A Fatal Four-Pack

by P. B. Ryan

  o0o

  “Pearl!” Nell, clutching the bottle and frock coat while holding her skirts above the slush, caught up to her quarry on the corner of Williams and Congress. “Wait!”

  Pearl turned, shielding her eyes with her hand, her grimace sweetening when she saw the bottle.

  “I thought that was terribly unfair of Detective Cook,” Nell said, hoping it didn’t take too long to find out what she wanted to know. She had to get to the Charles Street Jail; God knew how badly William Hewitt’s condition had deteriorated since yesterday. “A promise is a promise. Do you suppose there’s anyplace we can go...?” Public drinking was a surefire way to get you arrested in Boston.

  Pearl looked around and spotted an alley between a bank and a small hotel. “In there.”

  It was chillier out of the sun, but they found relatively clean fruit crates to sit on, and they were away from prying eyes. Pearl went through the motions once of offering the bottle to Nell, who politely declined, then set about steadily emptying it. “That hits the spot.” In the shadowy light between the two buildings, the prostitute seemed to be wearing a crudely painted plaster mask.

  “How long have you been...doing what you’re doing?” Nell asked conversationally.

  Pearl looked at her over the bottle, wiped her mouth. “This the first time you ever talked to somebody like me?”

  Would that it were. “Well, yes. And I must say, I’m a bit curious.”

  “Least you admit it.” Pearl smiled knowingly as she took another swallow. “I been liftin’ my skirts for a livin’ maybe nine, ten years, but I’ve only been at Flynn’s about a week. Molly said it was easier money than the street, and warmer, but I don’t care for it one bit. I still have to stand out in the cold on Saturday nights, and them other girls get most of the business, ‘cause they’re younger. I like the rich young swells, when I get one of them—they smell good, and they finish up quick, if they’re not too drunk—but them sailors, they’re a rough bunch. That Noonan? Mother of God.”

  “A tough customer, eh?”

  “You can’t see it,” Pearl said, pointing to her right cheek, caked with paint and powder, “but I’m black and blue under here.”

  “Oh. Did he do that Saturday, when you and he...?”

  Pearl swallowed down some more whiskey, nodded. “He kinda lost his, uh, interest after all that ruckus with Tulley and Touchette. Blamed it on me, though. Said I was too fat and ugly to be in the business, and it was my fault he couldn’t come. I made the mistake of lookin’ him up and down and saying at least I get paid to do it with the fat, ugly ones. There’s some of you so desperate you have to pay me.”

  Nell winced through her laughter, knowing what came next.

  “He told me he’d pay me, all right, and then he backhanded me into the bedpost. Said he’d stop there ‘cause I was nasty lookin’ enough without havin’ my face bashed up, but if I crossed him one more time, he’d make sure no man would ever want to pay for me again.”

  “And yet,” Nell said carefully, “you came to the station house this morning, which would be bound to infuriate him if he found out.”

  “He won’t.”

  “But still, it’s a risk. I’m just wondering why you took it.”

  Pearl tilted the bottle to her mouth; it was less than half full now. She stared at nothing in particular for a minute, her gaze unsteady, then took another drink. When she spoke again, her words were noticeably slurred. “I seen him come in Saturday night, Touchette. First thing I think is, there’s one deadly handsome devil. Then I realized who he was.”

  “You knew him?”

  “Long time ago, back in fifty-six or fifty-seven, before I was...doing what I’m doing now. I was assistant wardrobe mistress for the stock company out of the Boston Theatre over on Washington. We were doing Romeo and Juliet and Fortune’s Frolic that summer—same cast, one show right after the other, six nights a week plus matinees. Our Juliet was Virginia Kimball.”

  “Oh, I’ve seen her picture.” A raven-haired beauty with porcelain skin and slumberous, kohl-rimmed eyes. “Very pretty.”

  “I was pretty back then. She was ravishing—you wouldn’t believe it if you saw her in the flesh.” Pearl sounded as wistful as if she were talking about a man, one hand lightly stroking her throat. “And some actress. The critics loved her. So did the men. That’s when I first seen William Touchette. There was about a week that summer where he practically lived backstage, tryin’ to make time with Mrs. Kimball—even though she was probably a good ten years older than him, maybe fifteen. She called him ‘Doc’ for some reason.”

  “Mrs. Kimball? Was she married?”

  “If she was, no one ever saw him. But there was this Italian count who’d bought her a house on Beacon Hill and all them diamond necklaces she was so famous for. Course, he was hardly ever around either, seein’ as he had a wife and another mistress and about a dozen kids in Italy.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “Mrs. Kimball, she’d get lonely, and she did love to be wooed—and Doc was good at it, let me tell you—but she just strung him along, batted him around like a kitten with a ball of string, watchin’ him unwind bit by bit. She couldn’t do nothin’ more than flirt, see, ‘cause if the count found out, that’d be it for the house and the diamonds. But Doc, he thought he had a fighting chance. He found out different when the count cabled Mrs. Kimball that he was on his way, and she told Doc to run off like a good boy and quit pestering her.”

  “She said that?”

  “In so many words, and after all them flowers and gifts, and him being so...” Pearl sighed. “Damn, he was something. A little younger’n me, but not by much. Tall, elegant... Not real talkative, but when he did say something, it was worth hearing. And he had these eyes that looked like they could set you on fire if he stared at you hard enough. Always treated me so nice—not like most men, who only act that way to get you to drop your drawers. Course, I woulda laid down in a heartbeat if he’d asked me—he probably knew it, too. I swear I thought Mrs. Kimball was touched in the head, to turn her nose up at him, count or no count.”

  “How did he take it when she sent him away?” Nell asked.

  “He didn’t make a scene, but I could tell he’d had his heart ripped right out of his chest. He walked out of her dressing room like a man in mourning. I told him he looked like he could use a drink, and he said could he ever. I didn’t drink then like I do now, but I kept a bottle of port in my little sewing alcove. We went in there and pulled the curtain and tossed back a few. And then he sat me on the edge of the cutting table and...”

  Pearl drew in a tremulous breath, gulped down some more whiskey. “It should have been bad like that, me on that table with my skirts thrown up, him standin’ there in his evening clothes, just unbuttonin’ what had to be unbuttoned, but he made it... Christ, I thought my heart was damn near gonna burst. Do you know I had to bite my lip so hard to keep from screamin’ that I actually drew blood?”

  “My word.”

  “And he sent me the prettiest little pearl ear bobs the next day,” Pearl said, “with a note sayin’ as how their luster couldn’t compare to mine—somethin’ like that. You know—’cause I’m called Pearl?”

  “Yes.”

  “Course, I never saw him again, ‘cept once the next summer from a distance. He was in the audience for King Lear and The Guardian Outwitted, with a couple of other fellas. They left during one of the musical numbers we added to Lear. Wasn’t long after that I started runnin’ out of money and took to chargin’ for it—just every once in a while at first, and then... Well.”

  “I don’t understand,” Nell said. “You recognized Touchette. You’d liked him. Why on earth would you come here and give Detective Cook ammunition to prosecute him for murder?”

  “‘Cause he did it.” Another swig of whiskey.

  “Even if you think that, you wouldn’t have fingered him unless you had some reason to want to punish him. What happened Saturday night, Pearl? He came to the
boardinghouse and you recognized him. Then what? Did you talk to him?”

  “Not right away. I was aimin’ to—I seen him there in the back parlor—but then Noonan drags me upstairs, and just when he gets goin’, Tulley and Touchette kick up that racket and I end up with nothin’ to show for my time but a black and blue mark. By the time I got it covered up and went back downstairs, Touchette was back to rollin’ the log. I told him I was surprised to see the likes of him smokin’ gong in a place like Flynn’s, and I asked him how’d he been all these years. He looked at me the way folks look when they’re tryin’ to place you. I said, ‘Boston Theatre, about ten, twelve years ago, remember? My hair was brown then’ He didn’t remember—or if he did, he was pretending he didn’t.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, I know I’ve changed. I didn’t hold it against him. Them two sailors was there, so I whispered in his ear that I wanted to take him upstairs and do him for free—anything he wanted, on me. He turned me down. Fed me some soft solder about how pretty I was, and it wasn’t me, but his parts don’t work like they should, and I’d be wastin’ my time.”

  “He said that?” Nell asked incredulously. “That he couldn’t...?”

  “Yeah, sounded fishy to me, too—’specially since I knew from personal experience that his parts worked just fine, and then some. Plus which, hadn’t he just been upstairs tryin’ to do to Kathleen Flynn what he’s now sayin’ he can’t do at all? I ain’t no genius, but I can put two and two together, and what it added up to was he wanted a woman, he just didn’t want me.” Pearl’s voice snagged; her chin quivered.

  “Pearl, maybe he—”

  “Do you know how many times,” she asked in a rusty-damp voice, moisture welling in her eyes, “when I was layin’ under some stranger, waitin’ for it to be over, I would close my eyes and pretend he was Doc? It made me feel so good about myself, every time I remembered that a man like that had wanted me once. It was just about the only thing that ever did make me feel good about myself.” She shook her head; tears spilled down her cheeks, trailing rivulets of eye paint. “Damn him.”

  Nell handed her a handkerchief. She dabbed at her face. “Didn’t help my frame of mind none to spend the next hour out there in the cold, tryin’ to catch the eye of some fella half my age. I didn’t really go back to the back parlor to take a nap, like I told the detective. I was aimin’ to give that Touchette a piece of my mind for conjurin’ up a boldfaced lie and thinkin’ I’d believe it, but he’d nodded off, so I struck up a conversation with that other fella. He was a real charmer, and his whiskey wasn’t half bad. I offered to do him French-style for a half-buck, right there, ‘cause Molly had someone upstairs in the pink room, and there was another girl waitin’ for it after that.”

  “You were willing to...do that with Touchette still in the room?” Nell asked.

  “Touchette was asleep when I started in on the other one, but it took forever, so I was still goin’ at it when he woke up. He seen what was goin’ on, but he didn’t pay us no mind, just smoked him another bowlful, then dozed off again. Finally, I just had to stop. I thought the fella’d be mad, but he said it was all that whiskey he’d drunk, and he gave me a three-dollar gold piece for my trouble! Now, that’s a gentleman.”

  “Indeed.”

  “I drank some more of his whiskey and fell asleep on one of the couches. When I woke up, Touchette was sayin’ that about Tulley payin’ for what he done.”

  Nell said, “What did he look like, the other man?”

  Pearl shrugged. “Young. Nice lookin’. They’re all nice lookin’, them types.”

  “You’d recognize him if you saw him again? Even though it was dark in there?”

  “My eyes had gotten used to the dark, and I got a real good look at him. Yeah, I’d recognize him.” Pearl shook the bottle, sloshing the remaining ounce or so of whiskey around inside. “I’ve had a pretty wasted life, I guess. I used to think I was gonna be a seamstress, open up a shop, something like that. I grew up on a farm, you see, and we was dirt poor. All my sisters went to work in the mills just north of here, in Charlestown, but I wanted something better, so I come to Boston.” She laughed harshly and drained the bottle. “More the fool me.”

  Chapter 6

  “This is highly irregular, Miss Chapel.” Lloyd Cavanaugh, a sallow little man with slick black hair who was deputy warden of the Suffolk County Jail on Charles Street, squinted at Nell’s bail order through diminutive spectacles. “First I’m told to put him in solitary confinement—which is, by the way, utterly contrary to policy here, a fact which no one seems to care about but me—and then six hours later I’m to let him go?” He ruminated over the papers for far too long, as if looking for a reason to challenge the order.

  Please, St. Dismas, don’t let this dreadful little man ruin everything.

  Cavanaugh slapped the papers down with a grimace. “Reichert!”

  A lumbering uniformed guard appeared in the doorway of Cavanaugh’s office, a ring of keys in one hand, a short club tethered to the wrist of the other. “Sir?”

  “Go fetch William Touchette.”

  “That’s the one that’s sick,” Reichert observed.

  “Well, he won’t be our problem anymore, will he?”

  The guard shambled away, sorting through his keys. Cavanaugh sat back, fingers laced on his chest, his gaze—bug-eyed through the tiny eyeglasses—fixed unwaveringly on Nell. With a glance at the coat folded over her arm, he asked, “What, if I may ask, is your interest in this prisoner?”

  “He’s a charity project of the lady I work for.”

  “And that would be...?”

  “Mrs. John Amory Lowell.” They were August Hewitt’s main competition in the textile business, the Lowells. Although indisputably one of the First Families of Boston, Mr. Hewitt regarded them as relative newcomers, their presence in His City dating from barely over a century ago. They were, in his estimation, “avaricious parvenus who got where they are by marrying their cousins,” and he did not receive them. He would be furious, of course, that a Lowell matron with philanthropic pretensions had arranged for his son’s release, but his pride—and the risk of exposing William Touchette’s true identity—would leave him no choice but to let it go.

  “Mrs. Lowell, eh?” The little man’s eyes filled the thick lenses. He sat up, tucked his chair in, straightened some papers. “Most kind and generous of her to take an interest the...less fortunate.”

  “I quite agree.”

  “Yes. Yes, indeed.”

  He fussed and fiddled until Reichert returned—at a trot this time, and breathless, keys clattering. “What’s the matter, man?” Cavanaugh demanded. “And where the devil is William Tou—”

  “I think he’s dying,” the guard panted. “He was having some kind of fit when I went in there, and then he just... He’s laying there, gasping for air, and he don’t answer when I—”

  “I’ve got to see him,” Nell said. “Let me—”

  “Out of the question,” Cavanaugh retorted. “Ladies aren’t permitted in the men’s cellblocks.”

  “I—I’m a nurse. I can help him. Please.”

  The deputy warden shook his head resolutely. “It’s strictly against procedure. If I make an exception for you, I’ll be compelled to make it for—”

  “How do you suppose Mrs. Lowell will react when I tell her you allowed this man to die rather than bend the rules just this once?” Nell demanded.

  Streaks of pink stained Cavanaugh’s cheeks. “Take her back there,” he ordered Reichert. “But make sure the prisoners are all in their cells first, and don’t leave her side for a moment.”

  The big guard ushered her through the administrative core of this cruciform granite monstrosity to a door fashioned from iron bars and wire lattice, which was locked and manned by two keepers. Their jaws dropped when they saw Nell. She and Reichert had to wait while the prisoners were herded into their cells, whereupon the door was unlocked and she was escorted into a long, cavernous a
trium lined with four stories of cellblocks. It was surprisingly bright, sunlight from tall windows reflecting off whitewashed walls—a far cry from any jail Nell had ever seen the inside of.

  Some voices rose above the drone resonating in the vast corridor. “Look what Reichert done brung us!” someone bellowed from one of the cells, to the accompaniment of snickers and lascivious moans. “A late Christmas present, d’you reckon?”

  “Bring her up here,” someone called from the tier above. “I’ll do the unwrappin’.”

  There followed a cacophony of wolf whistles, guffaws and suggestive remarks, most of them far more lewd than anything she’d heard at Flynn’s Boardinghouse last night. “Sorry about them animals, miss.” Reichert shook his head as he rummaged among the keys on his ring. “This is one of them modern prisons—” he sneered the word “—where they let ‘em run around in the yard all day and feed ‘em beefsteak for supper. I don’t have it that good. You ask me, we should burn this place down, and the lot of ‘em with it. How’s that for progressive?”

  Unlocking a cell door toward the end of the row, he called out, “Touchette?”

  Nell stepped around the guard and into a good-sized, sun-washed cell, sucking in a breath when she saw the inert form of William Hewitt in a fetal position on the narrow bed, chin tucked to his chest, arms locked around his middle. His bruise-mottled face was pallid, his eyes half-closed and bleary. He looked like every corpse Nell had ever seen.

  She made a feverish sign of the cross as she leaned over him. “Doc—” Careful. “M-Mr. Touchette.”

  “Touchette!” Reichert nudged the insensate man with his truncheon. “You still with us?”

  He was answered with a strangled breath, such as a victim of consumption might produce in his death throes. William Hewitt was alive, after all—but in even worse condition than Nell had anticipated. This close to him, she could see how he trembled. A sudden spasm gripped him; he clutched at his stomach, groaning.