The Alienist

by Caleb Carr

  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 weste
rn 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.

  CHAPTER 33

  * * *

  The approach of dawn found us on a train and headed back to New York, where we planned to look in at Number 808 Broadway before going on to Newton, Massachusetts. It would have been impossible to do anything constructive in Washington—even sleep—once we’d had our inclination to pursue the Dury lead confirmed; the train ride north, on the other hand, would at least satisfy the craving for action and thereby allow us to rest easily for several hours. Such, at any rate, was my hope when we got on board; but I hadn’t been dozing in our darkened compartment for long when a feeling of deep uneasiness caused me to stir. Striking a match to try to determine if there was any rational basis for my fear, I saw Kreizler, sitting across from me, staring out the compartment window at the blackened landscape as it sped by.

  “Laszlo,” I said quietly, studying his wide eyes by the orange light of the match. “What is it, what’s happened?”

  The knuckle of his left forefinger was rubbing against his mouth. “The morbid imagination,” he mumbled.

  I hissed suddenly as the match burned down to my fingers. Letting the flame fall to the floor and go out, I mumbled into the resurgent darkness. “What imagination? What are you talking about?”

  “‘I myself have personally read this and know it to be true,’” he said, quoting our killer’s letter. “The cannibalism business. We’ve postulated a morbid, impressionable imagination as an explanation.”

  “And?”

  “The pictures, John,” Laszlo answered, and though I couldn’t see his face (or anything else in the compartment), his voice remained tense. “The photographs of massacred settlers. We’ve been assuming that our man must have been on the frontier at some point in his life, that only personal experience could have provided a model for his current abominations.”

  “You’re saying Victor Dury’s pictures could’ve served that purpose?”

  “Not for anyone. But for this man, given the impressionability created by a childhood of violence and fear. Remember what we said about the cannibalism—it was something he read, or perhaps heard, probably as a child. A frightening story that left a lasting impression. Wouldn’t photographs produce a far more extreme result, in a person characterized by such an obsessive and morbid imagination?”

  “It’s possible, I suppose. You’re thinking about the missing brother?”

  “Yes. Japheth Dury.”

  “But why would anyone show such things to a child?”

  Kreizler answered in a distracted tone: “‘Dirtier than a Red Injun…’”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’m not certain, John. Perhaps he stumbled on them. Or perhaps they were used as a disciplinary tool. More answers to be found in Newton, I hope.”

  I thought the matter over for a moment, then felt my head bobbing back down toward the seat that I was lying on. “Well,” I finally said, givi
ng in to the bob, “if you don’t get some rest you won’t be fit to talk to anyone, in Newton or anywhere else.”

  “I know,” Kreizler answered. Then I could hear him shifting on his seat. “But the thought struck me…”

  The next thing I knew we were in the Grand Central Depot, being rudely awakened by the slams of compartment doors and the bumps of bags against the wall of our compartment. Looking none the better for our eventful night, Kreizler and I stumbled off the train and out of the station into an overcast, gloomy morning. Since Sara would not yet be at our headquarters, we decided to make stops at our respective homes, then rendezvous at Number 808 when we were feeling (and hopefully looking) a bit more human. I got another two hours’ sleep and a splendid bath at Washington Square, then breakfasted with my grandmother. The mental ease that had so thankfully settled on her following the execution of Dr. H. H. Holmes was, I noticed during the meal, beginning to wear thin: she scanned the back pages of the Times nervously, looking for the next deadly threat with which to preoccupy her evening hours. I took the liberty of pointing out the futility of such a course to her, only to be told rather curtly that it was not her intention to take advice from someone who found it appropriate to commit social suicide in not one but two cities by being seen in public with “that Dr. Kreizler.”

  Harriet packed me a fresh overnight bag for the trip to Newton, and by nine o’clock I was in the caged elevator at Number 808 Broadway, full of coffee and feeling remarkably game. Now that I was back, it seemed as though I’d been away from our headquarters far longer than four days, and I looked forward to seeing Sara again with unabashed enthusiasm. When I reached the sixth floor I found her in close conversation with Kreizler, but, determined now to utterly ignore whatever it was that was going on between them, I dashed over and gave her a big, spinning hug.