The Murder of Willie Lincoln Page 10

  “You don’t want Pinkerton to take this over from you.”

  “Would you?”

  “Now”—Nicolay’s expression turned angelic—“I understand. You want to question Watt because Pinkerton told you not to.”

  Hay grinned. “Not only that.”

  “Johnny, you are as transparent as glass.”

  * * *

  Jamie Hall was seated in the waiting room, outside Hay’s office door. Hay glanced over the doctor’s shoulder at the latest edition of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated. The popular weekly lay open to the center spread, a drawing of the swirling eminences in the high-ceilinged East-room during the Hell-cat’s late, unlamented ball. Hay scanned the faces. When Harper’s Weekly had pictured the president’s New Year’s reception, Hay’s delicate face and Nicolay’s Bavarian severity watched from the side. This time, they were thankfully absent. But when Dr. Hall closed the newspaper, Hay saw the headline on the front page and groaned:

  THE PRESIDENTIAL PARTY

  Amid all the hazards of waging a war, this was the last thing they needed. Damn the Hell-cat!

  “We need to talk, suh.”

  In Hay’s office, Dr. Hall said, “The Marsh test, suh. My friend the chemist conducted it this morning. And yes, arsenic. He found it.”

  “A lot?”

  “Enough.”

  Hay felt the news in the pit of his belly. It was one thing for poison to loom as a possibility and another as a proven fact.

  “Would Willie not have tasted it?” Hay said. “It is bitter, yes?”

  “It is, suh, but it can be mixed with something else to soothe the taste.”

  “He was not eating very much, and whatever he was eating was bland.”

  “It also depends on how much was administered, suh. Here, it must have been a little at a time. It took seventeen days to succeed.”

  * * *

  “He is right, you know—Pinkerton is.” Nicolay had a wicked grin.

  Hay stopped brushing his teeth and blew a bubble as he replied, “About what?”

  “That you are an idiot.”

  Hay rinsed his mouth as noisily as he could and spat into the basin. “Any particular reason?” he said. “This time, I mean?”

  “That a plot to hurt the boys would feature as a central element John Watt, our good gardener, hiding behind a shrub.”

  “A spruce.”

  “All right, a spruce.”

  “Let me lay that, if I might, on the frail shoulders of Alexander Williamson. He is the idiot who told me.”

  “And you are the Vidocq who believed him.”

  “I believe in checking out all the possibilities. But yes, I will concede that relying on John Watt standing behind the spruce as the key to a murder plot is the act of a simpleton. Which may or may not make me an—”

  Nicolay broke in, “Which leaves us where?”

  “With John Watt, still. Now we know that he is not simply a blackguard and a padder of invoices and possibly a secessionist but a genuine criminal besides—an extortionist. Who extorted—allegedly extorted—the woman he had tutored in how to steal. He has shown the upstanding character of someone who would murder an innocent boy.”

  “And the opportunity?”

  “Absolutely,” Hay said. “As a gardener, he has easy access to arsenic. And he goes upstairs at least daily, delivering his blasted flowers every morning to Madam President. Wherever there is greenery, John Watt has an excuse to be. Nobody would question it.”

  “And the motive, you say, or at least the desire.”

  “So the tutor says. And on that I do believe him—this grown man Watt screaming at Tad over strawberries.”

  “Oh, the strawberries. Though there are times that I would like to scream at Tad.”

  “And whatever Willie knew about Watt that made him back off,” Hay said. “‘Two plus two is five.’ That could be reason enough to want the boy gone.”

  “But if Willie knew something that terrible about him, the Ancient would have known it, too. And have done something about it.”

  “Not necessarily. He hates doing that sort of thing.”

  “So, whatever Willie knew about Watt’s … doings, you are saying this was a motive for murder?”

  “I am not saying anything. It depends on how much Willie knew. And there is something else about John Watt—his loyalties. Kentucky—that could mean anything. For the Ancient, ’tis one thing; for the Hell-cat, quite another.”

  Hay went on, “And then there’s what ol’ Bowie Knife himself told the Ancient.” He recounted Congressman Potter’s supposed evidence of John Watt’s and Thomas Stackpole’s secessionist leanings. “This, I will inquire about tomorrow. That is a plausible motive, I would say. Besides the fact that he is a despicable man.”

  “John Watt is, or Bowie Knife Potter?”

  “Yes.”

  Chapter Five

  MONDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 1862

  The funeral was to start at two o’clock sharp. Nicolay was off at the cemetery in Georgetown, to make sure the borrowed mausoleum was ready for its temporary tenant.

  This gave Hay time to find John Fox Potter. No self-respecting congressman, much less a committee chairman, would be caught sober at the Capitol at nine o’clock on a Monday morning. The Congressional Directory said he lived at Chipman’s boardinghouse, across Seventh street from the Patent Office, between F and G.

  Hay swiveled in his chair and was rising to his feet—he would have to hail a hack—when a shadow fell over the room. A body blocked the door.

  “The president wishes you to join him, Mister Hay.” Thomas Stackpole’s jowls drooped over his neck.

  “Where?”

  “In the green parlor.”

  Dread. Was Willie-but-not-Willie still there? Could Hay find a way to ask the president if Willie’s knowledge of the gardener’s wrongdoing might have caused…? Hay found it hard to pose the question even to himself.

  He descended the office stairs and crossed to the green parlor door. He remembered feeling wobbly and worse. He turned the knob and pushed the door open. No chemical smell—a relief. The embalming table was gone from the center of the room. In its place was a catafalque. The coffin rested on top; its metal looked like rosewood. The lid was open.

  Inside, white silk billowed up, and Hay had no choice but to look. How untroubled Willie looked. In everyday attire of jacket and trousers, white stockings and low shoes, he looked ready to play. His calm, round face was restful—merely napping, soon to pull his next prank. His brown hair, brushed and parted, gave him away: In life, he was never so neat. That, and the hands crossed on his breast, clutching a bouquet—a camellia, white azaleas, and sprigs of mignonette.

  Hay looked along the length of the short coffin, at the survivor beyond. Lincoln sat slumped in an armless chair, his long, bony fingers clinging to the rim of the casket. Hay took the slat-backed chair to Lincoln’s left and uncharacteristically waited for his elder to speak.

  At last, Lincoln said, “John, do you believe?”

  “Believe … in…?” Hay glanced upward.

  A slight nod.

  Hay said truthfully, “I wish I did.”

  Another nod. In sympathy or in agreement—Hay could not tell.

  “This morning I had a talk with Missus Pomroy, Tad’s new nurse. She will stay with him ’round the clock, up at the cottage.”

  Hay was thrilled; for once, Lincoln had taken his advice, moving Tad away from the potential for danger to the presidential cottage at the Soldiers’ Home. “When?” he said.

  “After.” After the funeral, he meant. “Though I shall hate having him so far away. Nearly an hour’s ride. If he should cry at night. And with Mother so…” Lincoln’s hands flew to his face.

  Hay wanted to stroke the president’s sinewy forearm but did not dare.

  Again, silence. Hay felt his eyes drifting shut when a bang burst from beyond Willie’s feet.

  The door had slammed into the wall. In the entryway stood a quiveri
ng figure in black. Mary Lincoln’s face was contorted with rage. Her hair was wild, and her blue eyes were ablaze. The Hell-cat in full hell-cattishness, beyond self-control—any control. Someone hovered at her shoulder. It was Robert, glowering at his father and at Hay.

  “Mother, you must stay in bed.” Lincoln had leapt to his feet. “Robert, take your mother…”

  Mrs. Lincoln planted herself inside the doorway. “Mister Lincoln, you must not send Tad away. You must not.” Her voice shook; so did her shoulders. “I could not bear…”

  Until now, her gaze had been fixed on her husband. But something caused her to lower her eyes, onto the coffin. She staggered to her side, and Robert grabbed beneath her arm as she sank. Robert was toppling under her weight when two strong arms jutted out—Lincoln had arrived at impossible speed—and lifted his wife to her feet, letting Robert fall to the floor.

  “It was my fault,” she sobbed. “My fault. My fault.”

  “Puss, Puss, Puss,” Lincoln cooed, swallowing her up in his arms.

  “It was the ball. I never should have…”

  “No, no, no, no.”

  Robert, on his feet again, stood by the side door. The airless room, the anguish and intimacy—Hay’s breath grew short. He had fled from this parlor before. This time, he gave the casket a wide berth and had nearly reached the door when there was a shriek at his back: “It was you, John Hay! It was you.”

  Hay turned.

  “Mother!” Lincoln shouted. “Control yourself. This instant.”

  “It was you. It was, it was, it was.” Her cry had turned into a wail. “You will not take Tad from me, too.”

  Hay thought: Too?

  “If you take my Tad from me”—her keening kept on—“I will have nothing, nothing, left.”

  At the corner of Hay’s eye, Robert turned and slunk from the room.

  * * *

  John Fox Potter was not at his boardinghouse. The pinch-faced Mrs. Chipman allowed as to how the congressman had left already—for the Capitol, she presumed. Hay went on to the seat of government, to the House of Representatives side. He climbed the grand staircase and passed through the high wooden doors.

  Inside, everything was marble, remote from the world outside. The vestibule was eerily empty. The House was not scheduled to start its work—work was a leg-pull, Hay thought—until noon. Lawmakers slept late, then started their evenings early.

  Potter was unlikely to be sitting in the empty House chamber. In his office, then—in the attic, the sentry said.

  Hay hurried through a round hall and found a circular stone staircase that belonged in a castle, barely wide enough for two people to pass. The attic was two flights up. He followed the marble passages into a warren of narrow hallways and low ceilings. By the door to a WC, Hay sighted his man.

  “Mister Chairman,” Hay called to the hulking frame.

  The congressman turned and looked down on his interlocutor. A wilderness of whiskers concealed most of his face, other than his furrowed forehead and cavern-deep eyes. “Bowie Knife” Potter was taller and stouter than Hay, but surely a hard right to the ample belly would double him over. Such a silly nickname, in Hay’s mind, and one the congressman bore with too much pride. He had earned it back in ’sixty, when a House debate over slavery provoked a Virginia congressman to challenge him to a duel. Instead of pistols, Potter chose the wide-bladed Bowie knives, which the Virginian deemed uncivilized and backed out. The Wisconsin lawmaker became a hero across the North.

  Hay said, “A mere moment, if you could, sir.” On Capitol Hill, unctuousness was de rigueur.

  “If I can,” Potter replied.

  Not exactly a yes.

  Potter’s hideaway was no larger than a pantry, higher than it was wide. Rickety shelves lined with gray boxes covered the walls. The congressman towered over a desk piled high with yellow flimsies, tamed by a toy cannon on top.

  “What may I do for you, Mister Hay?” said Potter in a tone that implied: or may not.

  “And for the president.”

  “He is taking our investigation seriously, I am pleased to see.”

  “You could say that, I suppose.”

  “I just did.”

  Another reason to dislike the man.

  “I am interested in particular, Mister Chairman”—Hay made sure to use the honorific every sentence or two—“in two of the … your … allegedly … disloyal clerks.”

  “Yours, you mean.”

  Hay nodded rather than admit it. “John Watt—you are aware of his arrest yesterday?”

  Potter looked startled. “I am not surprised in the least,” the congressman recovered. “I warned the president about his traitorous views. In person, man-to-man. And still he refused to—”

  “I am here, am I not? On his behalf. Please, Mister Potter—Mister Chairman—can you tell me what your investigators learned about John Watt?”

  “That he is a venomous, traitorous—”

  “Specifically, Mister Chairman, if you would. If you could.”

  “That he has had intimate relationships with secessionists—a Capitol policeman said so. Plant, I think his name is. We took evidence against more than five hundred government employees, and we have reason to believe that at least three hundred fifty of them are disloyal. You cannot expect me to remember the details on each and every one, Mister Hay. But another witness told us—I believe it was the postmaster of Washington City, Mister Clephane—that the gardener has the reputation of being in league with secessionists.”

  “‘Has the reputation’? ‘In league with’? This isn’t evidence.”

  “Every accusation we make, Mister Hay, carries the accuser’s name. Nothing is concealed or taken on faith. You may value the testimony as you see fit.”

  Hay happened to know that Potter’s investigators had not bothered to verify any of the accusations from men who might have designs on the jobs of the accused. “May I see the affidavits?”

  “A complicated question, as you are doubtless aware. You are asking if the executive branch of government might examine the investigative files compiled by the legislative branch.” Potter had served as a county judge in Wisconsin before running for Congress. “I understand that this president takes an expansive—and quite possibly unconstitutional—view of his constitutional powers. I, however, do not.”

  Constitutional powers. Potter’s price, Hay judged, would be steep. His initial price.

  “The purpose of your investigation, as I understand it, is to compel the government to take action against its disloyal clerks.” Hay spoke with as little expression as he could muster. “Here I am, to take action. The president will do whatever he must to defend the Union. That is the oath he took upon becoming president, and he will fulfill his oath. This, you cannot doubt, sir.”

  “Of course I can,” Potter replied.

  “On what grounds, Mister…?” The honorific would not come.

  “An assessment of character, shall we say?”

  Hay could punch the man or just stalk out—or shift the conversation. He suppressed what he wanted to do. “Did any of your … witnesses”—a nicer word than informers—“suggest that John Watt is intent on harming anyone?”

  “Harming who?”

  Potter was sharper than Hay had assumed. “Anyone.”

  “I would believe anything of the man. Either you are loyal to the Union or you are not. We have evidence that he is not, in the men he keeps around him.”

  “Who were already working with him in the Executive Mansion.”

  “And have remained in their posts. And in Mister Watt’s case, with a military post as well. A traitor is a traitor, Mister Hay. You may not be aware that my ancestors were Puritans.” Hay was unaware but not surprised. “One of them served on the commission that condemned Charles I to the block. There is right, sir, and there is wrong. My ancestor did not compromise with evil, Mister Hay, and neither shall I.” Potter’s words rang with conviction, but he sounded bored, as if he had recited them a
thousand times before. “And your second man?”

  “Thomas Stackpole.”

  “I warned the president about him as well. He is worse.”

  Again, Hay heard a mishmash of half accusations. The president’s doorkeeper had been heard spouting treason and been seen with known (that is, suspected) secessionists. A secesh beyond doubt, he was, in the congressman’s eyes. A dangerous man.

  “How dangerous?” said Hay.

  “Any secesh is dangerous,” Potter said.

  This was not an answer. Hay could not picture either John Watt or Thomas Stackpole slipping arsenic to a boy—well, maybe he could. “I need to see the evidence,” he said.

  They settled on a postmastership in Kenosha, pending the president’s okay.

  * * *

  Black crêpe masked the mirrors; the crêpe on the windows was white. The only sounds in the East-room were footsteps and the occasional cough. Hay sat behind Robert’s right shoulder, hoping to catch his eye. He did not know what he would say, other than his condolences, heartfelt. On both sides of Robert, chairs stood empty, reserved for his parents and surviving brother.

  William Seward leaned across the aisle, fatigue on his clean-shaven face, and mouthed, “How is he?”

  “Persevering,” Hay whispered back.

  A hundred mourners encircled the part of the floor that Willie-but-not-Willie was supposed to—but did not—occupy. The coffin had remained in the green parlor, at the family’s—that is, the father’s—behest. Two and a half minutes before two o’clock, by Hay’s pocket watch, Lincoln shambled in. First Seward, then everyone else, rose from their seats and remained standing until the president seated himself on the aisle, next to Robert. No missus, no Tad. No Willie.

  At two o’clock sharp, the Reverend Gurley strode into the East-room and down the aisle like a bride who fears a jilting. It was not Phineas Gurley’s fault that his parents had given him a name suited to Dickens. Nor could he be blamed for his sloping forehead or bulging eyes. But the curl of his lips, his sprawl of side-whiskers, his archly pious demeanor—on those, Hay felt it fair to hold him to account. That most preachers positioned themselves between God and man—and not necessarily below the midpoint—was a given. Still, it offended Hay how the pastor regarded himself as the president’s intimate, refusing to understand that Lincoln had no intimates.