Читать книгу Death on the Mississippi: The Mark Twain Mysteries #1 - Peter J. Heck - Страница 12

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 given 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 over 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.

“When I called Rogers this morning, I expected that he would pull some strings and get that blasted detective off my back. There’s not a man in America, Carnegie and Rockefeller included, who has more real power than Rogers when he decides to apply it. Well, now I find out just where I rank in his scheme of things. This business with the murder and the notes came to his ear, and now he’s worried that somebody’s looking to kill me. It was at his insistence that Berrigan was sent to follow me, to make sure nothing happens to his investment.

“So now I learn that my dear friend Rogers—and he has been a friend to me, make no mistake of that—thinks I have to be protected like a champion racehorse. And my opinion of the matter don’t signify, no more than the horse’s. Detective Berrigan is under orders to stick with me until the murder’s solved—or until I die, which seems just as likely.”

Having vented his ire, Mr. Clemens spent the rest of the morning dictating letters, on various details of business with which I will not bore the reader. I wrote them up and posted them; then, after we enjoyed a hearty luncheon, he gave me my liberty for the afternoon, and I spent a pleasant few hours investigating the sights of a city new to me. The second city of our nation, Chicago is distinguished by a number of tall buildings, referred to by the locals under the picturesque name of “sky-scrapers.” Our hotel, the Great Northern, stands an impressive sixteen stories high, and there are several buildings in the city even taller. Perhaps the most striking is the huge Masonic Temple, a short walk from our hotel, and a remarkable twenty-one stories in height. It being a clear day, I paid twenty-five cents to ascend the elevator to the temple’s roof, from which a visitor obtains a stunning panoramic view of the city and the adjoining lake. It was startling to look downward at the backs of soaring birds, or at the antlike creatures scurrying about below them—which my eye at first refused to recognize as full-grown human beings.

After seeing the wonders of human ingenuity, I decided to take a closer look at Lake Michigan. A walk to the waterfront park gave me a close look at a broad harbor, with the open lake beyond a stone breakwater. To the south, I could make out some of the buildings of the Columbian Exposition that were still standing. Much of their grandeur endured despite the fire that had ravaged the site not long before; a large crane hung over them, ready to remove what was left of the ruins. The surface of the lake showed only a light chop (although I was assured that it gets fierce enough in a storm). It is not the ocean, but it is impressive enough.

I returned to the hotel and joined Mr. Clemens for dinner, to find him in a much better mood. “I’ve got the answer to all my problems,” he told me over the customary pre-meal libations. “If the murder is solved, Berrigan goes back to New York—taking the killer with him. And we can go ahead with our other mission in Arkansas.”

“That seems reasonable to me,” I said. “So you’re going to tell Mr. Berrigan the whole story, and cooperate with his investigation.”

“Not on your life, Wentworth. I’m going to solve the damned thing myself. I wouldn’t trust Berrigan to figure this thing out even if I thought I could trust him not to sell us out. And once we get to Memphis, we’re practically next door to the treasure in Arkansas. So I’ve got to identify the murderer, convince Berrigan’s boss I’ve got the right man, and send them packing before we leave Memphis.”

“How, pray tell, do you intend to do that?” I asked, intrigued.

“For openers, I’m the only one here who’s met Farmer Jack Hubbard in the flesh. So I stand the best chance of spotting him—even after all those years, and without the disguise. Funny I never noticed the phony beard—of course, I was a good bit greener then. But if he shows up, I’ll spot him soon enough. I’d lay odds I’ll know him the minute he opens his mouth.”

I wasn’t entirely persuaded by this plan. “And then what will you do?”

“If I’m convinced he’s the man, I’ll turn him over to Berrigan.” He puffed on one of his corncob pipes, then continued: “Or maybe I’ll talk to him first.”

I was appalled. “What, talk to a murderer?”

“If he’s after the money, he won’t find it with me dead,” said Mr. Clemens, confidently. “I want you to know I take great comfort in that, Wentworth.”

While I found his cheerful determination to take affairs in his own hands preferable to his earlier bitterness, I was dubious of his ability to carry out his intentions. For the moment, though, I had no clear idea what to do about things.

We took a cab to the auditorium, which I had noticed on my walk to the park that afternoon. It was an impressive building, with over four thousand seats, and it had a first-class hotel attached to it. A light shower had begun, so we took along an umbrella. I carried Mr. Clemens’s bag with his “lecture suit” to his dressing room. After stowing the umbrella in a corner, I hung our hats on two pegs, made sure he had everything he needed to prepare for the lecture, and then went out front—I was beginning to pick up a smattering of theater jargon already—to get a seat while he changed for the performance. The large modern auditorium was already nearly full, and there was a decided holiday spirit among the audience.

This was the second time I had seen my employer take the stage, and I was curious to see if I could make any more sense of the performance than the first time. At the appointed hour, the lights in the sumptuous arena dimmed and he strolled out, so casually as to escape notice if one happened not to be paying close attention. But the instant a few members of the assembly laid eyes on him, they began a general round of boisterous cheering, to which he responded with a dignified bow. When they finally fell silent, he rested his chin on his left fist, his left elbow on his right fist, and began his talk.

The first thing I realized was that I could hear his voice quite clearly from the back of the large hall, even though he spoke in an ordinary conversational tone. I also realized that he was employing very few gestures to reinforce his words, in fact hardly moving at all once he reached center stage. I had noticed these things the first time I had seen him, I now realized; but they had not made an impression, probably because my mind had been firmly set on my upcoming interview with my then merely prospective employer.

A few minutes into the “Jumping Frog” story with which he began his talk, I also realized that, while his delivery had all the symptoms of a spur-of-the-moment monologue, with him in jumping from one subject to the next as if at the caprice of a moment, his talk was in fact almost word for word the same as the first time I had seen it. So he had obviously memorized it; and, almost as if by clockwork, this audience laughed at the same moments as the first one had in his retelling of the same absurd incidents. And so it went again: for nearly two hours, he put forward the most absurd fabrications I have ever heard from one man’s mouth. I suddenly understood that he was deliberately presenting himself as an object of ridicule, the butt of the audience’s laughter. My first reaction was pity—to think that a man of his accomplishments, the author of a dozen books, should be reduced to playing the buffoon for money!

But I remembered that, however an audience that had come to see “Mark Twain” might perceive Mr. Clemens, I had no choice but to see him as my employer—even more, as my benefactor. Painful as it might be to see him pander to the laughter of strangers, that indignity was the price he chose to pay to support his family. It was far more disturbing that he apparently intended to confront a coldblooded killer, thinking himself immune to danger. Well, I decided, I would just have to make certain that I was present when danger appeared. I had not signed on as his bodyguard, but it would ill become a Cabot to shirk the duty of interposing oneself between one’s employer and bodily harm, I thought, should it come to that pass. While I was no trained fighter, the playing fields of Yale had been every bit as capable as those of Eton at teaching a fellow to handle himself in a crisis.

Still, I realized, even a strong six-footer such as I might be of little use against an armed man. Far better than confronting the killer (should he actually be stalking Mr. Clemens) would be letting the proper authorities capture the fellow and question him. A pity that my employer seemed to trust the probable killer more than the detective sent to catch him! Worse yet, the detective’s hands were tied by his ignorance of our mission in Arkansas, and the possible motives of the man he was seeking. But unless Mr. Clemens decided to share this information with the detective, I knew, it would be a betrayal on my part to do so behind his back. It was with some trepidation that I realized that the only person with a reasonable chance to solve the case was . . . I.

Very well, I would just have to do so—and then turn the scoundrel over to Detective Berrigan before we reached Memphis in something like three weeks’ time. I realized it might be embarrassing to my employer were I to solve the mystery he had determined himself to unravel; but my youth, strength, and superior education were undeniable advantages. Besides, protecting him from a murderer was far more important than salvaging his pride. And perhaps, if I were clever enough, I could manipulate the entire affair so that Mr. Clemens believed that he had solved the mystery himself.

I began mentally reviewing the clues: the two notes, the false beard, the murder victim having been in the audience at Mr. Clemens’s New York lecture. At that thought, I resolved to examine the audience carefully for familiar faces once the lecture ended. What would be more likely, if someone were stalking Mr. Clemens, than their being here tonight? So wrapped up was I in chains of evidence and possible explanations of the murder, I hardly heard a word of the lecture from then until the lights came up and the audience rose as one to applaud my employer.

I stood up along with them, scanning the audience as it filed out. The first familiar face I saw was Detective Berrigan, who was standing in the side aisle, also watching the crowd. Then I spotted a man I’d noticed on the train from New York, the gray-haired gentleman with the military air. A tall, fashionably dressed woman with striking blonde hair caught my eye as well, but I was forced to avert my gaze when she caught me staring at her. Of the other faces, two looked familiar, but as they were both respectable-looking women of my parents’ generation, I decided that neither made a very good murder suspect.

After the hall was empty, I went backstage to find my employer again surrounded by a small crowd outside his dressing room. Berrigan, who had slipped out ahead of me, watched from a short distance. Offstage, Mr. Clemens was more animated, shaking hands with this person and then another as they greeted and congratulated him. I had joined the fringes of the crowd, trying to catch his eye, when I saw his expression change. I followed his gaze to spot a knavish-looking fellow with a thick mop of curly gray hair pouring out from under a broad-brimmed hat. The fellow grinned, then stepped forward and stuck out his hand and said, “Remember me, Sam?”

Mr. Clemens stared at the hand as if it were a loaded gun. “Slippery Ed McPhee,” he said. “I wish I could forget you.”