[Mark Twain Mysteries 02] - A Connecticut Yankee in Criminal Court

by Peter J. Heck

  “I suppose not, now that you put it that way,” said Mr. Clemens. “George says you’re an honest man, and coming from him, that means a good bit. I think we can all play straight with each other. If you promise you won’t hold back anything we need to know about the case, I can promise to tell you anything we find out, one way or the other. Is it a deal?”

  “I think we can work with one another,” said LeJeune, and he reached out to shake Mr. Clemens’s hand. Just then the waiter arrived with our food, and a lull fell over the conversation as we turned to eating, which I was beginning to realize took precedence over all other business in New Orleans. I had again taken Mr. Cable’s advice on my selection, a spicy rice-and-meat concoction called jambalaya. Once again, it seemed to me that the cook had used too free a hand with the pepper pot, but with frequent sips of lemonade to quench the fire, I found it palatable enough. Strike that—I found myself asking for a second helping, much to Mr. Cable’s satisfaction.

  After the noise of forks and spoons had died down enough to permit conversation, Mr. Clemens wiped his mouth with a napkin and fixed the detective with his gaze. “Let’s take a different angle on this murder business,” he said. “Suppose there wasn’t any reason to blame the cook for it, and you had to figure out the whole thing from scratch. What would you be looking at?”

  “Well,” said LeJeune, “we have a man killed in his own home, and by poison. That eliminates a lot of things you’d have to think about if he’d been shot, or stabbed. It’s a good bet he didn’t surprise a burglar in the act, for instance. On the other hand, we have to make sure it’s not suicide, or an accident, which it might be, if the poison were something you’d expect to find around the house. But we can pretty much rule that out, if it’s jimsonweed. Robinson wouldn’t have been out picking greens for his own salad, and if he had, the cook would have known it wasn’t fit to eat.”

  “Never mind the cook,” said Mr. Clemens. “Pretend we don’t know how Robinson was given the poison, just that we know it was poison. Who are your suspects? Are we sure it’s not suicide?”

  LeJeune rubbed his chin. “I’d say suicide is even less likely than an accident. Odds are there are two or three faster and surer poisons he could have laid hands on: arsenic, maybe laudanum . . . besides, a man isn’t as likely to take poison as to put a pistol to his head. There wasn’t any note, or any kind of scandal he might have been trying to escape. And the autopsy would have found out if he’d had some incurable disease. I’d lay long odds against suicide.”

  “Fine. We’ll set it aside for now,” said Mr. Clemens. “That brings us back to murder. Assume for the sake of argument we’ve got a gilt-edged, government-bonded, ironclad alibi for the cook. Let’s say he was in Mexico. Who’s the most logical suspect?”

  “Usually, we’d be looking at the wife—except, this time, the wife’s the one with the gilt-edged alibi. She was out of town, visiting family up near Baton Rouge, for nearly a week. She didn’t get back until the morning Robinson was found dead. I checked her story myself, and it’s solid as a rock.”

  “Did you check her story just out of routine, or was there a reason to suspect her?” asked Mr. Clemens.

  “You always suspect the wife when a man’s been poisoned in his own home,” said LeJeune. “Eugenia Holt had her choice of beaux twenty years ago, and she married John David Robinson. Now, I don’t have any special reason to think Mrs. Robinson might have regretted her choice. These respectable people, they have a knack for keeping their scandals quiet. But she is still an uncommonly pretty woman, Mr. Clemens, and he was a very important man, and these very rich people don’t live their lives the same way as you and I. Of course I checked. And she was where she claims to have been, when she claims to have been there. Unless she could poison him by long distance, she is no suspect.”

  “How about other close family?” Mr. Clemens had taken out one of his corncob pipes and was packing the bowl with tobacco. “Any domineering mother-in-law, or worthless brothers, or jealous sisters?”

  “Mrs. Robinson has a brother and a sister, both living here in New Orleans. The brother, Reynold Holt, is a war veteran, a brooding fellow with a limp. He was wounded and captured by the Federals at Chancellorsville, and spent six months in a military prison. Her sister Maria has literary inclinations; if you wanted to talk to the family, she might be the one to start with. She’s married to Percy Staunton, who’s a bit of a reckless fellow, although he comes of good family. I don’t know anything that would make any of them likely to kill Robinson. Of course, once we arrested the cook, we didn’t really go prying for evidence against any of them.”

  “What about other enemies?” Mr. Cable asked. “Robinson was getting ready to run for mayor, or so say the papers. Who would have run against him? Whose share of the pie would have been smaller if he’d won?”

  “Robinson was a Democrat, on the reform platform,” said the detective. “There’s been some noise about corruption in the city government in the last few months, and Robinson was one of the main agitators. So Mayor Fitzpatrick could be vulnerable, next election. That’s two years off, though, and Fitzpatrick could turn things around. He might be stronger than ever by then. Or Joe Shakspeare might make another run, and a lot of the reform Democrats would stick with him. Or some other candidate might have knocked Robinson out of the lead—maybe dug up a scandal or found a hot issue to beat him on. So he wasn’t guaranteed the nomination. I wouldn’t be surprised at anything in New Orleans politics, but nobody’s head is really on the block until ’96.”

  “No reason to suspect anybody of killing off the opposition, in other words,” said Mr. Clemens. He’d gotten his pipe lit and was puffing away merrily. “But you probably didn’t look far enough to eliminate anybody there, either, did you?”

  LeJeune gave a nod and a wry smile. “Not really. Like I said, once we had the cook in custody, the investigation pretty much stopped. So, where do you think you want to start?”

  “There doesn’t seem to be any shortage of leads,” said Mr. Clemens, “but there’s no single area of suspicion strong enough to tell me I ought to concentrate on it alone.”

  He paused, puffing on his pipe and wrinkling his brow in thought. Finally, he said, “Let’s go straight for the brass ring and see if we can prove or disprove the main argument all in one shot. The key to the whole case is Leonard Galloway. If I can satisfy myself once and for all whether he’s innocent—or guilty, if that’s how the cards fall—I know whether to stop right there or go looking for another killer. Can you get me a chance to talk to him?”

  “I suspect so,” said the detective, standing up. “Let me go make a telephone call. I know a place around the corner where I can use the phone. I’ll have your answer before you’ve finished your pipe.”

  4

  “Do you really intend to embroil yourself in this murder case?” I asked Mr. Clemens. He was strolling at his usual leisurely pace (as I forced myself not to rush ahead) along Orleans Street, away from the river in the direction of the Parish Prison.

  Detective LeJeune had arranged for my employer to visit the Parish Prison that afternoon, and to spend half an hour talking to a certain prisoner: Leonard Galloway, the cook accused of murdering John David Robinson. Somewhat to my surprise, Mr. Clemens had accepted the invitation without hesitation.

  Mr. Cable, obviously pleased at how quickly events were moving, offered to accompany us to see the prison. At that, Mr. Clemens shook his head. “No, George, I have to do this one by myself—well, I’ll want Wentworth to come along. But the point is for me to make up my own mind. It’ll be hard enough to keep the cook from saying what he thinks I want to hear, without having somebody there he’s known since he was a boy to complicate things. I promise I’ll tell you everything when I get back.” Mr. Cable reluctantly admitted that Mr. Clemens’s objections were well-founded, and we left him and LeJeune sitting over their coffee.

  “I still haven’t decided what I’m going to do, Wentworth,” said Mr. Clemen
s now. “George Cable believes that Galloway is an innocent man; it’s damned near an article of faith with him. But George has been away from New Orleans for ten years, and a man can change a lot in that much time, especially if you figure that the cook couldn’t have been much older than twenty then. And that’s ten years of being told over and over again that he’s less than a real man, and having his nose rubbed in it by every white man he meets.” We paused a moment at the corner of Bourbon Street as a fully laden beer wagon rumbled past, the big horses straining at the traces, headed for some saloon.

  We crossed the dusty street and Mr. Clemens continued. “That’s why I don’t want to jump into the case just on Cable’s say-so, Wentworth. Is Leonard Galloway a convenient victim chosen to appease the public, or is he a poisoner? If he really is a murderer, and I lend my name to the battle to defend him, who does it help? It doesn’t help the blacks, it doesn’t help Cable, it doesn’t help the people of New Orleans, and it sure doesn’t help me. So I want to be sure I know what kind of man Galloway is, and the best way I know to decide that is to talk to him. I can tell more about a man in five minutes of talking to him, face-to-face, than in a year of hearing what other people say about him. So here’s a chance to talk to him and see what I can learn.

  “Besides, this is as good a chance as I’ll ever have to get a look around the old Parish Prison. It’s a New Orleans landmark in a dismal sort of way, on the order of the Bastille. It dates from before I was born, and there are a lot of strange stories about it. They’ve finally decided to build a new prison up on Tulane Avenue, and tear the old one down. So this is probably my last chance to see the inside of the place. I imagine I’m unlikely to see it as an overnight guest, now that I’m supposedly an honest citizen.”

  “I should hope not!” I said, shocked at the notion of my employer spending a night in prison. Perhaps respected authors of mature years were still imprisoned in Russia, or other barbaric places with no constitution, but I could not imagine Mr. Clemens being jailed. Well, perhaps it might have happened in the bygone era of debtor’s prisons—but hardly in these enlightened times.

  We walked up Orleans Street to the corner of Tremé, where we found a grim-looking structure, three stories high and covering an entire city block. We presented ourselves at the entrance, where the policeman on duty instantly recognized “Mark Twain,” and waved us through the doors where many wretches undoubtedly met a much less congenial welcome and entered with far less hope of a timely exit than we experienced.

  Even at first glance it was clear that the building sadly needed repair—better yet, replacement. One of the senior keepers, Mr. DeBusschere, appointed himself our guide and led us into the heart of the ancient dungeon.

  Mr. DeBusschere was a thick, muscular man with a full white mustache and a clean-shaven head. He wore a blue uniform with a holstered pistol at the waist, along with a large ring of keys. He was obviously impressed at the chance to escort a world-famous author, and so he took us on a roundabout route, giving us a full commentary on all the sights and history of the Parish Prison, smiling broadly all the time, although the smile stopped short of his eyes. Mr. Clemens looked at everything with lively interest, and so I refrained from expressing my annoyance that we were not taken directly to see the cook.

  Mr. DeBusschere put great emphasis on the lynching of the Italians accused of shooting the police chief a few years earlier; his theme appeared to be the valiant but unsuccessful efforts of the guards (himself prominent among them) to protect the prisoners. “Here’s Cell Number Two, where six of the Italians hid the night the lynch mob came,” he said. “We left the dagos free to run inside the prison, hoping they’d have a chance to save themselves, but the citizens followed them down that way into the courtyard—we’ll see that in a little while—and shot them down.”

  I peered into the gloomy cell, lit by a single gas flame from the hall where we stood. Several prisoners stared back, with no sign of recognizing their distinguished visitor. “What a terrible place! It must be a very hotbed of vermin and disease,” I said.

  “Well, we have the very answer for that,” said Mr. DeBusschere, proudly. He pointed to the ceiling with a sweeping gesture. “We let the bats nest in the rafters undisturbed so they can kill off the flies and mosquitos. That’s a sure preventative to yellow fever, you know.” I peered into the dark, but could not make out anything. Still, the notion of bats swooping down over the poor souls in the cells sent a chill up my back.

  “Yes, and Cable tells me they fumigated the place back in ’82,” said Mr. Clemens, conversationally. “They took out over a hundred barrels full of dead rats.”

  “Well, that’s what the newspapers claimed, but it’s an exaggeration,” said the keeper. “I was here at the time, and I doubt there were more than ninety-five barrels. But good riddance to the filthy vermin, says I.” He rattled his keys self-importantly and led us on to the next section of the prison. I resisted the temptation to ask whether the place had been given a proper cleaning since.

  Mr. DeBusschere took us through several different sections of the prison, pointing out places he thought we might find interesting: a doghouse where two of the arrested Italians had hidden and escaped the mob; bullet holes in the wall where two others had been found and shot to death; and the infamous sweatbox that, until very recently, had been used to coerce recalcitrant prisoners to confess. At every turn, prisoners crowded forward, some of them pleading pathetically, asking for their lawyers, for food, for their wives or mothers. A few of them tried to beckon me over to the bars, but Mr. DeBusschere had warned me not to listen to such invitations. “I can’t guarantee your safety,” he said. Still, my indignation grew to see such inhumane and uncivilized treatment, even of murderers and thieves, let alone the unfortunates whose only crimes were mental deficiency or lunacy, but who were indiscriminately thrown in with the worst kind of hardened criminal.

  I think our guide must have detected my revulsion at the barbaric conditions prevailing within the prison, for at last he took us up a stairway to a different section of the building. “Now, I don’t want you to think we don’t know how to treat decent folks who somehow fall afoul of the law,” he said. Much to my surprise, we found ourselves surrounded by cells far cleaner and more roomy than those we had just seen.

  We entered a large common room with comfortable chairs and writing tables and curtains concealing the bars on the windows. A couple of guards stood casually by the door, conversing with the prisoners as if they were the best of friends. The inmates here were far better fed and dressed than their fellows in the cells we had just left. Mr. DeBusschere told us that they were even allowed to order dinner sent in from restaurants in the neighboring community. One fellow was being measured for a suit of clothes, and another, a stout man with long stringy hair combed upward across his skull in a futile attempt to cover a large bald spot, recognized Mr. Clemens and had the audacity to walk over and offer him a cigar. “You’ll find this as good a smoke as you’ll get this side of Cuba,” he told him. Mr. Clemens stared at the fellow, but took the cigar and put it in his breast pocket, politely thanking the prisoner.

  After a short while in this comparatively comfortable section of the prison, we headed for the courtyard where we would meet Leonard Galloway, the cook arrested for Robinson’s murder. “Who was that rascal who gave me the cigar?” asked Mr. Clemens, as we came down the stairs.

  “Adolf Mueller,” said Mr. DeBusschere. “He’s a precinct worker in the Fourth Ward. He beat up a policeman who went to question him about extorting money from a house over on Customhouse Street, and the cop pressed charges. The madam and the girls were too scared to testify, but the cop wouldn’t be scared off or bought off, and neither would the judge. Now Adolf’s doing ninety days in the Orleans Hotel,” the prison guard concluded, chuckling. Upon hearing this, Mr. Clemens took the cigar out of his pocket and sniffed the wrapper with an expression that combined evident relish and profound regret. Then, as we passed an open window, he fl
ung it through the bars.

  “Waste of a good cigar,” said Mr. DeBusschere, with a surprised look on his face.

  “Damned good cigar, unless my nose has failed me in my old age,” said Mr. Clemens. “But somebody else is bound to find it before it gets rained on, and I hope he’ll enjoy it more than I ever could have, once I knew what kind of son of a bitch gave it to me.”

  Mr. DeBusschere brought us down a rickety flight of stairs to a large courtyard, surrounded on all sides by the prison buildings and walls. Along one side, three tiers of rounded arches created a pleasant contrast to the stark purpose of the building. Prisoners of all races and nationalities filled the courtyard, although they tended to stay in groups with their own kind. Some chatted animatedly with their fellows, while others simply paced or sat dejectedly against a wall, out of the direct rays of the hot afternoon sun. Among the latter was a dark-skinned man who did not even look up at our approach, until Mr. DeBusschere prodded him and said, “Leonard, there’s a man here to see you.”

  The man looked up, squinting into the sun, and rose quickly to his feet. “Excuse me, mister, but aren’t you Mr. Mark Twain?” he said to my employer. His voice was a deep baritone with the soft inflections I’d come to associate with the New Orleans accent.

  “That’s who he is, and he wants to ask you some questions, so mind your manners,” said the keeper, in a gruffer voice than he’d used speaking to Mr. Clemens or me.