The Alienist (40 page)

CHAPTER 34

T
o judge by the dilapidated state of his barns, fences, and wagons, as well as the absence of any assistants or particularly healthy-looking animals, Adam Dury had not made much of a go of his little dairy cattle enterprise. Few people live in closer proximity to life’s grimmer realities than do poor farmers, and the atmosphere of such places is inevitably sobering: Kreizler’s and my excitement at actually laying eyes on the man we’d traveled a fairly long way to find was immediately tempered by appreciation of his circumstances, and after getting down from the surrey and telling our driver to wait, we approached him slowly and carefully.

“Excuse me—Mr. Dury?” I said, as the fellow continued to struggle with the old horse’s left foreleg. The fly-ridden brown beast, its hide bare in several spots where a yolk would have rested, appeared to have absolutely no interest in making its master’s task any easier.

“Yes,” the man answered sharply, still showing us nothing more than the back of his balding head.

“Mr. Adam Dury?” I inquired further, trying to induce him to turn around.

“You must know that, if you’ve come to see me,” Dury answered, finally dropping the horse’s leg with a grunt. He stood up, rising to a height of well over six feet and then slapped the horse’s neck, half in anger and half affectionately. “This one thinks he’ll die before me, anyway,” he mumbled, still facing the horse, “so why should he be cooperative? But we’ve both got many more years of this to go, you old…” Dury finally turned round, revealing a head whose skin was so tightly drawn that it appeared little more than a flesh-colored skull. Large yellow teeth filled the mouth, and the almond-shaped eyes were of a lifeless blue tint. His arms were powerfully developed, and the fingers of his hands as he wiped them on his worn overalls seemed remarkably long and thick. He took our measures with a squinting grimace that was neither friendly nor hostile. “Well? What can I do for you two gentlemen?”

I moved directly—and, if I may say so, gracefully—into the bit of subterfuge that Laszlo and I had worked out on the Boston train. “This is Dr. Laszlo Kreizler,” I said, “and my name is John Schuyler Moore. I’m a reporter for
The New York Times.
” I found my billfold and revealed some professional identification. “A police reporter, actually. My editors have assigned me to investigate some of the more—well, to come to the point, some of the more outstanding unsolved cases of recent decades.”

Dury nodded, a bit suspiciously. “You’ve come to ask about my parents.”

“Indeed,” I answered. “You’ve no doubt heard, Mr. Dury, of the recent investigations into the conduct of the New York City Police Department.”

Dury’s thin eyes went even thinner. “The case was none of their affair.”

“True. But my editors are concerned with the fact that so many noteworthy cases are never pursued or solved by law enforcement agencies
throughout
the state of New York. We’ve decided to review several and see what’s happened in the years since their occurrence. I wonder if you’d mind just going over the basic facts of your parents’ death with us?”

All the features of Dury’s face seemed to shift and resettle in a kind of wave, as if a shudder of pain had rippled through him quickly. When he spoke again, the tone of distrust had vanished from his voice, to be replaced only by resignation and sorrow. “Who could have any interest now? It’s been more than fifteen years.”

I attempted sympathy, as well as moral indignation: “Does time justify the lack of a solution, Mr. Dury? And you are not alone, remember—others have seen murderous acts go unsolved and unavenged, and they’d like to know why.”

Dury weighed the matter for another moment, then shook his head. “That’s their business. I’ve got no desire to talk about it.”

He began to move away; knowing New Englanders as well as I did, however, I’d anticipated this reaction. “There would, of course,” I announced calmly, “be a fee.”

That got him: he paused, turned, and eyed me again. “Fee?”

I gave him a friendly smile. “A consulting fee,” I said. “Nothing excessive, mind you—say, one hundred dollars?”

Aware that such a sum would, in fact, mean a great deal to a man in his straits, I was not surprised to see Dury’s almond eyes jump. “One hundred dollars?” he echoed in quiet disbelief. “For
talking
?”

“That’s right, sir,” I answered, producing the sum from my billfold.

Thinking it all over just a bit more, Dury finally took the money. Then he turned to his horse, swatted its rump, and sent it off to graze on a few patches of grass that grew near the edge of the yard. “We’ll talk in the barn,” he said. “I’ve got work to do, and I can’t ignore it for the sake of”—he took heavy steps away from us through the sea of manure—“ghost stories.”

Kreizler and I followed, much relieved at the apparent success of the bribe. Concern returned, however, when Dury spun round at the barn door.

“Just a minute,” he said. “You say this man’s a doctor? What’s his interest?”

“I make a study of criminal behavior, Mr. Dury,” Laszlo answered smoothly, “as well as of police methods. Mr. Moore has asked me to provide expert advice for his article.”

Dury accepted that, though it seemed that he didn’t much like Kreizler’s accent. “You’re German,” he said. “Or maybe Swiss.”

“My father was German,” Kreizler answered. “But I was raised in this country.”

Dury seemed ill satisfied by Kreizler’s explanation, and silently walked on into the barn.

Inside that creaky structure the stench of manure grew stronger, softened only by the sweet aroma of hay, a store of which was visible in the loft above us. The bare plank walls of the building had once been whitewashed, but most of the paint had fallen away to reveal roughly grained wood. A chicken coop was visible through one four-foot doorway, the gurgles and clucks of its occupants floating out toward us. Harnesses, scythes, shovels, picks, mauls, and buckets were everywhere, hanging from the walls and the low roof or lying on the earthen floor. Dury went directly over to a very old manure spreader, the axle of which was propped up on a pile of rocks. Taking up a mallet and slamming away at the wheel that faced us, our host eventually forced it from its mount. Dury then hissed in disgust and began to fuss with the end of the axle.

“All right,” he said, grabbing a bucket of heavy grease and never looking our way. “Ask your questions.”

Kreizler nodded to me, indicating that it might be best if I took the lead in the questioning. “We’ve read the newspaper accounts that appeared at the time,” I said. “I wonder if you might tell us—”

“Newspaper accounts!” Dury grunted. “I suppose you’ve also read, then, that the fools suspected
me
for a time.”

“We’ve read that there was gossip,” I answered. “But the police said that they never—”

“Believed it? Not much, they didn’t. Only enough to send two of their men all the way over here to harass my wife and myself for three days!”

“You’re married, Mr. Dury?” Kreizler asked quietly.

For just a second or two, Dury eyed Laszlo, again resentfully. “I am. Nineteen years, not that it’s any business of yours.”

“Children?” Kreizler asked, in the same cautious tone.

“No,” came the hard answer. “We—that is, my wife—I—no. We have no children.”

“But I take it,” I said, “that your wife was able to attest to your being here when the—the terrible incident occurred?”

“That didn’t mean much to those idiots,” Dury answered. “A wife’s testimony counts for little or nothing in a court of law. I had to ask a neighbor of mine, a man who lives nearly ten miles away, to come and verify that we were pulling a stump together on the very day my parents were murdered.”

“Do you know why the police should have been so hard to convince?” Kreizler asked.

Dury slammed his mallet down on the ground. “I’m sure you read about
that,
too.
Doctor.
It was no secret. There’d been bad blood between my parents and myself for many years.”

I held a hand up to Kreizler. “Yes, we saw some mention of such,” I said, trying to coax more details out of Dury. “But the police accounts were very vague and confused, and it was difficult to draw any conclusions. Which seems remarkable, given that the question was vital to the investigation. Maybe you could make it a little clearer for us?”

Lifting the manure spreader’s wheel onto a workbench, Dury began to pound at it again. “My parents were hard people, Mr. Moore. They had to be, to make the trip to this country and survive the life they chose for themselves. But while I can say that now, such explanations are quite beyond a small boy who—” A blast of passionate language seemed about to escape the man, but he held it down with obvious effort. “Who only hears a cold voice. And only feels a thick strap.”

“Then you
were
beaten,” I said, thinking back to Kreizler’s and my original speculations after first reading of the Dury murders in Washington.

“I wasn’t referring to myself, Mr. Moore,” Dury answered. “Though God knows neither my father nor my mother ever shrank from punishing me when I misbehaved. But that was not what caused our—estrangement.” He looked out a small, filthy window for a moment, then pounded at the wheel again. “I had a brother. Japheth.”

Kreizler nodded as I said, “Yes, we read about him. Tragic. You have our sympathy.”

“Sympathy? I suppose. But I’ll tell you this, Mr. Moore—whatever those savages did to him was no more tragic than what he endured at the hands of his own parents.”

“He suffered cruelties?”

Dury shrugged. “Some might not call them such. But I did, and do still. Oh, he was a strange lad, in some respects, and the ways in which my parents reacted to his behavior might have seemed—natural, to an outsider. But it wasn’t. No, sir, there was the devil in it all, somewhere…” Dury’s attention wandered for a moment, but then he shook it off. “I’m sorry. You wanted to know about the case.”

I spent the next half hour asking Dury some obvious questions about what had happened on that day in 1880, requesting clarification of details that we were not, in fact, confused about, as a method of concealing our true interests. Then I managed, by asking him why any Indians should have wanted to kill his parents, to lead him into a more detailed discussion of what life in his home during the Minnesota years had been like. From there, it was no great job to expand the discussion to a history of the family’s private dealings more generally. As Dury related these, Laszlo stealthily withdrew his small notebook and began to silently scribble a record of the account:

Though born in New Paltz in 1856, Adam Dury’s earliest memories dated back only as far as his fourth year, when his family had relocated to Fort Ridgely, Minnesota, a military post inside that state’s Lower Sioux Agency. The Durys lived in a one-room log house about a mile outside the fort, the kind of residence that afforded young Adam an excellent vantage point from which to study his parents and their relationship. His father, as Kreizler and I already knew, was a strictly religious man, who made no attempt to sugarcoat the sermons he delivered to those curious Sioux who came to hear him speak. Yet Laszlo and I were both surprised to learn that, despite this vocational rigidity, the Reverend Victor Dury had not been especially cruel or violent to his older son; rather, Adam said that his earliest memories of his father were happy ones. True, the reverend could deliver painful punishments when required; but it was usually Mrs. Dury who called for such action.

As he spoke of his mother, Adam Dury’s aspect grew darker and his voice became far more hesitant, as if even her memory held some tremendous threatening power over him. Cold and strict, Mrs. Dury had apparently not offered her son much in the way of comfort or nurturing during his youth; indeed, as I listened to his description of the woman, I couldn’t help but think back to Jesse Pomeroy.

“Much as it pained me to be shunned by her,” Dury said, as he attempted to fit the now-repaired wheel back onto the manure spreader, “I believe her remote spirit hurt my father even more—for she was no real wife to him. Oh, she performed all the menial domestic duties, and kept a very tidy home, despite our meager circumstances. But when your family lives in one small room, gentlemen, you cannot help but be aware of the—the more intimate dimension of your parents’ marriage. Or the lack thereof.”

“You’re saying they weren’t close?” I asked.

“I’m saying that I don’t know why she married him,” Dury answered gruffly, making the axle and wheel before him bear the brunt of his sadness and anger. “She could scarcely abide his slightest touch, much less his—his attempts to build a family. My father, you see, wanted children. He had ideas—dreams, really—of sending his sons and daughters out into the western wilderness to expand and carry on his work. But my mother…Their every attempt was an ordeal for her. Some of these she suffered through, and some she—resisted. I honestly do not know why she ever took the vow. Except—when he preached…My father was quite an orator, in his way, and my mother attended nearly every service he ever held. She did seem to enjoy that part of his life, strangely enough.”

“And after you returned from Minnesota?”

Dury shook his head bitterly. “After we returned from Minnesota things deteriorated completely. When my father lost his post he lost the only human connection he had to my mother. They rarely spoke in the years after that, and never touched, not that I can recall.” He looked up at the filthy window. “Except once…”

He paused for several seconds, and to urge him on I murmured: “Japheth?”

Dury nodded, slowly rousing himself from his sad reverie. “I’d taken to sleeping outdoors when it was warm enough. Near the mountains—the Shawangunks. My father had learned the sport of mountaineering in Switzerland from his own father, and the Shawangunks were an ideal spot to keep his hand in, as well as to pass the techniques on to me. Though I was never very good at it, I always went along with him, because they were happier times—away from the house and that woman.”

If the words had been explosives I don’t think their concussion could have hit Kreizler and me any harder. Laszlo’s weak left arm shot out, and his hand grabbed my shoulder with surprising force. Dury saw none of it and, unaware of the effect his words were having on us, continued: