The mayor of New York was a small man in round spectacles by the name of Smith Ely Jr. He was extremely civil to Lenox and utterly indifferent to the subject of crime and its detection. After a stilted fifteen-minute meeting, he formally offered the Queen the full offices of the city of New York, should she ever need them, and said good day.
“Your luncheon will be better,” Wyatt assured Lenox, walking alongside him to a waiting carriage. “You’ll see the real New York at Delmonico’s.”
“Who are these commissioners?”
“There’s a passel of ’um—five or six. One’s old Baldy Smith, who ended up out of the war as general. He’s a hard-nosed gentleman. Won Antietam by himself, if you believe his account, but lost Fredericksburg in the same company, if you believe others.”
They each took a bench in the spacious carriage. It was a mild, sweet day, with sun slanting across the avenues. They were by a river, which Lenox knew must be either the Hudson or East, and discreetly he withdrew the pocket-sized book of maps that Lady Jane had given him just before he embarked. They were heading south, and the river was on his left, so it must be the East River, he supposed.
He looked back up at it from his little book. It was very pretty here. There were small orchards running along the avenue, and a few small houses here and there, nothing much really, mostly fields. They were all the way at Seventy-Fourth Street, though—the distant north.
Delmonico’s was on William Street. It was more impressive than Lenox had expected. At eleven o’clock there was already a line of carriages outside the tall, triangular building, whose two sides sloped away from a curved prow. The door was kept by an enormous mustachioed man in a green frock coat. If Lenox wasn’t mistaken, the coat had gold coins for buttons.
“Party, gentlemen?”
“The commissioners,” said Wyatt, with more direct bravura than Lenox would have suspected the long-serving diplomat of possessing.
“Follow me.”
“There are several of your higher-order criminals here,” Wyatt told Lenox in a quiet voice as they entered. “The doorman’s their lookout.”
Lenox might have queried the wisdom of police commissioners meeting in the same place as the criminals—but it fit in with New York, where everything seemed to happen inches from everything else.
It was raucous inside the establishment, with a strong, not unpleasant smell of sawdust and beer. At the center of the room at a round table was their party, a group of ten gentlemen.
They rose to meet Lenox, and they were all extremely courteous, the four commissioners and their various supernumeraries. The luncheon was delicious (it was here, at Delmonico’s on William Street, as one of the commissioners proudly told him, that the notion of ordering à la carte had been invented), and served with the best dark bread Lenox had ever eaten, each stacked piece spread with butter. The wine was good, too. As the bottles passed around the table, the commissioners more and more happily shared information about their department and asked Lenox several intelligent questions about London’s own system.
At dessert, the somewhat dusty old general ordered several additional bottles so that they might salute the Republic. There was quite a streak of patriotic pride in many of the gentlemen Lenox had met, he reflected—not surprisingly, with such a significant war, won at so high a price, so recent in the country’s past.
As the new wine was being poured, the least prepossessing member of the party found his way to Lenox’s side. He was a small, dark-haired fellow of perhaps twenty, with round black glasses and a weak chin. There was a much scarred and battered walking stick, joined together by a dingy silver ring, leaning against his leg.
“My name is Blaine, Mr. Lenox, Theodore Blaine. My friends call me Teddy.”
“I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Blaine.”
Blaine pushed his glasses up his nose. He seemed out of place in the company. “I wanted to express my sincere admiration for the monograph you published about madness and homicide in the Forensic Journal. I read it twice. Your interviews from Bedlam were especially informative, if you will forgive me the forwardness of saying so.”
“Ah!” said Lenox, who was not much better at withstanding flattery than the average man. “How very kind of you. That was a long while ago, but it did take a great deal of labor.”
“Tell me, do you really believe that there are murders without any cause, yet with premeditation?”
“Do you not?”
Blaine’s shoulders rose a little. “In America, we begin with money, revenge, and love, and find that answers for most of them.”
“To be sure, those are the three great motives,” said Lenox earnestly. “But I do believe, after these many years of observation, that there are rare instances—increasing, perhaps, as the size of cities increase, with the inevitable pressures of such an environment—in which murders are the work of the purely mad, driven only by their terrible instincts.”
“We had a case here in ’71,” Blaine said. “A Mr. Josiah McIlhenny. He was a—”
“I know the case well!” cried Lenox. “I followed it from across the sea with great interest. Yet perhaps you have details that I do not know.”
From here on out, the luncheon became a more definite pleasure. Blaine was, however diffident his initial appearance, a bright, open young chap, and eager to learn, with a surprisingly detailed knowl-edge of Lenox’s own history, dating as far back as the very tricky Thames murders of 1850.
They chatted for a good hour. “You found the plum in the pudding,” said Wyatt as they left. The young Irish servant climbing onto the box of the carriage, O’Brian, was carrying a silver bowl and a proclamation bound in leather, both presented to Lenox at the end of the meal by the (at that stage deeply intoxicated) general. “Blaine, I mean.”
“Yes, I liked him.”
“But do you know who he is?”
“I took him for the assistant to one of the commissioners.”
Wyatt laughed. “Blaine! Oh, no, no. He is altogether an amateur.”
Lenox was curious. “Then how did he come to be there?”
“You have heard of Arkansas?”
“I have.”
“Then you may conceive of the wealth that accrued to Blaine’s father when he bought most of it thirty years ago and sold it piece by piece in the last ten,” said Wyatt, chuckling to himself as he packed the bowl of a bright cherry-wood pipe with tobacco. He glanced up at Lenox. “It must surely be the third or fourth richest family in New York City, people say.”
The detective frowned. “Yet surely it’s not pronounced that way.”
“Blaine? I scarcely see how else it could be.”
“No, no—Arkansas. The case of Kansas, with that emphatic “ziss” at the end, seems very definite evidence.”
“No. It’s Ar-kun-saw. Come, Mr. Lenox, you cannot cavil at poor Arkansas, having come from the country of Godmanchester.”
Wyatt sounded each syllable in the town’s name, and Lenox laughed. “Gumster,” he said, which was the proper pronunciation. “And there you defeat me, Mr. Wyatt. I have no standing.”
Wyatt lit his pipe, and they fell into a pleasant silence. Lenox was surprised at this information about Theodore Blaine. He had been uncommonly respectful. Most single young gentlemen of large fortune he had known were drunk with their own high valuation of themselves, knowing it was held by others too; few Mr. Bingleys to be found anywhere, at any time.
“The Astors, though?” Lenox said when they had driven either time. “The Flaglers?”
“The Blaines are reckoned as rich or richer than either of them.” This was the kind of sentence you would never hear in Lenox’s circles in England, but which was uttered here as nonchalantly as news of the weather. “The Vanderbilts may come into it.”
“So Theodore Blaine holds no official position?”
“The son? No. He must have heard of your luncheon and asked for an invitation. He is a very odd duck, yet he would hardly have been refused.” Wyatt looked at Lenox. “You are surprised at his character? But you did not see him walk.”
“Walk?”
“He is badly lame in one leg, I’m afraid.”
Lenox frowned with sympathy. “Ah. I saw his cane. Poor chap.”
“The worst of it is that he has an elder brother who is quite different—tall, handsome, athletic. Their mother dotes on him, and I don’t know that she’s quite so fond of young Teddy. Perhaps she is. But it’s the brother that she brings everywhere with her, for her husband, the father, doesn’t go out much. Yet the father has a tender spot for the younger son, I believe. They play cards together, at least. A penny a hand. In a house on Fifth Avenue whose paintwork alone must have cost a hundred thousand.”
“What a very interesting country.”
“Yes. Teddy was at Deerfield but declined to go to Harvard. His brother would have been ahead of him there. In fact, if I am not mistaken the brother went to Andover, but Teddy needed a gentler schooling. He is an unworldly sort, as you saw. I am not quite sure what he means to do with himself now.”
The answer became apparent in the short term, at least; that afternoon, Lenox received a card from Blaine (a very plain card, by New York standards, cream colored with navy-blue borders and no other decoration) asking whether the detective might be free for breakfast or lunch tomorrow. It was with some regret that Lenox replied that he would be traveling to Boston early in the morning by train.