Death on the Mississippi: The Mark Twain Mysteries #1. Peter J. Heck
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the morning, I awoke to find the landscape had flattened out, with widely spaced farmhouses each in its little grove of trees—Indiana. A night’s sleep had done wonders for me, and I was looking forward to the second day of my new adventure.
Mr. Clemens, wearing a fresh white suit, joined me for breakfast—steak again for him, ham and eggs for me, and plenty of biscuits and strong coffee for both of us. Even before his second cup of coffee, he was grumbling about “being followed halfway to Hell and back,” complaining that “a man can’t take a breath in peace” and expressing other sentiments less printable. I listened without comment, although I myself was rather pleased that the police seemed to be taking the case seriously. Still, I was being paid to handle his business and correspondence, not to contradict him.
After our meal, my employer and I went to the onboard barbershop, in my own case primarily for the novelty—I had grown used to shaving myself while at Yale, and was in fact a bit apprehensive about exposing my neck to a sharp razor wielded by a stranger on a moving train. But the fellow who shaved me was an expert, and I arose from the chair without as much as a single nick, and feeling much refreshed. By then, we could see Lake Michigan (I could have taken it for an arm of the sea, it was so extensive) on the right side of the train. We pulled into the station promptly at 9:45 central time; I saw Berrigan dismount at the same time we did, but the crowd separated us and I dismissed him from my thoughts. Luckily, Mr. Clemens did not notice the detective, or it might have set off a fresh diatribe.
At our hotel, a sixteen-story building near the Customs House, my employer went to the telephone office to make a long-distance call to New York, while I supervised the delivery of our luggage to the rooms. These were on the top floor, to which I took an elevator with a bellboy carrying the bags. I wondered what business Mr. Clemens might have urgent enough to call New York for on a Saturday morning; I was not long in finding out.
I had barely begun to organize my belongings when I heard him slam the door to his room, and moments later pound on the connecting double door. I opened it, and at his gesture, entered his room. He waved in the general direction of a chair, which I settled myself into while he paced back and forth in an agitated manner, all the while letting loose a stream of invective as hot as anything I’d ever heard in my life.
“Why, what on earth has happened?” I inquired when he finally paused for breath. I had not seen him like this before, and wondered at it.
“I thought Abe Lincoln had done away with slavery, but it was all a barefaced lie, a sham and an imposture. These money-grubbing New York capitalists think they’ve bought me like a bushel of corn, and now they’ve gone and hired a scarecrow so the birds can’t get at me.”
“I’m sure this is all very important, but I don’t understand a word of what you’re saying,” I protested. He stopped his pacing and turned to look at me with an expression that could have ignited one of his cigars from across the room, then shrugged his shoulders and resumed pacing, his hands clasped behind his back.
“Sorry, Wentworth—I keep forgetting that you don’t know my affairs yet,” he said in a somewhat calmer tone. “The long and short of it is, I’ve been told I have to put up with Berrigan. It seems my backer, Henry Rogers in New York, specifically asked the police to assign a detective to protect me.”
“Surely you can ask Mr. Rogers to recall Berrigan?” I suggested, in as reasonable a tone as I could muster.
“It’s not as simple as that,” said Mr. Clemens. “I thought I was my own master, and now I’ve found out otherwise. It’s a sad lesson, but I guess I had to learn it.
“My problem is I’ve never really had much luck with money. I’ve made enough by lecturing and writing—scads of money, enough for a fine house in Hartford, European journeys, the best of everything for my family. I’ve given away more money to friends in need—some who did little enough to deserve it—than some people save in a lifetime of hard work. But I’ve never learned how to keep money—let alone invest it. You could take all my investments over the years, and not a single one of them has ever been worth spitting at. It would be comical if it weren’t so damned painful—a smart man could have made his fortune ten times over by looking at my investments and betting the opposite way.
“Back in ’77, I could have bought stock in Bell’s telephone company at five hundred dollars a bushel, and I passed it up. Instead, I invested in a steam pulley that pulled thousands of dollars straight out of my pocket, I set up a subscription publishing company that had the greatest, most successful book ever published in America—General Grant’s memoirs—and lost every cent because I put a self-important ignoramus who didn’t know the first thing about literature in charge of it. But my biggest mistake of all was Paige’s typesetting machine—I was convinced that we could sell it to every publisher in the world. It looked like a license to print greenbacks—and it would have been, too, if the damned machine had ever worked right. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back—and Sam Clemens’s back, as well. I lost close to a quarter-million dollars, a lot of it borrowed, with not a chance in Hell of ever seeing it back.”
I murmured some conventional phrase of sympathy, but Mr. Clemens waved his hand as if to dismiss it. “There’s nothing to be said, Wentworth. I’m descended from a long line of the improvident and unlucky, and heredity finally caught up with me. I thought I was safe from ever again having to go to work, and here I am back on the road, counting the house as anxiously as in the days when I was an utter unknown. A writer’s personal honor is his only stock in trade, and I’m determined to pay off every cent I owe, if I have to go to China, set up the stage myself, and do the Royal Nonesuch.
“But even honor has a price. A man needs money to make money, and I’m lucky to have found a man to back me. I owe a lot to Henry Rogers, whatever people say about him. He’s bankrolling this whole lecture tour, keeping my creditors at bay, making sure poor Livy and the girls have enough to live comfortably while I work off my debts. He’s even paying your salary, Wentworth. He’s been an absolute angel to me, at the very time I need it most—but I just found out the price I have to pay.
“When I called Rogers this morning, I expected that he would pull some strings and get that blasted detective off my back. There’s not a man in America, Carnegie and Rockefeller included, who has more real power than Rogers when he decides to apply it. Well, now I find out just where I rank in his scheme of things. This business with the murder and the notes came to his ear, and now he’s worried that somebody’s looking to kill me. It was at his insistence that Berrigan was sent to follow me, to make sure nothing happens to his investment.
“So now I learn that my dear friend Rogers—and he has been a friend to me, make no mistake of that—thinks I have to be protected like a champion racehorse. And my opinion of the matter don’t signify, no more than the horse’s. Detective Berrigan is under orders to stick with me until the murder’s solved—or until I die, which seems just as likely.”
Having vented his ire, Mr. Clemens spent the rest of the morning dictating letters, on various details of business with which I will not bore the reader. I wrote them up and posted them; then, after we enjoyed a hearty luncheon, he gave me my liberty for the afternoon, and I spent a pleasant few hours investigating the sights of a city new to me. The second city of our nation, Chicago is distinguished by a number of tall buildings, referred to by the locals under the picturesque name of “sky-scrapers.” Our hotel, the Great Northern, stands an impressive sixteen stories high, and there are several buildings in the city even taller. Perhaps the most striking is the huge Masonic Temple, a short walk from our hotel, and a remarkable twenty-one stories in height. It being a clear day, I paid twenty-five cents to ascend the elevator to the temple’s roof, from which a visitor obtains a stunning panoramic view of the city and the adjoining lake. It was startling to look downward at the backs of soaring birds, or at the antlike creatures scurrying about below them—which my eye at first refused to recognize as full-grown human beings.
After seeing the wonders of human ingenuity, I decided to take a closer look at Lake Michigan. A walk to the waterfront park gave me a close look at a broad harbor, with the open lake beyond a stone breakwater. To the