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Leonard jotted that down and then asked Charley, “Why’d you kill him?”
Bob intervened, “Say: we wanted to rid the country of a vicious and bloodthirsty outlaw.”
Charley smiled in agreement and craned his neck to see the flight of the reporter’s scribbled shorthand. He said to Leonard, “You should mention the reward too.”
“You shot him for money?”
“Only ten thousand dollars!”
Leonard looked at Bob and saw that the young man was scowling. He said, “I’ll mention that you are young but gritty.”
Charley grinned. “We are all grit.” He licked a cigarette paper and said, “You never expected to see Jesse’s carcass in Saint Joe, did you? We always thought we’d create a sensation by putting him out of the way.”
Zee gave in to Craig’s gentle interrogation and admitted the truth. She wished she were in Death’s cold embrace; she wondered what would become of the children; she talked about Jesse’s love and kindliness and promised to speak further if the city marshal would guarantee no entrepreneur could get at the body and drag it all over the country.
Shortly after ten o’clock the body was carried to the Seidenfaden Undertaking Morgue in a black, glass-sided carriage that was followed by a procession of mourners, including Mrs. James. Snoops and onlookers swarmed around the cottage, viewing what they could through the windows, appraising the horses in the stables, swapping stories about the James gang, stealing whatever would slide up their sleeves, so that the cottage was soon closed, the sashes nailed shut, and a policeman stationed on the sidewalk to scare off looters.
Removed as evidence by Enos Craig were a gold ring with the name of the gunman inside, a one-dollar gold coin made into a scarf pin and cut with the initials J.W.J., a set of pink coral cufflinks, a Winchester rifle that Jesse called Old Faithful, a shotgun that was nicknamed Big Thunder, four revolvers (Pet, Baby, Daisy, and Beauty), an eighteen-karat-gold stem-winder watch stolen from John A. Burbank in the Hot Springs stage robbery in Arkansas, and a Waltham watch in a gold hunting case stolen from Judge R. H. Rountree when the Mammoth Cave sightseers’ stagecoach was robbed in 1880. Mrs. James was not relieved of a resized diamond ring that was owned by Rountree’s daughter, Lizzie.
An onlooker came over to the boy Tim and smiled as if they knew each other. “So you’re Jesse Edwards James.”
The boy frowned at the man.
“Do you know who Jesse James is?”
The boy shook his head.
“Do you know what your father’s name was?”
Young Jesse was mystified. “Daddy.”
The man laughed as hugely as he would have if Jesse James had joked with him and tried to get the gathering reporters to jot down the story along with his name, spelled out.
Jesse Edwards James and Mary were sent to stay with a woman named Mrs. Lurnal, and the manager of the World Hotel gave Mrs. James accommodations there. She displaced her grief by fretting a great deal about finances, so an auction of unnecessary household items was suggested. Zee’s uncle, Thomas Mimms, sent telegrams to Mrs. Samuels and the family; the girl she was to shop with for Easter clothes packed a suitcase. Alex Green informed Zee that she was an accessory-after-the-fact in the multiple crimes that her husband committed but consented to represent the widow for a retainer of five hundred dollars; then R. J. Haire ruined Green’s scheme by volunteering his services as an attorney in loving remembrance of a much-maligned and magnificent man.
POLICE COMMISSIONER Henry Craig received Bob Ford’s telegram at his law office in the Kansas City Times building, but made no effort to inform the newspaper staff of the assassination; he merely sent a return message to Bob that read: “Will come on the first train. Hurrah for you,” and then notified William H. Wallace, the Jackson County prosecuting attorney, of the extraordinary news. And since the wait for a regular run would have been many hours, Craig rushed north in the readied Hannibal and St. Joseph locomotive and coaches, stopping once, in Liberty, to collect Sheriff Timberlake and a stunned and saddened Dick Liddil.
Thomas Crittenden’s secretary saw Bob Ford’s communiqué only after perusing the morning’s correspondence, but he immediately telegraphed the St. Joseph authorities for particulars and made arrangements for the governor to go there as soon as Crittenden returned from a meeting in St. Louis. The governor groaned when he
was greeted with the news, and according to Finis C. Fair, the secretary, Crittenden said over and over again on their walk to the executive mansion that he regretted the Fords did not apprehend Jesse James alive.
At noon in St. Joseph, O. M. Spencer, the prosecuting attorney for Buchanan County, scheduled a coroner’s inquest for three o’clock that afternoon and visited the Fords in Enos Craig’s office in order to inform them that he didn’t actually believe their stories about acting in concert with the government and that he intended to prefer charges of murder against them. He said, “I don’t care if Mr. James was the most desperate culprit in the entire world; that fact wouldn’t justify you in killing the man except in self-defense or after demanding his surrender, and the law is very explicit on that point.”
Bob looked at the floor but Charley smirked at O. M. Spencer and asked Enos Craig when lunch would be served.
At Seidenfaden’s funeral parlor on Fourth and Messanie streets, the cadaver was made void and then swollen by a cavity injection that was the substitute, then, for embalmment. A starched white shirt was exchanged for the stained one, but the cravat and remaining clothes were the same that Jesse James wore when he walked to the cigar store that morning.
On his second day of work with the Alex Lozo studio, a man named James W. Graham got the chance to become renowned at twenty-six by gaining the city marshal’s permission to be the only photographer of Jesse Woodson James. He set a single-plate, eight-by-ten-inch studio camera on a box and, with William Seidenfaden and two men, carried the cadaver from the laboratory into the cooling room where those who’d expired were exhibited in a case of ice.
Correspondents from Kansas City, Independence, Richmond, and Kearney were already in the city and clustered behind the crimson cord and stanchions in the cooling room, writing their impressions and comparing the physical features on the remains with the two available photographs of Jesse at seventeen and twenty-seven.
Graham and the undertaker’s assistants strapped the body to a wide board with a rope that crossed under his right shoulder and again over his groin, then they tilted the man until he was nearly vertical and let the camera lens accept the scene for a minute. The man’s eyes were shut, the skin around them was slightly green, and the sockets themselves seemed so cavernous that photographic copies were later repainted with two blue eyes looking serenely at some vista in the middle distance. Likewise missing in the keepsake photographs was the mean contusion over his left eyebrow that would convince some reporters that it was the gunshot’s exit wound and others that it showed the incidence of Bob Ford’s smashing the stricken man with a timber. The body’s cheeks and chest and belly were somewhat inflated with preservatives, necessitating the removal of the man’s thirty-two-inch brown leather belt, and making his weight seem closer to one hundred eighty-five pounds than the one hundred sixty it was. His height was misjudged by four inches, being recorded as six feet or more by those who wrote about him.
Graham carried the photographic dry plate back to the Lozo studio for development and many in addition to the newspaper reporters followed him, awaiting prints that sold for two dollars apiece and were the models for the lithographed covers on a number of magazines.
The body of Jesse James was lowered onto a slab that was surrounded with crushed ice and Mrs. Zee James was escorted into the cooling room by Enos Craig. She was so overcome with anguish and sorrow that she swooned in the city marshal’s arms and then catatonically sat in a chair, disinclined either to cry or talk, unmindful of other visitors, merely staring at the slain thirty-four-year-old man until two in the afternoon.
Bob and Charley were in the midst of perfunctory interviews with reporters by then. Many noted that the Fords appeared to be proud of their accomplishment and contemptuous of the men who’d sought the James gang of late. Their comments were sneering, snide, argumentative, cocky, misleading. Charley preempted most of the conversations, exaggerating his role and responsibilities in order to insure the governor’s indulgence. Bob lied about being an employee of the Kansas City Detective Agency, about being twenty-one, about Jesse’s wearing four revolvers instead of two .45s, about never having joined the James gang, about shooting Jesse through the left temple, when the man turned around, rather than to the rear of his right ear. When they were asked whether they feared retribution from Frank James, Bob answered in a sentence that seemed rehearsed: “If Frank James seeks revenge, he must be quick of trigger with these two young men; and if we three meet anywhere, it will be Bob Ford who will kill Frank James if there’s anything in coolness and alertness.”
