A Connecticut Yankee in Criminal Court: The Mark Twain Mysteries #2. Peter J. Heck
Читать онлайн книгу.
before, Robinson found the cook drunk on the job. He dressed him down pretty fierce in front of the other servants, docked him the day’s pay, and sent him home in shame. The cook didn’t like it one bit. Would anybody? The way it looks is that he went home mad, stayed mad, noticed the weeds, and decided to put them in his master’s soup or maybe his salad. Nobody else was home for the meal, so he didn’t have to worry about killing the rest of the family.”
“Has he confessed any of this?”
“No,” said the detective, “but that don’t mean anything. Sometimes they confess, sometimes they deny everything. And sometimes they confess when they didn’t do it.”
We were interrupted by the waiter arriving with our drinks: lemonade for me and Mr. Cable, a whisky and soda for Mr. Clemens, and a fresh coffee for the detective. We ordered our food, the waiter departed, and Mr. Clemens leaned both elbows on the table, a thoughtful look on his face. “So,” he said at last, “the cook’s guilt or innocence seems to ride on whether his motive is strong enough to make him poison his employer.”
“True enough,” said LeJeune. “That’s right where the case stands or falls, the way I see it. Nobody denies the cook had the chance to get the poison, though he claims he didn’t know it was growing there, and he had a perfect opportunity to give it to the victim. The main question is whether being yelled at and docked his pay made him mad enough to kill the man who did it to him. George doesn’t think so, and he claims to know this fellow pretty well. And the cook doesn’t have any history of previous trouble with the law. So I think maybe there’s some room for doubt.”
“Well, if everyone whose boss yelled at him turned into a killer, we’d be in a sad way,” said Mr. Clemens. “From what you say, the cook had plenty of time after Robinson bawled him out to sober up and think things over. What makes the police think he stayed mad? Did any of the other servants hear him make threats, or anything like that?”
“No, but that’s normal. These people always stick together—”
“As well they should, seeing how little help they can expect from anyone else!” Mr. Cable interrupted angrily, but Mr. Clemens silenced him with a gesture.
“Now, George, let’s stick to our business,” said my employer. “Mr. LeJeune’s come here to tell us what he knows about the case, not to argue about the racial question.”
Mr. Cable glared at both Mr. Clemens and the detective for a moment. Then the detective looked at him with a wry smile and a shrug, and the little man’s anger seemed to melt away. “That’s all right, Mr. Clemens,” said the detective. “George and I know where each other stand. We go back a long way. The fact is, one of the things that bothers me about this case is that the papers are talking as if the cook is some sort of black monster who killed his boss because he hated white men. Well, I was one of the men who questioned the cook when we arrested him, and if he hates anybody, I sure didn’t see it. So when George asks me to take a closer look at the evidence, I think maybe I should listen to George. But the prosecutor wants to treat the Robinson murder as a closed case, now that we’ve made an arrest. And the captain has been making hints that maybe I should get on with the rest of my caseload, which is plenty big enough, no question about that. Trouble is, I don’t think we’ve nailed the lid on it yet, and I guarantee you I don’t like being told to stop looking when there’s still something I’m not sure of.”
“So you figure you’ll let us do your looking for you,” said Mr. Clemens.
“Couldn’t have put it better myself,” said the detective. He took a sip of his coffee, put his cup down precisely in the center of the saucer, and continued. “I’m going to give you enough information to let you start, and then you’ll tell me anything you find out. I’m taking a bit of a chance, because most amateurs don’t know the first thing about a murder investigation. But you did do a pretty good job in that riverboat murder, so maybe you will find something. If you can prove the cook is innocent or even raise enough of a doubt that he did it, maybe I can still arrest the right person instead of going into court with the wrong man in the dock and making myself have a guilty conscience. And if you find something to prove the cook really did kill Robinson, I will trust George to tell me. So I can’t really lose, can I?”
“I suppose not, now that you put it that way,” said Mr. Clemens. “George says you’re an honest man, and coming from him, that means a good bit. I think we can all play straight with each other. If you promise you won’t hold back anything we need to know about the case, I can promise to tell you anything we find out, one way or the other. Is it a deal?”
“I think we can work with one another,” said LeJeune, and he reached out to shake Mr. Clemens’s hand. Just then the waiter arrived with our food, and a lull fell over the conversation as we turned to eating, which I was beginning to realize took precedence over all other business in New Orleans. I had again taken Mr. Cable’s advice on my selection, a spicy rice-and-meat concoction called jambalaya. Once again, it seemed to me that the cook had used too free a hand with the pepper pot, but with frequent sips of lemonade to quench the fire, I found it palatable enough. Strike that—I found myself asking for a second helping, much to Mr. Cable’s satisfaction.
After the noise of forks and spoons had died down enough to permit conversation, Mr. Clemens wiped his mouth with a napkin and fixed the detective with his gaze. “Let’s take a different angle on this murder business,” he said. “Suppose there wasn’t any reason to blame the cook for it, and you had to figure out the whole thing from scratch. What would you be looking at?”
“Well,” said LeJeune, “we have a man killed in his own home, and by poison. That eliminates a lot of things you’d have to think about if he’d been shot, or stabbed. It’s a good bet he didn’t surprise a burglar in the act, for instance. On the other hand, we have to make sure it’s not suicide, or an accident, which it might be, if the poison were something you’d expect to find around the house. But we can pretty much rule that out, if it’s jimsonweed. Robinson wouldn’t have been out picking greens for his own salad, and if he had, the cook would have known it wasn’t fit to eat.”
“Never mind the cook,” said Mr. Clemens. “Pretend we don’t know how Robinson was given the poison, just that we know it was poison. Who are your suspects? Are we sure it’s not suicide?”
LeJeune rubbed his chin. “I’d say suicide is even less likely than an accident. Odds are there are two or three faster and surer poisons he could have laid hands on: arsenic, maybe laudanum . . . besides, a man isn’t as likely to take poison as to put a pistol to his head. There wasn’t any note, or any kind of scandal he might have been trying to escape. And the autopsy would have found out if he’d had some incurable disease. I’d lay long odds against suicide.”
“Fine. We’ll set it aside for now,” said Mr. Clemens. “That brings us back to murder. Assume for the sake of argument we’ve got a gilt-edged, government-bonded, ironclad alibi for the cook. Let’s say he was in Mexico. Who’s the most logical suspect?”
“Usually, we’d be looking at the wife—except, this time, the wife’s the one with the gilt-edged alibi. She was out of town, visiting family up near Baton Rouge, for nearly a week. She didn’t get back until the morning Robinson was found dead. I checked her story myself, and it’s solid as a rock.”
“Did you check her story just out of routine, or was there a reason to suspect her?” asked Mr. Clemens.
“You always suspect the wife when a man’s been poisoned in his own home,” said LeJeune. “Eugenia Holt had her choice of beaux twenty years ago, and she married John David Robinson. Now, I don’t have any special reason to think Mrs. Robinson might have regretted her choice. These respectable people, they have a knack for keeping their scandals quiet. But she is still an uncommonly pretty woman, Mr. Clemens, and he was a very important man, and these very rich people don’t live their lives the same way as you and I. Of course I checked. And she was where she claims to have been, when she claims to have been there. Unless she could poison him by long distance, she is no suspect.”
“How about other