The Alienist

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.

During their interview with Murray on Tuesday, the Isaacsons did indeed discover (as they told Sara and me when they returned to Number 808 in the evening) that Beecham had been fired for paying excessive and disturbing attention to a child: a young girl named Ellie Leshka, who lived in a tenement on Orchard Street just above Canal. The address was within the Thirteenth Ward, and not far from where the Zweig children had lived; none of which changed the fact that stalking a young girl who wasn’t a prostitute (if such was indeed what Beecham had been doing with Ellie Leshka) was an activity he hadn’t engaged in since killing Sofia Zweig, to the best of our knowledge. Marcus and Lucius had hoped to shed further light on this subject by way of a visit to young Ellie and her parents, but as luck would have it the family had recently left New York—for, of all places, Chicago.

According to Murray, the Leshkas had never mentioned anything about violence when they made their complaint about Beecham. Apparently he’d never menaced Ellie—in fact, he’d been kind to her. But the girl had recently turned twelve, and her father and mother had developed perfectly understandable concerns about their daughter spending a lot of time with an unknown, solitary man at such an age. Charles Murray told the Isaacsons that he wouldn’t necessarily have fired Beecham, except that the latter had gained access to the Leshkas’ home by saying he was on official Census Bureau business, when the family had not, in fact, been scheduled for an interview. Murray’s experiences had been such that he was determined to avoid anything that even smelled like scandal.

Sara noted that, in addition to Ellie Leshka’s being a girl of good reputation, there was another unusual aspect to her case: she’d survived her association with Beecham. Given these circumstances, Sara thought it possible that Beecham never intended to kill her. Perhaps this was an example of a genuine attempt on his part to form an attachment to another human being; if so, it was the first in his adult life that we’d heard anything about, save for his shadowy behavior in the Chicago orphanages. Perhaps, too, the Leshkas’ insistence that he not approach their daughter, coupled with the family’s departure from the city, had contributed to Beecham’s rage; again, we had to remember that the recent boy-whore killings had begun soon after the events of December.

Such, however, was about all the information and speculation we could wring out of the Census Bureau connection. We completed that process at close to five-thirty on Tuesday, and then Sara and I presented the Isaacsons with the results of our own day’s work: a short list of occupations that we thought Beecham might have moved on to after his dismissal. Taking all the factors that we considered reliable into account—Beecham’s resentment of immigrants, his apparent inability to get close to people (or at least to adults), his need to be on the rooftops, and his hostility toward religious organizations of any kind—Sara and I had narrowed down our initial collection of possibilities to two basic areas of employment: bill collecting and process serving. Both were secular pursuits that not only would have kept Beecham on the rooftops (front doors often being barred to such unwanted characters), but would also have provided him with a certain sense of power—and control. At the same time, such jobs would have given him continued access to personal information concerning a broad range of people, as well as a rationale for approaching them in their homes. Finally, Sara had remembered something late in the afternoon that we felt further confirmed our speculation: when Beecham had been admitted to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, he had spoken of society’s need for laws, and for men to enforce them. Debtors and those involved in illegal activities (even if only tangentially) would certainly have aroused his scorn, and the prospect of harassing them would probably have been attractive.

Marcus and Lucius agreed with our reasoning, even though they knew, as Sara and I did, that it meant a new round of footwork. However, we had reason to be hopeful: the list of government bureaus and collection agencies that employed agents of the type we’d described was far more manageable than the long roster of charity organizations that we’d already tackled. Knowing that police secretaries such as Sara and reporters such as me would never get any information out of the city marshal’s office or any other government entity, the Isaacsons took on the task of assaulting those bureaucracies. Sara and I, meanwhile, split a list of independent collection agencies, again focusing on those that operated in the Lower East Side and Greenwich Village generally, and in the Thirteenth Ward in particular. By early Wednesday morning we were all on the streets again.

If canvassing the city’s charities had been a morally infuriating task, going up against the heads of collection agencies proved a physically intimidating one. Generally run out of small, dirty, upper-story offices, those agencies were most often headed by men who’d had unhappy experiences in some vaguely related field—police and legal work, confidence games, even, in one case, bounty hunting. They were not a breed that relinquished information easily, and only the promise of reward would even start their jaws moving. Too often, of course, such “rewards” were demanded in advance, and were repaid by information that was either blatantly false or of a usefulness to our work that only the author himself could possibly have divined.

Once again, tedious drudgery ate up hours (and by Thursday morning looked as though it would consume whole days) without producing results. The city did indeed keep careful records of those men it employed as process servers, the Isaacsons learned, but no John Beecham appeared in any of the files that they examined in the first twenty-four hours. Sara’s initial day and a half of work in the collection agencies resulted in nothing but vulgar propositions; and as for myself, Thursday afternoon found me back at our headquarters, finished with the list of agencies I’d been assigned to cover and at a loss as to what I should do next. Alone and staring out the windows of Number 808 toward the Hudson River, I was again consumed by that familiar sense of dread which said that we weren’t going to be ready. Sunday night would come, and Beecham, now aware that we would probably be watching those disorderly houses that dealt in boy-whores, would pick a victim from a new locale, make off with him to some unknown place, and again perform his loathsome ritual. All we needed, I kept thinking over and over, was an address, an occupation, anything that would let us get the drop on him, so that at the crucial moment we could step in to end his barbarity and his misery, the relentless torment that was driving him on. It was odd, after all I’d seen and been through, to think of his torment; odder still to realize that I had some sort of vague sympathy for the man. Yet the sentiment was in me, and it was understanding the context of his life that had put it there: of the many goals that Kreizler had outlined at the beginning of the investigation, we had at least achieved that one…

I was jolted back to the business at hand by the sound of the telephone. Picking it up, I heard Sara’s voice.

“John? What are you doing?”

“Nothing. I’ve finished my list and gotten nowhere.”

“Then come up to Number 967 Broadway. Second floor. Quickly.”

“Nine-sixty-seven—that’s above Twentieth Street.”

“Very good. Between Twenty-second and Twenty-third actually.”

“But that’s outside your assigned area.”

“Yes. I sometimes don’t say my prayers at night, either.” She sighed once. “We’ve been stupid about this—it should’ve been obvious. Now get moving!”

Before I could reply she had rung off. I found my jacket and threw it on, then wrote a note for the Isaacsons, in case they returned before we did. I was just about to go out the door when the telephone rang again. I snatched it up, and heard Joseph’s voice:

“Mr. Moore? Is that you?”

“Joseph?” I said. “What’s going on?”

“Oh, well, nothing, except that—” His tone was rather perplexed. “Are you sure about the things you told me? About the man you’re looking for, I mean.”

“As sure as I can be about anything in this business. Why?”

“Well, it’s just that I saw a friend of mine last night—he’s a street cruiser, doesn’t work any house—and he said something that reminded me of what you said.”

Rushed as I was, I took the time to sit down and grab a pencil and paper. “Go on, Joseph.”

“He said a man had promised to—well, what you said, take him away, and all that. Said he was going to live in a big—I don’t know—castle or something, where he’d be able to see the whole city, and laugh at everybody who ever did him a wrong turn. So it reminded me of what you said, and I asked him if the man had anything wrong with his face. But he said no. You sure about that thing with the face?”