“Everything quiet, Stevie?” he asked when he reached my room, in that low rumble that was at once powerful and gentle.
I nodded, then looked over at him. “He’s staying at the Institute, I guess.”
Cyrus returned my nod. “His last night for a while. Wants to make use of what time he’s got…” There was a quiet, worried pause, and then Cyrus yawned. “Don’t be up too late, now-he wants you to fetch him in the morning. I brought the barouche back-you’ll want to take the calash and give one of the horses a rest.”
“Right.”
Then I heard those heavy feet and legs lumber off toward the back of the house and the sound of Cyrus’s door closing. I set my book down and took to staring blankly, first at the simple blue-and-white-striped wallpaper around me, then at the small dormered window at the foot of my bed, out of which I could see the rustling, leafy tops of the trees in Stuyvesant Park across the street.
It didn’t make any more sense to me then than it does now, how life can pile troubles up on a man what don’t deserve them, while letting some of the biggest jackasses and scoundrels alive waltz their way through long, untroubled existences. I could see the Doctor at that moment clear as if I was standing next to him down at the Institute (that being the Kreizler Institute for Children on East Broadway): he’d long since have made sure the kids were all bedded down safe, as well as given late-night instructions to the staff about any new arrivals or troublesome cases, and by now he’d be at the big secretary in his consulting room working on a mountain of papers, partly out of necessity and partly to avoid the thought that it all might be coming to an end. He’d stay there under the glow of his green-and-gold Tiffany lamp, pulling at his mustache and the small patch of beard under his mouth and occasionally rubbing his bad left arm, which seemed to bother him at night worse than other times. But it’d likely be many hours before weariness began to show in those sharp black eyes, and if he did manage to get some sleep it would only be when he laid his long black hair on the papers before him and dozed off fitfully.
You see, it had been a year of tragedy and controversy for the Doctor, beginning, as I’ve said, with the death of the only woman he’d ever truly loved and coming to a head with the recent unexplained suicide of one of his young charges at the Institute. A court hearing to discuss the general state of affairs at the Institute had followed this last incident, resulting in an injunction. For sixty days the Doctor was to keep clear of the place while the police investigated the matter, and those sixty days were set to start the next morning-however, I’ll have much more to say about all that later.
It was while I was lying there counting the Doctor’s troubles that I heard the small, sudden scraping noise I’ve mentioned coming from outside my window. Like I say, I made the sound right away-my own feet had produced it too many times for me not to. As my heart began to race with a little nervousness but even more excitement, I thought for a second of fetching Cyrus; but then a quick succession of amateur slips in the climbing steps outside made me realize I wasn’t about to get a visit from anybody I couldn’t handle. So I just set my book aside, slid over to the window, and poked the top of my head out.
It makes me smile, sometimes, to think back on those days-and even more on those nights-and realize just how much time we all spent crawling around rooftops and into and out of other people’s windows while most of the city was sound asleep. It wasn’t a surprising or new activity for me, of course: my mother’d put me to work breaking into houses and lifting fenceable goods as soon as I could walk. But the image of the Doctor’s respectable young society friends jimmying windows and cramming themselves through them like a batch of garden-variety second-story men-well, I did and do find it amusing. And nothing ever gave me a bigger smile than what I saw that night:
It was Miss Sara Howard, busting just about every rule in the housebreaker’s bible, if there ever was such a thing, and cursing heaven like a sailor all the while. She had on her usual daytime rig-a simple dark dress without a lot of fussy, fashionable undergarments-but uncomplicated as her clothes were, she was having a hell of a time keeping a grip on the rain gutter and the protruding cornerstones of the house, and was a rat’s ass away from falling into the Doctor’s front yard and breaking what would most likely have been every bone in her body. Her hair’d obviously started out in a tight bun, but it was coming undone along with the rest of her; and her pretty if somewhat plain face was a picture of heated frustration.
“You’re lucky I’m not the cops, Miss Howard,” I said, crawling out onto the windowsill. That brought a quick turn of her head and a burning light into her green eyes that any emerald would’ve envied. “They’d have you out at the Octagon Tower before breakfast.” The Octagon Tower was an evil-looking, domed structure on Blackwells Island in the East River, one what, along with two wings that branched off of it, made up the city’s notorious women’s prison and madhouse.
Miss Howard only frowned and nodded at her feet. “It’s these blasted boots,” she said, and, looking down at them with her, I could see what the problem was: instead of wearing a sensible, light pair of shoes or slippers that would have let her get her toes into the gaps in the masonry, she-being a novice-had put on a pair of heavy, nail-studded climber’s boots. They weren’t unlike the ones the murderer John Beecham had used to climb walls, and I figured that that was where she’d got the idea.
“You need rope and gear for those,” I said, grabbing hold of the window frame with my right hand and extending my left arm to her. “Remember, Beecham was climbing sheer brick walls. And,” I added with a smile, as I pulled her onto the windowsill with me, “he knew what he was doing.”
She settled in, caught her breath, and just barely glanced at me sideways. “That’s a low blow, Stevie,” she said. But then the irritated face turned amused, in the way that her looks and moods always changed: suddenly, with the speed of a doused cat. She smiled back at me. “Got a cigarette?”
“Like a dog has fleas,” I said, reaching inside the room for a packet and handing her one. I took one for myself, struck a match on the windowsill, and we both lit up. “Life must be getting boring over on Broadway.”
“Just the opposite,” she said, blowing smoke out toward the park and producing a pair of more conventional shoes from a satchel that was hanging around her neck. “I think I’ve finally got a case that doesn’t involve an unfaithful husband or a rich brat gone bad.”
A word of explanation, here: after the Beecham case, all the members of our little band of investigators besides Miss Howard had gone back to their usual pursuits. Mr. Moore’d gotten his old job back, doing criminal reporting for the Times, though he continued to butt heads with his editors as often as ever. Lucius and Marcus Isaacson, meanwhile, had gone back to the Police Department, where, having been promoted by Commissioner Roosevelt, they were promptly demoted back to detective sergeants when Mr. Roosevelt left for Washington to become assistant secretary of the Navy and the New York Police Department fell back into its old ways. Dr. Kreizler had returned to the Institute and his consultation work on criminal cases, and Cyrus and me had gone back to running the Doctor’s house. But Miss Howard couldn’t face returning to the life of a secretary, even if it was at Police Headquarters. So she’d taken over the lease at our former headquarters at Number 808 Broadway and opened her own private investigation service. She limited her clients to women, who generally had a hard time securing such services in those days (not that it’s any easy trick for them now). The problem was that, as she’d just said, about the only ladies who could afford to hire her tended to be biddies from uptown who wanted to know if their husbands were cheating on them (the answer generally being yes) or what the wayward heirs to their family fortunes were doing with their private time. In a year of business Miss Howard hadn’t been involved in a single juicy murder case or even a nice, sordid bit of blackmailing, and I think she’d begun to get disenchanted with the whole detecting business. Tonight, though, her face reflected her statement that something genuinely racy might’ve come her way.