“He must’ve gotten lost,” said Peter.
“Hell of a security guard,” said Diana.
“Right you are, Lady T,” said Henry. “J-Man knows this city like he knows the three-second lane.” Henry looked around in the semi-darkness under the trees. “And how could J-Man be sayin’ he don’t know Ricky the Rican, when Ricky pushin’ a cart right under his nose. Who’d you say he delivered wine for last night?”
“Kathi Morganti, the lobbyist,” answered Peter. “She’s working for David Bruce.”
“David Bruce. We up against him, ain’t we?” asked Henry.
“Up against him or working for him,” said Evangeline. “Some of us haven’t decided yet.”
“Well, one way or the other, it looks like J-Man and his little Rican sidekick givin’ us up to Mr. David Bruce,” said Henry.
“Or to Bruce’s security boys,” said Peter.
Henry shook his head. “Like I said before, everybody’s fuckin’ everybody else in this deal.”
“Sometimes literally,” said Evangeline.
“What do you mean?” asked Peter.
“In all the excitement, I forgot to show you this.” So she pulled out her phone and called up the picture of Kathi and William Dougherty.
“Wow,” said Peter.
“Wow what?” said Henry.
“That closes the circle of deceit,” said Peter.
A big Buick turned the corner at the end of the block and rolled slowly toward them. Its windows were vibrating to the powerful bass line beat of some rap song. There were four guys inside. When the car slowed, Henry slipped his hand into his jacket. And the blasting beat receded down the street.
“You better hope they don’t set off any car alarms,” said Diana.
Peter said, “Do we call Dawkins yet?”
“Nah.” Henry had taken a claw hammer from the tool kit in his car. Now he pulled it from his belt. “Let’s have a look first. You gals stay here till we reconnoiter.”
Diana said to Evangeline, “Gals. Gals, he calls us.”
“I’m old-school, baby.” He and Peter went up the seven-stair stoop.
While Peter held a flashlight, Henry popped off a two-by-four nailed to the doorframe of Esther Molly’s house. Then he tried the door. Unlocked.
Peter and Henry made eye contact. Bad sign. Either there was nothing in there, or someone was waiting.
Henry replaced the hammer and pulled out the Magnum, “I go first. You hold the light. If you see a shadow, hit him in the eyes with the beam. Blind him so I can get off a good shot.”
“That’s good,” said Peter. “Shoot first, ask questions later.”
Henry turned the handle and opened the door.
At the same moment, Peter’s cell phone rang.
He grabbed it, looked at the caller ID: SAVANNAH DAWKINS.
Henry was opening the door, crying “Holy fuck!” and swinging out into midair …
… because there was no floor, no ceiling, no walls, no rooms, nothing. The interior was a void, except for new steel framing.
Peter dropped the flashlight, caught Henry by the belt, and pulled him back before Henry fell all the way to the dirt floor of the basement.
“Holy fuck.” Henry grabbed the doorjamb and steadied himself while Peter held tight to his belt and answered the phone at the same time.
Savannah was whispering, “I … I … We need help. There’s men in my house. Right here, right now. I’m in the bathroom, but they’re here, and they’re watching.”
Bang!
She screamed, “No!”
It sounded on the phone as if someone had broken into the bathroom.
“Let’s go.” Peter pulled Henry after him.
They flew off the stoop and ran toward the Dawkinses’ door.
They were halfway across Eleventh when they saw two flashes through the front window and heard two powerful bolts of thunder. Boom! Boom!
They stopped in the middle of the street.
Then came the scream of a woman inside.
Peter said to Evangeline, “You girls stay here.”
But Evangeline wasn’t moving. She was frozen in place on the sidewalk.
As Peter and Henry ran up to the door, Diana said to Evangeline, “I’ve heard that sound one time too many in my life. Gunfire, then a screaming wife or mother. Shit.”
Then Diana started after the men.
Henry banged through the front door of the house, rushing to rescue a brother veteran from Vietnam.
Peter went right in after him.
The smell of gun smoke hung heavy and acrid in the air. The sound of Savannah’s whimpering echoed from the hallway, directly ahead of them.
In the living room to the left, a big black man lay facedown on the sofa. At the end of the hallway, at Savannah’s feet, a white man lay flat on his back.
Henry held the Magnum high, ready to fire, and stepped into the living room.
Donald Dawkins said, “Don’t shoot.”
Peter stepped around the corner and said, “Are you all right?”
Dawkins said, “They come in the back about half an hour ago. Started grillin’ me and the missus about what all we sell at the Eastern Market. Real nasty. Then one of them got a iPhone message. They mentioned Black Irish, here, how him and his pals were comin’. Then they put out all the lights and started watchin’ out the window.”
Henry said to Peter, “That’s when J-Man sent them a text, the bastard.”
“Like we said,” answered Peter, “everybody’s fuckin’ everybody else.”
“Ain’t it the truth.” Henry kicked at the foot of the black man on the sofa.
Evangeline came to the door and peered in, as if she was afraid to step inside.
Dawkins said, “When they heard Savannah on the phone in the bathroom, it distracted them just long enough that I could get the sawed-off out of the sofa cushions.”
“Sawed-offs is illegal, bro.” Henry looked around the darkened living room and holstered his gun. “At least you shot them in the house.”
“We would’ve dragged them inside if we had to.” Savannah stepped into the parlor and wiped her tears. She was getting control.
“Yeah,” said Dawkins. “We ain’t stupid.”
“Well,” said Henry, “go take off them long pants and put on some Bermudas.”
“Why?” asked Dawkins.
“If the cops see your sawed-off leg, they might cut you some slack on the sawed-off shotgun.” Then he said to Peter, “You know these fellers?”
“They’re the bruise brothers who picked me up on the bridge yesterday. Mr. Redskins and Mr. Fit, Andre and Jonathan. They work for David Bruce.”
“Well, if they killed Sorrel, they paid.”
“Y’all better go,” said Dawkins. “We can handle this.”
“One question.” Henry gestured to the house across the street. “How come you didn’t tell us?”
“What could I say? That I cherry-picked the good stuff, then sold the place and they brought in the wreckers to gut it. Whatever you lookin’ for, if it was in Miz Molly’s house, it’s in some landfill now.”
“We think it’s a diary,” said Peter. “Worth a lot.”
“A diary? Goddamn. If I thought I threw away his diary”—Dawkins pointed to the picture of Lincoln on the wall—“I couldn’t live with myself.”
“And you ain’t too easy to live with as it is,” said Savannah.
“I’d sure like to read a thing like that,” said Dawkins, “just to see what he had to say on whatever he was thinkin’ about. There was truth in his thoughts and music in his words. Be a damn shame if we lost his words ’cause of me.”
“Well, the diary may be gone,” said Peter, “it may not. But you’re cut in, no matter what.”
They heard sirens in the distance.
Henry said, “We’d better go.”
FOURTEEN
April 1865
Halsey believed that on Tuesday night, Lincoln would give a sp
eech for the ages, another Gettysburg Address, which defined what they were fighting for in a few paragraphs, or another Second Inaugural, with its resounding call to mercy and resolve.
And though he was exhausted after his Monday adventures in the War Department, he had to hear it.
At dusk, he dressed in his soldier blues, begged a pass from the wardmaster, and walked up Fifteenth, past the illuminated Treasury Building, its pillars glimmering with transparencies of ten-dollar bonds. He met Samantha in front of the State Department, which mirrored the War Department on the other side of the White House with candles in every window. The first Grand Illumination was under way.
She slipped her arm into his and together they walked toward the gaslights and sputtering torches on the White House lawn, through a mist that floated like liquid anticipation in the air, into a close-packed crowd that smelled of damp wool and rye whiskey and a dozen ladies’ fragrances.
Then, at eight o’clock, the window above the White House door opened, and Lincoln appeared from the shadows, almost a shadow himself.
The crowd began to roar, but with a tone and timbre far different from the previous day. Their cry was full throated and high pitched, joyful and angry, victorious and vengeful all at the same time.
Lincoln raised his hands for quiet. Then his secretary, Noah Brooks, appeared on one side of him with a lamp to hold over the speech, and Tad came on the other to catch each page as it dropped. And Abraham Lincoln began to read.
But he called down no rhetorical thunderbolts, raised no angry spirits, offered no powerful imagery or rhythmic parallels. Instead, he presented his listeners with thorny prose for the thorny problem of Reconstruction. He called it a task “fraught with great difficulties.” He talked about the challenges of seating new legislatures, of the difficulties already faced in creating a government for Louisiana, and of Negro suffrage. He talked on … and on.…
People in the crowd grew restless. Some began whispering to their friends. Others drifted away. Undaunted, Lincoln forged ahead, as if he would outlast their boredom.
It was a good assumption, because that ghostly figure in the White House window had outlasted all his enemies and detractors, the Copperheads, the Knights of the Golden Circle, McClellan and Pinkerton with their inflated visions of Southern might, the Wood brothers and their Congressional allies, the Abolitionists and their radical expectations. Now, he would rise above them to do the hardest job of all, reuniting the broken nation. Vengeance might have been on the minds of many that night, but not on Lincoln’s.
Then, Samantha was tugging Halsey’s elbow. “Do you see him?”
“Who?”
“Up near the portico, right at the edge of the shadow. It’s Booth.”
Halsey looked over the sea of felt hats and ladies’ feathers and—yes—there were the square shoulders, the firm jaw, the undeniable presence.
Booth was turning to the man next to him, a big man in a canvas coat. He was whispering into the man’s ear, whispering hard and angry. The man shook his head once, then twice. Then Booth was turning, pushing through the crowd, in and out of the torchlight, his face flashing an actor’s angry scowl. He brushed past, close enough for Halsey to smell the brandy.
Halsey was glad that Booth had not recognized him. He had had enough of Booth.
* * *
Over the next two days, Halsey plotted two things: to find McNealy before McNealy found him, and to get closer to the president. He failed on both counts.
He read the papers for mention of a presidential appearance. Perhaps Lincoln would go to Grover’s to see Aladdin; or, The Wonderful Lamp, or to Ford’s, where Laura Keene was playing all week.
And on Wednesday, Halsey walked by the shoeshine stand at the National Hotel. He wanted information about McNealy, because he now had information to give. He had read through Squeaker’s ledger, studied the catalog of sins committed by men like Benjamin Wood, certain other senators, and yes, even old Doc Wiggins, the rebel sympathizer.
He approached on Pennsylvania, but Noah hardly glanced at him because Major Eckert and Police Superintendent Webb were sitting in the chairs, complimenting “the best shoeshine in town, a fine way to finish up after a fine lunch.”
Halsey leaned against the corner in front of the telegraph office, opened a newspaper, and listened.
Eckert was saying, “We hear your middle son marches with the Colored Troops.”
“He does, sir.”
“When he comes back, will he work in the hotel again like his brothers?”
Noah stopped polishing and looked up. “Well, he dream of bein’ a canal man.”
“Canal man?” said Webb. “On a boat?”
“No, sir, at the lock house. He always want to work the lock and keep the records and spend the rest of the day lookin’ up at Mr. Washington’s monument.”
“Not much traffic on the canal now,” said Webb. “It would be a better job for a man whose back is broke from bendin’ over shoes for too long.”
“Yes, sir,” said Noah. “That sure would be somethin’.”
“So long as his sons kept in the shoeshine business,” said Eckert.
Both men laughed. So did Noah. And two military officers came out of the hotel and got in line for shines. With celebrations every night, it seemed that everyone was looking to spiff, top to bottom.
So Halsey moved off and came back on Thursday, a gorgeous spring day with bright sunshine and warm temperatures, a day when the shoeshine business should have been brisk. But Noah’s stand was closed.
Halsey asked the Negro doorman where he could get a shine.
The doorman said, “Sometimes Noah Bone just take a day off. He’s plain tired out with worry ’bout his boy in the army. It wears on him, or so he say.”
* * *
That night, Halsey and Samantha walked arm in arm onto Capitol Hill to see the final, grandest Grand Illumination. The mighty dome floated like a crown of light above the republican city, and every street below, a simple grid overlain by radiating diagonals, appeared as part of a light-bejeweled train covering the monarch of democracy. And every building along every street, from the lowliest Negro shanty to the mighty Patent Office, glowed with candles and gaslight. And out of every circle and square, red rockets were rising and bursting, like a confetti of light.
Samantha took Halsey’s hand and said, “We’ll have a life together, Halsey. I know it. In my soul, I do.”
Halsey prayed that it would be so.
* * *
Sometime after midnight, Halsey was awaked by something landing on his chest, something small, cold, heavy.
“I believe that’s yours.”
Halsey popped up, saw his pistol on the blankets, then saw Detective Joseph Albert McNealy, legs crossed, arms folded, sitting in Walt Whitman’s place:
“Nice little game you’ve got here. Soft bed, three squares, commode chair to shit in—”
“—bullet holes, fevers, amputations. You fit right in.”
McNealy looked at the men in the beds on either side.
They were newcomers, both wounded at Five Forks. One of them was sleeping. The other seemed unconscious.
George Smith was snoring. He had not cried since Sunday night. Halsey had decided that seeing the president changed things for him … or perhaps it was a good drunk.
Halsey pulled himself up on his elbows and looked at the gun.
McNealy said, “Go ahead, take it. It’s yours. But don’t think about shooting me with it. It’s not loaded.”
Halsey picked up the pistol and turned it over. Then he studied McNealy, who had not aged at all. Neither had his brown suit.
“I cleaned it and oiled it for you.” McNealy pushed the gun under the covers. “Keep it. A man needs to protect himself on the dark streets.”
Halsey said, “What are you after?”
“We had a deal.”
“A deal?” Halsey remembered, but better for the moment if he pretended not to.
“You get
the daybook and we rescue your reputation. Or I get the daybook and you give me Squeaker’s ledger. Then we rescue your reputation.”
Halsey said nothing.
“Of course”—McNealy pulled out a cigar—“it’ll be harder to rescue now that you’ve shot down two men in cold blood on the Aqueduct Bridge.”
“A setup,” said Halsey, “telling me to track Doc Wiggins, then telling Hunter and Skeeter I’d be on the bridge. I was a fool.”
“I never told you to trust me. I wouldn’t trust me.” McNealy bit the tip from his cigar and spit it on the floor. “But I wanted them dead, and you did the job. Knights of the Golden damn Circle, a group of lunatics who’d make the war go on even longer. They deserved killin’ after what they did to Constance Wood. And if the soldier boys killed you in the process…” McNealy shrugged. “Instead, you’ve been a fugitive from justice for two and a half years.”
“A fugitive fighting for his country.”
“That’ll count for something.”
Halsey asked, “Do you have the daybook?”
McNealy nodded.
“From the beginning? From the day that you and Lafayette Baker went to the Squeaker’s shooting scene?”
“Harriet Dunbar had it first.”
“Had it?”
“She bought it from Squeaker that first morning. He showed her a page of it in the Willard. She went right home and told me.”
“You?”
“I visited every other morning. She liked the way my beard tickled her thighs. Had a lot of feist in her for fifty. But that morning, she wasn’t interested in my beard or my balls. She took two hundred in gold and went right back to Murder Bay and bought the diary. I bodyguarded her. Fucked her later.”
Halsey tried to wipe that picture from his mind. “I saw her in the Willard the next day. It looked like she was waiting for Squeaker again.”
“He liked her money, so he promised he’d sell other bits to her, out of his ledger. He may have thought he was doin’ somethin’ for the cause, gettin’ a Confederate spy to give up her gold.” McNealy lit the cigar. “She’s no longer with us.”
Halsey asked, “If you have the daybook, why haven’t you used it?”
“Waitin’ for the right moment.”
The Lincoln Letter Page 42
