When we reached the Seventeenth Street house, we found that the Doctor, Cyrus, and Miss Howard had returned-though there was still no sign of Mrs. Leshko, a fact what was beginning to make the Doctor wonder if he shouldn’t call the police. (He didn’t; and at about 5:30 the woman finally did stumble in, ranting something about Cossacks, the Russian tsar, and her husband. The Doctor just told her to go home and come back in the morning.) Hickie was more than a little impressed at where I’d ended up after all my years of thieving and conning, and I think for a few seconds the sight of the Doctor’s house made him wonder if there wasn’t some sense to the legitimate life, after all. He made quite an impression on the others, particularly the Doctor, who took an extreme interest in Hickie’s homegrown methods of animal training.
“It’s really rather remarkable,” the Doctor said, after Hickie’d made his good-byes to Mike in my room and then headed back downtown. “Do you know, Stevie, there is a brilliant Russian physiologist and psychologist-Pavlov is his name-whom I met during my trip to St. Petersburg. He is working along similar lines as this ‘Hickie’-the causes of animal behavior. I believe he would benefit greatly from a conversation with your friend.”
“Not likely,” I answered. “Hickie don’t much like leaving the old neighborhood, even on jobs-and I don’t think he can read or write.”
Chuckling a bit, the Doctor put an arm on my shoulder. “I was,” he said, “speaking rather hypothetically, Stevie…”
Mike the ferret’s taking up residence in my room presented me with a situation the likes of which I’d never before experienced. Suddenly I had a pet, a roommate, and for the next few days my own activities were pretty well dictated by the need to train and feed the animal. He was a living responsibility, an idea what had never before appealed to me; and yet I found that I didn’t half mind it, once I was actually in the situation. In fact, Mike became the center of my attention and-given his lively, affectionate manner-my joy and amusement, too. It ended up taking Miss Howard better than a day to get in touch with Señora Linares, and another day to lay hands on a piece of little Ana’s bedclothing; and I spent most of that time either romping around my room with Mike, trying to locate mice in our basement for him, or chatting away to the animal as if I expected answers. I’d seen people behave that way with pets before, but never having had one I’d never understood such conduct; suddenly the appeal was very clear, and as the time went by I found myself deliberately putting thoughts of Mike’s departure out of my head.
There were plenty of developments to take my mind off of that prospect. Detective Sergeant Marcus and Mr. Moore did eventually locate the widow of the contractor Henry Bates, and the news they brought back from Brooklyn was disturbing: Bates’s wife declared that he’d never had a sick day in his life, and that his heart had been as strong as an ox’s. On top of that, he hadn’t died a day or two after completing his job for Nurse Hunter-he’d died that very day, some six months ago, and at Number 39 Bethune Street. He’d been struck just after taking a cup of tea-fortified with some whiskey-what’d been offered by the mistress of the house. Nurse Hunter herself had apparently reported all this to the coroner, and had gone on to say that Bates’s attack had occurred as he picked up a heavy sack of tools on his way out of the house. The coroner had told Mrs. Bates that such things did happen, and that Bates could have had some hidden heart defect that didn’t make itself known until the very end. He’d asked Mrs. Bates if she wanted him to do an autopsy to confirm this; but she was a superstitious and fanatically religious woman, who had some strange notions about what would happen to her husband’s soul if his heart was removed from his dead body.
This slightly demented attitude made it tougher for Mr. Moore and Marcus to buy the next theory what Mrs. Bates shared with them-that her husband had been seduced by Nurse Hunter-even though they wanted very much to. Her statement that Mr. Bates had been directed by his boss at Number 39 Bethune Street to hire and fire construction crews on a regular basis, on the other hand, seemed to make sense: Nurse Hunter would want as few people as possible to know the complete details of what she was building. The only man who wound up with such knowledge was Mr. Bates; and it was the Doctor and Detective Sergeant Lucius’s belief that if we checked around the Hunter household carefully enough, we’d probably find some dried purple foxglove. Nurse Hunter might even have it growing in her yard; wherever she obtained it, the flower-source of the powerful drug digitalis, what could stop even the strongest man’s heart-could easily have been mixed into that last fatal cup of tea, and any unusual odor covered up by the smell of whiskey.
This might seem to’ve been so much of what the Doctor called “hypothetical” thinking-and so, in fact, it was. But nobody who’d ever seen the cold glare that could come into Elspeth Hunter’s golden eyes would’ve doubted for a second that she was capable of such an act. Still, the thought that we were up against somebody we now had good reason to believe had killed not only a whole group of infants but at least one full-grown adult male was more than a little frightening. In fact, it seemed like every day or two we were coming across some new revelation about the woman what proved her to be dangerous in a way we hadn’t anticipated. Such didn’t make preparing for our break-in to her house any easier. But other than carrying more and bigger firearms, there really wasn’t much of a way to improve on the plan itself; and when Miss Howard showed up on Thursday morning with one of Ana Linares’s little nightgowns, my part in that plan became more pressing: I now had to spend long hours making sure Mike was properly trained, being as an awful lot was riding on his nose.
Along with the nightgown, Miss Howard brought confirmation of what the Doctor had speculated about during and after his trip to the Museum of Natural History: Señor Linares did in fact have a Filipino aborigine in his employ. He was a spooky little character who gave the señora goose bumps and who she wouldn’t allow to sleep in their house, forcing the little man instead to pass his nights out in the yard. The pygmy, known only as “El Niño,” had been a Linares family servant for many years, but the señora was unclear about exactly what his duties were-though when Miss Howard told her about our encounters with the man, she was able to put together a much better idea. Miss Howard’s revealing this information had only put another strain on the Linareses’ marriage, which, it seemed, was close to falling apart: the señora’d told Miss Howard that if she hadn’t been a good Catholic, she would’ve already left her husband.
To top all this off, we had the now-daily headlines in the Times about the “mystery of the headless body,” following the case as it began to dissolve, before the Police Department’s helpless eyes, into the kind of boring domestic murder what Detective Sergeant Lucius had originally predicted it would turn out to be. By Tuesday the theory that the victim was one of the escaped lunatics from Long Island had been pretty well exploded, and the police were instead putting up the idea that the deed had been done by the same crazy butcher who had similarly killed and dismembered a young girl, Susie Martin, in a famous case a few years back. This theory, handed to the cops like a Christmas present by the pathologist who’d investigated the Martin case, took all of about two minutes to fall apart: various people with missing loved ones had shown up at the morgue to view the headless body parts, and by Wednesday no fewer than nine of these visitors had positively identified the things as being the remains of one William Guldensuppe, a masseur at the Murray Hill Turkish Baths.