The Attempted Murder of Teddy Roosevelt Read online

  I will confess that I was a tiny bit untruthful, suggesting it had been Henry’s pet name during his known period of infatuation. This raised no suspicions, as far as Clara let on. And I felt the webs of guilt and shame wrap themselves around my spirit as I told the half-truth.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 1902

  The rasping of the telephone was a sound I had grown to despise. The apparatus had its uses, to be sure. But I missed the quiet of the past, when the noise came mainly from animals (human and otherwise). Nowadays, machinery would intrude at any moment of the day or night—invariably, when I least wanted to hear it. My pocket watch on the side table said a quarter past six.

  The ’phone quieted at last, and soon a shuffling of footsteps approached the bedroom door. Clara was up and gone, of course, at the market or a friend’s. Two discreet knocks.

  “Come in, James,” I said.

  Chief Nicholson was on the horn. It was urgent.

  I put on my dressing gown and rushed downstairs. I had barely said hello when Chief Nicholson said, “Pratt is dead.”

  “Damn,” I said. “The cancer?”

  “No. His throat was slashed.”

  I gasped.

  “During the night,” Chief Nicholson said. “The morning nurse found him.”

  I was grateful to have a chair underneath me. “Murder?” I said.

  “Looks like suicide,” Chief Nicholson replied. “He left a note.”

  “What did it say?”

  “The usual. That he couldn’t take it anymore. They never tell you what ‘it’ is.” I had never considered the literary merits of suicide notes. “The cancer, I suppose. Though the doctors here say he wasn’t in terrible pain. Nor despondent, though I suppose that comes and goes.”

  “‘It’ could be guilt,” I said. “He cut his own throat? Is that even possible?”

  “I’ve heard of it happening. A couple of weeks ago, in North Carolina, I think it was. Here, we found a long-handled razor on the floor next to his bed. And the blood splatter was … well … the coroner is taking a look, even as we speak. I should know more later.”

  “And you’ll let me know?” I said.

  Chief Nicholson hung up without replying.

  * * *

  “What did he have against me?” Theodore said.

  “I wouldn’t take it personally,” I said. “The man killed himself.”

  “After trying to kill me, so you’re saying. If you try to kill a man, it’s personal. Especially to the intended victim.” Theodore grinned at the thought.

  I conceded the point. “Seems he had nothing against you, other than ten thousand dollars.”

  “Is that what a human life is worth nowadays? Does everything have a price?”

  “Not to be cynical,” I said, “but everything has always had a price.”

  “I don’t!” he sputtered.

  I believed him.

  “And now,” he said, “we’ll never know for certain why this fellow Pratt did what he did, if he did. You saying Chief Nicholson never got a confession out of the man? Did he even try?”

  “Says he tried. I wasn’t there.”

  “You need to be. Go back to Pittsfield.”

  “I don’t see what I can do that Chief Nicholson and his men can’t. I am more useful here, I should think. We still don’t know who took … Mrs. Cameron to Mason’s Island. And Mr. Turtle’s murderer is still at large.”

  “What I don’t understand about you, John, is your roundabout ways. When you see a problem, the best thing to do is to go straight at it.” This explained San Juan Hill and so much else in his life. If something went wrong—asthma, Spain, trusts—he would change it. As always, I envied his certitude. “There is no other way a problem of state—or a problem of the heart—ever gets solved.”

  I couldn’t have disagreed more, but I saw no point in saying so.

  * * *

  For once I was hoping that Lizzie Cameron would not come to the door—or Don, for that matter—and for once I got my wish.

  “Good morning,” said Nellie Bly. Her lips formed a girlish smile.

  “I need to talk,” I said.

  “Let me talk first,” she replied. “I haven’t finished my coffee, and they brought a big pot.”

  Her words poured out along with the coffee. She had located the desk clerk downstairs who had accepted the kidnapper’s note for Lizzie—from a street urchin, he said, any of a hundred.

  “All in a morning’s work,” I said.

  “Last night, mostly.”

  “Where is Mrs. Cameron now?” I said.

  “Sleeping.” Nellie pointed at the bedroom door. “The doctors gave her some laudanum.”

  “Good,” I said. “Put her out of her misery for a few hours. Better that than … Let me tell you the latest.”

  Nellie was as puzzled as I was about David Pratt’s suicide. She hypothesized guilt instead of cancer as the reason.

  “Or five thousand dollars in life insurance,” I said.

  “Not if it’s suicide,” Nellie pointed out.

  “So where in the hell does that leave us?” I said. “Another blind alley? Every lead fizzles out. Nothing leads to anything else, unless I’m not seeing it. All this investigating keeps coming back to the same place—nowhere!”

  “All right, what do you know?” Nellie said.

  I’d played this game before. “I know that David Pratt is dead, or so I’m told, apparently a suicide. I know that William Turtle was murdered—I saw that—and by someone he recognized. This narrows the list of potential suspects, of which I was—and maybe still am—one. Do I have everything correct so far?”

  “You do,” Nellie said, an amused look on her face. “And do you know that the late Mr. Pratt was truly at fault?”

  “No, I don’t know that. But five thousand unexplained dollars in a new bank account suggests … I don’t know what it suggests. But something.”

  “And we know that it was sent from Riggs, do we not?”

  “Oh yes, although we don’t know who sent it. A phony name and address. Mine.”

  “And do we know that the trolley motorman is truly innocent?”

  “We don’t know that, either. We have no strong evidence that he was guilty, other than a hand-drawn map stuffed into his seat and his mysterious nineteen-minute delay at the top of the hill.”

  “I’m no lawyer,” Nellie said, “but that sounds like evidence to me. Do we know that a crime actually happened—that it wasn’t an accident, I mean?”

  “I’m pretty confident on that. A knife to my throat persuaded me, if the gun in Pittsfield didn’t. That’s something else that I know. I was attacked twice, by someone or someones who know who I am and what I am doing and want me to stop. But neither time was I harmed”—I rubbed my throat—“very much.”

  “Compared to Mr. Craig or Mr. Turtle,” Nellie said.

  “Or our Sleeping Beauty here. My second attacker threatened her, and she was in fact … kidnapped I suppose is the most accurate term, and then returned unharmed. After you and I were shot at.”

  “Yes, I would accept that as a fact.”

  “And let’s not forget what Turtle told Governor Crane: that it wasn’t an accident.”

  “According to Governor Crane.”

  “Fair point,” I said. “Ol’ Ichabod. We keep coming back to him, don’t we? He chose the carriage and driver, and our friend Samson answered his door three floors below us. Though I can’t imagine that he was behind this. He was in the carriage, and he’s far too … flinty, shall we say, to risk killing himself. I’m been making the same points again and again. I’m not getting anywhere.”

  “Then let’s go at it that way. Who else can we eliminate?”

  “The president, for one.”

  “I’ll give you that,” Nellie said.

  “And by the same token, Cortelyou.”

  “Well, by the same token you should eliminate the carriage driver, and we seem to have
decided otherwise.”

  “True, true,” I said. “But Cortelyou has more to live for.”

  “Let’s go back to the motorman,” Nellie said. “Maybe he is guilty. Maybe he was lying in wait at the top of the hill for the president’s carriage.”

  “He’d have to time it exactly right.”

  “Which he could, if he knows the route and has the right sorts of brakes.”

  “Perhaps. But why? Why would he do something like that?” I jumped from my seat in despair. “I hate this case. Everything about it circles back. We can’t get anywhere and we can’t eliminate anything or anyone. It’s the anarchists, it’s the trusts, it’s the beloved senator from Ohio, or our favorite commanding general, our—” I stopped and glanced toward the bedroom door. “Everyone has a motive to want this president … gone. Most of all, me. Which is the other thing I know for sure: I didn’t do it.”

  “But you’re not so sure about me, is that right?” Nellie said.

  “Pretty sure,” I replied.

  “Let’s look at it this way, then: How many different people were involved, total, in all of these … stunts? Minimum and maximum, how many did it take?”

  “Smart question,” I said. “Somebody killed William Turtle, and somebody opened a bank account at Riggs—possibly the same person. There were two attacks on me—by different people, I’m pretty sure. One of them knew about Lovey. And two men took Lovey … Lizzie … Mrs. Cameron … to Mason’s Island. One of them sounds like our friend Samson—yes, that’s another connection to Governor Crane. Anyway, how many people is that?”

  “By my arithmetic, a minimum of two, a maximum of … say, six. Not including the carriage driver or the motorman—probably not both.”

  “In other words, a conspiracy,” I said. “Blithering blazes! A conspiracy to kill the president.” The words hung in the air.

  When I heard a door handle jiggle, I jumped up and made my escape.

  * * *

  Three floors down, Governor Ichabod (oops, Murray) Crane had an impenetrable expression as he blocked the doorway. “What do you want?” he said.

  “May I come in?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Do you know that David Pratt is dead?”

  “I know.”

  “Any idea why?”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to know what you know about Frank Forney.”

  “Nothing.”

  “He answered your door the other day.”

  “So?”

  “And he was David Pratt’s servant. And it seems he briefly kidnapped Mrs. Cameron—Elizabeth Cameron—and shot at me.”

  “What?” Patches of color tinted his face. “I can’t help you now,” he said.

  Before I could make my case of why he should, he slammed the door in my face. I hadn’t thought to put my foot in the way.

  * * *

  “Go home,” I told Adee.

  “Same to you,” he replied.

  The second assistant secretary’s head bounced up from the pile of papers on his desk, a beatific smile on his face. He liked being here on a Saturday afternoon. He mattered here. It was where he felt at home.

  “Some catching up to do,” I said. He was watching my lips, which wasn’t always easy, with my beard. “Any good news?”

  “A little. We’re almost ready to receive the crown prince of Siam—he arrives on Friday. And somebody out there loves you.”

  “Oh, pray tell, what misguided soul?”

  “Your favorites, from the Court of Saint James’s. Actually, from their pet newspapers, which is much the same thing. Good show, they say. The St. James’s Gazette calls you ‘an American Hamlet.’”

  “Is that a compliment?”

  Adee waved a page. “An American Hamlet who says, ‘Look on this picture and consider whether old Mother Europe should not be ashamed of herself.’”

  “If this is the best I can do,” I said, “I shall accept it with pride.”

  * * *

  John Wilkie was in his office. Despite a wife and decently behaved children at home, he was as married to the job as Adee was. The telephone receiver was at his ear while he puffed on his unlit meerschaum pipe.

  The Secret Service chief replaced the receiver and scribbled some notes on a legal-size pad. “A counterfeiting case in Minnesota,” he said. “The new McKinleys, this time. The ten-dollar notes. Not a bad job of them, either.”

  “They don’t waste time, do they?”

  “No, and these fellows have talent, I must admit.”

  “Every profession has its elite,” I said. “How did you catch them?”

  “We haven’t.” Wilkie grinned like he had scored the winning run for the Senators. “But we will. And I’ve been looking for you.”

  “I haven’t gone far.”

  “It’s about the ink,” Wilkie said.

  “What ink?”

  “From Riggs, on the form that opened the account.”

  “The one with my name on it.”

  “Yes, that was clever, wasn’t it?”

  “Not to me.”

  “Well, my chemists put the ink under a microscope and did…” He whirled his hand in the air, conjuring the mysteries of modern science. “Chemical tests. The results, as it happens, were interesting. Not your ordinary American ink. Ink, as you may or may not know, needs what the chemists call a stabilizer to keep it from clotting. Can be a plant resin or an egg white. Best our folks can tell, this ink uses the resin of a holly bush that isn’t found in this country. Only in Scotland, a few other places in northern Europe, and the South Island of New Zealand. Parts of Canada, too.”

  “Sold here?”

  “In New York, probably, at the better stationery stores. Not sure about Washington. My men are checking.”

  “It was his pen, you know. Whoever opened the account.”

  “Riggs doesn’t pay for fancy ink,” Wilkie said. He wiggled in his seat and placed both elbows on the desk. “Another fact about this ink. Just to satisfy my curiosity, we tested the note you got yesterday morning, the one that told you about, uh, Mrs. Cameron.”

  “Yes?”

  “The same ink.”

  * * *

  My Antoinette was not, I’m honor-bound to report, destined for Broadway. I had never heard boos before at the National Theatre—pardon me, the New National Theatre. (Did every institution in this city need to boast of its departure from the past?) Such a stately place, facing the avenue, with its handsome twinned towers and its lush crimson decor. The play was risqué, I had to admit. To me, that saved it from mediocrity, or worse. Not to Clara. She found some of the lyrics downright nasty and thought the kissing went on for too long.

  Her mood had lightened (wasn’t the point of entertainment to be entertained?) by the time our carriage reached home. I was trying to hum the ragtime-ish tune “Life Is Such a Bore,” the best of the forgettable music, when I saw James’s message by the door: “’Phone Chief Nicholson at home, no matter the hour.”

  It was nearly eleven o’clock and I was tired and a little out of sorts. No need for the ’phone number—I knew it by heart. The operator put the call right through.

  Chief Nicholson answered on the first ring. Poor devil, on the job on a Saturday night.

  “Hay here,” I said.

  “Pratt was murdered.”

  “What? I thought there was a suicide note.”

  “There was. But he didn’t write it. Our handwriting expert says it was close but not quite a match. It was pabulum, somebody’s idea of a suicide note.”

  “Whose handwriting, do you know?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Try Frank Forney, if you can find him.”

  I told Chief Nicholson about the red-bearded giant who had taken Elizabeth Cameron to Mason’s Island and then disappeared. David Pratt’s servant, apparently, if not his master.

  “But that was yesterday, in Washington,” Chief Nicholson said. “Could he have gotten back here in time?”r />
  “I’ll … check.” Actually, I’d have Nellie check. “Why are you so sure he was murdered?”

  “The autopsy report. This is what the pathologists found—and the pathologists, you know, have the last word. Try to follow me here. The gash across his throat went from right to left, from just below his right ear, but not quite all the way across. Pratt was left-handed—that’s what his widow says—and that’s the direction he presumably would have cut if he was slashing his own throat. Except for this. If it were a suicide, the gash would have been deeper at the beginning and shallower at the end, as the victim loses strength and maybe even resolve. But this gash was deeper at the end. So what they conclude is that Pratt didn’t do this himself. Somebody else did. Somebody strong.”

  It took me a while to exhale. “Do you suppose he was taken by surprise?”

  “He might have been sleeping, for all we know. And it seems he was taken from behind, judging by the blood splatter. It was uninterrupted. The killer wasn’t standing in front. From behind, the killer wouldn’t have blood all over him, and if he was careful enough, he wouldn’t leave bloody footprints. So he could get away without being noticed.”

  “That’s what happened here, you think.”

  “That’s all my men know at the moment. Though it gives us one useful clue.”

  “What is that?” I said.

  “If he was standing behind Pratt, cutting the victim’s throat from right to left, the killer was left-handed.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 1902

  “So tell me,” I said, “is there a God?”

  Whom better to ask than one’s masseur? If your body is a temple, isn’t he the high priest?

  Lindgren pressed the heels of his hands into my shoulder blades. I yelped. “Of course there is,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Everyone says so, and my daddy told me when I was a tot.”

  I couldn’t argue with the latter. “Well, if there is, I’ve got a few questions to put to him,” I said. A sweet pain filled the small of my back. “Maybe it’s time to pay the good Lord a visit.”