Murder on the Potomac (29 page)

By the time Mac and Annabel arrived, the crowd had swelled to justify calling it a throng, perhaps even multitude. A Dixieland band had set up in the center of the park at the foot of the statue of Andrew Jackson, “Old Hickory,” for whom the park had originally been named until the dashing Marquis de Lafayette upstaged him. Still, his was the most dominant of the statues that defined the center and corners of the park. And his was the only statue of an American hero in the park, the first president ever to be elected by the Democratic Party, which, in gratitude, had raised funds in 1853 to create their winner’s metal-and-marble tribute.

The Smiths had approached the park from Sixteenth Street, pausing in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church at the corner of H, the “Church of the Presidents,” where Washington’s
Social Register
was synonymous with its list of parishioners. They managed to make their way to a knot of people gathered at the side of a makeshift stage that had been erected for the performance. Behind it a long rented house trailer served the cast.

“Mother Nature’s been kind to you,” Mac said to Monty Jamison, who stood with Chip Tierney, director Seymour Fletcher, and some diehard Tri-S members.

“Yes, I would say so,” Jamison said, shaking Smith’s hand and kissing Annabel on the cheek. “Splendid day for a murder.” They looked up into a cloudless cobalt sky.

“Excuse me,” Jamison said, walking to the trailer. Smith asked Chip, “How are things going?”

The young man slowly shook his head. “Terrible. You know about Sun Ben, of course.”

“Of course,” Smith said. “Me and the rest of Washington. Is your dad here?”

“No, and you know how upset he must be to miss this. He’s secluded himself in his study.”

“What about Sun?”

“The same, I guess. I really haven’t seen him. I tried to talk to him about it the night he was arrested, but he didn’t want to. I guess I can’t blame him. This family has been rocked by one scandal after another. I just wish it would end.”

Smith remembered that Chip was to play a role in the production and asked if he was ready to go on.

“God, no,” Chip replied. “I told Sy Fletcher there was no way I could go through with this, considering what’s happened at home. He got the original actor to come back.”

Sam and Marie Tankloff joined them. “Amazing, the number of people who show up for these productions,” Sam said. “Like the garage sale Marie loves to run. They come out of the woodwork, descend in hordes, and usually hours before it’s supposed to start.” Marie laughed and playfully punched her husband’s arm. She punched his arm often in appreciation of things he said, or did.

Annabel and Marie had their own chat as Tankloff took Mac aside. “Have you spoken to Wendell?” Sam asked.

“Not since yesterday morning.”

“I’m concerned about him, Mac. You know Wendell. Depression isn’t in his vocabulary. But I swung by there this morning. At first, he wouldn’t see me. When he decided
he would, I was faced with an utterly dejected and demoralized man. This thing with Sun Ben has really shaken him. I was there yesterday afternoon when they had quite a confrontation. Frankly, if I didn’t know how strong Wendell was, I’d worry about him taking his own life.”

“Frightening,” Smith said. “Do you think he’s capable of it?”

Tankloff shrugged. “Who ever knows about those things? Someone on Marie’s side of the family took her life a few years ago. No one thought she knew how to spell suicide, but she did it.”

“Any suggestions?” Smith asked.

“No. I wish Wendell had come today. I think it would have done him some good, taken his mind off his troubles. You know how important Tri-S has always been to him.”

“Do you think he’ll attend the dinner tonight?”

“I hope so. I asked him this morning, but he was noncommittal. Maybe a call from you would push him in that direction.”

“I’ll call as soon as I get home.”

The trailer was a frenzy of activity. Sy Fletcher, Monty Jamison, and the cast and crew were making last-minute preparations before taking the stage. Suzanne Tierney, who would play the role of Congressman Dan Sickles’s indiscreet, adulterous wife, Teresa Bagioli Sickles, had arrived late, which wasn’t unusual for her. It was a chronic bad habit that upset most people but had not seemed to bother Fletcher. Until this day. To the surprise of others in the trailer, he lambasted her, saying, “Your lack of responsibility matches your lack of talent.”

Equally surprising was Suzanne’s calm acceptance. She smiled and said pleasantly, “Coming from you, Sy, I take that as a compliment.” And she walked away, humming.

“Is the president here?” someone asked.

“No, but I heard the secretary of agriculture is in the audience.” Groans.

“Could I please have your attention,” Fletcher asked. “We go on in a few minutes.” Everyone in the trailer continued to talk. “Damn it!” Fletcher shouted. The chatter trailed off. Before addressing the cast, Fletcher turned to Monty Jamison. “Are you ready?” he asked.

The roly-poly professor went through his throat-clearing routine. “Yes, Sy. Ready, willing, and able.” Usually, Wendell Tierney was the master of ceremonies at these events, but in his absence, Jamison had been pressed into service. Little pressing was needed. He left the trailer to address the crowd.

Fletcher stood on his tiptoes and held his hands in the air. “Ladies and gentlemen, may I please have your attention.”

The trailer door opened, and Chip Tierney entered, followed by Sam Tankloff. “I wish you were still playing the part,” a young female cast member whispered to Chip as he stood next to her. Her infatuation with him hadn’t been a secret during rehearsals.

“Wardrobe, wardrobe,” an actor shouted. “This damn button just popped on my cutaway coat.”

Fletcher clapped his hands. “Listen up now,” he said. “Is everyone’s energy level high? Your energy must be at its peak and transmitted to every individual in the audience if we’re—”

Tankloff threaded his way through the group and
went to a small bedroom at the far end of the trailer that housed costumes and some props. The woman in charge of wardrobe had responded to the actor’s cry for last-minute button surgery, leaving the prop girl alone in the room. “Everything ready?” Tankloff asked pleasantly.

“I think so,” the girl said. “Excuse me.” She left to deliver the handkerchief to Carl Mayberry he would use to signal Teresa Sickles that they were due to rendezvous. When she returned a few minutes later, the prop room was empty. Tankloff had gone back outside to join his wife, Mac and Annabel, and a dozen others.

Monty Jamison stepped up onto the outdoor stage, went to the microphone, coughed, and said, “Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to murder most foul from yesteryear.”

“Sorry to hear about your brother,” the young actress said to Chip.

“What? Oh, yes, thank you. All a mistake, I think.”

“I hope so. I tried to talk to him before, but he didn’t seem in the mood for conversation. I suppose I can’t blame him.”

“Sun? He was here?”

“Yes. I was one of the first ones to arrive. Ran into him here. But he didn’t want to, like, talk, you know?”

“He’ll be fine. Everything will be fine.”

Jamison explained to the crowd the circumstances that had led to the February 1859 murder. He introduced the major characters, each coming onstage as a thumbnail sketch of their background and role in the drama was presented. The opening scene, Jamison explained, was set in a boardinghouse run by a gentleman named Lorenzo Da Ponte, a ninety-year-old Catholic priest who’d been a librettist for Mozart and close personal
friend of the legendary Casanova and, besides running Washington’s most eclectic boardinghouse, managed a grocery store. The occasion was a party to celebrate the engagement of New York Tammany Hall congressman Dan Sickles to fifteen-year-old Teresa Bagioli. At the party was an assortment of friends and well-wishers, including James “Old Buck” Buchanan, future president of the United States, who at the time was ambassador to the Court of St. James. In a few days he would designate his close friend Dan Sickles to be his secretary of legation. Although Philip Barton Key, district attorney of the District of Columbia and son of Francis Scott Key, author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” had not yet become a friend of the couple, scriptwriter Madelon St. Cere had taken the liberty of hastening their friendship in the interest of introducing the character early on and had placed him at the party.

Jamison ended his introduction by announcing that Tri-S membership information and applications were available at selected locations throughout the park. “Next month’s meeting has been especially planned for newcomers. We shall present an overview of murder in fiction, honoring, of course, the great Edgar Allan Poe and his analytical approach to discovering why that poor young girl was stuffed up a chimney in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue.’ But we’ll also be going back in time much farther than that, to the Apocrypha and its murderous tales solved by none other than the prophet Daniel himself. In one—”

“Psssst!” Seymour Fletcher hissed from the side of the stage. He pointed to his watch.

“Yes, yes,” Jamison said. “We must forge ahead. Without further adieu—let the play begin!”

A dozen scenes leading up to the shooting of Barton Key by Congressman Dan Sickles were acted out. Sickles’s seduction of the young Teresa was tastefully presented, avoiding its more sordid aspects and stressing the role played by Lorenzo Da Ponte, who was actually Teresa’s adoptive grandfather and who, according to the script, had nurtured the premarital affair. And there was a pivotal scene in London between Sickles and Buchanan that preceded Buchanan’s election to the White House.

Once Buchanan became president, Sickles’s place in Washington political and social circles was assured. While he kept himself busy, including making frequent visits to area brothels, his close friend Barton Key became Teresa’s “official” escort to charity events and other social gatherings. They soon became lovers, frequently having their clandestine grapplings in the Congressional Cemetery on the tranquil, rolling banks of the Anacostia River.

But, as so often happens with such affairs, things began to unravel for the unfaithful Teresa and the lecherous Key, who once bragged that given thirty-six hours with any woman, he would have her doing his bidding. A young man named Beekman, who worked for Congressman Sickles and who’d become a close family friend, fell in love with Teresa. He got wind of the affair she was having with Key and took it upon himself to follow them to their graveside assignations. He reported his findings to another friend in government, who passed it on to yet another individual, who, predictably, made sure that Sickles knew. Confronted by Sickles, Key vehemently denied everything, which seemed to satisfy his suspicious friend.

Eventually, Key and Teresa decided to move their affair indoors. With shocking audacity and mind-boggling stupidity, Key rented a small brick house on Fifteenth Street, close to Vermont Avenue, but two blocks from Sickles’s home. There, the lovers met with increasing frequency, much to the amusement of their working-class neighbors, who quickly understood the purpose to which the house was being put and the identity of the participants.

One day, Sickles received an anonymous note informing him of his wife’s infidelity. The note went into considerable detail, including the fact that Key would signal to Teresa in her bedroom window that he was heading for their love nest by standing in Lafayette Square and waving a white handkerchief at her. Teresa would then follow.

Sickles hired people to confirm the rumor and soon knew the truth about his wife. She confessed to him—in writing. Sickles convened a meeting of his closest friends to discuss the situation. Should he challenge Key to a duel to maintain his honor? That was a serious possibility until, during the meeting, Sickles went to his window. Below, on the street, in broad daylight, was his friend Barton Key, waving a handkerchief at the upstairs windows.

Simultaneously, Sickles’s greyhound, Dandy, ran across the street and licked Key’s hand. “Scoundrel,” Sickles snarled. Even his dog was betraying him. He told one of his friends, Sam Butterworth, to go outside and detain Key while he fetched his pistol.

The actor playing Butterworth, Clarence, a tall, slender young man with a neatly trimmed black mustache, approached the Philip Barton Key character on stage.
“ ’Morning, Philip,” he said. “Beautiful day for February.”

Key, who was about to head for the rented house, replaced the handkerchief in his breast pocket and exchanged banalities with Butterworth as a dozen extras sauntered by. Some carried parasols; two female cast members dressed in period costumes held the hands of small children. But Key noticed that while Butterworth was friendly, he seemed nervous, kept looking over his shoulder. He was about to comment on his behavior when Dan Sickles, played by Stuart Gelb, approached, a pistol in his right hand. Butterworth backed away.

“You bastard!” Sickles said to Key, his voice matching the threat in his hand.

Key raised his hands in feeble defense. “Don’t, Dan,” he said. “Don’t shoot me!” He slipped his hand beneath his vest.

The revolver’s report violated the day’s tranquillity. Key grasped at his shoulder. “Murder,” he said, lunging at his attacker.

The strolling extras stopped, stared, and gasped. They braced like mannequins, mouths and eyes opened wide. Key pulled a small pair of opera glasses from a vest pocket and threw them at Sickles. They bounced off his chest.

Key slowly backed away, his hands again raised as though shields against another bullet. “Don’t murder me,” he said. “Please don’t murder me.”

Another shot. Key’s hand went to his groin. When the real murder had taken place in 1859, the second bullet had struck Key just below his groin, passed through his thigh, and exited where his right buttock joined his leg.

The look on Carl Mayberry’s face was more bewilderment than pain. “I’m shot,” he gasped. In an attempt to stay erect, he wrapped his arms around a tree that was nailed to the stage floor. But as his thigh and groin melted into a wet red stain, thanks to vials of raspberry juice concealed there, his body melted, too.