Murder on the Potomac

by Margaret Truman

  “Never for you, Mackensie. Come in, come in. Sit down.”

  “Where?” Smith asked. Night-vision goggles were needed to find the furniture.

  “Over there.” Jamison pointed to a straight-back chair that had miraculously avoided becoming a repository for books and papers.

  Seated, Smith apologized for barging in. “I thought you might have some material on Clement Vallandigham.”

  Jamison’s eyes lighted up. “Of course I do. The original Man Without a Country.” He got up from his chair with considerable difficulty, stood on tiptoe to reach a book buried under papers on a high shelf, almost fell into a pile of documents, steadied himself by grabbing the windowsill, and handed the book to Smith, who’d jumped to his feet when Jamison had begun to topple.

  “Lost my balance,” Jamison said.

  “Yes.” What Smith was thinking was that Jamison had, indeed, put his finger on the book Smith sought.

  “Sad case, Vallandigham,” Jamison said. “Shot off his mouth too much about Lincoln being a despot and was banished to the Confederacy. But they had no use for him and sent him back. Wandered about till he shot himself.”

  Smith browsed the book as Jamison capsulized the life of its subject. It was exactly what Smith needed to prepare a class, offering Clement Vallandigham as a possible example of excessive punishment for loyal opposition.

  Jamison returned to his chair, picked up what he’d been reading when Smith arrived, and held it up. “Fascinating story here, Mackensie,” he said.

  Smith looked up. “What is it?”

  “A biography of sorts of Pauline Juris.”

  “Where did you get that?”

  “From Wendell, last night, at his house. We were going over some last-minute details for Saturday’s production. When the others left, he handed this to me. You can imagine how I responded, being a journal keeper myself.”

  “It’s her journal? A day-to-day account of her life?”

  Jamison’s laugh was a low rumble. “No, nothing like that. Pauline’s family goes back to the Revolution, and she’d evidently assumed the role of family historian. Nice assortment of characters. Soldiers, rogues and criminals, merchants large and small, even a woman from her father’s side of the family who was a labor organizer in Massachusetts textile mills.”

  “Another Mother Jones,” Smith said.

  “Exactly.”

  “Why did Wendell give it to you?” Smith asked.

  “He thought I might be interested from a historical perspective, hopes I’ll volunteer to edit it and seek a publisher. It was very touching, Mac. Wendell had tears in his eyes. He said he thought its publication would be a fitting tribute to Pauline. I certainly agree.”

  “Is it good enough to be published?” Smith asked.

  “Not in its present form, as much as I’ve read. But with an astute editor’s touch it could be. Care to look at it?” Smith took it from where his friend plopped it on the desk and was surprised at its heft. It had been his experience that people who threatened to write family histories usually quit after page twenty. Pauline’s efforts had resulted in more than three hundred pages.

  He fanned through the manuscript. “Funny. Pauline didn’t seem the sort of woman who would be interested in history,” he commented. “I perceived her as strictly here and now. And Wendell, moved to tears?”

  “Exactly my perception. What a pleasant surprise to see another dimension to her.”

  “Have you read much of it, Monty?”

  “No, and don’t think I will for the next few days, not with the Sickles-Key reenactment this weekend. You and Annabel will be there?”

  “Yes. I’d be interested in reading this.”

  “Ho-ho,” Jamison said. “The professor of law about to intrude on the history professor’s turf.”

  Smith laughed gently. “Wouldn’t think of it, my friend, but I do have more free time than you do.” And more air, Mac thought, claustrophobic in the overwhelming office.

  Jamison squared his chair and leaned elbows on the desk. “Nothing in there, Mac, that will shed light on her murder. History pure and simple. I read the last few pages. She brings the history only up to 1921.”

  “I’m not looking for clues, Monty. I’d just enjoy a leisurely stroll through someone else’s family.”

  “Then take it. It’s yours.”

  Smith considered handing the manuscript back. Tierney had given it to the professor, not to him. “Sure it’s okay to have me read this?” he asked.

  “Of course. Wendell considers you family.”

  Hardly what Mac Smith aspired to. “I’ll tell him I’ve read it,” he said.

  “By all means,” said Jamison.

  “Everything shaping up for Saturday?”

  Jamison’s sigh was big enough to threaten a paper earthquake. “Yet another miracle if it goes off as planned,” he said. “This is the biggest production we’ve ever mounted. So many things to go wrong, so many people to appease.” He said with gravity, “It was the Bard who first suggested we kill all the lawyers. Correct?”

  Smith smiled. “Yes, although I have a problem with that, despite Shakespeare’s many followers.”

  “Well, I say, Mackensie Smith, first kill all the actors and actresses. They are the most self-centered, difficult, whining, infuriatingly frustrating people on earth.”

  Smith stood and tucked the manuscript and book beneath his arm. “Time to leave, Monty. I have a dentist’s appointment in half an hour. I’m sure everything will go splendidly on Saturday. Thanks for these. I’ll return both on Monday.”

  As Smith turned to leave, Jamison said, “Terrible what happened to that dental student last night.”

  “What dental student?”

  “The one who was killed. Incredible coincidence. I just sent out a Tri-S flyer in which …”

  “Another time, Monty. My dentist has a rule. If you’re late, you get root canal whether you need it or not. See you Saturday.”

  Dr. Bernard Kirshbaum, Mac and Annabel’s dentist, maintained elaborate offices in the Watergate complex. His patient roster read like a Washington Who’s Who list. It included familiar names from the Pentagon, State, the CIA, media, and the Washington Redskins. The hallways were lined with autographed pictures from patients, Kirshbaum’s personal rogues’ gallery: “Worst impacted wisdom tooth I’ve ever seen”; “Took three bullets in Nam but freaks out when the needle comes out”; or, “Spends most of the time in my chair taking calls from NATO and the White House.” He’d been after Smith to provide a photo, but Smith had balked. For Smith, cavities, like domestic quarrels, political preferences, and Oreo-cookie binges at midnight, were private affairs.

  Smith settled in Kirshbaum’s high-tech chair. An assistant secured a bib around his neck. Smith did not have an undue fear of dentists. What bothered him most was that he invariably sat with mouth filled with cotton, plastic strips, and metal bands while the dentist chattered on about everything from Madonna to Monday Night Football. It wasn’t fair. The most Smith could manage was a grunt or a hiss, neither of which contributed to the conversation.

  This visit was no different. Mouth chockablock with paraphernalia, he listened to a detailed accounting of Kirshbaum’s recent fly-fishing expedition to Nova Scotia. He held some photos from the trip in front of Smith, who did a lot of nodding, hoping the movement of his head wouldn’t disturb what was going on inside his mouth. Dr. K. worked, and rambled on.

  “Read about that dental student being murdered last night?” Kirshbaum asked as he mixed a gooey substance on a glass plate.

  “Uh-huh,” Smith managed.

  The dentist continued mixing his potion with his right hand as he picked up a piece of paper from the counter with his left and handed it behind his back to his patient. Because he wasn’t wearing glasses, Smith had to hold the paper at arm’s length. It was a newsletter that had obviously been created on a computer. Across the top in blood-red letters was THE SCARLET SIN SOCIETY.

  Dear Denti
st:

  Crime buffs don’t often think of dentists as being involved in the nasty business of murder and mayhem. But they’re wrong. Over the years there have been a number of murders associated with the field of dentistry. The Membership Committee of Tri-S wanted to relate but one example as an inducement for you to join the society.

  Ah, the joys of modern technology, Smith thought. It was the sort of document that could be personalized—send one batch to area dentists, another with different information to accountants, maybe send some in the hope of recruiting taxidermists.

  In 1901, at the Kenmore Hotel, a handsome young dental student, James Seymour Ayres, who also worked as a clerk at the Census Office and who was known to have seduced numerous young Washington ladies, was shot to death in his room. Witnesses saw a young woman dressed in a nightgown descend from Ayres’s room via the fire escape and disappear through a second-floor window.

  All young women living in the hotel at the time were questioned without result. But there were two anonymous letters. One had been written to Michigan congressman Weeks before the murder informing him that his daughter, who’d been often seen on the arm of James Ayres, was romantically involved with a philanderer of the first order. The second letter, written after the murder, was from an unnamed chambermaid—it was signed “chambermaid”—and suggested that the murderess was a young woman living in the hotel at the time, Mary Minas of Indiana. Subsequent interviews of Miss Minas did not bear fruit.

  Clues were everywhere. Ayres had been shot with a Harrison & Richardson .32 revolver whose barrel was smeared with blood. There was also a bloody handprint on his room’s window. (This was before the ability to identify criminals by their fingerprints had been developed—the sort of interesting information Tri-S members learn at our regular meetings.)

  Eventually, a thirty-four-year-old woman, Lola Ida Hemri Bonine, the mother of two children and married to a traveling salesman who was away all week, was charged with the murder. Numerous witnesses claimed she was a frequent visitor to Ayres’s room, as well as to the rooms of other young male boarders. Under intense questioning, she told the police that he’d pointed the gun at her to force her to share his bed. They wrestled, and the gun went off three times, each bullet striking him. Then, she said, she escaped through the window.

  It took the jury five hours. Lola Bonine was judged not guilty.

  This is, of course, the most sketchy of details about this shocking murder. It will be fully explored at a future meeting of the society, and we urge you and interested colleagues to join us at what will be an intensely fascinating evening.

  Montgomery Jamison

  Chairman

  Membership Committee

  Kirshbaum took the flyer from Smith and proceeded to plumb the depths of his patient’s gaping mouth. “Some coincidence,” he said as he worked.

  Smith tried to communicate with his eyes.

  “The murder of the dental student last night,” Kirshbaum said. “You didn’t hear about it?”

  Smith wanted to tell him that his friend and correspondent Monty Jamison, Tri-S’s membership chairman, had begun to mention it, but Mac couldn’t form the words.

  “Young dental student murdered in a seedy hotel on North Capital. Heard it on the radio. A witness claims to have seen a woman coming down the fire escape. What goes around comes around, I guess.”

  Eventually, and through lips numbed to stone by multiple injections of novocaine, Smith was free to get up from the chair and ask, “Planning on joining the Scarlet Sin Society?”

  “Yeah, I think I might. Sounds like fun. They have a big event coming up this Saturday, don’t they?”

  “They certainly do. All for a good cause.”

  “Sounds like something you’d be involved in, Mac. I mean, being a criminal attorney. Sounds like it’s right down your alley, your cup of tea.”

  “Maybe my cup years ago but not now,” Smith replied, curbing the temptation to add that an hour in a dentist’s chair somehow seemed more gruesome than simple, quick murder. He paid his bill to the nurse at the reception desk, said hello to the next patient, a young senator from Massachusetts with whom Smith occasionally played racquetball, and headed home, fingertips pressed against his abused jawbone, his mind filled with visions of young women in nightgowns dancing down fire escapes.

  What had another psychiatrist once told him? “Tell someone not to think of purple elephants, and that’s all they can think of.” Young women in purple nightgowns.

  He pledged not to straighten pillows on the couch when he got home.

  23

  That Night

  “I took it upon myself to read up on my character,” the clergyman playing President Buchanan said.

  “And?”

  “I think I now better understand him.”

  “Good.”

  Potomac Players’ director Seymour Fletcher started to walk away, but the reverend grabbed his sleeve. “The conclusion I’ve come to is that if I play him with a soft voice as you insist, it simply gives credence to all the nasty rumors.”

  Fletcher slowly turned. “What nasty rumors?” he asked.

  “Well, from what I’ve read, President Buchanan is accused by some of being our only homosexual president.”

  “So what?”

  “If not a homosexual, he might have been our only virginal president. But that’s just another nasty rumor without substantiation. The fact that he never married and preferred the company of male friends should not be used to support such scurrilous allegations. My concern, Seymour, is that if I play him sotto voce, it simply feeds into those allegations. I prefer to think of him as a robust man’s man with a big, booming voice.”

  “I think you’re absolutely right, Reverend. I think you should boom it out. Excuse me. I have to get this rehearsal going.”

  Originally, dress rehearsal was to be held on Friday night, but a series of conflicts with the cast, as well as with the church (the small theater had been booked months ahead for a children’s dance recital), left Thursday as the only possibility.

  The cast clustered in various parts of the auditorium. Some read that day’s newspaper story about the Saturday production. According to the article, it would be the Scarlet Sin Society’s largest fund-raising effort to date. Wendell Tierney was quoted: “It should be a splendid day and offer those attending a glimpse of one of this city’s most sensational murders. The forecasters promise us perfect weather. It’s a historic event all Washington will remember for a long time.”

  Fletcher stood center stage and clapped his hands. “People, people, listen up. This is our final opportunity to smooth the rough edges and go into Saturday confident that we have a first-rate production. We’ll go from the top and hopefully sail right through. Because we’ll be performing outside on Saturday, we won’t be burdened tonight with too many technical interruptions. But I remind you that even with the sound system, the crowd will be large and scattered, which means each of you is going to have to project as you have never projected before.” He looked at the reverend, who smiled. Fletcher continued. “I have just learned from Mr. Tierney that there is a possibility that the president and first lady might attend. While that would be a feather in our cap, it will also be extremely disruptive.” He looked to where Tierney sat with Chip. “Any further word about the president showing up?”

  “No,” Tierney replied.

  “All right then,” Fletcher said, “places everyone.” He stood next to the prop girl. On a table in front of her were two antique guns of the vintage used at the time Congressman Dan Sickles murdered Philip Barton Key. They’d been donated, as the paper said, “from the vast weapons collection owned by venture capitalist Sam Tankloff.” Tankloff, who was away in the Cayman Islands with Sun Ben Cheong, had been the source of weapons for the acting troupe since being enticed into Tri-S by his friend Wendell Tierney. He not only loaned weapons for productions, he had them retrofitted to fire blanks.

  There were two weapons on the table
because of a last-minute script change. When Madelon St. Cere had first written it, she included only the single gun pulled by Sickles from his pocket. But Monty Jamison had pointed out that Sickles had carried two weapons and dropped one of them during his initial scuffle with Key. And so a second weapon was added, although this one had not been modified to accept blanks.

  The cast took their places for the opening scene. Fletcher sat in the third row of the auditorium in front of Wendell and Chip Tierney. “Let’s go!” he shouted.

  “Where’s Carl?” Suzanne Tierney asked.

  Fletcher looked around the room. “Yes, where the hell is Carl?” Carl Mayberry was the actor playing the role of Philip Barton Key. Fletcher got to his feet. “Yes, damn it, where is Carl?” When no one answered, Fletcher leaped onto the stage and extended his arms in frustration. “Call him,” he said to the assistant director. “Wake him up. Tell him to be here immediately.”

  She called from the church’s only public phone and returned with a glum face. “He said he’s not coming.”

  “Why not?” Fletcher bellowed. “Doesn’t he know this is dress rehearsal?”

  “I told him that, Sy, but he said he didn’t care. He told me to tell you to take you, the script, and the play and … shove them.”

  Fletcher’s face glowed lobster red. “I can’t believe this,” he said more than once. “Dress rehearsal and—”

  “Chip could fill in,” Suzanne offered.

  Fletcher spun around to face her. “What?”

  “My brother, Chip. He knows all the lines.”

  From the audience came a laugh, followed by, “Oh, no.”

  Fletcher came to the apron and leaned forward, his hand positioned as a visor over his eyes. “Chip, my friend, would you? I mean, just come up and fill in so that we can get on with the rehearsal.”

  “But what happens on Saturday?” Wendell Tierney asked.

  “We’ll deal with that when we have to,” Fletcher replied. “At least let the rest of the cast have their rehearsal. Lord knows, they need it.” Again to Chip: “Chip, please. You can carry the script if you wish.”