The Lincoln Letter

by William Martin

  “The white folks did,” said Diana. “No ice cream for the slaves.”

  They had crossed into Virginia and were headed east for Washington. Once they were sure that the National Park Police or the Virginia Highway Patrol weren’t on their tails, they had relaxed and gone to work. Peter read Whitman. Evangeline and Diana studied the copies of the McNealy letters that Volpicelli had given them. Henry drove and offered opinions.

  Peter read the Whitman aloud off his iPad, “‘An Irish corporal from one of the Massachusetts regiments, initials JM—’”

  “Jeremiah Murphy?” said Evangeline.

  “‘—suffering a serious abdominal wound, sometimes speaks with a brogue that’s as Irish as Paddy’s Pig. But when he raves from pain or fever, he sounds like an educated Boston man. And always he speaks in a voice resembling rough gravel sluicing down a stream. This war has produced many mysteries, large and small, in my personal experience. This is surely one of the strangest.’”

  “Is he telling us that Halsey Hutchinson and Jeremiah Murphy were one in the same?” asked Evangeline.

  “It sounds that way,” said Peter. “If Halsey Hutchinson ran because of the murder of Constance Wood, he might have hidden out in his old regiment, where he had friends. He survives to Second Hatcher’s Run, is wounded, brought back, then tries to peddle the daybook for a presidential pardon.”

  “I wonder if he ever got it,” said Evangeline.

  “The pardon?” said Peter. “Lincoln’s offer came on the day Booth shot him, so probably not.”

  “Did this Halsey carry the daybook through the war?” asked Diana. “Would it have survived in his rucksack through two and a half years of fighting?”

  “He didn’t have it,” said Evangeline. “Not according to the McNealy letters.”

  “So McNealy had it?” asked Diana.

  “He seems to know where it is,” said Evangeline. “He never comes out and says he has it, though, not even in the last letter.” She read: “‘Dear Jane, I am getting close to doing something that will guarantee the future for us all. I have played the game for four years. I have done what I had to. I see a way out. Watch your papers for the name of Benjamin Wood in a week or two, then watch for me a week later. I hope you will have me in place of my brother. We both loved you.’”

  Diana said, “He sounds like a good soul.”

  “A lost soul,” said Evangeline.

  “It also sounds like he’s planning to blackmail the congressman who wrote Fort Lafayette,” said Peter.

  “But after that,” said Evangeline, “there’s nothing more from him.”

  “So maybe he got back to that little dirt farm and lived happily ever after,” said Henry, “screwin’ his brother’s wife and raisin’ his brother’s boys with the bucks he made in the big city in the big war.”

  “So much of this is about speculating,” said Peter, “and there are big spaces that we never fill. That’s what makes the Lincoln letter so tantalizing.”

  “Maybe we can track McNealy in the newspapers,” said Evangeline.

  “That can be your job tonight,” said Peter.

  “My job?” Evangeline looked at Diana. “When you wonder why I didn’t want to get married, it’s under the heading: ‘Likes to Give Out Little Jobs.’”

  “You brought it up,” said Peter.

  “Add,” she said, “‘Tries to make it sound like your fault.’ But in this case, he’s right.”

  Henry chuckled. “Hey, No-Pete, when a lady says, ‘He’s right.’ A man should get out his pen and write down the good news.”

  Peter said to Evangeline, “Tell me again, how am I right?”

  “If McNealy had the diary at the end, he’s the one we should be studying, because he’s what you always call the bridge.”

  “Bridge?” asked Diana.

  “The bridge between the past and the present,” said Peter, “the one that lets us walk across the years, over the big knowledge gaps, directly back to what we’re searching for.”

  “Bridges is damn hard to miss,” said Henry.

  “I think it’s a metaphor,” said Diana.

  “Well, ma’am, I don’t know nothin’ ’bout no metaphors”—Henry winked at Peter—“but you folks ought to be able to find a bridge with all your Ph.D.’s and BAs and MFAs and whatnot.”

  “I don’t think any of us have an MFA,” said Evangeline.

  “I do,” said Henry. “MFA, Motherfuckin’ All-American.”

  “That should be MFAA,” said Evangeline.

  Henry looked at Peter. “No-Pete, sometimes I think I ought to call the E-Ticket the Nit Ticket.”

  “It’s Nit Picker,” said Evangeline.

  “Nit Ticket sounds better,” said Henry. “Assonance along with back-end alliteration, where those two t’s match. Nit … Ticket. And we need a nickname for Miss Diana back there.”

  As if she had no time for nonsense, Diana said, “Call me Professor Wilmington.”

  “Not yet, we can’t. You ain’t Professor Nothin’ till you get tenure.” Henry almost always had time for nonsense. It was his way of clearing the air, or fogging it. “Your mama might’ve named you for Diana Ross, or Lady D, as I like to call her, and you nice and skinny like her, and you carry yourself like her, too, all sure of yourself.”

  Peter glanced into the backseat. Diana’s coffee skin had started to take on a blush. She had many fine qualities, but a sense of humor about herself, especially when she was under pressure, was not one of them.

  Henry kept talking. “Callin’ you Assistant Professor Wilmington may be truthful but it’s a mouthful, so we call you what you’ll be when we get done with this weekend.”

  “What’s that?” she said.

  “Lady T. That’s T for ‘tenure.’”

  Peter also knew that Diana could laugh as well as anyone. And it took a few seconds, but the laugh finally came out, deep, throaty, sexy. She liked her nickname.

  * * *

  By the time they pulled up in front of the Willard around five o’clock, backup had arrived.

  Henry had called, and Peter had promised to pay.

  A large black man in a well-cut black suit and black shirt was waiting on the sidewalk.

  “J-Man made it all the way to the NBA,” whispered Henry. “Could stick the jumper from the baseline … the other baseline.”

  “Hence the nickname,” said Peter.

  “But just a nano too slow playin’ D on his own baseline.”

  “Hence the job as D.C. muscle. Am I paying for his Armani suit?” said Peter.

  “He’s workin’ at a professional discount,” said Henry. “Him and me done business before. He also has a feller named Ricky the Rican, a little PR dude who’s usually watchin’ from somewhere we can’t see. They make a good team.”

  Henry introduced James “J-Man” Johnson. “You’ll be watchin’ the ladies, J. They be in the suite, doin’ book work while me and No-Pete do the fieldwork.”

  J-Man gave the ladies an eyeball over his sunglasses, a nod, just enough to say he was cool and all would be well.

  Peter could see Diana’s eyes light up. She liked the looks of J-Man.

  Henry said, “Ricky makin’ himself hard to see?”

  J-Man said, “I don’t know no Ricky.”

  Henry winked, as if he got the ruse. No Ricky. Yeah, right.

  J-Man then extended his hand toward the hotel door, “Ladies, allow me to escort you up to your suite.”

  Evangeline and Diana went into the hotel.

  J-Man turned to Peter and said, “The suit is Zegna, not Armani.”

  Peter looked at Henry. “Good hearing, too.”

  * * *

  Half an hour later, Henry pulled up in front of Jefferson Sorrel’s house. “Time to eyeball this old boy. He knows more than he’s lettin’ on.”

  They didn’t bother to reconnoiter from the park across the street. Sorrel had said that his neighbors were on vacation. And he lived on a corner lot, so nobody was watching from
either side.

  They went up onto the porch and rang the bell. No answer.

  They rang again. Nothing.

  Peter took out his cell phone and called Sorrel’s number. He heard the phone ringing. Once, twice.

  “Maybe he went to Florida, after all,” said Henry.

  “I’m calling his cell.”

  Henry furrowed his brow and cocked his ear.

  Ring. Ring.

  Then Henry walked to the end of the porch and looked toward the back, where a one-car garage faced the side street.

  Ring. Ring. Ring.

  They came off the porch, followed the sound to the garage, and peered in the side window.

  Ring. Ring. Ring.

  There was no car, just a lawn mower, a ringing telephone, and a body: Jefferson Sorrel.

  Peter saw him first. “Oh, shit.”

  Henry grabbed Peter by the arm. “Go slow.”

  “But—”

  “No need to go fast.” Henry took out a pair of thin leather driving gloves and put them on. Then he opened the side door and they stepped in. “That old boy’s dead.”

  Henry went closer, crouched, looked.

  “Should we take his pulse?” asked Peter.

  “He ain’t breathin’, and from the looks of the lividity—” Henry craned his neck to study the face pressed against an oil stain on the garage floor. “—the way the blood’s poolin’ on the right side of his face, he been dead about ten or twelve hours. Somebody wants us to think he died pullin’ on his lawn mower string.”

  “But the overhead door is closed.”

  “If they injected him with something to make it look like a heart attack, they didn’t want anybody to see it go down.”

  “Well,” said Peter, “that lawn mower was kind of balky. He cursed it a few times. And he didn’t look too good yesterday. Maybe a heart attack is really what happened.”

  “Yeah, and maybe if I get up real slow, my knees won’t creak.” Henry stood … real slow. “Nope. They creaked.”

  “Shouldn’t we call somebody?”

  “No-Pete, you are not thinkin’. Do you really want to spend three hours with the police from Arlington, Virginia, when they show up and start playin’ CSI ?”

  Peter knew that Henry was right.

  “If the guy who found the Lincoln letter is dead because he knew that ‘something’ was a diary, anyone who’s lookin’ for the diary could be next. So—”

  “Do we just leave him?”

  “No. We take care of him anonymous-like, once we’re gone.”

  They stepped out again, onto the pathway beside the house. No one was walking by on the sidewalk out front, so they started toward the street.

  Then Peter said, “Wait.”

  “What?”

  He pointed to the side door of the house, which led into the cellar.

  “You sure?” said Henry. “The longer we hang around, the more dangerous it gets.”

  Peter gave a jerk of the head. “If he still has the engraving, I want to see it.”

  “Which engraving?”

  “First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation. The one that had the letter hidden in the backing.”

  Henry grumbled, then turned the knob. The door opened. “Unlocked. Maybe they really did just catch him in the garage while he was doin’ his chores, just like any old fat white guy on a Sunday morning, and they figured that was as good a place as any to whack him.”

  * * *

  As soon as they stepped onto a little landing halfway down the cellar stairs, Henry closed the door and pulled out the Magnum.

  They stood for a moment in the semi-dark and listened.

  The refrigerator was humming in the kitchen at the top of the stairs. There was no other sound.

  Peter pointed down. Just a hunch. So down they went.

  They stopped, waited, listened some more. Then Henry flipped on the lights. They were in what had been called a rumpus room back in the fifties: knotty pine paneling, stone fireplace, sofa, TV. But this was also a showroom for Jefferson Sorrel’s collection, displayed in glass cases and frames, away from the sun, away from the prying eyes of neighbors and deliverymen, the kind of collection a man kept just for himself.

  Peter looked around and whispered, “Wow.”

  “‘Wow,’ what?”

  “Look at all this.”

  One case held muskets: Springfields and Enfields, along with a breech-loading cavalry carbine. The others held books, from Bruce Catton’s three-volume Army of the Potomac to David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln, or marvelous engravings of the major players, Lincoln, Lee, Grant, framed wet-plates from Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner, a whole tray of carefully arranged cartes de visite. And on the walls hung pennants, framed under glass: a Confederate naval ensign above the fireplace, a Union National flag with thirty-five stars arrayed in a circle above the sofa.

  “If I owned all this, I’d protect it,” said Peter.

  Henry pointed to wires running from the back of each frame and case, up to the dropped ceiling. “I guess he liked to look like he had nothin’. Doin’ the collector’s rope-a-dope, pretendin’ this is just a little bungalow in the ’burbs. But the room’s hot. You touch anything, alarms go off. Probably wired right to the police station.”

  “Wow.”

  “I swear, No-Pete, we don’t have time for any more ‘wows.’ Quit your ‘wowin and tell me what we lookin’ for.”

  “That.” Peter pointed to the far corner, near a worktable. On an easel, beneath a canvas covering, was a picture frame, about two feet by three feet. “I hope.”

  They went over to it. Henry inspected for wires, electric eyes, lasers. Then he carefully took one edge of the canvas and lifted to reveal the famous engraving: First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation.

  “Do we have Bingo?” said Henry.

  “Bingo,” said Peter. “Or wow. Take your pick.”

  Henry flipped on the light over the worktable and aimed it at the engraving.

  Peter glanced at the table: scissors, matte knives, rulers, various sizes of glass, large sheets of matte board, lengths of frame, some mahogany, some stainless. “It looks like Sorrel did his own conservation work. He was replacing the old materials with acid-free paper and matting.”

  “And UV-filtering glass?”

  “This is black and white, so it’s less susceptible to sunlight, but a good conservator always uses UV.” Peter looked closer. “A steel engraving, and there’s a little legend, ‘New York Independent, 1866.’ They were a publisher. This is the version that was given out with the book, Six Months in the White House, by Francis Carpenter. He was the painter. The engravings were made from his work by a guy named Ritchie.”

  “What’s it worth?”

  “Fifteen hundred, maybe. You can get an artist’s proof engraving signed by Carpenter himself, 1866, for twenty-five hundred on eBay. So—”

  “Old Sorrel made a good deal. Worth ten times what he paid for it.”

  “Maybe that’s why Dawkins is so angry.”

  “Always screw the black guy.”

  “At least Dawkins is alive.”

  “For now,” said Henry.

  Peter asked Henry to turn the frame over. That revealed the back of the engraving fitted neatly against the front matte, which pressed against the glass.

  Peter pointed at the little tacks around the edge of the frame. “You see here, he’s taken off the brown paper sheath that covers the whole package. And he’s removed the inner backing which would have been a heavy-duty cardboard made from the same high-acid paper that they used for most other things back then.”

  “The engraving, too? Is that on acid paper?”

  Peter nodded. “That’s why it’s so yellowed around the edges. Can’t do much about it. But replacing everything around it with acid-free materials will make a big difference in its long-term survival.”

  Peter stepped back, studied, thought, scratched his head, looked around the floor, looked behind him. An
d there: the wastebasket under the worktable. It was stuffed with old brown covering and cardboard backing.

  Peter reached, and Henry raised a finger—no touching without gloves.

  The backing had been folded into four pieces and broken apart to fit in the wastebasket. Henry pulled out a piece and put it on the table.

  “Just as I thought.” Peter brought his face close to the cardboard. “See the ghosting?”

  Imprinted on the faded gray cardboard was the square where the Lincoln letter had been secreted.

  “The sun heats the engraving from the front, through the glass, cooks the letter against the acid backing, and projects an image of the iron gall ink onto the backing.” Peter saw a pair of white cotton conservator’s gloves at the corner of the table and put them on.

  “Now you can touch stuff,” said Henry.

  Peter pulled the lamp over and saw the reverse image of the letter, almost illegible, and above it, half the outline of the envelope, which had been partially protected from sunlight and heat by the matting. He pointed out the signature. “‘A. Lincoln.’ As plain as day. If we studied this for a while, I bet we could read the whole letter.”

  Henry pulled out his phone and took a picture of it. Then he lifted the rest of the backing out of the wastebasket and laid it out on the worktable.

  After a moment’s inspection, Peter said, “At the risk of repeating myself, wow.”

  “What now?”

  “A second letter. Look.” With his little finger, Peter pointed to another square of discolored backing and more words.

  Henry took another picture.

  “Let’s just take the backing,” said Peter.

  “How about we find the second letter. It must be here someplace.”

  “If it’s here,” said Peter, “it’s in his sanctum sanctorum.”

  “Say what?”

  “His special place. Every collector has one. It might be a safety deposit box or a safe right in the house, hidden in a wall or in the floor.”

  Henry looked around a bit.

  “Don’t bother,” said Peter. “If we find it, we’ll never be able to—”

  Bing bong. Upstairs, the front doorbell rang.

  “Stay still,” Henry snapped from assistant into bodyguard, pulled his gun, stepped to the bottom of the stairs, and flipped out the lights.