The Murder of Willie Lincoln Page 4

  “One other word of advice, Johnny,” Nicolay said, “about how to think through this … puzzle. Begin at the beginning.”

  “What in the devil does that mean?”

  “That is the other way to figure things out. The journalist’s tactic is to work your way in from the edges, so you know as much as you can when you get to the center of things. The historian’s way is to begin at the beginning and work your way through to the end. To understand why things unfolded as they did. Either way can work. Best is to do both. As usual.”

  “The edges? The center of things? Speak in English, Nico.”

  “Who did this? To Willie, I mean. That is the center of things. Assuming … that somebody did. And who left the message in your satchel? That is almost at the center of things, assuming—again—that the same person or persons did both.”

  “Assume, assume.”

  “If necessary. And if you are aware of it, and can take that into account, as a discount.”

  “All right. And the edges?”

  “Any situation presents a universe of possibilities. In this case, everyone who was in the building when the note was placed into your satchel. Everyone who had access to poor Willie. And to Tad. The opportunity. Yes, and a motive. You might well be right about why—to injure the commander in chief. Where opportunity and motive intersect, there you will find the center.”

  “You should have been a detective, Nico.” Hay grinned and slapped Nicolay’s shoulder. “Or a lawyer.”

  “Spare me. When we got here to Washington City, Johnny, my first rule was never to be in a room with more than one lawyer at a time. Because suddenly the conversation becomes unintelligible, in a foreign tongue. The rule was impossible, of course—you and the Ancient, for starters—and within a day or two I gave it up.”

  “Don’t blame me—I wasn’t cut out for anything else. Nothing that paid.” Hay winked. “Nobody would want to be a doctor after watching my father scrape to get by. getting paid in bushels of carrots—when he was lucky—or half-bales of hay.” John Hay considered his father, Charles, the latest in a line of distinguished near failures, a warmhearted romantic who believed in the world as he wished it to be, not as it was. “Nor a teacher, nor a preacher, although I do like to talk. I would not suit the Baptists, for I dislike water. I would fail as an Episcopalian, for I am no ladies’ man. So, by a process of elimination, as the least of the evils, I became an attorney at law. And now I get to be a Vidocq.”

  “A what?”

  “Oh, Nico, you need some civilizing. Eugène”—he pronounced it in the French manner—“Vidocq. He was the French forger and thief, who as a thirteen-year-old stole his parents’ silver plates, and grew from there. Into a bad arse, the master criminal of his day. Then he had a conversion, an epiphany of sorts, and became the world’s first true detective. He started the Sûreté Nationale, and then he ran it. A story odder than fiction. Poe used him as the model for the detective Dupin—you know, in The Murders in the Rue Morgue and whatnot. You have heard of Poe, have you not?” Hay loved instructing Nicolay, when he could. He described the novel by Victor Hugo to be published in Paris this spring—a college friend had written to Hay—in which the criminal being pursued … “And the policeman who pursues him obsessively—Vidocq was the model for both.”

  “I do not waste my time on make-believe,” Nicolay said with the slightest of smiles.

  “Yes, you waste it in other ways. All right, then, let us begin at the beginning—what in the blue blazes does that mean? Start with the moment Willie got sick. He was riding his pony, he and Tad. Right after that, he fell ill. Both boys did. But why on earth should I care about that?”

  Nicolay shrugged. “It is better to know than not to know.”

  Hay rolled his eyes at the casual profundity, although he knew that Nicolay, as usual, was correct. “You are full of pearls to-day.”

  “Every day, Johnny, every day. If only you would listen.” That smile, again.

  Hay regarded most of his friends as smarter or braver or more talented than he was, which he secretly considered a tribute of sorts to himself.

  They reached the iron fence along the north grounds of the Executive Mansion. The gate was open, as it always was. The security around the Executive Mansion was notoriously lax, at the behest of a fatalistic president who insisted on keeping the building unbarred to the people it served. They turned onto the grounds. How starkly white the building was, even under the overcast sky, after the two fresh coats of paint in December. (Hay had seen those invoices, too.) Its unpretentious, democratic nickname—the White House—was catching on. Despite the Greek pillars at the portico, the building was simple and understated, a show of serenity and self-assurance. Except for the tragedy, the turmoil—and the treachery—within.

  Hay was surprised to see Old Edward at the crêpe-covered door. Usually he arrived no earlier than ten o’clock, depending on how many friends he met on the street.

  “Edward, a word, please,” Hay said.

  “Certainly, sir.”

  * * *

  The crimson parlor was ordinarily reserved for Mrs. Lincoln’s use, to receive visitors and to pour the afternoon tea. Not to-day, of course. Hay had heard nothing of her condition, other than she had not left her bed. He had seen the president slip in and out of her bedroom, along with Dr. Stone. And Mrs. Keckly, who carried a chamber pot covered by a red-and-white checkered towel. As for the Hell-cat, Hay was content to assume the worst. It was not only her extravagance and her meddling with the mansion’s staff. Something was wrong with her, inside her, in her explosions in temper and her caroms in mood; it seemed her jealousies had settled on her husband’s two young aides, for their intimacy with the man she mocked and needed.

  Hay had suggested the room and figured to lead Old Edward in, but the doorkeeper put himself in front. This was his bailiwick, after all. Edward McManus was a small, trim man with arctic-white hair curled close to his head. He called himself “the most ancient institution in Washington,” having served as the mansion’s doorkeeper since Zachary Taylor’s tenure, or possibly Polk’s. “Goatie,” Tad called him, for his white beard. But he moved as gracefully as a gazelle, with an impenetrable politeness and a gliding efficiency, taking the fewest steps necessary to reach his destination. His lively eyes promised an unaffected honesty, such as a president deserved. But anyone who shielded the mansion from unwanted visitors and only occasionally incurred their wrath was bound to be wilier and less deferential than he let on. (After Millard Fillmore succeeded to the Executive Mansion in ’fifty, upon President Taylor’s death, the new chief magistrate asked about the propriety of buying a secondhand carriage, and Edward replied that he was a secondhand president.) A man who could detect in an instant a caller’s purpose and worth was sure to be perceptive about the nature of men.

  The doorkeeper held the door open for Hay. The crimson room was almost garish, with a satiny sheen—the French wall hangings, the grand piano, the upholstered sofas and chairs, the Persian rug, the golden chandelier with its globes of light. The sole object Mrs. Lincoln had spared in her makeover was Gilbert Stuart’s painting of the only president who had never lived within these walls, the one for whom the city was named.

  Old Edward chose a straight-backed chair for himself and motioned Hay into a crimson love seat. At the obtuse angle, confrontation was impossible.

  “What may I do for ye, sir?” the doorkeeper said.

  “I need some help, please.” Pleading for assistance was often successful, Hay had learned, especially with older men.

  “At yer service, sir.”

  “Last evening, when”—Hay took a deep breath—“when Willie left us, were you on duty at the front entrance, do you recall?”

  “How could I ever forget, sir?” Old Edward tilted his head. “Fer the grand bulk of the time, I was, sir. Though not ev’ry moment. Once, I ushered Senator Browning and his missus upstairs.” Hay had sent a messenger for the Brownings, knowing the president would wan
t his old friends from Illinois nearby. “And another time or two I departed me post for a few minutes each. Once to fetch Doctor Stone. And once to…” He hesitated and looked embarrassed.

  “Understood,” Hay said. No man could stand at his post for hours on end without attending to the necessary. “Edward, I need to compile a list of everyone who entered the mansion last evening, from the time that … from, say, five o’clock ’til—how late were you on duty?”

  “Until eight, sir, as me usual. Then dinner in the kitchen.”

  That left an hour unaccounted for, from eight o’clock until nine, besides Old Edward’s occasional forays from his post. Assuming, of course, that the perpetrator, if there was one, came from outside.

  “Did anyone relieve you at eight?” An unfortunate choice of verb.

  “No, sir.”

  “Anyone on duty at all?”

  “Only the Pinkerton men, a few of them outside, in the bushes mainly. On Mister Pinkerton’s orders. The president is not to know.”

  “While you were at the door, did anyone unusual come in?”

  “Unusual, sir?”

  “Anyone who was a stranger to you?”

  Old Edward coiled his face and half shut his eyes. He took a pride in the keenness of his memory that Hay attributed to advanced age. His evenness of tone, when he resumed speaking, reminded Hay of a trance.

  “Three that I recall, sir. Paying their condolences. A young man with a full black beard and a soiled frock coat, a few minutes past six. Then an old colored man, a freedman, I would judge by his posture, with a ridge of silvery hair and a face like driftwood.” Hay admired the poetry—ah, the Irish. “He came around seven. And then an old woman, an odd woman, white whiskers on her chin, wearing a heavy gray shawl. Just before eight. I was heading down to the kitchen for my dinner.”

  “Did they come inside?”

  “No, sir. Not a step. At the door I turned them away. Two of them left their cards, all but the colored gent. He had none. I can find them if you like. The cards, I mean.”

  “No need. The news got out quickly. About Willie.”

  “I suppose it did, sir.”

  “Any notion of how?”

  “Could not say, sir.”

  “I thought you knew everything, Edward,” Hay said with a smile.

  Old Edward’s eyes crinkled with pleasure. “Nobody knows everything, sir. Not since Erasmus.”

  Hay shook his head—a doorkeeper schooled in the classics. “And during that time, did anyone leave?”

  “Of course, sir. ’Twas the end of the day.”

  “And who was that, do you recall?”

  “The usuals, sir. Ye and Mister Nicolay, of course.”

  Hay had gone to the War Department to wire the tragic news to Uncle Milt—Charles’s younger brother, a lawyer in Springfield, had cornered the family’s ambition and taken his nephew under his wing—and then met Nicolay for a somber dinner at Willard’s.

  “Who else?”

  “From five o’clock on?”

  Hay tried to remember when he had last noticed his satchel and seen nothing amiss. He could not say for sure and saw no point in guessing. He would rather know too much than not enough. (Oh Lord, he was turning into Nicolay.) “Yes, from the time that Willie”—this time he could manage a euphemism—“passed.”

  “Oh, I see,” Old Edward muttered, although Hay doubted that he did. He hoped not, anyway. “Let me think.”

  The doorkeeper’s eyes fluttered shut. He took his time before he reopened them and turned toward Hay.

  “The Brownings, the senator and his wife,” he said. “And Judge Taft and the missus. Neither of the boys, nor Julia. Too painful for the Madam, as I understand it, to see those boys here.” Old Edward had dropped his voice to signal that the information about Mrs. Lincoln was privileged. “Doctor Stone left shortly before eight and said he would return. Missus Welles and Aunt Mary and another nurse or two.” Mary Jane Welles, the wife of the navy secretary, had ministered to Willie and, now, to Tad. “And Tom Cross and another messenger, and Mister Stackpole and…”

  “Was he on duty at the president’s office—Mister Stackpole?”

  “Could hardly say, sir. Downstairs, I was. You were there, across the way, were you not?” Not really a question. “And, now that I think of it, there was Mister—excuse me, Major—Watt.” That was John Watt, the Executive Mansion’s longtime gardener.

  “Coming in or out?”

  “In. Just after seven.”

  Why would a gardener arrive after dark? “Not out?”

  A moment of focus, then a shake of his head. “Though the conservatory has its own exit.” The greenhouse was attached to the western wall of the mansion.

  Old Edward reported that Messrs. Seward, Stanton, and Blair—nearly half of the cabinet—had stopped by, each staying for varying lengths of time. The doorkeeper was exact about the comings and goings. Hay asked Old Edward to prepare a list of people who had arrived or left the building plus everyone who had remained on the premises—the cooks, the chambermaids, the messengers. Any of them might have slipped an envelope into Hay’s satchel. And one of them had.

  “Something else, if I might trouble you further,” Hay said.

  “Anything, sir.” The doorkeeper put on a patient look. “Almost anything.”

  “The morning that Willie and Tad fell ill, they went out riding. Early, before you arrived. Would you happen to know who took them out?”

  A pensive look, staring at the chandelier. Hay had the impression that rather than trying to retrieve a fact, Old Edward was deciding whether to reveal one.

  “Tom Cross, I woul’ suppose, sir. ’Tis usually he who accompanies the lads outside the grounds.” Hay thought of the messenger as an irascible Negro, although the Lincoln boys had always seemed content in his presence. “On tha’ morning in particular, sir, I cannot say fer certain.”

  “And where might I find Mister Cross?”

  “Now, sir?”

  The president’s messengers had their hideaway in the basement of the mansion. Tom Cross would be in around noon.

  * * *

  It was the right thing to do, and Hay knew it. He had pledged to be mature about this—he liked to do the right thing. When he could.

  This did not obligate Hay, however, to seek him out. Surely, if Allan Pinkerton was half as sharp a detective as he believed himself to be, he would already know what Hay was up to. The logotype of his detective agency was an eyeball, was it not? So, when Hay saw the Scotsman shuffling out of the president’s office, a snarl on his face, silence seemed the better part of valor.

  No such luck.

  “Mistah Hay!” Not a greeting but a command. Followed by an invitation into Hay’s own office, which Hay accepted with forbearance. It was the right thing to do.

  Hay was quick to offer Pinkerton a seat, to prevent Pinkerton from offering first. With a barrel chest and a thick black beard that swallowed his face, the famous detective had a glowering presence. Hay had never seen him smile. Pinkerton fixed Hay’s gaze—in a contest, it seemed to Hay, who was determined not to lose. One thing boxing had taught him was to look levelly into another man’s eyes with a comfort that did not expire. After a half minute or more, Pinkerton eyed a piece of lint on the cuff of his frock coat and picked it off.

  “I understand I can be o’ service,” Pinkerton said.

  “As what?”

  “As a truth-finde’, o’ course. The president told me o’ yer … efforts. Perhaps some … professional guidance woul’ be welcome.”

  “Always ready to learn from a master,” Hay said.

  Pinkerton missed the meanness. “What do ye know so fa’?”

  Hay showed him the note and succinctly described the biblical message—murder in the insurrection—and his plan to begin at the beginning, attributing the tactic to Nicolay, to slip any jabs.

  Pinkerton said, “Wha’ the bloody hell does tha’ mean?”

  “I will start with Tom Cross, w
ho took the boys out riding the morning they fell ill.”

  “A bloody waste o’ time, if ye ask me.”

  “I do not recall that I did.” Damn it, Hay thought—he would be mature. “What do you think I should do, then?”

  “Ever’thing ye can think o’.”

  “My plan, exactly,” Hay said. “Such as?”

  “Question ever’one who might’ve entered yer office when ye were gone. When, exactly, was tha’?”

  “I’m going to do that. About to start.” Hay gestured toward the door as if Pinkerton was holding him up, which he was not.

  “Very well, then.” Pinkerton seemed less than pleased. “And ever’one who ha’ any contact with … the boy. Or took care o’ him.”

  “Yes, that is next.”

  “And if he was killed,” Pinkerton went on before Hay had finished, “what do ye propose was the mechanism? Was he shot? Of course not. Stabbed? No. Strangled? Hardly. Poison, perhaps. Most likely, he was not murdered a’tall. And this is the note o’ a lunatic, which belongs in the trash.”

  Hay took back the note, but he hoped the detective was right. Pinkerton left without offering to help, to Hay’s relief.

  * * *

  Hay had no recollection of having been trapped in a cave as a lad, yet venturing into the basement of the Executive Mansion put him on edge. He descended the staircase and followed the mildewed corridor, with its low, arched ceiling and the green paint that peeled from the walls. Hay crinkled his nose at the smell—a dead varmint, with luck a runt. An incongruous aroma, sweet and warm, wafted from the kitchen at the distant end. Freshly baked bread.

  Whenever they were idle, which seemed to be most of the time, the president’s three messengers occupied a closet that was halfway to the kitchen, across from a storeroom. The unpainted door was ajar. Hay’s knock brought a barked order to enter.

  The windowless room held a pockmarked desk, two hard-backed chairs, and a sagging cabinet that must have dated to John Quincy Adams’s day. Behind the desk sat a muscular young Negro who lacked eyebrows or any hair on his head. His intimidating physique made him a suitable bodyguard for the boys. Ordinarily, Hay tried to stay clear of Tom Cross; last evening, Hay had practically begged the man before he would walk a half block to tell the secretary of state about Willie. Hay wondered if his own pugilistic training would prevail over Tom Cross in the ring and decided: not a chance.