Murder on Black Friday (15 page)

“Phil led the way up the service stairs,” Harry said, “so he was the first to find her waiting there in his office. He told the rest of us to go ahead to Zack’s and that he’d meet up with us later, but I confess my curiosity got the better of me. I lingered a while on the fourth floor landing after the other two had left.”

Will sighed and kneaded the back of his neck.

“She got right to the point.” Harry picked a fleck of tobacco off his tongue and flicked it in Nell’s direction. “Said she’d be free to marry now that Wallace was divorcing her, that she’d waited twenty years to be Phil’s wife, and now was their chance, and so on and so forth. Phil told her she was too late, that he had plans to marry Becky Bassett. She became quite worked up at that—apparently she’d no idea it had gone that far. She implored him to reconsider, got down on her knees, literally.”

“You could see them?” Will asked.

Harry nodded. “I’d crept up to the door. She begged and pleaded and declared her undying love. That might have actually generated a bit of pity on Phil’s part, I thought, but then she made a fatal error. She told him he was all she had left in the world, that Wallace was threatening to take the house and leave her without a settlement, because of the adultery. She said she was no good at being alone, that she was too old for it, that Phil owed it to her, after all those years on her back, to make an honest woman of her at last. She should have known better than to take such a tack with a man like Phil Munro—telling him what he owed, what was expected of him. He yanked her to her feet and told her, in so many words, that men in his position didn’t wed aging, round-heeled divorcees.”

Nell winced.

“Lovely fellow, your friend Phil,” Will said.

“She went completely round the bend.” Harry grinned and shook his head. “Came after him with claws bared, shrieking like a wildcat. ‘You heartless bastard. I gave you everything. You should roast in hell...’ All that sort of claptrap. He threw her down on the chaise and pulled her skirts up, with her fighting and screaming all the while. Told her he’d give her one last pop just to calm her down and help her get hold of herself, but then that would be the end of them.”

Will said, “Please tell me you didn’t stand there and watch.”

Harry waved a dismissive hand. “Phil wouldn’t have minded. It was rather exciting at first, with her thrashing and screaming. I was sure someone would come upstairs to see what the ruckus was, but no one did.”

What was it Catherine had said?
If it came to my attention that Philip was entertaining one of his female acquaintances, I merely ignored the fact and went on about my business.

“After a minute or two,” Harry said, “she gave up struggling and just sort of went limp—and then came the tears. Phil didn’t seem to mind, just kept on giving it to her, but that’s when I left for Zack’s.” He flung his cigarette butt to the ground and crushed it with his heel. “There’s nothing like a weeping woman to ruin a bit of harmless fun. It’s like a bucket of cold water every time.”

“Harry,” Will said on a long, weary sigh, “there are times when I wonder how you can bear being you.”

“Uncle Will!” Gracie exclaimed when she opened the lid of the big, iron-banded trunk she’d just unwrapped. “Oh, thank you! Thank you!” Her little friends, gathered around her like a bouquet of spring flowers in their frocks of taffeta and satin, contributed a chorus of oohs and ahhs.

The velvet-lined trunk, which bore the label
M. Jumeau - Paris
, housed six exquisite bisque fashion dolls, each wearing a traditional provincial costume. “They represent different regions in France,” Will explained as the dolls were passed from one enraptured little girl to the next. “That one with the lace bonnet and the blue neckerchief is from Poitou. The one you’re holding, Gracie, with the blue skirt, is from Brittany. The others are from Provence, Alsace, Pyrenees, and Bourgogne.”

The trunk yielded up a vast collection of accessories, as well—hats, fans, shoes, stockings, gloves, brushes, combs, jewelry, baskets, purses, mirrors, even pets, one for each doll; two dogs, two cats, a duck, and a lamb.

“Look!” said one of the girls as she turned the head of the Burgundian doll to the side. “It moves!”

This innovation inspired a new flurry of excitement. The girlish squeals put Nell in mind of a skyful of bats. Nurse Parrish awoke with a start from her armchair doze in the corner, looked around blearily, and went back to sleep.

“They’re wonderful! Oh, Uncle Will, I love them. I love
you.
” Gracie opened her arms to Will, who knelt to return the embrace.

“I love you, too,
ma petite
.” Will kissed his daughter’s cheek and pulled her close, burying his face in her hair.

Nell felt a fist close around her heart, squeezing, squeezing... She noticed Viola, watching Will and Gracie from her Merlin chair in the doorway of the festively decorated front parlor. The older woman looked up and met Nell’s gaze. Even from across the room, Nell could see her eyes glimmering wetly in the sunlight sweeping in through the windows.

Viola reached into her sleeve for her handkerchief, but Max Thurston, standing behind her with his hands on the grips of her chair, swiftly produced his own and shook it out for her. The elderly playwright had met the Hewitt matriarch only about an hour ago, when he arrived for Gracie’s birthday tea with a picnic hamper containing a beribboned poodle pup for Gracie and a flagon of Martinez cocktails for himself, but they seemed to have taken to each other with remarkable speed. Not that surprising, really, when Nell thought about it. Max and Viola were both iconoclasts in their own way, both outsiders stuck, for better or for worse, in the gilded cage of Boston aristocracy. They would have much in common, once one scratched the surface—and they were both, despite their upper-crust veneers, not above a bit of scratching now and then.

Max bent to Viola and whispered something. Nell read his lips: “Are you quite all right, my dear?” Only Max could get away with calling a lady he’d just met—one of the most venerable matrons in Boston, no less—“my dear.”

Viola returned her gaze to her son and granddaughter for a long moment, then nodded to Max and said something Nell couldn’t make out. He backed her chair out of the doorway and wheeled her down the hall.

Nell felt a hand on her arm and turned to find Will standing next to her. “Meet me in the garden?” he asked.

“I’ve got to help serve the cake and mulled wine,” she said, “and then I’ll be out.”

*   *   *

She found him stretched out in the afternoon sun on the little stone bench that was the focal point of Viola’s frowsily charming back garden. Dressed as he was, in a fine black frock coat, eyes closed, fingers laced on his stomach, he might have resembled a corpse laid out for viewing were it not for his healthy color. He’d been pallid when she first met him, and thinner, his eyes cast in shadow beneath that deep brow, a rapacious thrust to his jaw. Those sharp-carved features looked not so much predatory nowadays as patrician. Will Hewitt had the kind of face one saw on ancient Roman coins.

“Mulled wine for five-year-olds?” he murmured with his eyes still closed.

“It’s more sugar water than anything else,” Nell said as she strolled toward him. “There’s just a pint of port in that entire punchbowl.”

Opening his eyes, he said, “Just enough booze to make the wee misses feel chic and daring. The lure of sin starts young.”

Swinging up to a sitting position, he patted the bench next to him. Nell sat, brushing the dust of the bench off the back of Will’s coat. He smiled at her, and it struck her suddenly that this sort of offhand tidying was the type of thing a wife might do for a husband. She drew back, mildly embarrassed.

“No, please.” Turning to face away from her, Will said over his shoulder, “I’d hate to walk about looking like a dustman and not know it.”

She continued, all too aware, as she smoothed her hands over his shoulders and down his arms, of his lean, solid body through the velvety wool.

Their silence only made her more self-conscious, so she said, “I saw Eileen Tierney in church this morning. The Bassetts’ maid?”

He nodded. “The girl with the clubfoot. Did you speak to her?”

“She spoke to
me,
” Nell said, pulling his coat taut with one hand as she swept it off with the other. “She came up to me as I was waiting for confession before mass. She’d just made confession herself, and she asked Father Gannon what he thought about the idea of surgery to repair her clubfoot. He said God helps those who help themselves, and that he knew and trusted me, and if I thought it was a good idea, it probably was. There.” She gave his back one final, awkwardly chummy swat. “Not a speck left.”

He smiled at her again as he turned to face her. “It’s a novel thing to be tended to. Quite pleasant, actually. Thank you.”

It
would
be a novel thing, Nell realized, for a man who’d been spent most of his youth among uncaring relatives and schoolmasters, and his adult years fending for himself in the War, in Andersonville, and then in a long, smoky succession of gaming hells and opium dens.

“Your Father Gannon sounds like a good man,” Will said.

“He is.” It pleased Nell that the irreligious Will should make such an observation. “Eileen’s only qualms at this point have to do with... Well, she’s very young, and very innocent, and...”

“And she doesn’t like the idea of strange men touching her,” Will said.

“She doesn’t even want to be alone in a room with a man, even a doctor. She made me promise to be there when she met with you.”

“Did you set a date?”

“Tuesday morning at nine o’clock. I hope that’s all right, because she gets half a day off on Tuesdays, so long as she’s finished all her chores the night before, and nothing else all week. Well, except for a couple of hours on Sunday mornings, for mass.”

“Tuesday at nine is fine. And perhaps you wouldn’t mind accompanying me on a visit to Sophie Wallace tomorrow morning. There are a few things I’d like to ask her, as you can imagine, and your perspective, as always, would be invaluable.”

With a little shrug, Nell said, “I’ve got nothing but time on my hands this week, seeing as Gracie won’t be here.”

“I’d like to return Mr. Bassett’s papers to his daughters, as well,” Will said.

“Did you get a chance to look them over yesterday?” she asked.

He nodded as he lifted his bad leg over the good. “I gave the letters a fairly thorough read. As you know, Munro advised Bassett to buy gold over the summer, even if he had to take out a loan to do it. Bassett didn’t want to go into debt. He’d never owed money, and he didn’t want to start. He wanted to cash in his life insurance, but Munro told him he couldn’t, because the payments had lapsed. So that’s why, on Munro’s advice but much against his better judgment, he ended up borrowing fifty thousand against the house and signing the letter of attorney.”

“The life insurance had lapsed?” Nell asked. “It’s worthless?”

With a grin, Will said, “Not being quite as prone to galloping assumptions as a certain little Irish governess I could name, I decided to look up an old acquaintance of mine, a surgeon named Bill Morland. He used to edit the
Boston Medical and Surgical Journal
back before the war, and he wrote quite an excellent book on diseases of the urinary organs. Now, as it happens, he’s the chief medical examiner for New England Mutual. I paid a call on him yesterday and offered to buy him supper at Tuttle’s in exchange for a bit of brain-picking on the subject of life insurance.”

“And...?”

“And it seems the Commonwealth of Massachusetts passed a law eight years ago to the effect that when someone stops paying his premiums, the policy simply converts to term for a fixed number of years.”

“Converts to term?” Nell said. “I’m afraid you’ve reached the limit of what I know about life insurance.”

“Simply put, your beneficiaries can still collect the death benefit if you die—up until the end of the term—but you can’t cash in the policy or do anything else with it. I showed Bill the five policies Bassett held, and he told me the first one was due to expire two months from now, in November, and the rest before the end of the year.”

“So, Becky and Miriam
will
get the insurance money, but if their father had died just a few months later...”

Will raised his hands, palms up.

“Do they get it all,” she asked, “or will some of it have to go to the Tenth National Bank to pay off Bassett’s fifty thousand dollar loan?”

“I asked Bill that, too. He said there’s some other law that makes the proceeds exempt from the claims of creditors.”

“How fortunate for Becky and Miriam. Do you suppose they’ve known about this windfall that’s awaiting them?”

“More to the point, have they known they wouldn’t get a cent if Papa survived into next year? That might be worth finding out, I think. I also wouldn’t mind getting my hands on a copy of the
Canterbury Tales
and figuring out this business about Dame Prudence’s proverb.”

“Dame Prudence from the
Tale of Melibee
?” Max Thurston emerged through the back door with a rosy Martinez cocktail in a brandy snifter. He cut a striking figure, despite his advanced years, with his neatly trimmed goatee and dapper attire. Like the rest of Boston’s elite classes, he affected a high-toned British accent, although his was perhaps more pronounced than most.