The Murder of Willie Lincoln Page 14

  A butler was at the door, but the secretary of the Treasury was leaving. He was an imposing man, tall and portly, with a hairline that retreated like Napoleon in a Russian winter. His manner was imperious—and humorless. “Salmon the Solemn,” wags called him.

  “What do you want?” Salmon Chase barked.

  “Your daughter,” Hay replied. That came out wrong. Accurate, but unlikely to persuade, which at the moment was the only measure that mattered. “Is she at home?”

  “I do not see what business it is of yours.”

  “None at all, Mister Secretary, I assure you. I was under the impression that she was expecting me.”

  A lie.

  Which worked.

  “Reginald, see if she is receiving.” And the secretary slipped past Hay out the door.

  So, she was there. And within reach. His stomach tightened.

  Inside of ten or fifteen seconds, a petulant voice cried out, “Mister Hay, shall you never leave me undisturbed?”

  “Do you wish me to?”

  A gamble.

  “I would be devastated.”

  She stepped off the sweeping staircase and grabbed Hay’s hand and led him into the library. The room was luscious but unpretentious, its walls lined from floor to ten-foot ceiling with shelves of books. (Purchased at estate sales, was Hay’s guess.) A fire blazed, and Kate Chase guided Hay into one of the matching upholstered chairs. She continued to stand. Hay, swearing to himself, returned to his feet.

  And kissed her. Hard.

  Hay was starting to lie in apology—“I have no idea what came over…”—when she kissed him back. He grasped her shoulders and felt the strength in her back as she nestled her torso into his. Their kiss deepened and lingered. He was pondering the depths beyond the deepest kiss when suddenly she pushed him away.

  He opened his eyes. A look of mockery on her face, Kate Chase bowed slightly and said, “You see, Mister Hay, you needest not fear mine.”

  She remembered!

  Which meant—surely it did—that she cared. Either that, or she wanted him to think that she cared. Because she wanted something from him, in exchange for …

  Her violet eyes met his.

  Whatever the price, he would pay it. And Hay kissed her again.

  * * *

  Hay fell asleep at last, despite the roiling down in his nightshirt.

  A shriek woke him up. From down the hall. By the time Hay reached Tad’s bedroom, Robert and the president were there.

  “I heard him screaming,” Robert explained unnecessarily. He was half lying on the bed—the rest of him cantilevered—cradling Tad’s head in his hands. The boy was whimpering, eyes wide open. His father stood at the foot of the bed, looking numb.

  Lincoln said, “What happened, son?”

  “A knife, a knife, a knife,” Tad sputtered. “At me, at me.”

  “You said a rope,” Robert said.

  “No, no, a rope, a rope, a rope. And knife, a knife.” Tad started to shake, and Robert held him closer.

  “Who was coming at you?”

  “Ve man was.”

  Hay said, “You were dreaming, Tad.”

  “No, no. It was a man. A real man. Wiv a knife.”

  “You said a rope,” Robert said.

  “No, a rope.”

  Hay said, “What did he look like, this man?”

  “He was big, like my bruvver. A pillowcase on his head. All I saw o’ him was ve knife.”

  “The rope,” Robert said.

  “No, ve rope. And ve knife.”

  The president drew Tad away from his eldest son and curled the boy into his chest, kissing his forehead, chirping at him like a mother robin to her young.

  “Whatever you say, I believe, Taddie boy,” the father said to his son. “Because I know it is true in your heart.”

  Chapter Eight

  THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 1862

  Hay slept with an old man’s bladder, grateful for the chamber pot beneath his bed. As dawn broke, he was using it again when there was a hectoring outside his closed door. Nicolay’s bed was empty, but it was not his voice or demeanor. Recognition floated just beyond reach. Eventually, the shouting and the knocking fused, and Hay shouted back, “Come in, Bob!”

  The door flung open, and Robert Lincoln burst through. “I will not leave!” he cried. His smooth, round face was contorted and wet; his tangle of hair looked unwashed. “He wants me to go. And I refuse. I will not.”

  “Who is he?” said Hay, although he knew.

  “And so do you.”

  “I do what?”

  “Want me to leave.”

  Hay sat up. His nightshirt felt damp. “Did he tell you that?”

  “In so many words.”

  “All I said is that both of you are in danger here. You and Tad.”

  “From what?”

  “Bob, it was not typhoid fever that killed your brother.”

  Robert looked frightened. “What was it, then?”

  “We might know more later to-day.” Hay debated telling Robert about the messages received and decided he had a right to know, at least about the second one; it was his life at stake. Hay knew it by heart: And ye are risen up against my father’s house this day, and have slain his sons.

  “Plural,” Hay said. “Which is why both of you need to leave. In my half-baked opinion.”

  “But Tad is here.”

  “Not for long.”

  “Threats are not uncommon, correct? They come in every post.”

  “This did not come in the post. Somebody put them in my satchel—in my office. Without a postmark. And it was not the first one.”

  “How many others?”

  “Just one.”

  “So, who put them there?”

  “Ha, if I knew that…”

  “Someone here, you are saying.”

  Robert’s fear was understandable. Having your life endangered, and by someone on the premises, maybe someone you knew, must have been scary as hell. Robert should have been told already. By his father, not by Hay.

  * * *

  All morning long, the interruptions never ceased. Lord Lyons in search of the president, who was determined not to be found. A messenger delivering a copy of General Halleck’s order in Arkansas to hang any rebel soldier involved in poisoning Union troops, which Hay judged too painful for the president to see just now. The New-York Times man desperate for information about the rumors of battle on the Upper Potomac—Hay knew nothing because there was nothing to know. An office seeker who collapsed on the stairwell under the strain—served him right, was Hay’s reaction. Hay was busy drafting a demurral to Thaddeus Stevens’s demand for a postmastership in Pennsylvania for a deserving mulatto when there was a knock at his doorframe. Rather tentative, Hay was pleased to note. And for once, the intruder was someone he was happy to see.

  “It is, suh.” Jamie Hall’s pudgy figure fairly loped into the room. “Mercury. Too much of it. Much too much. A toxic amount, without doubt.”

  “Without doubt? No chance it was an accident, or a miscalculation? Or medicine that was too heroic—overheroic.” Hay realized how acutely he hoped this was so.

  Dr. Hall made a show of considering these possibilities, then exhaled noisily and shook his head.

  “There was nothing heroic about this, suh. Nor overheroic. No, suh, there was not. In my opinion, this was intended to be.”

  * * *

  “Either one, Jamie said—calomel or blue-mass pills,” Hay said.

  Lincoln’s reaction was confined to a twitch of the mole on his cheek. He stood by his office window, fingering the spyglass. “Enough to…?”

  “Yes.”

  “According to…?”

  “The laboratory man who conducted the Smithson test.”

  “Smithson test?”

  Hay wondered if Lincoln hounded for details to avoid thinking about what they meant.

  * * *

  The list of names on the seat of Hay’s chair bore Old Edward’s p
recise hand. Hay glanced down the first page, then the second, which listed everyone on the premises when the second message was left. The usuals. The four living Lincolns. Nicolay and himself. Mrs. Keckly. Nurses. Dr. Stone. Cooks and chambermaids, messengers and guards. Two assistant gardeners—Hay tried but failed to recall their countenances, curious why two assistant gardeners should be necessary on a cold winter’s night. And William Spaulding—but why would a housepainter work after dark?

  Silly Billy. Hay had heard the man’s nickname from Willie. Hay had understood why it made Willie giggle—because it portrayed the man as the opposite of what he was, which was a bully. This was obvious to Willie and surely to Tad. And to Hay. He pictured Spaulding high on a ladder, in the State Dining Room or the second-floor corridor, looking down at whoever was looking up. A painter could go anywhere without explanation. Hay could not visualize the painter actually applying paint.

  Hay posed the question to himself: What would Vidocq do?

  A blank.

  Hay had too many suspects and not enough facts. And a conjecture: that a conspiracy of secessionists inside the Executive Mansion had administered poison to Willie and possibly to Tad, while leaving two messages in Hay’s satchel. By solving one imponderable, Hay would solve the other. So, why not tackle the easier one first? The messages.

  For those, he had some facts—namely, the lists that Old Edward had prepared of everyone in the mansion when the messages were left. The previous list had twenty-seven names, and this one—Hay counted the entries on all three pages—had thirty-one. At least twenty names looked in common, although if more than one person was involved, the same name need not be on both lists.

  He put the two lists side by side. The president and Robert were on both, and Hay and Nicolay, Mrs. Keckly, Thomas Cross and Thomas Stackpole and William Spaulding … Silly Billy. Both times a message was left, he was in the mansion. Stackpole’s brother-in-law. The two had been seen together consorting out in Virginia with a Confederate … an alleged Confederate informant—that is, a spy.

  * * *

  The sunlight was a delight. Hay passed in front of the War Department and crossed Seventeenth street. He imagined Stackpole and Spaulding conferring in the intersection, eight times in the course of a night. Hay crossed the Avenue, dodging the erratic procession of wagons and hacks.

  The address was 190 Pennsylvania avenue, three doors west of Seventeenth. An apothecary was on the corner, then a milliner next door. Then a shabby brick building with a door handsomely painted in yellow and midnight blue:

  PARKER & SPAULDING

  House and Sign Painting

  and Glazing

  2nd floor

  Hay passed through a smoky vestibule and climbed the stairs. The banister was gone; its supports protruded from the wall.

  At the top, he passed from day to dusk. The plain brown door straight ahead bore no indication of what lay beyond. On the door to the right, Hay examined the letters still nailed in place:

  PA KER & PAUL ING

  Quite an advertisement for a housepainter, Hay thought.

  Hay’s knock drew no response. He twisted the knob, and the door swung open. The front room was empty but for a low-hanging chandelier and a Corinthian column embedded in the wall. Otherwise, no furniture, no occupants.

  “Halloo!” Hay called out.

  “Thomas?” came a shout from the back room.

  Hay grunted noncommittally.

  A strapping man with a broad, stupid face stepped into the room. He had a swagger and a smile that suggested brutality, not mirth. Silly Billy, indeed. His woolen jersey had a splotch of purple paint on the forearm.

  “You. What’s ya want here?” Spaulding’s drawl was belligerent. “Or is it Mister Parker yer after?”

  “No, it’s you I came to see. To ask you some questions”—Hay hesitated, then decided that courtesy worked even on oafs—“if I might.”

  “About?”

  “Thomas Stackpole.”

  “Be quick with ’em, then, Mister Hay. I am a man of affairs.”

  “Then let me start with this—what were you doing at the mansion last evening?”

  “Which mansion would ya mean?”

  “The Executive Mansion. You were in more than one?”

  “I got clients in many a mansion.”

  “It looks like you are giving them up.” Hay swept his arm around the barren room.

  “And in cities other than this’n.” Which was not an answer. “In Baltimore, in Phil’delphia. Wilmington, time to time.”

  “And Richmond.”

  “Not during the past year, sorry to say.”

  “How about the year coming up?”

  “Ya never know what will happen when ya wake up in the mornin’, Mister Hay. Surely ya’are old enough to know that.”

  “You are from Virginia, are you not? Born there.”

  “Story of me life, I see. Very well. A Virginian I am, and proud to be so. Seven years here in Washington City. Seven years of fat, as the Scriptures say. This one, the fattest of all.”

  “Despite the war.”

  “Because of it. Ain’t just the sutlers and the embalmers making out like horse thieves. Painting a house t’ain’t so reliable as squirtin’ a dead soldier or hawking tripe to the troops. But the more war, the more buildin’, which must be painted at least once to keep the termites away. Old buildings, too, them’s worth it now to keep ’em in shape. This means work, which means gold. Well, it used to mean gold. Now, greenbacks.”

  “And your hope as to which side wins the war?”

  “That nobody win. That the war keep on for the rest of my workin’ life, and my chillun’s too. Sadly, ’tis out of my hands.”

  Spaulding was a few inches taller than Hay and thirty or forty pounds heavier—all muscle, Hay could see in the slant of his shirtfront. Hay backed up a step, beyond a jab’s reach.

  “So, are you closing up here?”

  “Cutting me costs. But yer not here fer the state of my business.”

  “No.” Although that was not without prurient interest. “What I want to know is what you were doing at the Executive Mansion last evening.”

  “Cannot s’pose why ya care such a lot. But v’ry well. Examining the places I touched up in the State Dining Room. In the corner, where the rain leaked through. To make sure it’s all lookin’ right.”

  “And it was?”

  “Oh yes, we do good work here, Mistuh Hay. If you should have any doubts.”

  “No, none.” Hay could check this with Old Edward. “Were you in my office at any point?”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  Again, not an answer.

  “I assume you saw Mister Stackpole there. Your brother-in-law, as I understand it.” Hay waited for wonderment and was disappointed. “You were expecting him just now, I gather.”

  No reply.

  Nor did Hay learn anything about Spaulding’s unauthorized trip across the Long Bridge, or the Confederate trading permits, or the spy in crinoline at Bailey’s Crossroads. Spaulding was not as stupid as he seemed. He might well have stolen into Hay’s office, under Stackpole’s protective eye, and left a crudely written message. But in that case, Stackpole could have left it himself. Why bring an extra person into a conspiracy? Unless, of course, the conspiracy was Spaulding’s.

  As Hay descended the narrow stairs, he felt more confused than when he had mounted them. He was crossing the Avenue, returning to the Executive Mansion, when he saw Thomas Stackpole waddling toward him.

  “Billy is waiting for you,” Hay said, savoring the look of surprise.

  * * *

  The man Hay needed to see—but preferred not to—was leaving Tad’s bedroom.

  “Doctor Stone,” Hay called out.

  “What is it this time?” The physician’s handsome, craggy jaw jutted more than usual.

  “Questions the president wanted me—no, instructed me—to ask you.”

  “Then he can—”

&n
bsp; “Come with me,” Hay said sharply, then added, “Please. In here.”

  Hay strode into the oval study. To his surprise, Dr. Stone followed.

  The room was empty. They seated themselves in the upholstered rocking chairs across the center table. Dr. Stone’s expression had shifted from annoyance to curiosity.

  “As I imagine you are aware,” Hay began, “there were some … irregularities in Willie’s death.”

  Hay doubted that Dr. Stone was aware, unless he had caused them.

  “I was in charge of the case.” The doctor was matter-of-fact, confident in his authority over lesser beings. “There is nothing of which I was unaware. How does a layman such as yourself define ‘irregularities’?”

  Subtlety, Hay reflected, was not the good doctor’s strong point. Hay would oblige. “A toxic amount of mercury in his tissue.”

  “Impossible!” Dr. Stone lunged forward in his seat. “Who says this?”

  Hay described the Smithson test that the embalmer, Dr. Brown, had conducted.

  Dr. Stone’s eyes narrowed. “Either the test is nonsensical or the man is an amateur. I administered only as much calomel as a boy his size could take—and no more. I took his size into account—I swear it. Those were my instructions, from his father, and I fulfilled them. You can tell him that. Or I will.”

  “Nobody is accusing you of anything, Doctor Stone.” Although the verve of the doctor’s denials struck Hay as curious. “I am merely stating facts, trying to understand them. Let me ask you this: Did any of Willie’s symptoms … diverge from the typical symptoms of typhoid fever?”

  “No case is precisely the same as any other, Mister Hay. So any patient’s symptoms will diverge, as you put it, from what might be regarded—incorrectly, I assure you—as typical. Nor can we say for certain that this was typhoid fever. A bilious fever of some sort. Or possibly typhus, which as you know”—a steely look—“is a distinct disease, despite the similarity in name. But I have neither the time nor the inclination to educate you, which I assure you is a cause for regret.”

  Dr. Stone’s prominent chin invited an uppercut; his chiseled cheek was ripe for Hay’s right fist. The doctor started to stand, but Hay would not be deflected.