The Blackest Bird

by Joel Rose

  Sorry to say, now with unwarranted freedom at hand, of what might this young gentleman be capable?

  I am all too fearful that we, the innocent citizenry of our great metropolis, might all too soon find out lest a savior appear who can for us undo this moldering morass.

  37

  A Poem Before Dying

  If John Colt was dead or alive, buried or escaped, Old Hays was unable to attest. He had been most certainly absent at the time of Homicide Colt’s alleged demise. Likewise, he had not been paid the privilege to view the corpse. Nor had he opportunity to be on hand when the body was put to bed with a shovel.

  Still, he knew what he had seen: the gentleman in question, cloaked and curtained, passenger in that black brougham careening down Cross Street.

  On the night of the cupola inferno, finally arriving at the Tombs after midnight, dragging the prigger Holdgate with him, Hays found the prison charred and reeking, the body attributed to the condemned already gone. The detective, walking slowly through the facility assessing the damage, reconstructed in his mind what must have transpired while he was absent. He prided himself on a learned skill: having spent so many years in the profession, coming upon the scene of a crime, Old Hays felt himself entirely able to smell the criminal.

  Reasonably, the high constable questioned himself. What was he to make of the apprehension of James Holdgate in Gravesend after such extended period of successfully eluding police authorities? Had this not been a charade, its clever construct designed to lure the high constable away from his appointed rounds and the highly orchestrated crime scene? Had bribes been paid to facilitate the deception? And if they had, to whom? And for which reason? For Colt’s suicide to proceed unimpeded, or his escape? The answers would come, Hays knew. Patience was an attribute to which long experience had paid contribution.

  Still, he swore, he would not be had.

  It took additional three days’ time before Mayor Morris came forward, bowing to outside pressure and the outcry of Bennett and the public prints.

  During that period of frustration, Hays had sought on several separate occasions (first thing in the morning on three successive days) audience with the mayor, but had been rebuffed.

  Now Mayor Morris, in a noontime address to the Common Council and Board of Aldermen, professed to being merely astonished by the turn of events.

  Reluctantly, he was ready to admit that something duplicitous may have occurred in the city’s House of Detention. Yet he refused to believe John Colt had escaped.

  “The man is dead,” Mayor Morris declared.

  Yet, he wondered, how in heaven’s name had the prisoner come by the bejeweled dagger that he had plunged into his own beating heart in that final moment of what must have been unspeakable desperation?

  That afternoon, in the penny dailies, names were mentioned: both of Colt’s brothers, his lawyers, his minister. Even Dillback, the manservant. A horde of others, including Poe the poet and John Howard Payne the songster.

  Yet Caroline Colt, née Henshaw, assumed role of the presses’ general-consensus guilty party.

  Monmouth Hart, under pressure from the mayor’s office, now joined company and freely accused Mr. Colt’s new wife.

  Men were subject to close scrutiny before entering the prison, especially death row. Thorough search was required for men and women alike, Hart explained to a gathering of newspaper flacks.

  But on her wedding day how closely had Miss Henshaw been examined?

  On the hectic afternoon in question, the prison premises had suffered from a dearth of unoccupied guards, Hart conceded.

  Had Mr. Malcolm Trencher, the man assigned the task, done his duty?

  Later in the day, Warden Hart made a great show of calling the beleaguered man aside in front of Old Hays and posing the question:

  Had he patted her down?

  “Not her bosom,” Mr. Trencher, a nervous, forlorn type admitted. “I did not touch that part of her anatomy. Nor any area below the waist.”

  Looking on, Hays could not fault him, given the nature of their prurient society.

  Trencher was the very same keeper interrogated by the English author Charles Dickens, the one who had given misinformation in regard to the origin of the name of the Tombs institution.

  “I would have touched her below the waist,” Warden Hart impugned. “For God’s sake, man, where is your duty?”

  Hart continued his foray. “So the ornamental dagger of a certain proportion might have been hidden from view?” he went on in a bluster. “Carried between the breasts, let us say, point facing down?”

  Admitted.

  Hays looked on but said nothing, his sympathy with Trencher, his distrust with Hart.

  FOLLOWING TRENCHER’S INQUISITION, Hays returned to his desk. He sat himself heavily in his stiff ladder-back chair.

  Could this spectacle have been any more of a sham than it seemed? Had Monmouth Hart really had the bad sense and audacity to stage such show, assailing the twitchy Trencher entirely for the high constable’s benefit?

  Old Hays had no doubt. His eyes might have grown somewhat weak over the years, but he would have to be very well convinced otherwise that it was someone else than John Colt of whom he had caught sight behind that flapping carriage curtain.

  His constable’s staff in hand, Old Hays made his way down the cell block to John Colt’s purported place of last breath.

  Seven hundred and thirty-four inmates had inhabited the Tombs that November evening when Mr. Colt had been scheduled to die. Hays prided himself on knowing virtually each and every one of these maladroits by sight. The high constable claimed never to forget a criminal face. He also was famous for touring the Penitentiary of the City of New York at Bellevue and the Women’s Almshouse on Blackwell’s Island at least once a week, gazing into cell after cell, withstanding the shouted insults and mutterings, so as to know the countenances of the females incarcerated there as well as he knew their jailed brethren downtown.

  After the fire, all but a dozen inmates were said to be accounted for, recaptured, remanded, and transported to the women’s prison at Bellevue to be held there.

  Aside from a few ineffectual kirkbuzzers, shycocks, and top-divers, the notable exceptions were John Colt and Tommy Coleman.

  Albeit nervously, when questioned by Hays, the warden stood by his assertion. Colt was found dead in his cell. Hart maintained he could not be certain what had happened to Tommy Coleman and made no venture. He may have died in the inferno and his body consumed by the flames. He honestly did not know, he said, and could not guess. The cell doors along the block had all been thrown open. He may have escaped. If that was the case, he would be found and rearrested.

  “By whom?” Hays demanded.

  “By you, sir,” Hart said. “I have utmost respect for your prowess, High Constable.”

  Hays stalked away from the functionary. He found no necessity to mention he had no doubt seen John Colt during the course of his escape, and it was his conviction the man had appeared at the time hale and hearty.

  He stood in front of the empty and abandoned cell where Colt had purportedly died, staring through the bars. The grate stood ajar. He went inside. There was no blood soaked on the cot as you might expect if someone had expired there from a fatal knife wound to the heart.

  Hays returned down the corridor to Colt’s cell.

  Everything was relatively the same here as when Hays last saw it. Nothing much had been disturbed by the conflagration. Remarkably, the flames had actually consumed little, although the sharp smell of acridity was strong and there was a layer of black, pasty char and muck on the floor. But the reality was that most of the blaze had been restricted to the flue stacks. When Hays cursorily inspected the stone walls, it was not hard to find a series of ragged, fist-sized holes punched through the mortar from where the smoke had surely vented directly from the clay chimney liners into the prison block proper. Every indication told how the fire had been grease-fed. The fat from the broiling meats evi
dently had erupted in flames. Those flames had licked straight up inside the prison wall flues to the cupola dome, catching that structure on fire and eventually destroying it. The result being a spectacle of smoke and cinder that had poured into the prison through the holes punched in the flue liners and causing such panic.

  He called the jailer, “Mr. Trencher? Would you mind terribly?”

  Hearing his name, Trencher lumbered back down the block. By necessity he was at Hays’ beck and call. Hays knew he was a man who would do anything for him. In his mind, in some part because of his embarrassment in front of Dickens, Trencher was forever diminished in front of Hays and at disadvantage.

  “Mr. Trencher,” Hays said, “would you mind unlocking Mr. Colt’s house of solitude here for me?”

  Once the lock was keyed and open, Hays stepped inside the cell and stopped stock-still. Something came over him and seized him. The consummate shadow surveyed the man’s lair with its myriad appointments. He had an inner feeling, vast and unreal. The polished writing desk, the leather patent chair of Colonel Colt’s invention, the multivolume library neatly lined on the cherrywood book commode, an array of unbound folios rushed straight from the printer for the prisoner’s enjoyment, the plethora of pamphlets, extras, and popular magazines of the day, all stood their ground, barely touched by soot, much less fire.

  Hays studied the titles of the three books occupying Colt’s desk, holding them close to his eyes to better see. They were all Edgar Poe’s: Tales of the Grotesque, Tales of the Arabesque, and a pamphlet edition, Recent Tales of Ratiocination.

  Hays felt Trencher’s eyes on him. Hays knew the man could not read. Neither could he write, nor even recognize his own name when written.

  The entire prison and much of the law enforcement cadre had been taken to task by the popular press for Colt’s preferential treatment. A rose on the dinner plate. Brocaded drapery. A fussy British servant attired in evening clothes. A decorous writing table, his personal library, a reclining leather chair. Conjugal visits from his mistress for the sole purpose of frolic.

  For God’s sake. A man condemned to death?

  Rumors of bribery were in recent full circulation. The Herald even gave numbers: a thousand dollars each, offered to three unnamed jailers.

  Trencher was a self-acknowledged lout. Hays knew him to sometimes be abusive to prisoners. But bribery?

  Hays hoped not Trencher. Despite himself, without realizing, Hays lowered himself into Colt’s leather chair.

  John Colt had boasted to Hays on more than one occasion how his brother Sam had developed the design, had drafted the blueprint with his own hand, had even gone so far as to send the necessary paperwork to the national capital in Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Patent Office there.

  It was remarkable how the Colt chair changed position. Indeed, an engineering marvel. When you pushed your body back in a certain manner, for a moment there, you felt almost helpless as if you were about to plummet, then the mechanism sprang into action and all went smoothly, and it was for all the world as if you were luxuriating on a fat goose-feathered divan. Old Hays took a shallow breath. For the first time in he knew not how long, the pain in his back and legs subsided. Or seemed to be diminished, if not altogether relieved.

  Hays sighed deeply in comfort. He despised those who thought themselves above all else of God’s creatures. Humility was a large word to the high constable. He abhorred those, like John Colt, who chose to live outside the law, those who thought themselves better than the rest of their fellow citizens, those who, by action and choice, made a mockery of all law-abiding members of society.

  His mind came to Poe. He thought of Mary Rogers and wondered the connection between the two, vowed to himself it would be found out.

  Trencher’s voice brought Hays back from his reverie.

  “Got your eye on Mr. Colt’s patent chair there, Mr. High? I be glad t’he’p you carry it back to your office there. Surely is a thing of beauty. Nobody cares if you take it, sir, they surely don’t.”

  Hays chose not to acknowledge the dolt.

  It took some minutes before it dawned on Trencher that he was no longer needed.

  From where he sat on the recliner, Hays glimpsed a scroll, not unlike the one he had seen with Edgar Poe, partially hidden by a folded black handkerchief at the desk corner. He picked the tight roll up, slipping off the black ribbon, and began to separate the packet of pages. Noting Colt’s precise, elegant hand, one bit of doggerel written thereon caught his eye, causing the high constable to replace his magnifying spectacles on his nose to read his way with fascination through Colt’s most curious version of the aftermath to the Samuel Adams’ murder in verse:

  The deed was done, but one ugly fear

  Came over me now to touch this thing.

  There was nothing to struggle against me here

  In this lifeless heap. I wished it would spring

  And grasp me, and strike at me, as it did

  Only a moment or two before.

  I lifted the head, but it dropped, and slid

  From my grasp to its bed of gore.

  What will you do with this horrible thing?

  Down—shove, push it in a crate!

  Push! Push down hard! If you choose you may sing

  That song of his. Don’t start and look round!

  Push! How terribly inept you are!

  The dawn in the East begins to grow;

  The birds are all chirping; push there, shove there

  That body at once, and for God’s sake go!

  The world will be up in less than an hour,

  And rattle and ring along the road.

  Away! Away! Away for your life!

  Ah, well, that o’er,

  And he lies sepulchred in his last abode!

  In the half-light Hays sat pondering. He realized all must for him be reduced to a simple axiom: If Colt had made escape, he would catch him and see him pay. Any and all who had seen fit to aid this murderer and abet him, they too would be dealt with the same. Be it who it may, Trencher, Colt’s brothers, Edgar Poe, Monmouth Hart, whosoever. They would pay too.

  He put down the handwritten verse and settled down in Colt’s recliner, relaxed further. Remarkable how the supple leather molded and supported the small of the back. Colonel Colt was indeed a clever fellow. Hays had personally tried his Paterson pistol. The revolving weapon certainly had its imperfections. After the chambers were emptied, it was not a small feat to reload. But the implication of the weapon was clear to Hays. Once Colt had ironed out the kinks, the high constable had no doubt all men in law enforcement would want one of these equalizers, and it would make the profession that much easier. The real problem, however, Hays thought just before he fell into sleep, was that all villains and blackguards would desire one of Colt’s revolvers as well, and that acquisition would make their profession that much easier, and lethal, just the same.

  38

  Colt’s Patent Chair

  Later that evening, a grave cartman arrives on Lispenard Street, an irregularly shaped object of some size wrapped in thick gray blankets, bound with strong blue braided cord, and posited in the carry-bed of his two-wheeled wooden cart.

  The man struggles to unload the bundle, drag it to the door, and knock. After some moments, Olga Hays answers, drying her hands on a dish towel. She has been cleaning the kitchen following dinner: clearing the dishes, scrubbing the pots, wiping down the table of its crumbs.

  Lately, directly after dinner, her father has seen fit to abandon her. Already upstairs in his bed, under the covers, fueled by a cup of brewed black tea, a magnifying glass in hand, he would read, and reread, Poe’s strange and eerie tales, “MS. Found in a Bottle,” “Maelzel’s Chess-Player,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Black Cat.”

  Meanwhile, downstairs, Olga asks of the cartman, “What is this?” to which he wipes his spongy nose with the
back of his hand before responding.

  He pulls an envelope, twice folded from his back pocket. “A gif ’ fer ’igh Consuble ’ays from Cunnel Sam’l Colt,” he manages, clearly uncomfortable with speech. He hands over to Olga the folded communication, which he has managed to unfold in a manner.

  Olga takes it, scrutinizes the soiled envelope, but does not open it.

  “Does High Constable Hays know about this?” she asks. “He men tioned nothing of it.”

  “I dun’ know, ma’am? Mind if I bring thu bun’le in, be on m’way?”

  She tells him to wait, excuses herself, goes to the stairs, the soiled envelope in her hand, calls, “Papa?”

  When there is no answer, she hurries up.

  By the time she comes back down, the chair is in the center of the parlor, the cartman standing over it, sawing away on the final strand of rope by which it had been tethered.

  A few moments later her father follows her down the carpeted stair, the envelope torn open, the letter in his hand. He offers the folded page to Olga:

  My Dear High Constable Hays:

  Sir, please excuse this presumption on your privacy, but I have been made aware by one of your colleagues of your admiration for my deceased brother’s patent chair.

  Since tragedy has rendered it impossible for John to be here with us to enjoy this chair as intended, I would be remiss not to offer this object to you as a gift. In recognition of the respect you paid my brother in his last months, I would be honored if you, sir, saw fit to accept.

  My brother always spoke highly of you. And I too in our meetings, both social and business, have found you a highly moral man, a true and capable gentleman.

  Signed with sincerity,