Still Life With Murder (9 page)

“Why, for God’s sake?”

“Because you’re her son,” Nell said quietly. “Because she loves you. Why else would she have sent me here?”

He laughed wheezily, and without humor. “Because she’s addicted to philanthropic projects—it helps to ease her remorse over her lack of a soul. Trust me when I tell you that woman is incapable of maternal love. You think you know my parents, Miss Sweeney, but you really have no idea.”

Rising from the bench, Nell retrieved Viola’s letter from the petit-point chatelaine bag hanging from her waistband—a practical alternative to a mesh reticule—and reached through the bars to hand it to Dr. Hewitt. “She asked me to give this to you.”

“Still using the violet ink, I see.” Turning the envelope over, he rubbed his thumb across the dab of sealing wax. “She always did like to do things handsomely.” He crushed the letter in his fist and tossed it into the chamber pot.

Gasping in outrage, Nell clutched the iron bars that separated them. “Your mother
wept
as she wrote that,” she said with jittery fury, feeling close to tears herself on Viola’s behalf. “She
sobbed
. And you just…” She shook her head, appalled at the sight of the crumpled-up letter in the stoneware pot. “Then again, I don’t
know what else I would expect from a man who would walk away from his own family—his own mother—at Christmas, without even saying goodbye. Not to mention letting them think you’ve been dead all this time. It’s you who’ve lost your soul, Dr. Hewitt, and I pity you for it, but I despise you, too, for bringing this grief upon a woman who’s shown you nothing but a mother’s true, heartfelt love. Perhaps you really do deserve to hang.”

Uncoiling from the cot, he closed the distance between them with one long stride, the blanket slipping to the floor. Tempted to back away, Nell held her ground, hands fisted around the bars, not flinching from his gaze. For a moment he just stared down at her with his bloodied shirt and battered face, eyes seething, a hard thrust to his jaw. Reaching inside his coat, he produced a match, which he scraped across one of the iron bars; it flamed with a crackling hiss.

“You were told to keep your distance,” he said softly.

CHAPTER THREE

N
ELL
’
S HEART THUDDED IN HER
ears as she considered the prospect of her skirts bursting into flame, and what to do about that if it happened. She didn’t step back, though, nor did her gaze waver from his.

He looked away first, at the burning match, and then again at Nell. “You
are
a cool one, when you want to be.” Turning, he tossed the match into the chamber pot. The letter ignited. Nell lowered her head and closed her eyes as it burned, the smoke stinging her nostrils.

“It was a two-week furlough,” he said quietly, with little remaining of his former rancor.

Nell opened her eyes to find him leaning a shoulder against the bars, thumbs tucked in his leather braces, his gaze on the floor.

“Robbie and I arrived home the morning of December twenty-fourth—Christmas Eve. I made it through that day and the next without too much familial melodrama, but on the day after Christmas, I was, shall we say, discovered in an indiscretion. A minor thing, really, or it would have been, had it not been that monster of morality August Hewitt who discovered it.”

“Indiscretion?”

“He came into my room that morning to wake me for a shooting party and found a pair of ladies’ drawers on the floor next to my bed.”

He glanced at her, no doubt wondering if he’d shocked her, or perhaps hoping he had. Nell kept her expression bland and refused to step back, although he was unnervingly close, mere inches away. From this vantage point, she could see how he shivered, despite the sweat that soaked him.

“He went into one of his quiet, cold rages about my having smuggled a woman into the house. In fact, he was crediting me with initiative where none existed, since the woman in question had merely slipped down the service stairs during the night. Of course, if I’d told him that, he’d have sacked the poor wench on the spot and tossed her into the street like so much rubbish. Not quite what she deserved just for having had the poor judgment to favor the likes of me.”

“She was one of the house staff?” Nell asked.

“A chambermaid—my first and only, if you can believe it. Some men are enchanted by those white, ruffled aprons, but they were never quite my cup of tea. Of course, as far as Saint August was concerned, it may as well have been my hundredth offense as my first. He ordered me out of the house forthwith, but not before informing me, rather starchily, that his precious Robbie would never have done such a thing. He was right. Robbie was a good son, a good man. He was the only one of us who was worth anything—except perhaps for young Martin. He had possibilities. Harry was always…” he shook his head “…a bit too much like me, I’m afraid. My fault, to some extent.”

“Why do you say that?”

Dr. Hewitt rasped a hand over his unshaven jaw, his gaze still trained on the floor. “I never had very much time for him, during my visits home. He was three years younger than Robbie—
six
years younger than me—so taking him along on our…evening adventures was out of the question, although he begged to be included. And, too, I saw something of myself in him—those of us with an appetite for sin always recognize it in others—and I didn’t like what I saw. I could have offered him counsel, of course—led him away from that treacherous path I knew so well. But I was too preoccupied, too disgusted by him, and by myself, to offer him any meaningful guidance. So he continued down that road with only himself for a guide.”

“He may not have a guide,” Nell observed, “but he does have rescuers—rather too many of them, if you ask me. Perhaps if he’d had to answer for his sins now and again, he would have learned to avoid them.”

“Spoken like a true daughter of Rome.”

She bristled.

“Your quiet indignity is most impressive, Miss Sweeney, but you’re squandering it. I don’t single out your faith for special scorn. They’re all the same to me.” His expression grew wistful. “Robbie was devout. Not like Martin, but he believed. He used to crouch down in our little hole at Andersonville and pray. Yet still he was taken, at the age of twenty-five, and in a way that no man should have to…” He shook his head, his eyes gleaming. “But in my more philosophical moments, I’ve thought perhaps it was almost a blessing. He’ll always be young, always good. He won’t ever be ruined by that hollow, gold-plated world we were born into.”

With a grim smile, he added, “For that matter, neither will I. I was supposed to set up a medical practice here in Boston after the war—something on Beacon Hill, perhaps. My only regret is that I’ll have to wait months before that little appointment with the hangman. May as well just get it over with, all things considered.”

He scooped up the blanket, scrubbed it over his sweat-slicked face and wrapped it around himself again. Limping over to the cot, he seated himself with a grimace and lit another cigarette with unsteady hands.

“Are you going to be all right?” she asked.

“What did you say your Christian name was? Nell?”

“That’s right.”

“Short for…?”

“Cornelia.”

He drew on the cigarette and studied her as he exhaled, a haze of smoke blurring his ravaged face. “You should probably leave, Cornelia.”

She buttoned on her coat, draped her green woolen scarf over her shoulders, gathered up her Bible. “I may come back tomorrow.”

“Tuck your scarf in—it’s bitter out. And don’t come back tomorrow. You might not find me here, in any event. At some point they’ll be throwing me in the back of the Black Maria and—”

“The what?”

“It’s a closed wagon, painted black. They use it for transferring prisoners from the station houses to the Charles Street jail. They won’t let you in to see me there—you’ll be wasting your time if you try.”

“Your mother’s asked me to try to get you out of here tomorrow. She thinks she can convince a judge she knows to grant bail.”

“‘Convince’ meaning ‘bribe,’ I assume. Can she afford that out of her pin money? That’s the only way Saint August won’t find out about it.”

“I’m going to pawn some jewelry for her.”

“She’s sending you to a
pawnshop
?” A choking little cough escaped him.

“No, she told me about something called the Pawners’ Bank of Boston. It’s for ladies with jewelry and other high-value items. They’re honest, and they keep the rates low.”

“What will those noble Bostonians think of next?” he asked wryly. “Well, God knows she won’t miss the jewelry, and I daresay I’ll be desperate for my freedom by tomorrow.” He studied his quaking hand as he raised his cigarette to his mouth. “But tell her to send someone else for me. Not you.”

“There is no one else.”

“Then leave me be. As I have made my bed, so I must lie in it.
Vous l’avez voulu, George Dandin.”

“You may have brought this on yourself, Dr. Hewitt, but I’d hardly think to compare you to a ninny like George Dandin.”

“Your Dr. Greaves found Molière worth teaching, I see.”

“I read it on my own, actually.”

Surprise lit his eyes; she found that absurdly gratifying.

As she turned to leave, he hauled himself to his feet—a nicety she wouldn’t necessarily have expected, given the circumstances and his apparent indifference to matters of decorum; he had, after all, smoked in front of her. With a courtly little bow, he said, “This has been a most diverting conversation, Miss Sweeney. It was worth being arrested just to pass the last half hour in your company.”

Her face prickled.

“I didn’t mean to make you blush,” he said.

“Of course you did.”

He smiled, really smiled, for the first time, and shook his head a little. Pulling the blanket more snugly around his shuddering body, he said, not unkindly, “Do go away.”

As she was stepping into the hallway, he said, “Miss Sweeney.”

She turned.

He wasn’t smiling anymore. “Don’t come back.”

“T
HAT
’
S HER,
D
ETECTIVE
,”
MUTTERED THE
guard to a dark-haired hulk of a man standing near his desk as Nell walked down the hall.

The detective turned toward Nell, assessing her with the trenchant facility of a seasoned cop. He was like a bear in a gray sack coat, all mammoth shoulders and outsized head, the most prominent feature of which was a jaw that looked as if it could snap iron girders. He had a tweed overcoat slung over his shoulder, a bowler tapping absently against his leg. “You’re the one that was visiting Toussaint?”

“That’s right.”

“I’m Detective Cook—Colin Cook.” He spoke with the faded brogue of someone who’d come over in late childhood, probably one step ahead of the famine. “I’ve been assigned to the Ernest Tulley murder.”

She inclined her head in response to his cursory bow, surprised to encounter an Irish detective in a police department that had only grudgingly begun admitting his kind in recent years. “How do you do, Detective?”

“I’ll do just fine once I find out why William Toussaint done what he done last night.”

“
If
he did it.”

Cook smiled indulgently. “How long have you been contributing your services to the Society for…what is it, Prisoners and…”

Nell clutched the Bible to her chest as she foraged in her mind for the wording she’d given when she’d signed in.

“The Relief of Convicts and Indigents,” said the guard as he consulted the sign-in log.

“Quite some time,” she hedged.

“You’re to be commended for your benevolence, though why you’d want to waste it on a murdering cur like William Toussaint is beyond me.”

“You’re that convinced of his guilt?”

“We know the murder weapon belonged to him. Granted, that’s circumstantial, but he was there in the alleyway with the body, reeling on opium, and he didn’t even try to deny his guilt. We know he done the deed, he’s just not talking.”

“Not that you didn’t do your best to force a confession out of him last night.”

Cook held his hands up. “Wasn’t my doing, Miss…Chapel, is it?”

Did he look amused, or was that her imagination? “Yes.”

“I never touched the man. Not that I wasn’t tempted, but I tend to slam a body out cold on the first punch, which makes them less than talkative. It was the fellas that arrested him who worked him over, plus one or two boyos from the night shift who had nothing better to do. But can you blame them? A confession would have saved everybody involved a world of trouble.”

“‘Everybody’ meaning you?”

“My captain did assign me the job of establishing a motive for the murder.”

“I thought opium intoxication was the motive.”

“You ask me, that’s the long and the short of it. Who knows why an opium fiend does what he does? It don’t have to make sense to sober types like you and me. But orders are orders, so I’ve got to try and scare up a witness or two who saw the murder or what led up to it. Thing is, everybody at Flynn’s scattered like rats last night before I even got there. I know most of them fellas, the sailors that rent beds there and the ones that just come for the sport—they get pinched for public intoxication on a regular basis. They’re none of them exactly partial to chattin’ with the cops. Better if I show up when they aren’t expecting me.”