speculation. But it
And of course we did.
So began twenty of the most extraordinary and difficult days of my life. Knowing that the Isaacsons would not get back to New York any earlier than Wednesday night, Sara and I set ourselves the task of sharing, interpreting, and recording all the information we’d gathered during the previous week, in order to have it ready for the detective sergeants to quickly assimilate on their return. We spent most of the next few days together at Number 808, going over facts and—on a less obvious, unacknowledged level—reshaping the atmosphere and spirit of our headquarters so as to ensure that Kreizler’s would not become a crippling absence. All obvious signs and reminders of Laszlo’s presence were quietly put aside or removed, and we pushed his desk into a corner, so that the other four could be re-formed into a smaller (or rather, as I chose to view it, tighter) ring. Neither Sara nor I were particularly happy about doing any of this, but we tried not to be sad or maudlin, either. As always, focus was the key: so long as we kept our vision steadily fixed on the twin goals of preventing another murder and capturing our killer, we found we could get through even the most painful and disorienting moments of transition.
Not that we simply wiped Kreizler out of our minds; on the contrary, Sara and I spoke of him several times, in an effort to fully comprehend just what twists and turns his mind had taken after Mary’s death. Naturally, these conversations involved some discussion of Laszlo’s past; and thinking about the unfortunate reality of Kreizler’s upbringing as I talked with Sara dispelled the last of the anger I felt over Laszlo’s abandonment of the investigation, to the extent that on Tuesday morning I actually went, without telling Sara, back to Kreizler’s house.
I made the trip in part to see how Stevie and Cyrus were doing, but primarily to smooth over the bumps and cracks that had been left by Laszlo’s and my parting at Bellevue. Thankfully, I found that my old friend was also anxious to put things right in this regard, though he was still quite determined not to return to our investigation. He spoke of Mary’s death quietly, making it easy for me to appreciate how thoroughly his spirit had been savaged by the incident. But more than that, I think it was the shattering of his confidence that prevented him from coming back to the hunt. For only the second time in his life that I could recall (the first having occurred during the week before we visited Jesse Pomeroy), Laszlo seemed to truly doubt his own judgment. And while I didn’t agree with his self-indictment, I certainly couldn’t blame him. Every human being must find his own way to cope with such severe loss, and the only job of a true friend is to facilitate whatever method he chooses. And so I finally shook Laszlo’s hand and accepted his determination to bow out of our work, even though it pained me deeply. We said goodbye, and I wondered again how we would ever get along without him; yet before I’d even gotten clear of his front yard, my thoughts had turned back to the case.
Sara’s trip to New Paltz, I learned during those three days before the Isaacsons returned, had confirmed many of our hypotheses concerning our killer’s childhood years. She’d been able to locate several of Japheth Dury’s contemporaries, and they acknowledged—rather ruefully, to give them their due—that the boy had suffered much mockery because of his violent facial spasms. Throughout his years at school (and as Marcus had speculated, the New Paltz school had taught the Palmer system of handwriting at that time), as well as on those special occasions when he accompanied his parents into town, Japheth would often be set on by gangs of children who made a great game out of competing to see who could most accurately imitate the boy’s tic. This last was no ordinary twitch, the now-grown citizens of New Paltz had assured Sara: it was a contraction so severe that Japheth’s eyes and mouth would be pulled around almost to the side of his head, as if he were in terrible pain and were about to break into violent tears. Apparently—and strangely—he never struck back when attacked by the children of New Paltz, and never turned a spiteful tongue on anyone who teased him; rather, he always went silently about his business, so that after a few years the children in town grew bored of tormenting him. Those few years, however, had apparently been enough to poison Japheth’s spirit, coming as they did on top of a lifetime’s coexistence with someone who never tired of hounding him: his own mother.
Sara didn’t crow excessively about the extent to which she’d been able to predict the character of that mother, though God knows she would’ve been justified in doing so. Her interviews in New Paltz had supplied her with only a general description of Mrs. Dury, but she’d read enough into those generalities to be very encouraged. Japheth’s mother was well remembered in the town, partly for her zealous advocacy of her husband’s missionary work, but even more vividly for her harsh, cold manner. Indeed, it was widely held among New Paltz’s other matrons that Japheth Dury’s facial spasms had been the result of his mother’s relentless badgering (thus demonstrating that folk wisdom can sometimes attain the status of psychological insight). Encouraging as all this was, it gave Sara only a fraction of the satisfaction offered by Adam Dury’s account. Almost every one of Sara’s hypotheses—from our killer’s mother having been an unwilling bride, to her dislike of childbearing, to her scatological harassment of her son from an early age—had been borne out by what Laszlo and I had heard in Dury’s barn; Adam had even told us that his mother often told Japheth he was a dirty red Indian. A woman had indeed played a “sinister role” in our killer’s life; and while the reverend’s may have been the hand that actually administered beatings in the Dury household, Mrs. Dury’s behavior appeared to have represented another sort of punishment to both her sons, one that was just as powerful. Indeed, Sara and I felt confident in saying that if one of Japheth’s parents had been the “primary” or “intended” victim of his murderous rage, it was almost certainly his mother.
In sum, it now seemed certain that we were dealing with a man whose fantastic bitterness toward the most influential woman in his life had led him to shun the company of women generally. This left us with the question of why he should have chosen to kill boys who dressed up and behaved like females, rather than
The final step in Sara’s and my process of assembling our recently collected clues was the fleshing out of our killer’s transformation from Japheth Dury into John Beecham. Sara had learned little about George Beecham in New Paltz—he’d lived in the town for just a year, and only appeared in local records because he’d voted in the 1874 congressional election—but we were fairly sure that we understood the selection of the name, nonetheless. Since the beginning of our investigation, it had been clear to all of us that we were dealing with a sadistic personality, one whose every action betrayed an obsessive desire to change his role in life from that of the victim to that of the tormentor. It was perversely logical that, as a way of initiating and symbolizing this transformation, he should alter his name to that of a man who had once betrayed and violated him; and it was just as logical that he should keep that name when he began to murder children who apparently trusted him in just the way that he had once trusted George Beecham. There was a clear sense that, careful as the killer doubtless was to cultivate that trust, he despised his victims for being foolish enough to give it. Again, he hoped to eradicate an intolerable element of his own personality by eradicating mirror reflections of the child he’d once been.
And so Japheth Dury had become John Beecham, who, according to the assessments of his doctors at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, was highly sensitive to scrutiny of any kind, and also harbored at least strong feelings (if not outright delusions) of persecution. It was unlikely that these traits of personality had been much ameliorated after his release from St. Elizabeth’s in the late summer of 1886, since that release had been secured through the exploitation of a legal technicality and against the doctors’ wishes; and if indeed John Beecham was our killer, then, in fact, his suspicion, hostility, and violence had only worsened over the years. Sara and I determined that in order for Beecham to have gained the thorough familiarity with New York that he evidently had, he must have come to the city very soon after his release from St. Elizabeth’s, and stayed in it ever since. There was cause for hope in this supposition, because he’d probably had contact with a good many people over the course of ten years, and become, in some neighborhood or walk of life, a familiar character. Of course, we didn’t know precisely what he looked like; but, starting with the physical characteristics that we’d theorized early on, and then refining them by using Adam Dury as a physical model, we believed we could concoct a description that, in conjunction with the name John Beecham, would make identification a fairly easy matter. Of course, there was no guarantee that he was still using the name John Beecham; but both Sara and I believed that, given what the name meant to him, he had continued and would continue to do so, until forced to stop.
That was about all the hypothesizing we could do, pending the Isaacsons’ return. Wednesday evening
