The Attempted Murder of Teddy Roosevelt Page 23

  I relished the fried eggs and the thick-sliced, buttered bread. Clara sat across from me at the small, square table that the servants and the children used,

  “You are an idiot to do this, you know,” she said. But she wasn’t angry.

  Nor was I. “I know,” I said.

  To change the subject—and also to put it in grander perspective—I told Clara about the carriage driver’s cancer. She looked stricken.

  “How old is he?” she said.

  “Sixty-two.”

  A year younger than I was.

  “How long does he … have, do they say?”

  I shrugged. Nor could I say if he knew. Funny, those were the two questions everyone asked, the answers unknowable and nosy, respectively.

  “They shouldn’t tell him,” she said, with uncharacteristic vehemence. “What would he have left to live for? I meant that literally, not rhetorically. A man who is dying has nothing to lose.”

  There was a lot I loved about Clara. Her understanding of the human condition, for one, as well as her understanding of each human’s condition, including mine. Including the carriage driver’s, though she had never met him. I admired this in her, and I loved her for it, too.

  Her sentence kept me awake. A man who is dying has nothing to lose. A man who knew he was dying might feel released from all earthly restrictions.

  I bolted up in bed.

  A man who knew he was dying might be willing to die sooner if the cause—or the money—was right.

  Suppose the collision in Pittsfield hadn’t been an accident, and suppose Euclid Madden, the trolley’s motorman, was telling the truth—that he was an innocent man. If both of those were true, or so I deduced, the universe of possible culprits dwindled to one. The carriage driver, David Pratt, had nothing to lose.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 1902

  “Chief Nicholson, I’m glad I caught you at home. I need something, if you could.” The static on the ’phone line seemed worse in the morning. “A couple of things,” I said.

  “I’m listening.”

  Yes, he would have his men call the local banks to learn whether David Pratt held an account that showed any recent deposits. And yes, he would ask the carriage driver’s doctors whether the patient had been told he was dying.

  “Glad to oblige.” That’s what Chief Nicholson said, although his tone was less than convincing. He was doing his duty. I had no right to expect more.

  “A third thing, actually,” I said, pushing my luck. “Life insurance. And whatever else you can learn.”

  The exhalation was audible across the hundreds of miles. “I will try,” Chief Nicholson replied.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you.”

  * * *

  “It was too goddam hot,” Mark Hanna belched, in his sun-drenched kitchen.

  It was my fault, I suppose, for interrupting the senator’s breakfast (again). This morning, at least, Hanna was dressed, if you count a plaid smoking jacket and a polka-dot cravat (which I did). He chattered with his mouth full, about the mercurial weather in Cleveland and about the shenanigans of the city’s radical mayor.

  “I need to ask you about something unpleasant,” I interrupted.

  Hanna scowled.

  “Do you know a man named William Turtle?”

  A look of Neanderthal puzzlement crossed Hanna’s face, and then a ray of comprehension. “Wasn’t he shot?” he said.

  “Yes. How did you know that?”

  Hanna gulped and shrugged, as if he had said too much already.

  “The evening of the day he was shot,” I said, “he was planning to come see you.”

  I waited for a look of astonishment, but I was disappointed. Elmer Dover must have said something, because Hanna waved his hand like a monarch dismissing his courtiers and guided a forkful of sausage into his maw.

  * * *

  I like talking things out with a deaf man. I can think aloud and not worry overmuch about how it sounds. And Adee often has wisdom to dispense; maybe hearing only part of things improves one’s perspective. This morning I interrupted his daily recital of the world’s overnight woes to ask him, slowly, as he trained his sharp eyes on my lips, how to plumb a dying carriage driver’s mind.

  Leonardo da Vinci should have observed the muscles pulsate in Adee’s temples. At last he said, “He would want what he wanted, for loved ones first.”

  So saith the childless bachelor; it made my heart ache. I kept hoping that, someday, Adee and Margaret Hanna might bicycle into the twilight.

  “Clara’s view is that he has nothing to lose,” I said.

  “That could make a man dangerous.”

  We let that sink in.

  “Who could tell me about this man?” I said. “Governor Crane, I suppose. This fellow Pratt was his liveryman, as I understand it, whenever the governor was home in Dalton. He is back in Boston now, I would guess.”

  “You could telephone him there.”

  “I don’t…” I shook my head. “That man is difficult enough to converse with in person. And what am I supposed to ask him: Did the liveryman he personally recommended for the president turn out to be an assassin instead?”

  * * *

  “To get away from those brats. Why else?” Cortelyou said. We were striding across the carriageway toward the western wing, still under construction. “That’s what Princess Alice says, and she ought to know.” I was pleased to hear his disrespect.

  I suspected that Cortelyou’s own four children behaved more like civilized beings than the president’s half dozen did. Not to mention my four—excuse me, three. (That was a hard thing, when people asked you how many.) Helen, the poetess, had married last winter, and sunny Alice’s nuptials were days away. Clarence, our overlooked seventeen-year-old, had escaped to Harvard. Plus Del. Minus Del.

  “And not enough bedrooms,” I replied, for something to say.

  Cortelyou had been surprised at my sudden interest in touring the White House renovations. He had shown me first around the White House proper, still crowded with workmen and scaffolding. The main staircase was nothing more than wooden planks. The Corinthian pillars in the main vestibule looked lonely, even vulnerable, with the floor and walls ripped away. Beneath the East Room floor, I’d glimpsed the new iron beams that shored up the rotten timbers. It seemed ludicrous to think the Roosevelts could move back in by Thanksgiving, as Edith wished. For one thing, the White House painters had just gone out on strike, and the plasterers threatened to join them.

  “This used to be the conservatory—the greenhouse,” Cortelyou was saying, as we reached the new wing. “Also the rose house, the grapery, and the fern house. But you knew all that already.”

  “That, I did,” I said. Since before you were born.

  The high-ceilinged lobby of the new West Wing was aswirl with dust. Workmen darted hither and yon, their ladders clattering.

  “The tin roof is corniced,” Cortelyou continued, as my docent, “and the balustrades are up and painted—finished, thank God, before the strike. And we extended the coal vault in front, for additional storage.”

  I passed through the lobby to the spacious room at the rear, its curved windows facing south. I said, “The president’s office, I gather.”

  “No, the secretary’s office.”

  Ah, Cortelyou’s. “And where is the president’s office?” I said.

  “This way.” Cortelyou led me through his office-to-be and across an anteroom into a square corner chamber that was less centrally located and slightly smaller than the secretary’s. The walls needed plastering, and the beams were exposed in the ceiling. Electrical cords hung like nooses at the center of the room.

  “Very nice,” I said.

  “I’m glad you like it,” he replied.

  “I hope he does, too.”

  “He will.”

  Which was different, I reflected, from He does. I wondered if Theodore had noticed the disparity. Probably. Did he care? Evidently not
, for he could have altered the design if he liked.

  “But to meet with visitors,” Cortelyou went on, “the president will still use his old office, in the original building, upstairs. And over here”—he guided me back through his office and beyond the telegraph room—“is the staff room.” It was more than twice the size of the president’s office. Men were laying the wooden floor. “How big was the staff in your day?”

  “Two. Nicolay and me. And part of a third.”

  “We have forty now, counting the eleven clerks and six messengers on loan from the departments. They need to be organized, like in a business, and now we will have the space for it.”

  “I marvel at your capacity for detail,” I said. And fear it.

  Cortelyou’s capacity for work was legendary. Had the man ever made a mistake? I had heard a rumor once that, as President Cleveland’s stenographer, he had nearly touched off a war when he heard would instead of wouldn’t in transcribing a diplomatic note to the tsar. But I doubted it.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “I must tell you, by the way, that the driver of the president’s carriage in Pittsfield—”

  “And mine.”

  “Yes. He is still in the hospital. The doctors say he has … cancer.”

  A sigh. “What is his name?”

  “David Pratt,” I replied. “Senior; there is also a junior. Did you know him?”

  “In the carriage, certainly. We must have shaken hands.”

  “Before that? Did you not approve all of the president’s logistics?”

  Cortelyou rested his elbows on a sawhorse, then stood straight and dusted off his wrists, which were already clean. Beneath the spotless frock coat he wore a stiff white vest and high collar; his brilliantined hair, salted in gray, was brushed back.

  “I had that honor,” he said.

  “Did you meet Mr. Pratt then?”

  “Who had the time? How would I know a livery driver in Pittsfield?”

  “Dalton.”

  “Dalton—see? I left those arrangements to Governor Crane. I understood that this man Pratt sought the job. A personal acquaintance, I gather.”

  “How, do you know?”

  “I imagine everyone in Dalton knows everyone else. Certainly the governor does. His hometown. Whatever he wanted was fine with … us.”

  That rang true.

  “I’ll tell you this about the man,” Cortelyou said. “He was as nice a fellow as could be. He suggested the president could get a better view if he switched sides with the governor.”

  “And did he?”

  “No. He liked it where he was, behind the driver. Mr. Pratt wanted him to sit on the left side of the carriage, directly behind the bodyguard, Mr. Craig.”

  * * *

  Directly behind Mr. Craig. Why else would David Pratt have wanted the president to move other than to … to kill him?

  And himself. I should not forget that.

  I stumbled across the White House grounds, weaving among the piles of lumber, to the State Department building next door. I kept thinking about the carriage driver. What would impel a man of seemingly sound mind to drive his carriage in front of a hurtling trolley, on purpose? Knowing that anyone or everyone aboard might die. Including the president. Including himself. Who on earth would do that?

  This was who: A man who was dying and had nothing to lose. Who maybe had something to gain. Financial or otherwise.

  I thought I heard the guard at the door say, “Good afternoon, Mr. Secretary,” but I couldn’t be sure. I was too impatient for the elevator and climbed the marble steps two at a time.

  It was the question Cortelyou hadn’t asked that was troubling me. Why was I interested in David Pratt? Did Cortelyou know the answer already? He made it his business to know. Everything. In his ruthless quest for efficiency, he understood that information is power. Information gushed in; a trickle came out. Cortelyou was opaque because he tried to be. If he was the ideal of Twentieth-Century Man, I trembled for my country.

  I found a note on my desk: Chief Nicholson had ’phoned. Main got him on the line immediately. (Elsie was at lunch.)

  “I asked for this an hour ago!” he was shouting. A throat clearing and a sip of something. “Is that you, Mr. Hay?”

  I assured him it was.

  The man from the bank had been helpful. David J. Pratt Sr. had opened an account not quite two weeks before the collision, at Agricultural National Bank of Pittsfield. “They have a branch in Dalton. He opened it with a cashier’s check. Five thousand dollars, exactly. It was drawn on…” A rustle of papers. “On Riggs National Bank of Washington, DC. Do you know it?”

  “Do I know it?” I said. “It’s a block away from my house.” Clara and I had a couple of accounts there. So did everyone I knew.

  “And you asked about life insurance. Another five thousand. Also purchased last month. On the fifteenth.”

  About the time the president’s schedule became— No, not known yet to the public. But decided upon and known to … a few. A week before his New England tour got under way.

  “And the cancer?”

  “Well, let me finish with the life insurance, because I doubt they’re ever going to pay up. Because yes, he does know his diagnosis, and he has known it for a while.”

  “For how long?” I said.

  “The doctors couldn’t remember, and his son isn’t to be found. Three or four weeks at least. Maybe since before he bought the policy. Happily, it’s not my job to figure that out.”

  “Before the collision.”

  “Oh yes. And even now he seems pretty healthy. Double vision, some awful headaches. Nothing anyone else would necessarily notice.”

  “Double vision?”

  “Occasionally. Not until after the collision, he says.”

  Having been found unconscious but groaning, beneath the nigh wheel horse’s carcass, could have caused all sorts of symptoms. Not cancer, however.

  “How do they know he has cancer?”

  “They say they know. Who am I to say otherwise?”

  I was about to replace the receiver when Chief Nicholson spoke up. “One other thing, by the way—probably irrelevant. The president of the Agricultural Bank is a celebrity hereabouts: Governor Crane.”

  * * *

  “My dear Mr. Secretary, to what do we owe this honor?”

  Ah, the royal we. I wish people would quit invoking honor when they meant merely to flatter.

  Charles Glover, the president of Riggs, was a banker’s banker, a pillar of the community, a giver to all civic causes—a man made of marble, by my lights. His face had no sharp edges. His cheeks were smooth, as was his forehead, and his demeanor. Not a gray hair was out of place. Only the bristly, clipped mustache betrayed the aggressiveness I presumed lay underneath. Also his eyes, which narrowed and never left mine. He happened to be a neighbor on Lafayette Square, catty-corner from my house, a vacant lot away from the temporary White House. Neighborliness did not always breed affection.

  “It is a question of the highest security,” I said, indulging in flattery myself. “Information that may affect the president’s physical safety. That is all I am permitted to say.” I paused to gauge the effect. There was none. I described what I knew about the cashier’s check deposited into David Pratt’s account. “Someone had to come into the bank here in order to send the cashier’s check in the first place. Is that right?”

  “I will check and let you know,” Glover said.

  He meant that as a dismissal, but I stayed in my uncomfortable seat on the uncivilized side of the vast, gleaming desk. “I’ll wait,” I said.

  “As you wish,” Glover said, lifting the telephone receiver from its cradle. “You will be more comfortable, however, out in the lobby.”

  The new Riggs building, at Fifteenth and Pennsylvania, was made of granite and felt just as cold, inside and out. The exterior was meant to remind you—and it did—of the Treasury Building directly across the avenue, but the interior had none of Trea
sury’s stolid charm. Its marble and vaulted ceiling, all in golden hues, was meant to persuade people to part with their money, but it left me worried about how the money was spent. I chose a high-backed chair with a clear view of his door.

  Marble, marble, money, and garble,

  Make us rich or make us horrible.

  Hmm. Maybe the or should be and? Funnier, and probably truer—which, in poetry, I suppose is the point. And rhyming, I had to admit, still had its pleasures.

  The door to Glover’s office opened and an august forefinger beckoned me back in.

  “He is coming,” Glover said.

  I was expecting a Zeus, but a meek-looking man with thin, sandy hair and a pallid complexion sidled in. His cravat was askew and a thin folder was in his hand. He glanced around as if he had never been here. I wondered if he had met the bank’s president before, much less a secretary of state. He was introduced as W. J. Flather, an assistant cashier.

  “I just met another Flather,” I said, “down at police headquarters.”

  “My little brother.”

  His little brother was bigger. This one’s eyes grazed mine, and he raised the folder to his face like a shield. Inside of it was a single sheet of paper. “The account belongs to a company called Intrepid Americans Incorporated,” he said. “It was opened on the twentieth of August.”

  Two days before the president set off on his New England tour. “Opened by whom?” I said.

  Flather examined the paper and passed it to me. It was a scrawl. The first name might have started with an I or a J and the second name definitely with an H. The address was also indecipherable, although it was probably Thirteenth, Sixteenth, or Eighteenth street, definitely northwest. From his vest pocket Flather produced a magnifying glass. I handed the paper back, and a look of the most intense seriousness overtook him. His narrow face seemed to expand.

  “Sixteenth,” he announced. “That’s the street. And there’s a number in front. Three digits—they all look alike. Zero zero zero—couldn’t be. Six zero … No, eight zero zero. That’s it: eight hundred Sixteenth street northwest.”