The Gilded Hour (45 page)

•   •   •

J
ACK
WATCHED
C
ONRAD
Belmont shift in his seat, and he understood the man’s discomfort. In the privacy of a shared bed he could listen to Anna talk about anything, but in company it was quite a different matter to hear her use terminology only she and Sophie would consider technical and benign.

“A curette?” Sophie asked.

“Possibly,” Anna said. “Or a long-handled metal scraper or spoon of some kind.”

“Do I understand correctly that Mrs. Campbell may have undergone the operation to end a pregnancy that didn’t exist in the first place? And this was her own work? Self-induced?”

“I think it must have been,” Anna said. “But I can’t be sure; I was working as fast as possible. The doctors who did the postmortem will have more to say on that count.”

“Was she unbalanced, to have done this?” Conrad asked.

Anna said, “Desperate, certainly. Unbalanced is a different matter entirely.”

Conrad folded his hands on the table and was silent while he gathered his thoughts.

“I’m going to assume for a minute that neither of you has ever been questioned by the coroner before,” he began. “First, you will not be under
oath and you don’t have to answer any question put to you. I’ll speak up if I don’t want you to answer. The other thing to remember—and it’s something most people don’t realize at all: the coroner himself and the lawyers who question you—during this hearing or at trial—are not under oath.”

Jack’s face was set in a grim smile, and Anna took note. She would have questions for him later, when they could speak freely.

O
N
THE
WAY
to the coroner’s office, alone in a cab with Anna, it seemed to Jack that she had regained her calm, or at least to have gotten the upper hand over her anger.

Sophie had changed her clothes before they left for the coroner’s office, but there hadn’t been time for Anna to go home, and so she still wore the pretty gown she had put on this morning for the wedding. It was pale yellow with a raised pattern woven in; there was a name for it that he couldn’t recall just now, and really, he asked himself, why was he worried about fashions at this moment? He wasn’t, of course. His worries were elsewhere.

He covered her hand with his own and could feel how cold it was, even through her glove.

“Are you worried?”

The question surprised him. He said, “I wish we were married already.”

She smiled at him. “You want some kind of legal grounding to stand beside me?”

“Married or not, nothing less than a bullet would move me from where I am right now.”

She drew in a short, startled breath and pressed her forehead to his shoulder. He had robbed her of words and made her forget her question, which was exactly what he hoped to do. The simple truth was, he wasn’t sure he could lie convincingly, and he was glad not to have to admit to her that he was very worried indeed.

•   •   •

F
OR
S
OPHIE
THE
first surprise came before she had even gotten out of the carriage in front of the coroner’s office. Newspaper reporters—too many of them to count—were jostling for position like boys at a baseball game.
They shouted questions before the horses came to a full stop, their voices clashing, tossing up random words impossible to overhear:
Dr. Savard
and
Cap Verhoeven
and
coroner
and
malpractice
and
marriage
. She wondered if the day’s scandals might even warrant an extra edition.

“Don’t,” Cap said. “Don’t engage them in any way.”

“Try to keep your face neutral,” Conrad said. He sat across from her, his hat resting on his lap. “Don’t respond to even the simplest question. Don’t scowl, but don’t smile, either.”

Sophie swallowed hard to make sure her voice wouldn’t wobble. “I will do my best.”

Cap was sitting tucked back into the corner of the leather cushions, his lower face still masked. Sophie saw now that it was flecked with a fine spray of blood.

“You should be at home,” she said. “Right now, turn the carriage around and go home.”

“Nonsense.” The gauze mask puckered when he smiled. “I am perfectly comfortable right here. We’ll drive off a ways and come back to wait around the corner. Then I’ll nap while we wait. Anna and Jack are here. Best to get inside as soon as possible.”

The second surprise was the coroner’s clerk, who was polite and even deferential. Mr. Horner greeted them in a deep, damaged voice and bowed to Sophie and Anna solemnly, without a trace of condescension or mockery. He was a tall, cadaverously thin man, dressed in an ancient black suit carefully pressed and brushed. The knotted wide linen tie at his neck didn’t quite cover a winding scar, as thick and pale as a slug, reaching almost from one ear to the other. A veteran of the war, as were most men of his age.

Anna was studying Mr. Horner too, and Sophie knew her cousin was trying to work out for herself what injury the clerk had suffered, what the surgeon had done, and whether she could have done a better job and left less of a scar. This small evidence that Anna was, as always, more interested in practicing medicine than talking about it gave Sophie a way to focus her thoughts.

The issue before them was medical in nature, and medicine was her field.

They were shown into a meeting room that smelled of stale tobacco and sweat: damp walls, peeling paint, windows grimy with soot, the floorboards warped. City Hall always seemed to be rotting from the inside out.

Conrad’s clerk was already in place, arranging papers and notepads, ink bottles and pens.

Mr. Horner withdrew, closing the door behind himself, and their small party took seats around the industrious Mr. York, Conrad’s law clerk, who had managed to gather a great deal of information in very little time.

“The autopsy report,” he said, pushing a closely written sheet of paper into the middle of the table. “It might be best if one of the physicians read it out loud, sir.”

Anna took it up, to Sophie’s great relief. She thought her own voice would waver, and she didn’t want to give away her fear, not even to her own people.

As soon as Anna began to read, Mr. York turned to the business of making notes, his head lowered over the paper before him.

“It’s dated seven this morning,” Anna said, and read on quickly, stopping to summarize. “He notes normal signs of multiple pregnancies and a recent birth. This is a very blunt, technical document, I should warn you.”

“Read on,” Conrad said. “You needn’t worry about offending anyone here.”

Anna cleared her throat and did as she was asked.

The abdomen shows a standard laparoscopic incision neatly closed which I reopen. I find a puncture wound that passed through the cervix to tear the uterine wall from horn to horn made by an instrument similar in shape to a curette or probe. After sectioning and removal of the reproductive organs, intestinal and mesenteric injuries corresponding to the uterine perforation are visible. A four-inch-long piece of the ileum is torn from the mesentery. Visceral and parietal peritoneum is filled with yellow exudate, fecal matter, serum, albumin, and approximately two quarts of pus. A displaced intestinal loop was covered by fibrino-purulent deposits.

The other abdominal organs showed no irregularities, and beyond these, none other were examined, sufficient injuries being found in the reproductive organs to reach a conclusion.

Cause of death: Shock, septic peritonitis, and blood loss due to an illegal, negligent, and incompetent operation carried out by person or
persons unknown between twenty-four and forty-eight hours previous to death.

•   •   •

“I
T
’
S
SIGNED
D
R
. Donald Manderston,” she finished. “I don’t know the man. Sophie?”

She shook her head. “The name sounds familiar, but no.”

“At least now we know why we’re here,” Conrad said. “The sticking point is
person or persons unknown
. Mrs. Campbell’s injuries were not of her own making, in other words. They’re looking for her abortionist.”

“Only if you accept Manderston’s premise,” Sophie said, irritation blooming in her voice in a way she couldn’t temper. “Will this Dr. Manderston be here to answer questions?”

“Oh, yes,” Conrad said. “Here they come now. But Sophie, my dear. Leave the asking of questions to me.”

•   •   •

O
SCAR
WAS
THE
last man through the door, winded and windblown, a welcome face for all its ill humor. Somehow or another he had managed to insert himself into this matter, which was a stroke of luck. Another detective might not be quite so forthcoming as Oscar would be when Jack hit him with some difficult questions.

First and foremost, he wanted to know why it was that an assistant district attorney had taken a seat right next to the coroner. A district attorney meant that this wasn’t a simple meeting to clear up a few questions. A district attorney meant blood in the water. In the company of police and prosecutors, the words
person or persons unknown
were as much as a red flag to a bull. The coroner’s mind-set would be pivotal, and the coroner was an unknown.

Jack studied the man. He had very little to distinguish him beyond a mane of gray hair and an unruly beard. Together they hid almost every inch of skin, while pince-nez spectacles wedged between two lowering brows caught the sun and made it difficult to see the man’s eyes. Jack imagined, very briefly, a barber advancing on that wealth of hair with weapons at the ready.

Hawthorn introduced everyone in the room, starting with two stout, expensively dressed men, the physician Manderston, who had done the postmortem, and someone called Frank Heath, apparently Mrs.
Campbell’s physician prior to Sophie. Manderston seemed half-asleep, while Heath was agitated and jumpy. He had nodded at Anna and Sophie with obvious reluctance and something far short of the courtesy professionals owed each other.

Then Hawthorn turned to his left. “And District Attorney Mayo has joined us.”

Conrad Belmont sat up straighter. “This is a simple inquiry, as I understood it. Why is the district attorney here, if I may inquire?”

“I asked him to join us,” the coroner said shortly. “And now I’d like to get started. This is a sad business before us, one that requires some examination before it can be settled. We’ll work backward, I think. Dr. Anna Savard, you were the last physician to treat the deceased. Can you provide some information on your background and training?”

Some of the nervous energy that Anna had been unable to completely govern seemed to disappear, now that the questioning had begun. She simply provided information: what and where and with whom she had studied, her exams and qualifications, hospitals and clinics where she had seen patients, her experiences as a surgeon, organizations that she belonged to, and finally she mentioned her time studying in Vienna, Berlin, and Birmingham, England.

Jack had heard all of this before, and so he concentrated on the faces of the men around the table. There was little to make out about the coroner’s mind-set, hidden as he was behind his beard. The clerks—three of them, Jack counted—wore identical blank expressions as they scratched away. John Mayo gave away only slightly more, but Heath’s and Manderston’s feelings about what they were hearing were plain to see. When Anna mentioned working in England with a Dr. Tait, Manderston sat up straight and pointed at her.

“Your name was familiar to me, and now I realize why. You tried to poach one of my patients. A Mrs. Drexel. You tried to get her to leave my care.”

Jack saw Anna’s brow crease in confusion, and then just as suddenly, clear. “You are mistaken,” she said calmly, but two red spots had appeared on her cheeks. “Dr. Tait referred Mr. Drexel to me, and he wrote asking me to consult on his wife’s case. I replied. I never heard from him again, and I never approached him or his wife. In fact, I suspected that letter to be one of Mr. Comstock’s falsifications designed to entrap doctors.”

Jack wondered if Anna and Sophie would be relieved to know for sure that the referral had not been one of Comstock’s tricks. Instead it had just been a man’s reluctance to let a woman physician treat his wife.

Manderston sat back, arms crossed on his chest. “So you say.”

Hawthorn rapped on the table with his fist. “Dr. Manderston, please remember why we are here. Whatever issues you have to discuss with Dr. Savard must wait. Now Dr. Savard Verhoeven, may we hear from you?”

Sophie’s description of her training and experience met with even less approval from Manderston and Heath, who had begun to shift in their chairs. A question from the coroner changed all that.

“Dr. Heath, you were Mrs. Campbell’s physician of record until recently. How long had you been treating her?”

“She was my patient from the time of her marriage when she first came to this city. I last saw her in February, when she was near to term on her last pregnancy.”

“But you didn’t attend that birth.”

“No,” Heath said. “I had to be out of town. Miss Savard—Mrs. Verhoeven agreed to go in my place.”

“Dr. Verhoeven,” Conrad corrected, his voice carrying sharply.

“Dr. Verhoeven,” Heath echoed with a sour twist of his mouth. “Dr. Verhoeven attended the birth. That was all it was supposed to be. I didn’t think she’d have the gall to steal my patient.”

Belmont said, “Dr. Heath is making unsubstantiated accusations. Unless he has evidence that Mrs. Campbell was somehow coerced into seeing Dr. Verhoeven?”

Heath frowned, but had nothing to say.

“As I thought,” Belmont said. “If I may ask a question, Dr. Heath. How did you find Mrs. Campbell when you last saw her?”

He seemed ready for this question. “She was healthy, no sign or indication of trouble.”

“And her state of mind?”

Now he did look surprised, as if he had never heard such a question before. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“It’s not an unreasonable question,” the coroner said.

“She seemed herself. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

Jack sat back and folded his hands across his midsection, ready to sit
through what promised to be one of Belmont’s infamous wandering explorations, designed, it seemed to Jack, to extract information by artful prodding. Within a half hour he had Heath tripping over his own tongue, admitting that he didn’t know about Mrs. Campbell’s state of mind because he hadn’t asked her, and he hadn’t asked her because, well, he said, turning a hand, palm up, what difference did it make?

After a short silence the coroner turned to Sophie. “Dr. Verhoeven, you delivered Mrs. Campbell in March, as I understand it.”