Murder in the Lincoln White House

by C. M. Gleason

  “He was hiding behind a handkerchief so he couldn’t be identified. Even when pressed, McManus doesn’t remember much else about him. He wasn’t too tall, he wasn’t too short, he had on a hat that covered his hair, he wore gloves that covered his hands . . . and with all of the other people crowding in the foyer, he didn’t look at him very carefully.” Adam shook his head grimly.

  “And so he went up after Fremark . . . and what?” Hay pressed. “He couldn’t have been that close behind him. How did he even know in the first place Fremark was coming here?”

  Adam frowned. “I have the same questions, but I reckon maybe whoever it was saw or heard Fremark speaking to Birch about needing to talk to me, and heard him being sent up here. I don’t reckon it’s a secret that I’ve been tasked with finding out who killed Billings.

  “And if the murderer followed Fremark up to this floor—well, there are so many people here, there’s the long line waiting, and then McManus said they were all sent home. Maybe in the midst of the chaos, the murderer followed Fremark down the back hallway—or lured him there—and attacked him then. Stabbed him in the back several times. No one would have heard it happening, with all the noise and being at the opposite end of the hall behind a door.”

  Lincoln and Pinkerton were nodding in agreement. “If that’s true,” said the detective, “and it makes sense to me, then someone might have seen the murderer near the Willard yesterday when he saw Fremark, and then decided to follow him so he could off him as well. Bastard probably wouldn’t have been holding a handkerchief then.”

  “Yes, I reckon I’ll be talking to Birch to see if he remembers anyone loitering. Or the person might have been following Fremark anyway, already, waiting for an opportunity to silence him.” Adam looked out the window. If he’d gone home last night instead of socializing with the Megatherium Club, he would have seen Fremark, and possibly prevented this tragedy. The biscuit he’d eaten churned unpleasantly with the bitterness of coffee and regret.

  “Someone will need to inform Lyman Fremark’s family,” Nicolay said quietly. “Mr. President?”

  “I’ll do it,” Adam said. “I . . . I reckon I should, and his wife might have some information that would help.”

  “Very well, young man. I’m obliged to you—for all of this.”

  “If you need any assistance, Agent Pierce continues to be at your disposal,” Pinkerton said.

  “Thank you. I’d like to take another look at the scene, and I’d like permission to have Mr. Fremark’s body taken to Dr. Hilton, Mr. Lincoln,” Adam said. “In case there is anything he might be able to find about who did this.”

  “Of course.”

  Adam took his leave and was accompanied by Hobey Pierce when he went back to the small alcove. The body had been covered with a sheet and removed to an empty room, which left only the traces of violence on the floor: blood, disturbed dust, a few footprints.

  Lyman Fremark had been stabbed in the back several times—Adam would leave it to Hilton to determine the number. Regardless, it was a different situation from that of Custer Billings, who’d had fewer wounds and far less blood. Adam found that curious and wondered if it would mean anything helpful to the doctor.

  Pierce stood to one side, his round, youthful face serious as he watched Adam examine the walls, the doors, the floor. There wasn’t much to be found. A few faint footprints that had disturbed the dust, the spill of sticky blood, blood spatters on one of the walls.

  “Looks like he came at him here,” Adam said, demonstrating how the murderer would have laid the first blow, then pointing to the bloody spray marks on the wall nearby. “Fremark fell here—see the dust is all disturbed and there’s more blood.”

  Though he looked around on hands and knees, propped by an awkward false hand, Adam found nothing else to help identify the culprit. Then he and Pierce did the same painstaking examination of the stairs—down and then back up—looking for even a single footprint that didn’t match Fremark’s smaller ones, or Adam’s.

  Until he found, back at the top of the stairs, on the floor just outside the door that led to the alcove, a smudge of oil. A hardly noticeable drop that had seeped into the edge of an old, frayed carpet, and smeared onto a bit of the wooden floor.

  * * *

  George Hilton reckoned his life could have been a hell of a lot worse if he’d been born one day earlier.

  That simple bit of timing had ensured he was born a free man, because on February 7, 1829, his mother had made the last payment to her master and had been given papers that stated she was a free woman. The very next day, she’d given birth to him, and that made George Hilton free from the moment he was born.

  Had he come even a few hours earlier, he’d have been born into slavery like his mama had been. She would have had to scrape and save all over again, for years and years, to accumulate fifteen hundred dollars or more to buy her son’s freedom.

  And if Mr. Pellman, her master, had known Callie Hilton was pregnant, he surely would have held off on signing and sending those papers that made her free until she’d delivered herself of the baby. But because the master had rented out Callie Hilton to serve his distant cousin, not only did he not know she’d gotten with child over the last year, but he also enabled her to save the money to buy her freedom.

  It was a common practice to rent or loan slaves out to other families—especially in Washington, where people came and went with the seasons of government and didn’t want to bring their own servants. It was beneficial to both master and slave, for there was an elite class of slaves—usually from wealthy, equally elite families that were servants with excellent reputations and work ethics—that often negotiated their own rental fees. The slave owner expected a certain amount of money, and the slave was able to keep anything he or she negotiated above that fee.

  And servants who were particularly sought after—like Callie had been, because she was a brilliant seamstress and because she was from the greatly admired Pellman family—could make enough money doing extra side work as well. It had taken her five years to save the money for her freedom, and that was a relatively short amount of time because the master had set a low price on her head when she made the request—simply, and, as it turned out, fortunately, because she was sickly and not expected to survive.

  It was because of all those quirks of fate—and others to come later on in his teens, as if the bricks of his life’s path had already been laid so neatly—that George had figured he’d best make the most of this blessed life into which he’d blundered. His mama was dead and gone five years now, but she’d nearly been replaced in his maternal affections by Miss Lizzie Keckley, who was so much like Callie Hilton that George couldn’t help but wonder if his mother had somehow come back in the other woman’s shell. Hell, she was practically glowing over the fact that Mrs. Lincoln had hired her to sew the dress for her very first levee on Friday night.

  All of that was why George had returned to Washington a year ago. Returned to the place of his birth, though he’d lived here less than a year after he was born before Callie took them to the safer, Northern city of Philadelphia. For, even as recent as ten years ago, Washington City was a very dangerous place for free Negroes: they could be captured and sold as slaves at the whim of anyone who chose. There had been outdoor slave markets in the shadow of the Capitol Building as well as the President’s House. And even George well knew there was a dais adjacent to Judiciary Square where black men like himself were stripped and whipped for any infraction perceived or imagined. Even though the slave trade of bringing in people from outside the country had been abolished in Washington, slaves could still be bought and sold—and were, in reputable auction houses like Williams & Green.

  And though he was a free man, there was still the danger of being “taken” and sold into slavery. It was a subtle awareness George lived with every day. An underlying suspicion and wariness he couldn’t quite subdue, especially whenever he met someone new. Someone who was white, that is.

 
; There was the ugly Black Code that restricted his life and movements, and that, if he’d never left Washington, would have prevented him from becoming as educated as he was.

  Despite all of that, he’d come back here because he knew he was needed. His people needed him—because, by God, there was no one else to help them. Because, by the same quirky twists of fate—or, more likely, set forth from the Good Lord, as his mama had told him—that had helped him leave the capital city, he’d become something a black man in America could hardly dream of: a medical doctor.

  Negroes weren’t permitted to aspire to such professional positions as doctor, lawyer, or teacher. And even if they did, gaining admission to a medical school or even paying for it were insurmountable barriers.

  George figured he owed it to the Good Lord—and whatever angels had brought him from Washington to Philadelphia to medical school in Montreal and now back again—to help his people.

  To help any people.

  He lived in the same small boardinghouse Miss Lizzie did, over on Connecticut Avenue—where it was a little clearer, cleaner, and brighter than in Ballard’s Alley, a few blocks above Lafayette Square. But he spent most of his time in the cellar beneath Great Eternity Church, seeing patients who couldn’t afford to pay him and, as of early yesterday morning, performing a postmortem on a dead body.

  He didn’t know what had possessed him to offer such a service to the sober Mr. Quinn, but there he had, and here he was. The number of lamps he’d needed to borrow and buy—and the kerosene for them—had set him back some dollars, but for now, he had the money to do it. He figured the Good Lord had made things happen the way He did because He expected George to take care of things down here for Him.

  If caring for the sick and helping to find a murderer were some of the tasks on his brick path, so be it.

  “Now, there we are, Mrs. Brown,” he said to his patient as he helped her off the examining table. He steadied her until she got her bearings, then handed her a crude crutch her husband had made. “You need to keep yourself off that foot for another week, you hear? That stinky green mess coming out of that lacera—that cut—is gonna come back if you don’t keep it wrapped, and with this salve on it. Hot water and the salve—three times a day, there, Mr. Brown. She’ll need your help. You understand?” He gave the husband a firm look. “Otherwise, that foot’s gonna get infected again, and it’s going to end up coming off. And then where will you be?”

  “Yessir, Mr. Hilton, sir,” said the husband, sliding a dark, spindly arm around his much rounder, equally dark wife. “Thank you, sir.” He managed to jam a hat onto his head while steadying his spouse.

  “I’ll be by to see you, Mrs. Brown, and I’ll know if you’ve been walking around on that foot,” George warned as they hobbled their way to the door.

  As they did, the husband glanced curiously at the white sheet that divided the long, rectangular room in half, and George was thankful no one could see the cut-open corpse on the table there, even though it was properly covered from head to toe. Though, he supposed, everyone could probably smell it: the scents of blood, of death, of imminent decay.

  He took a moment to wipe his face and dunk his hands into a pump-sink before turning to his next patient. That convenience had been the deciding factor in using this location as his medical office: an internal water source with a sink. The fact that it was a cellar, and therefore cooler than aboveground offices, hadn’t been a factor at all—but now that he’d turned half the space into a morgue, it was obviously a benefit. Still, he’d had to move everything behind the sheet before opening up to patients this morning, and it was more crowded and darker back there.

  There were three chairs lined up along the wall near the door, and although at seven o’clock this morning they’d all been full—with two more waiting—now there was only one patient sitting there. George spared a moment of relief that he could attend to Mr. O’Malley’s stitches rather quickly (they only had to be removed and the wound cleaned), and then he’d be able to get back to the puzzle of Custer Billings’s body.

  The minimal amount of blood from the stab wounds on Mr. Billings continued to niggle at him. There’d been no blood to speak of on the floor where the body had been lying, and George knew he was correct when he told Mr. Quinn that the body hadn’t been killed and allowed to bleed out somewhere else.

  Until he got a more thorough look at the man’s insides, he wouldn’t have answers to that puzzle. And he might not even have an answer then.

  “Have a seat here, Mr. O’Malley,” George said, wiping his hands. As the broom-slender Irish man loped over to the examination table, he too glanced at the white dividing sheet. “What’re you about doing back there?” he asked, sliding onto the counter. “Smelling real bad. Like a bloody butchery shop.” He wheezed a laugh at the joke.

  “A man died two nights ago,” George told him, lest the man begin to suspect him of butchering a patient. He was, after all, a black man—and O’Malley was not. “I’m preparing the body to be laid to rest.” He figured that was as good an explanation as any.

  “Smells real bad,” said O’Malley, then winced as George used forceps to drag a thread from the stitched-up slice on his palm.

  “Sure does,” George replied cheerfully. “That’s why I’m going to get you fixed up and out of here as soon as I can.”

  He was just finishing up, washing the wound with water he kept heating at all times, when someone knocked on the outside door, then called for him.

  George stifled a grimace of frustration; he’d been hoping for a break from patients so he could get back to his work on Billings.

  “Office is open,” he called needlessly, for the door had begun to ease wide.

  There seemed to be a lot of movement outside, as if someone was managing a heavy or awkward parcel. The door thudded against the wall as a man backed in, carrying one end of something long and wrapped in a blanket.

  George stared for a moment, then recognized the man as the younger Pinkerton agent from the night of the Union Ball. The one who’d been helping Mr. Quinn. And it looked as if he was on one end of a body being maneuvered through the small doorway.

  “You’re all set here, Mr. O’Malley,” George said hastily, nearly dragging the man off the table by his wrist. “Keep it wrapped up, and feel free to pour a bit of your favorite Irish whisky on it whenever you have an urge for a little sip yourself.” He smiled, but his attention was on the two men who were making their way carefully through the door, with what could only be a body sagging between them.

  O’Malley gawked at the sight of the shroud, likely noticing the blood seeping through the layers of linen in which the body was wrapped.

  “By my eyes,” muttered the Irish man, staring as he walked past. He stumbled a little when he bumped into the edge of a chair. “Looks like you’re about turning yourself into a funerary home, Doc.”

  “What’s all this?” George asked as soon as he closed—and locked—the door behind O’Malley. Any new patients would have to wait, at least for a few minutes. “Bring it—well, to this table here for now.”

  “Adam Quinn sent us. He said he’d be obliged if you’d take a look at Mr. Fremark here,” said the Pinkerton agent.

  George was already peeling away the wrappings on the body, which the men had placed on the table. “What happened?”

  “Man was found stabbed to death inside a closet at the President’s House.”

  “At the President’s House?” A chill rushed through his body.

  “Quinn says he was the man who found Billings’s body the night of the ball, and he thinks someone killed Mr. Fremark in order to keep him from telling something he might have seen.”

  “All right, then. Tell Mr. Quinn I’ll take a look.” He didn’t add a thank-you to his message—it just didn’t seem right to be grateful for another mystery to solve. Yet, George found himself both intrigued and determined to have a go at this second challenge.

  Hardly noticing when the two men left, Ge
orge turned to the remains of Mr. Fremark, carefully easing away the shroud to expose the man and his clothing.

  One thing he already knew: this man had bled enough for both of the dead bodies he now had in his office.

  CHAPTER 11

  BY THE TIME ADAM BEGAN TO MAKE HIS WAY BACK TO WILLARD’S, IT was nearly five o’clock in the afternoon. His prosthetic was bothering him, for it had been strapped on for nearly ten hours without relief, and yesterday it had been more than eighteen.

  But his discomfort was nothing compared to that of Mrs. Lyman Fremark, whose face had crumpled with disbelief when Adam had delivered the horrible news. He’d gone to her directly after leaving the Executive Mansion.

  “No . . .” she had whispered, staggering back as she placed a hand over her heart. “Not Lyman. He’s such a harmless man . . . such a nice and harmless man. He wouldn’t hurt a fly! Who would want to do such a thing?”

  “Please, sit down, Mrs. Fremark,” Adam had said, helping her to the small parlor off the main entrance to the Fremarks’ tiny row house on Eighth Street. “I’m hoping to find out who would do that to your husband.”

  One of the servants was hovering, wide eyed, in a doorway, and Adam had suggested she make some tea for her mistress while he tried to calm her enough to ask a few questions. The servant, a matronly woman with mahogany skin and a cheerful face, had offered to send for Mrs. Fremark’s sisters and grown daughter.

  Mrs. Fremark had nothing helpful to share. She was overwrought, and barely coherent. But, no, she could think of no one who’d want to hurt her husband. And no, he hadn’t told her much about finding the body at the ball—she’d been there too, of course, wearing her new rose-pink frock and with a filled dance card too! They’d gone home soon after—but Lyman hadn’t spoken of the incident since. He felt it was unbecoming for a woman to think of or know about such things. He had been more quiet than usual since then, and he had woken abruptly from a dream the night before, but he wouldn’t talk about it with his wife.