The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [120]
“It’s really rather remarkable,” the Doctor said, after Hickie’d made his good-byes to Mike in my room and then headed back downtown. “Do you know, Stevie, there is a brilliant Russian physiologist and psychologist—Pavlov is his name—whom I met during my trip to St. Petersburg. He is working along similar lines as this ‘Hickie’—the causes of animal behavior. I believe he would benefit greatly from a conversation with your friend.”
“Not likely,” I answered. “Hickie don’t much like leaving the old neighborhood, even on jobs—and I don’t think he can read or write.”
Chuckling a bit, the Doctor put an arm on my shoulder. “I was,” he said, “speaking rather hypothetically, Stevie…”
Mike the ferret’s taking up residence in my room presented me with a situation the likes of which I’d never before experienced. Suddenly I had a pet, a roommate, and for the next few days my own activities were pretty well dictated by the need to train and feed the animal. He was a living responsibility, an idea what had never before appealed to me; and yet I found that I didn’t half mind it, once I was actually in the situation. In fact, Mike became the center of my attention and—given his lively, affectionate manner—my joy and amusement, too. It ended up taking Miss Howard better than a day to get in touch with Señora Linares, and another day to lay hands on a piece of little Ana’s bedclothing; and I spent most of that time either romping around my room with Mike, trying to locate mice in our basement for him, or chatting away to the animal as if I expected answers. I’d seen people behave that way with pets before, but never having had one I’d never understood such conduct; suddenly the appeal was very clear, and as the time went by I found myself deliberately putting thoughts of Mike’s departure out of my head.
There were plenty of developments to take my mind off of that prospect. Detective Sergeant Marcus and Mr. Moore did eventually locate the widow of the contractor Henry Bates, and the news they brought back from Brooklyn was disturbing: Bates’s wife declared that he’d never had a sick day in his life, and that his heart had been as strong as an ox’s. On top of that, he hadn’t died a day or two after completing his job for Nurse Hunter—he’d died that very day, some six months ago, and at Number 39 Bethune Street. He’d been struck just after taking a cup of tea—fortified with some whiskey—what’d been offered by the mistress of the house. Nurse Hunter herself had apparently reported all this to the coroner, and had gone on to say that Bates’s attack had occurred as he picked up a heavy sack of tools on his way out of the house. The coroner had told Mrs. Bates that such things did happen, and that Bates could have had some hidden heart defect that didn’t make itself known until the very end. He’d asked Mrs. Bates if she wanted him to do an autopsy to confirm this; but she was a superstitious and fanatically religious woman, who had some strange notions about what would happen to her husband’s soul if his heart was removed from his dead body.
This slightly demented attitude made it tougher for Mr. Moore and Marcus to buy the next theory what Mrs. Bates shared with them—that her husband had been seduced by Nurse Hunter—even though they wanted very much to. Her statement that Mr. Bates had been directed by his boss at Number 39 Bethune Street to hire and fire construction crews on a regular basis, on the other hand, seemed to make sense: Nurse Hunter would want as few people as possible to know the complete details of what she was building. The only man who wound up with such knowledge was Mr. Bates; and it was the Doctor and Detective Sergeant Lucius’s belief that if we checked around the Hunter household carefully enough,