Murder in July

by Barbara Hambly

  But I can’t just walk away and let them.

  Not even if I think Juju is a completely contemptible human being.

  He doesn’t deserve that.

  He frowned, as if he had heard what Juju had said for the first time. ‘How was that hundred dollars carried? In a wallet?’

  ‘No, sir. Just in his pocket.’

  ‘Rolled up, or folded?’

  ‘Rolled up. Inner money wasn’t hardly damp.’

  ‘So he hadn’t been in the water but a few minutes. This note from a girl – could you read it?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, it was in this wax-leather wallet, inside his waistcoat. It wasn’t hardly damp neither …’

  A body dead when put into the water would be slower to sink.

  ‘Nothing else in with it? No papers, no letters of introduction, no British passport, no documents about the land he’d purchased?’

  ‘No, sir. Nuthin’ like that.’

  January turned to Cat, said, ‘He’s done everything but take this house apart brick by brick. If he’d found that strongbox here, he wouldn’t be here now.’ Taking the candle, he crossed to the desk, and added, ‘No wallet. No passport. Whoever killed him, searched him before dumping him in the drink. And didn’t take the money or the watch.’

  The filibuster pondered that, as if trying to sort out its implications – or perhaps merely struggling with the concept of someone who wouldn’t have taken the money. He said, ‘Whoever the fuck that was …’

  Whoever the fuck.

  January glanced briefly at the keys – one of them indeed looked very much like a hotel-room key and the other, by its size and age, he guessed to be the key to the house at Chitimacha – then took up the folded note beneath them.

  Whoever it was who wrote to Brooke – making that assignation on the bayou road? – the moment he identified her – pointed to a name on Shaw’s list – he’d bring her to the notice of Jared Ganch and the men who stood grinning around the terrified Juju, their eyes gleaming in the near-darkness. He could smell them from where he stood.

  And if she – whoever she is – was only making a rendezvous for a few kisses in the twilight, knowing nothing of who and what Brooke was … Will she convince Ganch that she doesn’t have this filthy list?

  What will the result be, if I learn her name and give it to them?

  What will the result be, if I don’t?

  Virgin Mary, Mother of God, guide me, because I don’t know what the hell is right.

  He unfolded the note. It was written in French.

  ‘Gerry,’ it said. ‘I must see you. Come to the spot where the little bayou comes out of the Fortin place, into Bayou St John, at sunset. A.’

  January took a deep breath. His hands shook as he folded the note again, and slipped it into his pocket. He felt as if he’d been slammed over the heart with a bargepole. To Cat, he said, ‘Give me three days. I should be able to lay hands on both the list, and the strongbox, by then.’

  His voice must have sounded as strange to Cat Watling as it did in his own ears, because Cat glanced at him sidelong. ‘You ain’t thinkin’ of doin’ somethin’ funny on me, now are you, Mr J?’

  January shook his head. For a moment the only thing he could say was, ‘No.’ In his ears sounded the voice of a priest reading the De Profundis, with the cold steel of the guillotine’s blade gleaming against a gray autumn sky.

  De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine:

  Domine, exaudi vocem meam

  ‘I’m sure there’s no need for me to remind you, what’ll happen to Mrs J. an’ them kids of yours—’

  He shook his head again, still too stunned even to feel anger. He repeated softly, ‘No, sir. I remember. Would you do something for me?’ He turned to face the man. ‘Will you throw Juju in with the bargain, sir? He doesn’t know anything. Don’t kill him. Turn him loose with the others, when I bring the strongbox and the list?’

  Cat looked over his shoulder at Juju for a moment, then shrugged. ‘I can do that, sure. Boys’ll pout some, but I’ll do that.’ He cocked his head for a moment, green eyes narrowing, and he spit tobacco on the floor. ‘You’re playin’ this pretty close to the chest, my friend.’

  January raised his eyebrows, and glanced – as Cat had glanced – back at the ‘boys’: dirty, bearded, vicious, and – by the smell of them, at least – one or two of them more than a little drunk. ‘I have to, sir. This is life and death to me.’ He made his voice as apologetic as he could. ‘And this is … delicate. If your child,’ he went on, lowering his voice as he fished for an analogy that would mean something without coming out and insulting a white man, ‘had her hand caught in a bear trap, and you had to replace the spring in it, for her to get her hand out safely … Which of those men would you trust to do it?’

  To his enormous relief Cat’s unshaven face split in a laugh. ‘Well, you just said a mouthful, Mr J!’ He clapped January on the arm. ‘So we’ll play it your way. An’ we’ll throw in this worthless pimp into the bargain. Three days.’

  January said, ‘Thank you, sir, from the bottom of my heart.’ And he meant it.

  When Cat and his ‘boys’ had departed, dragging the stumbling Juju with them, Shaw emerged from the dark of the bedroom, chewing ruminatively. ‘That was smart talkin’, Maestro. If’n I’d had all the men on night duty with me, I’m still not sure we’d a’ been able to take Ganch’s gang, always supposin’ the men’d risk their lives for the likes of Juju Filoux.’ He picked up the candle, the light making tiny pinpricks of gold in his gray eyes. ‘You’re probably right, that havin’ that little purse gun, an’ a cab driver to testify to takin’ Brooke out to Bayou St John that night, will go a long way to turnin’ M’am Filoux free—’

  ‘If those don’t,’ said January quietly, ‘this will.’ He held out the note.

  Shaw glanced over it, nodded, and spat. Between the torn-up condition of the floor and the presence in the room of Cat’s ‘boys’ for half an hour, there was no point in looking politely around for a cuspidor. ‘Should do it,’ he agreed. ‘An’ you think this “A” gonna know where them papers is, an’ that strongbox of securities?’

  ‘The papers, anyway,’ said January.

  Sustinuit anima mea in verbo eius:

  speravit anima mea in Domino

  Shaw was watching him as Cat had watched him, and, January thought, probably for the same reason. He knew he must still look shaken to his bones.

  ‘You figure she’s one of them on that list I give you?’

  A distant figure in a green dress, her chestnut hair cut short. The flash of a descending blade …

  ‘I think so.’ He knew he didn’t sound any too sure of that.

  ‘You need help?’

  ‘I will, yes.’

  Shaw led the way out onto the banquette – every neighbor on the street must have been watching from behind their curtains. Before following him, January turned the note over in his fingers beside the candle flame. His hand no longer shook, but he felt very strange inside, as if, in the cemetery, he had heard someone call out to him from one of the tombs. Had seen someone he knew emerge from one of those shut stone doors.

  Then he blew out the light, and followed Shaw out into the darkness.

  The handwriting on the note was that of Anne Ben-Gideon.

  TWENTY-ONE

  ‘She was executed.’ January laid the note on the table, went into the kitchen for the coffeepot that sat on the hearth. He had slept, after a fashion, but in his dreams he’d found himself, again and again, in the Place de la Nation, with the smell of the open fields blowing over him, and the guillotine rising against the dawn sky. Autumn, on the threshold of winter, and bone-cold. Daniel had stayed home, swamped in an opium stupor which had lasted for nearly a month.

  ‘I saw her die.’

  1830

  The crowd hadn’t been much. Executions took place at dawn, and the rebellion in Belgium and fighting in the Netherlands the previous month had completely eclipsed the few newspaper account
s of the trial. As the tallest person in almost any gathering, January saw easily over the heads of those closer to ‘The Machine’ than he, and in any case he and Ayasha had stood within twenty feet of the platform. There had been no mistaking Anne for anyone else as she stepped down from the carriage in which she’d been brought, climbed the steps. There were police with her, as well as a priest, and her hands hadn’t been bound. He hadn’t been quite close enough to see if she wept, or to tell if she scanned the crowd, looking for a face she knew.

  He, Ayasha and Daniel had visited her in the prison the previous night. Neither her parents nor Armand, she had told them, had done so.

  The nuns had already been in, last night, to cut off her beautiful reddish-brown hair. She’d clung to Daniel, not weeping, only taking comfort in the warmth of his solid shoulders, the strength of his arms.

  On the platform she had looked very small in the green foulard dress Armand had brought her. Her head was high, as if telling herself, ‘I can do this. I can do this’. She was two months short of her nineteenth birthday.

  ‘Do they drug them?’ Ayasha had whispered, when Anne had stood against the bascule, to be strapped, and that swiveling table had been tipped to horizontal, so that Anne’s neck could be fastened in place beneath the blade.

  The priest had spoken the De Profundis: ‘Remember not, Lord, our iniquities, nor the iniquities our forefathers; neither take thou vengeance of our sins … be not angry with us for ever.’

  January had shaken his head. Ayasha – tough as she was – turned her face against his shoulder in the moment before the blade dropped.

  Remember not our iniquities …

  1839

  At the table, Hannibal said, ‘Wait – what?’ His startled voice brought January back from Paris, from dawn, from the flash of steel, to see the fiddler turning the note over in his fingers. ‘Anne Ben-Gideon?’

  ‘That’s her hand.’ January poured him some coffee, set the pot down next to Shaw’s list of the inhabitants of the up-river side of Bayou St John, and the dish of cold pork and grits that Olympe had left here sometime before dawn. ‘I’ve seen it a hundred times in Daniel’s house.’

  ‘Anne Ben-Gideon was Anne de la Roche-St-Ouen?’

  He was in and out of Paris for the preceding year, or two years … He went to every fashionable party, every opera and gambling-hell. Why did I never think they might have met?

  ‘You knew her.’

  Hannibal shook his head. ‘But Armand was one of our Merry Band. We’d been drinking together the whole of that spring. And this is exactly the way he used to forge his sister’s handwriting when he was sending their parents reports corroborating whatever he’d told them he was doing with his time and their money.’

  January drew up a chair and sat down, almost without being aware of it. The little yard behind the house on Rue Esplanade was still filled with morning shadow – it was nearly nine o’clock, an unthinkable hour for Hannibal to be abroad; he must not have been to bed yet. From the street beyond the wall drifted the rumble of dray wheels, the shrill sweet voices of women walking toward the markets.

  ‘Armand could forge her handwriting?’

  His hand lay on Shaw’s report. There were only two householders on that stretch of Bayou St John young enough to be Armand de la Roche-St-Ouen – he’d only be twenty-six or -seven now – and one of them, a cottonbroker, was American.

  ‘Good Lord, yes. Armand worshipped his sister – she had all the spirit he lacked, did all the things he wished he had the nerve to do – but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t use her name to stay on the good side of their parents. Apparently she always agreed with his story, if they asked her. He often told us, that winter, how he used to take her to taverns and race meetings, when she’d dress up as a boy in his clothing. Before she married and got her own establishment he’d buy things for her like cigars and brandy and guns.’

  ‘Guns,’ said January softly. ‘Did he ever buy her a muff pistol?’

  ‘The silver one with the designs on the barrel? It was a pair of them,’ said Hannibal. ‘I was with him – about six of us were – when he bought them, at Montjoie’s in the Palais Royale. He said one was for his sister; he bought them with her money. He himself could never save a sou.’

  ‘There were two of them.’ January had the sense of seeing a distant building slowly emerge from fog. ‘Was he one of the group that went out to Rambouillet with you that summer? Did he ever say anything about her husband? Or her husband’s lovers?’

  Hannibal shook his head. ‘He seldom spoke of him. Never named him – just called him “that Jew pig”. Or, to give him his complete title, “that Jew pig my parents sold my sister to”. And this while buying champagne with the money his sister had sent him – which presumably originated in her husband’s counting house. I never knew,’ he added, all his customary blitheness leaving his voice, ‘that this was your friend that he spoke of. Or what Armand’s sister’s married name was. And yes,’ he added, ‘he was with us in Rambouillet, until the Monday, the night before the rioting started. He went back to Paris then. We heard his sister had died, but the family hushed it up – I can understand why, now – and he never returned to our … revels. Knowing how he felt about his sister, I wasn’t surprised.’

  ‘There were two pistols,’ repeated January, at first feeling only a kind of shaken shock, akin to what had gone through him last night in that little cottage on Rue Toulouse when he’d seen the handwriting on that note, and known it for Anne’s.

  As if he’d heard her voice.

  As if he stood again in the crowd on the Place de la Nation, watching that small green figure mount the steps …

  Rage swept him, almost stopping his breath.

  Quietly, Hannibal continued, ‘That was the last I saw of him. He didn’t roister with us after that, and I left Paris myself the following year. Armand told me once – we were both pretty drunk, and I’d raised the subject of an old cent-per-center back in London I’d gone to, when things were at ebb tide with me, Armand went off onto a poisonous denunciation of the Chosen People: men, women, and children unborn. He seemed to think the possession of an Israelite brother-in-law was what had scuppered the proposed match between himself and the daughter of the Comte de Noirchamp, not the fact that his own family hadn’t a pot to piss in and was in debt up to their collective hairlines. He wrote sonnets to her for months that spring, presumably under the impression that being addressed as “Nymph, who puts the gold of dawn to shame” would somehow induce her to fly in the face of her parents’ expressed wishes and elope with him …’

  ‘Philippe was wearing Daniel’s coat,’ said January softly, ‘when he was shot. Daniel’s footman testified that a note had come from Anne to his house – urgent was written on the outside. Philippe must have read it …’

  ‘How would Armand have found O’Dwyer, after all this time?’ Hannibal touched the note that lay between them, on the scribbled page just above the scrawled legend: Francheville – Bertrand, 26, clerk Bordeaux & Havana Shipping – wife Belle, 3 children. ‘And why? If Armand was the man who killed de la Marche – and then kept his mouth shut and watched his sister go to the guillotine for it … Unless O’Dwyer did it, and fled from Paris.’ His sparse brows pulled together. ‘But if that were the case, how did Armand know O’Dwyer would be coming here? It says—’ He turned the list around – ‘this M’sieu Francheville came to New Orleans in 1835.’

  He looked up, and met January’s eyes. ‘Would you like me to ask him, amicus meus?’

  The house belonging to Bertrand Francheville stood at the very end of the short stretch of higher ground that lay along the crook of Bayou St John, where the little suburbs of Pontchartrain and St-John came to an end. It was an American-style house, like a large version of a cottage in the French Town but with a deep gallery across the front and a kitchen built into the main house. The whole affair was set back a good thirty feet from the shell road, and prudently raised on a six-foot foundation, the gal
lery supported by brick piers. Several of the original oaks of the ciprière still stood around it, but at least half of the lot was in its original condition – too low to do anything with, riotous with swamp growth, and undoubtedly flooded in the spring.

  This fact permitted January – accompanied by Abishag Shaw – to get within twenty feet of the house, standing unseen in the untidy thickets of palmetto and swamp-laurel which bordered a small garden on the swamp side of the house. Someone had taken great pains to prune the tidy box hedge which divided this wilderness from the neat beds of roses, tulips, and (in the soggier end of the plot) iris. As January and Shaw edged as close as they could, January could see a youngish, fair-haired man in a blue coat walking slowly among the plantings under the hot, noon sun, supporting his crippled wife on his arm.

  At this distance he recognized Armand de la Roche-St-Ouen at once, though the boy he had known in Paris had put on forty pounds and grown a skimpy Van Dyke, reminiscent of Tin-Tin de la Marche’s, nine years previously. You can’t step twice into the same river, he thought. And the Mississippi was a long way from the Seine.

  The woman who clung to his arm had clearly once been beautiful and was still pretty, though her skin was of an unhealthy pastiness, and her illness had aged her.

  Her eyes, when she looked at her husband, were a young girl’s still.

  ‘… if he didn’t insist on being the center of attention,’ she was saying, with a schoolgirl’s animation, ‘he wouldn’t make such a ghastly dinner guest!’ She spoke English, with a light inflection of southern German; it was only with difficulty that she kept herself from letting go of her cane to emphasize her words with gestures. ‘Mama used to say of people like that, “He has to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral”.’

  And her husband, Bertrand Francheville – Armand de la Roche-St-Ouen – flung back his head and laughed. ‘I knew a man like that in Paris …’