Page 22 of If Looks Could Kill

They arrest him again, on a charge of indecency.

Some complaint from a landlady—not the laundress, but another one; he had so many—with objections to his nightly activities, his comings and goings, his private amusements.

That was the nuisance about his ambulatory ways, his dependence upon landlords.

Someone else’s fussy, snoopy moralizing always hung over him.

But so be it. He can afford the legal counsel he’ll need to put this matter behind him.

In the meantime, though, a cold and unpleasant night behind bars. And worse, the nagging suspicion that they don’t really care about the indecency matter. That’s a ruse, a sleight of hand. They’re still hunting down the eccentric American doctor believed to be capable of the Whitechapel horrors.

Plenty of “experts” wrote letters to the editors of the newspapers insisting that only a doctor had enough anatomical knowledge to perform the extractions the Ripper had, and in the dark, no less, with such speed and stealth.

Which just proved what he’d always said: his own self-teaching was far superior to the quackery at their so-called schools of medicine.

Trained surgeons were little better than butchers, and with far less artistry.

They should’ve trusted him, during the war, to act as a surgeon in army hospitals.

If he can do what he’s doing now, in silent haste and the dark of night, think how many lives he could have saved!

But the world isn’t ready for him. His luster threatens lesser men, so they push away his light, to their own detriment. It’s always been this way.

There will be a hearing soon, some appearance before a judge or magistrate, and he will post his bail and go.

Go home. He won’t wait for a trial. The water here in Mother England is getting a bit too hot to swim.

His talents need a wider scope, and New York alone has plenty of slums of its own where females go to disappear, where one body, more or less, may make a splash in the papers, but is hardly missed and soon forgotten.

Police may not care to notice, and if they do, Lower East Side cops are easily bought in cases such as these.

They’re only women, after all.