Bloody Relations

NINE

Cobb had contacted the last of his snitches by eleven o’clock and then stopped for refreshment at the Cock and Bull. The tapster there mentioned that Nestor Peck would not likely be available for a day or two as he had been spotted staggering in last night with a bump on his noggin “the size of his brain.”

“That tiny, eh?” Cobb replied, and ordered another flagon. With both his thirst and his curiosity sated, he set out for Irishtown and some real investigating.

While too polite to say so, he felt deep down that Marc Edwards was out of his depth in a place like Irishtown. The people there were con artists and natural liars: without such finely tuned capacities they would not survive a month. A part of Cobb admired them, especially the ones who were supporting a family by eking out a livelihood in the only ways left to them by the ruling clique, the grasping merchants, the hypocritical church, and the customary cruelties of fate. But someone at Madame Renée’s had stepped over the line. A young woman had been brutally murdered with “all her sins upon her head.” And a very important person had been implicated.

What Cobb was thinking as he picked his way along the hawthorn path towards the shanties of Irishtown was that he had to catch Mrs. Burgess or one of the girls in a lie or a patent contradiction. Once one lie was exposed, others would soon fly up into the light. But so far the women’s story tallied with everything else they had learned about the events of Monday night. Five minutes later, with his generous nose twitching at the cumulative stenches along the way, he reached Madame Renée’s.

The shutters were closed over the windows. Cobb padded all the way around the house. It was sealed up like Pharaoh’s tomb. Either the women were out or still abed. Well, either suited his purpose. Glancing several times up and down the seemingly deserted pathway that served as a thoroughfare, he drew out of his jacket pocket a cumbersome key. It was a skeleton key that Sarge had issued to him and the other three constables when the force was inaugurated in 1835. What he was expected to do with it he was never quite sure. This would be its maiden run. He moved adroitly to the rear of the house once more but was brought up short when he encountered a pair of young ruffians wrestling in the dirt beside the scruffy bush in front of the escape hatch.

“Get outta here, you scamps, before I kick yer arses inta yer teeth!” he hissed, hesitant to deploy his fearsome stentorian tones.

The boys stopped instantly, untangled their limbs slowly, sat back on their haunches, and stared at the intruder as if he were some freak of nature materialized out of the dust, like Adam.

“That yer real nose, buster?”

“Does it glow in the dark?”

“Let’s hear ya honk it!”

Cobb glowered and put one hand on the butt of his truncheon. Laughing in mock fright, the boys scampered off.

Cobb had to stand perfectly still for a full five minutes to determine whether the ruckus the boys had raised would disturb the women inside or attract attention from neighbouring abodes. But all was quiet, so he proceeded to squat down before the hatch. He eased the skeleton key silently into the opening of the lock. Then infinitely slowly he turned it to the left. There was a sharp click. He held his breath. Then he pushed the hatch inward about an inch. Satisfied, he closed and relocked it.

It was just as he had thought. This lock was simple enough to be opened by a run-of-the-mill skeleton key. And that meant that almost anyone in Irishtown who knew about the hatch (who wouldn’t? was an easier question) and possessed such a key (anyone who cared to buy or steal one) would have access to the inner sanctum of Madame Renée’s. And that meant finding someone with both a key and a grudge.

Cobb had already worked out the answer to the latter part of the equation: Madame Charlotte, the competition. To Cobb it seemed inconceivable that two such houses of prostitution, whatever their particular intentions and clientele, would not be rivals. From that premise it was logical that if Madame Charlotte wished to do harm to Madame Renée’s business, all she had to do was hire the nearest hungry thug, supply him with a key, and send him on his way. She may even have suborned Badger himself, who already had a key. Whatever the details-and Cobb intended to get to them-the crime was connected to rivalries and animosities entirely within the boundaries of Irishtown. Whistling softly, he walked a hundred yards up the road to the rambling clapboard house of Madame Charlotte. It too was shuttered and barred. But this time Cobb took out his truncheon and rapped smartly on the paint-peeled door.

Soon after, Cobb sat in the parlour of the brothel on a stiff chair watching the two women across from him, both seated on a battered settee embroidered with roses and a number of random, greasy petals whose provenance Cobb cared not to reflect upon. The contrast between this room and its counterpart at Madame Renée’s was striking. Here, not a stick of furniture or wall surface had escaped being stained, gouged, or otherwise abused. Putrid pools of spilled wine-neat or regurgitated-festered here and there on the softwood floor, whose boards had not been swept or scrubbed since leaving the mill. Cobb couldn’t decide which was worse: the stink or the frantic perfumes used to subdue it. Undaunted, he soldiered on.

“I’m here to question you concernin’ an incident at Madame Renée’s on Monday evenin’,” he said, trying for the exact pitch between authoritative and invitational that the Major used in these situations.

“That slut!”

This assessment was offered by Marybelle, the only one of the inmates who was not “indisposed,” according to Madame Charlotte. Marybelle was perched on the edge of the settee, clad only in a floppy robe and a jangle of hair curlers that looked as if they were trying to escape. She was of indeterminate age but undoubtedly well travelled. She had made a half-hearted attempt to remove the caked powder, waxy lip rouge, and brow-black from her evening face, but had managed only to smear them together. With her dark pop-eyes and sagging chin, she reminded Cobb of a circus clown who’d put his makeup on without benefit of a mirror. Her voice scraped at the air like a rusted handsaw.

“Ya mean the murder, don’t ya?” Madame Charlotte demanded, staring at Cobb with bold, hardened eyes. Unlike her “girl,” Charlotte was dressed for the day or night in a brash, flouncy frock sporting bluebirds and some sort of exotic fruit and cut low enough to display her well-upholstered breastworks. Her considerable makeup had been applied with a trowel and worked to perfection: vermilion lips, rouged cheeks, kohl-sculpted eyelids and brows, topped by a powdered wig that one of Shakespeare’s boy-women might have blushed to wear.

“So you’ve heard what happened?” Cobb said.

“Nothin’s kept secret in Irishtown for more’n ten minutes!” Marybelle rasped.

“I was speakin’ to Madame Charlotte.”

Madame Charlotte frowned. “The name is Char-lotte,” she said with proud emphasis on the ultimate syllable. “And, yeah, we saw the body bein’ carted off yesterday mornin’.”

“Poor Sarah got herself topped, in her own bed!” There was more mockery in Marybelle’s voice than sorrow.

“By some nob, we hear,” Charlotte said. “Which means nothin’ll be done about it, so why’re you here disrupturin’ an honest woman and her business? It don’t look good to have the law lurkin’ about in daylight.”

“P’raps he’s come fer a good time,” Marybelle cackled.

This time it was Charlotte who laughed.

“If you know what’s good fer you, Madam Char-a-lot, you’ll answer my questions and answer them truthful, or I’ll bring the sheriff down here with a dozen torches to rid the town of-”

“All right, all right, there’s no need to get testy. We ain’t got nothin’ to hide, have we, Marybelle?”

“I ain’t ever been accused of hidin’ much,” Marybelle giggled grotesquely, and to demonstrate her point she let the robe drift open to expose the tops and inner curves of her breasts.

“Someone broke into Madame Renée’s about one-thirty Tuesday mornin’ and stabbed Sarah McConkey to death,” Cobb said.

“They couldn’t’ve got through them oak doors,” Charlotte said. “Norah seals that place up tighter’n a heifer’s cunt.”

“I don’t believe the intruder used either door,” Cobb said carefully.

“Ya mean the little hatch?” Marybelle blurted, and got a warning glance from her mistress.

“Ah, so you know about that, do ya?” Cobb said, pleased with his probing thus far.

“Everybody that lives within three hundred yards of the place knows about the booby-hatch,” Charlotte said levelly. “Just ask.”

“But you’d need a key to get in, wouldn’t you?” Cobb said quickly.

“The way I hear it,” Charlotte said just as quickly, “that little hatch was fer gettin’ out, not in.”

“Maybe so, but we think it was used by the killer.”

“So what’s this got to do with us anyways? I was here Monday night and Tuesday mornin’ pullin’ sailors offa my girls when their time was up. You figure I sneaked out and headed down to Madam Pompadour’s?”

“I’m not accusin’ you of anythin’, madam.”

“If I’d’ve kilt anybody down there it would’ve been the fat hooer who runs the place.”

Cobb pounced. “So you two aren’t friendly?”

“You could say that.”

“You believe her business is hurtin’ yer own?”

This remark produced prodigious mirth in both women, which triggered much jiggling of exposed and under-rigged flesh. Cobb felt himself redden.

“I’m not fond of Norah Burgess, but I ain’t jealous. Here, we cater to real, honest-to-goodness men: sailors and lumberjacks and teamsters who don’t powder their hair or perfume their pricks.”

“And Madame Renée takes care of the other kind?”

“Poofs and nobs and old fellas who can’t get it up but enjoy watchin’.” Charlotte spat out the next words: “The perversions that go on down there’d make Marybelle blush, and she ain’t done that since the midwife whacked her backside.”

“So you’re sayin’ you’d have no reason to hire some tough or bruiser to break in down there and stir up trouble-maybe damage or beat up the star performer?”

Charlotte guffawed so gustily her dentures popped halfway out of her mouth. “Sarah McConkey a star performer? That little slut wasn’t here six weeks before she got herself knocked up! She didn’t know one hole from another!”

As the women howled at this witticism, Cobb’s puzzlement deepened. Without forethought he asked, “Sarah McConkey worked here?”

“ ’Course she did. Everybody in Irishtown knows that.”

“ ’Least them that poked her,” Marybelle added. “Couldn’t’ve been more’n a hundred, could it, Char?”

But the look on Cobb’s face immediately dampened their mirth and Charlotte required no prompting. She told the tale of Sarah McConkey straight out. According to her, Sarah had been spotted by one of the madam’s scouts, alone and desperate on Lot Street, in late September. When brought to the brothel to be fed and coddled (“I spoil my girls rotten!”) Sarah informed Charlotte that she had left her home in Streetsville earlier in the month because her father had insisted she marry a religious zealot, who happened incidentally to be old and ugly. (“Them religious buggers is the randiest,” Marybelle added here, “they get so pent up!”) Sarah then found work as a housemaid in the home of some city preacher but, she claimed, he made advances and his wife kicked her out bag and baggage, accusing her of being a harlot. Distraught and friendless, she ended up at Madam Charlotte’s. So grateful was Sarah that after a week of recuperation she consented to earn her daily bread as her sisters in the house did.

However, she was only a “working girl” for a month or so, for the “silly fool” got herself pregnant. When Madame was considerate enough to arrange for the routine (“but ruinously expensive!”) abortion, Sarah balked, for which transgression she was once again tossed out on her ear. This time she was undeniably a harlot.

“We heard from the grapevine that she went back home, but her father closed the door in her face and disowned her. She was on her way back here, we was told, when one of that bitch Burgess’s scouts picked her up and took her to Renée’s. They pampered her there fer the whole winter, till she popped the poor dead babe a few weeks ago.”

Charlotte sat back, hitched up her breasts, and said scornfully, “So there’s yer star attraction at Madam Snooty’s cunny-crib. A common tart!”

Ideas were bouncing around Cobb’s head with alarming speed. Sarah McConkey had worked in this hellhole for over a month before she was dismissed and ended up a few days later at Madame Renée’s. Everyone in Irishtown would have been aware of her stint at Madame Charlotte’s. Why, then, had Mrs. Burgess and all three of her girls lied to him and Marc? They had made it sound as if Sarah had come straight to them from her job in the city. Well, Cobb would soon find out why. And where there was one lie, surely there were others.

“But I still don’t see what any of this has got to do with us,” Charlotte said.

“Nothin’, likely, but you been helpful just the same.” Cobb suddenly realized that Sarah may not have gone home when she left here. She may have gone straight to Mrs. Burgess. Which meant what? That the enmity between the two women may have had something to do with business after all. Sarah had been young and pretty, perhaps a rare find for Charlotte, with potential for expanding her horizons and hopes, only to have them dashed when Sarah was lured away to the competition. Maybe he should ride out to Streetsville and find out. Cobb’s heart began to pound and the tip of his nose throbbed: this detection game was exhilarating, and he was getting good at it.

“Ya sure ya don’t wanta stay a bit and divulge yerself?” Marybelle was saying. She let her legs sag apart. “That’s a mighty truncheon ya got stickin’ up outta yer belt.”

Cobb looked furiously away and jumped up.

“Won’t ya stay fer a cup o’ tea?” Madame Charlotte inquired sweetly, as if she were superintending an at-home.

“And a bit o’ crumpet?”

His proboscis aflame, Cobb stumbled to the door, regained his balance and some of his dignity, and was almost outside when he thought of a critical question. With his entire face now throbbing like a boil, he turned around and said sharply, “What was the name of the preacher Sarah worked for?”

Charlotte looked at Marybelle for confirmation. “Some fire-and-brimstone howler with a crazy name-Finley. . Findlay. . somethin’ like that.”

“Finney?” Cobb prompted, as his heart skipped a beat.

“Yeah, that’s it. The Reverend Temperance Finney.”

Marybelle howled with intemperate laughter.

Was it possible that a respectable Methodist minister had got himself entangled with his housemaid? And if so, had he decided to disentangle himself for good? Could he be the direct connection between the whist players and Madame Renée’s? This was all too much for Cobb. He began to wish the Major were here. Still, he had caught Mrs. Burgess in a lie. That was a tangible fact-unless of course Charlotte was lying. My God, this investigating game was taxing on the brain!

Cobb just managed to sidestep a heap of fresh, festering garbage, but in doing so he bumped into one of the local urchins.

“Watch where you’re goin’, fatso!”

Cobb had the miscreant by the scruff and dangling helplessly before he could blink twice. “Why you little fart, for tuppence I’d wring yer neck and toss ya to the rats.”

“Lemme go!”

Cobb dropped the lad, a sturdy fellow of thirteen or fourteen, but kept a grip on his tattered jersey. “Say, ain’t you Peter, one of them trackers?”

“Donald,” the boy whined. “And I ain’t done nothin’!”

“I doubt that, but what I want you to tell me is this: do you work fer both the madams?”

“What’s in it fer me?” Donald said, avarice nudging out fear.

“A broken arse if ya don’t answer and a penny if ya do.”

Donald pretended to mull the offer over before saying, “I useta work fer them both, but Miz Burgess pays me better not to.”

“Did you bring sailors to Sarah when she worked fer Madame Charlotte?” Cobb was secretly pleased with this bit of misdirection.

“ ’Course I did. But that was a whiles back.”

“Last fall perhaps?”

“Before the snow come.”

“Here’s yer penny, don’t spend it-”

But Donald didn’t tarry long enough to hear Cobb’s fatherly advice.

Well, well, Cobb thought. So here was a tangible fact indeed. Sarah McConkey had worked for Charlotte before moving to fancier quarters. If he could confront Mrs. Burgess and her girls with their dishonesty, who knew what else might then spill out?

As he was plotting an approach to such a confrontation-a peremptory pounding on the scarlet door or a discreet rap-he noticed out of the corner of his eye something pink and fluttery behind Madame Renée’s place. He marched around behind the house and almost hanged himself on a clothesline.

“Jesus! Where’d this come from?” he cried, pulling something sheer and silky and illicit from his face.

“Don’t throw them knickers on the ground! I just washed them!”

Mrs. Burgess stood a few feet away beside a basket of freshly laundered underclothes so multicoloured and exotic that Cobb could not have put a name to one of them. A clothesline had been strung up from a nail on the wall to a pole that had been inserted into the ground since Cobb’s visit half an hour ago.

“Put them in this!” she commanded, pointing to the basket.

The slithery underpants stuck to Cobb’s fingers like taffy, but he finally shook them free and watched them float onto their companion frillies.

This was not how Cobb had planned the confrontation.

“Can’t you people leave us alone,” Mrs. Burgess said. “We need time to mourn little Sarah and prepare for her funeral tomorrow.”

From inside the house came the sounds of furious scrubbing: the girls trying to expunge bloodstains, perhaps?

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Cobb mumbled, but it was not clear whether he was referring to the abused panties or his thoughtless entrance. “Fer yer loss,” he added, noting the dark patches under her swollen eyes. She had aged ten years in a day.

“Thank you.” For a moment she seemed to have forgotten her laundry and just stood still, waiting for Cobb to say something or merely drift away.

“I need to ask you one more important question, ma’am. And I’m sorry but it can’t really wait.”

Mrs. Burgess braced herself, but she seemed more resigned than anxious.

“Why did you and yer girls not tell us that Sarah McConkey worked fer Madame Charlotte before comin’ to your place?” The question was as direct and blunt as Cobb could make it in these circumstances and ought to have rocked even a tough old bird like Madame Renée back on her heels.

“Oh, that,” she said, unperturbed. “I didn’t see how it could’ve mattered. I told you when and how Sarah come to us. She was found wandering and delirious on Lot Street, pregnant and alone. We took her in. And all this happened last fall.”

Cobb blinked and tried to regain the high ground. “But we asked you to tell us all about Sarah so we could decide what facts were important and what facts weren’t. You and yer girls knew she’d lived and worked at Charlotte’s place. You deliberately chose not to tell us. I wanta know why.”

“Then I’ll tell you, Constable, and then you can leave me to my laundry.” She looked him boldly in the eye. “There were two reasons. First, when Sarah lost her baby and begged to join the business, we didn’t want our gentlemen callers to know that she’d spent a frightful and torturous month in Charlotte’s sinkhole. Sarah was young and free from disease and very attractive to our kind of visitor.”

Cobb’s distaste for such detail must have shown on his face, for Mrs. Burgess smiled grimly and said, “I apologize for my frank language, but you asked for the truth.”

“You ain’t embarrassin’ me,” Cobb said, but his nose belied the disclaimer.

“The girls and I made a pact never to speak of Sarah’s former employment.”

“But lots of folks knew about it. I can’t believe you people don’t gossip.”

“We use no last names in our business. You and Mr. Edwards alone know the surnames of my girls. I have tried to be wholly truthful with you, except for Sarah’s working up there.”

“You said ya had two reasons fer lyin’.”

“For omitting part of the truth,” she corrected. “The second reason was that Sarah herself asked us to keep it a secret. You see, she was saving her money and planning someday to move back into respectable society, probably in another town. She was a very independent young woman-as her papa discovered when he tried to force her into a marriage she found repugnant.”

“And you didn’t object to her talkin’ about runnin’ off? It’s hard ta believe you’d actually help her leave yer business.”

Mrs. Burgess sighed, looked almost wistful. “She wasn’t the first girl to have a dream like that.”

“So you figured it would all peter out?”

“It always does.”

Cobb suddenly thought of something neither he nor Marc had thought to ask yesterday, and he silently congratulated himself even as he said, “Was her money stolen after she was killed?”

Mrs. Burgess took umbrage at this veiled accusation. “I keep a tally of what my girls earn each week, I’ll have you know, and every Friday I walk them up to the bank on Church Street. I stand at the door while they go in and deposit their earnings. I have no way of touching that money.”

“And you went there last Friday?”

“We did. You can ask them at the bank. We’re usually noticed.”

“I will do that.” Afraid that he was being bested in this exchange, he looked stern and said sharply, “So you’re tellin’ me yer girls are all gettin’ rich?”

“I am not telling you any such thing. Before we go to the bank, we promenade along King Street.”

“And visit the shops.”

“Yes. Whatever’s left goes in the bank. And some of that gets mailed home.”

“So Sarah really didn’t have a lot of savin’s?”

“Sarah was not like the other girls-yet. Almost all of her earnings went into the bank. But she’d only been working for two months.”

Cobb felt deflated. Mrs. Burgess’s explanation seemed not only plausible but downright convincing. Still, he could relay all he’d discovered to the Major: perhaps he had overlooked some telling detail that Marc would tease out.

“I’ll let ya get back to yer washin’,” he said, then added, “Where’re ya plannin’ to hold the service?”

“In the old Mechanics’ Institute hall on John Street at ten o’clock. We’ve found a minister who hasn’t forgotten who Christ was.”

Chastened, Cobb made his way back to Lot Street and his rendezvous with Marc Edwards.