Murder on Black Friday (26 page)

“Do expedite your business with this...gentleman,” said Mrs. Mott. “It is imperative that we all be ready to leave promptly at ten o’clock. That’s less than an hour from—”

“Our bags are all packed and in the entrance hall,” Nell said. “We just thought we’d enjoy a spot of tea before our trip.”

Gracie lifted her empty tiny cup toward the housekeeper as if in a toast, and brought it to her lips. Mrs. Mott fixed the little girl with a nostril-flaring grimace before stalking away.

“Miseeney,” Gracie asked as she crouched down to gather Clancy in her arms, “what’s a by-blow?”

Eileen looked at Nell, her bottom lip caught in her teeth. She clearly
did
know what a by-blow was, even if she didn’t know, or hadn’t until now, that Viola Hewitt’s adopted daughter was the illegitimate child of one of her own servants. Viola had long ago forbidden the household staff to speak of Gracie’s origins, although clearly Mrs. Mott and Hitchens felt themselves above such constraints. As far as Gracie knew, her Nana had picked her out special after bringing up four sons because she’d always longed for a daughter.

“A by-blow...” Nell began hesitantly. She smoothed a hand over Gracie’s plaited and beribboned hair, as black and glossy as that of her father. “It’s a silly word for a child. It doesn’t mean anything.”

The little girl nodded uncertainly as she nuzzled the little dog, who responded by licking her chin. “What’s the House of Industwy?” Gracie was at the age where, once the questions started, they just kept coming.

Eileen looked at Nell as if wondering how she was going to answer that one.

Nell said, “It’s...a big house on a place called Deer Island where people go to live.” A house for paupers, orphans, the mad and diseased and doomed—a place not unlike the Barnstable County Poor House, where Nell had spent much of her dismal youth.

“It’s on an island?” Gracie asked, bobbing up and down as she did when she was excited. “Can we go live there after you and Uncle Will get mawwied?
Married?”

“Umm...”

Nell’s sham courtship with the Hewitts’ eldest son, William, was a fiction intended to facilitate his spending time with her and Gracie without arousing unseemly whispers. Will had proposed the ruse last summer in order to silence speculation that the prim and proper young governess might be carrying on with the notorious surgeon-turned-gambler who was the black sheep of the Hewitt family. If they were thought to be unofficially engaged, Will reasoned, no one would question their friendship.

It was a friendship that could never amount to more, given that
Miss
Nell Sweeney was, in fact, already married to an inmate at Charlestown State Prison. Duncan, whom she hadn’t seen in two years, was currently ten years into a thirty year sentence for armed robbery and aggravated assault. The only people in Boston who knew about him, and the rest of her questionable past, were Will and Father Gorman at St. Stephen’s, who served as her confessor. They were the only people who must ever know, lest she torn away from this charmed life and the child she’d come to love as her own.

That child was now staring at her with her big, guileless eyes, waiting to find out whether she could take the place of a real daughter to the couple she’d grown to consider her surrogate parents. It was a question she’d asked a number of times since learning, no doubt through servants’ careless comments, that Nell and Will were presumably destined to marry. This was the first time, however, that she’d proposed the county almshouse as their family home.

“We can’t live at the House of Industry, buttercup,” Nell answered, deliberately skirting the crux of the issue. “It’s for people who don’t have any other home. You’ve got a home here with Nana.”

“But Nana’s legs don’t work. That’s why she needs you.” Clutching Clancy tight to her chest, the child gazed up at Nell with the exaggerated pathos of an actress in some tawdry melodrama. “I need you, too, Miseeney. Who will look after me if you aren’t here?”

“What about Miss Tierney?” Nell asked.

“Aye, what about me?” Eileen demanded with pretended severity as she tweaked one of Gracie’s braids.

“She could come, too, couldn’t she? Please, Miseeney?” the child begged, hugging the dog tighter.
“Pleeease?”

Nell crouched down so that they were at eye level and told her what she always ended up telling her. “Engagements can last a very long time, sweetie. It might be years before Uncle Will and I get married.”

“But when you do, can I—”

“We’ll settle that when the time comes.”

“But—”

“I don’t have time to discuss this right now.” With a kiss on Gracie’s forehead, Nell stood and said, “There’s a constable downstairs who wants to speak with me, and one mustn’t keep constables waiting. Why don’t you and Miss Tierney make sure you haven’t left anything behind that you want to bring to the Cape. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

As she was leaving, Nell heard Gracie ask Eileen, “Miss Tiewny, what does ‘sired’ mean?”

“Er...”

“‘Sired by a Hewitt,’“ Gracie said. “What does that mean?”

Oh, hell.
Pausing in the doorway, Nell said, “I’ll explain it to you later,” although she’d no notion of how she would wriggle out of that one.

*   *   *

Nell opened the door of the music room to find Charlie Skinner standing with his back to her, lifting the sheet hanging over the largest of the many family portraits lining the rosewood paneled walls—a colossal full-length likeness of August Hewitt executed by his wife, Viola, a gifted amateur painter.

“You wanted to see me?” Nell asked as she closed the door behind her. Best not to let others be privy to their conversation, at least until she knew what in the devil he wanted with her.

Skinner turned, dropping the sheet, to address her with that look of vaguely amused disdain he seemed to reserve just for her. He hadn’t changed much over the past year: same slight build and rodentlike features, although his prematurely salt-and-pepper hair had gotten noticeably grayer.

He surveyed her up and down with a trace of a sneer. “Miss
Sweeney.”
The emphasis on her Irish name was intended as an insult.

Giving tit for tat, Nell allowed herself a lingering appraisal of Skinner’s attire, the dark blue uniform of the Boston constabulary. A pair of handcuffs, a truncheon, and a holstered pistol hung on his belt; policeman’s hat sat on the sheet-draped grand piano.

“Constable,” she said with a cool little smile. “It
is
‘Constable’ now, not ‘Detective?’”

Skinner’s mouth compressed into a churlish slit. The last time Nell had seen him, over a year ago, he’d been wearing a sack suit and one of those gaudy plaid vests he was so inexplicably fond of. At the time, he’d been one of seven officers assigned to Boston’s prestigious Detectives’ Bureau headquartered at City Hall. In February, however, following a battery of hearings prompted by widespread police corruption, the Detectives’ Bureau was abolished. Its members, save for a single detective who was found innocent of any major wrongdoing, were either sacked or downgraded to rank-and-file patrolmen. It would appear that Skinner had contrived to stay on as one of the demoted officers, but the reduction in rank had clearly stung.

From outside in the central hall came the thud of something heavy striking the marble floor, followed by a male voice hissing, “Shit!”

“You will watch your tongue in this house, young man.” It was Mrs. Mott, in her shrill supervisory mode. “Pick up that trunk, you two. Come, come.” She delivered two sharp claps. “You’ve not been hired to lollygag.”

“It’s bedlam out there,” Skinner observed.

Indeed, a kind of semi-controlled chaos had gripped the Hewitts’ Italianate mansion at dawn that morning, as twenty or so servants, aided by a fleet of hired cartmen, strove to transfer a vast array of household gear to the row of tipcarts and wagons clustered in the stable yard and lined up out front at the curb.

“The Hewitts spend most of July and August at Falconwood, their summer house on Cape Cod,” Nell said. “We leave this morning.”

“‘We?’ The servants, too?” he said.

The implication, that Nell was on the same level as the maids and footmen, wasn’t lost on her. In fact, her status as governess put her in that shadowy borderline between the hired domestics and the family, a distinction that the constable surely recognized, but chose, in her case, to disregard.

“The entire staff travels with the family,” she said. “The house will be closed up until the end of August.”

Skinner made a show of looking around. “This big, swanky house standing empty for what—six, eight weeks? Aren’t they afraid somebody might break in, make off with some of this fancy stuff?” He lifted the sheet over Viola’s prized Limoges urn sitting on the piano.

“It happened a couple of years ago,” Nell said. “Mr. Hewitt had stronger locks put on the doors.”

“There’s no lock so strong it can’t be picked if you know how,” Skinner said, reminding Nell the time Will had unlocked Virgil Hines’s writing box with a flick of a hairpin.
You have a great many shameful talents, don’t you?
she’d asked him.

“I could crack any lock in this house in less than a minute,” the constable bragged.

“I’m all too sure you could,” said Nell, who recalled that burglaries were among the infractions of which the disbanded detectives had been accused, in addition to rapes, extortion, bribery, murder for hire, and savage and unprovoked beatings of Irishmen and Negroes. “Did you come here just to chat,
Constable,
or is there a purpose to your visit?”

Crossing to the console table next to the door, Skinner uncovered a pair of Venetian lamps, very old and fragile. “There’s been a murder in the North End. Local hood name of Johnny Cassidy took a bullet in the head last night in a concert saloon called Nabby’s Inferno.”

He picked up one of the lamps and held it aloft, turning it this way and that to watch the exquisite blue glass ignite in the sunlight from the open windows.

Carefully lifting the lamp from his hand, Nell set it back on the table and re-cloaked it with the sheet. “What happens in the North End is of no interest to me.” Aside from the fact that it was home to tens of thousands of Irish, crammed together in their wretched waterfront hovels.

With a little snort of amusement, Skinner said, “Oh, yeah, you lace-curtain colleens think you’re too good for that rat warren, don’t you? Well, I happen to know you never miss early Sunday mass at St. Stephen’s up on Hanover Street.”

Rattled, but determined not to show it, Nell said, “Have you been spying on me, Constable?”

Skinner lifted the sheet draped over one of the six-foot obelisks flanking the entrance to the Red Room, Viola’s private haven. “The North End is my beat—and us cops like to keep track of them that make trouble for us.”

“I still don’t see what the murder of a perfect stranger has to do with me.”

“What it has to do with you,” Skinner said as he strolled around the room, eyeing the shapes beneath the linen shrouds, “is that the murderer happens to be an old friend of yours.” He met her gaze with a smug grin. “Detective Colin Cook.”

Nell somehow managed to keep her expression neutral even as her thoughts careened. Colin Cook, one of Skinner’s former colleagues in the Detectives’ Bureau, not that the rest of them had ever considered him as such, given his Irishness, had been the lone member of the bureau to escape the retribution meted out to the rest of them after the corruption hearings. Though not entirely blameless—Cook had been known to pocket a few greenbacks now and then—the bearlike black Irishman had enjoyed a singular reputation for integrity and competence. When the rest of the Boston detectives were fired or sent out to patrol the streets, Cook had been offered what amounted to a promotion: a coveted appointment to the Massachusetts State Constabulary. As a state detective, Cook was primarily charged with stemming Boston’s rising tide of vice, although murder investigations also fell under his purview.

“I can’t imagine that your information is correct,” Nell said evenly, “if you’ve come to the conclusion that Detective Cook is the responsible party.”

“You don’t think he’s capable of killing a man?”

“For just cause? Certainly. He fought for the Union, after all. But outright murder?” She shook her head. “I wouldn’t expect the likes of you to understand such a thing, but there
are
men in this world who have moral standards, and Colin Cook is one of them.”

“A pretty speech, Miss Sweeney,” said Skinner with a mocking little bow, “and I’m sure if Cook were present to hear it, he’d be moved by your faith in him. But as it happens, that faith is sadly misplaced. He did do murder. He did it savagely, and I must say, rather sloppily. I was the first cop on the scene, and I can tell you it was pretty cut and dried. They all know him there—he’s a regular—and we got three witnesses that say he done it.”

“‘We?’ Surely you’re not the officer handling this case. That would be the responsibility of the state detectives, would it not?”

“It would but for the fact that Major Jones, who’s in charge of that unit, feels it would be a—what did he call it?—’conflict of interest’ for his boys to investigate one of their own. Now, me, I’ve got experience as a detective, and no reason to want to go soft on Cook. So, in the interest of justice, I stepped forward and offered to—”