William Kennedy - The Flaming Corsage

CULBERT (CULLY) WATSON, known in Albany for years as a hotel sneak and petty hoodlum, was hanged from a telegraph pole in the French Quarter of New Orleans last night after being taken off a train at gunpoint by four men in kerchief masks. Watson was en route to New Orleans for trial on an attempted-murder charge, and was in custody of two New Orleans detectives when the four masked men disarmed and tied up the detectives, and fled the train with Watson.

His corpse was found hanging on Bourbon Street, near the hotel where ten days ago, police say, he raped, robbed, and left for dead a twenty-seven-year-old woman. She had been smothered, but revived to find the room filled with gas from an open jet. She said she’d seen her attacker working at the hotel desk as night clerk. Police said the attacker had gained entry to and left the woman’s room through the transom, and that Watson was slim and agile enough to accomplish this. He has a known history of such unlawful entry and assault on women.

Police caught Watson with the woman’s diamond brooch and $2,000 in cash as he stepped off a train at Memphis. To bargain with police, Watson told of his connection to the infamous Love Nest killings of 1908, when a prominent Albany physician, Giles Fitzroy, murdered his wife, shot and wounded the Albany playwright Edward Daugherty, then killed himself. The shootings took place at the Millerton House in Manhattan, where Watson was then working. He disappeared after the killings.

Police said Dr. Fitzroy and Daugherty testified against Watson at a hearing into a river-barge brawl in 1906, and Watson may have held a grudge against them. Police have a lengthy statement from Watson about the Love Nest case but have disclosed no details about Watson’s role in it; but they did say that others may be involved.

EDWARD, IN HIS white suit and white Panama with the flowerpot crown, walked at sunbright morning with a stream of other men, women, and children down Columbia Street past the new Union Station. Where the goddamned Delavan stood. Handsome new building and they used plenty of the Delavan’s scorched bricks. Some things can be salvaged from any wreckage. Katrina?

He headed toward the old red bridge that spanned the Albany Basin, then out toward the pier, where two covered, double-deck barges, and the tug that would pull them, rested at anchor in the placid water of the Hudson. He saw Maginn coming toward the bridge from another direction, and he waited for him.

“You’re alone,” Maginn said.

“So are you,” said Edward.

“I’m always alone, except when I’m with a beautiful and accessible woman, which I fully expect to be before this day is over.”

“My own beautiful woman decided not to come.”

“That’s truly a pity,” Maginn said. “How is she? I haven’t seen her in months.”

“She’s all right. You know she doesn’t favor the drinking.”

Despite Edward’s arguments to Katrina that today they could celebrate something together for a change — the river’s summer glory, the gift of a lustrous day — she said she couldn’t abide all that family sweetness, all those dowdy biddies, all the rowdiness. So she stayed home. Avoiding the class struggle.

“Then we’re a couple of bachelors for the day,” Maginn said. “Like the old days. Tent city at the State Fair, when you were still a lowly reporter? Remember?”

“Things have changed since then,” Edward said.

“Not I. I find myself a lowly reporter still. And I still dandle the doxies, don’t you, old man, once in a while, just for the hell of it? Tell the truth.”

“Part of my past,” Edward said.

“You’ve tamed the tendril. How resolute.”

At the gangway, a policeman was backing a man down the ramp, poking his chest with a billy club. Five others backed down behind him. Edward recognized the cop, Willie Glass.

“It’s not a free ride,” Glass said. “Buy a ticket.”

“Go scratch your ass, Glass,” said the ejected man, who was short, wiry, and thirtyish, with long black hair parted in the middle, a full mustache, and sufficiently irregular good looks that Edward judged him a pimp. He mumbled to the men with him and they went away.

“Sheridan Avenue boys,” Maginn said. “The one sassing the cop is Cully Watson. He doesn’t like to pay for things.”

“He has the look of a man who uses women,” Edward said.

“Very perceptive,” Maginn said. “He’s also very wild.”

Edward and Maginn boarded the barge for the impending voyage, a neighborhood outing of North and South End church groups, social clubs, and singing societies. They’d all been accumulating food in their club rooms and vestries for days for this, the Eintracht excursion, which took its name from the city’s premier choral group, the Eintracht Singing Society, a mix of working and professional men, Protestants and Catholics, Germans, Dutch, English, and Irish, who once a year embarked together on this exercise in social leveling.

The excursion was financed by boarding tickets, and the sale of prepaid tickets for beer and soft drinks. People had been boarding since eight o’clock, fifty cents a head; and the two barges (used to haul ice, hay, or produce on weekdays) were already a floating small town. At ten-thirty, with more than two thousand aboard, the sailors hauled up the gangway. Old Hellhound , the tug, towed the first barge under and past the narrow draws of the Maiden Lane and South Ferry Street bridges, then went back for the second barge; and when the two were side by side, sailors lashed them together, then opened the rails of their top decks so the two boats became one, doubling the conviviality. Then the tug moved them downriver at low speed, toward the Baerena Island picnic grounds.

Edward and Maginn searched for a table on a lower deck, where women were already passing out knockwurst, pork sandwiches, plates of beans and cabbage, and men were clustered at the bar, where two bartenders steadily drew mugs of beer from tapped kegs. Johnny Daugherty, the famous fiddler, Edward’s distant cousin through unchartable family links in Spiddal, broke into “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” for anyone ready to jig this early in the day, and there were a few. Card games proceeded, and Edward saw Midge Kresser unfolding his portable three-card-monte table, about to begin his day’s work parting suckers from their nickels and dimes. Ministers and priests were eating with their flocks. Policemen Willie Glass and Joe Anthony strolled the deck, keeping the peace.

“I see Giles,” Edward said, and they found him in line for drinks, wearing his commodore’s cap and lemon-yellow vest.

“Felicity come with you?” Edward asked, expecting Giles’s wife would have absented herself today for the same reasons as Katrina.

“She did,” Giles said, and he pointed toward a table where Felicity was sitting with a woman in her late forties. Felicity was quintessentially summery in a white linen frock and white straw boater with pink ribbon. The other woman was older, slender, bosomy, and narrow-waisted, her pale-green dress subtly décolleté.

“That woman with your wife,” Maginn said, “she’s suitable for a saddle, wouldn’t you say, Fitz?”

“I knew you’d notice her, Maginn,” Giles said. “Felicity’s Aunt Sally, a handsome woman. To tell the truth, I wouldn’t be surprised if she went for you. She has a weakness for your type.”

“What’s my type?”

“Worthless lout with a wit,” Giles said. “Her husband has no sense of humor.”

“She has a husband but fancies witty men.”

“I hear he’s not much of a husband. He’s a fire chief down in Westchester. You see before you the fireman’s wife.”