Among his many other charitable activities, Mr. Morgan had been the main source of funding for the transfer of the New York Lying-in Hospital to a large mansion previously owned by Mr. Hamilton Fish, which stood, as Marcus had said, just half a block away from the Doctor’s own house, on the corner of Seventeenth Street and Second Avenue. There were those uncharitable but knowledgeable souls what said that Morgan had made the expansion possible so that he’d have enough beds to accommodate all his mistresses. Whatever the fact, the hospital was one of the few medical facilities that worked with children what the Doctor had no contact with: partly because its concern was unwed and impoverished mothers and their newborn infants, which was out of the Doctor’s area of specialization, but mostly because it was run by Dr. James W. Markoe, who happened to be Mr. Morgan’s personal physician.
An amazing set of coincidences, some might say; but the born New Yorker knows what a small town this truly is, and that such things happen fairly frequently. So while it did take a good thirty seconds for the Doctor to absorb all this information, it took no longer, and he soon had his mind back on practicalities. “You say she worked there last year.” His eyes focused on Marcus. “I assume, then, that she was released or resigned?”
“A bit of both,” Marcus answered. “And under what might kindly be called a cloud.” From the stack of papers in his hand Marcus pulled a single sheet. “Dr. Markoe wasn’t at the hospital this morning, and when we contacted him at home he refused to give us any help. We could’ve pressed it and visited him in an official capacity, but our feeling was that a little cash spread around to the other nurses at the hospital would be more effective. It was-and here’s what we found out.” He indicated the paper, which was covered with notes. “To start with, every one of the nurses who was working at the hospital last year was absolutely certain of the identity of the woman in the sketch. Her name is Elspeth Hunter.”
Marcus paused for a second-but it was a long second, the kind I’d come to recognize from the Beecham case. When an unknown, unnamed person you’ve been pursuing-without even knowing for one hundred percent sure if they exist-stops being a bundle of descriptions and theories and becomes a living individual, it produces an eerie, frightening feeling: you’re suddenly certain that you’re in a very-high-stakes race, and that you can’t quit until you either win or get whipped.
“Any more of a background?” the Doctor asked.
“The nurses didn’t know anything,” Marcus answered, “but we were able to fill in some holes from her file.”
Lucius looked at the Doctor with meaning: “Her file-at headquarters.”
“So…” the Doctor breathed. “A criminal background, in fact?”
“Not so much a background as accusations,” Marcus continued. Before he could go on, though, a swarm of children herded by several governesses came flying into the room, making a racket as they bolted over to look at the mummy cases.
Glancing around at them, the Doctor said, “Upstairs,” quickly, at which we all made for one of the central cast-iron staircases and walked quickly up to the picture galleries. Moving through the rooms at the same fast pace, we reached one that was devoted to American paintings-and was deserted.
“All right,” the Doctor said, quickly moving across the plain wood floor and taking a seat on a viewing bench in front of Mr. Leutze’s enormous painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” He glanced back the way we’d come when he heard someone approaching, but it was only the still clucking Mr. Moore. “Go ahead, Marcus,” the Doctor said.
Marcus pulled out several other papers from his pile. “We-borrowed the file from Mulberry Street. It seems that Dr. Markoe reported Mrs. Hunter-she’s married, by the way-after several of the other nurses voiced disturbing suspicions concerning the patients she’d been attending.”
Mr. Moore now pulled up to us and, having heard Marcus’s last words, straightened up, so quickly that it was disturbing: for a man to shift moods that fast, it seemed that something dire must be coming. “You’d better prepare yourself for this, Kreizler,” he said, breathing out the last of his humor and relief in a heavy sigh.
The Doctor only held a hand up to him. “Patients?” he said. “Do you mean the mothers she attended?”
“Not the mothers,” Miss Howard answered. “Their babies.”
“It seems,” Marcus continued, “that during the eight months she was employed by the Lying-in Hospital, Nurse Hunter attended to an inordinately high number of babies who died-most of them only a few weeks after birth.”
“Died?” the Doctor echoed, quietly but with a kind of frustrated bewilderment. It was as if he’d been given a square peg of information that just didn’t fit into some round hole of an idea that he’d formed in his brain. “Died …” The Doctor stared at the floor a moment. “But-how?”
“Difficult to say, precisely,” Marcus answered. “The police report doesn’t go into any real specifics. But the nurses did. They claim that the children-there were four cases that they all agreed on, as well as some others that were questionable-were perfectly healthy when they were born, but fairly quickly developed respiratory problems.”
“Unexplained episodes of labored breathing,” Lucius added, “resulting, uniformly, in cyanosis.”
“Hunh?” I noised.
“A telltale bluish coloration of the lips, skin, and nail beds,” Lucius answered. “All caused by reduced hemoglobin in the small vessels-which generally indicates some kind of suffocation.” He looked to the Doctor again. “There would be two or three preliminary episodes, and then one during which the child would expire. But here’s the key: every time a child did die, Nurse Hunter was either rushing it to a doctor on her own or alone in a wardroom with it.”
Dr. Kreizler just kept looking at the floor. “Did the doctors at the hospital ever draw any connection between the events?”
“You know how things are in institutions like that,” Miss Howard said. “Sometimes the mothers had already left the hospital, giving their babies up. Under those kinds of circumstances there’s a high mortality rate, and nobody in authority tends to ask any questions. Dr. Markoe only went to the police because the nurses brought it to his attention-not that he’s a bad man, but-”
“But when you’ve got a dead infant and too few beds and nurses to start with,” Mr. Moore said, “it’s ship the body to the old potter’s field and on to the next case.”
“Actually,” Marcus said, “the doctors had always considered Nurse Hunter’s efforts on behalf of the cyanotic infants to be quite-well, heroic, in a way. It seemed to them that she worked tirelessly to prolong the babies’ lives.”
“I see…” The Doctor stood up and walked over to stare into the eyes of one of General Washington’s frozen oarsmen. “And what, then, made the nurses think that there was anything untoward?”
“Well,” Marcus said, “they took note of all the similarities involved in the various incidents, and decided that they were too exact to be coincidences.”
“Was Nurse Hunter particularly unpopular?” the Doctor asked.
Marcus nodded. “That’s a problem-she was apparently very high-handed, very competitive, and could carry quite a grudge against anybody who crossed her.”
The Doctor nodded along with the detective sergeant. “According to the other nurses, at any rate. I fear, Marcus, that these statements must be taken with a certain grain of salt-the medical profession breeds petty jealousy and infighting in all its branches.”
“Then you’re reluctant to believe the other nurses?” Miss Howard asked.
“Not reluctant,” the Doctor answered. “Not precisely that. But it simply doesn’t…” He shook his head once, hard. “Well-go on.”
Marcus shrugged. “Like Sara says, the rest of the nurses made a stink with Dr. Markoe. He went to the police, and Nurse Hunter was brought in. She vehemently denied any wrongdoing-got so incensed, in fact, that she immediately resigned. And it wasn’t as if these crimes-if in fact they were crimes-could be proved. Every one of them looked just like spontaneous infantile respiratory failure. And the way Nurse Hunter told it, she’d kept them alive for as long as they did live. Markoe was inclined to believe her, but-well, he has to worry about his funding. There can’t be even a hint of scandal.”