"Cheri, I was ready to strangle her with a scarf at that ball," retorted Dominique, returning to shuffling her papers. "And I hadn't just seen her walk off with the first man who'd paid me any attention in my life. There," she said, poking her finger down. "I thought I saw her go running downstairs just after Galen did. She could have come back up the service stairs."
"What is that?" January craned his head to see what was written. "I thought Shaw came and got his notes when they opened the case again."
"Silly." She crossed to him, handed them over- neat, small, perfect French handwriting on creamy gilt-edged notepaper. "I copied them. If there's going to be a nine days wonder in this town, of course I'm going to make sure I'm the one who has all the facts."
Minou had rearranged the notes in chronological order. At quarter of nine, Clemence Drouet was listed as "downstairs-court? lobby?" Also listed in the court at the time was the orange-and-green Turk, and Indian with a question mark, which could have been anyone.
Shortly thereafter, Xavier Peralta had been seen going into Froissart's office with the dueling party- Granger, Mayerling, the purple pirate, Bouille, Jenkins- but when one Doucette Labayadere (costumed as a mulberry tree-a mulberry tree?) saw them emerge, the party had consisted solely of Froissart, Granger, and Bouille. The others, presumably, had left at some earlier time.
No one had seen Galen Peralta in the downstairs lobby after the progressive waltz, but at least one other person had seen Augustus Mayerling.
He sat for a time, turning the notes over and over in his hand.
Mayerling was an outsider. A white man, true, but a man raised outside of slave-holding society. A man who would pick a surgeon on the grounds of experience rather than color.
If nothing else, it was worth asking what he knew.
"May I take these?"
"You may not!" retorted his sister indignantly. Then, relenting, "I'll make you out a copy; you can get it tomorrow."
"You're a peach." He kissed her hand, then looked out the open French doors, where the light was fading to final, rainy dusk. "Something tells me we may need an extra copy where we can get at it."
"I have the original notes, too," she said. "I mean the ones the officer made that night. Monsieur Shaw left them here when he had his fair copy and I just put them in a drawer. Will you be speaking to Monsieur Shaw?"
January set down the notes. "I don't know," he said. "If I can do it without being arrested on the spot, yes. You say you gave him my letter. Did he read it?"
She nodded.
"Did he say anything?"
"Nothing. Just put it in his pocket. But he can read," she added quickly. "I saw him read these notes when he took them."
Olympe sniffed, sounding extremely like their mother. "There's miracles every day. Will you need a place to stay, brother? This Shaw will know Mama's house-this house, too," she added, and January noted, a little cynically, that for one tiny unguarded second Dominique looked relieved. "If worse comes to worst there are other places you can stay as well, until we can get you out of town."
"Good," said January bitterly. "So I can be a fugitive, because witnesses don't want to testify anything that'll make a jury think a white killed that woman."
"Better than bein' a corpse for the same reason." She shifted the cat off her lap and fetched an oiled-silk umbrella from behind the door. "I'll find somebody who can get a letter to this Shaw, set up a meetin'." She went to the French doors, looked out at the street, where the oil lamps suspended high on the walls cast flashing coins of light in the dark water of the gutters. "Darn few on the streets now, so you should be safe enough."
January put on the jacket she'd brought him, kissed Minou, and stepped down from the French doors, helping his sister-who needed it no more than a gazelle- down to the brick banquette, and from there across the plank to the street. Only a few spits of rain flecked them now, but the darkening sky was heavily pregnant with more.
"I'll still want to find this Sally girl and speak to Clemence Drouet if I can."
"You really think that poor spaniel of a girl was clever enough to know if she killed Angelique in public that way, people'd go lookin' in all directions but at her?" Olympe shook her head. "Unless she was clever all these years-deep clever-I'd say if she killed her friend in anger over her walkin' off with Jenkins, she'd just have sat down beside the body and howled."
"Maybe," agreed January, knowing Olympe was probably right.
"I've told you what I know about it," his sister went on, "and so I'll ask you this, Ben: Be careful what you do with that knowledge. I think Clemence went off cryin' into the night, same as that boy Galen did. But Clemence is a colored gal, where Galen's white. And she did pay for that gris-gris. If the law's out lookin' for someone to hang, like you say, all you'll have to do is speak her name and she'll be a dead woman, for no more crime than hating a woman she wasn't strong enough to leave." January was silent, knowing again that Olympe spoke true and wondering wearily how he had happened to have the responsibility not
only for Madeleine
Trepagier's freedom yoked to his shoulders, but for the life of a girl he'd barely met. For some reason he remembered that Apollo was not only the god of music and of healing but of justice as well.
Monsieur Gomez had taught him, Make your diagnosis first, then decide on treatment when you know the facts.
Augustus first, he thought. Then we'll see what else we need to know.
"I didn't know you knew Minou," he remarked, as they drew near the corner of the Rue Douane.
"Not well. I've kept track of her, of course, but Thursday was the first time I ever went through her door." The dark eyebrows pulled down, troubled by some unaccustomed thoughts. "I didn't think I'd like her, to tell the truth, though she was sweet as a little girl. I was surprised."
"Why Thursday?"
"I went looking for you when I learned who paid for that gris-gris, and told off them boys to give you a poundin'." She frowned again. Her front teeth were just prominent enough to give her face a sharpness, a feral quality, like her watchful dark eyes. He wondered if she knew Lucius Lacrime. "And then, I was worried about you. The hairball I keep told me you were in trouble, or hurt." She glanced down at his bandaged hand.
January cast back in his mind and told himself that it was coincidence that his capture by Peralta, the interview in the sugar mill, and the long torture of escape had taken place on Thursday.
"I was there today because she asked me to come back, asked my help," Olympe went on. "She's with child, you know."
Something that wasn't quite anger-but was close to it-wrenched him hard. But he only said, "I didn't think Henri had enough red blood in him to make a child."
Olympia Snakebones glanced sidelong up at him, under the umbrella's shadow. "He's good to her," she said. "And he'll be good to the child. They mostly are, as long as those children do what they're told to do, be what they're told to be, and don't go askin' too many questions about why things are the way they are."
January was silent a moment, stopping at the corner of Rue Bienville, a few blocks above the tall house where Augustus Mayerling had his rooms. Then he sighed. "Nobody's got a monopoly on that, sister. Not the whites, not the blacks, not the sang mele."
Her smile under the shadow of the umbrella was bright and wry. Then she turned away, crossing a plank to the street and holding her blue skirts high out of the mud as she splashed across, to return to her home, her husband, and her daughters and sons.
Augustus Mayerling occupied two rooms on the top floor, high above a courtyard full of banana plants and plane trees and a shop that dealt in coffees and teas. The rain had eased again to thin flutters, glistening in daffodil patches beneath the streetlights. As he climbed the wooden steps from gallery to gallery, January was surrounded by the rising smells of foliage and cooking from the courtyard beneath him. The high walls of the house muffled the noises of the street, the distant hoot of the steamboat whistles, and the cries of a few final oyster vendors giving up for the day.