The Blackest Bird (7 page)

I
nside the same day’s edition of the
Herald
featuring the Nick Moore House etching and the Fitz-Greene Halleck ode of tribute to Mary Rogers, the family of a Transport Street printer, Samuel Adams, posted a desperate notice:

A cash reward was offered for any information leading to the return of this vanished man.

A week passed with no word on the whereabouts of the gentleman in question, whereupon Old Hays received a card at his office in the Tombs that a body had been found sepulchred in a crate in the hold of a packet steamer lying at the foot of Maiden Lane.

With McArdel in tow, Hays proceeded to the waterfront. There indeed, aboard ship, from below, there came the most fearful smell.

“We ’ave been delayed a week on our way to New Orleans,” the captain told the high constable. “When this morning come this ’orrible
stench from the ’old, I tole me mate, break cargo, and that is what ’e done.”

With his handkerchief clasped over his nose, Hays descended to view the remains of he who would later be identified as the printer Adams, without clothes, wrapped in canvas and stuffed, knee to chin, into a wooden box.

“Do you know how the crate got here?” Hays asked.

Both captain and mate said they did not. “Delivered by a cartman, it was, but who might ’ave employed ’im or who that feller was, I du’know.”

That evening Hays had McArdel advertise in several of the penny papers for any individual who might have brought a box to the ship.

The next day, the sought-after cartman, his interest drawn to the advertisement and solidified by the money offered as a reward by the family, came forward. He told of carrying a wooden crate, leaking a dark liquid that may have been blood, from the corner of Chambers Street and Broadway to the east side docks at Maiden Lane.

Hays asked could he recognize that person who had employed him.

“He wasn’t just your everyday kind of fellow,” he said. “No, not him. He was a high bloke, he was, with plenty of lucre.”

“How much did he pay you?” asked Hays.

“Gave me a five-dollar gold piece, he did.”

“Did that not alert you, sir?”

“Alert me to what?”

A granite building stood at the corner of Chambers and Broadway where the cartman indicated he had made his pickup. Hays walked the length of sidewalk, and by the public pump discovered a discoloration of the cobbles that may have been bloodstains.

He sent McArdel into a number of nearby buildings until he returned with a professional bookkeeper by the name of Wheeler. Mr. Wheeler told the high constable a week before he had been sitting in his office with a young lad who was a pupil of his. It was between three and four o’clock, he said, when a very agitated gentleman rushed
in from the street and up the stairs. Soon, the bookkeeper said, he heard the sounds of an argument, the cry “You lie!” followed by the sounds of a struggle, what might have been swordplay.

“Swordplay?”

“That is what it sounded like, sir. I remember looking up from my work and saying to my pupil, ‘Did you hear that? What was it?’”

The bookkeeper continued, “My room is next to another engaged in a similar field. He keeps accounts, although he instructs in the art of ornamental penmanship as well.”

“What might this gentleman’s name be?” asked Hays.

“John Colt. After hearing such noise and such fright, everything suddenly had gone silent. Stealthily I crept to Mr. Colt’s door, from where I was sure the commotion emanated, and peered through the keyhole, displacing the cover, which was down, with the handle of my pen.”

“What did you see?”

“A man I assumed to be Mr. Colt with his back to the door, stooping over something and quietly raising it. There was no noise. All was still and quiet as the charnel house.”

Old Hays had heard enough.

“Do you know if Mr. Colt is in his office at this moment?”

“I cannot say. I think he is.”

The man who answered Hays’ knock was tall and lean, handsome of his style, well haberdashed, not a mollycoddle exactly, but a fussbudget, what surely might have been taken by a cartman, or anyone of a certain predisposition, as a high bloke.

“Mr. Colt?” Hays inquired.

“Mr. High Constable,” the man answered.

It would not be quite accurate to say John Colt looked cool to Hays, but he did not appear exactly flummoxed either.

“You recognize me, sir?”

“I imagine there are few in this city, High Constable, who would not.”

“Just so,” Hays said. “Sir, I am here under the most regrettable of circumstances. Are you of the acquaintance of a printer by the name of Samuel Adams?”

Colt’s expression barely changed, but, as perceived by Hays, change it did. “I am not,” the suspect said.

“You are certain? A gentleman by the name of Samuel Adams?”

“I am certain, sir. I do not know this individual.”

“I see. And you are not the one to have sent a crate packed with the body of a man,
this man
, this gentleman whom you do not know, Mr. Samuel Adams, to New Orleans?”

Colt stepped back, smiling in what Hays saw as a disturbing, most unsettling manner.

Still, he denied all.

Hays tipped his bowler to him, bid him good afternoon, and returned to the street. He ordered McArdel to post a man outside the building with instructions to follow Colt wherever he might go.

McArdel himself was to proceed immediately to Adams’ home and place of business to see if there might be any record, or anyone with knowledge, perhaps his wife, of a previous connection between these two gentlemen, Mr. Adams and Mr. Colt.

H
IGH
C
ONSTABLE
H
AYS
was a well-known figure. Many criminals were stopped in their tracks when they heard uttered the warning, “Beware, Old Hays is after you.” Before dawn the following morning, the high constable, with Sergeant McArdel accompanying him in accustomed role of strong arm, came for Mr. John C. Colt at his home on Washington Square. After awakening the suspect, Hays requested that he accompany him to the Dead House, where, unbeknownst to him, the body of Samuel Adams was lying under a sheet.

The atmosphere in the Dead House justifiably brought a chill to Colt. In the cold and cavernous room, Hays reposed questions to him, and again the suspect assiduously denied the murder of the printer Adams, denied even knowing him.

Bearing him no heed, Old Hays persisted with his questioning. He was accustomed to initiating his interrogation with a warning: “Good citizens will tell the truth.”

He would intone this statement just so, cracking his staff in accompaniment on the hard floor for additional effect.

Adams’ body remained covered, and the room in the Dead House was dark and sinister.

Hays suddenly swept the sheet off the corpse. “Look upon this body!” he ordered Colt. At the same time, he carefully shone the beam of his lantern on the remains. “Behold the cold and clammy body of your victim, Mr. Colt! Have you ever seen this man before?”

Colt jerked back, terrified, and cried out in horror, but Hays, unrelenting, shoved him forward and pressed his head down until the suspect was forced to stare into the clouded eyes of the dead man.

“Murderer!” cried Hays. “Confess! Now, have you ever seen this man before?”

Colt broke into sobs. “Yes, Mr. Hays, as God is my witness, he is Samuel Adams and I have murdered him.”

A
WARRANT
was subsequently sworn and acted upon in the name of John C. Colt, and a confession to the following effect written by the alleged perpetrator.

“On the morning of Friday, September 17, 1841,” Colt began, “my publisher, Mr. Samuel Adams, called at my home on the north side of Washington Square, telling my manservant, Dillback, he had something most urgent to discuss with me. At the time, according to Dillback, he was told most politely I was still asleep.

“Mr. Adams asked if I could not be awakened,” Colt continued. “Dillback, who is an Englishman and beyond scrutiny, replied that I could not.

“Mr. Adams then requested paper and pen, sat down at the hall writing desk, and wrote a short note to me. He requested if I might not be given it as soon as I awakened. Then he bid good day and left.”

A
GED TWENTY-SIX
, John Colt was scion to the Colt armament business, the youngest of three brothers; his eldest brother being Samuel, the patriarch of the family and inventor of the Colt Paterson repeating revolver.

Young John, however, was not part of his brother’s firearm business. He aspired instead to the literary life and to literary fame.

His course?

Whatever means necessary, according to some detractors, including Olga Hays, who knew him vaguely as a hanger-on at Harper Brothers, and so informed her father.

Artistic considerations were said to be of little concern to young John. His first published work was a treatise on decorative handwriting. His second, a discussion of accounts.

But this new book was different. “A collection of poetry,” Colt happily explained to anyone who would listen.

For the pleasure of seeing his latest typeset, Colt had made financial arrangement with Mr. Adams in order for him to print the thin volume. And, indeed, the purpose of Mr. Adams’ visit that morning of the crime pertained to that very agreement, and certain accounts still outstanding for Adams’ printing and publishing services rendered.

Of only slightly less consideration to the money owed apparently was the quality and craft of Mr. Colt’s work. Evidently, in printer Adams’ estimation, the author’s poetical dabbling contained no meritable quality, and no craft. In no uncertain terms, Adams questioned the mettle of the poet, the honesty, integrity, and frankly, when a poem showed promise, the very authorship. Word had reached Adams that the best poems signed “Colt” were actually penned by the critic and poet Edgar Poe, commissioned for pennies from the rightful author owing to that man’s purported financial difficulties. Adams had apparently lent ear to rumors of scandal. He had heard Poe might even now be revoking his arrangement, decrying Colt for plagiarizing his work, and planning an exposé in the public prints.

Colt rose daily at midday. His coffee and an Anderson aromatic
segar in light green wrapper were brought to him in bed each noon along with that morning’s newspapers and a single red rose in a glass vase.

Adams’ note, sealed in an envelope smudged with black, inky fingerprints, was tucked under the linen napkin. Looking at it, Colt first took a sip of coffee before slitting the envelope.

He read the note and jumped up, spilling both coffee and vase.

Crying for Dillback, the manservant, he demanded his horse and carriage be readied immediately. He dressed and ran from his home into the street even as his mistress, Caroline Henshaw, tried to calm him.

His carriage pulled up, but apparently Colt now had second thoughts.

“Mayhem may very well have been at play on my mind,” he admitted in writing, “because I now declined to enter the vehicle. Instead, I dismissed coach and driver and headed east on foot from my home, skirting Washington Square before cutting south on the Broadway, with every intention of confronting Mr. Adams at his printing house offices on Nassau Street. Halfway downtown, however, I thought better of it, and again altered my plans.”