by Caleb Carr
“It doesn’t seem likely that Beecham was involved in falsifying returns,” Sara said, as we hustled up Greenwich Avenue toward Bank Street. “He’s not the type to get involved in politics—and besides, the census was already completed. But if not that, then what?”
“We can send the Isaacsons back to find out tomorrow,” I answered. “Murray seems like the kind of man who’ll respond to a badge. Though if you asked me to post odds right now I’d give you twelve to one that it’s got something to do with children. Maybe someone finally came forward with a complaint—not necessarily anything violent, but something seamy, all the same.”
“It does seem likely,” Sara said. “You remember the remark Murray made when he was discussing how respectable Beecham seemed? And how that made him find whatever it was so ‘remarkable’?”
“Exactly,” I answered. “There’s an unpleasant little tale in there somewhere.”
We’d reached Bank Street and turned left. A typical series of Greenwich Village blocks opened up before us, tree- and townhouse-lined until they closed in on the Hudson River, where trucking stations and warehouses took over. The stoops and cornices of the town houses were a picture of quaint monotony, and as we passed by each residence we could see into the relatively low-standing parlors of the comfortable middle-class families who inhabited the neighborhood. Number 23 Bank Street was only a block and a half from Greenwich Avenue, but as we covered that distance Sara’s and my hopes had time to rise high nonetheless. When we reached the building, however, disappointment crashed down hard.
In one corner of the parlor window was a small, very tasteful sign: ROOM TO LET. Sara and I exchanged sobered looks, then made our way up the steps of the building to the narrow front door. There was a small brass bell handle on the right side of the frame, and I pulled it. Silently, Sara and I stood and waited for several minutes; then we finally heard shuffling footsteps and an old woman’s voice:
“No, no, no. Get away—go on, now.”
It was difficult to tell whether or not the order was being directed at us; but when several bolts on the door were noisily thrown, I began to suspect that it was not. The door finally opened, and we were faced by a small, white-haired crone in a faded blue dress of a style dating back to the seventies. She was missing several teeth, and there were wiry white hairs protruding from her jaw at several points. Her eyes were lively, though they did not bespeak a particularly clear mind. She was about to say something to us when a small orange cat appeared at her feet. She kicked the creature lightly back into the house.
“No, I said!” the old woman scolded. “These people have nothing to say to you—any of you!” At that point I became aware of some rather loud mewing coming from inside—by my reckoning, the work of at least half a dozen cats. The woman looked up at me brightly. “Yes? Did you want to inquire about the room?”
The question put me at a momentary loss; fortunately, Sara stepped into the breach by introducing first herself and then me. “The room, ma’am?” Sara continued, following the introductions. “Not precisely—rather, about its former occupant. Mr. Beecham has, I believe, moved?”
“Oh, yes,” the woman answered, as another cat appeared at the door. This one, a gray-striped thing, managed to get to the top of the stoop. “Here!” the woman said. “Peter! Oh, do catch him, will you, Mr. Moore?” I bent down, snatched the cat up, and then gave him a little scratch under the chin before returning him to the woman. “Cats!” she said. “You wouldn’t think that they’d be so anxious to disappear!”
Sara cleared her throat. “Yes, indeed, Mrs…. Mrs….?”
“Piedmont,” the woman answered. “And it’s only the eight that I actually let into the house—the other fifteen are required to stay in the yard, or I become very cross with them.”
“Of course, Mrs. Piedmont,” Sara said. “Only the eight—a perfectly reasonable number.” Mrs. Piedmont nodded in satisfaction, and Sara asked, “As for Mr. Beecham…?”
“Mr. Beecham?” the woman answered. “Yes. Very polite. Very prompt. And never drank. Not a favorite of the cats, of course—not much of a man for animals at all, really, but—”
“Did he leave a forwarding address, by any chance?” Sara cut in.
“He couldn’t,” Mrs. Piedmont answered. “He had no idea where he was going. He thought perhaps Mexico, or South America. He said there were opportunities for men of initiative there.” The woman caught herself, and then opened the door a bit wider. “I am sorry,” she said, “you must forgive me. Please do come in.”
With a slight roll of my eyes I followed Sara through the door, knowing that every nugget of hard information we might get out of the charming Mrs. Piedmont was likely to be accompanied by five or ten minutes of useless babbling. My enthusiasm was further dampened when she led us into her very primly furnished but aged and dusty parlor. Everything in the room, from chairs and settees to a large collection of Victorian knickknacks, seemed on the verge of disintegrating quietly into dust. In addition, the unmistakable odor of cat urine and feces permeated the entire house.
“Cats,” Mrs. Piedmont said merrily as she sat down in a high-armed chair. “Wonderful companions, but they will run off. Quite disappear, without so much as a word!”
“Mrs. Piedmont,” Sara said indulgently, “we really are most anxious to find Mr. Beecham. We’re—old friends of his, you see—”
“Oh, but you can’t be,” Mrs. Piedmont said, her face scowling a bit. “Mr. Beecham had no friends. He said so. He always said so. ‘He travels swiftest who travels alone, Mrs. Piedmont,’ he would tell me in the morning, and then it was off to the shipping office.”
“Shipping office?” I said. “But surely—”
Sara touched my hand to silence me, then smiled as several cats wandered into the room from the hallway. “Of course,” she said. “The shipping office. A very enterprising man.”
“Indeed,” Mrs. Piedmont answered. “Oh, and there’s Lysander,” she went on, pointing to one of the cats, who was mewing profusely. “I haven’t seen him since Saturday. Cats! They do disappear…”
“Mrs. Piedmont,” Sara said, still showing remarkable patience, “how long did Mr. Beecham live with you?”
“How long?” The old girl began to chew at a finger as she cogitated. “Why, nearly three years, all in all. Never a complaint, always on time with his rent.” She frowned. “But a somber sort of a man, really. And he never ate! Never ate that I saw, that is. Always working, day and night—though I suppose he must’ve eaten sometime, mustn’t he?”
Sara smiled again and nodded. “And do you know why he left?”
“Well,” Mrs. Piedmont said simply. “The failure.”
“Failure?” I said, hoping for a clue.
“His shipping line,” came the reply. “The great tempest off the China coast. Oh, those poor seamen. Mr. Beecham gave all the money he had left to their families, you know.” A bony hand went up confidentially. “If you see a small calico lady come through, Miss Howard, do tell me. She didn’t come down for breakfast, and they will disappear.”
Mean as it may sound, I was about ready to wring Mrs. Piedmont’s neck, along with those of her blasted cats; but Sara stayed the course, inquiring congenially, “Did you ask Mr. Beecham to leave, then?”
“I should say not,” Mrs. Piedmont answered. “He went of his own accord. He told me he had no money to pay his rent, and he didn’t intend to stay where he couldn’t pay his way. I offered to give him a few weeks’ grace, but he wouldn’t have it. I remember that day very well—a week before Christmas. It was about the time that little Jib disappeared.”
I groaned quietly as Sara asked, “Jib? A cat?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Piedmont answered dreamily. “Just—disappeared. Never a word. They have their own affairs to attend to, cats.”
As my eyes wandered to the floor, I noticed that several more of Mrs. Piedmont’s charges had noiselessly entered the room, and that one of them was attending to its own affairs in a sh
adowy corner. I nudged Sara, indicating the upstairs impatiently.
“Do you think we might have a look at the room?” Sara asked.
Mrs. Piedmont came back from her daydream with a smile, and looked at us as though we’d only just entered. “Then it’s the room you’re interested in?”
“We may be.”
That set off a new round of chatter as we headed out of the parlor and up the staircase, the ancient green wallpaper of which was peeling and torn. The room that Beecham had rented was on the third floor, which, climbing at Mrs. Piedmont’s pace, seemed to take an eternity to reach. By the time we finally did, all eight of the house cats had already collected around the door, and were mewing away. Mrs. Piedmont unlocked the room and then we entered.
The first thing that struck me was that the cats didn’t follow us in. As soon as the door opened their mewing stopped, and then they sat at the threshold, looking momentarily concerned before they shot off down the stairs. With their departure I turned to survey the chamber, and quickly caught a trace of something in the air: the smell of decay. It was nothing like the stench of feline waste, nor did it match the familiar aromas of old age and antiques that marked the parlor. This was more pungent. A dead mouse, or some such, I finally decided, and when Sara wrinkled her nose sourly I knew that she’d caught it, too. Thinking nothing more of it for the moment, I finally fixed my attention on the room.
I needn’t have bothered. It was a spare, empty chamber, with a window that looked out over Bank Street. There were no furnishings other than an old four-poster bed, an equally aged wardrobe, and a plain set of drawers. A washbasin sat on a large doily atop the drawers, along with a matching pitcher; other than that, the room was absolutely empty.
“Just as he found it, is how he left it,” Mrs. Piedmont said. “He was that way, Mr. Beecham.”
Under the guise of deciding whether or not we wanted to rent the room, Sara and I went through the wardrobe and the chest of drawers, without finding any trace of human activity. There was simply nothing in the ten-by-twenty-foot confines of that chamber that would have made you believe that it had ever been inhabited by anyone, much less by a tortured soul whom we suspected of having done away with at least half a dozen children in a bizarre and brutal fashion. The lingering scent of decay in the air only reinforced this conclusion. Eventually Sara and I told Mrs. Piedmont that, though it was indeed a lovely little room, it was nonetheless too small for our purposes. Then we turned to go back downstairs.
Sara and our hostess, who once again began blathering about her cats, had already reached the staircase when I caught sight of something just inside the door of Beecham’s room: a few small stains on the bland, striped wallpaper. They were of a brownish hue, and in a pattern that indicated that whatever the substance was—and it could easily have been blood—it had hit the wall in a hard splatter. Following the path of the stain, I arrived at the bed; and, seeing as Mrs. Piedmont was now out of sight, I pulled the mattress up to have a look.
A stench hit me, suddenly and hard. It was identical to that which I’d detected on entering the room, only of an increased strength that immediately made me close my eyes, cover my mouth, and want to retch. I was about to drop the mattress again when my eyes opened long enough to catch sight of a small skeleton. A furry hide was stretched over the bones, though in some spots the hide had rotted away, revealing the dried remains of inner organs. Old, rotting string was wound around the four legs of the skeleton at the feet, and next to the rear legs lay several sections of jointed bone, almost like tiny vertebrae—a tail, I realized, that’d been cut into pieces. The creature’s skull, barely covered by a few small patches of skin and fur, lay some eight inches from the rest of the skeleton. Both the mattress and the spring beneath it bore broad stains of a color that matched the splotches on the wall.
I finally let go of the mattress, then jumped out into the hall and took out a handkerchief, dabbing at my face. Resisting one more urge to vomit, I took a few deep breaths and stood at the top of the stairs, trying to determine if I felt sound enough to navigate them.
“John?” I heard Sara call from downstairs. “Are you coming?”
The first flight of stairs was a bit tricky, but by the second I was doing much better; and when I reached the front door of the house, where Mrs. Piedmont was standing in the midst of her mewing cats, holding Sara’s hand, I even managed to arrange a smile. I thanked Mrs. Piedmont quickly and then stepped out into the cloudless night, the air of which seemed especially clean given what I’d been breathing inside.
Sara followed me, still talking to Mrs. Piedmont, and then the same gray-striped cat bounded out onto the stoop. “Peter!” Mrs. Piedmont cried. “Miss Howard, could you…?” Sara already had the animal in her arms, and she handed it to Mrs. Piedmont with a smile. “Cats!” Mrs. Piedmont said one more time, and then she called more goodbyes and closed the door.
Sara came down the steps and joined me, her smile shrinking as she studied my face. “John?” she said. “You’ve gone pale, what is it?” She stood still and then grabbed my arm. “You found something up there—what was it?”
“Jib,” I answered, wiping my face again with my handkerchief.
Sara’s face screwed up. “Jib? The cat? What in the world are you talking about?”
“Let me put it this way,” I said, taking her arm and starting the walk back toward Broadway. “Regardless of what Mrs. Piedmont may say, cats do not just disappear.”
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 symp
athize 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.
