The Alienist

Even though there were many details to be attended to that day, it was impossible for me to keep my mind from wandering back to the larger mysteries surrounding John Beecham and Victor Dury, and I’m sure Kreizler experienced much the same thing. Several questions became particularly persistent: If the story about Indian assassins was, in fact, false, who had concocted it? Who had actually committed the murder, and what had happened to the younger Dury boy? Why was there so little discussion, in the hospital records, of John Beecham’s early life, and no mention at all of his mother? And where was that obviously troubled man now?

The day’s work brought no answers to these questions: neither the Interior nor the War Department could supply further details of either the Dury murder or John Beecham’s life before his commitment to St. Elizabeth’s. Kreizler fared no better at said hospital, which, he told me that evening, was neither required nor empowered to find out where a patient was going once he had secured his release through a writ of habeas corpus. In addition, none of the few members of the nonmedical staff who had been at the hospital at the time of Beecham’s commitment could remember anything about the man other than his facial spasms. He was apparently utterly unremarkable in his outward manner, a fact that, while frustrating in terms of our present purposes, did fit in nicely with the proposition that our killer was not a man who would attract any notice save at the time of his violent acts.

The only useful bit of information that did emerge on that Friday was brought to the Willard in the evening by Hobart Weaver. According to War Department records, the lieutenant who’d had John Beecham relieved of duty in 1886 was one Frederick Miller, since promoted to captain and currently serving at Fort Yates, North Dakota. Laszlo and I knew that an interview with this man might prove invaluable; yet a trip to Yates would take the Isaacson brothers in the opposite direction from their original destination, the Pine Ridge Agency. Still, it was the most solid lead we’d been able to develop, and on balance seemed worth the detour. And so, at six o’clock that evening, Kreizler and I sent a wire to Deadwood, telling the detective sergeants to secure passage north immediately.

As for incoming messages, the cable office had received a wire from Roosevelt, saying that there was, in fact, a man living in Newton, Massachusetts, named Adam Dury. Theodore still hadn’t heard from New Paltz regarding our question about a man or family named Beecham, but he was pursuing the matter. Kreizler and I were left with little to do but wait and hope that we’d hear more from either Roosevelt or Sara later in the evening. After telling the desk clerk that we would be in the bar, Laszlo and I retired to that dark, richly paneled room, then sought out a secluded spot along the lengthy brass rail and ordered a pair of cocktails.

“While we wait, Moore,” Kreizler said, sipping his sherry and bitters, “you can edify me about this labor disturbance that led to John Beecham’s commitment. I have a vague recollection but nothing more.”

I shrugged. “Not much to explain. In ’86 the Knights of Labor organized strikes in every major city in the country for May 1st. The situation in Chicago got out of hand very quickly—strikers fought breakers, police busted up strikers, breakers went at it with cops—a mess. On the fourth day a big crowd of strikers got together in Haymarket Square, and the cops arrived in force to keep things orderly. Somebody—nobody knows who—threw a bomb into the police ranks. Killed a few. It could’ve been a striker, or an anarchist trying to start trouble, or even an agent of the factory owners, looking to discredit the strikers. The point was, the governor had a good excuse to call out the militia and some federal troops. The day after the bomb blast, there was a strikers’ rally at a mill in one of the northern suburbs. The troops showed up, and their commander later claimed he ordered the strikers to disperse. The strike leaders said they never heard any such order. Whatever the case, the troops opened fire. It was an ugly scene.”

Kreizler nodded, going over the thing in his mind. “Chicago…the city has a fairly large immigrant population, does it not?”

“Sure. Germans, Scandinavians, Poles—you name it.”

“There would have been a good number of them among the strikers, don’t you think?”

I held up a hand. “I know where you’re headed with this, Kreizler, but it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. There were immigrants involved in every strike in the country at that time.”

Laszlo frowned a bit. “Yes, I suppose so. Still—”

Just then a young bellboy in a brass-buttoned red uniform entered the bar, calling out my name. Jumping up, I went to the lad, who told me that I was wanted by the desk clerk. Kreizler followed as I dashed out front. The clerk handed me his telephone, and as soon as I took it up I heard Sara’s very excited voice:

“John? Are you there?”

“Yes, Sara. Go ahead.”

“Sit down. We may be onto something.”

“I don’t want to sit down. What is it?”

“I found the story of the Dury murder in the Times. There were featured articles for about a week, and smaller notices after that. Just about anything you’d want to know about the family was in them.”

“Wait,” I said. “Tell it to Kreizler so he can take notes.”

Laszlo put his small notebook on the registration desk, annoying the clerk, and then lifted the telephone’s earpiece. This is the story he heard, which I followed from his scribblings:

The Reverend Victor Dury’s father had been a Huguenot who’d left France in the early part of the last century to avoid religious persecution (the Huguenots being Protestants, and most of their countrymen Catholics). He’d gone to Switzerland, but the family’s fortunes had not flourished there. His oldest son, Victor, a Reformed Church minister, had decided to try his luck in America. Arriving at mid-century, Dury had made his way to New Paltz, a town founded by Dutch Protestants in the eighteenth century that had later become home to scores of French Huguenot immigrants. Here Dury had started a small evangelical movement, funded by the citizens of the town, and within a year he’d moved with his wife and young son to Minnesota, with the intention of spreading the Protestant faith among the Sioux there (said Indians not yet having been pushed west to the Dakotas). Dury didn’t make much of a missionary: he was harsh and overbearing, and his vivid descriptions of the wrath that God would bring down on unbelievers and transgressors did little to impress the Sioux with the advantages of a Christian life. The group in New Paltz that had been financing his work had been on the verge of recalling him when the great Sioux uprising of 1862—one of the most savage Indian-white conflicts in history—broke out.

During that event the Dury family only narrowly escaped the grisly fate that befell many of their fellow whites in Minnesota. But the experience nonetheless provided the reverend with an idea that he thought would ensure continued backing for his mission. Laying his hands on a daguerreotype camera, he went around taking photographs of massacred whites; and when he returned to New Paltz in 1864, he became famous—indeed infamous—for showing these pictures to large collections of the town’s better-off citizens. It was a blatant attempt to frighten those staid, fat people into providing more funds, but it backfired: the pictures of slain and mutilated corpses were so horrifying, and Dury’s behavior during the presentations so feverish, that the reverend’s sanity began to be questioned. He became something of a social pariah, unable to find a religious posting. Ultimately, he was reduced to working as a caretaker in a Dutch Reformed church. The unexpected arrival of a second son in 1865 only made financial matters worse, and the family was eventually forced to move into a tiny house outside town.

Knowing Dury’s troubled history and behavior as well as they did, and no more informed about Indian habits than the average white community in the eastern United States, most of the citizens of New Paltz had never questioned the idea that Dury’s murder in 1880 was prompted by the bitterness he’d engendered among the Sioux in Minnesota during his stay among them nearly two decades earlier. All the same, there was some scattered talk (its originators anonymous, of course) of bad relations between the Durys and their oldest son, Adam, who’d moved away to become a farmer in Massachusetts many years before the killings. Rumors that Adam might have snuck west into New York State and done his parents in—for what precise reason no one would publicly say—began to spread, but were never treated as anything other than gossip by the police; and while no trace of the younger Dury boy, Japheth, had ever been found, the idea of his being kidnapped to become an Indian brave fit in thoroughly with what New Paltz’s citizens had been taught to expect from the savages who inhabited the western territories.

So ended the tale of the Dury family; Sara’s research, however, had not been limited to that story. Recalling that she’d known a few people in New Paltz during her youth (even though the town was, as she put it, “on quite the wrong side of the river”), she’d made some social calls after leaving the Times, just to see if any of those old acquaintances knew anything about the murders. The one such person she found at home did not. But Sara had gone on to ask for a general description of everyday life in New Paltz, and in so doing had stumbled on a rather electrifying fact: that New Paltz sits at the foot of the Shawangunk Mountains, a range well known for its large, forbidding rock formations. Almost afraid of the answer she might get, Sara’d next asked