“Only that?” the Doctor asked suspiciously.
“No. Not only that.” Mr. Moore turned to the piano for a moment. “Cyrus, do you think we could have something a little less funereal? I’m sure we’re all sorry that old Otello mistakenly strangled his lovely wife, but given the display Nature’s putting on outside I think we might forgo such sentiments. You wouldn’t happen to know anything less-well-stuffy, would you? After all, friends and colleagues, it’s summer!”
Cyrus answered by gently breaking into “White,” a popular song from the forties, what seemed to set Mr. Moore right up. He beamed a big grin at the Doctor, who only looked at him with some concern.
“There really are moments,” the Doctor said, “when I doubt your sanity, Moore.”
“Oh, come on, Kreizler!” Mr. Moore answered. “I’m telling you, everything’s going to be fine. In fact, we’ve brought you living proof that things are starting to go your way.” Mr. Moore indicated Marcus and Lucius with a little nod of his head.
“The detective sergeants?” the Doctor said quietly, looking to them. “But what can you have to do with any of this?”
Marcus glanced at Mr. Moore with some annoyance, then handed him his empty glass. “That was truly graceful, John,” he said. “Suppose you stick to bartending.”
“My pleasure!” said Mr. Moore, dancing back over to the cocktail cart.
The Doctor gave up on expecting sense from his journalistic friend and turned to the Isaacsons again. “Gentlemen? Have Moore ’s nerves given way altogether, causing him to bring you here for some imaginary reason?”
“Oh, it wasn’t John,” Marcus answered quickly.
“You can thank Captain O’Brien,” Lucius added. “If ‘thank’ is the right word.”
“The head of the Detective Bureau?” Dr. Kreizler said. “And what can I thank him for?”
“The fact that you’ll be seeing quite a bit of us in the next sixty days, I’m afraid,” Marcus replied. “You’re aware, Doctor, that the court ordered a police investigation of affairs at your clinic?”
What was coming next clicked in my head right then, as I’m sure it did in the Doctor’s; nevertheless, he said only, “Yes?”
“Well,” Lucius continued for his brother, “we’re it, I’m afraid.”
“What?” There were both shock and relief in the Doctor’s voice. “You two? But doesn’t O’Brien know-”
“That we’re friends of yours?” Marcus said. “Indeed he does. That was part of the amusement for him. You see-hmm. Now, how do we begin this?”
As the detective sergeants’ explanation of what had gone on earlier that day at Police Headquarters was peppered with their usual squabbling over who’d been responsible for what, I may as well boil the tale down myself.
It’d started with the piece of a body that Cyrus and I’d seen on the waterfront by the Cunard pier the night before. (Well, really it’d started when the Isaacsons joined the force in the first place, for their advanced methods and peculiar attitudes, linked with the fact that they were Jewish, had made them instantly and almost universally disliked. But so far as this incident in particular was concerned, it was the body that’d set it off.) It’d been obvious to everyone, from the patrolmen on the scene to Captain Hogan and then up to Captain O’Brien of the Detective Bureau, that the section of torso was likely to develop into quite a sensational case. Summer in New York is just not complete without a big, splashy murder mystery, and this one had all the earmarks, starting with the probability that more pieces of the body would soon start to wash up in other parts of town (which they did). There’d already been and would likely continue to be a lot of press coverage of the thing and great attention paid to whoever worked on and solved it. But the deal had to be played just right: the cops had to represent it to the public as something what’d be tougher than shoe leather to work out, so that they could cover themselves with laurels when the time came.
The Isaacsons had been dispatched to the scene in the middle of the night, when Captain O’Brien was asleep and nobody knew what was waiting down at the pier; otherwise, they never would’ve gotten so close in the first place. O’Brien would choke before he gave what looked to be the summer’s biggest catch to a pair of detectives who spent near all their time telling him that his methods were so out of date as to be laughable. But the Isaacsons had really finished any chance what they might’ve had of working on the thing by writing up an initial report along the lines of what we’d heard Lucius saying that night by the river: all indications were that it was a crime of passion committed by someone close to the victim, someone who knew his identifying marks and had carefully cut them away-someone, in other words, whose main concern was hiding the victim’s identity and throwing suspicion off of themselves. But for the brass at the Detective Bureau, such wasn’t good enough. They preferred the idea of a crazed anatomist or medical student dealing in body parts, the kind of spooky tale what always sparks the public’s imagination. And that’s just what they started to give out to the papers that very night. The fact that everything about the body spoke directly against such an idea, well, that kind of thing never bothered the Detective Bureau much. A real solution to a crime never rated against an invented story that could be used to their advantage.
Anyway, when Monday morning rolled around, Captain O’Brien saw the Isaacsons’ initial report and decided that if he was going to milk “the mystery of the headless body” for all it was worth, he’d have to keep the brothers as far away from it as possible. It so happened that he also needed to make an assignment that morning of two detectives to investigate conditions at the Kreizler Institute for Children and the apparent suicide of young Paulie McPherson; and he took no wee bit of fiendish Irish pleasure in informing the Isaacsons that not only were they off the torso case, they were on the McPherson business. He knew that they were acquaintances of Dr. Kreizler’s-but, like most cops, O’Brien had no liking for the Doctor and would only be tickled by making the situation even more difficult for him than it already was. If the thing turned out bad and the Isaacsons had to come down on their friend, well, that would just be a bigger laugh; and if nothing came of it, O’Brien would at least have succeeded in keeping the brothers out of the more important “headless body” business.
“And so,” Marcus finished up, “here we are. I’m sorry, Doctor. We’ll try to make it as convenient and-well-dignified for you as we can.”
“Indeed we will,” Lucius tacked on anxiously.
The Doctor moved in quickly to put them at their ease. “Don’t let yourselves feel odd about it, either of you. There was nothing you could have done. Such a move was to be expected, really. We must try to make the most of it.” His voice became touched by sadness for a moment. “I’ve racked my own mind, and those of my staff, for any clue as to what drove the McPherson boy to take his own life-without success, I’m afraid. I’m as certain as I can be that there was no incident at the Institute to spark it, though you must of course decide all that for yourselves. I do hope you know, however, that there are no two people in the world I would sooner trust with the matter than yourselves.”
“Thank you, sir,” Lucius mumbled.
“Yes,” Marcus said. “Though I’m afraid we’ll be a damned nuisance to you.”
“Nonsense,” Doctor Kreizler added-and I could hear in his voice that the relief he felt over things working out this way was growing into a kind of happiness. I glanced at Mr. Moore and Miss Howard and found them smiling in a fashion what said they were positively delighted things had worked out this way, and it was no big job to figure out why: while the Isaacsons’ new assignment would only increase the chances of the Doctor taking on the Linares case, it would also cinch it that we’d have the talents of the detective sergeants on tap twenty-four hours a day. Such was cause for smiles, indeed.