Murder in the North End (11 page)

“You’re Finn Cassidy, ain’t you?” Will asked in a passably good working class Boston accent.
You don’t show up at an Irish grogshop sounding like a Brit to the manor born,
he’d told her,
and expect them to welcome you with open arms.
Digging in his pocket for the twenty-five cents, he said, “Sorry ‘bout what happened to your brother.”

“Did you know him?” Finn asked.

“No, but I—”

“No, you don’t, Boyle,” Finn growled as a grubby, boozy-smelling behemoth tried to squeeze through the doorway past Nell and Will. He pounced on Boyle with surprising alacrity, given his bulk, and seized him by his suspenders.

“But I ain’t so bollocksed now,” Boyle said in a heavily slurred brogue, trying to pry Finn’s grip loose as he was shoved out of the door and onto the sidewalk. “And I din’ really hurt her, not so’s she’d feel it tomorrah. I won’ do it again, I swear.”

“Not tonight, you won’t.” Finn gave the interloper a rough shove, sending him stumbling backward into the lamp post. The crowd loitering on the sidewalk hooted with laughter.

Finn said, “You know the rules, Boyle. Once I give you the heave-ho, you’re out for the night. Come back tomorrow and don’t give the chippies no trouble, and maybe I’ll let you stay.”

“Och, Finn, be a good lad,” Boyle implored as he lurched back toward the door, straightening his coat. “Lemme back in, jus’ fer tonight, and I swear on me dear departed mum’s—”

He broke off with a grunt as Finn grabbed him by the collar and rammed his left fist into his gut, doubling him over. The onlookers, appreciating the impromptu floor show, whooped and cheered. A second punch, this one to the head, dropped Boyle in a groaning heap on the sidewalk, blood streaming from his nose.

Nell instinctively stepped forward, ready to intervene, as Finn aimed a booted foot at the fallen man’s midsection, but Will pulled her back, tucking her behind him. “Bad idea,” he said quietly, but she could tell from his stance of coiled readiness that he was prepared to step in himself if need be.

The kick connected with a muffled crunch and a roar of pain.

Turning to leave, Finn said, “Not another word from you, you hear?”

“Christ Jaysus,” Boyle rasped, clutching his stomach.

Wheeling around, Finn dealt the big man another kick, then brought his boot down on Boyle’s throat and kept it there, making him gag and thrash. Leaning over, he asked, with studied calm, “Now, what did I say? ‘Not another word.’ That means you close that flappin’ jaw of yours and keep it closed. Got it?”

A gurgle rose from Boyle’s throat as he stared, bug-eyed, at his tormenter.

“Got it?” Finn repeated, bearing down with his foot.

Boyle nodded jerkily.

Finn kept it up another few seconds, regarding his victim with undisguised contempt, before easing up and backing away. “Get him out of my sight,” he told no one in particular. Several men scrambled to do his bidding as he turned back to Will, holding out a big, scarred hand, palm up. “Two bits.”

Will paid him, shoved his cap into a pocket of his jacket, and guided Nell into the saloon. “So. Finn Cassidy bounces as well as boxes.”

“Bounces?”

“Keeps order, throws out the trash. No small task in a place like this.”

“That doesn’t give him the right to such savagery.”

“Such savagery is a nightly occurrence in places like this,” said Will, “a fact of which Mr. Boyle was certainly well aware when he did whatever it was he did to get him ejected in the first place. More to the point, though, if I’d allowed you to call Finn Cassidy on the carpet for exercising his professional responsibilities as he sees fit, how willing do you think he would have been to grant us entrance to this place?”

“I know, but...” Nell shuddered, remembering the sickening crunch of those ribs. She’d softened over the years. Back when she was part of this world, or one very like it on Cape Cod, she’d had a thicker skin. On the one hand, it shamed her that she couldn’t handle things she used to be able to. On the other, her newfound delicate sensibilities were part of what defined her as a lady by the standards of Boston’s elite. They accepted her as one of their own—
almost,
but it was a good deal more than she’d ever had before.

Curling an arm around her waist, Will whispered, “We must keep our eye on our goal, Cornelia. We came here for information. We came for Colin Cook, to keep him from hanging. Nothing else matters.”

She nodded, sucked in a deep, calming breath, and looked around.

Nabby’s Inferno was housed in a building whose rooms—those on the first floor, anyway—had been mostly stripped of their walls, while retaining distinctly different ceilings and floors. In the front stood a long bar set up with kegs of beer and whiskey to serve the patrons sitting at, or slumped over, a hodgepodge of mismatched tables. A kaleidoscope of smoke-hazed mirrors, photographs, nude paintings, ribald engravings, and newspaper clippings adorned the walls. Nell breathed in a miasma of stale booze, staler sweat and cheap tobacco that made the gorge rise in her throat.

Toward the rear of the establishment was a dance floor and a stage, on which a man with lampblack hair and a faded dinner jacket leaned on a piano while crooning “The Man on the Flying Trapeze” between sips of what looked like whiskey. A few sailors were dancing with girls Nell recognized from the photographic display out front, while other customers—a diverse mix from all elements of Boston society, high and low—milled about, listening to the music or talking over it. On one corner of the stage three women in garish face paint and frothy can-can skirts sat sharing a cigarette, their black-stockinged legs nonchalantly dangling over the edge.

Catching the attention of a straw-haired waiter girl passing by with two pitchers of beer, Will asked her who they should see about renting a room. “That’d be Riley,” she said, nodding toward the bartender, a thickset fellow with a steel wool beard.

“We ain’t no boarding house,” Riley told them as he wiped out a used glass with a soiled rag and set it with the “clean” ones. “What makes you think we got rooms to let?”

“I heard you got a basement flat that just opened up,” Will said. “The guy that lived there kicked the bucket is what I heard.”

“You just want a place to live, or you got somethin’ else in mind?”

“If we just wanted a place to live,” Will said with a snide little smile, “I reckon we could find lots quieter places than this.”

Riley looked Nell up and down in a way that made her wish she’d kept herself covered up with the shawl, his gaze stilling for a long moment when it lit on her bosom. When he turned away to bellow “Flora!” to a plump bar girl, Nell gave Will an I-told-you-so look.

He just smiled and shrugged. She hiked her shawl up over her shoulders. He pulled it back down. “When in Rome, Cornelia...”

“I got to take these two to see Mother,” Riley told the bar girl. “Keep an eye on the hooch—and your nose out of it.”

“Don’t be long,” she said as she sauntered over. “It’s been a slow night for me, and my rent’s overdue. I gotta get busy.”

The bartender strode through the saloon with Nell and Will on his heels until he came to a room at the very rear, the only one whose walls were still intact. “Wait here,” he told them as he passed through the open doorway.

The room was large, dim, and choked with cigar smoke. Men, some with bar girls draped over them, sat at three round, oilcloth-covered tables playing cards. The only other furniture in the room was a writing desk facing the door, behind which, on a velvet-upholstered, barrel-back wing chair, sat the largest woman Nell had ever seen.

Her body was colossal, a half-ton of bread dough ballooning out of a sleeveless linen garment that looked suspiciously like an undershift. As a nod to modesty, she wore over it a blue-striped pinafore, its gathered yoke only accentuating her size while imparting a grotesque air of the infantile. The skirt ended several inches above the floor, revealing splayed feet clad in unlaced men’s brogans, the flesh oozing over them in flabby rolls. Were it not for her unbound hair, brown and lank but threaded with wiry gray filaments, she would have looked for all the world like a giant’s baby doll. Young, she wasn’t; yet she certainly didn’t have enough years on her to be Riley’s mother.

“Mother Nabby,” Riley said with a nod of greeting as he approached her. Leaning down close, he spoke too softly for Nell to hear above the applause from the adjacent dance hall. The vocalist announced that his next tune would be “Molly! Do You Love Me?” whereupon several audience members screamed, “Beautiful Dreamer! Beautiful Dreamer!” “I bow to public sentiment,” he said, and launched into that song instead.

Riley glanced in their direction, whereupon Mother Nabby did the same. Her tiny eyes, like raisins pushed into the pale, damp mound of her face, moved over the two of them in dispassionate appraisal. She raised a clay pipe to her mouth, took a puff, and blew out a contemplative plume of smoke. Unlocking a desk drawer with a key hanging around her neck, her massive arms wobbling like jelly, she retrieved a large anchor-shaped keyring with two old iron keys on it. She handed it to Riley, saying something to him.

“Denny!” Riley barked.

A boy Nell hadn’t noticed before jumped up from the floor in the corner, a book in his hand. He was a gangly youth of about fourteen, with overgrown hair and shabby clothes, good-looking despite his skinniness and a misshapen nose that was probably the result of a poorly healed fracture.

“Take these folks downstairs and show ‘em the flat,” Riley said as he tossed the key ring across the room to Denny.

The boy reached out to catch it, but fumbled, wincing when it struck his hand. As he scooped it off the floor, Nell saw that the middle and index fingers of his right hand were crooked, the knuckles distended.

“Mary and Johnny’s place?” Denny asked as he tucked the book into the waist of his trousers in back. “How come?”

“Stop askin’ so many questions and start earnin’ your keep,” said Mother Nabby in a husky rumble as she relocked the drawer.

“Since he’s going downstairs,” Riley told Mother. “I could use some Jameson’s.”

Shooting Riley a look of disgust for making her unlock the drawer again, Mother withdrew a shiny brass key tied to a red ribbon, and gave it to him. “Anything else?” she asked snidely.

“No, ma’am. Sorry to trouble you. Here.” He said, handing the key to Denny. “Bring me back a jug of Jameson’s from the coal cellar. Be sure and lock it up after, and come right back up. No holin’ up down there in a corner with your nose in that book. You hear me, boy?”

“Start earning your keep?” Denny grumbled as he led Nell and Will through the saloon toward the basement stairwell. “Any errand they got, no matter what it is, I hop to it. Nobody ever gave me nothin’ I didn’t work for, ever.”

“Where d’you think you’re goin’ with them keys, you little shite?” It was Finn Cassidy, striding toward them with an expression of fury.

Backing up, Denny said, “R-Riley wants me to fetch him a jug of Jameson’s from—”

“Not that key.” Pointing to the anchor-shaped key ring, Finn said, “Those.”

“I, um, I’m s’posed to take these folks downstairs and show ‘em Mary and Johnny’s flat.”

“We’re thinking of renting it,” Will said.

“The hell you are,” Finn said. “My brother ain’t even cold yet. I ain’t got the place emptied out. All his stuff’s still in there. Gimme that,” he ordered, reaching for the key ring.

“Mother says I got to show it to ‘em,” Denny told Finn in a shuddering voice as he held the keys behind his back. “I don’t do what she says, she’ll toss me right back out on the street. You know that.”

His hands squeezing into fists, Finn snarled, “You don’t do what
I
say, I deal you a few more cracked bones—big ones this time, arms and legs. You wanna end up a cripple, or you wanna give me them keys?”

Stepping between the hulking Finn and the cowering boy, Will said, “The kid’s just following his boss’s orders. She’s your boss, too, ain’t she?”

“You stay outa this,” said Finn, stabbing a finger in Will’s face. “This ain’t none of your affair.”

Tell you what,” Will said, pressing a coin into Finn’s hand. “Why don’t you take it up with Mother Nabby, and meanwhile we’ll just have a quick look at the room. We may not even want it.”

Finn studied the coin, a gold half eagle, with a surly but covetous expression before slipping it in his pocket. “I know everything that’s in that room,” he told Denny. “You pinch somethin’, you even just
touch
somethin’, and you’ll answer to my fists. Same goes for you,” he told Will. Turning, he stalked off toward the back room and Mother Nabby.

Denny let out a weighty sigh and turned to Will, “Thanks, mister. Finn, he’s...” He shook his head.

“A real hard chaw, eh?” Nell asked.

“He’s the Devil himself,” the boy said grimly as he watched Finn disappear into the back room. “Meanest pug I ever knew.”

Will said, “He’s the one who broke your nose and your fingers, is he?”

Denny’s jerked his shoulders, his gaze on the floor.

“How come?” Will asked.

Denny’s gaze shifted from Will to Nell, then back to the floor. “I reckon he was riled up. That there’s the basement stairs,” he said before Will could question him further. “I’ll go first. You want to be watchin’ your step, miss. Couple of these stairs are loose, and it’s dark as Hades till you get to the bottom.”