Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (4 page)

He pointed toward the weedy track that led from the end of Perdidio Street. The ramshackle saloons and whorehouses of the Swamp, which lay farther off in that direc tion, looked even dirtier and somehow more sinister under the brute glare of the late-July sun. Their stillness was deceptive, like a corpse teeming inside with foul activity.

“I hadn't made much on the levee-things is so slowbut I give her a couple bits for 'em. I know she didn't have nuthin', an' ol' Mulm that owns the Nantucket Saloon pays her for cleanin' up there with liquor instead of money. I had to just about twist her arm to take it.”

“It's funny,” said the woman Titine, with a shy gaptoothed grin. “Some days she'd come here beggin' an' cryin' to me an' Gali, 'cause she needed money for rum-that's when she was too drunk even to work for Mulm. An' last month, like Suzie said, she cut Richie up bad when she was off her head. Other days she'd give you whatever she had in her pockets.”

“And she went on into her house?” The man Gali nodded.

“Did you see any light burning later? Any of you?” January looked around at the little group on the gallery.

 “I had the shutters up already,” said Suzie, and nodded back into the cottage.

“Hot nights like these been,” explained Richie, reaching over to rub Suzie's knee, “Suzie shuts up the house the minute the sun goes down, 'cause of the mosquitoes. Seems like no matter what M'am Snakebones give her, lemon or camphor or juju oil, they still come after her like buzzards on a dead cow. She just so miserable these nights I want to weep for her, and they don't bite me at all.”

“But Suzie an' me, we was finishin' up the cookin' an' puttin' up the chickens for maybe an hour before that.” Titine hoisted her tiny daughter, naked and plump as a little loaf of brown bread, onto her shoulder, and stroked her back. Baskets dangled from every rafter-end along the cottage roof, the African way of cooping chickens away from the depredations of foxes and rats. “We'd a seen if somebody came into Hessy's house 'fore then.”

“But not after you went in and put up the shutters?”

“No, sir.”

“Anyone else around?”

Suzie and Titine looked at each other for a moment, then shook their heads. “No, sir.”

Had Hesione let her killer in? Or had he come in and waited for her in the dark? In either case, a candle had been lit, and had been let burn for fifteen or twenty minutes.... January didn't even consciously think, It had to have been last night. No tallow drippings would have remained standing upright after a day as hot as yesterday had been. The same way he didn't consciously think, I'll bet the man was American, after seeing the extra tobacco around where the chair had been.

She hadn't dropped the berries on the floor in surprise, upon entering. Yet neither had she carried them over to the chair, or dropped stems or leaves in eating any.

“You hear anything later in the night?”

The two men looked at each other, self-conscious. Then tall, thin Gali gave an embarrassed chuckle. “This gonna sound stupid, an' I'm purely sorry for it, because if either of us had thought ... See, we both heard a woman scream, Titine an' me. I thought it was Richie takin' out his mad for somethin' on Suzie, like every man does now an' then. An' he thought it was me hittin' Titine. Or maybe Titine hittin' me.”

Titine poked him hard in the ribs. “You'da screamed louder than that, an' more than once, my friend.”

He mouthed a kiss at her. “She cried out only once?”

All four nodded. “Damn, I wish we'd a' gone to look.” Richie's bulldog face twisted with distress. “We might a been able to stop him, or do somethin' to help her.”

January thought of the wax-drips of the search, and the deliberate final cut across Hesione's throat. No, you'd only have bought your own death by your helpfulness.

He said nothing.

By noon no one had yet come from the City Guards. The air cooled a little, as it does afternoon summers when the black clouds thicken for the daily thunderstorm, and the roar of the cicadas in the trees alters its note. January took the path that skirted the worst of the Swamp's taverns and boarding-houses, circled behind the new cemetery, and followed the unpaved track that became Rue St. Louis on the other side of Rue Rampart. The streets in the old French town were hushed, reeking heat lying like a dead thing between the pastel stucco walls of shuttered-up town houses, cottages, shops. As usual, the companies, hired to clean the municipal gutters were behind on their work, and the stench of sewage and offal hung over everything, as if the town were sunk to the roof-line in a cesspool. Bloated with gases, a dog lay dead in the middle of Rue Rampart-swarms of gnats, mosquitoes, and fat black greasy flies hung over the brown standing water in gutters and streets, slashed through by the gunmetal wings of dragonflies.

Even the Place d'Armes before the Cathedral, usually alive with the traffic of the levee and the markets which bounded it, seemed to sleep. The few steamboats at the wharves lay lifeless, like stranded whales. The only animation was that of a man in the stocks before the Cabildo: he wept with frustration and pain as he tried to jerk his head away from a persistent horsefly as big as January's thumb.

The blue shadows of the prison's stone arcade held heat, not coolness, as January crossed through them to the open double doors. Voices echoed in the flagstoned watch room inside, where the City Guards had their headquarters. A knot of well-dressed gentlemen clustered around the desk of the man January had come to see. All of them babbled and gesticulated in fury.

White men January recognized one of them as Arnaud Tremouille, Captain of the City Guards, and resigned himself to wait.

“Bertrand Avocet claims he was out searching for a runaway slave at the time of the murder,” Tremouille was saying, presumably to Lieutenant Abishag Shaw, whom January could not see beyond the crowd of backs.

“He lies, then!” interrupted another man, tall and stout and sweating profusely in a blue coat and a high scarlet neck-cloth. “His shirt was found in the woods, entirely soaked with blood!”

“Do you say my client is a liar, M'sieu Diacre?” demanded another, whose old-fashioned pigtail was so tightly braided as to curl up over the back of his musty black coat. “I say that your client had every reason to wish his brother dead and himself in charge of the plantation, M'sieu Rabot.”

A squirt of tobacco was spit from behind the desk, missing the sandbox a few feet away: the stone floor all around the box was squiggled with syrup-brown gouts and the whole watchroom smelled like a cuspidor. “Anybody ask where Guifford Avocet's wife was 'long about the time Guifford was kilt?”

The question, framed in Lieutenant Shaw's appalling French, acted upon the well-dressed French Creoles like a fox thrown into a henroost. Tremouille, the two lawyers, and the State Prosecutor Cire all burst into speech at once, while Shaw-visible now that everyone had drawn fastidiously aside from the path of further expectorations-calmly drew a notebook, a carpenter's lead-pencil, a measuring-tape, a small silver-backed mirror, and a pair of long-nosed tweezers from various drawers of his desk and secreted them in the pockets of his out-at-elbows coat. The lawyers and the Captain of the Guards, January noted, all shouted at one another, but none seemed willing to lower himself to shout at a greasy-haired American who looked like he'd come down from Kentucky on a flatboat. Shaw started to rise, bethought himself of something else, dug through another drawer, and pulled out a fresh twist of tobacco.

Then he stood, six feet two inches of stringy scarecrow homeliness, and said, “Maybe we better go have a look at the place? Maestro,” he added, surprised, seeing January for the first time. “'Scuse me just a moment, iff'n you would, sir,” he told Tremouille, and slouched over to January.

He smelled like his shirt hadn't been washed in weeks-January didn't know if he owned another besides that faded yellow calico-and his long hair straggled over his shoulders, ditchwater brown where his hat usually covered it, bleached to the color of tow-linen farther down.

With his rather cold gray eyes, his linsey-woolsey trousers tucked into high-topped boots, and his skinning-knife sheathed at his belt, Shaw looked like any of the thousands of keelboat owl-hoots who populated the taverns of the Swamp or the whorehouses of Gallatin Street, looking for liquor to drink and trouble to make. January's mother wouldn't have had him in her house.

“What can I help you with, Maestro?”

“A murder.”
January's voice was dry. “Out in the shanties, past the Swamp. According to the neighbors, it was reported just after sun-up. The victim's friends would like to get her body up off the floor and wash the ants off it so they can bury her. Sir.” He knew he was taking advantage of Shaw's tolerance in speaking this way: Shaw was, in fact, one of the few white men in New Orleans who wouldn't hit him a few licks with a cane for being uppity, and he guessed the delay in sending someone to Hesione's shack wasn't the Kentuckian's fault. But he was very angry, at Tremouille, at police in general, at Americans, and at the white French and Spanish Creoles who were becoming more like Americans every day: who looked at free men of color now as Americans did, as so much money loose on the hoof, money that could be going into their own pockets.

Angry that it was so.

And angry at Olympe, for being right.

“God bless it.” Shaw spit again, this time with no particular target. “I am sorry Maestro. You talk to DeMezieres about it....”

The lieutenant caught the eye of the burly desk sergeant, pointed significantly to January, and signed that DeMezieres should do as January asked.

“I should be back into town tonight,” Shaw said, and scratched under the breast of his sorry coat January could only guess as to whether his concern was fleas or prickly heat. “You still boardin' with M'am Bontemps on Ursulines? I'll be to you then.”

As Shaw ambled from the watchroom in the center of the little troop of Creole gentlemen, the backwash of their rising voices swept over January: “. . . attempted to alienate twenty arpents of land ... quarreled with his brother... account-books ... had a favorite slave of M'sieu Bertrand's sold....”

White men with money, thought January bitterly, returning to the cool ozone-smelling tension of the prestorm air. He would have bet, had he had any money of his own, that Shaw wouldn't return until well into the following day. Avocet Plantation, if he remembered his mother's gossip correctly, was forty miles away in Plaquemines Parish. Not in the jurisdiction of the New Orleans City Guards at all.

But somebody wanted a policeman more expert than the sheriff of Plaquemines Parish, and that somebody was almost certainly related to somebody on the City Council to whom Tremouille owed a favor. . . .

And Hesione LeGros could lie in her own blood and rot, for all anyone cared.

Only when the white guests were done eating did the slaves get the leftovers, if any.

And with justice, thought January, as with food. Lightning flickered above the trees in the direction of the lake; thunder distantly growled. In his years in Paris, this was one of the things January had never forgotten about the home he hoped he had left forever, that forerunning cool kiss of warning wind, and the smell of the lightning. His dear friend Rose, he thought, smiling, would check her barometer and make notes about the direction and strength of the wind.... He wondered if the man in the stocks breathed a prayer of thanks to the gods of the upper air.

Hesione LeGros, washed of blood and filth, lay on her bed beneath a clean sheet obviously borrowed from somewhere else. Flies clung to the mosquito-bar, swarmed around the bloodied dress where it lay wrapped in a newspaper outside the shack's rear door. The storm-shadowed interior of the little building reeked of the kerosene and pepper that had been sprinkled all around her to keep the ants away. Through the dirty scrim of the netting January saw that she still lay in the position in which he'd seen her on the floor, one arm flung above her head and the other tucked beneath her breast. Someone had combed out her hair. When the rigor wore off, he knew, her neighbors would dress her in a nightgown, probably not her own, and collect what money they could among themselves so that she would not be buried in Potter's Field.

Standing beside the bed-dripping on the scuffed and trampled floor, for the rain had caught him just the other side of the Swamp January could feel his sister's eyes on him, waiting for him to say something, so that she could lie and tell him the Coroner had come after all. Thunder boomed and the damp wind flowed through the shed, bellying the mosquito-bar. The cypresses and oaks outside made a rushing noise, like water through a millrace. Around the front door, Gali and Titine and their neighbors were drinking ginger-water and trading stories about the dead woman on the bed, the woman who'd glowed with topaz and flame-colored silk and that tower of black-and-golden plumes, who'd died so poor, she'd spent the last evening of her life scrounging leftover vegetables from the market-women ... and had insisted on dividing them with a neighbor who had a child.

I'm gonna shoot that man of mine for this. . . .

Twenty-three years, thought January, since she'd pressed beside him in the shelter of the piano, a stiletto in her hand and a smile on her lips. Twenty-three years during which he'd become a doctor, and played at the Paris Opera; in which he'd loved and married, studied and traveled.... “Michie Janvier?”

He opened his eyes, looked down to see the woman Suzie beside him. Her faded dress was soaked from the rain, which was pouring hard now. She must have just come across from her house. In her hands was the apron Hesione had worn, tattered and filthy where it wasn't brown with blood. “I was takin' her clothes to the trash-heap,” she explained, “when I found this. It was in her pocket.”

She held out her hand. In it were two cut pieces of a silver Spanish reale-bits, they were sometimes called, eighths of a reale sliced up to make change. Pieces of eight.

With them was a whole silver double-reale, a doubloon.

Enough for a poor woman to live on for months.