Murder in July Page 4

  He turned the body over.

  But the dead man wasn’t Daniel Ben-Gideon. The angelic features, the Cupid-bow lips beneath their soft brown mustache, the gem-blue eyes staring blankly up at the paling sky, belonged to Philippe de Gourgue, Vicomte de la Marche. Heir to the Comte de Belvoire.

  And the hole in the lilac coat, the green silk waistcoat beneath, hadn’t been made by a trooper’s musket.

  January saw this at once. He had fought on the cotton-bale barricades at the Battle of New Orleans as well as in the streets of Paris. He knew what musket wounds looked like.

  This wound was bloody but neat, the silk of the coat burned by powder, and the wound small.

  A small pistol, fired at close range.

  A muff pistol, almost certainly.

  THREE

  1839

  As a member of the Board of Directors of the Faubourg Tremé Free Colored Militia and Burial Society, it was part of January’s responsibility to march in the Fourth of July parade along Rue Royale – in the First Municipality of the now-tripartite city of New Orleans – and thence up St Charles Avenue through the Second Municipality, to Tivoli Circle. Though celebrating the Birth of Freedom in a nation which not merely tolerated, but actively defended, human slavery struck January as incongruous when he was in a good mood and blasphemous in his angrier moments, he was careful to lobby every year for the society’s continued place in the proceedings. He, and a number of other members, had fought under Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, and he considered it vital to remind the Americans of this fact. To remind the white Americans as a whole that it was, in fact, legal, under certain circumstances, for men of color to possess or carry guns. (What the police would have said about the two rifles, two pistols, and the smoothbore musket hidden in the rafters of his house was another matter.)

  Dressed in his red and blue uniform – and pardonably proud that, at forty-four, it still fit him as it had when he was in his twenties – he led the militia band, playing bright proud marches with the other members in step behind them. He was nevertheless conscious that once they crossed Canal Street into the American municipality, the cheering of the crowds that lined the parade route significantly lessened as their group marched past. White men didn’t like to see black ones – even the fairest-skinned quadroons and octoroons – in uniform, much less armed. They didn’t like to see the smart military formation, the sharp discipline and soldierly turnouts, that gave the lie to the contention that those of African descent were lazy, shuffling cowards. Before dark, he guessed, there’d be planters and cotton-brokers clustered on the porches of the big houses farther up the Avenue declaring that such displays were a ‘bad influence’ on ‘good niggers who know their place’.

  After the parade they all stood in well-mannered silence while the local (white, American) politicians made speeches about democracy and the Birth of Freedom under red-white-and-blue awnings erected in the circle. Then the various militia companies dispersed into the crowd and the society made their way back to Congo Square.

  It was at Congo Square that the issue of Henry Brooke’s murder re-entered January’s life.

  Congo Square, known also as Circus Square or Circus Place, opened off of Rue des Ramparts next to the turning basin of the Carondelet Canal: not, as Sir John Oldmixton had observed, the most salubrious district in the city. For as long as January could remember, on Sunday afternoons there had been a market there, for slaves to bring garden produce or handicrafts to sell. At the markets someone had always brought along a drum. They had danced – ancient rhythms, African rhythms, that men and women had brought from home or had learned from their parents in this new land of slavery. When January had first known the place it had lain just outside the city’s wall – if the crumbling palisade could be honored by that term – a few hundred yards upriver from the lake-ward gate. When he’d returned from Paris, seven years ago now, it had been to find the old rampart torn down, small houses built up in the new streets back from the new Rue des Ramparts over what had once been the municipal cow pastures. The Sunday slaves-market square was now surrounded by an iron fence and the turning basin hemmed about by a grimy collection of saloons, boarding houses, warehouses and bordellos constructed of flatboat planks and tent-canvas.

  And the slave dances were still being held.

  Congo Square was one of the few places where the colored population of New Orleans could gather – probably, January guessed, because the iron fence made the whites feel safe. Thus when celebrations for the Birth of Freedom were discussed by various of the free colored benevolent societies of the city, it had been arranged to hold them in the square. There was an unspoken understanding that they’d be ‘American’ – by which January guessed the City Fathers meant ‘no drumming’. But tables had been set up under the plane trees around the square’s edge, and the ladies – both plaçeés and artisans’ wives – had brought of their best: ‘dirty’ rice, gumbo, hoppin’ john, sweet potato pies. Society funds had been expended on barrels of beer and cauldrons of boiled shrimp and crawfish. Pits had been dug that morning, to roast a couple of pigs, donated by the better-off libré businessmen or the white relatives of several of the plaçeés. Though the picnic was officially the province of the free people of color – the librés – and only those from ‘downtown’ in the French district, January met and greeted men and women he knew were slaves, and welcomed the uptown blacks.

  ‘Hmph,’ said his mother, elegant as a dowager queen in butter-yellow voile. ‘You should be more careful who you let in, Benjamin. They’re barely more than slaves and they certainly have manners straight from the cane-patch.’

  January knew better than to remind the Widow Levesque that she’d cut cane herself, up til the age of twenty-five, and merely said, ‘It does no harm to get to know the uptown folks, Maman. Some day we may need to work together.’

  ‘God forefend. They’re completely without the slightest notion of how things are done.’

  Meaning, January knew, the delicate systems of favors and families by which the Creole French and their Creole African cousins did business.

  Turning, he caught sight (Thank you, God!) of his sister Dominique, his wife Rose, and their children (My child! My son! The sight of Baby John still filled him with ridiculously cataclysmic delight). ‘Minou!’ he called. ‘Rose!’ and his mother sniffed.

  ‘Don’t you think Rose is a little far along to be appearing in public?’ she asked, ignoring the fact that she herself had carried cane-stalks to the grinding-mill only hours before giving birth to January’s sister Olympe.

  Rose’s friends gathered around her, chattering and laughing – a Fourth-of-July picnic being a far different thing from a formal party, much less a gathering of white folks. Among the artisans and small shopkeepers of the libré community far too many women were obliged to tend to business in an advanced state of pregnancy to turn up their noses at a mother-to-be attending a picnic. This matter-of-fact attitude about the so-called facts of life, January suspected, might have had something to do with the attraction many ‘well-bred’ white men felt toward the free colored demi-monde: the relief at being able to drop polite pretense. (To say nothing of a different attitude about what could be done between the sheets.)

  While his mother went to embrace Dominique – the only one of her children for whom she actually cared – and to kiss four-year-old Charmian, he strode to Rose’s side and kissed her hands.

  ‘How do you feel?’ he asked in an undervoice, and her friend Cora laughed up at him.

  ‘Ben, Rose is pregnant, she hasn’t got a broken leg!’

  ‘I’m told there’s going to be ice cream,’ smiled Rose, watching Baby John – eighteen months old – toddle purposefully off to investigate the resurrection-fern growing along the iron fence. ‘I have no intention of giving birth until after I’ve had some.’ The afternoon was growing hot but breeze still wafted from the river; Rose faced it, eyes shut behind the thick ovals of her spectacles.

  Someone had
set up a makeshift awning over some goods boxes, and a pack of January’s fellow-musicians were playing, those who hadn’t been employed to perform at a dozen white militia picnics elsewhere in town. January took Rose’s arm, collected Baby John from beside the fence, and led them in search of beer and lemonade. He himself had had offers to play for the Urban Guards (Second Municipality) and New Orleans Fensibles (First Municipality), and while he admitted that they needed the money, it was good beyond measure just to be here with his wife and his son.

  He later reflected that he should have taken the paying jobs … not that it would have done him any good in the long run.

  ‘Benjamin!’

  His other sister, Olympe – Olympia Snakebones, the voodoos called her – came through the clumps of revelers to where January and Rose had found seats on some goods boxes beneath the trees. She was tall like their mother but thin, and like January himself, African-black, a complexion not admired among the free colored. The five points of her headcloth that marked her as a voodooienne flicked and wavered in the river breeze. A girl followed her, skinny and coltish, her face vaguely familiar. January thought he’d seen her along Rue Burgundy, when he’d walked through those neighborhoods that had grown dirtier and more crowded. The child of one of the whores, maybe, or at her age perhaps a whore herself.

  Certainly her eyes, when she looked up at him as Olympe stopped before him, were the eyes of a child too old for her years. A child who no longer trusts anyone or anything. He’d seen the same look in the eyes of children on the slave blocks.

  ‘This is Manon Filoux,’ Olympe introduced them, laying a long, bony hand on the child’s shoulder. ‘Manon, this is my brother Ben. He’s going to help get your mother out of jail.’

  The huge eyes – turquoise-gray, a color often seen among the fairer-skinned librés – returned to his face, not believing a word of it. Manon said nothing. It was far from the first time that someone in the libré community at the back of the French Town had come to January to solve a puzzle.

  ‘And what,’ asked January gently, ‘did your maman do, Manon?’

  ‘She killed Mr Brooke.’ The girl’s voice was startlingly deep for a child’s, and vicious satisfaction roughened her tone. ‘And I’m glad she did it. I wished I could have done it myself.’

  ‘Brooke?’

  ‘An Englishman,’ said Olympe. ‘Henry Brooke. They pulled him out of the turning basin Sunday morning.’

  ‘The girl’s mistaken.’ Olympe bore an old blanket over her arm, and she spread this on the ground beside the goods boxes where January and Rose sat. January got to his feet to give her and Manon his seat.

  ‘I hope the police believe so.’

  His sister sniffed. ‘The police want to arrest someone,’ she said. ‘They don’t care who.’

  He couldn’t argue with her there. ‘Does … What’s your maman’s name, Manon? Does she own a muff pistol? And had she reason to kill M’sieu Brooke?’

  ‘She’s called Jacquette. She killed him because he deserved it,’ returned the girl, but Olympe’s eyes narrowed at the question.

  ‘How did you know it was done with a muff pistol?’

  January shook his head. ‘I take it she knew the man?’

  ‘The pistol was stolen from her a week ago.’

  January raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Don’t look at me in that tone of voice,’ added Olympe, which was exactly what their mother – with whom Olympe had not willingly spoken since 1812 – used to say to them. ‘Jacquette is on the verge of losing her house. Without what he gave her, her children would be in the street. And she knew that in three weeks he would be gone.’

  ‘Did she, now?’

  Zizi-Marie wove her way to them through the crowd, balancing gourd bowls of red beans in her hands. Her harness-maker’s apprentice – Ti-Gall L’Esperance – lumbered behind her, bearing a half-dozen roasted corn-ears wrapped in newspaper. Olympe’s two middle children, Chou-Chou and Ti-Paul, trotted at his heels. ‘Papa says, Zéphine needs to be fed,’ Zizi reported. Zéphine was the family baby.

  ‘Tell your papa I’ll be along in a minute.’ Olympe’s whole thin, sharp face altered when she spoke to her daughter, anger dissolved by love. ‘Take Manon along with you, chère.’ She took the gourds, handed them to Rose and January. There were girls in the libré community – mostly the daughters of the plaçeés whose white fathers were paying for their upbringing – who avoided girls like Manon. January guessed Manon’s mother was of the type who called herself a plaçeé rather than a prostitute, but was in fact somewhere between the two categories. She owned a house, where she lived with a white lover, not for years or decades after the older French Caribbean custom, but in the fashion that had become more and more common in the past few years, for a few months or as little as a few weeks. The long-time plaçeés felt their own standing – and that of their daughters – threatened by this new pattern, and usually didn’t hesitate to express their scorn.

  But Zizi-Marie had grown up seeing everyone in the world of black New Orleans pass through her mother’s parlor: slave or free, dark or fair, marchande or plaçeé, wealthy or desperate. Olympe dealt in secrets, and through those secrets saw clearly into the dark waters of their souls. January had stood sponsor to his niece at her first communion, and knew – from living with her since the time of the bank crash – how deep was her faith in Christ’s teachings. Yet the voodoo’s all-accepting understanding showed now in the way Zizi-Marie took the younger girl’s hand.

  In the trees around the square the metallic drumming of the cicadas quickened its rhythm with the slow approach of the afternoon’s rainstorm, and far off over the lake the coming thunder growled.

  ‘I take it Jacquette was living with this Brooke?’

  ‘Since he came to town, the middle of June.’ Olympe’s voice was neutral, her shrug a sneer. ‘He’s one of those, says it’s cheaper than a hotel. She has the house her grandma left her on Rue Toulouse.’ Her nod down Basin Street – which dead-ended into Congo Square opposite where they sat – indicated the snaggle of low cottages just across the way, which had seen better days. ‘That, and just about nothing else.’

  January nodded. Over the past year or two he’d seen the Blue Ribbon Balls, where the wealthy of the French community came to dance with their plaçeés, become more mixed affairs. European and American travelers were more prominent at the balls, drawn to the gambling rooms on the ground floor of the Salle d’Orleans where they were held, and as French wealth had declined a number of women of the free colored demi-monde were willing to settle for what they could get. In turn, the more traditional plaçeés withdrew a little, drawing a line which divided the demi-monde itself.

  Jacquette Filoux (as Olympe gave the woman’s full name), though the daughter and granddaughter of plaçeés, was one of those on the wrong side of that line.

  ‘What was Brooke doing in New Orleans?’

  ‘What do any of them do?’ Olympe shrugged again. ‘He said he represented a group of Englishmen looking to invest, either in steamships or cotton-presses or land—’

  ‘It’s a foolish time of year,’ commented January, ‘to come to New Orleans for business.’

  The voodooienne’s eyes narrowed sharply at that.

  ‘Everybody with any money is at the lake, or has gone north. Even most of the slave dealers have left town.’

  Olympe turned the matter over in her mind. ‘Smuggling, do you think? For all Britain’s acts and treaties, men are bringing in more slaves than ever, through Cuba and Cartagena.’

  ‘I have no idea.’ He tried to sound as if he hadn’t been approached by an unofficial representative of Queen Victoria on the subject of ‘family papers’ that needed locating. But Olympe, who had spent decades making deductions from secrets, still watched him, with her huge dark eyes so like their mother’s, as if she could smell Sir John Oldmixton’s Parma violet lingering on his clothing.

  Or maybe she really does have a familiar spirit who tells her thin
gs.

  He wouldn’t put it past her.

  ‘Sounds like you and I, brother, need to have a look at Jacquette’s house. The City Guards took his clothes and things, but a man leaves his marks. And those marks will point to his killer.’ All around the square, men and women were finishing up their picnic, complimenting one another on the excellence of each others’ biscuits or callas, shaking out picnic-cloths and glancing at the sky. They’d all be back after it rained, in the evening when darkness mitigated the heat. There’d be drumming and dancing then, under the inevitable watchful eye of the First Municipality City Guards. But even the most hardline slaveholders would hardly forbid Fourth of July celebrations.

  ‘You have friends in the City Guard,’ Olympe went on. ‘Sounds like you might have heard from one of them already …?’

  ‘I haven’t said I’ll look into this.’

  Her eyebrows disappeared under the red-and-gold line of the tignon that wrapped her hair.

  ‘The woman’s daughter sounds pretty sure Jacquette shot her “friend”—’

  ‘That’s her anger talkin’.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean it isn’t right. If his body turned up in the basin – which is handily across the street from her house, as you say – the gun could be down there, too, swallowed up in the mud. Any of her neighbors hear a shot on Saturday night?’

  ‘In this neighborhood? There’s seven saloons around the basin itself and a dozen more you could hit with a rock from the water.’ Scorn smouldered in her voice. ‘You got to tell what shots you talkin’ about by what time you heard ’em – “Was that the ten o’clock shootin’ or the one at eleven-fifteen?” And you haven’t yet said how you know what he was shot with.’

  ‘I don’t remember. Somebody said a man had been found … and it sounds to me like whoever killed him, gave him what was coming to him. Even a frightened woman – or a good one, or a careful one – will turn on a man if she gets angry enough, or sufficiently scared.’