CHAPTER 11

THE POLICE CAME TO THE hospital the following morning in the person of a diminutive, sandy-haired sergeant named Borst from the Fifth Street station, who tended to clench and unclench his fists as he spoke and in general conduct himself with bullying pugnacity. We later learned that his moniker on the force was “Brass Buttons.” He specifically asked to see the Professor and me, and we convened in the Professor’s office.

Brass Buttons Borst made little effort to hide the fact that he believed himself to be investigating a conspiracy rather than an isolated death and, further, that he was likely in the company of two of the conspirators. “Once we discovered that we weren’t dealing with cholera,” he said after some preliminary questioning, “we broke the quarantine on Mr. Turk’s rooms. What do you think we found?” The smirk that accompanied the question left little doubt that it was meant to be rhetorical.

The Professor was quite capable of matching pugnacity when aroused. He turned his back on the sergeant and walked to the window. “Are you waiting for me to guess, Sergeant Borst?”

“Five thousand dollars. In cash.”

“Five thou …” I exclaimed. “In his rooms?” My cursory survey of the premises had apparently been severely lacking.

“Yep. Under the rug in the bedroom. He cut the nails out of one of the floorboards … left the nail heads in so it would lift up without being noticed … and then stuck a package with five thousand dollars in the hollow underneath. Lucky for him the mice didn’t get it.”

“I would hardly describe Dr. Turk as lucky, Sergeant,” said the Professor, still refusing to turn around.

Nor Mrs. Fasanti, I thought, for settling for two hundred dollars when she had walked across five thousand dollars every time she had to fetch Turk’s soiled chamber pots.

“Perhaps not,” acknowledged Sergeant Borst. “Still, where would a young doctor like Turk get that kind of money?”

The Professor finally deigned to face the policeman. “If you are asking me whether he could have come about it honestly through the practice of medicine, you know as well as I that the answer is no. If you are asking me if I had any idea of how he was obtaining it dishonestly, the answer is also no.”

“How about you, Dr. Carroll?” Borst asked, sizing me up as the more easily intimidated. “You have any idea what Turk was into? You was the one who tracked him down, wasn’t you?”

“I did not know him well,” I replied. “Turk was a remarkably secretive man. Until last week, I had never seen him outside of work. As you know, it was only by speaking to those we encountered on our evening out that I discovered where he actually resided.”

“Yes. One of those you encountered was Brigid O’Leary. You’re lucky to still have your teeth.”

“Brigid O’Leary?”

“I think she calls herself ‘Monique’… at least this week.”

“Yes,” I admitted. “She helped.”

“So, Doctors,” said Borst, raising himself up on his toes, “let’s see if I’ve got this right. One of you finds the body, even though nobody is supposed to know where this hospital doctor lives, getting help from a woman as handy with a knife as you are with a pillbox, then you decide to check to see if he was poisoned even though it looks like cholera, and when we look in his rooms, we turn up a small fortune, but nobody here knows anything about anything, is that what you’re saying?”

The Professor placed his fingertips on the desk and leaned forward. “Sergeant Borst,” he said with exaggerated patience, as if he were addressing someone who still believed in spontaneous generation, “you have done everything but accuse me and Carroll here of having some illicit involvement with Turk, either during his life or at the end of it. I will simply say to you that I am shocked that a member of the hospital staff has conducted himself in the manner that Turk apparently has. If, however, you do not find that statement satisfactory, I suggest you state your accusations plainly. If not, I have patients who are awaiting me.”

Borst stood fast. “Don’t be so sensitive, Doctor,” he replied with a challenging grin. “If—or when—I’m ready to accuse you, you won’t have to guess about it. There’s two ways that I can think of where’s a doctor can most easily make that much money on the side—drugs or illegal operations—and it’s a pretty trick to do five thousand dollars worth of either the way that this fellow did without no one knowing about it.”

“I cannot say that someone did not know about it,” retorted the Professor, “only that we did not know about it.”

Borst pursed his lips, then nodded. “All right, Doc. If that’s the way you want it. But we have a killing here and, as you two were so helpful in showing us, the amount of arsenic that this fellow swallowed was just the right amount to make it look like cholera. That means that whoever slipped this fellow the poison knew what they were doing … follow my reasoning?”

He was correct in that the dose would have been required to be administered with some precision to mimic death by cholera. Too much would have killed Turk within minutes; too little might have allowed him to recover. In other words, whoever had poisoned Turk had knowledge of the substance that could come only with experience or education.

“I follow your reasoning precisely,” the Professor replied. “Let me ask you this, then: If we were the someones, why would we be the ones to tell you that it was arsenic poisoning and not cholera?”

“I ain’t got that part figured out yet,” Borst admitted. The man was like a terrier, marking his boundaries. “And I didn’t say you were the ones that done it. I don’t think you are … couple of respectable fellows. But that don’t mean that you don’t have some idea who did … and why they did. I know you doctors think that what you do for a living gives you the right to play God, but we lowly police don’t see it that way. So I’ll say good day for now, but I expect we’ll get to chat again.”

“We are always at your service, Sergeant,” said the Professor.

And in that mood of mutual dissatisfaction, Sergeant Borst turned to leave. Before he reached the door, however, I cleared my throat. “Sergeant,” I said, “may I ask a question?”

“Why not?” he replied. “You sure ain’t given me no answers.”

“I was hoping to take Turk’s books as a remembrance. Would it be acceptable if I had them sent to my rooms?”

“Books?” he replied, the smirk returning. “Sure.” Sergeant Borst heaved an exaggerated sigh. “You people got the strangest ideas.”

“A singularly unpleasant man,” observed the Professor, after the sergeant had departed.

“Yes,” I agreed, “but far from incompetent. And I believe he is correct in his assumption that drugs and illegal surgeries are the most likely to be so lucrative.” With all that had passed, I still had difficulty believing that Turk had sunk to such depths as to mutilate women simply to line his pockets.

“That is assuming that Turk’s funds were acquired through the use of his medical expertise. Let us not dismiss the possibility that his medical career was coincidental to whatever other activities he was engaged in.”

“You think that likely?” I asked.

“As you said yesterday, I believe, ‘not a theory, but it cannot be ruled out.’ In any case, what I said to that disagreeable fellow is true. I am shocked to find out that a member of the staff has betrayed us so. I’m saddened too, Carroll. He was so bright … so very bright. It is a tragedy that it all ended like this.”

“Yes,” I agreed.

“I need to speak with you on a different topic,” the Professor interjected. “This one, I hope, a good deal happier. As I’m sure you expected, I intend to accept the appointment in Baltimore. I will submit a letter of resignation today to the university and send a telegram to Johns Hopkins. This weekend, I will visit Baltimore and I would like you to accompany me. You can have a look at the facilities—which promise to be extraordinary—and you can also meet the men with whom you will be working.”

“Thank you,” I replied. “That will be excellent. And may I please express my gratitude once more for your consideration.”

“Applesauce,” replied the Professor, with a wave of the hand. “There is no gratitude necessary. I will say once again that no man need be grateful for that which he has earned.”

“May I ask you something, Dr. Osler?”

“Of course.”

“If the dinner had gone better … or at least not so poorly … would your decision have been the same?”

The Professor laughed. “The dinner had nothing at all to do with it,” he replied. “Weir and Hayes both knew before we even set foot in old Benedict’s palace that I was going to leave. In fact, they both pressed me to do so—quite adamantly, I might add.”

“But …”

The Professor walked over and clapped me on the back. “You know nothing of politics, my boy,” he said. “Just as well, actually, eh? When three plutocrats invite you to dinner, you go to dinner. I’m just lucky they handled it so poorly … made it easier. Besides, Weir had told me in advance that Schoonmaker had been opposed to retaining me. He evidently considers me something of a wild-eyed revolutionary. As it turns out, the major objections on the board to what I was trying to accomplish here came from him.”

“You mean including women among the student body.”

“That certainly, but also the curriculum changes, the requirements that students spend time in the wards … just about everything, really.”

“So my comment about Dr. Burleigh made no difference.”

“None. Benedict, I am told, had to use all his persuasive powers for Schoonmaker to go along with keeping me on, but I suppose once the old boy was forced to actually share a table with the evil Osler, he couldn’t go through with it.” The Professor smiled. “But the evening was far from unproductive. I found Mrs. Gross quite enchanting. A very handsome woman, don’t you say?”

“Yes, quite handsome indeed,” I replied instantly, thinking of the plain, squared-off woman with whom the Professor had shared dinner.

“I suppose you know that we attended the theater together and are dining tonight. And you, I am sure, have found a way to see Miss Benedict, eh? You were obviously quite taken with her.”

“I suppose my behavior was excessively forward.”

“Forward?” laughed the Professor. “Ephraim, it was hardly you who was forward. In fact, you gave every impression of a puppy dog trotting after his master.”

“Miss Benedict is quite good friends with Lachtmann’s daughter.”

“The girl in Italy? So I was led to believe.”

“What of Lachtmann?” I asked. “Had you known him before?”

The Professor eyed me strangely. “By reputation, certainly. We had never met previously.”

“Dr. Osler,” I began, “do you remember … ?”

“Remember what, Ephraim?”

“Nothing. It isn’t important.”