Time Out of Mind

by John R. Maxim

  Tilden said nothing.

  “Have you a notion where she was goin', sir, that was worth bein' out on a night like that?”

  “No.”

  “Well, this is real embarrassin' for me, sir, but I have to point out I know different. I know you and her had some strong words, maybe even a blow was struck, and I know she said something about a feller named Ansel comin' to fix your hash.”

  Color rose on Tilden’ s neck. He did not know what infuriated him more, whether the fact that his striking a woman for the only time in his life was now public knowledge, or that a linkage of her name to Carling's was as well, or that this thug of a policeman could even consider the notion of Ansel Carling surviving two minutes with him.

  “Would this Ansel feller be livin' over at the Navarro Flats?”

  “He would. Why do you ask?”

  Williams pulled an object wrapped in paper from his coat pocket. “Your wife had no hat when she was found, sir. We found this along the way, right in front of where a man named Ansel Carling lives.” He showed the crushed lump of cloth and feathers to Tilden. “Looks like a dead bird, don't it. Would it be her hat, by chance?”

  “It would.” Tilden took a breath.

  Williams examined it curiously. ”A poor excuse for a head covering, ain't it, all things considered. It's a damn sight short of a nor’easter.”

  “Will there be anything else, Inspector?”

  “No, sir.” Williams rose to his feet,placing the hat on a table beside his chair. “I'll leave you to your grief now.”

  He stepped toward the door and paused. “By the way, sir, did you leave this house at all that night?”

  “No.”. “You're certain, sir?”

  “Yes.” He decided to risk it. “There's the baby.”

  “The baby. Yes, of course.”

  “May I ask you a question?”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  ''Why is an officer of your rank conducting this investigation?’ '

  “Well, sir”—Williams made a sweeping gesture, which took in Tilden and the apartment's furnishings—“not all the men in the lower ranks are as tactful as me in dealin' with people like yourself. Some of them might even have asked if you, by the slightest chance, might have a lady friend you want to keep quiet about and they might have asked you for a little gift appertainin' to them keepin' mum on it.” He held up a hand before Tilden could start toward him. “The real truth is, I'm lookin' in on you as a favor to a mutual friend. That's Mr. Gould, by the way.”

  “Jay Gould?” Tilden's eyes widened.

  “There ain't but one. And he has nothin' but kindly thoughts for you, sir. I know he hopes you feel as kindly toward him.”

  “Good afternoon, Inspector.”

  John Flood pulled the chain of the carved oak toilet tank, causing a pipe-banging rush of water that would allow Tilden to believe he'd not been listening in case that was the way his friend wanted it. But Flood had left the door ajar, not so much to eavesdrop as to be within quick reach if Tilden's interview with Williams turned ugly. The stare-down he'd given that copper promised as much. Tilden was a handy enough man with his fists, fair to say, but he'd be no match for Clubber Williams if it came to that, even if the Clubber was twenty years his elder.

  Flood himself was just a boy of fifteen when he saw Williams lay out some of the toughest men in New York. John had been working as a swamper in the old Florence Saloon down on Houston Street near Broadway and taking a pass-the-hat fight in the alley out back four or five times a week. Clubber, though they did not yet call him that, was the new patrolman assigned to that little section of the Fourth Ward where the worst of the city's gangs had their hangouts. There was a chalkboard on the wall of the Florence where the Whyos and the Plug-Uglies kept a sporting record of the policemen each gang had killed or maimed. The gang that let two weeks pass without having a copper's hat or ear to show as a trophy had to stand drinks for the other. But taking souvenirs was becoming harder work those days because the coppers were learning never to walk in groups of less than three. Over in Five Points, coppers had learned not to walk at all. Except Clubber Williams. Williams saw things different. His first day on the beat he walked right up outside the Florence and commenced to pick a fight with the two toughest men he saw there— Hoggy Walsh and Dandy Johnny Dolan of the Whyos— and he smashed both of them to the ground with his stick. Dandy Johnny Dolan got up and tried to use this eye-gouger he had special made for his thumb—it was carryin' eyes around in his pockets that finally got him hung—but old Clubber smashed his hand and then his knee and threw him through the Florence's window. Four more Whyos and two Plug-Uglies came runnin' out to teach him a lesson, includin' Skinner Meehan with his hash knife, and Clubber laid 'em out to a man. It's said he cracked a skull a day for three years after that till they jumped him to captain and put him where the money was. Now there ain't a whorehouse or gaming joint in all the Tenderloin, well named by Williams himself, that don't ante up to him the first of every month.

  “Did you hear?” Tilden asked as John Flood reentered the living room.

  “Not a word, lad,” he answered, “unless you want I did.”

  Tilden nodded, sighing deeply, then walked slowly to a window looking out upon New York. “Is there anyone in this city,” he asked sadly, “who does not know that Ella was ... deceiving me with Ansel Carling?”

  “Not so many lad. Not so many at all.”

  “And for that number,” he added, “how many will always believe it was I who killed her?”

  ”I did not hear that either, Tilden,” John Flood said firmly. “And I don't ever want to hear it again.” Flood had made up his mind it was an accident at worst, a suicide at best. “If you'd choked the life out of her with your own hands, I would not have blamed you. But you didn't. 'Twas she who fell; you did not knock her down. 'Twas she who mocked you and spited you to the end when a single word of repentance would have saved her. What else could you have done? Could the man I know have stepped aside and let her run on up to Ansel Carling's kip?”

  ”I should have. I should have just walked away and gone home.”

  “She'd be dead as Kelsey's goat all the same. Forget it, lad. It was no murder. You had no murder in your heart.”

  Tilden said nothing for a long moment. He looked out across the city he now despised. It was five days since the snow had stopped, and it remained in great mounds on every street corner and along every curb. Ella's body, not much colder dead than alive, was being kept on ice in a Ninth Avenue mortuary until the gravediggers could catch up with their backlog or until her family answered his wire asking if they'd rather she lie among her own in Philadelphia. He hoped they would take her. It would save him the agony of a service and it would place her all the farther from his thoughts. The Reverend Bellwood from Saint Thomas had come to comfort him and during his visit had inquired of his plans to have the child christened before bis soul went much longer without that protection. Saturday next, Tilden decided. Be done with it. What name, sir, the Reverend Bellwood asked. Her name, not mine. Call him Huntington.

  “Huntington Beckwith.” The minister wrote it down. “And the middle name?”

  “Sir?”

  “Have you chosen a middle name? It is customary to bestow one or more family names upon a child in addition to his Christian name so that he may carry his heritage with him always.”

  “His heritage, you say?”

  “That is the custom, Mr. Beckwith.”

  “Give him the initial B. Nothing more.”

  ''ß, sir? What does it stand for?”

  “It stands alone. It is his heritage.”

  “It will be so, sir.” Though he was doubtful, the Reverend Bellwood agreed.

  And may God forgive me this as well, thought Tilden. But if bastardy is his heritage, let him carry it. May God forgive me that I cannot love this unlovely child. True enough that the child cannot be blamed for his mother's sin, but even if this were a pretty and well-tempered infant, whi
ch it is not, how could I ever look upon its features except to be reminded every day of his life of Ella Huntington and Ansel Carling.

  Through the window, on down Fifty-seventh Street, his eye fell upon the signal tower of the Sixth Avenue Elevated, Cyrus Field's elevated. Even that had now turned ugly where once the sight of it had never failed to thrill him. Tilden's father had helped to build it just as he'd helped Cyrus Field ten years before that in the stupendous accomplishment of laying the Atlantic cable. Beckwith & Company had financed or secured loans for both and had issued the shares. The Sixth Avenue Elevated was a wonderful success. The fulfillment of one dream and the beginning of another. Crawling, congested traffic in the city's streets would be a thing of the past. And Cyrus's New York Elevated Company was turning a solid profit. It was much more successful, much better managed, than the rival Metropolitan Railway Company, which ran the Second Avenue Elevated under the rapacious ownership of Jay Gould and Russell Sage. Yet Cyrus Field had agreed to a merger of the two companies. Tilden and his father were against it. But Field was adamant. A centrally managed cooperative system was essential to well-ordered growth, he said. Just so, Stanton Beckwith argued, but not with these two brigands. They would surely raise the fares until the people are squeezed dry, and they will work every possible mischief with the company's shares.

  They did, of course. Gould quickly moved to double all fares and Field, though resisting at first, finally yielded to Jay Gould's argument that the resulting windfall would permit expansion all the way to the borders of Westchester. But when the New York Times loudly condemned the action, pointing out that the new Manhattan Company would be picking the average worker's pockets of one full dollar a week out of the mere eight that he probably earned, and when that paper began tarring Field with the same brush as Gould and Sage, Cyrus, Tilden believed, began to fear for the place in history his Atlantic cable accomplishment had already secured for him. He forced the restoration of the five-cent fare, threatening to take his case to the public if Gould did not yield on the matter. Gould did yield, agreeably on the surface but deeply resentful of Field's sentimentality and poor business sense. More, that Cyrus Field had defied him. Gould was not a man to forget such a thing. It was said of Gould that he ate his revenge cold. He would wait. In the meantime, he would content himself with the ten-cent fare being charged for the specially decorated parlor cars. But even these revenues soon fell beneath his expectations. Too few men and women were willing to pay the extra fare, the novelty of Axminster carpets having worn off, for so short a ride.as a shopping excursion to the department stores of Fourteenth or Twenty-third Street or the daily half-hour ride to a Wall Street office.

  By this time, Ansel Carling had become one of Gould's most trusted agents, to the extent Gould trusted anyone at all. Carling had first surfaced ten years earlier in San Francisco, where he appeared at the offices of the Central Pacific Railway bearing a letter of introduction from the governor general of the British East India Company. The letter said that after serving in the British army with great distinction, Carling, third son of England's reclusive Sir Andrew Carling, had joined the company and soon became one of the driving forces in the completion of the railway between Lucknow and Calcutta, slapping aside governmental interference and Sikh attacks with equal vigor. The Central Pacific's president, Collis P. Huntington, no relation to Ella, put him to work extorting bribes from towns along the railroad's right-of-way, offering them a choice between paying for a line or spur to be laid through them or withering into ghost towns as the spurs were granted, legally or not, to the higher bidder elsewhere.

  After Collis Huntington moved his family to New York, built a Fifth Avenue mansion across from that of Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., and settled into the pursuit of his wife's social ambitions, Ansel Carling developed similar, if more modest, tastes. He now had the Central Pacific Railway's letter of introduction to add to that of the British East India Company, and these he brought to Jay Gould, who at that time owned the Metropolitan Railway Company, parts of several other lines, plus the Western Union Telegraph Company and the New York World newspaper as well. Gould was much impressed by Carling’ s buccaneer spirit and even more so by his lineage, Gould himself being a former grocery clerk from upstate New York. Gould hired him and eventually made Carling his executive assistant. The two men being equally unencumbered by business scruples or compassion, understood each other well.

  In 1885, Cyrus Field secretly began buying up shares in the Manhattan Elevated Company in an effort to gain full control and to squeeze out Gould and Sage. As before, he did this through Beckwith & Company. By early 1886, Gould realized what Field was doing but bided his time, waiting month by month as the stock price was slowly driven up by Field's purchases. As the share price climbed higher, Field was obliged to buy on margin. Gould rubbed his hands. When the moment was right, and Field was believed extended to the breaking point, Gould and Sage dumped their stock on the market, forcing the share price down sixty points below the one Field was obliged to pay. Field was bankrupted. Utterly ruined.

  Both Tilden and his father had been aware that their friend was playing an extremely dangerous game. If Gould knew what Field was up to, and they had to assume he did, Gould would certainly do all in his power to learn precisely the right moment to strike. Through bribery or blackmail he would doubtlessly try to subvert some clerk at Beckwith & Company into telling him which transactions in Manhattan Elevated stock were those of Cyrus Field in disguise. To safeguard against this, Tilden chose to keep all such records at his home. He knew that Gould would learn about this as well, but he was not greatly concerned. Short of commissioning a burglary, Gould would have no access to them. Tilden never imagined, of course, that Jay Gould would simply commission Ansel Carling to seduce his wife.

  A loud jarring ring cleared Tilden's eyes and startled John Flood into a defensive stance. It rang again and Flood touched his palms to his ears. ”'Jesus,'' he shouted over the sound, “I'll never get used to those things.” Tilden crossed to the telephone whose clumsy box of oak and brass hung on the living room wall near its entrance.

  “Hello, who is there?” He spoke loudly into the funneled mouthpiece. “Yes, Nat, I hear you. Yes.”

  That would be Nat Goodwin, the actor from downstairs, Flood decided, although if he was in his apartment Flood couldn't imagine why he'd use that contraption when he could as well open a window. But wherever he was, whatever he was saying, Tilden’ s face was turning black as thunder as he listened.

  “How many men are there,” Tilden asked, “and how many with him?”

  He nodded, satisfied.

  “I'm grateful, Nat. Thirty minutes at the most. Stand them a round if you must but try to hold them there. I'm breaking off now so I can dress.” Tilden replaced the earpiece on its hook.

  “Carling?” Flood asked quietly.

  “Yes.” Tilden stepped past him toward his bedroom. “He is at the Hoffman House with some of his friends.”

  “I'll be going with you.”

  “No, John.” Tilden pulled off his shirt and slipped out of his trousers. From an armoire he'd already cleared of Ella's clothing he selected a suit of evening dress. “Nat Goodwin will watch my back if there's a need. He also has that Wild West Show fellow, Cody, with him at the bar.”

  Tilden fumbled with his studs and John Flood moved to help him. “Goodwin's no brawler, lad, and he's a bantamweight at best. I'd better work your corner.”

  “No.” Tilden shook his head. “When this is over, I do not want it said that I needed the man who gave John L. Sullivan all that he could handle to deal with the likes of Ansel Carling. There's more pride in that than I intend to leave him with.”

  Flood grunted doubtfully. “See that he doesn't leave you with your head stove in from behind or with a sword cane's blade between your ribs.”

  “You're a good friend, John.” He turned to receive the jacket Flood was holding for him.

  “Good enough,” the fighter asked, “to
say aloud it's cruel of you to have had no thought for Margaret in all that's happened?”

  “I've ached for her, John.” Flood saw his face soften at her name. -''Whatever thoughts I've had, she's there beneath them.”

  “How would she know that, lad?” he asked gently.

  Corbin, his hand still flat against the projected image of the newspaper page, nodded sadly.

  “Jonathan?”

  Corbin jerked.

  “Jonathan,” Gwen asked, “is something happening?”

  “I'd better go,” he whispered. He straightened and turned, then suddenly winced at the shock of bright fluorescent lights. Harry Sturdevant pushed back his chair and reached for his arm.

  “Wait.” Corbin waved him off. “Wait. It's all right.” The maelstrom of his mind began to slow and his inner eye watched as unconnected thoughts and fleeting memories settled one by one into sequence. Corbin knew where he was. The library. And there was no need to go after Carling. He'd done that. It was over.

  Nor was there a need to berate himself for his neglect of Margaret. He'd dealt with that as well. He must have. Because he remembered walking with Margaret when the child, his own child, was almost full grown in her and she was asking him to tell her again about the house that would be hers in Greenwich and about the grand new life they would begin there together. They were walking down Fifty-eighth Street in the snow and he was saying how her house would be the second in all Greenwich with electric lights inside, and she laughed when he told her about Mr. Johnson, the president of the Edison Electric Company, who not only had the first electric house but who even had an electrified carriage with battery-powered light bulbs on it including one that hung on a long pole in front of the horse and made him cockeyed.