Duel with the Devil Read online

  At the center of it all was a water company—and the murder that now haunted it.

  BROCKHOLST LIVINGSTON sat through the water board meetings, taking in the pleasant march of progress being made by their company. He was an unmistakable presence in any gathering: Balding and cerebral in appearance, he had a prominent nose that one contemporary deemed “a regular Roman triumph.” Livingston had duly considered all the old Federalist complaints about their water company, and he wasn’t much bothered, not least because he was a founding board member and a close ally of Burr’s, as well as a probable Republican candidate in the upcoming state elections.

  More improbably, though, he’d also been hired by the Weeks family to defend Levi.

  For a criminal case to command the talents of the city’s top three lawyers was unheard of, and yet Livingston had much in common with his two fellow counselors. He’d gone to school with Hamilton, and to college with Burr; like Hamilton, he’d also been a wartime aide-de-camp to George Washington—and like Burr, he was the scion of a powerful New York family. In the years since the war he’d built a law practice the equal of Hamilton’s and Burr’s, and become a trustee of Columbia College. But for all his respectable trappings, Livingston had always been known for an explosive sense of humor and an equally unpredictable temper. The two had combined disastrously a year earlier, when an editorial of his made a mild if careless jest about a local Federalist figure, James Jones. Incensed, Jones assaulted Livingston—beat him with a cane, in fact, while the lawyer was out promenading with his wife and children—and then grabbed him by his famous nose and yanked. It was the worst insult to the man’s vanity possible. Livingston immediately challenged Jones to a duel, in which he killed him with a single shot to the groin. A fuss was raised in the Federalist newspapers, but who would try a man publicly assaulted in front of his family—and who would dare to prosecute a Livingston? The constable had refused even to arrest him.

  The duel with Jones haunted the lawyer, though. “His best friends cannot lament his death more than Mr. Livingston does,” one acquaintance reported.

  Perhaps it was regret over the killing of Jones, or maybe it was that during the war Livingston had been held in the miserable prison ships the British kept in New York Harbor, but whatever the reason, and despite his formidable record in commercial law, Livingston had been more ready than his fellow lawyers to serve on some of the most clearly hopeless criminal cases on the docket. Just within the previous couple of months, he had defended Frothingham against the merciless libel charge by Hamilton, and represented the crazed John Pastano over the murder of his landlady.

  Livingston knew better than anyone that even with the best defense lawyers, the state could exact swift and terrible retribution. Two years earlier, there’d been the case of John Young, a bassoonist from the local theater’s orchestra pit. Young had run up some debts, and when a deputy sheriff came to arrest him for it, the musician panicked and shot the man dead. Livingston tried to get Young’s charge knocked down to manslaughter, but the trial did not go well: The gallery was packed with a hostile crowd, and when the judge’s sentence of hanging and dissection was pronounced, the spectators broke into victorious jeers—“an indecency,” one newspaper decried afterward, “which ought never to be tolerated before a tribunal.” Three weeks later, human body parts were found bobbing up against one of the local market piers in the East River. They proved to be the remains of Livingston’s late and very recent client.

  “This shameful exposure was not through the wantonness of the surgeons, as supposed,” reported the New-York Journal, “but of the porters employed to sink them, being contained in a bag, with weights for that purpose; it seems the porters conceived the bag was of value, and by this means the parts were set afloat.”

  In a state so hard in its justice, it was little wonder that the Weeks family had hired the city’s best lawyers to defend the bewildered young carpenter. Together, they would be greatest criminal defense team New York had ever seen. And they’d need to be, for the noose around their new client was now drawing even tighter.

  AT ABOUT NINE O’CLOCK THAT FRIDAY, AN ELECTRIFYING YELL broke the night.

  “Fire! Fire! FIRE!”

  Bridewell’s fire alarm clanged madly, and churches took up the alert as citizens scrambled to their upper windows and rooftops to find the source. Some began running northward, while others ran south, and it took some confused minutes to figure out why. On that winter’s night two fires had broken out simultaneously: one at a house in the northern reaches of the city, and the other down at the docks. The house was soon “entirely consumed,” but the docks augured even worse. When fire crews raced down to the Battery, they found “the heavens illuminated from fierce devouring flames”—columns of fire shooting skyward from the Admiral Duncan, a British trader set to sail to Liverpool the next morning fully loaded with $70,000 worth of cargo. It had gunpowder below decks, and as flames climbed up its masts and belched out from its portholes, another ship—the Olive—went up as well. The crew of the Admiral Duncan, out for one last night on the town, returned to find their vessel being desperately cut loose, and the burning hulk drifting into the East River. By the next morning, all that was left was smoke, and the smell of charred timber lingered in the air: the work, it was murmured, of an arsonist.

  But across the city, the defense team and the city’s recorder were pondering another, much more quietly mysterious evening. The recorder carefully dated a document—“Sworn, 18th day of January, 1800”—and listened as Levi’s sister-in-law made a sworn statement.

  On Sunday, the twenty-second of December last, my husband and I were at home, she began.

  They’d been lucky to get Elizabeth Weeks to make this affidavit at all: It had not been long since she’d borne Ezra a daughter, and these were perilous days for the health of a young mother. She was ready to testify, though, that John McComb, Jr.—Hamilton’s choice of an architect for his new Grange mansion—had come with Mrs. McComb to visit them on the night of Elma’s disappearance. And, crucially, there had been another visitor for that evening: Levi Weeks.

  About candle light, she continued, or a little while after, Mr. John McComb and his wife came in. Levi Weeks was then in the room, and remained with the company till after the clock struck eight, and then went away. The McCombs left about twenty or twenty-five after; Levi Weeks came in, and remained.

  Had she seen anything unusual in his countenance?

  No, she replied. He appeared cheerful—ate a hearty meal—and went off to his lodgings, about ten o’clock.

  It sounded like an entirely unremarkable evening, which was exactly what the defense team needed to hear. With respectable friends and family ready to testify to Levi’s alibi, and his bond easily backed by a powerful brother, the young carpenter was released. A generation earlier Levi would not have been so fortunate, but bail laws had been considerably loosened after the war.

  Ironically, the still-unreformed severity of debtor laws had likely helped to secure a fine defense team in the first place. Burr and Hamilton were both in the habit of running up the kind of debts that could put them at Ezra’s mercy, and debtor laws meant a contractor or architect could have them thrown into jail for any inability to pay a past-due debt. It was a threat that prominence gave little protection from: A few years earlier, even New York’s attorney general had been confined for a debt while still serving in office. Wisely, neither Hamilton nor Burr entered any fee into their ledgers for defending Levi Weeks.

  But if bond money and the debts of prominent lawyers could keep Levi safe from the Bridewell jail, Elias Ring’s talk of shooting him meant that he was still well-advised to lie low. For that matter, his other witnesses and supporters needed to keep quiet as well. “Those who dared to suppose him innocent,” one local observed, “were very generally considered as partakers in his guilt.”

  Some hinted that Ezra Weeks himself was also involved in Elma’s death. In the newspapers, even the McCombs suddenly found
themselves under scrutiny. “Directly in the rear of Mr. McComb’s houses,” warned the New York Commercial Advertiser, “the lower beams of a very extensive wooden building have just been laid”—one so tall and close to the property lines, in fact, that it violated city fire codes, which the builder had outrageously circumvented by paying off some paltry fines. “Should an accident happen, the whole of Broadway would be endangered,” the paper complained. It was a stinging attack to make, especially after the devastating local fires of the previous week.

  Ezra knew that he had to remain patient. He had his eye on the local City Hotel; its builder was teetering on the verge of selling the $100,000 behemoth at an immense loss, and Ezra had money ready to snap it up cheaply. And McComb, along with his Grange commission for Hamilton, had another and even greater project on the horizon: that of building a new City Hall.

  Things were going quite well for the builders, save for one problem: a prosecutor utterly determined to get their foreman executed.

  SOON SNOW was falling over the city, covering the charred piers on the East River, filling the hollows of Lispenard’s Meadow, and slowing Greenwich Street to a stately, muffled march. One figure could still be found stamping doggedly through the winter weather, his mind occupied in deep thought.

  Cadwallader Colden was thinking about a squeaky door hinge.

  Mark that noise, the Rings informed him. With both Levi and Elma now gone from their quarters, the Rings’ boardinghouse sat in doleful silence: a stillness occasionally broken by the creak of their poorly hung front door. There’s the staircase, and our bedroom—mark that as well.

  From their bedroom on the first floor, Elias and Catherine Ring explained, they could hear the door creaking as Elma departed the house on the evening of December 22, 1799. And it was here that they heard her whispering with—well, with someone, some other boarder—as she prepared to leave. Mrs. Ring had few doubts as to who that other person was.

  That very day, Elma told me that they were to be married, Mrs. Ring insisted.

  It’s true, Mr. Ring added. He had affections for her.

  William Anderson, Levi’s apprentice, came forward with even more damning evidence: I saw something, he admitted.

  He shared a room with Levi and had been locked out the night of the disappearance—he’d waited and waited in the parlor for Levi to come home with the key. What stuck in Billy’s memory, though, happened well before that evening.

  One night, Levi waited until he thought I was asleep. Then I saw him depart from the room dressed only in his shirt. I heard him creeping upon the stairs, he recalled. Levi did not come back until morning.

  A modest Quaker couple running a boardinghouse, a roommate who could implicate Levi in an affair with the deceased—these were the sorts of people who would make for good testimony. Colden considered the other possible witnesses from the boardinghouse, too: Mrs. Ring’s unmarried sister, Hope Sands; artisans such as Sylvanus Russel; and the peculiar London cloth merchant, Richard Croucher. True, boarders generally made a point of attending to their own business, because it was the only way to tolerate close quarters. But to one boarder, the quarters had been a little too close.

  I saw Elma and Levi in an indecent act, he hissed.

  This was the kind of information Colden was waiting for—information he desperately needed. His office’s handling of Manhattan’s previous two murders had not inspired much confidence, not least because one bore disturbing similarities to this new case. Two weeks before Elma’s disappearance, another murdered woman was found hidden in a cistern, this one mere blocks from City Hall in the narrow alley of Hague Street. The unfortunate victim was Rose Malone, a widow who had remarried a week earlier. Her new husband, William, was immediately suspected, and bundled off to jail under blaring headlines of HORRID MURDER! But there the headlines ended: The attorney general’s office had quietly dropped the case. The fact that Colden was only the assistant attorney general was not much cover: Since Attorney General Josiah Hoffman was Colden’s brother-in-law, he could hardly distance himself from the unsolved murder.

  Even when all the evidence was on their side, affairs were not going well for state law enforcement. Snapping open a newspaper brought this thunderbolt of news from Albany: AN ACT TO PARDON JOHN PASTANO FOR MURDER. “It appears satisfactorily to the Legislature,” the act read, “that at the time of the commission of the act aforesaid he was insane, and is therefore a proper object of mercy.” Both the New York State Legislature and Governor John Jay had personally reversed the state attorney general’s office’s highest profile case ever: Pastano’s death sentence was commuted, and the killer of Mary Ann de Castro was now to be repatriated to his home island of Madeira.

  The attorney general’s quick and ruthlessly straightforward conviction of Pastano was, it emerged, anything but. True, another boarder had caught Pastano in the middle of stabbing Mrs. Castro and was then stabbed himself, and numerous witnesses saw Pastano out in the street covered in blood. But while the attorney general and his assistant were both young and hasty to convict, the defense of Pastano by Brockholst Livingston—older, shrewder, and all too worldly in the ambiguities of violence—had completely undone their prosecution.

  In a deft legal feint, Livingston had allowed the attorney general to win the trial virtually uncontested. All of the testimony marshaled by Livingston instead concerned Pastano’s insanity. This seemed an odd choice: Under New York State law, there was no legal defense of insanity for a murder charge. Only the legislature had the authority for reversing a murder conviction on those grounds, an event that had never occurred in Colden’s or Hoffman’s lifetime—and, they felt they could quite safely assume, never would.

  They were wrong. Even in the hard-hearted world of New York justice, the prosecution of Pastano went too far. They never should have indicted him in the first place, for the man was obviously insane—and that, state law made clear, should have made his case a matter for the justice of the peace. Had Pastano merely been jailed indefinitely or deported in heavy chains, nobody would have taken much notice. But under criminal prosecution, Pastano had drawn a penalty of execution and dissection—an appalling fate to visit upon a helplessly mad wretch. It was an immense blunder for the ambitious young prosecutors to have made. To have its reversal publicly approved by Governor Jay—a fellow law-and-order Federalist, no less—was perhaps the greatest humiliation to the attorney general’s office in a generation.

  If Colden’s career was to recover, he needed to win this next case.

  INVESTIGATING A murder was a thankless task in New York: The local police were essentially watchmen, and beyond the immediate pursuit of a fleeing miscreant, actual crime investigation was largely left to the prosecutor himself. With Weeks bailed out and one local worthy already supporting his alibi, that would not be easy. If he was going to snare his killer, the assistant attorney general would have to figure out just where the carpenter really spent that fateful December evening.

  Other New Yorkers, though, were beginning to wonder where the defense team itself had disappeared to.

  “Where is the magnanimous General Hamilton?” snapped Greenleaf’s New Daily Advertiser. Still smarting from Hamilton’s jailing of its foreman David Frothingham, the Republican paper was not above reminding New Yorkers of the general’s peccadilloes: “Is he rioting in the pleasure which the imprisonment of a poor printer affords him? Or is he employed in relieving the wants of some tender amiable creature?”

  In fact, Hamilton and Burr alike were away in Albany for much of February, immersed in lucrative commercial lawsuits. The money was cold comfort to Hamilton: The death of George Washington was already proving disastrous to his own political and military career. Washington had been Hamilton’s great ally in D.C.—it was he who had engineered Hamilton’s promotion to general in the first place, over the angry objections of John Adams. As his most bitter rival in the Federalist Party, President Adams took deep offense at Hamilton’s tawdry affairs, as well as to his il
l-concealed military ambitions.

  “If I should consent to appointment of Hamilton,” Adams had complained to Washington, “I should consider it the most irresponsible action of my whole life and the most difficult to justify.”

  Now without George Washington’s protection, the general found even history itself turning against him. Much of Hamilton’s previous two years had been spent building up an “additional army,” justified by stoking fears of a French invasion of godless radicals. That country’s revolution, Hamilton warned, exposed America to a veritable “volcano of atheism, depravity, and absurdity … an engine of despotism and slavery.” But then France’s revolutionary council had capitulated to Napoléon Bonaparte. The new leader had no immediate fight to pick with America; some thought he might actually bring peace to Europe. Hamilton’s endless demands for more funding and troops were beginning to look foolish.

  “Speculations on a probable war in Europe have almost ceased to occupy the American papers,” one Federalist newspaper glumly admitted. About the best threat it could now conjure was a Gallic invasion from the heavens: “The French will not have any cause to regret the loss of their naval power when they find it so amply supplied by their aerial squadrons.… A whole fleet of balloons is soon to proceed to America upon commercial adventures: and, as the voyage will take only eight days, it is evident that sailing cannot enter into competition with flying.”

  Just a few blocks from the newspaper’s offices, Colden was unearthing an altogether more believable tale. It came from Susannah Broad, an elderly Quaker acquaintance of the Ring family—and, it so happened, a neighbor of Ezra Weeks’s.

  I remember that night, she told him. It was about eight o’clock on a Sunday night, and I heard one of Ezra’s gates open. Well, they never used that particular gate—I thought it was someone stealing from Mr. Weeks’s lumber yard! But when I looked out, it wasn’t anyone carrying out wood at all.… It was a horse coming out. Drawing a sleigh.