“And this is your handwriting on the back, correct? Since this card was found on the person of the unfortunate Monsieur Jones, I conclude you arranged a meeting between the two of you. A meeting at midnight.”
“As you say,” murmured Bingham, his eyes still closed.
“And the two of you argued?” prompted Daumier.
“Always . . .” Bingham looked as if he had more to say but he trailed off, his head cocked to the side.
“You were sick and tired of Monsieur Jones, and you wanted to be rid of him?”
“Always . . .”
Lincoln and I were a few paces back. “Shouldn’t you do something?” I whispered. “I’m no friend of Bingham’s—never spoken to him in my life—but it’s obvious he’s got no ability to be answering questions from the copper. He could be talking to Queen Victoria for all he knows.”
Daumier shook Bingham by the shoulders in order to continue his interrogation, although their conversation was obscured by the roar of the unruly crowd filling the tavern. Meanwhile, Lincoln grabbed Logan’s arm and drew him toward us.
“I think the man needs representation,” Lincoln said. “I’m going to offer myself up. Unless you’d prefer the case, Logan.”
“By rights, he’s yours,” said Logan. “There wouldn’t be a case if you hadn’t stumbled upon the body.”
“Second rule of the circuit?” Lincoln grinned.
“We’ll make it so from now on, if you’re going to make a habit of discoveries like this,” Logan said with a laugh. “If you find the dead body, you get first crack at defending the accused.”
A grin still spread across his face, Lincoln stepped toward the avocat and the insensible painter. I followed.
“Mr. Bingham,” said Lincoln, talking loudly to be heard over the din of the room, “My name’s Abraham Lincoln. I’m a lawyer—a plain one, but a lawyer nonetheless. I offer you my services.”
“Do not interfere,” Daumier said sharply. “Monsieur Bingham and I have begun to understand one another. He has just admitted that he and the victim, Jones, argued violently at midnight last night. He is about to tell me what happened next. We are coming to understand each other quite exactly, with no need for interference from another person. Isn’t that right, Monsieur Bingham?”
The hapless Bingham looked back and forth dumbly between the men. A drop of saliva leaked out of the corner of his mouth and rolled down his chin.
“The man has certain rights,” Lincoln said. “I don’t know the situation in your homeland, but in this country, he has rights. I insist that you respect them.”
Anger flashed in Daumier’s eyes. “I warn you, sir, not to trifle with me,” he said, the veins running along his shiny forehead suddenly pulsing a purplish red. “In this country, I may as yet hold only the rank of constable. But in my homeland, before I fled the July Revolution of 1830, I was a law graduate of the Lycée Fabert. I was a jugé auditeur at Versailles. I shall before long attain a similar rank in your nation, si Dieu le veut. If God is willing. This man”—he gestured at Bingham, his manner at once contemptuous and hungry—“may indeed be the vehicle for my advancement.”
“My concern is my client,” said Lincoln, standing his ground. “Him alone. You can aspire to be Mr. Chief Justice of the Supreme Court for all I care.”
“He is not your client.”
“He is if he desires to be,” said Lincoln. “Do you desire it, Mr. Bingham?”
Everyone looked at Bingham, who was staring dully at Lincoln. Nod, I thought. Do something. Anything.
A hint of animation finally came into Bingham’s features. “You’re his friend?” he said to Lincoln, giving an ungainly nod in my direction.
“I am,” said Lincoln, recoiling with surprise.
“You were Jones’s friend,” Bingham said to me.
It was an accusation, I realized. Bingham would have seen me conversing with Jones in the salon before the latter’s fateful wager. It was natural for Bingham to assume Jones and I were confidants. If Bingham and Jones really were enemies, that would make me his enemy as well.
Bingham’s caution, even in his drunken state, did him credit. Self-made men on the frontier got that way only by going through life with a great and abiding skepticism. The mouth of every gift horse had to be scrutinized with extreme caution. Indeed, there was no better proof of the peril in not doing so than the fate of Jones himself.
“I’d never laid eyes on Jones before last night,” I said. “But I know well this man Lincoln”—I gripped his shoulder—“and know he is motivated by an honest heart. He can be of great use if you’re in jeopardy.”
Bingham looked at me with wide, unblinking eyes, and at first, I worried I had spoken too quickly, or with too much complexity, for his liquor-addled mind. But then he nodded slowly.
“I do desire it, Mr. Lincoln,” he said, enunciating each word with great care. “You shall be my lawyer.” He paused and stared over at Daumier before adding, “I think I need one.”
CHAPTER 7
The next morning, I caught up with Lincoln as he was leaving the Franklin House.
“Heading to talk to your new client?” I asked.
Lincoln nodded. “He was taken away to the prison last night, but Daumier agreed I could conduct a proper interview with him this morning.”
“I still don’t understand why he was arrested,” I said. “Surely it’s not a crime to argue with someone, even violently, and that’s all he admitted when you intervened.”
“Daumier seems convinced Bingham’s words and conduct are tantamount to an admission of guilt,” Lincoln returned. “Maybe different standards of proof applied under the Bourbon monarchy.” He grinned at his own joke. “Why don’t you come to the prison with me? Perhaps you can ask some questions I wouldn’t have thought of, since you steamed with the two of them.”
I willingly fell into step beside Lincoln, and we took an inland path that cut up a ravine toward the prison. Even in the rising sun, the morning air was cold, and we could see our breath as we puffed from the exertion.
“Actually, I have my own reasons for wanting to talk to Bingham,” I said as we climbed the hillside.
“Oh?”
“I was thinking about it last night. He said he’d been aboard the War Eagle for only two voyages—”
“If anything he said last night, in his condition, is to be believed,” interposed Lincoln.
“True enough. If it is the case, though, perhaps he’ll be willing to tell me what was really going on aboard the ship, with Pound and the money due my father. I doubt any of Pound’s regular crew will admit the truth. I didn’t want to tell you the full story last night, with all the fellows around, but I didn’t make nearly as much progress as I hoped. I fear my family’s home is still in jeopardy.”
“Then we should both hear what Bingham has to say,” said Lincoln, nodding sympathetically.
The path we were following zigzagged sharply upward, and the whitewashed walls of the prison loomed ahead of us. They looked no less foreboding this morning, bathed in the rays of the rising sun, than they’d looked last night in the moonlight.
“How can this be the first prison in Illinois?” I asked, thinking back to what Lincoln had said the prior evening. “Even in Springfield, we’ve got a tiny jail cell behind the sheriff’s house.”
“We haven’t needed a place to confine men for long periods of time until now,” said Lincoln. “Under our old laws, convictions led to bodily punishment. Death for plenty of crimes, like murder, arson, and horse stealing. For less serious offenses, it was the pillory and fifty or one hundred lashes. But a few years ago, the legislature adopted the modern notion of extended prison sentences—for everything except murder, that is. So the state commissioned this place to hold the men given lengthy terms.”
Together we looked up at the foreboding prison, at whose entrance we now stood. It was a tall, rectangular structure, the walls twenty feet high, with guard towers on each corner. The wooden entrance d
oor was protected by great iron bars.
“I’ve never been inside,” Lincoln added, “but I’ve heard the wretched men confined here aren’t too happy with the new arrangement.”
After convincing the warden of our bona fides, we were allowed into the prison yard, a muddy jumble of trash and scrub brush, which sloped sharply uphill. The cellblock, located at the far end of the yard, comprised a stack of three rows of arched, side-by-side brick caverns, each sealed by a barred iron door.
A turnkey with coarse whiskers, a low cap, and a jangling chain of keys wrapped tightly around his waist led us up to the second row of cells and along a narrow wooden platform appended to the block. Filthy, gnarled hands reached out at us from inside each cell. The guard swatted them away viciously with his walking stick while I tried to avoid being grabbed by any of the inmates without falling off the edge of the walk. All the way, inhuman screams accompanied our progress—“Aiye, Aiye, Aiye”—as if we were parading in front of a pack of wild animals.
At the last cell on the row, the turnkey bellied up to the padlock hanging from the door and picked out a key from his chain.
“I’ll be waiting right here,” he growled. “Warden Enlow said I was to give you fifteen minutes. You ain’t getting a second more.”
We had to duck to enter the darkened cell, which was stale and smelled of urine. Bingham was sitting on the edge of a low iron-framed cot, his head in his hands. He lifted his eyes to look as we entered, then stared back down at the uneven brick floor. When I’d first spied him aboard the War Eagle, with his dark curly hair and boyishly pudgy face, I thought he managed to appear at once cherubic and devilish. Now he looked only desperate.
Thinking Bingham probably had little memory of last night, as soon as the cell door clanged shut, Lincoln and I introduced ourselves again. The artist took our hands without enthusiasm.
“If you’re here, it must have been real,” he said dejectedly. “I’d been hoping last night was a dark, drunken fantasy and I’d been jailed for intoxication.”
“I’m afraid not,” said Lincoln. “You’ve been accused of murdering Jones. I’ll apply to the judge for bail later today, but I must tell you it’s unlikely to be granted. You’ll probably have to stay here until your trial.”
“But I’m innocent,” he moaned loudly.
Jeers arose from the neighboring cells.
“They all is,” called the turnkey. He was slouching outside the cell door, watching us with a smirk. Bingham flushed.
“Give us our time, sir,” Lincoln said to the guard, gesturing angrily with his stovepipe hat, which he held in his hand. To Bingham he added, in a quieter voice, “We haven’t long. Tell us how you knew this fellow Jones. And about your encounter with him at midnight the other night.”
“We met each other about a month ago. We were both invited to a weekend gathering at a large plantation house in Commerce, Mississippi. Roman Hall, the home of Jacques Telesphore Roman, cotton baron and brother of the former governor. Jones and I were soon trading punches out back.”
“What was the provocation?”
“About ninety-nine percent of brawls are over cards or women, wouldn’t you say? Well, I don’t touch the first. It’s bad for business.”
“Touching the second isn’t bad for business?” I asked.
Bingham’s face lit up with a bittersweet smile. There was a hint again of the devilish cherub in his bright eyes. “In my younger days, I found it could be quite good for business. More than a few women want a memento, a reminder. And some fathers are too thick to realize what they’re paying for. Some husbands too, for that matter.”
As I laughed at Bingham’s daring, Lincoln asked, “Who was the young woman you quarreled with Jones over?”
“Tessie Roman, the eldest daughter of the cotton baron. The most beautiful woman in all twenty-six states. She possesses a beauty no portrait painter could capture. I’ve foresworn all other women to spend my life with her.”
“Jones desired her too?” asked Lincoln.
My friend was stooped over awkwardly, leaning against the arching brick wall, as the cell was not six feet tall even at its highest point. The cell walls were covered with beads of condensation. The prevailing winds must have blown the mist in off the river.
“He did, but before the weekend was over, she’d pledged her heart to me,” Bingham answered. “That should have been the end of it—except for her father. He’s a blam’d stubborn son of a gun. Started out dead set against his Tessie marrying an artist—even a respectable, accomplished one. In the end, he relented. A little.”
“How so?”
“He said he’d consent to our union if I could prove I was a success in my vocation. A financial success, mind you—the old bull has no notion of artistic achievement. He said he’d give me Tessie’s hand if I returned to Commerce with proof I’d been earning my keep as a painter. If I don’t, Tessie’s fate will be to suffer through life with some fool like Jones.”
“You told Daumier last night you’d steamed aboard the War Eagle twice,” said Lincoln. “How long have you been a traveling artist?”
“I’ve been drawing since I could first hold a pencil,” Bingham said. “After my father died, my mother, bless her, apprenticed me to a cabinetmaker and told me to become an artist. Now I have a studio in St. Louis, where I execute portraits of traders, bankers, speculators. I’ve attracted a few river travelers too, and one of them suggested I might find good opportunities aboard a packet steamer, so I tried going downriver on the War Eagle. The fellow was right, though not in the way he intended. If I hadn’t taken his advice, I’d have never met Tessie.”
“Since you spent time aboard, let me ask you,” I interjected. “What kind of man is Captain Pound?”
“You aren’t in business with him, are you?” Bingham replied. When my expression gave him the answer, he continued, “I figured as much when the giant, Hector, came for you the other night. I don’t envy that position.”
“My family stakes the ship. I was aboard because Pound owes us money. But when I confronted him, he told me the problem was—”
“Let me guess,” the prisoner said, interrupting me. “‘The Inspector of the Port.’”
I stared at Bingham in amazement.
“That was Pound’s stock answer anytime a passenger complained about anything. ‘I’m sorry, madam. I wish it were otherwise. But we’re required to operate in this fashion by the Inspector of the Port.’ It was a standing joke among the crew.”
“So you’re saying the Inspector doesn’t exist?”
Bingham shook his head ruefully.
I slammed my fist against the iron bars of the cell. The turnkey outside on the ledge jumped, then relaxed when he saw that Bingham remained on his cot. Lincoln was working without much success to suppress a smile.
“Damn him!” I said. “I’ll wring his neck! That bastard’s going to wish he never made the acquaintance of the Speed family.”
“There’s something I don’t understand,” said Lincoln to Bingham as I stewed. “You say you steamed downriver on the War Eagle. But then how did you end up on the ship upriver as well after the party? And how did Jones end up on the same ship?”
“All of us left Roman Hall for the river at the same time. Me and Jones. And Pound too, of course.”
“Captain Pound was at the affair at Roman Hall?” asked Lincoln sharply.
Bingham nodded. “Mrs. Roman was very pleased with him. Said having a riverboat captain present made her gathering distinctive. He certainly did a good job of keeping the ladies scandalized.”
“I’ll bet he did,” I said.
“I wonder how he found out about the party,” said Lincoln, more to himself than to us.
“You think that’s significant?” I asked. Lincoln was staring out through the bars of the cell, deeply lost in thought.
“We shall see, I suppose,” he returned at length. “It does seem—well, it’s all quite a coincidence.” Turning back to Bingham, he as
ked, “So is it true, as Daumier said, that you and Jones quarreled on the return voyage?”
“Jacques Roman’s hesitation about me had given Jones hope. All the way upriver, he kept telling me I had no chance with Tessie or her father, not with my low birth as compared to his lordly one. I wanted to shut his mouth. But I didn’t kill him.”
“But you did arrange to meet him at midnight the other night,” said Lincoln. “And you admitted to Daumier you argued one last time. Why?”
Bingham sighed and stared down again at the crumbling brick floor. When he turned back to us, he looked almost as adrift as he’d been in the Tontine the prior night.
“I wish I’d never gone to his cabin. I arranged the meeting before the disaster at the tables that you witnessed, Mr. Speed. My original intent was to shake hands, let bygones be bygones. I was disembarking in Alton, and I truly didn’t wish the fellow ill. After all, Tessie was to be mine. But then—the way he lost at the tables and the way he blamed everyone but himself afterward—it reminded me of why I’d thrown my fist at his jaw in the first place. Some men are born with every advantage but no common sense.”
“The captain told his crewman to tie Jones to his bed,” I said, remembering the scene. “Was he tied down when you got there?”
Bingham shook his head. “He was on his feet, sorting through his trunk. He was very much under the sway of the whiskey bottle—kept bumping into the furniture in his cabin. Anyway, I told him he’d gotten what he deserved, and of course he took exception. But he was alive when I last saw him, I swear it.”
“As Hector carried Jones out of the salon that night, do you remember he was shouting about exposing ‘the truth’ about something?” I asked Bingham. Lincoln looked over with interest. Bingham nodded.
“Do you have any idea what he meant? The truth about what?”
“There was a scheme of some sort aboard the War Eagle. Pound and his regular crew had these whispered conversations all the time. Somehow Jones must have learned about it, whatever it was.” Bingham shrugged. “Perhaps having to do with a secret gambling operation—that’s my best guess.”
Perish from the Earth Page 5
