Midnight Confessions
Page 6
Without another word, she turned to cross the street at an angle, toward the corner of Chartres, leaving him to follow or not, as he chose. In the distance, the cathedral bell began to toll the Angelus, a low, steady clang echoing out over the old city. “If you didn’t expect to find me at home,” she asked, not even glancing sideways at him as he came abreast of her, “then why are you here?”
“To talk to your servant.”
Only the infinitesimal catch in her stride betrayed her reaction, and she recovered quickly enough. “Rose is at home now. Don’t let me stop you from going to see her.”
He shook his head. “Later. You see, a few things have been puzzling me, ever since I watched you at the hospital.”
“Such as?”
“Such as, why you left Henri Santerre when he was wounded. With any other woman, I’d understand her going to get help. But not you.”
They were walking along Chartres now, toward Esplanade. Tall, narrow town houses rose up beside them, faded stucco facades peeling in the hot, damp air. From darkened, arched openings came the sounds and smells of tradesmen at work, the hot starchiness of pressed linen, the sweet, beckoning aroma of fresh pralines, the sharp tanginess of ale from one of the cabarets that could be found throughout the old city, even on the best streets. Overhead, chair legs scraped on gallery floors and shutters banged as housewives or servants in the apartments above moved to shut out the heat and glare of the encroaching sun.
Just when he’d decided she wasn’t going to answer him, the woman beside him said, her voice low, husky, “He was within a breath of being dead. There was nothing I could have done for him. He told me to run, and I did. I was afraid. I’m not proud of it. I should have stayed.”
They paused at the corner as a carter swung in front of them from Ursuline onto Chartres, the bay mule between the traces throwing up its head and neighing softly in exaggerated alarm at the sight of a tall black woman in gay yellow muslin, a basket full of greens balanced on her head. “Did it ever occur to you that Santerre might have been hit by mistake?” he asked almost casually as they stepped off the curb. “That the killer could have been aiming at you?”
She tripped on a broken section of the street where the previous night’s rain had collected in a dirty puddle. He only just managed to catch her, his hand snaking out to close hard around her elbow, yanking her up short before she fell.
If she’d been pale before, she was white now, her eyes huge as she stared up at him. “I have no enemies, monsieur,” she said in a broken whisper.
He held her gaze steadily. He’d thought her eyes were brown, but he realized now that they were actually green, the dark, mysterious green of a primeval forest, or a deep, shadowed ocean. “Everyone has enemies. You said so yourself.”
Her chest lifted with a quick intake of breath. “I don’t know of anyone who wants me dead, if that’s what you mean.”
He realized, suddenly, just how close they were standing. He dropped his hand from her arm and took a step away from her. “Someone obviously wanted one of you dead.”
Yet even as Zach said it, he knew it might be untrue. Not all victims were familiar with their killers. Some people killed for twisted reasons of their own that had little to do with those who ended up dead at their hands, while others killed for the sheer, sadistic joy of it.
What’s the matter, Captain? whispered a voice from the past. Haven’t you figured it out yet? Do you need another clue?
“Monsieur?”
Zach heard her voice, as if from a distance, and looked up to find a hack driver shouting at them. Alors! Qu’est-ce vous faites? They started off again, silent now, heading toward the swath of green that was the sycamores and elms of the neutral ground on Esplanade Avenue.
They had gone another block or two when she stopped again, her attention caught by the death notice tacked to a nearby lamppost, one loose, black-banded edge fluttering in the river breeze. “You’ve released Henri Santerre’s body,” she said.
He paused beside her. “I didn’t see a need to order anything more than a limited examination.” Autopsies were a relatively new procedure, and one that didn’t sit well with most people. “Especially with this heat.”
She nodded, the hot breeze gusting up again to whip at the long black ribbons of her widow’s bonnet. The heat was a problem, because Santerre’s sister had wanted to hold a wake—that curious, old-world custom that had entrenched itself in this city, along with so much else that was strange, foreign, to those raised elsewhere in America.
He gazed down at the woman beside him, at the soft curve of her cheek and the seductive sweep of her long, thick lashes, and knew a rush of disquiet, deep within him. She was as alien to him as this steaming city around them, with its voodooiennes and quadroon balls and crumbling courtyard walls smothered in honeysuckle and ivy; this city of masked Mardi Gras balls and dueling oaks and a bloodcurdling death rate twice that of any other city in America. Like the city that was her home, Emmanuelle de Beauvais was beautiful, dark, and dangerous. He knew she was hiding things from him, knew she might even be responsible for the death of that white-haired old man Zach had found sprawled in a bloody heap on the steps of her family tomb. He knew all this, and still she fascinated him, still she drew him, still he felt the slow burn of unwilled desire.
Up ahead, the Esplanade mule car passed on its way to turn around at the river, and they started off again, her step quickening. “There is one more thing I’m curious about,” he said abruptly as they came out of the narrow, closely built street into the relatively broad expanse of the avenue.
“What’s that, monsieur?” She had her head turned away, her attention all for the mule car drawing away from the built-up area of the river levee.
“If you were as fond of Henri Santerre as you’d like me to believe, then why won’t you help me find the man who killed him?”
She paused on the grassy neutral ground, the long, loose black ribbons of her hat fluttering out to brush against his arm as she swung to meet his hard gaze. She made no attempt to deny the accusation, to claim she was cooperating with him, but then, he’d known she wouldn’t. “If Henri had been shot by a Yankee sniper while helping tend the wounded on a battlefield, you wouldn’t be giving his death a second thought. Yet he would have been just as dead, and his killing just as deliberate and untimely.”
Zach set his jaw. “But not as senseless.”
She shook her head, her nostrils flaring as she sucked in a quick, deep breath. “War is senseless. Senseless, barbaric, and cruel. This war and all others.”
“I don’t agree.”
“No, you wouldn’t, would you?”
She made as if to turn away again, but he caught her arm, stopping her. “You didn’t answer my question.”
Her gaze dropped, pointedly, to where his hand rested on her sleeve, but he didn’t remove it. “Make no mistake about this, Major Cooper,” she said, her eyes glittering with an enemy’s hatred as she looked up at him again. “Henri Santerre was like a second father to me. But another innocent man hanging from a Federal gallows won’t bring him back to life.”
He let her go. “What makes you so sure the man we’d hang would be innocent?”
“You haven’t exactly earned a reputation for legality and due process of law since you seized this city,” she said, and although she meant you, the Yankees, rather than you, personally, it still stung, particularly because he knew it was true.
The mule car jingled to a stop beside them and she moved quickly, grasping the railing to climb up onto the high platform before he could make a move to help her. Before he could touch her again.
One hand resting on his saber, Zach took a step back from the curb. She stared down at him, relief mingling with wariness when she realized he meant to accompany her no farther. “You’re going back to talk to Rose,” she said.
He gave her a slow, mean smile. “Yes.”
“You’re wasting your time. She won’t tell you anything.”
The mule car jerked forward, but not before he saw the flare of surprise and consternation in those dark green eyes.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The woman, Rose, took her time answering the door, and then she let it swing inward no more than eight inches before stopping it with her shoulder.
She was a tall woman, tall and thin, with a long neck and sloping shoulders and an innately regal carriage. The pale, café au lait tone of her skin proclaimed her mixed parentage, but the features of her face were all African, the nose broad and flat, the lips full, the cheekbones high and wide. “Miss Emmanuelle’s gone out, and you know it,” she said, her mouth held in a tight, hostile line. “What you doing back here?”
Her accent surprised him, although it occurred to him he should have been expecting it. He’d become familiar with the upcountry blacks pouring into the camps in the city; American Negroes, who spoke English with broad tones and a diction all their own. But this woman was a Creole black, her English even more disdainful and heavily inflected with French than that of her mistress.
Beast Butler would probably have ordered the woman arrested for that kind of insolence. Zach took off his hat and said, “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
She hesitated, but no one in this city, man or woman, black, colored, or white, could afford to say no to a blue uniform. Shrugging, she stepped back and let the door swing wide. “I’ve things to do. You want to talk to me, you talk while I work.”
She led the way down a cool, flagged passage to an inner courtyard filled with potted laurels and mock orange, and a charcoal brazier topped by a copper pot that bubbled soapy steam into the hot air. “I don’t know what you’d be wanting to talk to me for,” she said, going to stir the wash in the copper with a long wooden paddle. “I didn’t know Michie Henri.”
“You know Madame de Beauvais.” An arched niche tangled with ivy and Carolina jessamine half-hid a gray, weathered bench, and he went to sit on it, disturbing a mockingbird that fluttered up to the second floor gallery and fussed at him. “She wasn’t born here, was she?”
The woman, Rose, glanced over at him, her eyes narrowing with suspicion. But she evidently could see no harm in answering, because she said, grudgingly, “They came here from France, her Maman and Papa. Fourteen years ago now.”
Eighteen forty-eight, Zach thought, counting backward. It had been a year of revolution all over Europe. He didn’t think it could be a coincidence that the Marets had chosen to leave France that year. Aloud, he said, “How long have you been with her?”
“I was the first thing they bought, just as soon as they stepped off that ship. I was sixteen, same as Miss Emmanuelle.” Rose tapped the three-legged paddle against the edge of the copper pot. “And I’ve been with her ever since.”
Zach fought hard to tamp down a spurt of irritation. If he got anything useful out of this woman, he’d be surprised. He would never understand it, this misplaced loyalty, even affection, so many slaves maintained for the people who owned them. And he knew a moment of vague self-disgust at the realization that he had actually found himself aroused by and attracted to a woman who kept another human being in bondage, like so much chattel. “Dr. Maret gave you to her, did he?” he said dryly.
The paddle hit the flagstones with a clatter as Rose swung to face him, her hands on her hips. “What you think? You think I’m a slave? Well, let me tell you, I’m as free as you are. Oh, I belonged to an old colored man, once. He used to beat me something awful, just to show as how he was better than me. He was lighting into me with his cane, down on the wharves, the day the Marets came off that ship from France. They bought me from him right there, on the waterfront, but they set me free just as soon as they could. And I paid them back every cent they spent on me out of my wages.”
Bending over, she picked up the paddle in one graceful motion and went to stir the washing again. “You don’t know Miss Emmanuelle,” she said, not looking at him, “if you think she’d ever own a slave. That was the one thing she and Michie Philippe agreed on—that, and the medicine. They both thought slavery was wrong, wrong, wrong.”
“You say that as if they didn’t agree on much.”
She glanced up quickly, then away, her lips pressing into a thin, tight line. “I didn’t say that.”
Zach knew he wasn’t going to get anything more out of her on that subject. Sighing, he propped one boot up on the other knee and said, “Tell me about Jacques Maret and his wife.”
“I want you to look into everyone associated with that hospital,” Zach told Hamish as they grabbed a quick lunch at the small Italian café near headquarters.
Hamish looked up from his plate of spaghetti, his eyes owlish. “Everybody?”
“That’s right. Send a couple of men to look over their patient files. I want the families of every patient who died or suffered an amputation there in the last year investigated.”
“You think that’s who we’re looking for?” Hamish asked, fumbling in his pocket for his notebook. “A patient with a grudge?”
“No. But I want to look into it, just to be sure. I want you to concentrate on the people Santerre worked with. Like this Englishman, Yardley. See what you can dig up about him. He claims he was with a friend last night. Find out who the friend is, and see if you can get someone else to verify that they were together. He says he had no quarrel with Santerre, but I have a feeling he’s hiding something, and I’d like to know what.”
Nodding, Hamish flicked open his clothbound notebook and began making a list with a dull, stubby pencil.
“Then there’s this young woman, this Claire La Touche,” Zach said. “She’s a volunteer, but I don’t think she got on well with Santerre. See if you can find out why.”
Hamish looked up, his pencil poised in midair. “And Madame de Beauvais?”
“I’ll take care of her.”
Hamish’s mustaches swept back and forth as he gnawed at his lower lip. “You can’t suspect her.”
Zach reached to break off a chunk of the café’s heavy Italian bread. “Why not?”
“Because she’s . . . well, she’s a woman, for one thing.”
“Huh. You telling me New York women don’t commit murder?”
Hamish shook his head. “Not women like her.”
“Like what? I don’t think we have the least idea what Madame de Beauvais is really like.” Zach pushed back his chair and stood up. “I want someone at this wake tonight from the time it starts. I want to know who comes—and who doesn’t come that people think should have.” He had a meeting scheduled with Butler that evening that was liable to run late, very late, for Butler had ambitious plans to turn over the area’s confiscated sugar plantations—and their black workers— to Northern profiteers.
Hamish nodded. “I’ll be there myself.” He patted his notebook. “I’ll get it all down, don’t worry.” Zach smiled, and the big New Yorker’s eyebrows drew together in a suspicious frown. “What’s so funny?”
But Zach only laughed and turned away.
“Now perhaps you will see some sense,” said Marie Thérèse de Beauvais, one pale, blue-veined hand moving languidly as she settled back in her chair and waved a palmetto fan to and fro through the still, hot midday air. “Dominic must come with us, to Beau Lac. At least for the next few months.”
They were on the rear gallery of the de Beauvais Greek Revival–style city residence, Emmanuelle and the mother of her dead husband. From here, they could watch Dominic and his grandfather, Jean-Lambert, playing horseshoes on the small strip of side lawn. Jean-Lambert might be seventy-six years old, thin and white-haired and dragging one leg since his stroke last May, but he still played a mean game of horseshoes.
Once, the family’s town house had been on Ursuline, in the old quarte
r. But with the expansion of the city and the steady influx of new, poor immigrants, they had moved here, to Esplanade Avenue, on the ridge of high land running northwest from the Vieux Carré to Bayou St. John. The de Beauvaises were one of New Orleans’s oldest families, and one of the most respected and wealthiest, for they had somehow managed for generations to avoid most of the vices that had brought ruin to so many of the original Creole families, the gambling and drinking, the dueling and overindulgence in that peculiar institution known as plaçage—colored women kept as mistresses in respectable cottages by rich white men. The center of the de Beauvais wealth was still the vast sugar plantation known as Beau Lac, on the Bayou Crevé, but the family had long ago diversified into shipping and banking, manufacturing and real estate. The occupation of the city by Union troops in May had been costly, but it hadn’t yet brought complete ruin to the de Beauvais family, the way it had to so many in this city. Old Jean-Lambert might hate the Yankees, but when it came to business, he never let his heart rule his head.
Standing at the gallery’s cast-iron railing, Emmanuelle smiled while she watched her son go suddenly, intensely still in concentration as he prepared for his next toss. But the smile faded when she turned to meet the fierce stare of her son’s grandmother. “It’s too dangerous. Some of what we hear about these Yankee patrols is exaggerated, but not all, I’m afraid. I’d feel better with him here, safe, in the city.”
“Safe? Here?” Marie Thérèse’s brows drew together in a frown that might have been either concern or annoyance. She was younger than her husband by some dozen years or more, a tall, attractive, silver-haired woman with a proud, erect carriage and flashing gray eyes. “And when the yellow fever strikes? Will he be safe then, hmm?”
Normally, everyone who could afford it would have left the city by now, fleeing to their country estates to escape the epidemics that raged so often through the hot summer months. Only, this year, the presence of undisciplined Yankee troops and Confederate guerrillas made the countryside even more dangerous than the city. And the dreaded fever had not arrived. Emmanuelle shook her head. “I don’t think it will come this year.”