A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [29]
But none of them were masked. And no Creole he knew, thought January, would have the wit to dress that much like an out-at-elbows upriver Kaintuck, with a shabby, flapping corduroy coat many years out of fashion and too short in the sleeves for his loose-jointed height.
Minou slipped past them, startlingly invisible for someone so beautiful and brightly clad, and melted into the crowd in the ballroom like snow on the desert’s dusty face. The tall officer stepped forward and laid a black-nailed hand on Froissart’s arm.
“Mr. Froissart?” Interestingly, he got the pronunciation right. “ ’Fore you and your boy head on back to the ballroom, we’d like to talk to you.” His tone was polite but his backcountry dialect so thick that his English was barely comprehensible.
Two of the guards were heading into the ballroom. The music ceased. Silence, then a rising clamor. January could already hear that the tenor of the noise from the gaming rooms and the downstairs lobby had changed as well.
“What …” stammered Froissart. “What?…”
The tall man touched the brim of his low-crowned hat, and spit a stream of tobacco in the general direction of the sandbox. He was unshaven, noisome, and the sugar-brown hair hanging to his shoulders was stringy with grease. “Abishag Shaw, lieutenant of the New Orleans police, at your service, sir.”
FIVE
“This is an outrage!” The plump Ivanhoe who’d been negotiating with Agnes Pellicot stationed himself foursquare in the central of the three ballroom doorways, ornamental sword drawn as if to reenact Roncevaux upon the threshold. Looking past him, January was interested to note that the invisible barriers that had separated the Americans—the Roman, Henry VIII, Richelieu—from the Creoles seemed momentarily to have dissolved. “None of us had the least thing to do with that cocotte’s death, and I consider it an insult for you to say that we have!”
“Why, hell, sir, I know you got nuthin’ to do with it.” Police Lieutenant Abishag Shaw, though he replied in English, did not appear to have any trouble understanding the man’s French. He folded his long arms, stepped closer to the doorway and lowered his voice as if to exclude the three constables grouped uncertainly behind him, their eyes on the curtained passage to the Théâtre next door. “But I also know men like yourselves don’t miss much of what goes on around them, neither. Anything happen out of the ordinary—an’ maybe you wouldn’ta knowed it was out of the ordinary at the time—you’d a seen it. That’s what I’m countin’ on to help me find this killer.”
The Creoles muttered and whispered among themselves in French. January heard a man start to say in English, “She’s only a …” The concluding words, nigger whore, remained unsaid, probably more because the speaker realized that saying them would damage his chances with the dead woman’s fellow demimondaines than out of any consideration of good taste. Old Xavier Peralta turned his head. “She was a free woman of this city, sir,” he said quietly. “She is entitled to this city’s justice.”
“I agree,” said Ivanhoe. “But there is no need for us to unmask to tell you what we have seen tonight.”
Shaw scratched his unshaven jaw. “Well,” he said in his mild tenor voice, “in fact there is.” And he aimed another long stream of tobacco juice into the nearest spittoon, missing by only inches—not bad at the distance, January thought.
“Malarkey!” barked Henry VIII. Only men were visible in the doorway, but January could see the silken bevies of women grouped in the other two entries, watching with eyes that held not love, but worried calculation, like the occupants of a sinking vessel computing the square footage of the rafts.
From the parlor a wailing shriek sliced the air: “Angelique, my baby! My angel! Oh dear God, my baby!” Other voices murmured, soothing, weeping, calming.
January’s eyes returned to the faces of the men. It was absurd to suppose the murderer was still in the ballroom, or anywhere in the Salle d’Orléans. Henri Viellard certainly wasn’t, having beaten a hasty retreat through the