Poe opened the brougham’s door, and as Pease got near it, stepped neatly behind him and shoved a gun into his ribs under the cover of his many-caped coat.
‘Get in the carriage,’ snarled Poe, ‘and you won’t be hurt. We just want to talk to you.’
Pease blenched, tried to pull away, and January took his arm in a grip like an anaconda. He thrust him into the carriage and climbed in after him, pulled the door shut behind them. Poe swung to the box and started the team at once. Pease started to squeak, ‘What the hell—’ and Henri raised his pistol.
‘Ten short minutes of your time is all we ask, Mr Pease. We mean you no harm.’
Masked, and in the gloom of the coach with all its shades drawn, Henri managed to look surprisingly sinister, a huge gray form with the gun in one plump white hand. ‘Ten short minutes, and a little information.’
He did indeed sound like Shylock.
‘You are Wylie Pease, the grave robber—’
‘Never! If it’s that stinking liar Fowler that told you so—’
‘I haven’t the pleasure of Mr Fowler’s acquaintance – yet.’ Henri cocked his head a little, just as if he actually saw the man sitting opposite him instead of an indistinct blur. ‘But you’re either a grave robber or receive goods from one …’
Without varying the pistol’s line in the slightest, with his free hand he produced the gold locket and one of the ivory portraits from his pocket. ‘I found these a few nights ago in your desk drawer—’
‘I don’t know who put ’em in there, Mister! We got all kinds of bad customers coming through the tavern, and many’s the time I’ve had to—’
‘What, through that storeroom and up your private staircase? That’s a pity,’ Henri went on smoothly. ‘My client has authorized me to pay twenty dollars for information which we were led to believe that you might possess.’ He laid locket and portrait on one chubby knee, reached into the breast of his coat – a lifetime of short-sightedness had given the young planter a surprisingly sure touch with finding things – and brought out first a twenty-dollar gold piece, which he placed on the seat beside him, then Selwyn Singletary’s silver reservoir-pen, card case, and spectacle case.
‘And don’t pretend you’ve never seen them before.’ He managed a surprisingly sinister sneer. ‘I haven’t the slightest objection to your disgusting occupation. I’m not going to peach on you –’ he tapped the ivory portrait with the end of the pen – ‘unless you insist upon making me do so. Why would Mr Fowler take the trouble to slander you, I wonder …? And him so popular with the constabulary of this city.’
‘Why d’you think?’ demanded Pease sullenly. ‘He’s beat me out of a dozen stiffs this year, him and his boys. He’s a greedy bastard, wanting a piece of everything in this town – and a traitor in the bargain.’
‘But it was you who found these things, wasn’t it? All I want to know is where.’
Pease hesitated – Henri still held the gun on him (‘If the gun really were loaded,’ he confessed to January later, ‘I wouldn’t have taken it off him for a second, would I?’) – then picked up the pen.
‘Oh, this stuff.’ He frowned, and his hard little eyes flickered from Henri’s face to January. ‘If you’d offered me gelt in the graveyard, Sambo, ’stead of grabbin’ me, Jimmy wouldn’t a’ slugged you. You ain’t going to believe this, sir –’ he turned back to Henri – ‘and God knows I got no way of provin’ it, but I swear you it’s true. I found it in the grave of the French minister’s secretary.’
Henri looked nonplussed, as if Shylock had suddenly been given Macbeth’s cue. January snapped his fingers like a man suddenly enlightened, cried, ‘Didn’t you say to me, sir, how funny it was that a man’d be buried with his pen, ’stead of a locket like them others you found?’
‘Er – I did indeed.’ Henri made a stab at sounding suave and villainous. He raised his pistol and Pease flinched. ‘Surely you aren’t going to attempt to convince me that the French Minister’s secretary picked Mr Singletary’s pocket before he died?’
‘I dunno nuthin’ about this Singletary jasper. But the stuff wasn’t on the Frenchy. It was tied up in a handkerchief and buried a couple inches deep at one side of the grave, like somebody’d just scooped a little hole in the loose dirt after the grave was filled an’ poked it in. They put the cut turves back over the soil when they close up the grave, but it’s nuthin’ to push one aside.’
Henri looked wildly at January, there being nothing that he could imagine a fat and oily spider in its web would say to this information.
January produced his notebook from his pocket and asked – as if it were his job to do so, which in fact it was – ‘When was this, sir?’
‘What, Frenchy’s funeral? Last fall sometime.’
‘Was Congress still in session?’
Pease glanced at Henri as if protesting that he didn’t owe a black man any answers to anything, and Henri – who appeared to have recovered his sangfroid – grated in a steely voice, ‘Answer the question, you wretch.’
The grave robber replied sullenly, ‘Musta been, ’cause there was a hell of a funeral. Old Van Buren himself spoke over him: this was a cousin of that Frog that married Old Hickory’s niece, and every Democrat in Congress showed up to shed tears. They put a guard on the grave for a week, but there was a cold snap. I knew he’d be pretty fresh still. Only reason I got to him, too. Fowler doesn’t know a thing about the business,’ he added with a sneer. ‘Thinks after a week nobody’ll take ’em. You might not get fifty for him, but there’s them’ll pay twenty-five.’ He glanced at Henri again. ‘That’s all I know, mister – sir. I swear it on my mother’s grave.’
‘I expect that was the first one you robbed,’ retorted Henri loftily.
‘Did you keep an eye on the grave yourself?’ asked January. ‘Watch it to see how long the guards remained?’
‘With that rat-bastard Fowler hanging around ready to get in ahead of me? You bet I did, Sambo. I wouldn’t put it past him to bribe the guards – pay ’em to help him dig, if I know Fowler.’
‘Did you see people visit the grave?’
‘There’s always people will visit a grave, that first week or two.’ Pease spread his hands. ‘Pomercy – and I didn’t get but twenty dollars for him, on account of the delay, though he was fresher’n anybody had a right to expect … Pomercy was related to half the Frogs in the District. There was somebody coming every day to snivel over the dear departed. I’d look over the churchyard wall, couple times a day. The grave’s about fifty yards from the church, but it’s around the back and there’s trees in between it and the gate, so you can’t see it from the road.’
‘So anybody kneeling beside the grave could have moved a turf aside, scooped a hole with his hands, and shoved these things –’ January gestured toward the artifacts – ‘down inside.’ He sat silent for a moment while the carriage jogged through the rutted streets around the Capitol, trying to identify the feeling that tugged at the back of his mind. The feeling that he was missing something, looking in the wrong direction.
‘Easy as takin’ candy from a baby, Sambo.’
You’d probably know.
‘His Lordship’s client –’ January nodded at the startled Henri – ‘is seeking news of a large man – about His Lordship’s stature – burly, bearded, graying, and last seen wearing English clothing.’ He pretended to be reading this from the notebook. ‘He came to grief between the fourteenth of October and the sixteenth.’ He picked the gold piece from the seat beside Henri and placed it in the grave robber’s hand. ‘Has such a body been found, in any grave? Or in any unorthodox spot? The money is yours, whether you answer yes or no. We only seek the truth.’
Pease shoved the coin immediately into his waistcoat pocket. ‘God’s honest truth, I ain’t heard of any.’ He continued to address Henri, as if it were inconceivable that the questions would originate in any brain but his. ‘Rusty McClain – works as a churchyard guard these days, but used to do a little res
urrectin’ – he’s with Fowler now, but he’ll come in and have a drink for old times’ sake. I’d have heard it from him, if there’d been anything funny turn up. And if it’s an Englishman you’re lookin’ for, Fowler would have told ’em at the Ministry.’
Henri merely looked puzzled, but January said, ‘That’s Christian of him.’
‘Christian my arse.’ A spasm of anger crossed the resurrection man’s ferrety face. ‘Told you Fowler’s a goddam traitor. He works for that Limey bastard Oldmixton. Collects information for him – any goddam thing. That stink-arsed sister of his runs three whorehouses down in Reservation C, and you can bet they send in a report to Oldmixton, about which Senators use the one that don’t peddle girls. If a Congressman fires a secretary that’s been readin’ somebody else’s love letters an’ pokin’ his nose in the dirty laundry, you bet that secretary knows Fowler’ll pay him for whatever he’s found.’
Pease sniffed. ‘Police in this rotten town get all over a poor man for turnin’ an honest dollar – and Fowler’s got them in his pocket, too! You bet he does! – and then shut their eyes when the likes of Fowler goes sellin’ whatever information he can get to this slick Limey nancy. No wonder this country’s going to the dogs.’
Henri paused in gathering up Singletary’s modest grave-goods and returned to his character as Shylock as he regarded Pease. ‘And are you so poor, Mr Pease?’
Pease smiled, like the First Murderer from Macbeth. ‘I am that, sir.’
‘Well, we’ll have to see what we can do about that.’ Henri fished in his pocket and held up another gold piece. ‘I think two can play at Mr Oldmixton’s game. Can I trust you to make enquiries – and I’ll want the truth, now; my client only wishes to know where his friend lies buried – about this large gray-bearded gentleman who met with an untimely end sometime in October of last year? I shall send Ben here for word.’
He returned the coin to his pocket and gestured with the pistol. ‘And I trust you’ll see to it that he returns to me safely.’ He took up his cane and thumped the roof of the coach, and in a few minutes – January guessed they’d simply gone back and forth along Pennsylvania Avenue – the vehicle came to a stop, and the door opened.
January sprang out and let down the step – though remembering the coils of shorn-off hair in Pease’s trunk the impulse was strong to trip Pease as he got down. They were in the market square near the canal. Beyond its smelly water, low-lying woodlands and swampy pasturage stretched for almost two miles from the river to the Capitol on its little hill, and, southward from the canal, those splendid, weed-grown, unpaved avenues extended amid woods and occasional farm-lots to the river and the hills of Maryland beyond.
Anywhere in that bucolic wilderness, he reflected despairingly as he swung himself up on to the footman’s stand again, Henri and Chloë’s wandering Englishman might be resting in a shallow grave …
Or not, he thought as the carriage pulled into motion again.
Or not.
TWENTY-ONE
‘You’re a surgeon, Benjamin.’ Henri pulled the satin mask from his face and for a moment appeared as Minou must often see him: fair, fine hair ruffled in a hundred directions, bovine brown eyes blinking myopically as he took a seat on the small parlor’s sofa and fished his spectacles from his pocket. ‘How might a body have been disposed of, other than by burial or throwing it in the river?’
Dominique and Chloë cleared from the marquetry table the remains of the hat that the latter had been watching the former trim. From the dining room came the music of dishes being set out, as beyond the curtained windows Mandie, Kizzy, and Charmian raced to the chicken run to search for eggs.
‘Don’t rule out throwing in the river,’ said January. ‘An unweighted body might stand a good chance of being washed up on a mudflat, but between the Treasury, the Post Office, and the canal docks this town is hip deep in unguarded building-stones. You can steal a stone during the daytime but the body has to go into the river at dead of night, when a wagon is noticeable—’
‘Always supposing the constables are sober.’ Chloë looked up from polishing her spectacles. ‘But you’re quite right. Bodies are found every day in the back alleys of Washington …’
Including Davy Quent’s, January reflected, with an inner sigh for the loss of bacon and eggs. It was the only regret he could yet feel for removing the man from the world, and that, he supposed, was the point of the penance.
‘The crux of the question,’ Chloë went on, ‘seems not so much who murdered M’sieu Singletary, but who would want to obliterate all trace of him?’
‘Exactly.’ January leaned against the door jamb. ‘Anyone kneeling at poor M’sieu Pomercy’s graveside for fifteen minutes with his back to the church could dispose of the pen and the card case. It’s safer than the river – scavengers work the mudflats, you know. But why would you? Why not sell them, unless it was to prevent any chance of recognition? That doesn’t sound to me like the act of a stranger.’
‘They do say, don’t they,’ put in Poe, ‘that something like half of all murder victims know their killer?’
‘I should certainly be happy to murder at least half of the people I know.’ Chloë put her spectacles back on.
‘But poor M’sieu Singletary knew no one in Washington,’ pointed out Dominique. ‘Or almost no one. Myself, I cannot picture M’sieu John Quincy Adams slugging him over the head and burying him in the garden.’
‘For one thing,’ added Chloë reasonably, ‘the servants would see, not to speak of Mrs Adams. Although Mr Adams is quite strong enough to lift a big man’s body unaided.’
‘Really?’ Minou’s beautiful eyes widened. ‘That is strong – it’s getting so I can barely lift Charmian, she’s grown to such a big girl! And him President of the United States!’
‘Former President,’ Henri corrected.
‘I’d like to see Van Buren sling a corpse about,’ remarked Poe. ‘He’d be the sort who’d pay someone else to do it, I expect … and then pay three times as much in hush money.’
‘And that’s precisely the problem.’ January lifted his hand to retrieve the attention of his erratic fellow sleuth-hounds. ‘Whether you bury the body in the woods or throw it in the river with a fifty-pound segment of the United States Treasury building attached to its feet or cut the flesh off and burn it – in which case you still have the bones to worry about, as well as tell-tale smoke and a tremendous amount of firewood to be accounted for … All those problems go away if you just kill him and let him lie. So why didn’t they?’
‘In this town,’ mused Poe, ‘it can’t be from fear of arrest.’
‘No.’ January let the word sink in. ‘No.’
‘If he had been ambushed in the woods—’ began Minou, and even as she said the words her voice tailed off.
‘I suppose you could drag him into the woods to bury him,’ pointed out Henri. ‘But you would need to bring a shovel out there with you. And if you buried him anywhere near the road, you’d run the risk of encountering Mr Fowler and his merry men lying in wait for some poor Negro. You’d certainly run the risk of them coming upon an informal grave and peddling its contents, and according to Brother Pease that hasn’t happened.’
‘The problems multiply further,’ continued January, ‘if the murder took place at whatever hotel or boarding house Singletary was staying at …’
He sat silent for a moment, turning over again the thought that had come to him as he’d stood by the canal that afternoon.
‘What if Singletary isn’t dead?’ he asked.
In the startled silence, Octavia Trigg’s heavy tread creaked in the hallway: a squeal of door hinges, a murmur of voices, then the landlady’s step retreated into the big parlor opposite …
‘You mean he’s fled?’ Henri frowned. ‘But why?’
January shook his head. ‘We know almost nothing about the man,’ he pointed out. ‘The only person in Washington – in the country, apparently – who knows him well is Mr Oldmixton, who seems
to be running a spy ring—’
‘You’d believe the word of a man like Pease?’ Henri’s pale eyebrows shot up. ‘Or Fowler, for pity’s sake?’
‘I don’t suppose the Secretary of State would,’ agreed January. ‘Or whoever it is who’s in charge of trapping spymasters. Oldmixton sounded extremely concerned about Singletary, but that may just mean that he’s as skilled an actor as you are, Marse Eddie …’
‘He’d scarcely be a successful spy if he wasn’t,’ observed Chloë. ‘And it does put a different context to M’sieu Singletary’s fears for his life. Mrs Bray could have dropped some remark about Oldmixton over tea that revealed the extent of Singletary’s danger … But if he is alive somewhere, why hasn’t he retrieved his notebook?’
‘Perhaps he’s being held prisoner?’ suggested Dominique, eyes aglow.
‘My dear Minou, where?’ asked Henri sensibly. ‘In the attic of the Ministry? The man’s been gone for six months! You can’t keep someone locked up for that length of time without the servants suspecting something!’
‘Only four years ago,’ January pointed out, ‘a very respectable Creole lady in New Orleans was discovered to have been keeping seven slaves imprisoned in her attic and torturing them daily, and nobody in town was the wiser.’
Henri turned pink. ‘That situation was rather different.’ The Viellards were related to the respectable Creole lady in question.
‘And there are people locked in pens and back rooms not fifty feet from the Capitol,’ added Dominique, her voice very soft, ‘and kept drugged, some of them, so that they do not cry out over the walls to passers-by that they are free men.’
‘Well, my dear –’ Henri looked excruciatingly uncomfortable – ‘one can hardly think that poor Singletary has been kept in blackface for six months.’
‘In any case,’ added Chloë, ‘who in their right mind would have hired Singletary as a spy to begin with, when they have so many more useful villains like Fowler skulking about? By all accounts he doesn’t sound capable of finding his way around Washington unaided, much less—’
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