The Attempted Murder of Teddy Roosevelt Read online

  Demetrios started to say something, then caught himself. He looked at my breast pocket and said, “Five.”

  “Five?”

  He knew when he had a fish on the hook, and he knew that I knew. I paid him.

  “Up to Georgetown. Thirty-second street wharf.”

  “What were they doing there?”

  “They don’t say. I don’t ask. They tell me where, that’s where I take ’em. The pay ain’t great, but that’s what I do, mister. What’d you say your name was again?”

  “You busy?” I said.

  * * *

  “Dropped ’em off jes’ ’bout here.” Demetrios smirked. “They go out to the end of the dock, like they figgered a boat was waitin’.”

  Between K street and the river, in Georgetown, was the industrial part of town, and it stank. The morning gusts brought signs of the coal yard, the soap factory, the fertilizer warehouses, more of sewage than the sea. Typhoid germs loved the Potomac, and the river loved them back.

  “She still seemed willing?” I said.

  “Didn’t see ’em all the way out, but what I see, yeah.”

  “How long did you watch them?”

  “A minute, no more. The gent pay the bill. No tip, though.”

  “I could fix that,” I said, “if you could wait.”

  Georgetown College’s boathouse blocked the foot of the wharf. It was a squat wooden structure with opaque windows and in need of fresh paint. The Columbia Athletic Club, the driver had told us, used it, too. Nellie and I stepped around the shack and plunked onto the dock.

  Small boats bobbed along both sides. The clouds had darkened and scudded across the sky. The river showed occasional whitecaps between here and the wooded Virginia shoreline.

  “What then?” I said to no one in particular.

  “What then what?” Nellie replied.

  “What in the hell did they do next? Oh, pardon my—”

  “Oh hell, forget it,” Nellie said.

  “The hell I will,” a man whooped from the last boat on the right, at the end of the pier. With its dark trim and clean lines, the rowboat looked sleeker than the rest—more so, certainly, than the two men seated cross-legged, sharing a flask. One was fat, one was thin; neither had an honest beard or could accurately be considered clean-shaven.

  “Top of the morning,” I said.

  “Just gettin’ started,” the fat man replied, saluting with the flask.

  “I’m looking for a tall, pretty woman”—another whoop—“and a man. They were here maybe an hour ago.”

  “We git a few of ’em each and ev’ry hour, as you can rightly see, generous sir.”

  “I would need to know where they went.”

  “Coulda gone anywheres. You can git to Bal’more from here. Or to London or the coast of Brazil. Can’t rightly say.”

  For five dollars, he could. For another fiver, he agreed to take us.

  “There,” he said, pointing south. “Mason’s Island.”

  That is what old-timers in Washington (such as myself, in this city of transients) called Analostan Island. Plopped in the river between Washington and Virginia, it invoked the name of George Mason’s son, an early owner.

  “You saw them go there?” I said, gesturing toward the island’s northern shore.

  “Naw, not the old ferry landing. There!” The boatman pointed to the bulge in the island’s eastern shore. “Past that bend. Nowhere’s else they coulda been goin’.”

  “London,” I said.

  That drew an affable smile, showing rotten teeth.

  The boatman was not as drunk as I’d feared—or as he would be by noon. I paid off the liveryman, beyond dutiful with my tip, and put my life—Nellie’s, too—in the boatman’s hands. Boatmen’s. The skinny fellow was coming along.

  He sat in the bow while the fat man—Eduardo—manned the oars. With considerable strength and skill, I must say. Nellie and I shared the bench at the back. I felt my jacket pocket and caressed the derringer for comfort.

  The wind was whipping up; the whitecaps danced like droplets on a drumhead. Eduardo smiled without stop, which worried me. The little man stared forward, transfixed by something I was unable to see. Just as well, no doubt.

  The island’s coastline was a jumble of shady groves and scraggly shrubs. The fat man steered the boat around toward the southern shore and eased it onto a mud bank sheltered by low-lying branches. Another boat was tucked beneath overhanging branches a few feet ahead and to the right.

  “After you,” the fat man growled.

  I stepped out of the boat with a minimum of agility. My boots sank into the marshy sand, up to and above my trouser cuffs. I lent Nellie a hand—unnecessarily, for she leapt like a ballerina onto the beach. The instant she touched the ground, the little man jumped out and pushed the boat backward into the water and hopped back in. This was why he had come. I thought of shooting at the boat, to put a hole in it. But what would that accomplish? Besides, they might shoot back. The wind swallowed the fat man’s maniacal laughter.

  We were stranded. It seemed we were impossibly far from the city, although it was in sight. We could swim if we must. And I remembered the other boat. I hoped it had paddles. I had to assume it belonged to Lizzie and her … Who was the gent? A kidnapper? A lover? A cousin or a brother—or a brother-in-law—who sought to … Lord knows what he had told her … and what he might want.

  Whoever he was, where were they?

  I motioned Nellie to halt, and we listened, but we heard nothing but the wind. I took three deep breaths and forced myself to calm down—for Nellie’s sake, I told myself. Really, for my own.

  Lovey is ours.

  “This way,” I said, pointing uphill, feeling a confidence unencumbered by evidence.

  I had been on the island twice before. The first time was back during the war—the real war—when it was a training camp for Union troops, who trampled the gardens and orchards beyond repair. I was here again last fall—with Theodore, in fact, to the athletic fields at the northern end, to watch trapshooting and a few innings of baseball. The island’s southern tip—that’s where we were—still showed the traces of terraced landscaping from antebellum days, but years of neglect had delivered an isle of civilization back into wilderness. I knew vaguely the location of Mason’s old mansion and outbuildings, up the hill from this beach. The old avenue, still lined with locust trees, was now a briar patch of weeds. Tangles of underbrush concealed the fields along both sides.

  I felt raindrops and looked over at Nellie, who pointed up at the trees. Branches swayed, and the leaves flashed their dull undersides. Nellie ran ahead, her cheeks red—with excitement, best I could tell. She had come to Washington in pursuit of an adventure like this. She leaned into the slope, and I followed. Gravel crunched under my boots.

  “The house is up ahead,” I said, “or was. It’s the only shelter on the island, as far as I know. I bet that’s where they are, if they’re here. I do have a gun, by the way.”

  “So do I,” she said.

  “Well, let’s hope neither of us needs to use it.”

  No reply. I wasn’t sure she agreed.

  I thought I heard a scrape on stone, and I stopped and listened hard, but the only sound was the wind through the trees. I inched ahead, at full alert. Nellie walked a step behind me. A blockade of hedges proved to be the ruins of a decorative circle. The drizzle was giving way to spatterings of rain. And me without my hat. Nellie had a parasol, which was almost wide enough for two. She offered to share. I found it wiser to get wet.

  High on the ridge I spied the remains of a stately mansion. Crumbling walls were haphazardly spaced; vacant doorways showed nothing behind them but spindly trees. As we tiptoed nearer, I noticed the ornamental brickwork, smothered by heavy branches like roots in a graveyard. We slogged through clustered leaves and skirted the nearest corner of the building. The interior stood as empty as the Parthenon. Grass jutted up through the vestiges of a herringbone floor. Most of the roof was gone.<
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  Just ahead was a forlorn stone structure with its roof intact. An old storage shed, perhaps, or an icehouse or a kitchen. We scooted toward it, picking a meandering route through the brush. The door was short and round at the top, as in a nasty fairy tale.

  I stopped and mouthed to Nellie beside me, Ready?

  Was she ever!

  I steadied the derringer in my hand, which wasn’t as difficult as I had expected. The door was ajar, and I kicked it open. The hinges screeched.

  I heard a scream behind me.

  “Lizzie,” I shouted.

  An explosion ripped through the air. It was a sound I knew all too well. I crooked my arm around Nellie’s neck, dived for the ground, and crawled inside. The gunshot had hit just above the doorway, intended not merely to frighten but to kill.

  I could taste the wet, loamy earth of the shack’s floor. The smell was rancid and rich, with a surge of cordite.

  “You all right?” I whispered fiercely.

  “Couldn’t be better,” Nellie said. Her eyes were aglow.

  A second scream—the same screamer—sounded farther away. It was heading toward the boat.

  “Let’s go,” I said. I picked myself off the ground, shifted the derringer to my left hand, and offered Nellie my muddy right.

  By the time we got down to the flats, the boat was gone from beneath the boughs. It was nowhere to be seen; it must have turned back north, toward Georgetown, out of sight. We had no choice but to swim.

  Actually, Nellie jumped in without a word. Soon she had hired a boy with a rowboat to come fetch me. I was willing to be rescued.

  * * *

  Tired and broken, the bath felt soothing. I was pondering an emergency call to my masseur when a knock at the bathroom door produced James.

  “Miss Bly ’phoned, sir,” he said. “She said Mrs. Cameron is back. That you would understand.”

  I leapt out of the porcelain tub. James handed me a towel, and within minutes I had dressed and left.

  Lafayette Park looked revived after the rains. The magnolia leaves shimmered. People hurried to an early week-end. I weaved through them like a college fullback and noticed nothing until I reached the Willard. If I caused an accident along the way or made a matron drop her wrapped-and-bowed package from Palais Royal, I beg forgiveness.

  The hotel lobby was buzzing. I cut through that, too. The elevators were engaged, so I took the stairs beyond the reception desk two at a time. I felt the walls of the stairwell closing in.

  The fifth-floor corridor was empty. I rushed to Lizzie’s door, but as I readied my knuckles to knock, I stopped. Suppose the kidnapper, or whoever he was, was here. Suppose he had forced Nellie to ’phone.

  But she would have refused.

  I made ready to knock, and nearly fell forward when the door opened before my knuckles struck the wood. It was Nellie. Her face looked tight. “She’s here.”

  “Is she decent?” I said.

  “Is she ever?”

  Lizzie Cameron was sprawled on a divan. I had never seen her so lovely. Her regal neck extended from a sweeping robe of royal blue with gold piping. She had covered all her blemishes with creams. Nellie returned to the edge of a high-backed chair. I stood between the windows overlooking the avenue.

  “It is marvelous what a bath can do, Johnny,” she said.

  “You’ve had quite an adventure.”

  “I have, at that,” she said. “And it’s your blessed fault.”

  “My what?”

  “You heard me.”

  “I did, but I didn’t understand you. My fault? For coming after you?”

  “No, no, no.” Her torso rose from the divan. “Your note last night.”

  “What note? I never sent you a note. What did it say?”

  “It promised a rendezvous this morning that would please and surprise me.”

  “A rendezvous with whom?”

  “You didn’t say.”

  “I didn’t say anything. I tell you, I never sent you a note. Where is it?”

  “I burned it, per instructions—your instructions.” She nodded toward the ashes in the fireplace grate. Nothing left for Wilkie’s lab.

  “Did it say anything else?”

  “To show up at the livery stable behind the Willard at half past six.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes, I was punctual.”

  Now she starts doing what I ask? When I hadn’t?

  At the livery stable she was met by a clean-shaven young man with broad shoulders, polite manners, and a round chin. Was this the fat-faced, stupid-looking bloke that Demetrios had described?

  “What was his name?” I said.

  Lizzie shook her head; her bell-shaped coiffure was fraying.

  “Did you ask?” I said.

  “Of course. I can converse with a fireplug.”

  “But not with him.”

  “Not a word.”

  “Had you seen him before?” Nellie said.

  A pause. “I don’t think so,” Lizzie said.

  I knew she was lying. “Did he say where you were going?”

  “Not until we got to Georgetown, down to the wharf.”

  “But the driver knew. Demetrios, I believe.”

  Lizzie looked startled. “I couldn’t say.”

  “When did you suspect that something wasn’t … right?”

  “When we got to the wharf. You don’t like boats. Or the water. I asked the man where we were going, and he wouldn’t say. He kept his hand in his jacket pocket in a way that was worrying me.”

  “So you got out and followed him.”

  “Oh no. He was following me. To the end of the pier. A boat was waiting.”

  “And you got in.”

  “Of course I got in. Now it was two against one.”

  “Oh?”

  “Oh yes. The man with the oars. A big, bruising fellow with a wild red beard.”

  “Samson!” I exclaimed. He hadn’t left town.

  “Pardon?”

  “Forney. Frank Forney. Was that his name?”

  “I don’t … Actually, I do remember the other fellow calling him Frank. With a tone of contempt, I must say.”

  “Was he the one who started shooting?”

  “Oh yes. And I knew who he was shooting at. They knew it was you. That’s why I screamed.”

  “Yes, I heard you. We heard you. How did they know it was me?”

  “They didn’t exactly bare their souls, Johnny. But they knew.” She was sitting up. “And they knew about us!”

  “What do you mean, us?”

  “Oh, they knew, and I didn’t tell them. ‘Tell your boyfriend,’ this is what the man with the red beard said, right after shooting at you. ‘Tell him that, next time, somebody dies.’”

  My bowels twitched. Sure, death threats were a badge of honor, but the reality felt less romantic.

  * * *

  I had never seen John Wilkie angry. “You could have been killed—both of you. Should have been.”

  “Much obliged,” I said.

  “Fools!” His pipe sent off plumes of purplish smoke. He pointed at me. “And you in particular.”

  “I couldn’t disagree. Are you done yet?”

  “Not quite. You didn’t need to come to me—though you could have—but why in the name of hell didn’t you go to the police?”

  “I told you, I got this note before seven o’clock, and you weren’t here, and we had no idea where we were going until we went there.” This was mostly true; what it omitted was that I had wanted to pursue this myself. “As for the police, where do you find one when you need one?”

  “That’s why God invented telephones.” Wilkie was starting to calm down. I figured he needed a fight or two each day to work up an appetite for dinner.

  “If they wanted to kill me, they would have already. That, and their bad aim.”

  “You are a fool. They didn’t pass up the chance at William Turtle. You willing to risk this for Mrs. Cameron? Or for Miss Bly?”


  “Mrs. Seaman,” Nellie said.

  “Whatever you call yourself to-day.” Wilkie was mad again. “I am lending her to you for safekeeping, Mr. Secretary.”

  “Nobody lends me,” Nellie said, half rising from her hard seat. “I lend myself.”

  “And believe me,” I said, “she doesn’t need safekeeping. Besides, you take risks.”

  The Secret Service chief swiveled in his seat and said quietly, “Mr. Secretary, I am paid to.”

  * * *

  “Lovey? What in the hell does that mean?”

  This was a conversation I had dreaded, and Theodore was in full falsetto mode. He was a purist about such things, as he should be. (Of course, he had abandoned infant Alice for a couple of years after his first wife died, and he later abandoned Edith—gravely ill—to gallivant into Cuba, but those are stories for another day.) It was not, strictly speaking, my neighbor’s wife that I was coveting—had coveted. The Camerons had moved away from Lafayette Square years before. Still, the merest hint of adultery, even the acknowledgment of any desire, was bound to upset Theodore. I respected that—admired it, even.

  On my better days, I even shared it.

  I forced myself to meet his glare. I would not have wanted to be a Spanish soldier on San Juan Hill. “Kind of a pet name,” I said. A lame answer, although the truth.

  He looked away, muttering, “John, John, John.”

  “Nothing has come of it,” I said. I hated defending myself—or having to. “It is a pet name, nothing more. I have known her—and, yes, liked her—for years. But somebody knew about it and kidnapped her, to stop me from investigating what happened to you. Or what almost happened. What did happen, certainly, to Mr. Craig.”

  Theodore looked angry—at me or at the gods or at whoever was responsible for his bodyguard’s death, I couldn’t tell. Nor could I blame him.

  “Does Mrs. Hay know?” he said.

  I did not answer, which was an answer in itself.

  * * *

  I couldn’t tell her. There was nothing to tell. But I had to say something about Lovey. Otherwise, the story of Lizzie’s kidnapping and my pursuit onto Mason’s Island made no sense.