The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [106]
Kat gave out with a sudden sound that I thought might be alarm, but when I turned to her I found that she was smiling and that the noise had been something like a laugh. For the first time, she looked as though she might be buying that the Doctor was okay.
The Doctor laughed along with her, very encouragingly. “So, Miss Devlin,” he said (and I could see that Kat liked being referred to that way), “you say that the woman in this picture is on romantic terms with Knox?”
“She’s his special moll just at the moment,” Kat answered.
“Indeed?” the Doctor replied.
“And,” Lucius added pointedly, “Knox has her home under his personal protection.”
“Does he really?” The Doctor looked to Kat again. “For any particular reason that you can think of, Miss Devlin?”
Kat shrugged, and loosened her grip on my arm a bit. “He’s a wild one, is that Goo Goo—and from what I seen, so’s Libby. They spend a lot of time upstairs in his room. I hear it gets a little crazy sometimes. I also hear that she—well, she—dances for him.”
“‘Dances’?” the Doctor echoed, a bit confused.
Glancing out the window in some embarrassment, Kat nodded. “You know, sir—dances. He’ll have the band come up, and play outside his door. And she—dances.”
It finally dawned on the Doctor that Kat was talking about something what was known in those days by a number of different terms, but which we now refer to by what it is: the striptease. “I see,” the Doctor said quietly. “Do excuse my ignorance, Miss Devlin. I don’t mean to be thickheaded.”
“Oh, no, sir,” she answered, very respectfully. “Ain’t no reason why you should know. Anyway, like I say, at the moment she’s the one of his girls that can really keep up with him—even more than the younger ones. She works at it, does that Libby.”
“Libby,” the Doctor repeated softly, bouncing the knuckle of his forefinger against his, mouth as he weighed it. “Libby …” He turned to the detective sergeants. “An alias?”
Marcus considered it with a little shrug. “‘Libby’ could be a diminutive version of ‘Elspeth’—it’s likely she had or has one, as ‘Elspeth’ is fairly archaic.”
“Hatch could be her maiden name,” Lucius added. “She’s using it in situations where she doesn’t want to be identified. You’re not going to get many nursing jobs if it gets around that you’re—dancing for Goo Goo Knox. But there’s a more important consideration here, Doctor.” Lucius approached him, glancing briefly at Kat. “There are two things we need to do at this juncture, forensically. We need to prove that the child is in Nurse Hunter’s home, and we need to demonstrate that Nurse Hunter was in fact responsible for the attack in Central Park.” He gave Kat another look and a very friendly smile. “I believe that Miss Devlin can help us with both things.”
Kat turned to me, speaking quietly. “Stevie … you said there wasn’t gonna be no trouble …”
“There ain’t, Kat,” I answered quickly. “Not for you.”
“Then what’s all this about a kid, and an ‘attack’?”
“‘All this’ is nothing in which you need fear you will be implicated, Miss Devlin,” the Doctor tossed in from his chair. “The detective sergeants are investigating a case. We are providing them with some help. Our motives are that simple.”
Grunting a little as she turned back to the Doctor, Kat took on a defiant look. “I don’t want to get mixed up in any police investigation,” she said. “Especially not if it’s got to do with Goo Goo. He’d as soon beat somebody half to death as look at ’em, even when he ain’t blowin’ the burny.”
“There might,” Marcus said, what you could call delicately, “be a rather substantial consideration involved, Miss Devlin.”
Kat squinted at him. “You mean—like money?” Marcus nodded. “Money don’t do you much good in the hospital. And not when you’re at the bottom of the river, neither.”
“And if it were enough money to ensure that you never had to return to Hudson Street again?” the Doctor asked.
Kat’s face went blank. “How could that be? If I cross the Dusters, even just one tiny bit, there won