He turned the corner on Tillary Street, near the foot of the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge, almost running. The clang of the conductor’s bell announced the trolley’s departure. Noah yelled for the conductor to wait, but the trolley was already creaking forward. He arrived in a full sprint just as the car was turning on the track to head back to Manhattan. The conductor stared at the figure hurtling toward him as if at a madman. He stood on the platform, blocking Noah’s entry, waving for him not to attempt to jump onto the moving car. But on the U-shaped curve, the trolley moved slowly. Noah timed his leap and landed on the bottom step just as the trolley straightened out. As he tried to lean toward the interior of the car, his left foot slipped. His momentum began to carry him out to the street. Noah reached out with his right hand and found a support pole. Pulling hard, he hauled himself aboard, crashing against the conductor’s chest, knocking the man’s hat askew.
“I ought to call the police, you brainless fool!”
“I’m a physician on an emergency call,” Noah gasped. “A matter of life and death.”
“Try a stunt like that again and it’ll be your death,” muttered the conductor, but Noah’s pronouncement had taken the sting out of his outrage. “All right, then,” he grunted, gesturing to the coin box, “five cents.”
Fifteen minutes later, the trolley discharged him at City Hall Plaza, and the ride to Twenty-Third Street on the Third Avenue elevated took only twenty minutes more. A quick walk from there and Noah was at the entrance of the squat, gray building that was the repository of the city’s dead. At the high desk just inside the door sat a police sergeant with a livid scar that began just below his right eye and disappeared underneath a sweeping mustache. When Noah inquired about Turner McKee, the sergeant tilted his head to one side and pursed his lips.
“You family?” He spoke in a low, official growl, not at all welcoming. McKee’s death had apparently attracted official attention as well.
“No. I’m a physician.”
“Name?”
“Whitestone.”
The sergeant took up a pen and reached for a ledger. He seemed to move with exaggerated slowness. “White-stone,” he said to himself as he laboriously formed the letters.
“Could you hurry, please?” Noah finally interjected. “This is urgent.”
“Can’t go down,” intoned the sergeant. “Family only.”
“But I told you. I’m a doctor.”
“Yeah. White-stone. Don’t know the rush. Can’t see why he’d need a doctor now.” The sergeant smirked at his wit. The scar whitened as it stretched across his cheek.
“Mr. McKee was my patient. I spoke to him just last night, and I’d like to make sure you’ve got the right man. I think a mistake might have been made in identifying the body.”
The sergeant shook his head slowly. “No mistake. Father’s there now. He don’t seem to have no doubts.”
Noah forced an affable grin. “Ah. I was to meet Mr. McKee here.”
The sergeant put his right index finger to the point of the scar and rubbed it up and down. “No dice, pal. You ain’t family, you ain’t goin’ in.”
Noah reached into his pocket and fingered a dollar coin, wondering whether to risk offering the man money. Then, from a staircase at the end of the hall, another man appeared. He was about fifty, portly, light-haired, with an aquiline nose, and obviously aggrieved. “There’s Mr. McKee now.” Noah moved quickly past the desk. Before the sergeant could decide whether to chase him, Noah had reached the portly man and whispered, “I’m terribly sorry about your son but I must speak with you, Mr. McKee. Away from the police. My name is Noah Whitestone. I’m a physician.”
Beneath the fleshiness, Turner McKee’s father had his son’s sharp, intelligent face. “About what, Dr. Whitestone? Were you a friend of my son?”
Noah glanced back. The sergeant had left the desk but had paused midway down the hall. He seemed to be trying to decide whether he should accost the interloper now that he was speaking with the father of the dead man.
“I met him only once . . . twice. We spoke of his work. The circumstances of your son’s death are suspicious. I’m not at all sure it was an accident.”
“Well, I am sure, Dr. Whitestone. I am sure it was not an accident. Of all the ways Turner might have met his end, drowning is the least likely.”
“I agree. Do you think I might see his body?”
“Can you learn anything from an examination here?”
“We won’t know unless I try, Mr. McKee.”
“Then try by all means. Come with me, Dr. Whitestone. He’s downstairs.”
Noah glanced back over his shoulder. The sergeant had not moved, still unsure how to proceed. He had not been chosen for the tedious job of manning a desk at the morgue because of quick wits. When they reached the staircase that led to the depository in the basement, the sergeant returned to his post and reached for the mouthpiece of his telephone.
On their way down the stairs, Turner McKee Sr. told Noah he was a milliner. He owned three hat-making facilities in the Bronx, an estate in Pelham, and had always known his son’s politics would lead to trouble. But he had tears in his eyes as he said it.
When they reached the lower floor, Noah felt the air grow distinctly colder. Halfway down the hall was a set of double doors, across from which stood a coatrack holding giant overcoats. Large wool hats and sets of both thick and thin gloves sat on a shelf on the top. The doors swung open, and Noah and Mr. McKee were hit with a blast of frigid air. The mortuary utilized the same ammonia-cycle commercial refrigeration system that was employed in meatpacking plants. A man in one of the overcoats, hats, and gloves emerged. Even when the doors swung shut, the intense cold remained.
“What are you two doing in here?” the man in the overcoat demanded. Icicles clung to his mustache. Then his ice-encrusted eyebrows rose in recognition. “Oh, it’s you, Mr. McKee. I thought you’d gone.”
“This man is a physician. I have asked him to look at my son.”
“I’m not supposed to.”
“Why not?” Noah asked.
“Orders.” But he looked furtively toward the stairway, then motioned that they should quickly don the requisite outerwear. The coat was lined with thick fleece, but the moment the attendant ushered them through the doors, Noah felt as if his joints had frozen solid. The attendant seemed unaffected.
The vault was immense, at least one thousand square feet. Stack after stack of sliding cast-iron drawers ran up each of the seven aisles. Every stack held four drawers. The room seemed like a macabre library card catalog. A mist of frost permeated the room, rendering the back indistinct. For all Noah could make out, it might extend to infinity. When Noah asked, the attendant told him that more than three hundred corpses could reside, if reside was the word, in this chamber at any one time. Great cities, it seemed, required equally great facilities for its dead.
The attendant led them to the third aisle to the left and then walked to the fourth stack. He grasped the wooden handle of the second drawer from the top. “I’m glad you came back, Mr. McKee,” he said before he pulled it open. “I wanted to tell you that I’m an admirer of your son’s work. I read New Visions.” McKee’s father nodded, embarrassed that the attendant had misread his politics, but flattered all the same at the reach of his son’s articles.
With a sharp tug, the attendant pulled open the drawer. Inside, on the sheet of gray metal that formed the drawer bottom, lay the body of Turner McKee. His clothing had been removed, and the signs of violent death were manifest. McKee’s father, who had been forced to view this same sight just moments before, turned his head away.
Noah cast his eyes over the body, his vision obscured by the cloud he created in front of his face every time he exhaled. The most obvious sign of trauma was a broad wound across McKee’s left temple, running from the zygomatic bone under the eye, across the sphenoidal, to the parietal almost at the crown of his head. It was matted with dried blood, where he had allegedly been st
ruck by the passing tugboat. There were a number of smaller bruises on the torso and extremities, all of which might have originated from the same source.
Then he saw it. Faint. He wouldn’t have noticed at all if he hadn’t been looking. He reached out and placed his hand on the dead man’s shoulder. To owe his life to someone who had passed him by in a breeze.
Noah felt a pull on his arm and looked up to see the attendant gesturing for him to finish. Noah nodded and let the man push the drawer back in place. The metal track shrieked in the cold. Moments later, they were out the door. The air in the hall felt tropical.
McKee’s father thanked the attendant as the three hung their coats. Noah heard noise coming from the staircase and turned to see the desk sergeant and another uniformed man hurrying toward them. The newcomer was shorter but extremely stocky. He walked stiff-kneed, his balled-up hands making short arcs around his hips. A man accustomed to using his fists.
He addressed himself to Noah. “Might I ask who you are and what yer doing here?” He did not need to make an effort to inject menace into the question. It was a natural by-product of his speech.
“I’m a doctor, and I’m looking at the body at the father’s request,” Noah replied evenly. “Might I ask who you are and what you are doing here?” He was becoming accustomed to dealing with bullies.
“I’m Lieutenant Laverty, New York Police Department. And I’m used to asking the questions, not answering them.”
“I gave you an answer. I was examining Turner McKee’s body.”
“And what did your ‘examination’ tell you?” Laverty remained pugnacious but there was a stiffness in his voice as he asked.
Noah shrugged. “Nothing much. It seems as if the blow on the head from the tugboat must have killed him.”
Laverty blew out an exaggerated sigh. “A tragedy. If the captain had looked over the side a few seconds sooner, the boy might have been saved.”
“Indeed,” Noah replied impassively. “But Mr. McKee here has been through enough for one day. We should leave him to make preparations for his son’s burial.”
As they walked down the hall, Noah glanced at McKee, indicating they should keep silent. Back on the street, Noah waited until they were a block away from the morgue before he spoke. “You must have your son removed to a mortuary immediately. I will give you the name of the one I wish you to use. Instruct the mortician to do nothing else until you hear from me.”
McKee grabbed Noah by the arm. “You found something?”
“Circular bruises on both wrists. They had to be made either by ropes or strong hands. Certainly not by an encounter with a tugboat.”
“So Turner was killed.”
“Yes. And I believe he also saved my life.”
“How? You weren’t with him.”
“I might have been, but he wouldn’t let me in his flat. There is more to be learned, Mr. McKee, but forensics is not my field and I want to be sure your son’s death is investigated properly.”
“What do you intend to do?”
Noah felt at the inside pocket of his coat. Yes. It was still there.
“Engage an expert,” he said.
THIRTEEN
DAY 4. SATURDAY, 9/23—10 A.M.
Noah instructed Turner McKee to have his son’s remains transported to the new Frank E. Campbell Burial and Cremation Company on Madison Avenue and Eighty-First Street. Frank E. Campbell had opened the year before to much fanfare. Its advertising promised to provide funeral services for New York’s new breed of apartment dwellers every bit as dignified and intimate as one could host in a private home. Relieved of the burden of providing ceremony and sustenance in confined spaces, New Yorkers had made Campbell’s an instant success. McKee was puzzled as to why Noah would choose a mortuary so remote from his home, but promised to do as Noah suggested.
After Noah sent McKee off, he stopped at the Gramercy Hotel on Twenty-Third Street to place a paid telephone call. From there, it was back to the Third Avenue el for a journey even farther uptown.
After leaving city employ in 1888, Justin Herold had taken offices in Yorkville, at 385 East Eighty-Seventh Street. To obtain an audience, Noah used the same stratagem with which Alan had enticed Dr. Jacobi. He promised to lay out the details of a forensic mystery the likes of which Herold had never seen. Fortunately, Herold was no less curious than the pediatrician.
Herold’s office and, Noah assumed, his residence were in a three-story row house in an area populated by German, Irish, and Slavic immigrants. Firmly working class. Why a physician of Herold’s reputation and achievements would choose such an area instead of Fifth Avenue or one of the other more prestigious sections of New York was a mystery. Noah hadn’t been in Justin Herold’s office five minutes before he found out.
“Sorcerers. And alchemists. This is what I’m speaking of, Whitestone. Those who are charged to bring scientific knowledge into our criminal system still believe that the sun circles the Earth.”
Herold was pacing the carpet when Noah entered. Without pleasantries, with one brusque sweep of his arm, he’d gestured for his visitor to sit. Herold was thin, clean shaven, almost completely bald, with an unlined and extremely handsome face. The offices were sparsely furnished and incommodious. For some moments, Herold continued to pace, sighing and nodding to himself. Finally, throwing up his hands in frustration, he dropped heavily into the chair behind his desk.
“Whitestone, what do you know of the Meyer case?”
“The poisoner? He’s in the penitentiary.” The case, six years earlier, had been one of the most lurid of the decade. Henry Meyer, a homeopathic physician, along with his wife, had been accused of killing two acquaintances, Ludwig Brandt and Gustave Baum, by arsenic poisoning. Mrs. Meyer then posed as each man’s widow and redeemed the victims’ life insurance policies. Meyer’s first trial was adjourned when one of the jurors went insane in the courtroom. Rumors of demonic possession had been rampant. Meyer had only escaped the electric chair in his second trial because one juror refused to vote for first-degree murder.
Herold wagged a finger back and forth. “The alleged poisoner, you mean. Brandt and Baum may both still be alive. Brandt has even reportedly been seen . . . in Mexico . . . living off the proceeds that Meyer is supposed to have stolen.”
“But I thought both Baum and Brandt had been positively identified through their remains.”
“After three months? Are you joking, Whitestone? Neither cadaver had been embalmed. I have performed over 2,200 autopsies. It is impossible to render an identification of an unembalmed corpse after three weeks, let alone three months. Four experts testified to that fact at the trial. I was one of them. I copiously laid out the forensics. But did the jury listen? Of course not! Not with the public devouring accounts of the proceedings like pigs at the trough. A conviction; that was all that was important. What did it matter that science disagreed? The judge, the jury, the prosecution . . . all are ignorant of legal medicine. Or choose to be ignorant. A jury would rather convict for the prurient joy of an expected electrocution than to follow science.”
“Is that why you left the coroner’s office?”
“I was forced out by Tammany Hall. My predecessor, Conway, a physician in name only, had spent three years bristling at my appointment. He found himself unable to secure a living by honest work, so he imposed upon his cronies to get him his old job back. Politics trumps competence, so I am out and Conway is in. The irony, of course, is that the coroner himself employs me as his private physician. I asked him once why he didn’t use Conway and he merely laughed.
“So, Whitestone, I now engage in private practice in a neighborhood where my services are appreciated and, as a sideline, have become a consulting forensic practitioner. I am flattered to be often solicited to provide scientific evidence at criminal trials. With good fortune, I may advance legal medicine as a private citizen more so than I was able to as a government functionary.” Herold thrust his right hand into his trouser pocket. “Now, suppose you t
ell me of this extraordinary case you have been so kind as to bring my way.”
Noah once again recounted the details of Willard Anschutz’s death and its aftermath, omitting, for the moment, mention of murder, Turner McKee, New Visions, or any conspiracy that might be afoot among the manufacturers of pharmaceuticals.
Herold listed attentively without interruption, paying particular attention to the recitation of Noah’s failed chemical analysis. “If the sulphomolybdic acid test and nitric acid test were negative,” he asked finally, “why not run the others?”
“I was afraid to destroy the remainder of the sample.”
“Nonsense. How much of the tablet is left?”
Noah withdrew the envelope from his inside coat pocket and passed it across the desk. Herold peered inside and then glared at Noah as if he was confronting a simpleton. “Half? You used half a tablet for two tests? You could perform ten tests on this and still have sufficient quantity for a court exhibit. Where did you learn forensic analysis, Whitestone?”
“Medical school.”
“Of course,” Herold muttered. He pushed himself from his chair. “Now let us go find out what this is.” At the side of the office, Herold opened a door and Noah realized where Herold had spent the money he had saved on furnishings. The laboratory inside was more modern and better equipped than the one Noah had used at Brooklyn Hospital.
After some preparations, Herold used a scalpel to scrape a few grains from the blue tablet into a ceramic dish. “This is all you really need, you know. If the test is negative, repeat it, with shavings from a different section of the sample. And again, if necessary. In that manner, if the material is distributed unevenly, you almost will achieve a positive result in one of your tests.” Herold reached to the shelf over his countertop and withdrew a small, corked bottle. Withdrawing the cork, he partially filled a medicine dropper. “We shall try the ferric chloride test first. Iodic acid is not as reliable, if have you read my book . . . you did read my book?”
Deadly Cure Page 9