The Alienist

CHAPTER 32

This is the man they originally wrote to us about?” I asked.

Kreizler nodded eagerly. “I’ve kept the file with me. I dislike hunches generally, but I couldn’t get away from this one. There are so many particulars that match—the poor upbringing in a strictly religious household, and the one sibling, a brother. Remember Sara’s idea about his being from a small family, because the mother disliked childbearing?”

“Kreizler…,” I said, trying to slow him down.

“And that tantalizing reference to ‘a facial tic,’ which even in his hospital record is never explained in any greater detail than ‘an intermittent and violent contraction of the ocular and facial muscles.’ No explanation as to why.”

“Kreizler—”

“And then there’s the pronounced emphasis on sadism in the admitting alienist’s report, along with the particulars of the incident that caused his commitment—”

“Kreizler! Will you please shut up and let me look at this?”

He rose suddenly, all excitement. “Yes—yes, of course. And while you do, I’ll check the cable office for messages from the detective sergeants.” He put the document I’d given him back down. “I’ve a powerful feeling about this, Moore!”

As Kreizler dashed out of the dining room I began to carefully go over the first page of the hospital file:

Corporal John Beecham, admitted to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in May of 1886, had at that time stated that he’d been born in New Paltz, the small town just west of the Hudson River and some sixty-five miles north of New York that had been the scene of the Dury murders. The specific date of birth cited was November 19, 1865. His parents were identified only as “deceased,” and he had one brother, eight years older than himself.

I reached over and grabbed the Interior Department document that told of the murdered minister and his wife. Those crimes had been committed in 1880, and the victims were listed as having a teenaged son who’d been kidnapped by Indians. A second and older son, Adam Dury, was apparently at his home just outside Newton, Massachusetts, at the time of the murders.

I grabbed another sheet of the hospital file and scanned the notes penned by John Beecham’s admitting alienist, in an effort to find the specific cause of the corporal’s confinement. Despite the sloppiness of the doctor’s handwriting, I soon had it:

“Patient was part of force requested by governor of Illinois to quell disturbances arising from strikes in Chicago area beginning May 1st (Haymarket riots, etc.). During May 5th action against strikers North Chicago, soldiers ordered to open fire; patient subsequently found stabbing corpse of one dead striker. Lieutenant M—discovered patient in flagrante; patient claims M—always ‘had it in for him,’ etc., and was constantly ‘watching’ him; M—ordered patient relieved of duty, regimental surgeon pronounced him unfit for service.”

Then followed the comments on sadism and delusions of persecution that Kreizler had already told me about. In the rest of the file I found more reports written by other alienists during Beecham’s four-month stay at St. Elizabeth’s, and I scanned them for further references to the man’s parents. There was no mention anywhere of his mother, and very little talk of his childhood generally; but one of the final assessments, written just before Beecham’s release, contained the following paragraph:

“Patient has applied for writ h.c. [habeas corpus] and continues to claim nothing wrong or criminal in behavior; says society must have laws and men to enforce them; father was evidently a very godly man, who emphasized importance of rules and punishment of violators. Recommend increased dosage c. hydrate.”

Just then Kreizler came speeding back to the table, shaking his head. “Nothing. Their arrival must have been delayed.” He indicated the various papers I was holding. “Well, Moore, what do you make of it all?”

“The timing matches,” I answered slowly. “Along with the location.”

Kreizler clapped his hands together and sat back down. “I never would have dreamed of such a possibility. Who could have? Kidnapped by Indians? It’s almost absurd.”

“It may be absurd,” I replied. “I haven’t gotten the impression in the last couple of days that Indians take many male children captive—and certainly not if they’re as old as sixteen.”

“Can you be certain of that?”

“No. But Clark Wissler probably could. I’ll put in a call tomorrow morning.”

“Do that,” Kreizler answered with a nod, taking the Interior document back from me and again studying it. “We need more particulars.”

“That occurred to me, too. I can telephone Sara, and put her onto a friend of mine at the Times who’ll let her into the morgue.”

“The morgue?”

“Where back issues are kept. She could find the story, it must have made the New York papers.”

“Yes—yes, it would have.”

“In the meantime, Hobart and I’ll see if we can find out who this ‘Lieutenant M—’ is, and whether or not he’s still in the army. He might be able to supply more details.”

“And I’ll return to St. Elizabeth’s, and talk to anyone who had any personal knowledge of Corporal John Beecham.” Kreizler lifted his wineglass with a smile. “Well, Moore—new hope!”

Anticipation and curiosity made sleep difficult that night, but morning brought the welcome news that the Isaacsons had finally arrived in Deadwood. Kreizler instructed them by wire to stay put until they heard from us that afternoon or evening, while I went to the lobby to place my telephone calls to New York. It took some doing to get through to the Museum of Natural History, and locating Clark Wissler was an even greater challenge; but when his voice finally did come through the line he was not only helpful but quite enthusiastic—largely, I think, because he was able to say confidently that the story described in the Interior Department document was almost certainly a fabrication. The idea that any Indian chieftain would dispatch assassins all the way to New Paltz—and that they would reach that destination without incident—was outlandish enough; but the further assertions that, having committed the murders, they would then leave behind an explanatory note, kidnap rather than kill the victims’ adolescent son, and make their way back across the country without ever being noticed was too far-fetched even to be considered. Someone, Wissler was sure, had put a none-too-clever bit of trickery over on the obviously dull-witted authorities in New Paltz. I thanked him heartily for his help, then rang off and ’phoned Number 808 Broadway.

Sara answered in a very edgy voice: Apparently there’d been a lot of interest displayed in our headquarters during the previous forty-eight hours by a variety of unsavory characters. Sara herself had been followed fairly constantly, she was certain of that; and even though she never went out unarmed, such close scrutiny was nerve-racking. Boredom only worsened things: Because Sara had had little to do since our departure, her mind was free to focus all the more on her spectral stalkers. For this reason the thought of activity, even if it was only research at the Times, acted as a tonic on her spirits, and she devoured the details of our latest theory with relish. I then asked her how long she thought it would be before Cyrus would be able to accompany her around town, to which she answered that although the big fellow had been released from the hospital, he was still too weak to leave his bed at Kreizler’s house.

“I’ll be all right, John,” she insisted to me, though her words lacked some of their usual conviction.

“Of course you will,” I answered. “I doubt if half the criminals in New York are as well armed. Or cops, for that matter. All the same, get Stevie to stick with you. He’s quite the item in a brawl, even at his size.”

“Yes,” Sara answered, with a calming laugh. “He’s already been very helpful—sees me home every night. We smoke cigarettes together, though you needn’t tell Dr. Kreizler that.” I wondered for a moment why she persisted in calling him “Dr. Kreizler,” but there was more pressing business at hand.

“I’ve got to go, Sara. Telephone as soon as you have anything.”

“All right. Watch out for yourselves, John.”

I rang off and went to find Kreizler.

He was still in the cable office, putting the last words to a wire that he proceeded to send to Roosevelt. Phrasing his sentences vaguely (and putting no signature to the message), Laszlo asked Theodore to contact first the office of the mayor of New Paltz, in an attempt to ascertain whether a family or person named Beecham had lived in that town at any point during the last twenty years, and second the authorities in Newton, Massachusetts, to see if one Adam Dury still resided there. Anxious as we both were to get replies to these questions, we knew that they would take time, and that we still had plenty of work to do at St. Elizabeth’s and the Interior Department. Somewhat reluctantly, we left the cable office and went out into another magnificent spring morning.

Even though there were many details to be attended to that day, it was impossible for me to keep my mind from wandering back to the larger mysteries surrounding John Beecham and Victor Dury, and I’m sure Kreizler experienced much the same thing. Several questions became particularly persistent: If the story about Indian assassins was, in fact, false, who had concocted it? Who had actually committed the murder, and what had happened to the younger Dury boy? Why was there so little discussion, in the hospital records, of John Beecham’s early life, and no mention at all of his mother? And where was that obviously troubled man now?

The day’s work brought no answers to these questions: neither the Interior nor the War Department could supply further details of either the Dury murder or John Beecham’s life before his commitment to St. Elizabeth’s. Kreizler fared no better at said hospital, which, he told me that evening, was neither required nor empowered to find out where a patient was going once he had secured his release through a writ of habeas corpus. In addition, none of the few members of the nonmedical staff who had been at the hospital at the time of Beecham’s commitment could remember anything about the man other than his facial spasms. He was apparently utterly unremarkable in his outward manner, a fact that, while frustrating in terms of our present purposes, did fit in nicely with the proposition that our killer was not a man who would attract any notice save at the time of his violent acts.

The only useful bit of information that did emerge on that Friday was brought to the Willard in the evening by Hobart Weaver. According to War Department records, the lieutenant who’d had John Beecham relieved of duty in 1886 was one Frederick Miller, since promoted to captain and currently serving at Fort Yates, North Dakota. Laszlo and I knew that an interview with this man might prove invaluable; yet a trip to Yates would take the Isaacson brothers in the opposite direction from their original destination, the Pine Ridge Agency. Still, it was the most solid lead we’d been able to develop, and on balance seemed worth the detour. And so, at six o’clock that evening, Kreizler and I sent a wire to Deadwood, telling the detective sergeants to secure passage north immediately.

As for incoming messages, the cable office had received a wire from Roosevelt, saying that there was, in fact, a man living in Newton, Massachusetts, named Adam Dury. Theodore still hadn’t heard from New Paltz regarding our question about a man or family named Beecham, but he was pursuing the matter. Kreizler and I were left with little to do but wait and hope that we’d hear more from either Roosevelt or Sara later in the evening. After telling the desk clerk that we would be in the bar, Laszlo and I retired to that dark, richly paneled room, then sought out a secluded spot along the lengthy brass rail and ordered a pair of cocktails.

“While we wait, Moore,” Kreizler said, sipping his sherry and bitters, “you can edify me about this labor disturbance that led to John Beecham’s commitment. I have a vague recollection but nothing more.”

I shrugged. “Not much to explain. In ’86 the Knights of Labor organized strikes in every major city in the country for May 1st. The situation in Chicago got out of hand very quickly—strikers fought breakers, police busted up strikers, breakers went at it with cops—a mess. On the fourth day a big crowd of strikers got together in Haymarket Square, and the cops arrived in force to keep things orderly. Somebody—nobody knows who—threw a bomb into the police ranks. Killed a few. It could’ve been a striker, or an anarchist trying to start trouble, or even an agent of the factory owners, looking to discredit the strikers. The point was, the governor had a good excuse to call out the militia and some federal troops. The day after the bomb blast, there was a strikers’ rally at a mill in one of the northern suburbs. The troops showed up, and their commander later claimed he ordered the strikers to disperse. The strike leaders said they never heard any such order. Whatever the case, the troops opened fire. It was an ugly scene.”

Kreizler nodded, going over the thing in his mind. “Chicago…the city has a fairly large immigrant population, does it not?”

“Sure. Germans, Scandinavians, Poles—you name it.”

“There would have been a good number of them among the strikers, don’t you think?”

I held up a hand. “I know where you’re headed with this, Kreizler, but it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. There were immigrants involved in every strike in the country at that time.”

Laszlo frowned a bit. “Yes, I suppose so. Still—”

Just then a young bellboy in a brass-buttoned red uniform entered the bar, calling out my name. Jumping up, I went to the lad, who told me that I was wanted by the desk clerk. Kreizler followed as I dashed out front. The clerk handed me his telephone, and as soon as I took it up I heard Sara’s very excited voice:

“John? Are you there?”

“Yes, Sara. Go ahead.”

“Sit down. We may be onto something.”

“I don’t want to sit down. What is it?”

“I found the story of the Dury murder in the Times. There were featured articles for about a week, and smaller notices after that. Just about anything you’d want to know about the family was in them.”

“Wait,” I said. “Tell it to Kreizler so he can take notes.”

Laszlo put his small notebook on the registration desk, annoying the clerk, and then lifted the telephone’s earpiece. This is the story he heard, which I followed from his scribblings:

The Reverend Victor Dury’s father had been a Huguenot who’d left France in the early part of the last century to avoid religious persecution (the Huguenots being Protestants, and most of their countrymen Catholics). He’d gone to Switzerland, but the family’s fortunes had not flourished there. His oldest son, Victor, a Reformed Church minister, had decided to try his luck in America. Arriving at mid-century, Dury had made his way to New Paltz, a town founded by Dutch Protestants in the eighteenth century that had later become home to scores of French Huguenot immigrants. Here Dury had started a small evangelical movement, funded by the citizens of the town, and within a year he’d moved with his wife and young son to Minnesota, with the intention of spreading the Protestant faith among the Sioux there (said Indians not yet having been pushed west to the Dakotas). Dury didn’t make much of a missionary: he was harsh and overbearing, and his vivid descriptions of the wrath that God would bring down on unbelievers and transgressors did little to impress the Sioux with the advantages of a Christian life. The group in New Paltz that had been financing his work had been on the verge of recalling him when the great Sioux uprising of 1862—one of the most savage Indian-white conflicts in history—broke out.

During that event the Dury family only narrowly escaped the grisly fate that befell many of their fellow whites in Minnesota. But the experience nonetheless provided the reverend with an idea that he thought would ensure continued backing for his mission. Laying his hands on a daguerreotype camera, he went around taking photographs of massacred whites; and when he returned to New Paltz in 1864, he became famous—indeed infamous—for showing these pictures to large collections of the town’s better-off citizens. It was a blatant attempt to frighten those staid, fat people into providing more funds, but it backfired: the pictures of slain and mutilated corpses were so horrifying, and Dury’s behavior during the presentations so feverish, that the reverend’s sanity began to be questioned. He became something of a social pariah, unable to find a religious posting. Ultimately, he was reduced to working as a caretaker in a Dutch Reformed church. The unexpected arrival of a second son in 1865 only made financial matters worse, and the family was eventually forced to move into a tiny house outside town.

Knowing Dury’s troubled history and behavior as well as they did, and no more informed about Indian habits than the average white community in the eastern United States, most of the citizens of New Paltz had never questioned the idea that Dury’s murder in 1880 was prompted by the bitterness he’d engendered among the Sioux in Minnesota during his stay among them nearly two decades earlier. All the same, there was some scattered talk (its originators anonymous, of course) of bad relations between the Durys and their oldest son, Adam, who’d moved away to become a farmer in Massachusetts many years before the killings. Rumors that Adam might have snuck west into New York State and done his parents in—for what precise reason no one would publicly say—began to spread, but were never treated as anything other than gossip by the police; and while no trace of the younger Dury boy, Japheth, had ever been found, the idea of his being kidnapped to become an Indian brave fit in thoroughly with what New Paltz’s citizens had been taught to expect from the savages who inhabited the western territories.

So ended the tale of the Dury family; Sara’s research, however, had not been limited to that story. Recalling that she’d known a few people in New Paltz during her youth (even though the town was, as she put it, “on quite the wrong side of the river”), she’d made some social calls after leaving the Times, just to see if any of those old acquaintances knew anything about the murders. The one such person she found at home did not. But Sara had gone on to ask for a general description of everyday life in New Paltz, and in so doing had stumbled on a rather electrifying fact: that New Paltz sits at the foot of the Shawangunk Mountains, a range well known for its large, forbidding rock formations. Almost afraid of the answer she might get, Sara’d next asked whether or not any citizens of the town enjoyed climbing those formations as a pastime. Oh, yes, she’d been told, it was quite a popular sport—especially among those residents who had most recently arrived from Europe.

Both Kreizler and I were fairly stunned by this last item and needed time to absorb both it and the rest of the tale. Telling Sara that we would telephone again later in the evening, Laszlo rang off, following which we returned to the hotel bar to mull things over.

“Well?” Kreizler said in a somewhat awed tone, as we ordered a fresh round of iced cocktails. “What do you make of it?”

I took in a deep breath. “Let’s start with facts. The older Dury boy witnessed some of the most horrendous atrocities imaginable before he was old enough to make any sense of them.”

“Yes. And his father was a priest, or at least a minister—the religious calendar, Moore. Their home would have been regulated by it.”

“The father also seems to have been a very hard, not to mention a rather peculiar, man—though outwardly respectable, at least in the beginning.”

Kreizler mapped his thoughts on the bar with a finger. “So…we can assume a pattern of domestic violence, one beginning early and continuing unabated for years. It plants an urge for revenge that steadily mounts.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “We’ve got no shortage of motive. But Adam’s older than we’ve posited.”

Kreizler nodded. “While the younger boy, Japheth, would have been the same age as Beecham. Now, if he committed the murders, then fabricated the note, disappeared, and took a different name—”

“But he’s not the one who witnessed the massacres and mutilations,” I said. “He wasn’t even born yet.”

Kreizler knocked a fist against the bar. “True. He would have had no frontier experience.”

Letting the facts recombine in a number of ways in my head, I tried but failed to come up with a new interpretation. All I could say after several minutes was, “We still don’t know anything about the mother.”

“No.” Kreizler kept rapping his knuckles on the bar. “But they were a poor family, living at close quarters. That would have been especially true during the Minnesota period, which would have been the most vivid time in the eldest son’s life.”

“Right. If only he were younger…”

Laszlo sighed and shook his head. “A host of questions—and the answers to be found, I suspect, only in Newton, Massachusetts.”

“So—do we go up there and find out?”

“Who knows?” Kreizler sipped his cocktail nervously. “I confess to feeling at a loss, Moore. I’m no professional detective. What do we do? Stay here and try to uncover more information about Beecham, at the same time pursuing any new leads we may uncover? Or go to Newton? How does one know when it’s time to stop looking at all possibilities and pursue one course?”

I thought about that for a moment. “We can’t know,” I finally decided. “We don’t have the experience. But—” I got up and headed for the cable office.

“Moore?” Kreizler called after me. “Where the devil are you going?”

It took me just five minutes to condense the key aspects of Sara’s research into a cable, which I dispatched to the telegraph office in Fort Yates, North Dakota. The message concluded with a simple request: ADVISE COURSE.

Kreizler and I spent the rest of the evening in the Willard’s dining room, fixed in place until the staff informed us that they were going home. At that point, with sleep utterly out of the question, we went for a walk around the White House grounds, smoking and putting every conceivable twist on the story we’d heard that night, while simultaneously searching for a way to connect it to Corporal John Beecham. Pursuing the Dury lead would take time, that much was becoming very apparent; and while neither of us said as much, we both knew that should such time be wasted we would likely find ourselves, at the moment of the killer’s next attempt, no better prepared than we had been on Pentecost to stop him. Two courses of action, both full of risks, awaited our decision. Wandering about aimlessly in the Washington night, Kreizler and I were effectively paralyzed.

It was fortunate indeed, therefore, that when we returned to the Willard the clerk had a wire in hand for us. It had originated in Fort Yates, and must have been sent only moments after the Isaacsons got to that destination. Though brief, it was unhesitating in tone: THE LEAD IS SOLID. FOLLOW IT.