[Mark Twain Mysteries 01] - Death on the Mississippi

by Peter J. Heck

  The Horace Greeley’s lecture hall was larger than anything available in most of the smaller towns we visited. (On Sunday mornings, it doubled as a chapel—the Reverend Mr. Dutton conducted the services, with his wife leading the singing in a determined, if wobbly, contralto.) So, even in towns with a suitable hall, we arranged to give the lectures on board in order to avoid paying rent. Only in the largest cities did we bow to necessity and engage a local hall. There were even a couple of smaller towns where, at the last minute, Mr. Clemens scheduled a second performance at ten o’clock so as not to disappoint all those who’d come from miles away to spend an evening with “Mark Twain.”

  The lecture varied some from one night to the next. While the core of it was the same talk I had seen in New York and Chicago, there were impromptu interludes in which Mr. Clemens alluded to something of local interest or recalled previous visits to the town we were in. But while the event lost some of its novelty for those on board, crowds eager to hear it packed the boat almost every evening—sometimes there would be two or three rows of local youngsters lining the deck outside the cabin, trying to get close enough to a door or window to hear what everyone inside was laughing at. The smiling faces at the end of the lecture were all the proof anyone needed that Mr. Clemens had lost none of his energy and good humor, despite a schedule that would have broken many a younger man.

  The success of the lecture tour, and the unhurried pace of daily life aboard the boat, did not distract me from the problem I had set myself: solving the New York murder case. But as we made our progress southward, I found myself no closer to the solution than before. I spoke occasionally to Detective Berrigan, who claimed to be narrowing down his list of suspects. On two or three occasions, I saw him ashore at the telegraph office, evidently communicating his latest findings to his superiors back in New York.

  I also crossed paths with the reporter, Andrew Dunbar, in the post office in nearly every town where we touched shore, presumably dispatching his stories to his paper—although what he had to report, other than the changing landscape and the size of the crowd from one night to the next, I had no idea. Once or twice I saw him huddled with some of Tiny Williams’s crewmen, although they surely had little enough to tell in the way of news. Mr. Clemens had steadfastly refused to give him an interview. Occasionally I saw the reporter among the ever-changing knot of cardplayers who congregated in the main cabin. From what I could tell, he was rarely a winner.

  Slippery Ed McPhee, for his part, seemed regularly to arise from the table with more cash than he sat down with. He was always vocal and ebullient, bantering with his fellow players and cajoling them into betting higher amounts. He never seemed to have any shortage of opponents, either; if he was cheating, as Mr. Clemens had hinted he had done in the past, none of the others seemed to suspect it. Perhaps he was refraining from winning too much too soon, so as not to deplete the crop of potential victims before the end of the voyage—or perhaps not having the Throckmorton boys handy to protect him from angry losers made him careful. Once we arrived in port, he would leave the table until after Mr. Clemens’s lecture. I assumed that he was merely taking a break for dinner and a rest before his usual late-night sessions. It wasn’t until our second night in St. Louis that I discovered how McPhee was spending his evenings.

  At first, I had faithfully attended Mr. Clemens’s lectures, not as a listener but to lend a hand before and after—rescuing him from local bores, making sure that a friend of his got a special seat. I eventually realized that as long as I delivered him to his dressing room and met him backstage after the talk, I could use the time while he was actually talking as I saw fit. So I began to avail myself of the opportunity to spend an hour or so reading, or conversing with passengers who had skipped the lecture—as many of them did, after they learned that it was essentially the same from night to night.

  This particular day, a Saturday, Mr. Clemens had gone to dinner with old friends in St. Louis, and told me to take the whole day off. I took the guidebook’s advice and walked across the Eads Bridge—the view of the river, with barges and riverboats crossing beneath you, is worth a good bit more than the nickel I paid to cross. I spent the rest of the afternoon walking about the city. The St. Louis Museum of Fine Arts had casts of the Elgin marbles, which were impressive enough, but the paintings were nothing special. After a while, the entire city began to strike me as a bit dull. I had an early dinner in a little beer garden, a pleasant enough place, but the lager was thin and too sweet for the sauerkraut and sausages I had ordered. When the relentlessly cheerful German band began to grate on my ears, I decided to go back to the boat while it was still light out. Perhaps there would be someone interesting to talk with, I thought idly—perhaps Miss Cunningham, or Miss Patterson.

  The most direct route to the steamboat landing took me past the Olympic Theater, where Mr. Clemens was lecturing that evening. A good number of ticket-holders had already begun to gather, but it was not so crowded that I didn’t see Miss Patterson, wearing a blue dress and standing at the fringe of a small group of people near the entrance. To my surprise, at the center of the group was Slippery Ed McPhee.

  I came closer, curious to see what McPhee could be doing to draw such a crowd. He had an upended barrel in front of him, with three playing cards, creased lengthwise, on top. “I’ve got the mama, and the papa, and the baby,” he said, turning the cards over to show a black queen, a black king, and a red jack. “Who wants to try to find the baby? I’m paying two to one.” He picked the cards up between the fingers of both hands, and with a well-practiced flick, threw them back down and mixed them, chattering like an auctioneer the whole time. To my utter astonishment, Alligator Throckmorton stepped out of the crowd and said, “Ten bucks says I can find it.”

  “Ten dollars; will anyone bet fifteen?” said McPhee. “Find the baby and win two for one! No takers? Ten it is, then.” Throckmorton put the money on the barrelhead and pointed at the center card with an evil grin. “You’re a lucky man,” said McPhee, flipping the card over to reveal the red jack. He peeled a twenty-dollar bill off a fat roll and gave it to the sneering lout. “Want to try again? I’m paying two to one.”

  “Sure,” said Throckmorton. “Let’s make it twenty this time.” He threw the bill McPhee had just given him back onto the barrelhead. McPhee picked up the cards again, two in his right hand and one in his left, and again threw them down and mixed them. “Who’ll bet twenty-five?” Just then, Miss Patterson tapped me on the shoulder.

  “So, you are interested in gambling, after all!” she said, smiling.

  “Not really,” I whispered. “Besides, Mr. Clemens has told me that McPhee is a cheat. If I played against him, I would surely lose.”

  “Oh, but that man seems to be lucky,” she said. Alligator Throckmorton had again found the “baby” card, the red jack, and McPhee had peeled two twenties off his roll.

  “There’s no luck involved. That fellow is in cahoots with him,” I said. “McPhee is letting him win only so that he can draw in someone else who doesn’t know the secret.”

  “Aha!” said Miss Patterson, staring at the cards. “I wonder how he knows which is the right card, then. There must be some signal that he knows to look for, and that we can’t see.”

  “Really. I never thought of it, but you must be right.” I peered closer at the cards, wondering by what means McPhee was signaling the right card to his confederate. It made sense that there was some secret signal, or perhaps a mark on the cards, but I didn’t detect anything suspicious as McPhee threw the cards down again.

  “Look,” whispered Miss Patterson. “The corner of the middle card is bent. Do you think that could be it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. Throckmorton put down ten dollars this time and pointed to the bent card. McPhee picked it up and turned it over, and it was the “baby” card.

  “That must be the secret mark,” said Miss Patterson, barely holding back her excitement. “If you bet on the bent card, you can win!”
r />   “But that wouldn’t be fair,” I protested. “Besides, he’s a cheat. He’d find some way to keep me from winning.”

  “If you make the highest bet, he has to take it,” she said. “If he’s a cheat, wouldn’t it serve him right to lose to someone who sees through his shabby tricks? Give him a taste of his own medicine!”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” I said. The man was such a fraud that turning the tables on him would be a public service of sorts. Soliciting some of the spectators in the crowd to bet, McPhee threw the cards down once again, with a dramatic flourish. Throckmorton pointed to the bent one. “Ten dollars,” he said.

  “Bet twenty! You can beat him,” urged Miss Patterson. I looked at the barrelhead; the corner of the right-hand card was clearly bent. “Fifteen,” I said, reaching for my wallet.

  “Twenty,” said Throckmorton, throwing down another ten. He glared at me, insolently.

  “That’s the kind of action I like to see! Bet more to win more, two to one if you find the baby,” said McPhee, looking at me. I shook my head. McPhee shrugged his shoulders and turned to Alligator Throckmorton. “Twenty dollars it is. Turn it over and see if you’re still lucky.” Sure enough, the bent card was the jack again, the “baby.” Throckmorton picked up his winnings and waved it at me, snickering. “I’d think a big fellow like you would have more guts,” he said.

  “You should have topped his bet,” Miss Patterson whispered. “You would have won.”

  “Twenty dollars is a lot of money, miss,” I said. “I can’t risk being cheated out of it.”

  She whispered in my ear. “I’ve heard that cardsharps always let you win a little at first, so you’ll keep playing for higher stakes. But if you’re smart enough to quit while you’re still winning, you can beat them. Try it!”

  McPhee had picked up the cards again and was holding his hands at shoulder height, like the conductor of an orchestra. “The hand is quicker than the eye, but anybody can get lucky,” he said, then threw the cards back down with a flourish. After he mixed them, the bent one lay on the barrelhead next to me. “Find the baby,” said the gambler.

  “Ten,” said Throckmorton, pointing to the bent card.

  “Fifteen,” I said. I threw a ten and a five down.

  “Twenty,” said Throckmorton, throwing down another bill. McPhee reached for the cards.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Twenty-five.” I put another ten on my pile.

  “Twenty-five it is,” said McPhee. “Where’s the baby, son?”

  I pointed to the bent card. McPhee reached for it, then stopped a moment and looked me in the eye. “Bet more to win more, if you’re sure,” he said, grinning.

  “I’m sure,” I said, firmly. “But I’m only betting twenty-five. Let’s see the card.”

  He turned over the king of clubs, and scooped up my twenty-five dollars before I could say a word. I turned and looked for Miss Patterson, but she was nowhere to be seen.

  “Damnation, Wentworth! I thought I told you not to play cards with that rattlesnake,” said Mr. Clemens, shaking his head sadly from side to side. When I’d met him backstage after the lecture, he had taken one look at me and dismissed the local grandees and amateur writers in jig time, then dragged me back to his dressing room and poured two glasses of whisky. It hadn’t taken me long to confess everything.

  “I thought I had figured out the game,” I said.

  “That’s exactly what that scheming son of a bitch wants you to think,” said Mr. Clemens. “Nobody above the age of four believes it’s an honest game—it’s too transparently crooked. But there are plenty of people fool enough to believe that they can outswindle the swindler. To the likes of McPhee, that’s as good as a gold mine.”

  “I thought that gamblers always let you win a little bit at first, so they can lure you into a bigger game,” I said. The argument had been convincing enough a couple of hours ago, but it sounded hollow at the moment.

  “You thought! What’s the world coming to when a man can graduate from Yale and still believe such unalloyed hokum? Why should McPhee let you win anything? For all he knows, you’ll walk away with the profits after the first game. Get it through your head, Wentworth—Slippery Ed McPhee is running a business, and the first rule of the three-card-monte business is that the customer always loses.”

  “If that’s so, why isn’t it against the law? Why don’t the police come and arrest him?”

  “It is against the law, in some places, but that doesn’t mean much. Sometimes they bribe the police, but if they’re careful, they won’t even have to do that—every three-card monte gang posts a lookout to signal if the police show up. The dealer can pick up the money and disappear before anybody can lift a finger. Sometimes the monte crew will stage a fake police raid—usually just after some poor sucker has lost big money—and disappear with the winnings before the sucker can start complaining.”

  “What if someone complains to the police?”

  “Usually they don’t—it would mean admitting what a fool they’ve been. Even when someone does complain, the swindler has usually moved on to the next town down the road. Or in this case, down the river.”

  “Why doesn’t Captain Fowler throw him off the boat, the way he did the Throckmorton brothers?”

  “McPhee hasn’t been caught doing anything illegal on the boat, and the captain’s authority doesn’t extend to things his passengers do on shore. Mike Fowler’s got the best heart in the world. But he can’t run the world, and he knows it, and so he pretty much ignores things that don’t affect his boat. If one of the other passengers catches McPhee cheating on board the Greeley, that’ll be a different story. Mike would probably put Ed off at the next port, if the passenger hadn’t already put him off somewhere in mid-river. But short of that, it’s live and let live, as far as Mike’s concerned.”

  “Does the captain know that the Throckmorton brothers are following the boat?” Billy Throckmorton had suddenly appeared at his brother’s side, immediately after McPhee had pocketed my money. It was an effective way to discourage protest, had I been so inclined. But common sense had gotten the better of foolish valor: seeing the two ruffians, I had retreated to the lecture hall, somehow feeling cheated of far more than twenty-five dollars.

  “He may. They’ve probably been meeting us at every town where McPhee intends to set up his monte stand, and Mike’s been ashore enough times to have spotted them. But what do you want him to do? He’s already thrown them off the boat, and he can’t tell the railroad not to sell them tickets.”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted reluctantly. “I suppose I just want somebody to stop them from preying on innocent people.”

  “It would be about as easy as stopping a candle from burning a moth,” said Mr. Clemens. “If the suckers stopped coming, McPhee would be out of business. The only person he can’t cheat is the one who won’t play to begin with. Everyone knows he’s a swindler; that just makes some people think it’s all right to try to swindle him. The fools think they can beat an expert at his own game, and they’re wrong every time. Between pure unadorned greed and every man’s conviction that he’s too smart to get bit, McPhee has a lifetime job, if he wants it.”

  He paused and took a sip of whisky, then added, “Not that he’s ever likely to see his full three score and ten. Mind you, Wentworth, I don’t buy the notion that every evil in the world is somehow balanced out by something good. It’s too facile, too sentimental. Still, I take some satisfaction in the belief that Slippery Ed isn’t going to retire comfortably and die in his sleep at a respectable age, surrounded by adoring relatives and faithful friends.” He paused again, looked me in the face, and grimaced. “Then again, neither may I.”

  15

  The next morning found me still angry about losing money to McPhee. I attempted to reopen the subject with Mr. Clemens at breakfast, but he had no comfort for me. He had told me the night before that, by sleight of hand, a three-card monte dealer could make any of the three cards appear in any po
sition, but that didn’t explain why the bent corner could be on a winning card three times straight and on a losing one the next. “I still don’t understand how McPhee changed the card,” I said.

  “Why the devil do you need to know how he did it? All you have to know is that he will do it. Playing cards with the likes of McPhee is just like sticking your hand in a wildcat’s den—you’re lucky if all it costs you is a finger or two. Learn the lesson, and be grateful it was so cheap.” And that was all Mr. Clemens had to say on the topic before he climbed up to the pilothouse “to have a smoke and a look at the river.”

  I lingered over coffee, still not satisfied with how things had gone. It was one thing to learn not to gamble with cheats, another to see them go unpunished. I had seen McPhee come into the cabin just before Mr. Clemens’s departure; he had taken his customary seat at the card table, bold as brass, and in short order was reeling out his usual line of cant and braggadocio. My coffee suddenly tasted stale, and I stalked out onto the foredeck for a breath of fresh air.

  I saw Miss Patterson first, and then Detective Berrigan, leaning on the rail and smoking his pipe, in his rumpled brown suit. Miss Patterson sat on a bench holding her parasol and reading a book, which upon a closer look I recognized as Mr. Clemens’s Life on the Mississippi. “I see I’m going to have to read that book,” I said, sitting down beside her. “Everyone on board seems to be reading it except for me, and soon I won’t be able to talk to anyone.” I wasn’t sure whether I ought to chide her for having encouraged me to bet against McPhee the previous evening, but I was not about to engage her in an argument with another person present.

  She disarmed me with a musical laugh. “Oh, but surely you, who work with Mr. Twain every day, know his work better than I!”