The Attempted Murder of Teddy Roosevelt Read online

  “He would know the exact spot where the carriage would be crossing the tracks.”

  “He would know anyway,” Chief Nicholson pointed out. “It’s his route.”

  “I defer to you on that,” I said. “But I want to know if he opened the map to look at it. Maybe he wanted to make sure of something. And I want to know if he just lied to us. If he lied about that, he might lie about anything.”

  “Maybe he plucked the twenty-dollar bill out and gave it back.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But why not give back the whole packet. Instead, he gave back the twenty dollars—he and Hull agree on that. He didn’t need it, that’s what he told Hull. No wonder. Three thousand dollars just dropped into his lap. But then he stuffed the map into his seat. Why would he bother?”

  “Maybe not to trash up the floor? Maybe as proof of bribery, should the need arise?”

  Maybe, maybe, maybe. Something, I felt, wasn’t right. If only I could figure out what. Sherlock Holmes could.

  * * *

  “This came for you, sir.”

  The carrot-haired desk clerk handed me a sealed telegram along with the iron room key. I was morally certain who had sent it. Who else fired off telegrams wherever I happened to be?

  I carried it to the corner of the lobby of this new hotel. The faux marble pillars annoyed me. The sofa was stiffer than it looked. Damn this modern furniture, built for appearances. I gave up on finding an arse-comfortable spot and tore open the envelope.

  I looked at the signature first. No surprise.

  “THEODORE.”

  Then at the text of the wire: “COME BACK. CORTELYOU HAS AN IDEA.”

  Oh, crap. That’s all I needed, Mr. Know-It-All’s idea for my investigation. But it was also what I wanted: to come back. To go home. To see Clara.

  The next train to New York left at seven forty-five. I had already checked. I was rushing toward the elevator, to pack my valise upstairs, when the desk clerk called, “This came for you, sir.”

  “Just now?”

  “A little while ago, while I … stepped away. It was left on the counter here.”

  The envelope was smudged, and the cursive across the back resembled a child’s.

  John Hay.

  I returned to the unwelcoming sofa and started to rip open the sealed envelope, until a feeling of … caution came over me. I had to be careful with this. It might be evidence—of what?

  My request for a letter opener brought a snicker from the carrot-haired clerk. I carried the weapon back to my seat and needled its nose under the flap and pried it apart. Inside was a rough sheet of lined white paper, torn at one end. Pasted on were scraps of newspaper copy, from headlines and advertisements.

  * * *

  “I was having a hard time,” the carrot-haired clerk explained with a smirk. “If you know what I mean.”

  Suddenly, I did. Oh, Lord. This was an alibi I was not inclined to try to disprove, which I supposed was the purpose.

  We were jousting in the manager’s office when Chief Nicholson rushed in. His face looked more drawn than usual. I showed him the note.

  “I see,” he said.

  I wished I did.

  * * *

  If the note was meant to drive me from Pittsfield, it succeeded. Or so I kept commiserating with myself as the train rumbled out of the depot. Coward, coward, coward, in the quickening rhythm of the wheels. Was I? Nah, I was no coward. I had proved that to myself in the ring. Besides, I had every good reason to leave. For one thing, the Secret Service needed to see this note, slathered with fingerprints as it probably was. For another … Well, first and foremost, the president had ordered me to. So here I was, occupying an otherwise empty seat in the almost empty club car, with a scotch over a chunk of chipped ice that tickled my nose.

  This left unanswered who sent the note—and why. The first question I delegated to Chief Nicholson and his men. The question of why, that was mine.

  As for the answer, I had no damn idea.

  Yet.

  What did I know? I knew the scotch felt warm going down. I knew there had been a collision. I knew a man had been killed. I had known the man. I knew that another two inches and somebody—or somebodies—else might have shared Craig’s fate. Two inches! And I might have been president. Did God have a hand in close calls?

  A longer sip.

  What else did I know? I knew that someone in Pittsfield knew who I was and why I was there. And wanted me gone. (And I’d left!) Someone had attacked me and then sent me a note. Why would he—I was assuming it was a he, and that it was the same he—send me a note? To scare me? He hadn’t, though he might be thinking he had. Could Euclid Madden have sent it? I had just left his house; he would have been hard-pressed for time. But possible. Or he might have sent an accomplice—a child, perhaps.

  What did I know about Madden? That he was a mild-mannered man who nursed grievances. (Didn’t we all?) That a hunk of money had found its way into his bank account, details to come. That his streetcar had stopped at the top of Howard’s Hill for nineteen minutes, to follow a schedule he had no need to keep. That he had rejected a bribe—or incentive, to be nice—but had stuffed a hand-drawn map under his seat. That his lawyer was bullying him to plead guilty to manslaughter, plausibly at the company’s behest. That the men who controlled the streetcar company seemed to control everything worth controlling in Pittsfield, including the judiciary and possibly the police. Maybe that’s who was behind this—all of it. A political machine protecting itself. Hardly unheard of. But why target the president—or the governor, for that matter? And why would they rely on a marshmallow like Euclid Madden?

  To that last question, I proposed an answer: Because he was in a position to do what they wanted without being traced. They had only to pay him.

  Implausible, I had to admit. But impossible? No. Some of the most astonishing events in history had been implausible until they occurred. Ask Jules Verne. One day, all of his tales will come true.

  But what else did I know? Not much more. Enough with the suppositions and the slipshod connections. I took a heartwarming sip of scotch and reached into my valise. The red and gold cover offered a tactile pleasure. So did the story of the detective who always knew, or who knew when he didn’t know and knew how to figure it out. I was never too old to learn—one of my few saving graces.

  I found my place in the story and read of Sherlock accompanying Dr. Watson to the station to send him out to Baskerville Hall alone. Watson’s assignment was to report the facts as fully as he could, anything that might bear on the case, even indirectly. Then he would let Sherlock piece the facts into a theory.

  I sighed. This was my job, too—Watson’s and Sherlock’s, both. Collect the facts first, then fashion a theory. The logical order of business. Ha! If only life were logical.

  Conan Doyle’s tale was rooted in an illogic, a horror, the Baskerville family curse. Hugo Baskerville, the evil seventeenth-century forebear, had ravished and murdered a maiden, until a huge and hellish black hound with dripping jaws tore his throat out. The mystery unspools with a note spelled out in letters scissored from the Times of London: “As you value your life or your reason keep away from the moor.”

  A note! A chill ascended the nape of my neck.

  Still, I had to admire Conan Doyle’s skill at creating a mood, and the easy-to-swallow implausibility of a plot that made even less sense than this mystery of mine. I marveled even more at Sherlock Holmes and his formidable powers of observation, the subtlety of his logic, the fierceness of his brain. These were not my strengths. I could be staring at a tub of lard and (as Clara enjoyed pointing out) see everything except the lard. I was reasonably confident that two plus two equals four and even that twenty-five squared was … I had to think … six hundred and a little more. But I could never match Sherlock in sheer brainpower. Nor did I share Vidocq’s flair for disguises or his talent for infiltrating the forces of villainy.

  So what in the hell was I good at? I don’t mean as a
husband or as a father or even as a secretary of state. My deficiencies in each of those roles are no secret, at least to me. Nor is the pain that they cause, the clench in my stomach when I make mistakes. Of which I have made more than my share. I’d like to think that comes from reaching so high, trying so hard, but I’m probably just excusing my shortcomings. Am I a perfectionist? Don’t make me laugh. At times I stand astonished at how imperfect I am. Let me count the ways. (Oh no, allow me.) As the chief diplomat for a self-consciously virile nation, I’ve been clever but not as blustery—my stick isn’t as big—as Theodore would like. As a husband … My faults—of the heart, not of the flesh—grind like wet, cold sand.

  As a father … My throat clutched. It’s so easy, being a father of girls. You tell them how pretty they are, which is even easier if you don’t have to pretend, and you keep their heads from swelling unduly; you find them husbands, or they find husbands for themselves, and your duty is done. With a son, however, your job is to turn him from a boy into a man. This requires molding and the sort of interventions that any red-blooded boy would resist. Only later would he see the benefit, and surely Del did. He seemed to be happy at the end—he seemed to be—and Lord knows I hoped he was. Until then, I had never felt old.

  But this was all beside the point, for the moment. I struggled to resume thinking of the matter at hand—this time, with a spurt of success. As a detective, what was my advantage? Surely I had one or two. My record of success was respectable. Granted, the denominator was small—Willie Lincoln and a smattering of other weird deaths over the decades—but the numerator was no smaller. I had solved them all.

  I tried to focus on the mystery—mysteries—before me. Why on earth would Euclid Madden want to kill a president—or a governor? And had he actually tried? How could I read another man’s mind? But that’s exactly what I needed to do. And I was good at it, not incidentally.

  Oh yes, that was my advantage. I was skilled at hearing what people didn’t say and at understanding the minds and motivations of men—why they do things, why they don’t. (Women were another story.) From time to time, I even understood myself.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 1902

  A glorious morning, in my own bed, with my own dear wife in my own caressing arms, the muscle memory of lovemaking. Streams of sunlight and strong hot coffee in my favorite mug. I tried to imagine lying in bed next to Lizzie Cameron. She would talk too damn much, and in too arch a tone. Clara was quiet, unless she had something to say. That counted. In a world of deceit and turmoil, Clara Stone Hay was a haven. But havens can get taken for granted or, worse, feel constricting, even (or especially) after a child dies. Besides, was I seeking a haven or an adventure?

  Both.

  Haven’t I learned by now that you can’t have everything you want?

  Apparently not.

  I had always admired Lizzie from afar. How could I not? She was … magnetic. The Camerons had lived for years on Lafayette Square, and I could hardly avoid her as she ambled with a parasol or fed the squirrels in the park. But she was Henry’s dream, not mine, and he was my friend—is my friend. Eventually Henry’s dream dissolved, as dreams do, and still I kept her at a distance, for years. Her marriage of convenience to a dissolute politician (who owed his career to his tyrannical father’s success) became her barricade of choice against her many suitors. Only a year ago or so did I begin to … compete. Halfheartedly, I must add. By which I mean wholeheartedly at some moments and no-heartedly at others. She was prone to do the same, which left us both unbalanced. I suspected that neither of us wanted to succeed—or, perhaps, to stop.

  Over breakfast, Clara explained why the lilies had prevailed over roses—a matter of informality, not of cost. I had been agnostic on the floral question but had rather enjoyed the Talmudic disputation and was sorry to see it end. Now, all that remained was the wedding itself.

  “Do you think Henry will give Alice another small Rodin?” I said over the chipped beef and poached eggs. That had been his wedding gift to Helen last winter.

  “How many could there be?” Clara said.

  “As many as Henry can sculpt.”

  Clara laughed. “Do you think Theodore will come?”

  “To New Hampshire? On a Tuesday? I doubt it. We’ll have to invite him. He does love weddings.”

  “Funerals, too,” Clara said. “Such is envy.”

  I had told her about my doings in Pittsfield—about the wrecked landau and the impervious streetcar, about the stoic carriage driver and the defiant motorman, about the map stuffed under the seat and the trolley’s nineteen-minute delay atop Howard’s Hill. I hadn’t decided whether to mention the assault in Park Square. I saw no compelling reason to scare her. This was the question at hand: Was I her protector or her confidant—her intimate?

  I decided incorrectly.

  Clara’s face went white. “You are too old for this, John.”

  “The hell I am!” My vehemence surprised me, though it shouldn’t have. I didn’t like being sixty-three, nor did I believe it, although my arithmetical skills were generally sound. Truth be told, sixty-three didn’t feel all that different from fifty-three, or even from forty-three. Nor, I liked to believe, in the face I showed to the world. I was surprised, when I looked in the mirror, to see the fissures in my forehead. But I also saw the same young—well, youngish—countenance, the wry mouth, the mischievous hazel eyes. I counted on my snowy beard and lush mustache to hide everything else. That face in the looking glass was still mine.

  * * *

  Cortelyou leaned forward to shake my hand. “A pleasure, a pleasure,” he said, as if we had never met.

  I was tempted to introduce myself. Instead, I summarized for the president and his private secretary what I had learned in Pittsfield. “Two inches!” I held my thumb and forefinger apart. “Mr. President, that was your margin between life and death.”

  “Bully!” he exclaimed, his eyes alive. He seemed transported. To San Juan Hill? Or to his bodyguard under the trolley?

  A window on the first-floor parlor of the temporary White House was open to the breezes from Lafayette Square. Surely the Secret Service men realized that a tall passerby could shoot a shotgun into the room.

  When I recounted my encounter in Park Square, punching the man who had pulled a pistol, I left no detail untold. Theodore lit up again.

  “I am proud of you, my boy!”

  I blanched, not because I was older than him but because the last thing I would ever want to be was his son. He taught his children to swim by making them jump from a dock into the deep water.

  I turned toward Cortelyou and said, “I understand you have an idea … for me.”

  “I do, I do,” he replied.

  Roosevelt beamed like a proud papa and clicked his teeth. I kept my grimace to myself. “I’m all ears,” I said.

  “The president was good enough to tell me of your theory that the collision in Pittsfield was not an accident.”

  “My theory?” I said.

  “That the wretched motorman was … presumably behind this. The question, then, is who was behind the motorman.”

  “That had crossed my mind, yes. And you have a theory about that, I imagine.”

  “In fact, I do. Who would you say has the most to gain from the president’s … premature departure from the presidency?”

  “Besides myself, you mean,” I said.

  Roosevelt cackled. Cortelyou’s face remained sober. It was an open secret in Washington that, once Congress got around to creating a Department of Commerce and Labor, Roosevelt would name Cortelyou as its first secretary. This would place him eighth—and last—in the line of presidential succession. “Yes, besides yourself,” he said.

  “The list is long, I would guess,” I replied. ‘You can measure a man’s greatness by the enemies he makes.” No one could have imposed a nobler gloss on Theodore’s predilection for picking fights.

  “I love mine enemies,” Roosevelt said. “I glory
in them. They bring me pride.”

  “I have a list,” Cortelyou said. He plucked a paper from his breast pocket and flicked it with his finger. “At the top is Northern Securities.”

  In spite of myself, I saw the sense. The Northern Securities Trust Company was a proposed railroad monopoly from the Upper Midwest to the Pacific Northwest, to be formed by merging the railroads currently competing along parallel tracks. One of them was controlled by J. P. Morgan and James J. Hill, the other by E. H. Harriman and the Rockefellers—robber barons all. Industrial trusts had become the rage throughout the economy, investing the immense profits spewed by the war against Spain. The beef trust, the sugar trust, the steel trust, the wire trust, the lead trust, the borax trust, the leather trust, the flour trust, the Standard Oil trust, the cracker trust—the very word trust was a perversion of its plain meaning. In baseball, the upstart American League was swiping ballplayers from the hoary National League, and there was talk the two circuits might combine. Why couldn’t railroads? Who would stand in their way?

  Theodore would. He had ordered the attorney general to block the merger; the lawsuit was heading toward court.

  “Is that the sort of thing they do?” I said. “Assassination?” After all these years, was I still naive?

  “If it’s necessary to get their way,” Roosevelt replied, his face flushed with pleasure.

  “By murdering you? And getting…”

  The throaty cough in the doorway coiled the hair on my arms.

  “Well, hello, Sister,” the president said. “How long have you been listening?”

  “Long enough,” she replied. An ivory-colored silk gown with rose buttons to her neck covered Alice Roosevelt’s lithe, languorous form.

  “Long enough for what?” her father said.

  “To tell you what to do.”

  “And that is?”

  “Senator Hanna,” Alice said.

  “What about him?” Roosevelt said.