The Angel Of Darkness

CHAPTER 23

Twenty-four hours later, all was darkness.

I was lying in the bed of the calash, along with Detective Sergeant Marcus and Mike the ferret, who was squirming around in a satchel what I’d slung around my neck and over my shoulder. The three of us were covered by a tarpaulin, which sealed out what little light came through the windows of the stables next door to Number 39 Bethune Street-and sealed the stale July heat in. Detective Sergeant Lucius had driven the rig in about twenty minutes earlier, telling the attendant that he had business in the neighborhood and reckoned to be back sometime before midnight. Then he’d strapped a bag of oats onto Frederick’s snout and departed, while the attendant had gone back to standing on the sidewalk and watching some fireworks that were being set off over the Hudson: the one thing we’d all forgotten, in the midst of our planning, was that the night we’d chosen for the break-in was the eve of July Fourth, and the city was full of drunken revelers setting off firecrackers and generally raising hell. This, we’d decided when we finally remembered it, would only work to our advantage, as the attention of the police and everyone else in town-including the stable attendant-would be directed toward either participating in or controlling the revelry: all in all, a good night to go housebreaking.

The day had been spent in last-minute coaching, of Mike by me and of me by the others. I had no doubts about Mike: he’d reached the point where he had thoroughly connected the idea of getting fed with the smell of Ana Linares’s nightgown. (The fact that I’d disobeyed Hickie’s orders and started feeding the animal prime cuts of meat from the local butcher had notched his already considerable enthusiasm up to positive mania.) As for myself, I was confident about the breaking-and-entering part of the plan; the only thing that worried me was the Doctor’s hope that I’d not only be able to grab the Linares baby but at the same time make careful mental notes of anything I saw that might help him understand Nurse Hunter’s behavior on the deepest level. I understood his desire for such information, and as I say, I was anxious not to disappoint him. But he plain didn’t know-and I didn’t think I could explain to him-what it was like when you stepped across the line and invaded somebody else’s territory: mental activity of the more intellectual variety did not tend to be high on your list of priorities.

Finally, night did fall, and the detective sergeants and I loaded into the calash. I could still read great misgiving in the Doctor’s face as we left, and some of the same in Cyrus’s features; but Miss Howard and Mr. Moore were there to keep their spirits on track, and by the time we rattled away from Seventeenth Street they were full of genuine encouragement. Our arrival at the stable had gone without a hitch-or at least, so it seemed to Marcus and me under our tarpaulin-and that had made the first period of hiding and waiting considerably easier. The plan from there on in was for Lucius-who was toting a.32-caliber New Service Revolver, the very latest thing to come out of Mr. Samuel Colt’s arms factory-to watch the Hunter house from the cover of a factory doorway across Washington Street and, when he saw Nurse Hunter depart, to return to the stables, explaining that he’d forgotten something. He’d then let us know we were clear to get under way, and afterward resume his post. At 11:45 he’d come back again, giving us something like an hour and a half to complete the job-more than enough time, if everything went off right.

Marcus and I lay in the calash, like I say, for about twenty uncomfortably warm minutes after Lucius’s first departure. We heard the occasional sound of a carriage or a horse coming or going, but we didn’t move barely a muscle until we finally heard a little rap on the side of our rig. Without taking the tarp off of us, Lucius began to root around inside the bed of the carriage, taking out a small case that he’d left positioned under the driver’s seat. It contained a twelve-gauge Holland and Holland shotgun, along with a box of shells: while he waited for us, Lucius figured to be the most heavily armed man in the area-and in that neighborhood in those days, that was saying something.

“Okay,” he whispered to us through the tarpaulin. “She just left. Light’s gone out on the third floor, looks like she already put her husband to bed. She’s wearing an awful lot of makeup, and-”

Even in the darkness under the tarp, I thought I could make out Marcus’s hot scowl. “Lucius!” he whispered back.

“Hmm?” his brother noised.

“Shut up and get the hell out of here, will you, please?”

“Oh. Right. The attendant’s still out front. I think he’s been drinking.”

“Will you go?”

“Okay, okay…”

We heard footsteps fading away from us, and then there was silence, except for the faraway rattle of firecrackers and the boom of bigger fireworks over the river.

“All right, Stevie,” Marcus whispered after a few minutes, pulling the tarpaulin back a bit. “I’m just going to have a look…” He poked his head out and up, then ducked back under. “All clear-let’s move!”

With almost no sound we got out of the calash. The night was hot, but the most miserable of the summer heat still hadn’t arrived yet-and that made the dark clothes we were wearing less of a burden. I had a simple pair of light leather moccasins on my feet, while Marcus was in just his socks for the moment. Around his neck was a satchel similar to the one Mike was wiggling around in, but bigger: in it he was lugging a pair of studded climbing shoes, a bar spreader, a coil of heavy rope, a crowbar, and a hefty hammer. He had a holster strapped to his hip, and in it was a pistol identical to his brother’s, but with a.38-caliber barrel and chamber, to provide a little extra punch if things got ugly. In my own pocket I was carrying Miss Howard’s Colt Number One derringer, half a dozen.41-caliber bullets-and a nice eight-inch piece of lead pipe.

When we got out of the calash, we found that Lucius had been able to park it right next to one of the rear windows of the stable, as far as possible from the entryway and the attendant. Because of that, it was no big job for us to get the window open and move into the alleyway behind the place; but when we completed our quiet run along the back of the building, we found ourselves face to face with a ten-foot brick wall around the Hunters’ backyard. It looked like it’d been built pretty recently, certainly in the last couple of years.

“Well,” I said, eyeballing the thing, “looks like somebody don’t wanna be seen doin’ something …”

Marcus nodded, going for his coil of rope and climbing shoes. “I’ll boost you over and keep hold of this end of the rope. You take the other end, let yourself down, and find a spot to anchor it over there.”

“Just get your shoes on,” I answered, taking my end of the rope in my teeth and grabbing at the gaps in the stone blocks what made up the corner of the stables. “If I can’t scale this wall without bein’ boosted,” I went on, through a scratchy mouthful of hemp, “then I been outta the business too long.”

Using the gaps in the stable’s stone corner along with a pretty solid drain gutter, I got on top of the brick wall in just a couple of minutes. I could’ve done it faster, too, if I hadn’t been trying so hard to keep Mike from banging into anything: not a bad piece of work for somebody who hadn’t been at it in many years. From my perch I had a good view of the houses that backed onto the alley and the Hunters’ yard from Bank Street to the south. Only a couple of windows were lit, and those just dimly. But there was no telling when somebody with good enough eyes might glance out and catch sight of us, so we had to move quicker here than at any other time.

Knowing this, Marcus had gotten into his studded boots fast, and by the time I got up top of the wall he had a good grip on the rope and was ready for me to descend. I looped the thing around my waist, then started to walk backward down the Hunters’ side of the partition. Once on the ground, I shot over to one of the back windows of the house, testing the bars: they were solid, all right, but now we would use that fact to our advantage. I looped the rope in and out of the three-quarter-inch iron strips, then tied it off and gave it a few good tugs: the bars’d stand Marcus’s weight easily. I went back over to the wall and snapped my fingers a few times.

It’d been Marcus who’d identified the murderer John Beecham as an expert mountain climber during that case, and in the process he’d become pretty good at the sport himself. So I wasn’t all that surprised when he made barely a sound getting to the top of the brick wall, then lowered himself down and dropped into a flower bed-one what was mostly dirt-just as quietly. Neither of us paused too long to catch our breath or examine the backyard; but even rushed as we were, we couldn’t help but be a little struck by the barren feel of the place. It was the height of the growing season, but that yard-made up of flagstone walkways and a few flower and herb patches, along with some struggling ivy on the brick wall-formed a picture what was straight out of early March.

“It ain’t natural,” I whispered. “There oughtta be weeds, anyway…”

Marcus made a noise of agreement, then shivered once and touched my arm. He nodded toward the window, getting the bar spreader out of his satchel and handing it to me. It was made up of two metal mounts driven by steel rods geared to a big central screw, one what was driven by placing the crowbar through a steel eye at its end and turning it. I got the thing into position nice and snug and gave it the first few turns, watching the bars on the window start to move apart; but once the first set of iron rails hit those outside them (the gaps between each were just five or six inches) Marcus had to step in and give the crowbar a few good cranks.

“You’re breaking the law, you know, Detective Sergeant,” I whispered with a small smile.

“I know,” he answered, returning the quick grin. “But there are laws and there are laws…”

The bars made a few painful creaks that sounded awfully loud in that quiet, dead yard; but then some firecrackers went off about a half a block to the west, so loud that I realized we still weren’t making any real noise. Another twenty seconds, and there was an opening big enough for me to get my head and shoulders through. That was all I needed.

“Okay,” I whispered, and before Marcus had even laid the spreader on the ground I was halfway into the house. I stopped, though, when he touched my shoulder.

“Remember, don’t go upstairs, but anything you can find that looks interesting-”

“Yeah. I know.”

“Oh, and don’t forget the secretary in the front room-it was covered when we were there.”

“Detective Sergeant-we been over all this.”

Marcus drew a heavy breath, nodded, and then retreated into a shadowy corner nearby. As he did, I finished squeezing through the bars, then brought Mike along carefully behind me. Finally, I turned to find myself standing in Elspeth Hunter’s kitchen.

The first thing I noticed was the smell: a stale, slightly rotten odor, not strong enough to be sickening, but disturbing just the same. Unhealthy, you might say-a general air of uncleanliness, such as even many of the poorest immigrant mothers I’d known on the Lower East Side wouldn’t have allowed. A bucket filled with garbage, uncovered, stood in one corner, insects flying around it even in the near-darkness. Passing by the stained sink, I looked up at some pots and pans that hung over it, then reached up to touch them. Each was covered with a thin layer of grease-again, not dirty, exactly, but not clean, either. Wiping my fingers on my pants, I kept on going.

The others had told me that there was a narrow hallway between the kitchen and the front room, with a doorway cut under the front staircase: that figured to be the way down to the basement. I made my way to the front room, which was furnished with just a few old items: an easy chair, a sofa, and a rocker. A beat-up wooden mantelpiece stood over the small fireplace, and a dusty, stained rug covered the floor. Just to the left of the doorway I’d entered through was the secretary Marcus had mentioned, a cheaply veneered job scarred with chips and scratches. But it wasn’t covered up, and I could see in the half-light of the street lamps what filtered through from outside that behind the glass-paned doors of its top half were a few books, along with some old photographs: faded daguerreotype portraits of a wrinkled man and woman, along with a batch of newer, neatly framed prints of young children. Some of these last were individual pictures of infants, while one was a group portrait of three older kids.

None of them was smiling.

I pulled at the lid of the lower half of the secretary but found that it was locked. The skeleton keyhole at the top of the lid was inviting-it wouldn’t have taken but a minute to pick-but I figured I’d better get to the more serious business first. Across the room were the front stairs, and underneath them a doorway: the entrance to the basement. I stepped lightly over to the staircase, glancing up to make sure that all was quiet, and then pulled a small vial of machine oil out of my shirt pocket. Coating the basement door’s hinges, I put the vial back into my pocket, wiped my hands once again on my pants, then grabbed the doorknob, turned it, and pulled the door back without a sound.

The stairs stretched away into darkness before me. I hadn’t wanted to bring a bulky lamp along, as Mike was trouble enough, though I did have a candle and matches; but we’d noted that the light over the front doorway on the outside of the house was electrical, and figured that the whole structure, being so small, was probably wired, too. So I put one hand to the wall and slowly made my way down into the blackness, my eyes steadily adjusting and searching for any lighting fixtures. About halfway down I spotted one: right by the stairs and screwed into the basement’s ceiling, easy to reach from where I was standing. Moving back up to shut the door, I bent down and switched the light on, then kept going to the bottom of the stairs.

I’d scarcely hit the dirty floor before Mike’s movements inside the satchel became more agitated and he began to make little squeaking sounds.

“Okay, Mike,” I whispered, “just gimme a minute.”

Glancing around I saw that Mr. Moore’s sketch of the basement had been pretty well on the money: about the only things to be seen were a furnace, which stood behind a load-bearing brick dividing wall; some cabinets containing what looked like old cans of paint; a few garden tools (rusty ones, which came as no big surprise); some chairs and a table what were in even worse shape than the ones upstairs; a small collection of picture frames, all empty; and a big wooden rack full of jars of preserves. The only thing he’d gotten wrong was the floor, and his mistake was easy to understand: though the thing was concrete, it was covered in a layer of soot and dirt so thick that it could easily have been mistaken for bare earth.

But there was no sign of any baby, and no indication that one’d ever been there.

Mike was by now pitching a positive fit in the satchel, and I looked down to see his snout pushing out from between two buckled fasteners. “Okay, Mike, okay, this is your time, son,” I said, moving to undo the buckles on the satchel. I’d only managed to get one open before he shot out of the thing and onto the floor, moving as he’d done the first time I’d seen him: like he was made out of liquid. He got down my leg and onto the floor, held his nose up above his spread-out forepaws, then raced once around the big furnace. Pausing for just a second, he got up on his hind legs, the little dark eyes taking in the whole room in just a second or two. Then he shot behind and around the pieces of furniture, through the picture frames, and up the side of one old cabinet.

I wrinkled my brow at him. “What’s going on, Mike?” I asked, but he only did another lap around the room, looking like the proverbial blind dog in a butcher shop: he could smell it, but he couldn’t find it. Then he reached the rack of preserves that stood against the brick dividing wall next to the furnace, and I thought he was going to turn apoplectic on me. He leapt up and into one of the shelves, then ducked behind a few jars, reappeared, and moved up to the next shelf in a clawing, lightning-fast streak. But just like that he was on his way back down to the floor again, and around to the side of the thing.

And all the while he was sniffing and clawing, sniffing and clawing, trying to find, it seemed, some way to move the rack.

How long it took me to understand what I was looking at I’m not sure; but however long, it was too long, because I should’ve gotten the point as soon as I saw that rack. After all, I’d had enough clues: the flower boxes on Sunday; the dismal backyard; the unhealthy kitchen; the spare front room, as hospitable as the barracks in the Boys’ House of Refuge; not to mention all the conversations about Nurse Hunter’s character what I’d been privy to. They were all part of a pattern, and so was that rack of preserves-but it took a half-crazed ferret to drive the idea home in my head:

“Wait a minute,” I mumbled, as I walked over to the rack. “Preserves? Who’s she trying to kid?”

I grabbed one of the jars off the rack and unscrewed the rubber-lined tin lid: looking down, I saw a thick layer of mold across the top of the contents. Making a sour face, I quickly screwed the top back on and tried another jar, only to find the same thing inside. I tried two more jars from different parts of the rack, and when I found them to be in similar shape, I just stood back for a second, pondering it. Then I looked down at Mike: he was still scratching away at the bottom of the rack, first in front, then around to one side, then to the other, never getting anywhere what with the concrete, but desperate to all the same.

“Unh-hunh,” I noised, stepping forward again. “Well, then…” I took a deep breath, laid hold of the corner of the rack, strained to move it away from the dividing wall, and-

And nothing. I tried again, putting my full weight into the attempt but gaining no greater result. I might as well have been trying to move the house. Looking around, I caught sight of the rusty garden tools and ran over to grab an old hoe. I tried to slide the lip of its blade into a narrow crevice between the back of the rack and the bricks. It wouldn’t go. I used the heel of my hand to jam it in and finally got a small purchase; but when I laid hold of the end of the hoe’s wooden handle and pulled it so that the blade would push the rack away from the wall, the tool snapped into two pieces. And it wasn’t the wooden handle that broke: it was the metal stem of the blade, half an inch of forged steel.

“What in hell …?” I mumbled, staring at the thing.

It was odd, all right; but I’d taken part in enough robberies in my life to know that when you were faced with a safe you didn’t have the tools to crack, you didn’t stick around to wonder why. I scooped up the still clawing Mike, who seemed to sense that he hadn’t done the job he’d been hired for and fought against me as I stuffed him back into the satchel and fastened it up good and tight. Going back to the stairs, I got halfway up them when-

Gunshots. I froze, already trying to figure how I was going to explain my presence in the basement. Then I realized: they weren’t gunshots but firecrackers, out on the street. They must have been right out on the street, too, judging by their volume. Sighing with relief and able to move again, I reached over to shut off the basement light, then carefully moved on up to the door and opened it, the oiled hinges swinging silently.

Once in the front room again, I could hear the laughter of a bunch of kids out on the street. Then a few more firecrackers went off, their sound sharp and startling against the distant, dull thunder of the bigger fireworks over the river. I looked around quickly. We weren’t going to get the baby out that night, I knew that much, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave empty-handed. There had to be something …

I glanced at the secretary, and remembered what Marcus had said: if the Hunter woman had thought to cover the thing before she’d asked them in, it stood to reason that there was something that’d be of use to us in it. I grabbed my collection of picks out of my pants pocket and dashed over to it, getting the lock in the lid undone faster than even I’d thought I could’ve.

When I pulled the lid down and open, my first reaction was disappointment: there wasn’t anything but some letters in the desk’s little wooden slots, and a stack of papers on a worn-out blotter in front of them. Before locking the thing up again, though, I decided to overrule my thief’s instinct that such items were worthless, and picked some of the papers up to read-wisely, as it turned out.

At first they made no sense to me. The items on top were written on stationery from St. Luke’s Hospital: they were addressed to Elspeth Hatch, and they seemed to be a bunch of advisories concerning the condition of a child named Jonathan. Below these were a series of hospital admitting forms what seemed to pertain to the same child. And finally, there were a couple of old newspapers, all folded up and dating from two years before. I flipped back to the hospital admitting forms, not knowing what I was looking at or for, exactly: they were all too full of unreadable handwriting, all too complicated-

But then I made out a few words that stopped me cold. At the bottom of one form appeared the pretyped word DIAGNOSIS:-and next to it somebody had scrawled RESPIRATORY FAILURE, CYANOSIS.

That was enough for me. I took the whole stack of papers, stuffed them inside my shirt, and closed the secretary. I was sure that I’d found something, sure that I hadn’t wasted-

“Don’t you move, you little bastard!”

I did just as I was told. I’d been nailed before, and when you got a command like that it was generally best to follow it until you’d had a chance to see who and what you were up against. Putting my hands halfway into the air, I turned slowly toward where the growling, desperate, and somehow familiar voice had come from: the front stairs.

On them stood what must’ve been Micah Hunter. He looked to be in his fifties, and he was wearing a badly faded white nightshirt. Two bony white legs stuck out from its hem, and his gray, grizzled face-with a similarly colored, unkempt mustache-plainly bore the mad, foggy expression of a morphine jabber in full binge. He held what looked like a rifled musket unsteadily in his hands, and as I turned he stared at me in wild disbelief.

“You!” he said. Then he started to glance around nervously, and little whimpering sounds came out of his throat. “You …?” he repeated with less energy this time. “Where-where’s Libby? Libby!”He looked at me again, very afraid. “It can’t be-it can’t be you… This ain’t the right house…” His voice got stronger, though no less frightened. “This ain’t the right house-and I already killed you!”