Murder in July
Page 15
January slapped at the thin droning in his ear and had to agree.
But his mind went back to that … Had it been a deer? It hadn’t moved like one.
The parcel of land that Brooke had purchased from the Labarres was even less productive of any hint as to what the Englishman – or Irishman, reflected January – had in mind. It lay far out along Bayou St John, halfway to the lake and several miles from the cluster of handsome houses that marked the only land along the bayou high enough not to flood repeatedly. The land here lay too low even for a sugar crop, let alone building: Shaw hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d described it as being half under water. An occasional houseboat marked the dwelling of squatters or fishermen. Cypress knees jutted from stagnant pools, and clouds of mosquitoes whined in the dark-green shelter of oaks curtained with gray moss.
Before descending from the road he unpacked the veils of mosquito netting he’d brought from home, and pinned it around the brim of his shallow-crowned hat. Even Olympe’s ‘bug-grease’ wasn’t going to be much of a deterrent here.
‘Is there anything there at all?’ The fiddler peered nervously into the humming gloom beneath the trees, and rubbed a second application of ‘bug-grease’ on his face. ‘Good Lord, what does your sister put into this? “Pernicious weed, whose scent the fair annoys”.’
‘Asafetida, cloves, catnip and wormwood.’ January took the little pot from him, and handed him the other piece of gauze. ‘And dead fish, from the smell of it. There isn’t so much as a hog pen on the property,’ he added, as he tied horse and mule to a sapling close to the narrow track of the Bayou Road. ‘But I think we have to look around.’
‘Moriamur et in media arma ruamus,’ sighed Hannibal, and tucked his shirt cuffs into the cuffs of his gloves.
They skirted the standing water where they could, and once – in addition to the omnipresent snakes – January saw a five-foot alligator basking on a higher hillock of ground. But the land which Henry Brooke had purchased contained nothing visibly notable. Among the trees the heat was suffocating, and with the approach of the inevitable afternoon thunderstorm the frogs and cicadas set up their steady, persistent chorus. The long, narrow plot – some two hundred feet along the bayou and nearly a half-mile back into the woods – contained mostly oaks and cypress, and in one place an almost-impassable thicket of palmetto: ‘But there isn’t even enough land here to make it worth anyone’s while to log it,’ Hannibal protested, as they waded their way back to the road. ‘I know times are hard, but land holds its value … any land but this, I suppose. And any land a French Creole family lets go of has to be worthless. Yet you tell me Brooke rode out to look at the place before he put up in his Bank of England stocks.’
‘It’s not the land.’ January swung into the saddle again. ‘It’s something else. Something about owning land …’
Bags of coin, boxes of rubies … Our Lord with his body made of pearl …
‘You couldn’t even bury treasure on land like this,’ said the fiddler, as they reined away back toward town. ‘You couldn’t dig a hole without it filling with water. Look at the size of the cypress knees, and the thickness of the brush – it must have been this wet for decades. You couldn’t even run cows on it.’
‘How many decades?’ wondered January. ‘And who held the land grant originally? Was Chitimacha part of the same grant? Or those other parcels Brooke was looking at?’ He frowned, as thunder growled to the north, coming down fast.
‘And how would he have found out about … whatever it was?’
January shook his head. ‘There’s a lot of questions,’ he murmured, ‘about Mr Brooke and where he went, and what he did, in the years since he stopped being Gerry O’Dwyer.’
ELEVEN
The rain caught them just short of the first houses, where the shell road from town joined the Bayou Road that led to the lake. Partly from the knowledge that his friend would not survive a bout of pneumonia, and partly from concern about being that close to a large body of water during a lightning storm, January took refuge in the stable yard of a house belonging to the banker Hubert Granville, for whom – as for the owner of Valentine’s livery – he had done services in the past. Granville wasn’t at home – the Bank of Louisiana had recently re-opened its doors under another name – but his coachman Marcellus knew January well, and put up the two rental steeds under the abat-vent that protected the front of the stable from the rain.
‘Myself, I’d take old Voltaire here over any horse in the city,’ remarked the coachman, slapping the riding-mule’s neck companionably as he loosened the cinches. ‘My apologies, Roux,’ he added, addressing Hannibal’s gelding. Marcellus was on a first-name basis with every member of the genus equs in Orleans Parish. ‘But you know it’s true. Can I fetch you some beer, Ben? I’m sure Claire—’ Claire was the Granville cook – ‘will draw us a couple, seein’ as she got a soft spot in her heart for you.’ Claire was sixty-two years old and it had never been proved she had a heart, but Olympe had taken a curse off her kitchen the previous year and the old cook would return any favor to Olympe’s family that was asked.
‘Tell her I would take it mighty kindly of her.’
‘Get you some lemonade, Hannibal?’
‘I will sing songs of undying love beneath the beautiful Claire’s window,’ responded the fiddler, ‘if she, and you, would be so kind.’
Marcellus laughed, and came back not only with beer and lemonade, but with Claire herself: it was mid-afternoon, pouring down rain, and evidently Michie Granville was having dinner in town. ‘Lookin’ at Miz Valentine’s boys there,’ he added, nodding toward the two steeds as he and Claire, January and Hannibal took seats on the rough bench beneath the abat-vent opposite them, ‘reminds me, Ben: that little maid over to the Marigny place, Savannah, tells me you lookin’ for a blonde-headed Englishman in a green coat, supposed to got himself killed Saturday night? I think I mighta seen him out here that evenin’.’
‘Calling on Michie Granville?’ A banker, he thought. ‘Six-feet tall, bukra duds, one of those new silk-plush hats—’
‘Not here on Michie Granville.’ The groom sipped his tin cup of weak ‘small’ beer. ‘An’ I just got a look at him as he’s headin’ the other way along the road.’
‘When you shoulda been payin’ mind to your own work,’ groused Claire, who never let a remark go unchallenged. ‘What you messin’ round lookin’ for dead white men anyways, Ben? Not your business.’
January shook his head, and spread his hands in a gesture of resignation. ‘Olympe asked me to help out,’ he said. ‘I owe her too much not to.’
Claire said ‘Hmph,’ and turned her attention toward the bayou, visible, like a sheet of hammered silver, through the half-open gate of the stable yard. ‘Them idiots out there gonna get hit by lightnin’, sure as gun’s iron,’ she added, as if she personally looked forward to the spectacle. And indeed, unlike January, there were at least a dozen pirogue and keel-boat crews within sight who clearly didn’t know or didn’t care that bodies of water would draw bolts of electricity in a storm. A little group of riders went past the gate, unshaven Americans from the backwoods of Kentucky, by the look of them, soaking wet themselves but cherishing their rifles in long bundles of oilskin slickers.
Rose, January guessed, would have calculated the relative likelihood of each ‘Kaintuck’ being hit: the leading man in the brown rawhide jacket, who was the tallest, or the slouched woman riding à l’Amazone closest to the water itself.
He turned back to Marcellus. ‘But you’re pretty sure about the green coat, and the blonde hair?’ He didn’t ask, Could you swear to that?, because the testimony of a slave was unacceptable in court. Even that of a free black wouldn’t be legal, if the culprit was white.
‘Pretty sure,’ agreed the coachman, nodding. ‘Seein’ old Voltaire reminded me, ’cause it was Tyrell Mulvaney that brought him in his cab, Tyrell drivin’ mules, not horses – which to my way of thinkin’ makes a lot more sense, mules bein’ stron
ger an’ a heap smarter. My apologies, Roux,’ he added again, with a friendly wave at the gelding. ‘But you do know that’s true. Surer-footed, too. Why, a horse’ll eat himself into a colic or drink water ’til he’s sick, but …’
There followed five minutes of comparison between the equine breeds and another five of headshaking over why anyone would choose a horse for any sort of work just because they were slicker and ‘prancier’ and didn’t have long ears – what was wrong with long ears anyways?
January inquired, did Tyrell Mulvaney get less custom by driving mules? And so gently led the conversation back to Saturday evening.
‘I didn’t see where he went to,’ apologized Marcellus. ‘I was drivin’ Mr Granville out to visit one of his lady friends – Mrs Granville bein’ up visitin’ her kin up North – an’ I waved to Tyrell as we passed, him goin’ the other way. ‘Bout the time we’s crossin’ over Bayou Gentilly Tyrell comes passin’ us, goin’ at a good trot back to town, so he musta dropped your Englishman – if it was your Englishman – someplace along between the bayou bridge and the edge of the woods there where that little Bayou Fortin runs into it, ’cause there’s no houses further along than that.’
‘Thank you.’ January made a mental note to track down Tyrell Mulvaney, who worked out of the cab ranks at the foot of the Place d’Armes near the levee. ‘You wouldn’t happen to have heard anything about Juju Filoux, would you?’
‘Heard anythin’ other than that he’s the most worthless piece of Original Sin that ever shamed his mother?’ retorted Claire.
‘About where he might be. Or who he might be with?’
‘Since that good-for-nothing whore Lallie Gardinier threw him out, I doubt there’s a soul in the town that’ll believe his lies or put up with his thievin’.’
The catalog of Uncle Juju’s enormities – unaccompanied by anything in the way of useful information as to his possible whereabouts – Marcellus’s horse-lore and January’s account of Rose’s health occupied a pleasant hour of the afternoon, until the rain lightened and the thunder grumbled its way out over the lake. With many thanks and promises to play at the festivities that would mark the end of next December’s sugar harvest, January tightened up the girths on Voltaire and Roux, and he and Hannibal proceeded on their way along Bayou St John, as more and more boats appeared on the water and more passersby – foot and horse – on the shell road. January didn’t want to call attention to his researches by riding back the way he’d come – the way the cab driver Tyrell Mulvaney had been heading with his fare a week ago Saturday night – but he turned in his saddle, and counted the houses that lay along the bayou in that direction.
This point – where the bayou dog-legged just beyond the half-constructed suburb of Pontchartrain – was the only place along the waterway where the ground was solid enough – and high enough – to support houses. There were about two dozen of them, counting both sides of the stream. Handsome places, some in the old Creole style and others newer and American, all surrounded by trees and by their own grounds. January had taught piano lessons to the children in three of them, though he knew the Santerre family had moved from New Orleans when the banks had collapsed and it was in the back of his mind that the Labranches had, too. He ticked off in his recollection the names of the inhabitants of the others. People he’d never met for the most part – French or Creole French or Creole Spanish, or some like the Champsverts who’d started out as Germans, several generations ago …
Which of them, he wondered, had land to sell?
Or information to buy?
‘Whoever Brooke went calling on,’ remarked Hannibal, ‘you’re going to have your work cut out for you, if they did in fact put quietus to the man. You know no jury in the state is going to convict a white man – or woman – when they have a perfectly good black cocotte to hang instead.’
January glanced back at him, brows raised in question at the second object of that sentence, and Hannibal added, ‘The fact that Brooke – if he was this O’Dwyer scoundrel of yours – or even if he wasn’t – had a librée mistress doesn’t mean he wasn’t also committing adultery with half the females in the parish as well, you know. And the fact that he was working for Her Majesty back in England may have nothing to do with some outraged husband putting a hole in him – and I speak here as a man with considerable experience of outraged husbands.’
January said, ‘Hmn …’
In either case, most of the people who lived along the bayou had access to boats of one kind or another. Saturday night the moon had risen late, and had been on the wane. A man could have taken a flat-bottomed pirogue at dead of night and nobody would be the wiser.
A dozen yards past the Granville place the bayou jogged briefly toward town, and at the first curve the smaller Bayou Metairie joined it from the west. January turned Voltaire’s head onto the track that skirted the lesser water, along a levee of barely three feet in height. As he did so he pulled from his pocket the sketched map Shaw had given him, marking the approximate location of the parcels of land whose owners Brooke had been ‘talking to’. The Allard parcel lay about two miles from Bayou St John, the Aury parcel, almost five. The heat had returned, more stifling than before, and the ragged monochrome green of the swamp-forest closed in around them.
‘As before,’ remarked Hannibal, ‘I can see why the owners would contemplate selling, but what on earth would possess anyone in their senses to buy?’
‘That,’ said January, nudging Voltaire to a trot, ‘is what I hope to learn. Or to learn at least that there is nothing to learn.’
But if any clue could be gleaned from contemplation of the few sodden arpents of bayou land – squishy with mud and humming with mosquitoes as the sun declined – it was beyond January’s ability to interpret. Now and then he smelled smoke from the dwelling of some squatter or swamp-trapper, and an occasional cow or pig could be seen foraging among the tangles of hackberry and elephant-ear. For the most part, there was no sign of human habitation at all, nor of any attempt to either farm or log this land.
‘If he was buying land to bury gold on,’ said Hannibal, after they had criss-crossed the portion of forest that January calculated – by the landmarks listed – to belong to the Widow Aury, ‘where’s the gold now? Any serious quantity of it isn’t something you carry in your pockets, you know. Surely Madame Filoux would have mentioned if Brooke had had shovels or barrows on the premises? Other than the fatal handcart she’s supposed to have lugged him in, but I can’t really see anyone carting a corpse across Rampart Street to the basin at three in the morning unseen by somebody, though whether they’d notice – or care – is another matter entirely. Why else – other than the obvious reasons – take up with a woman who had a house of her own?’
January shook his head.
When the fiddler started to speak again he held up his hand for silence, listening.
For the second time in fifteen minutes – his mind had registered it the first time and he’d merely thought, fox – January heard the flurrying burst of startled birds flying out of underbrush.
And from the same direction, he thought. Between them and the road.
He remembered the flicker of brown in the woods of Chitimacha …
Damn it.
Shadows were gathering in the green dimness beneath the trees. It would be growing dark by the time they reached town.
Up until a few years ago, runaway slaves had had villages here in the swampy lands along the bayous beyond the back of town. But according to Olympe, the last of them had disappeared shortly after the leader of the runaways, Cut-Arm, had been captured and hanged. Single runaways still camped where they could fish in the bayous, hunt in the woods, but they’d flee from riders as the birds fled …
And there was no earthly reason for anyone else to be out this far from town with evening coming on.
Which means that whoever scared those birds, is here because he’s following us.
He murmured, ‘Let’s get out of here.’
1830
When he’d been ambushed in Paris – on the trail of the lady with the moon and three stars in her hair, who might or might not have known the whereabouts of Philippe de la Marche’s real killer – this had not been the case. The knowledge that he was a free man and couldn’t be kidnapped and sold into slavery had been very little comfort when he was being clubbed and kicked into semi-consciousness on the slimy cobblestones of Paris.
He’d thought on that occasion that they were going to kill him, and knew, through a groggy haze of pain, that they could easily do so. But they dragged him a short distance along the narrow street – there were three of them, he estimated cloudily – and shoved him into a carriage of some sort. The floorboards stank of Paris mud and tobacco smoke, and the vehicle rocked and swayed wildly as it clattered at a gallop over the cobblestones. He didn’t lose consciousness, but had been sufficiently stunned to have only the dimmest notion of how long they drove; every turn and jolt slammed him into the boots of the men sitting above him, and he didn’t dare let them know he was conscious by bracing to save himself. The carriage tilted wildly as it rounded a corner, one of the men yelled, ‘Now!’ and the door flew open. January was thrust out, trying to roll as he hit first the paving stones, then the stone corner of a gateway.
He struggled to rise but collapsed, his nose full of his own blood and his body one mass of pain. Though not, he thought, as bad as being beaten by Michie Fourchet when he’d had a couple of drinks in him …
Far off he heard men shouting. Iron gates squealed – they must have flung me out in a doorway somewhere – and strong arms got him to his feet. Steps, and then lamplight. ‘Fetch some water, Jacques—’