A Connecticut Yankee in Criminal Court: The Mark Twain Mysteries #2. Peter J. Heck
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drivers, not to forget remarking on pretty women we passed and generally making it impossible to get a word of our own in edgewise. Since I myself had no particular opinion on any of these subjects, I was content to let him babble on, but I could see that my companions were happy when he finally pulled up in front of the address we had given him.
The houses in this section were quite different from those in the Creole quarter we had come from: low, narrow buildings that our driver referred to as “shotgun shacks.” There was no elegant ironwork here, nothing picturesque, and the streets were muddy, with wooden sidewalks and planks laid for pedestrians to cross at the corners. But the houses were well kept, and there was an air, if not quite of prosperity, at least of putting on a respectable face for the world. I wondered at the driver’s having described the neighborhood as rough. Perhaps he took our dress and manner as an indication that we were used to more affluent surroundings. I had certainly seen less attractive neighborhoods in workingmen’s sections of New Haven, although not with quite as heterogenous a mixture of races as here. And from some of the stories he told, I suspected that Mr. Clemens had seen far worse than I had.
We paid off our driver, and as we dismounted, he said, “Now, you ain’t going to have much luck findin’ a ride back downtown from here. That’s why them other fellows didn’t want to take you, like as not. I ’spose you could walk to the streetcar, but that’s a bit of a hike on these streets. If you want, I can wait and pick you up when you’re ready to go back.”
Mr. Cable nodded his agreement to Mr. Clemens, who turned to the driver and said, “That sounds good to me. Tell you what. Go get yourself a drink somewhere, and come back in about an hour.” He tossed the driver a fifty cent piece. “If we’re not ready then, we’ll let you know when we will be.”
“Sho ’nuff,” said the driver, looking at the coin with a surprised expression. “You finish up your business early, just send somebody down to the grocery store on the corner of Howard and ask for Henry Dodds—that’s me—and I’ll be here directly.”
“We’ll do that, Henry,” said Mr. Clemens, and we walked up to the house.
Mr. Cable knocked on the screen door. A tall, slim Negro man answered the door and peered out at the three of us with a puzzled expression. He looked us up and down and said, “Can I help you, gen’lemen?”
Mr. Cable stepped forward and put his hand on the door handle. “Yes, we’re looking for Matilda Galloway. Is this the right house?” But Mr. Cable had barely finished speaking when a woman’s voice came from within. “Is that Mr. Cable? My lands, don’t keep him waiting, Charley, let him in!”
Charley stood back, and the three of us entered the front room of the little house. There we found a heavyset Negro woman wearing a shapeless flowered dress and waving a paper fan as she greeted Mr. Cable. Another younger Negro man stood behind her rocking chair, looking at us with undisguised curiosity. “It’s been a long time, Aunt Tillie, but you don’t seem to have changed much,” said Mr. Cable.
“Well, it’s a wonder I ain’t withered away, worrying so much about poor Leonard being in prison,” she said, fluttering her fan. “But sit down, sit down. Can I get you gen’lemen some lemonade? Charley, get another chair in here. Don’t make them stand up.” After a few moments of bustle and agitation, the three of us were seated, and Mr. Cable had introduced us. Aunt Tillie remembered Mr. Clemens from his previous visit to New Orleans, and was obviously flattered that such a famous man took an interest in her nephew Leonard’s case. In turn, she introduced the two young men: Charley Galloway, Leonard’s younger brother, who had answered the door, and Charles Bolden, the son of her next-door neighbor. “Just call me Buddy,” he said, with a crooked smile, clearly impressed to meet Mr. Clemens. “No reason to get confused with two Charleys in the room.”
I took a moment to look around the little room as the woman went to the back of the building—presumably to the kitchen—to fetch our drinks. While the house was small and unpretentious, with kerosene lamps and bare floors, it was clean and cozy, with bright wallpaper in a geometrical pattern. There were pictures on the wall: a watercolor sketch I recognized as a younger Leonard Galloway, a large photograph of a smiling Negro couple (relatives, I assumed) dressed in slightly old-fashioned clothes, and two or three framed colored pictures of landscapes—chromolithographs, from the look of them. Mr. Cable and Mr. Clemens were seated on a Turkish-style sofa along the side wall, and I sat in a straight-backed chair next to the window. Young Bolden brought a chair in from the kitchen and was shortly followed by Aunt Tillie carrying a tray with a pitcher of lemonade and six glasses.
When we were all seated and had our drinks, Mr. Clemens told of our visit to Leonard Galloway in the Parish Prison. “So far, they seem to be treating him decently,” he concluded. “But jail’s a rotten place, even with good treatment, and Leonard’s taking it pretty hard.” He shook his head, then fixed Aunt Tillie with a sincere gaze. “It’ll take some doing to get him out of there, but if there’s any way to do it, you can count on my help.”
“Praise the Lord, that’s the best news I’ve heard since the police came and took poor Leonard off,” said the woman, raising up her hands in delight. “That boy wouldn’t hurt a fly, Mr. Twain. He’s a good churchgoing boy, and I told the police just that. And Mr. Robinson done took good care of him. He even paid him for the day he sent him home, and said he was sorry for yelling at him; Leonard gave me half the money that same day, bless his heart. Why on Earth would he try to poison a man like that?”
“That settles it,” said Mr. Clemens. “I might have doubted Leonard’s story up to now, but now I know it’s true. Leonard is an innocent man. Cable, Wentworth, we’re going to get him out of jail if it’s the last thing we do in this town.”
“I sure am glad to hear that, Mr. Twain,” said Charley Galloway, smiling for the first time since we’d arrived. “You need any kind of help from me, just say the word.” Young Buddy Bolden added his offer of help as well, and with a broad grin, Mr. Clemens jumped up and shook both their hands with great enthusiasm. “Good, we’ve got a team,” he said.
Then he paused and looked around at the six of us in the room, scratching his chin. “Now, all I have to do is figure out how to get Leonard out of jail. Does anybody here know how we can manage that without using guns or ladders?”
There was a moment of silence, and then Buddy Bolden laughed. “Well, if we was going to try and bust Leonard out of jail with guns and ladders, we wouldn’t need Mr. Mark Twain to help us. Plenty of folks have ladders, and there ain’t no shortage of guns, if it came right down to that. But I reckon you could count me out, if that’s what you was planning, ’cause all you’d end up with is a bunch of colored folks being shot instead of just one being hanged. Still, I do have an idea that might work, if you don’t mind listening.”
“I sure don’t mind listening,” said Mr. Clemens. “There might be plenty of ladders around, but good ideas are in short supply just now.”
“Well,” said the young man, “we all know Leonard didn’t kill this Mr. Robinson. But that don’t seem to hold no water with the police. So what we need to do is prove who did kill him, and then getting Leonard out of prison is no problem at all. That make sense?”
“Makes plenty of sense to me,” said Mr. Clemens, nodding his head. “Keep on talking.”
“I reckon whoever killed Mr. Robinson, it has to be somebody he knew,” said Bolden. “It don’t make no sense any other way. Strangers don’t go around putting poison in each other’s food, ’specially not in big houses down in the Garden District. So whoever killed him, it was somebody he knew and trusted enough to eat or drink with.”
“Yes, we’ve been thinking the same thing ourselves,” said Mr. Cable. “A family member, or close friend, or a trusted servant would be my guess.”
Charley Galloway shook his head. “Maybe family or a friend,” he said, “but unless