Blood & Ivy

by Paul Collins

  As they passed back out through the front door, the doctor was struck by a realization: he had forgotten something.

  “I should like to go back for my keys,” he apologized.

  That won’t be necessary, Clapp explained—they already had plenty of keys to unlock the building.

  “Very well,” Dr. Webster said, and strode with Clapp to the waiting carriage. A couple of other fellows sat in the front by the driver, and Webster and Clapp took seats in the back. The darkened roads rolled by them as they made their way to Boston, and it idly brought to mind the new railroad. In just weeks, perhaps days, it would arrive in Cambridge. To think, a ride like this might soon become a thing of the past! The two conversed animatedly on the subject; these were indeed extraordinary times they lived in.

  Ah, but crime. Carriages had their own problems, of course: one favorite trick at the omnibus stops was for a thief to blow cigar smoke at his mark, distracting him while a confederate picked his pockets clean. But might the coming of the rails not bring the city’s filth and wickedness upon Cambridge even faster and more efficiently? The city could be a terrible place for those who knew its darker corners. Officer Clapp had been on the police force for some twenty years, and the things one might see could freeze the blood. A pair of doomed sweethearts who hanged themselves face-to-face, with the same rope over either side of a beam in her father’s shop; that had been a bad one. Rat-fighting matches in saloons in the poorer quarters, with men hauling bags of twenty to thirty angry rats down the alleys at night to the contest; they’d collect them from the local stables, trapping them amid the horses’ oats. The endless arrests for drunkenness on rum—just terrible. The rails were a fine means of travel, but to what end?

  Their carriage rumbled and crackled over the Craigie Bridge. The tide was low, leaving the mud flats exposed in the moonlight. Just a few hours earlier, men had been sounding all around this stretch of river, looking for Dr. Parkman. There was a rumor, come to think of it, that Parkman’s hat had been found over at the Navy Yard. But there were also more leads; why, Dr. Webster had just heard another one himself.

  “There is a lady over there,” Dr. Webster noted helpfully, gesturing toward the port, “a Mrs. Bent, who knows something about it.”

  She’d apparently also seen Dr. Parkman last Friday, the professor said, and that gave him a splendid idea.

  “Suppose we ride over there?” he added brightly.

  “We had better postpone it to some other time,” Officer Clapp demurred. No need to interrupt her evening, after all. Webster settled back in as they drove onward from the bridge and down Leverett Street, and he watched as they clip-clopped straight past the Brighton Street turnoff. A block later they passed Spring Street, which should have been their next best route.

  “You ought to have turned that corner, if you are going to the college,” the doctor said.

  “The driver is probably green,” Clapp remarked apologetically—they’d have to take the long way, maybe down Leverett until Cambridge Street and then back around again, but they’d get to the college in a few minutes.

  Perhaps it was all for the best. Just a few blocks farther down Leverett was a building where the officers needed to needed to stop off for a moment anyway—did Dr. Webster mind? The carriage halted, and Clapp hopped down into the street. “Gentlemen?” he said, summoning his colleagues, and he indicated to Webster that he might as well come along, too. The group strode toward the back of a looming brick building.

  “Gentlemen, suppose we walk into the inner office?” Officer Clapp ushered the group forward, as their eyes adjusted to the lights ablaze inside. Dr. Webster followed them through the doorway; once inside, he stopped in astonishment. The door was shut soundly behind him.

  They were inside the Leverett Street Jail.

  “Mr. Clapp?” The professor spun around to face the officer. “What does this mean?”

  In a moment, Derastus Clapp’s pleasant demeanor had vanished.

  “Dr. Webster, it is no use to disguise our purpose any longer,” he said. “You recollect that I called your attention, at the bridge, to sounding above and below the bridge?”

  Indeed the doctor did; it had been scarcely a few minutes ago.

  “We have been sounding in and about the college,” Officer Clapp continued, “and have done looking for Dr. Parkman. We shall not look for his body any more.”

  There was much other work to be done, surely: a writ of mittimus to be drawn up, the coroner to be fetched, a county attorney rousted from his evening’s rest, a cell to be prepared in the jail. But the posting of more handbills, sending officers to search the woods and streams for miles around, the long hours spent shining lanterns into attics and basement corners? No, that was not part of their evening’s work any longer.

  “You are now in custody,” Officer Clapp announced, “on a charge of the murder of Dr. Parkman.”

  14

  A RUINED MAN

  “WHAT!” DR. WEBSTER BLURTED OUT. “ME?”

  “Yes,” Clapp replied. “You, sir.”

  The professor’s pockets were promptly emptied by the jail keepers, and an inventory taken: a wallet, $2.40 in cash, a gold watch, an omnibus ticket case, and one rather rusty set of keys. Before committing the doctor to the indignity of the downstairs lockup cell, Clapp needed to check in with the marshal’s office. The officers were to watch Webster in the booking office until then—“Don’t commit the Doctor until I get back,” he told his partner—and so Officer Starkweather kept his charge under observation while the jailers drifted back into their usual duties.

  The professor sat in stunned silence for a while, then finally cleared his throat. Could he have a glass of water? Starkweather drew a pitcher for him, and Webster drank several long drafts; it was something to fill the painful silence. Then the prisoner spoke.

  “Have they found Dr. Parkman?”

  Officer Starkweather wasn’t going to answer a question like that.

  “You might tell me something about it,” the doctor protested. “Where did they find him?”

  Officer Starkweather wasn’t going to answer that, either.

  “How came they to suspect me?” the doctor pressed.

  This, too, was a subject about which Officer Starkweather was not prepared to speak at this time.

  Webster sank back into his chair. For a man who always kept his own home particularly warm, this place had a terrible chill to it. The very walls of these dark chambers went from cold stone to even colder iron: old cannonballs had deliberately been embedded inside them to prevent prisoners from burrowing out. In the distance were the usual grim sounds: the clank of iron, the scrape of days scratched on the walls, the sordid groans of the drunk and the disorderly. Webster began to sob.

  “Oh!” he wept. “My children, what will they do! What will they think of me?”

  Officer Starkweather, to be fair, really could not answer that question, either. At length the doctor collected himself, reasoning out the impossibility of the whole thing. Clearly they’d found something at the college—something in his offices, if suspicion was on him.

  “Nobody has access to my private apartments,” Webster puzzled aloud. “None but . . .”

  But . . . but . . .

  “. . . the porter,” he finished slowly, “who makes the fire.”

  The professor sat in dead silence for a full minute.

  “That . . . villain!” he gasped. “I am a ruined man!”

  Webster leapt up and paced the office in wordless anguish. Starkweather watched him warily. Webster’s hands fidgeted around his own vest for a moment, and then he brushed a hand over his mouth, as if covering it in horror. In the next moment, his body went into a sudden, ragged spasm.

  “Doctor!” Starkweather grabbed him. “Have you been taking anything?”

  Oh no, Webster insisted—no medication or anything like that. The professor sank onto a settee, usually kept for the relief of the officers, and lay there without a word for the n
ext hour. When Clapp returned and gave the order—Take him to the lockup—Starkweather firmly grabbed the doctor’s right arm, ready to lead him away. His prisoner didn’t budge. I can’t stand, Webster explained weakly.

  It was true: his body had gone entirely and inexplicably limp. It took two men to lift him up and half-drag him to his cell; they rolled him onto his side on a cot, and Webster slumped over, facedown into his pillow, unmoving. Despite the cold of the jail, the doctor was sweating profusely. Whether he was in withdrawal from an opium habit, in the beginnings of delirium tremens, or undergoing some other nameless terror, it was hard to say. The jailers and officers conferred: Should they call a doctor?

  No need, Officer Clapp decided. They should just keep checking on him. The detective wasn’t too worried; the jail had taken in something like five thousand prisoners in the last year, and only a couple had died on them—that is, aside from one who was executed.

  An hour later, the jailers stood by Webster, waiting to accompany him back upstairs. The county attorney was here to see him, they explained. Webster, still facedown on his pillow, did not move. What few words could be made out seemed to be about his family and his attorney friend, Mr. Prescott. When they raised him up, he was nearly delirious.

  “I expected this,” Webster muttered, as they lifted his sagging frame heavily and dragged him step by step up the stairs.

  Samuel Dunn Parker awaited him in the booking office, exasperated and incredulous at having been called in for DA duties on a Friday night. Parker was nearing seventy, and he’d known John Webster and his father for decades, back to when the old man had run the family pharmacy. They were all Harvard men, both families; Parker’s own son was the alumni secretary for the Class of ’35. What could one of the most senior professors on campus, of all people, possibly have to do with a murder case? Yet the prisoner half-carried in from the lockup was hardly recognizable as his son’s old chemistry professor. Dragged into the booking office, Webster collapsed into an armchair, then nearly slid from it to the floor.

  Water, he called out weakly. A glass was held up to his lips; his teeth chattered and bit against it, and the water splashed down the front of his shirt.

  “Oh,” he mumbled distractedly, “my wife and children!”

  Parker, who’d arrived half-expecting a respectable professor indignant over an absurd mistake by the detectives, instead found himself confronted by a man who’d come completely undone. What could one say? There was, he gently reminded Webster, another family whose father had been missing for a week now. Could he not help them?

  “We do not come here to distress you,” the elderly attorney said soothingly. “It is a sad duty that devolves upon me. I come here to inform you of the dreadful charge against you, and the reason of your confinement in these dreary walls.”

  Webster’s head lolled to the side; he seemed on the verge of fainting..

  “It is the hope of all our hearts that you will be enabled to explain away these terrible suspicions,” Parker continued. “We will assist you to do this if you will accompany us now to the Medical College. That you may be enabled to remove all doubts of your innocence, is my earnest prayer to God.”

  Webster would go, though he refused the very premise of the visit.

  There isn’t anything to explain, he whispered.

  THE OFFICERS shivered in the cold at the back entrance of the Medical College, yanking on the bell pull and waiting for someone down in the crowded lab to hear them.

  “We’ve got Dr. Webster here!” one called in. “And he is very faint.”

  Two of them stood on either side of the doctor, holding his ragged form up; despite the cold, he was still sweating and his face had reddened. The lock rattled, and the door swung open, and at once Littlefield came face-to-face with his bedraggled employer.

  “They have arrested me,” Webster croaked reproachfully, “and have taken me from my family, and did not give me a chance to bid them good-night.”

  There was nothing for the janitor to say; he wordlessly let the officers and their prisoner pass. It was ten-thirty on a Friday night, and instead of being home asleep or out carousing on theater row, the coroner, the county attorney, the city marshal, and seemingly every available policeman had crowded into a lab that had rarely seen more than one or two men at a time. What was a largely solitary workplace in daylight was now a crime scene, and officers and officials swarmed around the most ordinary objects, scrutinizing them. Near the entrance to the lecture hall, one was eyeing a coat hanging on a hook. Evidence!

  “That,” the doctor said numbly, “is the coat that I lecture in.” As men barged into the small antechamber before the lecture hall, he added simply, “This is where I make examinations.” There was little else of interest in the area, it seemed. But Officer Starkweather, reaching toward the back of one of the room’s shelves, discovered a parcel wrapped in paper and unwrapped it. A ball of twine rolled out; inside remained some cod hooks arranged into a grapple, as well as a pound of lead sinkers.

  None of the keys worked on the privy door—“Force the door!” the yell went up—so a hatchet promptly smashed off the lock, while more men flooded over into a chemical supply room. Webster, helped over to watch from the hallway, protested—if they weren’t careful while moving about, they would break delicate labware and do great mischief to the premises. “You will find nothing but some bottles and demijohns,” he complained. “I don’t know what they want there, they won’t find anything improper.” That was nearly correct: there was also a set of filed keys, commonly considered burglar’s tools—a curious thing for a Harvard professor to keep in his office. Still, Webster remained insistent: “There is nothing there of importance.”

  Very well—then they would look where there was indeed something of importance. Webster was half-carried down to the lower laboratory, where Littlefield had been telling the officers everything, and with each step down the stairs, the professor’s agitation grew.

  “Where is the chimney that was so heated?” one officer called out.

  “There is the furnace.” Littlefield pointed. A chimney pipe led down to the lab furnace, and someone, peering in, remarked that there was something inside. Something in the ashes. Teeth? Then a melted chunk of gold glinted in the lantern light and, near it, the outline of a lower jaw. Chips of calcined bone were fused with the remnants of coal.

  “Don’t disturb the bones,” the coroner said sharply—better to leave them to him. Webster, who had barely managed to sit up in his chair, began convulsing and losing his balance; the officers steadied him, and he again fumbled a glass of water over himself. As the professor watched, a plank was gently carried up into the laboratory. Arrayed on top of it were glistening chunks of human flesh: a right calf, a right thigh, and a pelvis. They were set down in front of Webster, just out of his reach, and the officers watched him, waiting for the confession. Instead, Webster writhed for some fifteen minutes in silent agony. Tears were now streaming down his face, but not a word passed his lips.

  County Attorney Parker, whether in sorrow or disgust, was dumbstruck.

  Shall I take him away? a jailer finally asked.

  “I have nothing to say,” the old attorney answered at length. The officers hoisted Dr. Webster up and dragged him out into the night, and one by one the other officers and officials left. It was nearing midnight. They’d return to investigate further in morning.

  Officer Starkweather was left to guard the rooms, and he set about preparing for a long night. He moved the grisly pile of body parts into the privy, where they couldn’t be tampered with. Since the lock lay smashed on the floor, he drove a nail halfway into the door frame so that it couldn’t be opened. Then he grabbed a pair of pants that were hanging on a nail—J. W. WEBSTER, read a label inside them—evidence, perhaps, but also the softest thing in the room. Starkweather folded the pants into the semblance of a pillow. He’d sleep tonight in a murder scene, his head resting gently upon a murderer’s pantaloons. Still, that wasn’
t what haunted one’s mind as the hours ticked past midnight. No, the real mystery was in the cod hooks and twine found on a shelf. True, the Charles River was right here; but why would a Harvard professor come to work to go fishing?

  IT TOOK a while to get Dr. Webster back to his jail cell.

  Not that the professor wasn’t cooperating; it was that his body could not. As they called down a carriage at the medical school, the officers found that the doctor’s arms and legs had stiffened like boards in the frigid night air, unable to bend. Finally, like householders trying to fit a hat stand into a cab, Officers Cummings and Andrews managed to lift the professor awkwardly into the carriage compartment. Once he was inside, his joints gave way, and he collapsed into the seat, his pants and coat both now soaked with perspiration. Jailer Andrews watched him carefully; the man had seemed on the verge of mania or death for hours now.

  As they passed the darkened storefronts and homes, the doctor managed to speak.

  “Why don’t they ask Littlefield? He can explain all this,” he murmured. “He has the care of the dissecting-room. They wanted me to explain, but they didn’t ask me anything.” His departure from his study at seven that evening seemed impossibly far away, and his warm home in Cambridge receded farther with each turn of the carriage’s wheels. “What will my family think of my absence?” he beseeched Andrews.

  The jailer had been on the force for over twenty years now. He’d arrested everyone from dapper counterfeiters to the wild murderer of a night watchman, and he’d never seen anything quite like this.

  “I pity you,” Andrews said. “And I am sorry for you, dear sir.”

  Rather than feel comforted, the patrician doctor seemed simply bewildered by this. What pity could some poorly paid turnkey have for a Harvard professor?