The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [9]
“Yes, I know.” Miss Howard bent her head in heartfelt sympathy and sorrow. “He must be crushed,” she added quietly.
“That and more. Almost as bad as—well, you know.”
“Yes …” The green eyes turned toward the park with a faraway look in them, and then she shook herself hard. “Well, with the Doctor away, you and Cyrus will be free to give me a hand. If you’re willing.”
“Where we going?”
“Mr. Moore’s apartments,” she said, doing her hair back into its usual bun. “He’s not answering his doorbell. Or his telephone.”
“Probably not home, then. You know Mr. Moore—you should get over to the Tenderloin, check the gaming houses. His grandmother’s only been dead six months, he can’t have lost all his inheritance yet.”
Miss Howard shook her head. “The man at the door to his building says that John came in over an hour ago. With a young lady. They haven’t left again.” A small, mischievous smile came into her face. “He’s home, all right, he just doesn’t want any interruptions. You, however, are going to get us in.”
For the briefest moment I thought of the Doctor, of how he’d been trying hard to discourage me from my lifelong tendency to get into the kind of goings-on what Miss Howard was currently suggesting; but, like I say, my moment of consideration was brief. “Cyrus just came in,” I said, returning her smile. “He’ll be game—this house’s been like a morgue, these days. We could use a little fun.”
Her smile grew into a grin. “Good! I knew I had the right man for the job, Stevie.”
I nodded. “Yeah,” I said, crawling back inside the room. “You just had the wrong shoes.”
Miss Howard laughed once more and took a swipe at me as we headed in to rouse Cyrus.
I hadn’t been wrong in thinking that, after a year of things going badly in the Seventeenth Street house, Cyrus would be ready for something that might break the routine. In a matter of seconds he was back in his light tweed suit, starched shirt, and tie, and as we headed down to the front door he pulled his favorite old bowler onto his head. The pair of us listened as Miss Howard explained that it was urgent we get Mr. Moore to Number 808 Broadway, where a lady in great distress was waiting for her return. The matter, Miss Howard declared, had “not only criminal but quite possibly international implications.” More than that she didn’t want to tell us just yet, and more than that neither me nor Cyrus needed to know—what we wanted was a bit of action, and we both knew from personal experience that, given our guide, we were likely to get it. Lengthy explanations could wait. We fairly shot through the foyer and out into the iron-fenced front yard, Cyrus—ever the careful one—pausing just long enough to make sure the house was securely locked up before we made our way down the small path to the gate, started west on the sidewalk of Seventeenth Street, then turned north on Third Avenue.
There was no point in either getting the horses and barouche back out of the small carriage house next door or wasting time trying to hail a cab, as it wasn’t but four and a half blocks’ walk to Number 34 Gramercy Park, where Mr. Moore had taken apartments at the beginning of the year after his grandmother’s death. As we moved from one circle of arc light to another under the street-lamps that ran up Third, passing by simple three- and four-story buildings and under the occasional sidewalk-wide awning of a grocery or vegetable stand, Miss Howard locked her arms into Cyrus’s right and my left and began to comment on the little bits of night activity that we saw along the way, plainly trying to control her excitement by talking of nothing in particular. Cyrus and I said little in reply, and before we knew it we’d turned onto Twentieth Street and reached the brownstone mass of Number 34 Gramercy Park, the square bay and turret windows of a few of its apartments still aglow with gas and electric light. It was one of the oldest apartment houses in the city, and also one of the first of the kind they called “cooperative,” meaning that