Wet Grave, page 3
“He searched the place,” said January.
Olympe looked around at the jumbled bedding, the neglected dishes, the whiskey-bottles gleaming in the weeds, and gave a mirthless chuckle. “Like you can tell?”
“Oh, yes,” said January. “You can follow his tracks, for one thing. Look, he carried a candle, a wax one, not the tallow one on the box there, so he must have looked around after she was dead. Were the shutters open or closed when she was found?”
Olympe frowned, and glanced at the single window. “They was open when I got here.” They were open now, and between two cypresses another shack could be seen, a ramshackle cottage pieced together from bits of old flatboats, with chickens scratching around its rear door.
January looked back at Hesione LeGros' body. At her dirty dress and dirtier gray hair, and the bare feet whose toenails had grown out into curving horny claws. He recalled the parure of topazes she'd worn with that gaudy red-gold dress: that gorgeous necklace, earrings, bracelets the size of slave manacles. The glint of the stiletto in her hand, and the smile on her lips. I'm gonna shoot that man of mine for this. . . .
The ground here was low, close by the cypress swamp that lay all along the back edge of town. In the winter it would be freezing cold, and there was neither stove nor hearth. A ragged mosquito-bar hung over the bed, torn and looped carelessly back. By the number of bites on Hesione's face and neck it couldn't have done her much good. But then, she was probably drunk most nights, by the time she slept.
He let his breath go in a sigh. He hadn't recognized her when he'd seen her on the levee, inebriated and foul-mouthed and already grown old. Hadn't connected her with that bright-eyed girl in the defiantly gaudy dress.
Life battered the poor.
Olympe came back to his side. “What was he lookin' for? She didn't own but the clothes she wore.”
“Maybe some of her neighbors can tell us.”
He started to cross toward the door, but his sister stepped in front of him: “You ain't just gonna leave her lay?”
The flies had settled again. The body, which he'd returned to its original position face-down, looked as if it had been covered with a shroud of black lace, one that moved and glittered in the morning light.
“Whoever the Guards send to look at the place, he'll want to see it as it was when she was found.” Even as the words came out of his mouth he felt like a simpleton, and Olympe's eyes jeered at him, at his trust in the white man's laws. Two years his junior, she had known from earliest childhood, perhaps even before he had, that their mother had no great regard for her slave husband's African-featured children, lavishing her care instead on their lovely lace-trimmed half-sister by St.-Denis Janvier. Now she didn't even speak, only looked at him with that combination of incredulity and scorn.
“I'll go down to the Cabildo,” he said, “and see they send someone.”
“Oh, I'd go along to watch that, brother,” retorted Olympe. “Only I got the ironin' yet to do this morning.”
Still, she settled herself on the edge of the filthy bed to wait for him as he went out into the yard.
Summers, New Orleans slowed, like a stagnant river sinking in the heat. Sugar harvested in November, a desperate race against frost. In December, slaves dragged the long, coarse sacks through the cotton-fields before the bitter-cold first light dawned and picked the sharp, dry boles with chilblained fingers that bled. First frost brought the businessmen back to New Orleans from their country places in Milneburgh or Mandeville by the lake, brought the steam-boats downriver in droves with the winter rise. Flatboats came in from Ohio and Kentucky, loaded with pumpkins and pigs and corn and tobacco-spitting Kaintuck louts who gawked at everything they saw. Harvest and business and trade and sales, ships coming in from the Gulf, Christmas and Carnival and Mardi Gras . . .
Summers, everything stopped. The wealthy families—the Destrehans and de McCartys, the Bringiers and Livaudaises—fled the gluey heat that settled on the town, fled the clouds of mosquitoes that hummed over every gutter and puddle and the riotous proliferation of gnats and fleas and immense brown palmetto-bugs. Fled the reek of the gutters and the swollen carcasses of dogs, rats, horses rotting for days in the mud. Many years, they fled worse things as well, yellow fever some years, sometimes cholera, too.
The only people left in town were the poor and the relatively poor. Little business was done. The markets were quiet, the teeming levees nearly still. Even the gambling-parlors were a little subdued.
So nobody in Hesione LeGros' neighborhood was in any tearing hurry to get anywhere.
They waited for January in the shade of the rickety gallery of the cottage visible from Hesione's window: Suzie and Richie sitting side by side on the steps, another couple a few years older—the woman with a baby at breast—and two or three single men lounging in the cypress-tree's shade. January guessed that some were runaways, picking up a few cents a day at whatever inconspicuous jobs they could find and sneaking out to the plantations from which they'd escaped to visit their friends and families when they could. There were many such, in New Orleans.
“Who found her?” he asked.
Richie raised his hand tentatively, a little uncertain if that was the question that had been asked, and January inquired in English, “When was that?”
“Just after sun-up, sir.” The young man seemed relieved to be able to reply in his native tongue. “I was on my way down to the levee to see could I get loadin' work, an' I saw five or six dogs, diggin' at the wall of the shack. Two of 'em was Doc Furness' dogs from the Swamp, but the rest was wild ones, that live in the woods. You don't usually see 'em around folks' houses by daylight. It didn't look right to me.”
No, thought January. And the dogs would smell carrion even above the general fetor of privies and garbage and back-yard pigs that hung over the neighborhood in the heat.
“Was the shutters open or closed?”
Richie looked a little startled at the question, but shut his eyes a moment to picture it, then answered, “Closed, sir. I opened 'em up, to see.”
“They's open when she come home last night,” added the other man on the porch, taller and stringier than Richie and without the tin slave-badge. He spoke French, but January had seen his eyes, knew he'd followed the discussion in English. “I remember thinkin' how the place would be just roarin' with mosquitoes inside.”
“But you didn't see a light burning?”
The tall man shook his head. “I walked back with Hessy from town, round about full-dark. She'd been down the market, pickin' up what she could from the market-women that was closin' up. She had a couple baskets of berries, just gone off a little an' mushy. She asked me if Titine here would like some.” And he patted the slim sloped shoulder of the woman with the baby on the gallery's single broken-down chair at his side. “She give 'em to me just there where the path splits.”
He pointed toward the weedy track that led from the end of Perdidio Street. The ramshackle saloons and whorehouses of the Swamp, which lay farther off in that direction, looked even dirtier and somehow more sinister under the brute glare of the late-July sun. Their stillness was deceptive, like a corpse teeming inside with foul activity.
“I hadn't made much on the levee—things is so slow—but I give her a couple bits for 'em. I know she didn't have nuthin', an' ol' Mulm that owns the Nantucket Saloon pays her for cleanin' up there with liquor instead of money. I had to just about twist her arm to take it.”
“It's funny,” said the woman Titine, with a shy gap-toothed grin. “Some days she'd come here beggin' an' cryin' to me an' Gali, 'cause she needed money for rum—that's when she was too drunk even to work for Mulm. An' last month, like Suzie said, she cut Richie up bad when she was off her head. Other days she'd give you whatever she had in her pockets.”
“And she went on into her house?”
The man Gali nodded.
“Did you see any light burning later? Any of you?” January looked around at the little group on the gallery.
“I had the shutters up already,” said Suzie, and nodded back into the cottage.
“Hot nights like these been,” explained Richie, reaching over to rub Suzie's knee, “Suzie shuts up the house the minute the sun goes down, 'cause of the mosquitoes. Seems like no matter what M'am Snakebones give her, lemon or camphor or juju oil, they still come after her like buzzards on a dead cow. She just so miserable these nights I want to weep for her, and they don't bite me at all.”
“But Suzie an' me, we was finishin' up the cookin' an' puttin' up the chickens for maybe an hour before that.” Titine hoisted her tiny daughter, naked and plump as a little loaf of brown bread, onto her shoulder, and stroked her back. Baskets dangled from every rafter-end along the cottage roof, the African way of cooping chickens away from the depredations of foxes and rats. “We'd a' seen if somebody came into Hessy's house 'fore then.”
“But not after you went in and put up the shutters?”
“No, sir.”
“Anyone else around?”
Suzie and Titine looked at each other for a moment, then shook their heads. “No, sir.”
Had Hesione let her killer in? Or had he come in and waited for her in the dark? In either case, a candle had been lit, and had been let burn for fifteen or twenty minutes. . . . January didn't even consciously think, It had to have been last night. No tallow drippings would have remained standing upright after a day as hot as yesterday had been. The same way he didn't consciously think, I'll bet the man was American, after seeing the extra tobacco around where the chair had been.
She hadn't dropped the berries on the floor in surprise, upon entering. Yet neither had she carried them over to the chair, or dropped stems or leaves in eating any.
“You hear anything later in the night?”
The two men looked at each other, self-conscious. Then tall, thin Gali gave an embarrassed chuckle. “This gonna sound stupid, an' I'm purely sorry for it, because if either of us had thought . . . See, we both heard a woman scream, Titine an' me. I thought it was Richie takin' out his mad for somethin' on Suzie, like every man does now an' then. An' he thought it was me hittin' Titine. Or maybe Titine hittin' me.”
Titine poked him hard in the ribs. “You'da screamed louder than that, an' more than once, my friend.”
He mouthed a kiss at her.
“She cried out only once?”
All four nodded. “Damn, I wish we'd a' gone to look.” Richie's bulldog face twisted with distress. “We might a' been able to stop him, or do somethin' to help her.”
January thought of the wax-drips of the search, and the deliberate final cut across Hesione's throat. No, you'd only have bought your own death by your helpfulness.
He said nothing.
By noon no one had yet come from the City Guards. The air cooled a little, as it does afternoon summers when the black clouds thicken for the daily thunderstorm, and the roar of the cicadas in the trees alters its note. January took the path that skirted the worst of the Swamp's taverns and boarding-houses, circled behind the new cemetery, and followed the unpaved track that became Rue St. Louis on the other side of Rue Rampart. The streets in the old French town were hushed, reeking heat lying like a dead thing between the pastel stucco walls of shuttered-up town houses, cottages, shops. As usual, the companies hired to clean the municipal gutters were behind on their work, and the stench of sewage and offal hung over everything, as if the town were sunk to the roof-line in a cesspool. Bloated with gases, a dog lay dead in the middle of Rue Rampart—swarms of gnats, mosquitoes, and fat black greasy flies hung over the brown standing water in gutters and streets, slashed through by the gunmetal wings of dragonflies.
Even the Place d'Armes before the Cathedral, usually alive with the traffic of the levee and the markets which bounded it, seemed to sleep. The few steamboats at the wharves lay lifeless, like stranded whales. The only animation was that of a man in the stocks before the Cabildo: he wept with frustration and pain as he tried to jerk his head away from a persistent horsefly as big as January's thumb.
The blue shadows of the prison's stone arcade held heat, not coolness, as January crossed through them to the open double doors. Voices echoed in the flagstoned watchroom inside, where the City Guards had their headquarters. A knot of well-dressed gentlemen clustered around the desk of the man January had come to see. All of them babbled and gesticulated in fury.
White men—January recognized one of them as Arnaud Tremouille, Captain of the City Guards, and resigned himself to wait.
“Bertrand Avocet claims he was out searching for a runaway slave at the time of the murder,” Tremouille was saying, presumably to Lieutenant Abishag Shaw, whom January could not see beyond the crowd of backs.
“He lies, then!” interrupted another man, tall and stout and sweating profusely in a blue coat and a high scarlet neck-cloth. “His shirt was found in the woods, entirely soaked with blood!”
“Do you say my client is a liar, M'sieu Diacre?” demanded another, whose old-fashioned pigtail was so tightly braided as to curl up over the back of his musty black coat.
“I say that your client had every reason to wish his brother dead and himself in charge of the plantation, M'sieu Rabot.”
A squirt of tobacco was spit from behind the desk, missing the sandbox a few feet away: the stone floor all around the box was squiggled with syrup-brown gouts and the whole watchroom smelled like a cuspidor. “Anybody ask where Guifford Avocet's wife was 'long about the time Guifford was kilt?”
The question, framed in Lieutenant Shaw's appalling French, acted upon the well-dressed French Creoles like a fox thrown into a henroost. Tremouille, the two lawyers, and the State Prosecutor Cire all burst into speech at once, while Shaw—visible now that everyone had drawn fastidiously aside from the path of further expectorations—calmly drew a notebook, a carpenter's lead-pencil, a measuring-tape, a small silver-backed mirror, and a pair of long-nosed tweezers from various drawers of his desk and secreted them in the pockets of his out-at-elbows coat. The lawyers and the Captain of the Guards, January noted, all shouted at one another, but none seemed willing to lower himself to shout at a greasy-haired American who looked like he'd come down from Kentucky on a flatboat. Shaw started to rise, bethought himself of something else, dug through another drawer, and pulled out a fresh twist of tobacco.
Then he stood, six feet two inches of stringy scarecrow homeliness, and said, “Maybe we better go have a look at the place? Maestro,” he added, surprised, seeing January for the first time. “'Scuse me just a moment, iff'n you would, sir,” he told Tremouille, and slouched over to January.
He smelled like his shirt hadn't been washed in weeks—January didn't know if he owned another besides that faded yellow calico—and his long hair straggled over his shoulders, ditchwater brown where his hat usually covered it, bleached to the color of tow-linen farther down. With his rather cold gray eyes, his linsey-woolsey trousers tucked into high-topped boots, and his skinning-knife sheathed at his belt, Shaw looked like any of the thousands of keelboat owl-hoots who populated the taverns of the Swamp or the whorehouses of Gallatin Street, looking for liquor to drink and trouble to make. January's mother wouldn't have had him in her house.
“What can I help you with, Maestro?”
“A murder.” January's voice was dry. “Out in the shanties, past the Swamp. According to the neighbors, it was reported just after sun-up. The victim's friends would like to get her body up off the floor and wash the ants off it so they can bury her. Sir.” He knew he was taking advantage of Shaw's tolerance in speaking this way: Shaw was, in fact, one of the few white men in New Orleans who wouldn't hit him a few licks with a cane for being uppity, and he guessed the delay in sending someone to Hesione's shack wasn't the Kentuckian's fault. But he was very angry, at Tremouille, at police in general, at Americans, and at the white French and Spanish Creoles who were becoming more like Americans every day: who looked at free men of color now as Americans did, as so much money loose on the hoof, money that could be going into their own pockets.
Angry that it was so.
And angry at Olympe, for being right.
“God bless it.” Shaw spit again, this time with no particular target. “I am sorry, Maestro. You talk to DeMezières about it. . . .”
The lieutenant caught the eye of the burly desk sergeant, pointed significantly to January, and signed that DeMezières should do as January asked.
“I should be back into town tonight,” Shaw said, and scratched under the breast of his sorry coat—January could only guess as to whether his concern was fleas or prickly heat. “You still boardin' with M'am Bontemps on Ursulines? I'll be to you then.”
As Shaw ambled from the watchroom in the center of the little troop of Creole gentlemen, the backwash of their rising voices swept over January: “. . . attempted to alienate twenty arpents of land . . . quarreled with his brother . . . account-books . . . had a favorite slave of M'sieu Bertrand's sold. . . .”
White men with money, thought January bitterly, returning to the cool ozone-smelling tension of the pre-storm air. He would have bet, had he had any money of his own, that Shaw wouldn't return until well into the following day. Avocet Plantation, if he remembered his mother's gossip correctly, was forty miles away in Plaquemines Parish. Not in the jurisdiction of the New Orleans City Guards at all.
But somebody wanted a policeman more expert than the sheriff of Plaquemines Parish, and that somebody was almost certainly related to somebody on the City Council to whom Tremouille owed a favor. . . .
And Hesione LeGros could lie in her own blood and rot, for all anyone cared.
Only when the white guests were done eating did the slaves get the leftovers, if any.
And with justice, thought January, as with food.
