Murder at the Capitol

by C. M. Gleason

  Mrs. Tufts nodded, curving both hands around the teacup in front of her. Adam smelled the strong coffee that wafted from it and before he could think to ask for some, Miss Gates set a full mug in front of him. He gave her a grateful smile as she took the third seat at the small table.

  “Someone wanted your husband dead, Mrs. Tufts,” he said quietly. “Do you have any idea who might have wanted to kill him?”

  “You asked me this before, but I-I was in such a state that I just couldn’t think at the time. But I’ve done been thinking about it, Mr. Quinn, ever since you left, and I still can’t think of anyone who’d want to harm my Piney. He was a good man. Lived in his head a lot sometimes—always wanted to hit a gold streak like those miners did, or make it rich somehow. Why, if it wasn’t for me and Priscilla, I know Piney would have gone to California back in the ’Fifties. But he stayed here with us—Pris was just a baby, and I was expecting another . . .” Her voice trailed off and Adam knew better than to ask what had happened with her second pregnancy.

  “Piney loved working at the Patent Office because he got to see all of the different ideas people had—all the strange and wonderful inventions people come up with. If he’d had the money, he’d have invested in some of the ones he thought were good ideas. He told me all the time, ‘Marybelle, I wish’t I had some money to put down on number’ . . . whatever it was. He’d rattle off the patent number like it was his own birthdate.” She laughed affectionately, looking down into her mug. “My Piney wasn’t any sort of inventor himself, but he had a good mind and he fancied he knew what was going to make it and what wasn’t. He even made suggestions to some of the people who applied for patents—sending them off his thoughts on improving their inventions. He received many thank you letters from the inventors over the years.”

  Adam was quiet for a moment, then said, “Did Mr. Tufts know a man named Henry Monroe?”

  “Henry Monroe . . . that name does sound familiar.” Mrs. Tufts said thoughtfully, then suddenly she looked at him. “That’s the daddy of that Miss Monroe, who’s getting married to that handsome young man from Richmond, isn’t he? I read about it in the society pages.” She blushed a little. “I do enjoy reading about all the fancy dresses, and who is sparking who, and all of the other gossip.”

  “And why not?” Miss Gates said. “It’s a fascinating study of human character. I always read the society pages when I lived in New York. Do you know how your husband knew Mr. Monroe?”

  “Now let me think. I certainly recognize his name—oh, yes. I remember now.” Her face lit up with pleasure. “It was through the Patent Office. Mr. Monroe was interested in putting money toward a particular invention, and Piney was meeting with him and the inventor to talk about it. Not that Piney was an expert, you see, but as I said, my Piney had good ideas. Some of the local inventors always wanted him to be the one to file their patents when they came in so that he could tell them what he thought.”

  “Did Mr. Monroe invest in the patent?” Adam asked.

  “Oh. Oh, good heavens, well, I don’t know.”

  “Do you remember when your husband met with Mr. Monroe?” Miss Gates asked as she gestured with the kettle, silently offering Adam a refill on his coffee. He shook his head.

  “Oh. Well. It must have been in the spring I think. I don’t remember exactly when.”

  “What about when he died? Do you know why Mr. Tufts was at the Capitol Building that late at night? We reckon he got there after the fireworks were over and was killed shortly after.” Adam finished the last swallow of his drink while waiting for her reply.

  Mrs. Tufts drew in a deep breath. “He didn’t tell me where he was going that night. All I know is that Piney said he had an appointment. An important appointment that, if it worked out, everything was going to change for us. That’s when he was talking all about the carriages and new dresses and all of that.” She flapped her hand vaguely.

  “Did he give you any idea who the appointment was with?”

  She looked at him. “No. And it seemed . . . well, I’m not even sure he had an appointment with anyone at all. He mentioned something about the time, and how he wanted to be there early before something was dropped off.”

  Adam exchanged glances with Miss Gates, then, when she shook her head to indicate she had no other questions, he pushed back his chair. “Thank you very much for your time, Mrs. Tufts. If you can think of anything else that might help us, I hope you’ll send for me at the—”

  “Or you can contact me,” Miss Gates interrupted, giving him a quick, quelling look. “I live at the Smithsonian Institute with my uncle, the director, Dr. Henry. You can get word to me by sending over to the Castle.” She rose and began to stack the mugs and kettle on the counter next to the water pump and sink. “Did you say your daughter would be here soon? Would you like me to stay until she arrives?”

  “Yes, Pris will be here at three o’clock. Oh, thank you, Miss Gates, but there’s no need for you to stay. I’ll be fine alone.”

  Moments later, Adam and Miss Gates were back on the street.

  Before he could speak, she said, “The Tufts are Secessionists, and so I didn’t think it would be prudent for you to mention you were living at the President’s House.”

  “And since your uncle is rumored to be a Southern sympathizer, it was safe for you to mention him,” he replied.

  “Precisely. And it’s only a rumor. Well,” she said briskly, “that was a very helpful and enlightening conversation, don’t you agree?”

  “It certainly sounds as if Tufts was going to pick up something at the Capitol.”

  “A blackmail payment, surely. But the blackmailer decided to lie in wait for him and kill him instead,” Miss Gates replied with such relish in her tone that he looked at her quizzically.

  “You sound so delighted about Mr. Tufts’s demise,” he said.

  “Not at all. It’s just that things are falling into place rather neatly, don’t you think?” She smiled up at him and suddenly Adam felt particularly good-humored. It must have shown on his face, for she said, “What’s so amusing, Mr. Quinn?”

  “I reckon I never thought of you as the type of woman to pore over the society pages. Did you call them an example of the human character?”

  “A fascinating study of the human character,” she replied primly. “And I was simply trying to create empathy with Mrs. Tufts so she would open up to us—me—more readily. I had very little interest in the society pages even when I lived in New York and was required to read them. I could care even less about them now. Incidentally, I find it quite surprising that you even know what the society pages are, Mr. Quinn.” There was that smile again.

  “I reckon I ought to confess right here that I haven’t the least bit idea what society pages are,” he replied truthfully. “Or why anyone would be required to read them, living in New York or not.”

  Miss Gates laughed. “Indeed.”

  Without thinking too hard about it, Adam offered her his arm as they crossed the street. To his mild surprise, she had no comment and slipped her gloved fingers around his forearm—his real one—as they stepped into the road.

  “I suppose we should speak to Mr. Monroe,” she said after a few moments of them walking along.

  “We?” he asked, glancing down. He could only see the top of her bonnet and a hint of chin and nose now that she was walking so close to him. But at the same time, he felt the brush of her skirt against the leg of his trousers, and the warmth of her fingers. He decided that was a fair trade.

  “I think it’s only right, as I was the one who made the connection between him and Mr. Tufts,” she replied tartly.

  “I reckon I can’t argue with that, Miss Gates.”

  “How is Mr. Lemagne doing? He was in a bad way yesterday when I left,” she said suddenly. “I’m certain you’ve been by to call on the family.”

  “Yes, in fact I was there just before noon. As it turns out, Dr. Hilton was able to fix up Mr. Lemagne’s leg last night. He says he
’ll be able to walk again within a month—perhaps sooner.”

  “That’s wonderful news,” she replied enthusiastically. “I’m certain Miss Lemagne was relieved.”

  “She was.”

  “She must have been happy to see you when you called,” Miss Gates said.

  “Yes, she was.” For some reason, Adam felt strange about this turn of their conversation. “She was—uh—very grateful to Dr. Hilton for his help. I arrived just as she was telling Dr. Forthruth to see himself out.”

  “Was she?” Her question was posed in a way that he knew didn’t require clarification.

  Suddenly feeling awkward, Adam fell silent as they walked along, navigating between other passersby on the sidewalk.

  “Have you ever met Miss Lemagne’s friend Mrs. Rose Greenhow?” his companion asked after an unusually long silence.

  “Yes, I have. Briefly.” He wished he could see her face, but that damned bonnet blocked the view unless she was looking up at him. Which she wasn’t at the moment.

  But then she stopped. They had just reached the bottom of Capitol Hill on the Pennsylvania Avenue side, not far from where he knew Billy Morris had been killed. She pointed to a bench. “Would you mind sitting for a moment? I find it annoying to have to crane my head to look up at you, Mr. Quinn, and I have something important to tell you.”

  “Of course.”

  Miss Gates plopped down onto the bench with little fanfare, ignoring the way her skirts settled, bunching around her.

  Adam took a seat next to her, but far enough away that he could see her beneath the bonnet. “What is it, Miss Gates?”

  She huffed out a breath and looked up at him. “First, I believe it would be permissible for you to call me Sophie—if you like. Now that we’re working together on these investigations, we needn’t be so formal, need we?”

  “I’d like that, Sophie,” he said, and liked the way her name felt when he said it. “And you must feel free to call me Adam.”

  “Excellent. Thank you. Now, for the other thing I wanted to tell you . . .” She hesitated, then plunged on. “It’s about Mrs. Greenhow. I don’t trust her. In fact, I think . . . well, I think she might be a spy for the Confederacy.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Monday, July 8

  It was late in the afternoon on Monday by the time Sophie was able to visit the Patent Office, even though it was just a stone’s throw from the Capitol and the White House. But she’d been required to spend time with her aunt, uncle, and cousins Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday—including attending church services and having dinner with some of Uncle Joseph’s colleagues.

  During the last few days, however, Sophie mulled over whether she’d been right to tell Adam Quinn her suspicions—slim as they were—about Rose Greenhow. The last thing she wanted was for him to think she was trying to tarnish Constance with the same brush as Mrs. Greenhow—which she absolutely wasn’t. Just because Mrs. Greenhow was acting suspiciously, that didn’t mean Constance was involved.

  But that didn’t mean she wasn’t.

  Adam had listened to her reasoning with that sober, thoughtful expression with which she was familiar, but in the end gave her no indication whether he believed her, agreed with her, or would even do anything to investigate.

  So, she decided, if he wouldn’t, she would. But first, Sophie was going to follow up on the Pinebar Tufts case by poking around the Patent Office. She hadn’t been inside the grand building before, although her friend Clara Barton had talked about it often. Built in the same neoclassical style as the Treasury and War Buildings, the Patent Office took up the entire block between F and G Streets, and Seventh and Ninth Street. A massive, three-story structure with elegant columns and a jutting pediment above its portico, it housed the entire Department of the Interior. The place was one of the busiest government buildings in the city.

  A regiment from Rhode Island had been barracked there back in May, when the sudden influx of troops had overwhelmed Washington, but according to Clara, they were gone and the office had been put back to rights. Sophie walked up the steps, noting the scores of other visitors coming or going, most of them well-dressed men. Some of them were carrying large boxes with complicated machinery jutting out of the top or satchels.

  Inside, she made her way to the receptionist and asked for her friend.

  “Miss Barton is a copyist in the north wing,” the man behind the counter told her. Sophie felt the disdain rolling off him, likely over the fact that a woman was working in the office. Clara was the only female who currently did so, although Sophie wondered if that might begin to change. “Through that door, to the right.”

  She found her friend without incident, following the hallway lined with offices. Clara’s work area was in a large, low-ceilinged space clustered with desks. Half of the desks were empty of workers, but laden with piles of paper, bottles of ink, and pens.

  She found Clara carefully writing out the description of a patent from an original document on her desk.

  “Sophie! How nice to see you.” She rose and stretched her arms and shoulders, slightly twisting her back. “I was just going to finish this page, and then go home for the day.” Clara was older than Sophie, in her thirties, and had never married. She was a petite, shy woman who’d nonetheless managed to get a job in the male-dominated office—a feat in and of itself.

  It was Clara who’d started the movement to collect donations of supplies for the Union soldiers after a trainload of injured troops had arrived from Baltimore in April. Sophie had met her then, and they’d been friends ever since.

  “I was hoping you could show me around your workplace a little,” she said to Clara.

  “Are you thinking about trying to get a job here?” her friend asked in a low voice. “It’s not as busy as it was, so I don’t know if they are hiring.”

  “Oh, probably not,” Sophie replied vaguely. “Goodness. How many copies of each patent do you have to write?” she asked when she saw the stacks of paper.

  “Ten. At least. Sometimes more, if the inventor wants to pay extra.” Clara flexed her fingers, which were gloveless and stained with ink. “It can be tedious work, but it pays well enough.”

  Sophie followed her around as she showed her the copyist’s room. “There are twenty of us right now, and we write copies of patents as well as any correspondence that go out between the examiners and the inventors.”

  “Wasn’t Mr. Tufts one of the examiners?”

  Clara’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh, I see why you’ve come to visit,” she said, smirking a little. “Yes, Piney Tufts was one of the assistant examiners in the Civil Engineering Division. With the war, submissions have slowed down quite a lot and Commissioner Holloway just released five assistant examiners and five second assistant examiners—some of them were because of their sympathies, you know. But with Mr. Tufts gone, they may need to hire another one. Did you see all the models when you came in?”

  “Models?”

  “Oh, you must have come in from the south if you missed the display. Come with me.”

  Sophie followed as Clara explained. “Every patent that is submitted must come with a working model of the invention, no larger than twelve inches by twelve inches. And since we receive over three thousand patents a year, that means there are a lot of little machines and gadgets that need to be stored.”

  “Oh, that’s why there were so many model shops on F Street,” Sophie said with a laugh. “They must do a lot of business.”

  “It seems like every week a new one opens, usually right in this area,” Clara replied.

  “So all of them are on display?” Sophie said, just as they walked into the great hall in the west wing. She gasped at the sight.

  The gallery was three stories high, with a vaulted ceiling and a curved glass roof to let in the light. Three levels of walkways passed along its great length, with an open center from the ground floor to the ceiling. Glass cases lined the walls everywhere from the white tiled floor to the roof. People—m
ostly men—crowded the area, peering into the cases one by one.

  Miniature machines and gadgets crowded each case. Sophie identified several of them—a sewing machine, a strange-looking frying pan, a unique water pump handle—but there were many other models whose purpose was lost on her.

  Nonetheless, she couldn’t pull her eyes away. “It’s amazing. It’s like an inventor’s dream. Or a toy shop.”

  “Or nightmare,” Clara said. “Anyone who wants to have a patent approved needs to look through all of the other patents that have been previously approved—and the models—to determine whether their invention is, in fact, new and unique. That’s why there are so many people here,” she added in a low voice. “Lawyers and inventors and examiners are always milling about, digging through the cases, looking for information about previous patents. And that’s why we copyists have to make so many copies—so they can be sent out to the libraries in other big cities. Not everyone can travel to Washington every time they want to file a patent.”

  Sophie was standing in front of a case, staring at a miniature piece of machinery crammed in amid several other models. It was a container that had clawlike hands and snakelike pipes writhing from it. “What on earth is this?”

  Clara laughed. “I have no idea. It looks like some sort of fancy water bucket—with a drain, perhaps?” She sighed. “Unfortunately, when the Rhode Island troops were here, they broke a lot of the cases—Mr. Bronwick, the clerk for the Agriculture Division, told me that four hundred panes of glass have to be replaced because of the destruction. And some of the models were stolen too.” Her face was set grimly. “Heaven knows we need our troops, but they should show respect to our national buildings and property.”

  Sophie knew Clara was likely referring not only to the destruction here at the Patent Office, but also what had been done when soldiers were barracked in the Capitol. They’d both been inside visiting soldiers during that time and had seen the mess firsthand.