A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [116]
As if, January realized, in Galen Peralta’s mind, Angelique had no other life than as the center of his consciousness.
“Do you know who might have hated her?” he asked. “Who might have wished her dead?”
Of course you don’t, he thought, as the boy simply gazed with those tear-filled blue eyes. You never spoke to her about a single one of her other concerns, did you?
“I … n-no,” he stammered. “Who w-would have w-wanted to harm her?”
The blind naïveté—the complete ignorance—of the remark made him want to hoot with laughter, but that, he knew, would be his death.
“An ex-lover?” January suggested gently. “A rival? Someone she had wronged? If she had a crazy temper, she’d have taken it out on someone other than you.”
The boy shook his head and looked away, face darkening in the gloom as he realized, perhaps for the first time, that he had not known very well the woman he had professed to so madly love.
“Was there someone you saw on the stairway?” asked January. “Someone you passed in the courtyard on the way out?”
“I d-don’t … I d-don’t remember anything. Look, my p-papa says we should let this all blow over.…”
“But then the man who did this will get away.” January made his voice low, both grave and sympathetic, as if he were speaking to one of his students or to some poor soul at the night clinic. “Listen, Michie Peralta.” He carefully used the idiom of the slaves, like a dog lowering itself down before another dog so as not to get killed. “I’m grateful to your father for sending me away rather than doing some worse thing, because I know it’s in his power to do so.” The arrogant bastard. “But one day I want to clear my own name, and to do that I have to find who really did it. If you can tell me everything you remember about that night, I can write to my family from France or Mexico or wherever I end up, and they can talk to the police, investigate this thing. Clear your name as well, not just with the police but with your father.”
The boy licked his lips with a pale, hesitant tongue, but his watery eyes brightened a little. “I … I underst-stand. But I d-don’t … I really d-don’t remember.”
Just as his love for Angelique had been a matter of concern to him alone, thought January, so in his mind he saw only himself at their parting and not anyone around him.
“How did you leave the building?” asked January in a coaxing voice, trying to ignore the agonizing pain in his hand. “Down the service stairs?”
Galen nodded. “I d-didn’t … Everybody was in the upstairs lobby. But I heard … voices … in the office when I came out the b-bottom, so I w-went through the lobby and out into the c-court that way.”
His father’s voice, thought January. In Froissart’s office, talking to Granger and Bouille.
“Did you see anyone in the lobby? Anyone you know? Or would know again?”
“I d-don’t … I d-don’t know.” Galen shrugged helplessly and looked around, casting about for a reason to leave. “They were all w-wearing masks.”
“What kind of masks? Anything really pretty? Really vulgar? Really ugly?” If the killer had ascended the service stair sometime during the progressive waltz, he—or just possibly she—would have almost certainly passed this distraught boy in the lobby or the courtyard.
“There was that vulgar p-purple p-pirate,” said Galen promptly, his brow unfurrowing with relief at being able to recall something or someone. “M-Mayerling was d-down there, I … I hurried p-past because I didn’t want him to see me. I didn’t—I c-couldn’t—do with speaking to anyone. There was a w-woman dressed like an Indian in b-b-buckskin.…”
He frowned again, struggling with the mental effort as much as with his stutter. A very perfect young Creole gentleman, thought January dourly: competent with a sword or a horse and slowly being inculcated to the endless, careful work of running a sugar plantation, but utterly without imagination. Or perhaps with just enough imagination to sense that he was being pressed and molded against his will, the will he was