“Yes, that was what I thought.” Lucius picked up the letter. “The description’s awfully vague—the reference to ‘some sort of facial tic,’ for instance, might cover a lot of ground.”
Kreizler studied Lucius. “
“But—” Lucius grappled with his thought. “Well, it’s the postmark, Doctor: Washington. St. Elizabeth’s is the federal government’s principal asylum for the insane, isn’t it?”
Kreizler paused for a moment; and then his black eyes jumped in their quick, electric way. “That’s right,” he said, quietly yet urgently. “But since they never mentioned the man’s background, I didn’t—” He knocked a fist against his forehead. “Fool!”
Laszlo made a dash for the telephone, and Lucius followed. “Given the legal situation in the capital,” Lucius said, “it would hardly represent an unusual case.”
“You’ve a mastery of understatement, Detective Sergeant,” Kreizler said. “There are several such cases every
Sara was walking toward them, drawn by the excitement. “Lucius? What is it, what’s struck you?”
“The postmark,” Lucius said again, slapping at the letter. “There’s a very troublesome little codicil to the Washington laws that deal with insanity and the involuntary commitment of patients to asylums. If the patient hasn’t actually been adjudicated insane in the District of Columbia but is confined to a Washington institution, he can apply for a writ of
“Why’s that so troublesome?” I asked.
“Because,” Lucius said, as Kreizler attempted to get a telephone line through to Washington, “so many mental patients in that city, especially at St. Elizabeth’s, have been sent there from other parts of the country.”
“Oh?” Now it was Marcus’s turn to draw near. “Why’s that?”
Lucius took a deep breath, his own excitement mounting. “Because St. Elizabeth’s is the receiving hospital for soldiers and sailors who’ve been judged unfit for military duty. Unfit—because of mental illness.”
The slow, drifting way in which Sara, Marcus, and I had been approaching Lucius and Kreizler now became something of a stampede. “It didn’t occur to us at first,” Lucius explained, shying away from our advance, “because there’s no mention of the man’s background in the letter. Only descriptions of his appearance and his symptoms— delusions of persecution and persistent cruelty. But if he did, in fact, see military service and was sent to St. Elizabeth’s—well, there’s a chance, a slim but real chance that it’s—” Lucius paused, seemingly afraid to say the word: “him.”
The idea seemed a sound one; but our mood of hopefulness was fairly well dashed by Kreizler’s ’phone call. After being kept waiting for quite a while, he did finally manage to get the superintendent of St. Elizabeth’s on the line, but the man treated Laszlo’s request for further information with the utmost contempt. Apparently, he knew all about the notorious Dr. Kreizler and felt the way many asylum superintendents did about my friend. Kreizler asked if there wasn’t some other member of the hospital staff who could look into the matter, to which the superintendent replied that his staff was severely overworked and had already lent “extraordinary” assistance in this matter. If Kreizler wanted to rummage through the hospital’s records, he could damned well come down to Washington and do so himself.
The difficulty was that Kreizler couldn’t just drop everything and shoot off to the capital—none of us could, for we were just a couple of days away from Pentecost. There was nothing to do but put the trip to Washington at the top of the list of things to be attended to after our next all-night vigil, then swallow our excitement and patiently focus on the immediate job to be done. Given the poor results that had attended our Ascension Day efforts, however, I couldn’t help feeling that such focus was going to prove somewhat difficult to achieve.
Nonetheless, when Pentecost Sunday (the feast celebrating the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles) arrived we all returned to our various nocturnal aeries and waited again for the appearance of our killer. I cannot say what the mood on the other three rooftops was; but for Stevie and myself, up above the Slide, boredom struck early. It being Sunday night fairly little noise echoed up from Bleecker Street, while the occasional grunt and hiss of the Sixth Avenue Elevated nearby evolved in quality from monotonous to somewhat lulling. Before long it was all I could do to stay awake.
At about twelve-thirty I glanced over to see Stevie quietly laying out a deck of cards in thirteen piles on the tar in front of him. “Solitaire?” I whispered.
“Jewish faro,” he answered, giving the criminal class’s name for the game of stuss, a particularly shady and complicated method of bilking suckers that I’d never been able to comprehend. Seeing a chance to fill this void in my gambling education, I crept over to sit by Stevie, and he quietly tried for the better part of an hour to explain the game to me. I absorbed none of it; and finally, frustrated as well as bored, I stood up and looked out at the city around us.
“This is useless,” I decided quietly. “He’s never going to show up.” I turned to look across Cornelia Street. “I wonder how the others are doing.”
The building that housed the Black and Tan—where Cyrus and Lucius had been posted—was just across the way, and looking beyond its cornice I could see the back of Lucius’s balding pate reflected in the moonlight. I laughed quietly and called it to Stevie’s attention.
“He oughta wear a hat,” Stevie laughed. “If we can see it, so can other people.”
“True,” I answered; and then, as the balding head moved to another spot on the roof and finally disappeared, my face screwed up in puzzlement. “Has Lucius
“Must’ve been standing on the dividing wall,” Stevie answered, going back to his cards.
In such innocuous ways are disasters presaged. It was another fifteen minutes before a series of urgent shouts that I recognized to be Lucius’s started to blare across Cornelia Street; and when I looked over, the urgency and fear in the detective sergeant’s face were enough to make me immediately grab Stevie by the collar and head for the staircase. It was apparent even to my tired, bored brain that we’d had our first contact with the killer.
CHAPTER 26
Once on the sidewalk, Stevie and I dispatched our waiting contingent of street arabs to fetch Kreizler, Roosevelt, Sara, and Marcus, then sped across Cornelia Street to the Black and Tan. Making straight for the structure’s front door, we ran headlong into Frank Stephenson, who had been drawn out of his infamous brothel by Lucius’s shouts for assistance. Like most men of his profession, Stephenson employed plenty of muscle, and several of these thugs were standing on the stoop with him, blocking our entrance. I was in no mood, however, to go through the usual game of threat and counterthreat with them: I simply said that we were on police business, that there was a police officer on the roof, and that the president of the Board of Police Commissioners would be arriving soon. That litany was enough to get Stephenson and his boys out of the way, and in seconds Stevie and I were on the roof of the building.
We found Lucius crouching over Cyrus, who had suffered a nasty blow to the skull. A small pool of blood glittered on the tar beneath Cyrus’s head, while his half-open eyes were rolled frightfully up into their sockets and his mouth was producing strained wheezing sounds. Ever cautious, Lucius had brought some gauze bandages along with him, and was now carefully wrapping them around the top of Cyrus’s head, in an effort to stabilize what was at the very least a bad concussion.
“It’s my fault,” Lucius said, before Stevie and I had even asked any questions. Despite his firm concentration on what he was doing, there was deep remorse in Lucius’s voice. “I was having trouble staying awake, and went for coffee. I forgot that it was Sunday—it took longer to find some than I’d anticipated. I must’ve been gone for more than fifteen minutes.”
“Fifteen minutes?” I said, running to the back of the roof. “Could that have been enough time?” Looking down
