by Paul Collins
Shaw made his way to Bowdoin Square, where the Reverend Francis Parkman kept a household as distinguished as that of his younger brother, if less mercantile. He had not seen George, either. As no Parkman or Shaw would want to admit police into the matter, there was no question of whom they should consult next. The two men promptly walked over to Court Street, just out of the shadows of city hall, and into the offices of James Blake.
Any unexpected pleasure in a morning visit—Why, Uncle Francis!—was quickly dampened.
Blake was the doctor and the reverend’s nephew, but more importantly, he was the closest tie the family had to Boston’s constabulary. Blake, Shaw, and the Reverend Parkman were all Harvard men, but only Blake had ever had occasion to wield a billy club. Though now in the railway shipping business, until a few years ago Blake had served as city marshal, a rather genteel head of the city’s police force. Sitting in his office that morning—the brother, brother-in-law, and nephew of the missing man—they recognized that their fears were immediate and blunt. There was just one suspicious character in recent memory with abundantly clear motive to detain and possibly hurt the doctor.
It’s that Irish servant he sent to prison, they nodded. He’s to blame somehow.
Now a private and very upstanding search party of three, they marched down to the office of John C. Park, Esq., the walk taking Shaw past the same blocks he had strolled with Parkman just a day earlier. The lawyer ushered the men into his office; he was busy, but it was not often he had such distinguished visitors.
The problem, they explained to him, was with one of his clients.
That was understandable: Park represented a great many problematic fellows. Just yesterday he’d added four counterfeiters to his rolls, a local butcher and his friends, all accused of passing on two-dollar bills altered to resemble one-hundred-dollar notes. In another of his cases, he’d been the defense counsel in an assault case between two stage actors whose offstage bickering had moved onstage with a very real “fight scene” in full costume, to the slowly dawning realization of the audience. But though he represented every sort of rascal, Park was a respectable man himself, one who’d been on the city council and had served side by side with Blake in the local militia.
It’s that crook Patten, they said. The doctor had suddenly gone missing on his rounds—surely Park could see that the doctor’s former servant was behind it?
At North End Church, where the Reverend Parkman had just retired from preaching that year, the bells tolled ten o’clock; they were losing precious time.
Impossible, the lawyer replied.
His client was still firmly locked away in prison—he wouldn’t be out for another fourteen months—and as for the witnesses he’d brought to vouch for him during the trial, they were either out of town or not the vengeful sort. And what had they to be vengeful for, anyway? Dr. Parkman never did get most of his money back from that crowd. He was, one might say, their great benefactor. No, Robert Patten was not the man they wanted.
It was a painfully logical point, and all the more so because Park was clearly right. They were wasting their time here; the man they really needed was over in the city marshal’s office. Park had known the marshal for a long time—perhaps longer than these gentlemen realized, and there was no getting around seeing him now. Private inquiries could get them only so far; now they’d have to take it to city hall.
TO FATHOM what kind of fellow Boston’s police chief was, a visitor needed only to glimpse one of his prize possessions: not a signed proclamation, or an ornate mace of office, or an golden epaulet for his uniform, but what appeared at first glance to be a simple silver jug. Pick it up and examine it though, and one would find that it had a singular inscription on its side: “Presented by the Dry Good Merchants of Boston, to Francis Tukey, Esq., City Marshal, for his noble and humane assistance in rescuing Charles Pierce from the ruins of the Dearborn block, Federal Street, July 24, 1848.”
It was an event Bostonians knew well: the dramatic collapse the summer before of a brick merchant’s building—precipitated, it was thought, by one of its pillars plunging into an ancient, disused sewer. The proprietor’s younger brother suddenly tumbled below an immense pile of rubble, under which he could be heard calling weakly for help. Arriving firemen and police chose Tukey on the spot to lead a rescue operation deep into the night, even as a remaining three-story brick wall leaned ominously over them. Not only had Tukey saved his man but, almost as soon as Pierce was carried out, the last wall fell with a dramatic crash, obliterating the spot where the victim and rescuers had stood just moments before.
It had been only a few weeks before, come to think of it, that Tukey had also carried a printer’s apprentice out of a burning building where a fire roared so ferociously that the man was spattered in molten type. He, too, had survived.
There was not a man in Boston—nor a building—that could deter Francis Tukey. At only thirty-five years old, the marshal possessed what one reporter described as “a voice of cast-iron” and the lean form and dark and piercing eyes of a stage actor, a profession it was rumored he’d worked in his youth. Now, as the city’s top policeman, he had all Boston as his stage. That week he’d collared counterfeiters, pickpockets, umbrella snatchers, and one Madam Hufeland, an abortionist whose office doubled as a fence for melting down stolen flatware. His inscribed silver pitcher, as it happened, would have been a fine haul for her.
Gentlemen?
The trio had the marshal’s full attention; they were a respite from the usual run of rascals coming through his station. And for James Blake to be visiting with them was a peculiar honor indeed: Blake, the former city marshal, the man who the previous summer had petitioned the city council to throw Tukey out and give him his old job back—and failed! James Blake, whose signal achievement had been a dog-collar law! James Blake, who local criminals feared so little that his house had had its linens burgled from it a few months ago!
But let it pass: they were both Harvard Law alumni, and there were certain courtesies to be considered.
Shaw, Blake, and the Reverend Parkman laid out their worries to the marshal: Parkman’s schedule, his usual route, his mysterious absence overnight. Tukey pondered the situation; Dr. Parkman was a busy man with many business affairs, so might he not have simply been called out of town? The mere mislaying of a letter directed back to Walnut Street, announcing his absence or calling for his trunk to be sent onward, might explain the entire matter. Yet there was the real possibility of imperilment—a fit of apoplexy or a fall down the stairs while examining one of his vacant properties. He was a man on the verge of turning sixty, after all. And there were worse possibilities: he was a respectable citizen of well-known habits, identified by local scandal writers as possessing an estate of at least $500,000—Mr. Shaw, appraised at an astounding $1 million, was one of his few rivals—and the doctor was known to carry large sums of money on his person. He might, perhaps, have been lured into a dark cellar and robbed.
A number of out-of-town trains would be arriving by two p.m.; one of the first matters would be see to see if he was on board one of them. If so, the whole matter could become a fine story for next week’s Thanksgiving dinner—The thought of a den of thieves trying to tangle with you! Ha-ha!—a comical misunderstanding that might make even the stern Dr. Parkman crack a thin smile. In the meanwhile, the half dozen police officers who worked the West End would be sent around to Parkman’s properties to inquire discreetly—no alarm would be raised, nor any word breathed of a man being missing. Instead, they would knock on doors and claim to be responding to a local complaint, perhaps of a drain flooding into the street. Thanks to Tukey’s reputation for fining Bostonians for everything from improper ash disposal to insufficient snow removal from sidewalks, it was a credible cover story for entering a house and poking around.
They would also prepare a notice just in time for it to be typeset for the evening papers, the Boston Daily Journal and the Boston Daily Evening Transcript. Tukey drew up an
ad and waited as the three men fussed over minor corrections.
DR. GEORGE PARKMAN, one of our most respectable citizens, left his dwelling house yesterday at about one o’clock in the afternoon, to keep some appointment at about half past one o’clock, made with a gentleman unknown, who called upon him in the morning; and Dr. Parkman has not since been seen by his family.
Any one who can give information respecting him, or saw him after one o’clock yesterday, will confer a great favor by communicating with the City Marshal.
Saturday, Nov 24.
They did not bother with a physical description, any more than they would bother giving the marshal’s address: Bostonians knew both well. Dr. Parkman’s rapid walk and his curious bearing—prominent chin high up in the air—were recognizable even at a distance.
When the bells in the church nearby finally rang two o’clock, the report soon came back from the train station: Dr. Parkman was nowhere to be found. Tukey called in a Journal reporter who had been loitering nearby in the city hall’s suite of offices and handed over the ad, saying, Run this on the front page of the evening edition.
The time for discretion had passed. The police now had themselves a missing persons case.
CHARLES KINGSLEY waited at Dr. Parkman’s mansion, serving as the dutiful assistant to his missing boss by reassuring the women of the house. With the report from the train station, though, the real estate agent quickly excused himself and left. He knew better than anyone where George Parkman’s properties and daily circuits took him, and he purposefully set out to walk the old man’s rounds.
Kingsley roamed the streets around Beacon Hill, moving toward downtown, asking shopkeepers and acquaintances along the route if they’d seen the doctor the afternoon before. He picked up the doctor’s trail on Bromfield Street, a sleepy stretch of two blocks favored by furniture dealers and such arcane trades as feather selling and shade painting. Kingsley doggedly followed Parkman’s track from block to block, plotting out his walk: the doctor had turned up Washington Street, then proceeded through a stone archway and down an alley, emerging by Joy’s Building; he’d moved past Paine & Newcomb’s Fruit and Refreshments Room and continued beyond the People’s Daguerreotype Room. His route then confoundingly circled around the Old State House and turned back down Washington Street again, before heading north in a double loop, steering out of the downtown altogether, and arcing back into the heart of the West End. From there the agent followed his boss’s trail all the way back to Blossom Street—and into a stunning realization.
Kingsley was at his own house.
It was if the very search was mocking him: he’d just made an absurd day-long circuit through Parkman’s home and half of downtown Boston to wind up where he himself had woken up that morning. But the absurdity held a hint of unease: the doctor habitually stopped at Kingsley’s when in the neighborhood, and, indeed, many of the surrounding houses were also the doctor’s own properties. If Dr. Parkman had walked right through Blossom Street, what had kept him from knocking on Kingsley’s door?
Kingsley hadn’t been the only one to trace the doctor’s route here. Half a dozen police officers were walking the same blocks, questioning neighbors. As the sun set and the evening papers came out, word spread around the neighborhood. Locals joined in, with everyone quickly focusing on the doctor’s own vacant properties in the neighborhood, their calls reverberating down hallways and into attics, across empty backyards, the men holding lanterns aloft and peering intently as they descended into one damp cellar after another.
Parkman had last been seen along North Grove Street, and then perhaps on Fruit Street by the Medical College, around one-thirty in the afternoon. For night policemen, hunting down clues along that stretch was strangely familiar from a murder just three weeks earlier. The Grove Street Murder, as the newspapers immediately dubbed it, had begun with two black freedmen arguing over a woman. It was the old story: one beau scoffed, “Old fellow, are you following me?” and knocked off his rival’s top hat; the other suitor responded by stabbing the first twice in the throat. There had been much notoriety to that murder, but little mystery: the local barber languishing miserably in the city jail had numerous witnesses to his crime. But now one of the city’s most respectable men had simply walked down these same streets and—disappeared.
Kingsley, accompanying the police in their house searches, was baffled. Despite the faint leads around the college—where Parkman had been spotted by neighbors partway down the block, though none had talked with him—the last unequivocal sighting of the man had been in the corner grocery, where Dr. Parkman had ordered sugar and butter to go to his house and asked the clerk to hold on to a paper bag for five minutes. His lettuce was still sitting there forlornly behind the counter, those five minutes having now stretched into well over a day. But nobody could tell Kingsley where his boss was to be going for those five minutes.
Wait, a grocer’s clerk said before Kingsley left.
Yes?
It was a mere boy working in the store—but sometimes they were the ones who noticed the most important clues of all. Finally, the lad spoke.
Can you take the lettuce with you?
Kingsley pushed open the door, looked down the darkened streets, and walked out into the deepening November night.
7
THE YELLOW ENVELOPE
AT EIGHT O’CLOCK, JUST LIKE EVERY MORNING, THE DAY CONSTABLE roster was called out at the police headquarters in city hall.
Derastus Clapp . . . Lucian Drury . . . Lysander Ripley . . .
This was the Sabbath, though—normally a day off, save for the small special contingent of Sunday police. But with the disappearance of Dr. Parkman, the city marshal had turned out his entire force.
Marshal Tukey always stayed out of sight, behind his closed office door, his plans shadowy, so that, as one constable drily observed, “the Police were not usually overstocked with information in relation to his intended movements.” Whenever his door swung open and his brooding visage fell upon his men, nobody dared interrupt the low voice that sent them afoot for the day. Some days they had gambling dens to raid or unlicensed cabdrivers to harry; and still others, they were sent on inexplicable variations of their usual rounds. “Officers north of City Hall,” he would announce, “will pass the north end of the Court House every hour while on duty; officers south, will pass through School Street same, no questions asked or answered.” Then he would disappear. Only later, perhaps, would they find that they were foiling robberies that had not yet occurred or safeguarding shipments or prisoner transfers still unknown, the dangers of which had been whispered up into city hall through the marshal’s network of informers.
This morning, as usual, they could not guess his plans—but they could already assume whom they’d be centered upon.
Ebenezer Shute . . . the roll call continued. Archibald Towle . . . Willard Whiting . . .
The marshal, it seemed, had plans for all of them today.
The police fanned out. A number of men were to take to the rails, spreading fifty to sixty miles in every direction to nail up handbills reporting Dr. Parkman’s disappearance. For some pious Bostonians, this traveling by train on a Sunday was almost as shocking as the disappearance; in fact, legislation had been proposed to ban the pernicious modern practice. Tukey and his force had no such misgivings. Those not sent out to the railway stations were to instead go back to the West End, where they would be joined by Kingsley and concerned neighbors; even Littlefield, the Medical College janitor, dropped his Sunday chores to join in. Overnight, the revelation of the doctor’s disappearance had become the talk of Boston.
“The general enquiry,” one reporter noted, “is, ‘Have you heard from Dr. Parkman?’”
The search parties converged on Parkman’s houses and vacant lots, sweeping over the half-constructed new jail by the riverside, where they broke the Sunday quiet of the waterlogged site by crawling over its lumber stacks and dirt piles. As morning passed into afternoon, the weather b
egan to turn; after a week of unseasonably warm days, the cold was creeping back in, and those who had left their coats at home regretted the decision.
Pocket watches ticked toward four o’clock, tensing searchers with the knowledge that an early winter nightfall would soon arrive. Ephraim Littlefield rested from the search in front of the medical school and gazed wonderingly around North Grove Street, only to see the familiar form of one of his employers some twenty paces off. Dr. Webster, caught out in the gathering gloom, lacked an overcoat in the plunging cold, but he’d remembered his stylish cane.
“There comes one of our professors now,” Littlefield said, pointing him out to another searcher.
The chemistry professor seemed animated, his gaze scrutinizing the ground, as if seeking the doctor’s footprints. Like seemingly everyone else in the West End, one question was foremost in his mind this afternoon.
“Mr. Littlefield,” he blurted out, “did you see Dr. Parkman, the latter part of last week?”
Indeed the janitor had—not much went on around the college without him seeing it. Everyone had now heard that there had been a mysterious morning caller to Parkman’s and that the local foundry men had seen the missing doctor marching toward the medical school. But were that morning caller and the school connected?
“Where did you see him?” Webster asked.
“About this spot.” Littlefield indicated where they were standing. He’d been sweeping inside the college and had stopped at the front door for a moment and seen Parkman approaching. But he’d witnessed nothing further, because then he’d gone to lie down on a settee in an empty professor’s office.
“At what time?”
“About half-past one.”
“That is the exact time,” Webster banged his cane on the ground, “that I paid him $483.”
And in a moment, one of the great puzzles in Parkman’s disappearance became clear: the identity of the mysterious morning caller and, hence, Parkman’s destination that afternoon.