A Disgrace to the Badge

by Ed Gorman

  "Yes," Sam said.

  "Somebody was following you."

  "What? That's impossible. I would've noticed." His vanity was hurt. How could he have not known he was being followed?

  "If Jim says you were being followed, you were being followed," Cawthorne said.

  "Who was following me?"

  "I don't know. A man. I didn't get a good look at his face. He wore this hat with a snap brim and very heavy clothes."

  Cawthorne said, "This is serious."

  Sam couldn't argue with that. "You think they're on to us?"

  "Somebody's on to you, anyway," McReedy said.

  "I don't like your tone," Sam snapped.

  Cawthorne said, "Let's stick to the problem, all right?" His disgust with both of them was obvious on his face. McReedy liked to play the expert. Sam, with his money, education, and good looks, was all male vanity. "Jim has a solution."

  McReedy was pleased he got to play the expert again. "You're going to go home right now and I'm going to follow you again. But this time I'm going to find out who's in the buggy behind you. I can run him off the road now that it's dark. In the daytime too many people could see and I could get arrested." And that, of course, could lead the police directly to Cawthorne's Copperhead cell.

  Sam figured McReedy was probably getting a lot of pleasure out of this. A lower-class man like this getting to act superior to his social better.

  Yet Sam didn't have much choice but to listen and go along.

  * * *

  Sam set off in his buggy. In the darkest of late afternoon on November 1, there was a half-moon brilliant in its luminosity. It almost made the 28-degree temperature tolerable.

  He could smell the slums on the carriage. He'd have to have one of the servants give it a good brushing and washing. When you were near slaughterhouses that big, you couldn't get the stench off for days.

  He drove self-consciously, aware now he was being followed. He'd been stupid not to have noticed this earlier in the day. And behind his follower, Jim McReedy, no doubt gloating. Waiting his chance.

  He went ten blocks on Dearborn before the mansions and the wide estates began appearing. His neighborhood. His house was only six blocks away. He wondered when McReedy would make his move.

  He passed estates from which he could hear wonderful music, a party in progress, wondrous European chandeliers casting starlight out upon the autumn-frosted lawns. Good brandy and jokes and—Or so it had once been, anyway, before the death of his brother, before the death at the hands of the Union army had reminded Sam about who he really was in his heart and soul. Southern. Very much in agreement with his own people and their traditions. By rights he should've been fighting right alongside his brother. Before, he could get along with Yankees, almost convince himself that he belonged here and was one of them. But now—

  McReedy made his move.

  He pulled his buggy up sharply behind the follower and then lurched right up alongside of him, swerving into the follower's vehicle as he did so. Horses crying in fear and anger; wooden wheels clashing against each other. Shouts, oaths. Sam half expected gunfire.

  The paralleling buggies went on this way for half a block, McReedy finally forcing the follower's buggy up against the plank sidewalk.

  McReedy pulled his own rig ahead of the follower's, then jumped down. The estate homes were far enough back from the street that nobody inside would see or hear any of this.

  Sam, who had been watching this by leaning out of his own buggy, steered his horse over to the side of the road and hopped out. He was frightened. At this point in his life he had but one matter he wanted to take care of and he didn't want anything—or anybody—to interfere. He hoped this follower, whoever he was, could be dealt with.

  McReedy had his Navy Colt pulled and was pointing it directly at the man in the buggy. The follower's face was lost in shadow. He said nothing.

  "I want your name," McReedy said. "I'm a private investigator and I know you've been following this man all day. I want to know why."

  At least McReedy had his lies down, Sam thought. He sounded very imposing. He just hoped he scared the follower.

  "Your name," McReedy said again as Sam came up to him.

  Sam looked at the man. He was lost in an inverness cape soiled and worn by time, a large theatrical-style hat with an enormous, floppy brim covering his face. He wore tanned gloves on his hands. If he had any weapon, it was concealed somewhere within the folds of his coat.

  It was cold and dark here on the street. Fresh horse-droppings scented the evening; a distant violin sang sweetly and sadly.

  And McReedy, an obstinate little rat-terrier of a man, said, "Get down from there, and I mean now."

  But the follower said nothing. Nor moved.

  McReedy waited no longer. He lunged up the buggy step and seized on to the arm of the follower, yanking the man out of the vehicle with strength that startled Sam.

  The man might as well have been a rag doll, the way he was jerked from the buggy and flung to the street without much resistance at all.

  He lay at the feet of the men, his hat, remarkably, still on, his face still hidden. "Stand up," McReedy said.

  But the man wouldn't cooperate even now.

  McReedy didn't wait.

  He leaned down and tore the hat away from the man's head.

  * * *

  All Sam could do was stammer. "My god, Aggie. Why're you following me?"

  "You don't think I have a right to know?" Aggie said.

  "I've told you, Aggie. It's just a gun club I belong to."

  It was past dinnertime. They'd been arguing in the downstairs study for nearly two hours.

  He said, "Do you know how embarrassing it is, having your own wife follow you around?"

  "I only did it because I'm worried about you. You haven't been the same since your brother died."

  "Not died. He was killed. There's a difference."

  "You seem to forget," Aggie said, "your side killed my brother. You aren't the only one who's lost somebody in this war."

  She sank down on one of the French Victorian chairs. David's face came to her, fresh as it had ever been. Three years younger, he'd been. A long and distinguished career in law ahead of him, everybody said. Then the train car he'd been on had been dynamited by Confederate soldiers.

  But Sam wasn't listening. He was lost in his own troubles. "How do I explain it to them? My own wife following me around."

  "I'm worried about you and our family, Sam. And all you care about is losing face with some stupid gun club." She looked at him. "If that's what's really going on." She made her remark sound as suspicious as possible. "Maybe I'll have to start following you again if I want to find out the real truth."

  "Oh, God, don't say that, Aggie. Promise me you won't follow me around anymore. Promise me." Instead of rage, her threat had inspired only a kind of half-pathetic pleading. She'd never seen her husband like this. His pleading was especially worrisome. Sam wasn't the kind of man who pleaded with anyone. When he wanted something, he simply took it. "Promise me, Aggie. Promise me."

  What choice did she have? He looked so lost and miserable. She said quietly, "All right, Sam. I won't follow you anymore."

  But she had her suspicions, and she knew that she'd be following him again very soon.

  * * *

  When Sam returned later that evening, there was a stranger in Big Mike Cawthorne's office when Sam walked in. McReedy was there also.

  "I'm sorry about your troubles earlier," Cawthorne said. "There's nothing like a nosy wife. And believe me, I know what I'm talking about from personal experience."

  "A fine-looking woman, though," McReedy said. "Mighty fine."

  Sam didn't like the lurid implications in McReedy's voice. This man just didn't seem to understand his station in life, talking about a true gentleman's wife in this sordid way.

  There was some more chatter during which Big Mike was his usual expansive self. He offered brandy and cigars and everybo
dy partook. Sam noticed that he had yet to introduce the stranger. The man was short, blond, goateed. His clothes were several cuts above those of McReedy's—especially the velvet vest—but he still gave an impression of the streets. Perhaps it was the feral quality of his blue eyes—an unsettling mixture of subservience and arrogance.

  Big Mike Cawthorne, all blather at this point, suddenly looked uncomfortable. He glanced anxiously at the stranger and then at Sam. "Sam, this is Lawrence Dodd." He looked nervous. "He's going to take your place."

  There. He'd said it. It was over. There would be anger and complaining but it was over. You could read all this on Big Mike's face.

  "Take my place? You mean assassinating Kimble?"

  "Yes, I'm afraid so."

  "But why? I've been shooting every day. I've looked over the site several times. I know just how I'll get in and just how I'll get out."

  McReedy said, "Your wife knows."

  "She doesn't know anything," Sam snapped.

  Cawthorne said, quietly, "She may not know anything, Sam. But she suspects something and that's enough."

  "No, it's not enough!" Sam said. "And what's more, it's not fair. Not after all the work I've done."

  The only way I'll ever be able to pay my brother back for deserting him the way I did. The only way I'll ever be able to do my duty the way he did his. And now they're trying to take it away from me. Damn it, Aggie, why did you have to follow me yesterday?

  Cawthorne was his usual slick self again. His nerves were under control. The subject had been broached. "She's a Yankee, Sam."

  "You think I don't know that?"

  "One of her uncles back in New Hampshire is a colonel in the Union army."

  "And," McReedy added, "her brother was killed by some of our people."

  "No telling what she might do," Cawthorne said, "her loyalties being what they are. Mr. Dodd here—well, there won't be that trouble."

  Sam was sure his name wasn't Lawrence Dodd. He'd been borrowed from some other cell. Probably from out of town, though not far away. He'd been summoned overnight. From here on out, Sam would be told as little as possible about things. His longtime fear that Aggie's Yankee loyalties would hurt him, had come true. Big Mike saying he was no longer quite trustworthy. Sam had seen this happen before, cell members who were suddenly seen as suspicious in some way being subtly pushed out of the cell. Big Mike knew they'd never go over to the other side. Everybody in this cell had a personal reason for being part of it. They'd never betray the South. But that didn't mean Big Mike and the others would trust them with the inner workings of the cell.

  But that isn't the worst of it. The worst of it is that I put everything into this. Killing Lincoln's man is the only way I'll ever be able to make things up to my brother. Why can't you people see that? To you, it's just one more killing. To me, it's my honor.

  "I'm sorry, Sam," Big Mike said, "I really am."

  "She's a fine-looking woman," McReedy said, who must have known he was irritating Sam.

  "I'll try to do as good a job as you would have, Mr. Monroe," the man whose name wasn't really Lawrence Dodd said. "I really will."

  * * *

  Aggie didn't have much trouble finding what she needed. She almost smiled when she found it because it was so sloppy of Sam to keep it in the bottom drawer of his desk. Where anybody, including the police, could easily find it.

  Several clipped newspaper stories about a Mr. Harper Kimble, Esquire. Arriving by train in Chicago the day before the election to give a rousing public speech about why it was so important to vote—and to vote for those politicians who supported President Lincoln's handling of the war. Several references to the large ballroom in the Courier-Arms Hotel—one of the city's finest—were underlined. Then there was a hand-drawn map showing the front steps of the hotel—and a hotel room directly across the street. And a circle on the steps inside of which appeared the word Kimble.

  The secretiveness. The target practice. The newspaper stories. Aggie might not be a genius but she was smart enough to figure out what Sam was up to. She cursed the Union soldier who had killed Sam's older brother. Because in a very real sense he'd taken Sam's life, too. He no longer cared about his wife and children. His only reality was avenging his brother's death. And now she knew how he planned to do it.

  * * *

  Sam came home drunk. Not falling-down drunk but in-control, angry drunk. He stormed into the living room where she was sitting by the fireplace with their two daughters and said, "It's way past their bedtime—put them to bed! I want to talk to you!"

  She had never seen him so angry. The girls, four and five, were terrified of the man who had once been their loving, congenial father. He stank of the streets. His eyes rolled wildly. His clothes were soiled. His right hand was clenched in a constant fist. "And I mean now!"

  "What's wrong with Daddy?" said the youngest, Courtney, as their mother hauled them up to bed, one under each arm.

  "He's pickled," said Jenny, the eldest. She loved words and picked up new ones constantly.

  "Is he pickled, Mommy?" Courtney said, without having the slightest idea what the word meant.

  Sam leaned against the fireplace, a cigar in one hand, a brandy glass in the other. He didn't look up when Aggie came back in. He said, "Sit down."

  She knew better than to argue with him.

  She sat in a Hepplewhite chair she'd had as a girl, entwined hearts carved on the chair back. All the time she was growing up she had wondered whose heart would be entwined with hers. Sam's, of course. She'd fallen in love with him the very first night she'd met him, even though she didn't realize it until a month or so later. Entwined hearts . . . and they had been entwined, until he'd lost his brother in the war . . .

  After a time, he spoke. He said: "They don't want me. They say they can't trust me anymore."

  She wasn't sure exactly who "they" were. But she sensed that all this had to do with the newspaper stories she'd found in his drawer.

  "So they're not going to let me do it. They got somebody else." For the first time, he looked at her: "And do you know why, dear wife? Because of you! Because you just had to follow me around! And because you're a filthy Yankee!"

  He had never called her a "filthy" anything before and the word stunned her—shocked her, hurt her as he'd never hurt her before. A bond of faith was broken in that moment and they both knew it.

  But she fought against her pain and anger and rose solemnly from the chair as she heard him begin to cry. Not even in all the early months following his brother's death had he ever wept. But he wept now.

  She went to him and tried to take him in her arms. He wouldn't let her. He jerked away like an angry child. But finally, finally, he needed her strength and solace and so he came within her arms and she comforted him.

  "I know what you were planning to do," she said after a time, "but you would've destroyed our whole family, Sam. Think of what the girls would have to go through all their lives. Now you don't have to do it. Now we can be a family again and you can forget all this. The girls need you, Sam, need you the way you used to be. And so do I."

  An hour later, in the gentle darkness of their bed, they made love with fresh ardor and succoring passion

  * * *

  Sam slept in. He ate a late, good breakfast and then got up. It was a Sunday and he spent the entire afternoon playing with the girls in the living room, reading them stories, playing their favorite games, telling them about all the wonderful things winter would soon bring, including snowmen and ice-skating. It was as if he had survived a terrible fever that had not—thank God—killed him but had somehow burned itself out. He was the Sam of old.

  He was that evening, too. He took Aggie out to dine. They took the fancy carriage with the liveried driver, and took in a show following dinner. Nothing about his friends at "the gun club" was mentioned. Nor was the war referred to in any way. When they went to bed, they made long and leisurely love.

  On Monday, the day upon which Mr. Kimble,
Esquire, was to arrive from Washington, D.C., Sam went to the bank and spent a busy morning catching up on the work he'd been neglecting.

  At home, Aggie got the girls off to school and then went out in her buggy for some things she'd been needing at the store. She was only a block away from home when she realized she was being followed.

  She went to the store, tied the reins of her buggy to a hitching-post and hurried inside. She wanted to make sure she was indeed being followed. Maybe her suspicions had gotten away from her.

  But no. There he was. He'd pulled up to a hitching-post a quarter block away. He jumped down from his buggy and was now standing there and rolling himself a cigarette. Waiting for her to return.

  Her boldness surprised her. She bolted the store and hurried back outside into the winds that lacerated everything on this drab, overcast day. There wasn't even any snow to make it pretty.

  She walked right up to him. "I want to know why you're following me, sir."

  He smiled. "It's people like you who make my work hard for me, Mrs. Monroe."

  "Why are you following me?"

  Her voice was sharp enough to attract the attention of people walking along the plank sidewalk. This was a block of shops and offices of various kinds, from a saddlery to a doctor and a dentist.

  "Just had to make sure you didn't go see the police," he said in a quiet voice. "I've been watching you for three days now. You haven't left the house without Sam. We just wanted to make sure you didn't talk to anybody about what was going to happen."

  She hated them all. And for one of the first times, they formed a monolith in her mind: Southerners. Devious, violent.

  "Well, you can take this message back to your friends," she said. "He doesn't want any part of you anymore."

  This time the smile was a smirk. "He's gonna be a good little boy, huh?"

  She turned and stalked away.

  * * *

  She told Sam about all this before dinner but he only cupped her face in his hands and kissed her and said, "Let's just have a nice family dinner."

  And so they did. Wind lashed the windows and made her thankful for the warmth and beauty of her home. How tall and proud it stood against the most furious of nights. The girls, too, seemed affected by this same sense of melancholy. Not only did they manage to look prettier than ever in the flickering lamplight, they also sat very close to each other and even gave each other hugs from time to time. Sometimes they fought angrily. But not tonight.