The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits Volume 1 (The Mammoth Book Series)

by Mike Ashley

  “Because,” I replied hotly, “the toy rabbit was the only object she could have looked at!”

  “Pardon me; but it was not. You several times informed me that the bed curtains were closely drawn together on three sides. They were drawn on all but the ‘long’ side toward the door. Therefore the ideal reasoner, without having seen the room, may safely say that the curtains were drawn together at the foot of the bed?”

  “Yes, true!”

  “After looking fixedly at this point represented by the toy, Mme Thevenet then ‘rolls her eyes all round her’ – in your phrase. May we assume that she wishes the curtains to be drawn back, so that she may see something beyond the bed?”

  “It is – possible, yes!”

  “It is more than possible, as I shall demonstrate. Let us direct our attention, briefly, to the incongruous phenomenon of the barometer on another wall. The barometer indicates, ‘Rain; cold.’”

  Here M. Perley’s thin shoulders drew together under the old military cloak.

  “Well,” he said, “the cold is on its way. Yet this day, for April, has been warm outside and indoors, oppressively hot?”

  “Yes! Of course!”

  “You yourself,” continued M. Perley, inspecting his fingernails, “told me what was directly opposite the foot of the bed. Let us suppose that the bed curtains are drawn open. Mme Thevenet, in her nearly seated position, is looking downward. What would she have seen?”

  “The fireplace!” I cried. “The grate of the fireplace!”

  “Already we have a link with the weather. And what, as you have specifically informed me, was in the grate of the fireplace?”

  “An unlighted coal fire!”

  “Exactly. And what is essential for the composition of such a fire? We need coal; we need wood; but primarily and above all, we need . . .”

  “Paper!” I cried.

  “In the cupboard of that room,” said M. Perley, with his disdainful little smile, “was a very crumpled and begrimed (mark that; not dusty) copy of yesterday’s New York Sun. To light fires is the most common, and indeed the best, use for our daily press. That copy had been used to build yesterday’s fire. But something else, during the night, was substituted for it. You yourself remarked the extraordinarily dirty state of Mme Thevenet’s hands.”

  M. Perley swallowed the brandy, and his flush deepened.

  “Sir,” he said loudly, “you will find the will crumpled up, with ends most obviously protruding, under the coal and wood in the fireplace grate. Even had anyone taken the fire to pieces, he would have found only what appeared to be dirty blank paper, written side undermost, which could never be a valuable will. It was too self-evident to be seen. – Now go!”

  “Go?” I echoed stupidly.

  M. Perley rose from his chair.

  “Go, I say!” he shouted, with an even wilder eye. “The Jezebel could not light that fire. It was too warm, for one thing; and all day there were police officers with instructions that an outsider must touch nothing. But now? Mme Thevenet kept warning you that the fire must not be lighted, or the will would be destroyed!”

  “Will you await me here?” I called over my shoulder.

  “Yes, yes! And perhaps there will be peace for the wretched girl with – with the lung trouble.”

  Even as I ran out of the door I saw him, grotesque and pitiful, slump across the table. Hope, rising and surging, seemed to sweep me along like the crack of the cabman’s whip. But when I reached my destination, hope receded.

  The shaggy police officer was just descending the front steps.

  “None of us coming back here, Mr. Lafayette!” he called cheerily. “Old Mrs. What’s-her-name went and burned that will at a candle last night. – Here, what’s o’clock?”

  The front door was unlocked. I raced through that dark house, and burst into the rear bedroom.

  The corpse still lay in the big, gloomy bed. Every candle had flickered almost down to its socket. The police officer’s clasp knife, forgotten since he had dropped it, still lay on bare boards. But the Jezebel was there.

  She knelt on the hearth, with the tin box of lucifer matches she had brought there earlier. The match spurted, a bluish fire; I saw her eagerness; she held the match to the grate.

  “A lucifer,” I said, “in the hand of a Jezebel!”

  And I struck her away from the grate, so that she reeled against a chair and fell. Large coals, small coals rattled down in puffs of dust as I plunged my hands into the unlighted fire. Little sticks, sawed sticks; and I found it there: crumpled parchment sheets, but incontestably madame’s will.

  “M. Duroc!” I called. “M. Duroc!”

  You and I, my brother Maurice, have fought the Citizen-King with bayonets as we now fight the upstart Bonapartist; we need not be ashamed of tears. I confess, then, that the tears overran my eyes and blinded me. I scarcely saw M. Duroc as he hurried into the room.

  Certainly I did not see the Jezebel stealthily pick up the police officer’s knife. I noticed nothing at all until she flew at me, and stabbed me in the back.

  Peace, my brother: I have assured you all is well. At that time, faith, I was not much conscious of any hurt. I bade M. Duroc, who was trembling, to wrench out the knife; I borrowed his roomy greatcoat to hide the blood; I must hurry, hurry, hurry back to that little table under the gas jet.

  I planned it all on my way back. M. Perley, apparently a stranger in this country, disliked it and was evidently very poor even in France. But we are not precisely paupers. Even with his intense pride, he could not refuse (for such a service) a sum which would comfort him for the rest of his life.

  Back I plunged into the saloon, and hurried down it. Then I stopped. The little round table by the pillar, under the flaring gas jet, was empty.

  How long I stood there I cannot tell. The back of my shirt, which at first had seemed full of blood, now stuck to the borrowed greatcoat. All of a sudden I caught sight of the fat-faced bartender with the gold teeth, who had been on service that afternoon and had returned now. As a mark of respect, he came out from behind the bar-counter to greet me.

  “Where is the gentleman who was sitting at that table?”

  I pointed to it. My voice, in truth, must have sounded so hoarse and strange that he mistook it for anger.

  “Don’t you worry about that, monseer!” said he reassuringly. “That’s been tended to! We threw the drunken tramp out of here!”

  “You threw . . .”

  “Right bang in the gutter. Had to crawl along in it before he could stand up.” My bartender’s face was pleased and vicious. “Ordered a bottle of best brandy, and couldn’t pay for it.” The face changed again. “Goddelmighty, monseer, what’s wrong?”

  “I ordered that brandy.”

  “He didn’t say so, when the waiter brought me over. Just looked me up and down, crazy-like, and said a gentleman would give his I.O.U. Gentleman!”

  “M. Perley,” I said, restraining an impulse to kill that bartender, “is a friend of mine. He departs for France early tomorrow morning. Where is his hotel? Where can I find him?”

  “Perley!” sneered my companion. “That ain’t even his real name, I hearn tell. Gits high-and-mighty ideas from upper Broadway. But his real name’s on the I.O.U.”

  A surge of hope, once more, almost blinded me. “Did you keep that I.O.U.?”

  “Yes, I kepp it,” growled the bartender, fishing in his pocket. “God knows why, but I kepp it.”

  And at last, Maurice, I triumphed!

  True, I collapsed from my wound; and the fever would not let me remember that I must be at the dock when the Parnassus steam packet departed from New York next morning. I must remain here, shut up in a hotel room and unable to sleep at night, until I can take ship for home. But where I failed, you can succeed. He was to leave on the morrow by the Parnassus for England, and then for France – so he told me. You can find him – in six months at the most. In six months, I give you my word, he will be out of misery for ever!

>   “I.O.U.,” reads the little slip, “for one bottle of your best brandy, forty-five cents. Signed: Edgar A. Poe.”

  I remain, Maurice,

  Your affectionate brother,

  Armand

  THE GOLDEN NUGGET POKER GAME

  Edward D. Hoch

  Edward Hoch (b. 1930), has written a few novels, but is best known as a short-story writer and must be one of the most prolific writers of crime and mystery short fiction of all time, with over seven hundred stories published since his first in 1955. Despite this prodigious output Hoch can still bring a verve and originality to each new story. Hoch’s diversity is maintained by the many series characters he has created, amongst them Simon Ark, Captain Leopold, Nick Velvet and Jeffrey Rand. His stories related by Dr. Sam Hawthorne are technically historical mysteries, as Hawthorne, a New England country doctor, recounts cases from his youth in the 1920s and 30s. But more appropriate for this volume are the stories featuring western gunman Ben Snow. The series spans the years 1881 to 1905 and ranges throughout the wild west and as far north as the Yukon, in western Canada, the setting for the following story.

  Ben Snow reached for the freshly dealt cards and picked them up carefully. It wasn’t the sort of game where one made quick moves that could be misconstrued. Glancing around at the other five players, he decided he had never seen a more unsavory group of men in one place, and that included Dodge City at its worst.

  The poker game in the back room at the Golden Nugget had been going on, some said, since the saloon opened the previous summer in one of the wooden shacks that had gone up almost overnight along the main street in Dawson. The saloon was well named because in that summer of ’98 gold nuggets were as acceptable a currency as silver dollars in the bars and sporting houses of the Yukon Territory. Most places had small scales for weighing and evaluating nuggets on the spot.

  Ben Snow hadn’t traveled north to prospect for gold. He’d come as something of a paid bodyguard to a prospector named Race Johnson, who knew a great deal about panning for gold but very little about gunfighting. Even at the age of 38, Ben’s reputation with a six-shooter was as firm as ever. People rarely mistook him for Billy the Kid as they had in his younger days, but they still came to him when there was need of a keen mind and a fast gun.

  The journey north with Race Johnson had begun in the early spring, a full year after the first wave of the gold rush started. They’d sailed from San Francisco on a tramp steamer jammed to the gunwales with gold-seekers, following the inside channel through the Alaska islands to Skagaway. From there it was a back-breaking journey north to Dawson, starting with a rocky portage over the Chilkoot Pass for which they hired Indians to assist them.

  Already some of their fellow passengers were turning back, their meager funds exhausted. After the portage of twenty-five miles, Johnson and Ben had to hire a boat for the journey across Lake Linderman to the headwaters of the Yukon River. Dawson was still more than two hundred miles downriver and it wasn’t a pleasant voyage. Ben would have preferred a bucking horse to the rapids they encountered.

  It was June when they finally reached Dawson, steering the boat between the occasional ice floes that were a reminder of the hard winter too recently departed. They had camped along the way in abandoned cabins or on the boat itself, seeing fewer and fewer people the farther north they went. That was why the first sight of Dawson itself came as something of a shock. It was a city of tents and shacks, its population mushroomed in a year’s time to nearly fifty thousand people. Its muddy main street was lined with saloons like the Golden Nugget, in which the prospectors ate and drank, bought their provisions, and spent a few hours with hard-eyed sporting ladies. Most saloons even rented rooms by the week or month.

  A gold nugget – and more often gold dust – was the common currency, and there were professional gamblers like those at the Golden Nugget to grab as much of it as they could. What was left in the prospectors’ pockets usually went for supplies, in an economy where a plate of ham and eggs could cost $3.50.

  Although dance-hall girls frequented the saloons, the Northwest Mounted Police did their best to keep the prostitutes across the river in an area variously called Louse Town or Paradise Alley. It was reached by a rope bridge not far from the point where the Klondike River branched off from the Yukon. A better bridge for wagons and horses was a mile upriver.

  Race and Ben quickly learned of two important events which had occurred during their eight-week journey. On April 25th the United States Congress had declared war on Spain. And of more immediate importance, on June 13th the Yukon Territory had joined the Canadian Confederation.

  It was Sam Wellman, owner of the Golden Nugget, who explained the importance of this action to them. “This place is like the end of the world, and until now we were our own law. With this Confederation business, the Mounted Police have more power. They’re corralling prostitutes and even arresting some of the gamblers. Dawson will never be the same.”

  “Even a town at the end of the world has to have laws,” Ben pointed out.

  Sam Wellman was a big man who liked to make his own laws. He pointed angrily.

  “I’ve had a poker game going in the back room ever since I opened a year ago. They gonna tell me to close it down?”

  Race Johnson had his own rules as well. “Look here, Sam – if these Mounties are anything like the cops back home, a few dollars or some gold dust will have them looking the other way.”

  Wellman was inclined to agree. “But you get all sorts. There’s a Sergeant Baxter in charge here and I haven’t quite figured him out. If I offered him a little money he might take it. Or he might lock me up for attempted bribery. When I figure out which, I’ll know what to do.”

  Sam Wellman rarely sat in on his never-ending poker game. Ben didn’t, either, at first. But it soon became obvious that there was little point in accompanying Johnson to the creek every day. Dawson’s diversions were limited to women, booze, and cards, and after considering those possibilities Ben started sitting in on the game.

  The prospectors who gambled were mostly the newcomers, those who hadn’t yet made the acquaintance of the professional cardsharps like Yancy Booth who made their living off them. Of the five men grouped around the table with Ben the first evening in early July, he had to admit Yancy was the most respectable in appearance, with a string tie and black coat that would have made a banker proud. Still, after a few days of poker with him, Ben knew him to be totally ruthless. After he wiped out a tough-looking prospector named Grogan, winning everything the man possessed and reducing him to actual tears, Ben decided he’d had enough for the night.

  As he left the table, a bar girl named Tess approached him. “Want to try your luck at my place, Mister?”

  “Where would that be?” Ben sat down on a bar stool.

  “Across the river in Paradise Alley.”

  “I don’t trust that bridge.”

  She laughed and slapped his knee. “I’ll carry you across.”

  “Have a drink with me and I’ll think about it.”

  “Fair enough. Give me a whiskey, Pete.”

  The bartender’s name was Pete Waters and Ben knew he kept a shotgun behind the bar. He wondered if it had ever been used.

  “Here you are,” Pete said, sliding the whiskey down to Tess.

  “How long you been here?” Ben asked the girl. She was prettier than some of the others, with dark hair that framed a soft, inquisitive face.

  “I came up last August. It’s been almost a year.”

  “How are the winters here?”

  “Cold, but not as snowy as you’d expect. We only had about fifty inches of snow all this winter. I’m used to more than that back in the States. But you can get a frost here in late August, and they last till early June. Summer’s nice – usually in the sixties like today – but it’s too short.”

  “You like it here at the Nugget?”

  She shrugged. “Sam’s good to me. All the bars got their own girls and most don’t like
outsiders floating around. I been watching you. How come you’re not out panning for gold with the rest of them?” she asked.

  “I’m here with Race Johnson. You might say I’m his traveling companion,” Ben explained.

  That brought a short, sharp laugh from Tess. “Bodyguard, you mean. Or hired gunfighter. How’s he doing?”

  “He brought in a small nugget yesterday.”

  “He should go farther up the Klondike, toward Bonanza Creek. That’s where the first gold was found two summers ago. There are lots of little cabins up there he could use.”

  “He might do that, but then I’d have to go with him. I prefer staying in Dawson if I can, at least for now.”

  She took that as an opening to renew her invitation. “Sure you don’t want to come over to Paradise Alley with me? If you’re gonna stay in Dawson for the winter you’ll need a warm place when the temperature hits twenty below.”

  “That’s all the persuasion I needed,” Ben said.

  She grinned, happy with her conquest. “You can buy a bottle of whiskey from Pete to bring along if you want.”

  “Sounds like a fine idea.”

  There was still plenty of daylight left in the long northern summer and Ben followed her across the rope bridge without difficulty. Paradise Alley was composed of a number of wooden shacks built close together.

  Several young women called out to Tess as they arrived and one came to meet them.

  “Tess, we’re having a whiskey party for the boys on Sunday afternoon. You gonna be in on it?”

  “Sure, why not? Mary, this here’s Ben Snow. He’s only been in Dawson a few weeks.”

  Mary was a plain young woman in her early twenties, running a bit to fat. “Hi, Ben. Welcome to Dawson. Is this your first visit to Paradise?”

  “The first time I could face the trip across that bridge.”

  “Now that you know the way, come to the party on Sunday.”

  “I will,” Ben promised.

  He brought Race Johnson with him on Sunday afternoon, and they discovered that a whiskey party in Paradise Alley was something like a tea party back home. The sporting ladies were dressed in their finest duds, complete with straw hats, sailor caps, and a variety of other headgear. Tables had been arranged outside the shacks, and glasses and whiskey bottles were much in evidence. A few of the ladies held pets, little puppies or a cat, and one had a half grown Eskimo husky.