A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [37]
Shaw looked back at him, surprised. “Now I may be a upriver flatboat boy with no classical education, but I know the difference between a courtesan an’ a streetwalker, mask or no mask.”
“Does it make a difference?” asked January. “Sir?”
“To me?” asked Shaw. “Or to Mr. Tremouille, when I go back to the Cabildo an’ tell him what we got here?”
January started to say, You tell me, and shut his mouth on the words. The man was police, the man was white, the man was American. He might have said it to a Creole under the same circumstances, but the uneasiness returned to him, consciousness of the man’s power to harm.
Shaw rubbed his face again, grubby with brown stubble like a layer of dirt.
“A woman was kilt,” he said. “She bein’ a free woman, an’ a householder in this city, that meant the tax she paid was payin’ my salary, so it sorta obligates me to avenge her death, don’t it? I be violatin’ any code of conduct if I was to call on your sister this afternoon?” He patted the sheaf of yellow notepapers that stuck out of the pocket of his sagging coat, and donned his disreputable hat.
“Send her a note this morning giving her the time,” advised January. “That way she can get one of her girlfriends, or probably our mother, to play duenna. Four o’clock’s a good time. She’ll be awake and made up by then, and whatever’s going on at the Crozats’ won’t be until eight or so. You have her address?”
Shaw nodded. “Thank you kindly,” he said. “I was a constable here last Carnival time—and Lordy, I thought I’d stepped into one of my granny’s picture books!—and it stands to reason there’s gonna be more pockets picked now than any other time. And if a stranger kills a stranger, you don’t hardly never catch him, less’n he does something truly foolish with his loot. But somethin’ tells me it’s a rare thief who’d kill for jewels at a ball in a place like this. And there was plenty of women comin’ an’ goin’ through this tunnel, gussied up just as costive or more so. If somebody killed Miss Crozat for them necklaces she was wearin’, it was a damn fool way to go about it.”
He stepped out onto the brick banquette, spat into the gutter, and walked away into the weeping dawn, his coat flapping around his slouching form. January watched him out of sight, stroking the black cock feather with his fingertips.
SIX
The ochre stucco cottage on Rue Burgundy was silent when January reached it. It was one of a row of four. He listened for a moment at the closed shutters of each of its two front rooms, then edged his way down the muddy slot between the closely set walls of the houses to the yard, where he had to turn sideways and duck to enter the gate. The shutters there were closed as well. The yard boasted a privy, a brick kitchen, and a garçonnière above it.
When first he had lived there, his sister had occupied the rear bedroom, his mother the front, the two parlors—one behind the other—being used for the entertainment of St.-Denis Janvier. Although he was only nine years old, Benjamin had slept from the first in the garçonnière, waiting until the house lights were put out and then climbing down the rickety twist of the outside stair to run with Olympe and Will Pavegeau and Nic Gignac on their midnight adventures. He smiled, recalling the white glint of Olympe’s eyes as she dared them to follow her to the cemetery, or to the slave dances out on Bayou St. John.
His younger sister—his full sister—had been a skinny girl then, like a black spider in a raggedy blue-and-red skirt and a calico blouse a slave woman would have scorned to wear. Having a back room with access to the yard had made it easy for her to slip out, though he suspected that if she’d been locked in a dungeon, Olympe would still have managed to get free.
Olympe had been fifteen the year of Dominique’s birth. The two girls had shared that rear chamber for only a year. Then Dominique had occupied it alone, a luxury for a little girl growing up. But