[Mark Twain Mysteries 02] - A Connecticut Yankee in Criminal Court Read online

  It took us two or three minutes to get Mr. Clemens to stop laughing enough to climb on board, but eventually he did. The driver flicked his reins, and off we went.

  We crossed Canal Street and drove southwest along Saint Charles Avenue, with the driver pointing out various places and sights. “That’s the Saint Charles Hotel, which is a mighty nice place to stay, if you got the money, and the Saint Charles Theater right next to it. You could get the streetcar here, but you’d have to walk a good piece at the other end, where you’re going, so you a lot better off ridin’ with me. I’ll take you right there. This here’s—Ho! Git that mule out the way! Folks ain’t got all day to ride behind you!” (This latter to another driver moving too slowly for his taste.) “This here’s Lafayette Square, and that’s City Hall, where all the trouble starts. That statue over there ain’t Lafayette, though—that’s Ben Franklin. Lafayette was a Frenchman from France, and Ben Franklin was a Yankee, but I reckon they’s both dead. Never saw no statue for a live man. Good evenin’, sister!” (To a fashionably dressed young Negress.) “And that’s the Academy of Music, where they plays all kinds of concerts and operas—What you think you doin’? I had a rig like that, I’d look out where I was goin’ ’fore somebody ran me down!—And up ahead we got Lee Circle, with a statue of General Lee, which is who they named it after.”

  The driver kept up an endless stream of this sort of banter the whole way, commenting on the style and appointments of every other coach on the road and the competence or lack thereof of their 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?”

  6

  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 ladder
s, 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 I miss my guess, it wasn’t no servant.” He paused, looking from Mr. Clemens to Mr. Cable, and finally at me; then, as if satisfied with what he saw in our faces, he continued. “I think the murderer has got to be a white person.”

  There was a silence; then, “Charley! Watch what you say!” said Aunt Tillie, clearly apprehensive at her nephew’s statement.

  “He doesn’t have to hold his tongue for my sake, Aunt Tillie,” said Mr. Clemens. “I’ve already come to pretty much that same conclusion, and I think George agrees with me. The police talk like they’ve solved the case, but I think they’re going in the face of the facts. The important question is, which one of Robinson’s friends and family is the killer?”

  “Well, there’s where my idea comes in,” said Bolden. “One thing you learn pretty early, living this close to all those rich folks’ houses, is that they’ll go talking about anything in the world in front of the butler or cleaning maid, just as if there weren’t nobody listening at all. They may think they’ve got secrets, but every one of them has got a houseful of servants that know more about their secrets than they do. You know that, Miz Galloway.” He looked at the elderly woman who sat in her rocking chair, fanning herself and shaking her head. Outside the single window, the sky was turning darker, but it was still warm inside the little house.

  “Well, I suppose it’s true,” said Aunt Tillie, after a pause. “But it’s one thing to hear something, and another to tell about it. One thing for sure, if you work in the white folks’ house, you best know how to keep what you hear to yourself. Maybe somebody in Mr. Robinson’s house does know who killed him, but even if they do, how you goin’ to get them to tell Mr. Twain about it?”

  Bolden smiled. “That’s where my plan comes in, Miz Galloway. Maybe they won’t tell Mr. Twain about it, and maybe they won’t even tell you or me, but I reckon I know somebody they will tell. All we got to do is convince her to help us find out what we need to know, and then we can use that to help get Leonard out.”

  Aunt Tillie looked at Bolden with a suspicious expression. “Who you talking about, boy? Who’s this her everybody talks to?”

  “You know who he means, Aunt Tillie,” said Charley Galloway, his face lighting up with sudden comprehension. “He’s talking about Eulalie Echo.”

  Aunt Tillie dropped her fan and clasped her arms over her bosom. “Lord have mercy!” she said, shaking her head. “Poor Leonard ain’t in enough trouble already that now you want to go talking to a hoodoo woman!” She picked up her fan and began to ply it vigorously.

  Bolden and Charley Galloway stood there with sheepish grins, but Mr. Cable acted as if a poisonous snake had come into the room. “What a ridiculous suggestion! I know the kind of superstitious nonsense these voodooists believe. I witnessed some of their heathen rituals, back when I was writing for the Picayune. How can you expect anything useful from them?” He stood up abruptly, as if ready to bring the interview to an end.

  “Hold your horses, George,” said Mr. Clemens, furrowing his brows and motioning Cable back toward his seat. “One man’s superstition is another’s simon-pure gospel. We’ve had this argument before. Let me hear Buddy’s idea before you try to convince me it’s no good. We want to prove Leonard is innocent and get him out of prison. And as long as we accomplish that, I for one don’t especially care how we do it—short of murdering somebody on our own, I suppose. Who is this hoodoo woman, and how do you think she can help us?”

  The two colored men looked at each other, as if deciding who was willing to risk Mr. Cable’s wrath. At last, Charley Galloway swallowed, looking at Aunt Tillie, then turning to Mr. Clemens. “Her name’s Eulalie Echo, and she lives at Fourth and Howard, right close by. A lot of folks know her—I mean a lot of folks that works in the white people’s houses. She tells fortunes, and she gives advice, and they say she talks to spirits—”

  “You mean to devils!” said Cable, with an agitated expression. I was somewhat surprised at how much the subject disturbed him. One of my friends at Yale had dabbled in spiritualism, and after dutifully attending a couple of his séances, I had no doubt that some people could talk to spirits. Whether the spirits ever said anything of interest back to them was another question entirely.

  But Mr. Clemens cut Mr. Cable off with a wave of his hand and a look that threatened thunderbolts. “Let the fellow tell us what he has in mind, George. You can say your say when he’s finished, but I’m not about to have you cutting him off after every three words. And if you want to argue religion, argue it with me, on our own time. How do you think this fortune-teller can help us, Charley?”

  With hooded eyes, Charley Galloway looked back and forth between Mr. Cable and my employer, as if deciding which of them it was more dangerous to displease. Mr. Clemens’s impatient expression apparently decided him, for he turned to face him and continued his explanation. “Like I explained to you, a lot of folks talks to her, and sometimes they tell her things they won’t tell anybody else. And I reckon if she asks ’em questions, they’ll give her answers they won’t give anybody else. If she knows it’s to help Leonard, maybe she’ll ask some questions about what goes on in the Robinson house—and I bet she knows somebody who’ll tell her what she wants to know.”

  Mr. Clemens nodded. “That’s straightforward enough. No deals with the devil, no human sacrifices, no black magic—just asking the right questions of the right people. Do you find anything objectionable in that, George?”

  Mr. Cable still looked somewhat uncomfortable, although I wasn’t sure whether it was more at the notion of dealing with a hoodoo woman or at being chastised by Mr. Clemens. But he nodded his head and said, “I suppose not, if that’s as far as it goes. The object is to help Leonard, after all.”

  “That’s right,” said Mr. Clemens. “What about you, Aunt Tillie? Do you think Eulalie Echo can help us?”

  Aunt Tillie rocked slowly back and forth. “Maybe,” she said, grudgingly. “Maybe she can, and maybe she can’t, and maybe she will, and maybe she won’t. What I want to know is what she’s goin’ to want us to do for her. I never did hear that she was any special friend of Leonard, to be doing him favors. And I sure can’t see her doing us no favors for free.” She began rocking harder, as if to emphasize her opinion.

  “That’s a good question,” said Mr. Clemens. “We probably need to know the answer to it before we start counting on this Eulalie Echo. Buddy, you’re the one who suggested talking to her. Can you find out whether she’ll help us, and what she might want in return?”

  “Sure, I’ll go see her tonight,�
�� said Bolden.

  “I’ll go with him,” said Charley Galloway. He looked at Aunt Tillie and at Mr. Cable. “And maybe some folks ought to think about just how much Leonard’s neck is worth. All I know is, if it was me sittin’ there in Parish Prison, instead of my brother, I’d be mighty unhappy to find out my friends and family was letting me go hang because they didn’t want to do business with Eulalie Echo.”

  “That’s settled, then,” said Mr. Clemens, slapping his hand down on the arm of the couch. “Can one of you bring me the answer at Royal Street tomorrow?”

  Charley Galloway and Bolden looked at each other, and then Bolden said, “I’ll do it. I don’t got to work until tomorrow evening, anyway. Charley’s got his barbershop to look after.”

  “Good,” said Mr. Clemens. “Now, what else can we do to try to clear Leonard? Aunt Tillie, do you know the servants in the Robinson home well enough to talk to them?”

  Aunt Tillie thought a moment. “Only one I know to talk to is Arthur, the butler; he goes to our church, and Leonard brought him over a few times on his day off, when they was going to go out to the lake or to the park together. Arthur acted little bit stuck up at first, but he was friendly enough by the second or third time he came by. Now he nods his head and says hello when he sees me.”

  “You say you see him in church,” said Mr. Clemens. He leaned forward, closer to Aunt Tillie. “I’d appreciate it if you asked him if he’d be willing to talk to me, somewhere away from the Robinson house. Do you think he’d do that?”

  “He always acted friendly with Leonard, so I think maybe he’d talk to you if he thought it could help the boy—seeing as how it’s Leonard’s own family asking,” said the woman. “Day after tomorrow’s Sunday, so I’ll see him then and ask him.”