beecham’s rage; again, we had to remember that the recent boy-whore killings had begun soon after the events of December.
Such, however, was about all the information and speculation we could wring out of the Census Bureau connection. We completed that process at close to five-thirty on Tuesday, and then Sara and I presented the Isaacsons with the results of our own day’s work: a short list of occupations that we thought Beecham might have moved on to after his dismissal. Taking all the factors that we considered reliable into account—Beecham