LITMIR.BIZ

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don’t want to lose any more money to your crooked games anyway.”

      It was all I could do not to grab him by the collar and shake him. Either that or smack him on the back of the head. Didn’t he know he was getting off easy? They send people to jail for attacking other people.

      I took hold of his arm and steered him toward the door. “Let’s go, Mr. Webster.”

      Behind us, Rafferty said, “I hope to see you again during the cruise, Ms. Dickinson. Do you need someone to show you out?”

      “No, thanks. I remember the way I came in.”

      “Very well, then. Good afternoon.”

      I figured out then who he reminded me of. With his overly polite demeanor, coupled with the air of violence and menace that hung around him, he was like the movie and TV gangsters played by Sheldon Leonard, the character actor and producer. I had a feeling Rafferty’s civilized veneer was pretty thin.

      Nobody followed us as we went down the stairs and back out through the security office and the casino. Ben Webster trudged along beside me without saying anything until we reached the deck.

      Then he said quietly, “They really were cheating, you know. I’m not just a sore loser.”

      “I wouldn’t know about that,” I told him. “I wasn’t there, and even if I had been, I don’t know anything about how a roulette wheel could be rigged. I think you’d be smart to just let it go.”

      “What about the money I paid for a round-trip?”

      I thought about it. Since he had brought the trouble down on himself, I figured I’d be within my rights to keep his money. But since I like to be accommodating, I said, “I’ll refund you, say, thirty percent. But you’ll have to wait and let me send you a check.”

      “I’ll be out whatever a rental car costs me, too.”

      “Should’ve thought of that before you took a swing at that guy.”

      “Yeah, I guess so.” He nodded, glum as ever. “All right. Thanks. I know you could’ve told me it was my own fault and to go to hell.”

      “That’s right,” I said. “I could have.”

      He stopped in front of a door with metal numerals 1 and 7 nailed to it. “This is my cabin.”

      “I’m sorry this happened. You’d better stay in there, like Mr. Rafferty told you. I got the feeling he was pretty mad. He’ll call the cops if you give him any more trouble.”

      “He looked to me more like he wanted to break my neck.”

      “Yeah, well, he might do that, too.”

      I left Ben Webster at the door and headed back to my cabin. I got out my laptop and wrote an e-mail to Melissa, telling her to pull the file for Ben Webster and send a check for 30 percent of the money he had paid us to his home address. That was another big difference since Mark Twain’s time: The riverboats hadn’t been equipped with wireless Internet service back then. They didn’t even have dial-up.

      The cruise from St. Louis to Hannibal takes a couple of hours. The boat docks in Hannibal early enough so that folks can get some sightseeing done before dark. Then they have dinner on the boat and enjoy an evening of gambling and other entertainment, including Mark Lansing’s performance as Mark Twain. More sightseeing the next morning rounds out the trip, and then the boat cruises back downriver to St. Louis that afternoon, so the whole trip takes about twenty-seven hours. That’s long enough to give the passengers the authentic flavor of a Mississippi River voyage without causing a problem for modern-day attention spans.

      I didn’t have much interest in gambling. I own a small business; that’s enough of a gamble for me. I didn’t intend to spend the evening boozing it up like some of the passengers would, either. My hope was that nobody would get drunk and cause trouble. The incident with Ben Webster was more than enough of a ruckus for this trip.

      So my plan was to take in the Mark Twain show in the salon. Mark Lansing had struck me as a nice guy, and I couldn’t help but wonder what he looked like without the wig and the fake mustache and the old-man make-up.

      I hoped the wild white hair and the big mustache really were fake. You never know, though, with actors. Some of them really get into the parts they play.

      First, though, there were sights to see, and a little later, as the riverboat’s steam whistle let out several shrill blasts, I knew we were about to dock at Hannibal, Missouri, boyhood home of Mr. Samuel Langhorne Clemens himself.

      CHAPTER 3

      I’d never been to Hannibal before. As I walked toward the front of the boat, I saw the town sprawled on the western bank of the river with rolling green hills behind it. Since tourism was an important industry here, it was deliberately picturesque. Oh, there were plenty of modern touches visible, but many of the buildings really were old and had been restored to look like they had in Mark Twain’s time, like the riverboat itself.

      Quite a few of the passengers had gathered on the bow to watch the approach to the dock. I saw about half the members of my group among them. The others were still in the casino, I supposed. I noticed Eddie and Louise Kramer at the railing. She was snapping pictures with a digital camera. I was sort of surprised to see that he wasn’t talking on his cell phone but was resting his hands on the railing instead and looking at Hannibal with what appeared to be genuine interest. Maybe his wife had read him the riot act about actually enjoying this vacation of theirs, even though she didn’t seem the type to do such a thing.

      I didn’t see Ben Webster anywhere. I supposed he was still holed up in his cabin. That was good. Once we docked he could come out and get off the boat.

      The whistle blew again. Several people strolled out onto the dock and waved enthusiastically at the passengers as the riverboat approached. The women wore bonnets and long skirts and carried parasols. The men were in old-fashioned suits and beaver hats. One young couple wore the sort of period clothing that youngsters would have in Mark Twain’s time. I knew from the Internet research I’d done before the trip that they were supposed to be Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher. Folks in Hannibal played up its literary heritage for all it was worth, and I didn’t blame them a bit for doing so. The tourists would have been disappointed if it wasn’t that way.

      The captain, or whoever was at the wheel of the Southern Belle, maneuvered the boat next to the dock and brought it to a stop with a smooth, graceful touch. The big paddlewheels on the sides stopped turning. Water sluiced off the paddles and sloshed against the pilings that supported the dock. Members of the crew hurried to extend a railed gangway from the main deck to the dock so that the passengers could disembark.

      I didn’t have any group activities planned for the afternoon or evening, although I had a table reserved in the riverboat’s dining room so anyone who wanted to eat together could. My clients were free to take in whatever sights they wanted to, and there were plenty of dinner theaters and restaurants in Hannibal where they could eat if they chose. Or they could continue gambling in the boat’s casino if that was what they wanted to do. The more informal tours like this were welcome breaks from having to herd groups of tourists around from one attraction to another.

      People began disembarking from the boat as soon as the gangway was in place, among them the Kramers. I lingered there along the rail, waiting to make sure that Ben Webster got off the boat. I could see the door to Cabin 17 from where I was and expected to see it open any minute now.

      But it didn’t.

      I waited some more. Still no sign of Ben Webster. He couldn’t have gotten off the boat without me seeing him, I thought. I’d been close to the gangway ever since the boat docked.

      If Webster didn’t leave, like Logan Rafferty had told him to, Rafferty might call the cops and have him arrested. That would lead to bad publicity for my tour. Webster seemed like a pretty good kid overall, so that was another reason to avoid bringing the law into this. I walked along the deck to Cabin 17 and knocked on the door.

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