Murder in July Page 9

  Brooke was six-feet tall. Almost as tall as Philippe de la Marche had been, all those years ago – the question had been asked about Anne Ben-Gideon almost at once. An accomplice, the police had said, and had begun a search for her handsome fencing master.

  ‘There was a handcart she kept in her yard sometimes, for a friend of hers – Cuff Bazaire, his name is. He works on the wharf, couple days a week, an’ lives over on Girod Street an’ has noplace to keep it.’

  ‘Anybody find any blood in this handcart?’

  ‘Hard to tell. It’d been used two-three times ’tween Saturday night an’ Thursday when we arrested her. Hell, that thing’s so filthy there’s probably six kinds of blood soaked into them planks, an’ God knows what else besides. The cart was in her yard that night. Tremouille thinks that’s why the corpse’s head was tucked up like that. She put him someplace til the ruckus that goes on ever’ night sort of calmed down.’

  ‘Her brother have a key?’

  ‘Not no more, he don’t. The neighbors all say as how M’am Filoux turned Brother Juju out six months ago an’ got a new lock on the door. I guess Brother Juju waxed mighty eloquent on the subject of the relative thickness of blood an’ water. Even the evenin’ of the killin’ he was still complainin’ of it, accordin’ to Short-Change Jimmy at the Proud Cock on Franklin Street.’

  ‘What time did he leave the Cock?’ By Hannibal’s accounts of having played there, January knew the Proud Cock was a gambling parlor and house of prostitution which boasted the cheapest drinks in New Orleans: watered rum (said Hannibal) mixed with camphor and opium-sweepings.

  ‘Sometime ’fore three. Nobody can say rightly how much before. An’ he ain’t been seen since, barrin’ the visit he paid to M’am Filoux Sunday, which ain’t much of a surprise given what he owes all over town. But all Tremouille sees is how the neighbors all say how M’am Filoux said to more’n one of ’em how she hated Brooke. A week ago he give her a black eye, an’ it was no secret in that neighborhood as how she had a purse-gun. Woman who runs the place next door said as how Brooke had tried to rape M’am Filoux’s little gal.’ He spit again, missing the sandbox beside the door by feet.

  ‘Tremouille don’t hold much by medical evidence.’

  ‘Regrettably,’ spoke up Vachel Corcet in his soft, prim voice, ‘neither do juries in this state, when they have what appears to them to be a clear motive—’

  ‘An’ specially,’ added Shaw, ‘if so be the culprit’s a black woman, accused of shootin’ a white man.’ From the box on the table he drew a little screw of paper, from which he took a pistol-ball roughly the size of a chickpea, and held it out on his callused palm. January needed only a glance to note the characteristic deformation of a screw-barrel muff pistol. ‘That’s what they’re gonna pay attention to.’

  January set the book aside, and fished from his pocket the pistol-ball he’d found in the hidey-hole in Jacquette Filoux’s back cabinet. ‘She have more than one gun?’

  ‘Where’d you find that?’ Shaw set his own bullet down, took the smaller one from January’s fingers. ‘No gun with it, I suppose …?’

  January shook his head.

  ‘Well, consarn.’ The Kaintuck scratched his long nose. ‘We didn’t find no gun of any description on the premises. Given that neighborhood, wouldn’t surprise me none if she had more’n one. An’ that’s what the gentlemen of the jury gonna say, if’n we got no better evidence – ’specially if we don’t got neither one of them guns in hand. M’am Filoux claims she never had no gun—’

  ‘Who’s Gerry O’Dwyer?’ The attorney Corcet had picked up the battered copy of The Lustful Turk from the table, and was gingerly thumbing its pages.

  January swung around, shocked at the name. Shaw began to remark, ‘Some friend of Brooke’s with the same taste in—’ and then broke off, seeing the look on January’s face. ‘Somebody of your acquaintance?’

  January took the book, stared at the inscription scrawled on the flyleaf.

  Scribbled but readable, it said: Gerry O’Dwyer.

  ‘He was,’ he said. ‘Once.’

  SEVEN

  Gerry O’Dwyer.

  For a moment he was entering that narrow cell in the Saint-Lazare prison, with Daniel, with Anne’s dandified younger brother Armand, with old M’sieu Sarrien, the lawyer hired by the Vicomte de la Roche-St-Ouen for his daughter.

  1830

  ‘The police are saying Gerry helped me carry Philippe’s body to the barricade after I shot him.’ Anne Ben-Gideon sprang to her feet and crossed the room in two strides to catch January by the hands. ‘Has he come to you? Has anyone in the Société seen him? It’s ridiculous, it’s nonsense—’

  ‘They know about Gerry, then?’

  The young woman waved impatiently. ‘Everybody knows about Gerry. I’ve never believed in hiding what I felt—’

  ‘One could wish, madame,’ intoned M’sieu Sarrien disapprovingly, as the turnkey closed the door behind them, ‘that you had been a little more circumspect—’

  ‘As Papa is circumspect about his mistresses?’ Anne flared. ‘As my uncle Louis is circumspect about what goes on in that social club he frequents? As—’ She stopped the flood of her angry words with a glance at Daniel, who had his own reason to be circumspect.

  And her brother Armand, sixteen years old and nearly in tears of anxiety, cried, ‘All the juge d’instruction is going to say is that of course a woman who takes lovers would do murder!’

  ‘Where is Gerry?’ asked Daniel reasonably.

  Anne turned her face away, her body trembling as if under the lash of a whip. She whispered, ‘Dead.’

  1839

  ‘I never asked.’ The way Jacquette Filoux looked aside at January’s question, like a woman expecting at the best a tirade of shouts, at the worst a blow, brought that meeting in the Paris prison back to him in all its detail, and for a moment it seemed to him that he was, in fact, stepping into the same river that had nearly drowned him nine years before. Dimness, window bars, the stale taste of despair. ‘How stupid does that make me?’

  Jacquette’s face – dark ivory features that barely whispered of African descent – was dusted with a galaxy of freckles which most of the quadroon and octoroon ladies of Rue des Ramparts would have scorned as ugly. Tinier than her sturdy daughter, she wasn’t beautiful by classical standards – by white standards. But there was an elfin prettiness to her thin features and large gray eyes that made the classical standards seem lifeless. She was a woman, January felt at once, who would have been something other than what she was, had she had the slightest chance to do so.

  ‘Everything I’ve heard about Henry Brooke,’ returned January, ‘tells me you did the smartest thing you could. He’d probably have lied to you anyway.’

  Brought down to the watch room from the women’s cell, she’d sat drawn into herself, in the chair beside Shaw’s desk, intimidated by the three men gathered around her in the grilling forenoon heat. Now she glanced up at January with eyes that really saw him, and a little wry twist pulled one corner of her mouth. ‘That he would, sir. He lied fast as a dog can trot. I didn’t know that when I met him.’

  ‘Which of us does?’

  She returned his tiny, rueful smile with one of her own, in the moment before she glanced around her, at Corcet and at Shaw. Beyond them, the watch room had quieted, except for a fat, sloppy journalist from the True American arguing with the desk sergeant in bad French. The doors to the Place des Armes stood open in the vain hope of something resembling a river breeze, but all that came in were flies and the pong of horse droppings in the Place. January noted that Jacquette Filoux had taken the trouble to wash her face in what water was available in the women’s cell, and to re-wrap her tignon, the head cloth once required by law of women of color in Louisiana. That law itself no longer existed officially, but it would take a brave librée indeed to risk an unofficial beating by offended whites for being ‘uppity’, or the possibility of arrest on some other charge by a guard who
thought that women of color needed to be ‘kept in their place’.

  ‘Henry—’ she began, and then stopped, as if trying to gather a description of him that wouldn’t get her into worse trouble for criticizing a white man. She glanced at Shaw again, and then toward the desk sergeant. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me to hear Michie Brooke wasn’t his real name. Most men, they’ll relax sometimes, they’ll tell you things, over breakfast, or when you’re having a smoke out on the gallery. Little things, things they remember, like, “You ever been to Havana? Well, they have these ladies there who sell mangos in the streets …” Or, “My daddy used to tell me when we’d go walk on the riverbank in Philadelphia …” That kind of thing. Things that lead into stories. Michie Brooke wasn’t like that.’

  ‘You think he might have kept silent because he feared enemies in town?’ Corcet leaned forward a little, notebook in hand.

  ‘That wouldn’t surprise me, either.’ Her French was the sort taught by the nuns at the Ursuline convent; educated and grammatical, better than that of many white ladies January had heard. ‘It was like with the stories: most men will let it slip out how they make their living, when they brag about the money they’ve got. Henry didn’t. He’d go out, and come back smelling of liquor, and I saw gambling markers in his pockets and in the desk. Of course I never asked him – what man likes to be asked where he’s been or what he’s been up to? The markers weren’t enormous – I think the most I ever saw was for eighty dollars – but I don’t know what else he owed. And he had a temper. He’d get furious, if he thought that anyone was asking where he’d been, or what he’d been doing.’

  January wondered if she’d found that out in connection with the fading bruise under her left eye.

  Shaw, perched on a corner of his desk, asked in his execrable French, ‘An’ you got no idea who that mighta been that M’am Danou seen lettin’ himself into your place Saturday night?’

  ‘I told Michie Tremouille,’ she said pleadingly, ‘I heard nothing. I saw no one. I swear it! I dozed off in my chair in my room, waiting for Michie Brooke – I’d prepared supper for him, he liked me to wait up for him and sometimes he’d come back later than that. Only he had a key to the house – I take good care …’ She hesitated, suddenly painfully self-conscious at the admission that she might have to take good care to keep track of which men had keys to her house.

  She still clung, thought January, to the polite fiction that she was a real plaçeé instead of merely ‘cheaper than a hotel’.

  She finished with, ‘If he’d come into my room I would have waked.’

  ‘Would you have waked if he’d let himself into the dining room instead of your chamber?’ inquired January. ‘I noticed yesterday that the lock on the shutters to that door was freshly scratched around the keyhole, as if someone had unlocked it in the dark. It’s a new lock-plate – six months, isn’t it? – and the scratches showed clearly. And it would be dark, under the abat-vent, if he was at the dining-room door and not your chamber where candles burned. Could your brother have stolen a key?’

  Jacquette’s mouth tightened, hard and suddenly, at the mention of her brother. ‘If he had a chance, yes.’

  ‘Do you know your brother’s address?’ inquired Corcet, pencil again at the ready, and the young woman shook her head.

  ‘I know he had a room with Lallie Gardinier on Girod Street,’ she said. ‘But when I asked him about it Sunday he said he couldn’t stand her drinking and stealing everything he owned – meaning she’d asked him for rent money and he’d left, I assume. He asked me for money Sunday, when I wouldn’t let him go through the house. I gave him what I could spare.’

  ‘Could he have sneaked in Saturday night?’ asked January. ‘Sneaked in through the dining-room door and poked around looking for what he could steal?’

  Again her lips compressed. ‘If he saw a body floating in the basin – he often gambles at the Proud Cock on Franklin Street – he would certainly have pulled it ashore long enough to go through his pockets. And then of course he’d know that Michie Brooke wouldn’t be at my house. He could have taken his key … I did waken,’ she added, ‘some time late in the night. I took the candle and went into the dining room, thinking Michie Brooke might have returned. But I saw no one …’

  ‘One candle,’ drawled Shaw, ‘throws damn poor light. Your brother’s lucky you didn’t shoot him.’

  Fear sprang immediately into her eyes. ‘I have no gun—’

  ‘Accordin’ to M’am Boudreaux you do. An’ the maestro here found a pistol-ball on the premises—’

  ‘I had no such thing!’ she cried, trying to sound innocent and puzzled and not succeeding in the least. ‘I … Madame Boudreaux just hates me because I try to keep my girl away from the trash that hangs around her house. Ask anyone on the street! Please,’ she said. ‘Please …’

  Shaw said nothing.

  ‘M’sieu, it’s true I hated Henry Brooke. But I would never, ever have harmed him! Maybe if I thought he was going to remain with me for any length of time I’d have asked him to leave. But he said he was going on the twenty-first. I told myself I could hold out til then.’

  ‘He say why he was leavin’? Or where he was headed?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t know if you’d understand how it is, sir,’ she went on after a time. ‘Living with such a man. But I have to keep the house. I have to keep Manon and the boys in school. The nuns teach fine sewing, good manners, the proper way of speaking that the white ladies, the rich ladies, look for in a maid. Or that the shopkeepers look for when they hire a girl … or when they look for a wife for their sons. I don’t want Manon to live as I do. I don’t want my sons to be what my brother is, cheating at cards and living off women. You can’t do that, washing clothes, or selling pralines on the levee. For men it’s different,’ she finished in a whisper.

  ‘It is.’ Shaw spit again in the general direction of the sandbox near his desk. January had seen Shaw kill a man at fifty yards with a rifle by starlight, but with tobacco he couldn’t hit the side of a barn.

  ‘What did he look like?’ asked January. ‘Henry Brooke?’

  ‘Like an angel,’ replied Jacquette promptly. ‘A Greek god. Short little straight nose, wavy hair, golden like honey. Just a hint – the tiniest thread – of silver, but a man in his full prime. Thirty-five? Thirty-six?’

  Her eyes narrowed, calling his features back to mind. ‘There was a little cleft in his chin.’ She touched her own chin, as many people do when describing such a feature. ‘Blue eyes – dark-blue, like a new bandanna, and eyelashes that curled. Handsome …’ A flicker of pain crossed her face, or shame, at having once taken him into her bed. ‘He was always sort of catching his own reflection in things – windows, or the looking glass in the parlor. Always touching his neck-cloth or fussing with his collar, or pushing a curl of his hair straight.’

  January whispered, ‘Ah.’

  1830

  ‘I looked for him,’ murmured Anne Ben-Gideon, returning to the cell’s single chair. ‘When the rioting finished, I went back to his rooms on the Rue L’Asnier, thinking he would come there. I waited, all day Thursday. Friday I went to the morgue—’

  She shook her head. The Vicomte de la Roche-St-Ouen might have provided the family lawyer – a white-haired, vague-eyed man who had served the family for sixty-three of his eighty-plus years – but it was Armand who was responsible for the fact that Anne’s cell had a curtained bed, a small rag rug on the floor, a little dressing table, a lamp, and a prie-dieu. The going rate for such amenities – according to Maurice Pleyard, who had reason to know – was two hundred francs. January wasn’t sure whether Armand had borrowed this money himself at some shocking rate of interest, or whether he’d gone to their parents with hysterical visions of the daughter of the family being tossed into a prison dormitory with the floozies for whom Saint-Lazare was primarily intended. In either case the youth had met them at the prison gates with a bulky packet of linens, clothing, and toilet articles, which he
now stood clutching in his arms.

  ‘He wasn’t there.’ Anne looked up, her voice a little stronger. ‘Most of the bodies, they simply dragged off the barricades and buried where they could. Or put them in mass graves in the Cemetery of the Innocents, or the Champ de Mars …’

  ‘But you were with him,’ said old M’sieu Sarrien, ‘on the night of Tuesday the twenty-seventh?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Did others see you?’

  ‘Of course! Armand …’ she added impatiently, as her brother spread out on the narrow bed a frock of sage-green foulard cut high to the throat, a schoolgirl’s dress almost and certainly something January had never seen Daniel’s wife wear. With it, the young man had brought a small gold cross on a golden chain, which he held out to her. ‘Where did you get that thing, for Heaven’s sake?’

  ‘You can’t let them think you don’t love God, Anne!’ Armand pleaded, nearly in tears. ‘It doesn’t matter what you really feel! But they have to see that you’re innocent!’

  ‘Quite right,’ agreed M’sieu Sarrien, ‘quite right. Now … What did you say this young man’s name was, Hèléne?’

  ‘I’m Anne,’ Anne reminded him, her voice gentle. ‘Hèléne is Mother.’

  ‘Ah, yes! Quite right, Anne.’

  1839

  The stink, and the heat, of the New Orleans morning brought that cell in Saint-Lazare back to January as he stepped out of the Cabildo, spoke his automatic goodbyes to Vachel Corcet, turned his steps back toward Rue Esplanade. The last freshness of the morning remained only in the alleyways beside the cathedral, where the shadows clung, and in the open doors of the church itself. January knew if he didn’t hasten his steps back home and begin mixing paint, he’d be working into the insufferable heat of the day.

  Yet as he crossed in front of the cathedral’s shallow steps he turned sharply, and made his way inside. The sanctuary was empty. A small galaxy of candles burned before the image of the Blessed Virgin, the protector of women, and to these he added four more, dropping a coin he couldn’t really afford into the slit metal box and whispering their names as he worked the stumpy cylinders of white wax onto their spikes.