A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [75]
“Would it, now?” Shaw didn’t sound particularly surprised, or even terribly interested. But January was beginning to realize that for a man who never sounded interested in anything, the lieutenant had taken considerable pains that morning to make sure he, January, was out of the Cabildo’s cells before his superiors realized they didn’t even need to gather evidence to take him in.
“He may have his reasons,” Shaw went on after a moment. “I don’t know how well you got on with your daddy, but personally, if I’d just lost a girl I cared about—and even a kid’s stupid puppy love is pretty large to the kid—I’d want to be a lot farther from mine than a couple hours’ ride out Bayou Saint John.”
And even if he had killed the girl himself, thought January, that might still hold true.
At the same time he recalled the blood under Angelique’s nails.
He thought, She marked him.
And felt his heart beat quicker.
“And in the meantime,” he said slowly, “you’re to solve the murder as quick as you can. Before Tuesday next, presumably?”
“I suspect that’s the idea. Now, they got no evidence against you ’cept that you was the last person to see Miss Crozat alive. And that you left your job at the piano on purpose right then so’s you could see her alone. Half a dozen people saw you go after her.”
“I was only away from the ballroom for … what? Five minutes?”
“Nobody saw you come out. I asked pretty careful about that.”
Even during their conversation in the parlor, thought January, he’d been a suspect.
“Of course nobody saw me come out. Everyone was watching Granger and Bouille make asses of themselves. Hannibal Sefton saw me leave and spoke to me when I returned. He’s the fiddler.”
“White feller with the cough?”
January nodded. “He lives in the attic over Maggie Dix’s place on Perdidio Street. He’s the best I’ve ever heard, here or in Paris or anywhere, but he’s a consumptive and lives on opium, so he can’t teach or make much of a living.”
“He surely was lit up like a High Mass when I talked to him. I’m not sayin’ a man can’t judge the time of day when he’s that jug bit, but they ain’t gonna like that in court, if so be it comes to that.”
There was a burst of laughter around Mayerling’s table, where the sword master had disarmed one of his combative students with a spoon. January remembered that Arnaud Trepagier, too, had been one of Mayerling’s pupils.
He turned completely in his chair, fully facing the American for the first time. “I’m glad you’re still using that word if.”
“I mean to go on usin’ it as long as I can,” said Shaw gently. “Whole thing smells a little high to me, and higher yet now that somebody’s been interferin’ with you. Fifteen years ago I’d have said, Don’t worry, there’s no evidence and you didn’t know that woman from Eve’s hairdresser. Fifteen years from now I might be sayin’, Don’t worry, they ain’t gonna hang nobody for a colored gal’s death, free or not free. Tell you the truth, Maestro, I don’t know what to say now.”
“Well,” said January, “I know what to say.” He held out his hand. “Thank you.”
Shaw hesitated a moment before taking it, then did so. His hand was large, still callused from plow and ax. “It’s my job,” he said. “And it’ll be my job to arrest you, too, if ’n I don’t find anybody else. The person who asked you to take a message to Miss Crozat—you want to tell me about them?”
January hesitated, then said, “Not just yet.”
Madame Trepagier met him on the gallery, and even at a distance of several yards, as she emerged from the blue shadows of the house, he could see the marks of sleepless tension in her pale face.
“I wanted to thank you for your note,” she said, holding out her black-mitted hand for the briefest of contacts permitted by politeness. “It was good of you.”
“Not that it did you any good,” said January bitterly.
“That had nothing to do with you. And at least I had the … the warning of what to expect.” Her lips tightened again, pushing down anger that ladylike Creole girls were taught never to express. “Women so frequently turn out like their mothers