Ran Away (Benjamin January Mysteries)

by Hambly, Barbara

  ‘A specific call for God to blast a creeping minion of Evil,’ Hannibal said, quoting Promise, whose gentle manners and ascetic beauty – like a martyr in a Bible illustration – had clearly entranced Mrs Redfern, ‘counts as a weapon, if it comes from the lips of a Man of God. Ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked, God has promised his saints . . . And the Reverend Dunk responded in kind, you recall, with a very clear demand that God burst Promise’s guts asunder and devour him with worms, as God so obligingly did with Herod Agrippa in Acts. Possunt quia posse videntur . . .’

  He got to his feet and coughed, one hand pressed to his side in a way that January didn’t like. In the red glow of the hearth where the wash-up water heated, the fiddler’s eyebrows stood out very dark in a face chalky with strain, and despite the heat of the kitchen he shivered. If opium had made Hannibal a slave for half his life, January reflected grimly, at least it had kept the pain of his illness at bay.

  ‘If them curses was weapons,’ inquired old Uncle Bichet, and he sipped the beer Mr Trulove’s butler had provided for the musicians’ refreshment, ‘how come both those execrable shapes – like they called each other – wasn’t blasted out of their shoes then an’ there in the ballroom?’

  ‘They both missed,’ replied Hannibal at once. ‘Their aim was terrible.’

  Upon their return to the ballroom, January was entertained to observe that while most of the Americans had taken their departure, the Widow Redfern remained, and so perforce had the little court of gentlemen which always surrounded her. This included M’sieu Maillet – coincidentally the youngest and most handsome of the Board of Directors of the Planters Bank of New Orleans and also the only one in that organization who was unmarried – and the elderly planter Alfonse Verriquet, whose French Creole family, according to January’s mother, had threatened to disown him if he continued to court the extremely wealthy American. The Reverend Dunk was still there as well, glowering possessively on one side of the group, and the Reverend Promise on the other. Both pastors, in between admiring the worthiness of Emily Redfern’s soul, glared daggers at one another, smothering yawns of exhaustion as the small hours of the morning advanced. But neither was willing to leave until the Widow called for her carriage at three.

  At which point Cochon suggested the musicians all repair with their wages to the Buttonhole Café – which like all establishments operated by librés was supposed to close at sunset – for breakfast.

  So it was that as soon as the fog had burned off and the sun had risen high enough over the low pastel town to provide light into the morgue, January returned home, bathed, shaved, kissed Rose, picked up his satchel of surgical tools, and made his way to the Cabildo through streets that smelled of sewage and spilled liquor. A rumpled and sleepy-looking Shaw slouched at his desk, reading a smudgy newspaper which he passed silently to January.

  WHAT COST A YOUNG GIRL’S LIFE?

  A shocking crime of singular callousness was perpetrated late Sunday night in the very heart of the French Town. A Turkish gentleman, H—P—, recently come to this city, being displeased with two of his lesser wives, was seen to strangle them with a bowstring and cast them down from the window of his house into the street, behavior certainly not uncommon in the murky alleys of Constantinople but horrifying in the extreme in these freer climes.

  His punishment a foregone conclusion, you will say? No such thing!

  For when the witness to this bloody deed attended the Cabildo to offer provision for burial for these unfortunate daughters of the East – and to give testimony against the potentate whose gold has made him the cynosure of society since his arrival last month – he was met with mockery and derision, and hustled from the halls where the French still hold sway with the strongly-worded implication to keep himself out of the affairs of his betters . . .

  ‘There’s a letter from him, too,’ remarked Shaw, and he spat in the general direction of the sandbox beside his desk. ‘An’ from Breche hisself.’

  He removed his boots from the desk’s surface, stood, and bent his long body back and forth to crack his backbone. The watch room, still blue with the remaining shadows of the night, stank of burnt gas and vomit; a couple of prisoners were mopping the place out under the sour eye of a City street-cleaner.

  ‘And no mention, I suppose –’ January followed him to the courtyard doorway and stepped aside to let pass the line of prisoners armed with buckets and shovels, bound for the gutters at the back of town – ‘that the city has this potentate in custody?’

  ‘You think that’d make a difference?’ Shaw lit a couple of candle lanterns from the nearest gas jet. The cupboard-sized morgue beneath the courtyard stairs – which had previously done duty as an auxiliary cell, a spare infirmary, and storage for the shovels and buckets of the gutter cleaners – was windowless.

  Even allowing for the morning’s cold, January braced himself as they neared its door.

  The sweetish reek of decaying flesh met them even as Shaw turned the key in the lock. Thank God it’s winter. Nothing, of course, could be done about roaches. Not in New Orleans. When the gray light fell into the little chamber, a dozen of the huge insects took rattling flight from the cracks of the two coffins on the trestle table within and blundered clumsily around the walls. Despite most of a lifetime in New Orleans, January loathed the things.

  ‘I had a look at them girls yesterday mornin’, soon as it was light enough to see.’ Shaw used the side of his hand to sweep away the rat droppings that surrounded both coffins, and he untied the ropes that held the lids in place. ‘They was stone cold, an’ stiff. This rigor’s passing off now, but it was clear their joints had been forced – the rigor in ’em broke – elbows, shoulders, hips, knees. Their wrists an’ ankles an’ necks was still locked up hard. You can see by the way the blood’s pooled in their flesh that they was laid on their sides at some point, likely curled up.’

  ‘Likely,’ assented January softly.

  He lifted the first girl from her protective box.

  She must have been beautiful in life. January had seen enough death – in the yellow fever plague-wards, during his years at the Hôtel Dieu, in the years of the cholera – to be able to look past the bloating and discoloration of mortality and see beauty still in the delicate bones of the face. Her long hair, deep coffee-brown and rinsed with henna to give it red glimmers that bordered on the color of burgundy, trailed down over his arm; traces of kohl crusted the shut eyelids.

  ‘Her clothes is in that box over in the corner,’ said Shaw. ‘That’s Miss Noura; she was wearin’ the pink. Karida was the one in green. Far as I can tell, neither one was raped, but have a look at Miss Noura’s hands. She put up a fight.’

  January turned the soft fingers over. The nails were just beginning to loosen in their beds, but under them he could discern bits of blood and hair. From the battered leather surgical satchel, he took a pair of fine-nosed tweezers and a small square of white paper, such as apothecaries – and his sister Olympe – twisted up drugs in. With greatest care, he extracted the tiny wads. ‘Ever look through a microscope?’ he asked as he worked. ‘Rose has one . . .’

  ‘Them things the doctors at Charity use, to look at tiny worms an’ such in drops of water?’

  ‘Exactly. Ever looked through one at a human hair?’ He folded the paper delicately together. ‘A black man’s hair is different from a white man’s. I’m wondering if the hairs from a man’s arm are that different.’ He pushed up his sleeve, held his forearm next to the Lieutenant’s.

  ‘Don’t do no good lookin’ at me, I got hair like a little girl.’

  ‘I’m also wondering how different a white man’s hair would be from a Turk’s. The other girl fight?’

  ‘Nah. By what M’am Jamilla said, doesn’t sound like she would.’

  ‘You’d be surprised.’ Breathing as shallowly as he could, January examined Noura’s body all over with Rose’s magnifying lens: palms, feet, throat. ‘This wasn’t done with any bowstring.
Looks like the bowstring was done after they were dead. Was a bowstring found in the room, by the way?’

  ‘It was. There was two or three others in Hüseyin’s study – both horse hair an’ deer sinew – an’ Hüseyin’s bow hung up, unstrung, on the wall of his room. But I did wonder if a bowstring would bruise up flesh like that.’

  The narrow ligature had sunk into the skin of the throat like a wire into cheese, but there was no bleeding. The flesh was bruised under the clayey discoloration, and it would be impossible now to determine whether the bruises around it had been made by a man’s hands.

  Impossible to prove it in court, anyway.

  ‘Which means – I’m guessing – that she didn’t struggle against it. That she was already dead. Somebody seems to have gone to a great deal of trouble,’ January added as he laid the girl back into her borrowed coffin, ‘to put the crime on Hüseyin.’

  Shaw folded his long arms. ‘I’m thinkin’ so.’

  ‘Look at this.’ January lifted Karida’s body from its box, laid it on the table where the light fell through most strongly from the door.

  Outside in the courtyard, one of the sergeants grunted to someone – presumably the first slave of the day led to the whipping post – ‘Strip off, honey,’ and January set his jaw and willed himself not to hear.

  Shaw moved a step closer as January turned the girl’s hand over.

  ‘Nails were all broken.’

  Shaw frowned. ‘I didn’t see—’

  ‘They were broken days before she died.’ Gas and fluids were beginning to collect under the skin, rendering that graceful hand cold and slightly squishy. ‘Look how much shorter than Noura’s they are, and how uneven. She’s had time to file them neat.’

  ‘Don’t sound like they was made to do the floors.’

  ‘No. No calluses on either one, so whatever Karida was doing with her hands, it wasn’t done regularly, or for long. Let’s see their clothes – and especially their shoes.’

  The girls’ garments had been fouled by the wet pavement on to which they’d fallen, but, held to the light of the doorway and examined meticulously with Rose’s magnifying glass, they showed no sign of tearing or stress. From the baggy folds of Karida’s salvars, January picked a splinter of wood, and two more from Noura’s. ‘Down near the ankles,’ he said. ‘Look, here’s another splinter in Karida’s shoulder.’ He carefully turned the heavier wool of the entari. ‘It’s hard to tell whether there was much abrasion on the palms, but if there was, it wasn’t enough to break the skin. What does that tell us?’

  The Kentuckian’s eyes narrowed for a moment, as if he were reading animal tracks. ‘They climbed down from the kitchen roof with that long ladder that’s layin’ in Valentine’s livery yard, not a rope.’

  ‘And here’s a moss stain on Noura’s shoe, and horse dung. More dung on Karida’s. What do you know about Tim Valentine?’

  ‘That he’s a scoundrel.’ Shaw helped January lift Karida back into her box, settled the lids on both girls and roped them fast. January remembered the rat droppings. ‘I got a note this mornin’ from Mr Harik—’

  January raised his eyebrows a little at the proper use of the tutor Harik Suleiman’s name and, as usual, wondered where Shaw had found out how it should be.

  ‘—sayin’ M’am Jamilla’s asked him to make arrangements for the burial of the girls.’

  ‘That’s one in the eye for Breche.’

  ‘An’ won’t we hear about it, next issue of the True American.’ Shaw paused outside the morgue door to let January follow him out, locked it behind him. ‘There bein’ no Mohammedan cemetery here, she said she figured the best for ’em would be with the Jews on Rampart Street. I guess they allows Gentiles that’s married Jews to be put in that little boneyard of theirs, so there’s no danger of God rainin’ fire an’ brimstone on the place, the way he would if’fn they was put away among the Christians acrost the street.’

  Shaw’s voice was dry. So far as January knew, the Kentuckian was a Protestant – most Americans were – but he had never, he realized, heard his friend refer to his own faith or belief in God, if he had any, at all. Perhaps, like Rose, he was an intellectual Deist. But he could have been a Druid, for all he’d ever voiced an opinion of anyone else’s religion, as most Catholics and Protestants of January’s acquaintance were all too ready to do.

  ‘As for Tim Valentine,’ Shaw went on, ‘we had him in a dozen times over the past three years, for bustin’ up saloons or gettin’ in fights over cards. Mr Pavot, what leases him the back part of his lot to extend the livery yard, has swore out complaints against him for not payin’ his rent, an’ once for nearly killin’ a slave. That didn’t come to nuthin’, since Valentine swore he was just givin’ the woman a couple of licks for thievin’.’ He opened the lantern’s slide, blew out the candle.

  Though the morning was cold, and the water in the trough in the Cabildo yard icy, January was grateful for the chance to wash in it. He suspected he’d have to boil his shirt, to get rid of the smell of decay.

  ‘Treats his horses good, though,’ Shaw went on. ‘His wagons an’ buggies is always in first-rate shape, an’ clean as your Ma’s dishes. That slave of his, Sillery, has been brung in a dozen times, for theft an’ bein’ out after curfew. Far as I know Tim beats him hisself. He’s got three of ’em: Sillery, Delilah, an’ Jones. No wife, five kids, the youngest three an’ the oldest sixteen; the boy seems to do most of the work at the livery these days. Since the banks crashed I hear Tim’s been borrowin’ money all over this town. Care to walk on over there with me?’

  ‘I would,’ said January, though he felt in his bones the gritty ache of staying up too late. ‘I think I’d like to hear what Mr Valentine has to say about the events of Sunday night.’

  ‘As would I.’ Shaw set down the lantern on his desk in the watch room and collected his hat. ‘Problem is, last time anybody seen the man was Friday – the day them gals disappeared.’

  Burton Blodgett was sitting on a bench just outside the Cabildo’s great double doors, reading that day’s English-language edition of the New Orleans Bee. As January and Shaw emerged he rose to his feet, stretched like a man who has all the day before him, yawned, and fell into step about five yards behind them. Shaw’s eyes narrowed for a moment, and his glance crossed January’s. Then as they reached the corner of Rue St Philippe, he dug in his pocket and produced a couple of reales.

  ‘Ben, I thank you for your information,’ he said, not loudly, but loudly enough that their eavesdropper could certainly make out the words. ‘I reckon I’ll be seein’ you around town?’

  ‘That you will, sir.’ January touched the brim of his hat. He supposed that if he knuckled his forehead and bobbed in a bow, Blodgett would think it only right and appropriate. ‘I thank you, sir.’

  ‘You keep out of trouble now, Ben.’

  January manufactured the big, bright grin that as a child he’d reserved for his master’s friends. ‘Yes, sir.’

  Shaw continued along Rue Chartres with his hands in his pockets; January loafed on up Rue St Philippe in the direction of the swamps at the back of town. He crossed Royale, Bourbon, turned downstream along Rue Dauphine, and estimated that he reached Rue des Ursulines and turned back toward the river at about the same time that Shaw – with Blodgett still in tow – got to the front door of M’sieu Pavot’s house on Rue Bourbon, a locale which Blodgett already knew about.

  The gates of Valentine’s Livery stood open on to Rue des Ursulines. January stepped quickly through them into the yard, looking around him with an air of slightly bewildered innocence.

  As he’d suspected, where the lot formed an L – the extension of the yard rented to Valentine by Pavot – there was a small door in the fence that separated Pavot’s truncated lot from the rented-out extension. If there hadn’t been a door there Shaw would simply have to scramble over the fence . . .

  ‘Can I help you, sir?’ A thin red-haired youth emerged from the stable.

  ‘I’m loo
king for Mr Valentine.’

  ‘I’m Mr Valentine.’ The youth shaded his eyes and looked up at him, with a slight air of defiance, as if expecting laughter at the assertion. Shaw had said sixteen, but this ‘Mr Valentine’ didn’t look a day over fourteen, if that. ‘Magus Valentine, at your service with the best conveyances and the finest horseflesh you’ll find in the city.’

  ‘And Mr Tim Valentine is . . . ?’

  ‘In Baton Rouge this week. He should be back Thursday.’

  The door from Pavot’s side of the fence opened. Shaw slouched through and handed money to someone behind him, presumably Pavot’s obliging servant Jerry. January glanced around him and observed that the livery yard occupied much of the center of the block bounded by Ursulines, Bourbon, Dauphine and St Philippe. A ragged line of the back walls of kitchens, stables, and outbuildings hemmed it in, two and sometimes three stories tall, and with the addition of the back half of what had originally been the Pavot lot, the whole must have occupied some ten thousand square feet, half again the area of the average city lot. Most of that space was occupied by a long stable, a number of fodder sheds, and – across the carriageway that led out to Rue des Ursulines – a large coach house, whose upper floor, to judge by the lines of washing hung from its windows, served the Valentine family as their dwelling place.

  Shaw ambled over to January and Magus Valentine, taking in all these details with that deceptively mild gray glance. ‘Your pa got a key to that door, son?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Under the brim of the boy’s cap, the hazel eyes grew wary.

  ‘Keep it on his key ring?’

  ‘Yes, sir. It’s always locked.’

  ‘Always is a big word.’ Shaw spat into the dirt. ‘When did he leave?’

  ‘Saturday morning. He took deck passage for Baton Rouge on the Daffodil. I was tellin’ this gentleman he should be home Thursday or Friday.’