Dead water - Barbara Hambly [8]
And, thought January, Granville was here, at ten o'clock on a Sunday evening. From what January knew of the man, he wasn't going around town informing every one of his clients that they were now as poor as the wretchedest of the derelicts on the levee.
He'd sought January for a reason.
January brought up a chair and sat—the gesture seemed to reassure the banker. Granville's massive shoulders relaxed in the expensive linen jacket, and when he spoke, his voice had lost some of its cautious hardness. “Your mother tells me you're good at finding things, and finding things out. You were the one who solved Simon Fourchet's murder the winter before last, weren't you?”
January nodded. He'd hated Simon Fourchet, the man who had once been his mother's master and his own. Only his mother's blackmail had sufficed to make him work to save the man's life and bring the murder home. “I take it that's what you're offering me three hundred dollars for?” he asked. “To find Weems?”
“To find the money,” said Granville. “I know where Weems is.”
The candles on the small table—one of the few pieces of furniture in that darkly cavernous room—began to gutter. Silently Rose took candle-scissors from the table's drawer and mended the drooping wick. The reviving glow flickered across plastered walls painted yellow, touched the keys of January's beloved Austrian piano, and warmed color from the faded upholstery of the chairs. The light creak of footfalls overhead marked where Cosette was getting ready for bed in her attic bedroom.
January wondered what she prayed, on this night before she was going back to a mother who held her in such contempt.
The oval lenses of Rose's spectacles picked up the candles' orange gleam. It had been January's idea to bank with Granville. Her silence now was like broken glass.
“And where,” January asked, “is Weems?”
“At his lodgings, recuperating from the shock of the theft,” said the banker grimly. “The day watchman went in this morning and found the night man unconscious—the man still hasn't woken up. God knows what happened to him. Sometime last night—Saturday night—all the strongboxes were opened and everything but the silver taken. When I broke the news to Weems this afternoon he collapsed; I could barely get any sense out of him. He couldn't accompany me to the night guard's lodgings, where I had a devil of a time keeping the doctor in attendance from suspecting anything. Afterwards I went for a cup of cocoa at Madame Metoyer's shop in the Place des Armes. . . .”
. . . Which belongs to your free colored mistress, January mentally added. Or one of your several ex-mistresses . . . He'd never been able to keep track of his mother's accounts of the banker's squadron of ladyfriends.
“. . . and Madame Metoyer happened to mention to me that she'd seen Weems only this morning in the steamboat office, making arrangements to leave town on the steamboat Silver Moon first thing tomorrow.”
“Only this morning,” repeated January thoughtfully. “Before he'd ‘heard' about the theft.”
“Exactly. And he told me straight out that he'd been in all morning.”
“So the trunk with the money in it—or trunks—will be on board by this time.”
“If he's smart, they will be,” agreed Granville. “And not marked with his name.”
“No.” January stared into the shadows for a time, while Rose got to her feet and slipped quietly through the gap in the sliding-doors to the dark cave of the dining-room, and the pantry that lay beyond.
Seeing in his mind the levee that lay at the foot of the Place des Armes, the bustling offices of the steamboat companies that crowded one side of it, the boxes and bales of goods that even at this slow season piled the waterfront: packets of skins from the mountains of the Mexican territories, bolts of cloth from England and New York. Corn and pumpkins from the river valley to the north, hay and fodder, squealing