In the Shadow of Gotham (22 page)

“You gave me a hard time then, because you didn’t see much distinction between attempted and actual murder,” he said. “Yet I came to you because I had heard about the way you responded to new ideas. My contacts in the police department said you had quite a reputation for it, and were willing to learn in a way more seasoned members of the force would not. I felt you would be capable of understanding why the things I wanted to learn from Michael Fromley were so important.”

“Yes,” I said, impatient with his flattery. “But I would never sacrifice justice for the sake of knowledge. And I would never endanger the life of another human being for it. Tell me that is not exactly what you have done here!” I knew I sounded judgmental and I could not help myself. “Tell me the truth about Moira Shea,” I demanded, “the full story, with nothing omitted this time.”

He banged his fist on the table in response, jostling our glasses of beer. “Simon, don’t be so damned single-minded. You have the capacity to see and understand the moral complexities here—I know you do, because I chose you for it.”

“What do you mean, that you ‘chose me’ for it?” I demanded. “You couldn’t possibly have chosen me for anything. A young
woman had the misfortune to be murdered within my jurisdiction. You contacted me only some hours after the murder. If you had relevant information, then you had no choice but to deal with me.”

Yet the thought occurred to me: Was it possible the man had manipulated me to an even greater extent than I already recognized?

Alistair was adamant. “Absolutely not true. For a man with my contacts, a couple of hours were sufficient to learn all I needed to know about you. I could have gone to Chief Healy, though his suspicions of me are probably worse than your own. And given my contacts in Yonkers—a larger jurisdiction than yours that has aided you with the case—I could certainly have handpicked someone there. But I chose you. Because I was told you had the intellectual capacity to understand the importance of my work. And my work is not so far from your own interests. Why, our paths might have crossed naturally, had you not had to leave Columbia.”

I simply stared. I had no idea how he had managed to learn of that part of my life, and I resented him the more for knowing it. Somehow it seemed a double betrayal: that he had taken advantage of me both professionally and personally by withholding information he knew to be important.

“Yes,” he continued, “I know all about how your father gambled away everything and left your mother. You had to leave college to support her and your sister, didn’t you? Pity—it was a damned waste of a fine opportunity, if you ask me.” He took another sip from his beer. “I even know what happened the day of the
Slocum
steamship disaster. You had business uptown at the Thirty-fourth Precinct. When the call came in, you joined a group of police-commandeered rescue boats. I hear you helped
rescue many survivors. But your fiancée didn’t make it; she was among the thousand who perished.”

It was private information he should not have had, and I felt myself shaking with rage as unwanted flashes of memory distracted me. Alistair was partially right; I had been meeting with another officer from the Thirty-fourth Precinct to discuss a rash of robberies that spanned our jurisdictions. An officer walking his beat had called in with news of the burning steamship. I joined a number of others who sped to the waterfront near 138th Street to help. We had saved a number of people, but I had pushed to get closer and closer to the burning ship. Pushed too hard, those with me said—because I risked destroying our boat and the lives of everyone on it.

I took a series of deep breaths and forced myself to refocus on the present. Alistair wanted only to distract me and change the subject—something I would not allow.

“Enough of this talk. Either tell me about Moira Shea now, or I will go straight to my old precinct and find out from them. And I will be sure to share everything I have heard tonight about your role in suppressing information you obtained about her murder.”

It was not an empty threat, and he knew it.

He drummed his fingers on the table, glancing over toward the crowd at the bar as if to ascertain whether anyone was listening. But the assorted men gathered there had taken little if any notice of us; they were fully occupied in singing various Irish tunes in even more varied keys.

I looked at Alistair, waiting expectantly. After a moment, he cleared his throat and at last began to tell me what I wanted—yet dreaded—to hear.

“You must believe me, I didn’t know about Moira Shea
when I first made the arrangements for Michael Fromley in the Smedley case. When I spoke with Fromley’s half brother Clyde Wallingford, when I argued that the prosecutor should drop all charges, and even during our first few months working with Michael—I never heard a word about Moira Shea. The Catherine Smedley case was weak, and the other crimes of which he had been accused were minor.”

“Did you bribe or otherwise influence the judge in the Smedley case?”

“No,” Alistair said heatedly. “Who told you that lie?”

“Judge Hansen is a close friend of yours, however,” I said.

“Our families have known each other for years but that does not mean I acted unethically. The attempted-murder charge was dismissed because it was weak. And Michael’s plea on the lesser charges—the plea that released him to my custody—was perfectly aboveboard.”

I persisted. “I understand the original prosecutor was removed from the case against his will.” I looked at my notes. “That would have been Frank Hogart, with a stellar record of convictions and a reputation for tenacity. I believe you found the second-year rookie from the DA’s office to be more amenable to dismissing the major charge.”

Alistair looked at me with a pained expression. “The district attorney’s office shuffles schedules all the time. Personally, I think for all his bluster and complaints, Hogart didn’t
want
the case. Had it gone to trial, it might have blemished his perfect conviction record, for the evidence simply wasn’t there. And it would have hurt his tougher-than-nails image if he himself permitted the dismissal.”

He sighed deeply. “Michael did not confess to the Shea murder for nearly a year. He told Fred during a session in October
1903. Fred came to me at once, worried about the legal implications for us.” He leaned in even closer to my ear. “If we believed his ‘confession,’ then we were concerned we may have had an ethical obligation to report it.”

“
May
have had?”

“Yes,” Alistair repeated firmly, “
may
have had. It is difficult to explain without going over the entire case history, but Michael Fromley is a young man who maintains a very fragile distinction between fantasy and reality. Just because he says a thing, why should we believe it? How could we be certain that what he confessed to us about murdering Moira Shea was the truth—and not simply another instance of his active fantasy life?”

“Is a dead body not certainty enough?” I said. “All
you
needed to determine the truth was to consult whatever police ‘source’ was so forthcoming about the Wingate case in Dobson. The source could have confirmed whether a murder victim named Moira Shea ever existed.”

“And I did just that,” Alistair said, defensive now, “but what you fail to grasp is that such knowledge did not resolve the issue. Of course, I consulted the police. And I reviewed the crime logs of the
Times
and the
World.
There was nothing the police told me—and nothing Michael told me—that was not also public knowledge, reported in the pages of every press in the city. A girl named Moira Shea had been slashed to death in an empty warehouse by the river. And she had last been seen getting onto the subway. Were these circumstances in keeping with Michael’s disturbing fantasies? To be sure. And yet”—he leaned into the table again, his voice dropping as he realized he had been talking rather loudly—“how could Fred and I say with any certainty that Michael had not simply borrowed his confession from the
pages of the
Herald
? He was constantly feeding his imagination with clippings from the newspapers and magazines. Could we be sure he had actually committed this crime? Or—had he merely
wished
he had done so,
imagined
he had done so, because it so perfectly complemented his fantasies?”

“How about physical evidence?” I was angry now, too. “Or witnesses. Anything that may have placed Fromley at the scene. The police might have figured it out, had you properly reported what you knew.”

“Please,” Alistair said, “give me some credit for thinking through these issues. When he confessed to us in October 1903, it was well over a year after Moira Shea was killed in August 1902. You know perfectly well how ill preserved most crime scenes are, even a day after the crime occurs.”

He was right. The time span was a long one, and the lack of interest in physical evidence had been my greatest frustration at the department.

“But you might have given it a chance,” I argued. “There may have been other physical evidence to link him to the crime that was preserved. It could have been reexamined in light of what you knew.”

“You are missing an important point,” Alistair said, going on to explain. “There were discrepancies between Michael’s account and certain details about the Shea murder. He convinced us of his motivation, and certainly Moira Shea’s death was consistent with his choice of weapon. But he kept changing the details: the time of day the attack occured; what Miss Shea was wearing. These are important details the murderer should have known. It was established that she had taken a one o’clock train, and she had worn a yellow shirtwaist and dark skirt. Michael
should have been clear about these details—and yet he was not. That led us to doubt the veracity of his confession.”

But it was Alistair who missed the most important point. I said, “So you were reluctant to act because Michael’s confession may have been false. Still, it was not your call to make; didn’t it occur to you to speak with the police? Or even your old friend Judge Hansen might have reminded you of your responsibilities. To keep quiet was nothing short of obstruction of justice.”

He flushed ever so slightly. “My other concern involved the importance of our work. To make an issue of Michael’s guilt would be tantamount to throwing away significant research that could do tremendous good. To risk that was virtually unthinkable.” His tone was firm. “At first, I was despondent, believing all our work had been for naught. We had believed Michael was a criminal-in-the-making, not yet fully formed, which offered us a chance to test rehabilitative measures in a way never before done. Suddenly, our research risked being invalidated—for if Michael had crossed the line and committed murder, then what good was our research? Our efforts had been directed toward preventing him from acting on his violent fantasies.”

He paused a moment, and then continued with growing excitement. “Then it occurred to me: It was only our research
premise
that had to change. We could begin with the assumption that Michael Fromley may have been a murderer when we commenced work. How much more impressive, then, if we rehabilitated him! We would have every prison program in the country clamoring at our door for information about rehabilitation. Every psychologist would come to consult Fred about what treatment approach worked. Every jurist would analyze the implications for sentencing. Sociologists would be able to reframe questions
about how the criminal is shaped, and economists might begin to analyze the cost savings to society of lower crime rates. We might have achieved something truly groundbreaking, if only—”

Here, I interrupted with my own sentiments. “If only you hadn’t lost track of this confessed murderer and let him loose on an unsuspecting public. How could you think, even for a moment, that your research was more important than such a risk to human life?”

He replied quietly, “Of course I did not. I never expected it to come to that.”

“And putting aside your decision to keep quiet when you first learned of Michael’s confession, you didn’t even report the danger he posed when he went missing two weeks ago.”

“We sincerely believed he was on his way to a successful rehabilitation. We did not think he posed a substantial risk.”

I shot back, “But you were worried enough that you contacted the police each day, simply to reassure yourself that no criminal incident in the police blotter could be attributed to him. You did that much, yet you could not sound the alert that would have required the police to search for him and perhaps keep him out of trouble in the first place.”

“If you’re not going to listen to reason, there is little point in continuing this conversation,” he said.

“I am listening,” I said. “Listening attentively, and with a great desire to understand. But the choices you’ve made strike me as so reckless that it is difficult to do so.”

Both of us sat in silence, thinking. We were at an impasse.

“I need to know just one more thing,” I said quietly. “Had you known about Moira Shea from the beginning, would you still have facilitated the dismissal of charges against Michael Fromley and accepted him into your custody?”

His answer was important to my judgment of him, for in my mind, the question of his intent was crucial. Had Alistair made reckless decisions along the way because he had been blinded by the importance of his research? Or, was his hubris so large that he believed his own intellectual pursuits were all-important, and the rest of the world be damned?

There was a long moment’s pause as I waited for his reply.