Duel with the Devil (15 page)

Ezra knew that he had to remain patient. He had his eye on the local City Hotel; its builder was teetering on the verge of
selling the $100,000 behemoth at an immense loss, and Ezra had money ready to snap it up cheaply. And McComb, along with his Grange commission for Hamilton, had another and even greater project on the horizon: that of
building a new City Hall.

Things were going quite well for the builders, save for one problem: a prosecutor utterly determined to get their foreman executed.

S
OON SNOW
was falling over the city, covering the charred piers on the East River, filling the hollows of Lispenard’s Meadow, and slowing Greenwich Street to a stately, muffled march. One figure could still be found stamping doggedly through the winter weather, his mind occupied in deep thought.

Cadwallader Colden was thinking about a squeaky door hinge.

Mark that noise
, the Rings informed him. With both Levi and Elma now gone from their quarters, the Rings’ boardinghouse sat in doleful silence: a stillness occasionally broken by the creak of their poorly hung front door.
There’s the staircase, and our bedroom—mark that as well
.

From their bedroom on the first floor,
Elias and Catherine Ring explained, they could hear the door creaking as Elma departed the house on the evening of December 22, 1799. And it was here that they heard her whispering with—well, with someone, some other boarder—as she prepared to leave. Mrs. Ring had few doubts as to who that other person was.

That very day,
Elma told me that they were to be married
, Mrs. Ring insisted.

It’s true
, Mr. Ring added.
He had affections for her
.

William Anderson,
Levi’s apprentice, came forward with even more damning evidence:
I saw something
, he admitted.

He shared a room with Levi and had been locked out the night of the disappearance—he’d waited and waited in the parlor for Levi to come home with the key. What stuck in Billy’s memory, though, happened well before that evening.

One night, Levi waited until he thought I was asleep. Then I saw him depart from the room dressed only in his shirt. I heard him creeping upon the stairs
, he recalled. Levi did not come back until morning.

A modest Quaker couple running a boardinghouse, a roommate who could implicate Levi in an affair with the deceased—these were the sorts of people who would make for good testimony. Colden considered the other possible witnesses from the boardinghouse, too: Mrs. Ring’s unmarried sister, Hope Sands; artisans such as Sylvanus Russel; and the peculiar London cloth merchant, Richard Croucher. True, boarders generally made a point of attending to their own business, because it was the only way to tolerate close quarters. But to one boarder, the quarters had been a little too close.

I saw Elma and Levi in an indecent act
, he hissed.

This was the kind of information Colden was waiting for—information
he desperately needed. His office’s handling of Manhattan’s previous two murders had not inspired much confidence, not least because one bore disturbing similarities to this new case. Two weeks before Elma’s disappearance,
another
murdered woman was found hidden in a cistern, this one mere blocks from City Hall in the narrow alley of Hague Street. The unfortunate victim was Rose Malone, a widow who had remarried a week earlier. Her new husband, William, was immediately suspected, and bundled off to jail under blaring headlines of
HORRID MURDER
! But there the headlines ended: The attorney general’s office had quietly dropped the case. The fact that Colden was only the assistant attorney general was not much cover: Since Attorney General Josiah
Hoffman was Colden’s brother-in-law, he could hardly distance himself from the unsolved murder.

Even when all the evidence was on their side, affairs were not going well for state law enforcement. Snapping open
a newspaper brought this thunderbolt of news from Albany:
AN ACT TO PARDON JOHN PASTANO FOR MURDER
. “It appears satisfactorily to the Legislature,” the act read, “that at the time of the commission of the act aforesaid he was insane, and is therefore a proper object of mercy.” Both the New York State Legislature and Governor John Jay had personally reversed the state attorney general’s office’s highest profile case ever: Pastano’s death sentence was commuted, and the killer of Mary Ann de Castro was now to be repatriated to his home island of Madeira.

The attorney general’s quick and ruthlessly straightforward conviction of Pastano was, it emerged, anything but. True, another boarder had caught Pastano in the middle of stabbing Mrs. Castro and was then stabbed himself, and numerous witnesses saw Pastano out in the street covered in blood. But while the attorney general and his assistant were both young and hasty to convict, the defense of Pastano by Brockholst Livingston—older, shrewder, and all too worldly in the ambiguities of violence—had completely undone their prosecution.

In a deft legal feint, Livingston had allowed the attorney general
to win the trial virtually uncontested. All of the testimony marshaled by Livingston instead concerned Pastano’s insanity. This seemed an odd choice: Under New York State law, there was
no legal defense of insanity for a murder charge. Only the legislature had the authority for reversing a murder conviction on those grounds, an event that had never occurred in Colden’s or Hoffman’s lifetime—and, they felt they could quite safely assume, never would.

They were wrong. Even in the hard-hearted world of New York justice, the prosecution of Pastano went too far.
They never should have indicted him in the first place
, for the man was obviously insane—and that, state law made clear, should have made his case a matter for the justice of the peace. Had Pastano merely been jailed indefinitely or deported in heavy chains, nobody would have taken much notice. But under criminal prosecution, Pastano had drawn a penalty of execution and dissection—an appalling fate to visit upon a helplessly mad wretch. It was an immense blunder for the ambitious young prosecutors to have made. To have its reversal publicly approved by Governor Jay—a fellow law-and-order Federalist, no less—was perhaps the greatest humiliation to the attorney general’s office in a generation.

If Colden’s career was to recover, he needed to win this next case.

I
NVESTIGATING A
murder was a thankless task in New York: The local police were essentially watchmen, and beyond the immediate pursuit of a fleeing miscreant, actual crime investigation was largely left to the prosecutor himself. With Weeks bailed out and one local worthy already supporting his alibi, that would not be easy. If he was going to snare his killer, the assistant attorney general would have to figure out just where the carpenter really spent that fateful December evening.

Other New Yorkers, though, were beginning to wonder where the defense team itself had disappeared to.

“
Where is the magnanimous General Hamilton?” snapped
Greenleaf’s New Daily Advertiser
. Still smarting from Hamilton’s jailing of its foreman David Frothingham, the Republican paper was not above reminding New Yorkers of the general’s peccadilloes: “Is he rioting in the pleasure which the imprisonment of a poor printer affords him? Or is he employed in relieving the wants of some tender
amiable creature
?”

In fact, Hamilton and Burr alike were
away in Albany for much of February, immersed in lucrative commercial lawsuits. The money was cold comfort to Hamilton: The
death of George Washington was already proving disastrous to his own political and military career. Washington had been Hamilton’s great ally in D.C.—it was he who had engineered Hamilton’s promotion to general in the first place, over the angry objections of John Adams. As his most bitter rival in the Federalist Party, President Adams took deep offense at Hamilton’s tawdry affairs, as well as to his ill-concealed military ambitions.

“
If I should consent to appointment of Hamilton,” Adams had complained to Washington, “I should consider it the most irresponsible action of my whole life and the most difficult to justify.”

Now without George Washington’s protection, the general found even history itself turning against him. Much of Hamilton’s previous two years had been spent building up an “additional army,”
justified by stoking fears of a French invasion of godless radicals. That country’s revolution, Hamilton warned, exposed America to a veritable “
volcano of atheism, depravity, and absurdity … an engine of despotism and slavery.” But then France’s revolutionary council had capitulated to Napoléon Bonaparte. The new leader had no immediate fight to pick with America; some thought he might actually bring peace to Europe. Hamilton’s endless demands for more funding and troops were beginning to look foolish.

“
Speculations on a probable war in Europe have almost ceased to occupy the American papers,” one Federalist newspaper glumly admitted. About the best threat it could now conjure was a Gallic invasion from the heavens: “
The French will not have any cause to regret the loss of their naval power when they find it so amply
supplied by their
aerial squadrons
.… A whole fleet of balloons is soon to proceed to America upon
commercial
adventures: and, as the voyage will take only eight days, it is evident that sailing cannot enter into competition with
flying
.”

Just a few blocks from the newspaper’s offices, Colden was unearthing an altogether
more believable tale. It came from Susannah Broad, an elderly Quaker acquaintance of the Ring family—and, it so happened, a neighbor of Ezra Weeks’s.

I remember that night
, she told him.
It was about eight o’clock on a Sunday night, and I heard one of Ezra’s gates open. Well, they never used that particular gate—I thought it was someone stealing from Mr. Weeks’s lumber yard! But when I looked out, it wasn’t anyone carrying out wood at all.… It was a horse coming out. Drawing a sleigh
.

Really now?

Yes, and here was the peculiar thing. It had no bells upon it
.

This was news indeed. The pleasant jingling of sleigh bells was no mere wintertime fancy; it was
a basic courtesy of the road, particularly at night, so that others might hear the vehicle’s approach. True, some complained of the racket from drunks careening homeward from taverns in the wee hours—“
When you hear sleigh bells jingling along the road, about two o’clock in a winter morning, you hear many a curse from the driver,” one contemporary observed—but not to mount bells on a sleigh seemed downright secretive, even dangerous.

The strangest thing
, Susannah added,
was that it was scarcely gone for long at all. My son and daughter came home from their congregation meeting soon after eight, and I do believe the sleigh had already come back before they turned in for bed
.

What hasty mission had Weeks’s sleigh so quietly embarked upon that night?

A
LL OF
February 1800 passed as the prosecutor painstakingly gathered leads for his assault on Weeks’s alibi. By the time Aaron Burr found himself ready to return from Albany in early March to
arrange a defense, though, he was stymied by an unexpected problem: even more criminals.

“
I sent to take passage for to-morrow,” he wrote to his daughter, Theodosia. “And lo! The stage is taken by the sheriff to transport criminals to the state prison. I should not be much gratified with this kind of association on the road.”

There had been no lack of crimes to occupy the sheriff or gossiping New Yorkers, and one of them presented a grim reminder of the fate that might await Weeks. At the same time that John Pastano’s plea of insanity had been laid out to the assembly and the governor, another case had been
brought to them for appeal: the murder conviction of Benjamin Holmes, who
stabbed a good Samaritan that intervened as Holmes beat a child with an iron-tipped ox goad rod. The victim left behind a widow and five children of his own; when the whole grisly affair was recounted to the legislature, not only did they not stop Holmes’s execution, they also
made a point of passing an act demanding it.

In fact, the death of Elma Sands wasn’t even the only Manhattan Company crime. At least one enterprising soul upstate was already
counterfeiting Manhattan Bank currency. Another one made off with
a $350 check drawn upon the Manhattan Bank account of Washington Irving’s brother Dr. Peter Irving—something so infuriating to the Broadway pharmacist that he offered the full amount of the check itself in reward for information about the theft. As a close ally of Aaron Burr’s, Dr. Irving may have been as troubled by the defrauding of the bank as he was about his own loss.

But for Cadwallader Colden, patiently building up a line of witnesses, his work led him far from the intrigues and transactions of City Hall, Broadway, and the local courts—all the way north, inexorably, into the frozen streams and tracts of Lispenard’s Meadow itself.

Yes
, said Arnetta Van Norden, who lived in the rough terrain about halfway between Broadway and the well.
I heard it that night. A young woman yelling: Lord have mercy on me! Lord help me!

That’s right
, her husband added.
I heard it, too. I looked out over the
field, and … I glanced out the window and could see a fellow out by the well. Yes, walking about it. It was dark out, and I could see the stars that night—but I could make out a man’s shape out there
.

And yet they did nothing?

Well
, the husband explained,
we gathered the commotion came from one of the houses in the neighborhood
.

The point was plain enough: It was the reason, perhaps, that Benjamin Holmes’s victim had been killed. It was not someone’s business to interfere in other people’s family affairs. A number of cartmen lived around the meadow—hard physical laborers, like Mr. Van Norden himself, whom it would be unwise to confront in the middle of a beating.

A week before Elma’s disappearance, though,
one of the other cartmen who lived out in meadow had proven a bit more inquisitive.