Dead and Buried
Page 8
‘That fiddler a friend of yours, Big J?’ the cook demanded, laughing. ‘You better not let the Countess see him.’
‘An unforgiving woman, the Countess.’ Hannibal shook his head and sighed. ‘And, if I may be excused for criticizing a lady in her profession, a sadly unromantic one.’
They turned right at the rear corner of the house and followed its wall toward the bluer darkness that was all that was visible of the starlit street. The fingernail moon had set early, and in this neighborhood, far out along Prytania Street, the house lots were huge and widely-spaced. For a hundred yards in any direction of the handsome pink-brick house, cypress and oak grew, as they had grown when the Houma and Choctaw had still camped on the edges of the then-walled town.
It was nearly four in the morning. Even sin slept.
Hannibal went on: ‘From what Fräulein Nenchen tells me, Schurtz seems to prefer a man who can get him real estate at half the going price to the hard-working owner of a cotton press. Quennell will laugh uproariously at Schurtz’s jokes into the bargain – Trinchen says she hadn’t thought anyone could make a dirty story boring, but evidently that’s the one talent Schurtz has – and Miss Schurtz has expressed a decided preference for young Quennell, who has presented her so far with a necklace of pearls and a Chinese shawl. I suspect either Beauvais Quennell or the Burial Society had better look to their account books. Did you find out anything further about the sinister Blessinghurst from the kitchen help?’
‘Only what the girls have said of him.’ January opened his hands, like a magician would to prove them empty. ‘He’s generous, lavish with money, and universally charming, when charm will get him what he wants. Elspie – the parlormaid – says when she refused to kiss him he took the kiss by force, and not playful force, either. He said if she told the Countess about it, he would charge Elspie with the theft of his watch, and the Countess would have her sold.’
‘Is Elspie a slave?’
‘No,’ said January. ‘She reported the matter privately to the Countess, and they’re both pretending she didn’t. The man’s a good customer, and neither of them wants to upset Marie-Venise, who’s one of their best “specials”. When I go to the Cabildo tomorrow – today,’ he amended, with resigned regret, ‘this afternoon, I’ll mention what we’ve learned about Blessinghurst to Shaw. Though by that time I suspect that whatever Viscount Foxford was really doing Thursday night, he’ll have admitted it after a few hours in the Calaboso. I don’t think he’ll get much chiding from his uncle . . . Mr Droudge wouldn’t try to blackmail him, would he? Threaten to tell his mother he’d been investigating some of Bourbon Street’s gamier pleasures?’
‘Lady Philippa wouldn’t believe Droudge if he told her water flowed downhill. She loathes the man – at least she did when I knew her – and, considering what she put up with from the boy’s father, I can’t imagine there’s much in the way of vice she hasn’t heard of before. Droudge would tell her, of course. He’s vindictive that way.’ Hannibal frowned at some memory. ‘But once they have a decent lawyer, and he’s tracked down the girl – or boy – or multiples thereof – in question, I can’t see a judge refusing bail, no matter what Patrick’s will may have said.’
They had come among the large and handsome houses of the American section of town, ghostly shapes sleeping in starlight against the dark of trees. It was the hour when the wet heat briefly slacked, and wretched sleepers under pink clouds of mosquito-bar finally slid into dreams of something other than being baked alive in slow ovens. Even so, the stench of the city enfolded them: the soot of the wharves and the exhalations of a thousand privies and garbage middens. No wonder anyone who could afford to be elsewhere kept their distance from the place until frost brought an end to the tropical torture.
Anyone except Patrick Derryhick. And the young Viscount Foxford.
And, interestingly, Lord Montague Blessinghurst.
‘Always provided,’ said January softly, ‘that the boy didn’t actually do it.’
Hannibal checked his stride long enough to glance up at him – his pale face barely more than a skeletal blur in the frame of long hair and tall-crowned hat – and January thought he would have said something.
But he looked away and walked on without a word.
It was a curious fact about Americans, January had discovered, that while most American businessmen in New Orleans had not the slightest objection to fornicating themselves speechless on the Sabbath – either with their own house-slaves or with paid professionals – they were among the first to rise up in righteous wrath against any bawdy-house keeper with the temerity to maintain open hours on Sundays. The madames and whoremasters of the French Town faced no such limitation – uptown Protestants fumed that the French Creoles kept the Sabbath the way Bostonians kept the Fourth of July – but the Countess Mazzini, who shaped her business carefully to appeal to the Americans, was assiduous about closing her doors a few hours before first light on Sunday and keeping them closed until late Monday afternoon.
Thus, in addition to having his own Sunday evening to spend with Rose, January was able to meet Abishag Shaw in the brick-paved arcade in front of the Cabildo on Sunday afternoon, after what felt like far too few hours from his parting with Hannibal in the gluey blackness of Prytania Street.
‘Reckon if’n your folks had any luck draggin’ the bayous, I’d’a heard.’ Shaw spat in the direction of a bullfrog, which was making its unoffending way from one of the puddles in the Place d’Armes to the grille of the newly paved-over gutter drain that had replaced the open trenches which had, for so many years, kept the square more or less dry.
‘Heard and reported to Captain Tremouille that he can go on saving himself the trouble of assigning his own men to search?’ On his way to the Cabildo, January had stopped by his sister Olympe’s house and had received the news that no trace of Rameses Ramilles had yet been found.
Precisely the reason, he knew, that Patrick Derryhick’s murderer had chosen to dispose of his victim’s body in the coffin of a black man he would have seen brought into the undertaker’s yard.
The body of a white man would demand that the wheels of the law grind into motion.
A black man’s corpse, particularly after a week or two in the river, would draw no comment.
‘Captain Tremouille,’ sighed the policeman, ‘wouldn’t take the trouble to go look for his own daddy’s corpse, in between organizin’ the First Municipality vote, an’ buyin’ drinks for them foreigners as have the vote, down in Marigny.’ He removed his hat, scratched his long hair – the color of greasy onion-tops – caught whatever he was seeking there between dirty fingernails, and crushed it absently to death. ‘You want to have a word with the Foxford boy, whilst you’s here? I understand your pal Sefton put in a couple long nights oozin’ around absinthe cafés an’ whippin’ parlors, askin’ after him or Stuart—’
‘Foxford is still here?’ January’s eyes widened in shock as he recollected the long, filthy, stifling room where drunkards, brawlers, pickpockets and waterfront thieves pushed and bullied among themselves for space on the bunks and floor. What the hell had the boy done during those four hours on Thursday night that he wouldn’t admit to his lawyer?
‘Has he talked to a lawyer?’
‘That business manager of his went chasin’ one in Mandeville yesterday. ‘Course, there ain’t a lawyer in this town at the moment, nor won’t be till the weather breaks . . .’
January cursed. ‘What about Droudge?’ he asked. ‘And what about Stuart? You can’t say their activities are accounted for—’
‘So far as Captain Tremouille is concerned,’ Shaw replied drily, ‘Stuart’s are. A lady, name of Simone Alcidoro, come in yesterday an’ confessed all off’n her own bat as how she an’ Mr Stuart was up playing cribbage in her parlor till three in the mornin’.’
‘Simone Alcidoro?’ January was familiar with the name. ‘She’d swear she was playing cribbage with Robespierre’s ghost if you bought her two drinks.’
‘Have you heard of a man named Blessinghurst?’
Shaw’s gray eyes narrowed. ‘British lord? Come to town ’bout ten days ago? A tad too sharp at the poker table?’
‘That’s the man,’ said January. ‘He quarreled with Derryhick the night of the murder – as far as I can place the time, immediately before Derryhick’s return to the hotel at ten thirty.’ As they entered the Cabildo, and crossed the big stone-floored watch room together, January recounted what Trinchen, Fanny, and Marie-Venise had had to say about His Lordship on Friday night.
‘That a fact?’
‘It seems to be. And also, it sounds like, after parting from the Viscount earlier that evening, Derryhick went deliberately searching for Blessinghurst in the gambling-parlors along Rue Royale, rather than meeting him accidentally.’
Ordinarily, the watch room was quiet on Sundays, especially at this time of year, the few members of the City Guard on duty playing dominoes, smoking on the benches set around the walls, or drawing straws for who would get the duty of whipping the slaves that owners brought in for ‘correction’ at two bits a stroke. Today, however, as Shaw had said, the rentiers and merchants of the French Town, and the landowners and sugar-brokers who held political power in the city government, were gathered in clumps by the sergeant’s desk and at the foot of the stair that led up to Captain Tremouille’s office, and the air was heavy with the angry buzz of their talk.
In the courtyard, the whippings hadn’t started yet. There would be only two: a middle-aged man roughly dressed, like a stable-hand or a laborer, and a young woman in blue calico that was torn and dirty, as if she’d slept in it on the ground. January stood at the bottom of the stairs that led up to the cells of what was called the Calaboso – the city jail – while Shaw ascended. The prison latrine could be smelled everywhere in the court; a band of ants an inch wide streamed up the stucco to the gallery that led to the cells above. Somewhere a woman was screaming curses, muffled by the walls. Then, once more, the swift tread of Shaw’s Conestoga boots on the stair.
The Viscount reached the bottom and extended his hand. ‘Monsieur Janvier. Mr Shaw tells me you’re here on behalf of one of my father’s old friends, who knew – who knew Patrick,’ he said in somewhat laborious public-school French.
The boy’s godlike handsomeness had been severely marred by a black eye and a crust of blood on his nose; his linen jacket was gone and his white shirt torn, and by the sudden twitch of his shoulders and the look on his face when he scratched, he was having his first experience with the insect, as well as the human, residents of the jail.
‘I am indeed,’ January replied in English, to the young man’s obvious relief. Foxford had, he noticed, used the polite term vous in addressing him, as one adult to another. Most French and Spanish creoles of the city had slipped into the habit of using tu, the word one used when speaking to a child, a dog . . . or a slave.
‘I’m extremely grateful, of course, for your concern, sir – and for Mr Sefton’s – but I assure you, there’s really no need for alarm.’ The haggard worry that January had seen on the young man’s face yesterday had deepened; his voice was even, but there was something in the jerky motion of his hands when he folded them before him, or put them in his pockets, that betrayed how shaken he was. January’s own experience with the Calaboso’s common cell had been similar enough to things that had happened to him in his childhood that he hadn’t had to contend with shock as well. What had the boy made of his first experience with a common latrine-bucket?
But instead of the outrage that one might expect from fortune’s favorite, Foxford asked, ‘Did they ever find the body of the poor man whose coffin Patrick was hidden in? My God, what a frightful thing for his family! Do you happen to know –’ he turned to Shaw – ‘if Mr Droudge did as I asked and sent money to the Ramilles family on my behalf?’
‘If’n he ain’t,’ said Shaw, ‘I’ll sort of remind him. That’s good of you, sir.’
The boy waved his words away. ‘I can’t think – I can’t even imagine who would have done such a thing!’
‘Can’t you?’ asked January softly, and the Viscount started, as if at the flick of a whip. ‘Because that’s exactly one of the questions I wanted to ask you: is there anyone who would have done such a thing? Who would have murdered Mr Derryhick?’
Foxford wet his split lip, ran a quick hand through his blond hair, thick and tumbling in his eyes. ‘I’m afraid Mr Shaw has already been over that with me. I – I simply can’t help you there. Even in London, or in Dublin, Patrick hadn’t an enemy in the world—’
‘Not even your uncle?’
Something in the boy’s eyes shifted. He evidently had to think about that, like an inexperienced card player trying to remember what was trumps. ‘I don’t . . . Of course not. Are you thinking about what he said about my cousin’s death . . .? You were there, weren’t you, sir? In the hotel?’ His eyes met January’s again. ‘Please don’t – Uncle Diogenes knows, as well as anyone in the family, that his son’s . . .’ he fished visibly for a euphemism – ‘shortcomings were of Theo’s own choosing. Uncle . . .’ He fumbled for words. ‘When someone you care for dies – even someone you know was leading a life that could only end in a stupid accident like that – it’s hard not to blame. But Uncle would never . . . He was angry at Patrick, yes, but that doesn’t mean he’d . . . he’d do him harm.’
He can’t say it, thought January. Can’t say ‘stab him and hold a pillow over his face until he suffocated to death’. It has to be just ‘do him harm’.
Grief filled the young man’s eyes, and he looked away. He had what was generally called a ‘frank’ face, every emotion readable: How much longer do I have to keep this up?
Foxford went on, ‘But they can’t hang me for the crime because I simply didn’t do it. Ask anyone who knew Patrick! He was like a father to me!’ Sweat stood out on the young man’s face – understandable in the heat, and yet January sensed that heat was not the only cause.
‘Tell me about Lord Montague Blessinghurst, then.’
For one second there was unmasked terror in those expressive eyes. ‘I don’t know anyone of that name.’
January made no reply.
‘I don’t! Who . . . who is it?’ he added with a total lack of innocence.
‘He’s the man Patrick Derryhick quarreled with on Thursday night,’ said January gently, ‘just before he returned to the hotel and his death.’ The boy’s eyes widened: horror and shock. ‘And he’s the man you called a scoundrel – and attempted to assault – at Mr Trulove’s ball in Milneburgh on your first night in town. Did Derryhick know him?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘How do you know that,’ asked Shaw mildly, his long arms folded, ‘if’n you don’t know who he is?’
‘I – that is – I don’t know who he is, but Patrick would have said . . . Patrick didn’t know him.’
‘An’ the girl you fought over?’
‘We didn’t fight over a girl.’
Shaw spat. ‘Then why’d you fight?’
‘We didn’t. I mean, I – he – he called me a – I don’t remember. I was drunk,’ added the boy defiantly. ‘Uncle Diogenes told me I’d quarreled with a man but I didn’t remember any of it. Did we fight over a girl?’
‘According to witnesses,’ said January, ‘you quarreled – with sufficient violence as to alarm bystanders – over a young lady named Isobel Deschamps—’
‘Oh,’ said the Viscount quickly. ‘Oh, yes – was that her name? I saw this man �
� this Blessinghurst, you call him – trying to force his attentions on her and I . . . Well, one doesn’t simply stand by and let that sort of thing take place, does one? The man was clearly a scoundrel.’
January opened his mouth to point out that this directly contradicted his statement of three seconds previously; to ask why, since he had only been in New Orleans less than twenty-four hours at that point, the young lady had addressed him by his Christian name; to inquire what he, his uncle and their business manager were doing in a city known throughout the world as a pest hole in the summertime . . . and then closed it. The dogged wariness in the young man’s eyes informed him, if the foregoing conversation had not, that he would obtain nothing but more, and clumsier, lies. Instead he said, gently, ‘Your Lordship, I’m trying to help you. You say they can’t hang you because you didn’t do it. But if you go before a jury with the weak excuses you’ve given me today, I can promise you that they will.’
NINE
‘Do you believe him?’
Shaw stopped in the door of the watch room, his sparse brows twitching down over his gargoyle nose. ‘Do I believe him what? If’n I had a dollar for every lie that boy told us just now . . .’
Behind them in the courtyard came the leathery smack of a whip on meat, the girl’s frantic scream. January’s jaw hardened so much that he thought his teeth would break. He followed the Kentuckian into the dim rumbling confusion of the watch room again.
‘Do you believe he killed Derryhick?’
Shaw sighed, and in that sigh January heard the lies of sweet maiden aunts who had murdered their brothers for the family property, of respectable French Creole society matrons who tortured slaves in their attics, of charitable gentlemen who thought nothing of raping fourteen-year-old black girls. . . .
‘What is truth?’ Pontius Pilate had asked: the cry from the heart of judges and policemen down through the ages.