The Murder of Willie Lincoln Read online

  “Whatever for?”

  “The president asked me to find you, but you were gone.”

  “Why, do you know?”

  “No.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “No.”

  “You sure?”

  A scornful silence—deserved, Hay conceded.

  “Were you there the entire four hours?” said Hay.

  “Most of it. I left for dinner. And errands.”

  “In the building?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long were you gone, would you say?”

  “An hour, a little bit more. Then I left around a quarter past eight.”

  “Left for good?”

  “For home.”

  Another forty-five minutes during which someone might have placed an envelope in Hay’s satchel, unseen.

  * * *

  “Strawberries? Be serious.” Nicolay flung a copy of the latest House Appropriations idiocy, its red tape unloosed, onto Hay’s desk. “Johnny, how do we know he was murdered at all? Beyond that message, which looks meaningless to me.”

  “Except that somebody left it here, in my satchel. My satchel.”

  “And how was he murdered, assuming—assuming—he was? Have you thought about that, Mister Vidocq?”

  “All right, you made your point.”

  “Well, then?”

  “All sorts of ways,” Hay said. “Smothered. Typhoid fever from an infected blanket. Poisoned. An autopsy should help.”

  “The Ancient says no. An embalming instead—evidently it is one or the other. He wants to take Willie home, to Springfield. In seven years, or three.”

  “When did he decide this? I thought I was … Oh, never mind.”

  “While you were out at the tutor’s. He had been talking to the Hell-cat, coming from her bedroom, looking … nothing if not distraught. What else did the tutor say, beyond strawberries?”

  Hay told of John Watt leering at the boys on the South Lawn and of the projectile that fell from the sky. “And now the felonious gardener has everyone calling him Major,” Hay said. “Which makes him a liar and a thief. He took the Hell-cat to Philadelphia and New York—picture this in your mind, Nico, the two of them trooping from store to store—teaching her how to pad invoices.”

  “How much, I wonder,” Nicolay said.

  “Quite a lot, I would think—most of what he knows.”

  “No, how much he stole. Suppose he feared exposure—from his star pupil in thievery. This would be a way to stop her.”

  “What would be?”

  “Harming her son,” Nicolay said.

  “Or threatening to.”

  This suggested to Hay another reason for John Watt to murder Willie. If the Hell-cat was foolish or gluttonous enough to invite a scoundrel to tutor her in the intricacies of illegal accounting, she had left herself open to blackmail—or worse. By killing her son, the gardener could assure her silence, beyond hurting the commander in chief and simply getting rid of a boy who knew too much.

  * * *

  A few minutes past eleven o’clock that night, the president stuck his head into Hay’s office and invited him along to the War Department’s telegraphic office to examine the latest dispatches from the field. For Lincoln, it was a way to relax. To-night, the sleet was so sharp that the Smithsonian Institution had canceled Louis Agassiz’s lecture on the leaps of induction in Darwin’s fanciful new theory of evolution. Lincoln wore overshoes and wrapped himself in a thin overcoat that left his wrists exposed. A safety pin the size of a derringer fastened his favorite gray shawl. But no derringer, no qualms about safety. Lincoln believed that whatever to be was to be. Idiocy, to Hay.

  Hay debated telling him of his suspicions about John Watt. But what did Hay actually know, and how could he say anything without mentioning the missus? Hay felt protective toward this man who towered alongside him, almost as if he, Hay, were the adult and Lincoln, the awkward naïf. Part of why Hay loved him—and he did—was the man’s endearing air of incapacity. Lincoln was puppylike in his enthusiasms, often unmindful of the practicalities—rather like Hay’s father in that regard. In his goodness, too, which for both men was unremarkable and absolute. Hay found it inspiring, albeit unnerving, when a man always—always—tried to do the right thing. Not exactly Hay’s mug of beer. Which inclined him to regard Lincoln with a sneering disbelief: How could anyone be that good? For Lincoln, social ambition meant nothing at all. His too-short sleeves and mismatched stockings were merely the symptoms. It was his carelessness—his not caring—about worldly things that flustered Hay. How could a man rise so far in the world and not care a greenback for its opinion? He claimed never to have finished a novel. He read a lot, but the same things again and again—Scripture, of course, and Shakespeare and Robert Burns. As a boy, he read Robinson Crusoe and Pastor Weems’s paean to George Washington—little else. About poetry, he knew next to nothing, if you considered Burns and Byron something (and he had memorized Poe’s “The Raven”). About European history and anatomy and ancient languages, nothing. About cities and natural philosophy and even slavery, nearly nothing. About the habits of the high and mighty, and of women, Lincoln was blissfully unaware—and incurious. Little beyond the boundaries of Illinois or the banks of the Mississippi River or the Ohio had lain within his ken. Hay excused himself for feeling a little more—he searched for the fairest word—refined.

  To-night, Lincoln seemed preoccupied—understandably so. Although with what, Hay had no way of knowing. Hay was skilled at reading people, but never had he known a man so hard to understand. They were striding in silence, but for the crunching of frozen mud underfoot, when Lincoln said, “I have never met this Grant, but I reckon I like him.” The untried brigadier general had captured Fort Henry, on the Tennessee River, and now his troops and Union gunboats were besieging Fort Donelson, the rebel stronghold just to the east, on the Cumberland River bluffs. “He is my first real general. He is a general! He does things. Nobody need tell him twice—or once. The rest of them ask my permission to piss in the mud. So they can leave the burden of failure on my shoulders, like this here shawl. If they can be moved to do anything at all.”

  Hay was thrilled at the allusion to General McClellan, whose Army of the Potomac sat in the mud just north of Manassas, in northern Virginia, instead of marching toward Richmond. “Did you hear from him, sir?”

  “From Grant?”

  “From McClellan. To your five questions. And the war order.” In January, Lincoln had issued General War Order No. 1, commanding all land and naval forces to advance on the enemy by February 22—one day away. Nothing further had crossed Hay’s desk, but not everything did.

  “Not in writing, mind you. More eloquent than his words is his silence. And his actions—his inaction.”

  “All is quiet along the Potomac, as they say, sir.”

  “Yes, John, too quiet.” The president skidded a step ahead of Hay. “I am only the commander in chief. I command, but do my generals obey? This Grant, however, he does not swagger like a general—he only fights like one.”

  “And drinks like a private,” Hay said. “A four-finger imbiber, I am told. By a friend…” Hay nodded at the sturdy brick building ahead that housed the War Department. He had learned this tidbit over a lager at the Willard’s smoky bar.

  “Whatever brand of whiskey that man is drinking, please deliver a barrel to each of my generals in the east. Have someone else deliver it, John.” A teetotaler’s sly glance. “I would want it to arrive.”

  They passed between the orderly rows of boxed spruce and fended off the swirls of sleet. Suddenly, something lurched across the bend in the path. Hay froze. Half the size of a man, four legs—a fawn. Surely more frightened than they were. Lincoln had noticed nothing and stumbled along.

  They crossed the lawn without further adventure and passed through the wrought iron gate. The path descended into a hollow and ended at the War Department’s side door.

  The telegraphic office was on the second
floor, next to Secretary Stanton’s. Even at this late hour, it rattled with the clackety-clack of metal on metal—the swift tongue of lightning, thought Hay. (He made a mental note to use that in a poem.) The room had incongruously high ceilings and smelled of perspiration from the labors of the blue-clad young men seated in rows at telegraph keys, scribbling with steel-nibbed pens. Or possibly the scent of discomfort was Hay’s own, imagining a D. B. branded on his forehead—deadbeat.

  The soldiers at the telegraphic office were safe from cannonballs and moral quandaries. At the door, the towheaded clerk with scarcely a whisker on his chin greeted the president like a tent mate.

  “Yes, sir,” he said with a loose salute, “to-night you shall enjoy what you read.”

  The boyish soldier handed Lincoln two or three yellow flimsies, and the fifty-three-year-old president pored over them, line by line. Then he stood straighter and read them again. Hay studied his face—so ugly it was beautiful, he had heard someone say. A fissure ran at an angle from each nostril to the edge of the bristly beard. Now, the face wore a mask of concentration. A mask. Always a mask, separating what was inside from everything—and everyone—else.

  A full minute passed before the president whispered, “John, Fort Donelson is ours.”

  Hay gasped. Ten months after Fort Sumter fell, the Union had won its first important victory in the war. It assured the capture of Nashville, with its factories for cannons and percussion caps and its storehouses of bacon, and opened a corridor for invading the South.

  “Twelve thousand rebel prisoners!” the president burbled. “And, John, listen to this. When the Confederate general applied for an armistice, Grant wired back”—Lincoln’s voice caught—“wired back, ‘No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender.’ Magnificent! The man is a poet, John.”

  As they strolled back toward the Executive Mansion, the odor of coal oil lingered. “‘Unconditional surrender.’” Lincoln rolled the phrase around on his tongue. “Worthy of Richard III, it is.” That was Lincoln’s favorite Shakespeare, next to Macbeth, cautionary tales about the temptations of power. “Ulysses S. Grant. U. S. Grant. Unconditional surr—”

  Lincoln’s small smile was the first Hay had seen in days.

  Chapter Three

  SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 1862

  John Hay awakened to the tolling of church bells. They pealed like a dream from his boyhood, of a future with nothing but Sundays and sunshine. He squeezed his eyes shut, holding on to the yellow blooms of spring in the village of Warsaw, at the western edge of Illinois, the curled smoke of steamboats on the Mississippi, sleighs sliding past fields of winter wheat.

  But now, the bells grew sporadic, the rhythm fractured. These were not church bells; it was not Sunday. The noise was cannon fire, from the Union forts surrounding the city, answered by batteries across the Potomac, which sounded close, too close.

  Hay sprang to a sitting position. Had the battle for the capital begun?

  “Nico!” he cried out.

  He was glad nobody heard him, because he remembered. It was Washington’s Birthday. This was celebratory fire from the Union’s cannons. The Union’s alone.

  Now he was awake, like it or not. His head still longed for the feather-filled pillow. Torn as usual between comfort and duty, he chose the usual. “All shit and no sugar,” he muttered to himself as he slid out of bed.

  He performed his morning ablutions with dispatch. He donned two pairs of woolen socks and stopped by the kitchen for a mug of weak coffee and a slice of aerated bread and left the mansion through the rear basement door. He headed east along the gravel path, toward the stables. Hay had no intention of riding, however. He would see more, notice more, if he walked.

  It was cold and drizzly; the icy air felt thick under the pewter sky. Hay pulled his greatcoat tighter around him and tugged his slouch hat over his ears. This was less brutal than in Illinois or Rhode Island—those were honest, manly winters, with skin-slicing cold and quilts of snow. Here, the winter was a devious affair, dustings of white that soon melted away, a moist chilliness that wheedled its way through every line of protection.

  The gravel path led from the stables down onto the cobblestoned carriageway. Eight or ten feet to his right stood a majestic spruce. That spruce, without doubt. Its branches curved like slats across the bottom of a king’s canoe. Hay went behind the spruce and saw what he expected: nothing of note.

  Hay reversed course and followed the carriageway toward Fifteenth street. Outside the Treasury building, blocks of stone were piled high, for an extension to the already-mammoth building to be built where the State Department stood. Money runs the world, Hay thought. Such a mundane truth—try to fashion a poem out of that!

  Hay exited the grounds and turned south along Fifteenth street. His footsteps echoed off the high, whitewashed fence to his right, the eastern boundary of President’s Park. The absence of noise was eerie. No pedestrians except for a pair of scrawny Negro boys kicking a yarn-wrapped ball down the center of the rutted road. At the next side street, off to Hay’s left, the tents of Hooker’s soldiers stirred with morning life. A block farther south was the vacant lot where Hay had once watched the soldiers indulge in a rowdy game they had learned in the camps, called base ball. Hay reckoned people would prefer their sporting competitions kept simple and direct, man against man, as in the ring.

  Now, his task was anything but simple and direct. Hay needed a course of action, requiring intuition and cold logic, such as a poet and a lawyer—and yes, a fighter—might conceive.

  Begin at the beginning. To see whatever Willie and Tad had seen on their last day of health, to experience what they had experienced. As if he could. And if he could, what on earth would that tell him? Hay could not say what he was looking for. He could only hope he would recognize it if he crossed its path, or it crossed his.

  Hay smelled the canal before he could see it. Not as rank as in summertime, when the odor through the south windows of the Executive Mansion was as foul as the ghosts of ten thousand drowned cats. But even in winter, the smell was, to be kind, complicated. The National Intelligencer had quoted an olfactory savant who recognized “seventy separate and distinct stinks.” Hay could do no better than three or four, which was enough. Human excrement, for certain, and the inedible animal parts from the slaughterhouse across the canal. And ammonia and possibly the fish heads discarded at Centre Market, which had flowed—that is, oozed—downstream. All of this, incubated and permeated by rain and sleet and mud and the occasional sunlight and the piercing cold. By the time Hay reached the canal, he was breathing through his mouth.

  What once was the glory of Rome

  By the new Tiber’s malodorous banks …

  Hmm, possibilities. He fished out a pencil and his calfskin notebook—he always carried those—and scrawled.

  Where the soldiers thought only of home

  And of their … sweethearts’ …

  What rhymes with banks? Ranks … pranks … blanks … spanks … manx? No, no, no. The problem went beyond rhyme. It was his usual one: He had nothing to say.

  The stone-sided canal was low and calm, too calm. The isles of ice in the water stymied any movement and concealed the noxiousness beneath. An unclean place, a cesspool—literally. Across the lifeless canal, behind the slaughterhouse and its stockyards, stood the stump of an obelisk, a monument to the man whose 130th birthday was to-day. It had reached only a third of its intended height before the money ran out. Truncated, like the country he had fathered.

  Hay watched a crow fly low across the horizon. He reached for his pencil and notebook:

  Over the Capitol’s white dome,

  Across the obelisk soaring bare

  Not bad.

  To prick the clouds, crows travel home,

  And find somebody waiting there.

  Singsongy, true. And did crows have a home? Where somebody (was a “crow” a “somebody”?) waited? He shoved the pencil and notebook back in his pocket and set off westward a
long the canal.

  He regretted it immediately. The brambles on the path tore at his trousers and scratched at his side-buttoned boots—Nature, in control. Why not write an ode to the indoors, where Hay stood a fighting chance? He thought of the boys’ ponies. A misstep would crack a fetlock or send the rider hurtling to the ground or into the canal. Hay weaved his way around the rocks—rocks! Someone might have followed them along the path, except there was no place for a pursuer to hide. To his right, a hillock of boulders ascended to the base of the high board fence that marked the southern edge of President’s Park. A rock might have rolled down onto the path or been thrown over the fence.

  Hay knew he was kidding himself: He was no Vidocq. He had read the stories as a boy of how the Frenchman had known which clues to pursue and which to ignore, how to frame the wily question that unmasked the wrongdoer. What had Hay learned so far? That nobody suspicious had entered the Executive Mansion to leave him a vicious letter, other than the person or persons who had done just that. That the boys’ usual chaperone had absented himself, supposedly to cook flapjacks for his son, and was replaced by a novice incapable of fighting off a hummingbird. That the gardener had trimmed a spruce’s branches in a suspicious manner, according to a witness who was no arborist. That a rock had dropped from the sky, barely missing the boys, an act of God or a misflung projectile or an attempt on their lives or merely a pale tutor’s flight of fancy. That Willie had died of typhoid fever or possibly of some other unknown cause, or of typhoid fever and an unknown cause. Too many questions, sloppy questions, and not enough answers—no answers. Willie died—that was a fact. Someone had left a note in Hay’s satchel—that was a fact. Everything else seemed irrelevant or conjecture. To find meaning in this chaos—that was the job for a Vidocq. Sad to say, it was Hay’s.

  Hay was thinking about his multiple shortcomings when he tripped over a branch and fell heavily onto the path. His right shoulder struck something hard, and the surge of pain made him sick to the stomach. Only when it ebbed did he realize his forehead had slapped into the ground, penetrating the crust of ice and coming to rest half-submerged in the mud. Hay lay stock-still, not certain he could move. A veil began to descend, and Hay prepared himself for nothingness, but fought it. He had no choice but to move his head if he wanted to breathe, which he decidedly did. He lifted his head and, to his surprise and relief, spat out a liquid that was darker than mud. The salty taste confirmed it as blood. The sour taste, grainy on his tongue—that must be the mud.