Murder at Monticello

by Rita Mae Brown

  “Did that happen here?” Cooper’s pencil flew across the page.

  “Frontier. Kentucky.” Mrs. Hogendobber took the tablet from Harry. “May I?” She read. “Here’s another quote from Patsy, still about the slave sale. ‘Nothing can prosper under such a system of injustice.’ Don’t you wonder what the history of this nation would be like if the women had been included in the government from the beginning?—Women like Abigail Adams and Dolley Madison and Martha Jefferson Randolph.”

  “We got the vote in 1920 and we still aren’t fifty percent of the government,” Harry bitterly said. “Actually, our government is such a tangled mess of contradictions, maybe a person is smart to stay out of it.”

  “Oh, Harry, it was a mess when Jefferson waded in too. Politics is like a fight between banty roosters,” Mrs. Hogendobber noted.

  “Could you two summarize Jefferson’s attitude about slavery? His daughter surely seems to have hated it.” Cooper started to chew on her eraser, caught herself, and stopped.

  “The best place to start is to read his Notes on Virginia. Now, that was first printed in 1785 in Paris, but he started writing before that.”

  “Mrs. Hogendobber, with all due respect, I haven’t the time to read that stuff. I’ve got a killer to find with a secret to hide and we’re still working on the stiff from 1803, excuse me, the remains.”

  “The corpse of love,” Harry blurted out.

  “That’s how we think of him,” Miranda added.

  “You mean because he was Medley’s lover, or you think he was?” Cooper questioned her.

  “Yes, but if she loved him, she had stopped.”

  “Because she loved someone else?” Cynthia, accustomed to grilling, fell into it naturally.

  “It was some form of love. It may not have been romantic.”

  Cynthia sighed. Another dead end for now. “Okay. Someone tell me about Jefferson and slavery. Mrs. Hogendobber, you have a head for dates and stuff.”

  “Bookkeeping gives one a head for figures. All right, Thomas Jefferson was born April 13, 1743, new style calendar. Remember, everyone but the Russians moved up to the Gregorian calendar from the Julian. By the old style he was born on April 2. Must have been fun for all those people all over Europe and the New World to get two birthdays, so to speak. Well, Cynthia, he was born into a world of slavery. If you read history at all, you realize that every great civilization undergoes a protracted period of slavery. It’s the only way the work can get done and capital can be accumulated. Imagine if the pharaohs had had to pay labor for the construction of the pyramids.”

  “I never thought of it that way.” Cynthia raised her eyebrows.

  “Slaves have typically been those who were conquered in battle. In the case of the Romans, many of their slaves were Greeks, most of whom were far better educated than their captors, and the Romans expected their Greek slaves to tutor them. And the Greeks themselves often had Greek slaves, those captured from battles with other poleis, or city-states. Well, our slaves were no different in that they were the losers in war, but the twist for America came in this fashion: The slaves that came to America were the losers in tribal wars in Africa and were sold to the Portuguese by the leaders of the victorious tribes. See, by that time the world had shrunk, so to speak. Lower Africa had contact with Europe, and the products of Europe enticed people everywhere. After a while other Europeans elbowed in on the trade and sailed to South America, the Caribbean, and North America with their human cargo. They even began to bag some trophies themselves—you know, if the wars slowed down. Demand for labor was heavy in the New World.”

  “Mrs. Hogendobber, what does this have to do with Thomas Jefferson?”

  “Two things. He grew up in a society where most people considered slavery normal. And two—and this still plagues us today—the conquered, the slaves, were not Europeans, they were Africans. They couldn’t pass. You see?”

  Cynthia bit her pencil eraser again. “I’m beginning to get the picture.”

  “Even if a slave bought his or her way to freedom or was granted freedom, or even if the African started as a free person, he or she never looked like a Caucasian. Unlike the Romans and the Greeks, whose slaves were other European tribes or usually other indigenous Caucasian peoples, a stigma attached to slavery in America because it was automatically attached to the color of the skin—with terrible consequences.”

  Harry jumped in. “But he believed in liberty. He thought slavery cruel, yet he couldn’t live without his own slaves. Oh, sure, he treated them handsomely and they were loyal to him because he looked after them so well compared to many other slave owners of the period. So he was trapped. He couldn’t imagine scaling down. Virginians then and today still conceive of themselves as English lords and ladies. That translates into a high, high standard of living.”

  “One that bankrupted him.” Mrs. Hogendobber nodded her head in sadness. “And saddled his heirs.”

  “Yeah, but what was most interesting about Jefferson, to me anyway, was his insight into what slavery does to people. He said it destroyed the industry of the masters while degrading the victim. It sapped the foundation of liberty. He absolutely believed that freedom was a gift from God and the right of all men. So he favored a plan of gradual emancipation. Nobody listened, of course.”

  “Did other people have to bankrupt themselves?”

  “You have to remember that the generation that fought the Revolutionary War, for all practical purposes, saw their currency devalued and finally destroyed. The only real security was land, I guess.” Mrs. Hogendobber thought out loud. “Jefferson lost a lot. James Madison struggled with heavy debt as well as with the contradictions of slavery his whole life, and Dolley was forced to sell Montpelier, his mother’s and later their home, after his death. Speaking of slavery, one of James’s slaves, who loved Dolley like a mother, gave her his life savings and continued to live with her and work for her. As you can see, the emotions between the master or the mistress and the slave were highly complex. People loved one another across a chasm of injustice. I fear we’ve lost that.”

  “We’ll have to learn to love one another as equals,” Harry solemnly said. “‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.’ ”

  “History. I hated history when I was in college. You two bring it to life.” Cynthia praised them and their short course on Jefferson.

  “It is alive. These walls breathe. Everything that everyone did or did not do throughout the course of human life on earth impacts us. Everything!” Mrs. Hogendobber was impassioned.

  Harry, spellbound by Mrs. Hogendobber, heard an owl hoot outside, the low, mournful sound breaking the spell and reminding her of Athena, goddess of wisdom, to whom the owl was sacred. Wisdom was born of the night, of solitary and deep thought. It was so obvious, so clearly obvious to the Greeks and those who used mythological metaphors for thousands of years. She just got it. She started to share her revelation when she spied a copy of Dumas Malone’s magisterial series on the life of Thomas Jefferson. It was the final volume, the sixth, The Sage of Monticello.

  “I don’t remember this book being here.”

  Mrs. Hogendobber noticed the book on the chair. The other five volumes rested in the milk crates that served as bookcases. “It wasn’t.”

  “Here.” Harry opened to a page which Kimball had marked by using the little heavy gray paper divider found in boxes of teabags. “Look at this.”

  Cynthia and Mrs. Hogendobber crowded around the book, where on page 513 Kimball had underlined with a pink high-lighter, “All five of the slaves freed under Jefferson’s will were members of this family; others of them previously had been freed or, if able to pass as white, allowed to run away.”

  “‘Allowed to run away’!” Mrs. Hogendobber read aloud.

  “It’s complicated, Cynthia, but this refers to the H
emings family. Thomas Jefferson had been accused by his political enemies, the Federalists, of having an affair of many years’ duration with Sally Hemings. We don’t think he did, but the slaves declared that Sally was the mistress of Peter Carr, Thomas’s favorite nephew, whom he raised as a son.”

  “But the key here is that Sally’s mother, also a beautiful woman, was half white to begin with. Her name was Betty, and her lover, again according to oral slave tradition as well as what Thomas Jefferson Randolph said, was John Wayles, Jefferson’s wife’s brother. You see the bind Jefferson was in. For fifty years that man lived with this abuse heaped on his head.”

  “Allowed to run away,” Harry whispered. “Miranda, we’re on second base.”

  “Yeah, but who’s going to come to bat?” Cooper scratched her head.

  46

  The Coleses’ library yielded little that they didn’t already know. Mrs. Hogendobber came across a puzzling reference to Edward Coles, secretary to James Madison and then the first governor of the Illinois Territory. Edward, called Ned, never married or sired children. Other Coleses carried on that task. But a letter dated 1823 made reference to a great kindness he performed for Patsy. Jefferson’s daughter? The kindness was not clarified.

  When the little band of researchers left, Samson merrily waved them off after offering them generous liquid excitements. Lucinda, too, waved.

  After the squad car disappeared, Lucinda walked back into the library. She noticed the account book was not on the bottom shelf. She had not helped Harry, Miranda, and Cynthia go over the records because she had an appointment in Charlottesville, and Samson had seemed almost overeager to perform the niceties.

  She scanned the library for the ledger.

  Samson, carrying a glass with four ice cubes and his favorite Dalwhinnie, wandered in, opened a cabinet door, and sat down in a leather chair. He clicked on the television, which was concealed in the cabinet. Neither he nor Lulu could stand to see a television sitting out. Too middle class.

  “Samson, where’s your ledger?”

  “Has nothing to do with Jefferson or his descendants, my dear.”

  “No, but it has a lot to do with Kimball Haynes.”

  He turned up the sound, and she grabbed the remote out of his hand and shut off the television.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?” His face reddened.

  “I might ask the same of you. I hardly ever reach you on your mobile phone anymore. When I call places where you tell me you’re going to be, you aren’t there. I may not be the brightest woman in the world, Samson, but I’m not the dumbest either.”

  “Oh, don’t start the perfume accusation again. We settled that.”

  “What is in that ledger?”

  “Nothing that concerns you. You’ve never been interested in my business before, why now?”

  “I entertain your customers often enough.”

  “That’s not the same as being interested in my business. You don’t care how I make the money so long as you can spend it.”

  “You’re clever, Samson, much more clever than I am, but I’m not fooled. You aren’t going to sidetrack me about money. What is in that ledger?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then why didn’t you let those women go through it? Kimball read it. That makes it part of the evidence.”

  He shot out of his chair and in an instant towered over her, his bulk an assault against her frailty without his even lifting a hand. He shouted. “You keep your mouth shut about that ledger, or so help me God, I’ll—”

  For the first time in their marriage Lucinda did not back down. “Kill me?” she screamed in his face. “You’re in some kind of trouble, Samson, or you’re doing something illegal.”

  “Keep out of my life!”

  “You mean get out of your life,” she snarled. “Wouldn’t that make it easier for you to carry on with your mistress, whoever she is?”

  Menace oozed from his every pore. “Lucinda, if you ever mention that ledger to anyone, you will regret it far more than you can possibly understand. Now leave me alone.”

  Lucinda replied with an icy calm, frightening in itself. “You killed Kimball Haynes.”

  47

  The squad car, Deputy Cooper at the wheel, picked up an urgent dispatch. She swerved hard right, slammed the car into reverse, and shot toward Whitehall Road. “Hang on, Mrs. H.”

  Mrs. Hogendobber, eyes open wide, could only suck in her breath as the car picked up speed, siren wailing and lights flashing.

  “Yehaw!” Harry braced herself against the dash.

  Vehicles in front of them pulled quickly to the side of the road. One ancient Plymouth puttered along. Its driver also had a lot of miles on him. Coop sucked up right behind him and blasted the horn as well. She so astonished the man that he jumped up in his seat and cut hard right. His Plymouth rocked from side to side but remained upright.

  “That was Loomis McReady.” Mrs. Hogendobber pressed her nose against the car window, only to be sent toward the other side of the car when Cynthia tore around a curve. “Thank God for seat belts.”

  “Old Loomis ought not to be on the road.” Harry thought elderly people ought to take a yearly driver’s test.

  “Up ahead,” Deputy Cooper said.

  Mrs. Hogendobber grasped the back of the front seat to steady herself while she looked between Harry’s and Cynthia’s heads. “It’s Samson Coles.”

  “Going like a bat out of hell, and in his Wagoneer too. Those things can’t corner and hold the road.” Harry felt her shoulders tense.

  “Look!” Mrs. Hogendobber could now see, once they were out of another snaky turn, that a car in front of Samson’s sped even faster than his own.

  “Holy shit, it’s Lucinda! Excuse me, Miranda, I didn’t mean to swear.”

  “Under the circumstances—” Miranda never finished that sentence because a second set of sirens screeched from the opposite end of the road.

  “You’ve got them now,” Harry gloated.

  As soon as Lucinda saw Sheriff Rick Shaw’s car coming toward her, she flashed her lights and stopped. Cooper, hot on Samson’s tail, slowed since she thought he’d brake, but he didn’t. He swerved around Lulu’s big brown Wagoneer on the right-hand side, one set of wheels grinding into a runoff ditch. Beaver Dam Road lay just ahead, and he meant to hang a hard right.

  Sheriff Shaw stopped for Lucinda, who was crying, sobbing, screaming, “He’ll kill me! He’ll kill me!”

  “Ladies, this is dicey,” Cooper warned as she, too, plowed into the runoff ditch to the right of Lucinda. The squad car tore out huge hunks of earth and bluestone before reaching the road again.

  Samson gunned the red Wagoneer toward Beaver Dam, which wasn’t a ninety-degree right but a sharp, sharp reverse thirty-degree angle heading northeast off Whitehall Road. It was a punishing turn under the best of circumstances. Just as Samson reached the turn, Carolyn Maki, in her black Ford dually, braked for the stop sign. Samson hit his brakes and sent his rear end skidding out from underneath him. He overcorrected by turning hard right. The Wagoneer flipped over twice, finally coming to rest on its side. Miraculously, the dually remained untouched.

  Carolyn Maki opened her door to assist Samson.

  Cooper screeched to a stop next to the truck and leapt out of the squad car, gun in hand. “Get back in the truck,” she yelled at Carolyn.

  Harry started to open her door, but the strong hand of Mrs. Hogendobber grasped her neck from behind. “Stay put.”

  This did not prevent either one of them from hitting the automatic buttons to open the windows so they could hear. They stuck their heads out.

  Cooper sprinted to the car where Samson clawed at the driver’s door, his head pointing skyward as the car rested on its right side. Oblivious of the minor cuts on his face and hands, he thrust open the door and crawled out head first, only to stare into the barrel of Cynthia Cooper’s pistol.

  “Samson, put your hands behind your head.”

  �
��I can explain everything.”

  “Behind your head!”

  He did as he was told. A third squad car pulled in from Beaver Dam Road, and Deputy Cooper was glad for the assistance. “Carolyn, are you okay?”

  “Yes,” a wide-eyed Carolyn Maki called from her truck.

  “We’ll need a statement from you, and one of us will try to get it in a few minutes so you can go home.”

  “Fine. Can I get out of the truck now?”

  Cooper nodded yes as the third officer frisked Samson Coles. The wheels of his Jeep were still spinning.

  Carolyn walked over to Mrs. Hogendobber and Harry, now waiting outside the squad car.

  Harry heard Sheriff Shaw’s voice on the special radio. She picked up the receiver, the coiled cord swinging underneath. “Sheriff, it’s Harry.”

  “Where’s Cooper?” came his gruff response.

  “She’s holding Samson Coles with his hands behind his head.”

  “Any injuries?”

  “No—unless you count the Wagoneer.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  The sheriff left Lucinda Coles with one of his deputies. He was less than half a mile away, so he arrived in an instant. He strode purposefully over to Samson. “Read him his rights.”

  “Yes, sir,” Cooper said.

  “All right, handcuff him.”

  “Is that necessary?” Samson complained.

  The sheriff didn’t bother to respond. He sauntered over to the Wagoneer and stood on his tiptoes to look inside. Lying on the passenger side window next to the earth was a snub-nosed .38.

  48

  “Copious in his indignation, he was.” Miranda held the attention of her rapt audience. She had reached the point in her story where Samson Coles, being led away to the sheriff’s car, hands cuffed behind his back, started shouting. He didn’t want to go to jail. He hadn’t done anything wrong other than chase his wife down the road with his car, and hasn’t every man wanted to bash his wife’s head in once in a while? “Wasn’t it Noel Coward who wrote, ‘Women are like gongs, they should be struck regularly’?”