The Ironclad Alibi

by Michael Kilian

  “What do you want of me?” the manager asked, sounding as though Harry had not returned the revolver and was instead holding it to his head.

  “Were you here when Mrs. Mills came to this hotel?”

  “Yes. Of course. I must have been. I’m the manager.”

  “Did she come here alone?”

  “I believe she came in her coach.”

  “When she entered this hotel, was she alone?”

  “No one knows.”

  “No one knows? Your lobby’s about the most public place in Richmond.”

  The man finished his drink. Harry gestured to the bartender to pour another.

  “I expect she used the back stairs—what the maids and the other servants use. Nobody saw her come through the lobby.”

  “You wouldn’t find a woman of Mrs. Mills’s social station using back stairs.”

  “Yes you would, if she was calling on a gentleman who wasn’t her husband. And she wouldn’t be the only one. Your actress friend used them to visit you, at least for her arrival. With this war, it’s a problem keeping a reputable establishment.”

  “Did anyone see her?”

  “Your actress friend?”

  “Mrs. Mills!”

  “Seems not. The provost marshal’s people asked pretty near everyone. None of ’em saw her, or was willing to say so.”

  “Who would have been on duty?”

  “Cooks, maids, stable hand, baggage handler, pretty near everyone.”

  “Show me these stairs, please.”

  The staircase was at the rear of the building and served all of the hotel’s floors. At the bottom, it opened onto a hallway that led in one direction to the kitchens and in another to the cellar and a storeroom. The corridor was much trafficked, what with comings and goings for fresh bedding and supplies.

  There were three black women in the kitchen, all busy, none claiming to have remembered any white woman passing by their workplace. The same was true of a young black man loading cans of lard onto a shelf in the storeroom. “Nossuh. Ain’t no white lady come by here.”

  He’d looked to the manager before speaking.

  Harry examined the padlock hanging open on the storeroom door. It was clean and oiled and obviously had frequently been used. Going to the outside door just opposite the kitchen, he turned the knob. It was unlocked.

  “Your hotel is noted for its discretion, is it not?” Harry asked.

  “This hotel is noted for the excellence of its accommodations and genteel service to its guests,” said the manager, full of his position once again.

  “Catering to their every need,” Harry said, opening the door and stepping outside.

  The alley was narrow, barely wide enough for a cart or wagon, but led through to both side streets.

  “Maccubbin said Mills came in here because he saw his wife’s carriage waiting out in the street,” Harry said. “Where would that have been?”

  “This way,” said the manager. He led Harry to the left, past several barrelsfull of malodorous trash and a skittering rat or two. At the street, he pointed left again, to where a coachee and a hansom cab now stood waiting, both doubtless eventually bound for one of Richmond’s railroad stations.

  “It was there,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  “One of the hack drivers complained that it had been there for a long time. I went outside and saw that it was the Mills’s carriage, and so I let it be.”

  “Why is that?”

  The manager now gave Harry a very knowing look, the whole effect supercilious and oily.

  “More of your genteel service,” said Harry. “What time was that?”

  “I don’t know. Late afternoon. Still light out.”

  Harry turned back toward the alley, only to see the looming form of Nestor Maccubbin approaching at a rapid pace.

  “You there!” he shouted. “Stop!”

  Harry was not about to disobey. The hotel manager disappeared back inside.

  “I want a word with you,” Maccubbin said, speaking more quietly as he came nearer.

  Harry already had the military pass and General Lee’s note out. He presented them to Maccubbin with a flourish.

  The policeman read both over quickly. “I already know about these,” he said, thrusting them back.

  “I thought you’d best be reminded.”

  Maccubbin, who had a couple of inches on Harry, came even closer, pressing Harry back toward the alley wall.

  “You had to go to ‘old Granny,’ did you? And make a mess of this whole business.”

  “Who’s ‘old Granny’?”

  “That fussbudget General Lee. That’s what they call the old priss. A meddlesome man. And so are you, Raines.”

  “I’m merely protecting my property. Caesar Augustus is probably the most valuable slave in Richmond.”

  Maccubbin stepped back. Harry suspected he might have a more amiable nature than his conduct as a police official indicated.

  “Not now, he isn’t,” Maccubbin said. “A man bound to die in a week ain’t worth a lot to no one.”

  “How is he faring?”

  “I don’t bother myself about the welfare of murderin’ Negroes.”

  Something small ran over Harry’s foot. He moved away from the wall.

  “How would any man be faring at Castle Godwin, white or black?”

  “Better than at the old City Jail. Hell of a lot better than in Libby Prison. God, you can smell that place from here.”

  Harry looked back to the street, thinking of Miss Van Lew and her daily visits. And her incomparable morality.

  “I will see him free again,” Harry said.

  “Free?”

  “Unshackled.”

  “Raines, I do not think you understand the situation here. If your man didn’t do this, then the only explanation anyone’s going to believe is that she took her own life. Think of it, man! A suicide! And the lady bare-assed naked! In the hotel room of her old beau, a notorious gambler and wastrel and a suspected Lincolnite to boot. From common report it’s obvious you haven’t a shred of shame or care for scandal. What with actresses crawling in and out of your chamber night and day. But Mrs. Mills comes from one of the most prominent families of Richmond. So does her husband—and he’s involved in one of the most important enterprises of the war. We can’t have this, sir. Not now. Nosir.”

  “So your solution is to execute a convenient Negro, even if he didn’t do it.”

  “The rope goes where the evidence points, sir. And it points right at that man of yours.”

  Harry rubbed at his chin and moustache. The latter needed trimming; the former, a shave.

  “What about me?” he asked. “I was Mills’s rival. I was the one his wife was quarreling with.”

  “We’ve been over that. You’ve got an even better alibi than Mr. Mills has. You were dining with the president of the Confederate States of America.”

  There was a splash farther down the alley. Harry looked up to see that someone had just emptied a slop jar out the window.

  “Let’s move around to the front,” he said.

  Maccubbin nodded. At the corner, they paused as an army wagon came inching down the hill.

  “What is Mr. Mills’s alibi?” Harry asked.

  “I told you. He’s involved in an important enterprise. He was on his way home from the Ironworks when he saw his wife’s carriage. That was after you got there, so you’re both in the clear. Like I said, she’d been dead for some time.”

  “Hanged.”

  “Yes, sir. With a stout rope.”

  “And where did that come from?”

  “From over by the window. There’s a coil of rope in every room, in case of fire.”

  Harry felt an idiot. Why was he always overlooking the obvious? They moved on back toward the hotel’s main entrance. Eyeing the loungers on the gallery, Harry wondered what gossip they’d make of his promenade with Maccubbin.

  “May I go back to the room again?” he
said.

  “Raines. You’re just stirring up trouble.”

  Harry hefted his bundle. “Maybe I left more behind than this.”

  Instead of in the neat coil that was its normal state, the fire escape rope lay in a jumble some distance from the window. Harry picked it up, examining one end, where it had been cut evenly through, as though with one quick slice of a sharp knife. A woman of Arabella’s delicate strength would have had to saw it in twain.

  But why cut it at all? Why not use the whole thing?

  Maccubbin stood with arms folded. “See. A strong man cut that rope. Like your boy in Castle Godwin.”

  “He’s strong all right.”

  The chair had been put back against the wall. Harry took it to below the chandelier, peered up at the fixture, then climbed up on the chair. It creaked a bit under his weight.

  He pondered the distance from his head to the chandelier, guessing about a foot. He was six feet tall, and the ceiling was twelve feet high, the chair about two feet.

  Arabella was some eight inches shorter than he, as he had good reason to know.

  He went back to the fire rope, coiling it again.

  “How long are these supposed to be?” he asked.

  “This is a second floor room. Maybe about twenty feet. I think that’s the regulation.”

  Harry ran the line through his hands all the way to the end. He guessed that about five feet had been cut from it. Six at the most. With a knot around the chandelier pipe on one end and a noose made in the other, the length would have been even less.

  He returned to the chair, looking up, recalling again the horrible sight of Arabella’s dead face staring down at him. When he had stood on the chair to cut her down, her feet had not reached it.

  He stood on the chair again, then got off and kicked it over.

  “Easy, Raines! That’s not yours.”

  Satisfied with what he’d discovered, he reached to right the chair, but halted at the sight of something white sticking out a fraction of an inch from beneath the bedcover. Going to it, he raised the cover and pulled out what appeared to be Bella’s camisole, which was badly torn. “Your people aren’t very thorough,” he said, handing it to Maccubbin.

  Harry got down on his knees, throwing back the bedcover to admit more light as he peered beneath. He found only one other item. A black woolen stocking, also torn. There was straw caught in it.

  Sitting up on the edge of the bed, he stretched it out, then handed it to Maccubbin as well.

  “This was pulled off her,” Harry said. “With some force. She wouldn’t have done that. A woman rolls her stocking down to remove it.”

  “You’d know that, surely, Raines.”

  He stood up, studying the chandelier again. “I know something else, Maccubbin.”

  “What? That you’re wasting my valuable time?”

  “No, that I think this was done by two people.”

  Chapter 9

  The theater was one Harry had frequented as a Richmond resident before the war, spending nearly as much time backstage as he had in the seats, most particularly when Caitlin Howard had been in the cast.

  She was now in Chicago with the touring John Wilkes Booth, and, given his more pressing concerns, as far from his mind as she was from his person. Louise Devereux was his fixation now, though for reasons she could not possibly suspect.

  He made his way unimpeded to her dressing room, halting before the door and hesitating. As he had never heard her do before, she was singing. It was a French tune, and she treated it sweetly. Despite himself—and his affections for Caitlin—he was becoming increasingly smitten with this Belle of New Orleans.

  One day he would finally bring himself to accept the increasingly obvious fact that he had no future with Miss Howard—not so long as there was a Booth. One day this war would end, and Miss Devereux’s loyalties would no longer be a concern.

  He was perhaps too intimately familiar with the scope of her activities when she was operating as a Confederate agent in Washington, activities that included killing the Union Army major who’d been her lover. But he’d been about to expose her espionage role to federal authorities, and thus to the probability of a hangman’s rope.

  Belle Boyd, Harry’s distantly related cousin out in Martinsburg, had shot and killed a Yankee sergeant the previous Fourth of July in her mother’s parlor, and the Union commander there had let her go.

  Harry needed no reminder of the fact that he had himself killed a Confederate sympathizer in Baltimore. The fatal occurrence was entirely unintentional and inadvertent. His shot had been fired in the dark. And the woman had not only been a Southern spy but an assassin. All that on the scale, he still awakened at night wet with cold sweat from having relived the experience in his dreams. He felt a kinship with Louise that few could understand.

  Turning the knob, he gently pushed the door open. She was at her dressing table, faced away from him and wearing only undergarments. She was already in her theatrical wig, though the curtain was nearly an hour away. Stepping quietly within, Harry closed the door and went to her, placing his hands on her small shoulders.

  She shrieked, turned to look at him, then shrieked again. With good reason. Whoever she was, she was not Louise, and she would have no idea who he was.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, with a slight stammer. “I thought you were Louise.”

  She got to her feet, covering her chest with her arms and backing toward her changing screen. “Who are you?”

  “Harrison Raines, of the Belle Haven Plantation,” he said, smiling to ease her quite evident fear. She seemed very young. “I’m a friend of Louise’s. My apologies for the intrusion. I thought to surprise her.”

  “Well you surely surprised me.” The girl reached for her dressing gown and hurriedly put it on.

  “Where is she?” Harry asked.

  “I am not at liberty to say.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she asked me not to.”

  “Are you her understudy?”

  “She hasn’t one. But I have stepped into the role.”

  “You performed it last night?”

  “Yes. And received a good notice today in the Dispatch.”

  This would not please Louise, who had once put a hat pin into the backside of a rival actress who’d gotten better reviews.

  “Congratulations,” he said.

  “You’d better leave.”

  He took a step back toward the door.

  “When does she return?”

  The girl shrugged. “When she wishes.”

  Harry took out a carte de visite and wrote his new address on it. “Would you give her this? I’d like very much to see her.”

  She took the card. “So it would seem.”

  “I’d like very much to see you, too. On the stage.”

  “There’re still tickets for tonight.”

  “Perhaps another night.”

  The wooden-sided tunnel from Miss Van Lew’s smokehouse to her cellar had a lower ceiling than Harry had remembered from his last visit, and he banged his head on it twice in the dark. Once in the cellar, he stumbled against some barrels, making a great deal of noise and injuring his knee and ankle in the process.

  Miss Van Lew and her elderly manservant, the latter holding a pistol, awaited him at the top of the stairs.

  “I do believe you are in the wrong profession, Mr. Raines.”

  “I’m sorry. I should have carried a lantern.”

  “For the sake of my house, I am glad you did not. But do come into the parlor. Would you like some refreshment?”

  “If it’s not an imposition, and if you keep spirits in the house, I should be most appreciative of a bit of whiskey.”

  She frowned. “I do keep spirits, for necessary occasions. But why do you find it necessary now? We need our wits at their sharpest, Harrison.”

  “My nerves,” he said.

  “You’ve had an unsettling experience?”

  “I’m about to. I m
ean tonight to visit the embalmers where they have Arabella.”

  “To what purpose?”

  “I wish to examine her body. And take some time at it. I’d be greatly obliged if I might borrow one of your people to assist.”

  “You don’t think that a little ghoulish?”

  “More than a little. But I must do it.”

  “And you want one of my servants to be your lookout while you go about this macabre intrusion?”

  “Yes. That would be most useful.”

  “Harrison, there is so much else before us that is pressing.”

  “I have only a week to save Caesar Augustus. Less, now this day is most gone.”

  Her frown deepened. “Come this way.”

  She took him into her library, opening an ornate cabinet of French design and removing a crystal decanter. “I have only brandy. I hope that will suffice.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Thank you very much.”

  To his surprise, she took a tot for herself as well, though in a glass half the size of the one she gave him.

  He waited for her to seat herself in a high-backed chair, then took one near her. There was no fire in the fireplace.

  “I need to speak to Caesar Augustus,” Harry said. “I went by there earlier this evening, but that Captain Godwin would not admit me.”

  “No. You vex him. He wants the poor man dead.”

  “Could you manage to get word to Caesar Augustus?”

  She sipped her brandy and thought a moment. “There may be a way. But it might take a while.”

  “Miss Van Lew, there is no ‘while.’”

  Another sip, the last. She set down her little glass. Harry thought he was about to be dismissed.

  “Harry, we are at a desperate point here. My man in the war department has lost his courage and will not help. We must somehow get word through to the Union lines about the ironclad, and soon—if only to warn the warships on blockade station in the lower Chesapeake. We must do this, above all other things.”

  Rising, Harry finished his refreshment and set his glass down beside hers. He felt encouraged now to attend to his “ghoulish” task—if only to have it done and behind him.