Murder in the North End

by P. B. Ryan

  Chapter 8

  Backing up, Denny said, “R-Riley wants me to fetch him a jug of Jameson’s from—”

  “Not that key.” Pointing to the anchor-shaped key ring, Finn said, “Those.”

  “I, um, I’m s’posed to take these folks downstairs and show ‘em Mary and Johnny’s flat.”

  “We’re thinking of renting it,” Will said.

  “The hell you are,” Finn said. “My brother ain’t even cold yet. I ain’t got the place emptied out. All his stuff’s still in there. Gimme that,” he ordered, reaching for the key ring.

  “Mother says I got to show it to ‘em,” Denny told Finn in a shuddering voice as he held the keys behind his back. “I don’t do what she says, she’ll toss me right back out on the street. You know that.”

  His hands squeezing into fists, Finn snarled, “You don’t do what I say, I deal you a few more cracked bones—big ones this time, arms and legs. You wanna end up a cripple, or you wanna give me them keys?”

  Stepping between the hulking Finn and the cowering boy, Will said, “The kid’s just following his boss’s orders. She’s your boss, too, ain’t she?”

  “You stay outa this,” said Finn, stabbing a finger in Will’s face. “This ain’t none of your affair.”

  Tell you what,” Will said, pressing a coin into Finn’s hand. “Why don’t you take it up with Mother Nabby, and meanwhile we’ll just have a quick look at the room. We may not even want it.”

  Finn studied the coin, a gold half eagle, with a surly but covetous expression before slipping it in his pocket. “I know everything that’s in that room,” he told Denny. “You pinch somethin’, you even just touch somethin’, and you’ll answer to my fists. Same goes for you,” he told Will. Turning, he stalked off toward the back room and Mother Nabby.

  Denny let out a weighty sigh and turned to Will, “Thanks, mister. Finn, he’s...” He shook his head.

  “A real hard chaw, eh?” Nell asked.

  “He’s the Devil himself,” the boy said grimly as he watched Finn disappear into the back room. “Meanest pug I ever knew.”

  Will said, “He’s the one who broke your nose and your fingers, is he?”

  Denny’s jerked his shoulders, his gaze on the floor.

  “How come?” Will asked.

  Denny’s gaze shifted from Will to Nell, then back to the floor. “I reckon he was riled up. That there’s the basement stairs,” he said before Will could question him further. “I’ll go first. You want to be watchin’ your step, miss. Couple of these stairs are loose, and it’s dark as Hades till you get to the bottom.”

  As they descended the stairwell, a sweetly scorched aroma wafted up from below, almost like molasses burnt to the bottom of a pan—but with a telltale, underlying muskiness. Nell shared a look of recognition with Will when they got to the bottom of the stairs.

  “Where’s the hop joint?” Will turned to survey the basement, a cool, dimly lit cavern with stone-block walls and a ceiling so low that he had to duck under the beams as he walked.

  The boy pointed toward a shadowy corner, where there was a doorway hung with a glass-beaded curtain, dark within but for the flicker of oil lamps. “That’s where they smoke it. Two bits for a pipeful. It’s my job to check up on ‘em and fetch more gong from Mother when they want it. She keeps it locked up in her desk.”

  “What’s are those for?” Nell asked, pointing to a row of four small, curtained-off alcoves. From behind one of them came a woman’s muffled voice.

  “Those are, um...” Denny glanced at Nell, then at Will, whose smile alerted her to the naïveté of her question, which she suddenly wished she could take back. Even in the subterranean gloom, she could see the blood rise in Denny’s cheeks. “We call ‘em the dance booths, ‘cause they’re for when a customer wants to be alone with one of the girls for a...private dance.”

  “Yes, of course,” Nell said, her own cheeks stinging for having been a source of such amusement for Will. Only he had ever been able to make her blush like that.

  “There’s more booths up on the second floor,” Denny said, “plus a couple of rooms tricked out all special for the swells that want somethin’ a little fancier. ‘Course, they cost a lot more.”

  “Mother Nabby certainly makes this place pay,” Will said.

  “You wouldn’t know it to look at her,” Denny said, “but she’s prob’ly the richest woman in the North End. She don’t have just this place. She’s got her thumb in lots of pies around here, and she’s a lot smarter than you’d think. Not the nicest lady I ever met, but she knows how to make a nickel.” Plucking a lantern off a hook on one of the rafters, he said, “Mary and Johnny’s flat is back through here, by the coal cellar.”

  Denny guided them through the dank warren to the back of the building, where there were two doors with peeling green paint, side by side. The left one had a tarnished old lock plate, the right, a gleaming padlock. Twisting one of the keys in the lefthand door, he opened it and ushered them inside. A deathlike mustiness greeted them, overshadowing the smell of burning opium.

  “It’s just the one room?” Nell asked, looking around.

  “Yeah. Sorry.” Denny set the lantern down on a table draped with a stained, checkered cloth and lit a candle. Laid out on the table were playing cards arranged in a game of solitaire and a cup containing the evaporated remnants of what appeared to have been tea. From the look of the cards, the game had been interrupted halfway through. The ladderback chair at which the player had sat lay on its back in the middle of the stone floor near a rumpled-up braided rug.

  A bed stood against the rear wall beside a weathered old wardrobe, its doors so warped from dampness that they didn’t meet anymore. From the looks of the threadbare quilt tucked over the bed, it had been tidily made up, then tousled, as if someone—or, more likely, a couple—had used it without unmaking it.

  The walls were marred with water stains, mildew, and innumerable networks of cracks. Whole chunks of plaster were missing, exposing raw stone on the two outside walls, and rotted wooden lath on the others. The righthand wall, above a scarred old sea chest, bore a dark, ominous stain—a brownish-red burst surrounded by tiny spatters. There was more blood on the chest, against which Johnny Cassidy must have fallen, and a pool of it on the floor where he’d presumably come to rest.

  “That will take some cleaning,” Nell said.

  “Yeah, the, uh, the fella that lived here before,” Denny said, “he got shot in the head a couple of nights ago. Shot dead.”

  “We heard about that,” Will said. “Johnny Cassidy, right?”

  “Yeah, him and Mary Molloy lived here.”

  “What happened to her?” Nell asked.

  “She’s gone.”

  “Gone where?” Will asked.

  The boy shrugged, shaking his head and looking everywhere but at Will. “Nobody knows. She run off after Johnny got killed.”

  “What makes you so sure she ran off?” Nell asked. “If a murder took place here, perhaps she was the victim of foul play. She could have been taken against her will, or harmed in some way.”

  “Nah,” he said, shaking his head at the floor. “It wasn’t nothin’ like that. I mean...I sure hope it wasn’t.”

  “If you know where she is,” Will said, “I wish you’d tell us. We wouldn’t want her showing up and wanting her flat back after we’ve moved in.”

  “I wish I did know,” Denny said. “I been worried about her.”

  “You like her?” Nell said.

  The boy reddened violently. “She’s all right.”

  “I saw her picture out front,” Nell said. “She’s very pretty.”

  Denny’s Adam’s apple bobbed. Lifting the lantern, he said, “You, uh, seen enough, or...?”

  “Does that lead to outside?” Will asked, pointing to a door on the back wall next to a small, curtained window near the ceiling.

  “Oh. Yeah.” Carrying the lantern over to the door, Denny unlocked it and pulled it open with a grind o
f corroded hinges, revealing a narrow flight of stone walkout steps. “You got your own outside entrance if you want. You don’t have to go through the saloon to get in here.”

  “What’s out here?” Will asked as he climbed the stairs, with Nell and Denny on his heels. “The stable?”

  “No stable. Just the privy and the old chicken house, which is where Finn lives.”

  “He lives in a chicken house?”

  “He fixed it up.”

  By the light of a waxing half-moon, Nell could see that the backyard was small and overgrown with scrubby weeds, save for a beaten-down path leading from the side alleyway to the basement stairwell. The privy was built of wood, the chicken house of stone with a double wooden door and a row of shuttered windows. To the right of the basement stairs was the little flat’s narrow window, its glazing filthy and cracked, to the left a coal chute with a rusty metal door. From its size and shape, she guessed that it had once been another window.

  From inside the dance hall came a round of applause, and then someone yelled, “Bring on the girls!” Other men repeated the demand, to the accompaniment of whistles and the stomping of feet.

  “Is this outside door always kept locked?” Nell turned toward Denny to find him hastily averting his gaze from her chest. She shot a look at Will, who appeared to be biting back a smile.

  “Um, yeah.” Denny shrugged without meeting her gaze. “I mean, I reckon so. Mary and Johnny had the keys. I guess they prob’ly would have locked it, what with the type of roughnecks that hang around here. I know I would have.”

  “Does Mother Nabby have duplicate keys to those?” Will asked. “Others that open the same locks?”

  “Yeah, sure, she’s got extras for every door. She’s got about a million of keys in that drawer of hers. And I know what ‘duplicate’ means. I ain’t...I’m not dumb. I had seven years of schooling. Just the public school, but I never missed a day, not one.”

  A roar of cheers from inside drowned out the opening bars of the pianist’s new tune. When the ovation died down, Nell recognized the rousing “Galop Infernal” from Offenbach’s operetta Orphee aux Enfers.

  “Do you still go to school?” Nell asked Denny.

  “Nah. My mum and sister caught the smallpox a couple of years ago, and went to their rest. I had to start lookin’ after myself then. Runnin’ errands for Mother, I get food and a place to sleep. It’s this or the poor house, and I ain’t livin’ in no poor house.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Nell said with heartfelt sincerity.

  “I work for my keep,” Denny said with feeling. “I’m a Delaney. My mum always said us Delaneys never took a cent of charity from anyone, and I never will.”

  “Do you miss school?” Nell asked, thinking about that book he’d had his nose in earlier.

  “It was all right.” He looked away, shifting his jaw. “Yeah, sure. I liked it well enough. I mean, I liked the reading and writing, and learning about different countries, but I didn’t much care for them stuck-up...those stuck-up schoolmarms. They treated us Irish kids like dirt. During morning prayers, we had to say ‘em the Protestant way, and we couldn’t make the sign of the cross, or we’d get a whack with the yardstick. They said we were ignorant foreigners, and we had to learn to do things the right way, but then Father Gorman would say our way was the right way, and they were wrong.”

  “I imagine it was pretty confusing,” Nell said.

  “Not for me. I’m a Catholic. My folks were Catholic, and their folks, and their folks, goin’ back hundreds and hundreds of years. I don’t ever want to be nothin’ else. They could make me say different words, those schoolmarms, but they couldn’t ever change what I am in here.” He thumped his chest with a dirt-smudged finer.

  “Good for you,” Nell said, feeling a twinge of envy for his conviction, his unassailable fealty to his religion. She’d shared that fealty herself once, that comforting certainty that her Church’s way was the way. She never thought she’d feel any other way, yet here she was, contemplating not just Protestantism, but divorce.

  They went back inside and inspected the flat a while longer, vainly searching for some indication as to what had happened there Tuesday night. Through the ceiling came the rhythmic thudding of the can-can dancers’ feet as they kicked and gyrated on the stage directly overhead.

  “Um...I don’t think you should really be doin’ that,” Denny said when Nell cracked open the door to the wardrobe.

  “I just wanted to see how much room there is inside for my things,” Nell said. “The furniture does come with the flat, doesn’t it?”

  “I dunno. All’s I know is, Finn’ll trounce me good if he finds out I let you look through Mary and Johnny’s stuff. I’m sorry, really, but—”

  “It’s not important,” said Will, aiming a trenchant glance at Nell as he crossed to the door. “I think we’ve seen enough to make a decision, so we may as well...” Turning back to Denny, he said, “Oh, wait. Don’t you have to fetch something for the bartender? A jug of Jameson’s, was it?”

  “Oh, yeah. Thanks. I almost forgot. Riley woulda chewed me out somethin’ fierce.” Digging the key with the red ribbon out of his trouser pocket, he said, “It’s in the coal cellar next door. I’ll be right back.”

  He left with the lantern, plunging the room into darkness save for a trembling corona of light around the candle on the table. Will crossed to the sea chest and flipped up its lid. Nell opened the wardrobe and began rummaging through its paltry, oft-mended contents: three men’s shirts, two pair of trousers, a sack coat, a vest, torn suspenders, two pairs of darned socks, two shirt collars, a striped cravat, soft lace-up boots, a wide canvas belt with a leather buckle, and a pair of light gray, form-fitting knitted trousers similar to dancers’ tights. She recognized the boots, trousers and belt from Johnny Cassidy’s photograph in the window.

  “Did you wear this sort of thing when you boxed for Oxford?” she asked Will.

  He looked up from the sea chest, through which he was hurriedly rooting. “I did, yes. Quite cozy, actually, except for the belt. There’s nothing very remarkable in here, some moth-eaten blankets, a bit of this and that.”

  “Well, there’s one remarkable thing about what’s in here,” she said. “It’s all Johnny Cassidy’s. There’s not one item of female clothing in this wardrobe. No hats, jewelry, shoes, stockings, underthings—nothing.”

  “Which would suggest,” Will said as he closed the chest, “that she packed her things before leaving.”

  “Which, in turn, would suggest that she left voluntarily.”

  “Well, that’s something, I suppose.” Looking around, he muttered, “Bloody miserable place to call home. Excuse the language.”

  Nell nodded as she closed the wardrobe. “Like living in a cave. Must be worse in the winter. I can’t imagine...” She trailed off, squinting across the room at a glimmer of light high on the wall that separated the flat from the coal cellar.

  “What is it?” Will asked as Nell crossed the room to take a closer look.

  “There’s a hole here.” Standing on tip-toe, she reached up to trace the outline of the little aperture, which was about as big around as a man’s thumb. It blended in so well with the blackish speckles of mildew near the ceiling that she would never have noticed it had Denny not taken that lantern into the coal cellar.

  Coming up behind her, Will said, “It’s hardly surprising there should be a hole in one of these walls. It looks as if they’ve been deteriorating for years.”

  “This doesn’t look like the product of deterioration,” she said, stepping aside so that he could see what she meant. “It’s the only gap in a pretty solid expanse of plaster, and look—it’s almost perfectly round, and neat, unnaturally so.”

  “As if someone had chiseled it out deliberately,” Will said.

  “Do you think it could be some kind of...spy hole?”

  “Let’s go take a look from the other side.”

  Chapter 9

  The coal cellar,
which was about half the size of the adjacent flat, also had crumbling plaster walls, gone dusky from years’ worth of coal dust. Tucked into the back left corner, beneath the chute, a rudimentary coal crib had been built out of rough, unfinished wood. Within this three-sided enclosure a small mound of coal left over from the winter glittered darkly in the wavering light from Denny’s lantern.

  A coal shovel and a broom missing about half its bristles leaned against the back wall amid a grimy accumulation of detritus: shards of wood and crockery, a coil of twine, some wadded up handkerchiefs, an unidentifiable, lace-edged lady’s undergarment, old newspapers and magazines, a torn burlap sack, and an empty bottle of McMunn’s Elixir. There was also something that looked like a fat test tube made of rubber, which Nell assumed was a French letter, although she’d never actually seen one. Both fascinated and repelled, she tried not to stare, lest Will notice and tease her about it later—anything to coax a blush out of her.

  Piled up against the wall to the right was a jumble of wooden crates, barrels, and sacks, which Denny was busily searching through as he held the lantern aloft.

  “Aha!” He hauled a stoneware jug stamped John Jameson Dublin Whiskey out of a crate lined with wood shavings. “What are you doing?” he asked as Will climbed atop the coal crib’s low wooden partition, rather gracelessly, given his bad leg.

  Will bent over, arms buttressed on the wall, to peer through the hole, all but invisible against the haze of coal dust.

  “We discovered a hole between this room and the flat,” Nell said.

  “You get a pretty fair view from here,” Will said in his Boston accent. “The hole is angled downward, so I can see a good deal of the room.”

  “Did you know about this hole?” Nell asked Denny.

  He stared at her for a second. “Um...no. No, I...” He shook his head.

  “It’s a hole for peeking into the flat,” Will said. “Someone bored it out for that very purpose. Denny, hand me that lantern, would you?”

  Still balancing on the edge of the coal crib, Will took the lantern and held it toward the hole. The wall surrounding it bore smudges in the patina of coal dust. Scores of smeary handprints formed fluttery, ghostlike wings to either side.