The Alienist

CHAPTER 40

Sara and I got back to Number 808 Broadway just a few minutes ahead of the Isaacsons, whose mood on entering was little better than ours had been several hours earlier. In a flurry we told the detective sergeants of our adventures that evening, as Sara wrote the details of the encounters up on the chalkboard. Both Lucius and Marcus were profoundly encouraged at our having been able to trace at least some of John Beecham’s movements, even though the trips to the Census Bureau and Mrs. Piedmont’s house had—to my way of thinking, at any rate—left us in effectively the same position we’d been in that morning: with no idea where Beecham was now living or what he was now doing.

“True, John,” Lucius said, “but we do know much more about what he’s not doing. Our idea that he might’ve been inclined to make use of the knowledge he got from having a minister for a father appears to have been wrong—and there’s probably a reason for that.”

“Maybe the bitterness is just too powerful,” Marcus said, considering the question. “Maybe he can’t so much as pay lip service to what his father stood for, even for the purposes of finding a job.”

“Because of the hypocrisy within his family?” Sara asked, still scratching away at the board.

“That’s right,” Marcus answered. “The whole notion of church and missionary work may just make him instinctively too violent—he can’t pursue it, because he wouldn’t be able to trust himself to keep up appearances.”

“Good,” Lucius said, bobbing his head. “So he takes the job at the Census Bureau, which doesn’t seem to put him in any danger of revealing himself, accidentally or otherwise. After all, a lot of the men who got jobs as enumerators lied on their applications, without anyone discovering it.”

“The job also satisfies a big craving for him,” I added. “It gets him into people’s houses, and close to their children, whom he can learn about without seeming to be interested—which eventually poses a problem for him.”

Marcus took over: “Because after a while he starts having urges that he can’t control. But what about the boys? He didn’t meet them at their homes—they didn’t live with their families, and he’d already been fired, anyway.”

“True,” I said. “That’s an open question. But wherever he went after the Census Bureau, he’d want to have continued access to people’s private affairs—and hopefully go on visiting families in their homes—in order to do research on his victims. That way, even though the boys are living in the disorderly houses, he’d be able to sympathize and commiserate with their specific situations—which would be a very effective way of getting them to trust him.”

“And which is also the element that’s been missing from the charity workers we’ve interviewed,” Sara said, standing away from the chalkboard.

“Exactly,” I said, opening windows to let the evening air into our slightly stuffy headquarters.

“I’m still not sure, though,” Marcus said, “how this helps us figure out where he is now. I don’t want to sound anxious, friends, but we’re six days away from the next attack.”

That prompted a few minutes of silence, during which all our eyes wandered toward the pile of photographs that sat on Marcus’s desk. That pile would grow, each of us knew, if we failed now. Eventually, Lucius spoke up in a grimly determined voice:

“We’ve got to stay with what got us here—follow his confident, aggressive side. He didn’t show fear or panic, in his dealings with the Census Bureau and Mrs. Piedmont. He made up elaborate lies and lived within them for extended periods of time without losing control. Whether he’d been killing steadily throughout that time, or whether getting fired from his job brought on a new wave of violence, we don’t know. But I’ll bet he hasn’t run out of confidence yet, even if part of him does want to get caught. Let’s assume that, anyway. Let’s assume he’s been able to find another job that gives him what he wants—use of the rooftops, and a way to move among the tenement population without having to try to help or appeal to them. Any ideas?”

It was hard to watch a streak of creative thinking and good luck die, but die ours did at just that moment. Perhaps we all needed to distance ourselves from the problem for a few hours, or perhaps we’d been overly intimidated by the reminder that we were less than a week away from our literal deadline; whatever the case, our minds and mouths ground to a collective halt. True, we still had one more card to play at the Census Bureau: Marcus and Lucius would visit Charles Murray the following morning, and try to get a better idea of what had prompted Beecham’s dismissal in December. Other than that, however, our next steps were difficult to discern; and it was in a mood of extreme uncertainty that we finally let the long day end at about ten o’clock.

During their interview with Murray on Tuesday, the Isaacsons did indeed discover (as they told Sara and me when they returned to Number 808 in the evening) that Beecham had been fired for paying excessive and disturbing attention to a child: a young girl named Ellie Leshka, who lived in a tenement on Orchard Street just above Canal. The address was within the Thirteenth Ward, and not far from where the Zweig children had lived; none of which changed the fact that stalking a young girl who wasn’t a prostitute (if such was indeed what Beecham had been doing with Ellie Leshka) was an activity he hadn’t engaged in since killing Sofia Zweig, to the best of our knowledge. Marcus and Lucius had hoped to shed further light on this subject by way of a visit to young Ellie and her parents, but as luck would have it the family had recently left New York—for, of all places, Chicago.

According to Murray, the Leshkas had never mentioned anything about violence when they made their complaint about Beecham. Apparently he’d never menaced Ellie—in fact, he’d been kind to her. But the girl had recently turned twelve, and her father and mother had developed perfectly understandable concerns about their daughter spending a lot of time with an unknown, solitary man at such an age. Charles Murray told the Isaacsons that he wouldn’t necessarily have fired Beecham, except that the latter had gained access to the Leshkas’ home by saying he was on official Census Bureau business, when the family had not, in fact, been scheduled for an interview. Murray’s experiences had been such that he was determined to avoid anything that even smelled like scandal.

Sara noted that, in addition to Ellie Leshka’s being a girl of good reputation, there was another unusual aspect to her case: she’d survived her association with Beecham. Given these circumstances, Sara thought it possible that Beecham never intended to kill her. Perhaps this was an example of a genuine attempt on his part to form an attachment to another human being; if so, it was the first in his adult life that we’d heard anything about, save for his shadowy behavior in the Chicago orphanages. Perhaps, too, the Leshkas’ insistence that he not approach their daughter, coupled with the family’s departure from the city, had contributed to Beecham’s rage; again, we had to remember that the recent boy-whore killings had begun soon after the events of December.

Such, however, was about all the information and speculation we could wring out of the Census Bureau connection. We completed that process at close to five-thirty on Tuesday, and then Sara and I presented the Isaacsons with the results of our own day’s work: a short list of occupations that we thought Beecham might have moved on to after his dismissal. Taking all the factors that we considered reliable into account—Beecham’s resentment of immigrants, his apparent inability to get close to people (or at least to adults), his need to be on the rooftops, and his hostility toward religious organizations of any kind—Sara and I had narrowed down our initial collection of possibilities to two basic areas of employment: bill collecting and process serving. Both were secular pursuits that not only would have kept Beecham on the rooftops (front doors often being barred to such unwanted characters), but would also have provided him with a certain sense of power—and control. At the same time, such jobs would have given him continued access to personal information concerning a broad range of people, as well as a rationale for approaching them in their homes. Finally, Sara had remembered something late in the afternoon that we felt further confirmed our speculation: when Beecham had been admitted to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, he had spoken of society’s need for laws, and for men to enforce them. Debtors and those involved in illegal activities (even if only tangentially) would certainly have aroused his scorn, and the prospect of harassing them would probably have been attractive.

Marcus and Lucius agreed with our reasoning, even though they knew, as Sara and I did, that it meant a new round of footwork. However, we had reason to be hopeful: the list of government bureaus and collection agencies that employed agents of the type we’d described was far more manageable than the long roster of charity organizations that we’d already tackled. Knowing that police secretaries such as Sara and reporters such as me would never get any information out of the city marshal’s office or any other government entity, the Isaacsons took on the task of assaulting those bureaucracies. Sara and I, meanwhile, split a list of independent collection agencies, again focusing on those that operated in the Lower East Side and Greenwich Village generally, and in the Thirteenth Ward in particular. By early Wednesday morning we were all on the streets again.

If canvassing the city’s charities had been a morally infuriating task, going up against the heads of collection agencies proved a physically intimidating one. Generally run out of small, dirty, upper-story offices, those agencies were most often headed by men who’d had unhappy experiences in some vaguely related field—police and legal work, confidence games, even, in one case, bounty hunting. They were not a breed that relinquished information easily, and only the promise of reward would even start their jaws moving. Too often, of course, such “rewards” were demanded in advance, and were repaid by information that was either blatantly false or of a usefulness to our work that only the author himself could possibly have divined.

Once again, tedious drudgery ate up hours (and by Thursday morning looked as though it would consume whole days) without producing results. The city did indeed keep careful records of those men it employed as process servers, the Isaacsons learned, but no John Beecham appeared in any of the files that they examined in the first twenty-four hours. Sara’s initial day and a half of work in the collection agencies resulted in nothing but vulgar propositions; and as for myself, Thursday afternoon found me back at our headquarters, finished with the list of agencies I’d been assigned to cover and at a loss as to what I should do next. Alone and staring out the windows of Number 808 toward the Hudson River, I was again consumed by that familiar sense of dread which said that we weren’t going to be ready. Sunday night would come, and Beecham, now aware that we would probably be watching those disorderly houses that dealt in boy-whores, would pick a victim from a new locale, make off with him to some unknown place, and again perform his loathsome ritual. All we needed, I kept thinking over and over, was an address, an occupation, anything that would let us get the drop on him, so that at the crucial moment we could step in to end his barbarity and his misery, the relentless torment that was driving him on. It was odd, after all I’d seen and been through, to think of his torment; odder still to realize that I had some sort of vague sympathy for the man. Yet the sentiment was in me, and it was understanding the context of his life that had put it there: of the many goals that Kreizler had outlined at the beginning of the investigation, we had at least achieved that one…

I was jolted back to the business at hand by the sound of the telephone. Picking it up, I heard Sara’s voice.

“John? What are you doing?”

“Nothing. I’ve finished my list and gotten nowhere.”

“Then come up to Number 967 Broadway. Second floor. Quickly.”

“Nine-sixty-seven—that’s above Twentieth Street.”

“Very good. Between Twenty-second and Twenty-third actually.”

“But that’s outside your assigned area.”

“Yes. I sometimes don’t say my prayers at night, either.” She sighed once. “We’ve been stupid about this—it should’ve been obvious. Now get moving!”

Before I could reply she had rung off. I found my jacket and threw it on, then wrote a note for the Isaacsons, in case they returned before we did. I was just about to go out the door when the telephone rang again. I snatched it up, and heard Joseph’s voice:

“Mr. Moore? Is that you?”

“Joseph?” I said. “What’s going on?”

“Oh, well, nothing, except that—” His tone was rather perplexed. “Are you sure about the things you told me? About the man you’re looking for, I mean.”

“As sure as I can be about anything in this business. Why?”

“Well, it’s just that I saw a friend of mine last night—he’s a street cruiser, doesn’t work any house—and he said something that reminded me of what you said.”

Rushed as I was, I took the time to sit down and grab a pencil and paper. “Go on, Joseph.”

“He said a man had promised to—well, what you said, take him away, and all that. Said he was going to live in a big—I don’t know—castle or something, where he’d be able to see the whole city, and laugh at everybody who ever did him a wrong turn. So it reminded me of what you said, and I asked him if the man had anything wrong with his face. But he said no. You sure about that thing with the face?”

“Yes,” I answered. “At this point I’m—”

“Uh-oh,” Joseph interrupted. “Scotch Ann’s yelling, it looks like I’ve got a customer. Gotta go.”

“Wait, Joseph. Just tell me—”

“Sorry—can’t talk. Could we meet? Later tonight, maybe?”

I wanted to press him for more information, but knowing his situation I let it go. “All right. The same place. Ten o’clock?”

“Okay.” He sounded happy. “See you then.”

I replaced the earpiece of the ’phone and shot out of our headquarters.

Grabbing onto the back of a Broadway streetcar after leaving Number 808, I made the trip to Twenty-second Street in a matter of minutes. After jumping back down to the cobblestone pavement that bordered the tracks along that stretch of the avenue, I looked across the way at a triangular group of buildings that were covered with enormous signs advertising everything from painless dentistry to eyeglasses to steamship tickets. Tucked in among these notices, painted on the windows of the second story of Number 967, were a tasteful (and therefore distinct) group of golden letters: MITCHELL HARPER, ACCOUNTS SETTLED. After waiting for a break in the traffic, I crossed over and headed into the building.

I found Sara locked in private conversation with Mr. Harper in his small office. Neither the man nor the room matched the pleasant gold-leaf lettering on the windows. If Mr. Harper employed a cleaning service, you couldn’t tell it from the soot that coated the few pieces of furniture in his office, while the roughness of his clothing and large cigar were exceeded only by that of his unshaven face and jaggedly cut hair. Sara introduced us, but Harper didn’t offer his hand.

“I’ve read a great deal about medicine, Mr. Moore,” he explained in a coarse voice, locking his thumbs into his stained vest. “Microbes, sir! Microbes are responsible for disease, and they pass through the touch!”

For an instant I thought of telling the man that bathing might give those microbes something to worry about; but then I just nodded and turned to Sara, my face asking why in the world she’d forced me to come to this place.

“We should have thought of it right away,” she whispered, before saying out loud: “Mr. Harper was engaged by Mr. Lanford Stern of Washington Street in February, to attend to some outstanding debts.” Recognizing that this didn’t jog my memory one bit, Sara added confidentially, “Mr. Stern, you will recall, owns a number of buildings in the Washington Market area. One of his tenants is a Mr. Ghazi.”

“Oh,” I said simply. “Oh, of course. Why didn’t you just say that—”

Sara stopped me with a touch, obviously not wanting Mr. Harper to learn the real nature of our business. “I saw Mr. Stern this morning,” she said pointedly, and finally I realized why we should have thought of going back to Mr. Stern at the beginning of this phase of our search: the elder Ghazi had been months behind in his rent at the time of his son’s death. “I told him,” Sara continued, “about the man we’re anxious to find—the man who we believed worked as a collector, and whose brother has died, leaving him a great deal of money?”

I nodded and smiled, recognizing that Sara was developing her own talent for impromptu falsehoods. “Oh, yes,” I said quickly.

“Mr. Stern said that he referred all his back rent accounts to Mr. Harper,” Sara continued. “And—”

“And as I told Miss Howard, here,” Harper cut in, “if there’s estate money to be had, I want to know what my cut’ll be before I reveal anything.”

I nodded and faced the man fully—this was going to be child’s play. “Mr. Harper,” I said, with a broad flourish, “I feel confident in saying that if you can provide us with the whereabouts of Mr. Beecham, you can expect a very generous percentage. A finder’s fee, as it were. Say, five percent?”

Harper’s saliva-soaked cigar almost fell out of his mouth. “Five per—why, that is generous, sir. Generous, indeed! Five percent!”

“Five percent of all there is,” I repeated. “You have my word. But tell me—do you know Mr. Beecham’s whereabouts?”

The man looked momentarily unsure of himself. “Well—that is, I know them approximately, Mr. Moore. I know of where he’s likely to be, anyway—at least when he gets thirsty.” I gave the man a hard stare. “I can take you there, myself, honest to God! It’s a little stale-beer dive down in the Mulberry Bend, that’s where I first met him. I would tell you to wait for him here, but—the fact is that about two weeks ago I had to let him go.”

“Let him go?” I queried. “Why?”

“I’m a respectable man,” Harper answered. “And this is a respectable business. But—well, sir, the fact is you occasionally have to use a little muscle. Do some convincing. Who’s going to pay their bills without a little convincing? I originally hired Beecham because he was a big man, and strong. Said he could handle himself in a fight. So what does he do? Talks to them. Chats it up, that’s what he does. Well, shit, sir—oh. My apologies, Miss. But you’re not going to get any money out of anybody by talking to them. Especially not the immigrants. Hell, you give them the chance, they’ll talk you into the grave! That Ghazi character was a good example—I sent Beecham to his place three times and he never got one nickel out of the man.”

Harper had more he wanted to tell us, but we didn’t need to hear it. After asking him to write down the address of the stale-beer dive he’d mentioned, Sara and I told him that we were going to check his lead out that very night, and that if it led to Beecham he could expect his money very soon. Ironically, this avaricious little man had given us the first piece of free information we’d had in two days—and the only one that was destined to amount to anything.