Along toward one P.M.Mr. Roosevelt and Lieutenant Kimball took their leave and headed back for Washington, to resume the business of planning the war with Spain what they believed and hoped was on its way. I don’t know to this day if anyone ever told the former police commissioner just how much our business that night might’ve been connected, if things had broken only a hair differently, to the outbreak of that war; something tells me that he and the Doctor must have had words about it before Mr. Roosevelt’s death earlier this year. But the most important fact, then as now, was that Mr. Roosevelt had come to our aid without knowing anything more than that his friends and an innocent child were in trouble. It only made me like and respect the man all the more; and as I think of him now, pulling away from the house in his landau on his way to Grand Central, flashing us that wonderful grin what would one day keep political cartoonists in such clover, I wondered why it was that so few men had his kind of strength: that particular ability to be gentle and loving with a baby on the one hand, and to crack the heads of mugs like the Hudson Dusters on the other. It’s a question what still dogs me.
At about one-thirty the detective sergeants returned from the First Precinct house down on New Street, where the body of Libby Hatch’d been taken after its arrival at the police pier. From the First the corpse would be shipped on up to the morgue, a fact what made my spirit burn: I didn’t much like the idea of the murderess being in so much as the same building as Kat, even if they were both dead. Still, there was nothing to do about it, as an autopsy had to be performed on Libby. (The conclusions of said procedure, we later found out, were “inconclusive,” just as Mr. Moore’d suspected they would be.) As for El Niño, I half expected that he might telephone the house that night, just to make sure everything’d turned out okay; but then I realized that, so far as he was concerned, everything already had. His jefe had been avenged, and baby Ana would be returned to her mother; all that was left for him in New York was trouble with the law, and when I took the time to consider it I realized that I’d much rather he move fast to get safely out of town-and maybe out of the country-than slow down to risk contact with us.
For her part, Miss Howard had, according to plan, phoned uptown to the French consulate straightway when we returned to the Doctor’s house, to inform Señora Linares that all was well and that, as soon as she had police protection, she’d bring Ana to her. We all knew that the detective sergeants were needed for this job, and that they’d best be armed when they carried it out: there was no way of saying what new servants Señor Linares had hired when El Niño’d come over to our side, or if they, like the aborigine, had been keeping watch over the Doctor’s house. But as it turned out, such caution wasn’t necessary: Miss Howard, Marcus, and Lucius got the baby back to her mother without any sign of trouble. When they returned, they told us that the señora was in the process of deciding whether to go back to her family in Spain or to head west, to those parts of the United States where new beginnings were the common coin, and where, I’d once hoped, Kat might’ve been able to get a fresh start on life. But the great and inexpressible joy the señora’d experienced when she’d been reunited with Ana, Miss Howard and the Isaacsons said, was enough to make such decisions seem of small importance for the moment, and had given our three teammates the powerful feeling that everything we’d been through had been well worth it.
Such may have been true, too-for them. For Mr. Moore and me, though, there would always be questions, questions about whether we’d been right in getting people we cared deeply about involved in a case what ended up costing them their lives. Such questions seldom come with easy answers, and they never go away: as I sit here writing these words, I can’t say as I’m any closer to quieting those doubts than I was at three P.M.that morning, when everyone finally went their separate ways and I sat for an hour in my windowsill, tearfully smoking cigarettes and seeing Kat’s eyes all over the starry sky.
There were, of course, the funerals to attend to, and after a simple ceremony for Kat at Calvary Cemetery on Wednesday afternoon-one what I was grateful to every member of our group for attending-we all boarded a train early Thursday morning to head back up to Ballston Spa and watch Mr. Picton get planted in the ground of the same cemetery on Ballston Avenue what we had, only weeks earlier, violated. It was sadness, affection, and respect, of course, what drew us so far to say our last good-byes to the agitated little man with the ever-blasting pipe who’d refused to let the case of the murders on the Charlton road die, and who, in death, had given us the legal leverage we’d needed to openly pursue Libby Hatch in New York. But curiosity pulled us north, too: curiosity about what Mr. Picton’s final words about “a clue” in the cemetery had meant.
Standing by his open grave as his casket was lowered in, each of us sneaked a peek at the headstones of the other members of his family; and we were all slightly shocked to find that every person in that plot-not only Mr. Picton’s parents, but a younger sister and brother, as well-had died on exactly the same day. This led the Doctor to put some gentle questions to Mrs. Hastings after the ceremony, which she answered by saying that indeed, Mr. Picton’s family had all been killed one night as they slept, by a gas leak in the big house at the end of High Street. Mr. Picton had been away at law school when it’d happened, and he’d never spoken of the matter in later years; and while Mrs. Hastings wouldn’t comment on the odd coincidence of gas leaking in so many rooms of the Picton house at one and the same time, she did say that it was after the tragedy that Mr. Picton’d decided to pursue a career in prosecution. This was enough for the Doctor, who knew-as did, I think, Mrs. Hastings-that the “coincidence” of the several gas leaks was so incredible as to be dismissible. Someone had deliberately done away with the family, and the fact that all the doors of the house had been bolted when it’d happened indicated that it’d been one of the Pictons themselves.
Beyond that, though, neither the Doctor nor anyone else could do more than speculate. Had Mr. Picton’s mother, in a fit of some kind of despondency, done away with her husband, her offspring, and herself by means of gas-not an uncommon practice, according to the Doctor, among lethally melancholic women? Had Mr. Picton suspected the truth about the matter, and had that suspicion not only made him endlessly anxious for the rest of his days, but driven him for so many years to convict Libby Hatch? We would never know. But just the possibility, combined with the sad occasion of the funeral itself, was enough to keep us all very quiet during the train ride back to New York.
Things calmed down eerily around Seventeenth Street in the days what immediately followed-the case was over, but there was no possibility of returning to a normal routine, being as, even if our spirits had been strong enough to bounce back so quickly, we were still waiting to find out the results of the court investigation into affairs at the Doctor’s Institute. On Friday morning the Isaacsons-who’d put off giving their testimony ever since we’d gotten back to town-finally went before the closed court and told their tale. That same afternoon the Reverend Bancroft was called to give his opinion about how the Institute was set up, whether the staff were up to snuff, and if, in general, the place was a sound proposition. The court waited until Monday to hand down its decision, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that those two days were among the longest of my life. The weather turned foully humid, coating every person in the city in the kind of thin sheet of heavy sweat what seems impossible to get off and always sends tempers flaring. Monday was no better: the thermometer’d already climbed into the high eighties by ten, and when Cyrus, the Doctor, and I boarded the calash to head down to the Tweed court house at two I wasn’t sure that either Frederick-whose weeks of boarding had made him a touch lazy-or any of the rest of us was going to make it.