CHAPTER 25

On Sunday, Mike the ferret went home with Hickie, and I no longer had a companion to help me forget how badly I’d left things with Kat. But Monday morning saw our investigation pick up pace, and I was soon too busy carting the Doctor and the others around town to think much about where she might be or what she might be doing. I knew that she’d written to her aunt, and was waiting for a reply before heading to California; and I could only hope that she’d see her way clear to contacting me before then. But hoping was a step up from worrying, and as Kat had her money and her ticket now, I figured it was safe to put my fears for her aside, regardless of whether or not I heard from her.

The Doctor, Mr. Moore, and I started out Monday morning on the long trip up to St. Luke’s Hospital, which had moved the year before from its old home on Fifty-fourth Street to five new buildings between Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Drive at 114th Street. I saw the Doctor and Mr. Moore as far as the entrance to one of the pavilions-by coincidence, the Vanderbilt Pavilion-where nurses in long, sky-blue dresses and white aprons were trying to keep little white caps perched on their heads as they shuffled quickly up and down a spiral steel staircase what surrounded a small elevator. The Doctor and Mr. Moore got into the elevator and headed to an upper floor, while I went back to the calash and drove down to Morningside Heights, to spend the next few hours smoking a batch of cigarettes and looking down the steep rocks into the wide stretch of Harlem below.

The visit didn’t go as well as the Doctor’d hoped: those physicians, surgeons, and nurses on the hospital staff what had attended to Mrs. Libby Hatch and her “son” two years earlier were horrified by the suggestion that she might’ve done the boy in, and the Doctor had been forced to appeal to higher authorities in order to get access to official records. And those records hadn’t revealed anything new about Mrs. Hatch’s visits to the hospital: like the documents I’d stolen from her house, they all said that she’d acted with speed and courage, and kept herself composed throughout the ordeal in a way what had only inspired the admiration and sympathy of the staff of St. Luke’s.

This last bit interested the Doctor particularly, he told me and Mr. Moore during the ride downtown. It seemed that in Germany there were a batch of alienists, psychologists, and nerve specialists (what they called “neurologists”), who, while studying the subject of female hysteria, had found that their patients could sometimes become as addicted to the attention of medical professionals as any morphine jabber or burny blower was to drugs. If Libby Hatch shared this need, the Doctor said, she might’ve been using the illnesses of the children what she took care of (or failed to take care of) to satisfy it. It was two birds with one stone, you might say: she would’ve been covering up her maternal inabilities and getting attention and praise from doctors and nurses in the process. We’d know for sure if she did have such a craving when we got more information about her past, as it was a characteristic that would’ve formed early in life and showed up over and over. The day might even come when we could use the need against her somehow, being as, like any fiending behavior, it was at bottom a severe weakness and handicap, one what could betray and even destroy the person afflicted with it.

Mr. Moore, after considering all this, flew the idea that such a craving could’ve been the reason why Libby Hatch, or Mrs. Hunter, had treated Dr. Kreizler in a very different way than she’d approached either himself or the detective sergeants. True, she’d come at each man in a fashion designed to appeal to his weakness or vanity; but maybe there was something more in her very respectful treatment of the Doctor. Maybe she hadn’t figured on such a person taking part in the investigation of the abduction, and maybe, when she’d tried to be cordial to him as we were all leaving, she’d felt a real need for him to respond in kind, to believe that she was innocent. Certainly, that would help explain the furious way she’d reacted when he’d rejected her attempts to be cordial. And, Mr. Moore continued, if she did harbor some sneaking desire to be approved of by the Doctor, the fact that he was going to stay on the case with the cops might be something the detective sergeants would want to include in their warning to her: a little worm to plant in her brain, so to speak, just to help keep her off balance. When we met up with Marcus and Lucius that night at Seventeenth Street, they agreed with this line of reasoning wholeheartedly, and decided to make it a part of their presentation.

That event would not take place, though, until after they, with the help of Miss Howard, had further investigated the deaths of the babies at the Lying-in Hospital, being as they wanted to be loaded with as much ammunition as possible when they faced our opponent. But this side investigation proved especially tricky, being as it was difficult if not impossible to even locate most of the mothers of said babies, much less get them to talk. The Lying-in Hospital, like I’ve said, catered to unwed and poor mothers, and a lot of them didn’t give their right names when they checked in. This was true, in particular, of the more well-to-do women who were in the Hospital to cover the results of adultery or who’d enjoyed the advantages of matrimony before actually bothering with its formalities. It took the detective sergeants and Miss Howard days to find even a single woman who’d acknowledge that one of the dead babies had been hers; and when they did find that lone mother and told her about their suspicions, the woman showed them out in a hurry, smelling legal trouble and wanting no part of it. So they were forced to press on with their search.

The Doctor and Mr. Moore, meanwhile, went about their next task: getting in to see the honorable Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt II, him what Mr. Moore had referred to as “Corneil.” (The name distinguished him from his grandfather, the larcenous old coot who’d put the family on the map, and also from his own son, Cornelius III, who was called “Neily.”) He was a generous man when it came to charities, was Mr. Cornelius II, but he was also about the most holier-than-thou customer in New York; and he certainly had no interest in meeting with someone as questionable as Dr. Kreizler. If any of our team was going to be admitted to the enormous mansion-which was known to architectural types as a “French Renaissance château”-that took up the whole end of the block of Fifth Avenue between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth Streets, favors were going to have to be asked of third parties: specifically, Mr. Moore would have to seek the help of his parents, something he genuinely despised doing. And, though they did fix an audience up for Thursday afternoon, they also told Mr. Moore that, whatever his business was, he’d better make sure he didn’t bring up the subject of Mr. Vanderbilt’s son Neily, whose existence the old gent wasn’t currently recognizing.

Apparently, young Neily’d had the nerve to go and marry somebody he actually loved, but who his family considered socially below him. The battle over the marriage had become so hot that Cornelius II had actually had a stroke, and pretty well written his oldest son out of his will. The young man himself had gone through with the marriage, then hightailed it to Europe with his bride. They’d only recently returned, though the city’d been buzzing with word of their doings the whole while. The yellow press, of course, had jumped into the thing, and all on the side of love, the better to sell papers. Most of high society was likewise sympathetic to the young couple, since really old New York families, like Mr. Moore’s and Miss Howard’s, considered the recently rich Vanderbilts gate-crashers at their long-running party in the first place. The affair had continued to wear on Cornelius II (who was now migrating between his palace in New York and his even more ridiculously elaborate joint in Newport, Rhode Island), and by that summer he’d grown so bitter and self-righteous that it was actually killing him. Seventy million dollars and the New York Central railroad system all his own to play with, and the man was going to let two young people’s romantic escapades drive him into the ground: there was and is no figuring rich people sometimes…