Читать книгу A Connecticut Yankee in Criminal Court: The Mark Twain Mysteries #2 - Peter J. Heck - Страница 10

Mr. Clemens spent the next morning catching up on his writing and correspondence, which despite our best efforts, he had fallen behind in during our journey down the Mississippi on the steamboat Horace Greeley. He dictated a number of business letters to me, and once again, I regretted that Yale had not offered courses in shorthand, although I had gotten the knack of quickly jotting down his intention, if not his exact words. Later, I would turn my notes into finished letters while he took care of matters that required his personal attention. As usual, he devoted much of his time to a long letter to his wife and daughters, whom he had sent to Europe, where they could live more cheaply than at home, while he worked to liquidate his debts.

Toward that end, he had boarded up his home in Hartford, Connecticut, and, with the backing of Mr. Henry H. Rogers, the oil millionaire, embarked on the steamboat cruise and lecture tour down the Mississippi on which I had served as his secretary. (While I was responsible only to Mr. Clemens, I had learned that Mr. Rogers was actually the one who paid my salary, as well as Mr. Clemens’s traveling expenses.) At the same time, he had begun a book describing our journey, with plentiful observations on the customs, the history, and the life of the great American waterway. We were scheduled to give two final lectures here in New Orleans; meanwhile, Mr. Clemens worked on his newest book.

It was already after noon when a knock announced the arrival of Mr. Cable. Mr. Clemens greeted him enthusiastically, but his expression changed when Mr. Cable asked, “Have you looked into the Galloway case?”

“Damnation! I meant to, but I got involved in business, and it completely slipped out of my mind,” said my employer, slumping back into his overstuffed chair. I was somewhat embarrassed, also having completely forgotten his promise to investigate the cook’s arrest for poisoning his master.

“I wish you wouldn’t swear, Sam,” said Mr. Cable, a stem expression on his face. “I’m disappointed in you. You told me last night that you wanted to find out the facts before deciding whether to help poor Leonard Galloway, and the facts aren’t going to walk up to your door and knock.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Mr. Clemens admitted. “I’ll work on it this afternoon, if I get the chance.”

Mr. Cable gave my employer an indulgent look. “Sam Clemens, I know you better than that. You have the best intentions in the world, but you’re lazy as an old dog on a hot summer day. Well, I’m here to see that you don’t have any more excuse to put off fulfilling your promise.”

“Promise? I don’t remember promising to help the fellow.”

“No,” said Mr. Cable. “You promised to find out the facts—first thing this morning. Well, here it is after noon, and you don’t know any more than you did last night. Luckily for you, I still have a few friends in New Orleans, and one of them has offered to meet us for lunch and talk about the Galloway case. The facts may not come knocking, but if you’re willing to walk two or three blocks with me—and you’d better be, Sam!—I can promise you’ll find out some things that didn’t get into the newspapers.”

“It doesn’t look as if I have much choice,” said Mr. Clemens, standing up. “Come along, Wentworth, we might as well find out what George has up his sleeve. At worst, we’ll get another good meal out of it.”

We walked down to Saint Peter Street, where at a table in the courtyard of a little café, smoking a dark-colored cheroot, sat a rotund man of medium stature, meticulously dressed, and sporting a dark mustache waxed to sharp points. Mr. Cable introduced him as Richard LeJeune, a detective with the New Orleans Police Department, whom Cable had met when he was a writer for the New Orleans newspapers.

LeJeune stood and shook hands with Mr. Cable and Mr. Clemens. “I’ve heard about that business on the riverboat, where you caught that murderer, Mr. Clemens. A good piece of detective work,” he said. “A lot of policemen don’t like it when outsiders do their work for them. Me, I’m thankful for any kind of help we can get.”

“Well, I appreciate the compliment, although I don’t expect to make a habit of solving murders,” said Mr. Clemens. “It’s more work than I’m accustomed to, for one thing. But it was more or less in the line of self-preservation, and that’s a pretty good antidote to indolence.”

After the introductions, Mr. Clemens and Mr. Cable seated themselves on either side of the detective, and I took the fourth chair at the table. We ordered drinks, and when the waiter had gone to fetch them, Mr. Cable told my employer, “Richard is one of the few honest policemen still left in New Orleans. He’s assigned to the Robinson murder, and he’s agreed to tell us something about the case. So where would you like to begin?”

“Well, all I really know is what that newspaper said yesterday: that Robinson was poisoned and that the police have arrested his cook for it,” said Mr. Clemens, looking at the detective. “That seems straightforward enough, but I was a reporter long enough to know that no newspaper ever gets the whole story. Why don’t you start with the main facts. How did Robinson die, and how did the police decide it was a murder?”

The detective looked at Mr. Clemens intently for a moment, as if sizing him up. “Well, Mr. Clemens, Robinson died of jimsonweed poisoning. Now, jimsonweed is powerful stuff. The whole plant is poison, and most people around here know it. There’s not much chance Robinson would have took it by accident. For one thing, it has a pretty rank smell. The country folks call it stinkweed, and it’s hard to mistake for much else. We found some of it growing in a vacant lot near where the cook lives, and the cook admits that he fixed Robinson’s last meal.”

“How long was that before he died?”

“The coroner says four hours at least—maybe a lot longer. Sometimes the poison takes twelve, fifteen hours to kill a man. Split the difference and say eight or ten. We figure the poison was in his food at supper the evening before he died, disguised somehow so he wouldn’t smell or taste it—most likely in some kind of spicy sauce. He was the only one who ate the meal, on account of his wife was out of town to visit family. Later that evening, Robinson saw his brother-in-law, and complained of a headache and blurry vision. The servants say he went to bed early. The next day—this was Friday, nearly two weeks ago—his wife arrived home late in the morning and got worried when she learned he hadn’t come down for breakfast. She went into his room and found him. Old Doc Soupape was suspicious right away and asked for an autopsy.”

“And found evidence of the poison, I assume.” Mr. Clemens took a puff on his cigar. “Any reason to suspect the cook besides the plants growing near his home?”

“Yes. A couple of days before, Robinson found the cook drunk on the job. He dressed him down pretty fierce in front of the other servants, docked him the day’s pay, and sent him home in shame. The cook didn’t like it one bit. Would anybody? The way it looks is that he went home mad, stayed mad, noticed the weeds, and decided to put them in his master’s soup or maybe his salad. Nobody else was home for the meal, so he didn’t have to worry about killing the rest of the family.”

“Has he confessed any of this?”

“No,” said the detective, “but that don’t mean anything. Sometimes they confess, sometimes they deny everything. And sometimes they confess when they didn’t do it.”

We were interrupted by the waiter arriving with our drinks: lemonade for me and Mr. Cable, a whisky and soda for Mr. Clemens, and a fresh coffee for the detective. We ordered our food, the waiter departed, and Mr. Clemens leaned both elbows on the table, a thoughtful look on his face. “So,” he said at last, “the cook’s guilt or innocence seems to ride on whether his motive is strong enough to make him poison his employer.”

“True enough,” said LeJeune. “That’s right where the case stands or falls, the way I see it. Nobody denies the cook had the chance to get the poison, though he claims he didn’t know it was growing there, and he had a perfect opportunity to give it to the victim. The main question is whether being yelled at and docked his pay made him mad enough to kill the man who did it to him. George doesn’t think so, and he claims to know this fellow pretty well. And the cook doesn’t have any history of previous trouble with the law. So I think maybe there’s some room for doubt.”

“Well, if everyone whose boss yelled at him turned into a killer, we’d be in a sad way,” said Mr. Clemens. “From what you say, the cook had plenty of time after Robinson bawled him out to sober up and think things over. What makes the police think he stayed mad? Did any of the other servants hear him make threats, or anything like that?”

“No, but that’s normal. These people always stick together—”

“As well they should, seeing how little help they can expect from anyone else!” Mr. Cable interrupted angrily, but Mr. Clemens silenced him with a gesture.

“Now, George, let’s stick to our business,” said my employer. “Mr. LeJeune’s come here to tell us what he knows about the case, not to argue about the racial question.”

Mr. Cable glared at both Mr. Clemens and the detective for a moment. Then the detective looked at him with a wry smile and a shrug, and the little man’s anger seemed to melt away. “That’s all right, Mr. Clemens,” said the detective. “George and I know where each other stand. We go back a long way. The fact is, one of the things that bothers me about this case is that the papers are talking as if the cook is some sort of black monster who killed his boss because he hated white men. Well, I was one of the men who questioned the cook when we arrested him, and if he hates anybody, I sure didn’t see it. So when George asks me to take a closer look at the evidence, I think maybe I should listen to George. But the prosecutor wants to treat the Robinson murder as a closed case, now that we’ve made an arrest. And the captain has been making hints that maybe I should get on with the rest of my caseload, which is plenty big enough, no question about that. Trouble is, I don’t think we’ve nailed the lid on it yet, and I guarantee you I don’t like being told to stop looking when there’s still something I’m not sure of.”

“So you figure you’ll let us do your looking for you,” said Mr. Clemens.

“Couldn’t have put it better myself,” said the detective. He took a sip of his coffee, put his cup down precisely in the center of the saucer, and continued. “I’m going to give you enough information to let you start, and then you’ll tell me anything you find out. I’m taking a bit of a chance, because most amateurs don’t know the first thing about a murder investigation. But you did do a pretty good job in that riverboat murder, so maybe you will find something. If you can prove the cook is innocent or even raise enough of a doubt that he did it, maybe I can still arrest the right person instead of going into court with the wrong man in the dock and making myself have a guilty conscience. And if you find something to prove the cook really did kill Robinson, I will trust George to tell me. So I can’t really lose, can I?”

“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.”