The Meriwether Murder

by Malcolm Shuman

  Clothes rustling.

  Someone was standing between the bed and the closet, probably going through my things.

  But surely he’d heard the shower stop. Why hadn’t that alerted him? Maybe he was really just outside the door, waiting for me to step out.

  Maybe, for that matter, there were two of them.

  I took a deep breath. It didn’t matter: I couldn’t stay in here forever. I raised the vitamins in my right hand and reached slowly for the doorknob with my left.

  Count to three and then do it.

  With a wrenching movement, I jerked the door inward and then, with my left arm lifted to block a blow, jumped into the bedroom with the vitamins ready to fly.

  “I’ve never been threatened with One-A-Day,” Pepper said, arms crossed.

  She was standing beside the bed, a whimsical expression on her face, and her smile broadened as I felt my face turn red.

  THIRTEEN

  “Are you just going to drip water on the floor?” she asked.

  “How did you get in?”

  “You left your door unlocked. I heard the water going and I guess I let my curiosity get the better of me.”

  “What would your doctor friend say about you being in my bedroom?”

  She smiled. “You mean Fitz.”

  “Fitz?”

  “Do you remember that consulting job I did last year at Pirate’s Landing?”

  “The one you stole from under us?” I asked.

  “Don’t be jealous,” she said. “I underbid you.”

  “How could I forget?”

  “The subdivision was owned by Fitzhugh Griffin.”

  “And?”

  Her smile widened. “I did it for a hundred dollars.”

  “A hundred dol—” I went mute, mouth half open. “Four acres? With a known prehistoric site?”

  “I took a loss to get a track record for this area.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Don’t be miffed. I can charge anything I want. And he wasn’t one of your scum-sucking developers; he was building a retirement community for old people. I did a good job.”

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  “Anyway,” she said, “that’s how I met Fitz.”

  “Fitz,” I said.

  “He’s a very nice man.”

  “I’ll bet.” A surge of jealousy twisted my stomach.

  “He liked the report I did for him and we got to be friends.”

  I waited. “And?”

  “He even took me to the symphony last year, when they played Schubert.”

  “I didn’t know you liked classical music.”

  “This is different. Fitz is so intelligent, so knowledgeable. They played Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony and Fitz told me how it was only in two movements instead of four, sort of like Schubert’s life, because he died when he was only thirty-one, and when I heard the music I wanted to cry and …”

  I could imagine Fitz handing her a silk handkerchief.

  “… he told me if I ever needed anything to come to him.”

  “What did you need?” I asked.

  “Fitz is professor emeritus of medicine at the LSU medical school. His specialization is geriatric psychiatry.”

  “Emeritus?” I asked. “You mean he’s retired?”

  “Of course. He’s seventy-three years old. But his mind is as sharp as a needle.”

  I started to relax. Although old age wasn’t an absolute guarantee against licentiousness.

  “So what do you need a geriatrician for?” I asked. “That’s for the diseases of old people.” But even as I said it I began to have a glimmer of the answer.

  “I wanted him to talk to Ouida,” she said.

  “You wanted …?”

  “I wanted him to go with me to see her, as a friend, and form his own opinion. I want an independent judgment of whether she’s competent.”

  “You probably just broke fifteen different laws.”

  “If that nice old lady is being kept in a nursing home by that crooked nephew of hers, the law needs to be broken,” she said.

  “And it didn’t bother your friend Fitz that he might be getting into trouble?”

  “Fitz said he’d given up his license to practice medicine when he retired and there wasn’t much they could do to a man his age. Anyway, it wasn’t an official examination: I just wanted his impression.”

  I was beaten and she knew it.

  “So what did he say?” I asked.

  “He said he didn’t see anything wrong with her. He asked her questions about her past and then about recent things and he asked her what kind of activities she liked, and when he was finished he told me he thought he could get her attorney to agree to a formal hearing on her competence.”

  “Formal hearing.”

  “Sure.” She nodded at my towel. “But maybe we want to talk about it downstairs.”

  Damn.

  Much later, when she was gone and I was tired of cursing myself for letting her go, I fell into bed. I dreamed of a pirogue, gliding across the lake. Pepper was with me, seated in the bow, except that it wasn’t Pepper, because she had long black hair that flowed down her back. There was a splash in the water behind me and I turned around. When I looked back at the bow of the dugout Pepper was gone, and I wasn’t sure she’d ever really been there.

  I was calling her name, yelling soundlessly into the wilderness of swamp, when the jangling of the telephone shook me out of my dream.

  I groped for the receiver, almost dropping it.

  “Hello?”

  “Alan?” It was Esme’s voice. “I’m sorry to bother you this late.”

  I glanced at the bedside clock. Eleven-thirty. “What’s up?”

  “It’s Shelby. He’s here with me.”

  I tried to imagine Shelby and Esmerelda.

  “That’s your business.”

  “Alan, don’t be dense. Shelby came here to do research. That’s why I’m calling.”

  “About his research?”

  “Yes, for heaven’s sake.” There was a muffled sound, as if she’d put her hand over the phone. “Look, you really ought to come over.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, Alan, as I’ve been trying to tell you for the last two minutes, Shelby has finished his research, or, at least, enough of it, and we thought you and Pepper would want to know. She is there, isn’t she?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then you’re a fool. Call her and then both of you get over to my place, now.”

  “Because Shelby finished his research,” I repeated.

  “Because he finished his research and he has the answer.”

  “What answer?” I asked.

  “Alan, don’t act dull. Shelby thinks he knows the identity of our friend Louis.”

  FOURTEEN

  It was almost one in the morning and a cold fog hugged the ground. Pepper had driven over, still half asleep, after getting my call, and now she slid her car into the driveway of Esme’s condo on the lake. Across the dark water a few dim lights winked, but otherwise the night was black. The pale square of her picture window was the only sign of human life in the two-story complex.

  “This better be worth it,” Pepper mumbled as we hurried across the lawn. “I was having such a nice dream.”

  We mounted the concrete stairs to the second floor and I’d just raised my fist to knock when the door opened.

  Esme stepped aside, gave us a smirk, and then closed the door behind us. The room was hung with the paintings of artists she expected would one day be worth money, and there was a stone fireplace against the far wall. One side of the room was a bookshelf and on the other side was a bar.

  Shelby Deeds rose from the sofa as we entered and set his coffee cup down on the glass-topped coffee table. A welter of books and documents littered the sofa, coffee table, and rug. The wrinkles in his face seemed deeper in the bright light of the floor lamp and his sad eyes had
retreated even farther into his skull. The usual flowery aroma of Esme’s apartment had been destroyed by the smell of tobacco, and a crystal ashtray on the coffee table was filled with butts.

  “I’m sorry to call you out at such a late hour,” he said. “But Esme said you’d never forgive either one of us if we didn’t tell you as soon as we were sure.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t guess there’s some coffee handy?”

  “There’s a fresh pot in the kitchen,” Esme said and vanished into the back.

  “The handwriting’s the same,” Deeds said, but I didn’t know if he was talking to me, because there was an odd glaze in his eyes. “I’d be willing to stake my reputation on it.”

  “Handwriting?” I asked.

  Esme came back with a pot, two coffee cups, cream, and sugar on, of course, a silver salver.

  “Sit,” she commanded, pointing to a pair of woven cane chairs.

  Pepper and I sat down and fixed our coffees. “Now can you tell us what’s going on?” I asked.

  “It was murder,” Esme said gravely. “Except that he wasn’t really killed.”

  “Flowers?” Pepper asked, her sleepiness vanishing.

  “No,” Esme declared. “The man buried on top of the Indian mound with the Hardin family. The man without a past.”

  “Somebody tried to murder him,” I repeated. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  Shelby Deeds nodded. “Exactly.”

  “You’ve found a record, then,” Pepper said.

  Deeds nodded again. “Oh, yes. We even have his picture.”

  Now I was awake.

  “What?”

  Deeds reached into the papers and handed me the photocopy of a portrait.

  Pepper and I huddled together, staring at it.

  The man in the painting was in his mid-thirties, dressed in a black coat, with a white cravat. Dark hair spilled carelessly down over a high forehead, and intelligent, deep-set eyes stared into the distance. His nose was straight and aquiline, his chin strong, with just the hint of a dimple. But what got my attention were his lips, slightly pursed as if he had just tasted something and was unsure whether it met his approval.

  “Where did you find this?” I asked, incredulous.

  Deeds gestured toward the books. “In these. It’s all documented. You only have to look in an encyclopedia for the basics.”

  Now I was sitting on the edge of my chair.

  “Then this isn’t just some unknown traveler.”

  Deeds shook his head.

  “No.”

  Pepper looked up from the picture to Deeds and then over at me, and the truth began to hit us both at the same time.

  “My God,” I heard myself say.

  Shelby Deeds smiled grimly. “It happened on October tenth, 1809, at a place called Grinder’s Stand, about seventy miles west of Nashville. The accounts say he died early the next morning, either by suicide or murder. He’s buried there. Or somebody is buried there. It’s a national monument today.”

  “Louis,” Pepper and I said together. “The spelling in the will …”

  Esme smiled like a cat. “Yes. The second governor of the Upper Louisiana Territory. Thomas Jefferson’s protégé. The man who made the greatest exploration in American history, who traveled all the way to the Pacific Ocean and back with William Clark. Meriwether Lewis.”

  I got up slowly. “Wait a minute …”

  Esme held up a hand. “You probably think we’ve lost our minds.” Her hand was shaking and I didn’t know if it was from excitement or the caffeine. “But you know we wouldn’t invent something like this and we wouldn’t have called you here if we weren’t sure.”

  Deeds reached for his coffee cup and drank slowly, then set the cup down on the table and took out his cigarette pack.

  “When you came to me on Saturday, what you said rang a bell. But I couldn’t put my finger on it. After all, Meriwether Lewis was supposed to have died two years before this man turned up at Désirée. But there were some odd coincidences—the need to send a message to the president, for example—and the name was interesting. It was L-O-U-I-S on what was written about him, but in the one document in his own handwriting, he spelled it differently. I only knew of one Lewis who figured in the history of that era. Not to say there may not have been others. There probably were. But there was only one who could be checked historically. There was only one person who had samples of his handwriting readily available, that I could compare with the copy of the will that Esme brought me.”

  “You have copies of Meriwether Lewis’s handwriting?” I asked.

  The old man smiled and held up a book.

  “It’s not that hard. Some years ago, the writer Vardis Fisher published a study of Lewis’s death, with all the evidence he could find for and against the theory that Lewis killed himself. To illustrate his case, he reproduced a number of letters Lewis wrote toward the end of his life, to show the extent to which his handwriting had changed as the result of the pressures he was under just before he died.” He opened the book to its midsection and passed it to me. I saw a plate that was the photograph of a handwritten document. “I drove to Baton Rouge today to see the will in the library collection at firsthand. An historian always prefers original documents. Then all I had to do was compare the will and the examples in this book.”

  “They were the same?” I asked.

  Deeds shrugged and lit his cigarette. “Let’s just say close enough to make a believer out of me. But make up your own minds.”

  Pepper and I compared the various sheets of slanting cursive, the well-formed letters.

  “Notice the backward hooks on d’s and some of the e’s,” Deeds said. “And the way some of the terminal s’s sort of die off in midstroke.”

  Pepper nodded. “It looks the same to me. But I’m not an expert on handwriting.”

  “Nor am I,” Deeds admitted. “There are differences, but we’re also looking at fifty years of time. The handwriting of the will seems more, well, deteriorated, you might say. Nevertheless, it’s the sort of thing that requires the eye of a forensics handwriting expert. I know a man who used to work for the FBI as a specialist in questioned documents. He and I worked together as expert witnesses on an old land-claim case a few years back. I hope you don’t mind if I contact him.”

  “Not at all,” I said. “If it will settle the matter.”

  Deeds sighed and blew out a pungent cloud of smoke. “I wish it were that easy. In the sixties a writer named Clifford Irving made a fortune with a diary he said was written by Howard Hughes. Several top handwriting experts vouched for it. A major magazine paid a million or so for the scoop. Trouble was, Irving forged it himself.”

  “I remember something about that,” I said. “There were a lot of red faces.”

  “Indeed there were.”

  “And even if your expert says it’s real,” I pointed out, “that doesn’t explain how Lewis managed to convince people he was killed and then showed up at Désirée two years later without anybody knowing who he was or recognizing him during the trip.”

  “That raises another issue,” Pepper said. “Just how was he supposed to have been killed?”

  “And what was he doing on the Natchez Trace?” I asked.

  Deeds got up slowly, limped over to the window, and gazed out over the dark lake.

  “Lewis and Clark returned from their exploration, in 1806, famous. They went east, so that Lewis could make a report to President Jefferson. The expedition was something Jefferson had planned for a long time. Even before he acquired the area as part of the Louisiana Purchase he’d planned to send explorers to the northwest to see if there was a water route to the Pacific and to try to keep Britain and Spain from edging out American trading interests.”

  He turned around from the window and faced us.

  “He chose Meriwether Lewis because Lewis was a soldier, a fellow Virginian, and because Lewis had been Jefferson’s private secretary. So Jefferson had a chance to prepare the young ma
n and observe him closely, and it seems that he made the right choice.”

  We waited while Deeds drew on his cigarette. Somewhere in the distance I heard a siren, the sound keening over the waters and then dying away.

  “The expedition was a great success. In twenty-eight months, Lewis and Clark took forty-five men across an unexplored continent. They saw new animal species and described Indian tribes that other Americans had never heard of. It was a fantastic accomplishment.” The sad eyes looked away. “But as soon as Lewis got back things started to go wrong for him.”

  “Too much success?” Pepper asked.

  “It’s hard to say,” Deeds said. “Meriwether Lewis was an unusual man. He could act decisively in a life-or-death situation, command a body of men in a wilderness, but he had trouble making lasting relationships with women. He never married and yet never gave up hope that he’d somehow find his soul mate. He was a meticulous observer who could write copious notes about animal behavior and describe zoological and botanical specimens, and yet he could never settle down and publish the journal that he’d promised Jefferson, and that Jefferson had promised others, would be one of the great accomplishments of the expedition.”

  “But he kept a journal,” Pepper said. “I remember seeing it in bookstores.”

  “Certainly. But he was sporadic in writing it. There are gaps in his journal, some of them lasting for months. We don’t know if he never wrote those sections or whether he did and the originals are lost.”

  “Odd,” I said. “So a lost journal could pop up at some point.”

  “It’s quite possible,” Deeds said. “But in nearly two hundred years nothing has surfaced. Whatever the case, Jefferson needed to have the journals of the expedition published to justify the tremendous amount of public money he’d spent on the trip. Lewis kept promising to deliver the draft to the printer and never came through. It had to be done by others, using Lewis’s original materials, after Lewis was dead.”

  “Sounds like a lot of graduate students who never get their theses written,” Esme said.

  “I’m sure there were reasons for delay in the first months after getting back to the East after almost three years away from civilization,” Deeds said. “But after some weeks, after Lewis had seen his mother and visited Jefferson, the president appointed him governor of the Upper Louisiana Territory, which had its capital in St. Louis. I suppose Jefferson thought this wasn’t only a fitting reward, but also a chance for Lewis to get his journals into shape. But Lewis seemed to be in no hurry to get back there. And when he finally did go, he immediately fell afoul of the man who’d been in charge during his absence, Frederick Bates. Bates was the territorial secretary, sort of a lieutenant governor, and he and Lewis became bitter enemies.”