A bucket of ashes

by P. B. Ryan

  With a fleeting glance at Nell, Will said, “I’ll do without, thank you. “

  “She already knows you’re a hero, old man. The president himself has vouched for you.” Shaking the brown vial, Cyril said, “How much?”

  “Really, I’d much prefer to keep my wits about—”

  “Will, please,” Nell quietly implored. “Don’t make me watch you suffer.”

  He looked from Nell to Cyril, then sat back, letting out a long, grudging sigh. “Thirty milligrams.”

  Cyril prepared the solution and filled the syringe.

  “I’ll do it,” said Will, reaching for it.

  Before he’d even finished giving himself the injection, his eyes grew bleary, his body slumping bonelessly in the chair. He withdrew the needle and went to lay the syringe on the table, but it slipped from his hand and fell to the floor.

  “Right, then,” said Cyril. “Let’s get to work.”

  Chapter 9

  “Don’t see why not,” Chief Bryce told Nell and Will the next morning when they asked to see David Quinn, but as he led them upstairs to the second floor, he warned them that they wouldn’t find the prisoner very talkative. “He’s always been a real chaw-mouth, the kind that’ll yak a blue streak just to hear himself talk, but now he’s got this greenhorn public lawyer, Edwin Thursby, who’s making him keep his mouth shut. Kid’s with him right now, trying to hash out a defense. Quinn pled not guilty at his arraignment, claims he’s an innocent man, says he was out fishing while Susannah Cunningham was getting shot.”

  “Alone?” Nell asked.

  With a roll of the eyes, Bryce said, “They’re always alone.”

  “Will?” Nell said as he paused at the top of the stairs to lean against the wall, eyes closed. “Are you—”

  “I’m fine,” he said, a claim belied by his waxy complexion, the rigid set of his jaw, the tremor in his hands.

  “He sick?” Bryce asked.

  “He’s not contagious,” Nell said as she stroked his shoulder. He was, in fact, suffering both from his throbbing arm and from morphine withdrawal, for he had adamantly refused, since last night, to take any more. Nell had assured him there was no shame in using it as an anesthetic, but there’d been no reasoning with him. She’d told him she was perfectly capable of driving to Falmouth alone, that he should stay put and rest; he wouldn’t hear of it. She knew he was trying to prove something to her, which only exacerbated the guilt she already felt for having kept him in the dark about the divorce petition and pregnancy.

  It reassured her considerably, of course, to know that he’d been using the morphine not for inebriation, but for pain relief—this time. But would there be other times? Would there be more lapses into opium smoking, more trips to Shanghai, more gambling? As far as she knew, he still had no intention of returning to Harvard, nor of disclosing to Gracie that he was her father.

  She wanted to tell him everything. She ached to tell him. But then what?

  “If you don’t mind my asking,” said Bryce as he led them through a warren of corridors, “what do you expect to gain from talking to Quinn? If you’re hoping he’ll admit it was him that fired the fatal shot, and not your brother, I gotta tell you, you’re in for a disappointment. He’s been real tight-lipped. We haven’t been able to get a peep outa him.”

  “I would like to exonerate my brother of murder, if only posthumously,” she said, “but I’d also like to find out if Quinn is responsible for his death.”

  Bryce paused, frowning, with his hand on a doorknob. “Your brother burned to death.”

  “We have reason to believe he may have taken a knife to the chest before the fire started,” she said. “We’ll have a better idea tomorrow if that’s actually what he died from. We’ve just come from the Town Hall. Our application to exhume my brother’s body has been approved. The exhumation will take place tomorrow morning, and Dr. Hewitt and Dr. Greaves will perform an autopsy in the afternoon.”

  “He had an autopsy,” Bryce said.

  “A real autopsy,” replied Will, speaking for the first time since he’d been introduced to the constable.

  Bryce swung the door open with a smirk. “Suit yourself, but you ask me, it’s a waste of time and effort. Visitors!” he announced as he waved Nell and Will into the room ahead of him.

  It was a small, windowless meeting room with a hulking constable standing guard over a table stacked with papers, at which sat two men. One was a pink-cheeked fellow in a high collar with well-oiled, crisply parted hair: the lawyer, Edwin Thursby.

  The other man was slight and dark, a demonic elf with a sparse moustache and bulging eyes. He wore a black coat with drooping shoulders and a collarless shirt buttoned up to the throat. In one of his manacled hands he held a half-smoked cigarette. This was David Quinn.

  Thursby rose to his feet with a quizzical expression as Nell entered the room. Quinn surveyed her up and down, his mouth parting to reveal a jumble of yellowish teeth.

  “David.” The young attorney nudged his client, who kept his gaze fixed on Nell as he stood. Quinn slid his tongue over his teeth as he lifted the cigarette to his mouth.

  “This here’s the stepsister of your dead pal,” Bryce told Quinn as he leaned against the wall, arms crossed. “She wants to know if it was you or Murphy that shot that lady, and if you stuck a knife in Murphy’s chest.”

  So much for the subtle approach, Nell thought.

  Apparently dissatisfied with that dismal excuse for an introduction, Will said, “The lady is Miss Cornelia Sweeney. I am Dr. William Hewitt. You will put that out, Mr. Quinn.”

  Thursby, belatedly registering the breach of etiquette, plucked the offending cigarette from his client’s hand and stubbed it out in a yellow soup plate overflowing with butts, earning him a poisonous glare from Quinn.

  Bowing to Nell, the young lawyer said, “I’m sincerely sorry for your loss, Miss Sweeney, however I’m sure you can understand that I can’t allow my client to engage in a conversation of this nature. I must therefore ask you and Dr. Hewitt to—”

  “Allow?” Quinn spun on Thursby with eye-popping indignation. “You’re my mouthpiece, Thursby, not my ma. You don’t tell me what to do. You got that?”

  Seating himself as he tugged Quinn down onto his chair, Thursby leaned in close and said, in a low voice, “I’m your attorney, David. I’m here to guide and represent you. Given the circumstances of this case, it just isn’t smart to be talking to—”

  “You sayin’ I’m stupid?” Quinn was quivering all over, as if he were on the verge of detonation. “You sayin’ I’m some jughead that needs to be told what he can do and what he can’t?”

  “No, of course not. But—”

  “I’m the boss. You work for me.” Quinn stabbed his thumbs into his chest. “And if I wanna talk to the lady, I’m gonna talk to the lady. You got it?”

  Thursby turned away with a resigned sigh.

  Quinn turned his greasy grin on Nell and gestured with his bound hands toward the chair opposite his. “Miss, uh, Sweeney, is it?”

  “For the record,” said Thursby as Nell and Will seated themselves, “Mr. Quinn could not have shot Mrs. Cunningham, as he was fishing in Eel Pond at the time. And as for your brother, it is my understanding he died of—”

  “I never known Jim had a stepsister,” Quinn said in his odd, nasal voice as he lounged back in his chair, his gaze crawling over Nell. “‘Specially such a tasty little bit of—”

  “Be careful, Quinn,” Will said in a low, even voice. “I’ve never taken my fists to someone in manacles, but I find myself in the mood to break with tradition this morning.”

  “Dr. Hewitt,” Thursby said, “if you’re going to threaten my client, I shall have to ask you to leave. This situation is trying enough for Mr. Quinn. He’s an innocent man who’s being persecuted simply because he was acquainted with James Murphy. The assumption that he was Mr. Murphy’s partner in this heinous crime has arisen from guilt by association.”

  Will said, “
Yes, well, according to Claire Gil—”

  “Dear me, I had no idea,” Nell interrupted, shooting a glance in Will’s direction. Pitching her voice high and soft, she said to Quinn, “You’re going through all this just because you and my brother were friends? That’s dreadful! If Jamie were alive, I know he’d have something to say about that.”

  “Yeah, I reckon he would, at that,” Quinn said.

  Sitting forward with a conspiratorial little smile, Nell said, “You know, Mr. Quinn, I really wouldn’t mind it one little bit if you smoked. I don’t think it’s rude at all. In fact, I’ve always found cigarettes rather dashing. Some people think they’re low-class, but I think they impart a certain... virile sophistication.”

  From the corner of her eye, she saw Will cast a jaundiced look at the ceiling. He was cradling his right arm with his left, she noticed.

  “That’s swell of you,” Quinn said, sneering at Thursby as he fumbled in his coat for a hand-rolled cigarette and a match. “Real swell.”

  “They told me you were a fugitive for weeks,” Nell continued. “I must say, it was pretty savvy of you, laying low like that , knowing you’d be connected with my brother—but how absolutely horrid, having to hide from the police when one has done nothing wrong.”

  “I was hounded day and night,” Quinn said through a flutter of smoke, “but not by the cops. They tacked up my picture, but nobody pays them things any mind, not in my neck of the woods, anyway. It was the husband, Cunningham. He tried to run me to ground in my own neighborhood, got all my friends lookin’ to put a bullet in me—or them I thought was my friends. Come to find there wasn’t no safe place for me to hole up, and nobody I could trust. I had to keep on the move, keep my head down every second of the day, sleep with one eye open.”

  “Yes, I saw the handbill Mr. Cunningham distributed,” Nell said, choosing her words with care because of the intensity with which Quinn’s earnest young lawyer was following the conversation. “It was vigilante justice, nothing more. But of course it isn’t justice at all when an innocent man ends up arrested for a crime he didn’t commit.”

  “It wasn’t just them handbills,” Quinn said. “He was on my scent—Jim’s, too—long before he started handin’ them out. He was like a bloodhound, askin’ folks if they seen us, tellin’ ‘em they could make an easy five grand if they popped us...”

  “David.” Thursby closed a hand over Quinn’s shoulder. “You’d best—”

  “When did he start nosing around like this?” Nell asked Quinn.

  “Oh, he’d been gunnin’ for us since we done the job.” Quinn stilled in the act of raising the cigarette to his mouth.

  Thursby closed his eyes.

  Will smiled at Nell in a way that said, Touché, Cornelia.

  Quinn stabbed out the cigarette. “Shit.”

  Bryce pushed off the wall with a whoop of triumph. “That sounded like a confession to me.”

  “It was nothing of the sort,” Thursby said. “It was an innocent statement, open to interpretation.”

  “Yeah, well, I got a pretty good idea how a jury’s gonna interpret it,” Bryce said.

  “Did you shoot Susannah Cunningham?” Will asked Quinn.

  Thursby said, “David, don’t—”

  “No, uh-uh,” said Quin, shaking his head. “Nope. I sure didn’t. That was Jim.”

  “Really?” Nell said.

  “I didn’t even bring a gun. I don’t even own one.” Quinn drew on the cigarette, his gaze darting this way and that—everywhere but at Nell. “It was Jim that had the jumpy trigger finger, not me.”

  “Well, that’s very sobering,” Nell said. “And surprising. Jamie was always an abysmal shot, never could get the hang of it. Of course, I hadn’t seen him in over a decade. It’s possible he practiced and got better. Still...” She turned to Chief Bryce. “Didn’t you say Mrs. Cunningham was shot directly in the middle of the forehead?”

  “Yep. You’d of thought it was point blank range, but it had to be a good thirty, forty feet, given the size of that library—and dark, to boot.”

  “That sounds like the work of an expert marksman,” Nell said, “someone with unerring skill and cool nerves, a real deadeye. That kind of accuracy with a gun...” She lowered her voice to a throatier timbre and pressed a hand to her throat, as if on the verge of swooning. “I’ve watched sharpshooters practicing with targets. It’s breathtaking to see a man exhibit such mastery over his weapon. My heart races just watching him load and cock it, but when he squeezes the trigger and that bullet penetrates the bull’s-eye...” She hitched in a breath. “I shiver just thinking about it.”

  Every man in the room was staring in dazed silence at Nell. Will’s mouth curved into a smile. Young Thursby’s ears were a deep, scalding red.

  Quinn whispered something into his lawyer’s ear, but sound traveled in that little room. “...get away without hangin’ if I didn’t—”

  “It doesn’t matter who actually shot her,” Thursby whispered back. “It’s felony murder either way—but you don’t want to be admitting to any more than you—”

  “I did it,” Quinn told Nell, his bulbous eyes glittering with pride. “I shot her. Jim didn’t even have a gun, he didn’t like ‘em. It was me.”

  “For pity’s sake, David,” Thursby groaned.

  “We didn’t think no one was home till she come traipsin’ downstairs, callin’ out”—he adopted a falsetto—“‘Freddie? Is that you?’ I drop that cabinet full of boat crap we’re draggin’, whip out my Remington, and bam!” Quinn formed the shape of a gun by clasping his hands and extending a forefinger, which he pressed to the center of his forehead. “Neat as a drill, right through the braincase.” He aimed the finger at his mouth and mimed blowing into the barrel.

  Thursby was sitting back in his chair, looking defeated.

  Quinn lit another cigarette. “Jim, he was on the high ropes after that, screamin’ and hollerin’, sayin’ why’d I have to shoot her—me sayin’ she shouldn’t of snuck up on us like that. He threw a punch at me, but I dodged it and he lost his footing and landed on his ass. Didn’t get up, just hung his head and started boo-hooin’ like a schoolgirl.”

  “He cried?” Nell said.

  “A grown man, for Chrissakes. I didn’t know whether to laugh or puke. See, he knew the lady from working on her gardens, ‘cause he’d be tillin’ and she’d be plantin’, and they’d get to talkin’. He said she used to bring him lemonade with ice in it and slices of lemon in it, and sometimes cherries, and it was the best lemonade he ever drunk. He said he used to say funny things ‘cause he liked the way she laughed, with her whole face kinda crunchin’ up, which I never could picture. You ask me, he was sweet on her, never mind her bein’ older and a rich married lady. Anyways, me and him parted ways after that. He said he had his fill of me, didn’t ever want to lay eyes on me again, called me some names he didn’t ought to call me. I said good riddance.”

  Will said, “Was that the last time you saw him?”

  Quinn blew a plume of smoke in Will’s direction. “I told you—we parted ways. That means I never seen him again.”

  “Are you sure?” Nell asked. “You didn’t start worrying that he’d get caught and pin the killing on you? At the time, you thought only the actual shooter would get charged with murder. You wanted to make sure he couldn’t testify against you, so you snooped around and discovered he was hiding in the Gilmartins’ cranberry shed. You sneaked in there with a knife one night while he was sleeping and—”

  “Knives are for bitches,” Quinn said.

  His hands curling into fists, Will said, “Don’t give me an excuse, Quinn.”

  “That’s not an answer,” Nell said. “Did you stab him or not?”

  “No, I did not.” He was looking right at her.

  “Did Mr. Cunningham arrange for you and Jamie to steal that nautical collection?” she asked.

  His eyebrows quirked. “How’d you know that?”

  That question seemed to be echoed
in the expressions of every man there, including Will.

  She said, “When I first spoke to Chief Bryce about this case, he told me that Mr. Cunningham’s handbills offering a reward for your death were printed up the day after Jamie’s body was identified, which would have been August first. Prior to that, no one even suspected Jamie—nor you, Mr. Quinn. But a few minutes ago, you told me that Mr. Cunningham had been ‘gunning for you since you did the job,’ which was July nineteenth. So, for two weeks, Frederick Cunningham had known exactly who broke into his home that night.”

  “Hunh,” said Chief Bryce, who, had he the slightest aptitude for police work, would have sorted this out with no help from Nell.

  “There are only two ways Mr. Cunningham could have known this,” Nell said. “On possibility is that he figured it out through his amateur sleuthing. Then, rather than tell the police, he decided to exact personal revenge against his wife’s murderers by having them killed. The other possibility is that he contracted with you and Jamie to steal that collection while he and his wife were both away. You’ve just confirmed for me that it was the latter.”

  “Why the hell—’scuse me,” Bryce said. “Why the heck would he want his own property stolen? ‘Specially something so valuable?”

  “For the insurance money?” Will suggested.

  Quinn nodded as he took a puff. “That, and Jamie was supposed to fork over half of whatever he made fencin’ the stuff. It was Jamie he cooked up the deal with. He figured Jamie was a drifter who’d jump at the chance to make a haul like that, and he was right. Jamie said he felt bad, though, ‘cause Susannah—that’s what he called her, not to her face, but to me—he said she’d talked about that collection, said it meant a lot to her. She told him her husband was always on her to let him sell it, ‘cause they had money troubles, but she told him he should sell his sailboat instead—only he wasn’t about to do that. So that’s why he had to go around her back and set it up to look like a burglary. Jamie hated to go along with it, but he wanted that money. He said he could maybe buy himself a fishing boat and earn an honest living. He was always talkin’ about that—gettin’ outa the life.”