Secret of the White Rose (38 page)

“But our justice system is based on personal culpability,” I said in protest. “It’s not right for someone to pay for what he didn’t do.”

“What he didn’t do?” The commissioner slammed his hand down on the table. “He conspired to destroy this city and all the hardworking people who make it great. He and his ‘comrades’ did so every meeting they attended, with each word they spoke and every dollar they gave to their cause.” He leaned in close to me and spoke in a fierce whisper. “I’ve got a story here that will play—to juries and judges, as well as the press and the public. Drayson and the anarchist ringleaders are going down. The lot of them have enough crimes on their conscience that I feel no guilt whatsoever.”

He leaned back again. “Marie Sanders and the Swede are dead. We’ll fix the early blame on them as worker bees who executed their superiors’ orders. But the ringleaders will pay, too. They’ll go to trial for the killing of the guards in the Tombs bombing, as well as ordering the murders of the two judges and the professor. Now,” he said, fixing me with a glare, “I don’t want to hear another word.”

*   *   *

And I didn’t say another word to the commissioner. But I said plenty to Frank Riley, who came right away to meet me in the small Chinatown noodle shop where we spoke in complete privacy.

“What do you think?” I asked him when I finished talking.

He twirled his chopsticks through a half-empty bowl of noodles. “You’ve spun quite a story. I’m not sure they’ll let me print it.” He paused a long moment. “I’m not even sure I want to. If I do, people may go free who don’t deserve it.”

“Because of what they think?” I asked. “We don’t lock people up in this country because of that. It’s what they
do
that matters.”

“Do you really believe there is that much of a separation?” He gave me a hard look. “Take your friend Jonathan Strupp. Now, I understand why you want to help him. But think hard before you answer my question. Do you truly believe he’s a decent man who just got in over his head? Or—is this your guilt interfering with your better judgment?”

I waited a long moment before I answered. “I don’t know. But if we don’t give men like him a chance, then what kind of people are we?”

He pushed the bill toward me, saying with a grin, “All right, Ziele. I’ll see what I can do.”

I explained exactly that to Jonathan half an hour later. “It doesn’t look good,” I said to him. “There’s going to be a trial. But the lead crime beat reporter at the
Times
is going to ensure that your side of the story is heard.”

Jonathan could only shake his head. “What will become of my daughter now?” he said. “Marie was a passing acquaintance of mine, and I knew she had no interest in being a mother. It would have endangered her livelihood, which she’d protected at all costs by hiding her pregnancy.”

“Your parents will care for her as best they can,” I said after his words faded away. “I’ve seen that already. And there’s one more chance for you I can think of.”

“What’s that?” he asked, his tone morose.

“His name is Alistair Sinclair, and he’s a criminal scientist,” I said. “He’s a preeminent researcher—and he’s also got connections to some of the most influential people in this city’s legal system.”

“And why would he help me? People like him don’t care about people like me.”

“Personally, no. But he’ll care very much about what you have to say. You’ve just got to talk with him.”

Jonathan was dumbfounded. “Talk with him?”

“Exactly,” I replied. I didn’t tell him that Alistair would try to spin his story into groundbreaking research about how an anarchist is formed … about how the criminal mind and the terrorist are related. I’d leave all that to Alistair.

I got up. “He’ll help you get as light a sentence as possible. It will be worth your while: talk with him and tell him everything he wants to know.”

It was all Alistair would demand of Jonathan.

And exactly what I would demand of Alistair myself in coming days.

Friday,
November 2, 1906

CHAPTER 32

The Dakota, 1 West Seventy-second Street. 5
P.M.

My rift with Alistair was serious, and the chasm between us grew wider each day. Neither Isabella’s efforts—nor the time we spent together helping Jonathan plan his defense—served to resolve it.

To his credit, Alistair helped Jonathan in every way possible. He secured a top defense attorney, paid for out of his own pocket. And he did it for the reasons I had suspected: he found Jonathan to be a fascinating subject. Alistair had quickly become obsessed with figuring out why this studious young man had abandoned his passion for science in favor of anarchist violence. He understood Jonathan’s anger following the
Slocum
disaster, and how easily the anarchist leaders had manipulated it to persuade Jonathan to join their cause. But that didn’t completely explain why Jonathan had done it.

“After all,” Alistair had said to me, “the
Slocum
disaster was the greatest tragedy ever to strike our city. A thousand victims, and each one left behind a grieving, angry family. Yet others didn’t turn to the anarchists and embrace their talk of violence and dynamite. Jonathan did. I have to ask, ‘Why?’ What made him susceptible to their cause, when others were not?”

Alistair insisted that the answer would not only be the foundation for an award-winning paper, but it would also revolutionize how the justice system dealt with terrorists of the kind the Russians and French had long known. Terrorists were, he insisted, a unique kind of criminal that our existing legal system didn’t provide for.

He was expounding his ideas in that regard as we walked home together from Angus Porter’s memorial service on a crisp November evening—the kind where the wind whipped around corners with sudden ferocity and dry leaves danced somersaults on the sidewalk.

We had reached the entrance to the Dakota and exchanged brief good-byes when he turned.

“Winter’s coming,” he said. “You can feel it tonight.”

I breathed in sharply, appreciating the way the cold air cut into my lungs.

“Why don’t you come up for a dram of scotch? I’ve a new bottle of Glenmorangie.”

I hesitated for a split second, then agreed.

We rode up the elevator in silence, as Alistair made small talk with the attendant about the New York Giants and their prospects with Christy Mathewson come spring season. I had never known Alistair to be interested in baseball.

Then again, everybody was talking about the Giants since they’d won the World Series last year. And there was plenty about Alistair that I didn’t understand.

*   *   *

We soon settled into Alistair’s library with a fire roaring in front of us, and the vast expanse of Central Park forming a bleak picture outside the window. It was—almost—like old times. But the memory of something lost added a bittersweet quality to the evening.

I finally spoke. “I want to know if Marie Sanders was right.”

“About what?” he said, refilling his glass of scotch. “I’ve already told you that we made a mistake. Her father was indeed innocent of murdering young Sally Adams, though I didn’t discover that fact until he was in his grave.”

I leaned in closer, warming my hands by the fire. “When Marie made the attempt on your life, she claimed that the four of you had conspired against her father. She said that you planted evidence.”

Alistair sat silent, drinking.

“I’m asking you straight-out if she was telling the truth!”

He returned my gaze with tired eyes. “You assume there’s a simple answer.”

I stared at him in amazement. “Yes, I do. Either you manufactured the evidence that convicted him. Or you didn’t.”

He was silent, so I continued talking. “I’m inclined to agree with Marie Sanders. Because from what I’ve learned about Leroy’s trial, it was the testimony—the
last-minute
testimony—of Harry Blotsky that convinced the jury to convict.”

“I know how it looks,” Alistair snapped. He sniffed his glass of scotch, swirled it, but did not drink. “I’m not proud of the way we handled the Sanders case. We could have done better. I’d like to think I would have, anyway, if we’d been more seasoned in the practice of law.” He stared into the flames. “But the circumstances are more complicated than you might imagine.”

I took a sip from my own glass, savoring the liquid’s slow burn. Then I gave him a steady look. “I’ve got no other plans tonight.”

He sighed before getting up and putting another log on the fire. It crackled in response, spitting flames high into the chimney’s recess.

Finally, he returned to his seat and began talking as though determined to get it over with. “As much as I regret my failures with regard to Leroy Sanders, I can say that his case is responsible for changing my life—at least its professional direction. You see, he is the reason why I first became interested in—obsessed, really—with the criminal mind.”

But I didn’t want to hear a treatise that would make no sense. “I think you ought to start at the beginning. Tell me about how you started the Bellerophon Club.”

“That was so long ago.” His lips curved into a rueful smile—and though I knew it was only the way the light cast shadows that accentuated his graying hair and lined forehead, I thought suddenly that he looked old.

As if he knew my thoughts, he began by saying, “We were impossibly young—not very mature and no doubt far too pleased with ourselves. We were full of our own knowledge and learning, believing that we knew things that nobody else did. That was why we formed Bellerophon. Final clubs were popular, and we thought it was a way to leave a lasting influence on the classes behind us.”

“Why Bellerophon? I meant to ask you earlier and forgot.”

He shrugged. “I came up with it. Took it from Greek mythology, where Bellerophon was a slayer of monsters—including the Chimera, arguably the greatest monster of them all. It symbolized how we viewed ourselves: we were going to slay the criminal monsters of our society and put them away.”

“That doesn’t sound like you,” I said, shaking my head.

“It was at the time. As I said, the mistakes I made with the Sanders case changed me.” He paused a moment, collecting his thoughts. When he spoke again, I could almost imagine him as he must have been, thirty years ago. “We didn’t want to grow up and leave school, I suppose. Even after we had graduated Harvard and taken jobs at the district attorney’s office, we decided to continue meeting at the Lawyers’ Club. We talked about the cases we were working on and complained about our superiors. And we had impossible goals. We knew that every legal case set a precedent for the future, so we thought we could revolutionize our outdated legal system. All foolish dreams—for who were we, that we knew better than all the legal thinkers who had gone before us?”

He stopped again, and this time I noticed his gaze had fallen on the memorial service program from Hugo Jackson’s funeral just two days earlier.

“Tell me about Sanders.” I was almost afraid to breathe, for I didn’t want to disturb his focus.

“Leroy Sanders offered us the perfect opportunity to demonstrate what we had learned. He was—quite literally—the monster we would defeat with the law as our weapon. Sanders was the worst sort of criminal: he had brutally murdered a child. A little girl.”

“Go on.” I leaned forward, listening.

“The case was assigned to Hugo, who almost immediately became frustrated with the limits of the law. Sanders’s propensity for crime was clear. From interviews with his family and friends, we established that he had a long history of unnatural interest in young girls.”

“What do you mean by ‘a long history’?” I asked. “That’s too vague for me to understand.”

Alistair looked at me with somber eyes. “It means that we believed he had killed before. We also knew that he had raped before. I spoke with the victim myself.”

“Impossible! He would have been tried and made to answer for earlier crimes.”

But Alistair slowly shook his head. “The girl that we believed he murdered prior to our case was considered a runaway. She’d had troubled relations with her family, and the police were not inclined to treat her disappearance as anything out of the ordinary. And the girl that he had raped was from a poor immigrant family; they were not up to the task of seeking justice through the courts.”

“You could have brought this up at trial. As prior history, it would be relevant.”

He gave a harsh laugh. “You think we didn’t try? The judge wouldn’t allow it.”

“At sentencing, then.”

“But to get to sentencing, you first have to obtain a conviction.” Alistair rubbed his hands together. “His guilt for the Sally Adams murder was circumstantial, but it seemed unquestionable. Still, hard evidence was lacking. And Hugo was worried.” Alistair reached for the judge’s memorial program and stared at it—then pulled Angus’s program out of his pocket and joined the two together.

“Hugo and Angus didn’t have to do much,” he said. “Juries
want
to put away men like Leroy Sanders if you only give them the ammunition. I suspected what Hugo had done, with Angus’s help, the moment Leroy’s partner appeared out of the blue, ready to testify. Mr. Blotsky’s testimony was too perfect. And the jury believed him.” He gave a deep sigh. “The judge sentenced Sanders to life imprisonment at Auburn and you know the rest.”