Murder in July

by Barbara Hambly

  He had never felt safe crossing Canal Street. Now he didn’t feel safe in the French Town either, and when he left it, as he did now, he found himself mentally measuring the distance between himself and any white man he passed, and calculating his chances of escape.

  Several of the new, elegant American hotels graced St Charles Avenue a short distance upriver from the French Town; it was said that the Verandah, with its splendid balcony and marble statues, was the most home-like, a statement which made January reflect that whoever said that must have had an extraordinary home. He entered, as was considered proper for a man of his ancestry, through the rear yard, and sought out the concierge Louis Naquet – reflecting again upon the general usefulness of the FTFCMBS in acquiring a nodding acquaintance with pretty much everybody in town.

  He located Naquet in the pantry, through which waiters carried food from the kitchen into the spectacularly painted dining room. Elegant in livery, the concierge stood with three or four waiters and table captains beside the padded doors, looking through the small glazed windows into the dining room itself. Even from there January could hear the soft clamor of lunchtime customers, the voice of one man – a thickset American businessman with a rufous beard, he saw when he joined them in looking through the windows – raised in carping complaint. ‘Damn it, boy, when I say I want chicken I mean I want something that’s hot, not that’s been sitting on a counter somewhere while those lazy niggers take their sweet time fetching it out.’ His tablemates – all with dishes already before them – nodded and growled agreement as a harassed-looking waiter set a plate of chicken and cream sauce on the table.

  ‘And don’t think this is the end of it, boy,’ the man snapped at the waiter. ‘I expect this to be taken off my bill, for all the trouble you’ve caused me.’

  Naquet, at whose elbow January stood, shook his head, and January said softly, ‘M’sieu Naquet, if I—’

  Naquet held up his hand: Wait.

  All eyes were on the window, with a sort of breathless anticipation.

  Then Naquet grinned. ‘Well,’ he said, with great satisfaction, ‘he ate it.’

  The waiters dissolved into silent guffaws, slapping one another on the back in congratulation – for what, January could only speculate with a shudder. The concierge turned from the little windows with a shake of his head, said, ‘Janvier,’ in greeting, and grasped his hand. ‘It plumb amazes me,’ he added, with a glance back toward the dining room as he led January toward his own little office near the pantry, ‘that so many of those white men ain’t yet figured it out, that you don’t cause trouble for them that handles your food. What can I do for you, m’sieu?’

  Naquet recalled Henry Brooke – it was his job to remember everybody who stayed at the Verandah, sometimes over years between visits – but had little to say of him. He’d arrived with a single heavy trunk – something January already knew from Shaw – and a valise. He tipped adequately, was gone most of each day, didn’t bring prostitutes up to his room, and had departed after two days. ‘The morning after he’d gone to one of the Blue Ribbon Balls, I understand. I assume he met someone there with whom he reached an understanding.’

  ‘He did,’ said January quietly. ‘She was arrested yesterday morning for his murder. I’m certain she didn’t do it and I’m certain she’s going to hang for it – she can’t prove where she was at the time – and I’m looking to see who he knew in town. Did he meet anyone here?’

  It was a bow drawn at a venture, and January wasn’t surprised when Naquet shook his head. If the man Brooke was working for Oldmixton, he’d be taking pains to cover his tracks. ‘You have any samples of his handwriting?’ he asked, and the concierge took him to the manager’s office and fetched the hotel’s register, and one of the folders of dining-room records. January wasn’t sure – he was no expert in handwriting – but he thought the slightly cramped ‘r’s in ‘Brooke’ and ‘Henry’ were identical to those in ‘Gerry’.

  Did it prove anything? He didn’t know.

  And if Gerry O’Dwyer had fled from Paris in 1830 – if he’d been completely unaware that his lover faced the guillotine for lack of evidence as to her whereabouts on that hot Tuesday night – it wasn’t beyond the bounds of reason that he would come to New Orleans one day.

  Or even that he’d be working with, or for, the British.

  Why property? he wondered, as he made his way back to the French Town, glancing over his shoulder all the way. And why worthless property?

  There was a man named Ti-Jon, whose master usually rented him to one or another of the stevedore gangs that worked the steamboat wharves: Ti-Jon was the hub and facilitator of a network of slaves that covered the riverfront and half the city. Since his master – who owned a steamboat, a cotton press, four goods wagons and a hotel – was one of those who let his slaves find their own lodgings and food and demanded only a weekly cut of their wages, Ti-Jon was the man other slaves went to in quest of side work to earn extra money, or bargains of one kind or another for clothing or food.

  Knowing, as he did, that it was the slaves of the white folks who knew everything in any town, January inquired along the wharves for him, and was directed to the blacksmith shop of Mohammed LePas on Rue St-Pierre. Ti-Jon was there, with four of his master’s draft horses being shod. He and the blacksmith greeted January, and asked after Rose’s health, and the rumor that it was January who was inquiring into the matter of Jacquette Filoux’s arrest.

  ‘That would be me,’ sighed January, and explained the principle problem: that almost nothing was known of Henry Brooke, except that he was mixed up in some reputedly strange and illegal doings someplace. ‘The City Guards want to hang somebody for the murder, and right now there’s no alternative candidate. We don’t know who else in town would want to murder the bastard. How many enemies can you make when you’ve only been in town two weeks?’

  ‘Depends on who you play cards with,’ remarked Mohammed LePas wisely. He was a wiry old man, with old and faded ‘country marks’ scarred into his face. He’d been the apprentice blacksmith on Bellefleur Plantation when January was a child, and had known him almost literally from birth: his freedom papers were one of the finest examples in town of Hannibal Sefton’s talents as a forger.

  ‘On the subject of playing cards,’ said January, ‘I’m pretty sure when his body was dumped in the basin it was dragged out and robbed by Juju Filoux. So whatever he had on him that would tell us what he was up to and who he was involved with, is probably in Juju’s pockets right now. Either of you know where he might be found?’

  ‘You lookin’ for Juju,’ said Ti-Jon, ‘you standin’ in the back of a long line. What I hear, that boy owes money to every crap game in town – and to half the girls in town that he’s sweet-talked into lendin’. I don’t know what that boy’s got,’ he added, with a shake of his head, ‘but I would surely make my fortune if I was to bottle and sell it.’

  ‘You heard if he’s left town?’

  The slave considered the matter, while LePas went back to his bellows and his hammer; at length he said, ‘You know, I think if he had, he’d have taken some girl with him, and I haven’t heard any of their men cryin’ thief. So I may be wrong, but I’m thinking he’s still around someplace.’

  ‘Would you keep your ear to the ground?’ asked January. ‘About Juju, and about Brooke – and anything you might hear about the old Chitimacha Plantation, which Brooke apparently bought—’

  ‘That place?’

  ‘Good Lord, my uncle Dom worked on that place,’ exclaimed LePas – meaning, January knew, not the blacksmith’s literal uncle, but one of the older men who had been part of the Bellefleur workforce at some point in the man’s childhood. ‘He said that bayou would change course damn near every time it rained. They got a steamboat stranded just about on the front porch of the house one winter …’

  ‘I’ll ask around,’ promised Ti-Jon. ‘Mr W—’ this was the man who owned him, Jean-Francois Wachespaag – ‘has me drivin’ for him, no
w work’s so slow on the docks; which beats Jesus out of workin’ Jem Mayhew’s brickyard, which is what he had me doin’ last week. He’ll have me waitin’ tables next. Somebody should have heard something.’

  Olympe, whom January found in the shaded loggia outside her kitchen on Rue Iberville, scrubbing out her jelly-making kettle, had heard nothing of the errant Juju’s whereabouts either. ‘And that Brooke, he come and go quiet.’ Though like Jacquette Filoux she’d been sent to the convent of the Ursulines for an education, her French was still the coarse patois of the cane patch, a gesture of defiance against the plaçeé mother who, like Jacquette’s, had tried to make her into a plaçeé in her turn.

  In the afternoon heat the yard behind her cottage was still cooler than the streets, and in the shadows of what had been her husband’s workshop – back when customers had had work for him – Tiennot and Jean-Luc Filoux picked through baskets of berries with Olympe’s seven-year-old son Ti-Paul, removing rubbish and leaves.

  ‘He was up to something.’ January shed his coat, and carried the big terracotta pitcher to the cistern to refill it for his sister. ‘Four days ago a man offered me a hundred dollars to find Brooke’s killer, and get back some papers he might or might not have had on him – which for certain weren’t in his pockets when they pulled him out of the basin. So something tells me it wasn’t just buying up worthless plantations and selling them to ignorant Englishmen.’

  His sister set down the porcelain jelly-pot she was drying on the table before the kitchen, and her velvet-brown eyes narrowed. ‘Buying plantations?’

  He related to her what Shaw had told him, adding, ‘Uncle Juju might have made off with the deeds when he let himself into Jacquette’s house Saturday night. He was gambling at the Cock that night, and I think he found Brooke’s body and took the key. I notice Bridgie Danou said she didn’t see the man’s face, which means he was letting himself into the dining-room door rather than the bedroom where there was a candle. If he found the deeds – and the stock certificates, or whatever else Brooke had in the desk – he might well be afraid to sell them now, for fear of being traced. That might be why he went back Sunday. For cash money.’

  ‘For sure he couldn’t sell somethin’ like a deed or stocks on his own,’ agreed Olympe slowly. ‘He’d have to go through one of the big bosses, like Ganch or Shotwell at the Blackleg. Dobo at Lorette’s livery tells me he drove Brooke out to Alcinde Allard’s plantation, and out to the Labarre place. Other times, he said, he’d rent a buggy an’ drive himself.’

  ‘So Saturday afternoon,’ said January thoughtfully, ‘he got dressed up and either walked down a few streets to Rue Bourbon or Rue Royale—’

  ‘To see who?’ Olympe glanced over her shoulder at him as she entered the kitchen, came back out with a cone of sugar and a scraper. ‘The Merieults are at the lake.’ She named one of the most socially prominent of the Creole French. ‘Chesneau and his family left for Mandeville last week, the Almonesters and the de la Rondes are in Spanish Fort for the summer. Near every family that’s got a town house you can reach by foot from Rue Toulouse. Yet he was dressed up fine to go callin’.’

  ‘So he took a fiacre someplace.’ January bore the kettle into her tiny kitchen, which throbbed with the heat of the hearth, and hung it on the gallows-iron in the big fireplace. ‘So far as I can tell, he was shot early in the evening, with daylight still in the sky.’

  ‘Can happen, down by the basin.’

  ‘Somebody would have seen it, that early. There’s enough coming and going, someone would at least have seen the body. If you could ask among the drivers who were out that night – quietly,’ he added. ‘If Brooke was up to something that was worth a hundred dollars to somebody, I’d rather not have my name bandied around as looking for him.’

  ‘I’ll do that.’ She took a poker, and tidied the heap of searing coals beneath the kettle, turning with a smile as the boys brought in the cleaned berries – trying to pretend their mouths and fingers weren’t stained purple. ‘That’s very good, gentlemen. Now you put these little pots in a row there, and fetch me the big ladle … I’ll burn a green candle for you,’ she added, turning back to January, her dark eyes somber. ‘And I’ll ask M’am L’Araignee, if she has anything to tell me of this. Don’t laugh, brother.’ She nodded toward the house, where the altar of her gods occupied its niche in the parlor, and the spirit she called M’am L’Araignee dwelt in a black-painted bottle among a litter of silver pins and split peppers, graveyard earth and mouse bones. ‘M’am, she tell me last night, it’s the gold they want.’

  ‘What gold? I thought it was stock certificates …’

  Olympe shook her head. ‘She showed me in the ink bowl. Bags of coin, boxes of rubies, Our Lord with his body all made of pearl crucified on a cross of gold. “It’s the gold they after”, madame said.’ The stifling heat of the afternoon seemed to darken with the shadowing of her eyes. ‘The gold smelled like honeysuckle, she said. The diamonds like sandalwood. Diamond combs …’ Her brow creased in thought. ‘Diamond combs. The moon and three stars.’

  And seeing how his eyes changed, she asked, ‘You know what those mean, brother?’

  ‘No. But I’ve seen them.’

  And from the house, the treble voice of nine-year-old Chou-Chou called out ‘Mama! Mama, M’am Maurepas here!’

  ‘I must go.’ Olympe laid a hand on January’s, her eyes still intent on his. For two years Olympe’s trade in gris-gris, in hoodoo, in magic candles and fortunes read by the patterns of beans dropped on her carven tray, had put food on her family’s table. Maybe darker things as well. Big, good-natured Paul Corbier, a skilled upholsterer, had for two of those years rolled cigars in one of the cramped little factories along Tchoupitoulas Street, to keep Chou-Chou and Ti-Paul in school while those who’d been wealthier before the bank crash made do with shabby chairs. When the Mesdames Maurepas of the world came calling, it behooved Olympe not to keep them waiting.

  ‘You go careful, brother.’ With unaccustomed concern she laid a hand upon his shoulder, and tiptoed to kiss his cheek. Then she strode back to the house, straight as a sword blade in her faded red dress.

  ‘Gold is what anyone would be after, obviously,’ said January to Hannibal Sefton later, as the afternoon’s rainstorm pounded like an avalanche of stair rods on the tiled roof of the marketplace arcade.

  ‘Boxes of rubies and solid gold crucifixes somehow don’t sound like Sir John Oldmixton’s style,’ remarked the fiddler, and added, ‘Beautiful damsel, “dusky like the night, but night with all her stars” …’ as the old coffee vendor La Violette brought him a couple of pralines on a square of newspaper despite the fact that he had not a penny to his name.

  She bridled and said, ‘Go ’long with you, with all your pretty talk! These was dropped on the ground, I figured you might as well have ’em—’ Patently untrue, January knew, as he’d been facing her for the past fifteen minutes, and Hannibal took her hand and kissed it.

  ‘If they fell at your feet, gracious madame, they would be all the sweeter for having been crossed by your shadow,’ and she walked back chuckling to her coffee stand.

  The fiddler continued thoughtfully, ‘But certainly not something you’d find in the same cache with good, marketable Bank of England stock certificates. Though I quite agree with you about gold being at the bottom of it. Non quid mortalia pectora cogis, auri sacra fames!’ He pressed his hand to his side and coughed as if the life were being wrung out of him.

  January watched him uneasily, but in fact his friend sounded better than he had earlier in the summer, when the two of them had returned from a somewhat rough-and-tumble stint playing for a minstrel show up-river1. For years Hannibal had controlled his periodic pulmonary crises by liberal use of opiates, with predictable results, and his stubborn adherence to abstinence from the drug – it was nearly two years since his last binge – had results just as inevitable. He must, he had said, be back at the Eagle of Victory after dinner to play for the evening trade: he lo
oked rather like the ghost of an undertaker’s mute who had been run over repeatedly by a hearse.

  ‘This is easier at any rate,’ said January after a time, ‘than it was trying to find Gerry O’Dwyer in Paris nine years ago.’

  ‘If it is the same man,’ agreed Hannibal, ‘he was probably more lively then than now.’

  At the next table an American who looked like a steamboat pilot slammed a newspaper impatiently down, demanded of the man with him why the hell didn’t the United States government just send troops down to New Grenada and take the whole place and be done with all these damn uprisings and revolutions? ‘What the hell do them bean eaters know about revolution anyways?’

  What indeed? January reflected, remembering the barricade on the Rue St-Denis.

  ‘There’s good land down there, cotton land, just for the askin’! An’ what do them Spanish do but fight amongst themselves an’ screw up the trade! I lost a whole shipload of Yoruba – two hundred prime niggers straight from Africa, the ones that survived the voyage – just disappeared in Cartagena in the street-fightin’! An’ for what?’

  ‘Hell, with fifty guys I could take that place myself, while they’s all fightin’ each other …’

  ‘Serve them Pope worshipers right, too, for what they done in Texas—’

  ‘One of the first things Louis-Philippe did when he became king,’ January went on thoughtfully, ‘was to abolish the royal police and replace them with his own infantry and cavalry, mostly to keep “public order”, as they called it – but presumably also to keep control of the old Napoleonnistes who wanted the emperor’s son back on the throne, and those of us who’d thought we were fighting for a republic, the more fools we.’