The Alienist - Caleb Carr [96]
“Well—okay, Mr. Moore,” Joseph answered slowly. “But maybe—maybe you and Detective Sergeant Isaacson can come back and check on us, sometime. Those other cops, the ones that were here this morning, they didn’t seem to care much. They just told everybody to keep quiet about Fatima.”
“We’ll try to do that,” I answered, taking a pen and a piece of paper from my coat pocket. “And if you ever have anything you want to tell someone, anything at all that you think is important, you come straight to this address during the day, and to this one at night.” I gave him not only our headquarters location but also the number of my grandmother’s house on Washington Square, wondering for an instant what the old girl would make of this boy if he ever did show up. Then I had him write down the telephone number of the Golden Rule. “Don’t go to any other cops—tell us everything first. And don’t tell any other cops that we were here.”
“Don’t worry,” the boy answered quickly. “You’re the first two cops I ever met that I’d talk to, anyway.”
“That’s probably because I’m not a cop,” I said with a smile.
The grin was returned, and with a start I realized that I was seeing someone else’s face echoed in Joseph’s features. “You didn’t seem like one,” the boy said. Then his brows knotted up with another question: “So why are you trying to find out who killed Fatima?”
I put a hand on the boy’s head. “Because we want to stop him.” Just then the harsh sound of Scotch Ann’s gravelly voice came bursting out of the Golden Rule’s front hall, and I nodded in its direction. “You’d better go. Remember what I said.”
At a quick, youthful pace Joseph disappeared back into the club, and I stood up to find Marcus smiling at me.
“You handled that pretty well,” he said. “Spent much time around kids?”
“Some,” I answered, without elaborating. I had no desire to reveal how much young Joseph’s eyes and smile had reminded me of my own dead brother’s at the same age.
As we walked back across town, Marcus and I discussed the new lay of things. Sure now that the man we sought was well acquainted with places like the Golden Rule and Paresis Hall, we tried to identify who other than customers would regularly investigate such haunts. The idea of a reporter or social essayist like Jake Riis—a man out to reveal the evils of the city and perhaps driven to mad extremities by overexposure to vice—occurred to us, but just as quickly we realized that no one had yet made much of a print crusade out of child prostitution, and certainly not out of homosexual child prostitution. That left us with missionaries and other church workers, a category that seemed more promising: remembering what Kreizler had said about the connection between religious manias and mass murder, I wondered if indeed we were dealing with someone determined to be the hand of a wrathful god on this earth. Kreizler had said he didn’t consider a religious motivation likely, but Kreizler could be wrong about that—after all, missionaries and church workers were known to travel frequently by rooftops when doing their tenement work. Marcus and I were ultimately led away from such a hypothesis, however, by what Joseph had told us. The man who had killed Ali ibn-Ghazi had come to the Golden Rule regularly, and his visits had gone unnoticed. Any reforming crusader worth his salt would have worked hard to be the center of attention.
“Whoever or whatever he is,” Marcus announced, as we closed back in on Number 808 Broadway, “we know one thing—that he can come and go unnoticed. He looks completely as if he belongs in those houses.”
“Right,” I said. “Which brings us back to customers, which means it could be almost anyone.”
“Your theory about an angry customer might still work. Even if he’s not a transient, he still might’ve been fleeced one too many times.”
“I’m not so sure. I’ve seen men who’ve been robbed by whores. They might beat the living daylights out of one of them, but the kind of mutilation we’ve seen? He’d have to be