by P. B. Ryan
“And his wife’s. Poor woman. I can’t imagine what she’s going through.”
Will said, “You do realize she’s hiding something.”
Nell just sighed.
“All that elusiveness about how they first met,” he said.
“I know.”
“And this mysterious favor she wrote to thank him for.”
“I know, I know.”
“In other respects, I thought she was admirably forthcoming—except when I asked her outright if she thought her husband could have killed Johnny Cassidy. I mean, I like her—quite a lot, actually—but it does make me wonder.”
“I still can’t help but feel sorry for her, being ambushed that way by Skinner, and in her condition. He didn’t have to tell her all that, about her husband and Mary Molloy.”
“Do you suppose it’s true?” Will asked.
“I don’t know. I really don’t. On the one hand, he’s always spoken so lovingly of her. But on the other, well... like she said, he is a man, and men...”
“And men...?” He was fighting a smile, the dog.
She cast him a baleful look. “Have needs.”
“Ah, yes, those primitive, ravenous needs of ours. It has actually been my observation that if a man is truly devoted to his wife, and if he’s mature enough to have sorted out that one can’t eat one’s cake and have it, he can and will remain faithful through thick and thin—even if it means doing without the pleasures of the marital bed for months, or longer.”
“Nevertheless,” Nell said, “men do occasionally stray, even good men like Detective Cook. If we start out by assuming he didn’t, we might miss something important.”
“You dodged that assumption very adroitly,” Will said with a hint of a smile. “My incessant hectoring has borne fruit, after all.” Tapping on the roof of the cab, he told the driver to pull over.
“Nabby’s is a block away in that direction,” he said as he handed Nell down from the carriage and paid the driver. “It’s probably best if we’re not seen getting out of a hack by the people we’ll be dealing with. Mustn’t look too prosperous.”
He took her arm and escorted her up North Street, a meandering cobblestone lane lined with tenements and shopfronts, each more dismal and ramshackle than the last. Men swaggered down the sidewalk in packs, snorting with laughter as they drank from their flasks and smoked their cigarettes. Frowsy streetwalkers clustered beneath the lamp posts, fanning their sweat-sheened, desperately painted faces. The balmy night air carried whiffs of spoiled fruit, sewage and sour ale, underscored by the musty-damp smell of Boston Harbor just to the east.
“This is it,” Will said as they approached a weathered brick building fronted with leaded glass windows glowing orange-yellow in the dark. Men and women milled about in front, flirting and laughing, smoking and drinking. From within came muffled, lively piano music.
“Have you ever been here?” Nell asked Will.
“A few times, many years ago, but just for the drinking, never to play cards.” Lowering his voice so as not to be heard by those loitering nearby, he said, “Even back then, I knew enough not to wager a dime here. It’s a skinning joint. They’ve got their hands in your pocket from the moment you set foot in the place. If a man walks in alone, he’s immediately set upon by a bar girl who asks him for a dance—for which he has to pay, of course. Then she’ll be thirsty and want a drink, which, although it contains no alcohol, will set the chump back a pretty penny. Then comes the invitation to go off to some private nook for a more intimate form of entertainment, which will cost him whatever is left in his wallet. The card games are crooked, the boxing is fixed...”
“Boxing?”
“A couple of nights a week, they set up a boxing ring in the dance hall at the rear of the building and have bare-knuckled matches. The other nights, it’s music and dancing.”
He led her to a cluster of dusty, framed photographic portraits hanging in Nabby’s front window facing the glass, so that they could be viewed from outside by the light of a nearby street lamp. The photographs on top were of powerfully built, shirtless men scowling at the camera, fists raised. Each picture had a name inked across the bottom in a spikey scrawl: Phelix McCann, Davey Kerr, Pat “Bulldog” Cunigan, Jimmy Muldoon, Finn “Southpaw” Cassidy, Johnny Cassidy...
“Look,” Nell said, pointing to the photos of the two men named Cassidy, who bore a striking resemblance to each other, although one was dark, the other fair. The dark one, the late Johnny, was captured in a boxer’s crouch, fists curled near his face. He was turned away from the camera, the three-quarter profile highlighting his heavy brow and sharp cheekbones. Finn Cassidy, although he shared Johnny’s rapacious features, was substantially bigger than Johnny, a hulking brute with bulging muscles and small eyes cast into shadow beneath his brow ridge. Both men looked to be in their early to mid-thirties.
“Brothers?” Nell said.
“Looks like it. Those must be the wenches who work here,” Will said, indicating the dozen or so photographs below those of the boxers. They were full-length portraits of young, suggestively attired women, some in just their underpinnings, striking seductive poses. They had been labeled with first names only: Flora, Ivy, May, Pru, Fanny, Elsie, Mary...
“Do you suppose that’s Mary Molloy?” Nell asked, pointing.
“She’s the only Mary there.”
“I didn’t realize she worked here.”
“I assumed she did.”
The girl in the photograph looked young, very young, an effect emphasized by her petite stature and juvenile attire. Unlike the other bar girls, she wore a modest, white-collared blue frock hemmed above the ankles, displaying a pair of dainty black boots, a peek of white stocking, and a lacy fringe of petticoat. She had little in the way of bosom, but the face of an angel, with huge, pale eyes, a turned-up nose, and bee-stung lips. Her hair, which Nell guessed, from her befreckled complexion, to be red, fell over her shoulders in a torrent of ringlets.
“She doesn’t look old enough to be someone’s common law wife,” Nell observed, “not to mention a... Well, I take it these women are essentially prostitutes.”
“Some men have a taste for young girls,” Will said. “They’re usually immature themselves, and looking for someone they can control.”
“It surprises me that Johnny Cassidy could have tolerated her selling herself to other men.”
“It may very well have been his idea,” Will said. “Easy money.”
“Easy for him.”
Will gestured her through the front door, where a muscular, reddish-blond man in a tweed vest, but no coat, halted them with an upraised hand. He had the faded remnants of a black eye and a somewhat fresher contusion on his forehead. Nell recognized his deepset eyes and feral features from the photograph in the window.
“Two bits for you,” he told Will in a voice that bore just the faintest hint of an Irish lilt. “The lady gets in free.”
“You’re Finn Cassidy, ain’t you?” Will asked in a passably good working class Boston accent. You don’t show up at an Irish grogshop sounding like a Brit to the manor born, he’d told her, and expect them to welcome you with open arms. Digging in his pocket for the twenty-five cents, he said, “Sorry ‘bout what happened to your brother.”
“Did you know him?” Finn asked.
“No, but I—”
“No, you don’t, Boyle,” Finn growled as a grubby, boozy-smelling behemoth tried to squeeze through the doorway past Nell and Will. He pounced on Boyle with surprising alacrity, given his bulk, and seized him by his suspenders.
“But I ain’t so bollocksed now,” Boyle said in a heavily slurred brogue, trying to pry Finn’s grip loose as he was shoved out of the door and onto the sidewalk. “And I din’ really hurt her, not so’s she’d feel it tomorrah. I won’ do it again, I swear.”
“Not tonight, you won’t.” Finn gave the interloper a rough shove, sending him stumbling backward into the lamp post. The crowd loitering on the sidewalk hooted w
ith laughter.
Finn said, “You know the rules, Boyle. Once I give you the heave-ho, you’re out for the night. Come back tomorrow and don’t give the chippies no trouble, and maybe I’ll let you stay.”
“Och, Finn, be a good lad,” Boyle implored as he lurched back toward the door, straightening his coat. “Lemme back in, jus’ fer tonight, and I swear on me dear departed mum’s—”
He broke off with a grunt as Finn grabbed him by the collar and rammed his left fist into his gut, doubling him over. The onlookers, appreciating the impromptu floor show, whooped and cheered. A second punch, this one to the head, dropped Boyle in a groaning heap on the sidewalk, blood streaming from his nose.
Nell instinctively stepped forward, ready to intervene, as Finn aimed a booted foot at the fallen man’s midsection, but Will pulled her back, tucking her behind him. “Bad idea,” he said quietly, but she could tell from his stance of coiled readiness that he was prepared to step in himself if need be.
The kick connected with a muffled crunch and a roar of pain.
Turning to leave, Finn said, “Not another word from you, you hear?”
“Christ Jaysus,” Boyle rasped, clutching his stomach.
Wheeling around, Finn dealt the big man another kick, then brought his boot down on Boyle’s throat and kept it there, making him gag and thrash. Leaning over, he asked, with studied calm, “Now, what did I say? ‘Not another word.’ That means you close that flappin’ jaw of yours and keep it closed. Got it?”
A gurgle rose from Boyle’s throat as he stared, bug-eyed, at his tormenter.
“Got it?” Finn repeated, bearing down with his foot.
Boyle nodded jerkily.
Finn kept it up another few seconds, regarding his victim with undisguised contempt, before easing up and backing away. “Get him out of my sight,” he told no one in particular. Several men scrambled to do his bidding as he turned back to Will, holding out a big, scarred hand, palm up. “Two bits.”
Will paid him, shoved his cap into a pocket of his jacket, and guided Nell into the saloon. “So. Finn Cassidy bounces as well as boxes.”
“Bounces?”
“Keeps order, throws out the trash. No small task in a place like this.”
“That doesn’t give him the right to such savagery.”
“Such savagery is a nightly occurrence in places like this,” said Will, “a fact of which Mr. Boyle was certainly well aware when he did whatever it was he did to get him ejected in the first place. More to the point, though, if I’d allowed you to call Finn Cassidy on the carpet for exercising his professional responsibilities as he sees fit, how willing do you think he would have been to grant us entrance to this place?”
“I know, but...” Nell shuddered, remembering the sickening crunch of those ribs. She’d softened over the years. Back when she was part of this world, or one very like it on Cape Cod, she’d had a thicker skin. On the one hand, it shamed her that she couldn’t handle things she used to be able to. On the other, her newfound delicate sensibilities were part of what defined her as a lady by the standards of Boston’s elite. They accepted her as one of their own—almost, but it was a good deal more than she’d ever had before.
Curling an arm around her waist, Will whispered, “We must keep our eye on our goal, Cornelia. We came here for information. We came for Colin Cook, to keep him from hanging. Nothing else matters.”
She nodded, sucked in a deep, calming breath, and looked around.
Nabby’s Inferno was housed in a building whose rooms—those on the first floor, anyway—had been mostly stripped of their walls, while retaining distinctly different ceilings and floors. In the front stood a long bar set up with kegs of beer and whiskey to serve the patrons sitting at, or slumped over, a hodgepodge of mismatched tables. A kaleidoscope of smoke-hazed mirrors, photographs, nude paintings, ribald engravings, and newspaper clippings adorned the walls. Nell breathed in a miasma of stale booze, staler sweat and cheap tobacco that made the gorge rise in her throat.
Toward the rear of the establishment was a dance floor and a stage, on which a man with lampblack hair and a faded dinner jacket leaned on a piano while crooning “The Man on the Flying Trapeze” between sips of what looked like whiskey. A few sailors were dancing with girls Nell recognized from the photographic display out front, while other customers—a diverse mix from all elements of Boston society, high and low—milled about, listening to the music or talking over it. On one corner of the stage three women in garish face paint and frothy can-can skirts sat sharing a cigarette, their black-stockinged legs nonchalantly dangling over the edge.
Catching the attention of a straw-haired waiter girl passing by with two pitchers of beer, Will asked her who they should see about renting a room. “That’d be Riley,” she said, nodding toward the bartender, a thickset fellow with a steel wool beard.
“We ain’t no boarding house,” Riley told them as he wiped out a used glass with a soiled rag and set it with the “clean” ones. “What makes you think we got rooms to let?”
“I heard you got a basement flat that just opened up,” Will said. “The guy that lived there kicked the bucket is what I heard.”
“You just want a place to live, or you got somethin’ else in mind?”
“If we just wanted a place to live,” Will said with a snide little smile, “I reckon we could find lots quieter places than this.”
Riley looked Nell up and down in a way that made her wish she’d kept herself covered up with the shawl, his gaze stilling for a long moment when it lit on her bosom. When he turned away to bellow “Flora!” to a plump bar girl, Nell gave Will an I-told-you-so look.
He just smiled and shrugged. She hiked her shawl up over her shoulders. He pulled it back down. “When in Rome, Cornelia...”
“I got to take these two to see Mother,” Riley told the bar girl. “Keep an eye on the hooch—and your nose out of it.”
“Don’t be long,” she said as she sauntered over. “It’s been a slow night for me, and my rent’s overdue. I gotta get busy.”
The bartender strode through the saloon with Nell and Will on his heels until he came to a room at the very rear, the only one whose walls were still intact. “Wait here,” he told them as he passed through the open doorway.
The room was large, dim, and choked with cigar smoke. Men, some with bar girls draped over them, sat at three round, oilcloth-covered tables playing cards. The only other furniture in the room was a writing desk facing the door, behind which, on a velvet-upholstered, barrel-back wing chair, sat the largest woman Nell had ever seen.
Her body was colossal, a half-ton of bread dough ballooning out of a sleeveless linen garment that looked suspiciously like an undershift. As a nod to modesty, she wore over it a blue-striped pinafore, its gathered yoke only accentuating her size while imparting a grotesque air of the infantile. The skirt ended several inches above the floor, revealing splayed feet clad in unlaced men’s brogans, the flesh oozing over them in flabby rolls. Were it not for her unbound hair, brown and lank but threaded with wiry gray filaments, she would have looked for all the world like a giant’s baby doll. Young, she wasn’t; yet she certainly didn’t have enough years on her to be Riley’s mother.
“Mother Nabby,” Riley said with a nod of greeting as he approached her. Leaning down close, he spoke too softly for Nell to hear above the applause from the adjacent dance hall. The vocalist announced that his next tune would be “Molly! Do You Love Me?” whereupon several audience members screamed, “Beautiful Dreamer! Beautiful Dreamer!” “I bow to public sentiment,” he said, and launched into that song instead.
Riley glanced in their direction, whereupon Mother Nabby did the same. Her tiny eyes, like raisins pushed into the pale, damp mound of her face, moved over the two of them in dispassionate appraisal. She raised a clay pipe to her mouth, took a puff, and blew out a contemplative plume of smoke. Unlocking a desk drawer with a key hanging around her neck, her massive arms wobbling like jelly, she retrieved
a large anchor-shaped keyring with two old iron keys on it. She handed it to Riley, saying something to him.
“Denny!” Riley barked.
A boy Nell hadn’t noticed before jumped up from the floor in the corner, a book in his hand. He was a gangly youth of about fourteen, with overgrown hair and shabby clothes, good-looking despite his skinniness and a misshapen nose that was probably the result of a poorly healed fracture.
“Take these folks downstairs and show ‘em the flat,” Riley said as he tossed the key ring across the room to Denny.
The boy reached out to catch it, but fumbled, wincing when it struck his hand. As he scooped it off the floor, Nell saw that the middle and index fingers of his right hand were crooked, the knuckles distended.
“Mary and Johnny’s place?” Denny asked as he tucked the book into the waist of his trousers in back. “How come?”
“Stop askin’ so many questions and start earnin’ your keep,” said Mother Nabby in a husky rumble as she relocked the drawer.
“Since he’s going downstairs,” Riley told Mother. “I could use some Jameson’s.”
Shooting Riley a look of disgust for making her unlock the drawer again, Mother withdrew a shiny brass key tied to a red ribbon, and gave it to him. “Anything else?” she asked snidely.
“No, ma’am. Sorry to trouble you. Here.” He said, handing the key to Denny. “Bring me back a jug of Jameson’s from the coal cellar. Be sure and lock it up after, and come right back up. No holin’ up down there in a corner with your nose in that book. You hear me, boy?”
“Start earning your keep?” Denny grumbled as he led Nell and Will through the saloon toward the basement stairwell. “Any errand they got, no matter what it is, I hop to it. Nobody ever gave me nothin’ I didn’t work for, ever.”
“Where d’you think you’re goin’ with them keys, you little shite?” It was Finn Cassidy, striding toward them with an expression of fury.
