Читать книгу Death on the Mississippi: The Mark Twain Mysteries #1 - Peter J. Heck - Страница 13

Iinstantly pushed my way to the front of the group around Mr. Clemens, prepared to take action. My employer had made it clear that he considered McPhee dangerous, and I needed no prompting to recognize a situation that might turn nasty. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that Detective Berrigan had also stepped forward to within an easy arm’s length of McPhee. So had someone else—a big, rough-looking man from the back of the crowd.

McPhee broke the tension by laughing. “You always was a joker, Sam. Damn me if it ain’t been nigh on thirty years. Put ’er there, you ol’ dog!” And he reached out to grab Mr. Clemens’s hand with both of his, forcing a vigorous handshake on him willy-nilly. I could see from my employer’s face that he wanted no part of this artificial camaraderie, but as long as both McPhee’s hands were engaged, I saw no immediate threat.

Mr. Clemens pulled his hand free, inspecting it as if to count the fingers. “Well, Ed, I haven’t seen you since Nevada,” he said, looking the fellow up and down. “You left Virginia City pretty fast, if I remember right.”

“You sure do,” said McPhee, laughing again. “There was a big Texan took exception to some bad luck at cards, and he didn’t want to listen to common sense. The scrapes I used to get into in those days! But you left mighty fast yourself, Sam—or so I heard tell. Some story about a duel, wasn’t it?”

“True enough, although I got out without fighting the fellow after all,” said Mr. Clemens. His expression had softened, and his voice took on the drawling inflections of his stage presentation. “But you’re the last person I ever thought to see come to a lecture. What sort of deviltry brings you to Chicago?”

“Business, Sam, business. A man’s got to keep hustling, keep moving all the time, if he’s going to keep his head above water. But I couldn’t resist coming to see you—we got into town last night, and the first thing I saw was a poster for your show. I told my boys, here’s a fellow I knew when we was both no more than tadpoles, and now he’s rich and famous, and damn me if I’m going to miss seeing him. Ain’t that what I said, Billy?” He turned to the rough-looking man I’d noticed moving forward in the crowd; the fellow responded with a wordless nod, smirking at me around a chaw of tobacco.

I’d seen the same expression more than once on the face of fellows across a scrimmage line—sizing me up as an opponent and deciding they could handle me. Billy was perhaps an inch shorter than I, but stockier and a good bit older—probably at least thirty-five. I didn’t think he’d have as easy a time of it as he expected; I had the reach on him, and was almost certainly faster. On the other hand, he was unlikely to restrict himself to Marquis of Queensberry rules. One thing for certain: we’d each seen the other move forward, and recognized what it meant. If there was going to be trouble, he and I would be in the thick of it, and on opposite sides.

All that was communicated in a glance; then Detective Berrigan broke into the conversation. “Mr. McPhee, were you by any chance in New York City recently?”

“What are you, a Pinkerton?” said McPhee, eyeing the detective. “Not that it’s any of your business, but I’ve never set foot in the place in my life. And what makes you think you can step up to a total stranger and interrupt a pleasant bit of talk I’m having with my old pal Sam?”

“Perhaps this crowd isn’t the best place for us to talk,” said Berrigan. He showed his badge. “But we do need to talk, Mr. McPhee.”

“I’d like to be in on that talk,” said Mr. Clemens. “Come on down to my dressing room, Ed, and we’ll do it over a drink. I’ll even give the detective a glass, if he’ll take it. This is about somebody we both know from the old days.”

“I’ll be damned,” said McPhee. “You know I don’t take to policemen, Sam.”

“I’d be lying if I told you I much liked them either, Ed. But this fellow’s trying to track down somebody we both know, and he thinks that person might be following me. And the sooner he realizes he’s barking up the wrong tree, the sooner he’s off my back and on his way home to New York City. Besides, I’m working on a book, and need to find out where some of the old-timers are these days. I reckon you know as much about that as anybody I’m likely to meet in Chicago.”

“You’ve got me curious, Sam—somebody we both know, hey? Well, I’ve got a clear enough alibi, which is never having set foot in Mr. New York Detective’s jurisdiction. But I’m here with a couple of boys who work for me; this is Billy Throckmorton, and his brother Al—that’s short for Alligator. If you don’t mind them sitting in, just to insure that Mr. Detective doesn’t try anything unsportsmanlike, I think I’ll take you up on that drink, Sam.” The big fellow stepped forward, along with another man who bore a distinct family resemblance, though he was a smaller and smoother-looking model. Billy was still grinning malevolently, but his brother looked worried.

“Plenty of room—my secretary will join us too, so that’ll be just six. Come along, Cabot!” He dismissed the rest of the crowd with a wave, and the six of us tramped down the hall to his dressing room.

* * *

After a bit of maneuvering for seats and fixing of drinks—somewhat to my surprise, the detective did avail himself of Mr. Clemens’s hospitality, to the extent of two fingers of whisky—my employer turned to Berrigan. “Why don’t I start, and let you ask your questions after these boys know the lay of the land.”

The detective nodded. Mr. Clemens still wore the formal black evening dress that was his stage attire. He had remained standing, one hand on the back of his dressing-table chair, while McPhee and the brothers sat in a defensive line on a wide sofa that dominated the room. I had taken a folding chair near the door, while Detective Berrigan leaned against the edge of Mr. Clemens’s dressing table and puffed on a battered-looking briar pipe.

“To put it in a nutshell,” said my employer, “there’s been a murder in New York, and Farmer Jack Hubbard is right in the thick of it. You remember Farmer Jack, don’t you, Ed?”

Slouched on a sofa between his two henchmen, and still wearing his hat, McPhee held a match to a nasty-looking cheroot for a moment before answering. “Yeah, Jack and me go back a long ways. Don’t tell me he’s gone and killed somebody! That don’t seem like his style, Sam.”

“It doesn’t make sense to me, either,” said Mr. Clemens. “Jack was always pretty easygoing, even when somebody else might have gotten hot under the collar. But his name’s come up in this murder case, and the police have to follow up their clues. When’s the last time you saw him, Ed?”

McPhee scratched behind his left ear, meditatively. “Must have been at Richie Clark’s funeral—that was in Cincinnati, four, maybe five years ago. Richie owed me three hundred dollars to the day he died—not that I was ever going to see it as long as there was an unopened bottle in the country. A bunch of the regulars was there: Little Wes Horton, and that Italian fellow that the girls all used to like before he got his teeth knocked out—Vinnie something; Charlie Snipes and Heinie Schussler, too. Been a long time since I saw so many of the boys in one place. But Farmer Jack was there. We stayed up all night, playing cards—him losing, as usual—and shooting the breeze about the old riverboat days. Jack was talking about going east to take one last shot at being an actor, and I heard a few weeks later that he’d gone and done it.”

“So you knew he was in New York,” said Detective Berrigan, perched on the edge of the dressing table.

“Same as I know the president’s in Washington, not that I’ve ever been there, either.” retorted McPhee.

“If it came down to it, could you prove your whereabouts for the last few days?”

“Well, the clerk in the Windsor Hotel will tell you when me and the boys got there—about five o’clock yesterday. Took the morning train from Cincinnati, which is where I live these days. I suspect I could find a few people who saw me there, if I needed to. This afternoon, me and the boys went to a baseball game—won ten dollars betting against the Cubs. Cap Anson got three hits. What’s all this got to do with me? I thought Farmer Jack was your man.”

“Maybe he is and maybe he isn’t,” said Berrigan. “But we have to follow all our clues, and that means talking to anyone we can find who knew him.”

“Seems to me you’ve come an awful long way for clues to a killin’ in New York City,” said Al Throckmorton, the shorter of the two brothers, speaking for the first time. He had a high-pitched voice, with a drawling accent halfway between western and southern. He was more respectably dressed than his brother Billy, although not by much. Something about his posture suggested that he might be the more dangerous of the two.

Berrigan opened his mouth again, but Mr. Clemens cut him off with a gesture. “Well, boys, the New York police think that Farmer Jack left town and came west, which is why the detective is here. But if you haven’t seen him, there’s not much else the man needs to know from you, Ed. Tell me, though, who else is still around that Jack might go looking for, if he was on the run? There can’t be many of that old crew left.”

McPhee took a sip of his whisky and thought a moment. “Well, let’s see. Little Wes and Heinie settled down. They run a saloon in Cincinnati—nice place if you’re ever in town, although neither of them was ever partic’lar friends with Jack. Reds Murphy went west a couple years ago, after he got out of jail—said he was going to open a betting parlor in Frisco, and for all I know, he did. Vinnie the Italian’s still playing the game, but he was always mostly a lone hand—never really palled around with the boys. I think he works out of St. Louie nowadays.

“Poor Tom Walker went after a pretty young thing in Louisville, and her old man come looking for him with a Navy revolver. Found him, too. Jury let the old fellow off when it turned out Tom had a derringer in his boot top at the time and somebody swore he made a move for it. Tom was the only man I ever saw give Jack a close run at billiards. I guess that mostly covers it, Sam. If I was making book, I’d figure Jack to head for Cincy. What little’s left of the old crowd is mostly down there.”

“Yes, not many of us left,” said Mr. Clemens. “I hoped there’d be a few more old river hands I could talk to for my book, and I remember how old Tom played billiards. He managed to get a few dollars out of my pocket before I figured out he was about a couple of thousand miles out of my class. I hear George Devol died, too.”

“So I hear tell, if you can believe the grapevine. About the trickiest man that ever dealt a card. I was sorry to hear about George, if it’s the truth. He was a hardheaded old buzzard, but he treated me like I was his own son—taught me all I knew. I try to do the same for these boys—pass on what I’ve picked up.” He gestured at the two Throckmorton brothers seated beside him, who seemed not to notice, to judge from their scowls in the direction of Detective Berrigan.

Mr. Clemens rested his chin on his left fist, in much the pose I’d seen him in on stage, apparently lost in thought for a moment. “I guess that pretty much covers the ground, Ed,” he said. McPhee and his cohorts stood up, obviously ready to take their leave. “Oh, one more thing,” said Mr. Clemens. “Detective Berrigan has a photograph of the fellow who got killed in New York. Why don’t you all take a look at it and see if it’s anybody you recognize.”

“I don’t want to look at no pictures of no dead people,” said Billy Throckmorton—he had a deeper voice than his brother, with a more pronounced accent—but by then Detective Berrigan had reached in his pocket and handed the envelope with the photo to Mr. Clemens, who took it out and glanced at it again before passing it over to McPhee.

“Jesus!” McPhee exclaimed, his expression changing. He sat back down, looking almost stunned. “Look here, boys, if this ain’t Lee Russell, I’m a goddamn wooden Indian.”

“Lee Russell?” said Al and Billy Throckmorton, almost in unison. They joined McPhee on the couch, then Billy took the picture and stared at it. “Yeah, it’s him all right,” he said, passing it on to his brother. Al took it and nodded, with a grim expression.

“Lee Russell, is it? At last we’re making some progress,” said Berrigan. “Would you mind telling me anything else you might know about the victim?”

“Can’t say as how I know much else about him,” said McPhee, regaining his composure somewhat. “He was a cardplayer, a pretty good one. Lee showed up working the trains out of St. Louis a few years ago. Big redheaded fellow, built real solid—and got a good pair of hands on him. He could barely write his own name, but he had a head for the cards. We were on the same circuit, you might say, and we chatted a little about business, mostly names of places to find a game in towns we were going to. He dropped out of sight a couple months ago, now that I think of it—not that I made much of it at the time.”

“So you had no idea he’d gone to New York, or what his business there was?” Berrigan had taken out his little notebook and was scribbling in it.

“I can’t say we were ever friendly enough for him to tell me where he was going or why,” McPhee said. “But I suspect his business was the same in New York as anywhere else—trying to find a card game and make a few bucks.”

“Do you have any reason to believe he might have known Jack Hubbard?”

“Well, I did see ’em at the same card table a few times, for what that’s worth. It don’t mean they were friends or anything. Jack was an old-timer, and Lee was sort of a new man on the scene.”

Berrigan looked up from his notebook, scanning the faces of the three men on the sofa. “Either of you other boys remember anything about this Russell character?”

“I seen him a couple of times, is all,” said Alligator Throckmorton. “We never talked or nothing.” Billy Throckmorton nodded slowly, with a thoughtful expression, then aimed a stream of tobacco juice in the general direction of the spittoon. He missed, then grunted.

“I guess that gives me something to tell the Chief,” said Berrigan. “Somebody back in the city may be able to make more of the case, now that we have a confirmed name for the victim. I’m traveling with Mr. Twain, so I won’t be in Chicago past tomorrow, but if you think of anything else about Lee Russell or Jack Hubbard, I’m staying at the same hotel as he is—the Great Northern Hotel on Dearborn Street.”

Making empty promises to tell the detective anything else they thought of, McPhee and his boys knocked back their drinks and departed, leaving the three of us sitting in the dressing room. Billy Throckmorton favored me with another smirk, as he passed me where I stood by the door.

“Well, well,” said Detective Berrigan after they had shuffled out, “as unsavory a bunch of scalawags as ever I saw, and I’ve seen my share.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Clemens. “You probably ought to look into their story, on the off chance some of it’s true. But don’t get your hopes up too high; the name Slippery Ed might be the only thing McPhee’s come by honestly since I first met him, and that was before the war.”

Back in the hotel, Mr. Clemens poured himself another drink, while I gazed out the window of his room at the lights of the city below, visible far into the distance despite the soft rain that continued to fall. He settled into an overstuffed chair and propped his feet up on a hassock. “Quite a view, isn’t it?”

“Remarkable,” I said. “To think of the thousands of people out there—and here we are, high above them, looking down upon them almost as if they were a colony of insects.”

He laughed. “Not a bad comparison, Wentworth. I’ve heard far worse. I once watched an ant climb to the top of a blade of grass, carrying a big dead beetle. I figure it amounted to a man my size taking hold of a railroad car and climbing up a church steeple, then jumping off and climbing up the steeple of the church next door, and thinking he’d done something to be proud of. Some silly fellow back in Aesop’s time decided that ants were a model of industry—and the bulk of the damned human race has been fool enough to believe that ever since.”

“You don’t mean to compare all human beings to ants, do you? Even Aesop allowed that some of us might be grasshoppers.”

“Grasshoppers, and crickets, to be sure; they tend to run in my family. I’ve known the occasional honeybee—my sweet Livy comes to mind. But I’ve met my share of bedbugs and termites and boll weevils, and a few bloodsucking mosquitoes, too,” he said. “Berrigan might aspire to the dignity of a horsefly. And Slippery Ed McPhee is a one hundred percent pure, guaranteed original, unmitigated humbug.”

“I won’t argue with that description. I was surprised that you went so far as to entertain him in your dressing room after all you’d said about him.”

“Oh, that was just the quickest way I could think of to get him to talk. I’d buy the devil himself a glass of whisky if I thought it’d get him to tell me something I needed to know.”

“It certainly was a rare piece of luck that he recognized the murdered man from that picture,” I said. “It was the last thing I ever expected.”

“I’m not sure I expected it, either—although, looking back on it, I can’t say it surprised me. I’ve seen some damned queer things in my time, queer enough to make me think there’s no such thing as a coincidence. You can’t believe in coincidences and write novels.”

“Do you think he had anything to do with the murder?”

Mr. Clemens thought a moment. “I doubt he stabbed the fellow himself. Maybe he was capable of it in his younger days, but it stretches credibility a bit too much to think he’d kill a man in New York the day before we leave town, then show up at my lecture in Chicago the day we arrive here. And I don’t think he could face down a New York detective quite so smoothly if he’d just run eight hundred miles with blood on his hands. Ed’s got a good poker face, but not that good.”

“What do you think he was doing in Chicago, and especially at your lecture, then?”

“Larceny of some kind or another, I’m sure. You don’t go in the woods with a gun and a dog unless you’re hunting, and you don’t walk around with the likes of those Throckmorton boys unless you’re planning to get into trouble. Keep your distance from that crew, Wentworth. I saw you move in to protect me, back there in the auditorium, and it made my heart glad to see it—not that I was in much real danger with that many people around, but it’s good to know that somebody’s looking out for you when things get chancy.

“But you watch out for those Throckmorton brothers. I mean it, Wentworth. There’s no such thing as a fair fight with the likes of them. I’ll bet you fifty dollars American money to a plugged Mexican peso that Alligator Throckmorton carries a knife. You’re likely to find him whittling away at your back while you’re trying to stop his big brother from biting your nose off. He’d do it, too—bite it off before you could cry foul. I’ve seen backwoods boys like that; grew up with them in Missouri, saw them in Nevada and San Francisco, too. They’d like nothing better than to take apart an eastern dandy like you, just for the pure sport of it, and that’d leave me with a secretary I had to carry around in a bushel basket.”

I nodded. “I’m certainly not looking for any fights, Mr. Clemens. But I don’t imagine it’s likely we’ll see them again. We leave town tomorrow morning, after all.”

He shook his head slowly. “I hope you’re right about that, Wentworth. But Slippery Ed and his like thrive on a big crowd—it’s the next thing to heaven for pickpockets, confidence men, cardsharps, and other such two-legged vermin. And the one thing he can be sure of if he follows me is a crowd; a new one in every town, fresh suckers to be robbed. It’s like vultures following an army. I thought I had enough trouble with that damned Berrigan. But by jumping Jesus, Wentworth, the time may come when I’m actually glad to have a detective on my tail.”