by Paul Collins
11
WICKEDNESS TAKES ELEVEN
THANKSGIVING WAS GLORIOUS: GENTLE AND STILL AUTUMNAL, it spared Bostonians for just a little longer from the season’s usual lashings of cold. “What a contrast,” one local rhapsodized, “to those occasions when it has appeared, muffled in buffalo skins, amid snow and ice!” For Marshal Tukey, that was exactly the problem. The holiday meant men at home, and men at home meant feasting, and feasting meant drinking, and mild weather meant going outside. And Boston men at home feasting and drinking and then going outside meant one thing: it was time for a riot.
They didn’t need much of a reason to get started; with enough rum about, reason was altogether excused from the matter. Rioting was an honored local pastime, and even back in Tukey’s first days on the job, one had broken out because—well, nobody was quite sure why. Something to do one with one man upbraiding another’s son for misbehaving, claimed one account. There may not have been a father or son at all, in retrospect; but there was rum, and there was fighting, and by the time Tukey and his men had arrived, the crowd was a roaring, swinging, kicking mass spilling down Hamilton Street. The officers were trampled—and Tukey, in the droll parlance of a colleague, took a comprehensive set of knockings to “his knowledge-box.” In the three years since, he had suffered and dodged plenty more along the same streets.
It was also a great curiosity of Tukey’s career that, at one time in his life, he had also delivered some of those punches himself—and had supplied the often illegal rum sales that fueled them.
The marshal’s path to his job was nothing short of incredible. In the 1830s, after a youthful stint running a bakery in Salem, Francis Tukey moved to Boston and quickly fell afoul of the law. Suspected of plying the illegal liquor trade, he was hauled before a judge for viciously kicking, punching, and then tarring and feathering a police informer. A few months later, he declared himself insolvent. His next rum-selling venture netted a new charge of selling liquor without a license; a month later, Tukey was hauled in for yet another assault.
It was at around this time that he decided he was Harvard material.
Just how Marshal Tukey got out of his assault charge with a fifty-dollar fine was something, the Boston Herald later marveled, that “nobody, probably, but Tukey and the county attorney can tell.” Yet by some means Tukey not only averted prison but managed to gain admission to Harvard Law School. He passed the bar in 1844, and when he successfully applied for the city marshal job in 1846, his previous hometown paper, the Salem Register, could scarcely contain its bewilderment. Tukey was, its reporter noted, “a more promising candidate for a police court than a candidate for a police officer.” The Herald, always fond of a good scandal, vehemently attacked Tukey, issuing a pamphlet that declared him an embezzler, a necrophiliac, and a seducer of Sunday school teachers. Tukey’s second assault victim, the pamphlet claimed, had in fact later died of his injuries. The city marshal was “a three-cent rumseller, a homicide, a thief, and a suborner in perjury,” the newspaper declared. “A riper gallows apple never dangled between two uprights than this same lawbreaker.”
Or perhaps he was a reformed man—a true Harvard success story. But some old habits died hard, for a year after becoming city marshal, Tukey declared insolvency again. By the Herald’s account, the marshal had stocked up on groceries and two new suits the day before announcing himself broke. When the grocer tried to collect on the bill, the Herald claimed, Tukey told him “that he might go to hell, or wherever he pleased for it.”
For better or worse, it was on this officer of the law that the peace of Boston, and the fate of Dr. Parkman, now depended.
AND SO the Thanksgiving riot began. The day’s pugilistic festivities commenced on India Street. Walking his beat, Officer Burnham overheard something other than the usual singing and toasting from the tenements. It turned out to be the sound of rather inexpert breaking and entering, from the vicinity of Mr. Hobbs’s shop. Burnham paused and watched patiently as two men in an alleyway forced the closed wooden shutters and the first of them lofted himself inside the store. Burnham strolled up; the lookout promptly fled, and the officer peered triumphantly in through the window.
What’s this then?
It was a clean collar—or it should have been. As Burnham marched the young Irishman out into the street, a crowd swirled up around them. Fists materialized, and boots; then more officers. And that’s when Burnham was clobbered with a brick.
Some of the crime that day was of a blessedly tidier, more professional variety. With many Bostonians away visiting relatives, it was a fine day for housebreaking. One home on Fourth Street had a window pried open and some $700 in goods carried off—a silver plate, promissory notes, a vial of California gold dust, and nearly every stitch of linen and clothing in the house, from the mother’s and father’s right down to their children’s garments. But drink and a day off had largely brought out the amateurs. One would-be gang picked a house on Lexington Street that, once the would-be burglars tumbled inside, proved to have little worth stealing; they were so indignant that they tore open the home’s straw mattresses and set them afire. Another fellow, caught stealing pantaloons, appealed to his recent military service. “I fought in Mexico,” the suspect explained stiffly, “and am an honest man.” He was bundled into jail with the rest of the day’s catch.
And, as on every day for the past week, there was the matter of the missing doctor. Some men were spending the holiday still trying their luck at dragging the river, spurred on by yet another rumor—someone had been spotted dumping a package off a bridge—and by the Parkman family’s promise of $1,000 for even a dead body. Telegraph lines clicked insistently with sightings in other towns of eccentric wanderers who might or might not be Parkman. One of the more frequent reports—of shadowy appearances in the woods around Milton—did turn out to be a missing Bostonian: Benjamin Talbot, an insane man who’d gone missing not long after Parkman had. Another fellow, this one down in Braintree, proved too incoherent to identify at all; the police spared him the indignity of a holiday in jail and booked their ward into a hotel, waiting to figure out his name. But he did not, alas, appear to be Dr. Parkman.
Another fretful message came into Marshal Tukey’s office: there was an unbalanced older man answering Parkman’s description in the village of Lynn. Inquire into the matter, Officer Rice was ordered. Rice trudged back later with an explanation: the fellow was nothing more than “an honest old cobbler” whose alarming evidence of madness had been to inquire whether a local school admitted poor children.
“This,” a report marveled, “was considered proof of insanity!”
DR. PARKMAN’S disappearance also cast a strange unease over the Littlefields’ holiday in the Medical College building. Their turkey sat uneaten. It seemed a waste, as they’d had turkey every Thanksgiving; the one they’d picked up from Mr. Foster was a fine beast. But Ephraim Littlefield couldn’t shake off his sense that something was wrong. That morning, the janitor had pulled his wife aside to the bedroom, away from the children, to whisper his suspicion.
Just as much as I am standing here, he’d confided, that doctor’s involved in Parkman’s disappearance.
“What makes you think so?” his wife rebuked him. “For mercy’s sake, never mention it again. If the Professor should get hold of it—” She hardly needed to explain. Not just their livelihood but their very living quarters depended on the Medical College job. “It would make trouble,” she finished. Anyway, Littlefield had work to get done: the grapevines delivered to the lab by Mr. Sawin had been sitting out in the cellar, and the children had been scattering them all over the house and making a nuisance. Why on earth hadn’t they been stowed correctly in the lab?
He marched with her down the hallway and over to the lab door. The diminishing bundle of grapevines still sat in the corridor, along with three small pine boxes marked, in red chalk, J. W. WEBSTER, CAMBRIDGE. The various deliveries of the week were simply piling up outside the lab. Littlefield turned
the doorknob, then tugged on the locked door.
“You see?” he snapped. “Fastened.”
The two returned to their quarters, where the promise of a day’s cooking awaited. But the turkey in their larder weighed on them. Why had they been given it? In all Littlefield’s years of custodial service at the college, Dr. Webster had never shown any kindness at the holidays.
“He never gave me a present before this time,” he reasoned, “not even to the value of a cent.”
Nor had Webster, as was his usual wont, had these purchases delivered. No, he’d sent the Littlefields themselves out to a provisioner—a fine one, but many blocks away—to pick out a bird at the height of the holiday rush. It was as if the doctor had been trying to get them away from the building. And in that building, there was only one place that still hadn’t been searched at all.
So Littlefield didn’t want the turkey. He had a better plan for how he was going to spend the holiday.
I’m going to break in, he announced.
He’d had a sledgehammer lying unused in the cellar ever since the building was unveiled—the stonemasons had probably left it behind—but, of course, now that he needed it, he couldn’t find it. The local hardware stores would be closed today; and so, Littlefield had to make do with whatever he could procure: namely, a hammer, a hatchet, and a mortising chisel.
Here, he said, pressing the hammer upon his dubious wife. If you see Dr. Webster coming, hammer on the floor four times. It was a shame, really. He needed that hammer, but he couldn’t very well have her hitting the floor with a hatchet. So Littlefield lit a lamp, grabbed the hatchet and chisel, and, with his wife watching worriedly, slid down the trap door.
The medical school’s crawl space was as he’d left it two days earlier, when he’d shown Officer Fuller around. He made his way to the back of the building, the space narrowing lower and lower, to crouching and then crawling height. The damp and cold of the river surrounded Littlefield; somewhere, a few feet over his head and a house or two away, his neighbors were probably enjoying some coffee and pumpkin pie right about now. That was how any sensible person would be spending Thanksgiving afternoon. Yet here he was: stooped over, cold and alone, a hatchet in his hand. Before him, a thick layer of brickwork extended to either side, disappearing into the darkness of the crawl space. He set the chisel into the mortar between two bricks and reached for the hatchet.
He swung the flat of the hatchet hard, and again and again, the racket rebounding off the brick and the floorboards above. Bits of mortar smashed and crumbled into the dirt, scattering into the plot of land Dr. Parkman had once owned, the soil he’d given over to this very school. Still there was no sign from upstairs; Caroline hadn’t struck the floor with her hammer. It was probably safe—why would the doctor come in on a holiday? But if he did, it would be very hard for the janitor to explain what he was about to do. It wasn’t just that he was once again, for the second day in a row, breaking into the professional premises of Dr. John White Webster, MD, presently of Cambridge, esteemed member of the Geological Society of London and Erving Professor of Chemistry and Mineralogy at Harvard. It was that this time he was breaking into a very specific part of the doctor’s premises.
Littlefield was going to smash into the bottom of his toilet.
HE’D FAILED.
The janitor opened his eyes, brought the world into focus. He’d failed to wake up early, and according to the hectoring verses that had run in the local newspapers recently, a man’s character could be judged by how long he slept.
Nature requires five,
Custom gives us seven—
Laziness takes nine,
And Wickedness eleven.
At first glance, Littlefield wasn’t a wicked man: he’d slept only five hours. The problem was, before that he’d been out dancing until four in the morning.
He lumbered into the kitchen for the breakfast his wife had been waiting an hour for him to eat. Waking up late hadn’t been his real failure: it was leaving the crawl space work undone. Ephraim had managed to remove only a few bricks. The privy wall was improbably thick; after an hour, his arms aching from the clumsy combination of a hatchet and a chisel, he’d simply given up. Now, with the holiday over, Webster was liable to show up at any time and—
Good morning.
The man himself was at their side door. Just there, like any other visitor, or as if he were still making the rounds from his old physician’s practice from decades ago, but uninvited, and inviting himself in regardless.
Professor Webster entered and sat down in the janitor’s kitchen. Ephraim and Caroline watched warily as he nonchalantly picked up the day’s paper. It was peculiar for the doctor to visit, peculiar for him to make himself at home like this.
“Is there any more news?” Webster paged through headlines.
Why, there was plenty of news that day: a steamboat explosion in New Orleans; Mormon prospectors arrived in California; an Indian attack by the Colorado River. But that was not the news Dr. Webster was interested in.
“Do you hear any further of Dr. Parkman?” he added.
“No,” said the janitor cautiously. “I have not.”
Well, it seemed that Dr. Webster had. Why, he’d just taken the omnibus into the city with a friend and had stopped by Mr. Henchman’s—did Littlefield know Henchman, the apothecary over on Cambridge Street?—and heard that a woman had spotted a large and suspicious bundle stowed into a cab and had taken down the carriage’s number.
Worthy police! It had been only a few years ago that Marshal Tukey had decreed the licensing and numbering of hansom cabs—those notorious touts for theater-hall prostitutes—but here the numbering of the cabs had yielded an even greater catch than any embarrassed husband. This woman, the doctor explained, had reported what she’d seen to police, and the cab had been seized. And what did Littlefield think they’d found?
It was covered, Dr. Webster finished his tale triumphantly, with blood.
In the silence of the kitchen, the doctor’s observation hung like a challenge.
“There are a great many stories flying about,” Mr. Littlefield replied. “One does not know what to believe.”
The doctor finally left their kitchen, and his footsteps receded up the stairs and away from the stunned husband and wife.
He knows more than he lets on, Ephraim whispered.
Who knew how much time they had? And even if Webster left later for his customary lunch, surely other doctors would be entering and leaving the building before long. They had to act soon. In fact, they had to act that very day.
12
“I SHAL BE KILED”
ONE BY ONE, THE MURDERERS ARRIVED AT THE MEDICAL College.
There was William Corder, the smirking village intellectual who secretly buried his hometown sweetheart, moved to London to get married through the personal ads, and reinvented himself as a schoolmaster. He bore, it was said, an enlarged brain area of Destructiveness. There was the infant-drowning Catharine Welsh, deemed to have “the whole region of animal propensities very large.” Not to be outdone, there was also Madeline Albert, the young French girl who killed her mother with a hatchet, and Boutillier, a matricidal child with extreme enlargement of Acquisitiveness. And, most fittingly, there were Burke and Hare, whose impatience to procure cadavers for Edinburgh medical students led to homicidal shortcuts.
The Phrenological Collection was coming to Harvard, and there was little the doctors or staff could do to stop its skullish march.
That Friday morning saw Littlefield hauling plaster busts into Dr. Holmes’s anatomy lecture hall and stowing the blank-eyed visages in the storage space under the hall’s raked seating. The collection was an awkward present from Professor Emeritus John Warren—who, in the time-honored fashion of retirees, could now rain such gifts as he wished on the department, including and especially those the faculty did not necessarily want. Warren had a fascination with phrenology, even as its brief but powerful pull on academia was beginning to w
eaken, and he had acquired the immense holdings in plaster heads from the Boston Phrenological Society. For a brief spell a decade earlier, the society had counted scores of Boston doctors among its members and had even published its own journal; now, at the gentle suggestion of this emeritus, Dr. Holmes was to acknowledge the subject of phrenology in this quarter’s lectures. The matter was unavoidable, as he’d already accepted Warren’s gift of plaster heads—and, more importantly, a $5,000 donation by said emeritus.
But such was the life of a college dean. Holmes had no love for phrenology and admitted that he was “diffident to approach the subject at all,” but it would have been irresponsible to turn the gift down. And besides, the busts had a certain macabre charm. Along with what Warren delightedly called his “degenerates and celebrated criminals,” they also included the life masks of Samuel Coleridge and mathematician Charles Babbage.
As the murderers and worthies alike took their places, Littlefield turned to Dr. Bigelow, who was overseeing the whole operation. It had been a busy month for the new professor; while finishing his study of his patient with an iron rod through the skull, sorting plaster heads was the least of his concerns.
Sir? He took the doctor aside. Have you heard any talk concerning Dr. Webster and Dr. Parkman?
Indeed Bigelow had. And, like everyone in Boston’s tight fabric of respectable families, Bigelow had his own connection to the case: his sister was about to become engaged to Dr. Parkman’s son.
I am planning to break through the wall of Webster’s privy, Littlefield told him. It is the only place left unsearched.
To act on the janitor’s suspicion was terrible, but not to act could be even worse. And there was another problem: if the body wasn’t found, his future in-law’s vast estate could be tied up for years.
