The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [357]
The detective sergeants returned to their regular duties at the Police Department after they’d finished their investigation of the Doctor’s Institute, but their position there remained as troubled as it’d always been. Over the years there’ve been commissions what’ve investigated corruption in the department—in fact, it sometimes seems like there’s always a commission investigating said corruption—and Marcus and Lucius have given testimony before all of them, in an attempt to get at least the Bureau of Detectives cleaned up. But the only real result of their efforts has been to isolate them even more from their “peers,” and I’m sure that, if it wasn’t for the brilliance what they’ve demonstrated on so many cases, they would’ve gotten the axe a long time ago. But they keep on going, squabbling, experimenting, and generally trying to use forensic science to push police work forward; and many’s the thief, killer, rapist, and mad bomber what wishes that the Irish brass’d been able to get rid of the “Jew boys” a long time ago.
Miss Howard kept her operation at Number 808 Broadway going after the Hatch case; in fact, she and it are still going, though she eventually expanded its services so that both men and women could gain the benefit of her skills. Over time she’s gotten to be kind of a legend in the detection world, a fact what makes her very proud, though she’d never admit as much. And, despite all her talk about men’s defects, she’s actually taken the time to get herself mixed up with one or two of them along the way, though it’s not for me to reveal the details of those experiences. What I can say is that she remains the most singular woman I’ve ever come across, always displaying a combination of deep friendship and independence what many members of her sex are as incapable of achieving today as Libby Hatch was twenty-two years ago. I guess that this situation exists, as Miss Howard has always maintained, because of all the guff that women are fed as young girls—and maybe the solution is for more females to carry guns, I don’t know: Miss Howard’s certainly put quite a few more bullets into men’s legs over the years, and it’s only helped her stay her own person.
Cyrus’s and my friendship, well, that’s always been one of the rocks of my life. He got married, not too long after the business of Libby Hatch was completed, and his wife, Merle Spotswood, came to live with us, ending our long search to find a decent cook. She was and remains one of the best ever born, besides being as personally decent and strong as her husband. I was still living in the Doctor’s house when their three kids came into the world, and though they turned the top floor of the place into a noisy nursery (the young ones moved into the room what had once belonged to Mary Palmer), I didn’t mind. It did sometimes drive the Doctor a little crazy; but the kids always made sure to walk softly when they passed by his study door, and having children around the house did a lot of good for everyone’s spirits. Seventeenth Street was a happy place during those years, one what I was not a little sorry to leave when it came time for me to move out into the back room of my store and start life on my own.
As for the Doctor, once his name’d been cleared he dived back into affairs at his Institute like a man what’d been deprived of life’s necessities. That’s not to say that there weren’t questions raised during that spring and summer of 1897 what stayed with him—there certainly were. Some of them—What had driven Paulie McPherson to hang himself? What’d actually happened to Mr. Picton’s family? How many children had Libby Hatch killed that we didn’t even know about?—were unanswerable, and faded with the years; but others were more personal, and didn’t go anywhere. In fact, they seem to occupy the Doctor still, at times, as he sits in his parlor of a late night and ponders the complications of life. You couldn’t say that those questions were put into his head by the clever