Murder in a mill town

by P. B. Ryan

  “You’re good with people,” Will said as he took her arm and walked her toward them.

  “Good morning,” Nell said.

  Mrs. Fallon and the two men stopped walking. “Miss...Sweeney, is it?”

  “That’s right.” She introduced Will; they introduced Jimmy Sullivan, who stood with his hands in his pockets, looking distracted, or perhaps just bored. He wasn’t a tall man, but his arm muscles stretched the seams of his faded pea jacket. Although nominally handsome, his nose was bulky and dented, and he had a bruise over his right eye that was just starting to turn greenish; it was about five or six days old.

  Nell said, “I can’t tell you how sorry I am about your daughter. I was praying I’d find her alive. Please accept my most heartfelt condolences.”

  Mrs. Fallon sniffed, nodded. “You’re a good girl. You tried. She’s in the arms of the Lord now.”

  Not knowing how to broach the subject diplomatically, Nell said, “The reason we’re here, Mrs. Fallon, is that...well...”

  “Call me Moira—please.”

  “Moira...I know you were asked yesterday to approve a post-mortem examination of Bridie’s remains. You chose not to sign the letter of consent, and whereas I understand that decision, I must ask you to reconsider.”

  “I...I don’t know,” she began. “My husband thinks—“

  “We know who done it,” Mr. Fallon said. “What’s the point of butcherin’ the poor girl like a side of beef?”

  The poor girl? That was quite a turnaround from how he’d spoken of her just four days ago. She was paintin’ on the lip rouge when she was still in short skirts, that one. Weren’t no better than she ought to be, right from the get-go.

  “An autopsy isn’t like that, I promise you,” Will said. “It’s a methodical operation, and one which can yield a great deal of useful information. And afterward, you won’t even be able to tell that it was done.”

  Liam Fallon said, “You’re talkin’ like it’s gonna happen, but we ain’t signed that letter, and we ain’t about to. There ain’t no reason for it, that I can see.”

  “There’s a good chance Virgil Hines wasn’t the murderer,” Nell said. “Wouldn’t you like to find out what really happened?”

  “Will it make her any less dead?” Mr. Fallon asked.

  “If she were my daughter,” Will said, “I’d want to know for sure how she died, and by whose hand. This is your one and only chance to find out. Once she’s buried, the opportunity is lost.”

  “Oh, dear.” Moira Fallon turned to her son-in-law. “You’re her husband, Jimmy. What do you think?”

  “He ain’t got no say in this,” Mr. Fallon protested. “He don’t have no husbandly rights no more. He washed his hands of her last Spring.”

  With a sneer at his father-in-law, Jimmy said, “I was gonna back you up, old man. Don’t sit right with me, cutting her open and scoopin’ out her insides. But you know what? You’re right. It ain’t none of my concern no more, so you can go ahead and make your stand on your own.” Turning away, he said, “I got some fish to catch.”

  Moira rushed over and embraced him, murmuring things Nell couldn’t quite hear. Clearly uncomfortable with this display, he patted her back once, then finally succeeded in squirming out of her arms. He turned and walked away, his hands still in his pockets.

  “I don’t know, Miss Sweeney...” Moira began.

  “Nell—please.”

  “Nell... My poor Bridie, she’s already been...” Her voice caught. “She’s been through so much. The idea of her being cut open like that...”

  Nell said, “I promise you, Moira, it will be done with the utmost respect. Dr. Hewitt will do it himself, and I’ll be there. I’ll make sure Bridie is treated right.”

  “You’ll be there?” she asked, her eyes lighting.

  “Yes, I’ll be assisting Dr. Hewitt. I’ve done this sort of thing before—I was trained as a nurse once. I’m a Catholic, too, you know. I’ll say a proper prayer before we start.”

  “A prayer...I’d like that.”

  Her husband said, “Yeah, well, there won’t be no prayer on account of there won’t be no autopsy. The decision is made.”

  “By who?” demanded Moira, a mulish thrust to her chin that Nell wouldn’t have expected.

  Mr. Fallon stared at her a moment in surprise, then stuck his chest out. “By her husband and her father, that’s who.”

  “What was all that, then, about Jimmy not havin’ any husbandly rights no more, eh? And you ain’t her father at all, are you? You’re her stepfather. You been makin’ that plain enough all along. Seems to me the only one of us that’s got any real rights in the matter is me.” Turning to Nell, she asked, “Will you say a prayer afterward, too?”

  “I’ll be happy to.”

  Moira held out her hand. “Give me the letter, then.”

  Chapter 18

  “Isn’t that Jimmy Sullivan walking up ahead?” Nell asked as Will steered their rented phaeton onto North Street.

  “Mr. Sullivan,” Will called as he reined in the horses. “Care for a lift? We’ve got room in back,” he said, pointing to the groom’s seat.

  He shielded his eyes to look up at them. “Ain’t that far. I’m just headin’ home for my fishing tackle.”

  “Why walk when you can ride?” Nell asked.

  He ruminated on it for a moment, shrugged, climbed up into the rear seat. “You turn right on Lynde.”

  Twisting around in her seat to face him, Nell said, “I’m sorry about your wife.”

  Jimmy trained his gaze on the passing houses. “I don’t think of her that way no more.”

  “Still...”

  His meaty shoulders twitched.

  “Mrs. Fallon seems fond of you,” she said conversationally.

  He grunted, his expression unchanging but for a suggestion of something that might have been weariness, or even a hint of disgust.

  “Perhaps I was misreading things,” Nell said.

  “Naw, she likes me, all right.”

  “You say that as if you wish she didn’t.”

  He sniffed. “Is that tobacco I smell?”

  Will took one hand off the reins to fetch a tin labeled Arabi-Pascha and a brass match safe from inside his jacket.

  “These are them already rolled ones.” Jimmy lit his cigarette, nodding as he expelled a stream of smoke. His hands didn’t look as if they belonged on such a young man. They were cracked and leathery, the knuckles scabbed over. He’s got a short fuse, that Jimmy Sullivan, and he’s a bruiser. Makes a pretty penny fightin’ other bruisers bare-knuckled when he’s in town.

  “Not bad.” Jimmy handed the cigarettes and matches back to Will, picked a fleck of tobacco off his tongue. “Ma Fallon, she always thought me and Bridie could work it out, you know? I wanted to put an end to it, legal-like, but Ma said what God had put asunder and all that...”

  “She was making it difficult for you?” Nell asked. Never mind that she herself was as passionately opposed to divorce, on religious grounds, as was Moira Fallon.

  He nodded as he drew on his cigarette. “She talked Bridie into fightin’ me on it. Said she wouldn’t agree to a divorce on account of she didn’t want to end up in Hell. I told her they already had a spit reserved in her name and a divorce wouldn’t make no difference, but that didn’t go over too good.”

  “It seems to me,” Will said as he turned the buggy onto Lynde, “that she might have welcomed the idea, seeing as it would have accorded her...well, a certain measure of freedom to, er...”

  Jimmy grunted. “Yeah, well, Bridie, she went ahead and ‘accorded herself that freedom’ long ago. Didn’t need no divorce to do as she pleased. Me, I figure I’ll be wantin’ to get hitched again, to a good girl this time, a good Irish girl who’ll be there when I get home and have supper ready and the house fixed up nice. A girl who knows who’s boss and don’t run around on me or give me a lot of lip. Only, there ain’t no good girls that’ll have anything to do with me, on account of they
all know I got a wife that won’t let go. Or did.”

  “I can see why you were so frustrated,” Will said. “And, to be frank, I had wondered why you were taking your wife’s death so calmly.”

  “I’m a calm kind of a guy.”

  Nell said, “That’s not what Liam Fallon says.”

  Jimmy stilled in the act of bringing the cigarette to his mouth. “What’d that bast—“ He bit off the epithet with a grimace. “What’d he say about me? He thinks I had something to do with what happened to Bridie, don’t he?”

  Choosing her words with care, Nell said, “He didn’t say it in so many words...”

  “If that...” Jimmy swore under his breath and flung the cigarette onto the road, his hands clenching. “If he wants to make trouble for me, I can make trouble for him.”

  “I’m sorry I said anything,” Nell lied.

  “You know why he makes such a to-do about Bridie not bein’ his real daughter, don’t you?”

  “No...” Nell said, although she was beginning to entertain some suspicions.

  Jimmy looked away, grinding his jaw. “Let’s just say I know some things he don’t know I know.”

  “Things Bridie told you?”

  He nodded distractedly. “That son of a...”

  “Did he and Bridie... Were they...?” Nell didn’t know how to say it.

  Jimmy emitted a kind of churlish sigh. “I wasn’t never gonna say nothin’. Bridie, she made me promise.” He rubbed his big, scarred hands on his denim pants, frowning at nothing.

  “Would you like another cigarette?” Will asked.

  “Um, yeah.”

  “Here,” Will said as he handed back the tin. “Keep it.”

  “Yeah? Thanks.” He turned it over in his hands, admiring it, before opening the lid.

  “It seems to me,” Nell said as he lit up, “that your promise not to talk about it died with Bridie. Of course, I suppose if the truth would end up compromising Mr. Fallon, perhaps you should—“

  “The hell with him. I’ll be damned if I’m gonna... Sorry,” he muttered with a glance at Nell.

  “Perfectly all right.”

  “If he wants to point the finger at me, I can point it right back. Him and Bridie, they...”

  “Had relations?” Nell supplied.

  “Yeah, lots of relations, when she was just fifteen. It went on about half a year. It was before I even met her, so I didn’t get all het up about it, but she begged me not to tell, on account of him and Ma Fallon was married at the time.”

  “Do you know who broke it off?” Nell asked.

  “Him. Father Dunne made him. She was the one that started it, though.”

  Will said, “You may think that, because of how you view her, but at that age—“

  “No, she told me it was her. Said she got herself all tarted up one day and threw herself at him. Let me tell you, there was nothin’ in long pants coulda said no to Bridie Sullivan when she put herself on display.” He shook his head and whispered, “Damn,” without seeming to remember that Nell was within earshot.

  “Did she say why she did it?” Nell asked.

  “She was in love with him. I asked her how she coulda been in love with her own father, and she said he wasn’t her father. Her real father...all’s I really know about him is on her eleventh birthday, he got stinkin’ drunk and told her he wished she’d never been born, on account of now he was tied down with a wife and kid, and he couldn’t stand the sight of either one of ‘em. He went out that night and got hisself trampled to death by a horse car. Some birthday present, huh?”

  Nell and Will exchanged a look.

  “I suppose this is why Mr. Fallon dislikes Bridie so much,” Nell said. “He feels guilty about having betrayed his wife with his own stepdaughter.”

  “If he does, that just goes to show what a jackass he is. Like I said, it was all Bridie’s doin’. Not that she felt sorry for a second. She made like it was for her ma’s sake that she wanted to keep it a secret, but I know it was so she’d have somethin’ to hold over the old man’s head if she was ever of a mind to. She’d get what she wanted any way she could, that Bridie. I heard about her tryin’ to squeeze money out of Harry Hewitt.”

  “Did she ever try anything like that with you?” Nell asked.

  “Naw,” he said as he raised his cigarette to his mouth with his ravaged boxer’s hand. “She woulda known better than that.”

  * * *

  “You can put him back in the ice box now,” Will told the mortuary aide after Nell concluded her post-autopsy prayer over the body of Virgil Hines. They hung up their soiled aprons and washed their hands, then retreated to an empty office to go over the notes she’d taken during the back-to-back post-mortems of Bridie and Hines.

  It had been a revelation, watching William Hewitt wielding scalpels, bone saws, rib shears, dissecting forceps...all with such easy authority, although he hadn’t practiced any form of surgery since removing that bullet from his leg four years ago. For that matter, it had been just as long since Nell had assisted at a post-mortem, but it had come back to her fairly readily. She’d felt an absurd surge of pride when Will had complimented her handling of the skull clamp.

  In addition to providing an extra set of hands, Nell had recorded their observations in a little notebook she’d brought along for the purpose—no easy task, what with her hands coated with lard to help keep contagion out of accidental nicks and scratches.

  “Let’s start with Virgil,” Will said as they seated themselves across a table from each other in a homey little room that was probably used for consultations with grieving relatives.

  Nell flipped to the grease-stained page bearing the heading Virgil Hines, Sept. 20, 1868:

  —24 yr. old male.

  —5 ft. 11 in. in height, lean and muscular.

  —Dark brown hair, blue eyes.

  —All teeth present.

  —Tattoo of stars on forehead, no other major scars.

  —Skull: Outer table intact. Linear frontal fracture of inner table with extensive extravasation of blood between the bone and dura mater. Significant cerebral oedema with brown-green discoloration and softening of brain tissue near the site of the fracture.

  “Virgil fell or was pushed into the stream,” Will said, restating what they’d already concluded. “His head struck a rock, fracturing the interior of his skull, whereupon he suffered both an extradural hemorrhage and pronounced swelling of the brain.”

  He sat back in his chair, regarding Nell curiously. “If you had to hazard a guess, what would you say was the primary cause of death in this case—the hemorrhage, the swollen brain, or drowning?”

  Nell twirled her steel pen as she thought it through. “With extradural hemorrhage, it can take hours for the pressure to become fatal, but cerebral edema as severe as Virgil’s can kill very quickly. The edema’s what did him in.”

  “Not drowning?”

  “He definitely didn’t drown—you know that as well as I do. There was no water in the stomach or the lungs, no bits of weeds or algae. The lungs weren’t distended and spongy, the heart wasn’t enlarged, there was no mucous froth in his airway, no hemorrhaging in the middle ear...none of the indications we found with Bridie.”

  “Who definitely did drown.”

  “During or after a rape,” Nell added, “and a rather brutal one, judging from those bruises.”

  They both fell silent for a minute. Bridie had been about three months pregnant when she died. Nell hadn’t expected that discovery to break her heart. Yet it had.

  “I need to find out who did this to her,” Nell said.

  Will nodded. “I know.”

  Chapter 19

  “I’m sorry, miss,” said the young waiter who blocked the doorway when Nell tried to enter the Revere House barroom Tuesday night. “It’s gentlemen only.”

  “I’m just looking for someone. Dr. William Hewitt?”

  He shrugged and shook his head.

  “Tall, black hair...” Nell t
ried to peer around the waiter into the bar itself, but it was one of those darkly paneled, clubby establishments furnished with cozy little clusters of high-backed leather chairs. She couldn’t make out a single patron. “He’s with a minister wearing an Anglican collar.”

  “There’s no minister here.”

  “Please, could you just look?” she begged, her voice shrill from strained nerves. “They must be here. I was with them when they arranged to—”

  “Nell?” Will materialized out of the shadows. “Is everything all right?”

  “Yes. No.” Nell drew a steadying breath. “I need to talk to you.” They hadn’t seen each other since Sunday, when they’d performed those post-mortems. Will had had his “ultra high stakes poker game” to attend to yesterday. Nell herself had been unavailable today, having promised Viola she would accompany her and Gracie on an all-day excursion to the dressmaker, shoemaker, milliner, and furrier to place orders for their winter wardrobes.

  “I explained to her that it’s gentlemen only in here,” the waiter told Will.

  “But surely the occasional exception can be made.” Will withdrew two little gold dollars out of his pocket.

  “Perhaps,” said the young man as he plucked the coins out of Will’s palm, “if she sits where no one will see her...”

  “Most accommodating of you. Oh, and if you wouldn’t mind bringing the lady a sherry? She looks as if she could use one.”

  Will escorted Nell to a semicircle of four chairs facing a snapping fire, two of which were occupied—one by Adam Beals, who rose and fingered his hair as she approached, and the other, to her dismay, by Harry, who merely gaped in outrage as Will seated her. “Not you,” he growled thickly, obviously soused already. “Oh, Christ, now the evening is perfect.”