A Fatal Four-Pack

by P. B. Ryan

No, Nell had said, surprised to find that she meant it. She didn’t relish this mission Viola had set her upon; not only did it imperil the life she’d come to cherish so dearly, it dredged up a past she’d thought was long behind her. But she could do it. She was not just the only candidate for the job; she was the best candidate for the job. That had come to her as she’d lain in her too-large bed last night, curled up with her head beneath the covers, waiting for the sheets to absorb her body heat. Her life experience encompassed two very different worlds—the world William Hewitt had forsaken and the world he now embraced—for she moved as effortlessly today among the silk stocking set as she once had among thieves and cardsharps and whores.

  Nell might pass today for as fine a lady as any in Boston—by other ladies, if not by their servants—but she understood criminals and gamblers and fallen women. She understood men who maddened themselves with intoxicating poisons and then reached for their knives. She understood the police, both the good and the bad among them.

  “You all right, miss?” asked the guard. “You aren’t fixin’ to faint on me, are you?”

  “I’m not a fainter, no.”

  “What’s that you got there?” he asked, pointing to the papers in her hand. “A bail order? I thought bail was denied.”

  “That judgment was overturned.” Through no small effort of her own. First thing this morning, Nell had visited the Pawners’ Bank on Union Street, a surprisingly dignified establishment where she’d traded two brooches, a ring and a string of pearls for the thickest stack of greenbacks she’d ever seen. Then on to the courthouse chambers of Judge Horace Bacon, who’d been, as Viola had predicted, more than willing to overturn the bail decision in exchange for about an inch and a half of that stack. And now here, only to encounter this vexing little detour.

  “You’re bailing him out?”

  Nell turned to find Detective Cook looming like a grizzly in a doorway behind her.

  “I...yes, as a matter of fact, I—”

  “You’re not immune after all, are you?” Cook said disgustedly. “He’s worked his charm on you, and you’ve gone and convinced his father that he may not be—”

  Nell cleared her throat and slanted a look in the guard’s direction.

  Cook ground that great kettle of a jaw, shook his head. “Tell you what. Why don’t you step in here for a minute? There’s someone I want you to talk to.”

  The someone turned out to be Daniel Hooper, the young blond patrolman who’d been the first cop on the scene of Ernest Tulley’s murder. He stood in a corner of the detective’s office, a closet-sized nook rendered all the more cramped by the books and files stacked around its perimeter. The windowless walls were papered with newspaper articles, photographs of crime scenes and leaflets illustrated with drawings of menacing-looking men.

  “May I take your coat?” Cook asked.

  She shook her head. “I can’t stay long. I’ve got to get to the Charles Street Jail as soon as possible.”

  Gesturing Nell into a leather chair facing his cluttered desk, Cook took a seat behind it and folded his arms. “I’m going to let Patrolman Hooper tell you exactly what he saw Saturday night, just like he told it to me. I’d meant to spare you the details, but it strikes me it might serve to enlighten you a bit about the accused and what he’s truly capable of. And seeing as how you’re not one of these wilting blossoms who carries the smelling salts around with her, I’m thinking you can handle it.” He nodded to the patrolman. “Go ahead, Danny. You were in the vicinity of Foster’s Wharf when you heard a woman scream...”

  “So I come runnin’,” Hooper said. “Didn’t take me but a minute to get to the alley, and I seen that Touchette fella crouching over a dead man—or maybe he wasn’t quite dead yet, I’m not real sure. Actually, I wasn’t even sure it was a man at first, ‘cause his hair was kind of long and tangled, and there was a big mat of it laying over his face. There was—begging your pardon, miss, but there was blood everywheres. I mean, on the ground, on the side of the building...”

  “Was he actively bleeding when you got there?” Nell asked. Hooper hesitated. “Um...I’m not rightly sure.”

  “If there was still arterial bleeding, you would have noticed,” she said. “It would have spurted out in rhythm with his heart. If it wasn’t, he was probably already dead.”

  “I guess he was, then. But Touchette was hollering at him anyways—cursing, calling him names. I pulled my Colt and ordered him to stand up, but I don’t even think he heard me. He just keeps on doing what he was doing—”

  “What, exactly, was he doing?” Nell asked. “Or could you see well enough to tell? There wasn’t much moonlight Saturday, and no snow to reflect light.”

  Cook said, “There was light coming from the boardinghouse windows—not much, but some. I remember that.”

  “That’s right,” Hooper said. “I could see that the dead man had his throat laid open, and a knife sticking out of it, a little one. Turned my stomach, if you want to know the truth.”

  “Was Mr. Touchette actually cutting him?” Nell asked.

  “He was choking him.”

  “Choking him!”

  “Yeah, it was like he’d done as much as he could do with the knife, but he couldn’t stop. You should have seen his eyes. They were like a wild animal’s, and his face was spattered with blood. He’s got his hands around the fella’s throat, and he’s squeezing so hard he’s all red in the face. Still he’s swearing at the poor guy, saying he deserved worse than he was getting, stuff like that.”

  “What else?” Nell asked. “Can you remember his exact words?”

  “Yeah, he called him...something bad, something I don’t like to repeat in front of a lady. He said ‘You should choke to death, you...’ That’s when he said the bad word. ‘Or drown in the mud.’”

  “Drown in the mud?”

  Hooper shrugged. “That’s what it sounded like to me. He said, ‘You’re getting off easy, you...’ Well, you know.”

  Nell sat back, dismayed and bewildered. Hard as she tried to envision William Hewitt murdering a man so savagely, the image wouldn’t form in her mind.

  “I finally just walked right up to him and put the barrel of my gun right smack against the side of his head and told him to stop what he was doing and put his hands in the air,” Hooper said. “He calmed down some then.”

  “A gun to the head will have that effect,” Cook observed.

  The patrolman said, “By then, someone had raised the alarm, and they were pouring out of that boardinghouse like roaches when you light the gas jets. Only ones that stuck around till Detective Cook came was the owner and his daughter—and one other fella, a dago, I think.”

  Cook’s gaze lit on something over Nell’s shoulder. “Yes, Ferguson.”

  “There’s a woman here to see you, Detective. Says her name is Pearl Stauber.”

  “Really!” Cook sat forward, smiling. “That’s the new chippy from the boardinghouse,” he reminded Nell. “Send her in. Danny, you’re dismissed. Unless Miss Sweeney has anything further to...?”

  Nell shook her head. “Thank you, Patrolman.”

  Except for the addition of a voluminous red shawl, Pearl looked much the same as she had yesterday evening: same green satin dress, peroxided yellow hair sans hat, and tired face paint. She paused in the doorway, steadying herself with a hand on the jamb as she took in the tiny office and its inhabitants with a gaze that looked a bit too unfocused for mid-morning. A sour-sweet fusion of gin and rose oil wafted from her.

  “Here.” Rising, Nell offered the other woman her chair. “I’ll be leaving soon.”

  Pearl sat heavily, tucking her shawl around her. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a bit of the hair of the dog,” she asked Cook in a slightly thick-tongued voice. “I’ve got the devil’s own morning head.”

  “Gave up the bottle for Mrs. Cook when I got married,” the detective replied, rising and heading out the door. “But most of the boys have a little taste tucked away somewhere. I�
�ll be right back.”

  Pearl turned to squint blearily at Nell after Cook left. “Who the hell are you, anyway?”

  “I’m Nell...Chapel. With the Society for Criminals and... I mean the Relief of Criminals and... No, Convicts and Indigents. I, uh, I’ve taken a personal interest in this case, so Detective Cook is letting me observe the proceedings.”

  Cook returned then with a nearly full pint of whiskey, from which Pearl eagerly gulped. “That’s enough,” Cook said, taking it back. “You’re not hung over, you’re drunk. Did you spend the whole night that way, or was it that you needed a little Dutch courage before you came here?”

  “A bit of both, I guess,” Pearl said as she dabbed her mouth with her shawl, staining it with whiskey and lip rouge. “That Roy Noonan wouldn’t like it one little bit if he knew about this. He don’t see as how none of us should tell the coppers nothin’, even if it don’t concern him.”

  “Not fond of the constabulary, is he?” Cook asked dryly.

  “He’s got a brother in New York went simple in the head after the cops worked him over a little too rough. If he knew I was here...” She frowned. “You won’t let it get back to him, will you?”

  “Course not.”

  “It’s just, you said if anyone had somethin’ they wanted to say without an audience, they was to come here,” Pearl said. “So I came.” She gazed longingly at the bottle in Cook’s hand. “Just one more sip to—”

  “After you tell me what you came to tell,” he said. “I take it you know something about the murder?”

  “I know about something that happened a few hours before— maybe around eight o’clock. I was upstairs in the pink room. That’s where we take, uh...” She glanced uncomfortably at Nell.

  “I know about the pink room,” Nell said. “Who were you there with?”

  Pearl rolled her eyes. “Noonan, God help me. So, anyway, we’re...doin’ what we’re doin’, when all of a sudden there come this racket from right above us like to wake the dead. They was screamin’, slammin’ furniture around. I half expected the ceiling to fall in.”

  “Did you recognize any of the voices?” Nell asked.

  “One of ‘em was that Kathleen Flynn, which makes sense, seein’ as how that’s her bedroom up there—only her pa, he don’t allow no one up there but him and the girl, so I was surprised to hear them others.”

  “Were they male voices?”

  Pearl nodded, her gaze on the bottle of whiskey. “Yeah, it was that Ernest Tulley, the one that ended up dead in the alley, and the other one—the one they arrested.”

  “William Touchette?” Nell asked, thinking, No...please don’t let it have been him.

  “That’s right,” Pearl said.

  Nell asked, “You knew for sure it was them? Just from their voices?”

  “Touchette’s got that limey accent, right? Plus, I seen ‘em. They come tearin’ down the outside stairs, first Tulley and then the other one, trying to catch him. Tulley tripped and fell halfway down to the second floor and ends up sprawled on the landing. It was dark out, but I had a real good view through the window above the bed, ‘cause I was facin’ it on my hands and—”

  “Thank you,” Cook said, “I get the picture. What happened then? Did Touchette catch up with him?”

  “Oh, yeah, he leaps off the stairs and lands on him hard. They tussle a bit, and then Tulley slams that fella right through the window.”

  Nell winced, visualizing the boarded-up second floor window.

  “Touchette lands on the bed, right in front of us, glass flyin’. It’s a wonder none of us was cut. Tulley, he goes poundin’ down the stairs. Noonan’s fit to be tied. He starts throwin’ punches at Touchette, but Touchette’s already headin’ for the door and Noonan’s got his pants around his ankles. Anyway, by that time, Tulley was long gone. Touchette looked for him, but it’s a tangle of alleys over there near the wharves—no tellin’ which way he may have gone.”

  “Do you have any idea what they were fighting about?” Cook asked.

  “It was the girl,” Pearl said, as if that should be obvious. “They was fightin’ over that cow like she was Helen of Troy.”

  “Are you sure?” Nell asked. “Did you hear what they were saying?”

  “Didn’t have to. They both ended up in her bedroom at the same time, which sounds like bad planning on her part, but what can you expect from an ignorant little drab like that? I thought it was just that eye-talian she was lifting her skirts for. Turns out she’s givin’ free rides to anything in pants. No wonder I can’t make enough to live on.”

  Cook said, “Touchette returned, presumably.”

  “Yeah, and heads straight back to the parlor, which was where he’d been before all the hubbub. Back to his gong—I seen him cookin’ up another bowlful when I come back down.”

  “Was anyone else there with him?” Nell asked.

  “Couple of fellas—looked like sailors. I went back out to hang around the cellar stairs with the other girls, but it was freezing cold out there, and I wasn’t gettin’ picked, so I come back inside. I headed for the back parlor to lay down on one of them couches, ‘cause us girls had been passing around a bottle to keep warm, and I was feeling a little woozy. The sailors was gone, but that Touchette was still there—he’d nodded off between bowls. There was another fella there, too, and he was a gentleman—real fine clothes. Me and him started conversatin’.”

  Cook grunted. “I’ll bet you did.”

  Pearl answered that with an expression of frosty disdain. “He let me drink some of his whiskey, and then I just couldn’t keep my eyes open one more minute, so I laid myself down and dozed off. When I woke up, they was talkin’ about Tulley.”

  “You mean Touchette and the other man?” Nell asked. “Did it seem as if they knew each other?”

  “Oh, yeah, I’m pretty sure they did. They seemed real friendly. The one fella, the whiskey drinker, I think he might of been in politics. The city government, maybe, somethin’ like that.”

  “What made you think that?” Cook asked.

  Pearl shook her head distractedly, as if trying to remember. “I can’t rightly say. Course, I’d had a snootful by then, so who knows? What I do remember was Touchette sayin’ he was gonna make Tulley pay for what he done.”

  “Are you sure?” Nell asked. Oh, God...

  “Yeah, and he sounded like he meant business. They didn’t know I was awake, ‘cause it was real dark in there, so I just laid real still and listened. ‘I’ll make that bastard pay.’ He musta said it a dozen times. I knew it was him ‘cause of the accent. ‘He’ll pay for it, damn him. He’ll pay with his life.’ That sort of thing.”

  Nell shook her head, her gaze on the floor, her mind whirring. He’ll pay with his life... Over a woman? She couldn’t see it. But perhaps when one considered that Tulley was a southerner... William Hewitt had, after all, suffered greatly at the hands of the Confederates. Could a man ever be the same, after enduring what he’d endured? Was that enough, along with the opium intoxication, to induce a murderous rage in an otherwise civilized, if somewhat dissolute, man?

  Cook took down Pearl’s address on Milk Street—a little flat a few blocks from Flynn’s, which she shared with her friend Molly—and instructed her to stay in touch. “Buy yourself a dark, plain dress and a decent hat—something you can wear to court without lookin’ quite so much like what you are.”

  Pearl rose to her feet, eyeing the whiskey. “You said I could have some more of that after I told you what I come to tell.”

  Holding the bottle out of her reach, he said, “That was before I realized you had such valuable testimony to present. You’re going to need to sober up and stay that way. Won’t be much use to us in the shape you’re in now.”

  “Don’t know what I was thinkin’,” Pearl muttered as she huffed out, “trusting a cop to keep his word.”

  “So,” Cook began after Pearl had left and they were all alone. “You’ve got August Hewitt thinking that murdering cur mi
ght be innocent after all, eh?”

  “Not at all. He’s as determined as ever to see him hang.” Nell must make sure Cook didn’t doubt this, lest he say something to Captain Baxter about Mr. Hewitt’s change of heart, which would be disastrous once it got back to Mr. Hewitt himself.

  “Then why on earth would he bail him out?”

  “I gather Mrs. Hewitt insisted on it,” Nell replied, thinking the best lie was one that echoed the truth as closely as possible. “She’s planning on retaining an attorney, too.”

  “Ah. Of course. She has no idea her husband’s out to see her son writhing at the end of a noose, eh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, writhe he will,” Cook said with a smug grin, “bail or no bail, attorney or no attorney, now that all the pieces are falling so neatly into place.”

  “Are you going to have Noonan testify, too? I know he won’t want to, but you could subpoena him.”

  “It’s up to the prosecutor, but I’ll advise against it. First of all, all’s he witnessed was that tussle on the stairs between Hewitt and Tulley. Pearl’s the only one who heard Hewitt say that about making Tulley pay. Secondly, even if we could bully him onto the stand, he’d be more of a liability than an asset. Pearl we can clean up and coach. Noonan, forget it. The jury’s bound to distrust him and anything that comes out of his mouth. We don’t need him, anyway. Pearl’s testimony clinches the case against William Hewitt.”

  “Not quite,” Nell said. “Did it occur to you to ask yourself why she went to the bother—and risk—of coming here to tell you this? People like her don’t go out of their way to court trouble, Detective, and they only tell the authorities what they want them to know, I can assure you of that.”

  “Oh, you can,” Cook cheerfully sneered. “And what would you know of it, eh?”

  Careful. “It’s just common sense,” Nell bluffed. “But I daresay it might be useful to find out why Pearl Stauber is so eager to incriminate Dr. Hewitt.”

  “And how do you propose to do that, seeing as how people like that only tell us what they want us to know?”

  “You have to ask?” She plucked the bottle of whiskey out of his hand and strode out of the room, leaving him staring after her.