The Blackest Bird (27 page)

Old Hays smiles, albeit tightly, at his daughter as he wipes his lips with the napkin she has provided.

“Mr. Bennett has indeed developed the knack to extract good from small things,” he offers.

Olga agrees.

“In a more sober moment, Papa, Citizen Bennett concedes the likelihood of such possibility, Mr. Colt being returned to New York to face his punishment, scant at best.”

“Yes, but Mr. Bennett has missed the most salient point, Olga.”

“And what is that?”

“Tommy Coleman is no more likely dead than John Colt.”

S
ergeant McArdel was not to be found at any of his haunts, although Old Hays would have dearly loved to have a word with his underling. He failed to show for work. His home on Murray Street, near the Columbia College, stood unoccupied. The proprietor at his favorite drinking spot on Dey Street said the sergeant, a usual customer, had not been in his establishment for some three or four days.

Hays took McArdel’s actions as nothing less than testimony to his betrayal. He held no doubt this man, whom he had trusted, had turned corrupt under the influence of money, and in all probability had fled.

In accordance, trying to get to the bottom of it, Hays sought substantiating audience with the harelipped keeper and another jailhouse guard, but these two, highest on his list, too, had failed to report to their posts.

Trencher, however, was present.

“Mr. Trencher,” Hays said after summoning the man to his office.

Trencher stood uneasy in front of him. “Yes, sir, Mr. High,” he managed.

“Mr. Trencher, your fellow guards, you have not seen them?”

“Which ones would be those, sir?”

“I think you know.”

Trencher’s gaze slipped to the floor. “Yes, sir,” he mumbled.

“Mr. Trencher, I do not tolerate betrayal well.”

“Nor should you, sir.”

“What do you know of your fellows, sir? Tell me!”

“Not much, Mr. High. I speak the truth.”

“And Sergeant McArdel?”

“Not much either there, sir.”

“I have heard talk of bribes paid.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Were you offered money, Mr. Trencher?”

“If I were, sir, I didn’t take it.”

“But you were offered?”

“Yes, sir.”

“By whom?”

“Sergeant McArdel spoke with me, sir.”

“I see. Would you know the source of these funds offered you?”

“No, sir.”

“Could you guess?”

“I’m not very good at guessing, sir.”

“Come now, Mr. Trencher. We have worked together often over the years. I expect nothing less of you, speak the truth! Tell me what you know.”

Trencher looked back up from the floor. He puffed his chest and it swelled the blue serge of his keeper’s uniform. “Mr. Colt faced the gravest jeopardy,” he said. “The sergeant did not say where the reward was coming from, but a thousand dollars is a lot of currency. It weren’t hard for me to surmise.”

“No, I imagine it weren’t. Good lad, Mr. Trencher.”

By Friday of that week, with still no word of McArdel and without consulting Mayor Morris or any other superior for that matter, the high constable took it upon himself to enlist Balboa and travel with the barouche on the vehicle ferry to Paterson, New Jersey, to pay visit to Colonel Colt at his revolver factory. Over the last months, Hays had heard some vague talk circulating that Colt’s Patent Manufacturing enterprise might be on the verge of financial failure, by some accounts even leading to bankruptcy.

At the old mill where stood the plant, the high constable was announced. He found Mr. Colt in his office, behind his desk, smoking a well-formed segar. The two men shook hands. Old Hays had met Mr. Colt on any number of professional and social occasions, including several at the Tombs during John Colt’s prolonged incarceration. Nevertheless, Sam Colt again took the opportunity to speak expansively how he was an ardent admirer. He offered one of his dark-wrapped segars, not failing to mention that it was from Anderson’s top shelf. Hays declined.

The Colonel shrugged and resumed his desk chair, puffing tenaciously at his own smoke, achieving a bright red ember glow, gazing across his desk, over the segar ash, nodding slightly at Hays, an acknowledgment before inquiring had the high constable received the patent chair that had been sent to his residence.

Hays met Colt’s gaze evenly, said he had, expressed his gratitude, remarking the chair in question an uncanny instrument.

Colt grinned, pleased. He said he had much enjoyed in the pink pages of the
Police Gazette
—“Huey,” he called it, using the argot—the story of the Timothy Redmond bank fraud case from years past, where an innocent publican had been implicated, identified, and then arrested to face a life term for forgery. Hays had unmasked the true gang of scratchers, including the pugilist Bob the Wheeler, the screw-man James Holdgate, and the figure dancer John Reed, after carefully studying the physiognomy of Redmond in his Tombs cell.

“The part I liked the best was when, in the courtroom following his
acquittal, the hotelier—what was his name?—Redmond! turned to you in front of the entire procedural and cried, ‘Thank God for you, sir, and men of your kind!’ Was this true?” Colt asked.

The Colonel carried himself in such manner, thrust forward—his ponderous weight and bulk applied in a condition very nearly a threat—that might rankle a lesser man. Hays told him the account had been embellished, but intrinsically the facts were fairly depicted.

Colt nodded thoughtfully as if he concurred wholeheartedly with Redmond’s assessment of the high constable.

“Now what can I do for you, sir?” asked Colonel Colt. “I am at your service.”

“That is very kind of you. I am here to know, sir, what you may or may not know of your brother’s suicide.”

“Suicide?” Colt repeated slowly, his look guarded. “From all I am reading currently in the prints, do you not mean escape, High Constable?”

“I was hoping you might tell me.”

A laugh like an animal yelp erupted from Colt. His eyes twinkled. His big belly shook.

Ultimately Colonel Colt insisted he had no knowledge of how a dagger might have been smuggled into the Tombs for his brother to use on himself, if indeed he had committed such an act of self-annihilation. It was hard to believe everything read in the newsprints, especially the pennies. If John did not commit suicide but had escaped, Sam Colt said, he had no idea how this might have been managed. He himself had no culpability in such antics, he assured Hays. He had not heard from his brother, and assumed him dead. He had no presumption of any other scenario. He refuted any rumor that he had tried to pay bribes to any single individual employed at the Men’s House of Detention. Nor, he said, had he received any blackmail attempt to reclaim his brother’s remains. He said he did not know Sergeant McArdel.

Hays considered this. He thought it curious that the Colonel had seen fit to single out and mention the Timothy Redmond case of so long ago. Most especially as it evoked the name James Holdgate, the very man Hays had been dispatched to retrieve from Gravesend the night of the cupola dome fire and his brother’s undoubted escape.

“On parallel note,” Hays changed course in his inquiry, “what do you know of Mr. Edgar Poe, and how did you and your family come to him?”

If Colt thought the question queer or the change of subject vexing, he gave no indication. “I know nothing really of Mr. Poe,” he said. “My brother mentioned his name, calling him a colleague, someone he desired to be in concert with during his final days. Out of courtesy I followed through with Mr. Poe in my brother’s name.”

“Did you ever talk to him?”

“To Poe? I had several conversations, mostly about money and increasing his fees.”

“What was your impression?”

Samuel Colt smiled, almost as if Hays was a conspirator. “In all honesty, I found him a strange bird,” he said. “My brother never failed to call him a genius, but I had my doubts.”

“Was the name of Mary Rogers ever mentioned by your brother in conjunction with Mr. Poe?”

The Colonel seemed to consider. “The segar girl?” he said deliberately, as if to ruminate. “No. Never. Not that I can recollect.” He stood. “Excuse me for a second.” He left the room, to return almost immediately. With him he now carried an elegant book-sized cherrywood box. He laid it on his desk and opened it in front of Hays, revealing the box’s red felt lining. Within lay a magnificently crafted and hand-etched blue steel Paterson revolver, laid out with all its accessories, rammer lever, powder flask, bullet mold, and multifunction tool.

“Please excuse me for not having this pistol personally engraved with you in mind, High Constable. I would have preferred to present
an offering more personal and representative of your station, but your visit is unexpected and I am ill prepared. I’m afraid my armament venture on the verge of poor failure. All the same, I wonder if you would not honor me by accepting another small token. It is, of course, a repeating pistol of my design: forty-caliber five-shot percussion cap, capable of firing ten shots in forty seconds.”

O
ld Hays departed Colt’s office without the gun. Back home, he sits over an all but silent luncheon, prepared by his daughter, of stewed chicken and parsley dumplings, until suddenly, with no provocation, he says,

“I asked Colonel Colt if his brother John knew Mary Rogers. If John had ever mentioned her in context with the name Edgar Poe.”

Olga put down her fork. “What did he say?”

“At first he did not even answer. Then he said, ‘The segar girl? No. Never.’”

Olga asked, “Papa, do you think we shall ever know what befell her, what befell Mary Rogers?”

He now too put down his utensils. He declared to his daughter it was his honest conviction that with an open mind the individual has opportunity to learn, to discover. “With a closed mind? What is there?” He spoke rhetorically. “Nothing. Olga, when first I joined the constabulary, I was oft reminded on the first day Europeans set foot on this island, seven men lost their lives. Two red, five white. Since that day the killing has not stopped. Death and violence is the mere tapestry of life in this city. I accept this, Olga. You must as well.”

S
OMETIMES DURING THE
winter months it became so cold on lower Broadway that the ice forming in outhouses could not be broken, and the roaring fire in a fireplace was no guarantee that in the next room a penman’s ink might not freeze in its well.

The Lord’s Day, the second Sunday in December, was the day set aside for the funeral of Tommy Coleman. As it dawned, blue and crisp, the harsh wind roaring down the Hudson from the north country, howled its last, and by midmorning a new breeze, rising off the saline tidal river, billowing from the southern reaches across the harbor, gently insured it being the balmiest and most transcendent of December days.

Old Hays set forth from his home on Lispenard Street. In front of him the sun shone down on the sidewalk. Above him the sky transformed, and the warmth carried on the southern currents erased any hint of chill from the air. The ink in the well of the lowly priest Father Patrick O’Malley, scheduled to hold forth at Tommy Coleman’s funeral, finally thawed, assuring he would, praise to the Almighty, now be able to set about his Sabbath work of composition.

Meanwhile, at the funeral home on Mott Street, an Irish wake of phenomenal proportion was concluding. As Hays arrived, four of Tommy’s boyos stood sentries at the door in honor of their downed leader.

How young they were! Yet already they displayed the countenance of their elders. Hardened, inured, their rag caps pulled low on sloping brows, sure sign of studied stupidity. Greasy hair hanging, ragged at the edges under their grimy caps. Flat noses, mouths mere cruel slashes, crooked, downcast lines of insolence. Chins? Hays found them skimpy and weak. And necks? Ha! Scrawny and black with necklaces of dirt. The dirt rising like a vapor, extending and staining behind the fleshy, unwashed ears. As young as they were, the cauliflower ear was not remarkable among this set, and when they talked it was out of the side of their mouths with more than a modicum of “dims” and “does.”

Inside the oft-used funeral parlor, whiskey flowed, and had flowed over the last week.

Through the window Hays could see Tommy’s ma and da presiding over the mourners.

Both Coleman faces were red with drink and heat. Both their handsome heads, crowned with snowy white manes of silken hair, were abob with grateful acknowledgments of stricken sympathy and heartfelt good intent.

How many people attended this wake? Of mourners and curiosity seekers, gang members, adjutants, and well-intentioned neighbors? Family and friends? Pushy newspaper flacks, publicity seekers, and the semiliterate? Of louts and prigs? Good people and the compassionate? The plain? The simple? Those who knew Tommy Coleman and were personally devastated? The callous and devoid?

As far as Hays could tell, thousands, if there was one. All come to pay their respects in their own personal way to the too-soon-taken-from-their-midst young gangster.

They stood in line, waited their turn to enter.

Hays would not venture who came out of legitimacy and who out of perversion.

Eventually, after everyone was suitably rip-roaring drunk, the mourners carried the closed casket (Tommy’s face said in whispers to have been literally shot off in the fracas with the police and militia below the Morningside Heights) from the wake site to a basement resort happily owned by Petey O’Malley, nephew to the funeral home proprietor, Seamus O’Malley, and the curate, Patrick O’Malley, then one block to the church, Our Lady of Contrition, directly south of the Mulberry Bend on the north beat of Paradise Square, later the coffin to be heaved a-shoulder by Tommy’s favored companions and compatriots to be paraded through the streets more than a few blocks away via gala fete, muscled up through the Bend and on to the consecrated ground of the holy cemetery.

The pallbearers were indeed a well-soused yet still upright crew in
mourning coats and black stove hats, culled from the ranks of the fraternal Irish gangs, one from each brotherhood in a symbolic gesture on the occasion, in the face of tragedy, of newly found unity and good trust.

The streets surrounding Paradise Square all along the parade route were teeming with curiosity seekers. But only those calling themselves “blood relatives” and “honest folk” could be welcomed into the chapel proper.

Many more “close acquaintances” and “well-wishers” clotted the narrow streets starting south from Canal. The crowd swarmed the park and hundreds infested the roofs and windows and outer stairways of the buildings surrounding the church.

At one point the rickety wooden outer stairway providing access to upper stories and roof, tacked precipitously to the face of Sweeney’s Feed Warehouse & Distillery, groaned and creaked before loudly cracking, like a cannon shot, then crashing outright, sending some seventy-odd viewers to the sidewalk and street below.

Rubberneckers, giddy with joy and horror, seeing and hearing the commotion, ran will-I, nill-I, but even they, this dissolute mass of onlookers, became quiet when the bells finally tolled, signaling the start of the funeral mass proper, the sanctuary of the church so very well filled to the apse, the high constable relegated to standing uncomfortably in the rear behind the holy water.

Prayers were said, and on the pulpit from inside Our Lady of Contrition the priest, Father O’Malley, began his eulogy in voice loud enough to be heard by those nearly gathered right there in the chapel and through open door outside in the street, while for the benefit of those farther away the prelate’s words repeated and amplified by another, the crier, yet one more relative of the O’Malley clan, this one a third cousin, thin and pinch-faced, in shabby but soulful black robes, his voice of incongruous, ponderous deep timbre, blaring nothing but a misheard semblance of what his eponymous kin was saying to those poor shattered and shuttered inside, to those out there in the street,
feet dangling from the tin rooftop cornices or bearing witness from the surrounding tenement windows, straining if only to listen from tanneries and ash houses, and comprehend all God’s mysteries.

“Many tombstone of a miller reads: ‘Killed in his mill!’” intoned Father O’Malley from the pulpit. “The same may right be said of our young son and brother, Tommy Coleman.”

With the high constable watching from the back of the church, the father, he who Hays knew had baptized infant Tommy and had known him personally through his short and misspent life, looked up, as if scrutinizing the assembled, gauging their reaction (not a dry eye in the house), and pressed on.

“Killed in his mill? What mill had he? This was a boy of seventeen, nay, eighteen years. He had no mill! He had nothing. Absolutely nothing. So I’ll answer this inquiry myself.
What mill had he, he was!
I warn you one and all, and I repeat:
Stay away from evil!

“I knew the lad well, and said the same to him often. Our dearly departed, enough is enough!
Stay away from the evil that infests our
streets and our minds. Save yourself!
”

As Hays shifted his weight uneasily, this steadfast, earnest man of God looked over his overflowing, overzealous audience and congregation and continued.

“What’s more to be said?” he inquired.

Hays waited with the rest of the assembled for the answer.

“What more indeed? … Nothing. Not a thing. Take not another breath. Nothing more need be spoken. But speak we must. Cry out we must.

“He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword,” continued Father O’Malley. “It is our own stark reality, and so be it for what it is.”

The accepted code of conduct being, Shoot twenty poor citizens of the Points in the scragg and expect twenty bullets in your own boke in reprisal.

But the priest was not finished yet.

“Young as he was, we all looked up to Tommy Coleman,” the father
continued with his oration. “That is to say, young as he was, we all looked up to him at the same time we all looked down upon him. He was a boy. How old was he? I ask again. Eighteen? Then he died. A shame. A real shame. A mere mite. Yet how many more immutable movers of men have we known more astute than he? Our Tommy’s was a rare gift. To be admired, to be mined, to be put to use. But not to be killed. To be killed is a sin. Crime does not pay!” Father O’Malley intoned loudly, his voice quivering now with even more charged melodrama.

“Listen to me, one and all, inside and out, all about. All who can hear me, I implore you, pay attention! I beg you, pay attention! Humanity needs you! Pay attention! Do not waste yourselves! Pay attention! America needs you. Pay attention! New York City needs you. Pay attention! Your family, your friends, your brothers, your sisters, your children, they all need you. Pay attention!

“We all need you. Strangers, admirers, confess! Brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, pay attention! We need you. Heed the warning issued here today. Study the example extolled so clearly for us all this day. Mourn your loss, one and all, and repeat after me:
Crime does not
pay!
”

Credit must be given where credit is due, Old Hays noted to himself. Father O’Malley was, if nothing else, persistent. The priest fixed with a hardened blue eye his congregation.

Then all those massed in Our Lady of Contrition, and all those gathered outside on the sidewalks and on the cobblestones, and all those perched on the rickety fire escapes, and all those pressed together, shoulder to shoulder, in the alleys, breathing tannery fumes and privy stench, all those crowded stomach to rump, shoulder to maw, took up the chant.

“
Crime does not pay!
” went the reverberate through the holy building, through the streets.

From windowsill to lamppost, from tenement flagging to tree limb, wherever citizenry hung within earshot, scarred and unscarred, Irish-American
or the most recent greenhorn immigrant from Kerry, scathed or unscathed, he or she, child or man, boy or girl, they reached deep and repeated, crescendo and bravado, pure and deeply felt: “Crime does not pay!”

“
Crime does not pay!
”

“Crime does not pay!”