The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [138]
Marcus looked to his brother. “He’s got a point.”
“Far more than a point,” the Doctor answered, collecting the newspapers and hospital documents and holding them up. “We now have her past. Or pieces of it, at any rate. That is what we have been missing—some hint of what lies behind the current behavior, some ‘way in,’ as Sara puts it. Until now we have been crippled, primarily by the lack of any guidance from my own profession, which, like the rest of our society, suffers from a myopia which prevents us from seeing that a woman, a mother, can be capable of such crimes. And so we have moved haltingly, unsteadily, trying to know things about this particular woman that each of us, in some recess of our own minds, wishes was unknowable and untrue. Oh, we may have had her physical image, and evidence of her most recent destructive behavior, but how much could we truly read into that? Now, however, we have specific details of her past—keys. And we must not hesitate before using them.”
“Except, perhaps, Doctor”—Miss Howard suddenly rose and looked my way—“to take a moment to acknowledge the person whose bravery got us here.”
She held her wineglass up—to me. I shifted uneasily as the others then turned. Discouragement was gone from their faces and had been replaced by confidence, readiness—and smiles. One by one, they each held up their glasses and bottles; and I don’t mind saying, it made me nervous as hell.
But I was smiling a little, too.
“To Stevie,” Miss Howard went on. “Who’s done what none of us could have done,” she continued, “because he’s lived what none of us have lived.”
The rest of them all said, “To Stevie!” together, took big sips of their drinks, and then came at me in a wave.
I just looked at Mike and then out the window, as uncomfortable and as pleased as I can ever remember being.
“Okay, okay,” I said, shielding myself with my hands from their displays of affection and appreciation. “We got work to do, remember …”
CHAPTER 25
On Sunday, Mike the ferret went home with Hickie, and I no longer had a companion to help me forget how badly I’d left things with Kat. But Monday morning saw our investigation pick up pace, and I was soon too busy carting the Doctor and the others around town to think much about where she might be or what she might be doing. I knew that she’d written to her aunt, and was waiting for a reply before heading to California; and I could only hope that she’d see her way clear to contacting me before then. But hoping was a step up from worrying, and as Kat had her money and her ticket now, I figured it was safe to put my fears for her aside, regardless of whether or not I heard from her. The Doctor, Mr. Moore, and I started out Monday morning on the long trip up to St. Luke’s Hospital, which had moved the year before from its old home on Fifty-fourth Street to five new buildings between Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Drive at 114th Street. I saw the Doctor and Mr. Moore as far as the entrance to one of the pavilions—by coincidence, the Vanderbilt Pavilion—where nurses in long, sky-blue dresses and white aprons were trying to keep little white caps perched on their heads as they shuffled quickly up and down a spiral steel staircase what surrounded a small elevator. The Doctor and Mr. Moore got into the elevator and headed to an upper floor, while I went back to the calash and drove down to Morningside Heights, to spend the next few hours smoking a batch of cigarettes and looking down the steep rocks into the wide stretch of Harlem below.
The visit didn’t go as well as the Doctor’d hoped: those physicians, surgeons, and nurses on the hospital staff what had attended to Mrs. Libby Hatch and her “son” two years earlier were horrified by the suggestion that she might’ve done the boy in, and the Doctor had been forced to appeal to higher authorities in order to get access to official records.