Blood & Ivy

by Paul Collins

  There were also those who wanted to be found: the very young, the very elderly, and the very drunk, all of whom were prone to wandering off into trouble. In a seaport like Boston, the immediate danger was drowning, and in those cases, the search party was best. Sometimes these arrived in time, and sometimes, as with a drunken carpenter recently found floating facedown in an F Street quarry, they most certainly did not.

  And then there were the robbed, who if still alive also wanted to be found. Here the tip-off was the carrying of cash. If the missing fellow was a deliveryman or messenger, a landlord or a jeweler—especially if the newspaper ads for him noted that he had been carrying $100, $500, even $1,000 or more—then the odds turned grim. The happiest result in such cases was that the man had run off with the money himself or had stopped off in a tavern and drunk it all. That fall, the city had seen a circus around the disappearance of a deliveryman, whose desperate friends even consulted mesmerists. One seer gravely announced that the fellow had been killed and buried in a stable on Sudbury Street; men spent two days shoveling out horse manure and digging down into the fragrant dirt floors before giving up. No, scoffed another mesmerist, the missing man was a raving lunatic and had locked himself into the run-down Howard’s Hotel in New York City. That city’s police, alerted by telegraph, had no more luck than the manure shovelers. When the deliveryman finally turned up, it was in neither of these places but on a steamboat bound for Albany—much confused, and with his cargo perhaps distilled into a heavy hangover.

  But it was the cases involving “aberration of mind,” and particularly suicidal despair, that were the hardest to grapple with. Families were reluctant to talk about them. Moreover, a determined man or woman could reach heavily wooded land within the space of an hour from Boston and, in the throes of brain trouble, might lose themselves so thoroughly that they couldn’t reemerge even if they wanted to. There was still the open case of Franklin Taylor, lost that June, who had been miserable with delirium tremens; he’d last been seen wandering on a country road out past Concord, and search parties had failed to find him ever since. If he’d hung himself in the denser stretches of those woods, his body might not become visible until midwinter had stripped all the leaves from the trees.

  But that answer—suicide—just didn’t make sense this time.

  I saw Dr. Parkman, the old Registry of Deeds messenger insisted.

  Was it light out? Did you speak to him?

  No, but . . .

  The lead would probably go nowhere; most proved useless.

  Tukey had his own suspicions about Parkman, and they didn’t involve wandering moodily around lonely woodlands or empty churches. The doctor’s mental ailments might have explained a disappearance at other points in his life, but his actions that day, just before the last reliable sighting outside the Medical College, didn’t sound like those of a man about to go hang or drown himself. He’d still been collecting his rents; he’d bought a head of lettuce that he was to return for in a few minutes. Another new lead showed that he’d stopped by the offices of a religious newspaper on some minor business and told the proprietor he’d be back the next day. And, well, the man had just had his dentures fixed. Why would he have bothered, if he’d known they were to end up at the bottom of Charles River?

  DERASTUS CLAPP was almost embarrassed to be leading three fellow detectives up the steps of the medical school again that Tuesday. He’d been on the force for some twenty years, and he knew when his time was being wasted. The only person with much enthusiasm for going over the grounds again was Kingsley, Parkman’s nettlesome underling. The property agent had, as ever, tenaciously attached himself to their search.

  Clapp wearily knocked on the side door to the janitor’s apartment, and a surprised Littlefield peered out. Yes, they informed him, they were here to search the building again.

  Dr. Bigelow was nearby, and the janitor looked to him for guidance. But the busy young doctor had his own problems. Phineas Gage, the marvelous man brained by an iron rod, had proven about as unstable as—well, a man brained with an iron rod. Rumors had him begging on nearby blocks, which, if true, was an embarrassment to the school.

  “Show them everything,” Dr. Bigelow replied, dismissing the question. One more police search would hardly make a difference to their week now.

  The officers humored Kingsley in his insistence on thoroughness. They began in the janitor’s apartment, where they looked for a body under Littlefield’s bed, in Littlefield’s bed, and then—in the kitchen crockery. This was ostensibly to find any belongings of Parkman’s, but Kingsley thought he could hear the officers snickering at him.

  “Let us go into Dr. Webster’s apartments,” one of the detectives announced drily. It took several knocks, then pounding, to roust the absentminded Dr. Webster; he let them in and showed them once again through his lecture hall and his chemistry lab, just as he had the previous day. The officers, under pointless orders to search again, scarcely tried to hide their discontent.

  “We can’t believe, for a moment, Sir, that it is necessary to search your apartments,” one of them finally blurted out.

  The rooms about Webster’s lab were scattered with the thick grapevines and leather he’d been using in commercial experiments; nearby was a reused tea chest where he’d absently left some minerals heaped up. Clapp walked about, observed the laboratory equipment in respectful incomprehension, then paused before the door of a storeroom; it looked like it served some special purpose. What, he wanted to know, was the room for?

  “There’s where I keep my dangerous articles,” Webster explained.

  The old officer pulled a face and thrust his head in to make a very brisk inspection of the shelves. Clapp then pointed to the next door, an unprepossessing portal with a pane of frosted glass set in it.

  “What place is this?”

  “That is Dr. Webster’s private privy,” the janitor explained. This presented an even less appealing investigatory prospect than the roomful of chemicals had.

  “Gentlemen,” Dr. Webster added, leading them to the front of the lab’s storage areas, “here is another room that you have not looked into.”

  But there were not many places left to find a missing man except for the obvious: the various crawl spaces under the building. Littlefield, who possessed the one key to the dissecting receptacle, threw open the floor hatch for the officers; they peered inside its foul recesses with a lantern until their curiosity was satisfied. The officers then followed the janitor through a trap door and down onto the dirt cellar, and as the ceiling progressively lowered, just one hardy detective stuck with the janitor as he navigated the muddy perimeter where the river water washed in. After they emerged, old Detective Clapp was to be found chatting with Webster at the laboratory bench, their forms framed by the window that looked out toward the hospital.

  Derastus tried to put the best light he could on their investigation. “If we search the college first,” he explained, “people round here will not object to our searching their houses.” But it had clearly been a waste of time. Thanksgiving was a couple of days off. Three-thousand-dollar reward or not, soon they’d find better rewards at home than in crawling around cellars.

  THE DETECTIVES returned to city hall to find Tukey’s office cluttered with an improbable array of patent-office contraptions. A thief they’d arrested the night before, for breaking into a local brush factory and raiding its cashbox, was an ex-con whose efforts to go straight had repeatedly been thwarted by his habit of sawing through walls and floors to burglarize adjoining businesses. After two seven-year stretches in prison, the accused was now trying to invent new machinery for brick manufacturing, but he needed capital—so he’d merely gone to the nearest available source. From his cell, the would-be inventor had piteously asked for his patent models to be sent to Tukey, the better to plead for leniency. And here they sat, a mute testament to how a clever man might still stumble onto a path toward prison.

  He’d likely get another seven years, and th
en, like as not, he’d be caught stealing again.

  Theft was the simplest and most elemental of misdeeds; its flows of goods were the visible ripples that played across the surface where many other submerged crimes lurked. With Parkman’s search parties again turning up nothing, that Tuesday night Tukey reached for his last lure: the love of Boston thieves for selling watches. If Parkman had been killed for his money, only a truly disciplined thief would stop at the man’s wallet. A gold watch, readily convertible to cash, would simply be too good to pass up. While a murderer might not rise to the bait of a reward, an unwitting fence for the watch might. The key was to offer a much higher markup than the usual resale on the item, but not so much as to make someone suspicious of the ad’s true import.

  The Boston police knew their stolen goods. As a young man, Derastus Clapp had worked for years as an auctioneer, and even before joining the force he had shown a penchant for personally tracking down auction room swindlers. And so, as the officers wrote up their ad, they knew just the right amount to offer.

  $100 REWARD will be paid for Information which leads to the recovery of a gold double-bottomed lepine turned case-watch, ladies’ size, full plate, four-holed jeweled, gold dial, black figures, steel hands, no second hands, no cap.

  Marked, F. B. Adams & Sons, St. John street, London. No. 61,351.

  FRANCIS TUKEY, City Marshal,

  Police Office, City Hall.

  Boston, November 27th.

  Parkman’s peculiar timepiece made it the perfect ploy, as no newspaper reader would suspect that the ad was related to his case. Everyone knew that doctors carried masculine watches with a sweep hand, in order to take pulses. But Parkman, indifferent to style and long out of clinical practice, carried a ladies’ model with no second hand.

  The usual arrests of a Tuesday evening rolled in, along with more unconfirmed leads in the case: the doctor had been seen in Lynn, he’d been spotted grabbing a traveler’s horse by the reins on the Salem road, and so forth. The most intriguing visitor that evening was a Cambridge merchant who recalled crossing a bridge at four in the morning the previous Saturday; he’d seen a suspicious character carrying a very heavy parcel across the spans—and “so disliked the looks of the man, that he shunned him by crossing to the opposite side of the street, and started immediately for his residence.”

  But even as the hours on the city marshal’s own watch ticked onward after the ad ran, still there was no discovery of the living doctor, no finding of a body, and no response about Adams & Sons watch No. 61,351. Tukey went home in defeat. Dr. Parkman had now been missing for over a hundred hours. The doctor’s gold case watch, if not rewound, had long since stopped.

  Part III

  THE SUSPECT

  9

  THANKSGIVING BY THE FIRE

  THE MORNING OF WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 28, WAS A COLD and sober one. As Bostonians arose and clutched their nightgowns against the chill, at least some lacked their customary hangovers. Back in the summer, the temperance minister Father Mathew had thundered through Massachusetts, inveighing against the evils of alcohol to a crowd of twelve thousand on Boston Common, and converting half the inmates of the Cambridge Jail. And so now even the Medical College’s janitor—fond as he was of staying up late, dancing, and the crackling shuffle of a new deck of cards—had, like so many local husbands, found himself rather confoundedly spending his evenings at the Sons of Temperance hall.

  But whether Ephraim was sober or not, Mrs. Littlefield still could not persuade him to ever like getting up in the morning.

  Though his family’s quarters in the basement of the Medical College at least made the walk to work a short one, Ephraim’s acknowledgment of the new day was grudging. His building duties required that he rise in the early hours to stoke the stoves, not least for his basement neighbor. Earlier that season they’d stowed a load of soft coal in a bin between the lab stairs and the privy, and another load of hard coal near the assay furnace, where it would see slow but steady use well into the spring. Perhaps some professors liked the crisp, cold air of November, but the weather simply chilled Dr. Webster, who always needed to stay warm; the chemistry professor was, as Ephraim put it, “a cold-feeling kind of man.”

  One might have hoped that Wednesday, being the day before Thanksgiving, would see professors arriving late, if they came in at all. But a footfall upon the back steps announced Professor Webster’s arrival—not just on time but early. Lately Ephraim had been freed from firing Webster’s stoves in the morning; it seemed there were experiments the doctor didn’t want disturbed. Still, perhaps Professor Webster would change his mind, it being so early and the room so cold. Littlefield dressed, shuffled out into the basement hallway between his apartment and the academic rooms, and turned the knob on the lab door.

  It wouldn’t budge.

  This was vexing for the janitor. The doctor had taken to locking his doors, and while theft was always a concern, it made cleaning and maintaining the college rooms a nuisance. The door wouldn’t open, and Ephraim could hear the doctor inside. What was Webster doing that made him oblivious to knocks and the rattling of the doorknob? What were his experiments?

  Quietly, Ephraim bent down and placed his eye at the keyhole.

  Still nothing: the lowered latch inside the door covered the keyhole. A disappointment, but one for which no janitor worth his salt would be unprepared. Ephraim had a trusty utility knife, and the door possessed a thin section of partitioning that could be pried up by the workings of a blade. The task would hardly excite the attention of anyone who should pass by; what sight in a building was more unremarkable than grounds staff fiddling about with a door repair?

  He maneuvered the knife noiselessly at first, pausing periodically to listen to Dr. Webster at work within the lab. And then a small sliver of the wood detached with a loud crack. The movements inside the lab stopped.

  Ephraim froze in place; he had been heard. Also, he had been seen—by his wife. On the cellar stairs behind him, Mrs. Littlefield stood unamused, watching his goings-on.

  Come back! she hissed.

  Ephraim slid away from the door and back into their basement kitchen, as chastened as any of their children. What was the point of rising early if you were locked out of work, and also forbidden to play?

  But with the children and her visiting niece also occupying Mrs. Littlefield’s attention, it was not long before Ephraim found a chance to step back out into the passage between his home and Webster’s lab. He crept up to the entrance, and this time he softly lay down on the cold brick floor, in the grit and dust his broom had missed. A glimmer of light shone out from under the door, and the janitor silently moved his head closer to peek through the gap.

  He could see inside—just a little.

  Before him stretched the expanse of the lab floor, the legs of tables, the cold metal of an unused furnace, and then, entering into his line of sight, the shoes and pant legs of Dr. Webster. Only the professor’s legs were visible, sometimes drawing near to the door, sometimes farther away, sometimes nearer again. If he should find me here . . .

  The legs stopped in their movements; and then a scraping and dragging sound tore through the air. A pause, then another scrape. Then another: Ephraim could see Webster’s hand dragging a coal bucket used to feed the laboratory furnace. A hand and a sleeve reached down again and brought the bucket to rest near the assay furnace, by the lab’s privy. The doctor now lingered in that corner of the room, but whether in an absent professorial reverie or hard at work, there was no way to tell; the motions of his hands were hidden from sight.

  Dr. Webster was as far away from the lab door as he would get; and having lain there for five minutes, Ephraim could count on soon being missed back in his home. He quietly drew himself up off the floor and padded back through the basement passage and into the warmth of his kitchen.

  AS ALWAYS, there was work for Ephraim around the building; but it being the day before Thanksgiving, there also was shopping to do with Mrs. Littlefield. T
heir largest task had been made unexpectedly easier the day before when, in a fit of generosity, Dr. Webster had told him to go to a local provisioner—Do you know where Mr. Foster’s is, by the Howard Athenaeum? The place was a bit out of the way, actually, but the janitor could scarcely complain after Webster had jotted an order on a piece of paper and handed it to him, saying, “Take that order, and get you a nice turkey.” So now Ephraim and his wife searched past offices of lawyers and architects, past the corner police watch box and the plasterings of reward notices for Dr. Parkman, and down Howard Street, looking for the sign announcing A. A. FOSTER & CO.

  It was hard to miss: the shop was right next to the Howard Athenaeum, a Gothic building that looked more like a church than a theater. That was fitting; the site had previously been occupied by the Millerite end-of-times sect, which had chosen the plot for the imminent rapture; the parishioners had raised their building haphazardly, with the front wall leaning out worryingly, explaining that “it made but little difference as the world itself would last but a few days at the most.” Instead of the Second Coming of Christ, today the site, with a new and more stable structure, was to host a farce titled The Irish Secretary. There might be some Harvard students there, and not just in the seventy-five-cent box seats but onstage. Lately some had taken to low jaunts over to the theater to serve as extras, cavorting around as Roman centurions or, for tonight, donning the costume of liveried servants.

  But there would be no plays today for Ephraim. He and Caroline stepped into Foster’s, where the white-coated staff was busy wrapping up parcels of lard, pork, butter, and turkey for the onrush of Thanksgiving buyers. Mr. Foster read over the order—Please deliver Mr. Littlefield a nice turkey, weighing eight or nine pounds, and charge the same to me.—Dr. Webster—and opened his remaining stock to inspection. A. A. Foster’s, he liked to claim, sold the best poultry in town.