Damn, thought January. The charge that she could have had anything to do with Angelique Crozat's death was ridiculous, but Madame Trepagier had put herself in serious trouble by remaining. Why had she come upstairs after he'd told her to leave? Even without a ticket, a costumed woman could have slipped past the ushers, who were only there to keep out drunks and chance strangers from the gambling rooms. But it was, after all, a Blue Ribbon Ball.
Had she had second thoughts? Something else she had to tell him and was later prevented?
Had she decided to seek out Angelique herself?
In either case, she had lied to him Friday morning when she said she had gone directly back to Les Saules.
I was home by eight-thirty, she had said.
Why the lie?
He scanned the rest of the list.
There were only three other women unaccounted for, "seen" but not identified: "lavender domino," "green-striped odalisque," and "gypsy."
"Creole girls spying on their husbands," said Dominique offhandedly, when January asked.
"Silly." She returned his look of surprise with the warm flicker of her smile. "You don't think Creole ladies sometimes try to sneak in and see what their menfolk are up to? We can spot them a mile away. I understand why they want to do that," she added more soberly. "And I... I feel sorry for them, even the ones who complain to the police if you go to a restaurant or buy dresses that are too fine. But what good will it do, to see your husband with a woman you already know in your heart exists? It only hurts more. But most of them don't think about that till later."
January remembered himself, standing on the banquette opposite Catherine Clisson's house all those hot nights of his youth and shook his head. It did only hurt more. And he knew that it was a rare man, white or black or colored, who would truly give up a mistress because of the pleading or nagging of a wife. They simply hid them deeper or put them aside for a while only to go back. He turned the lists over in his fingers, the scribbled and amended and much-crossed chronology of the evening, arranged, he was interested to note, like a dance card, by what songs were being played. Minou's dance card from the evening was included in the bundle-with every dance taken, naturally-and even Shaw's original questions were linked to what music was being played.
Dominique must have suggested it to him. He spelled waltz, "walce."
No one had seen Galen Peralta after he'd stormed downstairs following his initial spat with Angelique.
"Was there ever anything between Augustus Mayerling and Angelique?"
Dominique trilled with laughter. "Mayerling? Good heavens, no! He hated Angelique almost from the day they met."
The woman who marries him will have cause to thank the one who wielded that scarf.
"Because of the way she treated young Peralta?"
"If Trepagier and the Peralta boy were bodi his students," pointed out Hannibal, "it's my guess that's how Angelique met our boy Galen to begin with. Augustus would have had a front-row seat on the whole seduction from the first dropped handkerchief, meanwhile watching her take Arnaud for every cent he had. His... antipathy... could have been as much disgust as hatred. He's fastidious about diings like that."
Hardly a reason for murder, thought January, no matter how fond he was of Galen Peralta. But now that he thought of it, Augustus Mayerling had been absent from the ballroom for far longer than would be accounted for by the conference over the duel.
Four dances-slightly under an hour-had intervened between Bouille's challenge and Mayerling's reappearance to ask January to preside as physician over the duel. During those dances-the most popular of the evening-the lobby had been almost deserted. For the same reason, none of Dominique's friends had been willing to absent themselves from the ballroom no matter what portions of their tableau
costumes remained unfinished. Galen, storming out of the building, had been smitten with I'esprit d'escalier and had gone back to renew his quarrel with Angelique, ascending by the service stair. If Clem-ence had gone after him down the main stair, she would have missed him. He had presumably departed the same way, and the murderer could have entered quietly from the lobby.
Always assuming, of course, that Galen was not the murderer himself.
"Those names on the last page?" Dominique reached over his shoulder to tap the papers. "Those are the people- Thank you, Therese." She smiled at the maid who came in to refill the coffee cups. "Those are the people we know were there that weren't on Lt. Shaw's list, so they must have left either before the murder or just after it, or sneaked out before Shaw could speak to them. Catherine Clisson was one of the ones who sneaked out-or Octave Motet did and insisted she go with him because if anyone recognized her, they'd know he'd been there, too. He's the president of the Banque de Louisiane; he doesn't dare let his name be connected with anything like this. Do you think Galen Peralta was the one who did it? Strangled Angelique, I mean?"
January moved the papers again, studied the lists- who saw whom during the jig and reel, during the Rossini waltz, during the progressive waltz, during the Lancers. Josette Noyelle-Aphrodite in the Greek tableau- had gone into the parlor during the progressive waltz and hadn't seen Angelique then. After the Rossini waltz Dominique had been searching for Angelique, in and out of that room, frequently encountering other friends there as they put up each other's hair, repaired trodden hems, changed or finished costumes for the tableaux.
Only one person-Dominique herself-noted Clemence Drouet's presence at the ball at all. Clemence was that kind of woman. She'd arrived at Angelique's house the following morning in the expectation of seeing her alive, so she must in fact have left the building between her brief encounter with January, just before the quarrel, and the discovery of Angelique's corpse.
And of course, no one had bothered to notify her.
The American Tom Jenkins had clearly been searching as well, if he'd left a laurel leaf in the parlor, but unless he was far cleverer than he looked, he wouldn't have kept searching if he knew she was lying dead at the bottom of an armoire.
"I don't know," he said slowly. "On the face of it, I'd say yes... Except for his age. He's young, and he was crazy possessed by her, even before Trepagier died, I've heard. I'm not sure he'd have had the wits to hide the body and strip her jewelry to make it look like robbery. If he'd killed her, I think he'd have been found by the body."
"You'd be surprised what you do when you have to," pointed out Hannibal, warming his small, rather delicate-looking hands over the coffee cup's aromatic steam. The light had faded from the windows, and Therese came in with a taper to light the branches of candles on sideboard, table, and walls. The gold gleam lent color to the fiddler's bloodless features, banishing the dissipated pallor and camouflaging the frayed cuffs and threadbare patches of the black evening coat that hung so slack over his thin shoulders.
"For all he follows Augustus around like a puppy, he wasn't at the duel this morning, and I'm told he didn't attend the Bringiers' ball last night. Not something his father would have let him miss."
"No," said January thoughtfully, leafing through the papers again. "No."
Columbines, Pierrots, Chinese Emperors, Ivanhoes had filled the upstairs lobby and downstairs entry hall; Uncases and Natty Bumpoes (Bumf if, wondered January, recollecting his Latin lessons); Sultans and Greek gods. Men in evening dress and dominoes. Women in unidentifiable garments described by
Shaw's laboring clerk as "lace with high collar, violet sash, pearls on sleeves" (except Livia would have pointed out those were not genuine pearls), to which Dominique's more regular hand had appended "lilac princess-Cresside Morisset- wDenis Saint-Roche (motherfiancee in Theatre)."
Out of curiosity, January asked, "Is Peralta Fils engaged to anyone?" The woman who marries him...