A Fatal Four-Pack

by P. B. Ryan

  “A hundred?”

  “We’re talking about an enormous outdoor pen, Miss Sweeney, comprised of hewn pine logs, with sentry boxes every thirty yards, housing some thirty-two thousand men.” His speech lost its torpor and took on the resolute tone of a lawyer addressing a jury. “There was a diseased creek running through it for bathing and washing down the occasional spoonful of rice and peas, sometimes a potato—nearly always rancid. The prisoners were forbidden to build shelters. There were a few tents, some lean-to’s, but most of them lived their lives completely exposed to the elements, day and night, all year round. In the summer it could get to a hundred degrees on a regular basis, and in the winter there was often freezing rain, and sometimes even snow. After a bad rainstorm, they would just pull the bodies out of the mud and bury them in a mass grave.”

  Nell said, “I saw photographs of emaciated prisoners in Harper’s Weekly after the Union Army arrived at the end of the war.” She wished she hadn’t. They were little more than skeletons with skin stretched over them, those men—eyes vacant, toothless mouths gaping. The images of their suffering still haunted her.

  “That was the issue that came out in June of sixty-five,” Jack said. “It’s what sparked the general outcry over Andersonville—that and the fact that every Union veteran one meets either spent time there or knows someone who did—Andersonville was so populous that it was actually the fifth largest city in the Confederacy. The North wanted retribution. I wanted retribution. That’s why I went to Washington after the war, instead of back here. I went to work for the Adjutant-General’s office of the War Department, to help them prepare the case against Andersonville’s commandant, Captain Henry Wirz. There was a great deal to do. The trial lasted sixty-three days.”

  “I read about that. He was executed, wasn’t he?”

  “That’s right,” he said as he drew on his cigar. “Hanged by the neck November tenth, eighteen sixty-five. Took him a while to die, but he still got off easy—a good deal easier than those poor fellows who lived and died inside that pen. ‘Wanton cruelty,’ that was our charge against him. And never was a man more guilty. If there was any justice in the world, any real justice, he would have been made to suffer the way those prisoners suffered.”

  “Why do you suppose the Andersonville death roll lists Will as having died of dysentery, when he actually escaped?”

  Jack turned his cigar this way and that, contemplating it from various angles. “Perhaps they found a body they thought was his. Or perhaps it was just poor record-keeping. In any event, ‘dysentery’ was what they’d put down when they weren’t sure of the real cause of death, because almost all of them had it. But there were innumerable ways to suffer and die there—scurvy, malaria, smallpox, typhoid, pneumonia, starvation, gangrene...plain old exposure. They said you could choke on the stench in that pen, and every man was crawling with lice. The ‘hospital’ was a shanty, with men lying in their own filth. The blow flies didn’t bother waiting for death. Most of the men were infested with maggots by the time they... My God,” he said, looking up with an abashed expression. “I don’t know what I’m thinking, telling you such things. Please forgive me.”

  “I’m not easily shocked,” she said, thinking giddily that perhaps she should have a badge made up that said that. “I was a sort of nurse once.”

  “Still...” He rubbed his temple. “It’s just that my outrage gets the better of me when it comes to that place. So many fine young men, like Robbie, dying in such awful ways.”

  “Those who lived through it must have died a little bit, too,” Nell said. “Look at Dr. Hewitt. The opium, the fatalism. He obviously doesn’t care what becomes of him. If he did, he would have denied his guilt by now. He would have retained a lawyer, a good one, instead of just waiting to see who the commonwealth appoints.”

  Jack smoked his cigar, brow furrowed, as Nell counted off the seconds. Nell found that she actually was enjoying its aroma, which mingled pleasantly with the familiar scents of linseed oil and turpentine. A little over a minute passed before he met her eyes and said, “I want to represent him.”

  Nell forced herself not to smile in triumph. “Are you sure? Your father’s bound to disapprove, and I doubt Dr. Hewitt will make it easy for you.”

  Pushing off the table, Jack crossed to the wall of glass and gazed out into the moonlit back garden. “I’ve spent nearly my entire life following the path of least resistance, Miss Sweeney. Somehow I suspect you have no idea what that’s like.”

  Too true.

  “Will used to joke about how I was living my life according to ‘Papa’s Rulebook,’” Jack said. “But I wasn’t like Will. The only time I ever displayed any real backbone was when I took that job with the adjutant-general instead of coming back to Boston after the war. I was going to spend the rest of my life in Washington, make my own way. Father begged me to come back and join the firm, started making offers that grew ever more generous. I told myself I could never be bought. Now look at me.”

  He turned, shoved a hand in his pocket and puffed thoughtfully on his cigar. “I’ve taken the easy way, the expected way, once too often. This is my opportunity to make up for that. Yes, Miss Sweeney, I mean to represent Will—whether he wants me to or not. And I’ll do what I can to help you sort through this mess. I don’t have much in the way of contacts in Boston—not yet—but I’ve got a fair measure of legal expertise, and I can gain access to certain kinds of information, go places that might be dangerous for you.”

  If he only knew the places she’d been! “Thank you, Mr. Thorpe. You don’t know how much this will mean to Mrs. Hewitt. She’ll want to pay you a fair fee for your services.”

  “Absolutely not!” he exclaimed, sounding truly offended. “I wouldn’t dream of charging her for this. If she tried to, I would consider it an insult.”

  “Very well,” Nell said with a smile. “I’ll let her know.”

  Jack rotated his cigar carefully in the clay dish to roll off its excess ash. “Let’s see if I understand this correctly. Will is supposed to have killed this man because of an altercation over a woman.”

  Nell nodded. “Kathleen Flynn, the owner’s daughter.”

  “Is she beautiful?”

  “I...she’s...” Nell shrugged. “I’m not really sure, from a man’s perspective. Why?”

  “Will’s women were always magnificent. And very sophisticated. He liked them smart and a little dangerous.”

  “Kathleen is none of those things. Although her father did compare her to his most vicious rat terrier.”

  Jack chuckled. She hadn’t seen him smile before, and it was quite the transformation, affording Nell a glimpse of the carefree young man he must have been before the war. “I must say, she doesn’t sound quite like Will’s type. And although I’ve seen him come to blows over a woman, it was only once, and with good cause. The notion that he would murder a man over some chippy they both wanted to...” he paused uneasily “...court...strikes me as—”

  “Court?” Nell couldn’t help laughing. “I hardly think courtship was at issue, Mr. Thorpe, but yes, that’s the idea. That and what the police refer to as a ‘frenzy of intoxication.’ But whoever came up with that theory has obviously never seen anyone under the influence of opium. It’s not like being drunk on whiskey. One tends to do a great deal of lying about and dozing off. I can’t imagine someone committing murder after smoking it—especially such a vicious murder.”

  Jack nodded distractedly. “The trick will be convincing a jury of that, and with all the lurid newspaper stories about opium dens, that might be a bit of a challenge. What about this Noonan fellow? He seems a likely culprit.”

  “He is—especially if it’s true that Tulley wouldn’t pay him the money he owed him. But I’ve also been thinking about the second man in the back parlor. He had been drinking. We should try to find him. Perhaps Pearl could help us. She lives at one sixty-four Milk Street, a ground floor flat. She did say she’d recognize him if she saw him again.”

>   “Yes, but assuming that fellow didn’t know Tulley, he would have even less reason than Will to murder him. At least, with Noonan, we have a motive.”

  Nell said, “I just wish Dr. Hewitt weren’t being so difficult. He must know how incriminating it looks for him to refuse to enter a plea, or discuss what happened that night, even under police interrogation. You should have seen him the next day, after they worked him over. His face...”

  Jack whispered something under his breath. “I’m glad I didn’t.”

  “If he is guilty,” she said, “I assume he’s keeping quiet in order to avoid the noose. Why help the prosecution build a case against him? I get the impression he wouldn’t mind dying—he seems to view himself as despicable—but he loathes the idea of hanging.”

  “He’s not guilty,” Jack said. “He can’t be. You don’t know him as well as I do, Miss Sweeney. Believe me—he didn’t do this.”

  “Then why won’t he hire a lawyer and encourage an investigation?” she asked. “If he establishes a reasonable doubt as to his guilt, he could be acquitted...couldn’t he?”

  “I hope so, because that’s exactly what I’m going to try to do. As for why he’s being uncooperative...” Jack looked down, frowning meditatively. “I’ve often found Will Hewitt to be something of an enigma. Perhaps if I speak to him in person, it will start to make sense. Did you find out where he’s staying?”

  Nell groaned. “He gave the name of a hotel, but I’ve since found out there is no such place.”

  “Ah, yes,” Jack said with wry smile. “That was an old ruse of his to get away from his family now and again. Only Robbie knew how to figure out his whereabouts. He and Will revealed the secret to me one night when we were sharing a bottle around a fire. It had to do with his current actress.”

  “Actress?”

  “They were actresses, most of them, the ladies he, um...”

  “Courted?”

  He returned her smile with a rather endearing little duck of his head. Clearing his throat, he said, “The name of the hotel generally had some connection to the play she was currently appearing in, or the featured play if there was more than one. Robbie didn’t always know who Will was keeping company with, but he’d seen and read a great many plays, and he had a good memory for details. For example, Will once left word that he was staying at the Shelby. Robbie recalled that Tom’s owners in Uncle Tom’s Cabin were named Shelby. This was back in fifty-three, when it was playing at the Tremont, so Robbie bought a ticket, picked out the prettiest member of the cast, and cornered her in her dressing room after the show. It turned out Will had spent the past three days in her flat on Prince Street.”

  “Why didn’t Will just tell Robbie where he was staying, if he wanted him to know?”

  Jack contemplated Nell over his cigar as he brought it to his mouth. “You don’t know Will very well, do you?”

  “I met him less than a week ago.”

  He smiled, smoke curling from his mouth. “An enigma, as I said—but an enigma with his own, peculiar sense of humor. What hotel did he say he was staying at?”

  “The Belmont.”

  “The Belmont...” He stared at the floor, eyes narrowing in concentration. “Belmont...”

  “Portia lived in Belmont,” Nell offered.

  He looked up.

  “In The Merchant of Venice? Portia. She lived in Belmont.”

  Jack smiled at her the way Will had when he’d first begun to detect her hidden dimensions. “There’s a version of The Merchant of Venice playing at the Boston Museum Theatre.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded. “Do you have any plans for tomorrow?”

  “Well...church in the morning.”

  “Yes, of course—for me, too.”

  “And then I need to watch Gracie while her nursemaid goes to church.”

  “What are you doing after that? Say, around one o’clock?”

  She smiled. “I think you and I are going to the Boston Museum Theatre.”

  Chapter 11

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather wait downstairs in the lobby?” Jack asked Nell as he prepared to knock on the door of the apartment that occupied the entire third floor of the posh Pelham Hotel.

  “I’ve already answered that,” she reminded him. “More than once.” Four times, to be precise, during the six-block walk from the Boston Museum Theatre near the old Burying Ground to the corner of Tremont and Boylston. Jack’s reluctance to have Nell accompany him into the home of the actress with whom William Hewitt might be living at the moment—a concession to her maidenly sensibilities, presumably—was amusingly ironic. After all, hadn’t Nell herself spent some four years living in sinful cohabitation with Dr. Greaves? But her good humor, strained from having gotten too little sleep last night, had waned with every repetition of his offer to handle this encounter himself.

  Not that she’d minded his taking the lead during their conversation with the stage manager for the theater’s stock company—a chinless troll with a trailing moustache who’d leered openly at Nell while Jack scrutinized a handbill illustrated with drawings of the cast.

  Her, Jack had said, pointing.

  The stage manager had grinned lasciviously. Not bad, eh? That’s Mathilde Cloutier. She plays Portia’s servant, Nerissa.

  Jack had met Nell’s eyes with a look that made it clear they’d struck pay dirt. Where does she live? he’d asked the troll.

  Well, now, I can’t just be givin’ out company members’ addresses without their... His eyes had glinted as Jack pressed a couple of shiners into his palm. Pelham Hotel. That’s them French flats on the corner of Tremont and Boylston. Third floor.

  “I really don’t mind doing this alone,” Jack persisted as he stalled outside the apartment door.

  With a groan of frustration, Nell raised her fist to knock, only to have him capture her wrist before she could do so. “She’s not French,” he said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Mathilde Cloutier. You probably think she’s from France, because of her name. But she’s actually from the French West Indies. She’s, um...they call her the...Ethiopian Enchantress.”

  “Ah.”

  “You’re shocked.”

  A little. “No.” Her gaze lit on his hand, still gripping her wrist.

  Jack released her abruptly, muttering an apology as a faint pink stain crawled up his throat. He knocked on the door and said, without meeting her gaze, “Will saw her on and off for several years before the war. I met her a few times. She performed with Buckley’s Minstrels then, wearing blackface.”

  “But isn’t she already...?”

  “Yes, but the audience didn’t know that. It was the only work she could get at the time. Things are different now.”

  As footsteps approached from the other side of the door, Jack whispered, “Remember me mentioning a woman Will came to blows over once? That was Mathilde.”

  The door swung open on a lissome creature whose most outstanding feature was a great froth of corkscrew curls tumbling just past her shoulders. Mathilde Cloutier had huge, heavy-lidded eyes, bold cheekbones and smooth-burnished skin the color of coffee laced with a dollop of cream. So swiftly did she size up her visitors that Jack had barely opened his mouth to greet her when she said, “I hope you’re here to take him away.” Her accent, while nominally French, was seasoned with a sing-songy Caribbean lilt. Opening the door wider so they could enter, she added, “I am sick to death of him.”

  She turned and motioned for them to follow her through the vast, opulent apartment—room after room papered in watered silk, layered with Oriental carpets, furnished with Turkish-tufted fainting couches, French gilt mirrors, lushly overgrown rubber trees...none of it more gorgeously exotic than Mathilde Cloutier herself. She didn’t walk so much as strut, her long legs propelling her with a graceful underwater languor as her dressing gown—a wisp of amethyst silk—floated along behind her like an empress’s court train.

  Nell breathed in the sooty-sweet
aroma of opium mingled with a whiff of patchouli as Mathilde called out, “Company!” Sweeping aside a curtain of tinkling glass beads, she ushered them into a boudoir that might have housed a sultan’s harem, so lavishly bedecked was it in jewel-toned draperies and mounds of pillows.

  Looking quite at home in this silken seraglio was William Hewitt, reclining on his side atop a colossal bed tented in sheer netting. Drowsy-eyed and naked from the waist up—his lower body being concealed beneath a rumpled sheet—he had his head propped on one hand while the other cradled a bamboo smoking pistol. A silver tray on the floor held the attendant paraphernalia—spirit lamp, spindle, sea sponge, knife... Nell noticed the cylindrical horn opium box he’d purchased at Deng Bao’s hop joint, which lay open on its side. It had been full when he’d bought it on Monday; now it was nearly empty.

  Will went very still when he saw Jack. He stared at his old friend through the netting, looking suddenly wide awake. The cuts and contusions on his face were healing, but Nell was sobered by the bruising to his torso—fading but extensive, especially around his ribs.

  “Will,” Jack said with a nervous little smile.

  Pushing the netting aside, Will looked from Jack to Nell, his expression grim. Quietly he said, “Miss Sweeney, I do wish you hadn’t done this.”

  “Take him away.” Snatching up a leather traveling case from the corner, Mathilde proceeded to cram into it various items strewn around the room—a man’s shirt, a china shaving cup, a pair of leather braces... “Take him out of my sight. I cannot bear another moment of this.”

  “You cut me to the quick,” Will said wearily.

  “Take your filthy gong and go!” she yelled at him. “Poison yourself if you must, but don’t do it here. I’ve put up with it as long as I care to!”

  “Save it for the stage, Mattie,” Will drawled.

  She began berating him in French—although it didn’t sound much like the French Dr. Greaves used to drill into Nell—hurling abuse and imperious commands as she stuffed the bag with his possessions. Will responded in the same dialect, but with a good deal less volume and emotion.