"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 him like a wave of ice water.
And the fact that the American had gotten him out of there at all.
"You believe me."
"Well," said Shaw, "I think there's better candidates for the office. At least one who paid them bucks yesterday to rough you up, maybe. Fact remains that gal Clem-ence Drouet says you was so all-fired eager to see Miss Crozat, you just about shoved her out of the way goin' down that hall, and you was the last person to see that gal alive."
Voices raised, shouting, at a table nearby: Mayerling and his students. Though it was broad daylight they still wore fancy dress from some ball the previous night, those who had worn masks having pushed them up on their foreheads, their hair sticking out all around the sides. Two had half-risen from their places, dark-haired Creole youths with anemic mustaches. One of them was the blue-and-yellow Ivanhoe who'd driven the barouche to the duel.
Mayerling put out one big hand to barely brush the lad's parti-colored sleeve. "I beg of you, Anatole, mon fils," he said in his husky, boyish voice, "settle the question of Gaston's manners with words! Don't deprive me of a pupil. At any rate not until I get my diamond stickpin paid for."
There was laughter and the boy sat down quickly, laughing unwillingly too. "I'm glad you think I'm capable of it," he said, casting a withering glare at the haughty young man who had been the object of his rage.
"If you don't strengthen your redouble the pupil you will deprive me of is yourself. Unless Gaston goes on neglecting his footwork."
The haughty Gaston bristled, then laughed under his instructor's raised brow.
"Way those boys carry on you'd think they didn't have the cholera or the yellow fever waitin' on 'em, to help 'em to an early grave," murmured Shaw. "What kind of good's it gonna do their daddies, spendin' five thousand dollars educatin' 'em and sendin' 'em to Europe and all them places, to have 'em kill each other over the flowers on some gal's sleeve? An' pay that German boy to teach 'em how to do it."
"I notice Peralta isn't among them," said January. "Was I the last person to see him alive as well?"
Shaw's mouth twitched under a fungus of stubble. "Now, I did ask after Galen Peralta," he said. His gray eyes remained on the little cluster at the other table: Mayerling was currently demonstrating Italian defenses with a broomstraw. "His daddy tells me he's gone down the country, to their place out Bayou Chien Mort. He'll be back Tuesday next, which Captain Tremouille says is plenty of time to ask him where he went and what he did after his little spat with Miss Crozat."
"Tuesday next?" said January. "He left before Mardi Gras."
"Somethin" of the kind occurred to me." Shaw produced a dirty hank of tobacco from his coat pocket, picked a fragment of lint off it, then glanced at a couple of clerks gossiping in French at the next table over beignets and coffee and put the quid away. "But he was sweet on that gal. Crazy sweet, by all everyone says. May be he just couldn't stay in town."
January looked down at his hands, remembering how the sight of drifted leaves against a curbstone in the rain, the sound of a shutter creaking in the wind, had wrung his heart with pain that he did not think
himself capable of bearing. He had packed all Ayasha's dresses, her shoes, her jewelry in her ill-cured leather trunk, and dropped it off the bridge into the Seine, lest even selling the dresses or giving them away to the poor might cause him to encounter some woman wearing one in the market and rip loose all the careful healing of his pain.
"But Bayou Chien Mort? That's forty miles away."
Shaw said nothing. After a moment, January went on, "I came back to this city-where I can't even walk in the streets without a white man's permission to do so-because it was home. Because... because there was nowhere else for me to go. But the place out at Bayou Chien Mort is one of Peralta's lesser plantations. It's run by an overseer."
"How you know this?"
"My mother," said January. "My mother knows everything. The place Galen would call home would be Alhambra, on the lake."
"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.