The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [234]
“Now, now, Rupert,” Mr. Moore scolded, “don’t be bitter.”
“He likes Russian literature—poetry and philosophy, too,” Marcus went on. “He has a sort of salon of like-minded souls out there—reads aloud to them at their little gatherings. All in all, a very theatrical and very manipulative character, for all his talk about social justice. Even his own people say so. I talked to a woman who’s a partner in his firm—”
“He’s got a woman in his firm?” Miss Howard said. “An actual partner?”
“That’s right,” Marcus answered.
“Just to show off to his suffragist friends?” Miss Howard continued. “Or does she actually do something?”
“Actually, that’s the interesting part,” Marcus answered. “He’s not much of an advocate of women’s rights himself—doesn’t really consider them an ‘oppressed’ part of society. Not like, say, labor men or blacks.”
“Well,” the Doctor said, “perhaps we’ll be spared the usual lectures on maternal sanctity, then.”
“Oh, I think we will,” Marcus replied quickly. “But I think what he’ll come at us with instead will be more dangerous—much more dangerous.” Taking a pull off the flask, Marcus hissed and turned to our host. “Mr. Picton, how much of a history were you able to compile on Darrow?”
“I found a piece on the Debs trial,” Mr. Picton answered with a shrug. “It mentioned his background with the railway, but there wasn’t much more than that.”
“Nothing on the Prendergast case?” Marcus asked.
“The Prendergast case?” Mr. Picton said, sitting bolt upright. “Great jumping cats, was he involved in that?”
“I’m afraid so,” Marcus answered. “Heavily involved.”
“Well, well, well,” Mr. Picton said. “I assume you remember the affair, Doctor.”
The Doctor was already nodding gloomily. “Indeed. A more ludicrous example of perverting justice to please the public has rarely been seen.”
Marcus laughed a bit. “Oddly enough, Doctor, that’s exactly how Darrow saw it.”
Mr. Moore was trying hard to catch up, knocking a fist against his head. “Prendergast, Prendergast…” His face lit up. “Not the fellow who shot the mayor of Chicago?”
“The same,” Marcus answered. “On the last day of the Exposition of 1893—the first assassination in the city’s history. Eugene Patrick Prendergast turned himself in, along with a four-dollar revolver, and claimed that he’d killed Mayor Carter Harrison because his honor hadn’t lived up to a pledge to put Prendergast in charge of building the city’s new elevated track lines. The claim was a fantasy, of course, and the man was obviously a lunatic. But, well, Harrison had been shot at the Exposition, which made for some very bad international press—”
“And so the state of Illinois,” the Doctor continued bitterly, looking at those of us what didn’t already know the story, “decided to entrust the assessment of his sanity to the chief physician of the Cook County Jail—a man with no special training in mental pathologies. Yet even this handpicked flunky had absolutely no trouble declaring that Prendergast was a raging psychotic.”
“Not that it mattered,” Mr. Picton finished. “Prendergast was quickly declared sane by a jury. He was sentenced to hang—and he did hang, didn’t he, Detective?”
“There’s more to the story than that,” Marcus answered. “After the conclusion of the first trial, Darrow—whose personal opposition to the death penalty has always been almost fanatical—offered to help Prendergast’s lawyer try to get a new sanity hearing. This second proceeding began on January twentieth of ’94, and it was very revealing, especially for our purposes.” Flipping further through his notes, Marcus took another pull from the flask. “Darrow took the lead in arguing the defense’s case. And his tactics, according to several people who witnessed them, represented a whole new kind of lawyering. From the start, he shifted the focus off of Prendergast, and onto the jury: he told them that the prosecution was asking them to violate their sacred oath to weigh the case on its merits in order to satisfy