Murder in July Read online

  ‘I don’t give a chicken’s dream about this Englishman.’ Olympe folded her arms. ‘I agree with you, brother, he probably did get what he was asking for. But Jacquette didn’t do it. And whoever did it walked off and left her holding the bag.’ Her gaze remained steady on him, as if she saw in his eyes the chill autumn dawn in the Place de la Nation. The silver glint of the guillotine’s blade.

  ‘She’ll hang for it,’ Olympe said.

  Whatever the evidence, January knew that nobody was going to bother to defend a young woman of color for killing a white man who was sleeping with her. Particularly if her daughter had gone about the neighborhood crying that he’d deserved to be shot by the woman he had used.

  Damn it.

  Damn it.

  There was more to the killing than met the eye. That much he knew.

  And also that he’d be very, very sorry for the next words out of his mouth.

  ‘Let me get Rose home,’ he said. ‘I’ll meet you there.’

  FOUR

  Of course Rose insisted on coming as well.

  ‘If Jacquette – she wouldn’t be Lucette Filoux’s granddaughter, would she? – did the murder, she’s safely locked up and no threat to me.’ She wrapped her hand firmly around her husband’s arm, and walked close, partly for better balance on her iron shoe pattens and partly to share the shelter of his black silk umbrella. ‘And if someone else did it I can’t imagine they’d still be hanging around in the house.’

  ‘Lucette Filoux …?’ January vaguely remembered the name. His mother, who knew every plaçeé in the French Town, had mentioned her, though he couldn’t recall the context. He did remember his mother’s tone, though, as she spoke of the woman to her cronies over coffee. Patronizing, and full of contempt.

  ‘Lucette Filoux was plaçeé to a shipowner named Jean Filoux, in Port-au-Prince.’ Olympe named the town that had once been the administrative center of the French sugar colony of St-Domingue. She and the girl Manon were waiting for January and Rose in the dining room – or what had once been the dining room – of the shabby stucco cottage on Rue Toulouse, at the very back of the old French Town in the narrow block between Rue des Ramparts and Basin Street. By this time it was, as January’s mother often put it, ‘raining pickaninnies’, and water poured off the edge of the little dwelling’s abat-vent in gray curtains.

  It was raining indoors as well. Through the door at the back of the dining room that let into a tiny ‘cabinet’ in the rear of the house, January saw buckets on the floor to catch the drips. The cottage, like a scaled-down version of his own house, consisted of two rooms and two ‘cabinets’, plus the half-story of attic above: fewer rooms than the house on Rue Esplanade, but laid out in the same fashion. Across the drenched yard behind it, visible through shutters wide open to the exquisite wet coolness of the air, a dilapidated kitchen boasted a little garçonnière on its upper floor.

  From the gallery of the garçonnière, two little boys watched the house. Presumably Manon and her brothers were relegated to the upper floor of the kitchen building, as January himself had been in the larger cottage that his mother’s white protector had given to her. The dining room was furnished with factory-wrought American chairs and sideboard, fairly new and extremely cheap. Any decent furniture had clearly been sold years ago.

  ‘When the slaves rose up in ’91 Lucette managed to get on one of the boats to New Orleans, with her four-year-old daughter Galianne.’ Olympe crossed to the sideboard, where coffee things stood ready, as January helped Rose to one of those gimcrack chairs. ‘Jean Filoux was away at the time. From all I can tell he never even inquired for Lucette or their daughter. Lucette found another protector in New Orleans – a wine merchant named Madrazo, I think his son still has a shop on Rue Bienville. He bought her this house.’

  She poured out coffee into cups; Manon brought it to them on a japanned tray. The girl had clearly been ‘talked to’ on the subject of speculating about the murder, but she seemed still to vibrate with resentment, like a piano string’s soft drone lingering on after a note.

  ‘Galianne started going to the Quadroon Balls as soon as she was old enough and eventually became plaçeé to Gilbert LaBranche.’ Olympe’s grasp of the biographies of everyone in the French Town was as comprehensive as their mother’s. It thoroughly entertained January that his sister was so like their mother, whom she despised and by whom was despised in her turn. ‘She died of the fever when Jacquette was two. Madrazo was dead by that time and Lucette took Jacquette in; when LaBranche died his wife and her family managed to get hold of not only the cottage LaBranche had bought for Galienne, but the annuity he had settled on Galienne and their child. Lucette took Jacquette to the Quadroon Balls when she was fourteen and got her placed with a man named Revel, a banker. That lasted about five years.’ Her dark glance touched Manon, who looked aside. ‘She still comes to the balls.’

  And probably keeps to the groups in the lobby or the gambling room, with the younger women, and the poorer ones, thought January. The women of the generation who didn’t have long-term protectors, who made short-term liaisons with men passing through town: in effect, a single-resident boarding house with sex thrown in. Walking up Rue Toulouse, he had noted two cottages on the block, including the one next door to that of Jacquette Filoux, that were clearly bordellos – not the fancy parlor houses like that of the Countess Mazzini uptown, but simply establishments where four or five women lived and received their customers in cottages that had once belonged to plaçeés.

  He sipped the coffee. A woman who presented herself as a plaçeé would never serve even a pro tempore lover coffee with this much chicory in it. At a guess, Olympe had brought it, as she’d brought the pralines on the German china plate. ‘So tell me about Henry Brooke.’

  Manon perched on the end of the daybed beside Olympe, opened her mouth, and Olympe raised a finger for her silence.

  ‘He’s an Englishman – or he was – and came into town in the middle of last month, on the Hannah Crowder from London. Where he went and what he did with himself in the daytimes I haven’t had time to find out. I’ll start asking around tomorrow.’

  ‘Manon?’

  ‘He’d rent a buggy and a horse sometimes.’ The girl spoke with a kind of gruff hesitancy, as if she feared being shushed again. ‘He said he was driving out to look at plantations, or out to Milneburgh. He’d be dressed up, you know, in a nice coat and a silk waistcoat and all that. He had some mighty pretty things, and he talked like a gentleman. You got to,’ she added wisely, ‘if you’re gonna get anybody to lend you money, or buy something from you. That’s what M’am Boudreaux says, that runs the house next door. When he’d go out on foot he dressed cheap, a calico shirt and big boots like the Kaintucks wear.’

  ‘Did he, now?’ January remembered Oldmixton’s description of Brooke’s instinct for protective coloration. ‘You happen to see which way he went, either time?’

  ‘I’d only see him when he came out to use the couillon.’ She nodded toward the outhouse, against the tall brick wall that bounded the rear yard. ‘Maman told us – Tiennot and Jean-Luc and me—’ she glanced in the direction of the yard behind the house, and the garçonnière where the two little boys watched – ‘to stay out of his way. I think he wore them cheap things to walk over to the basin and drink at the barrooms there, so he wouldn’t look like a mark. When he’d come back late, drunk, he’d be dressed that way. It’s how he was dressed the time he came up to my room,’ she added, turning her face aside.

  January said nothing, but only regarded her in silence.

  ‘I hope you brained him with the chamber pot and threw him off the gallery,’ Rose said calmly.

  The flicker of Manon’s grin told January before the girl spoke that the rape hadn’t been consummated. Told him, too, that Manon understood that Rose wasn’t going to ask, What did you do to lead him on?

  ‘I should have. If he’d broke his neck then nobody’d be saying …’ She shook her head. ‘I bit him, and then scr
eamed and screamed, and Maman came running out of the house. He told Maman I’d asked him to come up to my room. She didn’t believe him … but she didn’t make him leave, either.’ The girl’s face tightened. In her turquoise eyes was the understanding of why her mother hadn’t defended her more, mixed with anger at the betrayal. ‘After that he was meaner to me and the boys than before. But that time he was dressed like that, and I smelled the liquor on him.’

  ‘That the only time he tried?’

  Her voice strengthening in the face of January’s tone – adult to adult – she replied, ‘Yes, sir. But he did poke Lili Estevez next door. She’s a friend of mine. I couldn’t really tell Maman because Maman doesn’t want me talking to Lili or any of M’am Boudreaux’s girls.’

  I’ll bet she doesn’t. The line between a plaçeé, who theoretically chose which men she gave access to her body, and a whore who could be raped with near-impunity, was all-important but razor-thin. A girl of eleven who strayed – or was dragged – across it would lose the greater part of her choices in life thereafter.

  ‘And he’d hit me sometimes,’ added Manon. ‘Or hit the boys. He broke Tiennot’s wrist. Or he’d yell at me, like if he’d ask me something and I’d say “Yes, sir,” or “No, sir,” and he’d yell, “What the hell you mean by that, girl?” Once Maman got on him about it and he slapped her ’cross the mouth.’

  ‘Well,’ said January, ‘I can see why the police think she shot him. Tell me about Saturday night.’

  ‘He wasn’t here Saturday night!’ Manon turned on her seat, caught his hands in her anxiety. ‘Swear to Jesus he wasn’t! Maman made dinner and supper for him both, and I didn’t see her come out to get either one from the kitchen. He’d never tell her if he was going to be in or not,’ she added. ‘But he’d get mad if he got home and dinner wasn’t waiting for him, or supper if he came in late. Or if she was out when he got here. When I came downstairs Sunday morning, there was dinner and supper both, still on the trays where she’d left them, with covers on them, on the kitchen table: chicken and rice for dinner, and cold ham and tomatoes for dinner. We ate them up, Sunday dinner and supper. Saturday night from the gallery we could see candles burning here in the house until three in the morning.’

  ‘But you don’t know for certain your maman was here?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Benjamin,’ said Rose. ‘No woman would go off and leave candles burning in an empty house. Do you happen to know if the candles burned themselves out, or were blown out?’

  ‘Burned themselves out,’ returned the girl promptly. ‘I cleaned out the holders Sunday and there was nothing left in them but a puddle and the wick. And anyway, Maman said as how he hadn’t come in. Then later that day our uncle Juju, Maman’s brother, came in and said as how Michie Brooke had been found in the basin shot dead. Juju said, he and Maman better go through the house and round up any money Michie Brooke might have left, in case he owed money someplace in town.’

  The grin returned for a moment to the girl’s strong-featured face. ‘He said, “You search downstairs while I go through the attic,” and Maman said, “No, how about you and me search together.” You can’t trust Uncle Juju with twenty-five cents. Maman stuck to him like a leech and together they found about twenty dollars in his suitcase and something Maman said was a bank credit-paper for fifty more. She kept that twenty dollars and the credit-paper on her, in case Uncle Juju sort of came back when she was out, and they were still on her when the policeman came this morning, and arrested Maman for killin’ Michie Brooke, and took away all his papers and things.’

  She looked aside then, her eyes filling. Rose moved over to the daybed where the girl sat, and she and Olympe both encircled Manon’s shoulders in brief hugs.

  January asked, ‘Do you really think your maman did it?’

  ‘Of course she didn’t—’ cut in Olympe, and it was January’s turn to motion his sister silent.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Manon whispered. ‘She was mad enough to. I wanted her to. It would serve him right, he treated her so mean. But we really needed the money he gave her and she was just waiting for him to leave. It’s the first time Maman ever said to me she wanted one of her gentlemen to leave.’

  He glanced across at Olympe. ‘What do the guards say?’

  ‘That Brooke came home at one in the mornin’. Bridgie Danou, that lives across the street, says she saw him unlockin’ the door, lettin’ himself in as she was comin’ home – she’s a maid at the Verandah Hotel. She says she was waked up by shots at around two. Other neighbors say the same.’

  ‘You hear shots, Manon?’

  The girl nodded. ‘I thought they were at M’am Boudreaux’s,’ she said, as if not entirely convinced of it herself. ‘Or at M’am Tonnerre’s, or down over at Vidi Vigaud’s that runs a crap game most nights in her parlor—’

  ‘You can’t pass a night in this neighborhood without hearin’ shots,’ reiterated Olympe impatiently, and January, who lived only blocks away, knew she was right. It was one of the things he knew he’d have to talk his way around, to the parents of Rose’s young scholars.

  ‘And you can bet your Sunday shoes,’ his sister went on, ‘that Effie Boudreaux and all her girls will swear nothing of the kind went on under their chaste roof.’

  And the owner of the place – a wealthy gentleman on the municipal council – would, January knew, back them up.

  His glance returned to Manon. ‘Does your maman own a pistol?’

  ‘I told you it was stolen.’

  January wanted to ask Olympe how she knew this, but guessed that she’d have an answer ready.

  ‘Like as not by that good-for-nothing brother of hers.’

  From what he’d heard of Jules-Jérôme Filoux – whose name was not unknown to the members of the Faubourg Tremé Free Colored Militia and Burial Society – this also sounded not unlikely.

  ‘She had a little one,’ said Manon, with a worried glance at Olympe. ‘I only saw it once, more than a year ago. She kept it hid, on account of the boys. Lili told me—’ Manon’s voice grew hesitant again, like one who has been forbidden to discuss the subject (or maybe just forbidden to talk to Lili) – ‘if there’s trouble over in M’am Boudreaux’s house, M’sieu Alvarez sorts it out: if one of the men causes trouble with a girl, or tries to rob her, or something. But Lili said, Maman not working in a house, she needed a pistol. Monday afternoon, when I was doing the chores, I went and looked in the place where Maman hid it, and it was gone.’

  ‘Why don’t you show me where that was?’

  There was a false back on one of the drawers of the bedroom armoire. One would have to pull the drawer all the way out, to get at the little compartment there. A few grains of powder dusted the bottom of the compartment, and the smell of gun-oil lingered.

  Trailed by the ladies, January went on to search the rest of the cottage, while the afternoon’s rainstorm gradually wore itself out overhead and blew on up the river toward Baton Rouge. Shortly after the last drops rattled on the abat-vent, January heard music start up again in Congo Square.

  The City Guards had already cleared out the armoire in the bedroom and the small desk in the dining room which, Manon said, Henry Brooke had appropriated for his own use. All the furnishings – bed, armoire, desk, chairs, the dishes in the dining-room cupboard, the curtains and the toilette articles on Jacquette Filoux’s bureau – were new and cheap, while the few older objects which remained, stored in the attic or relegated to the cabinets at the back of the house, were of infinitely better quality, though worn and scuffed. False economy, his mother would have sneered, but January understood that when one needs something that doesn’t scream poverty, it isn’t always possible to purchase good quality. Observing how the fabric of Jacquette’s dresses had been carefully picked apart and re-cut to more recent fashions was like reading a bank book.

  January located two other hidey-holes in the attic and one in the cabinet that housed the attic stair. One of these held five dollars in silver, an ivory min
iature of a beautiful, dusky-complected woman in the extravagantly-wrought tignon characteristic of the Caribbean, and the deed to the house. Another held receipts and notes pertaining to two loans from the Bank of Louisiana, one against the house, the other against a slave woman named Nanny (foreclosed, January assumed, since there didn’t seem to be any servant on the property and Jacquette had made dinner and supper for her lover herself). There was also a bank book from the First Commercial Bank, one of those which had closed its doors in the spring of 1837 and had never re-opened. The third held only a few receipts, and, jammed into a corner where the bricks of the house-wall had been removed behind the attic stair, a pistol-ball about the size of a pea.

  A tiny gun, thought January, turning the ball in his fingers. Easily palmed, but any salt-river roarer who pulled a weapon that size in a Basin Street saloon would be laughed out of the place with his tail between his legs and a nickname on the river that he’d never live down.

  ‘Have you got anyone to stay with?’ he asked Manon, as they descended the attic steps, and he saw a flicker of panic cross the girl’s eyes.

  As well it might, he reflected, given the neighborhood and the proximity of such entrepreneurs as Madame Boudreaux and M’sieu Alvarez next door. The parish orphanage, January was well aware, didn’t have any more money than anyone else did in these times, and it wasn’t a place he’d have wanted any child of his own to stay.

  ‘They can stay with me.’ Olympe gathered up her skirts, to follow them down the narrow stair.

  ‘I’ll speak to the board of the society,’ said January, ‘about getting you a little money to help with their keep. Can the house be locked up?’ The entire contents, if carried off and sold second-hand, probably wouldn’t have realized twenty dollars, but they were all Jacquette Filoux owned. ‘Obviously it can,’ he added immediately, ‘if Bridgie Danou saw M’sieu Brooke letting himself in with a key—’

  ‘There’s bolts on the back doors,’ provided Manon. ‘Good key-locks on the front.’ Like most of the older Creole cottages, Jacquette’s had long French doors to provide both entry and light. Dining room and bedroom each had two sets of ‘doors’ on the street side, glazed and equipped with simple latches but defended with stout pairs of shutters, whose louvered jalousies would admit a striped light even when the shutters were closed. One French door of the dining room, and one of the bedroom, were equipped with bolts on the inside, the second set in each chamber fastened with nearly new brass Chubb locks. Each chamber also had one set of French doors that looked into the rear yard – fastened with an interior bolt rather than a lock. The little cabinets that extended into the yard had American-style sash windows, latched at the top of the sash in the usual way. They looked like they’d been forced more than once, but not recently.