The Lincoln Deception Read online

  The rainy spring had left the roads soft, which made for slow going in Cook’s open wagon. The horse, a sorrel mare beyond her salad days, labored up the hills and wobbled down them. “Don’t know why they call these rolling hills,” Cook said as the mare heaved up a considerable rise. “They’re just damned hills.”

  Fraser was transfixed by Cook’s hands. They were large and powerful, but the fingers were twisted and gnarled. He’d never seen hands like that, not even on the miners. He asked about them.

  “You ever try to catch a professional fast ball, curve ball, with your bare hands?” Cook held up his right hand. “Did it for nine years. Most days my hands swole up twice normal size, broke every finger on both of ’em, some two or three times. Catcher ain’t no little boy’s job, but they paid me to do it, paid me real well.”

  “They give you much pain?”

  Cook shrugged. “You get used to it.”

  They talked baseball for a while. Cook sputtered about Cap Anson being a race hater, how the man drove every last colored player out of professional ball. Fraser suspected that with Speed Cook a lot of conversations came back to race.

  Cook said he was planning to start a newspaper for colored people, one that would explain that they had choices, they had to stand up for their rights, no matter what the cost. Fraser protested that there weren’t any race haters in Harrison and Jefferson counties. It used to be so, Cook admitted, or it seemed so when he was a boy. But it didn’t seem so anymore.

  “ ’Course, I’ve been baited by professionals,” Cook said. “Grandstands full of white people screaming at me, calling me names, threatening me, all because my skin’s darker than theirs— and not darker than all of them, neither. Hell, they even come down out of the stands after me.”

  “I remember reading about that fracas, the one where the man got killed.”

  Cook didn’t answer. Fraser looked up the hill on his side of the wagon. A few scrawny cattle cropped what looked like weeds.

  “Jury said I was innocent,” Cook said. “Twelve white men on that jury, they all agreed I had the right to defend myself.”

  “That’s right.”

  Cook shook his head and snorted. “That’s why I carry a knife, always do. And that was in the North. Don’t even want to talk about down South.”

  Steubenville huddled on the edge of the Ohio River. Cook drove to the south side, land that was too low and too near the water. They pulled up in front of a tired two-story structure that dwarfed the shotgun shacks on either side of the street. The building expressed its ambitions through a sign that read COOK HOTEL, plus a coat of whitewash with green trim. The wind gusted in the fading light. Rain was coming, maybe a lot of rain. As they dropped off the wagon, Fraser doubted he would sleep in his own bed.

  “When you said you could put me up,” Fraser said, nodding at the sign, “I guess you meant it.”

  Cook smiled his first smile in three hours. “Rooms available.” Hoisting Fraser’s bag, he brushed off the road dust with his free hand.

  Cook’s wife, also fair-skinned but looking ten years younger than her husband, waited at the door. She led them into the parlor. Its furniture, also tired, did not quite fill the room. The woman stretched out on the divan had to be Rachel Lemus. Fraser pulled aside the window curtains to let in more light, adjusting to the way the floorboards bent to his step. Fat raindrops began to hit the window. Mrs. Cook turned up a lamp on the wall. In the light, Rachel looked to be on the far side of sixty, heavy-set, and feverish. Fraser helped her sit up and pulled a chair over. He unwound the cloth strips that held a short piece of molding to her right forearm.

  “Mr. Cook’s done a good job,” Fraser said as he felt around the break. It wasn’t puffy, didn’t look infected. “I’m going to move it a bit to help it heal.”

  “Do it quick,” she said. She grunted when he aligned the bones, sweat standing out on her forehead. He rewrapped her arm, using the same piece of molding as a splint. Then he mixed some powder in a glass of water from a side table and made her drink it. She screwed up her face. “Ee-yew. Mighty bitter. What’s it called?”

  “It’s called aspirin. It’s new. It should help you rest.”

  “That laudanum works good for me, you know.” She gave him a hopeful look.

  “Let’s see how the aspirin does. I’ll be here a bit longer, what with the rain.” He pulled out a cloth to rig up as a sling for her arm and tied it behind her neck, then pointed to the wall behind her head. Muffled voices, sometimes shouts, were coming from the other side. “Does that racket bother you?”

  Rachel eased back, supporting her slinged arm with her good hand. “That’s just the dice game,” she said. “Don’t bother me none, not how I’m feeling.”

  When Fraser emerged from the parlor, the street was slick with rain. It soon would be a mass of mud. He accepted Mrs. Cook’s invitation to supper, a stew featuring meat he could not quite identify. The biscuits were exceptional. Fraser praised them, probably too much. Unexpectedly, the Cooks talked of their college days. They both attended Oberlin, some years apart, though Speed admitted he’d loved baseball more than school, loved it all the way to the pros. Fraser had heard about another Negro who went to college, a lawyer in Cadiz.

  After supper, Fraser found Rachel asleep on the couch. Her fever was down. He woke her long enough to administer more dissolved aspirin.

  Mrs. Cook showed him to a narrow room on the upper floor. She explained that she would ordinarily place him at the back, away from the street noise, but on Saturday night the rear of the hotel could get noisy. The bed was hard, but he saw no bugs. He was tired.

  In the bright, warm morning, Fraser found the Cooks in the rear yard, seated with his patient at a table carried out from the house. There was no sign of another hotel guest.

  Rachel looked clear-eyed and alert. She was feeling better, she said, the arm sore but not so bad. That aspirin, she added, tastes like the devil but works like a miracle.

  The eggs were on the runny side, but the coffee was strong and the bacon thick, the way Fraser liked them. Even though Cook’s hotel was empty, the man had to have income from somewhere. From his ballplaying days? The dice game? Sopping up the egg yolk with toast, Fraser spoke the question he had choked back since Cook first spoke Rachel’s name.

  “Rachel,” he started, “I was wondering. Are you the one worked for Mary Surratt? In Surrattsville? You testified at her trial?”

  Rachel drew back for a moment, then shrugged. “That I am. That trial, my Lord, I was scared to death there. How’d you know about that?”

  Chapter 5

  Cook broke into the conversation. “You’ve got no call to ask that of this woman, still with a broken arm. This some kind of a trick to catch her out?”

  “You came to fetch me,” Fraser answered. “Do you think I tricked you into coming to get me? Maybe I made Rachel take her fall?”

  “All right, all right. It’s just I don’t believe in coincidences. Why’re you asking Miz Lemus about the Surratts? That’s all a long time ago.”

  Fraser put on a smile and drew a slow breath. He reminded Cook that they had both been at the funeral for Mr. Bingham. The dead man’s family, he explained, had asked him to help sort through the man’s papers, including some about the Lincoln case. Fraser had read about the case and recognized Rachel’s name. “A coincidence,” he concluded. “Really.”

  Rachel asked what Mr. Bingham looked like. When Fraser described him, she shook her head. “Can’t say I remember him. Them generals and colonels was everywhere. I swear I was waist-deep in them.” She broke into a throaty laugh. “I don’t rightly remember who all was there.”

  “What interests me,” Fraser said, “isn’t the trial so much. What was it like there in Surrattsville? What was the tavern like? Were there Confederates around?”

  Rachel looked at Cook first. When he shrugged, she said, “Doc, wasn’t nobody there but Confederates, except for us colored. We was loyal to the union, loyal to Mr. Linc
oln. You got to understand, ’cause we was in Maryland, people stayed slaves longer than even in the South. That emancipation didn’t take effect right away in Maryland. I was free right along, though. My daddy bought his way out, then bought my momma out, too.”

  “What I meant was,” Fraser said, “were there Confederate spies, you know, spying.”

  “You mean like young John?” She shook her head. “I never seen such a group of people for talking in low voices. Young John, though, he couldn’t keep quiet, he’d just brag and brag on how he was meeting with the big men in Richmond and in Canada. Real proud, he was. Couldn’t hardly not know what he was doing.”

  “What was Mrs. Surratt like?”

  “Miss Mary? She was a fine woman, for a Confederate. She prayed to her savior, believed in her religion. Smart, too. Way smarter than that no-good drunk of a husband. That saloon of theirs didn’t make no money till he died and Miss Mary took it over.”

  “Did she ever travel from Surrattsville?”

  “No, someone had to run that place. Her and me, we really run it together. She said as much once.”

  “But you didn’t move to Washington with her?”

  “Me? In the city? No, I’m a country woman. I know where I belong.”

  Fraser shifted in his chair, choosing his words carefully. “Did you see anything, in those weeks toward the end of the war, that made you think the Surratts were planning something big? I don’t mean that they said that Lincoln would be killed, but something out of the usual, something extra going on?” He hadn’t chosen his words well, but the old lady nodded, raising his hopes.

  “No,” she said. “Nothing like that. But something unusual did happen.”

  “Yes?”

  Rachel closed her eyes in the effort to remember. “Was this one man, named Harper, Harmon, something like that?”

  “Harbin? Thomas Harbin?”

  She opened her eyes. “That could be. Yeah, Harbin could be it. You been studying on this. He come in one night when young John was there; then the two of them met some rich man from New York. Seemed like they was cooking up something.”

  “How’d you know he was a rich man from New York?”

  “They talked about New York a lot, I could hear that. And I knew he was rich from his clothes. They were beautiful. We didn’t see clothes like that. I still remember that gray suit. He got off that stage from Washington, which bounced people around like popcorn, but with that gray suit he looked like he stepped out of some magazine drawing.”

  “What’d they talk about?”

  “Lord, I don’t know. By that time, white folks was careful around us colored. Everybody knew things wasn’t going good for the South, and that meant the colored was going to be citizens, gonna happen sometime soon, so they got real careful ’round us.”

  “Did you see that New York man again?”

  “No, not again. But after Mr. Lincoln was killed, that Harbin was around some. You know, we all heard that Booth was hiding somewhere near. Couldn’t keep a secret like that.”

  The road back to Cadiz was softer after the rain, making the mare’s work that much harder. Cook asked Fraser what he was after with the old lady.

  “I’m not sure. You see, I don’t like coincidences much myself. Mr. Bingham, you know, when he prosecuted the Lincoln case, he claimed the Confederacy was behind Booth, even had witnesses who said so. When it turned out the witnesses were liars, Mr. Bingham didn’t change his tune. Ever since, people have been dreaming up all these conspiracies Booth could’ve been part of, but Mr. Bingham never wavered. He stuck by what he said first. Makes me curious.”

  “Did Rachel help?”

  “I don’t know. What she says jibes with what I was thinking. People don’t pay much attention to how Confederate agents took care of Booth when he was trying to escape. That makes me think the assassination might have been a Confederate plan, just like Mr. Bingham said. Maybe that man Harbin was part of it. He was a Southern agent, he said so himself.”

  “What about that Surratt woman?”

  “Some people claim she was innocent, just a weak woman, but Mr. Bingham never doubted she was guilty. Called her a she-lion. The way Rachel described her—a strong, smart woman, running her business—that sounded like the woman Mr. Bingham talked about.” Fraser sighed. “I’d like to figure this out, just curious, you know.”

  “If you was going to try to figure it out, how would you do that?”

  “Why’re you so interested? What’s it to you?”

  Cook scowled. “What’s it to me? I’m interested, that’s what’s it to me. Biggest crime in history, I’m interested. I’m supposed to be some ignorant coon, don’t care why the sun comes up in the morning?”

  Fraser wondered how this high-strung Negro had lived long enough to have gray hairs. “I’ve thought about writing to this newspaper man,” Fraser said. “He was there back then, there in Washington when Lincoln got shot. He wrote about it then, wrote more about it since. He was a friend of Mr. Bingham’s, knew everyone. Maybe he knows more.”

  “If he knew more, why wouldn’t he write it?”

  “It could be the sort of thing he’s not quite sure of. Or even could be something that he doesn’t really know he knows, something he doesn’t see how it’s important.” Fraser didn’t add that doctors know all about that, about missing the evidence that’s right in front of your eyes and you end up diagnosing a patient wrong.

  “And you’ll see it, you’ll see it when this writer fellow didn’t?”

  Fraser smiled and looked out at the road. “I suppose that’s why I haven’t written him. It was just a thought.”

  “Sounds like you’re missing the big story.” Cook switched the reins to his left hand, pointing in front of him with his free hand. “This woman Surratt, see, it doesn’t sound like she’s any big deal. Hell, they hanged her, right?”

  “Right.”

  “But what about the men who ordered this thing? They’ve never been brought to account. That’s the story here, that’s what we need to figure out—”

  “We?”

  “Told you yesterday, I’m going to be a newspaper man, start a paper in that building back behind the house. Going to call it the Ohio Eagle. Not going to spend my life running that hotel, making sure the craps players don’t cut each other up.

  “This would be one hell of a story to start my newspaper with,” Cook continued. “The biggest story of the old century just when we start a new one. And it should be a Negro paper breaks it. You white folks act like that war was about you, but that was our war. You white folks just did some of the dying”—Fraser snorted—“okay, a lot of the dying. Hey, you had the guns. But that was our war, don’t make any mistake about it. And it’s not over, either. Only thing is now we’re the only ones still fighting on our side. Something like this, who really killed Abraham Lincoln, this could remind people what that fighting and dying was for.”

  When Fraser didn’t respond, Cook fell silent. The wagon lurched and rocked along. Fraser wondered about the man next to him. Baseball star, college man, hotel owner, hothead, sponsor of dice games. Not like anyone Fraser knew. He thought about what Cook said. Fraser’s father did his share of dying, more than his share. It was his war, too.

  “Also,” Cook started again, “there’s an election this year. Wouldn’t that be a powerful piece of news, who killed Lincoln, keep those Southern Democrats from crawling back into power? Remind everyone this wasn’t just some crazy actor did that. This was an attempt to overthrow a government. They killed Lincoln, meant to kill Seward, Johnson, even Grant.”

  “You know all about it,” Fraser said.

  “Didn’t just get found in a cabbage patch. Think about it. Say they’d managed to kill everyone they meant to kill, who would’ve been president? Who would’ve run the country? Those same people, their sons anyway, who’re still running the South. We can’t let them fool people into voting for them anymore.”

  Fraser objected that the election for
president was going to be about new issues—the fight against rebels in the Philippines, whether to keep the gold standard for the dollar. It wasn’t about the Civil War.

  Cook waved him off. “The Civil War’s still going on, every day, getting worse, driving colored people out of jobs, off trains, out of restaurants, even out of the damned roller rink right there in Steubenville. It’s still about that war. That war won’t be over till my grandchildren are dead and gone. You and me, we figure this thing out, maybe we turn around this war we’re still fighting, make sure the right side wins again. ’Cause right now, we ain’t winning. Today, this ain’t no country for the black man.”

  Fraser let some time pass. Then he said, “Okay, if I wanted to figure out what happened with the Lincoln assassination, why would I do it with you?”

  “That’s easy. I can go places you can’t, just like you can go places I can’t. You need that. Without me, you never meet Rachel Lemus. Think about it. Also, I know my way around a knife and a gun. You’re serious about this business, you may need that, too.”

  That sounded ridiculous to Fraser, but Speed Cook had passion. That impressed him. It might help to have someone else trying to solve the puzzle of Mrs. Surratt’s confession. Fraser sure hadn’t solved it on his own. What could it hurt?

  “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ve got a whole shelf of Mr. Bingham’s papers and books on the assassination, every sort of thing. You take some back today, look ’em over. Then we can talk about what you think.”

  Cook gave him a long look. “All right, Doc.”

  “You know, my friends call me Jamie, not Doc. Why don’t you?”

  “All right, then. I go by Speed.”

  Chapter 6

  Fraser tried to ignore the stares and nervous glances. He and Cook were unsettling the train’s first-class car. The other passengers might have started out thinking that Cook was his servant, but they couldn’t hold on to that idea very long. In his sober black suit, right leg crossed over left, and arm stretched over the back of the seat, Cook sat in first class like he was born there. When the conductor punched their tickets, Cook ignored the man’s fish-eyed look.