The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [42]
“Only that?” the Doctor asked suspiciously.
“No. Not only that.” Mr. Moore turned to the piano for a moment. “Cyrus, do you think we could have something a little less funereal? I’m sure we’re all sorry that old Otello mistakenly strangled his lovely wife, but given the display Nature’s putting on outside I think we might forgo such sentiments. You wouldn’t happen to know anything less—well—stuffy, would you? After all, friends and colleagues, it’s summer!”
Cyrus answered by gently breaking into “White,” a popular song from the forties, what seemed to set Mr. Moore right up. He beamed a big grin at the Doctor, who only looked at him with some concern.
“There really are moments,” the Doctor said, “when I doubt your sanity, Moore.”
“Oh, come on, Kreizler!” Mr. Moore answered. “I’m telling you, everything’s going to be fine. In fact, we’ve brought you living proof that things are starting to go your way.” Mr. Moore indicated Marcus and Lucius with a little nod of his head.
“The detective sergeants?” the Doctor said quietly, looking to them. “But what can you have to do with any of this?”
Marcus glanced at Mr. Moore with some annoyance, then handed him his empty glass. “That was truly graceful, John,” he said. “Suppose you stick to bartending.”
“My pleasure!” said Mr. Moore, dancing back over to the cocktail cart.
The Doctor gave up on expecting sense from his journalistic friend and turned to the Isaacsons again. “Gentlemen? Have Moore’s nerves given way altogether, causing him to bring you here for some imaginary reason?”
“Oh, it wasn’t John,” Marcus answered quickly.
“You can thank Captain O’Brien,” Lucius added. “If ‘thank’ is the right word.”
“The head of the Detective Bureau?” Dr. Kreizler said. “And what can I thank him for?”
“The fact that you’ll be seeing quite a bit of us in the next sixty days, I’m afraid,” Marcus replied. “You’re aware, Doctor, that the court ordered a police investigation of affairs at your clinic?”
What was coming next clicked in my head right then, as I’m sure it did in the Doctor’s; nevertheless, he said only, “Yes?”
“Well,” Lucius continued for his brother, “we’re it, I’m afraid.”
“What?” There were both shock and relief in the Doctor’s voice. “You two? But doesn’t O’Brien know—”
“That we’re friends of yours?” Marcus said. “Indeed he does. That was part of the amusement for him. You see—hmm. Now, how do we begin this?”
As the detective sergeants’ explanation of what had gone on earlier that day at Police Headquarters was peppered with their usual squabbling over who’d been responsible for what, I may as well boil the tale down myself.
It’d started with the piece of a body that Cyrus and I’d seen on the waterfront by the Cunard pier the night before. (Well, really it’d started when the Isaacsons joined the force in the first place, for their advanced methods and peculiar attitudes, linked with the fact that they were Jewish, had made them instantly and almost universally disliked. But so far as this incident in particular was concerned, it was the body that’d set it off.) It’d been obvious to everyone, from the patrolmen on the scene to Captain Hogan and then up to Captain O’Brien of the Detective Bureau, that the section of torso was likely to develop into quite a sensational case. Summer in New York is just not complete without a big, splashy murder mystery, and this one had all the earmarks, starting with the probability that more pieces of the body would soon start to wash up in other parts of town (which they did). There’d already been and would likely continue to be a lot of press coverage of the thing and great attention paid to whoever worked on and solved it. But the deal had to be played just right: the cops had to represent it to the public as something what’d be tougher than shoe leather to work out, so that they could cover themselves with laurels when the time came.
The Isaacsons had been dispatched to the scene in the middle of the night, when Captain O’Brien was asleep and nobody knew