The Attempted Murder of Teddy Roosevelt Read online

  The police were their usual unfriendly selves. Their only concession to my high-blown status had been to spirit me out the Willard’s back door, to prevent the newspapers from witnessing the spectacle of the secretary of state being detained in a murder.

  The city’s police headquarters was a bunker at C and Fifth streets northwest. The holding cell stank of urine. None of it was mine, although I imagined that might change. I sat on the edge of the lower bunk, grateful to be alone, listening to the chatter of fellow prisoners in the neighboring cell. How on earth had I ended up here? It was true: you never knew what would happen when you woke up in the morning.

  I could understand, albeit dimly, the grounds for suspicion. My presence in Turtle’s hotel room, for one thing. My smell, for another. I reeked of cordite—even I could tell. And my derringer. What choice did I have but patience? Never my strong suit.

  As it happened, I didn’t need much of it.

  My rescuer was a portly guard with a rust-colored mustache and a gap between his front teeth.

  “You!” he snarled. I flinched. “This way.”

  The guard pulled a key from his belt and unlocked the cell door. I followed him along corridors fragrant with a century of evil men. Three turns later, I was ushered into an office that smelled as fresh as an oasis after a rain, although the furniture must have dated to the war, and not the Spanish one.

  “Have a seat, Mr. Secretary.” The booming voice belonged to the superintendent of the Metropolitan Police—one Major Richard Sylvester, according to the nameplate on the gleaming desk. He was a sturdy fellow, with a wrestler’s shoulders and twinkly blue eyes that invited confidences but promised none in return. “We have a few questions to ask you. This is Detective Flather.”

  Only now did I notice the sour-looking man seated in the corner, by the flagpole. He had a thin face and a scar on his cheek. For his vitality, he might have been in rigor mortis.

  “A pleasure,” I said, distorting the truth. “Do I need a lawyer?”

  “No need for that, I shouldn’t think,” Major Sylvester said, flashing a smile that put me on edge.

  He led me through the morning’s event. I was surprised at how little I remembered. Everything was a blur, other than the sight—which I knew I would never forget—of the astonished look on Turtle’s fat face.

  I told him whatever I knew. That the killer was someone Turtle had recognized at the door. But I didn’t mention the woman’s voice in Turtle’s bedroom. I kept that to myself for now, although I wasn’t sure why.

  Actually, I did know why. Out of a wild fear that I knew who she was. This, I needed to think about later. And to make inquiries—an inquiry—on my own.

  Toward the end of my recital of ignorance, while trying to describe my dip into deafness, Detective Flather awakened. “And your pistol, Mr. Hay,” he whined.

  “What about it?” I said.

  “Exactly. What about it? Did it remain in your pocket all that time?”

  “All what time? We’re talking a few seconds here. And yes, it did.”

  “Why, then, has a shot been fired?”

  “What do you mean, from my gun? That little derringer?”

  “You heard me.” Detective Flather had stood and was looming over me. Tall and gawky, he cast a shadow. I wanted to punch his receding chin, but knew this was not a wise idea. I had outgrown that stuff anyway. (Hadn’t I?)

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said. My neck ached as I kept looking up. “The Secret Service must have fired it before they gave it to me.” Surely Wilkie would explain this to the police and clear up this idiocy, assuming I could reach him from my jail cell (my sense of humor was still intact).

  “You stank of gunpowder,” Flather said. “You still do.”

  “The smoke was everywhere. I ran out into the hallway.” A slight exaggeration.

  Detective Flather looked at me as if he knew I was lying. “Once we hear from the coroner, we can determine whether the bullet fired from your chamber matches the bullet fired into Mr. Turtle’s forehead.”

  “I assure you that…”

  I had lost my audience. Detective Flather resumed his seat and his previous quiescence. Major Sylvester had been listening with amused indifference.

  “You are going to hold me, then,” I said. I shivered at the thought of returning to that cell.

  “You haven’t been charged with anything,” Major Sylvester said.

  “And I won’t be?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  * * *

  I must admit I was shocked—and relieved, more than anything—when my possessions were returned intact. Those included the pocket diary I had filched from Turtle’s inside jacket pocket. I had told the sergeant it was mine, and no one bothered to check the handwriting against my own. As Henry said about playing whist, you can usually count on your opponents’ ineptitude to hand you a trick and a half.

  I spirited the pocket diary home, along with my wallet (all forty-three dollars accounted for), my keys, and my grandfather’s pocket watch. Major Sylvester had summoned a hansom cab to get me home swiftly and was kind enough to pay the fare in advance.

  I was never so happy to sit in my library, in my maroon leather armchair. I considered a scotch but thought I might need to see Theodore; he wouldn’t approve. Nor would I, in the abstract. But life was not lived in the abstract. I had had one hell of a morning. I had never seen a man die before.

  I had never seen a man die before.

  I had seen men dead. At Bull Run, as a spectator. On two other battlefields, as Lincoln’s emissary. Besides a cousin who had died (too young) in bed. But to watch as a man lost his life, was alive one moment and dead the next, was impossible to fathom, except that I had seen it for myself. The miracle of childbirth, in reverse. The impossibility did not end there. The death I had witnessed was not merely a death; it was a murder.

  I cradled the dead man’s pocket diary in my lap. The thin leather-bound volume was slightly larger than a postcard. The cover was gilded, “1902.”

  The pages were crinkled, as if victim to a sudden squall. The early months needed prying apart. I leafed through and saw nothing of note. A scrap of newspaper marked the page I cared about: September 11. To-day.

  The page had two entries. At eleven a.m., Cortelyou. At six p.m., Hanna. Everything else was blank.

  Cortelyou, the gateway to the president. Mark Hanna, still the party’s chairman and, if he had his way, the twenty-seventh president of the United States. (Assuming, God forbid, it wasn’t me.) Why on earth would Turtle want to talk to them—and why would they be willing? I needed to find out. Turtle might be impervious to questioning, but Cortelyou and Hanna were not.

  I turned the page. Friday, September 12, had a single entry, at ten a.m. My mouth went dry when I read it.

  Hay.

  * * *

  “You ran toward him!” the president exclaimed. “Bully for you!”

  That was not the reaction I had expected, but I should have, knowing Theodore. He detested cowardice. I had been tested under enemy fire and found worthy, as simple as that. (As if there had been any place to flee to.) I said nothing about the derringer that had stayed in my pocket.

  The back room at the temporary White House had become Roosevelt’s sanctum. He used the front parlor for the senators and diplomats he was unable to escape and reserved the rear for intimates, or Theodore’s version of them. The furniture was seedy and the room had the sharp scent of pine. Theodore sat nestled in a thin-cushioned chair of brown corduroy, his injured leg propped on a mismatched hassock. He looked tired.

  “I felt for his pulse, but there was nothing to be done. Nothing that—” I began to choke up and Roosevelt reached across and patted my cheek, which calmed me. (This couldn’t be about Turtle.) I told him of ’phoning for a doctor and then for the police. “Who arrested me!”

  Theodore clapped his hands in glee. “For what?”

  “As a material witness, it seems, no
t for the crime. Yet. Apparently I am a suspect. There’s a detective who thinks I killed him.”

  A belly laugh that became a cackle. “And did you?”

  “I hope I don’t need to answer that.”

  “Bully for you, my boy. Bully for you.”

  This was the asthmatic boy who, with unrelenting effort, had made himself into a manly man and assumed—yes, assumed—that anyone else of mettle could do the same. (Have I mentioned how I would have hated to be his son?)

  “Well, thank you,” I said, “but it leaves me with a problem. Two problems. I was a witness to this … murder, so I am now involved. And if … something had happened to you, I would have stood to … gain, at least in some people’s eyes. I have terrible conflicts of interest here. I am enough of a lawyer to know that. So how can I continue to investigate all this?”

  “Are you saying these … incidents are related?” Theodore’s eyes narrowed. “This Mr. Turtle’s … murder, as you say, and what happened to me?”

  “I have to think so,” I said. This had not occurred to me explicitly, but he had to be right. The lawyer for the motorman accused of manslaughter in the death of the president’s bodyguard—and by extension, in the attempted murder of the president—was himself murdered, and before my eyes. A coincidence? Conceivably, but unlikely. “Which makes it even more imperative that you find someone else to investigate.”

  “Nonsense, Hay. Your involvement makes you all the more … qualified to ferret out the truth. You have every incentive, I must say. That is the only thing I care about, John—the truth. Not about the rules or the niceties of procedure.” He spat the word. “Only about the truth and about right and wrong. Nothing else matters.” I imagined a scribe behind the curtain—or rather, imagined that Theodore was imagining a scribe behind the curtain—scribbling down every word for history. But when Theodore wanted something, who could say no?

  I waited until his oration was finished and then told him I needed to ask Cortelyou about his scheduled eleven o’clock appointment—fated to be unconsummated—with the late William Turtle. Theodore could shed no light on the possible subject but had no objection to my inquiry.

  “Tell me, John, how did you learn of this appointment, given that Mr. Turtle was, through his misfortune, unable to confide in you?”

  An astute question, and I gambled on the truth. I told him of finding the pocket diary and claiming it as my own. This onetime police commissioner was entertained rather than horrified at my deceiving the constituted authorities.

  “I will need to confess my sins to Wilkie,” I said. “He won’t be pleased.”

  “I shall fix things with Wilkie,” the president replied. “He works for me.”

  “You think he does, and as your protector he does. But as an investigator he works for himself—or, as you like to say, for the truth. Any investigator does, if they’re any good.”

  “Including yourself, I take it.”

  “I do this at your pleasure, my dear Theodore. I also do it in pursuit of the truth. I will take this wherever it goes; you know that. I must assume you would want nothing less.”

  That was my speech, and I hoped the scribe got it right. Without waiting for Theodore to counter-orate, I left. The Roumanian Jews would have to wait.

  * * *

  I hated to confess my sins, though Lord knows I’d had plenty of practice.

  “It didn’t fall out, exactly,” I said, handing Turtle’s pocket diary to John Wilkie.

  “I gathered that.” The Secret Service chief leaned back in his seat and drew on his pipe. The smoke swirled toward the ceiling, slightly smellier than the day before. “This was tampering with evidence, you understand.”

  “Technically, perhaps,” I allowed.

  ‘The world lives on technicalities. My world does.”

  “In diplomacy, the vaguer the better. Harder to get trapped that way. Anyway, I didn’t tamper with anything. I just took it. And here it is.” I plunked it on the table. “Besides, you’re the one who sent me there.”

  “You sent yourself,” Wilkie said. “And I never suggested that you tamper with evidence. Oh, forgive me”—before I could open my mouth—“that you steal it.”

  The swirls of his pipe smoke had grown less turbulent. I deduced that his misgivings about the pocket diary had passed.

  One more confession, then, the first one having gone so well. “I am under suspicion, for Turtle’s murder.”

  Wilkie did not laugh. “Says who?”

  I told him of the DC detective’s questions about the bullet evidently fired from the derringer I was carrying (had been carrying, for the police still had it) at Wilkie’s behest.

  “I fired it,” Wilkie said. I felt a wash of relief. “On our rifle range, down in the basement. To make sure it was accurate.”

  “And it was?”

  “Accurate enough.”

  “And you didn’t reload it?”

  “I told … someone else to. The man who runs the range.”

  That should be good enough to clear me of suspicion. Especially if the caliber was different from …

  “Tell me, is my derringer a twenty-two or a thirty-two?” I felt stupid having to ask; it was like inquiring whether your horse was really a mare. But I had to. Suppose the range manager, out of self-protection, insisted he had replaced the bullet. That would leave me with a bullet to explain.

  “Twenty-two,” Wilkie said, trying hard not to smile. He didn’t succeed. “What was Turtle shot with, do they know yet?”

  I shook my head. “This afternoon.”

  Wilkie leaned back in his swivel chair, propped his feet on his desk, and blew an elephant-shaped cloud of smoke into the murky air. “There is someone you should meet,” he said at last. “She is looking for … not a job, but a … project. A cause, even. She might be able to help.”

  * * *

  I knew her by name, of course. Everyone had heard of Nellie Bly, although a half dozen years had passed since The New York World had last bragged of her byline. Wilkie ushered me through the lobby of the Ebbitt House, across Fourteenth street from the Willard, and into the “red parlor,” the gentleman’s lounge. There she was, at the farthest table, seated in a high-backed leather chair. Her presence drew stares from all over the red-and-gold-draped room, but the cutaway-clad waiters were evidently too gentlemanly to evict her. She sparkled.

  She half stood and I realized how tiny she was, slim and dainty. Her delicate features suggested a deference that her fierce hazel eyes dispelled. She offered her hand coquettishly, but her handshake was strong. This was the daredevil who had feigned lunacy and spent ten days in a madhouse. Who had encircled the world in seventy-two days, without a Sancho Panza to smooth her way. Who had made herself the center of every story. Who had married a man four decades older, after a two-week courtship, and stood to inherit his wealth. Who was nearing forty with flawless skin and self-possession. The eighteen-nineties’ vaunted New Woman, personified. And dressed like one, in a sensible white shirtwaist, practical and confident—for my benefit, I had to assume.

  Wilkie introduced her as Mrs. Elizabeth Seaman. “May I say, she came into my office this morning, unannounced, and offered her services. I thought of you.”

  “You may call me Nellie,” she said. That was her pen name, after a racehorse in a Stephen Foster ditty.

  I doubted she meant this as a compliment. “You may call me…” I was tempted to say Mr. Hay, but that was a rude way to begin. I surprised myself—and Wilkie—when I said, “John.”

  Wilkie excused himself.

  “What are you drinking?” I said.

  “Bourbon,” she replied. “Care to join me?”

  I did. The waiter did not cast Nellie a glance.

  “And what brings you here … Nellie?” I said.

  “Boredom, I suppose.”

  An honest answer. “With?”

  “Milk cans, John.”

  I laughed.

  “No, really,” she said. “And garbage
cans and kitchen sinks and hot water heaters and galvanized this and that. Everything the Iron Clad Manufacturing Company manufactures.”

  She had been running her husband’s factory in Brooklyn since ’ninety-nine. He was nearly eighty and just about blind. I surmised that Mr. Seaman was part of her boredom.

  “I am a married man, you know,” I said. I was shocked at myself—how undiplomatic.

  She burst into laughter. It was a carefree sound that lit up her face. “And I am a married woman,” she replied, and again she extended her hand and shook mine heartily. “The pleasure is mine.”

  “How else, then, can I relieve your boredom?”

  “What have you got?”

  Oh Lordy, what a pistol she was—more than a derringer!

  I suddenly got serious. I’d decided to trust her. I needed to trust her—I needed the help. “I’ll tell you what I’ve got,” I said, and proceeded to tell her about the collision in Pittsfield and the president’s suspicions, then about the murder of William Turtle. “Before my very eyes,” I added, still amazed and, yes, a little shaken by what I had seen.

  Something happened in her face. It softened—grew innocent, vulnerable, enticing. I knew this was her reportorial persona (I had been enough of a journalist to recognize technique), but I didn’t care, and she knew I wouldn’t.

  “So tell me, what can I do?” she said.

  I suggested that she venture to the Willard Hotel—“Excuse me. The New Willard Hotel”—and question the desk clerk and the doorman and anyone else who might have caught sight of a murderer in flight.

  “Who shall I say I am?”

  “Tell them who you are—Mrs. Elizabeth Seaman, yes?—and that you are…” How best to phrase this? “Working with the Secret Service.”

  “And if they ask for proof?”

  “I’m sure you’ll think of something,” I said.

  That melodious laugh again. “Tell me,” she said, “does the local constabulary have any suspects in mind?”

  “Oh, yes,” I replied. “Me.”

  * * *