Still Life With Murder (35 page)

“Good evening, Miss,” greeted the white-haired apothecary as he measured a mound of powder on his scale. Glancing up, he said, “Ah, it’s Miss…Sweeney, is it not? Dr. Toussaint’s assistant?”

“That’s right.”

“He wants those extra needles after all, does he?”

“I’m sorry?”

“For the syringe. I
told
him the one wasn’t enough. It has to be cleaned between patients, after all, and they do break.” Hauling a tray out from beneath the counter, he asked, “How many would he like?”

The tray had compartments for the display of hypodermic injection supplies: delicate silver and glass syringes, sturdy steel ones, medicine vials, needles of various sizes, and portable syringe kits in cases ranging from utilitarian brass to ornamental gold-plate.

“That’s…not actually what I’m here for,” Nell said, looking away from the rows of needles glinting in the bright overhead light. “He, um, asked me to pick up a few things this morning, but I couldn’t get here till now, and it looks as if he might have beaten me to it.”

“Ah.” Mr. Maynard nodded sympathetically as he put away the tray. “Some days are so hectic, aren’t they? One wonders where the time goes. Yes, Dr. Toussaint was just here about fifteen minutes ago. What did he ask you to pick up? Perhaps he got it himself.”

So much for Will’s promise to stay home tonight. “It’s actually a fairly long list,” she said. “Why don’t you tell me what he bought so I’ll be sure not to get the same thing.”

“Just the syringe, the needle, and four grams of morphine sulfate.”

“Four grams…How much would that be in—”

“Ounces? Less than an eighth.”

“No, um…he mentioned doses. How many doses would that be?”

“It depends on the patient’s body weight, of course, but at an average of ten milligrams per dose, that would be four hundred.”

She stared at him. “Four hundred doses?”

“Average doses. A large man would need twenty milligrams—more if he’d developed a tolerance. And as for addicts, well, they can go through hundreds of milligrams a day. In fact, I once heard of a man who regularly went through as much as I just sold Dr. Toussaint in a single day—over the course of twenty-four hours, of course. Four grams would be a lethal dose for anyone, injected all at once.”

Striving to keep her voice steady, Nell said, “Did he mention what he needed it for?”

“It really only has the one medical application,” Mr. Maynard replied. “Pain relief. I offered to put it on his account, but he insisted on giving me cash and paying off the account, seeing as he’ll be gone.”

Gone?
Nell’s heart felt as if it were trying to hammer a hole through her stays.

“I wish all my customers were as good about tidying up loose ends before long trips. You should see what some of them end up owing! It’s a wonder I can…Miss Sweeney? Are you—”

She grabbed her skirts and bolted from the shop, heart tripping, mind whirling. Four grams of morphine and one needle…
Four grams would be a lethal dose for anyone, injected all at once
.

She raced around the corner to Jack’s house, leapt up the stairs, pounded on the door.

No answer. It was dark inside. She tried the knob, but it was locked.

“Mr. Thorpe!” She pounded harder.
“Mr. Thorpe! It’s me, Nell Sweeney. Answer the door!”

This can’t happen. Please, God, don’t let this happen
.

“Damn you, Jack, answer the damn door!”

Nell heard a gasp from behind her and turned to see an elderly couple walking a tiny white dog. They averted their gazes and hurried away.

There came a yellowish haze of gaslight from within the house. Squinting through the glass, she saw Jack, in rumpled
shirtsleeves, lighting a wall bracket in the foyer. He blinked when he saw her, tucked in his shirt as he approached.

“Where’s Dr. Hewitt?” she asked, bulling her way past him when he opened the door, praying Will had come back here after Maynard’s rather than disappearing into the night. “Is he here?”

“Yes, of course,” Jack said groggily as he finger-combed his untidy hair, one cheek imprinted with creases.

“Are you sure?” she asked. “Did you just wake up?”

“No.” He hesitated guiltily. “Y-yes, I suppose I—”

“Oh, Jesus.” She sprinted up the stairs, checked his room, the bathroom.

I wouldn’t let you go through opium withdrawal in a situation like that
.

I don’t intend to
.

No sign of him anywhere in the rest of the house, which she swiftly searched.

As for you, Miss Sweeney…it has been a very real pleasure
.

Jack was waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs with a sealed envelope.
Miss Cornelia Sweeney
was written on the front in a masculine, economical hand. “He left me one, too,” Jack said, holding up his own envelope. “I found them on my desk.”

Nell broke the seal and read the note:

My Dear Miss Sweeney
,

        
I have decided to sacrifice Lady Viola’s bail money after all and take my chances in Shanghai, where a pipe fiend is less likely to attract notice than in any other city on earth. If we never meet again, please know that making your acquaintance has been a bright spot in a rather dark life
.

        
And do watch those assumptions
.

Gratefully yours
,

Wm. Hewitt

“He’s not going to Shanghai,” Nell said. “He just wants us to think that. I was just at the druggist around the corner. Dr. Hewitt was there about fifteen minutes ago. He bought a great deal of morphine and a hypodermic syringe.”

Jack stared at her, his eyes widening as the implication sank in. He shook his head. “No. He wouldn’t.”

“He doesn’t seem to mind dying,” she said. “But he loathes the idea of hanging.”

“Let’s not jump to conclusions. We know he was almost out of opium. Perhaps this is just a substitute.”

“He uses Black Drop for that. But he once told me he’d prefer a syringe full of morphine to the noose.”
Quick, fairly painless…
“And now that the case against him is pretty much airtight, and Detective Cook is threatening to lock him up again if he so much as steps out the front door…”

“Christ.” He raked both hands through his hair. “It’s my fault. I was just going to rest my eyes for a moment on the couch, and I…I…”

“We’ve got to—”

“I told you I’d fail him,” Jack said, his voice taking on a frantic pitch. “You see? I told you. I
knew
it. Jesus Christ!”

“Mr. Thorpe, please calm yourself.”

“I should never have let this happen,” he said, kneading his temples with tremulous fingers. “I should never have let him—”

“Get hold of yourself,”
Nell commanded, a although she felt perilously close to panic herself. “I need you. Dr. Hewitt needs you. We’ve got to find him before he…”
Don’t think about it
. “We just have to find him, as soon as possible.”

“What if he’s left Boston?”

She shook her head as she thought about it.
There’s a whole, vast world beyond Boston, Miss Sweeney
. “Let’s just hope he didn’t.”

Jack nodded mechanically, his face flushed, rubbing that vein on his forehead as if trying to erase it.

“We can cover twice as much ground if we separate to look for him,” she said. “If we’re right about his intentions, he’ll want to be someplace relatively private, where he won’t be disturbed. But not too private. I should think…I mean, if I were him, I should think I’d want to be…found.”

“Yes…yes. A hotel room, perhaps.”

“There are so many hotels in Boston. Where would we start?”

“I’ve got this year’s city almanac. It lists them all.”

Jack fetched the little green book from his desk in the library, where they sat to divide up the hotels, Nell taking the larger, more respectable ones—the Tremont, United States, Parker, Revere—while Jack assigned himself the more questionable establishments, as well as the flop houses and de facto brothels in the poorer quarters.

“You don’t want to dress too well, where you’ll be going tonight,” she said, “or you might attract the wrong kind of attention. If you’ve got an old sack coat, wear that. And a slouch hat or a plain cap. Oh, and no tie.”

“You’re right,” he said. “I wouldn’t have thought of that. He offered to drop her off at the Tremont Hotel if she would just give him a few minutes to change his clothes and have them hitch up his gig at the livery stable half a block away.

“You can leave me just down the street from there, at the Tremont Temple,” she told him. “The Hewitts are seeing
Bluebeard
tonight, and I need to speak to Harry.”

“You think he might know where Will would have gone?”

“It’s possible,” she said, although she thought it best not to elaborate, given Jack’s brittle state of mind; he needed to focus on the task at hand.

S
HE WAS ABOUT TO BE
sacked.

Nell drew as deep a breath as her stays would allow, let it out, and knocked on the door of the Hewitts’ box at the Tremont Temple. From the other side, over the muffled music—a jauntily gothic duet to orchestral accompaniment—she heard a deep male voice, August Hewitt’s, say “Who the devil is that?”

He would dismiss her for what she was about to do. It wasn’t even worth praying to St. Dismas over, or hoping for intervention by Viola—not that she wouldn’t try, but her chances of success would be virtually nil. A servant—and that was what he considered her, regardless of her standing in his wife’s eyes—did not meddle in her employer’s private family affairs. She didn’t work to undercut the express dictates of the man who paid her salary. And she certainly didn’t barge into his private opera box to accuse his son of murder.

By this time tomorrow, she would have no job, no home…

And no Gracie.

A nervous impulse propelled her to step back from the door, screamed at her to turn, run! There was still time to save herself. She didn’t have to do this.

But then she thought about Will, bowing to her with such solemn finality as he took his leave this afternoon.
It has been a very real pleasure
.

She raised her fist to knock again as the door swung inward, pulled open by Harry, who’d tilted his gilded chair backward at a perilous angle to reach the doorknob. “Miss Sweeney!” he chuckled as he righted the chair with a thump. “A secret fan of Offenbach, are you? You may have my seat.” He stood, tugging at his tailcoat. “I’ve just discovered that I can’t bear comic opera.”

His father and younger brother, in white tie, like Harry—creamy orchids in their lapels, the three of them—also rose as Nell stepped hesitantly into the darkened loge. Martin looked startled, but pleased, to see her there; Mr. Hewitt scowled in
bewilderment. On the gaslit stage below them, a man in an outlandishly tall European-style top hat, fur-trimmed great coat and chalky face paint was singing in French to a cartoonishly pink-cheeked young woman in an ivory gown.

“Nell?” Viola, in jet-beaded aubergine velvet, an opera glass cradled in her white-gloved hand as it rested upon the railing, had turned to address her governess with an expression of anxious bewilderment. Her two ivory-handled canes, folded at present, were hooked over the arm of her chair. “Nell, darling, is something wrong? Is it Gracie?” she asked, making an awkward effort to rise.

“No! No, Gracie is…Nurse Parrish is watching her. I…” Nell pressed a hand to her churning stomach. “I need to speak to Mister Harry.”

“What business do you have with my son,” asked August Hewitt in his formidable baritone, “that would prompt you to interrupt us at such a time?”

Nell nodded toward the door and said, “I’d rather speak to him in pri—”

“You’ll speak to him in front of me, or not at all,” his father intoned as laughter rose from the audience. “What is this about?”

Nell licked her lips. Everyone was staring at her. Viola looked terrified. “I…” Turning to Harry, she asked, “Do you…do you know where I might find your brother?”

“My brother?” Harry pointed to Martin, wide-eyed with confusion. “He’s right—”

“Not him,” Nell said. “William. Has he ever mentioned a hotel or rooming house? I desperately need to find him.”

The only sound, a short intake of air, came from Martin, who must have thought she’d lost her senses.

“My brother William,” Harry said slowly, “is in a graveyard in Georgia.”

“I don’t know what this is about,” his father bit out, “but I’ll have you know I do not appreciate—”

“How long have you known he was alive?” Nell asked Harry. “How long? Since before he came to Boston, or has it only been—”

“You’re mad.” Harry turned to his parents, hands raised in self-absolution. “She’s mad. I have no idea—”

“Liar!”
Nell said. “You knew. You knew and didn’t—”

“He didn’t know,” said Mr. Hewitt. “No one knew but Mrs. Hewitt and I.”

“What?”
Martin exclaimed.

“I’m sorry, Martin,” Viola began. “We only found out—”

“He’s
alive
? How could you know and not tell me?”

“That’s enough,” his father scolded as one or two audience members glanced up at them. “We’ll discuss it when we get home.”

“Ah, yes,” Harry muttered. “Mustn’t make a scene.”

“
You
knew,” Nell accused Harry. “But you kept it a secret. And how convenient it was, after they found Ernest Tulley in that alley, to have an older brother handy to take the blame for—”

“What are you implying?” Mr. Hewitt demanded.

Still addressing Harry, Nell said, “It was you. It was you in that back room at Flynn’s that night, wasn’t it?”

“Flynn’s?” Harry shook his head in apparent puzzlement, as if he’d never heard of the place.

“It’s a boardinghouse for sailors in Fort Hill,” Nell said, “and you know it very well.”

“Sorry,” Harry said on a little huff of laughter. “Not my kind of neighborhood—or establishment.”

“I think it is,” she said. “I think you like whiskey and cards and whores, and I think—”

“My God!” Mr. Hewitt exclaimed, gripping his wife’s shoulder. “Miss Sweeney, I’ll thank you to leave here and—”