A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [73]
The lanky Kentuckian slowly licked the remains of the praline from his bony fingers, along with a certain amount of clerical ink, before he replied.
“Someone who sure wanted to do you harm, anyway. Given they was sicced on you by whoever planted that charm.… How’d they have known it was you?”
January sniffed. “Everybody in New Orleans heard Madame Dreuze beg me to find her daughter’s killer,” he said. “And since no one else seems to be taking any further interest in the case …” he added pointedly.
“Well, now, that’s changed again,” said Shaw. “As of this morning. That’s why I was over at your ma’s.”
“So they changed their minds?” said January, anger prickling through him once again. “Decided that a woman doesn’t have to be white to merit the protection of the law?”
“Let’s just say several folks on the city council have come to see the matter in a different light.” Shaw finished his coffee and set the cup on a nearby table, pale eyes thoughtful, watchful, under the overhang of brow. “Captain Tremouille spoke to me this mornin’ on the subject, and that’s why I’s at your ma’s—that’s why I came hotfoot down to the Calaboose, too, when I heard you was there. Seems they’re lookin’ for evidence to put the killin’ on you.”
TWELVE
“Me?” All January could think of was the half-dozen wounded men he’d spoken to after the battle at Chalmette, who said that when first hit by a musket ball, all they felt was a sort of a shock, like being pushed hard. They’d fallen down. Later, the pain came.
“That’s right.”
Fear. Disbelief, but fear, as if he’d just stepped off a cliff and was only realizing gradually that there wasn’t a bottom.
“I didn’t even know the woman.”
“Well now,” said Shaw mildly, “Captain Tremouille asked me to look into that.”
“I didn’t! Ask anyone! Galen Peralta—”
“Nobody saw Galen Peralta go into that room,” said Shaw, “except you, Maestro.”
There was no bottom to the cliff. He was plunging through the dark. He’d die when he struck the bottom.
His mother hadn’t come to the jail. Nor had his sister.
Only Shaw.
“Captain Tremouille’s problem,” said Shaw, judiciously turning the fragments of praline over in sticky fingers, “is that he has a colored gal—a plaçée—dead, and the man who looks likeliest to have done it is the son of one of the wealthiest planters in the district. Now, Captain Tremouille believes in justice—he does—but he also believes in keepin’ his job, and that might not be so easy once the Peraltas and the Bringiers and the half-dozen other big Creole families that are all kissin’ kin to each other start sayin’ how let’s not make a big hoo-rah and start arrestin’ white folks over a colored gal who wasn’t any better than she should have been.
“So I got to spend about two days chasin’ down slaves sleepin’ in attics over on Magazine Street.”
“Go on,” said January grimly.
“Well,” Shaw went on, “yesterday—and maybe only gettin’ a thousand dollars for two prime wenches had somethin’ to do with it—Euphrasie Dreuze figured two could play that friends-an’-family game, and went to see Etienne Crozat, that was her gal’s pa. I dunno what she told him, but this mornin’ Captain Tremouille called me in first thing and says let’s get this murder solved and get it solved quick, and wasn’t there any man of her own color who hated her enough to want her dead? He’s a powerful man, Crozat. He brokers the crops of half the planters on the river and there’s three members of the city council who’ll be livin’ on beans an’ rice if he calls in his paper on them or gives ’em a couple cents less per pound on next year’s sugar.”
“I didn’t know her.”
The gray eyes remained steadily on his. “You think that’s gonna make any difference?”
He remembered, very suddenly, Shaw handing him his papers in the Cabildo courtyard, taking him out through the postern door. Looking around the courtyard while he, January, washed at the pump, watching like a man in Indian country.
The realization of what Shaw had rescued him from hit