Still Life With Murder (13 page)

She smiled. “So you’ve said.”

N
ELL
HAD
SEEN DEAD MEN
, many of them, but none in recent years, and never one who had succumbed to such savagery. Ernest Tulley’s throat had been carved open like meat. Pushing his beard aside, Nell counted seven haphazard slashes, some shallow, some deep and gaping. One had severed the carotid, hence the copious bleeding and a death that was almost certainly swift—blessedly so.

Almost as hard to look upon as the dead man’s throat was his face. With his grayish skin, protruding tongue and wide, startled eyes, he resembled nothing so much as a gargoyle on some medieval cathedral.

“Have you located his next of kin?” Nell asked.

“I’ve got the boys working on it. I’d like to get some background on him, anyway. Oftentimes it turns out the seeds of a murder were planted long ago—they just need the right conditions to sprout.”

Pointing to the slashed neck, Nell asked, “Does this look to you like the work of a surgeon, Detective?”

“That wasn’t surgery, Miss Sweeney. It was a mindless attack by a man in the grip of opium intoxication.”

“Yes, but still, one would think—”

“Then one would be thinking too much—something that seems to be a bad habit of yours, if I may be so bold.”

“Did you notice the blood on Dr. Hewitt’s shirt?” she persisted. “Those few little spatters? Given these wounds, and the violence with which this man bled out, the killer should have been saturated with it.”

“He was wearing a long frock coat and vest. A tie, too. Most of the blood would have ended up on them.”

“He didn’t have them in his cell.” Otherwise he wouldn’t have had to wrap himself up in that blanket when he started shivering. “Were they put aside as evidence?”

“Should have been, but the boys don’t always see to the details like they should. Things tend to get a little confusing when a fella gets arrested for murder. Stuff gets misplaced. There’s no question Hewitt had blood on him, though. His hands were red up to the wrists.”

Nell closed her eyes, remembering the dried blood encrusting William Hewitt’s shirt cuffs. She filled her lungs with chilled air tainted with death and carbolic, let it out.

“Seen enough?” asked Detective Cook from behind her.

“Almost.” Had Tulley been ambushed and dispatched before he realized what was happening, or had he struggled with his attacker? She eased the sheet down to expose the huge man’s burly crossed arms. “He tried to ward off the blade,” she told Cook, pointing to the lacerations on his wrists and hands where he’d raised his arms or made grabs for the weapon; indeed, the little finger of his right hand was nearly chopped off.

“Where did you learn about defensive wounds?” Cook asked. “From some book?”

From witnessing knife fights, actually, and patching up the survivors, but she could hardly tell him that. “From a book, yes. There was a whole chapter on it.”

“Are you done now?” he asked.

Nell whipped the sheet back over the dead man.
How I wish I were
.

“S
O, WHAT DID YOU AND
William Hewitt talk about this afternoon?” Cook asked when they were outside on the street again, breathing in the clean night air.

She scoured her mind for something innocuous, something he couldn’t use to help build a case for the prosecution. “He’s estranged from his parents.”

“I think I already guessed that.” The detective blew on his ungloved hands and rubbed them together.

“He doesn’t want an attorney.”

“Which he made abundantly clear last night.”

“He did say he doesn’t consider himself a surgeon anymore.”

Cook shoved his hands impatiently in his coat pockets. “Did he say anything about Tulley? Give any hint why he done it?”

“He never admitted having done it. I imagine he knows that the burden of proof rests with the commonwealth. He
is
innocent until proven guilty, regardless of your own prejudices.”

Cook studied her in the dark. “Where on earth did August Hewitt find the likes of you, anyway?”

“I’m the governess for a little girl they adopted.”

The detective barked with laughter. “A governess! That’s perfect. The demure little Irish miss who knows just what to do and say. You know, you remind me of my wife, Miss Sweeney. Not in
looks so much, though you’re almost as pretty as she is. No, it’s that whipcrack brain—” he thumped a finger on his own broad cranium “—that seems to know everything except when to back off.”

“I hardly think—”

“Back off, Miss Sweeney,” he said with quiet fervor. “Heed a word of warning from someone who’s been dealing with miscreants of all stripes for far too many years. William Hewitt may be well-born, and he may be educated and amusing and all the rest of it, but that don’t mean he didn’t rip Ernest Tulley’s throat open like a rabid dog last night. In fact, it’s often those young Brahmin princes who do the worst, ’cause they’ve been raised to do as they please, and never mind the consequences. There’s always someone willing to clean up their messes.”

Too true, Nell reflected, thinking of Harry, and so many others like him.

“You think William Hewitt’s different somehow, but he’s just another rich young bounder who takes what he wants when he wants it—and what he wanted last night was opium, and plenty of it. Whether it was that alone that drove him to do what he done, or whether he’s a little bit gone in the head, or even if there’s some better reason on top of that, the fact remains that he’s a vicious man—a vicious and
charming
man. Take it from me, they’re by far the most dangerous kind.”

“As I’m all too well aware,” she said sincerely. “Don’t worry, Detective. I’ve been exposed to that breed. I’m quite immune now.”

“For your sake, I hope that’s true.”

U
PON ARRIVING HOME THAT EVENING
, Nell headed straight for the Red Room to report the day’s events to Viola, only to pause outside the door when she heard Mrs. Mott’s voice from within.

“As you know, Mrs. Hewitt, my duty is to the household rather than any one member of it. And when a situation arises that upsets the balance of the household, well, I see it as my duty to say something. Now, as regards the Sweeney girl…” To Mrs. Mott, Nell was “the Sweeney girl.” Mrs. Bouchard, of whom she also heartily disapproved, was “the Negress.” “You know my feelings on the matter. The girl is underbred for her position, and that causes enough problems right there, but to let her lark about like she does…Meaning no disrespect, ma’am, but it sets a poor example to the other servants.”

Viola’s tone, when she spoke, was very quiet and even in that way that meant she was holding herself in check. Mrs. Mott was the third generation of her family to serve the Hewitts, and August wouldn’t hear of dismissing her despite her testy relationship with his wife. “Nell is not a servant.”

“A matter of semantics, ma’am. She’s—”

“And therefore not under your jurisdiction.”

“Not officially, but—”

“Will there be anything else, Mrs. Mott?”

There came a strained pause. “No, ma’am.”

Nell stood right where she was until the door opened. Mrs. Mott’s parchment-pale face lost a bit more of its color when she encountered the subject of her little diatribe staring her in the face. Stepping aside to let her pass, Nell said, “Good evening, Mrs. Mott.”

The housekeeper brushed past her and receded down the central hall, her footsteps utterly silent on the marble floor.

CHAPTER FIVE

“Y
OU HERE FOR
W
ILLIAM
T
OUSSAINT
?” the pockmarked guard asked as Nell approached his desk at Station House Two the next morning. “You’re too late. Sorry.”

“Too late?” Nell remembered how pale Dr. Hewitt had been when she’d left him yesterday, how shaky. “You don’t mean—”

“He took sick after you left yesterday, real sick.”

“Oh, God.” The floor felt as if it were shifting under her feet. She braced her free arm on the desk to steady herself, the other being burdened with the coat Viola Hewitt had sent for her son.

“We got him out of here around dawn. If he’s fixing to go under, better he does it at the Charles Street Jail than here. Let
them
file the report.”

Nell closed her eyes, weak with relief. He was alive—ailing, but alive. The first thing Viola had asked when Nell joined her in the Red Room yesterday evening was
How is he? Is he all right?

He’ll be fine
, she’d hedged, loath to reveal the true extent of William’s condition. Viola was reeling emotionally; first the revelation that one of her two dead sons was actually alive, followed immediately by the news that he’d been arrested for murder. How much more could she take?

Tell me everything
, Viola had implored. Nell had told her as much as she dared, hating that her well-meaning prevarications put her in the same league with August Hewitt, who coddled her to a fault. She did tell Viola that her son had burned her letter, but not how badly he’d been pummeled, nor how ill he’d appeared toward the end. They talked for quite a long time; Viola was more forthcoming than Nell had ever known her to be.
Are
you
all right?
Viola had asked her as their conversation wound down.
I’m asking a great deal of you, I know. Is it too much?

No
, Nell had said, surprised to find that she meant it. She didn’t relish this mission Viola had set her upon; not only did it imperil the life she’d come to cherish so dearly, it dredged up a past she’d thought was long behind her. But she could do it. She was not just the only candidate for the job; she was the best candidate for the job. That had come to her as she’d lain in her too-large bed last night, curled up with her head beneath the covers, waiting for the sheets to absorb her body heat. Her life experience encompassed two very different worlds—the world William Hewitt had forsaken and the world he now embraced—for she moved as effortlessly today among the silk stocking set as she once had among thieves and cardsharps and whores.

Nell might pass today for as fine a lady as any in Boston—by other ladies, if not by their servants—but she understood criminals and gamblers and fallen women. She understood men who maddened themselves with intoxicating poisons and then reached for their knives. She understood the police, both the good and the bad among them.

“You all right, miss?” asked the guard. “You aren’t fixin’ to faint on me, are you?”

“I’m not a fainter, no.”

“What’s that you got there?” he asked, pointing to the papers in her hand. “A bail order? I thought bail was denied.”

“That judgment was overturned.” Through no small effort of her own. First thing this morning, Nell had visited the Pawners’ Bank on Union Street, a surprisingly dignified establishment where she’d traded two brooches, a ring and a string of pearls for the thickest stack of greenbacks she’d ever seen. Then on to the courthouse chambers of Judge Horace Bacon, who’d been, as Viola had predicted, more than willing to overturn the bail
decision in exchange for about an inch and a half of that stack. And now here, only to encounter this vexing little detour.

“You’re bailing him out?”

Nell turned to find Detective Cook looming like a grizzly in a doorway behind her.

“I…yes, as a matter of fact, I—”

“You’re not immune after all, are you?” Cook said disgustedly. “He’s worked his charm on you, and you’ve gone and convinced his father that he may not be—”

Nell cleared her throat and slanted a look in the guard’s direction.

Cook ground that great kettle of a jaw, shook his head. “Tell you what. Why don’t you step in here for a minute? There’s someone I want you to talk to.”

The someone turned out to be Daniel Hooper, the young blond patrolman who’d been the first cop on the scene of Ernest Tulley’s murder. He stood in a corner of the detective’s office, a closet-sized nook rendered all the more cramped by the books and files stacked around its perimeter. The windowless walls were papered with newspaper articles, photographs of crime scenes and leaflets illustrated with drawings of menacing-looking men.

“May I take your coat?” Cook asked.

She shook her head. “I can’t stay long. I’ve got to get to the Charles Street Jail as soon as possible.”

Gesturing Nell into a leather chair facing his cluttered desk, Cook took a seat behind it and folded his arms. “I’m going to let Patrolman Hooper tell you exactly what he saw Saturday night, just like he told it to me. I’d meant to spare you the details, but it strikes me it might serve to enlighten you a bit about the accused and what he’s truly capable of. And seeing as how you’re not one of these wilting blossoms who carries the smelling salts around with her, I’m thinking you can handle it.” He nodded to the patrolman.
“Go ahead, Danny. You were in the vicinity of Foster’s Wharf when you heard a woman scream…”

“So I come runnin’,” Hooper said. “Didn’t take me but a minute to get to the alley, and I seen that Toussaint fella crouching over a dead man—or maybe he wasn’t quite dead yet, I’m not real sure. Actually, I wasn’t even sure it was a man at first, ’cause his hair was kind of long and tangled, and there was a big mat of it laying over his face. There was—begging your pardon, miss, but there was blood everywheres. I mean, on the ground, on the side of the building…”