Brass Buttons Borst made little effort to hide the fact that he believed himself to be investigating a conspiracy rather than an isolated death and, further, that he was likely in the company of two of the conspirators. “Once we discovered that we weren’t dealing with cholera,” he said after some preliminary questioning, “we broke the quarantine on Mr. Turk’s rooms. What do you think we found?” The smirk that accompanied the question left little doubt that it was meant to be rhetorical.
The Professor was quite capable of matching pugnacity when aroused. He turned his back on the sergeant and walked to the window. “Are you waiting for me to guess, Sergeant Borst?”
“Five thousand dollars. In cash.”
“Five thou …” I exclaimed. “In his rooms?” My cursory survey of the premises had apparently been severely lacking.
“Yep. Under the rug in the bedroom. He cut the nails out of one of the floorboards … left the nail heads in so it would lift up without being noticed … and then stuck a package with five thousand dollars in the hollow underneath. Lucky for him the mice didn’t get it.”
“I would hardly describe Dr. Turk as lucky, Sergeant,” said the Professor, still refusing to turn around.
Nor Mrs. Fasanti, I thought, for settling for two hundred dollars when she had walked across five thousand dollars every time she had to fetch Turk’s soiled chamber pots.
“Perhaps not,” acknowledged Sergeant Borst. “Still, where would a young doctor like Turk get that kind of money?”
The Professor finally deigned to face the policeman. “If you are asking me whether he could have come about it honestly through the practice of medicine, you know as well as I that the answer is no. If you are asking me if I had any idea of how he was obtaining it dishonestly, the answer is also no.”
“How about you, Dr. Carroll?” Borst asked, sizing me up as the more easily intimidated. “You have any idea what Turk was into? You was the one who tracked him down, wasn’t you?”
“I did not know him well,” I replied. “Turk was a remarkably secretive man. Until last week, I had never seen him outside of work. As you know, it was only by speaking to those we encountered on our evening out that I discovered where he actually resided.”
“Yes. One of those you encountered was Brigid O’Leary. You’re lucky to still have your teeth.”
“Brigid O’Leary?”
“I think she calls herself ‘Monique’… at least this week.”
“Yes,” I admitted. “She helped.”
“So, Doctors,” said Borst, raising himself up on his toes, “let’s see if I’ve got this right. One of you finds the body, even though nobody is supposed to know where this hospital doctor lives, getting help from a woman as handy with a knife as you are with a pillbox, then you decide to check to see if he was poisoned even though it looks like cholera, and when we look in his rooms, we turn up a small fortune, but nobody here knows anything about anything, is that what you’re saying?”
The Professor placed his fingertips on the desk and leaned forward. “Sergeant Borst,” he said with exaggerated patience, as if he were addressing someone who still believed in spontaneous generation, “you have done everything but accuse me and Carroll here of having some illicit involvement with Turk, either during his life or at the end of it. I will simply say to you that I am shocked that a member of the hospital staff has conducted himself in the manner that Turk apparently has. If, however, you do not find that statement satisfactory, I suggest you state your accusations plainly. If not, I have patients who are awaiting me.”
Borst stood fast. “Don’t be so sensitive, Doctor,” he replied with a challenging grin. “If—or when—I’m ready to accuse you, you won’t have to guess about it. There’s two ways that I can think of where’s a doctor can most easily make that much money on the side—drugs or illegal operations—and it’s a pretty trick to do five thousand dollars worth of either the way that this fellow did without no one knowing about it.”
“I cannot say that someone did not know about it,” retorted the Professor, “only that we did not know about it.”
Borst pursed his lips, then nodded. “All right, Doc. If that’s the way you want it. But we have a killing here and, as you two were so helpful in showing us, the amount of arsenic that this fellow swallowed was just the right amount to make it look like cholera. That means that whoever slipped this fellow the poison knew what they were doing … follow my reasoning?”
He was correct in that the dose would have been required to be administered with some precision to mimic death by cholera. Too much would have killed Turk within minutes; too little might have allowed him to recover. In other words, whoever had poisoned Turk had knowledge of the substance that could come only with experience or education.
“I follow your reasoning precisely,” the Professor replied. “Let me ask you this, then: If we were the someones, why would we be the ones to tell you that it was arsenic poisoning and not cholera?”
“I ain’t got that part figured out yet,” Borst admitted. The man was like a terrier, marking his boundaries. “And I didn’t say you were the ones that done it. I don’t think you are … couple of respectable fellows. But that don’t mean that you don’t have some idea who did … and why they did. I know you doctors think that what you do for a living gives you the right to play God, but we lowly police don’t see it that way. So I’ll say good day for now, but I expect we’ll get to chat again.”
“We are always at your service, Sergeant,” said the Professor.
And in that mood of mutual dissatisfaction, Sergeant Borst turned to leave. Before he reached the door, however, I cleared my throat. “Sergeant,” I said, “may I ask a question?”
“Why not?” he replied. “You sure ain’t given me no answers.”
“I was hoping to take Turk’s books as a remembrance. Would it be acceptable if I had them sent to my rooms?”
“Books?” he replied, the smirk returning. “Sure.” Sergeant Borst heaved an exaggerated sigh. “You people got the strangest ideas.”
“A singularly unpleasant man,” observed the Professor, after the sergeant had departed.
“Yes,” I agreed, “but far from incompetent. And I believe he is correct in his assumption that drugs and illegal surgeries are the most likely to be so lucrative.” With all that had passed, I still had difficulty believing that Turk had sunk to such depths as to mutilate women simply to line his pockets.
“That is assuming that Turk’s funds were acquired through the use of his medical expertise. Let us not dismiss the possibility that his medical career was coincidental to whatever other activities he was engaged in.”
“You think that likely?” I asked.
“As you said yesterday, I believe, ‘not a theory, but it cannot be ruled out.’ In any case, what I said to that disagreeable fellow is true. I am shocked to find out that a member of the staff has betrayed us so. I’m saddened too, Carroll. He was so bright … so very bright. It is a tragedy that it all ended like this.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“I need to speak with you on a different topic,” the Professor interjected. “This one, I hope, a good deal happier. As I’m sure you expected, I intend to accept the appointment in Baltimore. I will submit a letter of resignation today to the university and send a telegram to Johns Hopkins. This weekend, I will visit Baltimore and I would like you to accompany me. You can have a look at the facilities—which promise to be extraordinary—and you can also meet the men with whom you will be working.”
“Thank you,” I replied. “That will be excellent. And may I please express my gratitude once more for your consideration.”
“Applesauce,” replied the Professor, with a wave of the hand. “There is no gratitude necessary. I will say once again that no man need be grateful for that which he has earned.”
“May I ask you something, Dr. Osler?”
“Of course.”
“If the dinner had gone better … or at least not s
o poorly … would your decision have been the same?”
The Professor laughed. “The dinner had nothing at all to do with it,” he replied. “Weir and Hayes both knew before we even set foot in old Benedict’s palace that I was going to leave. In fact, they both pressed me to do so—quite adamantly, I might add.”
“But …”
The Professor walked over and clapped me on the back. “You know nothing of politics, my boy,” he said. “Just as well, actually, eh? When three plutocrats invite you to dinner, you go to dinner. I’m just lucky they handled it so poorly … made it easier. Besides, Weir had told me in advance that Schoonmaker had been opposed to retaining me. He evidently considers me something of a wild-eyed revolutionary. As it turns out, the major objections on the board to what I was trying to accomplish here came from him.”
“You mean including women among the student body.”
“That certainly, but also the curriculum changes, the requirements that students spend time in the wards … just about everything, really.”
“So my comment about Dr. Burleigh made no difference.”
“None. Benedict, I am told, had to use all his persuasive powers for Schoonmaker to go along with keeping me on, but I suppose once the old boy was forced to actually share a table with the evil Osler, he couldn’t go through with it.” The Professor smiled. “But the evening was far from unproductive. I found Mrs. Gross quite enchanting. A very handsome woman, don’t you say?”
“Yes, quite handsome indeed,” I replied instantly, thinking of the plain, squared-off woman with whom the Professor had shared dinner.
“I suppose you know that we attended the theater together and are dining tonight. And you, I am sure, have found a way to see Miss Benedict, eh? You were obviously quite taken with her.”
“I suppose my behavior was excessively forward.”
“Forward?” laughed the Professor. “Ephraim, it was hardly you who was forward. In fact, you gave every impression of a puppy dog trotting after his master.”
“Miss Benedict is quite good friends with Lachtmann’s daughter.”
“The girl in Italy? So I was led to believe.”
“What of Lachtmann?” I asked. “Had you known him before?”
The Professor eyed me strangely. “By reputation, certainly. We had never met previously.”
“Dr. Osler,” I began, “do you remember … ?”
“Remember what, Ephraim?”
“Nothing. It isn’t important.”
CHAPTER 12
IF TURK KNEW HE HAD been poisoned, his refusal to be taken to a hospital was not delirium, but instead lent credibility to his insistence that a doctor was trying to take his life. But which doctor? And why?
There were a plethora of facts with no confirmation—the cause of the young girl’s death, her identity, the medical problem for which Rebecca Lachtmann was seeking treatment, the identity of the man who had appeared at The Fatted Calf, and whether my hallucinatory sighting of the Professor had been hallucinatory after all. But the most pressing unknown, that which threatened not only my future but also everything that I had come to believe in, was what role, if any, the Professor might have had in the death of George Turk and possibly of Rebecca Lachtmann. Distrust coincidence indeed. I knew the instant that I withheld mention of Rebecca Lachtmann in Dr. Osler’s office that I feared he was involved in some way.
I needed to unburden myself, to talk the questions through. There was only one person in Philadelphia in whose judgment and discretion I trusted sufficiently.
I knocked on the rectory door at about seven and Reverend Powers himself answered. I inquired whether or not I was interrupting his dinner, but he assured me my visit was welcome. He escorted me through the hall, allowed me to pay my respects to Mrs. Powers, and bade me join him in his study.
He poured us each a small glass of port and we sat in two red leather wing chairs set on diagonals to each other, with a small, low table in between.
“I am in need of guidance,” I said.
“I’m happy to be of whatever help I can,” the Reverend replied, leaning back, allowing me to tell the tale at my own pace.
I took a sip of excellent port and then began. I detailed the incident in the Dead House, stressing that my observations had come at the end of a grueling day and that I could not be precisely certain of what I had seen. I then described my evening with Turk, attempting to be as complete and as unsparing of my own behavior as possible. I told him of Eakins, Rebecca Lachtmann, and Abigail Benedict. I omitted nothing, not even my suspicions of the Professor and my hallucinatory vision of him at The Fatted Calf. I found myself speaking as well of my work at the hospital, the great respect with which I and everyone in medicine held the Professor, and how intensely flattered I was by his decision to offer me such an important post at Johns Hopkins. By the time I had finished recounting Sergeant Borst’s visit, I had spoken for almost an hour.
“I am sorry, Reverend,” I said, embarrassed. “I have been interminable.”
“Not at all,” he said with an easy and genuine smile. “As you were flattered by Dr. Osler’s faith in you, I’m flattered by yours in me. In addition, it is an intriguing tale and does not strain concentration in the least.”
I thanked him for his understanding and asked what course of action he would advise.
“I cannot advise a course of action, Dr. Carroll,” he replied. “Every man’s actions must come from his own Christian sense of what is right. Perhaps, however, I can help you plumb your conscience.”
“I would be grateful.”
“You are, I take it, aware of no specific behavior by anyone involved that would require you at this point to notify the authorities?”
“That is true,” I replied. “The great dilemma in all of this is a lack of certainty on any front. The Professor may have known of Rebecca Lachtmann, or he may not have. He may have had some awareness of Turk’s activities—whatever they were—or he may have been as surprised as I. Rebecca Lachtmann may have been the cadaver in the Dead House, or she may be alive and safely secreted somewhere in the city. Miss Benedict may have feelings for me, or she may be pretending simply to secure my assistance. There has been sufficient peculiarity of behavior to create irrepressible doubt on nearly every count, but not enough to suggest resolution. I can be sure of nothing. I am a man of science, Reverend. I am used to the unknown, but not to ambivalence. I feel an increasing desperation for answers.”
“And you do not think Dr. Osler was the man to whom Dr. Turk referred in his comments to his landlady?”
“No.”
“Well, then, why not inform the authorities of your suspicions and let them try to make sense of things? They are certainly more capable of settling these issues than you.”
“I cannot, Reverend Powers. Sergeant Borst made little secret of his dislike of doctors and the man would certainly, at the very least, cause a scandal. One does not have to be guilty to be judged guilty. Even if he was completely without culpability, if Dr. Osler was seen by Johns Hopkins to have been involved in disreputable activities, even peripherally or simply by his association with Turk, the hospital might withdraw its offer. His career might be ruined.”
“Your future would also be in doubt, would it not?” asked the Reverend.
“There is no denying it,” I said. “But I ask you to believe that while I have no desire to risk all that I have worked for, in this I am guided by a different motivation.”
“Loyalty to your superior?”
“He is not simply my superior. He is more like … There are two types of parenthood, Reverend Powers, one an accident of birth and the other an adoption by choice.”
“And you feel toward Dr. Osler as you would feel toward a father?”
“Yes.”
“But what of your own father?”
My own father? My mouth opened to once more begin the well-practiced legend, but I did not. “My own father was a drunk and a wife-beater. He was shot for desertion dur
ing the war.”
Reverend Powers nodded without evidencing surprise. I might have just told him that the sun would rise the next morning.
I realized in that moment how desperately I wanted to tell him, to lance the abscess of my memory, and the entire squalid tale came flooding out. “My father enlisted soon after Fort Sumter. The farm was doing poorly … mostly because of his own laziness and penchant for drink … and he thought, as did most people in Marietta, that the war would be short, and so the army would be a good way to acquire some ready cash. Events played out quite differently, of course, and in February 1862, he found himself in Kentucky, at Fort Donelson with Colonel Grant.
“My father was part of a brigade ordered to mount a frontal charge at the rebel lines. Instead, he turned and ran, and was shot down by one of his own officers. The wound suppurated and it was determined that his arm had to be amputated. As a deserter, he did not rate the regimental surgeon. The assistant assigned the task completely botched the surgery. Afterward, my father lay in the field hospital, moaning, loathed, and ostracized. When it was deemed he could travel, he was thrown out of the army and sent home. It was only because the officers felt that the loss of the arm and the agony he was forced to endure from the butchery were punishment enough that he was not shot.
“When he returned, he told my mother and my brothers that he had lost his arm in a heroic action, in which he had charged an enemy position to save his comrades. He was lauded and we had more callers at the farm than my mother could remember. A collection was even taken up in the church. It was only when one of the neighbors from the same troop returned home two months later with the genuine version of events that my father’s deceit was revealed. From that point on, our family was reviled.
The Anatomy of Deception Page 14
