Murder in the North End (10 page)

“Yes, and I wish he had. It would have been perfect for him. But he was concerned about providing for his family, and of course he was still reeling from the hearings and their aftermath. It’s not easy to have the rug pulled out from under you, professionally, especially when you’ve done nothing to deserve it. He was an exemplary detective. Still is.”

“Were you privy to the hearings at all?” Will asked.

“I wasn’t present during them, but I followed them as closely as anyone, and I had my sources for information. Some of the men who were on the board that conducted the hearings belong to my club. Colin was found innocent of any serious misconduct, of course—in fact, as I understand it, the hearings pretty much showcased his sterling qualities, which was why Major Jones snapped him up for the state constabulary.”

“Do you know anything about secret testimony Detective Cook may have given?” Nell asked. “Constable Skinner seems to think he fabricated evidence against them.”

“I do know about that testimony,” Shute said as he raised the cigar to his mouth. “It was about restructuring the city police. They just wanted Cook’s candid opinion about what was wrong with the department and how to fix it.”

“It had nothing to do with Skinner and his pals?” Will asked.

With a little grunt of humorless laughter, Shute said, “They didn’t need Colin to condemn those men. Their offenses were many and varied—and well documented. I’m quite sure the only reason Skinner is still on the force is that he greased a few palms. Probably called in a few favors, maybe even engaged in a little blackmail.”

“Whom would he have blackmailed?” Nell asked.

“One of the men overseeing the hearings, perhaps, someone in a position to say yea or nay to his continuing on the force. Cops learn all kinds of things about people, things men in certain positions wouldn’t want known.”

Shute leaned back against the wall, one hand in his pocket as he drew on his cigar. Through a drifting blur of smoke, he said, “Even the most upstanding among us have our little secrets, do we not?”

“A bit warm tonight for that shawl, isn’t it?” Will asked Nell as he handed her into a hackney on a dark street corner two blocks from Colonnade Row, where none of the Hewitts’ neighbors would see them; he’d sold his phaeton and horses before leaving for Shanghai. “Nabby’s Inferno,” he told the driver as he climbed in next to her. “The corner of North and Clark.”

Nell drew the swath of fringed wool around herself as she settled into the seat. “I think I may have overdone it.”

Will had suggested they dress so as to blend in with the local denizens, the better to elicit their trust and cooperation.
If we show up at Nabby’s looking like a couple of toffs on a gaslight tour of the slums, all we’re likely to learn is how quickly they can pick us clean and hurl us back out onto the street.

The only females who frequented North End saloons at night, Will had said, were those who either sold their favors outright, or in implicit exchange for shelter, protection, or trinkets. In that spirit, they tended to flaunt their charms rather boldly; a modestly attired lady would, paradoxically, attract a measure of suspicion after dark at a place like Nabby’s.

There was no arguing with Will’s logic. The only problem, aside from Nell’s natural aversion to looking cheap, was the fact that she owned nothing that wasn’t supremely tasteful; as a governess, it was incumbent upon her to present an image of refinement and good breeding. She’d resorted, finally, to rummaging through the clothing left behind by the Hewitts’ maidservants when they departed for the Cape—the “civilian” garb they wore during their off hours. The pickings were slim. They’d taken most of it with them, of course, and there wasn’t anything really tawdry—until Nell opened an old steamer chest belonging to one of her least favorite people, the cheeky, copper-haired Mary Agnes Dolan. Inside, she found three snug, lowcut basque bodices, a modish blue tournure skirt festooned with swags, ruffles and bows, a flashy little feathered hat, and a pair of fingerless black lace mitts.

Nell chose a basque of emerald satin, which was so wasp-waisted that she had to lace her stays within a quarter-inch of asphyxiation for it to fit. It was scandalously low-cut. She blanched when she looked down and saw how much bosom had been propped up on display. Reasoning that exhibition was, after all, the idea, she resolved to throw herself into the role, rouging her lips and cheeks and twisting her hair into a loose chignon with ringlets haloing her face and tumbling down her nape. Her accessories were a mesh reticule, some of Mary Agnes’s paste necklaces, the feathered hat, and the mitts.

She’d smiled at her reflection in the mirror on the Hewitts’ entryway hallstand, thinking,
If Saint August could see me like this...
The grin vanished when she heard Will come in through the back door, having returned from a visit to his house to collect his things. She snatched one of Viola’s shawls off the hat rack and hastily wrapped it around herself, wishing she’d thought to pin a lace fichu over her décolletage. It would have compromised the effect, of course, but at least she could have held her head up.

Turning toward Nell on the seat of the hack, Will—clad in a humble sack coat and tweed cap—said, “I can’t imagine you’ve gone too far. You may think you have, given that monstrous propriety of yours, but some ladies are incapable of true vulgarity, and you’re one of them. Come, now.” He pushed the shawl off her shoulders. “You’re supposed to look like a tart tonight, not a school...” He blinked down at her. “Marm.”

“You see?” she said, pulling the shawl back up.

He tugged it back down. “Nell, don’t be ridiculous. It’s far too warm a night for—”

“But I look...I look...”

“You look wonderful,” he said softly.

“I’ll be plagued by leering boors,” she said. “They’ll stare at my...” She glanced down at her abundant cleavage.

“Any man you’ll encounter at a place like Nabby’s is used to seeing women dressed like that. They won’t leer.”

“It’s just...it’s been a long time since I’ve fit in with people like this. I’ve gotten so far from these people, this world. It feels...” She shook her head.

“I know.” Will closed his hand over hers, but withdrew it almost immediately, as if he’d committed some sort of indiscretion. “It’s not as if you’re returning to this world, though, not really. You’re just acting a part, for Colin Cook’s sake.”

“And his wife’s. Poor woman. I can’t imagine what she’s going through.”

Will said, “You do realize she’s hiding something.”

Nell just sighed.

“All that elusiveness about how they first met,” he said.

“I know.”

“And this mysterious favor she wrote to thank him for.”

“I know, I know.”

“In other respects, I thought she was admirably forthcoming—except when I asked her outright if she thought her husband could have killed Johnny Cassidy. I mean, I like her—quite a lot, actually—but it does make me wonder.”

“I still can’t help but feel sorry for her, being ambushed that way by Skinner, and in her condition. He didn’t have to tell her all that, about her husband and Mary Molloy.”

“Do you suppose it’s true?” Will asked.

“I don’t know. I really don’t. On the one hand, he’s always spoken so lovingly of her. But on the other, well... like she said, he
is
a man, and men...”

“And men...?” He was fighting a smile, the dog.

She cast him a baleful look. “Have needs.”

“Ah, yes, those primitive, ravenous needs of ours. It has actually been my observation that if a man is truly devoted to his wife, and if he’s mature enough to have sorted out that one can’t eat one’s cake and have it, he can and will remain faithful through thick and thin—even if it means doing without the pleasures of the marital bed for months, or longer.”

“Nevertheless,” Nell said, “men do occasionally stray, even good men like Detective Cook. If we start out by assuming he didn’t, we might miss something important.”

“You dodged that assumption very adroitly,” Will said with a hint of a smile. “My incessant hectoring has borne fruit, after all.” Tapping on the roof of the cab, he told the driver to pull over.

“Nabby’s is a block away in that direction,” he said as he handed Nell down from the carriage and paid the driver. “It’s probably best if we’re not seen getting out of a hack by the people we’ll be dealing with. Mustn’t look too prosperous.”

He took her arm and escorted her up North Street, a meandering cobblestone lane lined with tenements and shopfronts, each more dismal and ramshackle than the last. Men swaggered down the sidewalk in packs, snorting with laughter as they drank from their flasks and smoked their cigarettes. Frowsy streetwalkers clustered beneath the lamp posts, fanning their sweat-sheened, desperately painted faces. The balmy night air carried whiffs of spoiled fruit, sewage and sour ale, underscored by the musty-damp smell of Boston Harbor just to the east.

“This is it,” Will said as they approached a weathered brick building fronted with leaded glass windows glowing orange-yellow in the dark. Men and women milled about in front, flirting and laughing, smoking and drinking. From within came muffled, lively piano music.

“Have you ever been here?” Nell asked Will.

“A few times, many years ago, but just for the drinking, never to play cards.” Lowering his voice so as not to be heard by those loitering nearby, he said, “Even back then, I knew enough not to wager a dime here. It’s a skinning joint. They’ve got their hands in your pocket from the moment you set foot in the place. If a man walks in alone, he’s immediately set upon by a bar girl who asks him for a dance—for which he has to pay, of course. Then she’ll be thirsty and want a drink, which, although it contains no alcohol, will set the chump back a pretty penny. Then comes the invitation to go off to some private nook for a more intimate form of entertainment, which will cost him whatever is left in his wallet. The card games are crooked, the boxing is fixed...”

“Boxing?”

“A couple of nights a week, they set up a boxing ring in the dance hall at the rear of the building and have bare-knuckled matches. The other nights, it’s music and dancing.”

He led her to a cluster of dusty, framed photographic portraits hanging in Nabby’s front window facing the glass, so that they could be viewed from outside by the light of a nearby street lamp. The photographs on top were of powerfully built, shirtless men scowling at the camera, fists raised. Each picture had a name inked across the bottom in a spikey scrawl:
Phelix McCann, Davey Kerr, Pat “Bulldog” Cunigan, Jimmy Muldoon, Finn “Southpaw” Cassidy, Johnny Cassidy...

“Look,” Nell said, pointing to the photos of the two men named Cassidy, who bore a striking resemblance to each other, although one was dark, the other fair. The dark one, the late Johnny, was captured in a boxer’s crouch, fists curled near his face. He was turned away from the camera, the three-quarter profile highlighting his heavy brow and sharp cheekbones. Finn Cassidy, although he shared Johnny’s rapacious features, was substantially bigger than Johnny, a hulking brute with bulging muscles and small eyes cast into shadow beneath his brow ridge. Both men looked to be in their early to mid-thirties.

“Brothers?” Nell said.

“Looks like it. Those must be the wenches who work here,” Will said, indicating the dozen or so photographs below those of the boxers. They were full-length portraits of young, suggestively attired women, some in just their underpinnings, striking seductive poses. They had been labeled with first names only:
Flora, Ivy, May, Pru, Fanny, Elsie, Mary...

“Do you suppose that’s Mary Molloy?” Nell asked, pointing.

“She’s the only Mary there.”

“I didn’t realize she worked here.”

“I assumed she did.”

The girl in the photograph looked young, very young, an effect emphasized by her petite stature and juvenile attire. Unlike the other bar girls, she wore a modest, white-collared blue frock hemmed above the ankles, displaying a pair of dainty black boots, a peek of white stocking, and a lacy fringe of petticoat. She had little in the way of bosom, but the face of an angel, with huge, pale eyes, a turned-up nose, and bee-stung lips. Her hair, which Nell guessed, from her befreckled complexion, to be red, fell over her shoulders in a torrent of ringlets.

“She doesn’t look old enough to be someone’s common law wife,” Nell observed, “not to mention a... Well, I take it these women are essentially prostitutes.”

“Some men have a taste for young girls,” Will said. “They’re usually immature themselves, and looking for someone they can control.”

“It surprises me that Johnny Cassidy could have tolerated her selling herself to other men.”

“It may very well have been his idea,” Will said. “Easy money.”

“Easy for
him.”

Will gestured her through the front door, where a muscular, reddish-blond man in a tweed vest, but no coat, halted them with an upraised hand. He had the faded remnants of a black eye and a somewhat fresher contusion on his forehead. Nell recognized his deepset eyes and feral features from the photograph in the window.

“Two bits for you,” he told Will in a voice that bore just the faintest hint of an Irish lilt. “The lady gets in free.”