The Alienist

which a small group of buildings stood amid a stand of oaks. As we approached these structures—a farmhouse and two barns—I made out the figure of a man standing ankle deep in barnyard manure and trying with difficulty to shoe a tired old horse.

The man, I noted quickly, had thinning hair, and his scalp glistened in the morning sun.

CHAPTER 34

To judge by the dilapidated state of his barns, fences, and wagons, as well as the absence of any assistants or particularly healthy-looking animals, Adam Dury had not made much of a go of his little dairy cattle enterprise. Few people live in closer proximity to life’s grimmer realities than do poor farmers, and the atmosphere of such places is inevitably sobering: Kreizler’s and my excitement at actually laying eyes on the man we’d traveled a fairly long way to find was immediately tempered by appreciation of his circumstances, and after getting down from the surrey and telling our driver to wait, we approached him slowly and carefully.

“Excuse me—Mr. Dury?” I said, as the fellow continued to struggle with the old horse’s left foreleg. The fly- ridden brown beast, its hide bare in several spots where a yolk would have rested, appeared to have absolutely no interest in making its master’s task any easier.

“Yes,” the man answered sharply, still showing us nothing more than the back of his balding head.

“Mr. Adam Dury?” I inquired further, trying to induce him to turn around.

“You must know that, if you’ve come to see me,” Dury answered, finally dropping the horse’s leg with a grunt. He stood up, rising to a height of well over six feet and then slapped the horse’s neck, half in anger and half affectionately. “This one thinks he’ll die before me, anyway,” he mumbled, still facing the horse, “so why should he be cooperative? But we’ve both got many more years of this to go, you old…” Dury finally turned round, revealing a head whose skin was so tightly drawn that it appeared little more than a flesh-colored skull. Large yellow teeth filled the mouth, and the almond-shaped eyes were of a lifeless blue tint. His arms were powerfully developed, and the fingers of his hands as he wiped them on his worn overalls seemed remarkably long and thick. He took our measures with a squinting grimace that was neither friendly nor hostile. “Well? What can I do for you two gentlemen?”

I moved directly—and, if I may say so, gracefully—into the bit of subterfuge that Laszlo and I had worked out on the Boston train. “This is Dr. Laszlo Kreizler,” I said, “and my name is John Schuyler Moore. I’m a reporter for The New York Times.” I found my billfold and revealed some professional identification. “A police reporter, actually. My editors have assigned me to investigate some of the more—well, to come to the point, some of the more outstanding unsolved cases of recent decades.”

Dury nodded, a bit suspiciously. “You’ve come to ask about my parents.”

“Indeed,” I answered. “You’ve no doubt heard, Mr. Dury, of the recent investigations into the conduct of the New York City Police Department.”

Dury’s thin eyes went even thinner. “The case was none of their affair.”

“True. But my editors are concerned with the fact that so many noteworthy cases are never pursued or solved by law enforcement agencies throughout the state of New York. We’ve decided to review several and see what’s happened in the years since their occurrence. I wonder if you’d mind just going over the basic facts of your parents’ death with us?”

All the features of Dury’s face seemed to shift and resettle in a kind of wave, as if a shudder of pain had rippled through him quickly. When he spoke again, the tone of distrust had vanished from his voice, to be replaced only by resignation and sorrow. “Who could have any interest now? It’s been more than fifteen years.”

I attempted sympathy, as well as moral indignation: “Does time justify the lack of a solution, Mr. Dury? And you are not alone, remember—others have seen murderous acts go unsolved and unavenged, and they’d like to know why.”

Dury weighed the matter for another moment, then shook his head. “That’s their business. I’ve got no desire to talk about it.”

He began to move away; knowing New Englanders as well as I did, however, I’d anticipated this reaction. “There would, of course,” I announced calmly, “be a fee.”

That got him: he paused, turned, and eyed me again. “Fee?”

I gave him a friendly smile. “A consulting fee,” I said. “Nothing excessive, mind you—say, one hundred dollars?”

Aware that such a sum would, in fact, mean a great deal to a man in his straits, I was not surprised to see Dury’s almond eyes jump. “One hundred dollars?” he echoed in quiet disbelief. “For talking?”

“That’s right, sir,” I answered, producing the sum from my billfold.

Thinking it all over just a bit more, Dury finally took the money. Then he turned to his horse, swatted its rump, and sent it off to graze on a few patches of grass that grew near the edge of the yard. “We’ll talk in the barn,” he said. “I’ve got work to do, and I can’t ignore it for the sake of”—he took heavy steps away from us through the sea of manure—“ghost stories.”

Kreizler and I followed, much relieved at the apparent success of the bribe. Concern returned, however, when Dury spun round at the barn door.

“Just a minute,” he said. “You say this man’s a doctor? What’s his interest?”

“I make a study of criminal behavior, Mr. Dury,” Laszlo answered smoothly, “as well as of police methods. Mr. Moore has asked me to provide expert advice for his article.”

Dury accepted that, though it seemed that he didn’t much like Kreizler’s accent. “You’re German,” he said. “Or maybe Swiss.”

“My father was German,” Kreizler answered. “But I was raised in this country.”

Dury seemed ill satisfied by Kreizler’s explanation, and silently walked on into the barn.

Inside that creaky structure the stench of manure grew stronger, softened only by the sweet aroma of hay, a store of which was visible in the loft above us. The bare plank walls of the building had once been whitewashed, but most of the paint had fallen away to reveal roughly grained wood. A chicken coop was visible through one four-foot doorway, the gurgles and clucks of its occupants floating out toward us. Harnesses, scythes, shovels, picks, mauls, and buckets were everywhere, hanging from the walls and the low roof or lying on the earthen floor. Dury went directly over to a very old manure spreader, the axle of which was propped up on a pile of rocks. Taking up a mallet and slamming away at the wheel that faced us, our host eventually forced it from its mount. Dury then hissed in disgust and began to fuss with the end of the axle.

“All right,” he said, grabbing a bucket of heavy grease and never looking our way. “Ask your questions.”

Kreizler nodded to me, indicating that it might be best if I took the lead in the questioning. “We’ve read the newspaper accounts that appeared at the time,” I said. “I wonder if you might tell us—”

“Newspaper accounts!” Dury grunted. “I suppose you’ve also read, then, that the fools suspected me for a time.”

“We’ve read that there was gossip,” I answered. “But the police said that they never—”

“Believed it? Not much, they didn’t. Only enough to send two of their men all the way over here to harass my wife and myself for three days!”

“You’re married, Mr. Dury?” Kreizler asked quietly.

For just a second or two, Dury eyed Laszlo, again resentfully. “I am. Nineteen years, not that it’s any business of yours.”

“Children?” Kreizler asked, in the same cautious tone.

“No,” came the hard answer. “We—that is, my wife—I—no. We have no children.”

“But I take it,” I said, “that your wife was able to attest to your being here when the—the terrible incident occurred?”