The Cabinet of Curiosities

Now working backward, Smithback paged through the city sections, looking for articles on the Museum, the Lyceum, or any mention of Leng, Shottum, or McFadden. It was slow going, and Smithback often found himself sidetracked by various fascinating, but unrelated, articles.

After a few hours, he began to get a little nervous. There were plenty of articles on the Museum, a few on the Lyceum, and even occasional mentions of Shottum and his colleague, Tinbury McFadden. But he could find nothing at all on Leng, except in the reports of the meetings of the Lyceum, where a “Prof. Enoch Leng” was occasionally listed among the attendees. Leng clearly kept a low profile.

This is going nowhere, fast, he thought.

He launched into a second line of attack, which promised to be much more difficult.

Starting in 1917, the date that Enoch Leng abandoned his Doyers Street laboratory, Smithback began paging forward, looking for any murders that fit the profile. There were 365 editions of the Times every year. In those days, murders were a rare enough occurrence to usually land on the front page, so Smithback confined himself to perusing the front pages—and the obituaries, looking for the announcement of Leng’s death which would interest O’Shaughnessy as well as himself.

There were many murders to read about, and a number of highly interesting obituaries, and Smithback found himself fascinated—too fascinated. It was slow going.

But then, in the September 10, 1918, edition, he came across a headline, just below the fold: Mutilated Body in Peck Slip Tenement. The article, in an old-fashioned attempt to preserve readers’ delicate sensibilities, did not go into detail about what the mutilations were, but it appeared to involve the lower back.

He read on, all his reporter’s instincts aroused once again. So Leng was still active, still killing, even after he abandoned his Doyers Street lab.

By the end of the day he had netted a half-dozen additional murders, about one every two years, that could be the work of Leng. There might have been others, undiscovered; or it might be that Leng had stopped hiding the bodies and was simply leaving them in tenements in widely scattered sections of the city. The victims were always homeless paupers. In only one case was the body even identified. They had all been sent to Potter’s Field for burial. As a result, nobody had remarked on the similarities. The police had never made the connection among them.

The last murder with Leng’s modus operandi seemed to occur in 1935. After that, there were plenty of murders, but none involving the “peculiar mutilations” that were Leng’s signature.

Smithback did a quick calculation: Leng appeared in New York in the 1870s—probably as a young man of, say, thirty. In 1935, he would have been about seventy. So why did the murders cease?

The answer was perfectly obvious: Leng had died. He hadn’t found an obituary; but then, Leng had kept such a low profile that an obituary would have been highly unlikely.

So much for Pendergast’s theory, thought Smithback.

And the more he thought about it, the more he felt sure that Pendergast couldn’t really believe such an absurd thing. No; Pendergast was throwing this out as a red herring for some devious purpose of his own. That was Pendergast through and through—artful, winding, oblique. You never knew what he was really thinking, or what his plan was. He would explain all this to O’Shaughnessy the next time he saw him; no doubt the cop would be relieved to hear Pendergast hadn’t gone off the deep end.

Smithback scanned another year’s worth of obituaries, but nothing on Leng appeared. Figures: the guy just cast no shadow at all on the historical record. It was almost creepy.

He checked his watch: quitting time. He’d been at it for ten straight hours.

But he was off to a good start. In one stroke, he’d uncovered another half-dozen unsolved murders which could likely be attributed to Leng. He had maybe two more days before his editor started demanding results. More, if he could show his work was turning up some nuggets of gold.

He eased himself out of the comfortable chair, rubbed his hands together. Now that he’d combed the public record, he was ready to take the next step: Leng’s private record.

One thing the day’s research had revealed was that Leng had been a guest researcher at the Museum. Smithback knew that, back then, all visiting scientists had to undergo an academic review in order to gain unfettered access to the collections. The review gave such details as the person’s age, education, degrees, fields of specialty, publications, marital status, and address. This might lead to other treasure troves of documents—deeds, leases, legal actions, so forth. Perhaps Leng could hide from the public eye—but the Museum’s records would be a different story.

By the time Smithback was done, he would know Leng like a brother.