The Cosgrove Report: Being the Private Inquiry of a Pinkerton Detective into the Death of President Lincoln Read online

  Praise for The Cosgrove Report:

  “Dazzling ... A superior example of this genre.”

  —Nicholas Meyer, author of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution

  “A humdinger of a mystery ... transports us to a landscape at once familiar and as exotic as a sinister, murderous Oz.”

  —The Washington Star

  “Compelling ... a stunning conclusion.”—Grand Rapids Press

  “A gem ... it truly takes the reader back to relive those days. But don’t let anyone tell you how the book ends ... that would be cruel and inhuman treatment.”—Memphis Commercial Appeal

  “Moves along at lightning speed ... sprightly and intriguing ... what gorgeous entertainment.”—Columbus Dispatch

  “Fascinating ... an exciting chronicle of what might have been ... ending with a twist that should satisfy the most fanatical mystery aficionado.”—Civil War Times

  “My hat is off to G. J. A. O’Toole. He has come up with an idea for a mystery so good ... and he has brought it off with a flair that rivals Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time ... Ingenious and plausible ... the research is meticulous.”

  —The Baltimore Sun

  “If you think there is no more mystery surrounding that assassination, you are dead wrong. ... A must for anyone to whom history is a wonderful old trunk in the attic, always full of dusty surprises.”—The Plain Dealer

  “A political thriller based on a careful reading of history that will make a thrice-told tale seem completely different.”

  —The Boston Herald

  “Startling. Don’t tell anyone how it ends.”—The Pittsburgh Press

  “Contains more factual information about the truth of the assassination and the alleged conspiracy than I have seen in print anywhere ... Lovers of mystery stories will find O’Toole a master teller of tales. This is the best of historical fiction from historical fact that you’re likely to find.”—Cincinnati Enquirer

  “Rejoice, lovers of mystery and history. You’re in for a treat you’ll be talking about for a long time.”—Newport News Daily Press

  “A first-rate thriller by any standards ... a truly distinctive historical detective story. No one has done it any better.”

  —Savannah News-Press Sunday Magazine

  “A tour de force of its kind.”—Publishers Weekly

  THE COSGROVE REPORT

  OTHER BOOKS BY G. J. A. O’TOOLE

  An Agent on the Other Side

  The Assassination Tapes

  The Private Sector

  Honorable Treachery

  The Encyclopedia of American Intelligence and Espionage

  The Spanish War: An American Epic

  THE COSGROVE REPORT

  Being the Private Inquiry

  of a Pinkerton Detective into

  the Death of President Lincoln

  by Nicholas Cosgrove

  EDITED AND VERIFIED BY

  MICHAEL CROFT,

  COL., U.S. ARMY (RET.)

  AN ANNOTATED NOVEL

  PRESENTED BY

  G. J. A. O’TOOLE

  Copyright © 1979 by George O’Toole

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any

  form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation

  thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission

  in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who

  may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions

  wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom

  use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include

  the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to

  Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Originally published by Rawson, Wade

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST GROVE PRESS EDITION

  ISBN-10: 0-8021-4407-1

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-4407-2

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  09 10 11 12 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Mary Ann

  Contents

  Foreword

  PART ONE

  John Wilkes Booth, Dead or Alive

  1. A Mystery Is Exhumed

  2. A Five-Cent Clew

  3. The Custodian of Military Dispatches

  4. Dinner with the Devil

  5. The Restless Remains

  6. One of the Strangest Coincidences in History

  PART TWO

  Magic and Mystery

  7. An Inquiry into an Inquest

  8. “The Preceptor of All Great Magicians”

  9. The Blind Photographer

  10. A Hand from the Dead

  PART THREE

  Riddles Within the Mystery

  11. The Shadows Gather

  12. In the Crypt

  13. A Charming Secret Detective

  14. Conjuring in the Countryside

  15. The “Glory-to-God” Man

  16. “Stand and Deliver!”

  17. A Profitable Bargain

  PART FOUR

  Dr. Stewart’s Secret

  18. A Theft Is Investigated

  19. An Honest Man

  20. Edwin Stanton’s Secret

  21. A Mendicament for Mendacity

  PART FIVE

  The Twelfth Article of Impeachment: Assassination

  22. High Crimes, Misdemeanors and Murder

  23. The Gentleman from Kansas

  24. Cosgrove Confesses

  25. Saddles, Steamboats and Shank’s Mare

  PART SIX

  Nicholas Cosgrove’s Report

  26. Some Remarkable Disclosures

  27. Secretary Stanton in the Dock

  28. President Johnson Explains

  29. A Verdict of a Single Vote

  PART SEVEN

  The End of the Game

  30. A Major Disclosure

  31. The Letter of the Truth

  32. The Players Palace

  33. A Secret Place

  34. The Magic Box

  35. Pursuit Above the Clouds

  36. High Risk

  37. The Prisoner’s Tale

  38. In Quest of Myself

  Afterword

  Appendix: Professor Haselmayer’s Magic Tricks

  Bibliography

  THE COSGROVE REPORT

  Foreword

  BY MICHAEL CROFT

  Credentials are going to be an issue here, there’s no doubt about that. I’ve rankled enough experts of various kinds in my time to know what to expect. Coroners, cops and criminologists resent amateurs poaching on their professional territory. I don’t see why historians should be any different, especially when the interloper is someone so lacking in academic status as a private detective. So I want to make it clear at the outset that I did not volunteer for this assignment. I was hired to do it by someone who felt the job could be done better by me than by a professional historian. I’ll let him explain why shortly. For my part, there was no point in trying to argue with my client about it. He couldn’t change his mind; he died several weeks before he hired me.

  About a year ago I found among my mail an envelope with the expensive
ly embossed return address of the firm of Lawson, Hurley, Clinger and Osborn, Attorneys at Law. Most people quake at unexpected letters from law firms because they usually mean trouble. But in my profession they can also mean business, and as I slit open the envelope I recalled I had done some work for Raymond Lawson, senior partner of this firm, almost ten years ago. At the time Lawson was into his seventies, and I was surprised now to see he was still practicing law. But when I unfolded the enclosed letter and read it, I learned the old man had recently passed away. The letter was from one James Marsh, a junior partner. It was brief and not very informative.

  Dear Mr. Croft:

  I have been appointed executor of the estate of Mr. Raymond Lawson, the late senior partner of this firm. It is necessary that we meet to discuss a matter that may be of considerable benefit to you.

  Please contact me at your earliest convenience.

  Sincerely,

  James Marsh, Esq.

  Marsh wasn’t any more enlightening on the phone, but his firm’s offices in downtown Washington, D.C., were only a few blocks from my own. In person, Marsh turned out to be a young man with the meticulous air of a certified public accountant. He was the type that might have some trouble dealing with things that seem “a little irregular,” which was how he described the matter that brought me to his office.

  Mr. Lawson had left something for me, he explained. Not a bequest, exactly—a job. What kind of job? Marsh said he didn’t know. He produced a sealed parcel of the same general size, shape and weight as the Manhattan telephone book, and a check in an amount that would pay my daily rate for almost a year. According to the terms of Lawson’s will, Marsh was instructed to tell me only that the job was neither illegal nor hazardous, but that if I accepted it, I had to promise to give it my best efforts, priority over all other cases except those involving “life and death, or national security,” and to work on it until either it was completed, or the fee had been exhausted. No report of progress or completion need be submitted to Lawson, Hurley, Clinger and Osborn. Under the terms of Lawson’s will, the firm had no further responsibilities in the matter, after handing the parcel and the check over to me.

  I don’t usually take cases sight unseen, but I had to admit that this one certainly sounded like a good proposition. The “neither illegal nor hazardous” promise went a long way toward allaying my suspicions, and a year’s solid booking is very attractive to anyone who freelances at anything. But I think my main reason for accepting the check and parcel from Marsh was curiosity; it seemed the only way to learn what had been on the old man’s mind. And, of course, there was nothing to keep me from returning the money and the package to the law firm if, on finding out the details of the assignment, I decided it was something I didn’t want to do. And that’s exactly what I nearly did about forty-five minutes later.

  Back in my office on Pennsylvania Avenue, I put the check aside and broke the seals on the parcel. Inside I found an envelope with my name on it, several hundred yellowing sheets comprising what appeared to be a book manuscript, and an assortment of very old photographs. The envelope contained a letter from Lawson detailing my assignment. I reread it several times because I couldn’t believe what it said. There was no ambiguity in the late attorney’s message however: Lawson had hired me to reopen the investigation into the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

  Dear Mr. Croft:

  First, permit me to thank you, for, if you are reading this letter, you have agreed to take charge of a matter that has been a vexing burden to me for most of my adult life. The time seems to have come for me to put my personal affairs in order and tie up the many loose ends left over from a life of more than fourscore years. But I could not do so with any sense of equanimity or peace of mind without first arranging for the proper disposition of this matter.

  The problem in question concerns the enclosed manuscript, which I inherited from its author, my maternal grandfather, Nicholas Cosgrove, upon his death in 1914. During his lifetime, my grandfather had been wonderfully generous to my family, and especially to me. He made it possible for me to attend Harvard Law School, and saw to my earliest professional opportunities. In death, he was no less generous, and his bequest to my family has permitted us to live in moderate affluence, independent of the commercial exigencies of my law practice. Thus it hangs heavily upon my conscience that I have never fulfilled the single request that he made of me—to see to the publication of his manuscript.

  It would not, of course, have been possible to publish the book in 1914; several of those who played roles in the account, or their immediate survivors, were still living. In fact, Grandfather Nicholas stipulated that I should wait until all involved had long passed from the scene before publication. But many years have gone by since that condition was met, yet I still find myself unable to do my grandfather’s bidding. It is my hope that you, Mr. Croft, will enable me to discharge that obligation. Naturally, to do so, you will require some background information.

  Nicholas Cosgrove was born in New York City in 1835 of Irish immigrant parents. For a few years in his early manhood he followed his father’s trade of blacksmithing, but by 1855 he had joined the New York Police Department. After four years on the police force, he was assigned to assist in the investigation of a safecracking ring. The investigation was led by the famous private detective Allan Pinkerton, who had been hired by several of the victimized banks. Pinkerton was favorably impressed with the young policeman and offered him a job as a detective with his agency in Chicago. Grandfather accepted.

  Two years after Grandfather went to work for the Pinkerton Detective Agency, the Civil War broke out, and Allan Pinkerton put his entire staff of detectives at the service of General George McClellan. Grandfather was sent to Cincinnati to establish a clandestine headquarters from which reconnaissance missions into the South could be mounted. Grandfather himself crossed the lines many times during the war in a variety of disguises. He narrowly escaped hanging as a spy on several occasions, and once made his getaway by means of an untethered observation balloon.

  After the war, Pinkerton’s agency resumed its private investigative business, and Grandfather had developed a special kind of skill. Pinkerton’s had many ex-scouts who could track a bank or train robber through the wild, but Grandfather was one of the few detectives who knew how to track an embezzling employee who changed his name and fled from city to city, across the country, or even to foreign lands. Undoubtedly it was that talent that led to his involvement in the events he has recounted in his manuscript, which, if accurate, describes the most important missing-person case of the nineteenth century.

  During the 1870s Grandfather made a series of shrewd investments in railroad and telegraph stocks. In fact, these ventures succeeded so handsomely that I must admit to the suspicion that they were actually elaborate mechanisms devised by some rich and powerful individuals to purchase his silence regarding the matters contained in this manuscript. I know that it is unworthy of me to voice such thoughts, but I do so to you because it bears on your assignment, in that it may tend to corroborate Grandfather’s account.

  In any event, Grandfather became a wealthy man and left Pinkerton’s. He bought a seat on the New York Stock Exchange and hired a bright young man to run the stock brokerage for him. He married the daughter of a clergyman and moved to Newport, Rhode Island, where he built an elegant home. It was there that my mother, his one child, Penelope, was born.

  His wife died in 1885, and four years later, Penelope met and married my father, Arthur Lawson, the young headmaster of a nearby academy for the sons of affluent New England families. Grandfather invited the couple to live with him in his mansion at Newport, and so that is where I was born in 1890.

  My grandfather wrote the enclosed narrative during the early years of this century, using diaries he had kept during his detective days. As close as I can recall, he seems to have begun it in 1902 and completed it about 1905. He told us he was writing his “memoirs,” and I remember often se
eing him in his study, day and night, laboriously scribbling in longhand at his enormous rolltop desk. Every Wednesday a woman stenographer would come down from Providence to transcribe the foolscap sheets on a typewriter under my grandfather’s close supervision. I remember that several different women were employed at this task during the years he was writing the narrative, and I later realized my grandfather had arranged things this way so that none of the stenographers would have read the entire manuscript.

  None of the family was shown the manuscript. After it was completed my grandfather locked it away somewhere, and I had completely forgotten about it when, shortly before he died, he gave it to me. He asked me not to read it until after his death, and then to hold it and arrange for its publication at whatever time in the future I judged proper. I would never have agreed to do so had I known what it contained.

  The manuscript purports to be a memoir of my grandfather’s activities shortly after the Civil War—1868 through 1869 to be precise. In it, he writes that he was assigned by the Pinkerton Detective Agency to investigate the circumstances surrounding the assassination of President Lincoln, which, of course, had occurred only a few years earlier. According to this account, he discovered that the assassination conspiracy involved many more people than were caught and punished. My grandfather implicates some of the most important men in government and industry of the post-Civil War period.

  After reading it, I realized that I, as my grandfather’s literary executor, could not simply publish this memoir without taking a position regarding its authenticity. That is when I realized I was faced with an impossible dilemma. To offer this memoir as fact would be to assume the role of historical revisionist, a role I neither was qualified for nor wished to play. But to publish the manuscript prefaced by some sort of caveat as to its veracity would be to impugn the memory of a man who treated me with nothing other than kindness. The solution I have chosen may seem cowardly, but I believe that it is at least honest—to defer the matter a brief while longer until I too am gone, and to arrange to engage you at that time to investigate the memoir and, if possible, establish whether or not it is true. A former client of mine, who is a free-lance writer, has read it and has promised to see to its publication, regardless of what you may discover; he feels it is of some intrinsic historical interest, in any case, since its author was a Pinkerton’s detective involved in the events of that period. His name is George O’Toole (I think you may know him) and I have enclosed his address with the manuscript. He will see that your findings are published together with the memoir.