[Mark Twain Mysteries 01] - Death on the Mississippi

by Peter J. Heck

  Captain Fowler shook his head. “It ain’t like Charlie to leave his office unlocked—there’s a good bit of cash, not to mention the passengers’ valuables and all, in the safe there. It don’t make sense he’d leave it sitting open for any jaybird to waltz in and help himself. More likely they’d try to bribe a cleaner, although I don’t know how we’d find out if they did.”

  “Which leaves us no further along than when we began,” said Mr. Clemens. “Unless . . .” He put his hand to his chin and stared off at the window.

  After a few moments of silence, the captain cleared his throat loudly. “Unless what, Sam?”

  “What do you know about that assistant clerk of Snipes’s?”

  “That young fellow? Tommy something, I think. This is his first trip with us. Charlie hired him, and I don’t see much of him except when Charlie has him run a message up to me. What about him?”

  “I don’t know; it just occurred to me that he’s the one looking after the office when Snipes is out. Maybe somebody slipped him a few dollars to look the other way while they borrowed the keys, or maybe they just reached over the counter and snagged a set of keys while he was daydreaming. Hell, maybe he killed Berrigan himself, although I can’t imagine why. I suppose I’m just fishing for answers, Mike. Any decent answer will do about now.”

  “Amen to that, Sam,” said the captain. He took out his watch and looked at it, then polished it with a handkerchief before returning it to his vest pocket. “Speaking of Charlie Snipes, he should be coming up in about an hour to report on exactly who’s on board this morning. Once we know that, we’ll have a better idea which tree to start barking up. I’ve got a couple little chores to attend to before then; why don’t we meet back here about nine o’clock and see what we know?”

  As we left the captain’s cabin, I remembered the other half of my news for Mr. Clemens. “Do you remember that manuscript you asked me to look at for you—Major Demayne’s poetry?” I said.

  Mr. Clemens gave me a weary look. “I’m afraid so,” he said. “Don’t we have enough calamities for one morning without taking on a load of godforsaken amateur poetry?”

  “Normally, I’d agree,” I said. “But I think you’ll want to make an exception for this one. In fact, I think it’s directly relevant to our case.”

  “You’re baiting me, Wentworth,” said Mr. Clemens, no trace of humor in his voice. “Are you going to tell me about it, or am I going to have to read the fellow’s verses for myself?”

  We were standing right next to my cabin door. “I think you’d better take a look at the manuscript,” I said. “Step inside, and I’ll show you what I mean.”

  He came in, grumbling a bit—more or less pro forma, I thought. But when I gave him the manuscript, and pointed out the key words on the first page—Napoleon, Golden, Ten thousand, and Eagles—his demeanor changed. “I see what you mean, Wentworth. If the fellow wanted to grab my attention, he chose a pretty sure way. It’s a shame he’s turned all this good blank paper into puerile nonsense you wouldn’t light your cigars with on account of the stench. But I think he’s accomplished his main purpose. Did you notice how these lines begin?”

  I looked again at the verses. “Somewhere I hear the cannon’s fearsome roar. . . I don’t know, it seems perfectly commonplace to me. Is there some allusion I’m missing?”

  “No, man, look at the first letter of each line. Read them straight downward as if they were a sentence.”

  Suddenly the letters jumped out at me, as if written in a different color: S-A-M I N-E-E-D T-O S-E-E Y-O-U. “Good Lord, it’s a hidden message!” Now that I saw it, all in bold capitals, I wondered how I’d missed it first time through. It was as obvious as a turkey in a flock of geese.

  “Yes, an acrostic—an old schoolboy game. Most people never notice that the first letter of each line spells out a message of some kind. What do you think it means?”

  “Clearly, it’s from someone who knows about the gold we’re searching for—I don’t think the reference to Napoleon could be accidental. And since he calls you Sam, I suppose it’s someone who knows you. But if that’s the case, why didn’t he just ask for a chance to speak in private?”

  “Exactly what I was wondering,” said Mr. Clemens. “I’m not all that hard to talk to. In fact, if he’d chosen almost any other way to approach me, he would have bettered his chances. So he must be worried about a direct approach—which means that he thinks there’s danger in it.”

  “Or that he has some sort of mischief in mind,” I said. “What if the fellow wants to get you off somewhere and torture the location of the gold out of you? I’d advise against seeing him unless I’m present.”

  “And if he pulled out a pistol to argue his position, what could you for me do that I couldn’t do by myself?” Mr. Clemens looked me straight in the eye, and all I could do was shrug and grin. “Exactly what I thought,” he said. “But frankly, I don’t think the person who wrote this is our killer.”

  “Why not? He appears to know about the treasure, and he’s trying to arrange a meeting without telling anyone else about it. And as you yourself point out, he might very well be armed and desperate. I’d approach this fellow with the greatest caution.”

  Mr. Clemens clapped me on the back and said, “You’re a good man, Wentworth. You’ve got the right instincts, and I appreciate it. Major Demayne is certainly something other than he appears to be, and I have a suspicion about what—or rather, who—he really is. If I’m right, I’d be very surprised to learn that he’s the killer, either of that man in New York or of Berrigan.”

  He pointed to the manuscript. “For one thing, this message is the work of a man of some education: the handwriting alone would tell you that, let alone the fact that it’s written in competent verse—execrably bad verse, but competent nonetheless. If you’ll remember the two notes we saw from the killer, they were both barely legible scrawls. I don’t think the man who wrote those notes could have written this.”

  “You almost convince me,” I said. I didn’t want to believe that a man who’d helped me could be the murderer we feared. Still, I had to follow my reasoning to its logical conclusion. “Couldn’t the killer have disguised his handwriting? For that matter, why assume that the killer wrote them? Perhaps they were written by the victim, Lee Russell.”

  “Ed McPhee told us that Russell could barely write his own name. Granted, Ed doesn’t have a fine regard for the truth, but this time I think we can take him at his word. For one thing, he doesn’t stand to gain anything by it, as far as I can see.”

  “Russell could have learned his letters after he moved to New York,” I argued. “But that’s a side issue. The real point is that we don’t know who wrote those notes, and until we do, there’s no reason to assume the killer did it.”

  “I suppose you’re right about that,” said Mr. Clemens, seating himself on my bed. “You did tell me that Berrigan claimed he’d solved the case, and I think we can take his being killed as corroboration. He couldn’t have done it without some sort of tangible evidence, and those two notes are just about the only solid clues he had. I wish his notebook hadn’t disappeared, although I can’t say it surprises me.

  “But remember, he told you that something on the passenger list had given him a lead. Perhaps we ought to look at that again. The two of us may notice something neither of us has spotted independently.”

  “As good an idea as any,” I agreed.

  Mr. Clemens stood and walked to the cabin door. “I left it in my stateroom; there’s a bit more room to sit over there, and a table to spread things out on. Why don’t we adjourn next door and see what we can learn.”

  I gave my assent, and we went out on deck. I brought along Major Demayne’s “poem” to see if it contained any further clues. We had barely stepped out on the deck when I heard a loud commotion from the deck below—voices raised in anger, and the unmistakable sounds of a fight in progress.

  “What the devil?” said Mr. Clemens. Before he could say a
nything more, I thrust the Major’s manuscript into his hands and dashed headlong down the nearest stairway in the direction of the disturbance. It occurred to me briefly that the fight might be none of my business, but I thought I had recognized one of the voices in the uproar. From behind me, I heard my employer shout my name, but I paid him no attention.

  The sounds of the altercation came from the main corridor of the hurricane deck. I plunged in. Ahead, I saw a group of men struggling by the door of a cabin, although it was too dim for me to make out who they were. I thought I recognized Chief Clerk Snipes’s voice, and that of Tiny Williams, the mate; and one other sounded familiar to me, one I was not pleased to hear.

  “Stand back, you double-crossing son of a bitch! Give a man room—”

  “Watch it, Billy, he’s got a shiv!”

  “I told you worthless ****** skunks to stay the **** off my ****ing boat. . .”

  “What the hell is going on here? Belay that, Mr. Snipes!” The last voice signaled the arrival of Captain Fowler, who pushed his way past me and put his hand on the chief clerk’s shoulder. Mr. Snipes half turned, his clothing disheveled and a feral look in his eye, and I thought for a moment he would strike out at the captain. I was startled to see a foot-long blade in his hand. But when he recognized the captain, he was instantly calm.

  “I’m sure glad to see you, Captain,” said Snipes. “I was down here checking the passengers, like you said. Well, this cabin was supposed to be empty, but I thought I heard somebody inside. So I opened the door, and lo and behold, there they sit, cozy as a pair of bedbugs!” He waved in the direction of the cabin door, where, craning my neck, I could make out the porcine features of Billy Throckmorton, firmly in the grasp of Tiny Williams. It didn’t take a great leap of imagination to realize that the other occupant of the cabin, whose voice I had heard from on deck, must be Billy’s brother, Alligator Throckmorton.

  “I think you can put away the knives, boys,” said Captain Fowler. To my surprise, he was holding a pistol—was it Berrigan’s or his own? “Easy now. I don’t want any more nonsense. Mr. Williams, would you take that other blade? Thank you. Now, if both you fellows will sit on the bed—and keep your hands in sight, if you please—we can try to sort this out.”

  Captain Fowler stepped forward, and I moved aside to let him through. On both sides, I was vaguely aware of other passengers peering out of their cabin doors with worried and frightened expressions. The captain must have noticed them at about the same time, for he turned and said, “The show’s over, folks. Nothing more to see.” Then, noticing me, he nodded. “Right in the middle of things again, eh, Mr. Cabot? You might as well come in and help me keep these rascals in order. You too, Sam—I should have known you’d be along in good time.”

  Mr. Clemens, who had come up behind me—puffing as if he’d run down the stairs—followed me into the little cabin, which seemed barely big enough to hold the Throckmortons, let alone the rest of us: Captain Fowler, Chief Clerk Snipes, First Mate Williams, Mr. Clemens, and myself. The captain kept his gun trained on the stowaways, while Williams was holding a wicked-looking knife, which I assumed he’d taken from Alligator Throckmorton; Mr. Snipes, who was sporting a black eye in addition to a torn jacket, had already returned his blade to wherever he kept it concealed.

  “So,” said Captain Fowler after the cabin door was closed. “How long have you two been aboard?”

  “I ain’t sayin’ nothin’,” said Billy Throckmorton. He glared from face to face, and I had the firm impression that he was considering jumping up and resuming the fight, whatever the odds against him.

  “You can say as much or as little as you like,” said the captain. “Riding a boat without paying is the same as stealing, and I’d just as soon call the sheriff on you the minute we dock in Memphis. Maybe a few days in the lockup will change your attitude.”

  “I doubt it, Mike,” said Mr. Clemens. “These fellows look to me as if they’ve seen the wrong side of the bars before now. We aren’t going to scare them all that easily.”

  “You’re right about that, Mister,” said Billy Throckmorton, a half-beat ahead of his brother’s “Shut up, Billy.”

  “You shut up, Al,” said the larger of the two brothers. “We ain’t got nothin’ to worry about. Soon as Ed finds out we’re in the can, he’ll be down to go bail for us. We’ll be struttin’ down Beale Street ’fore you can say ‘boo.’ ”

  “If he knew you were on board, he’ll be in the can himself,” said Snipes. “And for a lot worse than just snitching a ride without paying. They’ll be measuring the three of you for hemp neckties, if I know the law in Memphis.”

  “Have you gone plumb crazy, Charlie Snipes?” said Alligator Throckmorton. “They don’t hang a man for anything we’ve done.” But his brother Billy was in no mood for words. He leapt up from the bed, and with one pawlike hand knocked the pistol from the captain’s hand on his way to the door. He felled Snipes with the other hand before the clerk could make a move, knocking him into Tiny Williams before yanking open the door and bursting out.

  I was the only one in a position to pursue him. I ran after him, out the door and down the corridor. He paused as he came onto the afterdeck, and I overtook him and hit him shoulder-high with as good a flying tackle as ever I’d made on the football field at Yale. We both went down. I struck my head on the railing, and the next thing I knew he was on top of me with his hands around my throat and his knee jabbing into my groin.

  I tried to break his choke hold, but his hands were like iron. I landed a punch on his nose, another just below his ribs, but could get no leverage behind them. I could feel myself losing strength, and tried to gather what little I had left to defend myself; I lay with my head through the railing, and below me I was vaguely aware of the river and the paddle wheel. I threw a feeble punch at his Adam’s apple, but he tucked his chin under and absorbed it without effect. “Good try, city boy,” he growled. ‘Now it’s lights out. . . .”

  I threw another ineffectual punch at his face. He laughed, and then I saw a huge hand descending on him and pulling him upward by the hair before I lost consciousness—for the second time in as many days.

  20

  I opened my eyes to see Mr. Clemens and Captain Fowler standing over me with concerned expressions on their faces. Behind them several passengers peered at me, undoubtedly drawn to the scene by the noise and the fight. I must not have been unconscious for long, because not far away I could see Tiny Williams holding Billy Throckmorton against the cabin wall. I sat up and shook my head, trying to clear it.

  “Are you all right, son?” asked the captain.

  “I think so,” I said. I was still a bit groggy—my head hurt where I had hit it—and I suspected that I would have a few bruises when I next looked in a mirror. But, in view of the fact that two men had already been killed in the short time I had been working for Mr. Clemens, I was content to find myself still among the living.

  “I didn’t know you could move that fast,” said Mr. Clemens. “I might have tried to stop you, if I’d known it. I can’t really blame you for chasing that rascal when he ran away; it’s the most natural thing in the world. But did you ever stop to think what you’d do with him if you caught him?”

  “Leave him alone, Sam,” said Captain Fowler. “He did a brave thing, and he’s lucky Mr. Williams got back on his feet in time to help. Now, we’ll lock up these blasted Throckmortons until we make Memphis, and that’ll be the end of it.”

  “Go ahead and lock them up, but don’t expect it to be the end of anything,” said Mr. Clemens. “What do you mean, Sam?”

  “I’ll tell you shortly, Mike—this whole crowd doesn’t need to know all the details. For now, let’s just get these two rascals locked away where they can’t cause any more trouble.”

  We took the Throckmorton brothers down to the main deck, to a storage room near the clerk’s office. It had not previously occurred to me that a riverboat might require a place to confine violent passengers, but the reinf
orced door was proof that someone had anticipated the need. Mr. Williams held Billy Throckmorton in an apparently effortless armlock, while Mr. Snipes brought along the smaller brother Al with a firm grip on one arm. Captain Fowler followed with his pistol drawn, and Mr. Clemens and I brought up the rear, with a few curious passengers staring after us—among them, to my discomfort, Miss Cunningham. The prisoners scowled out at us as Mr. Snipes swung the door shut, but made no further effort to escape. The chief clerk shot the bolt and brushed his hands off with a satisfied expression.

  “That ought to hold ’em,” said the captain, thrusting the pistol into his trouser pocket. “Good work, Charlie, Tiny—and Mr. Cabot, too! I thought sure that villain would be over the side and halfway to shore.”

  “At least he’d have been off the boat,” said Mr. Snipes. “I’d have led three cheers if he’d drownded himself, but I’ll be just as glad to hand the pair of them over to the Memphis police and wash our hands of the whole mess. Damn shame we didn’t catch McPhee in there with them. It’d be a good excuse to get rid of the master along with his dogs.”

  “We haven’t gotten to Ed McPhee yet,” said the captain. “And he ain’t home free yet, either. I guarantee you he’ll have some questions to answer as soon as I lay eyes on him—I’m going to make the deck hot under his feet, believe you me. Unless he has the right answers, I’ll put him off at Memphis and not shed a tear about it.”

  “I’d like to be there when you ask those questions, Mike,” said Mr. Clemens. “They don’t call him Slippery Ed for nothing. But maybe the two of us can smoke him out.”

  “Aye, two pairs of hands are better than one, when you’re trying to catch a snake,” said the captain. “What cabin is McPhee in, Charlie? We’ll go haul him out of bed, if we have to.”

  “Let me come show you,” said Snipes.

  “Oh, we can manage,” said Mr. Clemens. “We’ll bring Cabot along, in case Ed tries anything foolish, not that I expect him to. But I think it’s more important for you to finish checking whether all the passengers are still on board. You didn’t find anyone missing yet, did you?”