Desperate Acts (32 page)

“You better stay here an’ wait fer us,
Abner,” Cobb said to the driver. When Abner opened his mouth to
object, Cobb said, “You want yer two pounds, don’t ya?” Then Cobb
sped after the other two.

Without saying a word, Itchy pushed open the
flimsy door of his house and stumbled into the main room,
illuminated only by the natural light falling through two small
windows. With Marc and Cobb close behind, Itchy went through a
curtained doorway into what had to be his bedroom. And there,
perched on the edge of a rough bedstead, his skinny buttocks just
balanced on the wooden side-slat, was Nestor Peck. He was as naked
as a plucked pullet. And trembling all over. And emitting a low
babbling sound that might have been a moan or a plea. His face was
swollen twice its size, the lips blackened and puffed. His eyes
were open but rolling up and down in their sockets – unseeing.

“Jesus,” Cobb whispered, “the poor bugger’s
flipped his wig!”

Before Itchy could stop him, Marc reached up
and drew aside the burlap curtain covering the lone window in the
room. Cold, late-day sunshine poured in. And they could now see
that Nestor’s pale, leprous skin was dotted everywhere by inflamed
and suppurating sores. Cobb fell back against the commode, gagging.
Marc’s stomach lurched, and he closed his eyes against the horror
of Nestor’s mutilated body.

“I been tryin’ to get him to lie down or take
some tea or just talk to me – ever since I found him here at noon.
But he’s just been sittin’ there, gabblin’ like a loony.” Itchy had
tears in his eyes.

“He ain’t said a word?” Cobb said.

“Just a few, when he first seen me. All I
could make out was he’d been livin’ in a hut with some trapper way
up Yonge Street. An’ run over somethin’.”

“Wasps,” Marc said. He was kneeling in front
of Nestor and looking closely at his right arm. “He must have
stepped on a nest of them. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Cobb knelt down beside his long-time snitch.
“Hey, Nestor. It’s me, Cobb. You
know
me?”

While the babble-moaning did not pause,
Nestor’s gaze brushed across Cobb’s distinctive features, and he
nodded.

“He ain’t loony,” Cobb said. “’Least no
more’n usual. He’s just in agony.”

Again Nestor nodded.

“And he sure as hell didn’t run off to
Buffalo with Duggan’s loot!”

“We gotta
do
somethin’,” Itchy
said.

“I suggest we get him to a doctor as soon as
we can,” Marc said.

“I got a better idea,” Cobb said. “Let’s get
him to my missus.”

***

While Marc remained with Itchy and poor Nestor, Cobb
– reinforced by several of Marc’s pound notes – directed the cab
hastily down to Baldwin House. There, the family’s four-seater was
commandeered, and then driven by the Baldwin’s own driver back up
Berkeley Street. As Nestor shrieked piteously every time he was
touched anywhere close to one of his three-dozen wasp-stings, Marc,
Cobb, Itchy and the driver had to pick him up by the palms of his
hands and soles of his feet and ferry him to the vehicle covered
only by a red flannel sheet. Once inside, they kept Nestor
suspended between the facing seats – his babbling now punctuated by
periodic sobs – until they reached the Cobb cottage on Parliament
Street just above King.

Young Fabian Cobb, who was playing outside,
spotted the carriage a block away, and by the time it reached the
house, Dora and Delia had joined him on the stoop. Once again, as
he had done so many times in the past three years, Marc watched in
awe and admiration as Dora Cobb dealt with a medical emergency.
Nestor was pitched, buttocks-first, onto Dora’s upturned palms,
whereupon she wheeled her two hundred and some pounds about and
waddle-trotted the patient into the cottage, his scrawny limbs
thrashing helplessly under the sheet. Marc thanked the driver, and
followed Cobb into the house. Itchy, much relieved, decided he
needed a drink in town, but promised to come by first thing in the
morning to check on his pal.

Fortunately, Dora had been preparing a bath
for the children, and so two huge pots of water were already
boiling on the stove in the kitchen. Still holding Nestor aloft by
the buttocks, Dora issued a series of commands to Delia, Fabian and
her husband – initiating a well-practised sequence of actions. The
gleaming copper bathtub was pulled out from behind its screen into
the middle of the room. The boiling water was poured into it, and
quickly tempered by buckets of cold water transferred from the well
out back. Delia was ordered to the nearby medicine cupboard, and
returned to the tub with a vial in each hand. Dora was panting now
under the strain of her squirming burden, who sensed that something
more unpleasant than three-dozen wasp-bites was about to happen.
Still, she hung on grimly, and gave her daughter precise
instructions about the dosages she wanted applied to the bath.
Seconds later, the bath-water began to bubble and dance, and a
pungent aroma suffused the room.

“Pull off that rag!” Dora said to her
husband.

“But he’s buck-naked!” Cobb said, glancing at
Delia.

“That little pickle of his wouldn’t make a
nun blush!” Dora said, “so do as you’re told, Mister Cobb.”

Cobb flipped the flannel sheet up and away
from Nestor’s ravaged body, and the gasp from the children was not
induced by his wizened male nakedness. With the dexterity of a
juggler, Dora tossed Nestor into the air and, just as he was about
to splash into the foamy, aromatic mixture, she seized both elbows
as they flew by, steadied his flight-path, and eased him down as
gently as a baby into its bath.

Nestor let out a howl that would have
rivalled King Lear’s over the corpse of Cordelia, and sustained it
for twice as long. While everyone else winced and fell back, Dora
hung onto those two slippery elbows like a pair of forceps. Over
and over, she dunked his body up and down in the medicinal
concoction calculated to cleanse, purge, and heal – never once
letting Nestor’s inflamed sores touch the metal of the tub.

“Help! Help! I’m bein’ drownded!”

“Well,” Cobb said to Marc, “she’s got him
talkin’.”

Just then, at a signal from Dora, Fabian held
up a soft, muslin sheet. Dora hauled Nestor up and out of the bath,
set him on his feet, and wrapped him in the sheet as tenderly as
she would a newborn in its blanket.

“You got the cot set up?” she said to Delia,
who nodded.

“Fabian, you bring them salves in, an’ lots
of dressin’s.”

Nestor was led off to Dora’s sewing-room,
which doubled as a spare bedroom or patient’s recovery-room when
necessary.

“She’s gonna apply some poultices,” Cobb
said. “She’s real good at that.”

“She’s real good at a lot of things,” Marc
said.

Cobb beamed, happy to take reasonable credit
for his wife’s accomplishments.

***

Twenty minutes later, while Marc and Cobb were still
mulling over Marc’s afternoon in court, Dora came back into the
kitchen.

“When can we talk to him?” Cobb said,
realizing, as surely as Marc did, that, given the effectiveness of
Kingsley Thornton’s efforts so far, Nestor might possess
information that could blow the Crown’s case apart.

“The poultices’ll start to work right away.
The swellin’ in his face is already on its way down. I give him a
sleepin’ potion with a good dose of laudanum in it. He oughta sleep
fer a week.”

“Don’t say that, missus! We gotta find out
what he knows about Duggan.”

“He ain’t eaten in days. When he wakes up in
the mornin’, I’ll start spoon-feedin’ him. If you’re lucky, he
could be sensible by the afternoon or evenin’.”

“Damn!”

“You’ve done wonders for him and for us,
Dora,” Marc said. “I’ll stop by after the morning session in court
and check on his progress.”

Dora grinned. “Nice to be appreciated,” she
said and, glancing at Cobb, added, “by a gentleman.”

***

On the stoop, under a cold but clear November sky,
Marc said to Cobb, “Thanks for all this. It could be the break
we’ve been waiting for.”

“But Thornton’ll be finished by noon-hour
tomorrow, won’t he?”

“It’s my defense that matters. And that won’t
begin until Monday.” Marc was about to leave when a new thought
struck him. “Say, you’ve been on the day-patrol this week, haven’t
you? That means you left your post at six tonight to pursue Itchy
and Nestor?”

“That I did, major. I figured that there
business was more important than helpin’ drunks weave their way
home to their
gripe-ful
wives or shooin’ stray mutts outta
alleys.”

“I suppose the day-patrol is a lot more
pleasant than night-duty.”

“Usually is.”

“Why ‘usually’?”

“You ain’t gonna believe this, but Wilkie,
who’s been takin’ my night-shift, caught the burglar we been
huntin’ fer a month or more.”

Marc laughed, though he could see Cobb had
found no humour in the improbability. “The culprit must have
tripped over him, eh?”

“You got that exactly right,” Cobb sighed.
“Wilkie was sound asleep under three blankets near the garden-shed
behind a mansion on York Street when the burglar, luggin’ a
gunnysack full of loot, trips an’ falls on top of him. This is just
enough
dis-turbulence
to jar Wilkie awake. He opens his eyes
an’ sees this fella with a black mask on his face, scrabblin’
around amongst the silver candlesticks an’ snuffoxes. An’ real slow
it begins to dawn on Wilkie that this guy ain’t the butler come
into the garden to polish the family
inheritlooms
at four in
the mornin’. So he gives him a friendly rap on the noggin with his
truncheon.”

“And?”

“And it’s Wilkie that gets to collect the ten
dollars!”

Marc tried not to laugh. “Well, old friend, I
guess virtue still has its rewards.”

SEVENTEEN

The trial of Brodie Langford continued on Friday
morning. To come were the critical witnesses in the Crown’s effort
to construct a story of blackmail, intemperate youth, sudden rage,
cunning improvisation and calculated deception. Cyrus Crenshaw was
first up.

As it turned out, there were no surprises in
his testimony, for which Marc was grateful, but it was damning
enough anyway. Crenshaw testified, in a straight-ahead and
unequivocal manner (much appreciated by Thornton, who let him talk
away as much as he pleased), that he had left the meeting via the
cloakroom about three or four minutes after Fullarton, and observed
two men in the alley. One was comatose on the ground and the other
crouched over him. In the jurors’ minds, this account followed
nicely upon the one Fullarton had provided yesterday, in which two
men had been seen grappling in anger. Now one of them had evidently
knocked out the other, and the victor was checking out the damage.
Like Fullarton, Crenshaw had not seen their faces or recognized
either combatant, and he too had exercised a gentleman’s
prerogative and scuttled off home. Again, Thornton pressed the
business of the attacker’s hatless head and familiar blond hair,
but Crenshaw stuck to his original claim.

Marc began his cross-examination by once more
going through the motions of demonstrating that the precise
time-line being presented by Thornton was not really precise at
all.

“Could you not have left seven or eight
minutes after Mr. Fullarton instead of three or four?”

“Anything’s possible,” Crenshaw shot
back.

Marc now moved to a point mentioned in Cobb’s
notes of his interview with Crenshaw that had been conveniently
overlooked by Thornton.

“You told Constable Cobb when he spoke to you
that you thought the man crouched over Albert Duggan was feeling
about the injured man as if he were concerned that he had hurt him
badly, did you not?”

“Milord, I must object. The question involves
pure speculation on the part of the witness.”

“I am almost quoting from the constable’s
notes, Milord.”

“You may answer yes or no,” the judge said to
Crenshaw.

“I did say somethin’ like that.”

“Thank you. One final question. You cannot
say with any certainty that the man crouched over the victim was
the defendant, Mr. Langford?”

“I could not, sir.”

Marc concluded by requesting permission to
recall Crenshaw. Thornton looked puzzled, but not worried. He did
not even bother to rebut. No member of the jury would believe that
it had not been Brodie, in view of the lad’s own statement. And he
would tidy up the time-line and sequence of events in his
summation. But for Marc the departure times were significant. If
Crenshaw had been only three minutes behind Fullarton, he could not
only have witnessed the punch to the cheek but also heard enough to
realize who Duggan was – and take the decision to finish him off
after Brodie ran.

Tobias Budge drew on his vast experience as
friendly tapster when he took the stand, smiling most cooperatively
and nodding knowingly at the prosecutor’s questions, as if they
were part of the natural order and begged answers that were obvious
and incontrovertible. Thornton led him smoothly through the tale he
had spun for Cobb: he had gone down to the wine-cellar about a
quarter to ten to look for a case of French wine, happened to peer
out the tiny window looking onto the alley, and noticed two pair of
legs involved in a scuffle.

“And there were bodies attached to these
legs?” Thornton said with a nice smile for the jury.

“I assumed there had to be,” Budge said,
“though the window wasn’t high enough fer me to see ‘em.”

Budge happily went on to say that he had
heard loud voices coming from one or both combatants, assumed he
was witnessing yet another drunken punch-up out there, and so went
back to his task.

“And then?”

“Maybe four or five minutes later, no more,
I’m back in that part of the cellar again, and I peek out to see if
the fight’s over.”