The Alienist - Caleb Carr [67]
“And he doesn’t drink?” Kreizler asked. “No drug addictions?”
“Apparently not,” Lucius answered with a shrug.
“Nor did he stand to gain materially from the children’s deaths?”
“In no way.”
“Good! Then we have several elements we need: extensive premeditation, a lack of intoxication, and no obvious motive. All would characterize our killer. But if we discover that Markowitz is not in fact our man—as I suspect we will—then our task becomes to determine why he isn’t.” Laszlo picked up a piece of chalk and began to rap on the large blackboard, as if trying to coax information out of it. “What makes him different from Santorelli’s murderer? Why didn’t he mutilate the bodies? When we know that, we can focus our imaginary picture just a bit more. Then, as we build our killer’s list of attributes, more and more candidates can be eliminated at first glance. For the moment, however, we have a wide field.” He pulled on his gloves. “Stevie! You’ll be driving. I want Cyrus to oversee the installation of the piano. Don’t let them butcher it, Cyrus. Detective Sergeant, you will be at the Institute?”
Lucius nodded. “The bodies should arrive by noon.”
“Bodies?” I said.
“The two boys killed earlier this year,” Laszlo answered, moving to the door. “Hurry, Moore, we’ll be late!”
CHAPTER 13
* * *
True to Kreizler’s prediction, Harris Markowitz proved thoroughly unsuitable as a suspect in our case. Aside from being short, stout, and well into his sixties—and thus wholly unlike the physical specimen described by the Isaacsons at Delmonico’s—he was obviously quite out of his mind. He’d killed his grandchildren, he claimed, in order to save them from what he perceived to be a monstrously evil world, whose salient aspects he described in a series of rambling, highly confused outbursts. Such poor systemization of unreasonably fearful thoughts and beliefs, as well as the apparently complete lack of concern for his own fate that Markowitz exhibited, often characterized cases of dementia praecox, Kreizler told me as we left Bellevue. But while Markowitz clearly had nothing to do with our business, the visit was still valuable, as Laszlo had hoped it would be, in helping us determine aspects of our killer’s personality by way of comparison. Obviously, our man was not murdering children out of any perverse desire to attend to their spiritual well-being. The furious mutilation of the bodies after death made that much plain. Nor, clearly, was he unconcerned with what would happen to him as a result of his acts. But most of all, it was apparent from his open display of his handiwork—a display that was, as Laszlo had explained, an implicit entreaty for apprehension—that the killings did disturb some part of him. In other words, there was evidence in the bodies not of the murderer’s derangement but of his sanity.
I puzzled with that concept all the way back to Number 808 Broadway, but on arrival my attention was distracted by my first really clearheaded perusal of the place that, as Sara had said, would be our home for the foreseeable future. It was a handsome yellow-brick building, which Kreizler told me had been designed by James Renwick, the architect responsible for the Gothic edifice of Grace Church next door, as well as for the more subdued St. Denis Hotel across the street. The southern windows of our headquarters looked directly out onto the churchyard, which lay in a dark shadow cast by Grace’s enormous tapering spire. There was quite a parochial, serene feel about this little stretch of Broadway, despite the fact that we were smack in the center of one of the city’s busiest shopping strips: besides McCreery’s, there were stores selling everything from dry goods to boots to photographs within steps of Number 808. The single greatest monument to all this commerce was an enormous cast-iron building across Tenth Street from the church, formerly A. T. Stewart’s department store, currently operated by Hilton, Hughes and Company, and eventually to gain its greatest