The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [286]
Shrugging just once, the Doctor threw his cigarette into the gutter and began to walk down High Street alone.
CHAPTER 48
By midnight on that Thursday the odds against our convicting Libby Hatch had risen to a hundred to one at Canfield’s Casino, and it wasn’t hard to understand why: Mr. Darrow’d managed to plant doubts in the jury’s minds about Lucius’s ballistic testimony even before his own “expert,” Albert Hamilton, had taken the stand, while Mrs. Louisa Wright’s thoughts about a possible romantic motive for the killings had been reduced to unprovable by the sudden and shocking “accident” what had befallen the Reverend Clayton Parker that morning at Grand Central. Mr. Darrow’s very effective questions about the Doctor’s motivations and techniques had been the icing on this bleak cake, and it was plain to all of us that if things kept going the way they were, defeat was just around the corner.
It was no wonder, then, that the atmosphere at Mr. Picton’s house that night moved past gloomy, until it almost seemed like there was a wake going on. Feeling what you might call resigned about the legal case as such, we began to focus our energies not on what remained to be done in court (which was just about nothing, so far as our side was concerned, except for Mr. Picton’s official announcement that the state was resting its case) but on what steps we’d need to take to try to get Ana Linares out of the Dusters’ place before Libby made her way back to New York. This meant getting word to Kat by way of the go-between Mr. Moore’d engaged: Kat’s pal Betty, who was supposedly waiting for us to send a wire to Frankie’s joint as soon as we knew it was time for Kat to make her move. Just talking about this possibility played hell with my nerves again, and for a few minutes I actually toyed with the idea of heading down to New York and making sure everything was set and in place; but the sight of me hanging around would, I knew, only make Kat’s situation even more dicey. So I stayed put, waiting with the others for what looked like it was going to be the dismal end of our business in Ballston Spa.
“And so the new century will bring a new kind of law,” was how Mr. Picton summed things up, as we all sat out on the front porch of his house late that night. “Proceedings where victims and witnesses are put on trial instead of defendants, where a murderer is identified as ‘a woman’ instead of an individual… ah, Doctor, it’s no step forward, that I can tell you, and I don’t think I want to be party to it. If things go on like this, we’ll find ourselves in some shadow world, where lawyers use the ignorance of the average citizen to manipulate justice the way priests did in the Middle Ages. No, if we lose this case—when we lose this case—it’ll be my last, I suspect.”
“I wish I could find some aspect of the affair that might offer you solace,” the Doctor answered quietly. “But I’m afraid I see none. Darrow is the legal man of the future, that much is indeed clear.”
“And I’m a relic,” Mr. Picton agreed with a nod; then he laughed once. “A relic at forty-one! Hardly seems fair, does it? Ah, well—such are the fortunes of the new age.”
You had to hand it to the man: unlike many other sporting bloods I’ve known, he was a genuinely graceful loser, and I don’t think there was one of us who failed to appreciate his ability to receive the head what’d been handed to him (his own) in court and still come up philosophical—except, of course, for Miss Howard, who was always the last member of our company to accept failure or defeat of any kind.
“You two can just stop acting like the whole thing’s over,” she said, sitting on the steps of the porch with a small kerosene lamp and a large map of New York State. “Darrow hasn’t even opened his case yet, for God’s sake—we’ve still got time to come up with something.”
“Oh? And what would that be?” Mr. Moore asked.
“Face it, Sara—you can’t fight the prejudices of an entire society, and a woman who’s as lethally cunning as this one,