Murder on Black Friday

by P. B. Ryan

  Will said, “I’m afraid I’ve some bad news for you, old man—really bad news.”

  Harry just stared at his brother, his eyes glassy and a little too fixed, the hat clutched in one hand, bat in the other.

  Nell turned away, crossed to the window, and gazed out at the houses across the street, wishing she were somewhere else, anywhere but here.

  Quietly Will said, “There was an...incident, yesterday afternoon. Munro...he was found out there on the front steps. It would appear—“

  “What? What do you mean, ‘he was found’? Is he hurt? Sick?”

  “He fell from that window,” Will said. “I’m sorry, Harry. He’s dead.”

  There came a pause of several long seconds, then Harry said, “You son of a bitch, what are you trying to—”

  “Harry, you need to listen to—”

  “And you need to kiss my ass. I don’t know what you’re trying to—”

  “He’s dead, Harry. I autopsied him myself.”

  “Liar! You’re a goddamn liar! He can’t have just fallen from that window. Look at it! You’d have to climb out of the damn thing. You couldn’t just fall.”

  Nell leaned on the window sill and closed her eyes, wishing she could close her ears to Harry’s pain, because it was the last thing she wanted to hear. Not that it should trouble her; she should revel in it, after what he’d done to her. But she wasn’t made that way, nor did she care to be.

  In a voice shaky with emotion, Harry said, “This has something to do with that uppity little bit of cheap Irish lace over there. She put you up to—”

  “Harry,” Will growled in his warning tone.

  “She’s got your cherry splitter in a vise, you know that, don’t you? She’s just leading you around by your—”

  Nell flinched at the sound of Will’s fist striking his brother’s face, squeezed her eyes shut as Harry landed with a grunt and a torrent of curses on the carpeted floor.

  “My sympathy only extends so far,” Will said in a softly strained voice. “You will leave Miss Sweeney out of this conversation.”

  Harry muttered something unintelligible, his breath coming in tremulous pants. He sniffed, coughed, sniffed again.

  Nell turned to find him sitting up on the floor, holding a handkerchief to the side of his mouth. His tawny hair hung over his forehead, and his left cheek bore a scrape surrounded by a livid bruise. He tried to glare at her, but his eyes were wet and his face blood-flushed, which somewhat compromised the effect.

  Will met Nell’s gaze with a wretched expression; this was no easier for him than for her.

  Sitting Indian-style on the floor, Harry dug an engraved silver flask from inside his coat and unscrewed it one-handed, which looked to be a practiced maneuver. Removing the blood-stained handkerchief from his mouth, he tilted the flask and took a long pull, wincing at the sting of alcohol on his split lip. Harry gulped as if it were water, his hand trembling. He wiped his mouth with the handkerchief, gasping, then raised the flask again and emptied it.

  He shook his head as he screwed the top back on the flask. “What happened?” he rasped.

  Will said, “The police think he committed suicide.”

  “Mullet-headed pigs,” Harry muttered as he dabbed the handkerchief on his mouth, his gaze unfocused. His voice seemed a little thick-tongued; the drink, perhaps, or his swollen mouth, or perhaps both. “Why would a man like Phil Munro kill himself? He had everything. He was...” He ducked his head, the bloody handkerchief pressed to his mouth, his shoulders quaking.

  Nell wrapped her arms around herself and looked down.

  Will said his brother’s name softly.

  Harry’s muffled sobs were excruciating to listen to.

  “Harry.” Will hiked up his trousers and crouched next to his brother. “Harry, I’m sorry for your—“

  “Go to hell!” Harry lashed out with his fists, catching Will on the side of the head. He grabbed his cricket bat and leapt to his feet. “You’re not sorry for anything!”

  He swung the bat as Will was rising; Will ducked before it could connect. “Harry, for pity’s sake!”

  Harry spun around and whipped the bat across the big oak desk, sweeping papers across the room, along with the crystal inkwell, which cracked against the wall, splattering ink all over the luxurious silk wallpaper.

  “Harry!” Will yelled as he gained his feet.

  Nell backed up swiftly as Harry took the bat to the étagère, shattering the glass shelves as he sent Munro’s cricket trophies flying. “Don’t you tell me you’re sorry, damn you!” he screamed as she smashed the glass on a row framed prints. “You’re not—“

  “Stop this!” Will grabbed the bat as Harry raised it overhead, wresting it from it grip. “For God’s sake, Harry.”

  “Stop telling me what to do!” Red-faced and wild-eyed, Harry wheeled toward the table with the architectural drawings as Nell stumbled out of his way. He seized a rolled-up plan and tore it in half, then grabbed one of the paperweights and hurled it at his brother.

  Will sidestepped the glass sphere, bunting it away rather deftly with the bat as Harry closed his fist around another.

  “Oh, my God.”

  Harry stilled at the faint words from the doorway, the paperweight raised to throw. Catherine Munro, pale as chalk, stood with her hands clasped at her throat, surveying the carnage Harry had made of the room she’d meant to keep forever untouched. “Oh, dear God.” She closed one hand around the locket housing her late brother’s portrait, the other over her mouth.

  Harry stared at her, wet-faced, his chest pumping, a trickle of blood coursing down his chin from the split lip. He blinked at Catherine, then at the room around him. He seemed to wilt; the paperweight thudded onto the floor.

  “Miss Munro...” Nell began. As she was pondering what to say next, Harry bolted across the room, muscled Catherine aside, and tore down the stairwell, his footsteps reverberating through the house.

  * * *

  “There he is.” Will, walking arm in arm with Nell in the Public Garden, pointed to the far side of the lake, where a lone figure sat slumped over on a bench, elbows on knees. From this distance, Nell would have taken him for an old man, were it not for that garishly striped jacket.

  After Harry’s abrupt departure, she’d watched from the window of Munro’s office as he jogged east on Marlborough Street. He slowed down as he approached the park. Harry had always liked the Public Garden, Will had said. Idyllic in the manner of an English country estate, it was one of his favorite trysting places.

  Harry lifted his head as they approached, squinting against the midday sunshine. His posture remained the same, as did his expression of drained resignation. He was hatless, his well-oiled hair in disarray, a crust of blood drying on his lower lip, that abraded bruise on his cheekbone purpling already.

  He offered no objection when Will sat beside him on the bench. Nell, knowing better than to force him to interact with her, chose the next bench over—close enough to hear what was said, but far enough away so that Harry could dismiss her from his mind if he chose to.

  From inside his morning coat, Will retrieved his own flask, which was oval-shaped and about half the size of Harry’s, and offered it to his brother. “Brandy,” Will said. “Not your poison of choice, I know, but...”

  Harry took it and sat upright to swallow its contents in a single tilt. He returned it to Will, sat back, and scrubbed his hands over his face, flinching when he touched the contusion on his cheek.

  “Sorry about that,” Will said, “but you were begging for it.

  Harry just stared, rheumy-eyed, at the breeze-riffled surface of the water. A young nursemaid was wheeling a perambulator down the walk that surrounded the lake; otherwise, this area of the park was remarkably empty for such a fine, sunny day. He felt around inside his coat, muttered something under his breath, and said wearily, “Forgot my cigars.”

  Will pulled a tin of Bull Durhams from his coat and flipped it open. “Just don’t le
t the gendarmes catch you smoking out here.”

  Harry slid a cigarette out of the tin and looked at it. “You have the nerve to call me a ditch-digger?” Indeed, when Nell first met William Hewitt a year and a half ago, he was the only wellborn gentleman she’d ever seen with a cigarette in his hand.

  Will took out his match safe and lit his brother’s cigarette. He didn’t take one himself, which surprised Nell. If any situation called for an “inhalable nerve tonic,” it seemed to her it would be this one.

  Harry drew on the cigarette, gagging. “Tastes like shit.”

  Will’s gaze flicked in Nell’s direction. Knowing his instinct would be to upbraid his brother for swearing in her presence, she caught his eye and shook her head. It was better that she should remain on the periphery—seen from the corner of Harry’s eye, perhaps, but not heard.

  “It’s probably stale,” Will said. “I’ve been carrying that tin around for a while.”

  Harry smoked the cigarette down to a stub, asked for another, and lit it off the first. “So, what were you doing at Phil’s?” he asked.

  “Trying to figure out how he died.”

  “I thought you said he killed himself.”

  “The police said he killed himself. He didn’t.”

  Harry turned to look at his brother for the first time.

  Will said, “He was attacked from behind, possibly with one of his own antique cricket mallets. The cause of death was a fractured skull. His assailant then pitched him out the window to make it look like suicide.”

  Harry returned his gaze to the lake, puffing thoughtfully on the cigarette. “I knew he couldn’t have...” He shook his head. “Not a man like that. Never.”

  “At first, we thought he might have been ruined when gold collapsed, but that’s not the case. We know he bought millions of dollars worth of it over the summer, when it was a bull market, on behalf of himself and the men he advised. But he dumped it yesterday morning, right before word arrived in the Gold Room that President Grant would be selling four million in federal gold, which was when all hell broke loose.”

  “And when everyone else who owned gold got trounced,” Harry said. “He’s a clever bastard. Was. Must have made a pretty penny yesterday.”

  Not so Noah Bassett, whose $50,000 in borrowed money went to buy gold that Munro chose not to sell, leaving the poor old fellow ruined—a wrinkle that Will wisely chose to withhold from his brother at the present time.

  “If I’m to prove Munro was murdered,” Will said, “I need information. That’s why I was in his office. And that’s why I’d like to talk to you. You were his best friend. You might know things about him that others didn’t.”

  Harry took a long draw on the cigarette. “I don’t like people thinking he did away with himself.” He tapped his ash onto the ground; some of it fell onto his pristine white shin guard, but he didn’t seem aware of it. “What do you want to know?”

  “I’m intrigued by his connection with the Bassett family,” Will said, “especially given that Noah Bassett was also found dead yesterday.”

  “Yes? Well, he’d been ailing, hadn’t he?”

  “It was suicide,” Will said. “There was no note, but he was ruined in the gold crash, so that would appear to provide a motive. What I’m most curious about is Munro’s relationship with Bassett’s daughters.”

  “He was engaged to the one and amusing himself with the other,” Harry said matter-of-factly.

  “Amusing himself?” Will asked. “Are you saying Miriam Bassett was Munro’s mistress?”

  “God, no, he already had one of those. And a Brahmin princess like Marion, impoverished or no, would never stoop to being a mistress if she thought she could sugar-talk the fellow into marrying her.”

  “But she already has a fiancée,” Will said. “He’s a minister, one of Martin’s professors at Harvard.”

  “You don’t say. Well, perhaps she was just keeping the good reverend in reserve—a contingency plan in case she couldn’t manage to bring Phil around. Not that she had a prayer of doing that, of course. She was nothing to him but a sort of...diverting nuisance.”

  “So, when you say Munro was ‘amusing himself’ with her, that means...?”

  “Trying to crawl under her petticoats, and giving it quite the heroic effort, for all the good it did him. Other women, they’d tumble pretty fast for Phil, but Miriam wouldn’t give an inch. Normally he didn’t have a lot of patience for the lovesick prigs, used to flick them away and move on to likelier prospects. But he told me Miriam just refused to be gotten rid of, kept after him all summer, but with those legs locked in the closed position, which made her something of a challenge.”

  “Kept after him?”

  “Hounded him—that’s how Phil put it. Mostly it was little surprise visits in the evenings. Women did tend to go dotty over him, and they could become tiresome. In Miriam’s case, I suppose his reasoning was that if he couldn’t be rid of her, he may as well try to get his corn ground—so long as he could do so without any mawkish declarations or promises, of course. He was engaged, too, you know.”

  Ah, yes, his unofficial betrothal to Becky Bassett. Had Catherine Munro actually believed what she’d said about her brother being too much of a gentleman to have carnal designs on his fiancée’s sister? A love match it may not have been, but there are some lines one doesn’t cross.

  “It didn’t give him pause,” Will asked, “trying to coldheartedly seduce his prospective sister-in-law?”

  Harry grinned. “The willie doesn’t have much of a conscience, brother—and if ever there was a town bull, it was Phil Munro.” Almost reverently he added, “Most horn-mad fellow I ever knew.”

  “Did he actually tell you all this, about Miriam?” Will asked.

  Harry squinted into the smoke as he inhaled. “What he told me was that she was really getting to him, her holding out so stubbornly against all his smoothest maneuvers. He told me it wasn’t so much that he wanted her, although he did, desperately. He wanted her to want him—and to tell him as much. It wasn’t enough for her to just submit, not after all the waiting and all the effort he’d gone to. She had to ask for it—better yet, beg.”

  “Will said, “Are you sure he wasn’t just telling you all this to enhance his reputation as a lothario?”

  “I know she used to pay him those covert little nocturnal visits,” Harry said. “A few nights ago, I caught her slipping out the back door of his house. I was stopping by to see if Phil wanted to pay a visit to that swanky new jay house over on Bowdoin—Flora’s. You ever been there?”

  “No.”

  Harry snorted on a gust of cigarette smoke. “Wouldn’t admit it if you had, would you? Not in front of her.” He cocked his head toward Nell, whom he’d apparently tired of pretending to ignore. Now, it would appear, he was going to do his best to shock her.

  “They’ve got the freshest meat in Boston at Flora’s,” Harry said, “sweetest little chickens you ever pegged. Phil and I used to pick out two and get a room with a nice, big bed and have us a little buff-ball. They know how to take it rough there, and they aren’t stingy with the absinthe, either.”

  Will, obviously loath to chastise Harry lest he get up and walk away, merely closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. His ears, Nell noticed with some amusement, had turned a scalding purplish red.

  For his part, Harry seemed to have put his anguish behind him, or nearly so. He’d always had an almost indecently resilient temperament; his tribulations tended to be short-lived.

  “If it was nighttime,” Will asked, “how are you sure it was Miriam Bassett you saw?”

  “There was a lamp in the kitchen window, so I got a pretty good look at her.” Harry sat back and crossed his legs. “I hid behind the coal shed while she crossed the kitchen yard. She kept looking ‘round to make sure no one saw her.”

  “I take it she didn’t see you,” Will said.

  “She wouldn’t have, if I hadn’t stepped out from behind the coal
shed and tipped my hat to her,” Harry said with a snigger as he crushed the spent cigarette underfoot. “You should have seen her mouth drop open. She turned and fled like I was Frankenstein’s monster. I went in the house and up the service stairs, and when I get to the third floor landing, who do I see on her way down, but that sister of his.”

  “Catherine?”

  “She didn’t see me, ‘cause she’d turned to scream at Phil, who was still up in his office.”

  “She was screaming at him?”

  “Oh, she was fit to be tied—crying, wailing... ‘You can’t do this! It’s unspeakable!’”

  “Can’t do what?” Will asked.

  Harry shrugged. “Carry on with Miriam, I assume. My best guess is that she walked in on them and realized Phil was trying to seduce his fiancée’s sister. She’s a demon for propriety, you know, always worried about Phil fitting in with ‘the right sort.’”

  “Was there any response from Phil to her outburst?”

  “He came to the top of the stairs and saw me, which was when Catherine realized I was there. She started screaming at me, then—accused me of eavesdropping, called me all sorts of things. Phil very calmly told her to go to her room and take some of her medicine and lie down.” With a salacious grin, Harry said, “I should have lain down with her and given her some of the medicine she really needed. Those frustrated old maids, they’re aching for it, you know—they just don’t realize it. Turns them into raving bedlamites.”

  Will caught Nell’s gaze. She rolled her eyes.

  “I wasn’t sure Phil would be interested in a visit to Flora’s after that,” Harry said, “but he said he hadn’t gotten any in two days, so he was overdue for a poke. We had a damned fine time that night—damned fine.”

  “This happened a few nights ago, you say?”

  Harry nodded. “Wednesday, I believe.”

  “So, in addition to his...amusement with Miss Bassett,” Will said, “Munro frequented the houses of assignation and had a mistress. Were there other lady friends that you knew of?”