Good Man Friday

by Barbara Hambly

  The smell of the blood brought back the alley behind the Globe and Eagle, and the man for whose sake he was to fast on Lenten rations until Easter of next year … The man who had tried to kidnap Mede into slavery on his first night of freedom.

  All that struggle for nothing.

  All the anguish it cost Mede to pull himself free of a master he loved. To take the harder, colder road that led to manhood.

  It’s a damn game …

  Flies were beginning to circle the bed and settle on the clotted slash.

  Children’s voices on the stairway. Musette said sharply, ‘No, stay away, that isn’t for you to see.’

  A shadow darkened the doorway. Trigg said, ‘Jesus Christ—!’ He came in and shut the door. ‘How could they have got in the house?’ he asked. ‘I locked the place up good after that hoo-rah at the game. And I told Mede to make sure his shutters was bolted fast.’

  ‘Mine surely were.’ January walked to the window again. ‘This’s how he got out. Ran a double length of clothes-rope, it looks like, around this post of the chair-back. With the chair taller than the window is wide it just braced against the frame. He climbed down, then pulled the rope down after him.’

  ‘Still doesn’t tell us how he got in.’

  The door opened a crack, more than filled by Octavia Trigg’s towering shape. ‘We gotta get him outta here.’

  January half-drew breath to begin a sentence containing the word constables, then let it, and the thought, dissolve away.

  In New Orleans – at least in the French Town, where everyone knew who was who and the free colored owned property – it was still possible to deal with the City Guard and have some assurance that one wasn’t going to be comprehensively sorry you’d called them in. But as if he’d opened the door to the future and looked down a lighted vista populated with inescapable events, he saw Kyle Fowler with the second ward constables; he saw men stinging with disappointed rage at the loss of their bet money; he heard those rough American voices: Arrest ’em all, one of ’em’s got to have done it. And then, We gonna lose our bet money, they owe us to make it up …

  And saw Kyle Fowler, and George Klephert, and every other one of the dozens of slave dealers operating in the District walking through the crowded cells: I recognize that one, he’s a runaway … Yeah, that wench is a runaway too …

  Rage went through him like a poison.

  He took a deep breath, let it out. Closed his eyes. The brotherhood of man, the fatherhood of God, for that moment jeered back at him, an obscene jest.

  God, guide me …

  Don’t let me go down that road.

  First things first. ‘Get the children out of the house,’ he said, and opened his eyes. ‘Octavia, can you tell them Mede’s suffered an accident and needs to be taken to a hospital? We’ll need a couple of quilts, laid on the floor here for the blood. We can keep him in the cellar till it gets dark—’

  ‘Bury him there,’ said Octavia calmly. ‘Under the coal bin, so’s the children won’t find his grave.’ And, when her husband opened his mouth in protest: ‘Constable Jeffers got money on the game. If word gets out Mede’s dead he’ll ask why, an’ God knows what kind of answer he gonna come up with.’ She turned to regard Poe with somber eyes. ‘That sit with you, sir? You know what happen to any black man or woman that end up in a jail in this town?’

  Poe started to answer, then closed his mouth again and thought about it. Quietly, he said, ‘I have no objection to the program, Madame. I’m only sorry that …’ He looked down at Mede’s quiet face. ‘That it can’t be otherwise than it is. He deserves much better.’

  ‘Lot o’ men do, Mr Poe,’ she returned. ‘Lot o’ men do.’ Through the window January could see Musette, Minou, and Clarice Perkins hurrying away with the children in the direction of the open fields.

  Trigg stepped into the hall; Seth Berger’s voice came muffled: ‘Damn, not even a Christian grave—’

  ‘Better men have gone to worse graves,’ responded the Reverend Perkins’ rather thin tones. ‘God no more cares about that than you’d care about what inn you spent a night at, on your way home. I’m sure our brother Mede doesn’t care.’

  ‘You sure ’bout that, Reverend?’ asked Harrison Winters, one of the railroad conductors. ‘He ain’t gonna walk, is he?’

  And the waiter, Lunn: ‘It’s just, there’s kids in the house …’

  ‘He will have as good a burial as any Christian man,’ said Frank Preston. ‘Men don’t walk after that.’

  January stepped to the door, half-opened it where the men stood in the shadowy hall. ‘We’ll find the one who did it,’ he said softly. ‘As long as he knows we’re looking, no, he won’t walk.’

  As the men came into the room January looked around again. The chamber was starkly bare and simple: bed, a small dresser, washstand, a rag rug on the floor. Mede’s white jacket from Blodgett’s dining room, his dark ‘good’ trousers and white shirt, lay on the floor in a heap. The killer had dumped them to take the chair … Yes, there was a smudge of blood on the shirt. His ‘other’ shirt – the one he’d been wearing when he walked out of Luke Bray’s house – hung on a peg on the wall, with his ‘other’ trousers. The bat that Fip Franklin had whittled for him stood up in the corner.

  It’s a damn game …

  Grief like a knife, at the memory of that young man standing in the sunlight like an oak tree, beating white men at an honest game. Showing the white men who’d come to watch that it could happen.

  Good Man Friday, with his feet on the road that led to the rest of his life.

  The dresser drawers contained nothing but a single clean shirt, a few pairs of under-drawers, some socks, and in the bottom drawer a shoe-shining kit. A small stack of coins, amounting to about three dollars, stood on the corner of the dresser, with a second-hand clothes-brush and a comb. Nothing else.

  January’s eyes narrowed as he understood what had happened.

  ‘Mr Poe,’ he said quietly. ‘Would you come with me, please?’

  Frank Preston had fetched an improvised stretcher from the kitchen, made of clothes poles and a sheet. As he, Berger, and Trigg moved Mede’s body on to this, January and Poe slipped out into the hall. ‘It’ll take most of the day to dig a grave deep enough to contain the smell,’ he said as they passed along the narrow hallway between the rooms of the single men: Berger, Preston, Winters and Lunn. ‘There’s half a ton of coal in that bin—’

  ‘Might it not be quicker to bury him upright in the wall, as disobedient nuns were interred in the Middle Ages?’ inquired Poe. ‘I’ve been in that cellar; there’s space between the piers that hold up the house. Surely the brickwork would be enough to keep it from stinking.’

  ‘It wouldn’t,’ replied January simply. He picked up a lamp from the hall table – not yet cleaned, contrary to all habit of the house. ‘You might do something like that in a catacomb or a deep wine-vault, where no one is going to come for months at a time. But under a regular house, even if there were seepage from the cesspit into the cellar – enough to make it smell – rats, or a cat, would scent meat. If they did so while there was anyone in the cellar of a suspicious nature, it would give the game away.’

  ‘And do you think –’ Poe scratched a lucifer, held the flame to the wick – ‘that gentlemen of a suspicious nature might come asking to have a look at Mrs Trigg’s cellar in the near future?’ He cocked a worried eyebrow up at January, who had already thought of this possibility.

  ‘Proving a murder would prove that the betting had been tampered with.’ He opened the narrow door that led to the attic’s lightless stair. ‘It would be cause for people not to pay. If that’s why he was killed.’

  ‘What other reason would there be?’

  The attic – like all such spaces – was crowded with trunks and boxes. Yet it was scrupulously neat, without cobwebs or the smell of mold. January almost laughed. Of course Octavia Trigg’s habitual cleanliness and order would extend to places in the house where no one went
. There was no such thing, in her world, as ‘out of sight, out of mind’. No broken chairs or household utensils too worn to be used, and every cardboard box was labeled: Quilts. Sheets. Good dishes. Winter clothes. The piles of newspapers were recent and clearly only in temporary storage before serving as kindling or wrapping paper or for service in the jakes. Dismantled bedsteads – January counted five of them – stood neatly in one place along the wall, awaiting an occasion for use downstairs. Though dusty and already growing hot, the room had a feeling of openness under its low, slanting rafters.

  There were no obscure hidey-holes.

  He moved systematically to the darker corners, holding the lamp low to the floor. After watching him in silence for a moment Poe darted down the stairs and returned a few minutes later with a second lamp, as if he guessed the kind of thing January was looking for.

  As if he understood suddenly how the killer had gotten into the house.

  ‘There.’ January held the lamp down almost to the boards, in a sort of nook between Church Banquet Linens and a half-dozen empty mattresses rolled up in holland sheets.

  Poe brought his own lamp close.

  It wasn’t much. A couple of fragments of half-dried mud, the right angle of two sides cleanly defined, still damp enough to adhere together.

  ‘From the inside angle of somebody’s shoe sole.’ January turned his own foot sideways to demonstrate. ‘Between the instep and the heel. Somebody who was up here – sitting here out of sight – yesterday. You can see it’s still damp. Mrs Trigg—’ He swiveled on his heels as the landlady’s heavy step creaked the floorboards. ‘Somebody came to the house yesterday afternoon with a note for Mede, didn’t they? I heard your voices in the hall – and I didn’t see that note in his room.’

  ‘White boy,’ she answered promptly. ‘Fifteen, sixteen I’d say. Dressed pretty rough.’

  ‘You leave him alone in the hall when you went to look for Mede with the note?’

  She nodded, confirming January’s recollection. ‘When I come back he gone. The front door was open, lettin’ the flies in—’ Her eyes widened. ‘You ain’t sayin’ instead of leavin’ he come up here?’

  ‘I think he did.’ January pointed down to the fragments of clayey mud. ‘I think he had a razor and some candles in his pocket and fifty feet of clothesline rope wrapped around his body under his shirt. He came up here, found the darkest corner he could, and sat quiet until the dead of night when the house was asleep … Look.’ He passed the lamp close to the floor again.

  Three spots of white wax – fresh and untouched by dust – dotted the floorboards near the tell-tale chunks of shoe dirt.

  ‘Was he dark or fair?’

  ‘He wore a cap, pulled down ’most to his eyebrows. His eyes was green.’

  ‘Were they? Hazel-green, or green-green?’

  ‘Light,’ she said, ‘like new leaves. His brows was dark, an’ so’s the little bit of hair down by his ears—’ With her own thick fingers she fluffed at the place.

  ‘Thin boy, fat boy?’

  ‘Husky in the body, but his face was thin. So was his hands. They was dirty, too—’

  January was silent for a moment, thinking. Expensive wax – that didn’t smell as tallow did. And not a stub of match left behind … ‘What about his voice?’

  ‘Sort of low and rough, but it hadn’t broken. He spoke like an Irish.’

  An easy accent to mimic. ‘Could it have been a girl’s face? A woman’s?’

  Her brows drew sharply together. ‘It surely could. Not a pretty gal, but delicate.’

  ‘This boy didn’t happen to say who the note was from, did he?’

  ‘He say, he had to be sure it went straight into Mr Tyler’s own hand, though I’d already told him Mr Tyler just left for Blodgett’s. He might catch him up if he ran, I says. He says, was I sure about that? ’Fore he went off runnin’ only to find himself runnin’ all the way to Blodgett’s in front of the man he was supposed to catch … I went an’ checked in the kitchen,’ she added as they descended the attic stair, moved along the thin carpet of the upstairs hall. ‘When I come out, he’s gone.’

  ‘But not to deliver the note?’

  ‘No, that note was in my hand when I went in the kitchen.’ As they descended to the second floor January heard the quiet voices, the shuffling footsteps as the furtive pall-bearers descended the main stair before them. ‘So I put it on the sideboard, for Mr Tyler to get when he come in for supper.’

  ‘Which he picked up,’ said January thoughtfully. ‘I saw him carry it out. Who was it from?’

  ‘By what that boy say,’ said Octavia Trigg, ‘it was from Mrs Bray.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  ‘But why on earth would Rowena Bray want to murder her husband’s ex-valet?’ Henri’s voice had a plaintive note, as if to protest that he’d allowed himself to be dragged two thousand miles from his butterfly collection to search for a missing friend, not to solve a murder – and a black man’s murder, at that.

  Before descending to the cellar to move coal and dig Mede’s grave – tasks which had not concluded until long after dark – January had sent a message to the Viellards at the Indian Queen, requesting a rendezvous at the Mockingbird Inn above Rock Creek on the following day. Trigg had recommended the place: private, respectable, and with a separate entrance to its private parlor, so that none could see who came or went. One could only speculate, in Washington, who else had need of such facilities.

  ‘It’s absurd,’ fretted Henri. ‘I’m terribly sorry about young Mede, of course – he seemed like a quite personable young man, and even if he weren’t, it’s still a frightful way to die …’

  The Viellards had been told that Mede’s body had been ‘taken away secretly’, though the reason January had given them for doing so had been truthful: Henri had murmured, ‘Oh, surely not …’ but had not pursued his objections further. Chloë, sitting at his side, had said nothing, her blue eyes speculative and crystal-cold, as if she were working mathematical sums in her head.

  The Reverend Perkins had read the burial service over that narrow grave before they’d put the coal back, and Octavia Trigg had sacrificed four cups and a couple of flowerpots, to provide enough fragments of broken pottery and china to surround the grave with the traditional hedge of teeth. The shards had been buried completely, lest by any chance anyone dig down under the coal and find the grave outlined. But they were there, to keep ill ghosts away from Mede’s secret bed …

  And to keep Mede himself from staggering forth like a sleepwalker in quest of vengeance.

  ‘But is it really any of our business?’ He cast a pleading glance at his wife and, receiving no help there, at Minou.

  ‘No.’ Minou folded her hands – she had threatened violence unless she was included in the conference. ‘It isn’t. Nor is it yours – nor Chloë’s, really – to go three weeks in that awful ship to this frightful town looking for a man neither of you has ever met. But you did it because poor M’sieu Singletary has no family, and no friends, and no one else to look for him or to care whether he lives or dies. You did it because he deserves better than to lie in an unmarked grave and be forgotten by everybody.’

  It had been Dominique’s idea, January had learned later, to take the children to the house of Charlie Springer, who rented out his barn loft for everything from dances to Masonic meetings. Springer had been given a tale of feared exposure to scarlet fever, Thèrése and Musette had been sent back to the Triggs’ for food and quilts – it was Musette who had gone with the note to the Viellards at the Indian Queen – the children had ‘camped out’ in the barn under the supervision of Clarice Perkins, Minou and the two servants, and a splendid time was had by all.

  But returning to the house that morning, and walking out to the Mockingbird Inn with January and Poe, Dominique had been unwontedly quiet.

  ‘Madame Bray is entertaining tomorrow evening,’ spoke up Chloë unexpectedly. ‘Mostly, I believe, to convince people that her husband merely suffered a
bad fall from a horse. If I send Madame Bray a note this afternoon begging for an appointment to go driving – pleading the need of her advice—’

  ‘Dearest—!’

  ‘Be still, Henri, we cannot expect M’sieu Janvier to burgle the house by night. He might miss something. We already know the household is short a maid, so all the servants will be downstairs polishing silverware and rearranging the dining room. No one will go upstairs after ten o’clock, I should say, until Madame Bray returns to get dressed – at four, to judge by the way I’ve seen her turned out at the British Minister’s. There’s a French door from the garden, though you may have to pick the lock, Benjamin.’

  ‘Dearest—!’

  ‘And I will go,’ added Dominique, ‘to break the news to the other servants in the kitchen that poor Mede has disappeared, and to give them all the details of the fracas at the ball game Tuesday—’

  ‘Excellent, darling!’

  ‘—and the scarlet-fever scare last night—’

  ‘Dearest, I beg of you—’

  Chloë turned to regard her husband, her small hands folded primly on the tabletop in the dappled sunlight. That evening, January knew, the Stalwarts would be out practicing by the creek, and given the probable presence of O’Hanlon and the Irish teamsters, rumors about Mede’s disappearance would be flying by dark.

  ‘I have been seeking a good reason,’ Chloë went on, ‘to have someone go in and search Madame Bray’s establishment for some days now.’ From her reticule she plucked the copies January had made for her of the notebook, and of the paper he’d found in Luke Bray’s watch, and unfolded both on the table. ‘I’ve had tea with Madame Bray three times and have spoken to her at a dozen different entertainments. Likewise have I spoken to M’sieu Bray when I could catch him on his way to the gaming rooms. And neither of them is of a mathematical turn of mind.’