Murder on the Potomac

by Margaret Truman

  Pauline Juris chuckled softly and said, “Better that Hazel teach you than Wendell, Annabel. He’s a brilliant businessman, but his own checkbook will never qualify as a model.”

  Tierney laughed loudly. “She should know,” he said. “Pauline’s been balancing my checkbook for years.” He surveyed the faces at the table. “Well, shall we adjourn?”

  While the board members stood and chatted, Annabel went to where she’d draped her raincoat on a chair in the corner. She paused before picking it up as a hushed conversation between Tierney and Pauline Juris reached her ears: “I’m pretty goddamn fed up with Seymour’s temperamental outbursts and disregard for budget,” Tierney said. “Straighten him out when you see him tonight.” Annabel slipped into her coat and headed for the door. Suddenly, Tierney was at her side. “I’ll walk you to your car,” he said. “A hell of a building, but not the best neighborhood.”

  They descended to the first floor over a wide, redbrick staircase grooved by a century of shoes and stepped into the Great Hall, the scene of inaugural balls dating back to 1885 and Grover Cleveland. Harrison, McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, and Taft had also feted their elections there. Woodrow Wilson chose not to have a ball in 1913, and it wasn’t until after World War II that such gala events again lit up Washington’s social calendar. One of Richard Nixon’s three 1968 balls was held in the National Building Museum. Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton had also used it as a setting to celebrate their elevation by voters to the White House.

  The building’s architect and chief engineer, Montgomery C. Meigs, quartermaster of the army, had been mandated in 1881 to find a suitable site and to design a fireproof building for a centralized Pension Bureau. Originally created in 1792 to serve disabled veterans and dependents of the Revolutionary War, the Pension Bureau had facilities scattered all over Washington and had become overwhelmed as the War of 1812 and the Mexican and Civil wars created new generations of needy veterans. Meigs’s budget was not to exceed $300,000.

  After researching Renaissance architecture around the world, including the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli of Rome and the Temple of Jupiter at Baalbeck (Meigs was determined that his columns would be larger than those at Baalbeck) and Palazzo Farnese of Rome, whose basic design would be his inspiration, he submitted his plans. Ground was broken in 1882, construction completed in 1887. The central section of the Great Hall was the largest of three courts separated by two screens of four huge Corinthian columns, each constructed of seventy thousand bricks and rising seventy-five feet into the air, their bases eight feet in diameter. It was the largest brick building in the world—more than fifteen million of them at a cost to the taxpayers of $886,614.04, testimony to the fact that government cost overruns are not a contemporary phenomenon.

  The huge hall now was in virtual darkness as they walked together, talking. Small perimeter lights dimmed to conserve electricity provided only faint, ethereal illumination. Annabel leaned against the hall’s central fountain and looked up to the gabled roof, 160 feet above. One of the many swallows that were the bane of the building’s management flew over her head, soared upward, and disappeared into the center bay’s cornice.

  “This has to be the most unusual building in Washington,” she said.

  “No argument from me,” said Tierney.

  “I’m just beginning to learn about it,” Annabel said. “I suppose being on the board will hasten the process.”

  “Heard all the ghost stories? Heard about the canaries?”

  Annabel laughed. “Ghost stories? Yes. Canaries? No.”

  “When Cleveland held his inaugural ball here, the roof wasn’t completed, so they draped the hall with a tarp. Then they released a cage full of canaries during the festivities. Up they went, straight to the tarp, where they immediately died from the cold and fell at the feet of the gathered.”

  “How terrible,” Annabel said.

  “It was—for the birds.”

  “Oh, my.”

  “Sorry. But true story.”

  When they reached her car, Tierney said, “Be sure to say hello to Mac for me.”

  “Of course.”

  “Shame what happened to the child up at the falls. You say Mac saw it happen?”

  “Horrible. Mac had driven up to get away for a few hours and was about to leave when it happened. He can’t shake it, keeps seeing the child in the water.”

  “I suppose we don’t easily shake such images,” Tierney said. “My foundation is setting up a scholarship fund in the girl’s name.”

  “That’s good,” Annabel said.

  “You do what you can do. See you and Mac on the cruise?”

  “We’ll be there. Thanks, Wendell, for putting me on the board. I think it’s going to be extremely interesting and fulfilling.”

  “A proper mix of both, I hope. Safe home.”

  4

  That Same Night

  “No! No! No! No! No!”

  Seymour Fletcher, director of the Potomac Players, flung his script across the room and stomped onto the stage. His baggy blue pants, unlaced white high-top basketball sneakers, khaki workshirt, and multicolored bandanna, tied around the neck to give the appearance of a bow tie, combined with long strands of colorless hair flowing down and around wire-rimmed glasses tethered to his neck by a pink-and-white string, gave him the appearance of a man coming loose.

  “You are making a mockery of this script,” he shouted at actors and actresses on the stage.

  Stuart, the young actor playing the role of Congressman Dan Sickles, swore under his breath. “You said we could take liberties with the dialogue, Sy,” he barked.

  “That’s right,” said Carl, who played Key. “You did say that.” Key had been U.S. district attorney for the District of Columbia and son of Francis Scott Key, author of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  “Liberties? Yes. Butcher it? No! No! No! Sickles and Key did not call each other ‘bastards.’ The dialogue is very clear and important. Key had been cuckolding Sickles for a long time. He’s been climbing under the sheets with his wife, and half of Washington knows it. That’s why when Sickles approaches Key with the revolver near Lafayette Square, he says, ‘Key, you scoundrel, you’ve dishonored my house.’ He didn’t say ‘you bastard.’ ”

  A female voice offstage said, “Maybe this is a good time to discuss that line again, Seymour.” The voice was that of Madelon St. Cere, who had written the script. She stepped into the light. “ ‘House’ falls so flat,” she said. “Key hadn’t dishonored Sickles’s house. He’d been sleeping with Teresa Sickles for a year, waving his handkerchief to let her know he was on his way to that house they rented. He dishonored Sickles’s bed, not his whole house. Besides, ‘house’ is a weak word. Bed has strength. It says something. This was lust, not housebreaking.”

  Fletcher fumed. “I thought we resolved this two weeks ago. I will not discuss it again.”

  St. Cere went to the stage apron and looked out into the house. Scattered throughout the small auditorium was an assortment of onlookers, including “Chip” Tierney, son of developer and National Building Museum chairman Wendell Tierney; Chip’s fiancée of most recent vintage, Terri Pete; Sun Ben Cheong; and Monty Jamison, a professor of American history at George Washington University. Jamison was unofficial historical adviser to the theatrical troupe rehearsing in the basement of a small, run-down church on O Street.

  The Potomac Players had been performing in the D.C. area for ten years. As with most small, semiprofessional theater groups, its existence was perpetually precarious—an occasional handout from a Washington arts organization, ticket sales that rose, when they did, for Neil Simon, and were modest for Beckett, dinner-theater performances in which badly scripted murder mysteries competed with bad food for audience attention—until Wendell Tierney caught one of their whodunit dinner performances at a Maryland Holiday Inn and recruited them to reenact Washington crimes from the past for his Scarlet Sin Society, “the scarlet sin” being Shakespeare’s label f
or murder.

  The society, commonly known as Tri-S, represented a special agacerie for Tierney. An inveterate crime buff with special interest in historical misdeeds, he often explained, “With all the crimes committed in D.C. these days, most of them connected with drugs or government or both, it’s nice to focus on what the man called a kinder, gentler time when crimes of passion and jealousy prevailed.”

  Eventually, Tri-S developed into one of Washington’s premier fund-raising groups. The newspapers and TV programs enjoyed the recall of crimes less current than the Six O’Clock News. But Tri-S’s staged reenactments, despite patches of bad acting, were historically accurate and drew large audiences and generated considerable sums of charitable money. When not playacting, members of the society enjoyed lounging around Tierney’s mansion in the Potomac Palisades discussing and dissecting crimes, old and new.

  Despite Tierney’s infusion of steady money into Potomac Players, Seymour Fletcher, Madelon St. Cere, and other guiding lights were unhappy on his payroll. The Tri-S productions did not constitute theater as they defined it, preferring Mamet, Albee, Shepherd.

  But money talked, and art walked. Tierney’s subsidy was generous and didn’t demand full-time commitment. Once the historic murders had been performed for their adoring public, the players were free to perform other, less distasteful productions.

  “Monty, please,” Fletcher yelled from the stage.

  Professor Jamison, a heavyset man whose front bowed out like the Hitchcock caricature, pushed himself up from his cramped seat and waddled down the aisle. He wore what was his “uniform”—heavy tan twill pants, blue button-down shirt, Paisley vest, brown Harris-tweed jacket, and one of hundreds of bow ties from a proud collection. His white beard and fringe of white hair were trimmed short. Tortoiseshell glasses were thick.

  Jamison cleared his throat before speaking, as he always did. It was as though a tiny pump needed to be primed before each sentence. “I’ve done some additional reading on the Sickles-Key case, and I must admit, Seymour, that the body of evidence grows heavier in favor of ‘house.’ In his 1976 book, Kelly has Sickles saying, ‘Key, you scoundrel, you have dishonored my bed—you must die.’ But in Nat Brandt’s excellent re-creation of the sordid affair, he has Sickles saying, ‘Key, you scoundrel, you have dishonored my house—you must die.’ Other trustworthy sources favor the use of ‘house,’ rather than ‘bed.’ I can cite these other sources if you’d like.”

  “Please, no,” Fletcher said.

  “What the hell does it matter?” St. Cere said haughtily. “The dishonoring took place in Teresa’s hot bed. ‘Bed’ and ‘sex’ are synonymous. ‘House’ can be the little house on the prairie, for Christsake.”

  Fletcher gritted his teeth and clenched his hands at his sides as he glared at Stuart. “I can’t get this excuse for an actor to say house or bed. All he wants to do is call everybody bastards.”

  “I’ve had enough,” said Stuart. He slammed his script to the floor and walked away.

  Fletcher now directed his wrath to Carl, who played Philip Barton Key. “And when Sickles shoots you,” Fletcher said, “look as though you’re in pain instead of dumb and confused.” Then, salt for the wound: “And be bloody careful when grabbing the tree for support. It’s as shaky as your performance.”

  Carl, too, disappeared into the wings.

  “Please, please,” Jamison said after a false start. “We had already decided that ‘house’ would suffice.”

  “What would suffice,” said Fletcher, “is for this cast to say anything that even approximates Madelon’s script.”

  “Maybe we should take a break to calm down,” the assistant director suggested.

  “We already have,” Fletcher said disgustedly. He vaulted the stage and fled into the auditorium.

  Everyone scattered, leaving Monty Jamison with Suzanne Tierney, the actress playing the adulteress Teresa Sickles.

  “Much ado about nothing,” she said lightly.

  They were joined by Chip Tierney, Terri Pete, and Sun Ben Cheong. “Chip knows everybody’s lines,” Suzanne said. “He’s been here for every rehearsal.”

  Which was true. What Chip hadn’t told his sister was that their father asked him to be there. His eyes and ears on how things were progressing.

  “How can you put up with these prima donnas?” Chip asked Suzanne.

  “They’re not prima donnas,” Suzanne said. “They’re actors.”

  “And directors, I might say,” Jamison said. “Volatile chap, isn’t he?”

  “Insufferable is more like it,” Chip Tierney said. He turned to Sun Ben and said, “As opposed to inscrutable.”

  Cheong shook his head. “It’s good none of you handle large sums of money,” he said.

  “Why?” Suzanne asked.

  “Because money and emotions don’t mix.”

  Cheong had been brought to America through the efforts of the Chinese-American Connection, a nonprofit, altruistic group to which Wendell Tierney lent his name and money. Its predecessor had been the Chinese Educational Mission, an organization funded by an indemnity reluctantly paid by the Chinese government after the United States had helped quell the Boxer Rebellion.

  President Teddy Roosevelt decreed that the money be used to educate promising Chinese students, and the mission began bringing them to America. Although it ended in bloody scandal in the early 1920s, the Chinese-American Connection picked up on its spirit. Sun Ben Cheong was one of many recipients of its generosity.

  He’d been scheduled to return to China following his education in America. But after receiving a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, Tierney placed him in a job with his close friend, investment banker Sam Tankloff. It took Cheong less than a year to establish himself as Tankloff’s financial wizard. “I don’t make a money move without him,” Tankloff often said. “He knows ways to make money that haven’t been invented yet.”

  Not only did Tierney arrange for Cheong to stay in America, he legally adopted him. Cheong had told his rich benefactor that he had little reason to return to China. His only living relative there, he claimed, was an older brother, John, whose business was precious gems. They hadn’t seen each other in years.

  Jamison observed the two brothers and their sister. Chip and Suzanne shared few features to visually link them to the same family. Chip had his father’s fine features, the aquiline nose, resolute mouth, and lean, supple six-foot body. Although Suzanne was tall, only a few inches shy of Chip’s height, her body was angular in a masculine sense. Her features tended to the coarse—mouth too small for her broad face, heavy, dark eyebrows, and large, watery green eyes. Not wholly unattractive, simply lacking the refinement of Tierney genes.

  Cheong, of course, had not been born to Wendell and Marilyn Tierney. But, Jamison decided, he looked more comfortable as a Tierney than did Suzanne. He was Chip’s height but more solidly built. He wore his clothing well; the deft hand of a Tierney tailor helped. His ebony hair was combed straight back on top and at the sides. Pitted remnants of teenage acne on his full cheeks were visible in the right light.

  As Jamison watched them, he wondered at the relationship between Sun Ben and Suzanne. They sometimes looked at each other in a way that led him to speculate whether there might be more between them than simply sister and adopted brother. Nothing tangible to fuel his speculation. But Monty Jamison considered himself astute in picking up on subtleties. He’d never expressed such thoughts to anyone, even to close friends. But these and other observations would be dutifully recorded each night in one of many diaries he hoped to publish one day in the tradition of his literary idol, Edmund Wilson.

  “Can we go?” Terri said to Chip. She was a pretty little thing with breasts and hips better fitted to a larger woman. Jamison had noted in his diary that she represented this generation’s brooder, pondering anything and everything but, in reality, lacking spark. She appeals to those young men who savor sour sucking candies rather than sweet chocolate, he’d written, pleased with his met
aphor.

  “In a minute,” Chip replied. Terri pouted and sighed, something at which she was thoroughly rehearsed.

  Director Seymour Fletcher returned to the stage, clapped his hands, and resumed the dramatization of the murder of Philip Barton Key by Congressman Daniel Sickles on February 3, 1859.

  “Before we begin,” Clarence, the actor depicting Sam Butterworth, said, “could we discuss my motivation in this scene?”

  “What about it?” Fletcher said.

  “Well, I’m not quite certain what my motivation is. I mean, there I was with Sickles when he looked out the window and saw Key waving his handkerchief as a signal to Teresa. Was I dispatched by Sickles to detain Key long enough for Sickles to get his revolver and confront him? Or was it purely chance?”

  “What difference does it make?” Fletcher asked.

  “It makes a great deal of difference to me,” Clarence said. “You told me to act apprehensive, nervous when speaking with Key. Why would I act that way unless I knew Sickles was about to kill him? If I know that, it certainly will color the way I speak, hold my body, everything about my performance.”

  “We’ll discuss it later,” Fletcher said. “Places, everyone. Let’s go over the murder scene again.” He pointed to Carl, who played Key. “Please don’t act as though Sickles has gunned you down with a machine gun. He grazes your shoulder, then shoots you in the ribs. Grimace all you wish, but stop flailing your arms like an insect in its death throes.” He turned to Stuart. “Remember, you say when you approach him, ‘Key, you scoundrel, you have dishonored my bed—you must die.’ ”

  “House!” the assistant director yelled, her face buried in the script.

  “House. Yes, house. Can we p-l-e-a-s-e get on with it?”

  They rehearsed the murder scene twice more. Then Fletcher decided to go over the trial scene in which Teresa, forced to testify, was ripped apart by eight prominent defense attorneys retained by Sickles. In order to keep the cast numbers down, only one attorney was represented in the production. He was played by an older man, Brent Norris, an accomplished Shakespearean actor who’d had a modicum of success on Broadway and returned to Washington to bask in that glory. The rest of the cast watched as Norris attacked the young Teresa, played by Suzanne Tierney, with assurance and professional bearing. But Suzanne constantly flubbed her lines and seemed capable of only two emotions—tearful hand-wringing and comic indignation.