THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 1902
“Chief Nicholson, I’m glad I caught you at home. I need something, if you could.” The static on the ’phone line seemed worse in the morning. “A couple of things,” I said.
“I’m listening.”
Yes, he would have his men call the local banks to learn whether David Pratt held an account that showed any recent deposits. And yes, he would ask the carriage driver’s doctors whether the patient had been told he was dying.
“Glad to oblige.” That’s what Chief Nicholson said, although his tone was less than convincing. He was doing his duty. I had no right to expect more.
“A third thing, actually,” I said, pushing my luck. “Life insurance. And whatever else you can learn.”
The exhalation was audible across the hundreds of miles. “I will try,” Chief Nicholson replied.
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you.”
“It was too goddam hot,” Mark Hanna belched, in his sun-drenched kitchen.
It was my fault, I suppose, for interrupting the senator’s breakfast (again). This morning, at least, Hanna was dressed, if you count a plaid smoking jacket and a polka-dot cravat (which I did). He chattered with his mouth full, about the mercurial weather in Cleveland and about the shenanigans of the city’s radical mayor.
“I need to ask you about something unpleasant,” I interrupted.
Hanna scowled.
“Do you know a man named William Turtle?”
A look of Neanderthal puzzlement crossed Hanna’s face, and then a ray of comprehension. “Wasn’t he shot?” he said.
“Yes. How did you know that?”
Hanna gulped and shrugged, as if he had said too much already.
“The evening of the day he was shot,” I said, “he was planning to come see you.”
I waited for a look of astonishment, but I was disappointed. Elmer Dover must have said something, because Hanna waved his hand like a monarch dismissing his courtiers and guided a forkful of sausage into his maw.
I like talking things out with a deaf man. I can think aloud and not worry overmuch about how it sounds. And Adee often has wisdom to dispense; maybe hearing only part of things improves one’s perspective. This morning I interrupted his daily recital of the world’s overnight woes to ask him, slowly, as he trained his sharp eyes on my lips, how to plumb a dying carriage driver’s mind.
Leonardo da Vinci should have observed the muscles pulsate in Adee’s temples. At last he said, “He would want what he wanted, for loved ones first.”
So saith the childless bachelor; it made my heart ache. I kept hoping that, someday, Adee and Margaret Hanna might bicycle into the twilight.
“Clara’s view is that he has nothing to lose,” I said.
“That could make a man dangerous.”
We let that sink in.
“Who could tell me about this man?” I said. “Governor Crane, I suppose. This fellow Pratt was his liveryman, as I understand it, whenever the governor was home in Dalton. He is back in Boston now, I would guess.”
“You could telephone him there.”
“I don’t…” I shook my head. “That man is difficult enough to converse with in person. And what am I supposed to ask him: Did the liveryman he personally recommended for the president turn out to be an assassin instead?”
“To get away from those brats. Why else?” Cortelyou said. We were striding across the carriageway toward the western wing, still under construction. “That’s what Princess Alice says, and she ought to know.” I was pleased to hear his disrespect.
I suspected that Cortelyou’s own four children behaved more like civilized beings than the president’s half dozen did. Not to mention my four—excuse me, three. (That was a hard thing, when people asked you how many.) Helen, the poetess, had married last winter, and sunny Alice’s nuptials were days away. Clarence, our overlooked seventeen-year-old, had escaped to Harvard. Plus Del. Minus Del.
“And not enough bedrooms,” I replied, for something to say.
Cortelyou had been surprised at my sudden interest in touring the White House renovations. He had shown me first around the White House proper, still crowded with workmen and scaffolding. The main staircase was nothing more than wooden planks. The Corinthian pillars in the main vestibule looked lonely, even vulnerable, with the floor and walls ripped away. Beneath the East Room floor, I’d glimpsed the new iron beams that shored up the rotten timbers. It seemed ludicrous to think the Roosevelts could move back in by Thanksgiving, as Edith wished. For one thing, the White House painters had just gone out on strike, and the plasterers threatened to join them.
“This used to be the conservatory—the greenhouse,” Cortelyou was saying, as we reached the new wing. “Also the rose house, the grapery, and the fern house. But you knew all that already.”
“That, I did,” I said. Since before you were born.
The high-ceilinged lobby of the new West Wing was aswirl with dust. Workmen darted hither and yon, their ladders clattering.
“The tin roof is corniced,” Cortelyou continued, as my docent, “and the balustrades are up and painted—finished, thank God, before the strike. And we extended the coal vault in front, for additional storage.”
I passed through the lobby to the spacious room at the rear, its curved windows facing south. I said, “The president’s office, I gather.”
“No, the secretary’s office.”
Ah, Cortelyou’s. “And where is the president’s office?” I said.
“This way.” Cortelyou led me through his office-to-be and across an anteroom into a square corner chamber that was less centrally located and slightly smaller than the secretary’s. The walls needed plastering, and the beams were exposed in the ceiling. Electrical cords hung like nooses at the center of the room.
“Very nice,” I said.
“I’m glad you like it,” he replied.
“I hope he does, too.”
“He will.”
Which was different, I reflected, from He does. I wondered if Theodore had noticed the disparity. Probably. Did he care? Evidently not, for he could have altered the design if he liked.
“But to meet with visitors,” Cortelyou went on, “the president will still use his old office, in the original building, upstairs. And over here”—he guided me back through his office and beyond the telegraph room—“is the staff room.” It was more than twice the size of the president’s office. Men were laying the wooden floor. “How big was the staff in your day?”
“Two. Nicolay and me. And part of a third.”
“We have forty now, counting the eleven clerks and six messengers on loan from the departments. They need to be organized, like in a business, and now we will have the space for it.”
“I marvel at your capacity for detail,” I said. And fear it.
Cortelyou’s capacity for work was legendary. Had the man ever made a mistake? I had heard a rumor once that, as President Cleveland’s stenographer, he had nearly touched off a war when he heard would instead of wouldn’t in transcribing a diplomatic note to the tsar. But I doubted it.
“Thank you,” he said.
“I must tell you, by the way, that the driver of the president’s carriage in Pittsfield—”
“And mine.”
“Yes. He is still in the hospital. The doctors say he has … cancer.”
A sigh. “What is his name?”
“David Pratt,” I replied. “Senior; there is also a junior. Did you know him?”
“In the carriage, certainly. We must have shaken hands.”
“Before that? Did you not approve all of the president’s logistics?”
Cortelyou rested his elbows on a sawhorse, then stood straight and dusted off his wrists, which were already clean. Beneath the spotless frock coat he wore a stiff white vest and high collar; his brilliantined hair, salted in gray, was brushed back.
“I had that honor,” he said.
“Did you meet Mr. Pratt then?”
“Who had the time? How would I know a livery driver in Pittsfield?”
“Dalton.”
“Dalton—see? I left those arrangements to Governor Crane. I understood that this man Pratt sought the job. A personal acquaintance, I gather.”
“How, do you know?”
“I imagine everyone in Dalton knows everyone else. Certainly the governor does. His hometown. Whatever he wanted was fine with … us.”
That rang true.
“I’ll tell you this about the man,” Cortelyou said. “He was as nice a fellow as could be. He suggested the president could get a better view if he switched sides with the governor.”
“And did he?”
“No. He liked it where he was, behind the driver. Mr. Pratt wanted him to sit on the left side of the carriage, directly behind the bodyguard, Mr. Craig.”
Directly behind Mr. Craig. Why else would David Pratt have wanted the president to move other than to … to kill him?
And himself. I should not forget that.
I stumbled across the White House grounds, weaving among the piles of lumber, to the State Department building next door. I kept thinking about the carriage driver. What would impel a man of seemingly sound mind to drive his carriage in front of a hurtling trolley, on purpose? Knowing that anyone or everyone aboard might die. Including the president. Including himself. Who on earth would do that?
This was who: A man who was dying and had nothing to lose. Who maybe had something to gain. Financial or otherwise.
I thought I heard the guard at the door say, “Good afternoon, Mr. Secretary,” but I couldn’t be sure. I was too impatient for the elevator and climbed the marble steps two at a time.
It was the question Cortelyou hadn’t asked that was troubling me. Why was I interested in David Pratt? Did Cortelyou know the answer already? He made it his business to know. Everything. In his ruthless quest for efficiency, he understood that information is power. Information gushed in; a trickle came out. Cortelyou was opaque because he tried to be. If he was the ideal of Twentieth-Century Man, I trembled for my country.
I found a note on my desk: Chief Nicholson had ’phoned. Main got him on the line immediately. (Elsie was at lunch.)
“I asked for this an hour ago!” he was shouting. A throat clearing and a sip of something. “Is that you, Mr. Hay?”
I assured him it was.
The man from the bank had been helpful. David J. Pratt Sr. had opened an account not quite two weeks before the collision, at Agricultural National Bank of Pittsfield. “They have a branch in Dalton. He opened it with a cashier’s check. Five thousand dollars, exactly. It was drawn on…” A rustle of papers. “On Riggs National Bank of Washington, DC. Do you know it?”
“Do I know it?” I said. “It’s a block away from my house.” Clara and I had a couple of accounts there. So did everyone I knew.
“And you asked about life insurance. Another five thousand. Also purchased last month. On the fifteenth.”
About the time the president’s schedule became— No, not known yet to the public. But decided upon and known to … a few. A week before his New England tour got under way.
“And the cancer?”
“Well, let me finish with the life insurance, because I doubt they’re ever going to pay up. Because yes, he does know his diagnosis, and he has known it for a while.”
“For how long?” I said.
“The doctors couldn’t remember, and his son isn’t to be found. Three or four weeks at least. Maybe since before he bought the policy. Happily, it’s not my job to figure that out.”
“Before the collision.”
“Oh yes. And even now he seems pretty healthy. Double vision, some awful headaches. Nothing anyone else would necessarily notice.”
“Double vision?”
“Occasionally. Not until after the collision, he says.”
Having been found unconscious but groaning, beneath the nigh wheel horse’s carcass, could have caused all sorts of symptoms. Not cancer, however.
“How do they know he has cancer?”
“They say they know. Who am I to say otherwise?”
I was about to replace the receiver when Chief Nicholson spoke up. “One other thing, by the way—probably irrelevant. The president of the Agricultural Bank is a celebrity hereabouts: Governor Crane.”
“My dear Mr. Secretary, to what do we owe this honor?”
Ah, the royal we. I wish people would quit invoking honor when they meant merely to flatter.
Charles Glover, the president of Riggs, was a banker’s banker, a pillar of the community, a giver to all civic causes—a man made of marble, by my lights. His face had no sharp edges. His cheeks were smooth, as was his forehead, and his demeanor. Not a gray hair was out of place. Only the bristly, clipped mustache betrayed the aggressiveness I presumed lay underneath. Also his eyes, which narrowed and never left mine. He happened to be a neighbor on Lafayette Square, catty-corner from my house, a vacant lot away from the temporary White House. Neighborliness did not always breed affection.
“It is a question of the highest security,” I said, indulging in flattery myself. “Information that may affect the president’s physical safety. That is all I am permitted to say.” I paused to gauge the effect. There was none. I described what I knew about the cashier’s check deposited into David Pratt’s account. “Someone had to come into the bank here in order to send the cashier’s check in the first place. Is that right?”
“I will check and let you know,” Glover said.
He meant that as a dismissal, but I stayed in my uncomfortable seat on the uncivilized side of the vast, gleaming desk. “I’ll wait,” I said.
“As you wish,” Glover said, lifting the telephone receiver from its cradle. “You will be more comfortable, however, out in the lobby.”
The new Riggs building, at Fifteenth and Pennsylvania, was made of granite and felt just as cold, inside and out. The exterior was meant to remind you—and it did—of the Treasury Building directly across the avenue, but the interior had none of Treasury’s stolid charm. Its marble and vaulted ceiling, all in golden hues, was meant to persuade people to part with their money, but it left me worried about how the money was spent. I chose a high-backed chair with a clear view of his door.
Marble, marble, money, and garble,
Make us rich or make us horrible.
Hmm. Maybe the or should be and? Funnier, and probably truer—which, in poetry, I suppose is the point. And rhyming, I had to admit, still had its pleasures.
The door to Glover’s office opened and an august forefinger beckoned me back in.
“He is coming,” Glover said.
I was expecting a Zeus, but a meek-looking man with thin, sandy hair and a pallid complexion sidled in. His cravat was askew and a thin folder was in his hand. He glanced around as if he had never been here. I wondered if he had met the bank’s president before, much less a secretary of state. He was introduced as W. J. Flather, an assistant cashier.
“I just met another Flather,” I said, “down at police headquarters.”
“My little brother.”
His little brother was bigger. This one’s eyes grazed mine, and he raised the folder to his face like a shield. Inside of it was a single sheet of paper. “The account belongs to a company called Intrepid Americans Incorporated,” he said. “It was opened on the twentieth of August.”
Two days before the president set off on his New England tour. “Opened by whom?” I said.
Flather examined the paper and passed it to me. It was a scrawl. The first name might have started with an I or a J and the second name definitely with an H. The address was also indecipherable, although it was probably Thirteenth, Sixteenth, or Eighteenth street, definitely northwest. From his vest pocket Flather produced a magnifying glass. I handed the paper back, and a look of the most intense seriousness overtook him. His narrow face seemed to expand.
“Sixteenth,” he announced. “That’s the street. And there’s a number in front. Three digits—they all look alike. Zero zero zero—couldn’t be. Six zero … No, eight zero zero. That’s it: eight hundred Sixteenth street northwest.”
That was my house.
Lafayette Park was alive with the scampering of squirrels, the warbling of birds, the long looks of lovers. I saw none of it. The one thing I knew for certain was that I had not opened that Riggs account. Why would someone say that I had? A practical joke?
I felt a chill up my spine.
Then I got scared. The twentieth of August was two weeks before the attempt on Roosevelt’s life, if that is what it was. Meaning it happened before Theodore even asked me to investigate. Someone was out to get me. Or tease me. Or hold this in reserve against me. Who? And for what unearthly purpose?
I shook my head fiercely and uttered a one-syllable word that caused a lady in a saucy hat to clench her parasol.
I was heading home, although I was needed at the office. Instead of either, I knocked on Henry’s door. He was in, and at work (on whatever it was), but was pleased to be disturbed, if I would kindly wait a minute or two, which I did. Henry’s foyer was simple and spartan but as fascinating as most men’s craniums, and more exotic, what with its teak umbrella stand from Siam and the carved wooden mask with its nose pointed like a stalactite. On the wall was a black-framed photograph of Chartres. I assumed it was Clover’s—she had been accomplished at the art—but I had never dared ask.
I was marveling at the splendor of the steeples when the familiar breathy voice said, “Phallic, yes?”
I doubled over in laughter. Other than a lady’s ankles, I had never heard Henry refer openly to anything below the waist. The man was sixty-four; it was time.
“Not exactly,” I said. “Pointy, and two steeples. I can see you’re having a difficult day.”
“Sometimes the words won’t flow.”
“What words are those?” I pried.
“Words. Flimsy things.”
Instead of taking a stroll, I looked for an empty bench in the park. I found one by the new statue of General de Rochambeau, in the corner nearest the White House West Wing. Henry had a quizzical look, as if he expected a flogging for someone else’s crime.
A woman ambled by, leashed to a poodle that stopped at every shrub to sniff. I had perfected the practice of speaking under my breath, so that only one person could hear. If that person wasn’t hard of hearing, which Henry was.
“My epiphany!” I said. I told him about David Pratt and the likelihood of his guilt. By a process of elimination, bolstered by a cashier’s check and life insurance. “He wanted the job—that’s what Cortelyou says.”
“For more than one reason, perhaps.”
“Including money, apparently.”
“Often suspected as a motivator of men,” Henry drawled.
“In this case, a total of ten thousand dollars. For a man who is dying.”
Henry rocked back on the bench and said, “In … what … sense … dying?”
“In the usual sense.” I lowered my voice and named the dreaded disease.
“I see,” Henry said.
“There is more,” I said. I described the bank account at Riggs on which the cashier’s check had been drawn, opened with a bogus name and address. “Mine! This was before the collision. Before I ever got involved in this. What on earth do you make of that?”
Henry stared into his lap, lost in thought. At last he looked up and shook his head. “I wish I could help you,” he said.
Clara and I were halfway through the pheasant when James tiptoed in and told me that someone was waiting. I wasn’t expecting anyone. Or wanting to see anyone.
“A Mr. Flather,” James said.
Damn! Was I about to be arrested? I had assumed—assumed!—that peril had passed.
“Excuse me, dear,” I said, wondering when I would see her again. My stomach heaved.
I followed James to the front hall and was relieved to find the timid bank clerk. “Oh, Mr. Flather, what can I do for you?” I gushed. “Please come with me. We can join my wife. Would you like some coffee?”
“Er, no,” he said. “I mean, no thank you, Mr. Hay … Mr. Secre— I don’t want to … Please forgive me … sir. I waited ’til dark.” He glanced back at the door.
“Let’s try the library,” I said. “Coffee?”
“Oh no, sir. I can’t stay long.”
I nodded at James and said, “Please tell Mrs. Hay.”
The electric lamp beside my chair made the cranes look alive and ready to swoop. My preferred Mr. Flather squirmed in the red plush chair. If he had rehearsed what he wanted to say, it was lost to him now.
“Take your time,” I said. “Why did you wait until dark?”
“Not to see Mr.— So he wouldn’t see…”
“Mr. Glover,” I said. My neighbor; his boss.
Flather’s head bobbed, and kept bobbing, as he struggled to say something that was building inside him. It rose out of his scrawny chest and exploded into the stuffy air: “It was me!”
“What was you?”
“I handled it. Opened the account. With the … wrong … false … name and address. I know I…”
Now I understood why he didn’t want Glover to know.
“Did you check on his identity?” I said.
His eyes went wide, like a guilty child asserting his innocence. “I took his word for it.”
“I can understand,” I said, almost truthfully. “Can you describe … him?” I exhaled with what I hoped was unnoticed relief.
“Yes, him … I can’t rightly recall. It was weeks ago, and I see dozens of people a day. I half remember a funny little man—not handsome, not ugly, well, a little bit ugly—who insisted on using his own pen. A smooth little number it was.”
“Whiskers?”
He squinted, trying to recall. “I guess so. Yes. A full beard, rather like yours.”
“Hair color?”
A puzzled look. “He kept his hat on. I’d forgotten. I thought it was odd at the time.”
“How did he pay? Do you remember that? Five thousand dollars is a lot of greenbacks.”
“That I do remember. It was cash, all of it cash. Fifty-dollar bills, the new ones, with Sherman.” That was John Sherman, Lizzie’s uncle, the former secretary of state. “I remember because I counted them out.”
He seemed out of breath and rose to leave. “You know, you’re not the only person to be asking about this,” he said.
“Oh?”
“That’s really why I came here.” Flather had ceased being timid. “Last week sometime, we received a wire from a man who was interested in this particular transaction. He said he would come by, but he never showed up. He had an unusual name. A rodent of some kind.”
“Turtle?”
“Yes, that’s it. Not a … but, yes. I wouldn’t have told him much anyway, it being none of his business, you know. But as I say, he never showed up.”
Theodore had his nose in a book, literally, when I entered his sanctum. His legs were propped up on a hassock, the inevitable cup of coffee at his side.
I knew he was aware of my presence because he raised a forefinger as he finished a page. He was reading The Virginian, the year’s best seller. “Listen to this,” he exclaimed, leafing back to the opening page. “For the first time I noticed a man who sat on the high gate of the corral looking on. The cowboys, you understand, were trying to break a wild pony. For he now climbed down with the undulations”—every syllable drawn out—“of a tiger, smooth and easy, as if his muscles flowed beneath his skin. Beautiful, yes? This is life in the West as it was.”
This was rank sentiment, of course. Everyone knew that cowboys were lowlifes who worked on a whim and spent too much time in saloons. They weren’t the novel’s silent, stoic, heroic figures that Theodore adored. No surprise that he did, considering that he had been one of those cowboys, despite his Tiffany’s bowie knife, gaining his brethren’s respect by knocking down a bully in a bar who had called him Four Eyes. Besides the fact that the novel’s author, Owen Wister, was his Harvard chum. Theodore was as skilled as any politician in rearranging history to his liking. Maybe more so, being a historian himself.
“You must read it,” he said.
“I’ve started it,” I said. In truth, I had not made it past the dedication—To Theodore Roosevelt—with the (arse-kissing) “author’s changeless admiration.”
“I need to ask you something,” I said.
My tone must have betrayed me, because he laid the book in his lap and gave me his undivided attention. I felt privileged, as he no doubt intended.
“The carriage driver in Pittsfield—David Pratt was his name. Do you remember him?”
“Oh yes. Rather a tall fellow, a little on the ungainly side, I thought. Pleasant enough. Governor Crane’s man.”
“Did he ask you to switch seats with the governor?”
“I suppose he did. I didn’t think anything of it. I was fine where I was. Why do you ask?”
“That would have put you right behind Mr. Craig.”
“It would have.” He understood instantly what I meant. “But Murray Crane wasn’t hurt.”
“True, true. But he might have been.”
“Why don’t you ask the governor? He is still in the city, working with me on the coal strike. I have never known a more honorable man.”
An impressive endorsement, given Theodore’s strict standards. “He is the one who told me,” I said. “There is also this.” I described the five thousand dollars sent to Pratt from a newly opened account at Riggs.
“Whose account, do we know?” Theodore said.
I appreciated the we. “The short answer is no.”
“The longer answer?”
“There’s a name on the account, but it isn’t the correct one,” I said. “It’s … mine.”
Theodore burst out laughing. “You keep edging your way into this case, my dear Hay. One might almost think you had a vested interest.”
“I keep telling you I shouldn’t be doing this. Even I can see the conflict of interest here.”
“So you say. Except when you tell me you want to keep doing this.”
“Well, I’m just trying to keep you—and me—out of trouble, physical or political. Or ethical,” I made sure to add. To Theodore, life was a morality play—his father’s gift (and burden). Anything that involved right and wrong was sure to entice him.
“Where is your … servant?” I said. I meant Frank Forney, the red-bearded Samson.
“Back home,” Governor Crane replied. “Had to go.”
Ichabod had answered his own door, even at twenty minutes past ten. His octagonal sitting room at the Willard was dimly lit, courtesy of the lamps along the avenue outside. He was still dressed for dinner. So was I.
“I have a couple of additional questions,” I said.
His stone face was probably the one he used in facing all of life’s annoyances.
“One of them has to do with the Agricultural National Bank of Pittsfield,” I went on. “You are the president, are you not?”
No reply.
“Five thousand dollars was deposited into Mr. Pratt’s account at the bank—a new account. Deposited in cash. Would you know anything about this?”
Governor Crane rocked back in the Queen Anne chair and, miraculously, moved his mouth. “I am the governor,” he affirmed. “That occupies all of my time.”
I waited for him to tell me something I didn’t already know. In vain. My turn again.
“My second question,” I said, “is about Mr. Pratt. How well do you know him?”
“Years.”
“What do know about him?”
A quizzical look, as if to say, How much does anyone know about anyone?
“Is he a good man, would you say?” Another vapid question. What did I want to know? It was this: Would he murder a president? Oh yes, that was a question sure to bring a candid response.
I was flailing for what to ask next when Governor Crane snapped out of his trance and stated, in no uncertain terms, “Yes, he is a good man. A Christian man; a family man. He would do anything for his family. Anything.”
“Including…? Actually, I have a third question. Do you know of anyone who would want to kill you? Maybe the president wasn’t the intended target.”
Crane laughed. I am not sure I had ever seen that before. “I should hope so,” he said, “or I wouldn’t be much of a governor. But there are easier ways to kill me, if someone is so inclined. He needs merely to come to my office and make an appointment.”
Clara was asleep, and I awakened her to say good night. She didn’t seem to mind. She even managed a smile before her eyes closed again.
I promised myself I would never give Lizzie Cameron another thought. I recognized I had promised this before. But this time I meant it. Clara was dear to me in a way that no one else has ever matched, or ever could. That I knew. If I knew anything at all—and I had learned a thing or two in my time—I knew that your good fortune must not be assumed. I was a lucky man to be worthy of her love. By Lincoln’s deathbed, I had learned that nothing was certain in life. But Clara’s devotion to me, and mine to her, came pretty damn close.