The Blackest Bird (26 page)
Authors: Joel Rose
Poe looked up at him then through forlorn eyes. His head still hung, and the hurt emanating from those exposed windows did not escape Hays.
“I did,” Poe murmured. “I did know her.”
“And my daughter tells me you have made claim to reveal who murdered Miss Rogers in the third installment of your story.”
Poe now struggled to sit up straight.
“I repeat, Mr. Poe, you and Mary Rogers, you were what to each other?”
Poe stammers. “We … M-Mary …” he struggles. “I …”
It is then and there that the high constable hears gunshots ringing out. At least a dozen, if not more. Distinct, echoing over the countryside. Distant pops and cracks, muffled by miles, reverberating over wooded land and flowing river, carried by the wind on the water, the crispness of the predawn air.
Hays turned his keenest attention in that westerly direction from where he surmised the shots had emanated. There was absolutely no telling, no seeing, nothing.
The night returned to stillness and silence, little more than the lapping of the river.
Hays looked back from where he had been peering into the utter blackness of tree and woods, trying to see that which was unseeable, what was miles away and invisible, as the barge on the river carried listlessly toward Spuyten Duyvil, the name, bastardized, Hays knew, from the first Dutch more than two hundred years before: “in spite of the devil.”
41
F
rom inside the barouche, racing alongside the Haarlem River, past the Macombs Dam, through the dark and tangled woods of upper Manhattan Island, Hays shouted up his instructions of direction to Balboa, given the dark road and breakneck speed, Hays, who knew every nook and cranny, hell-bent to reach the source of that gunfire, to atone for that which he had been delinquent.
Opposite him, Poe remained, muttering to himself, doubled over into his own lap, his head covered by his arms.
Hays ignored him.
Eventually the high constable shouted for the carriage to cut sharply west until they attained the oft-traveled route, the Kings Bridge Road. Below and to the south he espied the sparse, flickering lights of Haarlem Village.
“South here!” Hays cried to Balboa.
Poe stirred with the sound of the high constable’s bark, but made no further discernible move or action, not rising from his bent and fraught position.
At this juncture, from what seemed far away but may have been closer, Hays thought he could hear the faintest indication of the
shouting of men working in concert, their voices raised so as to be carried faintly on the wind.
Balboa slapped the horses with the reins. The carriage continued in its singular direction until the high constable, listening with all his concentration, cried abruptly, “Left here!”
A hundred yards off the main road, they took up an eastern path through the woods toward the Morningside Heights. Ten feet from the precipice edge, Balboa reined the matched geldings and lit from the carriage.
He returned almost instantaneously. “Mr. High, come see quick, suh,” he said, and offered his broad brown hand down to Hays.
Following Balboa, the high constable made his way through the shrubs and low growth to a vantage point at the cliff crest.
Far below Hays could make out Tommy Coleman’s wagon being righted. On the rocky ground John Colt’s empty mahogany coffin lay askew, its lid torn off, battered and splintered.
“Hardly seem real, Mr. High,” Balboa said.
A twisted corpse lay on the ground. A group of boys stood to one side beneath a rogue growth of ailanthus trees, their backs to the cliff, hugging themselves against the wind and cold. From this distance, Hays could not make out who they were for sure. A group of armed men stamped and milled about in front of them, occasionally joking and laughing among themselves, but for all intent ignoring the golgoths.
Even from this elevation and distance, however, Hays was able to recognize at least one of these armed individuals. Hays despaired what Sergeant McArdel, too familiar by his gait and manner, would be doing down there with this array.
A lone voice carried up on the wind. “Shoot the wid a few more times in the mummer.”
Hays knew it McArdel’s order.
Three men stepped forward and aimed their muskets point-blank into the dead man’s obscured face. The loud blasts resounded. The corpse jumped.
Then, as Hays watched, the now-faceless, disfigured body was fitted back into its wooden coat. The lid was replaced, the brass fittings of the coffin twinkling, and the box lifted, then tossed by two oafs back into the righted flatbed.
Hays nudged Balboa. “Let’s go,” he whispered, “I’ve seen enough,” starting back through the undergrowth before turning one last time to catch the armed men grouping, the procession forming presumably for return to the city.
In the carriage, Poe had not moved. His head remained cradled in his arms. “Nevermore … evermore …” He had resumed his incessant chant.
Balboa called softly to the horses and they nudged into motion, the black barouche following the comparatively easy path of the Bloomingdale Road due south toward town.
As they rolled, Poe began to speak, although his voice was garbled and unclear.
“From the first, High Constable,” he mumbled, making no attempt to meet Hays’ eyes, “I have viewed you that
rara avis en terra
—a kindred soul. I beg you, sir, do not abandon me now.”
“Abandon you?” Hays answered, very nearly astonished. “How so, sir?”
Poe’s long and delicate fingers clutched at his black and matted hair. He did not lift his head. “I loved Mary Rogers,” he said. “I did not abandon her. She abandoned me.”
Poe’s great head bobbed and fell. Hays made attempt to inquire further, but Poe failed to respond.
At Eighty-fourth Street the carriage came upon a farm with several barns in the rear, a small rudimentary shed, a silo, and a number of other outbuildings hedging the back acreage. A phalanx of farm trucks stood, their dray teams tied at several of the yard’s numerous hitch rails. The animals pushed with their muzzles at random bales of hay, thrown for them on the hoary, cold ground.
Even at this early hour there was activity, the farm a livestock and
produce depot, the truck farmers and jobbers engaged already with their morning pickups and deliveries.
Hays called to Balboa to pull in.
Dutifully he obliged. He reined the horses, sliding the carriage in skillfully among other vehicles where it might not so easily be singled out by any casual viewer passing on the road.
It was not long before Hays heard the clatter of horses, the iron wagon wheels riding the ruts.
The processional of armed men had ascended the Heights, regained the main thoroughfare of the Bloomingdale Road, and was now rolling by. All in line were grim and silent. Hays had opportunity now to see more than some were militia, others police. No one saw or noticed the high constable’s barouche where it sat hidden under a swamp maple.
Hays had indeed recognized his sergeant from the Night Watch. It was McArdel all right, standing the column lead.
Tommy Coleman and his cohorts were nowhere in evidence, under custody or otherwise, although the wagon carrying the casket was undoubtedly theirs.
Poe stirred from his oblivion. His eyes twitched.
“If you don’t mind, Mr. Hays,” he coughed, struggling to sit up, “I find necessity to bid adieu.”
Hays turned, “Wait!” but before he could restrain him, Poe had pushed the carriage door open and stumbled to the hard ground.
“Mr. High, should we follow, suh?” Balboa called from above, motioning after McArdel and the line of wagon, casket, horses, and men already past.
Hays stared after Poe as he disappeared, stiffly hobbling behind the white farmhouse.
“Yes,” the high constable said, his stomach hollow. “By all means, follow.”
H
aving, for whatever reason, slept fitfully, wracked by worry, Olga Hays sits at the kitchen table at noon, awaiting her father’s return, nursing her third cup of Javanese of the morning, when she hears the deep tones of voice in the street, directly outside the door.
“Guh’night, Mr. High,” Balboa says. “Or should I say guh’day, suh?”
The kitchen door opens with Balboa’s tired laughter, and Old Hays enters. Olga hurries to help him out of his cloak, off with his boots, but he is in no good mood, and does little talking.
Instead, after sitting for a minute or two, he exhales heavily, kisses her, and takes the stairs, turning at the top of the landing to say, “Olga, the day’s prints, I need them all, and your opinion, when I wake.”
Later, after a solitary midafternoon luncheon of vegetable soup, bread and butter, Olga dutifully dons her Persian fur coat and matching Persian hat, both once her mother’s, and walks through the brisk, cutting air to the corner for the afternoon papers requested by her father.
At the news shed it is not hard to see. In 48-point type the
Herald
headline proclaims:
Even before arriving back home on Lispenard Street, Olga is engrossed. She reads fixedly as she walks, only taking time out to manage the doorknob.
The byline is an accustomed one, that of James Gordon Bennett.
Late last night below the Morningside Heights a small caravan was observed proceeding due north at swift rate of speed by local sheriff authorities, including Haarlam Village and Manhattanville office deputies, a contingent of militia soldiers, and representatives from the Night Watch and city police.
The police received anonymous tip that a band of ghouls had robbed a fresh grave in the city and were out to blackmail the grieving family. Little did the authorities suspect that the grave robbed was that of the Homicide, John C. Colt.
Surprised by the confrontation, the gang turned out to be a cutthroat band representing the Forty Little Thieves, a notorious Five Points collective of wild boys and apaches, none more than seventeen years old, known for their wanton viciousness.
Until recently this group had been led by Tommy Coleman, younger brother of the infamous, now deceased, gangster Edward Coleman, who met his maker three years ago on the gallows in the Tombs, perpetrator of the murder of his wife, the well-known, in this metropolis, and much-admired “Pretty Hot Corn Girl.”
This Mr. Coleman, too, had been condemned to death. In his case, for the murder, ironically, of the very sister of the very Pretty Hot Corn Girl his older sibling had seen fit to murder, a young woman, not much more than a girl, who had, much to her credit, according to all credence, spurned her brother-in-law’s first advances.
Mr. Coleman had also been charged and convicted of killing his wife’s alleged lover, one Ruby Pearl, a butcher at the Centre Market, and her small daughter, aged four years.
But before said sentence could be commissioned, Mr. Coleman engineered his escape.
It has been surmised this roué fled the prison the night the cupola dome of the Palace of Justice was set ablaze, the same night Mr. Colt was found dead in his cell, the hilt of a jewel-encrusted dagger protruding from his lifeless chest.
Olga reaches for her tea, having switched after lunch from the dark, thick coffee. Lifting cup and saucer, seated at the kitchen table, she thinks she hears her father stirring now in his bedroom.
For some seconds she listens intently, but hears nothing more. After another sip of Ceylon leaf, realizing him still asleep (due to the clarity of his rather loud snoring, penetrating through the floorboards from above), she resumes reading Bennett’s depiction of the last night’s activities:
All ghouls, including Mr. Coleman, were reportedly killed in the ensuing conflagration with police authorities and militia.
The bodies of the others were reportedly taken to Haarlem Village or various nearby enclaves. The body of Mr. Coleman was returned to this city, much mutilated by musket balls, especially in the area of the face, sustained during the foray.
Fittingly, for this last journey, Mr. Coleman was transported in the same coffin set aside for the remains of John C. Colt, the Homicide. This band is now considered undone.
Of late, in Olga’s scornful observation, Mr. James Gordon Bennett has seen fit to take it upon himself, in a brazen exercise of sinful pride, to have himself identified in the city prints as the singular practitioner of what he so readily liked to call the new, “objective” journalism.
Olga snorts her utter contempt at the mendacity of the man for the very notion. In reality Olga knows Mr. Bennett, through a series of meetings at the Harper Brothers and close scrutiny of his newspaper
forays, to be a callous cur, a mere retailer of scandal, profiteer of vulgarity and sensation, purveyor to all who delight in the misery of others.
Still, Olga admits to having been drawn back, and back again, to the wide spectrum of Bennett’s exposés. The man’s particular brand of charlatanism manifest in print held its own particular delights. The brutal murder of the prostitute Helen Jewett and ensuing sensational acquittal of her conspicuously guilty murderer, a young pansy christened Richard Robinson but self-named Frank Rivers, comes to immediate mind.
“A journalist’s duty,” Bennett lectured her (and others, presumably) from the podium of the
Herald
’s 5 p.m. edition, his self-revelatory third extra of the day, “is to gather the facts, independent of prejudice, preconception, pressure or personal agenda, and present them, in order to reproduce the world as it is.”
If it is not in keeping with what we might like, so be it. You, Dear Reader, are entitled to know every last fact and conjecture connected with the Homicide Colt case, and only I can provide them. But need I remind you, facts don’t necessarily add up to reality. Especially when the possibility of justice is sat upon by the privileges of power, the inequities of class, the consequence of sin, the very nature of evil.
My
Herald
is equally intended for the great masses of the community— the merchant, the mechanic, the working person—the private family, as well as the public hotel—the journeyman and his employer—the clerk and his principal.
I hold no favorites. I attack rich or poor, religious nut or agnostic, high society or low, police or criminal. I am an editor. I am your editor. I am fearless. I am candid. I am honest. I am independent. All my reporting is dedicated to serving the legitimate interests of you, the people. My questions are asked in this capacity, and this capacity only.
Olga is beyond herself with disbelief, caught between outright disgust and delight. Compulsively, she finds herself following every fleck and
nuance of the extravaganza through the rest of the afternoon until her father wakes in the early evening. In spite of the hour, she brings him a breakfast of two fried eggs, two pancakes, two chicken legs, and a basket of warm buttered rolls and places the tray on his lap in bed.
With the tray she carries what she can only hope wearily is Bennett’s final ejaculation of the day, the one wherein he conveniently sums up the melodrama and addresses what he now has come to call:
“Papa, while you slept Mr. Bennett has taken it upon himself in the most extraordinary way to sound quite a loud noise. He now charges John Colt not dead, but having made good an escape, solely owing to the cooperation of the Watch, the warden, certain prison authorities and guards, and that even Dr. Archer was aware of the deception, in on it, too, his jurymen carefully selected for their ignorance of Mr. Colt’s physical appearance.”
“What exactly does he say?” inquires Hays between ravenous bites of pancake and egg. “Has he implicated me, dear?” his old eyes twinkling with his facetiousness. He has awakened famished, and is grateful to his daughter for providing such bounty in such timely manner.
“Not you, Papa. Even he knows in this city you are beyond reproach. Your implication would not sell newspapers. The opposite. His readership would only see through him, and abandon him in disgust.” She winks. “Papa, what I loathe about Mr. Bennett is not his doggedness, but how he so shamelessly plays to his readers. He is the worst sort of demagogue. He claims the populace entitled to know every fact, every conjecture, yet he disdains them. He proclaims himself nothing less than an editor on public duty, yet again, he makes like it is he, and only he, who can provide the goods, flailing this way, flailing that. All geared to the single, purposeful, deplorable bottom line of making money.”
“It is the American way. If Mr. Bennett is crass, you, my dear, are
not the first to point at his fallacy. Now what is it he does allege? Please tell me.”
“His allegations are as follows, Papa,” she fumes. “A body had been looted from the Dead House, substituted for John Colt’s, replacing the privileged murderer in his coffin after the corpse had assiduously been prepared for the occasion. The famous bejeweled dagger, he alleges, has undoubtedly been plunged into the innocent’s heart by conspirator or conspirators unknown. The hapless victim’s clothes removed from the corpse and more than likely carefully destroyed in the ensuing inferno at the prison. None of this could have been carried out, according to Mr. Bennett, without the cooperation of certain officials and men in charge. Here, I’ll read to you from his latest and, I hope, final screed of the day:
“We now know Mr. Colt’s suicide to be an untrue make-believe. Presently, it is assumed the two, Mr. Colt and Mr. Coleman, escaped in concert, leaving another body in Mr. Colt’s stead to be mistaken for his own.
Authorities further speculate that Mr. Coleman was paid to rob Mr. Colt’s grave in order to curtail a rising tide of rumor, gossip, and out-of-hand speculation, in this way preventing city authorities from exhuming the coffin to see once and for all if it really was Mr. John C. Colt sepulchred in said crypt.
At first blackmail seemed the game, and it still might have been, because after ambushing the gang of ghouls and upon unlidding the box, sheriff ’s deputies said they discovered the coffin empty.
If ever a corpse was interred within may now never be known. The bones of Mr. Colt may have indeed lain there, to be ransomed by his family, or, perhaps, as is the consensus at this writing, the body was not (and never was) that of Mr. Colt, but that of another, a derelict, laid out in his stead, until last evening, no one the wiser.”
Olga continues. “Mr. Bennett further charges the cupola dome fire to be neither accident nor coincidence, Papa, but deliberately set, also
with cooperation, while Colt’s clothes were soaked in the dead man’s blood and then fitted to the body. He runs on at the mouth ad nauseam with his opportunist onslaught, claiming he has no doubt that Governor Seward of New York State, as well as New York City Mayor Morris, will order an investigation at once into this most unheard-of, most unparalleled, travesty.
“According to Bennett,” she moves on spitefully, “lending credence additionally to this nefarious conspiracy is the disappearance of Colt’s bride, Caroline Henshaw, now, he claims, substantiated. The rival
Sun
, he alleges, speculates she has traveled out west, to California or Texas, in the company of her husband. Mr. Bennett writes, unequivocally, this is untrue. He has learned from unknown source, he says, she is on her way to Europe with her infant son, specifically to Germany, having booked passage using the name Julia Leicester.”
“None of this is news, Olga. All of this information, including that in regard to Miss Henshaw, is known, and has been available to the constabulary. Go on, please.”
“Grudgingly, I will admit, the man has a certain capacity, Papa. He finishes masterfully. You, Mr. Hays, of all people, I fear, will appreciate Mr. Bennett’s salient point. Prick your ears and prepare yourself, sir.”
She clears her throat and once more begins to read:
“On the plus side, our city is now spared the cash outlay, in this time of relative recession, of hanging the likes of Mr. Coleman, killed in the resultant shoot-out with local police and support authorities.
Now if only to recapture Mr. Colt and hang him, even in these hard times, dash the expense.”