Murder in July

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘Can’t prove a thing on Ganch, of course.’ Shaw spit again. They had reached the more respectable neighborhoods along Rue Esplanade, and the occasional Spanish plantation houses more and more mingled with the low, stuccoed cottages. The first of the traffic from the wharves began to be seen on the track that ran between the trees of the ‘neutral ground’ between the two lanes of the wide street. Slaves swept the brick banquettes before the steps that led up to the French doors of snug dwellings, or scrubbed them with brick dust against the night’s drift of steamboat soot. ‘He got friends on the First an’ Second Municipal councils,’ Shaw went on. ‘Or anyways folks that owe him money. That ain’t his handwritin’ on the note – I got samples of that. He’s a businessman. Cold as a witch’s kiss.’

  Rose would be delivered within weeks – maybe within days. Panic turned him sick. I will kill them …

  ‘House was as you see it,’ added Shaw, as January ran up the tall steps of the old Spanish house, unlocked the shutters on the French door that led into his study. Shuddered as the smell washed over him, the prosaic mustiness of plaster and paint, redolent of dreams and plans and the exquisite peace of his life with Rose. Yesterday, only yesterday … ‘No windows broke, nor the locks nor latches neither. No sign of a fight.’

  All the other French doors looking out onto the galleries – front and back – were shuttered and latched inside.

  January strode, trembling, past the huddle of tarpaulin-covered furniture in the parlor and into the dining room, where Rose would have been lighting the candles yesterday evening. And indeed, half a dozen candles in their holders stood on the table, barely burned down. The kidnapping must have taken place at about eight, as the first shadows began to fall.

  He found he could barely breathe, though his mind felt curiously calm, as if he were halfway through some hideously complex symphony, everything laid out before and behind him, like a burning road.

  The chairs had all been neatly placed against the walls. There was a blue glass tumbler from the kitchen on the table, with a few inches of lemonade still in it. Zizi-Marie’s sewing box had been closed, but the baby dress she’d been embroidering for Secundus lay beside it.

  Don’t do this, he screamed at God. Don’t do this …

  A needle gleamed coldly where the light from his study came through the doorway. He passed through into the bedroom and saw at once that the satchel in which Rose carried Baby John’s clouts and shirts was missing. Opening the dresser drawer sanctioned to his son’s things, he thought a few of each were gone.

  He could just hear Rose saying, Unless you’re especially fond of the smell of baby urine, I suggest you let me collect a few things from the bedroom before we leave …

  He would have wept, only a part of him – the part that had been born and raised a slave – told him that it would only waste time.

  And he would not let a white man see him weep.

  Crossing the yard to the kitchen, he found signs of a scuffle: fragments of a broken plate, a wooden chair set in a corner where Gabriel wouldn’t have put it. Flies rose in a cloud from the pot where yesterday afternoon’s dinner gumbo had been heating for supper. No kitchen candles. The doors looking into the yard had all been closed and latched, but they’d have been open yesterday evening when this happened. Gabriel had at least been allowed time enough to bank down the fire.

  Your wife and children are unharmed …

  Whoever they were, they’d taken pains. They really wanted something of him.

  Or maybe they just didn’t want to call attention to the kidnapping by a conflagration.

  ‘What you need me to do, Maestro?’ Shaw’s voice was matter-of-fact as the clunk of a butter churn. January had the impression that if he’d replied, ‘Assassinate the Queen of England and burn London’, the tall Kentuckian would have shouldered his rifles and set forth to do so without a word. Knowing Shaw, he’d probably succeed …

  ‘If I’m not back by evening,’ he said slowly, ‘go to Sir John Oldmixton at the British consulate and give him the note I’m going to write for you. And then start checking the slave pens of every dealer between Natchez and the river mouth. Even if this Ganch kills me—’ he slid the note Shaw had handed him into his jacket pocket – ‘he’ll sell them.’

  Shaw nodded, and spit tobacco out into the yard. January would have bet money his friend couldn’t spit through an open French door at two paces. ‘I will do that.’

  ‘You own such a thing as a palm pistol?’

  Without a word the policeman produced one from the top of his boot. The lineal descendant of Anne Ben-Gideon’s muff pistol, it was small enough to lie concealed in January’s enormous palm.

  ‘Thank you.’ He was well aware that Shaw had just broken Louisiana state law by handing him the weapon. ‘You wouldn’t happen to know,’ he added, as he slipped the ramrod down the muzzle, ‘whether any of those Bank of England securities – the ones Brooke used to back up his purchase of Chitimacha Plantation and the Labarre land – have turned up? Cashed in at a bank, for instance? Or put up for any other kind of purchase?’ The gun was indeed loaded, not that he had for a moment thought that Shaw would carry an unloaded gun.

  ‘Not as anybody’s sayin’.’ The Kentuckian followed him from the kitchen across the yard again, up the back gallery steps and into the house. ‘I had a feelin’ Uncle Juju wouldn’t’a gone back Sunday – after Brooke’s body was found – if’n he’d had luck getting’ those sustificates by breakin’ into the dinin’ room Saturday night. But he’s into Jared Ganch for maybe five thousand dollars, plus whatever else he owes to every other snap-house in town. So I’m guessin’ they figure you know where they is. Or maybe where he is.’

  In his study, January uncapped the inkwell, sat for a moment at his desk.

  In the dining room, Rose’s small French clock tinged the hour. Eight clear notes, bringing her before him, a quicksilver smile and a flash of spectacles. Calling forth Baby John’s solemn steady gaze, a thousand years old in his infant face; briefly conjuring Gabriel’s laughter, Zizi-Marie’s sweet voice singing, from the shadows of the paint-smelling parlor draped in old sheets. Shaw’s voice ran on in the back of his mind, and he was aware of the policeman watching him with those cold gray eyes, asking him what else ‘they’ might figure he knew.

  I may never see any of them again.

  I may never see the face of my only daughter or my second son.

  It was his childhood nightmare returned, the dread he’d lived with for the first seven years of his life: not fear of his master’s beatings, but the sickened awfulness of not knowing, when he came in from taking water to the men in the fields, if he’d find his mother, his sister, his father gone.

  Holy Mary, full of grace, his heart whispered, return them here safely. Guide me …

  With a steady hand he dipped his pen, wrote, ‘Dear Sir John …’

  Mounted again on Voltaire, January scanned the flat gray water, the flat pale sand mingled here and there with low islets of gray-green grass, as the shadows of cypress and tupelo opened out around him. From the end of the Turnpike Road a long fishing pier extended into the waters of the lake, and as he approached he could see men moving about on it from the boats docked at the far end. But it lay too far from the nearest cottages – summer dwellings begun before the bank crash two years ago had wiped out the credit of their builders – for there to be much activity. His heart thudded painfully in his chest.

  It was three miles from the town itself, and most of that distance through the marshy wastelands of the ciprière. Shaw had accompanied him through the Swamp, to make sure no one followed him: a free black man riding alone through those empty woods was asking to be kidnapped. Beneath the scrunch of Voltaire’s hooves on the broken shells, January had listened every foot of the way for sounds in the trees around him. Had turned in the saddle, time and again, to scan the road behind him, the dark-green monotony of woods on either side.

  White egrets picked at cow dung by the road
side ditches. A hawk circled overhead.

  When he saw the break in the trees, and the lakeshore beyond, January heard the plaintive mewling of gulls.

  He drew rein where the road ended, a hundred feet from the shore. Though clouds rose like advancing towers above the water, the day was grilling hot, even the storm breeze that soughed across the lake helpless before the sweltering heat.

  Their names turned on themselves as they passed through his mind again and again: Rose. Zizi. Baby John. Gabriel. Rose.

  Hooves ground on the shell road behind him. Two men emerged from the trees a dozen yards behind him, a third came riding fast up the road from the direction in which he’d come. Americans, he thought. The kind of Americans he hated most, ‘Kaintucks’ who came down the river on the flatboats, from the frontier towns of Arkansas and Missouri. Small-time land speculators, slave traders (or slave stealers), ‘filibusters’. As Hannibal had surmised, mercenaries who hung around the saloons of the Swamp, waiting to be hired by smugglers or gamblers or river thieves.

  One of them wore the brown Mexican jacket he remembered from the Bayou Road yesterday, coarse cowhide embroidered on the sleeves in dirty white. He wore a low-crowned Mexican hat, too, beneath which blondish-red hair straggled to his shoulders. His mouth and unshaven chin were stained with tobacco, and the paunch that sagged over his belt in no way decreased his aspect of brute strength. ‘You January?’ he asked, when he got close.

  ‘That would be me, sir.’ At least this is the party I’m here to meet and not random kidnappers …

  ‘Nobody back there, Cat,’ reported the third rider, and jerked his thumb back toward the road.

  ‘Take the nigger’s mule, Rocky.’

  The man named Cat dismounted, caught Voltaire’s bridle, and January warned, ‘Watch out for him, sir; he kicks like a bastard,’ even as the big animal swung his hindquarters into firing position. January reined him around, then stepped from the saddle as Rocky sprang down from his own mount and carefully took the mule’s rein.

  ‘Never met a mule that didn’t,’ grinned Rocky – younger than Cat, but bigger, with the same hulking frame and red-gold hair. Under the brim of a shallow-crowned beaver hat his pale blue-green eyes were both crueler and stupider.

  ‘You stay with ’em here, Rocky,’ instructed Cat, and gestured to the other member of the party – the skinny, mean-eyed, lantern-jawed woman who’d been with him on the road yesterday – who stepped up to January’s other side. ‘That’s a fine mule,’ he added, with a glance at January. ‘Your’n?’

  ‘Maggie Valentine’s.’

  Cat spit. ‘Bet she charged you a packet. My brother’ll keep an eye on him for you, give him back when Mr – uh – Smith – is done talkin’ to you.’ He took January’s arm, as did the woman, and walked him toward the pier. ‘I hope you ain’t prey to seasickness.’

  FOURTEEN

  Cat blindfolded January when they got him into the boat at the end of the pier, which, he reflected, they should have done a lot earlier if they were really concerned about secrecy. It would be difficult for him to determine where they’d taken him – the newish, dark-green, twenty-foot sailing-skiff could be steered anywhere along the shore of the lake – but it would be fairly easy to trace the boat to its owner by a description, and to guess at least to within a few miles where they’d landed, given the direction of the wind.

  He hoped that meant that Cat and his friends – and ‘Mr Smith’, presumably the gambler Jared Ganch – were careless, and not that they didn’t care what he learned because they planned to kill him and drop his body over the side. They had patted his pockets, but hadn’t searched him thoroughly, possibly because they knew that even with a knife or a small pistol he wouldn’t be able to fight them all.

  Yet looking back on the carefully banked kitchen fire, the extinguished candles, he didn’t think this was the case.

  They wanted him alive, and they wanted him to do something for them.

  Probably, he reflected, exactly what he was already trying to do.

  Find Juju Filoux.

  And learn what Henry Brooke had done with his Bank of England stock certificates – and his gold.

  They wouldn’t have left Rocky to keep an eye on Voltaire if they hadn’t been told to be polite.

  His escort spoke little – a third man, addressed as Chuy, had been in the boat – and mostly about fishing in the lake, though once the woman said, ‘There’s the rocks – swing her around here,’ in a voice devastated by tobacco and drink.

  Far off, thunder rumbled across the water and Cat said, ‘How fast that storm comin’ in?’

  ‘We fine,’ returned Chuy. ‘We put in anywhere here.’

  Mexican or Caribbean Spanish.

  They changed direction – January felt it in the sway of the boat, the direction of the wind on his face – two or three times in the half-hour they were on the water. January guessed they backtracked, to keep him from guessing where along the shore they’d put in. Another hopeful sign that they didn’t intend to kill him, at least not yet. Still blindfolded, he was helped out of the boat when they scraped bottom, and waded some forty feet to dry rock and grass. He counted sixty more steps inland, among trees, and up rickety steps. Fishing camp, he guessed, even before he was guided to a chair (Not pushed, they must not intend to sell me in Texas either). The man on the other side of the table – whose edge he felt with his arm – used bay rum on his hair. A lot of it. And Parma violet to cover up the smell of clothing too long unwashed.

  The blindfold was removed.

  The man on the other side of the table was better dressed than his employees, but his eyes, and his clean-shaven face, had the same callous hardness. He sized January up as if pricing what he’d bring on the auction block, and folded hands that had done manual labor, though not recently. The diamonds on his stickpin and pinky ring screamed, ‘I bought these because I can afford them now!’ The room, as January had guessed, was plain and walled with old flatboat planks whose shrinkage let slits of daylight through, though the roof was solid. In a fishing camp you wanted a roof, but the deep galleries that shaded its floor-length windows on all four sides kept away the rain. The windows were open to the lake air.

  After a first glance January kept his eyes down. He’d learned the hard way that white men didn’t like to have black ones meet their gaze.

  ‘You find anything at Chitimacha?’ asked his host.

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Or at the Labarre parcel?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘You looking for anything in particular?’

  ‘No, sir,’ replied January. ‘That is, I’m looking for anything that might tell me who would have murdered Henry Brooke. I think if Madame Filoux had done so she’d have gotten herself and her children out of town the next day – or she would have buried the body under the house, not dumped it in the basin. The bullet I found at the house wasn’t nearly the same size as the one dug out of his body.’

  ‘And that’s your business why?’

  Stick as close as possible to the truth. He’d learned that about telling lies as a child. You never can tell what they already know.

  ‘My sister’s a friend of hers. Some of the local voodoos told me Mr Brooke was supposed to be mixed up with dangerous men. The banks told the City Guards the property purchases had been backed up with Bank of England stock certificates, but I didn’t find any in the house, ’cept for the one Madame Filoux had on her when she was arrested. There was some talk of gold, though that might just be ya-ya. You talk to any voodoo about someone who’s been murdered and sooner or later they start saying there’s pirate gold behind it.’

  ‘Mr Smith’ was silent for a time at that, studying January’s face with cold dark eyes, like onyx collar studs, seeming darker still against his neatly-trimmed sandy hair. Gauging his words. Sniffing for a lie.

  ‘So gold wasn’t what you was lookin’ for out in the woods along Bayou Gentilly?’

  ‘I don’t know what I was loo
king for, sir. But Mr Brooke bought two pieces of land, and according to what the bank told the City Guards he was getting ready to buy two more. The only thing you can do with land like that is bury something on it. The land was sure too worthless for him to re-sell. I think it was a blind, and I wanted to go out there and see what I could see.’

  ‘And what did you see?’

  ‘Nothing, sir. No dirt turned up fresh, and no water deep enough – barring the bayou itself – to sink a box in, that it wouldn’t be found. Not that I think he’d have hidden so much as train fare on land he didn’t own.’

  ‘Smith’ nodded. This was something he understood. ‘You search the whore’s house?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Find anything?’

  ‘Some receipts and an old bank book. A little jewelry. The deed to the house.’

  Ganch’s mouth twisted thoughtfully. January put his age at forty or so, a man who’d lived all his life as a predator, robbing other men as casually as a toothed garfish swallowed smaller fish. ‘A list of men’s names? A strongbox? Or the key to one?’

  ‘No, sir.’ Personal papers. He could almost hear Sir John Oldmixton’s creamy baritone pass casually over the words. Which it is imperative that I find, and find quickly. ‘Sounds like it was Juju Filoux who let himself into the house late Saturday night, almost certainly after finding Brooke’s body in the turning basin and going through his pockets. He could have searched the dining room, one of the cabinets, and the attic without his sister waking up. I don’t know what he might have found, either there or in Brooke’s pockets. Since he came back next day I’m guessing he didn’t find anything.’

  ‘Any idea where he is now?’

  ‘No, sir. I’ve been asking around town.’

  ‘That’s what I hear tell.’ The gambler placed palms together, and leaned lips and chin against them, as if praying. At length he said, ‘There’s no need for us to be working against each other here, January. I need another man to help me find Juju Filoux. A man who knows the colored side of town. A man who’s respected among the niggers. Now, it happens that Mr Brooke and I were in the process of closing a business deal when he met his unfortunate end, before he was able to turn over to me the strongbox containing these Bank of England certificates you mention, as well as a list of his associates, and a couple hundred dollars in gold. Would you be willing to help me find that?’