Jeffery Deaver - The Twelfth Card

“But I still don’t understand why ,” Cole, the lawyer, said. His sourness had blossomed into full-fledged irritation.

Rhyme explained the final piece of the puzzle: He related the story of Charles Singleton, the farm he’d been given by his master and the Freedmen’s Trust robbery – and the fact that the former slave had a secret. “ That was the answer to why Charles was set up in 1868. And it’s the answer to why Ashberry had to kill Geneva.”

“Secret?” Stella, the assistant, asked.

“Oh, yes. I finally figured out what it was. I remembered something that Geneva ’s father had told me. He said that Charles taught at an African free school near his home and that he sold cider to workers building boats up the road.” Rhyme shook his head. “I made a careless assumption. We heard that his farm was in New York state…which it was. Except that it wasn’t upstate , like we were thinking.”

“No? Where was it?” Hanson asked.

“Easy to figure out,” he continued, “if you keep in mind there were working farms here in the city until the late eighteen hundreds.”

“You mean his farm was in Manhattan?” Stella asked.

“Not only,” Rhyme said, allowing himself the colloquialism. “It was right underneath this building.”

“We found a drawing of Gallows Heights in the 1800s that shows three or four big, tree-filled estates. One of them covered this and the surrounding blocks. Across the road from it was an African free school. Could that’ve been his school? And on the Hudson River ” – Rhyme glanced out the window – “right about there, at Eighty-first Street, was a dry dock and shipyard. Could the workers there have been the ones Charles sold cider to?

“But was the estate his? There was one simple way to find out. Thom checked the Manhattan recorder’s office and found the record of a deed from Charles’s master to Charles. Yep, it was his. Then everything else fell into place. All the references we found to meetings in Gallows Heights – with politicians and civil rights leaders? It was Charles’s house they were meeting in. That was his secret – that he owned fifteen acres of prime land in Manhattan.”

“But why was it a secret?” Hanson asked.

“Oh, he didn’t dare tell anyone he was the owner. He wanted to, of course. That’s what he was so tormented about: He was proud that he owned a big farm in the city. He believed he could be a model for other former slaves. Show them that they could be treated as whole men, respected. That they could own land and work it, be members of the community. But he’d seen draft riots, the lynchings of blacks, the arson. So he and his wife pretended to be caretakers. He was afraid that somebody would find out that a former slave owned a large plot of choice property and destroy it. Or, more likely, steal it from him.”

“Which,” Geneva said, “is exactly what happened.”

Rhyme continued, “When Charles was convicted all his property was confiscated – including the farm – and sold… Now, that’s a nice theory: setting up someone with false charges to steal his property. But was there any proof? A tall order a hundred and forty years later – talk about cold cases…Well, there was some evidence. The Exeter Strongbow safes – the type that Charles allegedly broke into at the Freedmen’s Trust – they were made in England so I called a friend at Scotland Yard. He talked to a forensic locksmith, who said it’d be impossible to break into a nineteenth-century Exeter safe with only a hammer and chisel, which is what they found at the scene. Even steam-powered drills of that era would take three or four hours – and the article about the theft said that Charles was inside the trust for only twenty minutes.

“Next conclusion: Somebody else robbed the place, planted some of Charles’s tools at the scene and then bribed a witness to lie about him. I think that the actual thief was a man we found buried in the basement of the Potters’ Field tavern.” He explained about the Winskinskie ring and the man who’d worn it – that he was an officer in the corrupt Tammany Hall political machine.

“He was one of Boss Tweed’s cronies. And another one was William Simms, the detective who arrested Charles. Simms was later indicted for graft and planting false evidence on suspects. Simms, the Winskinskie man, and the judge and prosecutor engineered Charles’s conviction. And they kept the money from the trust that wasn’t recovered.

“So, we’ve established Charles owned a huge estate in Gallows Heights and he was set up so somebody could steal it.” His eyebrow rose. “The next logical question? The big one?”

No takers.

“Obviously: Who the hell was the perp? ” Rhyme snapped. “Who robbed Charles? Well, given that the motive was to steal his farm, all I had to do was find out who took title to the land.”

“Who was it?” Hanson asked, troubled but seemingly caught up in the historical drama.

The assistant smoothed her skirt and suggested, “Boss Tweed?”

“No. It was a colleague of his. A man who was seen regularly at the Potters’ Field tavern, along with some of the other notorious figures back then – Jim Fisk, Jay Gould and Detective Simms.” A glance at each of the people across the table. “His name was Hiram Sanford.”

The woman blinked. After a moment she said, “The founder of our bank.”

“The one and only.”

“This is ridiculous,” said Cole, the attorney. “How could he do that? He was one of the pillars of New York society.”

“Just like William Ashberry?” the criminalist asked sarcastically. “The business world wasn’t really any different then than it is now. Lots of financial speculation – one of Charles’s letters quoted the New York Tribune referring to the ‘bursting bubbles’ on Wall Street. Railroads were the Internet companies of the 1800s. Their stocks were overvalued and crashed. Sanford probably lost his fortune when that happened and Tweed agreed to bail him out. But, being Tweed, he naturally wanted to use somebody else’s money to do it. So the two of them set up Charles, and Sanford bought the orchard at a rigged auction for a fraction of its value. He tore down Charles’s house and built his mansion on it, where we’re sitting right now.” A nod out the window toward the blocks nearby. “And then he and his heirs developed the land or sold it off little by little.”

“Didn’t Charles claim he was innocent, tell them what happened?” Hanson asked.

Rhyme scoffed, “A former slave against the anti-black Tammany Hall Democratic machine? How successful would that have been? Besides, he’d killed the man in the tavern.”

“So he was a murderer,” the attorney, Cole, pointed out quickly.

“Of course not,” Rhyme snapped. “He needed the Winskinskie man alive – to prove his innocence. The death was self-defense. But Charles had no choice but to hide the body and cover up the shooting. If they’d found out, he’d be hanged.”

Hanson shook his head. “Only there’s one thing that doesn’t make any sense: Why would what Hiram Sanford did way back then affect Bill Ashberry? Granted it’s bad PR – a bank founder stealing a former slave’s property? That’d be an ugly ten minutes on the nightly news. But frankly there are spin doctors who can handle that sort of thing. It’s not worth killing somebody for.”

“Ah.” Rhyme nodded. “Very good question…We’ve done a little research. Ashberry was in charge of your real estate division, right?”

“That’s right.”

“And if it were to go under he’d lose his job and most of his fortune?”

“I suppose so. But why would it go under? It’s our most profitable unit.”