Murder in the North End

by P. B. Ryan

  Nell’s mum was right; she had been born to be a mother. It was the one thing she’d always yearned for, the one bone-deep, primal drive that she’d ever felt. It was, in a word, her destiny—a destiny Duncan Sweeney stole from her in his last vicious, snarling, inexcusable assault.

  It had been inexcusable, no matter what the priests said about pardon and absolution. “Forgive us our trespasses,” Nell prayed every morning, “as we forgive those who trespass against us.” And she meant it. With one single exception.

  “If you’ll never forget what I did for you,” Duncan said, “givin’ up my parole and all that, how can you want to divorce me?”

  Still gazing out the window, she said softly, “There’s a lot I can’t forget, Duncan.”

  You gonna leave me, Nell? Huh? You want to leave? You can leave when I’m done with you. She forced herself to relive it—the punches and kicks, the sting of the knife, the horror as he ripped open her basque and threw up her skirts. I’m gonna make it hurt, he’d growled. And it had. It had hurt her horribly.

  It had killed their baby.

  “I’m sorry, Nell,” he said in a voice raw with feeling. “I can’t ever make it up to you, what I took from you, but I’ve changed. You know I have.”

  I’ve changed, Nell. I’m gonna stop drinkin’. I’ll make it up to you. I’ll be different from now on...

  God, I’m sorry, Nell. Please give me another chance, please, I’m beggin’ you, just one...

  You don’t deserve me, but I love you so much. I don’t know what I’d do without you. Just one more chance...

  It was the booze. I’m really stopping this time. I won’t happen again. You’ll see...

  “Nell...darlin’. Say somethin’,” he implored. “Please.”

  “I...I’m asking for your help so that I can move on with my life,” she said. “If I can petition for the divorce in both our names, instead of you fighting it, there’s a much better chance of it being granted, and it won’t take nearly as much time or—”

  “Don’t do this, Nell. Don’t do this to us.” He stood with his arms braced on the table, leaning toward her, imploring her with those eyes she’d once thought of as most exquisite she’d ever seen, the eyes of a young god, now shimmering wetly. His forearms, revealed by the rolled-up sleeves of his striped prison shirt, were ropy and dusted with powdered granite; a vein pulsed on his forehead.

  “Duncan,” she said earnestly, “please don’t make this more painful than it has to—”

  “Jesus, Nell. Christ.” He scrubbed a hand over his eyes as the tears spilled out, leaving the upper part of his face smeared with granite dust. “You’re all I got anymore,” he said in a low, quavering voice, his arms shaking. “I ain’t got nothin’ else, nothin’. Nothin’ but this place, this...purgatory. All I do all day is chop stone and think about you and how marryin’ you was the only good and smart thing I ever done in my life, even if I did muck it up. That’s it, that’s all I got. Just you. Jesus, Nell, don’t take that away from me, I’m beggin’ you.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut—I’m gonna make it hurt—then opened them and stood, pushing her chair back. “You’ll, um, you’ll be sent some papers at some point. I would appreciate it very much if you would just sign them and—”

  “No!” Duncan seized the table and hurled it aside, two legs cracking off as it hit the wall. “Goddamn it, no!”

  Nell backed away from him so frantically that she tripped over her chair and landed in a heap of silk and crinoline, her left arm taking the brunt of the fall. She sucked in a breath to call the guard, not knowing whether he was even within earshot, but Duncan was on her in an instant, one hand gripping her wrists, the other clamped over her mouth as he straddled her. He leaned down so close that she could see her own eyes, wide with fear, reflected in the scalding blue of his.

  “You gonna serve me with papers, Nell?” he demanded, teeth bared, his fingers digging into her jaw so hard she wondered if she’d be left bruised. “Are you? Huh?”

  Nell squirmed and thrashed, trying vainly to throw him off, break his grip, scream for the guard...but to no avail. A decade of stonecutting had left Duncan even brawnier than he’d been before.

  “If I get them papers, darlin’,” he murmured, “you know the first thing I’m gonna do? Do you? I’m gonna write a letter to Mr. and Mrs. August Hewitt, one forty-eight Tremont Street, Boston, Massachusetts, tellin’ ‘em all about how me and Miss Nell Sweeney been married twelve years, and how you was once the very best pickpocket in all of Cape Cod, maybe all of Massachusetts, and how you been humpin’ ol’ Dr. Willie on the sly for God knows how long.”

  Nell bucked, loosening his grip on her mouth just enough for her to sink her teeth into his palm, good and deep.

  He recoiled, swearing savagely. “You little—”

  “Guard!” she screamed as she whipped a fist across Duncan’s nose, spattering both of them with blood.

  Duncan howled, hands cupping his nose, as the door slammed open. Both guards who’d been smoking under the tree leapt on him and heaved him off of her, kicking and flailing and spewing blood.

  “I’ll do it!” he screamed nasally as they wrestled him out of the room and down the hall. “Don’t you think I won’t, you ungrateful little bitch! You try and divorce me, I’ll tell ‘em everything! Every last goddamn thing! You’ll be ruined! You hear me? Ruined!”

  * * *

  Coming home, Nell had the driver leave her off on Bedford Street, cutting through an alley, a neighbor’s stable yard, and the Hewitts’ sunny rear garden to get to the back door. Listening to her footsteps echo off the marble floor of the central hall, she was struck, as always, by the sense of hollowness in the huge, empty house. With its windows thickly curtained and no lamps lit, it was as dark inside as if it were nighttime, even on a sunny afternoon like this.

  As she passed the music room, there came a squeak of wood, as of someone rising up from that hundred-year-old duet stool next to the piano.

  “Will?” Nell turned, seeing a shadow at the edge of her vision, darting behind her. She opened her mouth to scream.

  A hand covered her mouth, pressing her head back against a meaty shoulder.

  “Shh,” he whispered into her ear.

  Chapter 14

  “Don’t scream, Miss Sweeney, please. It’s me, Colin Cook.”

  Detective Cook? It was his voice; there was no mistaking it. Nell nodded, trembling with relief.

  He took his hand off her mouth, supporting her for a moment by gripping her upper arms as she regained her bearings.

  “What the devil...?” she began.

  He came around to stand in front of her, a black-haired behemoth with an outsized head, his eyes huge in the gloom. His face and hands were dusky with soot, and his cap and clothing were that of a common laborer—a chimney sweep, Nell realized when she noticed the distinctive, long-handled brush leaning against the wall.

  “I’m sorry to have startled you like that,” he said in his timeworn brogue, “but I mustn’t let anyone find out I’m here. You know I’m a wanted man. Mrs. Cook... She said you came to the house, you and Dr. Hewitt, and that you’re tryin’ to—”

  “Yes,” Nell said, rubbing her shaky arms. She winced when she touched her left elbow, which had taken the worst of it from her tumble onto the floor of the visiting room at the state prison. Her sleeve was torn open there, and stiff with blood. “Will and I are looking into things. We...we went to Nabby’s Infero last night, and—”

  “Later,” he said, his grip on Nell’s arms tightening. “You can tell me later. Mrs. Cook...she needs you. I think...” His eyes glimmered in the dark; his throat moved. “I think she’s losing the baby.”

  “Oh, no,” Nell said.

  “I snuck back home this morning, just before dawn, ‘cause I was worried about her. Turned out she’d already taken ill.”

  “In what way?” Nell asked.

  “Cramping, a little bleeding.”

  “Just a little?”<
br />
  “What’s a little and what’s a lot? I’ve no idea. I went and fetched Lily Booth, her friend, to stay and keep and keep an eye on her, and then I went lookin’ for her doctor, this fella Mathers, but he’s left town for the weekend. A sign on the door said to see Dr. Silk, over on Beacon Street, so I went to see him, but he was lunching at the Tremont Hotel, so I went there.” Cook shook his head in exasperation. “I found him, finally, but he was eating, and you could tell he didn’t want to be bothered. He said it didn’t sound like there were any ‘alarming symptoms,’ and just to have her lie down, and ‘all will pass off naturally.’ Thing is, we been that route, the missus and I, and I ain’t about to let her go through that hell again if there’s anything to be done. She said you knew of a way, some Injun tonic or something...”

  “A herb,” Nell said. “Black haw. I have some. I use it for... I have occasional uses for it.” Nothing else had proven as successful at easing her monthly cramps. Some black haw tea and a glass of wine were generally enough to keep her on her feet. “Give me a minute fetch it and leave a note for Dr. Hewitt. I’ll be right back.”

  * * *

  “I want to thank you for what you been doin’, you and Dr. Hewitt,” Cook told Nell as he drove her in his buggy to Fayette Street. They must have presented an odd image, a well-dressed young woman sitting next to a soot-covered chimney sweep, but at least he wasn’t recognizable. “Can’t say I was all that surprised, when Mrs. Cook told me. You always been one to stick your neck out, but I never thought you’d have to stick it out for me. I’m that grateful, Miss Sweeney. Just wanted you to know that.”

  “I appreciate that, Detective. I take it you realized you were a wanted man when you came home. You said you sneaked back.”

  “I heard ‘em upstairs at Nabby’s that night, screamin’ for the cops, and I knew how it must have looked,” he said. “Mrs. Cook tells me Skinner’s on the warpath. She told me how he talked to her. However this turns out, I aim to get that little blowhard alone and put a fist in that big mouth of his. Let’s see him try that kind of thing with no teeth in his head.”

  “Don’t do that—” Nell began.

  “With all respect, I don’t reckon you could stop me.”

  “—without me there to watch.”

  Cook threw his head back and laughed, inadvertently jerking on the reins in a way that made the horses clatter to a stop on the cobblestone road. He got them moving again and said, “You remind me of Mrs. Cook when you say things like that. I told her once I thought you and her could be friends if you were ever to meet.”

  “I like her enormously,” Nell said. “It’s awful, what she’s been through these past few days.”

  “It’s my fault,” Cook said as he negotiated a corner. “I never shoulda took that job with the state constables. The hours, the dangers... It’s been hard on her all along, and now this.” He shook his head gravely.

  “I’m going to ask you something frankly,” Nell said, “and I hope, as a friend, that you’ll give me a frank—”

  “Mary Molloy was never anything to me but a snitch,” Cook said resolutely. “I can’t tell you how it felt, hearin’ what that bastard Skinner— ‘scuse the language.”

  “Feel free, when it comes to him.”

  “And she believed it, poor thing, or accepted it, anyways. But she knows the truth of it now, all of it.”

  “Which is...?”

  “There’s a whole network of crooks up in the North End, everything from street prowlers and common cutters right on up to them that do murder for hire. They buy opium off the ships and sell it to the hop joints. They fence stolen goods, run cons and extortions, lend money to gamblers and break their legs when they can’t pay... It’s like a family, almost, and every day it goes unchecked, it only gets more organized and powerful. Brian O’Donagh’s one of the big potatoes. Mother Nabby’s another one. They do some business on their own and some together. This Johnny Cassidy, the one that got shot, he saw to Mother’s end of things.”

  “What did he do, exactly?” Nell asked.

  “That’s what I was payin’ Mary to find out,” Cook said, “on account of Major Jones is plannin’ a big raid to clean up this mess once and for all, but we can’t do it if we don’t know what we’re lookin’ for. It was my job to gather information. I’d go see Mary when Johnny wasn’t around, peel off a few greenbacks, and she’d tell me whatever she’d managed to squeeze outa him since my last visit.”

  “Pretty dangerous for her,” Nell observed.

  “Johnny woulda snuffed her out like a candle if he’d found out. He was a hard ticket if ever there was one, used to threaten to kill her in some pretty nasty ways if she ever tried to leave him—not so much ‘cause he liked having her around, but ‘cause she made money for him, lots of it. That’s why he kept her penniless, so she’d have nowhere else to go.”

  Nell shivered despite the warmth of the afternoon. This scenario was all too reminiscent of Duncan’s obsessive control over her during the two years of their marriage.

  “That’s why she narked for me,” Cook said, “so as to save up enough dough to get away from Johnny and settle down someplace he’d never find her. I didn’t know that till a couple of days ago, after I got her away from Nabby’s. I didn’t know how bad he was beating her, either, but I should have. I should have known all them bruises couldn’t have been just from the badger game. I was closing my eyes to it, not thinking about it, ‘cause she was giving me so much good information.”

  “The badger game?”

  “It was the con they ran—or rather, Johnny ran it and made her play her part.”

  “A young girl in schoolgirl frocks and braids.”

  Cook nodded, a disgusted look on his face. “‘Chickens,’ they call ‘em, or ‘fresh greens.’ There’s some men go in for that—don’t ask me why. She’d set there with her milk and her freckles, waitin’ for a prosperous lookin’ type to come on over and start chattin’ her up. She’d get him drunk and let him take her downstairs to that basement room.”

  “And a minute or two later, Johnny would head down there,” Nell said.

  “After getting the key to the coal cellar from Mother Nabby, ‘cause he’d made a spy hole to watch her play the mark.”

  “Mother was in on it, of course,” Nell said.

  Cook nodded. “He’d owe her a cut of the take from the con. Anyway, once Mary and the mark were on the bed with their clothes half off, Johnny’d burst into the room screamin’ about how he was her father, and she’d disgraced him. He’d deal her a few blows, usually, to make it look good—bloody her nose, split her lip. The mark, would be shakin’ in his boots, of course. Johnny was almost as scary as that brother of his. He’d threaten to beat the fella to a pulp or have him brought up on charges of seducing a girl under the age of consent—or both. In other words, he’d ruin the fella’s life.”

  “Unless he paid up.”

  “And it would take a mountain of greenbacks to make the problem go away, whatever Johnny thought the mark could afford, and then some.”

  “What happened Tuesday night?” Nell asked. “Did it have something to do with the badger game?”

  “I wish I knew. Tuesday night’s fight night, and that’s when I liked to go see Mary, on account of Johnny would usually be upstairs runnin’ the bets. They were into the second fight when I got there. I sneaked down the back stairs, as usual, and found Mary packin’ her things and Johnny on the floor with a bullet in his head. First thing I did was draw my weapon, ‘cause I didn’t know who shot him, and if he was still around. I even thought for a second Mary might have done it, but I looked around, and there was no gun. They got an errand boy at Nabby’s, kid name of Denny Delaney, and he’s standin’ in the doorway with his eyes big as saucers—”

  “Denny?” she said. “He was there? He told me he was upstairs when it happened.” Or he’d led her to assume that.

  “No, he was there, but Mary yelled at him to go upstairs and make like he was never
down there, for his own good. She was always like a little mother hen to him, the only friend he had in that place. He said, ‘But what about you?’ and that’s when she kinda turned and I saw how bad she’d been beat up. The whole right side of her face was all bloodied. She said she was all right, and he should worry about himself.”

  “So he left?”

  “First he asked me if I was gonna look after her, get her away from there and get her fixed up. I said I would, and then he left. He’s a good kid, that Denny. I hate to see him in a place like Nabby’s, running and fetching for slamtrash like that.”

  “He should be in school,” Nell said.

  “I know. Problem is, he won’t take anything from anybody. I offered to have him live with Mrs. Cook and me, told him I’d send him to Boston College High School—on account of it’s a Catholic school, and he don’t like the way the Catholic kids are treated in the public schools. He was tempted, I could tell, but he wouldn’t hear of it, ‘cause it’d be charity. I said he could do odd jobs around the house to earn his keep and the tuition, but he saw through that. He told me he knew could never work off what it’d cost to go to that school.”

  “It was very generous of you to make the offer, though.”

  Cook lifted those big shoulders. “It was the right thing. You want to sleep at night, you gotta at least try.”

  “What happened after Denny left the flat?” she asked.

  “Well, I checked Johnny to make sure he was dead. No question about it. I asked Mary who done it, but she wouldn’t tell me. Said, ‘Don’t ask me, please just don’t ask me.’ She said she had to get outa there, go someplace far away, ‘cause if she stuck around there, chance were she wouldn’t be alive that time tomorrow.”