The Attempted Murder of Teddy Roosevelt Page 20

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 1902

  Ewell Lindgren pressed the heel of his huge hand into the small of my back, and I nearly dived off the table.

  “Yes, a little bit tense,” he said. His Scandinavian lilt undermined his certitude.

  “Getting knifed will do that,” I replied, with a trifle too much pride.

  He had noticed my throat right away and was stunned I hadn’t consulted a doctor. In the light of day, so was I.

  * * *

  So was Theodore. I had to tell him, of course. It was not much of a wound, but it was hard to keep secret from anyone who was observant, a category that often—but not always—excluded my current host.

  “Ah, a scratch,” Roosevelt said when I pointed it out. “But I shall call Dr. Lung.”

  “Not necessary.”

  “Yes, it is.” Sometimes there was no arguing with him. Most of the time, actually. “Does it hurt?” he said.

  “Only when I talk,” I said. Both of us laughed. “Or laugh.”

  “Then don’t,” he said. “But you need protection.”

  “No. If he had wanted to kill me, he would have. And I don’t want somebody following me around.” For reasons Theodore could well understand, and for one that he couldn’t. “Shouldn’t you have more than you do—than you did?”

  “I have plenty,” he growled. “Now, tell me again what the blackguard said.”

  “He told me to drop it, using … rather colorful language. And he knew my name. Like in Pittsfield.”

  “Same man?”

  “Don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “Same method?”

  Theodore should be the detective. “No,” I said. “This one had a knife, not a gun.”

  “You have told the police, of course.”

  “Not yet.”

  The former police commissioner’s eyes narrowed. It gave him a studious look. “Do so,” he said. “Forthwith.”

  “Let me tell Wilkie first,” I replied. I also had another stop in mind.

  Theodore asked if I wished to withdraw from the investigation, but I declined. For reasons beyond the altruism of aiding the president or the satisfaction of solving a mystery. This was personal. Theodore was famous for his point-to-point walks in Rock Creek Park, leading sons, senators, foreign ambassadors, and other unfortunates on hikes in a straight line from one chosen point to another, over or under all obstacles, never around. So far, I had managed to avoid thesè hikes. I simply hadn’t wanted to be graded, not by him. But now I had lost to him in the boxing ring, so skillfully he never saw I meant to. This, then, counted as Theodore’s latest test of my manhood. I did not intend to fail.

  * * *

  With a grave manner, Dr. Lung informed me I had a shallow cut across my throat and applied a flesh-colored bandage. I thanked him for the excellence of his professional judgment. He missed the sarcasm, as I figured he would, or I probably would have refrained.

  I left the temporary White House and crossed Jackson Place, into Lafayette Park. I froze, then whipped around, looking for … what? For whom? I might have broken into a run, had the park been empty of witnesses. I passed the Treasury Building, glancing over my shoulder, and saw no one I recognized. Which meant nothing. I weaved through clumps of … Who were all these people? Tourists or malingering mandarins, no one was in a hurry but me. Crossing Pennsylvania avenue, I dodged the rigs and managed to sidestep a pyramid of manure. My gait felt unsynchronized.

  The Willard lobby hummed with men who had money (or pretended they did) and wanted more of it. I asked at the desk whether Mrs. Cameron was in. The clerk—I had not seen him before—checked the pigeonhole and found her room key.

  My shoulders relaxed. “May I leave a note?” I said.

  Lizzie,

  I need to see you. Soonest.

  When and where?

  Yr. obedient servant,

  J.H.

  I folded it, sealed the envelope, wrote “Mrs. Cameron” on the opposite side, and felt lucky to make my escape.

  * * *

  John Wilkie’s head was shrouded in smoke, and his feet were propped up on his desk.

  “Halloo, Hay! We were just talking about you.”

  Nellie Bly was seated on the leather divan by the wall, beside the marble-topped table. Hardly the usual furnishings for a government office.

  “Nothing pleasant, I hope,” I replied.

  “It was about the world being in such a mess and wondering what you were doing about— What the hell?” He had noticed my bandage. “Oh, forgive me, Miss Bly.”

  “Mrs. Seaman,” she said. “What in the hell did happen, Mr. Hay?”

  I took the straight-backed chair by Wilkie’s desk. I kept my recounting brief, hoping to elicit fewer questions. Wrong audience for that.

  “What did he say exactly?” Wilkie said.

  The question I had feared. I saw no way out but … omission. “Best I can remember,” I said, to give myself a bit of latitude, “he said, ‘Drop it, Hay, you—’” I looked over at Nellie; her eyes were bright. “‘Hay, you fuck.’ Actually, the first thing he said was something like ‘Told you.’”

  “‘Told you’ like ‘Told you before’?” Nellie said.

  “Maybe. Or ‘Told you so.’”

  “Either way,” she said, “doesn’t that prove it’s the same man?”

  “Or they’re working together,” I said. “He didn’t say I; he didn’t say we.”

  We both turned toward Wilkie, who was staring at the ceiling, lost in thought. “Tell me again,” he said, not looking our way.

  “All right, best I can remember: ‘Told you, Hay, drop it, you—’”

  “That’s not what you said last time,” Wilkie said.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “No, you told me a different order. Where your name was.”

  “Well, best I can remember, ‘Told you, Hay’—you’re right—‘Told you, Hay, drop it, you … you fuck.’”

  I stopped. Wilkie’s head popped out of the swirling smoke. “Yes?” he said.

  “Yes what?” I said.

  “That’s all?”

  I felt a knot in my chest. “Just about,” I said.

  “Oh? It sounds like he should finish by saying, ‘Or else…’”

  I turned toward Nellie. The eight or ten seconds seemed much longer, until the message registered. A shadow crossed her pretty face and then, without a word, she left the room, shutting the door firmly but gently.

  “Or else what?” Wilkie said.

  “Or else Lovey gets hurt.”

  Wilkie was all business. “Who is Lovey?”

  “Do I have to answer?”

  Wilkie’s laugh was one of genuine amusement.

  I sighed. “Mrs. Cameron,” I replied. “I call her that. Sometimes.”

  “I see.”

  I could not gauge his expression through the haze.

  He said, “Does she know that your … assailant…”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “She needs to. And she needs our— Are you going to drop it, your investigation?”

  I pursed my lips and shook my head. Wilkie waited for an explanation, but I had none I wanted to give.

  “So she will need our protection,” he said. “And you will, too.”

  “Oh, no. No.”

  “I am sorry, this is not up to you, Mr.… Secretary.”

  “We are back to that, are we?”

  “Oh yes. We are sworn officials of the United States government, long may it live.”

  “The answer is still no,” I said. “For me, at least. And I will get the president to back me up on this. He of all people will understand. As for Mrs. Cameron, I’ll ask her. Is there a way to protect her without anyone knowing … the exact reason why? Other than herself, I mean.”

  “I’ll try,” Wilkie said.”No promises, I’m afraid.”

  “This is important, you understand.”

  “I do, Hay.”

  W
e were unofficial again, and I was tempted to trust him. He was an honest man, or tried to be, which in Washington was the best you could hope for. And really, what choice did I have?

  * * *

  “What in the hell happened to you?” Alvey Adee was staring at the bandage on my throat.

  “Accident shaving,” I said.

  “You have a beard.”

  “You are observant.”

  “Which is what they pay me for,” Adee said. “That, and my facility with falsehoods.”

  I laughed. This was Adee’s value: his levity (and efficiency) in a world as confused and unpredictable as a Ouija board. He sat across my desk and recited a litany of overnight events, none of them urgent. The attorney general’s early departure from Paris without any agreement over a canal route through Panama. The Russians’ latest attempt to outflank the Germans in Mesopotamia by using their influence in Persia. (Good luck with that!) The third assistant secretary of state’s report of progress, such as it was, in the Russian seal arbitration at The Hague. The president’s compulsion to shift our European ambassadors around like chessmen.

  “What he worries about, as I understand it,” Adee said, “is that Vienna won’t want a Catholic and that Meyer will be thought of as a Jew in Berlin and won’t have the social recognition an ambassador needs.”

  It sounded to me as if one of the Henrys (Adams or Cabot Lodge) had gotten to Theodore, although maybe the objection was apt. I said, “I don’t think Meyer is a Jew.”

  “Does that matter?”

  “It ought to. Anything else?”

  “Nothing you need to bother your pretty little head about,” Adee said.

  Margaret knocked at the doorframe and entered. “A wire for you,” she said.

  It came from Pittsfield: “MADDEN IN MY OFFICE AT 2. NICHOLSON.”

  The grandfather clock in my office said one forty-five.

  “When did this come?” I said.

  “Just now.”

  I shooed them out and shut the door. Madden held the secret to the entire affair. How could I worm anything out of him—and over the telephone, for God’s sake—after Nicholson and his men had failed in person? How could I dislodge the motorman from the story he had told time and again and—true or not—had probably come to believe?

  I arranged with the department’s operator for two o’clock sharp. On the first ring, Chief Nicholson answered.

  “Is Madden there?” I said.

  “Oh yes. Not a happy man.”

  “Has he told you much?”

  “Not a thing worth knowing. Your turn, if you like.”

  “Oh, thank you,” I said.

  “My pleasure,” he replied.

  A fumbling of the receiver sounded like the staccato of a gasoline-fueled automobile.

  “H-h-helloo.” Euclid Madden’s voice was frailer than I remembered. Maybe it was the connection. It was astonishing I could hear him at all from nearly four hundred miles away.

  “Mr. Madden,” I said.

  “Y-yes. Yes, sir.”

  “How are you?” Another of my vices was politeness, whether called for or not.

  A pause. “Gettin’ along, I s’pose.”

  “Glad to hear that,” I said. “Did you hear what happened to Mr. Turtle?”

  No response.

  I had decided on shock as a strategy, from a flank. “That he was murdered? Here in Washington. I saw it.”

  Static on the line.

  I said, “Do you know anything about it?”

  No reply.

  “I think it had something to do with your case,” I pressed. “Did you know he was coming to Washington?”

  “No!” Madden wailed. “Why are you blaming me?”

  “I’m not blaming you,” I said. “Your lawyer did. Apparently he said that it wasn’t an accident, that he has proof of it. Had proof of it. And he wanted you to plead guilty to manslaughter.”

  “But I’m not guilty!”

  “Your lawyer says—said—you are.”

  “But I’m not.”

  “So you wanted him gone, is that right?”

  “What are you accusing me of?”

  A fair question. Of murder, I suppose. But I never had a chance to say. I heard a click and then Chief Nicholson yelped, “Gosh almighty! Pick that up!” Then a smothered “G’bye.”

  Another click, and another, and the connection went dead.

  * * *

  I arrived ten minutes early. The Corcoran’s new edifice stood a block and a half from my office and was almost as French. Not in the exuberant ornamentation of the State, War, and Navy Building, but more austerely, in a stolid Beaux Arts style, with a rounded prow that reminded me of a beached whale. The entrance was near one of the fins. I sidled in, as if to a secret rendezvous, which in fact this was.

  The sly-looking guard gave me barely a nod. Adultery-minded men must show up here all the time. This did not describe me—not to-day, anyway. To-day I was a detective pursuing a case involving a possible attempt to assassinate the president. I had every right to be here. I was working, for God’s sake. Even if my work required a rendezvous with a woman who wasn’t my wife.

  Entering the gallery was a joy. The atrium was two stories high and blindingly white. It was surrounded by balustrades and peopled by statues in varying states of undress. Glass panels in the ceiling opened to the sky. I was wading into Greece on a sun-filled day, when the future looked eternal.

  We were meeting in our customary spot. Night was on the second floor, in the north gallery. It was considered Rebouet’s finest, which is to say, his most risqué. The room was empty, other than Lizzie seated on a slatted bench. A daffodil-yellow frock clung to her shoulders and her hair was braided in the back. Her head was cocked, as if entranced by the painting she was facing. I knew better. Night was a black-and-white portrait of a nearly naked witch riding the back of an owl. Advertising cards used the image in cigar stores all over the city, but here it was Art. I found it arousing. Lizzie found it a tease.

  I wanted to touch the nape of her neck, and she wanted me to, but I didn’t, not to-day. I called to her instead, in a stage whisper.

  “Mrs. Cameron.” This was official.

  She turned with a coquettish smile and raised her face to be kissed. Instead, I said, “Hello, Lovey.”

  “Hello yourself.” She studied my face, which was unlike her. Not everything she saw satisfied her. “Is anything wrong?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Sit,” she said.

  I obeyed. Our knees touched, and I pulled back.

  “This looks serious,” she said. No one would accuse Lizzie Cameron of missing the subtleties.

  “It is serious. I was attacked last night by a man with a knife”—Lizzie gasped—“in the park, Lafayette Park, just across from my house. I was walking from the … where the president is staying. Somebody jumped out and held a knife to my throat.”

  “Oh my dear, were you hurt?” Her eyes widened like spring pools. She grasped my forearm.

  I was touched by her concern, though not fooled by it. “A small cut, nothing worse. It could have been worse. He wasn’t trying to rob me—he didn’t—or kill me. He had something else in mind. To stop me from … This is what he said to me.” I wanted to avoid her eyes but dared not pull away. “‘Drop it, Hay’—I omitted the vulgarity—“‘or Lovey gets hurt.’”

  Another gasp. Lizzie’s head drooped to her chest. “Who was it?” she moaned.

  “Precisely what I’d like to know. Lovey. Does anyone else call you that?” I was being mean, but I intended to be.

  A miserable shake of her head.

  “Who else knows that I do?”

  A shrug.

  “Who?” I wanted to shake her.

  “Nobody,” she muttered.

  “Not a single soul?”

  She shook her head but would not look up at me.

  “I know I never told anyone. Could someone have overheard us?”

  Another shrug.
<
br />   “Well, somebody knows,” I said. “Multiple somebodies, if the gentleman who pressed a blade to my throat wasn’t the same somebody who learned this lovely tidbit of our lives. Could one of those somebodies be your devoted husband?”

  “That’s absurd, and you know it. Besides, Don wouldn’t remember it even if he happened to hear it.”

  “This, he would. Any man would. To his dying day, he would remember it. The question is, would he tell anyone if he had? Such as you. Or would a cuckold be too embarrassed?”

  “Cuckold?” she said. Her head popped up, and her face came within spitting distance of mine. “May I remind you, Mr. Hay, that you and I have done nothing that would merit such a … rudeness?”

  I remembered the instant our relationship had taken a turn toward the … intimate. Albeit never as intimate as I had pictured. We were at a reception at the British embassy and her husband had imbibed one (two? three?) too many. I took his other arm in easing him into a gold-covered divan, and our fingertips touched at his waist. Electricity jolted from Lizzie to me, and also—of this I felt sure—in the opposite direction.

  “No reminder is necessary,” I said. This meeting was no longer official. “I apologize for my … imprecision. But my question remains. Might he have overheard us and told someone else? Or opened your mail, perhaps?”

  “Or someone might someone have overheard you. By your telephone stand. Or on another extension.”

  “Have I ever said—”

  “Several times.”

  “I don’t think I—”

  Lizzie cocked her head in a way that thrilled me. The glistening below her eyes might or might not have come from the electric lights.

  What was she hiding? “Not to repeat myself,” I said, “but somebody knows. That is a fact. Maybe I could ask him.”

  “Don? Don’t you dare!”

  “Then you’ll need protection.” I told her that Wilkie had insisted.

  “The hell I will. How would I ever explain that?”

  A reasonable question. I had an alternative idea, and Lizzie went for it. Nellie Bly was an explainable guest, and she was someone you would want on your side in a brawl.

  * * *

  I mentioned nothing to Henry Adams about Lizzie. I was careful about his feelings. His infatuation had been worse than my own—longer lasting, anyway. I had certainly heard enough about it at the time. That far-off look would enter his eyes, the tremor in his voice, whenever he spoke of “Mrs. Cameron”—it was always “Mrs. Cameron,” with a catch in his throat. That was long ago, but I understood that Henry’s feelings were painful still. Mine were. Henry had been a widower, but I assuredly was not. I hated doing what I was doing—more precisely, what I thought about doing—to Clara, even if she didn’t have a clue. I knew that I shouldn’t—couldn’t—do it anymore. I knew it.