31 Bond Street (2 page)

T
he teakettle whistled with an insistent shriek. John replenished the firewood in the stove while Hannah muttered prayers. The door under the stoop opened and men came in, bringing a gust of wind and wet snow. The coroner slammed the door shut. Edward Connery was a stocky man with a heavy stomach that protruded from his waistcoat, a rumpled shirttail trailing beneath his vest. He entered the kitchen and removed his oilskin coat, dropping his wet garments in a pile on the kitchen floor.

“The Coroner’s arrived, Captain, the Coroner is here!” came a deputy’s voice from the hallway.

“I could use a good cup of stew to chase this wetness from my bones,” Connery said.

“It’s about time someone hauled you uptown,” said the Police Captain, George Dilkes, joining him in the kitchen. He had a lilt to his brogue and the doleful eyes of an Irish setter. “The errand boy came to the precinct,” he said, pointing to John. “Then I sent my men to fetch you, over an hour ago.”

“And how about a spike of rum, lass?” asked Connery. Hannah
brought him a cup of broth and poured some rum into it. “A good Irish wench would give a man a double shot.”

Hannah turned, reddening. “This is a respectable home, not a downtown gin mill,” she sputtered. “A man’s been murdered in this house, and the Coroner is tanking up on rum? God, help us!”

“A dead man is just as dead on Bond Street as in the lower wards, wouldn’t you say so, Captain?” said Connery, sipping the oily mixture.

“Could be,” Dilkes replied, “but uptown or downtown, this man just had his head near cut off. You’d better brace yourself,” he said. “I never seen anything so bad. He’s got fifteen stab wounds, and his throat is cut from ear to ear.”

“Oh God, dear God,” lamented Hannah, crossing herself.

“Catch me up,” Connery said with authority; as City Coroner, he was the elected official in charge of the crime scene: besides attending to medical matters and an autopsy, it was his job to call a coroner’s jury to the house. The jury, pulled by lots, would interrogate neighbors and family members—anyone with knowledge about the victim—using testimony to piece together evidence at the scene. With a coroner’s deft handling, the coroner’s inquest could point a finger in the right direction, nabbing a perpetrator and solving a crime.

Dilkes led Connery out of the kitchen, passing a policeman with a shovel, stamping the snow off his boots. “The men have been digging up the backyard for the weapon,” explained the Captain. “I sent them to search in the outhouse and down the latrines.”

“Dirk or dagger?” asked the Coroner.

“From the depth of the cuts, I figure it was a two-sided blade.” The two men climbed the small back stairway, their bulky frames bent, with Connery puffing behind. They emerged onto the first floor, with its soaring ceilings and chandeliers. A cluster of officers was lounging against a marble table.

“What are you waiting for, men?” shouted Connery. “Some politician to give you a handout? Go into the parlor and turn everything upside down. We’re still looking for a weapon.”

Dilkes led Connery to the main staircase and pointed to some tiny blood spots along the wallpaper, almost imperceptible, at the height of a man’s hand. “There’s hardly any trace of blood anywhere, except with the body. This morning, the cook didn’t notice anything amiss. The doors to the house and the windows were locked tight.”

Connery squatted, examining the specks, touching a blood spot to determine if it was still wet. “Who else lives here?”

“The victim is a dental surgeon, unmarried, about forty-six years old. A housemistress lives on the two upper floors, with her daughters.” Dilkes flipped through a small notepad, reading from his notes. “The cook sleeps in the attic. A serving girl was dismissed yesterday, and there is a carriage driver who drove Dr. Burdell last night, but he doesn’t live here.”

“Does everyone have a key?”

“We are still checking to see if any keys are missing.”

“Was anything taken?” asked Connery.

“There’s plenty to take, but it seems nothing’s been touched. It doesn’t seem to be a robbery.”

The two men started up the stairway. Connery leaned over the banister and gazed upward along the graceful arc as it curved to the top of the house. Forty feet above, a skylight was embedded in the roof, an oval of wood and glass that sat atop the stairwell like an elegant crown. He whistled. “This is a fine place, all right.”

They entered the room where the body lay across the floor. Dr. Burdell’s dental office, converted from a bedroom, was furnished like a parlor with engravings and a velvet-fringed sofa. The dentist chair sat in one corner, a torturous contraption with clamps and wooden blocks that held the patient’s head still when a tooth
was pulled. The body lay in the center of the floor. A pool of blood spread several feet in diameter around the corpse. The dead man’s shirt had been torn open, exposing the purple knife wounds that punctured his white flesh.

“This is a bestial crime,” muttered Connery.

An officer entered. “Your men have arrived, sir,” he announced. In the hallway were several men from the Coroner’s office, carrying microscopes and medical bags, and behind them, a crew of reporters, arching their necks to see the body. “And these reporters came from the New York dailies. They want to know if they can come in for a look.”

“Get them out of here,” said Dilkes, waving his arms.

“No, let them stay,” countered Connery. “We’ll put them to work. Send the reporters downstairs—we’ll have them record the witnesses’ testimony in the parlor, and the sketch illustrators can make a likeness of the scene. Besides, if I send them away, the editors will cry foul all the way to City Hall.”

“We’d be most obliged to you, sir,” said a newspaperman from the crowd in the hall, doffing his hat.

“Take the body to the bedroom and strip it naked for an autopsy,” Connery ordered. Two coroner’s deputies entered and rolled the dentist’s body onto a sheet, grabbing the corners like a sling and lifting the sagging mass. Dr. Burdell’s neck twisted at the open wound and his head fell sideways. His eyes remained open, as if he were following the conversation.

“He sure didn’t go down without a fight,” said Connery. “It’s hard to think that no one heard the attack, or any cries or footsteps.”

“Well,” pondered Dilkes, “these ceilings are pretty high. The victim didn’t come home until midnight, after everyone in the house was asleep. The attacker could have been hiding in the wardrobe passage.” The coroner paced around, opening the door of the
closet that formed a wardrobe passage between the office and the man’s bedroom. There were cabinets with shelves of bottles and tonics, but nothing seemed out of place. The doctor’s gumshoes were placed carefully in front of the fireplace, on the sofa his shawl. His desk had papers stacked on it, in an orderly fashion. A chair had been pushed away from the desk several feet, marking the spot where the skirmish began.

Connery rifled through the papers on the doctor’s desk. A ledger lay open with a quill pen on top. He put on his spectacles, pushing them along his nose, squinting as he looked over the fine columns of numbered entries. A locked safe was beside the desk. He took a tangled handkerchief from his waistcoat and wiped his face. “Something smells rotten here.”

“I don’t know,” protested Dilkes. “Everyone seems to be telling it straight—after all, the housemistress’s story is backed by innocent girls.”

“Innocence—in this city?” countered Connery.

“If someone in the house committed this deed, the perpetrator would be covered in blood from head to toe,” said Dilkes.

“There was plenty of time to clean up after this bloody brawl, and I don’t see any trace of the killer leaving the house.” Connery went to the door and yelled down the staircase to one of the officers. “I want everyone detained in their rooms until they are interrogated.”

“It’s the weekend, sir,” said Dilkes. “Maybe we should confer with the District Attorney before we put anyone in house arrest.”

“The District Attorney will be here fast enough. He’ll be jumping all over this one. With a murder on Bond Street, he’ll want it solved quick. Pull a jury. Drag them from their Sunday suppers if you must. Now, let me speak to the woman of the house.”

On the third floor, Emma Cunningham sat by the window in her bedroom. She was lost in a reverie, almost a stupor. Augusta and Helen sat with her, weeping by the fire. It had been several hours since the trauma, and the wind still howled through the street. The wood of the stairway heaved, and the bedroom door opened. The Police Captain entered along with Coroner Connery and several officers. They crowded in, an imposing presence in her floral bedroom.

“Excuse me, Ma’am,” said Captain Dilkes. “We need to ask you some questions. We will be placing you under detention in your room while we conduct a full inquest.”

“Detention?” asked Emma. “Why?” Connery looked her over carefully. She had been described as a widow but was remarkably youthful, seeming not much older than her teenage daughters, who were huddled on an overstuffed ottoman by the fire. Her body was prone, leaning across the arm of the chair, as if the distress of the morning had left her languishing in despair. Her linen blouse was disheveled, revealing traces of her camisole and a corseted bustier. Her complexion was blotchy from tears, her lips pink, her dark hair glossy, falling wildly from her hairpins and curling across her shoulders.

“With all due respect to you and your daughters, Madame, I need to ascertain how a man came to be viciously massacred while so many people were home. You’ve haven’t told us everything, now, have you?” asked Connery.

“I have told the officers everything,” Emma replied, her voice tinged with alarm. “I was sleeping, and did not hear a thing.” She tried to summon her best composure but her expression changed like a cloud movement: flashes of red emerged in sudden streaks across her face, and tears began coursing along her cheeks. Her countenance betrayed such anxiety that Connery eyed her closely. His instinct told him to remain still—emotional moments like these were often followed by a confession.

She clutched a paper in her hand. Pale and shaking, she lifted it and offered it to the Coroner. It was a scroll wrapped with a blue satin ribbon.

He slowly opened the scroll. He looked it over, his eyes darting across the words, and then to the faces of the men.

“This sheds quite a different light on matters, doesn’t it?” he said. It was a certificate, dated January 14, 1857, two weeks earlier, and signed by the reverend of the Reformed Dutch Church on Greenwich Street. He passed the paper to Dilkes. “Is this yours, Ma’am?”

“Yes, it is mine…,” she said, barely above a whisper. “It was supposed to be a secret and not to be made public until the spring.” She drew a breath, and spoke louder, with clear diction, “This is my marriage certificate and I am Harvey Burdell’s wife.”

Monday, February 3, 1857

H
enry Clinton scraped the blade along his neck and then tapped the razor against the side of the china basin. He heard a newsboy crying the headlines: “Murder, Murder! Murder on Bond
Street!” As the call echoed closer, it drifted into his bedroom like a song. He continued scraping the skin and tapping the bowl without missing a beat. Bond Street was just across Broadway, a block east from his house on Bleecker Street, yet the news did not interrupt the rhythm of his shave. Clinton was a criminal lawyer and no stranger to bloodshed.

He pulled the towel from his neck and wiped away the last beads of lather. He fastened a collar to the top of his shirt, adding cuff links and a silk-lined vest. Lifting a gold watch from his dressing table, he fastened the chain to his pocket. Bond Street, he thought. That would teach her. It was his wife’s idea that they move uptown from Warren Street. As the burgeoning commerce of the city spread like a fan through lower Manhattan, the fine homes downtown, once belonging to bankers and merchants, gave way to shops, and the houses along the side streets were now flanked with tradesmen. The well-to-do had long ago moved north to the quiet elegance of Bleecker Street, Bond Street, and Washington Square.

It wasn’t to keep up with the wealthy that had prompted Elisabeth to insist they move. She had argued for it because their old home was walking distance to his office on Chambers Street and the courts, allowing Clinton to rush back and forth at all times of day and night, never sitting still long enough to eat a proper meal. Now his ride downtown took half an hour on the Bowery omnibus, the distance allowing, Elisabeth had hoped, for a fuller domestic life. In fact, the long commute aggravated him, and his longer absences made her nervous. Now, she was always traveling downtown to visit him and to deliver him food.

Putting on his jacket and fixing his cravat, he entered the breakfast room. Out the high windows, wisteria vines hung bare with icicles and snow drifted deep across the garden from the weekend storm. The aroma of fresh muffins came from the kitchen below. The cook was at it again, making batches of baked goods for his
office. His wife fretted about his nourishment and believed that if pies and cakes accompanied him downtown, they would buffer him from the harsh world of the prison and the courts.

The
New York Times
was folded next to his plate. Elisabeth entered, and as she passed his chair, she kissed him on the head. She sat down at the opposite end of the table, fluttering her napkin to her lap. She had a blooming complexion even in the deep of winter.

“Did you sleep well?” he asked, snapping his newspaper open.

Elisabeth eyed him warily. “Just fine. I dreamt that newsboys entered the bedroom and wouldn’t leave until I got my purse.”

“That wasn’t a dream, dear, it is the spectral presence of the press.” Just an hour earlier her auburn hair had been a tousle of silk, curling across her pillow as she slept; now it was expertly pinned and caught the morning light. He had met his wife after he had finished his law degree at Harvard and come to New York to work as a junior counsel for a pair of septuagenarians on Battery Place. A classmate, a New Yorker, invited him to meet some girls. Unfamiliar with the social rites of ambitious mothers and their unmarried daughters, Clinton was pulled along to an afternoon tea, which featured a roster of pretty girls taking turns at a piano, each attempting to play music that was beyond their reach. Elisabeth sat on a chair at the edge of the parlor, the loveliest in the room. Irritated by the music, he eyed the chair next to her, and whispered, “How do you do, I am Henry Clinton. I am afraid I am a bit tin-eared.”

“I am, too,” she whispered back.

“Tin-eared?” he asked,

“No, a Clinton,” she replied. “Elisabeth Clinton.” It turned out that she was indeed a Clinton, but unlike his family, who were from a small town in Connecticut, she was descended from the illustrious Clintons of New York. Her grandfather DeWitt, a Mayor, a Governor, and a candidate for President, had used political office
to plow through the end of the eighteenth century and reshape the continent. He had spearheaded the construction of the Erie Canal, allowing the riches of the West to flow into the ports of New York, and then forced the streets of Manhattan into a grid to absorb the backsplash of commerce. At present, the logjam of vehicles on the city streets was so fierce as to convince its inhabitants that New York was the capital of the world.

During the course of that afternoon tea, Clinton was smitten by Elisabeth, and in a matter of weeks he had fallen in love. He wooed her with his small salary, his best wit, and invitations to entertainments that they never reached, instead walking the streets of New York, lost in conversation until the moon shone through the quiet elms and it was time to take her home. She had a passion for the Romantic poets and had devoured Thomas Paine and John Stuart Mill. Without much resistance, she had married him, making her Elisabeth Clinton Clinton. Had there ever been a woman lawyer, she would have been a superior one, and he often imagined their partnership, with twin names painted on a door.

He glanced at her from across the table. Now, nearly thirty to his thirty-six, there was not a moment of their habitual domestic life that failed to suit him. They had not been blessed with children, a circumstance that had once filled them with melancholy. Sometimes he still found her alone in the sitting room, paused over a book, looking sadly out past the lilac bushes, but as the years passed, each of them seemed to have eased their own personal wound of regret.

“I see you have already read the paper,” he said. The newspaper showed evidence that his wife and the maids had been picking through it in the kitchen for news of the murder.

“The cook fears that the murderer has satisfied his revenge for dentists, and lawyers are next,” said Elisabeth.

“Well, if an assassin is lurking in our alley, she will take good
care of him. She wields a fierce knife. I have seen her butterfly a lamb,” he replied, scanning the many pages of bold headlines.

“Do you remember you visited him once?” asked Elisabeth. “You had an abscess, and he removed it,”

“Dr. Burdell?” said Clinton. “He persecuted me mercilessly, with clamps around my head and steel calipers in my jaw. It appears he had his throat sliced from ear to ear—a just retribution for a dental surgeon, I’d say.”

“Henry, please,” said Elisabeth. Inured to the cruelties of life, Elisabeth could be happy if only everyone would eat a full breakfast every day.

A maid entered and passed biscuits with dried apples and nut breads thick with walnuts, crocks of butter, honey, and peach preserves and a stack of corn cakes drowned in syrup. She carried a pot of tea back and forth from the sideboard.

‘“Intense excitement in Bond Street!’” Clinton read from the paper, piercing a breakfast sausage with his fork and waving it for emphasis. “My dear, I know you had hoped we’d escaped the intense excitement of my profession by moving uptown, but here we have it, practically at our doorstep.”

“They’ve locked everyone up in the house, even the cook. The police have turned the parlor into an interviewing room. No one has been permitted to speak to a lawyer,” said Elisabeth.

Clinton flipped through the pages. “Do you know why the editors are trumpeting this crime, when there are murders in the poorer wards every day?”

Elisabeth said, “Because, Henry, as you like to tell me ceaselessly, our illustrious, but corrupt mayor, Fernando Wood, has so polluted our metropolis, that this city is going to hell.”

“Precisely,” said Clinton waving his sausage in the air and taking a bite, for he loved to spar with her at breakfast. “However, as much as I enjoy blaming everything on Mayor Wood, I sense other mo
tives afoot. Politics and crime make comfortable bedfellows and the District Attorney is about to throw his hat into the ring. A population roused to a fearful state by a frenzied press will be easy to deliver at the next mayoral election.” He stuffed the sausage in his mouth.

“Henry—”

“Don’t you agree, darling,” he said, interrupting her, “that if this murder had occurred in the poorer wards, we would not be supping on it for breakfast?”

“Listen to me,” she urged. “There is someone in the front parlor, to see you.”

“Here? Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

“I was sure he could wait until you’d finished your meal. It is a messenger with a packet from your office.” Messengers were often sent from his office to deliver urgent news.

“Well, excuse me, my dear, while I attend to the man. He is, no doubt, wondering why I am dallying over sausage.” He pulled his napkin from his lap and dropped it on the table.

Clinton went into the front parlor, where a man sat on the edge of a seat with his satchels and parcels on the floor beside him. “Good morning, sir,” said Clinton. “I am sorry to keep you waiting. My wife has an obsession with breakfast and I regret to say, as her spouse, I am a prisoner of the meal.”

“Mr. Clinton,” said the man, rising. “I was sent this morning to bring these to you.” He bent down to untie the elaborate laces on his satchel.

“Has Mr. Armstrong been into the office yet?”

“No, not yet, sir, just the morning clerk.” Armstrong was Clinton’s partner, his senior by twenty years, who had distinguished himself as one of the city’s top attorneys with formidable legal skills and a permanent air of reproach. The contrasting style of the
two law partners was a source of entertainment for the junior staff. James Armstrong was sober and exacting, his clients a roster of the rich and socially connected, while Clinton was impetuous and dynamic. His cases were more exciting, with dramatic consequences at the eleventh hour. The firm of Armstrong and Clinton was one of the most notable criminal firms in the city, built by the reputation of both partners. Clinton had made a name for himself with a string of successes at trial, but he chose his cases differently than Armstrong. He was forward-looking and preferred cases where the principle of the law was at stake, championing the wrongly accused, or the newly arrived, often representing those who could not pay.

The messenger handed Clinton a clerk’s note with the address of Josiah Livingstone, a mansion on Lafayette Place, not far from Bleecker Street. The case was about property disputes, with multiple lawsuits and fractional divisions arranged around lot lines. Such cases bored Clinton, for the outcome was always the same, with the bluebloods getting richer, simply by juggling pieces of earth and air.

“Mr. Armstrong would like you to stop over to Mr. Livingstone’s, sir,” said the messenger, “and witness his signature on these papers. They need to be filed by noon. And here’s a letter for you.”

“This came from the office?”

“Yes, sir, the morning clerk said it’s been at the door since Sunday.” It was a thin envelope on blue paper, with his name in ink across the front, in a shaky hand. When he opened the note he could see that it was written by a woman.

According to the newspaper, the murder scene had been turned over to a Coroner’s inquest, whereby the Coroner and his minions occupied the crime scene until they finished interrogating all possible witnesses, to gather facts while the crime was still fresh. In Clinton’s view, calling a jury to the scene of a murder was an antiquated custom, descended from English law, no longer suited to crime in modern cities. In addition, he knew that the Coroner, Edward Connery, was a blustery blowhard with a flair for theatrics. In Clinton’s mind, there was no greater obstacle to justice than the reckless ambition of an incompetent man.

Clinton returned to the breakfast room to find the table cleared. It was now eight thirty and his morning was slipping away. Elisabeth appeared with his overcoat.

“I’m off,” he said, distracted.

“Henry,” she said, looking at the envelope. “That’s not about the Bond Street murder is it?” She met his eye, which confirmed her guess. “There is no need for you to get involved—it sounds as if it’s turning into a Broadway melodrama.”

“From the reports, I suspect it is more like a circus, and I pity the animals in captivity,” he said. “You wouldn’t blame me if I stopped by to take a look—as a concerned neighbor, that is.”

“As a concerned neighbor, I fear you will try to give legal aid to every person at the scene.” There had been a recent lull in his workload and she cherished the calm. Elisabeth followed him to the front door, wrapping a white scarf around his neck, tenderly
fretting about the cold air. From the street, he took a last look at her, shivering at the door.

“Good-bye, my dear,” he said. “Please promise me you will not make a pilgrimage downtown today to bring me lunch—it’s far too cold. It’s best to remain inside, in the warmth.”

“I will, if you promise to stay away from that murder on Bond Street,” she said blowing him a kiss.