tell, if you can believe the grapevine. About the trickiest man that ever dealt a card. I was sorry to hear about George, if it’s the truth. He was a hardheaded old buzzard, but he treated me like I was his own son—taught me all I knew. I try to do the same for these boys—pass on what I’ve picked up.” He gestured at the two Throckmorton brothers seated beside him, who seemed not to notice, to judge from their scowls in the direction of Detective Berrigan.
Mr. Clemens rested his chin on his left fist, in much the pose I’d seen him in on stage, apparently lost in thought for a moment. “I guess that pretty much covers the ground, Ed,” he said. McPhee and his cohorts stood up, obviously ready to take their leave. “Oh, one more thing,” said Mr. Clemens. “Detective Berrigan has a photograph of the fellow who got killed in New York. Why don’t you all take a look at it and see if it’s anybody you recognize.”
“I don’t want to look at no pictures of no dead people,” said Billy Throckmorton—he had a deeper voice than his brother, with a more pronounced accent—but by then Detective Berrigan had reached in his pocket and handed the envelope with the photo to Mr. Clemens, who took it out and glanced at it again before passing it over to McPhee.
“Jesus!” McPhee exclaimed, his expression changing. He sat back down, looking almost stunned. “Look here, boys, if this ain’t Lee Russell, I’m a goddamn wooden Indian.”
“Lee Russell?” said Al and Billy Throckmorton, almost in unison. They joined McPhee on the couch, then Billy took the picture and stared at it. “Yeah, it’s him all right,” he said, passing it on to his brother. Al took it and nodded, with a grim expression.
“Lee Russell, is it? At last we’re making some progress,” said Berrigan. “Would you mind telling me anything else you might know about the victim?”
“Can’t say as how I know much else about him,” said McPhee, regaining his composure somewhat. “He was a cardplayer, a pretty good one. Lee showed up working the trains out of St. Louis a few years ago. Big redheaded fellow, built real solid—and got a good pair of hands on him. He could barely write his own name, but he had a head for the cards. We were on the same circuit, you might say, and we chatted a little about business, mostly names of places to find a game in towns we were going to. He dropped out of sight a couple months ago, now that I think of it—not that I made much of it at the time.”
“So you had no idea he’d gone to New York, or what his business there was?” Berrigan had taken out his little notebook and was scribbling in it.
“I can’t say we were ever friendly enough for him to tell me where he was going or why,” McPhee said. “But I suspect his business was the same in New York as anywhere else—trying to find a card game and make a few bucks.”
“Do you have any reason to believe he might have known Jack Hubbard?”
“Well, I did see ’em at the same card table a few times, for what that’s worth. It don’t mean they were friends or anything. Jack was an old-timer, and Lee was sort of a new man on the scene.”
Berrigan looked up from his notebook, scanning the faces of the three men on the sofa. “Either of you other boys remember anything about this Russell character?”
“I seen him a couple of times, is all,” said Alligator Throckmorton. “We never talked or nothing.” Billy Throckmorton nodded slowly, with a thoughtful expression, then aimed a stream of tobacco juice in the general direction of the spittoon. He missed, then grunted.
“I guess that gives me something to tell the Chief,” said Berrigan. “Somebody back in the city may be able to make more of the case, now that we have a confirmed name for the victim. I’m traveling with Mr. Twain, so I won’t be in Chicago past tomorrow, but if you think of anything else about Lee Russell or Jack Hubbard, I’m staying at the same hotel as he is—the Great Northern Hotel on Dearborn Street.”
Making empty promises to tell the detective anything else they thought of, McPhee and his boys knocked back their drinks and departed, leaving the three of us sitting in the dressing room. Billy Throckmorton favored me with another smirk, as he passed me where I stood by the door.
“Well, well,” said Detective Berrigan after they had shuffled out, “as unsavory a bunch of scalawags as ever I saw, and I’ve seen my share.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Clemens. “You probably ought to look into their story, on the off chance some of it’s true. But don’t get your hopes up too high; the name Slippery Ed might be the only thing McPhee’s come by honestly since I first met him, and that was before the war.”
Back in the hotel, Mr. Clemens poured himself another drink, while I gazed out the window of his room at the lights of the city below, visible far into the distance despite the soft rain that continued to fall. He settled into an overstuffed chair and propped his feet up on a hassock. “Quite a view, isn’t it?”
“Remarkable,” I said. “To think of the thousands of people out there—and here we are, high above them, looking down upon them almost as if they were a colony of insects.”
He laughed. “Not a bad comparison, Wentworth. I’ve heard far worse. I once watched an ant climb to the top of a blade of grass, carrying a big dead beetle. I figure it amounted to a man my size taking hold of a railroad car and climbing up a church steeple, then jumping off and climbing up the steeple of the church next door, and thinking he’d done something to be proud of. Some silly fellow back in Aesop’s time decided that ants were a model of industry—and the bulk of the damned human race has been fool enough to believe that ever since.”
“You don’t mean to compare all human beings to ants, do you? Even Aesop allowed that some of us might be grasshoppers.”
“Grasshoppers, and crickets, to be sure; they tend to run in my family. I’ve known the occasional honeybee—my sweet Livy comes to mind. But I’ve met my share of bedbugs and termites and boll weevils, and a few bloodsucking mosquitoes, too,” he said. “Berrigan might aspire to the dignity of a horsefly. And Slippery Ed McPhee is a one hundred percent pure, guaranteed original, unmitigated humbug.”
“I won’t argue with that description. I was surprised that you went so far as to entertain him in your dressing room after all you’d said about him.”
“Oh, that was just the quickest way I could think of to get him to talk. I’d buy the devil himself a glass of whisky if I thought it’d get him to tell me something I needed to know.”
“It certainly was a rare piece of luck that he recognized the murdered man from that picture,” I said. “It was the last thing I ever expected.”
“I’m not sure I expected it, either—although, looking back on it, I can’t say it surprised me. I’ve seen some damned queer things in my time, queer enough to make me think there’s no such thing as a coincidence. You can’t believe in coincidences and write novels.”
“Do you think he had anything to do with the murder?”
Mr. Clemens thought a moment. “I doubt he stabbed the fellow himself. Maybe he was capable of it in his younger days, but it stretches credibility a bit too much to think he’d kill a man in New York the day before we leave town, then show up at my lecture in Chicago the day we arrive here. And I don’t think he could face down a New York detective quite so smoothly if he’d just run eight hundred miles with blood on his hands. Ed’s got a good poker face, but not that good.”
“What do you think he was doing in Chicago, and
