MURDER AT BERTRAM'S BOWER

by Cynthia Peale

  Ames laughed, but then suddenly he sobered. “I have a more serious business, Desmond,” he said. “The murder of the girls at the Bower.”

  “Ah.”

  “Miss Montgomery, the proprietress, is a friend of Caroline’s.”

  “I see.”

  “Caroline holds to the belief that one must help one’s friends when trouble comes. And so now she has it in her head that we must help Miss Montgomery by attempting to …”

  To what? Find the madman who had murdered, in the most hideous fashion, two of the Bower’s girls?

  Crippen’s ugly little face rose up in his mind’s eye, and he went on. “To find who might be responsible for the deaths. Crippen is heading up the investigation,” he added as if in explanation.

  Delahanty nodded. “Your sister is a loyal friend.”

  “Loyal—yes. And perhaps rather foolish. But she maintains that if the murderer is not caught—if, God forbid, more girls are killed—the Bower will suffer.”

  “Yes. Well, she is right about that, I’d say. And of course my fellow journalists hereabouts make as much sensation as they can out of such matters. Anything to sell their rags.”

  “Both those girls were Irish, Desmond.”

  “That they were.” Delahanty’s eyes were suddenly cold.

  “We visited Inspector Crippen just now over at police headquarters, and I had the distinct impression that he has not put their deaths at the top of his agenda.”

  “Because they were Irish girls,” Delahanty said. He glanced at MacKenzie. “To be Irish in Boston, Doctor,” he went on, exaggerating his accent, “is to be less than human. It is the NINA effect. I’m sure you’ve seen it. ‘No Irish Need Apply’—a motto found in every help wanted advertisement, every position listed at every Intelligence Office—”

  Ames held up his hand. He had been friends—good friends—with this particular Irishman since they had met five years before. He did not need yet another of Delahanty’s sermons on the iniquities of Anglo-Saxon Boston.

  “Yes, Desmond,” he said. “I imagine that is so—because they were Irish girls.”

  Delahanty waited.

  “And so,” Ames went on smoothly, “I thought perhaps—I don’t suppose you knew them yourself, but I thought perhaps you might know someone who does. Did,” he corrected himself.

  “I might.” Delahanty nodded. “Yes, in fact, I’m sure I do. My friend Martin Sweeney runs the Green Harp Saloon down on Atlantic Avenue. He knows nearly every Irish family in Boston.”

  “Crippen believes the girls came from elsewhere.”

  “Even so. They may have had some connection to the Irish community here, and if they did, Martin will know of it—or he will know of someone who does.”

  “Excellent. What do you say to lunch at Durgin-Park, and then perhaps you will be good enough to introduce us to this Martin Sweeney?”

  Delahanty looked around his cluttered little office. “I don’t—”

  “Oh, come on, man,” Ames said, reading his friend’s thoughts. “It will do you good to get out for a bit. And if you have lunch at Durgin-Park, you won’t need to bother with dinner. Unless they’ve shortened their portions since the last time I was there.”

  The Durgin-Park Market Dining Rooms opposite the Quincy Market were always busy at noontime: men from the neighboring financial district, seamen on leave, traveling salesmen—“drummers”—in town for a little recreation. There was no individual seating here; customers sat at long, communal tables and suffered the slings and arrows of the outrageously rude waiters whose insufferable manners were part of the attraction of the place, as Ames had explained to MacKenzie on their first visit some weeks before.

  This day, the place was crowded as always, the waiters as harried and rude as ever as they dashed back and forth from the kitchen bearing platters of Yankee pot roast and boiled scrod and Indian pudding. The noise precluded any further conversation about Bertram’s Bower or anything else, so Ames and his companions devoted themselves to their food—a bargain at fifty cents for the pot roast, less for the scrod—and in good time, well fed, stood outside once more in the busy Haymarket.

  “Shall we call on your friend Sweeney?” Ames asked Delahanty, stepping out of the way of a farmer’s wagon navigating the straw-strewn cobblestones. Behind them, the domed granite market building loomed into the rainy sky. Directly in front of them was the redbrick Faneuil Hall with its gilded cricket weathervane; farther on was Scollay Square and its notorious, illicit entertainments.

  Delahanty waved down a herdic, and soon they were making their tortuous way through the city’s narrow, crooked streets. The horse was balked at almost every corner, and more than once they heard the driver cursing, not at his horse but at the malign Fates that seemed to rule the city’s traffic.

  At last, however, they came to the waterfront, the neighborhood of Sweeney’s saloon. It was only mid-afternoon, but the early winter darkness was fast coming on. In the rain, the streetlamps, sparsely spaced out, gave off a pale, ghostly glimmer. Faint gleams from the cab’s sidelights glistened on the wet cobblestones, and the odor of the sea filled the air. Over the clop-clop of the horse’s hooves came the melancholy clang of bell buoys in the harbor. Gone was the cozy residential neighborhood of Beacon Hill, the bustling streets of downtown. MacKenzie could see only the black hulks of warehouses and chandleries, the grim establishments of any working waterfront. Opposite the long row of their forbidding exteriors were the wharves and docks, and the bowsprits of fishing smacks tied up prow to street, arching over the heads of the occasional passersby on the sidewalk. Every so often they saw the dimly lit sign of a place like Sweeney’s.

  A little hush fell over the crowd as they entered, and MacKenzie was made uncomfortably aware that he and Ames, at least, were aliens.

  “Martin, my friend!” Delahanty cried as he led the way to the long, polished mahogany bar. Behind it stood a tall, stout, gray-haired man wearing a spotless white shirt with sleeve garters, and an equally spotless white apron over his trousers. He nodded at Delahanty, but he did not smile.

  “Desmond. It’s been a good long while, man, since you’ve shown your face to us.”

  “Yes, well, I have a demanding profession that never lets me rest. But today I have brought you two new customers. Gentlemen, what is your pleasure?”

  Ames and MacKenzie, introduced to the barkeep, ordered Guinness Stout, and Delahanty did the same. As they made themselves a little place to stand at the bar, talk rose up around them again; still, MacKenzie had the uncomfortable sensation that they were being watched. Like explorers coming into a native village, he thought, we are indelibly marked as outsiders.

  Delahanty, however, proved to be a man of two worlds, comfortable in both. In a little while he had chatted up his friend to the point where the saloon proprietor, poker-faced at first, actually gave Ames and MacKenzie a small, grudging smile.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “I know Bertram’s Bower.”

  “Do you indeed?” said Delahanty. “Might you know anyone there who could be of assistance to Mr. Ames?”

  Sweeney observed them for a moment, his smile vanished. Then: “I know a lad who works there. A handyman, like. Jack of all trades. He comes here nights to help out, when he can.”

  Delahanty’s thin face brightened. “Does he indeed? And who might that be?”

  “Garrett O’Reilly. I’ve known his ma since she stepped off the boat, and that was twenty-five years ago if it’s a day. Used to know his da as well—a good friend of mine, Jim O’Reilly was—till he died, two years ago now. Left his missus with eight little ones younger than Garrett. The lad’s worked for Miss Montgomery over to the Bower since Jim went. The missus thought it was a bad influence on him, but they needed the money, so she’s let him stay. He had th’infantile paralysis when he was just a little lad, so he’s a bit lame, no good to th’army, or on the docks hereabouts neither. So when the Reverend Montgomery and his sister, Miss Agatha, offered him a handyman’s pla
ce, he was glad enough to take it. His ma is always worried he’ll take up with one o’them women, but I guess he’s kept clean. I’ve not heard a bad word about him, an’ I would’v’ if any was bein’ said. Talk to him, tell him you spoke to me. He might know somethin’.”

  “Will he be here tonight?” Ames asked.

  Sweeney shrugged, expressionless. “Don’t know. He doesn’t keep a regular schedule. He might be, might not.”

  “Martin,” said Delahanty, “did you happen to know either one of those girls?”

  “No,” Sweeney said. “I don’t say that I don’t know one or another of ’em over there from time to time. There’s good Irish girls enough who’ve fallen by the wayside, or been ruined through no fault of their own. But those two—no, I didn’t know ’em.”

  “But you’ll keep an ear out for us, will you?”

  “That I will.” Sweeney nodded once, emphatically. Ames felt that he was a man of his word, and that once he had accepted your friendship, and given his own in return, he was your friend for life. “I hear a good deal one way and another,” Sweeney added.

  Ames produced his card. “A note to this address will always reach me.”

  Without looking at it, the barkeep tucked it into his shirt pocket. “All right,” he said. “If someone’s taken it into his head to kill Irish girls, I want to help put a stop to it right enough. But talk to Garrett. He’ll know something the police haven’t picked up, or I’m an Englishman.”

  He turned away to tend to business, for the place was filling up now toward the end of the day.

  “Shall we wait for this lad?” Ames asked Delahanty.

  “I can’t stay—not tonight. I must dress for dinner at Mrs. Gardner’s.”

  A smile of understanding passed over Ames’s face, and to MacKenzie he explained: “Mrs. Gardner—Isabella Stewart Gardner, of the New York department store Stewarts and the Boston Lowell Gardners—has the most artistic and literary circle in the city. She is a noted collector—not only of objets d’art, but also of talented young men like Desmond here.”

  “None of your blarney now,” Delahanty said, laughing. “The next time she gives one of her big ‘crushes,’ Doctor, I’ll have her secretary send you a card. Addington is invited regularly, but he never comes.”

  “A waste of time, those big turnouts,” Ames said brusquely.

  “But you won’t get better food this side of Paris, my friend.”

  Outside, it was full dark now, and still raining hard. A carriage light came bobbing toward them along the broad cobblestone street: a vacant hansom. They hailed it and climbed in.

  Carefully, because she was a little on edge, Caroline lifted the china teapot, poured the hot amber liquid into one of her second-best cups, and handed it with its saucer to her guest.

  “It is so kind of you to call, Cousin Wainwright,” she said. “I’m sure Addington will be home any moment now.” For there was no need to maintain the pretense that Cousin Wainwright had come to visit her; it was Addington he wanted to see, and she had a good idea why.

  On the other hand, she had promised Addington that she would deal with Cousin Wainwright, and she felt duty bound to do so now, while she had him to herself. The only problem was, Cousin Wainwright had a firmly settled opinion of woman’s place, and interfering in a murder investigation was not it.

  He was a tall, fat, balding man with none of the family looks. He stared into the depths of his cup as if he were looking for tea leaves to read. He seemed uncomfortable, she thought, far too large for the chair he had chosen, which was a delicate Empire piece with fluted legs and a worn brocade seat. Caroline hoped that his trousers were not damp, else the brocade would be ruined.

  Ordinarily at ease in any social situation, for the moment she was at a loss. She hadn’t seen Cousin Wainwright in ages—not since her mother’s funeral well over a year before—and in any case, whenever she had seen him over the years, she’d never known quite what to say to him. He was stern and straitlaced, a man of impeccable rectitude, who had single-handedly brought about great improvements in the Boston police force. This had included the hiring of a few Irishmen, somewhat lessening the tensions between the reigning Yankee class and the huge numbers of Hibernian immigrants. “Paddies,” they were called, after St. Patrick, the patron saint of their benighted island. So many Irishmen were arrested, day after day, that the long black police wagons that carted them off to jail had become known as paddy wagons.

  “And how is your boy, cousin?” Caroline asked a little too brightly.

  “Well enough.” Wainwright’s boy—a boy no longer—was in his third year at the College, which was what Brahmin Bostonians called Harvard.

  “Enjoying his studies?” she added, feeling slightly desperate. Try as she would, she could not summon up an image of the lad.

  “I shouldn’t think so,” Wainwright said, looking up at her at last. “But I told him he had to stay on, and so he will.”

  “Oh, yes, you are quite right to tell him—”

  She broke off as she heard the clatter of hooves outside, and prayed silently that it was a cab bringing Addington home at last.

  “There he is,” she said as she heard his voice and MacKenzie’s in the front hall. Cousin Wainwright took a quick sip of tea and set down his cup. As he stood, Caroline glanced apprehensively at the brocade. It looked quite dry.

  The pocket doors slid apart, and Ames and MacKenzie came in. “Well, Caro, we have had a most interesting—” Ames began. For a moment, Caroline thought he looked startled at seeing their guest, but he quickly assumed his usual sangfroid.

  “Cousin. Good to see you,” he said, advancing to shake Wainwright’s hand. He introduced MacKenzie, and the men settled themselves. Caroline handed around tea, while MacKenzie helped himself to a piece of Sally Lunn cake.

  There was a little silence. Then Ames, never one to flinch from an awkward moment, said, “I visited your place this morning, cousin.”

  “So I understand.” Wainwright scowled at him.

  “Things seem to be going fairly well, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Well enough—if we can be free of outside meddling.”

  Oh, dear, thought Caroline. So it was going to be an unpleasant encounter after all. Well, it couldn’t be helped. And Addington was certainly capable of standing up to anyone, even Cousin Wainwright.

  “Oh? Who has been meddling?” Ames asked. His face was bland and smooth, but Caroline thought she saw a hint of amusement in his dark eyes.

  “I shouldn’t think you’d need to ask that,” Wainwright said. “Inspector Crippen—”

  “Good man,” Ames interjected.

  “Yes. He is. And he doesn’t need civilians coming in to interfere—”

  “Oh, now, I wouldn’t say it was interfering, simply to pay a call—”

  “That is exactly what it was,” Wainwright said. His jowly face had taken on a pinkish color, which made the contrast with his starched white shirt collar all the greater as it cut into the folds of his neck. “Interfering with police business. I cannot understand why you believe that you can manage our affairs better than we can manage them ourselves. Hah? Why is that?”

  Ames bit back the sharp retort that sprang to his lips: because Crippen works hind foremost, deciding upon the solution to a case and then finding evidence to fit it. “I am not trying to manage anything,” he said.

  Caroline was proud of him. Ordinarily he did not trouble to hide his irritation, but at the moment he was hiding it very well.

  “Then why did you take up an hour of Crippen’s time this morning?” Wainwright demanded.

  “It was more nearly fifteen minutes. Did he complain?”

  “What with the Copp’s Hill Boys ripe to be got,” Wainwright went on, “and now these murders over in the South End—”

  “It is my fault, cousin,” Caroline put in. She knew she shouldn’t interrupt, but she had to deflect his anger before it boiled over with who knew what consequences for poor Agatha Mon
tgomery.

  Sharply, he turned to look at her; he seemed to have forgotten her existence. “What?”

  “I said, it is my fault that Addington went to see Inspector Crippen. I urged him to do so.”

  “And why did you do that, pray?”

  “Because Agatha Montgomery, the proprietress of the Bower, is a friend of mine. She grew up just around the corner on Pinckney Street. She has been the heart and soul of the Bower ever since she started it, and it seemed to me that with these dreadful murders, she stands to lose it all. People will no longer support the Bower if scandal attaches to its name, and poor Agatha would be—”

  “And what does that have to do with Crippen?” Wainwright demanded. His face was redder than before, and he was blinking rapidly, as if her putting herself forward in such an unladylike way had unnerved him.

  “Why—I asked Addington—and Dr. MacKenzie too—to pay a call on him to see if they could help him in his investigations. It was not meant to be an interference—or meddling, as you put it. It was meant to help. The sooner we—you—find the person who killed those girls, the less danger the Bower’s mission will be ruined.”

  Wainwright looked baffled. “You think that Addington can outwit the police in a matter like this?”

  Caroline lifted her chin, and her face took on the look of steely determination that MacKenzie had come to recognize.

  “It is not a question of outwitting anyone, cousin,” she said. “It is a question of helping Agatha. And if Addington—or even if I—can assist her in any way, we intend to do so.”

  Wainwright’s jowls, bright red now, flapped like a turkey’s. “You!” he exclaimed, fixing her in his hard little eyes. “You don’t mean to tell me that you would involve yourself in a murder investigation!”

  “Yes,” she said. “I do mean to tell you exactly that. If any of us here”—her gaze swept over her brother and MacKenzie—“can do anything at all to help Agatha in this terrible affair, we will do so. And I might add, cousin, that it would not be the first time that Inspector Crippen owed us—owed Addington—a debt of thanks. You will remember the business at the Somerset Club—not to mention the death of Colonel Mann—”