Seven for a Secret (21 page)

Then I lost my focus on him entirely.

The house’s windows had been covered. Not draped in black bunting, as with mourning, but boarded with thick wooden shutters bearing heavy locks. Empty houses are secured so, to prevent sixty or seventy Irish taking up residence and using your fainting couch for kindling. Then Mr. Adams faced the street, in an overcoat of beige wool, and I saw he wore no mourning band. Whatever his strange business with the house, he knew nothing of the fate of his wife.

“I wonder why—” I began, stepping out into the street.

A fist of iron closed around my upper arm. I landed behind a billboard claiming that Galvanic Rings could cure heart palpitations, rheumatic pains, and general nervous derangement at one go. I wasn’t sure that was possible. But I was dead certain that if my brother manhandled me one more time, he was going to happen upon my knuckles in his eye unexpectedly.

“What the hell is the matter?”

I twisted free. Valentine peered down the road, following the easy progress of Charles Adams’s camel-colored coat and navy top hat.

“Not sure I savvy where to start.” Cautiously, he emerged from behind the advertisement. “Eighty-
four
West Broadway. I’ll be damned. I knew it sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it.”

“What are you talking about? Start with whatever just turned you into a spooked colt.”

“All right,” he returned placidly. “That is not Charles Adams. That is a man by the name of Rutherford Gates, and he is a Democratic Party state senator to Albany. Now, wipe that look off your mazzard. You are about to learn how to bird-dog
effectively
. Why I didn’t school you before now will be an everlasting puzzle to me.”

twelve

I’ll tell you a good joke. The other day I saw a strapping fellow standing on the Corner of Franklin-street, with his back to me. I walked quietly up, and taking him roughly by the collar, saying
“Oh, I’ve got you at last, you runaway scoundrel.”
If I had fired a pistol near his ear, he would not have been more frightened; breaking away from me, he left a
dusty
streak after him towards the river.

—WILLIAM M. BOBO,
GLIMPSES OF NEW YORK CITY BY A SOUTH CAROLINIAN (WHO HAD NOTHING ELSE TO DO),
1852

A
s I shadowed
Valentine,
who was shadowing the man I’d supposed to be Charles Adams, I thought,
They can’t be the same fellow—Gates and Adams. It’s impossible.
The men must have been friends, business associates, perhaps even kin.

Surely.

I didn’t want to mull over the alternative. The alternative was a tar pit of no small proportions.

“Where then is Charles Adams?” I attempted.

We’d just reached Anthony Street, heading eastward. Val whistled through his teeth at a news hawker, the lad’s throat bulging as he bellowed over the possibility that we may, if not now then all too soon, be at war with either Mexico or England. My brother tossed the lad a coin and rolled the newspaper, stuffing it in his inner pocket as he spared me a glance that looked—to my deep consternation—almost patient. Fully alert, anyhow. Having a target to tail had livened him considerably.

“Wherever Charles Adams might be, that was Senator Gates’s ken. I’ve been there before. Such an out-and-outer you’ve never seen. Muscat, prime rib, ice carved into the shape of a swan.”

“I’ve been there before too. Lucy Adams lived there.”

“Then our stocks have just taken a turn for the bearish, supposing you hankered after a happy ending.”

“How do you know they don’t share that townhouse? Adams and Gates?”

“Because I can tell which way the wind is blowing, particularly when it’s sending shit in my eye.”

Why I wanted so badly for there to be a Charles Adams, and for him to have loved his wife, I don’t entirely understand. After all, I’d have been forced to inform a soon-to-be-grieving widower of his loss. Yet I longed for that outcome from the marrow in my bones to the prints of my fingers.

Because if there was no Charles Adams, there was no Lucy Adams either. There was only a living, breathing, beautiful lie who wasn’t aware that she was a heartless ruse personified and not a wife.

Not living and breathing any longer,
I corrected myself.

Gates was still in sight when we reached Broadway. The street beyond the flagstone sidewalk was packed with sleighs, single-horse cutters skirting past the massive vehicles in deadly spurts and starts. A swarm of people surrounded us. Black people, white people, every sort of human wearing every cut of cloth and every style of hat yet invented. A Mohammedan with his head neatly wrapped jostled my arm and murmured a polite apology, just as I gripped the collar of a figner—a child pickpocket to the uninitiated—who’d taken instant advantage of my imbalance and sent grubby fingers into my coat. I tossed him back into the river like an undersized fish.

“First,” my brother said, stepping around an enormous pram draped in pink satin, “stop
looking
for him. See with the sides of your vision. Thankfully, we’re on the Dollar Side. Savvy?”

Val was peering at the shop windows as we progressed. The west side of Broadway is colloquially called the Dollar Side for its plate-glass-fronted shops brimming with English jewelry and French silk and Belgian lace and Italian statuary. On the Shilling or eastern side, chophouses and saloons and steps leading into subterranean oyster cellars prevail. And in the polished glass, I realized I could spy Gates as well in reflection as I did in plain view.

“Stop walking like that, you ninny. You’re squandering the fact you’re small. It’s flash that you’re small. Head up, shoulders out, as if you want to be seen. Then nary will see you.”

Unaware I’d been skulking, I straightened up like a bantam rooster.

“Notice we’re twice as far back as you were when trailing me. That was journeyman’s work. Stay alert but stay distant.”

Dodging a group of gabbing Spanish tourists who all seemed to be pointing in different directions, I recalled a ghastly stretch of three hours when I was five, on the July afternoon when eleven-year-old Val decided I needed to know how to swim. He’d dragged me down to the shore from nearby Greenwich Village, tied a rope around my waist, looped the same rope around his wrist, and thrown me in the Hudson. Eight times. I caught the gist of it after that.

“Val, he’s stopped,” I hissed.

A trinket in a window had arrested Gates’s interest. As we approached, he proved to be studying ornamental cigar boxes.

“Break your stride and I will break your ankle,” my brother said affably.

We breached Gates’s shadow and emerged from the other side. After about ten yards, my brother cut past a parson wearing homespun, nearly sending the poor hayseed into the gutter, and stepped to the curb. Val’s stick shot up through his fingers and flashed above his head like a torchlight as he finally glanced back the way we’d come. But now—due to the sluggish traffic and the way his body was oriented—he for all appearances was seeking out a sleigh for hire.

“When you do look back, have a reason. Never keek over your shoulder.”

Just as Gates caught up to us, Val glared impatiently out at the choked roadway. He then made a small circle, slid the leaded stick back down through his fingers, and resumed our pursuit when the distance was safe. It was like watching a ballet savant. If ballet were based upon sneakthievery and rowdyism.

Half a block farther along, Val muttered, “I knew it. That uppish peacock. I could have taken us straight here and saved the botheration.”

“I’d not have learned bird-dogging.”

“Fair play, then.”

“Where . . . oh,” I breathed as Gates entered the Astor House hotel.

Most of Broadway’s edifices, both on the Dollar and Shilling sides, are built either of sandy stone or of brick and mortar. The Astor House is a pink-granite behemoth, scrubbed and eager as a debutante with a paltry dowry, finished ten years ago at the apparent cost of three or four equivalent European palaces. Facing City Hall Park, its entrance is flanked by four great pillars, the building itself occupying the entire city block between Broadway, Vesey, Church, and Barclay streets. At six looming stories, it looks as if America’s first multi-millionaire had dumped a cartful of moneybags at an empty lot to see what sprouted. Which is exactly what happened, so far as I know. They probably employ more laundresses than Ward Six does copper stars.

Gates slowed before the carpeted entrance, checking his watch. But Val plunged ahead while the senator’s head was down. I found myself within a disquieting land of piercing crystal chandeliers, polished gold monocles, potted palms, and ruby-draped white throats. The society women slid about with blank expressions meaning
I will
do you the honor of allowing you to stare,
while the men of business somehow managed to look both impatient and bored, sipping from snifters and trimming their cigar ends. My brother ambled through the lobby toward the sunlit courtyard in the center of the opulent monstrosity. Finding an emerald settee commanding a view of the entrance, he took a seat, pulling the newspaper from his jacket and leafing through its pages. I joined him.

“And finally,” Val said, eyes not leaving the page, “the very best way to trail a rabbit is to arrive at his destination first. Saves them getting peery.”

“What now?”

“Now you keep your mouth shut as much as is possible for you. Here he comes.”

Gates stood casting his eyes over the room. A colored waiter of military bearing marched by, effortlessly balancing a salver of what smelled like clam soup. The quirk of the Astor is that if you stay there and you want something—any something, day or night—you get it. I presume such services cost copious chink, but I’m not in any position to know. When Gates proceeded toward the bar, my brother lowered the paper with a snap.

“I’ll be damned. Gates! What a streak of luck. Just the man we were looking for.”

Rutherford Gates veered our way with an open smile. From closer up, I saw that his goatee was neatly waxed, his brown eyes radiating good health and good cheer. Thrusting a palm at my brother, he tucked his left thumb under his braces. The right thumb did likewise after he’d shaken Val’s hand. Why every politician on the face of the earth feels compelled to copy this mannerism I do not know, but I will ache with curiosity over it until the day I die.

“Captain Wilde. What a pleasure. Good lord, I haven’t seen you since last year’s elections. And this is . . . ?”

“My brother, Timothy. Another copper star, as you can see.”

“Pleased to meet you,” I said.

“The pleasure is mine, Mr. Wilde. Always happy to meet an ally. I do take it, seeing who your sibling is, that you’re one of my voters.”

Having never voted in my life, I merely nodded.

“You said you wanted me, Captain?” Gates took a seat on a chair next to the settee, gesturing magnanimously for us to sit as well, as if he were visiting royalty or possibly the owner of these specific furnishings. “Gearing up for spring elections soon, and all, I’ll be seeing more of you, no doubt. We can’t have eighteen thirty-eight happening again.”

Val raised his fingers to the bridge of his nose in what seemed genuine distress. “Do not speak of that year. It puts me off my appetite for days at a time.”

“What happened in eighteen thirty-eight?”

Valentine placed his boot over my toe and pressed down painfully.

“I was very ill that year,” I explained. “Scarlet fever.”

“We nearly lost him,” Val agreed. “Had to take a rest cure in Savannah. He drifted in and out, helpless as a babe. He’s never recovered entirely. Has these sudden fits, eh, Tim?”

“Fits.” I glared at him. “Yes. On occasion.”

“My sympathies.” Gates smiled at me, wise and generous. “Well, in eighteen thirty-eight, the Whigs secretly imported hundreds of men from Philadelphia, set them up in boarding houses, and paid them to vote against us. And it worked beautifully. The bastards.”

“That’s revolting,” I said, sincerely.

“I know.
Why
didn’t
I
think of it sooner?” Val lamented. “We’re flush with lowre, we can afford our own Philadelphians. It was disgraceful.”

“You mustn’t blame yourself, Captain,” Gates soothed. “We are at least still gratifyingly fiscally solvent. In fact, I’m meeting with a major contributor. I fear I’ve only five minutes to give you gentlemen.”

“Here’s the gist of it.” Val leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, pressing the tips of his fingers together. “A moll was found in an alley near the river yesterday. Strangled to death. Foul piece of work.”

“How dreadful.” Gates pulled a silver case from his waistcoat and offered us French cigarettes. Hands steady, gaze dispassionately interested, mouth in a neutral line. I declined to smoke and Val readily accepted.

“We’ve done a little digging. And the worst of it is, Senator Gates, I’ve reason to think you knew the victim. She was a high-yellow colored woman, around thirty years, dimber lass—really, she made quite a picture. Sound familiar?”

Gates paled. The cigarette in his fingers dangled unlit. I stared voraciously, ravenous for details—for every twitch of his lips, for the subtle tremor at his temples. A thready pulsebeat fluttered in his throat as he swallowed. “You can’t possibly mean my housekeeper, Lucy Wright?”

Housekeeper.
God in heaven,
I thought.

“I think that might be just who I mean,” Val said evenly. “We identified her this morning.”

“Oh, God,” he said. “God, that’s . . . oh,
Lucy
.”

He sure enough resembled a man whose spine had just been yanked from his torso. Pain had speared him, and it was quick spreading. Gates’s hands shook. He looked at them helplessly, as if they belonged on another animal.

“When was the last you saw her?” Val asked.

Gates’s head fell forward, his eyes closing. “I hadn’t seen her since returning from Albany. I’d assumed that she’d found new lodgings, you see. I never dreamed harm could have come to her.”