Free Savage Girl by Jean Zimmerman Page A

clearly within view, the town boundary fifty yards away, but after losing Savage Girl we shut ourselves off from it.
    Tahktoo joined me that afternoon, entering the parlor car silently, easing cross-legged to the floor to work on his knitting.
    Melancholy, I gazed out the window some more. “You know, Henry Comstock wound up committing suicide,” I said, to myself rather than to the berdache (he didn’t converse much). Comstock, the early miner who had swindled a couple of others out of what turned into the biggest claim ever in the history of the country. Then lost it all.
    “They named the whole sixty-million-dollar lode after him, and he put a bullet in his head in a nickel-a-night flop.”
    The alkali wind swept through the chock-a-block town jumbled at the foot of the mountain. The berdache did not seem contaminated with the same mood of mournfulness.
    •   •   •
    Wait, wait, Bill Howe says.
    Tahktoo had upon first meeting struck me—
    Wait, wait. The rotund attorney waves his hands. Your father had a twelve-car private train?
    Sandobar, I say. Named after Grandfather’s estate on Long Island.
    By that time, late morning Saturday, the warden’s quarters where we speak are a little more lively, busy with a half dozen clerks, factotums and secretaries, all summoned from the law offices of Howe & Hummel. Actual personnel from the Tombs—turnkeys, bailiffs and such—visit only occasionally.
    Out the window, across Centre Street, the firm’s immodest billboard-size sign dominates the area, in enormous block letters that are illuminated by night ( HOWE & HUMMEL’S LAW OFFICE ), looming over the Tombs as if to declare that the prison is a mere annex to the illustrious partnership.
    Imagine an arraigned criminal, bonded out of the Tombs, wavering in his conviction of what to do next. Whiskey always foremost in his mind. But then the huge blazing billboard. Perhaps, before a drink, an attorney. It sometimes happens that way.
    The firm’s clients include the most celebrated citizens of New York City, the highest of the high. Bankers. Brokers. The actor Edwin Booth. P. T. Barnum. And the lowest of the low. When seventy-four brothel madams were rounded up during a purity drive, every one of them named Howe & Hummel as counsel.
    With all my talking, I am perhaps overtired, since I don’t feel like sleeping but rather exist in a sort of in-between twilight of mind and memory. I still have blood on my clothes, random spatters from the corpse in the Gramercy Park mansion.
    One of the cars wasn’t our own, I say. We were transporting Lincoln’s car back to the East as a favor to Huntington.
    Huntington, Howe says. That would be the Central Pacific man.
    Yes.
    Lincoln’s car. Of the martyred president.
    One made for his use, I say. Unfortunately, he only ever occupied it in death. It carried his casket from Washington, D.C., to Springfield.
    Howe asks, This car was in your train on the siding at Virginia City?
    I didn’t wonder at his special interest. The Lincoln car holds great significance for many people. Stories, myths and tall tales are linked with it in the popular mind.
    Do you mark it, Mr. Hummel?
    Hummel nods and produces a soft sound such as “Uh-hmmn.” His first verbal communication of the morning, I believe, although he is a furious note taker.
    I see the thought wheels turning in their massive brains. A possible defense strategy. On his trip across the country, the Delegate boy becomes inhabited by the ghost that haunts the Lincoln car. He (that is, me) is driven mad. The late murders are to be assigned not to me, not to her, but to some disembodied ectoplasm. The spook of John Wilkes Booth himself, perhaps.
    I am found innocent by reason of demonic possession.
    A ludicrous strategy, but William Howe is known for putting over all sorts of ludicrousness to juries.
    An anecdote they tell of him: When Howe was once rehearsing his dramatic closing speech to the jury in a capital case, his partner,