The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [24]
“You just had to take the opportunity to lecture them all, as if we were in some elementary school classroom,” Marcus answered in irritation.
“I was recording important evidence!” Lucius answered. Glancing back once, I could see that they were leaning in toward each other over Cyrus and the bewildered cabbie, like a pair of bickering kids. Cyrus just smiled at me—we’d seen a hundred scenes like this before. The cabbie, however, seemed to be thinking that the strange spat was further evidence that he’d been abducted by lunatics.
“‘Recording important evidence,’ “Marcus echoed. “You were grandstanding! As if we don’t have enough problems in the department right now, without you acting like an old schoolmarm!”
“That’s ridiculous—” Lucius tried. But Marcus wasn’t having any of it.
“Ridiculous? You’ve been that way since you were eight years old!”
“Marcus!” Lucius was trying to get a grip on himself. “This is no place to bring up—”
“Every day, when we’d get home from school—‘Mama! Papa! I can recite my whole day’s lessons, listen, listen!’”
“—no place to bring up personal—”
“Never occurred to you that Mama and Papa were too goddamned tired to listen to your entire day’s lessons. No, you just went right ahead—”
“They were proud of me!” Lucius hollered, abandoning all attempts at dignity.
“What were you thinking?” Marcus bellowed as I drove the grey mare past Christopher Street and then east on Tenth, in order to avoid any chance of seeing Kat again. “That Hogan’s going to go back to Mulberry Street and say, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, those Isaacson boys certainly know their business—showed us a thing or two!’? One step closer to getting forced out, that’s all we are now!”
The “discussion” went on in that vein right up until I turned the cab north on Broadway and spun it around in front of the Hotel St. Denis. There weren’t two better detectives in all the world than the Isaacsons, they’d proved that much during the Beecham case: trained in medicine and law in addition to criminal science, they kept up with advances in tracking theories and techniques from every corner of the world. It was their knowledge of the still unaccepted science of fingerprinting, for instance, that’d put the first crack in the Beecham case. They had an arsenal of cameras, chemicals, and microscopes that they brought to bear on any problem what might seem totally incomprehensible to your average detective; but they did love to bicker, and most of the time they went at it like a couple of old hens.
Cyrus gave the cabbie a little extra cash and I gave him his hat back as we left him to recover his wits in front of the hotel. Then we walked quickly over to Number 808 and got back into the elevator. Once inside, the detective sergeants brought the volume of their argument down, but not the passion.
“Marcus, for God’s sake,” Lucius seethed, “we can talk about this at home!”
“Oh, sure,” Marcus mumbled, straightening his jacket and smoothing back his thick hair. “When you can bring Mama into it.”
“Meaning?” Lucius asked in some shock.
“She’ll take your side. She always does, because she can’t stand to hurt your feelings. Sure, she’ll tell you she always loved to listen to you recite. But she was actually bored stiff. Trust me—she used to say so when you weren’t around.”
“Why, you—!” Lucius started; but then the elevator reached the sixth floor and bumped to its usual weighty stop. The sign that Sara’d had painted on the door seemed to jolt the brothers back to adult reality, and they both fell silent, dropping the whole thing as suddenly as they’d picked it up. As for Cyrus and me, it’d been all we could do to keep from laughing out loud during the elevator ride. But as we stepped back into the old headquarters, seriousness of purpose returned to us, too.
CHAPTER 5
We found Mr. Moore, Miss Howard, and the señora more or less where we’d left them, though it was clear from the way that Mr. Moore had drawn a chair up close to the Linares woman and was listening to her intently that she’d made quite an impression on him. A large part of that,