The Twelfth Card

“he talks about the secret. But what is it? Must have something to do with those meetings in Gallows Heights. ‘Sake of our people.’ Civil rights or politics. He mentioned that in his first letter too . . . What the hell is Gallows Heights?”
    His eyes went to the tarot card of The Hanged Man, suspended from a gallows by his foot.
    “I’ll look it up,” Cooper said and went online. A moment later he said, “It was a neighborhood in nineteenth-century Manhattan, Upper West Side, centered around Bloomingdale Road and Eightieth Street. Bloomingdale became the Boulevard and then Broadway.” He glanced up with a raised eyebrow. “Not far from here.”
    “Gallows with an apostrophe?”
    “No apostrophe. At least in the hits I found.”
    “Anything else about it?”
    Cooper looked over the historical society website. “A couple things. A map from 1872.” He swung the monitor toward Rhyme, who looked it over, noting that the neighborhood encompassed a large area. There were some big estates owned by old-family New York magnates and financiers as well as hundreds of smaller apartments and homes.
    “Hey, look, Lincoln,” Cooper said, touching part of the map near Central Park. “That’s your place. Where we are now. It was a swamp back then.”
    “Interesting,” Rhyme muttered sarcastically.
    “The only other reference is a Times story last month about the rededication of a new archive at the Sanford Foundation—that’s the old mansion on Eighty-first.”
    Rhyme recalled a big Victorian building next to the Sanford Hotel—a Gothic, spooky apartment that resembled the nearby Dakota, where John Lennon had been killed.
    Cooper continued, “The head of the foundation, William Ashberry, gave a speech at the ceremony. He mentioned how much the Upper West Side has changed in the years since it was known as Gallows Heights. But that’s all. Nothing specific.”
    Too many unconnected dots, Rhyme reflected. It was then that Cooper’s computer binged, signaling an incoming email. The tech read it and glanced at the team. “Listen to this. It’s about Coloreds’ Weekly Illustrated. The curator of Booker T. Washington College down in Philly just sent me this. The library had the only complete collection of the magazine in the country. And—”
    “ ‘Had’?” Rhyme snapped. “Fucking ‘had’?”
    “Last week, a fire destroyed the room where it was stored.”
    “What’d the arson report say?” Sachs asked.
    “Wasn’t considered arson. It looks like a lightbulb broke, ignited some papers. Nobody was hurt.”
    “Bullshit it wasn’t arson. Somebody started it. So, does the curator have any other suggestions where we can find—?”
    “I was about to continue.”
    “Well, continue !”
    “The school has a policy of scanning everything in their archives and storing them in Adobe .pdf files.”
    “Are we approaching good news, Mel? Or are you just flirting?”
    Cooper punched more buttons. He gestured toward the screen. “Voilà—July twenty-third, 1868, Coloreds’ Weekly Illustrated. ”
    “You don’t say. Well, read to us, Mel. First of all: Did Mr. Singleton drown in the Hudson, or not?”
    Cooper typed and a moment later shoved his glasses onto the bridge of his nose, leaned forward and said, “Here we go. The headline is ‘Shame, the Account of a Freedman’s Crime. Charles Singleton, a Veteran of the War Between the States, Betrays the Cause of Our People in a Notorious Incident.’ ”
    Continuing with the text, he read, “ ‘On Tuesday, July fourteenth, a warrant for the arrest of one Charles Singleton, a freedman who was a veteran of the War of Secession, was issued by the New York criminal court, on charges that he feloniously stole a large sum of gold and other monies from the National Education Trust for Freedmen’s Assistance on Twenty-third Street in Manhattan, New York.
    “ ‘Mr. Singleton eluded a drag-net by officers throughout the City and was thought to have escaped, possibly to Pennsylvania, where his wife’s sister and her family lived.
    “ ‘However, early on the morning of Thursday, the sixteenth, he was noticed by a police constable as he was making his way toward the Hudson river docks.
    “ ‘The constable sounded the alarm and Mr. Singleton took flight. The police officer gave chase.
    “ ‘The pursuit was soon joined by dozens of other law enforcers and Irish rag pickers and workers, doing their civic duty to apprehend the felon(and