The Anatomy of Deception

by Lawrence Goldstone

  “Yes, he did try to get me to talk about you,” I admitted. “This all seems plausible, certainly, but then who poisoned him?”

  “We may never know. I am sure Turk had any number of enemies.”

  “Despite what you seem to think, Doctor,” interjected Halsted, “it does not take a scientist or a physician to administer arsenic in an appropriate quantity to replicate cholera. Poisoning has been a time-honored means of murder for centuries, and there are countless cases in which poison was confused for some other malady. In its storied history, arsenic was often referred to as ‘inheritance powder’ because of the facility with which an heir might dispatch an unwanted legator.”

  “You are a fine scientific practitioner, Ephraim,” the Professor told me. “Your method, tenacity, and use of logic, as this episode has demonstrated, are all first-rate. But there is more to science than logic. You need instinct and, yes, even heart. You will develop these qualities, I am sure, but you should always bear in mind how, in these events, pure method not only led you astray, but came perilously closer to causing the ruination of an innocent man.”

  There was nothing to do at that point but agree and ask Dr. Halsted’s forgiveness. He was quite magnanimous in granting it. Dr. Osler then asked if I could still feel comfortable in having him and Dr. Halsted as colleagues. Of course I was comfortable—I was a man reprieved. A little less than twenty-four hours earlier, I had sat in Jonas Lachtmann’s study with my freedom and even my life left to the financier’s whim, and now I would leave for Johns Hopkins in three days to take up a position of responsibility and respect.

  As promised, Mrs. Barlow had prepared dinner. For the next ninety minutes, I sat and discussed the future of medicine, with two of the greatest men in the field. They treated me thoroughly as an equal. It was perhaps the happiest hour and a half of my life.

  As soon as I was out of Dr. Osler’s door, however, I was reminded that I had not quite fully emerged from the shadow of Rebecca Lachtmann’s death. Waiting outside, a reminder of my promise to deliver up a murderer to Jonas Lachtmann, was Keuhn.

  CHAPTER 24

  THREE DAYS. I TRIED TO convince myself that once I left for Baltimore, the threat from Lachtmann would recede, that the man’s power somehow ended at the city limits. But distance would only prolong my separation from Abigail. I must see her, help her to defy her father, and come with me to start a new life in a new city. What impact her brother’s despicable behavior would have, if she or her father even knew of it, was not clear, but I was certain that she and I could surmount any obstacle. I wanted to rush once more to the Benedict home, but the appearance of desperation was not the answer. I must seem calm and in control of events if I was to expect her to place her trust in me.

  Upon my arrival at the hospital the next morning, Keuhn once again an obvious presence at a respectful distance, I went straight for the administrative offices and, after complimenting her on her dress, I asked Miss Prendergast to please allow me to use the telephone. She cocked her head disapprovingly and noted that the telephone, one of only three in the entire hospital, was restricted to official use and emergencies.

  “But this is an emergency, Miss Prendergast.” I sighed. “A sort of emergency, anyway.”

  Miss Prendergast pursed her lips and looked out at me over the tops of her glasses. “An emergency of the heart?” she asked with a knowing smile. Miss Prendergast was a rail-thin spinster of forty with muddy brown hair who, it was rumored, had rejected the one man who had proposed marriage on the grounds that a better proposal was in the offing, but no other proposal ever came. Now, her only opportunity for passion was in observing the passion of strangers.

  I confessed that, yes, I did wish to telephone a young lady. When I told her which young lady so that she could place the call with the exchange, she fluttered with excitement. To a woman of Miss Prendergast’s romantic bent, a young, rich, and beautiful woman such as Abigail Benedict was an object of both fascination and self-satisfying contempt. “Why, Dr. Carroll,” she said with schoolmarm disapproval, “you do fly close to the sun. You’d best be careful if you intend to go traipsing with that set.” She allowed her judgments to lie in abeyance at the prospect of overhearing my conversation, however.

  To Miss Prendergast’s disappointment, and mine, the Benedict servant who answered claimed that Abigail was not yet awake, so I was forced to leave word that I would call on her that evening, and hope the message would not be intercepted. I thanked Miss Prendergast for her kindness, swearing her to secrecy about our little conspiracy, and then left the office.

  As I stepped outside, Simpson came running up to me. “Ephraim,” she said with atypical agitation, “we’ve been looking all over the hospital for you. Dr. Osler needs you in his office immediately.”

  I hurried with her down the hall and then up the stairs. When we arrived at the Professor’s office, the door was closed, an unusual occurrence in itself, and there was a uniformed policeman outside. Reflexively, I glanced down the hall before entering, expecting my Pinkerton doppelganger to be in sight, but Keuhn was not there.

  As I opened the door, I saw Sergeant Borst in the center of the room, rocking forward and back on the balls of his feet, his hands clasped behind him, a thin smile stretched across his face. Seated next to the Professor’s desk, looking ashen and forlorn, was Farnshaw.

  The Professor gazed up somberly as we entered the room and motioned me to close the door behind us. I could tell instantly that he was making a huge effort at self-control.

  “Sergeant Borst has come to arrest Farnshaw,” he said. His voice wavered in anger.

  “What? Farnshaw? For what?”

  Borst was enjoying himself far too much to allow the Professor to steal the initiative. “Complicity in murder.”

  “Murder?” I exclaimed. “Farnshaw? Absurd. Who is he supposed to have murdered?”

  “George Turk. Death by arsenic poisoning.”

  “Farnshaw kill Turk? That’s absurd.” I might have laughed had the circumstances not been so obviously dire.

  “That’s what we told him,” Simpson said.

  “Absurd, is it?” Borst replied, not the least bit put out. “Not nearly as absurd as a bunch of doctors trying to cover for one of their own. That is what you people do, isn’t it?”

  “We people do nothing of the sort,” muttered the Professor. “It is you people who want to make an arrest without caring very much about whether the person is guilty or innocent.”

  “Is that so?” exulted Borst.

  “Farnshaw?” I repeated. “You can’t be serious. Farnshaw is … as … as likely a culprit as President Harrison,” I stuttered, unable to find words to question such idiocy. “You can’t possibly have any evidence.”

  “That’s what I told him,” murmured Farnshaw from the chair. It was the first he had opened his mouth since I’d walked in.

  “No evidence, huh?” said Borst.

  “Must you keep speaking in the interrogative?” snapped the Professor.

  “The interrogative?” Borst replied. “Bet you think I don’t know what that means. Well, I do. And I’ll tell you something else I know. I know that we’ve got plenty of proof—evidence. Your friend Farnshaw here was the one who messed up Rebecca Lachtmann’s abortion … although in respect to the family, we ain’t made that part public, but you all know all about it, don’t you? Then, to cover his crime, he fed the arsenic to Turk.”

  “I’ve never performed an operation in my life,” bleated Farnshaw. “I’m no surgeon.”

  “So the results would say,” Borst retorted.

  “Wait a minute, Sergeant,” I said. “Where could you possibly have gotten the idea that Farnshaw was involved with Turk?”

  “Actually, Dr. Carroll,” the policeman replied, favoring me with an especially broad grin, “we got it from you.”

  “From me?” I shook my head violently. “I never …”

  “It’s funny … sometimes you don’t find something that’s right unde
r your nose until you look for it. We weren’t thinking about an accomplice until you told Mr. Lachtmann about one. Once we started to look for an accomplice, we worked backward from what we had and from there, it was pretty easy to figure out it was George Farnshaw.”

  I felt the Professor’s eyes on me. Simpson’s and Farnshaw’s as well. What could I say? That I had deliberately misled Lachtmann? That I had since spoken with poor, pathetic Halsted and realized that he was innocent? Borst would never believe me. He would pursue Halsted regardless, on the chance that he might uncover enough to arrest a prominent physician.

  “Whether there was an accomplice or not,” I said, doing my best to make the notion sound ludicrous, “it most certainly was not Farnshaw.”

  “Who, then?” asked Borst.

  “How should I know?”

  “You told Mr. Lachtmann that you knew. Want us to go back and tell him that you lied to him? He won’t like that. ‘Specially the way his daughter was found. An’ notice …” Borst wagged a finger at me. “I ain’t asking you about that, though I might.”

  “I said I may know,” I protested.

  “Well,” Borst went on, “don’t matter now if you do or you don’t. We know. Want me to tell you how we know? Dr. Carroll was a real big help here, too. First, he was not only kind enough to find where Turk lived, saving us lots of leg-work, but also to be there when he died. I’d lay you ten to one that if Turk had croaked with just that old lady in the room, nobody’d ever have seen the body again. Then, he did us an even bigger favor by figuring out that Turk died of arsenic poisoning and not cholera. The other doc here”—Borst turned to me and crooked a thumb at the Professor—“told me that it was you who checked his hair when he was cutting him up. Very clever. Of course it means that you suspected foul play in the first place, but we’ll leave that go for now. Then, you did us the biggest favor when you missed the money in the floorboards after you searched his rooms—”

  I began to protest, but Borst waved me off. “C’mon, Doc. We ain’t so dumb that we can’t tell when somebody’s been through somebody else’s things. Missing the money was the biggest favor, ‘cause along with the money—I must have forgot to tell you—was a journal. Seems your friend Turk kept a record of his dealings. Not all that unusual, actually.”

  A journal? What journal? I had the journal. I had found it at Wharf Lane.

  “Now, we couldn’t get much from the journal at first—Turk had used letters instead of words—so we put it aside in case it came in handy later. That was about where things stood, when the doc told Mr. Lachtmann about the accomplice. As soon as Mr. Lachtmann told us, we went back to Haggens’ place. Once we know what we’re looking for, we know how to get information out of folks. We found out that there was another George that Turk was friendly with. We also found out that after Turk had a couple of accidents with some young ladies he came up with someone else to do the actual dirty work, or at least that’s what he told potential customers. Even women in desperation ain’t gonna just lie there and die. There was even one girl who told us that Turk told her that if she ever needed fixing up, George was just the guy to do it. That sent us back to the journal ’cause there seemed to be money moving between Turk and a ‘GF.’ We had figured it was money coming in—payment for goods, so to speak—but after we heard what we did, we figured maybe it was money going out—services rendered kinda thing. Once we had that, it wasn’t too hard to figure out who ‘GF’ was.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” I protested. “Just because Turk wrote something in a book, it doesn’t mean it happened.”

  “Oh, yeah, Doc. Sure. Turk takes the trouble to write all these letters and numbers in a book and hides it where’s he figures no one’s gonna find it, but it don’t mean nothing? If that makes sense to you, all I can say is I hope I never get sick.”

  Borst reached down and took Farnshaw by the arm. “Well, if there’s nothing else, me and Dr. Farnshaw will be going.” The three of us were forced to watch helplessly as Borst led our young colleague out the door. Before he left, he turned back. “Been a pleasure chatting with you.”

  We remained in the office, stupefied. Simpson and the Professor were merely overwhelmed by the episode itself. I had other questions to consider. Two journals—I had to decide which was real or, in fact, if either of them was real. Turk might well have created a spurious document implicating Farnshaw to barter with in case the police uncovered his activities. The more information to be traded, the better the deal. It was certainly preferable to be able to bargain with the police for the name of the person performing the actual abortions than to be forced to face the entire charge alone. It would explain why Turk took Farnshaw out that evening—to let his face be seen and get it around that this was the other “George.” And now, I realized bitterly, he may well have had the same plans for me. In that case, there might easily have been a different journal under the floorboards, with the initials “EC.”

  “Someone should go with him,” Simpson said, looking searchingly at me.

  “I’ll go,” I replied.

  I expected the Professor to agree immediately but, instead, he seemed to hesitate at the prospect. “I’m not sure,” he mused. “It might make Borst even more vindictive.”

  “More than he is already?” I asked.

  “One of us must be there, Dr. Osler,” Simpson pressed. “I would go myself …”

  “No,” the Professor agreed finally, “Carroll is right. And they’d never let a woman near a jail. Yes, Carroll, by all means go. Let us know if there is anything at all you need. I’ll get word to Farnshaw’s family in Boston.”

  Keuhn was down the hall when I left the office, but I ignored him as I raced through the halls and down the stairs, trying to overtake Borst before he left with Farnshaw. I caught up with them just inside the front door.

  “I’d like to go with you,” I said.

  Borst seemed pleased. “Of course, Doctor. Nothing is too good for our medical community. We have a private carriage. You can join your friend in the seat of honor. It’s only too bad that I can’t take you the whole way.”

  “Yes, Sergeant,” I replied. “Since you obviously don’t care who you arrest, I’m sure you are heartbroken.”

  Borst wheeled and stood face-to-face with me before I knew it. “Look, Doc. You and your boss have lots of fun making me out to be stupid. You put that little ‘doctor’ in front of your names and you think that gives you the right to kill people without nobody being able to do nothing about it. But I’ll tell you how stupid I am. I know that you, or him, or both of you, know a lot more about all of this than you’re telling. Fine. But now I’ve got enough to lock your little chum up in Eastern State Penitentiary for the rest of his life—if he ain’t hanged. You or your boss decide to give me someone who fits better, and your pal will be out before you can spit. If not, he goes for it. That’s how stupid I am. Now, if you want to ride, get in the back of the wagon. It’ll give you an idea what it’s gonna be like for him.”

  The “wagon” was a two-horse, closed box with one tiny barred window on either wall, not tall enough to allow one to stand. There was a bench along each side built to accommodate three or four people. Farnshaw was alone, seated on the right side and I got in and shuffled, hunched over, to a seat across from him. He looked up for a moment, surprised and grateful, and then dropped his gaze to the floor. As soon as I had entered the compartment, the door slammed shut and I could hear the sound of a key turning a padlock. That click was the most terrifying sound that I had ever heard. I wanted to stand up and scream to whoever could hear me to “Let me out!” but Farnshaw was frightened enough. Moreover, I would be getting out in short order, while Farnshaw would be forced to go from here to an incarceration far more horrible.

  The wagon began to move, but all we could determine was that we were bouncing along the cobblestone streets. We knew when we made a turn because the sunlight coming through the bars shifted its angle. Farnshaw continued to sit mutely, staring at
the floor, and I expected him at any moment to vomit, but he didn’t. Finally, he looked up.

  “I’m completely innocent, Carroll. I swear. I had no involvement in any of this.”

  “I know,” I replied. “Don’t lose hope. We’ll prove you innocent.” I tried to sound casually confident, but now, with Halsted no longer in my calculations, I had no idea how I was going to achieve that end. Lachtmann had caught me by surprise by enlisting the police when I had been convinced that he would handle the entire affair privately. Of course, without the police, he never would have landed Farnshaw, as dubious a catch as it was.

  “I need to know, Farnshaw. Did Turk say anything at all that night you were out with him … or any other time … that might help us in our inquiries? Anything about his activities, who paid him, whether he really had an accomplice … anything?”

  He shook his head miserably. “No. I had no idea, Carroll. I was as stunned as anyone when Turk’s true nature was revealed. It was as I told you. Turk seemed most amiable, introducing me to everyone—including a number of ladies who I suspected were not of strict virtue. But there was nothing else. I’m certain.”

  Turk had chosen the perfect lamb.

  Farnshaw and I sat in silence, bumping along in an indeterminate direction in semidarkness. Street noises penetrated the gloom, emphasizing that, on the other side of the walls, people were moving about, engaged in their daily routines. And they were free. There seemed little else I could say. I could only hope that my presence provided some comfort.