Murder in the North End

by P. B. Ryan

  “Have Paddy bring a pot of tea and a plate of scones for our guests.”

  “Right away, sir.”

  “Do you know Detective Cook?” O’Donagh asked.

  “He’s a friend of mine,” Nell said. “Three nights ago, there was a murder at—”

  “Yes,” O’Donagh said with a wave of his hand. “Johnny Cassidy. And now Colin has disappeared with Cassidy’s woman. Mary...”

  “Molloy,” Nell said.

  “Molloy.” O’Donagh nodded. “Not much happens in this neck of the woods that I don’t hear about, Miss Sweeney. And, of course, I’ve had a good many personal dealings with Johnny Cassidy, given that he acted as liaison between Mother Nabby and those with whom she had business arrangements, so his killing is of particular interest to me.”

  As casually as she could, Nell said, “May I ask the nature of those business arrangements, Mr. O’Donagh?”

  The big man gave her a forbearing smile. “A pretty lass may ask all sorts of things that others wouldn’t dare to, Miss Sweeney, but I’m afraid you shan’t find me very forthcoming on the subject. The activities of the Brotherhood are varied and complicated—and more importantly, prone to misinterpretation by those who think it a simple matter to see to the interests of the Irish in a hostile Brahmin enclave like Boston. Suffice it to say Mother and I share some ventures of mutual interest. Johnny facilitated those for her. He was her ‘legs,’ so to speak.” Turning to Will, he asked, “You ever seen his brother box?”

  “Never had the opportunity, no. I understand he’s very good.”

  “I wouldn’t bet against him, that’s for sure.”

  Paddy, the red-headed bartender, delivered a tea tray and a plate of scones and left.

  “I’m not responsible,” said O’Donagh as he poured tea for Nell and Will, and a refill for himself.

  “I’m sorry?” Nell said.

  “For Johnny’s death. I didn’t do it, and I didn’t order it done.” He stirred a dollop of honey into his tea and reached for a wedge of lemon. “Just wanted to get that out of the way.”

  “Of course. So—”

  “‘Looking into it,’” O’Donagh said as he squeezed the lemon into his cup. “What does that mean, precisely? You tryin’ to prove Colin didn’t do it?”

  “Yes,” said Will.

  “Who do you think did?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Nell said, “so that Detective Cook doesn’t end up hanging for a murder he didn’t commit.”

  Will said, “Your friendship with Cook goes back to the old country, yes?”

  O’Donagh nodded. “We were both Young Irelanders, fought side by side till they started rounding us up for deportation, then we took ship for Boston.”

  Will said, “We know that Cook mined coal in Pennsylvania for a few years while you established the Sons of Erie here, and that when Cook came back to Boston, he worked for you.”

  “He was my righthand man, saw to various aspects of the Brotherhood’s dealings.”

  “Such as?” Nell asked. Will glanced at her, looking amused, but also perhaps a little impressed by her persistence.

  O’Donagh’s smile was a bit tighter this time, a bit less indulgent. “Once again, Miss Sweeney, the Brotherhood’s interests are many and complex.”

  She nodded and sat back, waiting. Will, bless him, knew better than to puncture the increasingly weighty silence.

  O’Donagh smiled knowingly. “You learned this tactic from Colin, didn’t you? He used to say, ‘Ask a question, then keep your mouth shut and wait for the other fellow to give in and start talking. Most folks can’t bear to sit and look at each other with no words to fill the air.’ Well, I’m not most folks, Miss Sweeney, so I’m afraid you’ll have a long wait ahead of you if you choose to employ that strategy.”

  She said, “Let me ask a simpler question, then, on the understanding that your answer will go no further than this room. The things Detective Cook did for you, were they by and large legal, or...?”

  “If you know Colin, I think you know the answer to that question. Yes, Miss Sweeney, they were by and large legal—getting urchins off the streets, finding wharf jobs for the men and maidservice jobs for the women, feeding starving widows. The closest he ever came to the edge of the law was bracing the occasional landlord or boss.”

  “Do you mind telling us why he left the Brotherhood to join the Police Department?” she asked. I know he was disgusted with the road they were taking, Shute had said, the tactics, the payoffs.

  “If you ask me, it all came down to Chloe.”

  “His wife?” Will said.

  “She wasn’t his wife then,” O’Donagh said. “She was Daniel Duffy’s wife.”

  Nell and Will glanced at each other. “Daniel Duffy?” Nell said.

  “He was in the Brotherhood, one of the original members who formed my inner circle—my ‘cabinet,’ you might say. Danny was smart as a whip, and the most likeable fellow you ever met—when he was sober. But he had a real love affair with the bottle, and it changed him, made him surly.”

  “A mean drunk?” Will said.

  “The meanest.” O’Donagh shook his head, looking genuinely somber. “Anyway, the long and the short of it is that Colin went to Danny’s place on Brotherhood business one evening and caught him beating up on Chloe. He knew it wasn’t the first time—we’d all seen the marks on her—but Danny was in a particularly vicious mood that night. I saw her afterward, and, well...it’s a wonder she lived through it, is all I can say. She might not have if Colin hadn’t put a bullet in Danny.”

  “He killed him?” Will asked.

  “Shot him, didn’t kill him. He hit him in the chest, but missed the heart. Said it was the only way to stop him. Soon as Danny could travel, we put him on a steamer headed for the west coast. Chloe petitioned for a divorce on the grounds of desertion. It was a legal nightmare, took years and cost her everything she had, but—”

  “Years?” Nell said. “It takes years to...?”

  Will turned to look at her.

  “Well, sure,” said O’Donagh. “Divorces are hard to come by in this state. This is a subject I know something about. Several times over the years, I’ve been called upon to...exercise my connections with certain judges on behalf of local Irishwomen whose husbands abused them and their children—or, in one case, left the wife for another woman.”

  “These were Irish Catholic wives?” Nell asked.

  “They knew they would never be able to remarry in the Church,” O’Donagh said, “and they knew they’d have to live with the stigma afterwards, but at least they’d have the legal right to keep these bastards...” He glanced contritely at Nell. “Sorry.”

  “Not at all.”

  “They’d have the right to keep their former husbands out of their homes. But it’s a long, torturous process, getting a Massachusetts court to grant a divorce decree—unless you’re a Lowell or an Abbot, I suppose, and have plenty of cash and influence to throw around. Otherwise, it’s hard enough even if both parties are agreeable, but if one of them fights it, or isn’t around to fight it, ‘specially the husband, it’s nigh unto impossible. Few of those women I tried to help were able to get a divorce decree.”

  “I see,” Nell said quietly.

  “But luck was on Chloe’s side—that, and she’s one smart, determined lady. Her divorce finally came through, and after Colin returned from the war, she married him. I understand she made him stop drinking first, but you can hardly blame her for that.”

  “Hardly,” Nell agreed, recalling Duncan’s drunken rages, and the scars she’d wear for days afterward.

  O’Donagh said, “It was after we shipped Danny away that Colin more or less fell out with the Brotherhood. He’d shot one of our own, and some of the boyos weren’t all that that sure it’d been called for. Not that he hadn’t needed to be stopped, but with a bullet? There were whispers that Colin had been sweet on Mary before that, and just itching for an excuse to get Danny out of t
he way, but I never did believe that. It wasn’t Colin’s way. He’s always been one for doing the right thing and choosing the right path—the godly path. Almost became a priest once, did you know that?”

  “Mrs. Cook told us,” Nell said.

  “Was that the only reason for Cook’s rift with the Brotherhood?” Will asked. “His shooting Daniel Duffy?”

  “Well, Colin and I never did see eye to eye on the best way to do get things done,” O’Donagh said. “I’m a pragmatic man. I do whatever it takes. Colin...well, he’s a man of honor. He does the right thing, and the right thing only. Sooner or later, the two of us were bound to part ways, but I’m happy to say we didn’t part enemies.”

  “But did you part friends?” she asked.

  O’Donagh laced his fingers over his chest and sighed. “No, Miss Sweeney, I can’t rightly call us friends anymore. Truth is, when we pass each other on the street, we nod and walk on by. I know what he thinks of me and the Brotherhood nowadays, and there’s no forgetting who he works for now, and where his loyalties lie. I can’t imagine we’ll ever be on the same side again, fighting for the same cause. But back when we did, in the old country...” O’Donagh smiled wistfully, looking beyond them to a different time, a different land. “There was no man on God’s green earth I would rather have had by my side than Colin Cook.”

  * * *

  “Wait here,” Will told the driver as he handed Nell out of a hack a discreet block and a half away from his parents’ house around noon. “I’ll be back in ten minutes, and then I’ll be going to the Somerset Club.”

  “Do you really think this is necessary?” Nell asked as Will took her arm to walk her to the house. “It’s midday, the sun is shining. I very much doubt that I’ll be accosted by Skinner or his evil minions between here and Colonnade Row.”

  “I doubt it, too,” he said, “but it is not, unfortunately, out of the question. There’s also the issue of the house itself. What if someone broke in this morning while we were out, and is lurking in there, waiting to pounce?”

  “And what do you think the chances are of that?” she challenged.

  “What do you think the chances are of my concentrating on anything other than your welfare if I don’t look through the house first and make sure there’s no danger to you?”

  Nell followed Will through the house as he made a swift but thorough search of every room, closet, pantry, W.C., stairwell, alcove, nook, and cranny. He tarried for a minute in his room, or rather, Gracie’s room, in order to fetch some money with which to bribe his way into the Somerset Club in the unlikely event that his pedigree alone didn’t do the trick.

  Nell leaned on the door jamb, watching Will’s reflection in a monumental, gilt-framed mirror as he unbuckled the old alligator satchel that held his gambling cash. He was almost cruelly handsome, with that height, those intense eyes, that lean, masculine grace.

  Very early this morning, after lying awake in bed for some time listening to Will’s somnolent breathing, Nell had risen and padded silently to the doorway separating the two rooms. The sanguine glow of dawn sifting through the curtains had imparted an otherworldly radiance to the sheet-draped furnishings, making them look like a range of snow-covered mountains. On the carpeted floor next to the bed lay the pair of white linen drawers he’d shucked off upon retiring for the night.

  The frothy lace curtains surrounding Gracie’s canopy bed had been tied back, revealing Will lying facedown with the sheet tangled around one long leg. The exposed leg, the right one, was the one with the deep, ragged scar puckering the quadriceps—from a bullet he’d removed himself shortly before his escape from Andersonville.

  His face was turned toward Nell. Tendrils of hair hung over his eyes, and his mouth was half open, imparting an almost childlike aura, in striking contrast to his sinewy, ravaged body. She’d had to fight the urge to go over and brush the hair off his forehead. He would have awakened, had she done that, lying naked in bed with her standing over him in her night shift. Touching him. Unthinkable.

  Unthinkable.

  “Nell? Don’t you think so?”

  “Um...I’m sorry. I’ve been...”

  “Don’t you think, if and when this case goes to trial, that the prosecution will have a field day with Cook’s past? Having served as lieutenant to the likes of Brian O’Donagh was bad enough, but he actually shot a man for mistreating a woman, which may be exactly what happened Monday night.”

  Nell looked at him sharply.

  “According to the D.A.,” he hastily amended, meeting her gaze in the mirror with a pacifying smile.

  “I knew Chloe wasn’t telling us everything yesterday,” Nell said. “She gave us to believe she hadn’t really known Cook when he first came to Boston from Pennsylvania, said they’d met through ‘mutual acquaintances.’”

  “Not so much lies as equivocation,” Will said. “She didn’t want us to know that her husband shot Daniel Duffy for fear that we’d reach the conclusion any jury is likely to reach—that if Colin Cook is capable of shooting one woman-beater, he’s capable of shooting another.”

  “Do you think he did it, Will?” she asked.

  Turning to face her, he said, “I respect you far too much to lie and tell you I think it’s impossible.”

  A helpless little whimper rose in her throat. “I hate this.”

  “I know,” he said softly as he came to stand next to her, closing a hand over her arm. “Colin Cook is a lucky man, to have a friend like you. As am I.”

  * * *

  Nell watched from her bedroom window as Will walked the block and a half to his waiting hackney and climbed into it.

  She kept her gaze on the carriage until it was out of sight, and then, having reached a decision, she went downstairs and hailed a hack. “Charlestown State Prison,” she told the driver.

  Chapter 13

  “No,” Duncan said.

  “Duncan—”

  “No!” He slammed both hands down on the scarred wooden table in the middle of the prison’s little visitors’ room, sending tremors not just through the table, but through Nell, sitting at the opposite end. Duncan’s aquamarine eyes, the most striking feature of his devilishly handsome face, caught fire in a stripe of sunlight from the nearby window. “You’re my wife.”

  “Duncan, we haven’t lived as man and wife for ten—”

  “That don’t matter! How could that matter? We were married in the Church. The Church made us man and wife, and it can’t ever be undone. Never!”

  Nell had half-hoped, during the two years since she’d last seen Duncan, that his attachment to her would have lessened a bit. Clearly, that had been wishful thinking.

  Struggling to keep her voice even, she said, “It can’t be undone in the eyes of the Church, perhaps, but it can in a court of law. It won’t be easy. The Hewitts mustn’t find out. As you know, I’ve kept my marriage a secret from then, so I’ll have to keep my divorce a secret, as well. It’ll be all the more difficult if you contest it. It could take a great deal of time to secure a divorce decree, years perhaps, and it might cost every cent I’ve saved working for the Hewitts. But it’s something I have to do.”

  “Why?” he demanded. “You fixin’ on getting’ hitched again?”

  “I have no such plans.”

  “It’s him, ain’t it? The son. The doctor.”

  “I told you,” she said, cursing the uncanny insight, at least when it came to her, that had helped him to wield such absolute control over her in the beginning. “I have no such—”

  “You bangin’ him?”

  “No.” She shook her head in weary frustration. “Duncan, please. Just look at this from my point of view. Even if my marriage to you still felt...like a marriage, even if I still considered myself your wife, would you honestly expect me to wait twenty more years for you? That’s how long you’ve got left on your sentence, with no possibility of parole.”

  “I coulda gotten paroled,” he reminded her. “It was all set up. If I hadn’t bust
ed outa here two years ago, I’d be a free man already. I did it for you, to keep you from getting killed, and now you just want to toss me out with the trash?”

  Nell closed her eyes, drawing a deep, steadying breath as her throat began to tighten. “Duncan, you know I’ll always be grateful for that sacrifice, deeply, sincerely grateful. I’ll never forget it.”

  She opened her eyes to find that sea-blue gaze searching hers, as if to capture some remnant of the affection they’d once shared for each other. Wresting her gaze from his, she stared through the barred window at the sun-washed courtyard and the two barnlike stone shops in which the prisoners made themselves useful to society. A pair of uniformed guards stood some distance away under a shade tree, smoking cigarettes. One of them was the guard who’d told her he’d be standing watch out in the hallway in case she needed anything.

  No, she would never forget Duncan’s selflessness in giving up his freedom to protect her; how could she?

  But neither, unfortunately, could she ever forget the rages, the beatings, and that last, ferocious attack and ensuing miscarriage, which she’d barely survived. If not for Dr. Cyril Greaves, she wouldn’t be sitting here now, trying to wheedle cooperation out of Duncan.

  Dr. Greaves hadn’t merely saved her life after infection had ravaged her womb. He’d taken her in, trained her in nursing, taught her history and French, how to appreciate opera and art and literature, how to write a letter and comport herself, and so much more. When she’d finally gone to his bed, she’d gone willingly, gratefully. He’d not only saved her, but remade her, so that when Viola Hewitt realized she needed a governess for her adopted infant, Nell was a natural choice.

  Every evening, upon retiring, Nell whispered her thanks to God for having brought Gracie into her life. Without the little girl she’d come to think of as her own, she couldn’t imagine how empty she would feel, looking ahead to decades of childlessness. She’d always wanted babies, even when she was little more than a baby herself. “You were born to do that,” Nell’s mother would say as she watched her daughter cuddle and feed and diaper the homemade rag doll that eventually disintegrated, despite dozens of mendings, from a surfeit of constant nurturing. But by then she had Tess, the baby sister whose care had fallen to her when cholera claimed their mother and most of their siblings. Little Tess, her darling, sweet, impish little Tess, had succumbed herself to diphtheria in the Barnstable County Poor House when she was just three years old, leaving Nell lost and bereft...until Duncan.