“Clever man,” the Doctor said, watching Mr. Darrow hold court with the journalists in a way what showed that the Chicago lawyer was very at home with the process.
“Oh, yes,” Mr. Picton said, coming over to join us. “A clever, sanctimonious prig, wrapped up in the broadcloth of the people.” Turning to pack up his briefcase, Mr. Picton laughed once, hard. “One of the easiest kinds of people to irk!”
“You were certainly doing your best, Rupert,” Mr. Moore said, with a shake of his head. “Do you want to spend this trial bickering with the man?”
“I’m sure the Doctor will agree, John,” Mr. Picton answered, sticking his unlit pipe into his mouth. “That when a man is perpetually irritated he’s far more likely to make errors of judgment than might otherwise be the case.”
“Yes, I thought that was your purpose, Mr. Picton,” the Doctor answered. “And you achieved it admirably.”
“Oh, nothing to it,” Mr. Picton answered, tucking his briefcase under his arm. “Lawyers like that, as I’ve told you, generally think they have nothing to learn from Jesus Christ himself when it comes to being saviors with a mission. Annoying them is like falling off of a log, really. Well! The opening’s gone well, but I’d like to regroup and go over our next set of steps, if it’s all right with you, Doctor.” Taking out his watch again, Mr. Picton checked it. “We can talk in my office, if you like.”
“Of course,” the Doctor answered, leading the way up the aisle and around the little group of newspapermen who were still throwing questions at Mr. Darrow and Mr. Maxon. They tried to pull Mr. Picton aside, too, with questions what were pretty predictable: wasn’t the state’s charging Libby Hatch an act of desperation, what possible motive could a mother have for killing her own kids, wouldn’t such a woman have to be insane-all that sort of stuff. But Mr. Picton was ready for it, and very handily talked his way through the group without saying anything of importance, all the while referring them back to Mr. Darrow, who, he was sure, would have much more interesting things to say than any humble assistant county prosecutor.
Once up in his office Mr. Picton told the rest of us that his main concern at that point in the affair was to figure out just what kind of citizens would make the best jurors for the case, and to assemble a set of questions what would separate such people from the rest of the candidates who would be called in. He asked the Doctor’s opinion on this matter, and got a quick answer: poor men, the Doctor advised, preferably farmers, would be the best prospects-men who led tough lives, and whose families were well acquainted with hard times. Such characters would best know just how easily personal conflicts and money concerns can lead to violence, even in a family what seems happy and peaceful on the outside: they likely would’ve seen or at least heard of women going after their own kids when things got especially discouraging or frustrating, and wouldn’t have your more well-to-do man’s opinions about the purity of female motives and actions. Mr. Picton said that he was relieved to hear all this, as it matched his own opinions perfectly; the trick now would be to find ways to identify such men without tipping Mr. Darrow off to the fact that he was doing it.
As for the Doctor, his main concern was still preparing Clara Hatch for what was to come: now that we’d actually met Mr. Darrow, it was easy to see that he’d be clever enough to find many ways to trip Clara up and make her seem not so much a liar as a confused little girl who didn’t actually remember the real facts of what’d happened to her, but had been fed a story by the prosecution. It was likely, the Doctor said, that Mr. Darrow would make this attempt in the kindest and friendliest manner possible, and that Clara would be tempted to play along with him as a result. So she would have to be carefully taught that even a person who seems pleasant and respectful might be out to lay traps for you: a fact what she certainly knew from experience, but might not have fully developed in what the Doctor called her “conscious mind.”
The Doctor would be doing double duty through the weekend and on into Monday, for while he’d spend his days getting Clara ready, he’d spend his nights interviewing Libby Hatch and assessing her mental condition. Having been through this procedure with the Doctor myself, and having watched him perform it on others, I knew generally what would take place in Libby’s basement cell: there’d be few or no straight inquiries about the murders, just a series of random questions about the woman’s childhood, her family, and her personal life. Libby was required by law to cooperate with him, though such didn’t mean that she couldn’t at least try to manipulate her answers so as to confuse the Doctor. But I’d seen much more hardened criminals try the same thing with him and fail pretty badly: it didn’t seem that Libby’d stand much of a chance, even with all her cleverness. Still, I knew it would be a pretty interesting little set of encounters, and I hoped that I’d have time to listen in on some of it.
Such seemed unlikely, though, seeing as the rest of us weren’t going to be exactly idle in the few days left before the start of the trial. The Isaacsons-joined, now, by Mr. Moore, who’d use any excuse to get back up to the gaming tables in Saratoga-put themselves to the job of finding out what witnesses and experts Mr. Darrow was planning on calling, along with trying to predict as much of his trial strategy as they could. Miss Howard was still determined to find somebody who, if not actually related to Libby Hatch, knew about her childhood, and it looked like I’d have to continue to give her a hand with the search, at least until Tuesday. This fact didn’t exactly set me up, as it seemed to me that by now we were definitely chasing ghosts. I would’ve much preferred to go along to Saratoga with Mr. Moore; but I knew how important Miss Howard’s task was, and I tried to accept the assignment with as much good humor as El Niño showed at the prospect of continuing to play bodyguard to “the lady” who’d been his original benefactor in our group.
But good intentions and keeping your nose to the grindstone don’t always pay off, and by the weekend we hadn’t turned up anything what would’ve passed for useful information. It began to look almost as if there’d been some deliberate attempt to wipe away any trace of Libby’s existence. Our travels eventually took us pretty far north, around the southern shores of Lake George and into the edge of the Adirondack forest; and though the countryside got nothing but more beautiful, the towns also got nothing but smaller and less frequent, until it took the better part of the day just to reach them and most of the evening to get back home. One thing, at least, was for sure: if Libby Hatch had truly been born and raised in a town in Washington County, then neither she nor her family had gotten out and around much-assuming, of course, that she hadn’t killed the lot of them off years ago, an idea what began to haunt my thoughts more and more on those long, useless trips from village to village. For her part, Miss Howard didn’t seem to like the idea of continuing to look for a needle what might not even be in our assigned haystack any more than I did; and I knew that she also shared my desire to sit in on some of the Doctor’s interviews with Libby Hatch. But she kept me and El Niño on the job, knowing that any clue to Libby’s past what might be used in court would mean a lot more than our being entertained by the battle of wits what was taking place under the Ballston court house.
We did get nightly reports about those meetings, though, as we sat around Mr. Picton’s dining room table for what, given all our activities, usually turned out to be very late suppers. During the first of these meals the Doctor explained that Libby’s attitude toward him had been typically changeable: she’d started with expressions of deep injury, as if the Doctor-someone whom Libby’d expressed admiration for when they first met-had done her some kind of deliberate hurt by trying to lay not just the Linares kidnapping but the deaths of the kids she’d had care of in New York and the murders of her own children at her door. Such was a smart position for her to start from, the Doctor told us: whether consciously or unconsciously, Libby was trading on every person’s secret horror of accusing a mother of horrible crimes toward the children she is supposed to watch over, and on society’s hopeful belief that what Miss Howard called the “myth of maternal nurturing” was in fact as solid and reliable as the Rocky Mountains. But once it became clear that the Doctor wasn’t going to let his own uneasiness overrule his intellect, Libby had quickly moved on to what was, for her, an equally familiar role: the seducer. She’d begun to coyly tease the Doctor about what secret longings and desires must be hidden underneath his detached, disciplined exterior. This, of course, also got her nowhere, and so in the end she’d been forced to rely on the last of her most accustomed behaviors: anger. Throwing the victim and temptress acts aside, she’d become the punisher, and sat petulantly in her cell, giving the Doctor short, resentful answers to his questions-many of them, he could tell, outright lies-and punctuating the statements by telling him how sorry he’d be one day for ever tangling with her. But what she didn’t realize was that this change in attitude itself gave the Doctor just what he was looking for: Libby’s ability to analyze what he was trying to do and come up with a series of different but carefully planned responses was evidence that, as he’d always suspected, no serious mental disease or brain disorder was dominating her behavior. The very fact that she knew enough to come up with wily, dishonest answers to his inquiries-all of them designed to serve a larger purpose-was proof that she was as sane as anyone.