Only in New England : the story of a gaslight crime (8 page)

From the wharf a woman's voice answers, "Here."

"Have you got it?" calls a basso voice from the dory. "Have you got the three hundred and fifty pounds?"

"Yes, I have," answers the woman. "But before I hand it over, I'd like to see who I'm handing it to."

With that the dark is split by the ray of a bull's-eye lantern spearing out from the wharf. Jumping across the water, the little spotlight focuses on the bow of a black dory. Standing in the bow, and framed in the circle of light, is a big man wearing a cocked sea cap and a turtle-neck sweater—a man with a car-niverous-looking black beard and the build of John L. Sullivan.

"All right," he hails, showing white teeth. "Where's the payoff?"

"Right here," answers the woman on the wharf. "All three hundred and fifty pounds of it."

The lamp-ray whips around to a snubbing post at the end of the wharf. There, stuck atop the post, all bloody and raw, is an ox-head.

Trained on this pay-off, the bull's-eye lamp was left behind. Clattering and reeling, the" springer-wagon departed in the night. It is also told that the dory and its captain departed—after the latter emitted one unholy yell.

True story? No "Pointer" could really say. Next day the ox-head was gone, the black schooner was gone, the man called Ox was

nowhere in evidence. Indeed, who could say that anyone or anything had been there in the first place?

But the story got around, as stories do. And there were one or two known facts that loaned it substantiation.

Late that summer Abby Bridewell reported a missing ox. She said she presumed the animal had wandered off into the marshes and had drowned. No trace of it was ever found.

As for the smuggler called Ox, after that summer he never returned to Quahog Point. Some say the Syndicate was broken up by revenue men. Others say something else put an end to it. If one chose, one could believe in local legend.

Ed Brewster concluded the folktale with his prefatory qualification. "As I say, you can disbelieve it, if you want. Here's a fact, though. All those cheese entries in the old store ledger—they end in the fall of Nineteen Seven. And here's another fact. Quahog Point is a county, see. Even today it's the only county in New England where there's no ordinance making it against the law to drive a vehicle at night without lights."

We drew up in front of the Anchor Saloon. On the face of it, I could quite believe the story.

CHAPTER 7

The raw rain chased us through the door into a shadowy barroom that was not quite as slatternly as the tavern's exterior.

Typical resort bar out of season. Bare dance floor. Vacant tables. A range of windows overlooking a stretch of desolate beach with miles of whitecaps flanking in from distant horizon.

Wind gnawed at the eaves, and the rumble of breakers vibrated the floor. But the room was reasonably warm; ship's lanterns created a marine atmosphere; and the old-time mahogany bar

with brass rail would have been picturesque had someone cleared away the trashy strew of wisecrack placards, tacky calendar art and carved coconut-heads.

The bartender put aside a newspaper and spoke in an asthmatic husk. "Glad to see you, Ed."

"How's things, Dober?"

"Fair to middling. Slow, though."

I was introduced to Dober Davenport—two hundred and fifty pounds in shirtsleeves and apron sorely in need of laundering. He gave me a moony smile and a damp, fat hand. He wheezed: "Your friend was here."

"Mr. Martin?"

"Said to tell you he'd gone back to the Center. Expecting a longdistance. Back'n half hour. Would you wait."

We would.

I ordered a rye.

Ed said, "Ward Eight."

We carried our drinks to the far corner away from the windows. Ed said it would be warmer there. In subsequent reflection, I suspected that Ed's concern was privacy; our retreat was partly screened by the facade of a battered old Wurlitzer piano.

Even in the late 30's it was well to speak of smuggling at Quahog Point with diffident circumspection. Pinguid Dober Davenport was simply a post-Prohibition version of the gaslight blackleg. Only the dialect of the business had changed. We did not call the modern Ox a smuggler; in the new argot he was a hoodlum, mobster or racketeer. Instead of knife and six-shooter he used a Tommy automatic or a sawed-off shotgun.

Still, the game had been sufficiently dangerous in Abby Bridewell's day. You could die as hard from a dagger in the ribs as from a Tommy blast. If any part of the ox-head episode were true, the old lady had an iron nerve as well as an inflexible will. I began to see in her a touch of Ma'arm Mandelbaum and Calamity Jane Canary. Masked, of course, by Down East proprieties and pious Sabbatarianism.

Ed raised his glass. "Here's how."

"How."

I heard a phone ringing. After a minute Dober Davenport called from the bar, "It's that Luke Martin. Wants you to come, Ed, with your car."

Ed said to me, "Stay and finish your drink. I won't be long." He gulped his and headed out. At the door he said something to Dober. Presently Dober came to the table to join me with a Ward Eight. He sat down with a gasp.

I asked him if he usually drank Ward Eights (a New England favorite) and where the name came from.

He said he liked the look of them better than the taste. The name? "Some say it's from an insane asylum, ward for alcoholics. I've heard, too, it came from a political ward."

"The sources blend," I said.

He nodded, and sniffed at his drink. Then, looking up, "Speaking of politics, did Ed Brewster tell you a President once visited here? My grandfather—he was a Robinson—used to run the Seagull. You can see his picture in the lobby. Crusoe Robinson. And up in the cupola, still there, there's a big canvas banner says Welcome Grover Cleveland.'"

"No!"

"Fact." Dober sipped, and looked at me reflectively. "Ed says you might write something about State Senator Bridewell. You a political writer?"

"No, but I'm interested in Cleveland coming here."

"I don't know about Cleveland," Dober rubbed his chin. "But I can tell you a story my grandfather told me about how Earnest Bridewell got into politics back then."

And, therein as Victorian novelists used to put it, lay a tale. Another chapter of the Bridewell biography that culminated in a murder case.

Chronologically, this chapter reverts to the early red-plush era of the Bridewell history. The year 1884.

Abby Bridewell is in her vigorous fifties; Earnest, smalltown

lawyer, is thirty odd; Lionel, in his Adonis period, is in Boston cultivating his voice. Captain Nathan Bridewell is a paralytic, buried. Well, not exactly buried. Entombed in a third-floor eyrie. Characteristic of Abby, who saves everything, to deposit her husband in the attic with the rest of the household's worn-out effects. When he dies she will store his remains in a new brown-stone-front mausoleum that dominates the acreage of Headland Cemetery as an imposing and perdurable bank where he can be held in perpetuity.

Meanwhile, with her husband secured under the eaves, Abby can now devote full time to the Bridewell estate and to Earnest, who has been complaining that his Quahog Point career is in the doldrums. Earnest is restless, dissatisfied. What does he want? Barring a J. P. Morgan clientele, what do many budding lawyers want? So did Earnest Bridewell.

It was typical of the time. And, indeed, in keeping with American tradition. Probably nine-tenths of the gentlemen in Congress and a majority of the Presidents had been lawyers. True, three or four Army generals had ridden into the Presidency on the shoulders of hero worship. But a law career was the standard stepping-stone for success in politics. Perhaps because few other professions endowed the practitioner with similar ability to harangue, to debate, to dissemble, to wangle, to temporize, and to indulge in the incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial.

Anyway, Earnest Bridewell espied an opportunity in the political arena. He had been approached. Had made the appropriate donation. Had promised fealty to the Party platform. Had satisfied the bosses in the smoke-filled room behind the State capital. All he needed were a few hundred dollars and his mother's blessing. And, of course, a sufficient number of votes.

He got his mother's consent and the necessary financial subsidy. The votes were horses of another color.

Researching the story's background (details unknown to Ed's friend Dober) I could see what Earnest Bridewell was up against as a candidate for State Senator in 1884.

National politics in that election year were violent, complicated, and confusing. One might say, as always. But our present-day

campaigns are almost rational and gentlemanly compared with those waged in the gaslight decades which immediately followed the Civil War.

This was the epoch characterized by public idols with feet of clay. Grant's sorry administration—the Black Friday crash— the Robber Barons—the Pension Grabs—America had never had it worse. As election year dawned in 1884 angry political cartoons showed fat spoilsmen looting the national treasury and porcine profiteers gloating over plunder. Graft ran rampant.

The Republicans accused Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall. They had something there. The Democrats accused the Republicans. They had more.

Then, as later in Harding's time, the Republican leadership was shot through with graft, the worse because it wore a mask of prudence, patriotism and piety. At least it could be said of the Tammanyites that they were not hypocritical Pharisees. Boss Tweed made few bones about his depredations, and his ward heelers bragged openly of stuffed ballot boxes and purchased votes.

The average voter? At this stage of American history he was much as usual. That is, baffled, bewildered and bamboozled. Too busy raising children and trying to make ends meet to give much study to the issues raised in City Hall and the ends legislated under the Capitol Dome in far-off Washington.

While he waits for Election Day, let us further examine this voter of 1884. Stereoscope views show him riding to work in a horse car. He wears a brown, high-crowned derby with a tight-curled brim, a celluloid collar and detachable cuffs, a woollen suit, the trousers tight, the jacket short with small, high lapels. His high button shoes have little knobs on the toes.

According to fancy, he may wear sideburns or a soup-strainer mustache. He smokes one-seventh of a mile of cigars a year, and he expectorates such quantities of tobacco juice per day that an entire industry is devoted to the manufacture of brass receptacles. He probably imbibes too much lager beer, and (dietary caution being relatively modern) his eating habits are atrociously overloaded with carbohydrates and lards. If he attains the higher in-

come brackets, he develops the massive paunch significantly dubbed in period vernacular an "alderman." He will festoon this tummy with a gold chain and a fob, perhaps an animal's tooth. The mark of true success is a gold toothpick and a snap-lid watch.

His wife (who does not enjoy the right of suffrage, but votes through her husband more or less by proxy) wears one of the weirdest costumes in all die history of feminine fashion. Foundation is an hourglass corset that has to be laced by an assistant and is guaranteed to wreck the posture and anatomy of the wearer. Once corseted in this wasp-waisted straightjacket, the lady dons a tight little tunic with choker collar, huge leg-o-mutton sleeves, and a regimental file of some thirty or forty tiny silk-covered buttons. After a twenty-minute struggle with the buttons, she may be ready to step into a tight-waisted skirt that falls to the heels of her shoes and is just the right length for sweeping the streets.

This fashionable garb is topped by a dumpy plumed hat, the same being pinned to the coif by a brace of murderous hatpins. But the crowning glory, if one may use the term in this particular, is the bustle—an enormous pillow affixed to the lady's derriere. To the present day no one knows why she consented to be thus disfigured; if she thought the silhouette defended modesty and turned men's thoughts toward spiritual channels, the joke, like the bustle, was on her. If she supposed the style an improvement on her form, the assumption was certainly assinine. As someone once said of the camel, the costume looked like something put together by a committee.

To politics, then. The voter seen in our 1884 stereoscope may not know much about the major political issues, but he will certainly vote. Aside from the arrival of P. T. Barnum's Circus and the occasional revival meetings staged by itinerant evangelists, nothing excites him so much as an election campaign.

Early in June the Republican National Committee met in Chicago and on the fourth ballot nominated James G. Blaine of Maine for President.

Convening in Chicago in July, the Democrats nominated Grover Cleveland, former Sheriff of Buffalo, for President.

There were two other candidates for the Presidency. The Na-

tional Greenback Party put up General Benjamin F. Butler. The Prohibition Party nominated John P. St. John. Both Butler and St. John could best be forgotten. And generally were. The big contest lay between Elephant and Donkey.

At the outset both Parties experienced internal trouble. Although clever and occasionally brilliant, James G. Blaine was a political hack whose every move was guided by a wet finger in the wind. He was ingratiating and plausible, but he had slipped on the banana peel of a tricky railroad swindle, and was known to be thoroughly unscrupulous.

Disliking Blaine, the intelligent liberals of the Republican Party broke away to support Grover Cleveland. They weren't called liberals or do-gooders in those days. They were called "Mugwumps." And they were called a lot of other things by the Old Guard leaders who staunchly stood by Blaine.

The campaign soon degenerated into a mud-slinging match that outdid any previous imbroglio in the political arena. It must be conceded that Blaine's record made a ready target. His involvement in the Western railroad swindle was exposed, and great was the smell thereof. Behind front-men he had palmed off a lot of worthless stock on his constituents in Maine. When the Democrats unearthed this skullduggery, the Old Guard leaders panicked. As Maine went so could go the nation.