“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 c
olony 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.”
6
The next morning was Sunday, and I woke to the sound of rain. My watch read 8:20. I put my head under the pillow and dozed a while longer, then roused myself enough to bathe, shave, and dress. A glance out the curtained window revealed a steady drizzle. Hearing no sound through the adjoining door to Mr. Clemens’s room, I wandered down to the dining room and breakfasted on coffee and sweet rolls, then (mindful of a promise made to my mother) headed for the hotel desk to determine if there was a church within walking distance.
“I beg your pardon, young man,” came an unfamiliar voice at my elbow. I turned to see the tall, gray-haired gentleman I had noticed on the train from New York and again at Mr. Clemens’s lecture the previous evening. He gave a little bow and said, “Please forgive the intrusion, but I believe you are traveling with Mr. Mark Twain?” His voice was deep and resonant, in keeping with his exemplary posture and slightly old-fashioned dress, vaguely military in its cut.
“Why, yes,” I said, “I am his secretary. And to whom do I have the honor. . . ?”
“Major Roy Demayne, formerly of the Twenty-fifth New Jersey, sir.” He gave another little bow. “It is I who will have the honor, in that I am to be one of the passengers on the literary Mississippi river cruise which Mr. Twain will be conducting.”
“Ah, I am not surprised. I saw you on the train, and then again at Mr. Clemens’s lecture last night. How can I be of service?”
“Well,” he said, spreading his hands. “I don’t mean to impose, especially on someone as busy as Mr. Twain—and I’m sure his secretary is no less busy. But I myself am an author, a poet to be precise, and I need the advice of an experienced literary man. As I am sure you know all too well, even an intimate familiarity with the muse does not guarantee one’s ability to navigate safely through the pitfalls of publication. But I understand that Mr. Twain, in consequence of his stature as one of the foremost literary lights of the age, is familiar with all the publishers on both sides of the Atlantic.”
“That may well be,” I said. “But I’m afraid I’ve been with Mr. Clemens—Mr. Twain—only a short while, and I am not yet completely familiar with his affairs. I am sure that he is well acquainted with the leading publishers, but I don’t know how I can help you.”
“Well,” he said again, with the same gesture. “I’m not sure this is within your purview, but I believe that a tête à tête with your employer might be of the utmost value in opening doors at the publishers. I have with me samples of my work, including selections from my heroic epic on several sanguinary engagements of the late war, in which it was my honor to lead men into battle in the service of the Union.”
“Indeed, sir,” I said, my interest piqued. “Which battles were you in?” I had always half regretted being born in peaceful times, when society showered its rewards upon the cautious and the reliable rather than the brave and adventuresome. The ritual combats of the football field were but tame substitutes for what men of the previous generation had seen at first hand.
“Well,” said Major Demayne, rubbing his lower lip, “we fought the Secesh all up and down the country, from First Bull Run to the Peninsular campaign. We weren’t always in the thick of it, but we were always mighty close to it. Some good men didn’t come home to tell about it.”
He shook his head pensively. “I have taken it upon myself to erect some small memorial in verse to their great patriotic sacrifice. I thought that perhaps Mr. Twain could spare the time to offer some words of advice to a fellow author.”
“Perhaps he could, although I really don’t know whether he has any interest in verse.”
“Why, surely he does; he has even included original verse in some of his novels. But perhaps it
would be presumptuous for an amateur such as myself to impose on a man of his accomplishment. His free time is undoubtedly precious. That is why I approached you, Mr. . . . your pardon, I don’t believe I caught the name.”
I laughed and introduced myself, and we shook hands. “I’m afraid I can’t make promises for Mr. Clemens’s free time today or tomorrow; we’ll be traveling to St. Paul to board the steamboat. I assume you’re on the same timetable, since you’re traveling downriver with us. But perhaps once we’re on the boat, and things have settled down, he’ll have time to talk with you. I suspect there’ll be more than one aspiring writer with us—I’m planning to become a travel writer myself.”
Major Demayne’s face lit up like a freshly ignited gas lamp. “Ah, a fellow supplicant to the muse! You know, Mr. Cabot, I have often felt that prose is but a shoddy medium for the depiction of the marvels one sees in traveling. Give me Lord Byron, or someone equally inspired, for mountains or the sea! These modern fellows could learn something about turning a verse from him, or from Sir Walter Scott, you know.”
“Yes, I suppose they could,” I said. Not entirely certain I could recite a single line of either Byron or Scott, I was in no position to say much more; but the Major paid me no heed and continued with a full head of enthusiasm.
“I call to mind a passage in my canto on the great Battle of Antietam—which the rebs called Sharpsburg, after the town—that shows what a well-conceived metaphor can do for an ordinary scene. If you can spare a moment, I believe I have it with me.” He reached into his breast pocket and extracted a thick sheaf of papers, which he tucked under his arm while he fished in the opposite pocket for a pair of spectacles. Then he propped the glasses on the end of his nose and began leafing through his papers.
[Mark Twain Mysteries 01] - Death on the Mississippi Page 6