Looking not at all ashamed of it, the señor answered, “What would you have done, Doctor? The Spanish Empire is sick-dying of its own arrogance, which seeks any excuse to be unleashed. I know this. Yet at the same time, I was raised to be a part of that empire. My family has served it for three hundred years. I must do all that I can to hold off the final destruction.”
“Including letting your own daughter quite possibly die?” Miss Howard said.
Señor Linares didn’t look at her as he answered. “Spain needs sons-not daughters. The cost had to be weighed against the return, as you Americans say.”
“So now,” Marcus went on for him, “you’re just trying to make sure that they won’t resurface somewhere. You want to be certain the matter is really ended.”
The señor shrugged. “I should like an annulment from my wife, if she will not return to me. I shall marry again. As I say, Spain needs sons.”
Suddenly standing up, his eyes burning, the Doctor said, “I have told you that we know nothing of the whereabouts of your family, Señor Linares. That is the truth. And now I must ask that you leave my house.”
The señor didn’t look like the fairly rude order came as much of a surprise: he got up, leaning on his stick, then nodded and walked into the hall.
“Señor,” Miss Howard called after him. The man stopped at the top of the staircase and turned. “If a man can place a greater priority on his country than his own child-and if his country not only tolerates but encourages such a choice-then hasn’t that country already been destroyed?”
“In the months to come,” Señor Linares answered quietly, “I suspect that we shall learn the answer to that question.”
Stepping quickly, almost lightly, the señor made his way out of the house and back to his carriage, leaving the rest of us to sit quietly and think over this, the last missing piece in the case of Libby Hatch.
CHAPTER 59
Of course, war between the United States and the Empire of Spain did come, just months after we sat in the Doctor’s parlor with Señor Linares; and in spite of what a lot of people seem to’ve taken to believing since, what the señor had called Spanish “arrogance” was just as responsible for the bloodbath as were all the rantings and ravings of those Americans what favored the idea. Señor Linares’s predictions about the outcome of the thing proved just as accurate as his ideas about its causes: the Spanish Empire was pretty well destroyed, and the United States found itself in possession of a whole string of new foreign possessions-including the Philippine Islands. I don’t guess that much of anybody, even in Washington, had a really sound idea of what they were getting themselves into by taking over such places: as Mr. Finley P. Dunne, the newspaper wag, wrote at the time, most Americans couldn’t have told you whether the Philippines “were islands or canned goods” before the war. As for me, I had only one thought-a question, really-when I heard that we were the new rulers of the place: Had El Niño returned to his homeland before we invaded, and had he then become part of the native army what quickly began to fight against our country for independence? I never found out; but it would’ve been like him.
The detective sergeants returned to their regular duties at the Police Department after they’d finished their investigation of the Doctor’s Institute, but their position there remained as troubled as it’d always been. Over the years there’ve been commissions what’ve investigated corruption in the department-in fact, it sometimes seems like there’s always a commission investigating said corruption-and Marcus and Lucius have given testimony before all of them, in an attempt to get at least the Bureau of Detectives cleaned up. But the only real result of their efforts has been to isolate them even more from their “peers,” and I’m sure that, if it wasn’t for the brilliance what they’ve demonstrated on so many cases, they would’ve gotten the axe a long time ago. But they keep on going, squabbling, experimenting, and generally trying to use forensic science to push police work forward; and many’s the thief, killer, rapist, and mad bomber what wishes that the Irish brass’d been able to get rid of the “Jew boys” a long time ago.
Miss Howard kept her operation at Number 808 Broadway going after the Hatch case; in fact, she and it are still going, though she eventually expanded its services so that both men and women could gain the benefit of her skills. Over time she’s gotten to be kind of a legend in the detection world, a fact what makes her very proud, though she’d never admit as much. And, despite all her talk about men’s defects, she’s actually taken the time to get herself mixed up with one or two of them along the way, though it’s not for me to reveal the details of those experiences. What I can say is that she remains the most singular woman I’ve ever come across, always displaying a combination of deep friendship and independence what many members of her sex are as incapable of achieving today as Libby Hatch was twenty-two years ago. I guess that this situation exists, as Miss Howard has always maintained, because of all the guff that women are fed as young girls-and maybe the solution is for more females to carry guns, I don’t know: Miss Howard’s certainly put quite a few more bullets into men’s legs over the years, and it’s only helped her stay her own person.
Cyrus’s and my friendship, well, that’s always been one of the rocks of my life. He got married, not too long after the business of Libby Hatch was completed, and his wife, Merle Spotswood, came to live with us, ending our long search to find a decent cook. She was and remains one of the best ever born, besides being as personally decent and strong as her husband. I was still living in the Doctor’s house when their three kids came into the world, and though they turned the top floor of the place into a noisy nursery (the young ones moved into the room what had once belonged to Mary Palmer), I didn’t mind. It did sometimes drive the Doctor a little crazy; but the kids always made sure to walk softly when they passed by his study door, and having children around the house did a lot of good for everyone’s spirits. Seventeenth Street was a happy place during those years, one what I was not a little sorry to leave when it came time for me to move out into the back room of my store and start life on my own.
As for the Doctor, once his name’d been cleared he dived back into affairs at his Institute like a man what’d been deprived of life’s necessities. That’s not to say that there weren’t questions raised during that spring and summer of 1897 what stayed with him-there certainly were. Some of them-What had driven Paulie McPherson to hang himself? What’d actually happened to Mr. Picton’s family? How many children had Libby Hatch killed that we didn’t even know about?-were unanswerable, and faded with the years; but others were more personal, and didn’t go anywhere. In fact, they seem to occupy the Doctor still, at times, as he sits in his parlor of a late night and ponders the complications of life. You couldn’t say that those questions were put into his head by the clever Clarence Darrow, exactly, for the Doctor had always vexed himself with nagging doubts; but Mr. Darrow’s skilled statement of those doubts during Libby Hatch’s trial gave voice to what might otherwise have stayed unspoken ideas. Most of all, the question of why the Doctor had-and has-always worked so hard to find explanations for the terrible events he’s encountered in his professional life seems to have been tough for him to come to grips with. Mr. Darrow’s suggestion that maybe he was at heart using his work as a way of quieting the doubts what he had about himself obviously struck a deep chord; and as the Doctor watched his onetime opponent go on to great fame in courtrooms all across America, I think the idea only haunted him all the more. But it never stopped him from working, from pressing ahead, and it’s that ability-to work through the self-doubts what any worthwhile human being feels-that is, so far as I can tell, the only thing what separates a meaningful life from a useless one.