Death on Beacon Hill

by P. B. Ryan

  “Yes, yes, of course. Of course. Dr. Hewitt.”

  Skinner invited them to sit in the pair of cracked leather chairs facing his desk, then took a seat himself, his hands linked over his plaid-vested stomach. “I’m told you have some information for me?”

  “Quite a bit, actually,” said Nell as she unfolded her sketch of Mrs. Kimball’s bedroom.

  “It’s about Virginia Kimball’s murder,” Will said.

  “Ah. Yes, well...that’s not actually an open case. It’s been resolved, so I’m afraid any information you have wouldn’t really be of any...” Skinner stared at the sketch as Nell flattened it out on his desktop, frowning as he realized what it was.

  “This is the scene of the murder.” Pointing to the sketch, Nell said, “Here’s where Mrs. Kimball fell. Fiona fell in this direction. Here’s where her killer was standing. Here’s where the blood from her head wound—”

  “How did you get into that house?” Skinner asked, his voice like rolled steel, all business now.

  “A more pertinent question,” Will said, “might be how could you have seen what we saw and still have blamed the murder on Fiona Gannon?”

  With a condescending little smile, Skinner said, “I assure you, my conclusion, and the conclusion of the county coroner and the inquest jury—erudite gentlemen, all—was arrived at after a thorough consideration of the facts.”

  Will said, “Perhaps the inquest jury didn’t have access to all the facts.”

  Skinner said, “Perhaps you ought to leave police work to the Police.”

  “That might be reasonable advice,” Will said, “if the police in this city would stop holding their hands out long enough to actually investigate the crimes they’re supposed to be solving.”

  “I believe I’ve heard enough,” Skinner said as he rose to his feet. “I’ll thank you both to take your little drawings and your theories and—”

  “You lied under oath during the inquest, Detective, and we have proof of it.” Will made this statement as casually as if he were discussing the weather. “What’s the punishment for policemen who commit perjury? Dismissal from the department?”

  “Oh, I’m sure it would be dismissal plus a prison term,” Nell said.

  The detective sat back down with an unconvincingly blasé smirk. “And what makes you think I lied?” His bravado was belied by a telltale tightness in his speech and his restless eyes that kept looking for something new to focus on.

  Will unwrapped his handkerchief from around the bullet he’d found on Mrs. Kimball’s bedroom floor. “I fished this out of the blood that had soaked into the rug under Fiona Gannon’s head.” Holding it out so Skinner could see it, he said, “It’s the bullet that killed her. As you can see, this is no thirty-one caliber lead ball.”

  Skinner stared at the spent slug with a rigid lack of expression. “So?”

  “So you testified that Mrs. Kimball’s Remington, a thirty-one caliber five-shooter, was missing three rounds when you found it at the scene. We do know that three bullets were fired in that room that afternoon—one into the window frame, one into Mrs. Kimball, which was buried with her, and one, this one” –Will held the bullet between thumb and forefinger— “into Fiona Gannon’s head. The bullet from the window frame came from the Remington. This one did not, nor, it’s safe to say, did the bullet that killed Mrs. Kimball. According to Maximilian Thurston, she always kept the Remington fully loaded. So if only one bullet was fired from it that day, how did it end up with three rounds missing?”

  “Unless,” Nell suggested, “you fired two yourself before handing it over to Mr. Watts for ballistic testing. Of course, you testified that you’d found it with those rounds missing—hence the perjury. The coroner perjured himself, too, undoubtedly at your behest, about the bullet having remained in Fiona’s head. You knew everything all along. You saw the blood spray, you saw Fiona’s wound...’

  “You saw those powder burns on her face and cap,” Will said. “You knew the direction in which she fell. You had to know her killer was standing right next to her with the gun pressed to her head. Mrs. Kimball was mortally wounded and in respiratory distress. She couldn’t have gotten up and done it herself. The evidence of a third person in that room was overwhelming, yet you contrived, you and the coroner, to paint Fiona Gannon as a thief and a murderess.”

  “Did you suggest to Orville Pratt that he have Mrs. Kimball’s house cleaned to expunge it of evidence,” Nell asked, “or did he come up with that idea himself?”

  In a flat, strained voice, Skinner said, “You are delusional, Miss Sweeney” –he sneered her name— “if you suppose I’d submit to an interrogation from the likes of you.”

  With quiet wrath, Will said, “You will submit to far worse than that from me, Detective, if you presume to address Miss Sweeney in that manner again.”

  Chapter 13

  Skinner looked away with an air of ostentatious disdain, but it was an unpersuasive performance; William Hewitt knew how to exude an aura of cold menace that other men paid attention to.

  “What’s your interest in this?” Skinner asked Will.

  “Miss Gannon’s uncle believes her to be innocent, as do Miss Sweeney and I.”

  “The chit’s dead,” Skinner said. “Does it really matter so much?”

  Nell said, “You’re a policeman, for God’s sake. Don’t you have any interest in bringing the real murderer to justice?”

  “The real murderer—and who do you suppose that is?” the detective asked.

  “I have my suspicions,” she said. “How could I not, knowing that Orville Pratt and three other men bribed you to bury the Red Book and keep their names out of the investigation?”

  “Did you ever find that book?” Will asked.

  “If I had, do you think I’d tell you? As for these supposed bribes, I have no idea what you’re—”

  “You were visited the day after the murder,” Nell said, “by Mr. Pratt, Isaac Foster, Weyland Swann, Horace—”

  “How would you know that?” Skinner demanded. “It’s that Cook bastard, isn’t it? Goddamn flannel mouth son of a—”

  “Careful,” Will growled.

  “He’s the one that told you, isn’t he? You Irish are always whispering to each other, cooking up your schemes...”

  “It wasn’t he,” Nell lied.

  “Who, then?”

  “Do you think I’d tell you?” she asked, echoing his own taunt.

  “You’re barking up the wrong tree, anyway,” Skinner said. “Those men have all got alibis as to where they were when those two women were getting shot. Bacon was in court, Swann was in a board meeting, Foster was giving a lecture, and Pratt was...visiting a friend.”

  “His mistress,” Nell said. “She’ll testify however he wants her to, so long as he keeps paying her rent.”

  Skinner smiled greasily. “Now, what would a sweet little paddywhack like you know of such things?”

  Will tensed as if to leap from his chair; Nell pacified him with a hand on his arm. “That doesn’t sound like much of an alibi to me,” she said. “And I know Mr. Thurston told you about Pratt’s having threatened to kill Mrs. Kimball the day before the—”

  “That sorry old nanny goat?” Skinner snorted. “Let me tell you something. Old lady Thurston has a vivid imagination, which I suppose is good for writing plays, but it’s not so good when it comes to being a credible witness. And in case you were wondering, Thurston claims he was at home during the murder, dressing for tea with Mrs. Kimball—all by his lonesome, no one to back him up on it. Just a little food for thought, there.” Skinner sat back and crossed his arms. “Why’d you two come here, really? If you were fixing to have me brought up on perjury charges, you’d have gone directly to Chief Kurtz, or the D.A. You wouldn’t be here.”

  Nell said, “You’re going to tell Orville Pratt to hold off on having the house cleaned.”

  “Why? So you can make a case for the Gannon girl being innocent?”

  “How about so
we don’t tell Chief Kurtz and the district attorney that you lied under oath?” Will drawled.

  Skinner looked everywhere but at Nell and Will. “What excuse am I supposed to give Pratt?” he finally asked.

  Will said, “That’s entirely your affair. If you can manage to keep that house untouched until we’re done looking into things, I promise we’ll do what we can to make your deceptions and machinations look like mere bungling instead of what they really were. That should save you your job and possibly a jail term. But if that house gets scoured of its evidence before Miss Sweeney and I have wrapped things up, I guarantee you’ll answer for your deceit.”

  Skinner was fumbling for a response when Will and Nell rose from their chairs.

  “Good day, Detective,” Nell said as they turned to leave.

  * * *

  “There it is.” Will pointed to a green and gold sign hanging over a shop in Dock Square behind Faneuil Hall:

  Samuel L. Watts

  GUNSMITH

  REVOLVERS & RIFLES

  BOUGHT Ï SOLD Ï REPAIRED

  CUSTOM FIREARMS

  A bell tinkled as Will held the door open for Nell, ushering her into a dim, cluttered shop that looked as if it had been there, accumulating objects and dust, for eons. Firearms of every conceivable type were displayed in rows on the smoke-bruised brick walls, alongside racks of tools. Vises, lathes and anvils sat on massive tables, their age-burnished surfaces strewn with drills, wrenches, hammers, polishing stones, rifle barrels, stocks, pistol grips, and innumerable bits and pieces of guns. Coals smoldered in a hooded stone forge at the very rear of the shop.

  “‘Afternoon.” They turned to find a man smiling up at them from a small worktable half-hidden amid the chaos, where he was cleaning a partially disassembled revolver by the light from a nearby window. He started to rise; Nell waved him back down as they approached him, sawdust and metal filings crunching underfoot.

  “Mr. Watts?” Will said as he removed his hat.

  “If I’m not, then I’ve been in the wrong place for about thirty years.” Samuel Watts was a bulky, affable looking fellow in shirtsleeves and an oil-stained leather apron, a pair of spectacles sitting low on his nose; his curly black hair and beard, the latter threaded with gray, looked long overdue for a trim.

  Will made introductions, then produced the bullet taken from Mrs. Kimball’s bedroom rug and the cartridge he’d swiped from Orville Pratt’s study. “We were wondering if it’s possible to tell whether this spent bullet might be from a pinfire cartridge like this one.”

  Setting down his bore brush and the pistol barrel, Watts took the bullets and peered at them over his glasses. “‘Like this one,’” he asked, “or ‘exactly like this one’?”

  “Exactly,” Will said. “Say, a cartridge from the same box.”

  “It’s possible. They’re both about the same caliber.”

  “The spent one is a forty-five?” Nell asked. “Are you sure?”

  “Forty-four or forty-five,” Watts said. “No smaller. I’ve got no way of telling if it was a pinfire, but I do know it came out of a metal cartridge.”

  “Are you positive?” Nell asked.

  The gunsmith smiled indulgently. “Miss, I’ve been in this business since I was a boy apprenticed to my grandpa. Yeah, I’m positive. Not that I could say for sure if it came from one of these cartridges—not without test-firing the fresh cartridge from the same gun that fired the spent one. You don’t happen to have it handy, do you—the gun?”

  Will shook his head. “I dearly wish we did.”

  “What kind of a gun is it?” Watts asked. “Maybe I’ve got one lying around.”

  “A Lefaucheux Brevete,” Will said.

  Watts looked at Will for a second, handed back the bullets. “‘Fraid I don’t have one. You don’t see too many of them. Only fella I know of who owns one of those is Mr. Orville Pratt.” He took off his spectacles, breathed vapor onto the lenses, and wiped them with a clean rag. “Only fella in Boston, anyway. Stonewall Jackson carried one as his sidearm. I reckon that one’s still down South somewhere.”

  Reasoning that it was hardly a secret, Pratt himself having crowed about it to all of Boston society, Nell said, “As a matter of fact, Mr. Pratt’s Lefaucheux is the one that belonged to Stonewall Jackson.”

  “So he thought when he bought it,” Watts said as he shoved the bore brush through the pistol barrel, “but I set him straight on that score. God knows how much he paid for it. Some flimflammer made a killing on that one.”

  Nell and Will looked at each other. “The gun’s a fake?” she asked.

  Will said, “When did Mr. Pratt find this out?”

  Watts aimed the barrel toward the window and peered into it with one eye. “Few weeks ago. It was the end of April. I remember, ‘cause she came in wet and grousing about all the rain we’d been having, and I said, ‘That’s April for you, but it’ll be over soon.’”

  “She?” Nell and Will said it together.

  “Pratt sent his daughter on account of him being real busy with work or some such,” Watts said. “Had her bring me the gun for an appraisal, and to find out how to find a buyer, ‘cause he’d decided to sell it.”

  “Which daughter?” Nell asked.

  Watts scratched his chin with the stem of the brush. “I didn’t catch the first name. She was pretty enough, but she had on some kind of funny...” He made a flowing gesture down his body.

  “Emily,” Nell said.

  “She said it was Stonewall Jackson’s Lefaucheux, and I said one of my customers had been talking about that gun just yesterday. He told me he’d been at some big blowout at the Pratts’ the night before, and he got to hold the very gun General Jackson carried during the war. Well, she showed me the gun, and I took one look at it and said her pa might as well hang on to it, ‘cause he wasn’t gonna get more than eighty bucks or so. It was a good weapon, nice and clean, worked real well. But it had never belonged to Stonewall Jackson.”

  “You knew that for a fact?” Will asked.

  Watts traded his brush for a rag, with which he wiped down the pistol barrel. “Jackson’s Lefaucheux is one of the most famous guns in the world right now. I’ve seen pictures of it, read detailed descriptions. Pratt’s gun looks nothing like it, and it’s got a completely different serial number. He got the wool pulled over his eyes.”

  “How did Emily react to the news?” Nell asked.

  “She was one unhappy young lady,” Watts said as he set about reassembling the pistol. “Looked like she was fighting back tears when she left. Probably wondering how she was gonna break the news to the old man.”

  “Did you ever discuss the matter directly with Mr. Pratt?” Will asked.

  “Yeah, just the other day. You know that actress that got killed up on Beacon Hill? Virginia Kimball? Well, me and Pratt both testified at the coroner’s inquest, me ‘cause I’m a ballistics expert and Pratt ‘cause he was Mrs. Kimball’s lawyer. I went up to Pratt during a break and introduced myself. Told him how sorry I was about the Lefaucheux being a fake, and that if he was aiming to buy any more collectible firearms, he should have me check ‘em out first. I said if he was busy, he could just send his daughter with the gun, like he did last month, but it wasn’t a step he could afford to skip—not unless he wanted to get bamboozled again.”

  Will glanced at Nell as he rubbed his neck. “How, er...how did he react to that?”

  Watts paused in his work to consider his response. “He was real... I don’t know. Real quiet like, in a daze almost. He just sort of stared at me, like I’d been talking Chinese or something. Then finally he kind of blinks, and thanks me in that real stiff way of his, and walks away. I put it down to him being, you know, preoccupied with the inquest. That kind of fella, big, important lawyer and all that, he’s probably got stuff on his mind all the time.”

  “I should think,” Will said, “that he had a great deal on his mind just then.”

  Chapter 14

  “Good eveni
ng...Merritt, is it?” Will greeted as the front door of 82 Beacon Street swung open around dusk.

  “It is, sir.” The thickset, funereally attired butler bowed as he took Will’s card. “Good evening, Miss Sweeney...Dr. Hewitt.”

  “Is Miss Emily Pratt at home, by any chance?” Nell asked.

  “I’m sorry, miss, but Miss Emily is out for the evening.”

  “Oh.” Nell and Will had come up with quite a list of questions for Emily over supper, a simple but excellent meal in a private upstairs room at the Oyster House, which Will had secured in exchange for a half eagle pressed into the palm of the headwaiter. To get to it, they’d had to negotiate a labyrinth of creaky stairways and passages leading at last to an isolated little nook, warmly paneled and hung with century-old paintings. It had been lovely sharing a good meal all alone with Will. He’d leaned back and propped his feet up on the bench next to her, smiled at her in the candlelight, watched her in that dreamily engrossed way of his... She hadn’t wanted it to end.

  “Are the rest of the family at home?” Will asked.

  Merritt shook his head. “They’re visiting friends, I’m afraid. Oh, except for Miss Pratt—Miss Vera Pratt. She’s, er...I believe she’s taking the air out back in the courtyard.”

  “How lovely on such a mild evening,” Nell said. “You don’t suppose she’d mind if we went back there just to say hello?”

  Merritt hesitated for some reason, then bowed again and invited them to accompany him to the rear of the house. They followed him through the French doors and into the twilit courtyard, in which Vera Pratt stood with her eyes closed and her arms stretched out to the sides, humming tunelessly. She had on another poorly altered frock tonight, of an extremely dusty rose that only accentuated her paleness.

  To either side of Vera stood a round iron table ringed in candles. Strange designs had been scrawled in chalk onto the brick pavement. The largest of these was a six-pointed star about ten feet in diameter, in the center of which Vera stood. Surrounding this hexagram was a snake swallowing its tail. Other symbols included a Greek cross with its arms bent at right angles, another cross with a loop for an upper arm, and some kind of Oriental writing.