Murder in a mill town (21 page)

He sat—or rather, lounged—behind Cook’s desk, a glass and a bottle of whiskey in front of him, staring in disgust at Nell. Nell stared back, startled to find his nose heavily bandaged and an eye blackened. Two middle-aged men—immediately recognizable as constables despite their civilian sack suits—occupied the two chairs facing the desk, while Cook himself sat perched on the edge of a big filing chest, a dainty tea cup cradled in his massive bear’s paw of a hand.

Big Irishman...giant head.
That was Colin Cook.

All the men except Harry rose to their feet when Nell joined them; Harry just glared and puffed on his cigar.

Detective Cook bowed to her. “Miss Sweeney,” he said in his faded but dense-chested brogue. “Always a pleasure. And Dr. Hewitt... Let’s see, last time I saw you, you were in a holding cell, covered in blood and filth.”

“I’ve had a change of clothes since then.”

“They suit you.”

“Christ, Will.” Harry gestured with his cigar toward Nell. “Did you have to bring along that goddamn—“

“You’ll watch your mouth in front of the lady,” warned Cook, “or I’ll give you a shiner to match the one you got. I don’t care what your name is.”

Nell expected Will to ask Cook if his men were responsible for Harry’s injuries. He didn’t, merely tossed the two packs of bills on the desk in front of his brother.

Harry picked them up and handed one to each of the Salem cops without even looking at them. Bracing himself to rise, he said, “I take it I’m free to go?”

They told him they were done with him for now, thanked Detective Cook for the cooperation of the Boston Police, and took their leave. Harry crushed out his cigar and stood. As he was reaching for his homburg and scarf on the coat tree in the corner, Will said quietly, “I’d like a word with you before you go.”

“Look...” Harry lowered his voice to a whisper. “I’ll pay you back as soon as the cards start falling my—“

“It’s not about the money.” Glancing toward Nell and Cook, Will said, “I wonder if you’d mind...?”

“Not at all.” Cook escorted Nell out into the central, high-ceilinged clerical area and shut the door, the upper half of which was glass hung with open blinds, like the door of Harry’s office at the mill; she couldn’t hear the two men inside the office, but she could see them. Harry sat down and poured himself another whiskey with a here-we-go-again expression. He offered some to Will, who shook his head. Will said something; his brother smirked.

“He’s a bad egg, that one,” Cook said.

“What happened to his face?” Nell asked.

“I know what you’re thinking, but I’ll have you to know he came to us that way. Even those Salem yokels aren’t dumb enough to start whalin’ away on a Hewitt. What he told us was, he had a little too much absinthe and took a spill.”

“Did he, now.”

“That’s a lot of green that just changed hands there,” Cook said. “I wouldn’t have expected a right-thinking, churchgoing lass like yourself to be a party to such shenanigans.”

“I’m more of a grudging witness than a party.”

Will was leaning over his brother, both arms braced on the desk, speaking intently, while Harry stared straight ahead, his whiskey untouched.

“Then we’re in the same boat, me and you,” Cook said. “I’m supposed to be showin’ them jackanapes the ropes, on account of neither one of them’s ever investigated a murder before. Only they don’t want my advice, they just want an office where they can conduct such business as you and me just bore witness to in there.”

Nell said, “Please, Detective, don’t try to pretend that you’re above taking graft. I know better, remember?”

Cook shrugged, swallowed the last of his tea. “And what would you do, Miss Sweeney, if they paid you peanuts, but there’s folks throwin’ money at you from all angles, and you’ve got a sweet little wife who deserves to live someplace other than a Fort Hill hovel and cook up something a little better than dried peas and potatoes once in a while? Yeah, there’s a few stray shinplasters end up in my pockets now and then, but, see, there’s so much of it here in Boston that I can turn it down when I’ve a mind to. Them boys from Salem, they’ve
never
had nobody offer ‘em the kind of cabbage Harry Hewitt’s offerin’, and they ain’t about to say nay to it.”

“You turn it down sometimes?” she asked skeptically.

“Some of these miscreants—“ he glanced through the door at Harry “—they’re just begging to get what’s coming to ‘em.” He shook his head. “Two young folks like that, layin’ out there dead for God knows how long, the girl strangled and...who knows what else. But...” He lifted his thick shoulders. “It’s not my case. Not even my jurisdiction.”

He swallowed the last of his tea and gestured with the empty cup. “Would you care for some? I drink gallons every night. Only thing that keeps me going till my shift’s over.”

“No, thanks—I just had two cups of coffee. Is this your regular shift?”

He nodded as he refilled his cup from a pot sitting on top of a little stove. “Four to midnight, later if there’s anything afoot. Many’s the shift I’ve eaten breakfast at my desk. Low man on the totem pole, don’t you know, and a mick to boot, so I’ll probably be the night man till the Second Coming. The weekend man, too, ‘cause they’ve got me workin’ Saturdays and Sundays.”

“You must get days off, though.”

“Mondays and Tuesdays, but it’s not the same.”

The office door slammed open. Harry stalked out without a word, his battered face darkly flushed, his expression that of a surly adolescent who’s been forced to sit through a dressing-down.

Will stood in the doorway rubbing the back of his neck as he watched his brother leave. “Were you there the whole time they were questioning my brother?” he asked Cook.

The detective nodded. “Strictly as an observer. Nobody was much interested in what I had to say.”

“Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

“Not at all.” Cook invited them back into his office and gestured them into the chairs facing his desk. “Hitchcock!” he called.

A young uniformed cop appeared at the door. “Detective?”

Cook held out the whiskey bottle and glass. “Take these back to where you got ‘em. Can’t stand the smell of the stuff, not since I gave it up. And close the door on your way out, would you?” When they were alone, he asked Will, “What is it you want to know, then?”

“Did they actually interrogate him, or was it a complete farce?”

“Well, they started out pretty serious—had to put the fear of God in him, don’t you know—but after about five minutes of that, your brother started making offers. Once they agreed on a price, they treated him like the Prince of Wales.”

“Did they ask him about the scarf?”

“First thing. He told ‘em it went missing from his office recently—he’s not sure when, ‘cause he didn’t notice it right away. Said he assumed Bridie Sullivan stole it, on account of she’d always admired it.”

“Pretty convenient,” Nell said.

“They asked him about his comings and goings over the past week or so,” Cook said. “Not that it matters much, seeing as how nobody knows when those two were done in. That was about it, I guess. Not much in the way of an interrogation.”

Nell asked, “Are they allowed to just stop investigating a case without solving it?”

“They’re calling it a murder-suicide,” Cook said. “The official story’s gonna be that Virgil Hines strangled her out of jealousy over Harry Hewitt, then realized what he done and drowned himself.”

“Drowned himself,” Will said.

“In a foot of water?”
Nell asked.

Cook shrugged. “I seen a drunk drown in a rain puddle.”

“Because he passed out,” Nell said. “A man can’t commit suicide by lying facedown in a shallow stream.”

“Won’t there be a coroner’s inquest?” Will asked.

“Nah. Why would they want the coroner involved, and post-mortems, and folks asking all kinds of prickly questions?”

“It isn’t routine in suspicious cases?” Nell asked.

“It is in Boston,” Cook said. “And probably in Salem, too, unless the right palms are greased. All’s they have to say is that it’s an open and shut case and autopsies would just prove what they already know. Saves the city of Salem the cost of hiring a surgeon to cut those two open.”

Will scrubbed his hands over his face, muttering something under his breath.

Detective Cook sat back and folded his arms, his chair squealing rustily as it swiveled back and forth. “You’re a curious family, you Hewitts. First you get pinched for murder, and your old man moves heaven and earth to make sure you swing. Now it’s your brother that’s facing a murder charge—
two
murder charges—and he buys his way out of that mess, with your help, mind you, only to have you boo-hoo’in ‘cause he’s getting off.

“Dr. Hewitt doesn’t think his brother did it,” Nell said. “He thinks Harry just paid off those cops to avoid trouble with his father, and that an autopsy might help to prove that it wasn’t him.”

“How so?” Cook asked.

Will said, “The scarf around Bridie’s neck was knotted rather than twisted, and it didn’t leave much of a ligature mark. Also, if you were of a mind to murder somebody, would you do it with a weapon that was undeniably yours, and leave it around the victim’s throat for the police to find? It’s too obvious, absurdly so.”

“You think he was set up?” Cook asked.

“I think it’s a possibility, and if that’s the case, I want to clear my brother’s name for real.”

And, of course, he wanted to know in his heart that Harry wasn’t guilty of such a heinous crime—not just for his sake and Harry’s, but perhaps his mother’s as well—but William Hewitt was hardly the type to so casually bare his soul.

“I wouldn’t draw too many conclusions about that scarf being left behind,” Cook said. “You’d be surprised, the boneheaded things some criminals do, especially the amateurs—and especially when they’re under the influence. Your brother’s absinthe habit is no secret in this town, Dr. Hewitt. As for the ligature, they don’t always leave obvious external marks.”

“I know,” Will said, “but an autopsy would show signs of strangulation. Or it might reveal how she was really killed.”

“What if it helps to point the finger at your brother?” Cook asked. “What then?”

“I suppose I’ll have to address that problem when it arises—but I don’t think it will.”

Cook scratched his great jutting boulder of a chin. “Do you share Dr. Hewitt’s opinions on the matter, Miss Sweeney?”

“I’m as eager as he is to uncover the truth,” she said, diplomatically omitting the fact that her working theory—Harry strangling Bridie and killing Virgil when he tried to intervene—wasn’t quite the same as Will’s.

Detective Cook twirled back and forth for a minute as he sipped his tea. “Like I said, those Salem cops nixed the idea of autopsies when they took that money from your brother. But before they knew how it was gonna play out, they went to the trouble of asking the families to sign letters of consent for post-mortems.”

Will sat up straighter in his chair. “Did they sign them?”

“Virgil Hines’s folks did—anything to clear their son of the murder-suicide stigma, even posthumously. But the Fallons—the dead girl’s folks?—they were another story. Didn’t want their daughter’s body cut up just to prove that Hines was the no-good, vicious brute they always thought he was.” 

“Just hypothetically,” Will began, “what if the families insisted on autopsies? What if they both signed the consent letters and provided their own surgeon?”

Cook sipped his tea thoughtfully. “Surgeons don’t come cheap.”

Will said, “What if one volunteered his services? What would he have to do to get access to the bodies?”

Nell turned to look at Will.

Detective Cook smiled slowly. “They’re at a private mortuary in Salem. You’d—the surgeon—he’d have to bring the letters of consent, and then they’d let him at it, I suppose.”

“These letters,” Nell said. “How are they worded?”

“You mean could you write them up yourselves?” Cook shook his head. “Sorry. They’ve got to be issued by the City of Salem, in the right clerk’s handwriting, with the city seal on the bottom. And signed by the next of kin, of course. No mortuary employee would settle for anything else.”

Will slumped back in his chair, cursing under his breath.

“And the thing is,” Cook said, “when those Salem cops worked their deal with your brother, they threw out them letters, figuring they wouldn’t need them anymore.” He raised his teacup to his mouth and drained it in a leisurely but thorough manner.

Nell and Will both looked toward the wastepaper basket next to the detective’s desk, a few inches from Will’s feet.

“Course, it’d be worth my job to let such documents fall into the hands of mere civilians—and I like my job. Oh, lookit this.” Cook tilted his cup to show them its empty interior. “Time for another refill. Can I bring some back for either of you?” he asked as he rose and circled his desk.

“Er, no,” Will answered. “We’ve got to be on our way fairly soon.”

“I’ll just be a minute, then.” Cook paused a moment to shut the blinds on his door before leaving.

The moment the door clicked shut, Will dragged the wastebasket toward him and started rummaging through it. “Here, open these.” He dropped a handful of crumpled papers in Nell’s lap and emptied the rest onto his own. They worked swiftly, flattening out paper after paper until at last Nell saw the glimmer of a gold seal imprinted with the words SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS. “Will—I think this is it.”