The Attempted Murder of Teddy Roosevelt Read online

  Henry and I passed the blacksmith’s and the machine shop, heading south on Thirteenth-and-a-half street, before turning east on D. More visible in the daylight than the whorehouses were the ironworks and the brass works and the lumberyard and the Potomac Electric Power smokestacks belching soot. We kept sight of our feet, to keep them from stepping into— Best not to think about that.

  Meanwhile, I filled Henry in on my genuflection before Pierpont Morgan and on my lack of any temporal benefit. “A statement of fact, he says, nothing more. He would prefer me as president. Period.”

  “I shouldn’t doubt it,” Henry said. “So would I.”

  “But doing something about it … That’s a step I very much doubt he took. I have to wonder if this was the kind of crime—assuming there was a crime—that a man like Pierpont Morgan would commit.”

  “I never said it was,” Henry said.

  An exaggeration, to be sure. He had showed me the scrawl in the margin and pointed the way to a suspicion. But he had let me—and Theodore, of course—jump to a conclusion.

  * * *

  “Donald Cameron couldn’t kill a polecat,” I told Nellie Bly, “much less a president. He’d have been a bum without his pa.” Simon Cameron, Lincoln’s venal war secretary, became a Pennsylvania senator who bequeathed his seat and his political machine to his son, who had squandered both. “It’s not Don I’m worried about. If he had known about Lovey, would he have told anyone? I wouldn’t have.”

  “Then who are you worried about?” Nellie said. “Mrs. Cameron?”

  I hoped she was kidding, but I doubted it. “I don’t know. Maybe she was overheard. Or she had told somebody who told somebody else.”

  Nellie agreed to the plan right away, and we were meeting in the Willard lobby, behind the marble pillar farthest from the door, before I delivered her to Lizzie’s suite. She was dressed like an industrial magnate’s wife, in a gray, high-necked street gown with a cameo at her throat. She also had a pistol in her purse. My long-winded explanation of what she needed to know had, by necessity, included more of a confessional nature than I was accustomed to sharing. But duty called. She was kind enough not to giggle at Lovey. Or to inquire further.

  “Lizzie—Mrs. Cameron—is hiding something,” I said. “I know she is. She almost admitted telling someone, by what she wouldn’t say.”

  “Any idea who?”

  “That’s your job.”

  Nellie’s small smile grew.

  The old elevator operator nodded gravely, noticing Nellie’s leather Gladstone bag, and without a stop or spasm delivered us to the fifth floor. The corridor was empty. Before we reached Lizzie’s door, we heard shouting from inside. A man’s voice.

  I rapped on the door, and the shouting continued. I rapped harder, and it ceased. I kept knocking until heavy footsteps approached.

  “Who is it?” A growl.

  “Senator Cameron, this is Secretary Hay,” I said. Best to make this official. “I have somebody here you should meet.”

  A pause. “Who?”

  Got ’im! “Nellie Bly,” I said.

  “Nellie … Oh, her.… Why would I want to…”

  “Because your wife wants to meet her.” I hoped he would not ask how I knew.

  Another pause. “All right.” The latch grated and the doorknob creaked. In the doorway stood the shell of a man once known as Donald Cameron. His cheeks were red and his droopy mustache twitched. I could smell the bourbon from where I stood. “What do you want?” he said. “And who is this?”

  “Nellie Bly,” I replied.

  “So you said.”

  “May we come in?”

  “Why?”

  “Miss Bly will be staying here to-night. Your wife was kind enough to invite her.” I stepped through the doorway and he edged back.

  “She di’n’t tell me.”

  “Ask her,” I said.

  “You telling me what to do?”

  “No, of course not, Senator.” Once a senator, always a senator.

  “With my wife, damn it?”

  “No, no.”

  “’Cause you, of all people…”

  I didn’t see his fist sweep from above and to my left, beyond my peripheral vision. It was outside of all expectation, which is my only excuse for not trying to duck.

  Only after I departed, leaving Nellie behind, did the pain set in.

  * * *

  “Why would he want to do that?” Clara said.

  Not an unreasonable question. I was lying in bed, and she was bringing me another warm compress. This one was scalding. Her compassion was wearing thin.

  “Ask him,” I said. “I gather he doesn’t like me.”

  “I thought maybe he gave you a hint about why. Like the fellow did last night, the one who cut your throat.”

  “He didn’t quite cut it.”

  “Oh yes, he did. Literally.”

  “Well, not deeply.”

  “That is why you are here and not in the morgue.”

  “I get your point.”

  “Do you? So when are you giving this up?”

  I hoped she meant the investigation.

  I lay awake for hours, listening to Clara’s breathing. It pulsed like the waves in a lake—lazy, contented, unending. I wondered what she knew and what she thought she knew. And what there was to know.

  What I did know was this: when I was with Clara, I was calmer than when I wasn’t. Is that love? I think so. It’s part of what love is, anyway. The part of love I must be true to. Beyond the sparkle. Enduring love, I mean—a deeper love, an unflashy love, arguably the only kind worth having.

  Arguably.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1902

  “Yes, it hurts!” I said.

  I figured your masseur was like your lawyer or your pastor—whatever you said was a secret and would not count against you in court or, with luck, on Judgment Day. There, I would need all the help I could get.

  I had told Lindgren about the punch I had not seen coming, and confessed that the perpetrator was a drunken fool. My defense, as it were.

  “A drunk is like a child,” he replied, pressing into my clavicles. “You don’t know what they’ll do next—because they don’t.”

  He suggested a salve for my bruise. “I have some with me,” he said.

  * * *

  “On my right side.” I managed a laugh. “And how was yours? Restful?”

  “Restful enough,” Nellie Bly said. “And productive.”

  I had guessed this, for she had shown up unannounced at my house in time for breakfast, looking marvelous in an arctic-white gown. As she ladled marmalade onto her toast, Nellie glanced over at Clara. I prayed that she would leave Lovey unmentioned.

  “Any signs of danger?” I said.

  “Only from the man of the house,” Nellie said.

  Clara snorted—at Don Cameron or at me, I wasn’t sure.

  “Any more violence?” I said.

  “Not after you left. A lot of shouting. A visit from the night manager, but only once.”

  “And for you,” I said. “How late did it go?”

  “You mean, how early did it start again.”

  “How early did it start again?”

  Nellie checked the diamond-flecked watch she wore around her neck. “Early,” she said.

  “See how lucky you are,” I said to Clara.

  “Oh yes, things could always be worse,” Clara replied, I hoped in jest.

  Nellie carried her coffee to the library. I closed the door and said, “‘Productive’ how?”

  “She did tell someone about Lovey,” Nellie said. “Her sister Mary.”

  I should have guessed. Lizzie and her oldest sister were close. “How did you get her to tell you?” I said.

  “Easy. She wanted to tell me—was bursting to. Happens all the time. You’d be surprised. People love to be asked about themselves. They’re flattered. They want to tell you things, even intimate things, if you’re intereste
d enough to listen. As a memento of their time here on earth, I suppose.” Nellie’s smile was angelic. “It also helps to be a woman.”

  I understood why Lizzie did not want to tell me, although I must say I felt a little insulted. “If Mary knows, then her husband must know,” I said. Mary was married to Nelson A. Miles, the commanding general of the U.S. Army since ’ninety-five. “Right?”

  “Maybe,” Nellie said. The corners of her mouth curled into a smile. “Is the reverse true?”

  That stung, as I felt pretty sure it was meant to. “General Miles,” I said. “He hates the president. For good reason, I must say. The president humiliated him, and not in private.”

  I told her the tale of the Civil War hero, whom Roosevelt had scorned as a “brave peacock” during the war against Spain. The pompous old gent saw himself as a plausible president—as a Democrat, perhaps. When he told an interviewer something he shouldn’t have, thereby interfering in a military court, he hurried to the White House to explain. At an open reception, the president had bawled him out.

  “She didn’t say a word about that,” Nellie reported.

  “She must have figured everyone knows what happened, given the dozens of gossipy witnesses. It wouldn’t have surprised me if the good general had gone home that day and done what the Japanese consider the honorable thing. But he didn’t. He isn’t that brave—or that honorable.”

  “Is that reason enough to kill a man?”

  “How much of a reason do you need?” I said. “His ambitions? His humiliation? His dishonor? Or all of them combined?”

  * * *

  The trim brick town house at 1746 N street, between Seventeenth and Connecticut, was four stories tall and wider than any other on the block. This was an elegant but unostentatious neighborhood, not far from the Lodges. Here, the door met the sidewalk.

  I knocked. It was half past ten.

  No answer.

  I engaged the door pull and produced the chimes of Big Ben, for my enjoyment alone. (I had sent Nellie back to protect the Camerons.) I knocked harder and heard light footsteps.

  A uniformed chambermaid, no older than sixteen or seventeen, opened the door. Behind her, the spacious hallway ended in a sweeping staircase. I gave her my card and asked whether Mrs. Miles might receive a visitor.

  “Is she expecting you, mistuh?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  The girl was flustered for a moment, but she ushered me into the parlor, on the left, and abandoned me there. The room was distressingly formal, with sober armchairs, heavy drapes, and time-darkened paintings of military men. Glass cases on the wall each contained a sword and a brass label noting the wars against the Confederacy, Crazy Horse, or Sitting Bull. Over the mantel, in a gilded frame, hung the congressional Medal of Honor, awarded for the young Miles’s derring-do in the Union’s defeat at Chancellorsville. I was examining the attitude of the eagle perched on the golden star—vengeful, I decided—when a sultry voice behind me said, “And to what do I owe this pleasure, Mr. Hay?”

  “The pleasure is mine,” I said.

  We stood for a moment. Mrs. Miles hunched forward, head cocked, intelligent eyes alert. She was reputed to be the Sherman family beauty, although her mouth was pouty and her pile of chestnut-brown hair looked like a mop. She offered me a seat but not a beverage. I would not be staying long.

  “This is a delicate matter,” I began. I had been unable to decide on a strategy and hoped that coming face-to-face with her would help. It did not. “It involves the security of … the nation,” I tried. This had the advantage of being true, or true enough, and usually it worked. “It involves your sister, Mrs. Cameron.”

  “What about her?” Her voice was low and throaty, protective—menacing.

  I decided to get straight to the point. The wife of a general, even this general, might appreciate that. (Or might not.) “Have you ever heard about someone calling her … Lovey?”

  A lift of her eyelids suppressed a look of surprise. She knew. “Don, you mean,” she said.

  “No, somebody else.”

  “Did Mrs. Cameron suggest that you speak with me?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ask her this question?”

  “I did.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “Well, here I am,” I said, hoping the deflection would succeed.

  Mrs. Miles sat back in the oversize armchair and said, “Only once.” Yes! “By someone”—she stared at me in astonishment—“she used to care for.”

  So Lizzie had mentioned me.

  “Let me explain why I ask.” I told her of my attacker’s threat against Lovey. “So I need to ask you, did you tell anyone else?”

  Her eyes widened and her head shook as if she were ill.

  “Your husband, perhaps,” I added.

  She snapped out of her torpor and declared, “How dare you ask me that! What business is this of yours, Mr. Hay?”

  Mrs. Miles was no milksop. “It is very much my business, if your husband had a hand in … in what happened to me the other night.” I told her of the knife at my throat and the whispered warning about Lovey.

  “Why would my husband want to do something like that?” she said.

  So she had told him. “I am making inquiries on behalf of the president. I imagine your husband doesn’t hold him in the highest regard.”

  I expected fire or ice but got neither. “He is the commander in chief,” she replied. A verifiable fact.

  * * *

  I was only half aware of the clip-clop, clip-clop of the rigs along Connecticut avenue or the unpredictable screech of the trolley. I dodged pedestrians without looking or thinking.

  Would General Miles wish to murder a president who had humiliated him? Anyone might. Would he actually try? Conceivably, if—a big if—he still had the courage he had shown at Chancellorsville. But would he try it by using a trolley car as his weapon, in the hands of an unknown motorman? Is that how a military man would react? Unlikely. Or he might have mentioned Lovey to someone else, as his contribution-in-kind to an assassination plot. Was this plausible? Not especially. But not impossible.

  The commander of the United States Army occupied an office two floors below mine. It was fancier—more colorful, anyway. I chalked that up to the Stars and Stripes along the walls, the Cuban flag over a bookcase, and the ribbons across General Miles’s chest. I could tell he was expecting me, by the fresh smell of cologne. Obviously his wife had ’phoned. I’d have been disappointed had she not.

  “I am at your service, Mr. Secretary.” General Miles rose from behind his desk—I feared he was going to salute. Obsequiousness was his habit, no doubt, granted to anyone above him and expected from everyone below. (His abrasiveness had deterred at least one promotion.) He looked like what he thought an old general should look like, with a broom of a mustache on a square-cut face, a broad chest, and a broader belly. His uniform was starched and looked uncomfortable; its epaulets must have worried the nation’s supply of golden tassels. His handsome face—the Sherman girls insisted on manly beauty—was devoid of expression.

  The only available chair had a hard wooden back and a cushionless seat. This was not a self-confident man.

  “I am conducting an investigation for the president,” I said.

  “Yes, sir.” A military man understood authority, even if he hated the source.

  “So there is only so much I can tell you. But let me ask you this. Your brother-in-law, Senator Cameron, have you been in touch with him of late?”

  “No. I believe he is up at his farm, in Pennsylvania.”

  “Actually, he is back. He, uh, punched me last night.”

  General Miles looked puzzled, unsure if I was kidding. “Why would he want to do that?” Clara’s words exactly. “Let me amend that,” he said. “Why did he do that? I can definitely understand the desire.”

  Maybe the man was not as dim as I had thought. “Well, thank you,” I said—not stiffly, I hoped. “You would have to ask h
im why. Though I wonder if he knows. Or remembers.”

  For the first time, Miles looked me in the eye. He understood what I meant.

  “Let me ask you this, then,” I said. “Did he—or anyone else—mention anything to you about … Lovey?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Lovey. A pet name, as it were. For your sister-in-law.”

  General Miles’s face drained of color, which left it as bleached as a barnacle. “Why are you asking me this?” he said.

  “It is a matter of … our nation’s security … and the president’s.” To the commander of the army, surely a winning argument.

  “I see,” he said. I hoped he didn’t. “I have heard this … word … this gossip. Though not from Don, I don’t think.” He stopped, having remembered who told him. “From someone,” he said. He remembered something else. “It was you—what you call her. Why are you asking me about—”

  “Because I was attacked last night, and the man who attacked me threatened Lovey. I want to know who attacked me, and I want to prevent any danger to … Mrs. Cameron.”

  “Are you accusing me of—”

  “No.” This was at least partially true. “Did you happen to tell anyone else?”

  “Tell them what? This piece of gossip? Why would I want to do that? Besides, who would possibly care?”

  That, indeed, was the question at hand. And it had an answer, one I hadn’t found yet.

  I tried once more, with a jab to the chin. “You have reason, do you not, to think ill of the president?”