Murder in the North End Page 5

  “Sweeney?” Chloe Cook looked up from the card to meet Nell’s gaze. “Would you be Nell Sweeney, then?”

  “That’s right,” Nell said. “Your husband has mentioned me, I take it.”

  “Yes, of course, of course. Do come in,” Chloe said, opening the door wider and gesturing them inside. “It’s so good to meet you at last, Miss Sweeney, even if...well, even under these...” Her chin quivered; she pulled a handkerchief from her apron pocket.

  Nell said, “I truly am sorry to disturb you at such a time, Mrs. Cook. We...we’re here because...well, we thought perhaps we might be of some help in sorting through—”

  “They think he—” A sob rose in Chloe’s throat. She pressed the handkerchief to her mouth. “They think...they think...”

  “I know.” Nell said soothingly.

  “He’s in terrible trouble.”

  “I know. We know.”

  “I’ve been trying to be strong for Colin’s sake,” Chloe managed as she wiped her face, “but it’s just...it’s so hard. I don’t know what to do. I’m...I’m so bewildered.”

  “So are we,” Will said. “But we want to help. We find it difficult to believe that he did what they’re saying he did. That’s why we’re here. Perhaps there’s someplace we can talk?”

  “Yes, of course. Um, yes. Please.” Turning, Chloe ushered them down the corridor, which smelled of fresh paint, and through the open glass doors, which led to a sunny little garden out back. “W-would you like some tea, or...”

  “No, really,” Nell said. “We don’t want to impose.”

  “It’s already made,” Chloe said, indicating a porcelain teapot sitting on an iron table next to a half-empty cup. “Make yourselves at home—please. I’ll be right back.” She turned and disappeared into the house.

  “She’s so young,” Nell whispered to Will as he held a chair out for her. “Somehow I thought she’d be older.”

  “Cook is about forty, I would think,” Will said as he seated himself. “There’d be about a ten or twelve year difference in their ages, not so much. Do you know how long they’ve been married?”

  Nell shook her head. “He’s never talked very much about his personal life.”

  “Hopefully his wife will be more forthcoming. She’s very well spoken, don’t you think?”

  In an exaggerated Irish brogue, Nell asked, “More so than most of us ignorant paddywhacks, d’ye mean?”

  Casting a baleful look in her direction, Will said, “I mean she sounds like someone with a good upbringing, perhaps even an education. That is rare among Irish immigrants, as you’re very well aware. Just makes me curious, that’s all.”

  Chloe returned carrying a tray laden with two cups, a sugar bowl, a creamer, and a plate of prettily molded cookies. “These are from yesterday, but they’re still good.” She set the tray on the table, untied her apron, and draped it over the empty fourth chair. It was only then that Nell noticed the styling of Chloe’s frock, a loose, wrapper-like garment with a wide double panel down the front secured with frogs over the young woman’s rounded belly.

  Observing the direction of Nell’s gaze, Chloe rested a hand on her stomach and said, with a watery little smile, “Colin and I are expecting a blessed event in October. Our first.”

  “Oh. I...I didn’t realize,” Nell said. “That’s... that’s wonderful.”

  “Congratulations,” Will said.

  Chloe glanced up at Nell as she poured the tea. “You’re wondering why he didn’t tell you.”

  “Well...”

  Setting the cups in front of her guests, Chloe said, “It’s not the first time I’ve been in the family way. We’ve lost three wee ones, Colin and I. Our first was stillborn, a little boy we named Patrick, and the other two never even made it this far.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Nell said. “That must be incredibly painful.” It was a pain Nell knew all too well, having suffered, after Duncan’s final, savage beating, a miscarriage that had more than likely left her sterile.

  “I trust you’re seeing a physician,” said Will as he pulled Chloe’s chair out for her.

  “Yes, indeed, Dr. Mathers.”

  “I know of him,” Will said. “He’s very well thought of.”

  “He’s given me a list of rules meant to keep this babe tight in the womb. No strenuous activity—I can’t even weed this disastrous garden. No... restrictive garments.”

  “Good for Mathers,” Will said. “Whenever I see a pregnant woman in a corset, I want to throttle her.”

  “Dr. Hewitt is a physician,” Nell said, by way of explaining his frankness.

  “Non-practicing,” he said. “My only experience with expectant mothers was during medical school at Edinburgh, back before the war.”

  “Is it true,” Chloe asked, “what Dr. Mathers says, that there’s no way to stop a...mishap, if you feel one coming on? He...he said it was God’s will, that all I could do is lie down and ‘let nature take its course,’ but he’s so old, you know. You’re younger. You were trained so recently. Is there something new? Some tonic, or...?”

  With an apologetic little shrug, Will said, “Bed rest is what we were taught to prescribe. Miss Sweeney actually has a good deal more experience with such matters than I do.”

  “I served as nurse to a doctor on Cape Cod for four years,” Nell explained. “There are some herbs native to this country that the Indians use for that purpose, but no tonic per se. The best thing you can do is to try to prevent such a mishap by not over-exerting yourself.”

  “Oh, I’ve been pretty much staying at home,” Chloe said, “reading, doing embroidery and watercolors... I’m bored out of my wits, but I don’t mind. I don’t mind looking this way, I don’t mind any of it. I want this baby so badly—Colin, too. He hired a girl to come in at noon for the cooking and cleaning. I asked him not to tell people I’m expecting. He thinks I’m being superstitious, but that’s really not it. There’s just so much pity I can bear, and if...if anything were to happen to this baby...”

  “Surely you’ve told your family,” Nell said as she stirred sugar and milk into her tea.

  “My parents are gone. I’ve just got the one older brother, James—he lives in New York. He’s a constable, too. Colin has no kin at all in the States. He came over alone. I have a friend, Lily Booth, who lives around the corner. She’s the only person I’ve told. She spent most of yesterday with me, trying to keep me calm for the sake of the baby.”

  “She was right to do so,” Will said. “Given your condition, and your past history, it’s best that you not allow yourself to become too overwrought.”

  “Your advice is well taken, Doctor,” Chloe said, “but given what’s happened...” She sat back wearily. “What they’re saying Colin did...”

  “We actually know very little about the circumstances,” Nell said. “Detective Skinner paid a call on me yesterday afternoon, but he didn’t tell me much.”

  Chloe grimaced. “He came to see me, too. Loathsome man. Colin can’t bear him.”

  “All we know,” Nell said, “is that Detective Cook is supposed to have shot someone named Johnny Cassidy at a place called Nabby’s Inferno Tuesday night.”

  “When did you last see your husband?” Will asked Chloe.

  “Tuesday afternoon. He came home for lunch. It’s the one meal we always share together, because he sometimes works so late. He’s often not home till after I’ve gone to sleep. I woke up yesterday morning and reached over to his side of the bed, but he wasn’t there. The covers were undisturbed, and it was obvious his head had never lain on the pillow. I knew immediately that something was wrong.”

  “Did he happen to mention what he would be doing later on Tuesday?” Will asked. “Where he might be headed?”

  “Colin doesn’t talk much about his work, not the day-to-day specifics of it, but I do know that he spends most of his time in the North End. Fort Hill sometimes, and other areas, but mostly the North End. It’s his job to deal with vice, and that’s where the w
orst of it is. And it’s only the worst of it that he troubles himself over, not the routine things—drunken sailors, pickpockets, street girls. It’s the beat cops and watchmen who keep them in line, or try to. Colin goes after bigger game—gangs of thugs, slashers, rapists...”

  “Dangerous work,” Will said.

  “I fret about him constantly.” Chloe closed her eyes and shook her head. “Constantly. I wish to God he hadn’t gone to work for the state constables. He didn’t really want to. After that awful business in February, the hearings and all that...” Chloe’s gaze lit on something over Nell’s shoulder; she smiled. “Maureen. You’re early today.”

  Nell and Will turned to find a moon-faced young woman in an apron and head rag unlatching the garden gate, a market basket over one arm. Eyeing Nell and Will with a kind of dull curiosity, she said, “They stayin’ fer lunch?”

  “Oh. Um...” Turning to Nell and Will, Chloe said, “That would be lovely, actually.”

  “Thank you all the same,” Nell said, “but we can’t stay. We’ve a great deal to accomplish this afternoon.”

  “Just you, then, missus?” Maureen asked.

  “No, set two places,” Chloe told her. “Out here, if you don’t mind.”

  “Two?” Maureen stopped walking. “He ain’t back, is he? Detective Cook?”

  “No. No, he, er, he’s not back. Mrs. Booth will be joining me for lunch.”

  Maureen nodded and entered the house through the back door.

  Chloe sighed. “I’m not used to having help, but I don’t think I like it very much. Or perhaps it’s just...I don’t know. I just never know what that girl is thinking.”

  “You’d mentioned the hearings in February,” Nell prompted.

  “Oh, those blasted hearings.”

  “Constable Skinner claims that there were secret sessions at which your husband testified,” Nell said. “They seem to have made him even more of a pariah among his colleagues than he’d been before. I don’t suppose you’d know anything about that.”

  “No, all Colin would tell me about the hearings was that he wasn’t in any trouble and everything would turn out all right. It was his way of keeping me from worrying, but it had the opposite effect. I kept imagining the worst possible outcomes.”

  “Does your husband have any enemies?” Will asked. “Aside from Skinner. Someone who might want to see him hang for a murder he didn’t commit?”

  “Just Skinner’s colleagues, the other city detectives. I can’t think of anyone else.”

  “What about friends?” Nell asked. “Someone at City Hall, perhaps, who could tell us what really went on in those secret hearing sessions.”

  “Or who might have been privy to his dealings in the North End,” Will added.

  “Well, there’s Ben Shute,” Chloe said. “Ebenezer, really, but Colin calls him Ben. He’s Superintendent of Pawnbrokers. A few years younger than Colin, mid-thirties, I should think—a bachelor. Lost an eye and a leg at Fredericksburg, poor fellow. Colin got to know him when he joined the Detectives’ Bureau in City Hall. Their offices were on the same corridor.”

  “Are they just casual acquaintances,” Will asked, “or...?”

  “Oh, Ben is Colin’s closest friend in the world, has been for years. I was surprised at first when the two of them hit it off so well. Ben is from a family of Maryland tobacco planters, very wealthy and well-connected. He’s worth a fortune, but you’d never guess it.”

  To Nell, Will said, “We can stop at City Hall on our way back from Mass General and see if Mr. Shute will speak to us.”

  “It might help,” Nell told Chloe, “if you could write us a brief letter of introduction so that Mr. Shute knows he can speak to us in confidence.”

  “Of course.” Shaking her head, Chloe said, “I just wish Colin had taken Ben’s advice and set himself up as a private detective when the bureau was disbanded. Ben said he’d recommend Colin to friends—you know, send business his way. There wouldn’t have been much money in it, not at first, anyway, but he would have been his own man, answering only to himself. Colin really took to the idea—me, too.”

  “Why didn’t he do it, then?” Nell asked.

  “It was Major Jones, the fellow who’s in charge of the state constabulary. He offered Colin a position, told him he was just the type of solid, upright man they needed. Colin turned it down. Jones increased the salary by quite a bit. Colin was fixing to turn it down again, but then we found out I was expecting. He said he wanted to give us the kind of life we deserved, the baby and me. We had a nice little house a few blocks away, in the South End, but he didn’t think it was big enough anymore. I told him we could make do, but he said didn’t want his child to grow up just making do, as he had. He wanted us to have nice furniture and clothes, a shiny new carriage, playthings for the baby. I’ve never cared about all that. I just wanted him. I wanted him safe. And now—” Her voice cracked; she looked away.

  “Mrs. Cook.” Nell leaned across the table to touch Chloe’s arm. “I’m sorry this is so difficult, truly I am. But the more we can find out—”

  “It’s fine,” Chloe said as she raised her teacup. “I’m fine. I’m very grateful to you for wanting to help. God knows what will happen to Colin if his fate is left in the hands of Constable Skinner.” Smiling at Nell, she said, “Colin thinks very highly of you, you know, says you’ve got a whipcrack mind, and a certain way with people, with making them open up to you.”

  “She does, indeed,” Will said, with a fleeting smile in Nell’s direction. “Mrs. Cook, I must ask you this, and I beg you to be completely truthful and candid for your husband’s sake. Have you had any contact with him at all since Tuesday? A note, perhaps—anything?”

  “You can tell us in complete confidence,” Nell assured her. “We would never—”

  “If I knew where he was,” Chloe said, “I wouldn’t be half as wrought up about all this. He just...never came home. It’s so unlike him to do something like that with no word to me. We haven’t been apart this long since we were married.”

  “When was that?” Nell asked.

  “The twenty-ninth of October, eighteen sixty-four. Colin had mustered out of the Army in September. We were married as soon as he was sure the police department would take him back.”

  “I take it you’d known him before the war, then,” Nell said.

  “Um, yes. Yes. Not well, but... I, er, wrote to him when I found out he’d enlisted. He wrote back. We established a correspondence that became...more affectionate, shall I say, than we had anticipated. It was in his final letter to me that he asked me to marry him, because he didn’t know if he’d have the nerve to do it in person. Of course I accepted. Colin was...” Chloe gazed off in the direction of the overgrown, weed-choked garden. “He was unlike any man I’d ever known. So big, you know, with that commanding way about him, and those rough edges, but his heart...” She pressed her fist to her chest, her eyes shimmering. “It was his heart I got to know through the letters. It was his heart I fell in love with.”

  “Do you mind if I ask why you initiated this correspondence?” Will asked.

  She turned to look at him.

  He said, “You said you hadn’t known him that long. It just seems a rather...bold gesture for a lady such as yourself. I’m curious as to what inspired it.”

  She hesitated, as if formulating her response. “I’d written to thank him for something.”

  “May I ask for what?”

  “It’s not important,” Chloe said as she wiped up a drop of tea off the table with her napkin. “I mean, so far as all the rest of it goes. It has nothing to do with what happened. It couldn’t have.”

  Will said, “I’m just asking because we really know so little about Detective Cook, and the more we can piece together about his background as a constable, the more information we’ll have with which to—”

  “It had nothing to do with his being a constable.” Chloe said. “It was...something that happened before he joined the department.<
br />
  “When did he join it?” Will asked.

  “January of eighteen-sixty. He took a three-year leave to serve with the First Company Sharpshooters in September of ‘sixty-one, but then he went back to the police afterwards.”

  “The Sharpshooters?” Will said. “I’m impressed.”

  With a spark of pride in her eyes, Chloe said, “They’d held recruiting trials for the Sharpshooters that summer. He had to hit a ten-inch target from two-hundred yards. He got ten bulls-eyes.”

  “Where did he learn to shoot like that?” Nell asked.

  “In the old country,” Chloe said. “He’d been part of Daniel O’Connell’s Young Ireland movement to repeal the Act of Union and end discrimination against the Catholics. It was a fairly peaceful process till the famine, and then some of them had enough and took up arms. You know about the revolt in ‘forty-eight, I assume.”

  “Of course,” Nell said. “I was little at the time, and living over here, but my father and his mates could talk of nothing else.”

  “Colin was involved in that,” Chloe said. “He was eighteen, and something of a hot-head, very passionate about the cause. The leadership wasn’t what it could have been, though, and they failed miserably. Most of them were rounded up and transported to Van Diemen’s Land—Tasmania, they call it now. Colin and some of the others escaped to America before they could arrest him.”

  “What did he do before he joined the police?” Nell asked.

  “He mined coal in Pennsylvania for a few years. He came from a family of zinc miners in Tipperary, so it was familiar work to him. Of course, it was it backbreaking work, the conditions were appalling. The owners didn’t give a fip how many of them got sick or died, so long as the profits kept coming. Colin joined a group of men who were trying to organize the miners, but they were almost as selfish and corrupt as the owners—not Colin, of course, but the others—so it came to nothing.”

  “That must have been discouraging for him,” Will said, “especially after his experience in Ireland.”

  “Colin likes to say that good intentions are no match for a little power. Eventually he got fed up and made his way back to Boston.”