by Caleb Carr
Beecham had told his recruiting officer in New York that he was eighteen at the time of his enlistment, though Miller doubted that this was true—even when the still-green trooper had arrived in Chicago, six months later, he seemed younger than that. However, boys often lie about their age in order to enter the military, and Miller had thought little of it, for Beecham had shown himself to be a good soldier—well disciplined, attentive to detail, and efficient enough to have made corporal within two years. True, his persistent requests to be sent farther west to do some Indian fighting had annoyed Beecham’s superiors in Chicago, who weren’t particularly anxious to have their better noncommissioned officers lost to the frontier; but overall, Lieutenant Miller had been given little reason to be anything but satisfied with the young corporal’s performance until 1885.
In that year, however, a series of incidents in several of Chicago’s poorer sections had exposed a disturbing facet of Beecham’s personality. Never a man with many friends, Beecham had taken to going into immigrant neighborhoods during his off-duty hours and offering his services to charitable organizations that dealt with children, particularly orphans. At first this had seemed an admirable way for a soldier to make use of his time—far better than the usual drinking and fighting with local residents—and Lieutenant Miller had not concerned himself with it. After several months, however, he’d noticed a change in Beecham’s mood, a decided shift toward the sullen. When Miller asked the corporal about it he received no satisfactory explanation; but soon thereafter the head of one of the charities showed up at the post wanting to talk to an officer. Miller listened as the man asked that Corporal Beecham be prohibited from coming near his orphanage again; when asked why he was making such a request, the man declined to say any more than that Beecham had “upset” several of the children. Miller immediately confronted Beecham, who initially became angry and indignant, declaring that the man from the orphanage was only jealous because the children liked and trusted Beecham more than they did him. Lieutenant Miller, however, could see there was more to the story than that, and pressed Beecham harder; the corporal finally became immensely agitated and blamed Miller and the rest of his superiors for whatever it was that had happened. (Miller never did find out the exact nature of the incidents.) All such trouble could have been avoided, Beecham said, if those officers had complied with his request to be sent west. Miller found Beecham’s manner during this conversation alarming enough to warrant sending him on a long leave. Beecham spent that leave mountaineering in Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia.
When he returned to his unit, at the beginning of 1886, Beecham seemed much improved. He was once again the obedient, efficient soldier Miller had first known. This image proved an illusion, however; and it was shattered during the violence that followed the Haymarket Riots in the Chicago area during the first week of May. Sara and I already knew that Beecham had been sent to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital after Miller had found him “stabbing” (as the doctors put it) the corpse of a dead striker during the May 5th melee in the northern suburbs; we now learned from the Isaacsons that this “stabbing” had borne a chilling resemblance to the mutilations of both Japheth Dury’s parents and the dead children in New York. Revolted and horrified at finding the blood-drenched Beecham standing over a carved-up corpse whose eyes had been gouged out with an enormous knife, Miller had not hesitated to relieve the corporal of duty. Though the lieutenant had seen men driven to acts of blood lust in the West, such behavior was uniformly predicated upon years of savagely violent encounters with the Indian tribes. Beecham, on the other hand, had no such history, and no such rationalization for his actions. When the regimental surgeon examined Beecham after the affair, he quickly pronounced him unfit for service; and Miller added his hearty concurrence to this report, prompting Beecham’s immediate dispatch to Washington.
Thus ended the tale that the Isaacsons brought back from the Dakotas. Having told it without pause, the two brothers had also been unable to eat, and now addressed their food voraciously as Sara and I informed them of all we’d learned in their absence. Then it was time for the hard news about Kreizler and Mary Palmer. Fortunately, Marcus and Lucius had by then both gotten most of their dinner down—the story destroyed what was left of their appetites. Both men were obviously apprehensive about the idea of continuing the investigation without Laszlo; but Sara stepped in with an even stronger sales pitch than the one she’d given me and within twenty minutes had convinced the detective sergeants that we had no other option than to press on. The story they’d brought back only gave her more ammunition with which to prosecute her campaign—for there was now little doubt in any of our minds that we knew the identity and history of our murderer. The question was, could we devise and execute a method of finding him?
By the time we left the little restaurant, at close to three o’clock that morning, we’d managed to convince ourselves that we could. The task was still a daunting one, however, and not to be undertaken until we’d all gotten some sleep. We made directly for our respective domiciles, relishing the prospect of that rest; yet by ten o’clock Thursday morning we were back at Number 808 Broadway and ready to map out a strategy. Both Marcus and Lucius seemed a bit disoriented by the shrinking of our circle of desks from five to four, as well as by the appearance of a new hand on the big chalkboard; but they were, after all, experienced detectives, and when they turned their attention to the case, all extraneous issues eventually became just that.
“If no one else has a particular starting point in mind,” Lucius announced, reacquainting himself with the materials on his desk, “I’d like to suggest one.” The rest of us mumbled general assent, and then Lucius pointed to the right-hand side of the chalkboard, specifically to the word ROOFTOPS. “Do you remember, John, what you said about the killer after you and Marcus went to the Golden Rule that first time?”
I shuffled through my memories of the visit. “Control,” I said, repeating the word that had come so clearly to me the night we’d stood on the roof of Scotch Ann’s miserable hole.
“That’s right,” Marcus chimed in. “On the rooftops he’s consistently displayed thorough self-confidence.”
“Yes,” Lucius said, standing up and going to the board. “Well, my idea is this: we’ve spent a lot of time understanding this man’s nightmares—the real nightmare that was his past and the mental nightmares that haunt him now. But when he plans and commits these murders, he’s not behaving like a tormented, frightened soul. He’s aggressive, deliberate. He’s acting, not just reacting—and as we saw in his letter, he’s fairly impressed with his own cleverness. Where did he get that?”
“Where did he get what?” I asked, a bit confused.
“That confidence,” Lucius answered. “Oh, we can explain the cleverness—in fact, we already have.”
“It’s deviousness,” Sara said. “The kind that harassed children often develop.”
“Exactly,” Lucius said, bobbing his balding head quickly. Then he produced a handkerchief for the inevitable wiping of his ever-sweaty scalp and brow—I was delighted to see the nervous little move again. “But what about the confidence? Where does a boy with his past get that?”
“Well, the army would’ve given him some,” Marcus answered.
“Yes, some,” Lucius judged, pursuing his new role of lecturer with ever more gusto. “But it seems to me that it goes back farther than that. Didn’t Adam Dury tell you, John, that the only time his brother’s facial spasms calmed was when they were hunting in the mountains?” I affirmed that Dury had told us as much. “Climbing and hunting,” Lucius continued. “He seems to be able to relieve his torment and pain only through those activities. And now he’s doing it on the rooftops.”
Marcus was staring at his brother and shaking his head. “Are you going to tell us what you’re talking about? It was one thing to play cat and mouse with Dr. Kreizler, but—”
“If you will please give me a minute, thank you very much,” Lucius said, holding up a finger
. “What I’m saying is that the way to find out what he’s doing with his life now is to follow the trail of what makes him feel secure, instead of the trail of his nightmares. He’s hunting and killing on the rooftops, and his victims are children—all of which suggests that having control over situations is the most vital thing in his life. We know where the obsession with children comes from. We know about the hunting and trapping. But the rooftops? As of 1886, he hadn’t spent much if any time in a major city—yet now he’s thoroughly mastered them, so much so that he even trapped us. That kind of familiarity would take some time to develop.”
“Wait,” Sara said, nodding slowly. “I’m beginning to see your point, Lucius. He leaves St. Elizabeth’s and wants to go to a place where he can be fairly anonymous—New York is a likely choice. But when he gets here he finds that he’s completely unfamiliar with how life works on the streets—the crowds, the noise, the agitation. It’s all very strange, perhaps even intimidating. Then he discovers the rooftops. It’s a completely different world up there—quieter, slower, fewer people. It’s much more what he’s used to. And he finds out that there’s a lot of jobs that require spending a great deal of time on those rooftops—he barely needs to come back down to the streets at all.”
“Except at night,” Lucius added quickly, again holding up a finger, “when the city’s much less crowded, and he can familiarize himself with it at his own pace. Remember—he hasn’t yet killed during the day. He understands the nighttime rhythms thoroughly, but during the day—during the day I’m willing to bet he’s up there almost all the time.” Lucius’s forehead continued to sweat as he quickly went back to his desk and grabbed some notes. “We talked about the idea of a daytime job that keeps him on the rooftops after the Ali ibn-Ghazi murder, but we never did much with it. I’ve been going back over everything, though, and it seems to me to be the best way to track him at this point.”
I groaned once with purpose. “Oh, God, Lucius—do you understand what you’re suggesting? We’ll have to canvass every charity and mission society, every company that uses salesmen, every newspaper, or medical service. There’s got to be a way to narrow it down.”
“There is,” Marcus said, his tone only slightly more enthusiastic than mine. “But it’s still going to involve one hell of a lot of footwork.” He got up and crossed over to the large map of Manhattan Island, pointing at the pins that had been stuck into the thing to mark abduction and murder sites. “None of his activities have taken place above Fourteenth Street, which suggests that he’s most familiar with the Lower East Side and Greenwich Village. He probably lives as well as works in one of the two areas—our theory that he doesn’t have much money fits in with that. So we can confine our search to people who do business in those neighborhoods.”
“Right,” Lucius said, indicating the chalkboard again. “And let’s not forget all the work we’ve done. If we’re right—if the killer did start out his life as Japheth Dury and later became John Beecham—then he wouldn’t apply for just any kind of job. Given his character and background, some things would be far more attractive than others. For instance, you mention companies that use salesmen, John—but do you really think the man we’ve been studying would make much of a salesman, or would even try to get a job like that?”
I was about to argue that anything was possible, but then something suddenly told me that Lucius was right. We’d spent months putting details of personality and behavior to our killer’s vague image, and “anything” was most distinctly not possible. With a rather strange pang of dread and excitement I realized that I now knew this man well enough to say that he wouldn’t have sought a job that would have required him to either curry favor with immigrant tenement dwellers or hawk the shoddy wares of manufacturers and store managers, whom he would almost certainly consider less intelligent than himself.
“All right,” I said to Lucius, “but that still leaves a wide range of people—church workers, charity and settlement people, reporters, medical services…”
“You can narrow them down, too, John,” Lucius urged, “if you just keep thinking. Take the reporters who cover the tenements—you know most of them yourself. Do you really think Beecham’s a member of that group? As for the medical services—with Beecham’s background? When did he get the training?”
I considered all this, and then shrugged. “Well, all right. So the odds are he’s involved with mission or charity work of some kind.”
“It would be easy for him,” Sara said. “He’d have gotten all the religious grounding and terminology from his parents—his father was a powerful orator, after all.”
“Fine,” I said. “But even if we narrow it down that far, we’ll have a hard time checking them all by June 21st—Marcus and I took a week and only got through a fraction. It’s completely impractical!”
Impractical it may have been, but there was no way around it. We spent the rest of that day amassing a list of all the charitable and religious organizations that did business in the Lower East Side and Greenwich Village, then divided the list up into four regional groups. Each of us took one of these sub-listings and headed out the next morning, it no longer being practical to travel in pairs if we hoped to check the dozens of organizations on our rosters. In the first few places I visited that Friday I received a somewhat less than warm reception; and though I hadn’t expected anything different, the experience nonetheless filled me with a dread of the days and perhaps weeks to come. Repeated reminders to myself that tedious footwork is often the detective’s lot did little good: I’d already gone through one such exercise earlier in our investigation (an effort that had involved trips to some of the same places I was now visiting, though for a different purpose), and taking to the crowded sidewalks again only fixed my attention rather pessimistically on the clock that was ticking down toward the Feast of Saint John the Baptist—just sixteen days away.
One aspect of this latest search did, however, give me cause for optimism: it didn’t appear that I was being followed. Nor did I find, when I returned to our headquarters at the end of the day, that any of the others had noticed any disreputable types dogging their steps. We couldn’t be certain, of course, but the logical explanation seemed to be that our enemies simply didn’t believe we could succeed without Kreizler. Throughout the weekend we saw no trace of Connor or his accomplices, or of anyone else that looked as though they might be working for Byrnes or Comstock. If one had to pursue a tedious yet nerve-racking task, it was certainly preferable to do so without having to look over one’s shoulder; although I don’t think that any of us ever really stopped taking those looks.
Though we were hopeful that John Beecham had worked for one of the charitable organizations on our list at some point during the last ten years, we didn’t think that he’d necessarily visited any of the disorderly houses involved in the killings in an official capacity. It was far more likely, to our way of thinking, that he’d become acquainted with said places as a customer. Thus, though my assignment included those organizations that targeted the poor and wayward on the West Side between Houston and Fourteenth streets, I didn’t make any inquiries at the boy-pandering brothels in that neighborhood. I did, however, stop in at the Golden Rule just long enough to pass the new information we’d gathered concerning the killer along to my young friend Joseph. There was an awkward moment, when I arrived, being as I’d never before seen the boy actually practicing his trade. When Joseph caught sight of me he quickly vanished into a vacant room, and for a moment I thought he might not come back out; but finally he did, having taken the time to wipe the paint from his face. He smiled and waved cheerfully, then listened with a great show of attentiveness as I related my news and asked him to pass it along to his friends. Having concluded my business, and anxious to get on to the many offices in the neighborhood that I had assigned myself to visit that day, I said goodbye and turned to go. Joseph caught me at the door, however, and asked if maybe we could play billiards again sometime. I assented to the idea warmly;
and with that tenuous connection between us ever so slightly reinforced, the boy disappeared into the back of the Golden Rule, leaving me to feel the usual remorse at his occupation. But I left quickly, knowing that I had a great deal of work to do and little time for useless rumination.
Every conceivable vice, it seemed, had a society in New York dedicated to its prevention. Some of these were general in their approach, such as the Society for the Prevention of Crime, or the various mission societies, Catholic, Presbyterian, Baptist, and others. Some, like the All Night Mission, chose to make their continuous accessibility the focus of speeches and leaflets delivered by their roaming agents in the ghettos; others, such as the Bowery Mission, were simply regional in their approach. A few, like the Horse Aid Society and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, didn’t concern themselves with human beings at all. (When I came across the names of those organizations, I couldn’t help but think back to Japheth Dury’s torture and mutilation of animals: it seemed to me that organizations that offered such close contact with helpless beasts, although they made no use of rooftop visitations, might still appeal to our man’s sadistic nature. Interviews with their officers, however, produced no results.) Then there were the seemingly infinite number and variety of orphanages, all of which employed roving zealots who were constantly on the lookout for abandoned waifs. Each of these institutions had to be checked especially carefully, given the predilection for such places that John Beecham had exhibited in Chicago.
It was the kind of work that quickly absorbed hours and then days, without producing any profound sense of satisfaction or reassurance that we were doing everything possible to stave off another killing. How many archly sanctimonious churchmen and churchwomen, not to mention their civilian counterparts, did Sara, the Isaacsons, and I have to interview, and for how many tedious hours? It would be impossible to say, nor would there be much point to revealing the numbers even if I knew them—for we learned nothing. All through the following week, each of us forced ourselves again and again through a similar procedure: we’d go to the offices or headquarters of some charitable service, where the simple question of whether a John Beecham, or anyone of similar appearance and manner, had ever worked there would be answered by long, pious statements about the organization’s laudable employees and goals. Only then would the files be checked and a firmly negative reply given, at which the unlucky member of our team might finally escape the place.
