The Blackest Bird Page 2

  “All have been identified by Mrs. R. as Mary’s.” Payne began again to sob. “It is undoubtedly her, sir.”

  4

  Between Two Tides

  Early that afternoon, having boarded the ferry at the Barclay Street pier, Old Hays crossed the Hudson River to arrive within an hour’s time at the office of the Hudson County coroner, Dr. Richard Cook.

  Dr. Cook, a tall, lean man, took a seat and indicated one for Hays. He intertwined his long, bony fingers in a sort of steeple in front of him as he settled down to the business at hand.

  He told Hays that on the previous evening he had testified in front of the Hoboken Board of Inquiry to the following effect:

  The body in question was that of Mary Cecilia Rogers, aged twenty-one years, resident of 126 Nassau Street, New York City, New York. Miss Rogers was victim of murder by person or persons unknown.

  “The remains were found by two fishermen,” Dr. Cook said, referring to his notes, “Jimmy Boulard and Henry Mallin, over on the steam ferry from Manhattan for a day’s outing.”

  About noon, while heading north on the footpath from the Elysian Fields, the pair had spotted what they took as a bundle of rags bobbing in the river a few hundred feet from shore. They waded out to get a better look, upon which they realized what they were seeing was a bloated and hideously disfigured corpse, floating in the shallows, half in the water, half out. Following this discovery, they ran back to the Elysian dock, where they commandeered a skiff and rowed out to the spot where the body remained adrift, caught between two tides.

  “She had been killed most brutally,” Dr. Cook told Hays, “the crime committed without question by more than one person. It is my feeling that this young woman was most likely attacked by a gang of wretched blackguards. In all probability, soon after being set upon, she fainted, and before she was able to recover, her murderers had tightly tied not only restraints around her wrists, but also a piece of fine lace trimming around her neck. This lace alone would have prevented her from breathing again.”

  “Was there any foam, as might be the case with the drowned?”

  “I observed no foam. About the throat were bruises and impressions of fingers. In evidence was an ecchymose mark, about the size and shape of a man’s thumb on the right side of the neck, near the jugular vein, and two or three more marks on the left side resembling the shape of a man’s fingers. The arms were bent over on the chest and rigid, so tight and stiff I had to use force to straighten them. The right hand was clenched; the left partially open. It appeared as if the wrists had been tied together. On both the left and right wrists were circular excoriations, apparently the effect of ropes. The hands had probably been tied while the body was violated, and untied before being discarded. All indications are she had been bound, gagged, throttled, and then raped before being thrown in the water.”

  “Is there any sign that she had been drugged beforehand?” Hays asked.

  “There were none. The face was suffused with dark blood, some of which issued from the mouth. Her flesh and features were swollen. The veins highly distended.”

  “I knew her,” Hays sighed deeply. “I buy tobacco at the store in which she once worked. She was a vibrant young woman.”

  Cook glanced up from his notes. “You would never know it now,” he said. “A crime of this nature, it is all very disturbing. It makes you wonder the state in which we live in our society.” The coroner shook his head in sadness before proceeding. “Her dress was much torn in several places and otherwise disordered. From the outer dress a long slip, say a foot wide, had been torn upward, extending from the bottom of the frock hem to the waist, but not wholly torn off. Instead, it was wound around her waist a few times and secured by a slipknot. Not a lady’s knot, mind you, but a sort of buntline hitch secured in the back, reminiscent of that tied by a sailor.”

  “A sailor?” Hays muttered. “To what effect do you surmise this arrangement, Doctor?”

  “As far as I can tell, the knotted strips formed a sort of handle, used to transport the body.”

  “Then she was not killed by the riverbank?”

  “No, she was not.”

  “I see,” said Hays. “Do we know where she was killed?”

  “Not as of yet. There was considerable excoriation upon the top of her back and along both shoulder bones, and excoriation also at the base of the back, near the hips. In my estimation, these were produced by the victim struggling to get free while being held down to effect her violation. This act was without doubt carried out while she was laid down upon some hard surface: a hardboard floor, the bottom of a boat, or somewhere similar.”

  “But not, for example, on a bed?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  Cook returned to his notes once more. He squinted at his own cramped handwriting for some seconds before returning his attention to Hays. “Her dress, immediately beneath the frock and between the upper petticoat, was made of fine muslin. One piece, about eighteen inches in width, was torn clean from the garment. This piece was used to cover her mouth, again utilizing a sailor’s hard knot at the back part of the neck; I suspect this was done to smother her cries and that the gag was in all likelihood held tightly in place over her mouth by one of her ravishers. Again, the flesh of the neck in this general area was much swollen. I must say the piece of fine lace trimming of which I before spoke very nearly escaped my attention. I found this length so tightly, so severely tied about the neck as to be virtually hidden from sight; it was completely buried in the flesh, again fastened by a sailor’s hard knot, which lay just under the left ear. Around it her flesh was much distended. I only came upon it by observing a deep crease encircling her neck. Passing my hand behind her ear, I accidentally felt, rather than saw, the small knot, which I supposed to have been the trimming of her collar, so deeply buried as to have been initially obscured from view.”

  “From such description, would this arrangement alone not have sufficed to produce death?”

  “It would have exactly. I would calculate she had been sexually attacked several times before expiring. Perhaps by as many as three men.”

  “And previous to that?” Hays asked.

  Dr. Cook hesitated almost imperceptibly. “I found her to have been a person of kerrect habits and chaste character,” he said.

  A sudden sharp pain shot from the high constable’s right knee to his buttock, very nearly making him squirm. His physician, Dr. John Francis, had informed him he suffered from poor circulation and chronic arthritic dysfunction of the leg joints, particularly the knee, ankle, and hip, among other varied ailments associated with advancing years. Sitting or standing in one position for any prolonged length of time often resulted in excruciating discomfort for the high constable, although it was not in Jacob Hays’ constitution to complain. “Where is the body now?” he asked. “I’d like to view her.”

  Dr. Cook frowned. “Because of the heat, I have found it necessary to inter her in a temporary grave. I’m afraid the state of her was untenable.”

  “Yet you are convinced this is Mary Rogers? There is no question? Despite the profound decomposition of her features, you are sure?”

  “I am sure. All circumstances point to it, and she has been positively identified.”

  “By the law clerk and ex-suitor Crommelin?”

  “Yes, by Mr. Crommelin. He and his friend came upon the body while I was making my preliminary examination.”

  “His friend?”

  “A gentleman giving his name as Archibald Padley, also an ex-lodger, also a law clerk.”

  “What exactly did these two gentlemen do and say?”

  “A curious crowd had gathered. They pushed through the throng for a closer look. At some point, Mr. Crommelin voiced alarm to my colleague, Gilbert Merritt, the Hudson County justice of the peace, that he feared he and his friend knew the identity of the corpse. After closer scrutiny, however, the companion backed off from his statement. He claimed, given the state of the facial features, he could not be
sure. But this Crommelin knelt and took the arm of the corpse in his own hands, and carefully pushed up the fabric of her dress sleeve, proceeding to minutely study the hair on the forearm beneath, seemingly its quality and quantity. Following some moments of his examination in this manner, tears welled in his eyes. ‘I know her,’ he stated. ‘With certainty I know her! This is Mary Cecilia Rogers, and I am fearful this blow will kill her mother.’”

  “Her mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Those were his exact words?”

  “Yes, that is what he said.”

  “And you took his identification as fact.”

  “I might have preferred a blood relative, the mother called in to question, for example, but frankly, the condition of the body was appalling, especially for such a relatively short time in the water. In this heat, her dissolution was of such rapid and profound nature, I feared to subject the mother, who I understood to be quite old and infirm, to any more anguish, or compromise the body any further, unless evidence be lost before being corroborated by another.”

  “The New York coroner, for example?”

  Dr. Cook smiled sheepishly and shrugged. His blue eyes sparkled. “If you will.”

  “So you are hopeful to see the City of New York taking over this investigation, Dr. Cook?”

  “My superiors are reluctant to take jurisdiction. After all, the victim is a resident of your metropolis, High Constable, not New Jersey. True, the poor girl’s body washed up here, but this outrage, you cannot possibly argue, very likely took place within the confines of your fair city, not ours. So in the end, I have to agree. Who, sir, better able to see this criminal atrocity to its logical end than a man of your remarkable skills and acumen?”

  5

  The City Brain

  Because Old Hays had a daughter of his own, the last surviving of his children, the other four, all sons, having succumbed during the feral yellow fever epidemic of 1822, all within the short span of a sweltering, humid August weekend, the death of the segar girl Mary Rogers took on for him added significance. His cherished youngest, also a Mary, in her case Mary Olga, although called by family and friends exclusively Olga, was not that many years older than Mary Cecilia Rogers herself, and therefore the death of the segar girl evoked for him a special poignancy. Sarah, his wife of forty-eight years, had fallen ill from arrhythmia of the heart only January last. She had just made dinner, had taken her place at the table, when she lost consciousness and hit the floor, facefirst. She woke almost immediately, but as her eyes blackened, her organs began to fail, and within three days his most beloved was forever gone. Since then, understandably, his daughter had assumed a role something more than precious to her father.

  Hays did not usually make habit of having his emotions become involved in his cases. He knew even if he had acted when first he had heard of this newest disappearance of the segar girl, there was surely nothing that could have been done. She was already dead.

  Still, burrowing guilt had taken hold of him.

  From the time of her first disappearance, Hays knew Mary Cecilia Rogers to be in her twenty-first year, having been born in Connecticut in 1820. Her mother, Phebe Mather Rogers, had married into the family of the sour Puritans Increase and Cotton Mather. But Phebe’s first husband, Ezra Mather, had died of an infection at thirty-seven, leaving her with two children, a boy and a girl. She remarried, this time to a descendant of another well-known Connecticut family, religious zealot and Quaker James Rogers, founder of the troublesome and dissenting Rogerene sect. Mary was born when Phebe Rogers was forty-two years old, the only child of that union. Hays recalled there had been some spurious talk that Mary was not Phebe’s child at all, but her granddaughter, the out-of-wedlock child of Phebe’s daughter, also called Phebe.

  In 1835, when Mary was fifteen, James Rogers had been killed in a Long Island Sound steamboat explosion, leaving mother and daughter in a state of economic travail.

  During the financial panic of 1837 they had moved to New York City, where they hoped there would be chance for better circumstance. At first they had lived at 116 Liberty Street at the home of John Anderson, a young shopkeeper and family friend of Phebe Rogers’ first husband, Ezra Mather.

  Anderson was proprietor of a segar shop on lower Broadway, at number 319, opposite City Hall Park. Up until that time the shop had been the meeting place of a disappointingly craven lot of loafers, gamblers, and blacklegs, most drifting over from a nearby establishment of poor reputation which Hays knew all too well, called “Headquarters.”

  At seventeen, Mary was unquestionably a great beauty, and Anderson was very much aware that such a fresh young lady as she would attract the respectable and influential male clientele he so craved to transform his establishment. He offered her a job, and after conferring with her mother, Mary accepted.

  To all accounts, with Mary’s presence behind the counter, Mr. Anderson’s expectations were met, and his segar shop, purveyor of “Anderson’s Solace Tobacco and Snuff,” located just a few short blocks from the busy and influential Publishers’ Row and Printing House Square, soon became the meeting place for all sorts of important newspaper and publishing types, including many writers and editors.

  At the time of that first disappearance, Hays had been told by her aunt, Mrs. Downey, and her cousin, Mrs. Hayes (no relation to the high constable, the names spelled differently), how Mary loved and thrived on the attention paid her, and she reportedly talked often in a gush about the varying men who frequented the shop.

  Her beauty was only part of her charm, these female relatives said. Mary was vibrant, outgoing, comely, and graceful. Admittedly, she was somewhat given to wildness. Occasionally she had been known to slip out from the family residence on Liberty Street for secret assignations and rendezvous. With whom, she never divulged.

  As previously stated, the first mystery surrounding Mary occurred three years before this present tragic disappearance, almost a year after the start of her employ at Anderson’s. At that time, Mr. Anderson and the rest of her admirers at the segar shop were thrown into a sudden state of high tizzy when she unaccountably disappeared. Her mother turned, in a mood of grand and helpless flux, to the newspapers and the wealth of varied publishers and reporters, all of whom knew and admired her daughter. Mrs. Rogers tearfully admitted that she had found a suicide note on her bureau and had become understandably panic-stricken.

  Stories appeared in the Evening Tribune as well as the Journal of Commerce, the Sun, the Mercury, Atlas, and Commercial Intelligence. The depictions, tinged with melodrama and despondency, expressed dread that Mary may very well have destroyed herself, explaining how she had for some months been paid particular attention by a suitor (unnamed) who frequented her employer’s tobacconist’s shop.

  It was related that this gentleman had since ceased his attentions and left the city. As portrayed in the Tribune: “vanishing like the smoke of one of that gentleman’s segars in thin air.”

  When questioned by Hays at the time, Anderson alleged that this difficult affair (for her) had so taken its toll on the impressionable young lady as to produce the circumstances of mind which the press accounts described.

  During the course of his investigation Hays had asked Anderson several times who the mysterious gentleman may have been. Anderson contended he did not know. He mentioned several names upon whom he might speculate, among them the American men of letters Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving, the acerbic southern critic Edgar Poe, at the time a resident of New York, and the laureate poet Fitz-Greene Halleck. Even the name of the swashbuckling frog Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America, and the eminent British scribbler Charles Dickens came up, the latter a snuff-seeker, and as such, a frequent guest in the shop while on his last American book tour; all customers, all purportedly infatuated by Mary.

  Again at that time, in support of what Mrs. Rogers had reported in the press in regard to her daughter taking her own life, Anderson, upon reflection, told how when last s
he left his establishment, he feared Mary might have taken with her a shilling from the till with the intention of purchasing poison.

  With the fertilizer of this revelation, now even further speculation blossomed in the public prints and among the many gossips of the hub, only to soon wilt when Mary reappeared some weeks later, none the worse for wear, speaking innocently of a visit to a relative in Brooklyn.

  During her absence much curiosity had been engendered, but when she returned and learned how John Anderson had spoken quite liberally to the broadsheets about her personal affairs, particularly in regard to men, Mary stormed from his establishment in a fit of pique, never to return.

  Anderson expressed sadness to see Mary go. She had months earlier left his home on Liberty Street for her cousin Mrs. Hayes’ home on Pitt, made uncomfortable, her mother revealed, by the man’s over-solicitation and unwelcome attentions.

  Additionally, there was some belated speculation, especially in the sixpenny Commercial Advertiser, to the effect that Mary’s disappearance might have been concocted by Anderson (with cooperation from Mary) as a way to attract business to his segar and tobacco enterprise.

  Now this.

  IN THE TOMBS’ COURTYARD, Balboa awaits the high constable, standing in front of the barouche, feeding the dappled carriage horse a stubby carrot, at the same time engaged in easy conversation with another Negro, a man employed as prison sweep.