Murder in the North End (2 page)

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—”

 “In the interest of justice?” she scoffed. “In the interest of revenge, you mean. You’d like nothing more than to see Detective Cook hang.”

Skinner tugged the sheet off the round marble table in the center of the room, laid out with a selection of August Hewitt’s favorite antique musical instruments. He picked up the pocket hunting horn, a heavily coiled brass trumpet less than a foot long, dented and tarnished with age. Viola thought it ugly, and didn’t see the point of keeping it out, but as the music room was her husband’s special haven, the instrument remained on display.

Skinner hefted the horn as if testing its weight. “I won’t deny that it gives me a warm feeling inside to see murderers twitch at the end of a noose.”

Nell said, “It would give you no end of glee to see Detective Cook hang, if only because he’s Irish, and a better man than you. But on top of that, he was actually rewarded when the truth came out about what you detectives were up to, while the rest of you ended up—”

“He sold us out,” Skinner said, teeth bared. “He ratted on us in secret sessions during the hearings, just him and those big bugs that don’t have the slightest idea what it takes to deal with the foreign vermin who’ve overrun this town. Next thing you know, I end up policing Paddyland for a Paddy
captain,
of all damn things, who treats me like I’m some stray cat he’d like to drown, while that humbug-spouting mick gets bumped up to Jones’s unit. He’s earning almost twice what he used to, while I’m still making do on eight-hundred bucks a year.”

“Surely, Constable, you’re making the job pay better than that,” Nell said with a knowing little smile.

In a crude imitation of an Irish accent, Skinner said, “Oh, you fancy yourself quite the clever little lass, don’t you, now?”

“I’m not stupid,” she said. “I know how you and your kind do business. As for Cook spouting humbug, what are you saying? Are you claiming he lied?”

“He made stuff up just to get us in hot water, and they swallowed it whole and asked for more.”

“And how would you know that,” she challenged, “if those sessions were so secret?”

“Oh, you
are
clever, aren’t you?” He closed in on her, clutching her arm in a painful grip; she could smell the rum on his breath, the sour tang of his sweat. “You’re two of a kind, you and Cook, a couple of crafty, high-reaching bogtrotters out to get what you can over the backs of all us regular, hardworking Americans. Yeah, but I’ll bet you’re not so high-and-mighty when the good detective gets you alone, eh? Do you give him a good ride, Miss Sweeney? Do you buck and scream and—”

“Get out.” Nell tried to wrestle free of his grip, but she was no match for his wiry strength.

He slammed her one-handed against the door, holding her there as he tilted her chin up with the mouthpiece of the horn. In a menacing murmur he said, “I wouldn’t mind hearing you scream.”

“Nor I you.” She wrenched the horn from his hand and whipped it across his face.

He stumbled back into the piano with a yowl of pain, his hands cupping his nose. “You
bitch!”
he screamed in a nasal rasp. “Jesus! You goddamned—”

“Get out.” Nell opened the door to the hallway. Two kitchen maids passing by with armloads of pots and kettles paused to gape at the constable.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he snarled as he advanced on her.

From the Red Room came a woman’s steely, British-inflected voice. “Oh, I think you are.”

Viola Hewitt, seated in her Merlin chair, wheeled herself through the doorway with an expression of resolute fury. Garbed with atypical severity in a tailored gray suit, her black-and-silver hair mostly concealed beneath a square-crowned riding hat trailing a swath of netting, Viola cut a daunting, almost majestic presence, even in the wheelchair.

Skinner stared unblinkingly at the revered Brahmin matron, blood trickling from between his fingers, before pointing a shaky finger at Nell. “She assaulted an officer of the law. I mean to have her brought up on—”

“And I mean to have you ejected from this house by my footmen, who will bloody more than your nose in the process, unless you leave here immediately.”

Glaring at Nell, Skinner said, “I know you know where he is.”

Nell said, “I have no idea what you’re talking ab—”

“Cook.” Skinner wiped his hand across his face, smearing it with blood; there was a livid scrape on his cheek, as well. “He disappeared last night, after shooting Cassidy. If anyone knows where he lit off to—”

“I haven’t seen nor heard from Detective Cook in weeks,” Nell said.

“You lying little—”

“Bridget,” Viola said to one of the kitchen girls. “Would you fetch Peter and Dennis? I believe they’re outside loading the—”

“I’m leaving,” Skinner said, adding, to Nell, “Tell Cook we’ll catch up with him sooner or later, and make no mistake, he
will
hang—I mean to make sure of it. As for you, don’t you ever forget there are eyes out there, watching your every move. One of these days, Miss
Sweeney,
you’re gonna get the lesson you’ve been begging for.”