The Alienist - Caleb Carr [9]
“Kreizler estimates that the boy was killed earlier tonight,” Theodore said, glancing at the sheet of paper in his hand. “Something about the temperature of the body. So the killer may still be in the area. I have men combing it. There are a few other medical details, and then this message.”
He handed the paper to me, and on it I saw scrawled in Kreizler’s agitated block hand: “ROOSEVELT: TERRIBLE ERRORS HAVE BEEN MADE. I WILL BE AVAILABLE IN THE MORNING, OR FOR LUNCH. WE SHOULD BEGIN—THERE IS A TIMETABLE.” I tried for a moment to make sense of it.
“It’s fairly tiresome of him to be so cryptic” was the only conclusion I could reach.
Theodore managed a chuckle. “Yes. I thought so, too. But I think I understand, now. It was examining the body that did it. Do you have any idea, Moore, how many people are murdered in New York every year?”
“Not really.” I gave the corpse another curious glance, but jerked my head back around when I saw the cruel way in which the face was pressed to the steel walkway—so that the lower jaw was pushed at a grotesque sidelong angle away from the upper—and the black-red holes that had once been eyes. “If I were to guess I’d say hundreds. Perhaps one or two thousand.”
“So would I,” Roosevelt answered. “But I, too, would only be guessing. Because we don’t even pay attention to most of them. Oh, the force bends every effort if the victim is respectable and well-to-do. But a boy like this, an immigrant who turned to the flesh trade—I’m ashamed to say it, Moore, but there’s no precedent for looking into such a case, as you could see in Flynn’s attitude.” His hands went to his hips again. “But I’m getting tired of it. In these vile neighborhoods husbands and wives kill each other, drunkards and dope fiends murder decent working people, prostitutes are slaughtered and commit suicide by the score, and at most it’s seen as some sort of grimly amusing spectacle by outsiders. That’s bad enough. But when the victims are children like this, and the general reaction is no different than Flynn’s—by God, I get to feeling warlike with my own people! Why, already this year we’ve had three such cases, and not so much as a whisper from the precincts or the detectives.”
“Three?” I asked. “I only know about the girl at Draper’s.” Shang Draper ran a notorious brothel at Sixth Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street, where customers could purchase the favors of children (mostly girls, but the occasional boy as well) between the ages of nine and fourteen. In January a ten-year-old girl had been found beaten to death in one of the brothel’s small paneled rooms.
“Yes, and you only know of that one because Draper had been slow with his graft payments,” Roosevelt said. The bitter battle against corruption waged by the current mayor, Colonel William L. Strong, and lieutenants such as Roosevelt had been courageous, but they had not succeeded in eradicating the oldest and most lucrative of police activities: the collection of graft from the operators of saloons, concert halls, disorderly houses, opium dens, and every other palace of vice. “Someone in the Sixteenth Precinct, I still don’t know who, made the most of that story to the press as a method of turning the screws. But the other two victims were boys like this, found in the streets and therefore useless in trying to pressure their panderers. So the stories went untold…”
His voice faded into the slap of the water below us and the steady rush of the river breeze. “Were they both like this?” I asked, watching Theodore watch the body.
“Virtually. Throats cut. And they’d both