Still Life With Murder (38 page)

She wandered farther into the thicket, out of breath, heart hammering, trying to make out anything in the damp haze. “Dr. Hewitt!” She groaned in frustration, muttering, “Damn it, Will…”

There came a deep chuckle from behind her.

Wheeling around, she saw him several yards away, standing with his weight on his good leg, a cigarette in his hand.

“Such unladylike language, Cornelia. Good for you.”

She walked toward him, still breathless, the hat in her outstretched hand. “You forgot this.”

“Nonsense.” He took it from her, tucking it under his arm with a smile. “A gentleman never forgets his hat.”

It took her a moment to digest his meaning, and then she smiled, too. The hat had been a ruse; he’d wanted to see her alone.

She said, “It’s good to see you, Dr. Hewitt. I thought you were dead.”

He crushed his cigarette underfoot. “You called me ‘Will’ before.”

“Yes, well…” She looked out through the trees at the irregular rows of tombstones, dry gray stumps fading into a watery gray background.

“Yes, well…” he gently mocked. “When one has gone through as much trouble as you have to save a man’s life—even if it’s as pointless a life as mine—it seems rather silly to be on such formal terms.” A quiet gravity replaced his smile. “Please give me this. I know I haven’t earned it, but…”

“Yes.” Something in his demeanor—that earnest, frank request, his eyes so boyish, almost needful—touched her with unexpected force. “Yes—” Her throat closed; she cleared it. “I would like it if you called me by my Christian name.”

He smiled, gave her a little bow. “Thank you, Nell.”

The implication was that they’d be dealing with each other again, but Nell couldn’t imagine under what circumstances their paths would cross.

“Why did you come here today?” she asked, “if you weren’t going to stand close enough to hear the service?”

He ducked his head, rubbed the back of his neck. “I wanted to be there when Jack was buried. I just didn’t…I didn’t think I could deal with seeing my parents again.”

“What made you change your mind?”

Will shrugged, looked away. “Perhaps it was seeing you there, knowing I wouldn’t be facing them alone.” He looked back at her.

She looked down, fussed with her glove buttons. “Where have you been these past weeks? You bought all that morphine and disappeared. I thought—”

“You
knew
about the morphine?” he asked. “How…?”

“Mr. Maynard told me.”

He closed his eyes, muttered something under his breath. “I didn’t want you having to bring me Black Drop on death row. It wasn’t fair to you—I knew how you felt about it. So I concocted this oh-so-scientific plan to wean myself off opium before the trial. Decreasing doses of its primary active ingredient—morphine—by injection.”

“Did it work?”

“I’m still dependent on it, but I’ve reduced my need, and I’ve stopped smoking gong altogether.”

“I’m pleased to hear it,” she said, wondering if he would slide back into his old ways now that there was no stint on death row to prepare for. “Where did you go? Jack and I looked all over Boston for you.”

He gave her a surprisingly diffident little smile. “Don’t think me bourgeois, but I actually have a little place out in the country—upstate New York, the Finger Lakes.”

“You?”

“I won it in a game of lansquenet. It’s just an unassuming little cottage, but it’s right on Skaneateles Lake. I rather like the sound of the waves slapping the shore when I’m falling asleep at night.”

Lansquenet?
She said, “I assume you know that Jack’s father has managed to obliterate all trace of his confession. No one will ever find out what really happened.”

“That’s as it should be. Jack paid the price for his sin, as did Ernest Tulley. That should be the end of it.”

Interesting, she thought, that a man who seemed relatively contemptuous of religion should speak so casually of sin. She said, “I’ve worked some of it out in my mind, but I can’t quite figure out what Jack was doing with you at Flynn’s that night.”

“Drinking whiskey.” Will leaned back against a tree, lit a cigarette.

“No, I mean—”

“I know what you mean. The first time I ran into Jack after Andersonville was the day they hanged Henry Wirz at the Old Capital Prison in Washington. They were issuing tickets for that particular show, and I’d made it my business to get one. Ernest Tulley could never have worked his evil if Wirz hadn’t looked the other way. Jack noticed me in the crowd, and later, after a couple of beers, I asked him if he wouldn’t mind forgetting he’d ever seen me. He said, ‘Of course, old man,’ without even asking why. He understood instinctively. I always appreciated that.”

“So you stayed in touch and ended up spending that Saturday evening together at Flynn’s,” she said.

“The early part of the evening went pretty much as I’ve already told you—seeing Tulley, pulling him off the girl…But then Jack showed up, and by that time I was pretty far gone on gong, and I blurted out the whole story—about Tulley killing Robbie, and how he’d been there earlier and left. I pointed out that other fellow who looked like Tulley…”

“Roy Noonan?”

“Him, yes. I said, ‘That’s what he looks like. Let me know if he comes back.’ I wanted Tulley tried and hanged by the War Department. I thought he should die as Wirz had died—publicly shamed, kicking and choking. Jack, though…” Will shook his head. “He was drunk even before he got there, and my story about Robbie really lit his fuse. He’d loved Robbie like a brother, and he
always felt as if he’d abandoned him when he retreated with the regiment instead of letting himself be captured.”

“I know. That’s absurd, though.”

On a plume of smoke, Will said, “People are absurd, Nell. Anyway, Jack was…not himself that night. He thought we should take matters into our own hands.”

“Kill Tulley.”

Will nodded. “Avenge Robbie ourselves, like men—that was how he viewed it. I think he wanted to prove something, and he saw this as the way. He was so soused I didn’t think he could possibly pull it off—that was my second mistake. I smoked myself into my usual coma and awoke to the sounds of a scuffle out in the alley. It seems Jack had been looking out the window and saw Tulley come back. He grabbed my bistoury, went out to the alley and…” He shrugged and took a draw on his cigarette.

“And you let yourself be arrested in his place?” Nell asked incredulously.

“That wasn’t quite what I’d initially intended—although I probably wasn’t thinking straight, what with all the gong. I do remember telling Jack to get out of there. No matter what transpired, he was to tell no one that he’d been there, and certainly not with me.”

“And then you tried to save Tulley’s life by applying pressure between the wound and the heart.”

“If one’s victim doesn’t die, one can’t very well be charged with murder. And I still wanted Tulley to have to make that long climb up to the gallows. Clever you, figuring that out.”

“It didn’t make sense that you would want to choke him while he was spewing blood from a severed carotid, no matter how intoxicated you were.”

He let out a little huff of laughter as he tossed down his cigarette and ground it out. “How dead can one man get? In fact, I had
to be careful not to press on his windpipe while I was compressing the artery. And I didn’t want to take the bistoury out in case—”

“—it worsened the bleeding,” she finished. “When in doubt, leave knives in.”

“Dr. Greaves was thorough.”

“I didn’t learn that one from him.” Before Will could pursue that, she said, “Why didn’t you just tell that patrolman what you were doing, when you realized he thought you were the killer?”

“Oh, I doubt anything I’d said at that point would have been very convincing. He’d caught me in the act! And, too, I wanted Jack to get away. If they even suspected it had been someone other than me, they would have gone looking for him.”

“So you let yourself be arrested and charged with murder.” Just as he’d let himself be captured and sent to Andersonville. “Pretty self-sacrificing of you.”

Wearily he said, “Not if you don’t have that much to lose in the first place. Jack
did
have something to lose—a career, a fiancée, a family that could not only stand the sight of him, but actually wanted him closer. Why not trade an empty life for a full one? I’d hesitated about that once—I wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice.”

Nell got it: Will hadn’t been able to save Robbie; he wasn’t about to lose Jack.

“Why didn’t you just plead guilty, then?” she asked.

“I was trying to do a friend a favor, not martyr myself. Oh, I was willing to see the sentence through if it came to it—I do believe in playing out one’s losing hand—but why just present it to them on a silver platter? Make them work for it, by God.”

“Fine, then,” she said. “Why didn’t you plead
not
guilty?”

“Because they would have investigated in earnest then, and it wouldn’t have taken much for them to home in on Jack. It’s not as if he’d been particularly careful about the whole thing. And the reason I didn’t want a lawyer,” he continued, anticipating her
next question, “was because
he
might very well have investigated, stumbled on Jack, and used him to get me off whether I liked it or not. Are you done? Can we flirt now?”

“Not quite. That’s why you didn’t want
me
snooping around, either, because I might find out it was Jack all along.”

“Ah, you’re finally catching on,” he said with a smile, “now that it doesn’t matter anymore. You
were
a damnable nuisance, but you have a certain prickly way about you that I find diverting, and those galloping assumptions of yours helped to keep you from doing too much damage.”

“Why did Jack let you take the blame this way,” she asked, “especially considering what was at stake for you?”

“He didn’t realize I was doing it until you recruited him for legal services. And then he convinced himself he could get me off and we’d both walk free. We had a couple of long, fairly passionate arguments, he and I, about what would happen if I was sentenced to hang—he advocating for a last-minute confession on his part, I for the manly playing out of the hand, and all that. So, you’re saying we
can
flirt, once—”

“He never wanted me to pursue that other man in the back parlor,” Nell murmured. “The one you were talking to, the one Pearl…” She looked away, her cheeks warming. “Because it was him. It was Jack. It was all right to frame Noonan, though, because Noonan—”

“—was a blackguard. There’s something about a beautiful young woman in mourning attire…”

“He probably would have done it,” she said thoughtfully. “He would have admitted his guilt. He would have snatched away the sword you were trying to throw yourself on and shoved it into his own chest.”

“Yes,” Will said, suddenly sobered. “He would have. Which was why I had to…‘leave for Shanghai.’”

She looked at him. The sun must have been burning through the mist while they were talking, because a ray had penetrated the foliage overhead to infuse his face with a golden radiance. A glance through the trees into the cemetery revealed the truth of this; it was awash with sunlight.

“I’m glad you were worried about me.” He replaced his hat on his head, nudging it to precisely the correct infinitesimal slant, something Brahmin males learned to do in the nursery.

Nell wanted to ask what he would be doing now, where he would be living, what his plans were, but she didn’t. She didn’t want to hear him say “cards,” or “Shanghai,” or “morphine.” And God knew she didn’t want to hear the name of some fictional hotel based on his “current actress’s” play.

“You’ll never learn.” He reached out to take hold of her green woolen scarf. She didn’t resist him, but instead let him take both ends and pull them even. “It may be April, but it’s nippy.”

He tucked it in, first one end, which he snugged beneath her right coat lapel, taking his time to make it smooth, and then the other, overlapping the first. For the briefest of moments—a second perhaps—he let his hand linger there, pressing it to her upper chest as if to gauge the thudding of her heart.

“You should listen when a physician gives you advice about your health,” he said, allowing his fingertips just the barest graze along her bare throat before withdrawing them. “I’ll be seeing you, Nell.”

He turned and walked away, into the morning sunshine.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to the warm and generous Susan Uttal for almost forty years of unwavering friendship, and for her enthusiastic service as my personal Boston tour guide. Also, my deepest appreciation to Nick Dichario, Kathryn Shay, Tim Wright, my Evil Twin Pamela Burford, and my husband Richard Ryan for taking the time to read and sometimes re-read this manuscript as it took shape. Your insights were valuable, your encouragement and support priceless. This book, and the experience of writing it, wouldn’t have been the same without you.