The Blackest Bird (23 page)

T
he following morning, at the behest of her father, Olga Hays visited the news shed on Canal Street to return home burdened with the early-edition array of public prints, each and every one full of Colt’s suicide and the inferno at the Tombs.

proclaimed the
Sun
.

wondered the
Tribune
.

shouted the
Mercury
.

cried the
Brooklyn
Eagle
.

bellowed the
Herald
, delineating in minute, tantalizing detail:

“I am reluctant to add to the misery of the Colt family,” wrote eminent publisher and editor James Gordon Bennett.

The consensus on who might have smuggled the lethal blade into the prison laid culpability with Colt’s bride. Especially after reporters, dispatched to her apartments, discovered the new Mrs. Colt not at home and nowhere to be found in society.

“We hardly know where to begin,” persisted Bennett. “Or how to express the feelings and thoughts which rise up in the mind in contemplating this awful, this unexampled, this stupendous, this most extraordinary and most horrible tragedy.”

Accompanying this phlegmic editorial and conclusion, a line drawing depicted Colt’s corpse, viewed through a jailhouse window, the body lying in his well-appointed cell, the hilt of a bejeweled dagger protruding from his chest, smoke and flame, presumably from the fire in the cupola dome, licking and swirling all about the body.

The caption beneath the lurid scene read:

Bennett demanded those city officials in charge be held responsible.

With somewhat less diatribe was dealt the blaze at the Hall of Justice itself. The gist: The fire burned most of the night. As a result, the building sustained substantial damage, but, thankfully, not total decimation. The blaze had been attributed to grease, for the most part held to the flue stacks, and blamed on the carelessness of the restaurant Delmonico’s, using the prison facilities to prepare succulents for the Colt wedding banquet.

Warden Hart was quoted as saying that not less than twelve official fire companies, not including rogue street gangs, had participated in the extinguishment (Hart’s word) of the inferno.

The fire was considered an accident, a coincidence. The cupola dome had caught fire certainly, and would have to be replaced, the warden admitted. There was much smoke and water damage.

For his part, Mayor Robert Morris declared in no uncertain terms that the building structure would be rebuilt.

“How,” he was quoted in the
Mercury
, “could the city ever endure without its glorious Palace of Justice?” 

Three days passed before the public prints saw fit to question what might have really transpired the night of the Tombs fire.

asked Bennett in yet another of his special editions.

Until then, somewhat to High Constable Jacob Hays’ surprise, not a word had seen print to the effect that John Colt might have eluded punishment. For the most part, the follow-up accounts in the public papers had merely stated that the deceased’s body was removed immediately from the Palace of Justice, an inquest soon held, the Dead House eschewed, and the corpse quickly buried without ceremony in the churchyard cemetery of St. Mark’sin-the-Bouwerie on Tenth Street at Second Avenue.

Acidly, Bennett now publicly assailed city coroner Dr. Archibald Archer, accusing him of having been in on the deception from the start, charging that an unfortunate corpse had been prepared beforehand, and the jurymen at the inquest selected for one reason, and one reason only: their ignorance of John C. Colt’s appearance.

Assuming an ill-fitting stance of moral superiority, Bennett took opportunity to perch himself even higher than he was accustomed, with relish sniping down from this unaccustomed new height: “Then again a most extended system of bribery has been in operation to effect the escape of Homicide Colt from the beginning,” he wrote. “Certainly, since his conviction.”

Bennett charged the supposed “suicide” was at that very moment on his way by private coach to either California or Texas.

Perhaps with his new wife. “Nothing is beyond the family Colt and their influence,” he sniffed.

And then more.

In the next day’s edition, the publisher-editor pondered:

seeing fit to name a single name:

While another headline in a follow-up edition chose to link the two, wondering

Followed by still another speculative column stating it had been assumed at first that Tommy Coleman had lost his life in the conflagration, but now, with rumor rampant about John Colt having made his way beyond the prison walls and the hangman, the fact of no body being found, the probability must be examined that Tommy Coleman, too, had taken the opportunity of the inferno to make his own escape.

Olga Hays reads to her father editor Bennett’s final thoughts of that publishing day:

I
f John Colt was dead or alive, buried or escaped, Old Hays was unable to attest. He had been most certainly absent at the time of Homicide Colt’s alleged demise. Likewise, he had not been paid the privilege to view the corpse. Nor had he opportunity to be on hand when the body was put to bed with a shovel.

Still, he knew what he had seen: the gentleman in question, cloaked and curtained, passenger in that black brougham careening down Cross Street.

On the night of the cupola inferno, finally arriving at the Tombs after midnight, dragging the prigger Holdgate with him, Hays found the prison charred and reeking, the body attributed to the condemned already gone. The detective, walking slowly through the facility assessing the damage, reconstructed in his mind what must have transpired while he was absent. He prided himself on a learned skill: having spent so many years in the profession, coming upon the scene of a crime, Old Hays felt himself entirely able to smell the criminal.

Reasonably, the high constable questioned himself. What was he to make of the apprehension of James Holdgate in Gravesend after such extended period of successfully eluding police authorities? Had this
not been a charade, its clever construct designed to lure the high constable away from his appointed rounds and the highly orchestrated crime scene? Had bribes been paid to facilitate the deception? And if they had, to whom? And for which reason? For Colt’s suicide to proceed unimpeded, or his escape? The answers would come, Hays knew. Patience was an attribute to which long experience had paid contribution.

Still, he swore, he would not be had.

It took additional three days’ time before Mayor Morris came forward, bowing to outside pressure and the outcry of Bennett and the public prints.

During that period of frustration, Hays had sought on several separate occasions (first thing in the morning on three successive days) audience with the mayor, but had been rebuffed.

Now Mayor Morris, in a noontime address to the Common Council and Board of Aldermen, professed to being merely astonished by the turn of events.

Reluctantly, he was ready to admit that something duplicitous
may
have occurred in the city’s House of Detention. Yet he refused to believe John Colt had escaped.

“The man is dead,” Mayor Morris declared.

Yet, he wondered, how in heaven’s name had the prisoner come by the bejeweled dagger that he had plunged into his own beating heart in that final moment of what must have been unspeakable desperation?

That afternoon, in the penny dailies, names were mentioned: both of Colt’s brothers, his lawyers, his minister. Even Dillback, the manservant. A horde of others, including Poe the poet and John Howard Payne the songster.

Yet Caroline Colt, née Henshaw, assumed role of the presses’ general-consensus guilty party.

Monmouth Hart, under pressure from the mayor’s office, now joined company and freely accused Mr. Colt’s new wife.

Men were subject to close scrutiny before entering the prison, especially death row. Thorough search was required for men and women alike, Hart explained to a gathering of newspaper flacks.

But on her wedding day how closely had Miss Henshaw been examined?

On the hectic afternoon in question, the prison premises had suffered from a dearth of unoccupied guards, Hart conceded.

Had Mr. Malcolm Trencher, the man assigned the task, done his duty?

Later in the day, Warden Hart made a great show of calling the beleaguered man aside in front of Old Hays and posing the question:

Had he patted her down?

“Not her bosom,” Mr. Trencher, a nervous, forlorn type admitted. “I did not touch that part of her anatomy. Nor any area below the waist.”

Looking on, Hays could not fault him, given the nature of their prurient society.

Trencher was the very same keeper interrogated by the English author Charles Dickens, the one who had given misinformation in regard to the origin of the name of the Tombs institution.

“I would have touched her below the waist,” Warden Hart impugned. “For God’s sake, man, where is your duty?”

Hart continued his foray. “So the ornamental dagger of a certain proportion might have been hidden from view?” he went on in a bluster. “Carried between the breasts, let us say, point facing down?”

Admitted.

Hays looked on but said nothing, his sympathy with Trencher, his distrust with Hart.

F
OLLOWING
T
RENCHER’S INQUISITION
, Hays returned to his desk. He sat himself heavily in his stiff ladder-back chair.

Could this spectacle have been any more of a sham than it seemed? Had Monmouth Hart really had the bad sense and audacity to stage
such show, assailing the twitchy Trencher entirely for the high constable’s benefit?

Old Hays had no doubt. His eyes might have grown somewhat weak over the years, but he would have to be very well convinced otherwise that it was someone else than John Colt of whom he had caught sight behind that flapping carriage curtain.

His constable’s staff in hand, Old Hays made his way down the cell block to John Colt’s purported place of last breath.

Seven hundred and thirty-four inmates had inhabited the Tombs that November evening when Mr. Colt had been scheduled to die. Hays prided himself on knowing virtually each and every one of these maladroits by sight. The high constable claimed never to forget a criminal face. He also was famous for touring the Penitentiary of the City of New York at Bellevue and the Women’s Almshouse on Blackwell’s Island at least once a week, gazing into cell after cell, withstanding the shouted insults and mutterings, so as to know the countenances of the females incarcerated there as well as he knew their jailed brethren downtown.

After the fire, all but a dozen inmates were said to be accounted for, recaptured, remanded, and transported to the women’s prison at Bellevue to be held there.

Aside from a few ineffectual kirkbuzzers, shycocks, and top-divers, the notable exceptions were John Colt and Tommy Coleman.

Albeit nervously, when questioned by Hays, the warden stood by his assertion. Colt was found dead in his cell. Hart maintained he could not be certain what had happened to Tommy Coleman and made no venture. He may have died in the inferno and his body consumed by the flames. He honestly did not know, he said, and could not guess. The cell doors along the block had all been thrown open. He may have escaped. If that was the case, he would be found and rearrested.

“By whom?” Hays demanded.

“By you, sir,” Hart said. “I have utmost respect for your prowess, High Constable.”

Hays stalked away from the functionary. He found no necessity to mention he had no doubt seen John Colt during the course of his escape, and it was his conviction the man had appeared at the time hale and hearty.

He stood in front of the empty and abandoned cell where Colt had purportedly died, staring through the bars. The grate stood ajar. He went inside. There was no blood soaked on the cot as you might expect if someone had expired there from a fatal knife wound to the heart.

Hays returned down the corridor to Colt’s cell.

Everything was relatively the same here as when Hays last saw it. Nothing much had been disturbed by the conflagration. Remarkably, the flames had actually consumed little, although the sharp smell of acridity was strong and there was a layer of black, pasty char and muck on the floor. But the reality was that most of the blaze had been restricted to the flue stacks. When Hays cursorily inspected the stone walls, it was not hard to find a series of ragged, fist-sized holes punched through the mortar from where the smoke had surely vented directly from the clay chimney liners into the prison block proper. Every indication told how the fire had been grease-fed. The fat from the broiling meats evidently had erupted in flames. Those flames had licked straight up inside the prison wall flues to the cupola dome, catching that structure on fire and eventually destroying it. The result being a spectacle of smoke and cinder that had poured into the prison through the holes punched in the flue liners and causing such panic.

He called the jailer, “Mr. Trencher? Would you mind terribly?”

Hearing his name, Trencher lumbered back down the block. By necessity he was at Hays’ beck and call. Hays knew he was a man who would do anything for him. In his mind, in some part because of his embarrassment in front of Dickens, Trencher was forever diminished in front of Hays and at disadvantage.

“Mr. Trencher,” Hays said, “would you mind unlocking Mr. Colt’s house of solitude here for me?”

Once the lock was keyed and open, Hays stepped inside the cell
and stopped stock-still. Something came over him and seized him. The consummate shadow surveyed the man’s lair with its myriad appointments. He had an inner feeling, vast and unreal. The polished writing desk, the leather patent chair of Colonel Colt’s invention, the multivolume library neatly lined on the cherrywood book commode, an array of unbound folios rushed straight from the printer for the prisoner’s enjoyment, the plethora of pamphlets, extras, and popular magazines of the day, all stood their ground, barely touched by soot, much less fire.

Hays studied the titles of the three books occupying Colt’s desk, holding them close to his eyes to better see. They were all Edgar Poe’s:
Tales of the Grotesque, Tales of the Arabesque,
and a pamphlet edition,
Recent Tales of Ratiocination
.

Hays felt Trencher’s eyes on him. Hays knew the man could not read. Neither could he write, nor even recognize his own name when written.

The entire prison and much of the law enforcement cadre had been taken to task by the popular press for Colt’s preferential treatment. A rose on the dinner plate. Brocaded drapery. A fussy British servant attired in evening clothes. A decorous writing table, his personal library, a reclining leather chair. Conjugal visits from his mistress for the sole purpose of frolic.

For God’s sake. A man condemned to death?

Rumors of bribery were in recent full circulation. The
Herald
even gave numbers: a thousand dollars each, offered to three unnamed jailers.

Trencher was a self-acknowledged lout. Hays knew him to sometimes be abusive to prisoners. But bribery?

Hays hoped not Trencher. Despite himself, without realizing, Hays lowered himself into Colt’s leather chair.

John Colt had boasted to Hays on more than one occasion how his brother Sam had developed the design, had drafted the blueprint with his own hand, had even gone so far as to send the necessary paperwork
to the national capital in Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Patent Office there.

It
was
remarkable how the Colt chair changed position. Indeed, an engineering marvel. When you pushed your body back in a certain manner, for a moment there, you felt almost helpless as if you were about to plummet, then the mechanism sprang into action and all went smoothly, and it was for all the world as if you were luxuriating on a fat goose-feathered divan. Old Hays took a shallow breath. For the first time in he knew not how long, the pain in his back and legs subsided. Or seemed to be diminished, if not altogether relieved.

Hays sighed deeply in comfort. He despised those who thought themselves above all else of God’s creatures. Humility was a large word to the high constable. He abhorred those, like John Colt, who chose to live outside the law, those who thought themselves better than the rest of their fellow citizens, those who, by action and choice, made a mockery of all law-abiding members of society.

His mind came to Poe. He thought of Mary Rogers and wondered the connection between the two, vowed to himself it would be found out.

Trencher’s voice brought Hays back from his reverie.

“Got your eye on Mr. Colt’s patent chair there, Mr. High? I be glad t’he’p you carry it back to your office there. Surely is a thing of beauty. Nobody cares if you take it, sir, they surely don’t.”

Hays chose not to acknowledge the dolt.

It took some minutes before it dawned on Trencher that he was no longer needed.