The Attempted Murder of Teddy Roosevelt Read online

  No laugh. His eyes had become watchful, like a predator’s in the bush. I realized his question was serious. So I offered a serious reply: “No, you are much more fun alive.”

  “Sometimes,” Alice said.

  Theodore’s face lit up. He probably got more joy out of life in a day than I did in a month.

  * * *

  John Wilkie rocked on his side porch, sucking on his pipe, waiting—for me, I had to assume. But how could he know I was coming? I hadn’t told a soul. Oh. Theodore had, after I left. Probably ’phoned Wilkie himself.

  The Secret Service chief lived at the edge of the city—beyond it, by my figuring—a mile north of Florida avenue (originally Boundary street, between Washington City and Washington County). Single Malt enjoyed the ride as much as she could with a man on her back. The occasional rabbit required a pull of her reins. Out here, Thirteenth street was a dirt roadway, lined by clusters of houses and by tangles of bushes and trees. Morgan avenue, a short, slender street just west of New Hampshire avenue, was succumbing to settlement. Wilkie’s house was the farthest north, a three-story duplex with a side yard and a roofed porch that wrapped around from the front.

  “A pleasure as always, Mr. Hay,” Wilkie said, gesturing me into the adjacent chair. “Mr. Cortelyou said you were coming.”

  “And Mr. Cortelyou is always right,” I said.

  Wilkie snorted. “He would agree.”

  I knew I liked this man. “Did he say what I wanted?”

  “I thought I would let you do that.”

  Clickety-clack. Clickety-clack. The sound came from the side window. Wilkie listened alertly, then shook his head. “The telegraph,” he explained. “I had them put one in here. For days like this.”

  “Are all days like this?”

  “Most of them.”

  A girl of twelve or thirteen popped her blond head through the door. “Later, dearie,” Wilkie said. The smiling face withdrew.

  “How many do you have?” I said.

  “One of each.”

  “You are a busy man, I can see.”

  A quick, professional smile. I noticed furrows beginning to form near the corners of his mouth. “And what can I do for you, Mr. Hay?”

  My request for a handwriting expert to confirm J. P. Morgan’s signature got his attention.

  “May I ask why?” he said.

  I produced the two pages Henry had found and pointed out the capital Ps.

  “I can help,” Wilkie said. “How quickly?”

  “Yesterday?”

  “Let me see what I can do.”

  I told him I was leaving shortly for New York and expected to speak with Morgan in the morning. “Mr. Cortelyou is making the arrangements.”

  “Can you leave these with me?” Wilkie balanced the pages on his fingertips and rested them on the metal table between us. He added, “There is something I need to tell you.”

  “Oh?”

  “That bullet? The one the doctors extracted from Mr. Turtle’s cranium? It looks consistent with the bullet missing from your derringer, judging by the one that wasn’t fired. They fired a test bullet and it’s consistent with that, too.”

  “What in the hell does that mean—‘consistent’?”

  “Just what it says. Maybe it came from your derringer. Maybe it didn’t. They can’t say any better than that. This is my lab men, and they’re the best in the business.”

  “So I’m still under suspicion, you’re saying.”

  “Let’s say you’re not entirely free of it.”

  “This is ridiculous!” I sputtered.

  “Agreed. I am with you on this. All the same, you might want to check in with the local folks before you leave the city.”

  “Before I what?”

  “Just as a courtesy.”

  “I’m going to New York overnight, at the president’s—”

  “You might want to say something to … what was that detective’s name?”

  “That big gawky fellow? Flather?”

  “That’s the one. Just to let him know. In case he’s looking for you.”

  “To ask permission, you mean?”

  “No, no, just to let him know.”

  Wilkie scuttled inside and I stayed on the porch for a spell.

  * * *

  “Anything new?” I said, trying to sound disarming.

  “Nothing to speak of,” Detective Flather replied.

  That was ominous.

  I was sitting by his desk at police headquarters. The place was almost deserted on a Sunday, but not deserted enough. I had figured to leave Flather a note. Imagine my surprise when the sergeant led me back to a detectives’ room that, despite the afternoon sunlight streaming in, looked dank and generally downbeat about the human experience. Flather had glanced up and glared at me. I hoped he did that to everyone.

  Once I had borrowed his attention from the worn manila folders, I told him I was traveling to New York overnight. “Just in case you wanted to know.”

  That brought a grunt of indeterminate meaning. I studied the detective’s face and saw only lumpy features and gauzy eyes. “Why?” he growled.

  How much did I trust him? Not much. “On the president’s business,” I said. How do I tell a real detective that I was playing at his game? Except it wasn’t a game. People got killed, as I could attest. I made up my mind. “It isn’t clear that the president’s collision in Pittsfield was an accident,” I said. Flather’s sleepy eyes snapped to alertness. “I am … looking into it.”

  “And you think the two are connected,” he said. “That and … this.” Flather waved his hand across his desk. He was not as dumb as he looked.

  “It is possible,” I said with care.

  “I agree.” Flather’s face had relaxed; his dark eyes focused. He knew what he was doing. “We found something,” he said.

  That something was a letter of introduction in Turtle’s valise. The handwritten note was unexceptional—“This is to introduce…”—other than the identities involved. The letter, undated, was addressed to “My dear Mr. President” and signed “Murray Crane.” That was Winthrop Murray Crane, the honorable governor of Massachusetts.

  * * *

  “I think he trusts me,” I said. “He showed me the letter.”

  Nellie Bly flashed a look of pathos she might reserve for a fifty-year-old who hasn’t learned how babies are made. “Maybe he does,” she said, “and maybe he doesn’t. I doubt your personal detective trusts anyone very much. I would hate to be his wife.”

  “Have you met him?”

  “No, but I know the type.”

  I would hate to get on her bad side. “So you think I’m still considered a suspect,” I said.

  “How can I know?” Nellie said. “But, in this country, you are guilty until proven innocent.” Emma Goldman couldn’t have put it better.

  The Willard’s bar was closed on a Sunday, of course, so we sat in the lobby, behind a marble pillar, as far as possible from anyone else. The hotel was not only the scene of the crime but also where Governor Crane was staying. Ichabod was prickly to question; a woman’s salve might help.

  “Which room?” I said.

  “This, you’re not going to believe.” Nellie had made inquiries of a desk clerk she had befriended. “The same as Turtle’s.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “He asked for it. The police said they were finished.”

  “Why on earth would he…”

  “One way to find out,” Nellie said.

  We passed the registration desk—the clerk’s gaze followed Nellie like a hunter’s in a blind—and climbed the staircase. I could have found the room with my eyes closed. I asked Nellie to knock on the door.

  “Who is it?” came a parched voice from inside.

  I gave my name.

  The latch was unhooked and the door opened.

  Neither Governor Crane nor the late William Turtle stood in the doorway, but rather a giant with an unkempt red beard. I had seen him befo
re but couldn’t remember where. He seemed startled to see me.

  “Who are you?” I rasped.

  “Forney,” he said.

  Oh yes: Samson. David Pratt’s man. From Dalton, Massachusetts. As Governor Crane was.

  “Is the governor here?”

  “He expecting you?”

  “Not unless he’s clairvoyant.”

  Samson grimaced. “Yer name?” he said.

  I reminded him.

  With nary a glance at Nellie, he closed the door and left us waiting outside.

  “Who is he?” Nellie said.

  I explained, best I could, that Frank Forney was an angry French Canadian who lived as a servant of some sort in David Pratt’s—the carriage driver’s—household.

  Two or three minutes passed and then the door opened again. Governor Crane, his cravat half tied, looked unaccountably harried. “Come in,” he said. “What can I do for you? And for…?”

  I introduced the awkward governor to the pert and poised Mrs. Seaman. No hands were shaken. We crossed the octagonal sitting room, a place I remembered all too well—the gaudy furnishings, Grant’s portrait, a gunshot in the doorway, louder than any noise I’d ever known. I stared at the windows, their curtains closed, to avoid looking at the door. Nellie and Governor Crane shared a divan. I remained standing.

  “I have been in this room before,” I said.

  “With Lincoln?” Governor Crane said.

  “That would be the old Willard,” I replied. “No, with Turtle, three mornings ago.”

  I had thought his spare Yankee face incapable of additional longitude, but his mouth dropped into an O. I told him briefly what I had seen. “In his effects,” I said, “the police found a letter from you.”

  I waited for a look of surprise.

  “Do you know which letter I mean?” I said. A slight nod, which for a man like Ichabod Crane connoted high emotion. “Do you happen to know why he wanted to see the president?”

  I was glad he sighed, because it meant he was breathing.

  “How well did you know Mr. Turtle?” Nellie purred.

  Governor Crane seemed startled by her presence. He gathered himself and croaked, “Well enough.”

  “Well enough to what?” I said.

  “To write.”

  “Do you often write the president with letters of intro—”

  Nellie raised a palm. “Was he a good man, do you think?”

  An eloquent shrug.

  “When did you write this letter?” I said.

  Governor Crane looked puzzled for a moment, as if I had spoken a language he had learned as a child. “Last week,” he said.

  After the collision.

  “It was good of you to do that, Governor,” Nellie said. “What inspired you to this kindness?”

  I worried she was overdoing it, but no, the crusty Yankee lapped it up. “He asked me, and I was happy to oblige.”

  “Where was this?” she said.

  “In the corridor of the statehouse. Later he came to my office to pick it up.”

  “Why did he want it? Did you ask him?”

  “In so many words.”

  “And what did he say?”

  A pause. A noise back in the bedroom alarmed me. “He had something he needed to tell the president—that’s all.”

  “About what, did he say?”

  He shook his head.

  “No idea at all?” I said.

  Nellie said, “You were in the carriage, too. He must have told you.”

  “All he said is that the collision wasn’t an accident and that he could prove it. But it was something he could only tell the president.”

  “So you gave him the letter of introduction,” Nellie soothed.

  “I had already written it for him,” Governor Crane explained. “I would not waste good stationery.”

  * * *

  As busy as an anthill was the Pennsylvania Railroad Station on Sunday evening. I sidestepped the star marking Garfield’s shooting and weaved my way unrecognized through the passengers scurrying past. I took a seat in the least crowded car and held The Washington Post in front of my face. Two trains collide in Colorado. Milliners in Chicago form a labor union. The president will hunt for ducks in Virginia. Nebraska’s governor threatens a lawsuit if packinghouses merge. The price of anthracite coal soars to twenty-five dollars a ton, in the eighteenth week of the strike; in hopes of arranging a settlement, Pennsylvania’s governor and the capitalists are traveling to New York to call on J. Pierpont Morgan, like paying homage to the Buddha.

  As was I.

  J. Pierpont Morgan—the august name conveyed an image either of utter rectitude or of utter greed—was more powerful than any president or potentate. The Wall street financier had his hand in everything across the economy and, inevitably, in politics, too. The banks, the railroads, the steel mills, the steamships, the coal mines—during the past quarter century’s surge of an industrial economy, his word ruled everywhere that mattered. Since the Spanish war he had reigned as monarch of the trusts, the financial genius behind the creation of U.S. Steel—the world had never known a more valuable company—and the Northern Securities railroad cartel. I had dined with him once, at the White House, back in ’ninety-eight, and found him … shy.

  “Wait, aren’t you…”

  Damn, I had let my newspaper slip.

  A round-faced man with a belly was peering at me. “Aren’t you Mr.… You know, that secretary of…” I hated that the newspapers were publishing photographs. “You know … What’s the name? Root. Yep, that’s the name. The war fellow, E-li-hu Root.”

  “I get mistaken for him all the time,” I said. Root had a stern face and no beard.

  I cast the newspaper aside and returned to my traveling companion and mentor—ha!—Sherlock Holmes. My bookmark was a ticket to a recent prizefight, out in Maryland. I took up where I’d left off, trying to let the fictional mystery distract me from the menace of the real-world murders I faced.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1902

  I awoke at ten past seven and felt like a caboose had sideswiped my forehead. Not from an excess of scotch the night before, although that might have contributed. Or from the quality of the scotch. Or from the lateness of the night. Or from the pillows, as cuddly as mica. Or from the mattress … the room … the hotel …

  I was staying at the Astor House—for old times’ sake, certainly not for the facilities. The hotel was already old-fashioned when I lived there in the ’seventies, and it hadn’t done much to spiff itself up. The marble floor in the lobby had taken on a brownish tint and the porcelain spittoons had webs of cracks in the sides. The rooms lacked telephones, which in a way was a plus. If the world was collapsing, Adee could leave word at the desk.

  Moving my head from side to side brought a spectrum of pain. Ol’ Pierpont wouldn’t see me until ten o’clock. Maybe the headache powder would work by then.

  Only when I had forced down a breakfast (of porridge and tea) and exited the Astor, onto Broadway, did I realize the source of my distress: Manhattan. My aching head was a sensible reaction to all the noise and congestion. After decades in the East, in Providence and Washington and New York—and London—I was gratified to learn I was still a boy from Warsaw, Illinois. Too much was going on. Too much! That was the ugly variable—the multiplier, if you will. The men were monochromatic in their derbies and frock coats, unlike the ladies in their flowered bonnets and long, sweeping skirts. Pedestrians clogged the sidewalks, crossing Broadway at every angle, dodging the horse carts, minding the trolleys, ignoring the policemen in their round bobby hats. A chaos of choreography. It was a marvel that every moment did not bring a collision. I felt trapped and exhilarated, both at once.

  Crossing Broadway would lead to the Tribune’s offices, my old haunt. Instead, I turned south, past Saint Paul’s.

  Let me stipulate here that I hate crowds. Anyone who believes in the dignity of man (and woman!) should. Think of the hajj, in M
ecca; you might be trampled at any instant, at a sudden sound. Crowds steal your sense of self and mock the illusion of control over one’s fate. So, without a further thought, I plunged in.

  I felt surrounded and smothered and breathed on, and I craned my neck and twisted it—and saw him. He was reflected in the slanted glass of a florist’s window. I am not sure why I noticed him at all. He was unexceptional looking—egregiously so. Maybe that was why: he looked so damn ordinary, of medium height and complexion, with regular features and the ubiquitous derby, as if he was trying too hard to blend in. Something about the angle of his gaze. He wasn’t looking straight ahead, as any pedestrian would. He was staring at me. And for an instant, by way of the florist’s window, I stared back. Our eyes met.

  I sped up, and he did too. I was south of Maiden lane when I glanced back and nearly collided with a matronly woman—“Oh, sorry,” I muttered—and the man was still behind me. Instead of panicking, I considered my options. The most obvious was to start running, which I rejected for fear of the attention this would bring, even in Manhattan. Besides, he could probably outrun me. Or I could stop and confront him. I had my fists and my derringer—Wilkie had loaned me another—in addition to my vaunted way with words. (I am known as the literary secretary of state, if you must know.) This dangled a certain emotional satisfaction but seemed less than reliable as a route to success. Or I could … lose him. Outthink him. As Sherlock would do.

  I darted into the street, just in front of a trolley, without pondering how stupid this was. Once the trolley passed, I looked back across Broadway and did not see my pursuer in the crowd. I leapt onto the curb—and there he was, a half block behind me, on my side of the street. Damn!

  I ducked through the last doorway before Liberty street, which happened to belong to a grocery. I must have looked a mess, because the redheaded young woman behind the boxes of apples and pears gave me the kind of glance my mother favored when I picked a fistfight with my older brother out of boredom.

  “May I help you, sir?” she said.

  “A back door?” I said. I considered waving the derringer but decided it would not bolster my case.