American Quartet

by Warren Adler

  Then there was the case of Lincoln’s guard, John F. Parker. He was supposed to be sitting on a chair outside the President’s box. He was an unreliable fellow, also a bit of a drunkard. As soon as the Lincolns were ensconced in their box, the bodyguard left his post to have drinks in the tavern next door. Without these two circumstances, Wilkes could never have accomplished his purpose. Surely, a master puppeteer was at work.

  All four of the people in Lincoln’s box when the shot was fired faced doom. Mrs. Lincoln went mad. Major Rathbone, who was stabbed trying to apprehend Wilkes, attended his fiancée, Clara Harrison. They later married, but years later, the major murdered his wife and spent his last years in an insane asylum.

  If Garfield had appointed Guiteau minister to Paris or, for that matter, to anything, his death, too, might not have occurred. And McKinley. His meeting with the public had been an afterthought. Kennedy was reluctant to go to Dallas.

  Remington knew that these assassinations were irrevocable. Once the machinery was set in motion, the final act was preordained. Nothing could stop them. Just as nothing could stop him. Nothing!

  Through his friends at the Kennedy Center, he had reserved the box next to the presidential one for the entire run of Tonight at 8:30. Also, through these friends, he was going to ascertain what night the President had chosen to go. He would know this on the day of the performance. How could he possibly arouse suspicion? Wasn’t he known to the President? The Secret Service would ignore him as a threat.

  He would invite others to join him for that performance, all in formal evening wear. He knew exactly where he was going to sit, where the President would sit. It was completely worked out in his mind. All previous tests had been passed. The signs were unmistakable. He was the instrument.

  “They will rue the day,” his mother had said after his Senate defeat. “You must make them pay for their ignorance.”

  He spent the first week in April walking around the city, observing details he had never stopped to notice before. He visited the National Gallery, that very spot where he had achieved his first “breakthrough,” lovingly viewing the pictures that had served as the backdrop for this historical act. At the Pan American Union, he strolled through the atrium, looking up to see the dome of light that fed the plants around the fountain. He walked from the White House following the route of the inaugural, east on Pennsylvania Avenue, past the stately buildings, their styles reflecting the entire panorama of American history. At the Capitol he proceeded across the park to the Library of Congress. He even went upstairs to the very room where he had done the third deed, following the pattern of the grand design.

  It was thrilling to know that of all men, he alone had been chosen to be the lightning rod to warn this great nation of its peril. He alone! The instrument! Retracing his steps along the historic route, he moved westward to the Lincoln Memorial, standing in awe again at the remarkable likeness of the Great Emancipator, sculpted in perpetual reflection. He, too, had once saved America.

  “You could be greater than Jefferson or Lincoln,” his mother had assured him during one night of bliss.

  He put his worldly affairs in order, leaving instructions for the disposition of his papers in his safe deposit box. On the chosen day, he would make arrangements for the key to be delivered to his lawyers, as well as the letter to the Post.

  “This house and everything in it is to be kept intact in perpetuity,” he had instructed, recommending how his chosen executors were to handle its financing, using the vast inheritance that would ensue, the entire proceeds of the family fortune.

  At first, he knew, it would be a museum of infamy, but time would heal that. One day it would serve as a symbol to the concept of greatness itself, a historical memory to the one man who dared use the symbols of assassination as the lightning rod of communal memory. He also designated that space on his library shelves be reserved to the hundreds of books that were sure to be written about his divinely inspired acts. One day he would be revered as the apogee of human courage. America would heed his warning and acclaim him.

  Yet he remained on the lookout for further trials. They were necessary to goad his courage, test his mettle. Euphoria was a dangerous condition.

  When the call came from Fiona FitzGerald, he knew what it meant, another obstacle to be conquered.

  “I must see you,” she said.

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  It was, he was certain, the last gauntlet.

  26

  THE matter with Bruce was beyond apology. When she faltered, her anger would come to her rescue. It was obscene to be used, manipulated, by someone to whom she had given her trust. Indeed, trust was the most enduring value she possessed. What was love against trust? That piece of herself would never be given away to anyone.

  But that knowledge could not get her through the lonely nights. Nor could her obsession with the Kennedy assassination. The words in the endless testimony and books swam without meaning or comprehension in her mind. Finally, she could barely focus on the subject.

  Yet whenever she was tempted to surrender, the unalterable fact remained. There was someone out there with a gun and some unsuspecting victim as well. Meanwhile, the tide of protests was rising. Jefferson was getting more edgy. The eggplant was leaning on both of them now. They had looked into every dust-covered corner, past and present. There were simply no other places to explore.

  “Let’s leave it alone, Fiona,” Jefferson pleaded.

  He was right, of course. A look in the mirror confirmed it. The circles under her eyes had darkened and the network of red veins in their whites seemed a permanent fixture. Her color, too, was pallid and unhealthy.

  “I appreciate your concern,” she told him, trying to muster an air of sarcasm. It melted on contact. “I liked you better when you called me mama.”

  “Okay, mama. Let’s get the hell off this case.”

  “What happened to that sense of ethnic revenge?”

  He sighed. It was impossible for her to bait him and she finally gave up.

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “Let’s leave it alone. Let him become an inspector without any more hassles. I think we should make our peace. No skin off our asses. Call it a victory and forget it.”

  She might have taken his advice. She was that close. But Dr. Benton’s call changed all that, changed everything. It came, as most cataclysmic events, in the middle of the night.

  “I found something,” he cried. “I’m coming over. You get Jefferson.”

  She made a pot of coffee and waited. She called Jefferson, who groaned a response. She heard a female voice of protest.

  Dr. Benton’s cottony hair was frazzled. His dress was careless and he needed a shave. Jefferson arrived soon after. She poured out three cups of coffee and for a long time they all sat in silence, sipping the hot liquid, waiting for Benton to begin.

  “History,” he muttered. “We seemed to have neglected history.” He stood up and, in an odd gesture, clasped his hands in front of him as if to hold in his excitement.

  “In less than three months it will be the hundredth anniversary of James Garfield’s assassination.” He watched them, savoring the suspense. “President Garfield.” He unclasped his hands and waved a finger in the air. “It was in the newspaper, a tiny little piece. I nearly missed it. July second, eighteen eighty-one, President James Garfield was assassinated at the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Station by a man by the name of Charles Guiteau, a disgruntled job seeker. July second.” He looked at them. “Mean anything?”

  “My God,” she cried. “You said the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Station.”

  “I did say that. And do you know where that station used to be?”

  She tried to lift her coffee cup, but her hands shook too much.

  “The National Gallery of Art,” he said in a quivering voice.

  “Sombitch.” The revelation finally reached Jefferson. He slapped his thighs.

  “And the other?” Fion
a blurted. She wanted to reach out and embrace the doctor.

  “I have this set of encyclopedias,” Dr. Benton said, enjoying their reaction. “It only gives dates and a few details. President McKinley was killed in Buffalo.”

  “Buffalo?” She was disappointed. “Where’s the connection?”

  “At the Temple of Music . . .” He paused, relishing it. “On September sixth, nineteen hundred, at the Pan American Exposition.”

  “The Pan American Union Building.” It came in a duet; Jefferson and she.

  “With a revolver wrapped in a handkerchief,” Dr. Benton continued.

  “A witness had said a ball of fire shot out of his hand,” Fiona shouted. “And the time?”

  “I haven’t had a chance to check, but if you would like to wager, I’ll say that the time was exact, the wounds similar.” His hand swept toward the piles of books in the apartment. “You’ve been on the right track, Fiona. But going in the wrong direction.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “Shall I pinch you?” Dr. Benton said, his fingers gathering the skin on her arm.

  “The old ammo. He used the old weapons?”

  “As night follows day.”

  “The man’s crazy,” Jefferson said.

  “As crazy as a fox,” Dr. Benton said. “He’s got this whole thing down to a near science, an elaborate delusional fantasy. He’s also been quite brilliant in the execution.”

  “Either that. Or he’s been phenomenally lucky,” Fiona’s mind was racing now. “I never heard of a case like this. Never. Some of his actions were so . . .” She groped for words. “. . . esoteric.” She suddenly thought of Remington, who had inadvertently set off the chain reaction. Inadvertently! An idea struggled somewhere in her mind.

  “It sure slopped over on a lot of people,” Jefferson said.

  “That poor painter,” Fiona said. “All those loused-up lives. Innocents. The lot of them. What kind of a mind conceives this?”

  “Who knows?” Dr. Benton said. “Someone seething. with frustration, someone sad and sick and brilliant. A loner, probably, like the real assassins.”

  “Well, at least we know the MO,” Jefferson said. “The chief will piss in his jeans.”

  “I rather think he might want to go public now,” Dr. Benton said. “He could even get a commendation for having the foresight to keep the cases in active investigation. He could say he had to deliberately keep the matter under wraps.”

  “That still won’t get the killer,” Jefferson said.

  “The good old bottom line.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Dr. Benton said.

  Fiona and Jefferson looked at him, pacing the floor now, his head down. He stopped abruptly and turned toward them.

  “There were four.”

  “Four what?”

  “Assassinations.”

  “Lincoln.” Jefferson croaked. “Lincoln.”

  “Exactly”

  She was already rummaging among the papers and books. She had screened out the material on everything but the Kennedy incident. Now she remembered that there was something in the Warren Commission report, a section on presidential assassinations that she had ignored. She thumbed through the pages and found it.

  “Oh, my God. What day is it?”

  “April tenth,” Dr. Benton said.

  “Four more days. It’s going to happen in four more days. The theater,” Fiona said.

  “Ford’s.”

  “Right fuckin’ on,” Jefferson shouted, slapping his thigh again.

  “It was going too fast. Fiona felt the tangled energy as their minds raced.

  “Let’s face it. He’s a sucker for authenticity. This is the real thing. What day is it?”

  She looked at the calendar.

  “Tuesday.”

  “I believe they’re running something. It’s the height of the tourist season,” Dr. Benton said.

  “We better let the muvva know, Fiona,” Jefferson said.

  She nodded.

  “We just don’t want to throw it at him. We need more facts. It’s got to come out as more than just an educated guess.”

  She paused to read from the Warren Commission report.

  “He’ll be using a brass Derringer,” she said. “One shot, percussion weapon. We better get him before he gets it off.”

  “It may be the only way we’ll find him,” Jefferson said. “Then I want the privilege of blowin’ him away.”

  Fiona spent the morning at the Martin Luther King Library with Dr. Benton, gathering up books on previous assassinations. It crossed her mind briefly that, in the interests of time, she might have called upon Bruce’s office to use the facilities of the Library of Congress. That was the past, and her rejection of the idea became, in her mind, the first line in a new chapter of her life.

  While they were at the library, Jefferson was at headquarters going over the case files of both the gallery and Pan American Union cases, extracting relevant information to play off against the actual facts of each assassination. Later they met back at Fiona’s apartment and began poring over the books, making notes. The material was formidable. It wasn’t until late in the evening, their eyes strained and burning, that they decided to go on what they had. Amid a clutter of hamburger wrappings and denuded chicken bones, they began their comparisons. Dr. Benton worked on the earlier assassinations, while Fiona reviewed her Kennedy material; essentially, it had been validated before. This done, she had proceeded to gather the facts of the Lincoln assassination. Jefferson, too, studied a number of books on that subject.

  “James Garfield was elected in eighteen-eighty,” Dr. Benton summarized. “He was shot by Charles Julius Guiteau, a white male, thirty-eight years old, five foot five, one hundred twenty pounds. The weapon was a forty-four caliber English Bulldog with a white bone handle, which he bought for ten dollars . . .” He coughed. “This included a box of cartridges and, inexplicably, a woman’s penknife.” Fiona felt he was going into too many details. Sensing their impatience, he shook his head. “The damned thing is so fascinating, you don’t know what material to screen out. I’ll stay with the day of the killing.” He continued: “Guiteau spent the night at the Riggs House, a hotel near the White House. He awoke at five, went to Lafayette Park, read a newspaper. At seven, he went back to the hotel, had a hearty breakfast, returned to his room, wrote a few letters, prepared a package of his autobiographical writings, put a revolver in his right hip pocket . . . note the details . . . right hip pocket. Wearing a clean white shirt, a black vest, coat, trousers and hat, he left the Riggs House a little before nine. He didn’t even pay his bill. He was good at that. He was an expert at skipping bills. He took a horse car to the depot, located at Independence and Fourth Street, now the site of the National Gallery of Art. He even arranged for a taxi to get him away in case a lynch mob might gather after the shooting. Then he had his shoes shined. Also, he had only twenty cents left in his pocket; he owed the taxi driver two dollars. Apparently he planned to stiff him as well. He left his package with the news stand vendor, went to the men’s room to be sure the revolver worked, then waited for Garfield.” Dr. Benton looked up. “Sounds so pedestrian, don’t you think?

  “The President arrived at nine-twenty. He and Secretary of State Blaine walked through the ladies’ waiting room. Guiteau waited for them behind a bench. He drew the revolver when they were almost across the room, walked up behind Garfield, then calmly shot the President in the back. He fired a second time, but this one only grazed the collapsing President’s arm.”

  “Check and double check,” Jefferson said. “The man was shot in the gallery. Two shots, the fatal one in the back. Time. About nine-twenty. The gun. English Bulldog was one of the alternatives Hadley had cited. Was Garfield bearded?”

  “Bearded and big.” Dr. Benton said.

  “Like Damato.”

  “Like Damato,” Fiona repeated.

  “It took Garfield ninety days to die. They tried everything. Today he would have lived
. The bullet had entered through the tenth and eleventh ribs, nipped the vertebrae and an artery, then settled behind the pancreas. An aneurysm formed on the artery, halting the bleeding. Our killer’s bullet was close, but more deadly and close enough for us to get the message.”

  “And the motive?” Fiona asked.

  “In a nutshell?” Dr. Benton said, pausing. “God made me do it. The man was a religious nut, had been a shyster lawyer and itinerant preacher. He was a follower of a man named John Humphrey Noyes, a cult leader of the last century who had a commune in upper New York State called the Oneida Community. They even had their own version of the Bible, The Berian. It was all quite mad, but not much different from today’s cults. Anyway, Guiteau was a frustrated nonentity who had begged the President for a job as consul to Paris. Had even met with him. That was the way jobs were given out in those days. The President was accessible. Anyway, Guiteau’s trial was a media circus. They didn’t hang him until nearly a year later.”

  “Obviously a nut case,” Jefferson said.

  Dr. Benton put down his notes and shook his head.

  “Maybe. It seems somehow irrelevant. He was determined, obsessed, fanatical. To him, the reasons for the crime were quite logical. He was saving the country, removing what he thought was a controversial President, whose election had split the Republican Party. He died unremorseful, proud of his act, as if the President was more of a symbol than a human being. Also, he wanted, above all, to be remembered as a hero. That’s why he had bought a pearl-handled revolver instead of an ordinary one. He thought it might look better in a museum.”