[Mark Twain Mysteries 01] - Death on the Mississippi

by Peter J. Heck

  “He started asking about old George Devol, who used to deal three-card monte on all the riverboats—George taught me most of what I know about gambling for a living. And then, after a while, he turned the conversation around to you, Sam,” Farmer Jack said, pointing to Mr. Clemens. “He said he’d heard about your lectures in New York—there was one that same night—and he started asking about that trip you’d taken on the Gold Dust back in ’82, when George Devol was on the boat, and about the money you’d claimed was hidden in Napoleon, Arkansas. Of course, I couldn’t tell him much besides what George told me—I wasn’t on that trip, and I hadn’t even read your book then, although I have since.”

  “What was George’s version of that story?” asked Mr. Clemens. “I’ve always wondered what he thought of my little hoax, especially since it was concocted on purpose to mislead him.”

  Hubbard thought for a moment before continuing. “George told that story two or three times that I heard. He’d get all excited about you going after all that money, and talk about how he meant to swindle you out of it, until he found out it was all washed away. Then he’d start moping about how close he’d been to being rich—until he realized you’d been selling him a bill of goods. And then he’d laugh, and slap his knees, and say it was the best joke in the world. Serve me right to think I could count Sam’s chickens before I looked in the henhouse, he used to say. So I suspect you had him pretty well fooled.”

  Mr. Clemens nodded. “Well, that’s gratifying,” he said. “It’d be a shame to invent such a splendid imposition and not fool the person you aimed it at. But I’ve interrupted you, Jack. Go ahead with your story.”

  “Well, Lee told me he’d met someone who’d been there—on the same trip down the river, I mean—and this fellow thought the story was suspicious. Said you’d pulled that business about the gold being in Napoleon out of your hat—after the Gold Dust docked in Memphis, and everybody learned about Napoleon being flooded away. He heard about it the same time you did, he said. So when you claimed the treasure was in Napoleon, he smelled a rat, but he wasn’t in a spot to do anything about it at the time, or so he told Lee. But when he learned you were planning a trip back to the river, he figured that you might be planning to go get the money this time.”

  “Very astute of him; that’s close to the truth. Did Lee Russell say who this other fellow was?”

  Hubbard shook his head gravely. “No, he didn’t, Sam, and I wish he had. Because I’m pretty sure this other fellow was the one that killed him.”

  A ripple of excitement went through the audience, as passengers turned to their neighbors to comment on this new revelation. Mr. Clemens waited a moment for the hubbub to die down, then turned back to Hubbard. “I expect you have a reason for saying that, Jack. But if you don’t know who this person is, why are you so sure he killed Lee Russell?”

  “Yes, that’s a very convenient accusation,” shouted Andrew Dunbar from the front of the audience, waving his reporter’s notebook. “How do we know you didn’t do it, Hubbard? Why are you here under an assumed name if you don’t have anything to hide?”

  “I figured somebody would get to that question sooner or later,” said Hubbard, fixing the reporter with an icy stare. “It’s one of the reasons I haven’t been in any hurry to drop the masquerade. But there’s a good answer, if you’ll be civil enough to hear me out.”

  “Yes, by all means let Jack have his say,” said Captain Fowler. “If he can’t satisfy our questions, he can explain himself to the police in Memphis. This isn’t a courtroom, you know.” Dunbar looked unhappy, but he sat back down, and Mr. Clemens gestured to Hubbard to continue.

  “Lee Russell and I talked a little more, about this and that, although he kept coming back to that treasure, and I could see he was leading up to something. At last, he told me that this other fellow had an idea that he could trick you into telling him where the gold was. By then, I already suspected that tricks was the least of it. So I told him to count me out; I didn’t think there was any gold, just a long story with a surprise ending, and I thought I had him convinced. We talked a little longer, and called it a night.

  “Then, a couple of days later, I got a note telling me about an audition at the Standard Theater on Thirty-third Street, and I went up there the next morning eager to try out. But when I got there, nobody in the theater knew anything about auditions. Well, I was pretty hot at being called uptown for nothing, but once I realized nobody knew what I was talking about, I knew I’d been tricked. All I could think of was to turn around and go home. And when I got home, I found out somebody had broken into my place.”

  “It sounds as if somebody wanted you out of the way,” said Mr. Clemens. “Did you manage to figure out why?”

  “I sure did, and it didn’t take me long, either. They’d only taken one thing, which was my farmer outfit—the false beard and the straw hat I used to wear when I went looking for a game of billiards. Nothing else was touched, and most of it was a lot more valuable, if somebody was looking to pawn it. I didn’t have anything in the way of jewelry or money around the place, but there were things a man who knew where to take them could trade for a few drinks, or a dose of opium in Chinatown.”

  “Why do you imagine anyone would go to all that trouble just to get something of no particular value except to you?”

  “Well, I figured out pretty fast that the only reason anybody would want my old disguise was to impersonate me. And the only person in New York they might want to fool like that was you, Sam. I remembered that Lee Russell talked about tricking you into telling him and his partner where the gold was, and thought, This doesn’t mean any good for Sam. I was mad enough that they’d broken into my place, and madder that they would use my name to trick you. We were friends, Sam—I’d never forgive myself if somebody hurt you when I could have stopped it. So I went to warn you that something was going on.”

  “Ah,” said Mr. Clemens. “That must be when you sent me the note I got at my hotel.”

  Hubbard looked puzzled. “I never sent you any note, Sam. What note do you mean?”

  “Why, this note right here,” said Mr. Clemens, pulling a scrap of paper out of his pocket. “I suppose Lee Russell must have written it, then.”

  “Not likely,” said Hubbard, reaching out his hand for the paper. “Lee was the next thing to illiterate—he could read the pips on a deck of cards, but not much more. When he was looking for a room, I brought home a newspaper for him to look at the advertisements, and he hemmed and hawed and finally asked me to read them to him. I don’t think he could write at all.” He looked down at the paper in his hand and looked back at Mr. Clemens with a surprised expression. “But here’s something—this is Lee Russell’s address on the note. Whoever sent it must have been working with Lee. I’d bet that handwriting is the same as on the note I got inviting me to the bogus audition.”

  “So—Lee Russell’s mysterious partner must have written this,” said Mr. Clemens. “And quite likely that’s the man who murdered him, and murdered Berrigan as well.”

  “Yes, that makes sense,” said Hubbard. “It looks like they wanted to lure you down to Lee’s place, under the pretext that it was for a meeting with me—God only knows what would have happened if you’d gone down there to meet them. That has to be why they stole my disguise, so when the hotel clerk described the man who delivered the note, you’d think I was the one. Lee Russell couldn’t have fooled you very long, beard or no beard.”

  “They took a big chance,” said Mr. Clemens. “What if I had been at the hotel when the note arrived, instead of at a business meeting?”

  “Maybe Lee waited until he saw you leave,” said Hubbard, handing back the note.

  “I suppose so,” said Mr. Clemens. “But let’s get back to your story. What happened next?”

  “Well, first of all, I had to do a good bit of sleuthing before I learned you were staying at the Union Square Hotel. I fast-stepped it up to the hotel, and got there just as you came in the door. I thou
ght I was home safe. But before I could say anything, young Mr. Cabot called you, and you started talking to that detective, Berrigan. Then Mr. Cabot said something about murder, and I knew I better figure out what was going on before I stuck my neck into a noose.

  “The three of you went upstairs, so I slipped fifty cents to the bellboy to find out what room you were in, and went up to see what I could hear through the transom. Well, I knew I was in trouble when I found out that somebody with a false red beard and Mr. Mark Twain’s address in his pocket had been murdered. Of course, you figured it was me that was murdered—you couldn’t have known I was standing right outside your door, listening to you. But I didn’t dare come in—I knew I’d be the main suspect the minute I heard you say my name. I didn’t know whether Lee Russell or his partner was the dead man, but I figured it had to be one or the other. And I thought there was a good chance that the killer had left that beard there to make it look like I was the murderer.

  “Then a room maid came along the hallway and I couldn’t just stand there without drawing attention. I walked down the hall as if I were headed for the stairway, meaning to turn back and eavesdrop some more. And then that detective came out of the room, and I was afraid to look him in the eye. So I just kept going right down to the street, and when I got there I didn’t know what to do next.”

  Hubbard shifted his cane from hand to hand, staring off into the distance, then resumed his story. “I decided that my best chance to clear myself was to follow you and try to talk to you, Sam. From what I’d learned, somebody had decided that your story about the gold was true and meant to get his hands on it. He couldn’t trap you in New York, so he would probably follow you down the river and try to steal the gold after you recovered it. He’d already killed one person, and likely wouldn’t balk at killing again. I couldn’t just walk away and leave you in that kind of danger. To tell the truth, I didn’t know if Lee Russell was the killer or the corpse. It wasn’t until we got on the boat and Lee didn’t show up that I felt sure that Lee had to be the dead man.”

  “I can understand why you were confused,” said Mr. Clemens. “For a while, I thought you were the dead man, Jack. But why didn’t you tell me your story as soon as we were out of New York? You had plenty of chances to come up and start talking; instead, you went through the charade of Major Demayne and that awful poem with messages hidden in it. Why, Jack?”

  “Well, Sam, that was my plan at first, just to come up to you and tell you the whole story.” Hubbard shuffled his feet and looked at the floor. “Then I saw you on the train talking with the detective, and I began to worry. I was afraid he’d think I was the murderer. If he’d convinced you of that, I might not get a chance to talk to you. And I knew the police wouldn’t give me a fair chance to tell my story. So I lay low, trying to figure out a way to get your attention without tipping my hand, and I came up with the idea of the poem. Now I wish I’d just come forward, because I might have saved that Berrigan fellow if I’d said the right thing right away.”

  “I wouldn’t blame myself if I were you, Jack,” said Mr. Clemens. “Maybe Berrigan would be alive if I’d looked at your poem earlier, but that’s as much my doing as yours. Now, the best we can do is to try to catch the killer before he has a chance to hurt anyone else.”

  “And how do we know this fellow here isn’t the killer?” said a stern-looking man from the back of the auditorium. Half the audience swiveled around in their seats to look back at him, while the rest seemed to be staring at Hubbard. “His story is as phony as anything I’ve heard in years. Why should we believe in some mystery man, when Hubbard fits the picture so well? I say we hand him to the Memphis police and be done with it.”

  “Yes, give him to the police,” shouted Knepper, and the audience rumbled its approval.

  Mr. Clemens raised his hands and waited for silence. “I’ve never seen a crowd so generous in accusing people of murder,” he said. “If this goes on much longer, the Memphis police will have to hang everyone aboard the boat. First you were all convinced that Cabot was the killer, then you were ready to convict Ed McPhee and the Throckmortons, and now you want to put Jack Hubbard’s neck in the noose. And once again, I have to tell you that you’re wrong.”

  “Who is it, then?” shouted Andrew Dunbar. “Or are you just distracting everyone until we get to port by pretending that you know?”

  “Up until now, I wasn’t really sure,” Mr. Clemens admitted. “I had a pretty good idea who wasn’t the killer, but it wasn’t until a few minutes ago that all the pieces of the puzzle finally fit together and I figured out who it was. And of course, it was the man I should have suspected all along.”

  28

  Mr. Clemens’s announcement that he knew who killed Berrigan brought the audience to an expectant hush. The ladies even stopped fanning themselves, lest they miss the next word. While the audience absorbed his statement, Mr. Clemens stuck his hands in his pockets, as he often did during his lectures, and let his gaze wander about the auditorium while Jack Hubbard returned to his seat. The passengers looked nervously at their neighbors, as if they had finally realized that one of their number was a murderer. I tried to read the expressions on their faces, but without success—perhaps the killer believed that Mr. Clemens would accuse someone else, or possibly he intended to bluff his way out of the accusation if it came his way.

  Finally Mr. Clemens broke the silence. “It’s funny how getting on a boat and traveling makes people act differently than they do at home,” he said. “There’s something magical about boats—I felt it when I was a boy dreaming about being a pilot, and I’ve seen it a thousand times since. I’m sure all of you have felt some of it. Travel’s very seductive. It makes people look back at their everyday life and wonder why they put up with it, and sometimes they decide they won’t put up with it anymore. I’ve seen it happen to the most respectable folks, businessmen and judges and even ministers. And I think something like that happened to Paul Berrigan.

  “Berrigan was a police detective, a man with ten or fifteen years on a dangerous job, grubbing through the dirt of other people’s lives. He must have seen some dreadful tragedies, and even worse miscarriages of justice—innocent people irrevocably harmed, and men he knew to be guilty as the devil walk away free because of some idiotic loophole in the law, or because a witness wouldn’t tell the truth. A policeman gets mighty disillusioned after seeing this kind of thing year in and year out, and knowing he can’t do anything about it. It’s no wonder so many of them become cynics—or go bad.”

  Mr. Clemens shook his head. “And suddenly, after all that, Berrigan got an assignment that must have looked like a dream. It started out looking like a run-of-the-mill stabbing in a New York alley—the kind of murder a policeman sees dozens of in a career, and never has much chance of solving. The only thing at all different about this one was that the victim had a famous man’s name and address in his pocket—my name. Naturally enough, Berrigan came to visit me, to see if I knew anything that might help him. He probably didn’t expect much to come of it—there are dozens of clues in any case, and most of them aren’t worth a wooden nickel. But without knowing it, he’d stumbled on the mother lode—a lost treasure! And I was the only man who knew where it was hidden. Of course, I didn’t tell him that. I was already worried that somebody might be on my trail, planning to take it away from me.

  “As it turned out, I was right. You’ve heard Jack Hubbard tell about Lee Russell and his mysterious partner hatching a plot to lure me to an out-of-the-way place and force me to tell them where the gold was hidden. The two of them fell out, and Lee Russell ended up dead. Cabot, my secretary, saw Russell at one of my lectures a few days before the killing. My guess is that Russell heard me spin a few tall tales and decided the story about the gold was a hoax—just as I meant everyone to believe. So Russell decided to back out of the plot, while his partner wanted to follow it through, and it ended up with Russell being murdered.”

  “That makes a certain amount of sense,�
� said the captain. “What I can’t figure out is why Lee Russell would have your name and address in his pocket. Jack told us Lee couldn’t read, so it couldn’t have done him any good.”

  Mr. Clemens nodded. “It had me puzzled for a while, too,” he said. “I knew Lee Russell was illiterate—Ed McPhee mentioned it when Berrigan showed him a picture of Russell’s corpse. It wasn’t until just now, when Jack was talking, that I realized that Russell must have been embarrassed to let anyone know about it—remember how Jack said he ‘hemmed and hawed’ before admitting he couldn’t read the newspaper ads? So when his partner handed Lee my address, he never admitted that he couldn’t read it—he was afraid his partner would think he was stupid, and make fun of him, if he found out. He just took the paper and pretended he could understand it. He probably got some stranger, a shopkeeper or somebody else he didn’t mind knowing that he couldn’t read, to tell him what it said.

  “I do know one thing: it’s a good thing he kept that address. Without it, the police wouldn’t have thought to tell me about the murder. And if Berrigan hadn’t shown it to me, and if I hadn’t noticed that the handwriting was the same as on the note asking me to meet Farmer Jack downtown, there’s a good chance I would have gone downtown to that apartment, expecting to meet Jack—and that might have been the last anyone ever saw of me. By keeping that little slip of paper, Lee Russell probably saved my life. If for no other reason, I feel I ought to bring the man who killed him to justice.”