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stir up something,” Fraser insisted. “Maybe people who would be angry to be investigated, people who could be dangerous.”
    Townsend continued to pace. The floor creaked under his tread. Fraser finally asked the question he had come to ask. “If you were going to investigate this, where would you go?”
    â€œAh,” Townsend stopped, pointing his index finger to the ceiling. “Louis Weichmann. There’s really nowhere else to start.”
    â€œHe was the star witness.”
    â€œAt the conspiracy trial and at John Surratt’s trial. And by now he’s completely loony on the subject.” Townsend shrugged. “He has spent his entire life on it. Last I saw him he was assembling an archive, a veritable shrine of papers about the assassination and the conspiracy. If you’re looking for a fanatic to talk to about the case, Weichmann’s your man. He’s in Indiana, a town called Anderson.”
    â€œWould he talk to us?”
    â€œWho knows?” Townsend said. “It might depend on how unbalanced he has become.”
    â€œI’ll send him a wire, so he’ll expect us.”
    â€œNo,” Townsend objected, shaking his head at the floor. “I wouldn’t do that. He’s easy to spook. He’s had a good deal of trouble because of his testimony. Threats and such. He’s persuaded there are people out to do him ill. He may, of course, be right.” Townsend looked up. “I’ll write you a letter of introduction that you can deliver in person.”
    â€œWhat else,” Cook asked, “what else would you do to investigate?”
    â€œI say,” Townsend mused, “perhaps we should arrange for a small repast. I will think better if my stomach is not snarling from hunger.”
    Over a Spartan meal of cold ham, dark bread, and pickles, Townsend regaled them with stories of the conspiracy trial, the hoods and shackles that the prisoners were forced to wear, and the degenerate quality of the prisoners themselves. “I suppose one should expect that with assassins, but we who had read our Shakespeare hoped for something finer. Compared with that fool who shot President Garfield, of course, John Wilkes Booth was a great soul.”
    Fraser steered the conversation back to the unanswered questions about the Lincoln conspiracy. “What parts of the conspiracy do you think were never really looked into?”
    â€œBessie Hale!” Townsend almost shouted the name. “That young woman was the fiancée of John Wilkes Booth. She was with him in the week before the assassination, and even on the morning of it. But she was a senator’s daughter—Senator Hale was, of all things, an abolitionist from New Hampshire—so she never testified anywhere. I got run off that part of the story myself. Bessie Hale, she’s always stuck in my craw. How could she not know something? She’s still around, you know, in Washington.” Townsend smiled. “She married a man who also became senator from New Hampshire. What, sir, are the odds on that? The daughter of a senator and the wife of another, and the former fiancée of Lincoln’s assassin?”
    Fraser had never read that Booth had a fiancée. He needed to learn more about her. “What else,” he asked, “were you dissatisfied with?”
    Townsend looked up at the ceiling and let a smile play at the corners of his mouth. “Booth and his money.” The writer explained that Booth made no paid appearances as an actor for almost a full year before the assassination, yet lived in high style and supported Lewis Paine and Atzerodt, plus Arnold and O’Laughlen.
    â€œSo”—he leaned forward on his elbows—“how does this twenty-six-year-old unemployed actor, who never achieved the popularity of his brothers, have enough money to support this entire operation for months and months? Someone else was paying those bills. There