“Then why not take the police into our trust when we had the opportunity?”
He took a long hard look out the window; the Appalachian Mountains were painted by a golden sunset. He tasted his drink, sighed, and said, “A hunch. I have a bad feeling about that detective.”
He paused as a tall gentleman with a full head of gray hair, cut short, and wearing a dark suit of semimilitary cut passed by us, nodding and smiling in our direction as he passed. Mr. Clemens nodded back, absently; I was already becoming used to the fact that a large fraction of the population recognized my employer by sight. As he continued on in the direction of the dining car, I heard the door open again, and a sour look came over Mr. Clemens’s face as he spotted the person who’d just entered.
Before I could even decide whether or not to look around, a familiar voice behind me solved my problem. “Sure, and it’s Mr. Mark Twain again. And Mr. Wentworth.”
“Wentworth Cabot,” I corrected him. It was the New York detective, Berrigan.
“And are you traveling on business, Berrigan, or is this a vacation?” my employer asked him.
“Business, Mr. Twain, and there’s a bit of a funny twist to it. Do you mind if I sit with you a moment?” He took off his hat and plopped himself in the chair adjacent to me without waiting for an answer. Then he fished out a pipe and tobacco pouch, and began loading it.
“I checked with the desk clerk at your hotel, asking who had left the note for you. It was a tall fellow with a red beard, a bit shabbily dressed, which is why the clerk noticed him. He waited around for another fifteen minutes, then left. The clerk was just as glad to see him go—said he was making the quality folks uncomfortable.”
“That sounds like Farmer Jack to me,” said Mr. Clemens. “He used to act so countrified that most city folks wouldn’t believe he had two cents’ worth of brains. It made it easier to find suckers to play billiards with him.”
The detective nodded. “We went to the address on the note he’d left for you, and it was a shabby little rented room down in Five Points, which isn’t a part of town decent folk go into after dark—not and come back out with a whole skin. The landlord said the tenant was there a few months. And it took a little persuasion, but we got him to look at the body,” he said. He popped the filled pipe into his mouth and began searching his jacket pockets.
“There’s matches on the table,” said Mr. Clemens.
“Right you are,” said the detective, taking them. “Well, he recognized the dead man, all right. But he swore he’d never seen him with that phony red beard. And he’d never heard of Jack Hubbard—the room was rented under a different name, probably an alias.” He dug into his pocket again, and came up with an envelope. “So we’re back to you again, Mr. Twain. Take a look at this.”
Mr. Clemens opened the envelope and extracted a photograph, which he looked at, then shrugged and passed to me without saying a word. It showed the garishly lit face of a shabbily dressed man whose eyes were closed in death—or so I had to assume. The sepia tints of the glossy photographic print gave no hint as to the color of the man’s hair or complexion. But I had the feeling I had seen him before, though I couldn’t for the life of me say where. I told the detective so, and he nodded.
“What about you, Mr. Twain?”
“It’s not Farmer Jack Hubbard, even allowing for ten years and the false beard. You think Hubbard killed him?”
“That’s one possibility. Killed him and planted evidence to make it look as if he were the one that died.”
“Why?” I asked.
“If I knew that, I’d have a better idea where to find him, wouldn’t I?” Berrigan’s pipe was finally lit, and he puffed a couple of times before continuing. “But all the signs point to some connection to you, Mr. Twain. For one thing, he had your name in his pocket; for another, you had a note in the same handwriting at your hotel, signed by this Hubbard. And for a third, the dead man had Hubbard’s phony beard. That’s a few too many coincidences, says I. That’s why we were hoping you could tell us who the victim is.”
Mr. Clemens took the photograph again and stared at it a while longer. “If I ever knew him, the name’s escaped me. He’s a bit too young to be one of the old crew I knew along the river,” he finally said, passing it back to me.
“But Hubbard’s from the river, and he wanted to see you,” said the detective. “And now you’re headed back there. Are you sure there’s not more involved in this trip than you’ve told me?”
Mr. Clemens shook his head. “A lecture tour and research for a book,” he said. “My backer says my last Mississippi book was a great success, and he suggests I do another one. As it happens, I need the money, so I’m willing to listen to suggestions.”
“Aye,” said Berrigan, “I brought along a copy of that very book for reading on the train. I was of a mind it might give me an idea what to look out for.”
“I see,” said Mr. Clemens, raising one eyebrow. “So you’ll be traveling with us down the river?”
“Unless I catch my man first. Maybe Hubbard planted the beard on this fellow to cover his own escape, or maybe the dead man grabbed it from him. Either way, I think he’ll come looking for you. That’s why I’m on the train with you, and it’s why I’ll be riding on the steamboat with you. And it’s why I’m wondering if there isn’t more to this story than you’ve told me so far, Mr. Twain.” He paused, then continued in a lower tone. “This is a murder we’re talking about, Mr. Twain. You could be putting yourself in a lot of danger by withholding information from us.”
“I’m well aware of that,” said my employer. “I’ve been around some rough characters in my time, and lived to tell the tale so far, so I know what they’re capable of. I didn’t get these white hairs by taking foolish chances, and I’m not about to start. Believe me, if I see hide or hair of Farmer Jack Hubbard, you’ll be the first to know.”
I had picked up the grisly photograph for another look, racking my memory, and suddenly recalled where I’d seen the dead man. “This fellow was at your lecture the other night,” I blurted, and both of them turned to stare at me. “He sat slightly ahead of me, on the right-side aisle.”
“Now I’m sure I’m on the right trail,” crowed Berrigan.
For his part, Mr. Clemens just took the picture from my hands, and looked at it, frowning. “What name did the landlord say this fellow gave him?” he asked at last.
“Lee Russell,” said Berrigan.
“Never heard of him,” said Mr. Clemens, and his frown went even darker. “But I’m afraid we haven’t seen the last of him.”
4
At dinner, Mr. Clemens ordered us a bottle of champagne—“to celebrate the start of the tour,” he said. In keeping with the occasion, he maintained a constant stream of amusing, if trifling, patter all through the meal, entertaining not only me but our fellow diners; but it seemed to me that his mind was elsewhere. After dinner, in a quiet corner of the smoking car, he confirmed my suspicions.
“Murder or no murder,” he growled, “a man ought to have a right to his privacy, instead of the police dogging his heels halfway across the blasted continent. You’d think we were the suspects, instead of that old swindler Hubbard. Still, I never would have thought Jack had it in him to stab a man.”
“Yes, I wonder what he wanted with you. It makes me shiver to think that you and I might have returned to the hotel to find a killer waiting for us.”
“Well, not for you, strictly speaking,” said Mr. Clemens, with a wry grin. He swirled his whisky glass and took a meditative sip. “And Berrigan’s not here for you, either. You could get off at the next stop and go home to Connecticut and never hear another word of this. But if I decided to take a side trip to Timbuktu on my way to that place in Arkansas”—by which I took it that he meant the town where the gold was supposedly still hidden—“that impertinent flat-footed Irishman would follow me—and to the moon, too, if I decided to go there.”
He prepared still another cigar—I had already gi
ven up trying to keep track of how many he smoked in a day. “And if the detective does try to follow us all the way downriver, what’s to stop him from trailing along when I go look for Ritter’s money? And what’s to stop him from deciding it’s stolen property and confiscating it? That’d be the last we ever saw of it, I promise you—never mind that the rightful owner’s probably long dead, even if we could figure out who he is.” He lit up the cigar and breathed the smoke in deeply.
“I myself am far more concerned about the possibility of a killer following us to the treasure,” I protested. “You can’t deny that having a policeman near at hand makes us both a good bit safer.”
“I wouldn’t bet a nickel on it. Unless he’s going to scrub my back in the bathtub, and sit up watching me every time I take a nap, and make himself even more of a damned nuisance than he is already, there’ll always be a chance for somebody to sneak up behind me and do me in. And besides, I don’t think anybody here has that kind of grudge against me.”
“But what about that fellow coming to your lecture before he was killed?”
Mr. Clemens scowled at his glass. “Plenty of things happen at the same time and in the same place without being related. Enough people get murdered in New York City as it is; it could be sheer chance that one of them was at my lecture a few days before.”
“And that he had your name in his pocket? In the same handwriting as on a note in your hotel? Isn’t that a few too many coincidences just to ignore?”
“I’m not ignoring them, Wentworth—I just don’t believe that having a detective along will magically clear up all those coincidences. Policemen are very clever at finding sinister implications behind perfectly innocent things; they have to, to justify their impertinence. The way I see it, this rascal Berrigan has managed to convince his chief that I’m being stalked by a murderer and have to be watched every second. If he plays his cards right, he gets a paid vacation on a cruise to New Orleans, and the relatively painless duty of keeping an eye on an old man, whom he undoubtedly expects to be eternally grateful. It’s a perfect hoax; almost a work of art, if you admire such things. The biggest danger, from Berrigan’s point of view, is that his chief will recognize the whole thing for the shameless fraud it is, and assign himself to trail me.”
“I wish I could share your belief that there’s no danger,” I said. “You still haven’t explained the notes.”
“There needn’t be anything sinister in the notes,” said Mr. Clemens. “It’s possible Jack Hubbard found out I was in New York and came looking for a handout. He wouldn’t be the first to think that knowing me thirty years ago entitled him to an endless string of baksheesh. He goes to the hotel, doesn’t find me, and leaves a note—if he wore his farmer outfit, they wouldn’t have let him sit around the lobby for very long; I’m surprised they let him in in the first place. He leaves me a note, and because he’s uncomfortable about begging, doesn’t call me by the name he used in the old days. Then, on the way home, this other fellow tries to rob him in an alley, and Hubbard defends himself with a knife. In the struggle, the other fellow grabs him by the false beard and it comes off. When Hubbard realizes he’s killed the other man, he skedaddles.”
“And how did the other man come to have your name in his pocket?” I persisted.
“He picked Hubbard’s pocket. Or Hubbard put it there, to lay a false trail. Or—damn it all, Wentworth, you’ll give me a headache if you keep this up! Go see if you can get me another whisky; easy on the soda water, this time.” I took this as a clear signal to end the discussion; I got him his drink, listened to him chat on general subjects for another half hour, and then retired for the evening. It had been a long day, and despite the unfamiliarity of sleeping on a rapidly moving train, I was asleep almost as soon as my head touched the pillow.
In the morning, I awoke to find the landscape had flattened out, with widely spaced farmhouses each in its little grove of trees—Indiana. A night’s sleep had done wonders for me, and I was looking forward to the second day of my new adventure.
Mr. Clemens, wearing a fresh white suit, joined me for breakfast—steak again for him, ham and eggs for me, and plenty of biscuits and strong coffee for both of us. Even before his second cup of coffee, he was grumbling about “being followed halfway to Hell and back,” complaining that “a man can’t take a breath in peace” and expressing other sentiments less printable. I listened without comment, although I myself was rather pleased that the police seemed to be taking the case seriously. Still, I was being paid to handle his business and correspondence, not to contradict him.
After our meal, my employer and I went to the onboard barbershop, in my own case primarily for the novelty—I had grown used to shaving myself while at Yale, and was in fact a bit apprehensive about exposing my neck to a sharp razor wielded by a stranger on a moving train. But the fellow who shaved me was an expert, and I arose from the chair without as much as a single nick, and feeling much refreshed. By then, we could see Lake Michigan (I could have taken it for an arm of the sea, it was so extensive) on the right side of the train. We pulled into the station promptly at 9:45 central time; I saw Berrigan dismount at the same time we did, but the crowd separated us and I dismissed him from my thoughts. Luckily, Mr. Clemens did not notice the detective, or it might have set off a fresh diatribe.
At our hotel, a sixteen-story building near the Customs House, my employer went to the telephone office to make a long-distance call to New York, while I supervised the delivery of our luggage to the rooms. These were on the top floor, to which I took an elevator with a bellboy carrying the bags. I wondered what business Mr. Clemens might have urgent enough to call New York for on a Saturday morning; I was not long in finding out.
I had barely begun to organize my belongings when I heard him slam the door to his room, and moments later pound on the connecting double door. I opened it, and at his gesture, entered his room. He waved in the general direction of a chair, which I settled myself into while he paced back and forth in an agitated manner, all the while letting loose a stream of invective as hot as anything I’d ever heard in my life.
“Why, what on earth has happened?” I inquired when he finally paused for breath. I had not seen him like this before, and wondered at it.
“I thought Abe Lincoln had done away with slavery, but it was all a barefaced lie, a sham and an imposture. These money-grubbing New York capitalists think they’ve bought me like a bushel of corn, and now they’ve gone and hired a scarecrow so the birds can’t get at me.”
“I’m sure this is all very important, but I don’t understand a word of what you’re saying,” I protested. He stopped his pacing and turned to look at me with an expression that could have ignited one of his cigars from across the room, then shrugged his shoulders and resumed pacing, his hands clasped behind his back.
“Sorry, Wentworth—I keep forgetting that you don’t know my affairs yet,” he said in a somewhat calmer tone. “The long and short of it is, I’ve been told I have to put up with Berrigan. It seems my backer, Henry Rogers in New York, specifically asked the police to assign a detective to protect me.”
“Surely you can ask Mr. Rogers to recall Berrigan?” I suggested, in as reasonable a tone as I could muster.
“It’s not as simple as that,” said Mr. Clemens. “I thought I was my own master, and now I’ve found out otherwise. It’s a sad lesson, but I guess I had to learn it.
“My problem is I’ve never really had much luck with money. I’ve made enough by lecturing and writing—scads of money, enough for a fine house in Hartford, European journeys, the best of everything for my family. I’ve given away more money to friends in need—some who did little enough to deserve it—than some people save in a lifetime of hard work. But I’ve never learned how to keep money—let alone invest it. You could take all my investments over the years, and not a single one of them has ever been worth spitting at. It would be comical if it weren’t so damned painful—a smart man could have made his fortune ten times ov
er by looking at my investments and betting the opposite way.
“Back in ’77, I could have bought stock in Bell’s telephone company at five hundred dollars a bushel, and I passed it up. Instead, I invested in a steam pulley that pulled thousands of dollars straight out of my pocket, I set up a subscription publishing company that had the greatest, most successful book ever published in America—General Grant’s memoirs—and lost every cent because I put a self-important ignoramus who didn’t know the first thing about literature in charge of it. But my biggest mistake of all was Paige’s typesetting machine—I was convinced that we could sell it to every publisher in the world. It looked like a license to print greenbacks—and it would have been, too, if the damned machine had ever worked right. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back—and Sam Clemens’s back, as well. I lost close to a quarter-million dollars, a lot of it borrowed, with not a chance in Hell of ever seeing it back.”
I murmured some conventional phrase of sympathy, but Mr. Clemens waved his hand as if to dismiss it. “There’s nothing to be said, Wentworth. I’m descended from a long line of the improvident and unlucky, and heredity finally caught up with me. I thought I was safe from ever again having to go to work, and here I am back on the road, counting the house as anxiously as in the days when I was an utter unknown. A writer’s personal honor is his only stock in trade, and I’m determined to pay off every cent I owe, if I have to go to China, set up the stage myself, and do the Royal Nonesuch.
“But even honor has a price. A man needs money to make money, and I’m lucky to have found a man to back me. I owe a lot to Henry Rogers, whatever people say about him. He’s bankrolling this whole lecture tour, keeping my creditors at bay, making sure poor Livy and the girls have enough to live comfortably while I work off my debts. He’s even paying your salary, Wentworth. He’s been an absolute angel to me, at the very time I need it most—but I just found out the price I have to pay.
[Mark Twain Mysteries 01] - Death on the Mississippi Page 4
