Murder in the Lincoln White House

by C. M. Gleason

  The desk manager hurried out from behind the counter, clearly on his way to soothe the ruffled feathers. Adam turned toward the much slighter man and gave him a cold look. The manager spun around on his heels and skittered back behind the desk.

  “Mr. Lemagne,” Adam began, keeping his voice calm and even. “I need to speak with you about something that happened last night at the Union Ball.” He offered the man his card from Mr. Lincoln. “The president has asked me to—”

  “The president?” Lemagne’s eyes bulged. He snatched the document from Adam, took one look at it, and tore it into four pieces. Flinging them aside, he said, “That damned rail-splitter’s no president of mine. Constance.” He took her by the arm. “You are forbidden to speak to that man again.”

  “Daddy!” she exclaimed, obviously horror stricken at his rudeness, but more appalled than frightened by his anger.

  As Lemagne towed her past the hotel desk, he said to the manager, “If you see him here again, you have my permission to throw him out.”

  Adam watched the father and daughter leave, then looked down at the scraps of placard at his feet. He gathered them up. As he rose, he glanced at the desk clerk, who seemed to be enjoying himself while casually adjusting the straw-colored badge pinned to his coat.

  “Well, I reckon there’s no question where Mr. Lemagne’s sympathies lie,” Adam said dryly, then replaced his hat and walked out of the hotel.

  * * *

  Though it was several hours past dawn and the sun was high in the sky, its light was obscured by a blanket of pale gray clouds. The fact that it might rain weighed more heavily than the hope the clouds might disintegrate and offer a brighter day, so when Adam left the St. Charles he made his way directly to Judiciary Square, the stuccoed City Hall, and the makeshift building that had housed the inaugural ball.

  In the daylight, he examined the plank walkway that stretched between the civic building and the temporary structure and noted more than a few dried footprints on it—most of them leading from the hall to the ballroom. Obviously more than one person had brought with them traces of dirt on their nice shoes. But that was because mud was everywhere, due not only to the recent, hasty construction of the dance hall, but also the simple fact that Washington was a city of unfinished streets, nonlandscaped parks, and unpaved squares.

  Judiciary Square was finished with neither brick nor cobblestone, and Adam jolted to a halt when he saw a pig mucking in the shadow of a building. He stared, hardly believing his eyes.

  Yes. There was a very happy sow snorting about in one corner of a public square bordered on one side by City Hall and the mayor’s office, and less than five blocks from the Capitol Building. There were people entering the building, obviously going to their offices for work, and none of them seemed to pay any mind to the pig.

  And there were people in Washington who claimed Lincoln was rustic and came from an uncivilized town?

  Shaking his head, Adam put aside the irony of the situation and concentrated on the tasks at hand. He was looking for two things. One, a smudge of oil that might confirm his suspicions as to whether Mr. Billings had obtained a significant amount of fresh mud on his shoes by being one of the persons Fremark had seen in a “secret meeting”—and then possibly some indication as to who was with him. And two, the trail Miss Altman had left when she disappeared from Agent Pierce’s sight last night.

  Adam started with the dance hall’s anteroom. The door was unlocked, and although office personnel and clerks were entering and exiting City Hall from both the square side and the Indiana Avenue side, this adjacent building was silent and empty now that its purpose had been fulfilled. Workers would surely arrive at some point to tear down the decorative buntings and put away the tables and chairs that had been used for the supper, but for now, he had the place to himself.

  Once inside, Adam located the traces of oil and, with the external door open, was better able to see them in the natural light. There was a slightly larger stain just outside the threshold that he’d missed in the moonlight, and he noticed a scuff mark next to it.

  He knelt to get a better look. There was definitely a scrape of mud, and he recognized it as the sort of track a shoe would make if it was being dragged. He could tell the stain wasn’t from the heel, but from the side of the shoe, and when he looked around, Adam found another trace of a trail almost parallel to that one.

  Yes. Someone—Billings—had been either dragged or half carried into the room. If that was the case, then logically it followed that he was either dead or dying at that time. And whoever dragged or helped him had had a smudge of oil on his shoe.

  He reckoned that the “secret meeting” Fremark had half-heartedly noticed was Billings speaking with the man—or woman—who, moments later, killed him and then dragged his body inside the anteroom.

  Next, he examined the closet where Miss Altman had been hidden, but there were no grease smudges inside or near the door. He did find an oil stain the size of a nickel near the wall where the closet jutted out. There was a slender, faint streak leading from the smudge—as if the drop had been made, then something had marred it slightly.

  Adam scrutinized all of the marks—both inside and outside—carefully, but he couldn’t make out enough of the shape of any print to get an idea of the size of the shoe, or any marks that might identify a flaw in the footwear. None of them were more than small scrapes of grease . . . but that didn’t mean there wasn’t more to find where the shoes in question had originally picked up the mud or oil.

  Once he traced the tracks to the door and outside, things became much more complicated. For the marks he was following mingled with the main foot traffic. Another close examination of the walkway all the way to City Hall confirmed no other oil smudges, which meant that whoever made them hadn’t walked into the antechamber directly from the wooden path, but from somewhere else.

  With great care and patience, Adam examined the area outside the antechamber and was rewarded when he discovered the barest trace of grease on the edge of a piece of the plank walkway just outside the entrance to the building. If he hadn’t been so persistent, he might have missed it.

  Satisfied he was on the right path, he continued his search in the direction from which the prints had to have come—which would have been in the shadows last night. This was far more difficult since he was no longer looking at a wooden surface, but peaks and valleys of mud, anemic patches of grass, and small, sticky puddles. But Adam had tracked animals and humans on surfaces much more challenging than rough, damp mud, and it wasn’t long before he found what he was looking for: a few indentations in the soft ground that were too new to be from the construction crews and too precise to be natural upheavals of earth.

  And there was a small, crushed clump of grass with traces of black grease on it.

  A rush of comprehension washed over him as he read the tracks, and the story filled his mind like a stream of sand pouring into the bottom half of an hourglass. He closed his eyes and took himself to the scene, utilizing the skill of “knowing” that Ishkode had taught him by becoming part of the story. . . .

  They stood here . . . right here, rather close to the doorway.

  Just as Fremark had said.

  They stepped off the walkway, likely so as not to block the way of people going in and out of the building. They were within sight of anyone walking by . . . but it would have been in the shadows last night at midnight. If someone like Fremark saw them—two of them, only two of them, the murderer and Billings—they’d think nothing of it. Just two men conversing.

  They faced each other, so Billings knew his killer well enough to stop and talk to him—not to just pause, but to stop and move out of the way for an extended—maybe private—conversation.

  Adam continued, unraveling the story in his mind: picturing the tracks, the traces of oil, the way the footsteps had been made.

  “Step over here, I need to speak to you,” the murderer would have said. “Let’s get out of the way of anyone w
alking by. It’s not too muddy.”

  Billings would have agreed for some reason; he had no reason to fear or be wary of this person, especially here and now, in the shadow of the most public event in the city. Perhaps even Billings had been the one to make the suggestion.

  Adam thought again of Annabelle Titus, wondering if she and Billings might have slipped away for a private moment.

  They stood talking for a short time—it wasn’t very long, for there aren’t many signs of shifting footsteps. And then, when there was no one walking by, no one to see, the killer would have struck out with his knife: slash, slash.

  Adam’s eyes bolted open. So the killer would have had to pull out his knife from a pocket? It would have been difficult to conceal such a weapon, at least for very long.

  And the assailant would have to take Billings by surprise, when at any moment someone could walk out of the building or walk by and see him? Adam frowned.

  Surely Billings would have seen the knife and held up a hand or an arm to ward off the blow? There’d been no marks on him other than the two stab wounds.

  And would one thrust of the knife have killed the man immediately, or would he have cried out in pain or surprise? The killer had struck twice, right here, right out in the open, unerringly stabbing his victim twice in the torso....

  He shook his head. So risky. Such a bold chance to take.

  There was something he was missing . . . something he couldn’t quite see.

  Adam knelt, looking at the tracks again. Could the two men have been farther away from the entrance when the killer struck? Around the building, away and out of sight?

  No. He shook his head, imagining the shoes he’d brought back to the Willard. There wasn’t enough mud on them for Billings to have walked more than a few steps in this muck, and the entire perimeter of the building was of soft, wet dirt.

  The tracks stopped here, right here.... They hadn’t gone very far from the door—

  Adam stilled, crouched awkwardly, balancing on his false hand. Yes, that was blood. Right there, in a small arc across the mud-stained grass. It was like a small spray, as if someone had dipped a brush in whitewash and whipped it out too quickly, leaving a trail of paint behind it.

  But the spray wasn’t from the white paint that covered the dance hall exterior. It was blood.

  He frowned. Such a small amount of blood for a man to have died from being stabbed multiple times. No great pool of it, no other drops . . . just the small, delicate arc. Hardly enough blood.

  Surely it couldn’t be enough blood for a man to die. There hadn’t been much more than this inside, either, where the body had been lying.

  Billings had to have been killed elsewhere. Adam knew what it looked like—how much blood there was—when a man was stabbed or shot.

  There just wasn’t enough blood here.

  It didn’t make any sense.

  He rubbed his eyes and looked again. He walked all the way along the side of the building in both directions, looking for more prints, for blood, for grease stains—for something that would lead him to the place where Billings had been killed.

  But there was nothing more. He read the tracks again and again, and the story didn’t change.

  They stood here. Fremark walked by on his way to City Hall, hardly noticing them, he was in such a hurry.

  As soon as Fremark was gone, the man killed Billings—here’s where the weight of his stance changed, where Billings staggered and lost his balance and sagged forward, toward his killer, maybe even brushed against the outside of the building. The murderer caught him, and then he put his arm around his waist and half carried him into the building, walking side by side. If anyone saw them, he’d say his friend was soused.

  But where was all the blood? A man who was stabbed would bleed out somewhere.

  Adam stared blindly at the ground. And why would the murderer have brought him inside? Why would he have taken the risk of doing this here, where anyone could see him? Come upon him?

  Because he wanted the body to be found. It was the only explanation that made sense.

  And then there were the traces of oil. The biggest smudge was just outside the door, and there was another one on the edge of the temporary walkway, right at where the killer would have stepped on it to take his victim inside.

  He nodded. Yes, the oil smudge was on the bottom of the killer’s—he looked narrowly at the track, imagined it in his mind—his right shoe. And the genesis of the grease stain was here in the muddy grass. There were no other traces of oil anywhere but at the murder scene and just inside the building where Billings had been arranged.

  Adam knew it then. He knew it in the same way he’d read the rest of the tracks, the way he saw it all. The oil smudge had to be directly related to the killing—to the moments surrounding the murder.

  And he had that same sense of easy comprehension he’d experienced a moment ago: learn the reason for the oil and why it was on the shoe of the murderer . . . and then he’d be able to follow the rest of the “tracks” to their conclusion.

  * * *

  Though he continued to look around the grounds for another twenty minutes, Adam could find nothing to negate the story he’d built in his mind.

  He was right. He knew he was right. He just didn’t know why and how.

  With a sigh, he passed a hand over his face and realized that it was approaching midday, and that he’d had nothing to eat since early last night. The coffee with which he’d fueled himself had long done its job, leaving him with an empty, gnawing stomach.

  Since it was nearly noon, and the scrawny Brian Mulcahey would be arriving at the Willard as directed—he hoped—Adam decided to go back and meet the young boy. He could get himself something to eat, and feed the kid as well.

  When Adam approached the Willard, Birch was standing at the door in his pristine white gloves and shiny black shoes. He grinned and thumbed toward the wall behind him, and that was where Adam saw Brian Mulcahey. The boy was leaning against the bricks watching everything happening around him. Currently, a horse-drawn omnibus was rumbling down the avenue, and behind it was a shiny barouche upholstered with a plush gold interior.

  Brian was so entranced by the activity on the street he didn’t seem to notice Adam right away. But when Birch gave a sharp whistle and shouted at him, the kid straightened up guiltily.

  “I’m here, mister,” said the boy, running over to him as if afraid Adam would disappear if he didn’t move fast. “What are you wanting me to do?”

  “How about we get something to eat and I’ll tell you. I reckon I could eat an entire cow and still want more.”

  Brian looked up at him as if uncertain whether to believe him. After all, Americans were strange. “Eat a whole cow yourself? How would you be doing that, mister?”

  Adam shook his head and laughed. “With my Arkansas toothpick and a very big fork. Come on, boy.”

  “What’s an Arkansas toothpick?” Brian asked, trotting along next to him, the tip of his big toe pale as a baby’s backside as it extruded from his boot.

  “It’s a very long knife. Long as my forearm here, with a blade about two inches—this big—wide.”

  “Why’s it called a toothpick?”

  Adam grinned. “Some of the fiercer men claim they use the tip of that long damned knife to clean their teeth. Me, I know that’s a load of bunk because you’d be holding its hilt way out to here in order to manipulate it without cutting off your lip.” He demonstrated.

  Brian sucked in his breath, his pale blue eyes wide, the freckles on his face standing out against his fair skin. “I guess you’re right about that, mister.”

  “We wore ’em strapped to our backs out west like so.” Adam showed how he could reach behind his head and pull out the sword-like knife. “There’s a saying on the frontier not to let a man reach behind to scratch his neck or he might come up with a toothpick in his hand.”

  “Gor! You’re from the frontier?”

  “I sure am.” Even as
he described the Kansas frontier to Brian’s litany of questions, Adam was imagining the murderer pulling out his knife in front of his victim, and how Billings would have reacted to seeing such a threat. The dagger with the blue stone on its hilt hadn’t been nearly as long or wide as an Arkansas toothpick—or Bowie knife, as it was also called, though some purists argued they weren’t precisely the same blade—but it certainly had done the job.

  And he reckoned the killer sure hadn’t had an Arkansas toothpick stuck down behind his dress shirt and waistcoat.

  They went to a shop that sold meat pies, crusty bread, and other edibles, and Adam’s stomach hurt in a different way than hunger pangs when he saw how round Brian’s eyes became when he looked at all the food offerings. So Adam bought four meat pies stuffed with potatoes, carrots, and peas, along with two apple tarts. They stood at a small counter in the shop to eat.

  “Reckon I wasn’t as hungry as I thought,” Adam said after they’d each eaten a pie and washed it down with water from a pump outside. “Maybe you could do me a favor and take these others to your family for me, boy. I don’t have anywhere to keep them at the hotel.” He offered him the rest of the food, which was in a brown paper bag.

  Brian’s eyes were wide as he nodded. “My mam would be happy to see them pies, I’d be guessing.”

  “I guess she would. Now,” Adam said, wanting the boy to remember he had work to do, “I need you to go to the St. Charles Hotel. You know where that is?”

  When the urchin nodded his head, but looked confused and then stricken, Adam realized he probably didn’t know where the building was and didn’t want to admit it, so he casually told him.

  “You got anywhere you need to be today? School?” he asked belatedly. His mama would flay him if she found out he was keeping a kid from learning. She’d been so strict when they were growing up, which was how Adam came to be as well read as he was.