A Fatal Four-Pack

by P. B. Ryan

  “And you won’t leave the house,” Jack added.

  Will rolled his eyes. “All right. Fine. I won’t leave the house.” He ran a hand through his still-uncombed hair. “You’re very irritating, Jack, and a great deal of trouble. But you’re a good friend, to care what becomes of a wretch like me. As for you, Miss Sweeney...”

  He bowed slowly, almost gravely, smiling at her as he straightened. “It has been a very real pleasure,” he said quietly, then turned and went upstairs.

  Chapter 15

  “Did you notice how distraught he became,” Nell asked Jack as she pulled on her coat, “when I brought up that other man, the one he’d been talking to in the back parlor?”

  She’d stayed behind after Will’s departure in order to discuss the case outside of his hearing—and his persistent attempts to hamstring their efforts. Unfortunately, Jack, who’d been tossing back whiskeys like water, was no longer in any condition to formulate legal strategies. He stood facing the library fireplace, arms braced on the mantel, staring into the flames with glazed, wavering eyes; hence Nell’s decision to head home and finish this discussion some other time.

  “Distraught?” Jack said thickly. “You think so?”

  “For him. He’s normally so self-contained.” She withdrew from her chatelaine the leather case housing the photograph she’d been showing to witnesses—the portrait of Will, Jack, Robbie and Harry in white tie before the Children’s Aid Ball. Flipping it open, she studied Will’s urbane, flawlessly groomed image. He seemed almost to be holding in a chuckle, as if something about being photographed had amused him. Try as she might to imagine him slashing a man’s throat, regardless of the circumstances or motivation, the picture would not come.

  She shifted her gaze to Harry, with his careless grin and his garish waistcoat. I saw something of myself in him, Will had said. Those of us with an appetite for sin always recognize it in others.... But I was too preoccupied, too disgusted by him, and by myself, to offer him any meaningful guidance.

  Viola shared Will’s guilt at having failed Harry, and his concern over his excesses. When he heard about Robbie’s death, he went a little mad.... I just worry that someday he’ll do something money can’t put right.

  “Jack,” she asked, “do you know anything about your father’s personal legal work for August Hewitt? The, um, private family matters that he attends to?”

  Jack shook his head as he lifted his glass from the mantel. “That’s all confidential, even from me. Very hush hush.” He pressed a finger to his lips, swaying slightly now that he wasn’t holding onto the mantel. “Nothing in writing, ever.” Gulping down the last ounce or so of whiskey in his glass, he headed unsteadily to the liquor cabinet for more.

  Nell considered and swiftly rejected the notion of sharing her speculations with Jack; that could wait until he was sober. “You probably shouldn’t be drinking so much,” she said as she checked her pendant watch. Half past six. Would Detective Cook still be at the station house?

  “Just one more,” he said as he twisted the glass stopper out of the decanter.

  Crossing to him, she said, “It would be best if you remained sober tonight, so you can keep an eye on Dr. Hewitt and make sure he doesn’t leave the house.”

  “He told us he wouldn’t.”

  “But he’s low on opium, so I know he’ll be tempted.” Perhaps she should bring him some laudanum or Black Drop later, after she met with Detective Cook, so that he’d be less likely to head out in search of gong.

  Jack hesitated, his gaze on the decanter’s amber contents, shimmering in the firelight, then pushed the stopper back in. “What did you mean when you said the offer about the Black Drop was only good for death row?”

  “Dr. Hewitt asked me if I would smuggle in opium tonics when he was waiting to be executed.”

  “Christ,” Jack whispered, gripping the edge of the liquor cabinet. “I can’t...I can’t let him...”

  “I know,” she soothed. She reached out to pat his back, then, for some reason, withdrew her hand.

  “If he hangs, I’ll have lost both of them, him and Robbie. And it’ll be my fault.”

  “Even the best lawyer can’t work miracles,” she said. “Especially when their clients are as difficult as—”

  “It doesn’t matter!” He wheeled to face her, that vein rising on his forehead, his eyes red-rimmed. “It doesn’t matter how difficult he is. He’s my friend, the only real friend I have left, and I can’t...I can’t...”

  “You’re upset because you’ve been drinking,” she said evenly. “But we haven’t exhausted all our options. When you’re more yourself, we’ll talk about—”

  “More myself?” He laughed, but his eyes shone damply. “Oh, yes, I’m so terribly capable when I’m myself. You think that because of who you are, so clever, so imperturbable. I’m not like you, Miss Sweeney. God, I wish I was, but I’m not.” Tears welled in his eyes; he scrubbed them away before they could fall. “Tell me what to do. Tell me what you would do.”

  “I...I can’t. I’m not a lawyer. Please, Mr. Thorpe, just—”

  “Help me,” he pleaded, seizing her by the arms. “Help me to not fail him. I can’t do it on my own. I don’t trust myself. I’ll miss something...”

  “You won’t,” she assured him as calmly as she could. “Of course I’ll help you, but—”

  “That’s all I ask,” he rasped, his hands tightening on her. “You don’t know how much it helps, having your insight. I need that. I need you. You see so much. You see everything.”

  “Mr. Thorpe...” Nell tried to squirm away from him, but he was surprisingly strong.

  “It’s meant so much to me, your perception, your...” He looked down at his hands clutching her upper arms. Easing his grip, he stroked her through her coat sleeve. “You’re wise beyond your years, and so...”

  “Mr. Thorpe.” She pried his hands loose and stepped back. He teetered, but managed to remain upright. “I really must be going.”

  Jack started to move toward her, seemed to reconsider that, and retreated awkwardly to lean against the liquor cabinet. “Yes, of course.” He raked an errant lock of hair off his forehead, his gaze bleary and sad. “Of course.”

  “It’s just that I want to catch Detective Cook before he—”

  “No need to explain,” he said, grabbing onto the edge of the cabinet as he turned to face it. “Go on. You’ve got things to do.”

  She hesitated, wondering if she should caution him again about drinking.

  “Go,” he said.

  She did.

  o0o

  An hour later, having convinced Detective Cook to bring her with him tomorrow when he served the subpoena on Pearl Stauber, Nell stepped out of a hack at the corner of Arlington and Commonwealth. Joseph Maynard & Co. was the only business still open on the darkened block, its windows radiant with the glow of a battery of pendant lamps hanging from the ceiling. Regardless that it violated her principles to provide Will Hewitt with opium—a qualm he seemed, surprisingly, to respect—there was nothing to be gained right now from condemning him to withdrawal sickness.

  “Good evening, Miss,” greeted the white-haired apothecary as he measured a mound of powder on his scale. Glancing up, he said, “Ah, it’s Miss...Sweeney, is it not? Dr. Touchette’s assistant?”

  “That’s right.”

  “He wants those extra needles after all, does he?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “For the syringe. I told him the one wasn’t enough. It has to be cleaned between patients, after all, and they do break.” Hauling a tray out from beneath the counter, he asked, “How many would he like?”

  The tray had compartments for the display of hypodermic injection supplies: delicate silver and glass syringes, sturdy steel ones, medicine vials, needles of various sizes, and portable syringe kits in cases ranging from utilitarian brass to ornamental gold-plate.

  “That’s...not actually what I’m here for,” Nell said, looking away from the rows
of needles glinting in the bright overhead light. “He, um, asked me to pick up a few things this morning, but I couldn’t get here till now, and it looks as if he might have beaten me to it.”

  “Ah.” Mr. Maynard nodded sympathetically as he put away the tray. “Some days are so hectic, aren’t they? One wonders where the time goes. Yes, Dr. Touchette was just here about fifteen minutes ago. What did he ask you to pick up? Perhaps he got it himself.”

  So much for Will’s promise to stay home tonight. “It’s actually a fairly long list,” she said. “Why don’t you tell me what he bought so I’ll be sure not to get the same thing.”

  “Just the syringe, the needle, and four grams of morphine sulfate.”

  “Four grams... How much would that be in—”

  “Ounces? Less than an eighth.”

  “No, um...he mentioned doses. How many doses would that be?”

  “It depends on the patient’s body weight, of course, but at an average of ten milligrams per dose, that would be four hundred.”

  She stared at him. “Four hundred doses?”

  “Average doses. A large man would need twenty milligrams—more if he’d developed a tolerance. And as for addicts, well, they can go through hundreds of milligrams a day. In fact, I once heard of a man who regularly went through as much as I just sold Dr. Touchette in a single day—over the course of twenty-four hours, of course. Four grams would be a lethal dose for anyone, injected all at once.”

  Striving to keep her voice steady, Nell said, “Did he mention what he needed it for?”

  “It really only has the one medical application,” Mr. Maynard replied. “Pain relief. I offered to put it on his account, but he insisted on giving me cash and paying off the account, seeing as he’ll be gone.”

  Gone? Nell’s heart felt as if it were trying to hammer a hole through her stays.

  “I wish all my customers were as good about tidying up loose ends before long trips. You should see what some of them end up owing! It’s a wonder I can... Miss Sweeney? Are you—”

  She grabbed her skirts and bolted from the shop, heart tripping, mind whirling. Four grams of morphine and one needle...Four grams would be a lethal dose for anyone, injected all at once.

  She raced around the corner to Jack’s house, leapt up the stairs, pounded on the door.

  No answer. It was dark inside. She tried the knob, but it was locked.

  “Mr. Thorpe!” She pounded harder. “Mr. Thorpe! It’s me, Nell Sweeney. Answer the door!”

  This can’t happen. Please, God, don’t let this happen.

  “Damn you, Jack, answer the damn door!”

  Nell heard a gasp from behind her and turned to see an elderly couple walking a tiny white dog. They averted their gazes and hurried away.

  There came a yellowish haze of gaslight from within the house. Squinting through the glass, she saw Jack, in rumpled shirtsleeves, lighting a wall bracket in the foyer. He blinked when he saw her, tucked in his shirt as he approached.

  “Where’s Dr. Hewitt?” she asked, bulling her way past him when he opened the door, praying Will had come back here after Maynard’s rather than disappearing into the night. “Is he here?”

  “Yes, of course,” Jack said groggily as he finger-combed his untidy hair, one cheek imprinted with creases.

  “Are you sure?” she asked. “Did you just wake up?”

  “No.” He hesitated guiltily. “Y-yes, I suppose I—”

  “Oh, Jesus.” She sprinted up the stairs, checked his room, the bathroom.

  I wouldn’t let you go through opium withdrawal in a situation like that.

  I don’t intend to.

  No sign of him anywhere in the rest of the house, which she swiftly searched.

  As for you, Miss Sweeney...it has been a very real pleasure.

  Jack was waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs with a sealed envelope. Miss Cornelia Sweeney was written on the front in a masculine, economical hand. “He left me one, too,” Jack said, holding up his own envelope. “I found them on my desk.”

  Nell broke the seal and read the note:

  My Dear Miss Sweeney,

  I have decided to sacrifice Lady Viola’s bail money after all and take my chances in Shanghai, where a pipe fiend is less likely to attract notice than in any other city on earth. If we never meet again, please know that making your acquaintance has been a bright spot in a rather dark life.

  And do watch those assumptions.

  Gratefully yours,

  Wm. Hewitt

  “He’s not going to Shanghai,” Nell said. “He just wants us to think that. I was just at the druggist around the corner. Dr. Hewitt was there about fifteen minutes ago. He bought a great deal of morphine and a hypodermic syringe.”

  Jack stared at her, his eyes widening as the implication sank in. He shook his head. “No. He wouldn’t.”

  “He doesn’t seem to mind dying,” she said. “But he loathes the idea of hanging.”

  “Let’s not jump to conclusions. We know he was almost out of opium. Perhaps this is just a substitute.”

  “He uses Black Drop for that. But he once told me he’d prefer a syringe full of morphine to the noose.” Quick, fairly painless... “And now that the case against him is pretty much airtight, and Detective Cook is threatening to lock him up again if he so much as steps out the front door...”

  “Christ.” He raked both hands through his hair. “It’s my fault. I was just going to rest my eyes for a moment on the couch, and I...I...”

  “We’ve got to—”

  “I told you I’d fail him,” Jack said, his voice taking on a frantic pitch. “You see? I told you. I knew it. Jesus Christ!”

  “Mr. Thorpe, please calm yourself.”

  “I should never have let this happen,” he said, kneading his temples with tremulous fingers. “I should never have let him—”

  “Get hold of yourself,” Nell commanded, although she felt perilously close to panic herself. “I need you. Dr. Hewitt needs you. We’ve got to find him before he...” Don’t think about it. “We just have to find him, as soon as possible.”

  “What if he’s left Boston?”

  She shook her head as she thought about it. There’s a whole, vast world beyond Boston, Miss Sweeney. “Let’s just hope he didn’t.”

  Jack nodded mechanically, his face flushed, rubbing that vein on his forehead as if trying to erase it.

  “We can cover twice as much ground if we separate to look for him,” she said. “If we’re right about his intentions, he’ll want to be someplace relatively private, where he won’t be disturbed. But not too private. I should think... I mean, if I were him, I should think I’d want to be...found.”

  “Yes...yes. A hotel room, perhaps.”

  “There are so many hotels in Boston. Where would we start?”

  “I’ve got this year’s city almanac. It lists them all.”

  Jack fetched the little green book from his desk in the library, where they sat to divide up the hotels, Nell taking the larger, more respectable ones—the Tremont, United States, Parker, Revere—while Jack assigned himself the more questionable establishments, as well as the flop houses and de facto brothels in the poorer quarters.

  “You don’t want to dress too well, where you’ll be going tonight,” she said, “or you might attract the wrong kind of attention. If you’ve got an old sack coat, wear that. And a slouch hat or a plain cap. Oh, and no tie.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “I wouldn’t have thought of that. He offered to drop her off at the Tremont Hotel if she would just give him a few minutes to change his clothes and have them hitch up his gig at the livery stable half a block away.

  “You can leave me just down the street from there, at the Tremont Temple,” she told him. “The Hewitts are seeing Bluebeard tonight, and I need to speak to Harry.”

  “You think he might know where Will would have gone?”

  “It’s possible,” she said, although she thought it best not to el
aborate, given Jack’s brittle state of mind; he needed to focus on the task at hand.

  o0o

  She was about to be sacked.

  Nell drew as deep a breath as her stays would allow, let it out, and knocked on the door of the Hewitts’ box at the Tremont Temple. From the other side, over the muffled music—a jauntily gothic duet to orchestral accompaniment—she heard a deep male voice, August Hewitt’s, say “Who the devil is that?”

  He would dismiss her for what she was about to do. It wasn’t even worth praying to St. Dismas over, or hoping for intervention by Viola—not that she wouldn’t try, but her chances of success would be virtually nil. A servant—and that was what he considered her, regardless of her standing in his wife’s eyes—did not meddle in her employer’s private family affairs. She didn’t work to undercut the express dictates of the man who paid her salary. And she certainly didn’t barge into his private opera box to accuse his son of murder.

  By this time tomorrow, she would have no job, no home...

  And no Gracie.

  A nervous impulse propelled her to step back from the door, screamed at her to turn, run! There was still time to save herself. She didn’t have to do this.

  But then she thought about Will, bowing to her with such solemn finality as he took his leave this afternoon. It has been a very real pleasure.

  She raised her fist to knock again as the door swung inward, pulled open by Harry, who’d tilted his gilded chair backward at a perilous angle to reach the doorknob. “Miss Sweeney!” he chuckled as he righted the chair with a thump. “A secret fan of Offenbach, are you? You may have my seat.” He stood, tugging at his tailcoat. “I’ve just discovered that I can’t bear comic opera.”

  His father and younger brother, in white tie, like Harry—creamy orchids in their lapels, the three of them—also rose as Nell stepped hesitantly into the darkened loge. Martin looked startled, but pleased, to see her there; Mr. Hewitt scowled in bewilderment. On the gaslit stage below them, a man in an outlandishly tall European-style top hat, fur-trimmed great coat and chalky face paint was singing in French to a cartoonishly pink-cheeked young woman in an ivory gown.