Fever Season (24 page)

The sensitive mouth flinched. He saw old memory flit across the back of her eyes, trailing a silvery wake of pain. “That’s true,” Rose Vitrac said. “Her mother …” She made a small gesture, and ceased.

“If we start to make up those stories in our heads, about would-have and might-have and if-only-we-hadn’t, we’ll go mad,” said January softly. “You know that.”

“I know.… You’re seeing me at a bad time, M’sieu Janvier. I’m not usually this … this ticklish.”

He met the green-gray eyes again, and smiled. “Well, Mademoiselle Vitrac, since you’re the only woman of my entire acquaintance to ever be brought down by the death of those she loves, the fear of the plague, and the sheer exhaustion of a hero’s work in nursing, I’ll have to give it some thought before I forgive you.”

She gave a swift, tiny spurt of laughter, clapped behind her hand again before sheer fatigue could turn it into
tears, and her eyes sparkled quick gratitude into his.
“Dum spiro spero;
where there’s life there’s hope.”

“And as a doctor I can tell you,” he replied, “that where there’s hope, there’s often life.”

“And where there’s a will,” added Hannibal, climbing up the last few boards of the stairway with his arms full of rough-dried sheets, “there’s a relative, and I’ve found a most curious thing in the newspaper.”

“What?” January turned, grateful for the diversion. “An admission there’s an epidemic on?”

Mademoiselle Vitrac flung up her hands like a comic servant in a play. “An epidemic? Really?”

“Heaven forfend. Nothing so custard-livered and contrary to the principles upon which Our Great Nation was founded, whatever those are.” Hannibal dumped the sheets on one of the unoccupied beds, and from the rear pocket of his trousers produced a folded page of the
New Orleans Abeille
. He was in shirtsleeves, the shirt itself stained with soap and blotched with water, his long brown hair wound up in a knot on the top of his head scarcely dissimilar to Mademoiselle Vitrac’s makeshift coiffure. Like hers, his small, pale hands were blistered and burned.

Perching tailor-fashion on the end of the bed beside the sheets, he unfolded the paper.

“This is Wednesday’s,” he announced. “The eighteenth of September.
Runaway—Cora—Age about twenty-one, housemaid. Small, mulatto, well set up, speaks both French and English. Stole $250 and a necklace of pearls from Mrs. Emily Redfern, thought to be going to New Orleans. Reward.”

“Two hundred and fifty dollars?” said January, baffled. “What happened to the five thousand in cash Redfern got from Madame Lalaurie and the Bank of Louisiana? What happened to the birthmark on her shoulder?”

“Cora didn’t have a birthmark on her shoulder.” Mademoiselle Vitrac sat back down on the edge of Geneviève’s bed, and took the wasted hand in hers. “At least not one that I ever saw, and we washed each other’s hair a thousand times.”

“The two hundred and fifty would be the original sum of that hundred and eighty you found, Rose,” said Hannibal. “What did you do with that money, by the way?”

“It’s in my desk.” She looked slightly embarrassed. “I know it’s stolen money, but … I’m keeping it for now, in case things get worse before the lever season ends. There’s a hidden compartment, a false back behind the left-hand upper drawer. And I’d say it’s fairly clear why the five thousand isn’t mentioned. The advertisement must have been placed Tuesday. When did Otis Redfern come down sick, M’sieu Janvier? Tuesday? Wednesday?”

“Wednesday night.” January leaned over to take the paper from Hannibal. “When did Cora come to you?”

“Wednesday night, after the girls were asleep. It must have been ten or ten thirty.”

“This would have been placed Tuesday. Cora told me she slept out in the Swamp the night before coming down here. Obviously whoever placed this didn’t know yet that the five thousand dollars were missing.”

“Do you think she took it?” asked Hannibal.

Rose Vitrac sighed again and sat for a time with folded arms, hands on shoulders as if instinctively protecting her breasts. Not wanting to be disloyal, thought January. But she knew Cora.

At length she sighed, surrendering one bastion of the fortress she could no longer defend. “I think she would have, if she’d known it was in the house,” she admitted. “If both the Redferns were ill, and she saw her chance to
get away in the confusion. But she didn’t have it when she came to me. I know she didn’t. And if she’d taken it …” She had clearly been about to say,
She would have told me
, but the discovery of the hundred and eighty dollars, and the necklace of pearls, had proven that trust untrue.

“In any case,” she finished, after that sentence had died untouched, “I know she wouldn’t have done murder.”

“She may not have,” said January. He sorted two sheets from the pile and went over to one of the stripped beds; Hannibal went to help him. “But you’re going to have a hard time proving she didn’t. What I’m trying to figure out is why the money was in cash instead of a draft.”

“Easy,” said Hannibal. “If you were a gambling man yourself, Benjamin, you wouldn’t be asking a silly question like that. No, stay where you are, Athene, we don’t want your help.”

Rose smiled a little at the nickname and settled back on the edge of Geneviève’s bed gathering the girl’s hand again in hers. Grateful, January thought, to be still.

“It takes only an hour to come downriver from Twelve-Mile Point,” said January thoughtfully. “Cora could have slipped back into the house Wednesday evening sometime.…”

“Wouldn’t she have known the Redferns were sick, then?”

He shook his head. “According to Shaw, at least, that didn’t take place until after dinner.” He didn’t add that if Cora had slipped back into the Redfern house Wednesday evening she would have had access to the food, but he saw the searching look Mademoiselle Vitrac gave him. “Monkshood acts fast. The coroner would know what
time, exactly, they started to show signs of illness. And he’s the only one, now that the servants have all been sold off.”

He spread the clean sheet over the bed, and gently lifted the girl Victorine from her soiled, sweaty, wrinkled sheets to the clean ones, the endless, brutal labor of sick nursing.

After a time he went on, “If Cora took the five thousand dollars, it might explain why she left the hundred and eighty dollars here—a hundred and ninety, counting Madame Lalaurie’s money—and the pearls. If she had the five thousand with her, in a pocket or a reticule, she might not feel she needed what was here. I certainly would think twice about trying to bribe Madame Lalaurie’s coachman. But if the five thousand was on her when she was taken, it’ll show up somewhere. And given human nature, I suspect I know where.”

I will never in my life
, Abishag Shaw had said,
understand a gamblin’ man
.

But at least, thought January, if you did happen to want one you knew where he’d be.

Naturally, no man of color was permitted through the front doors of John Davis’s casino on the corner of Rues Bourbon and d’Orleans. From the small service courtyard in the building’s rear, January could look through the windows to the salons within. The flickering glow of gas lent a curious cast to the faces of the men grouped so intently around the roulette wheels, to the polished tabletops scattered with the garish reds and golds of the cards.

Maybe it was just the heavy buzzing of sleeplessness in his head, the too-recent memory of that stifling dormitory bedchamber he had just left, but there was something weirdly disjointed about that sight.

Money lay on the tables, too, green or orange or brown banknotes, gold American cartwheels and eagles, silver Spanish dollars. Folded papers—deeds to houses, papers for slaves, letters of credit for crops or cargoes. Men who had only their six-reale daily wage to gamble away didn’t come to Davis’s. The croupiers—fair-haired Germans, quick, small Frenchmen or Mexicans, mustachioed
Italians—scooped up cards and money impassively, deft and expert. Did they realize that newcomers to the city were the first to die in the epidemics?

Maybe the management didn’t beat up greenhorns or rob winners the minute they cleared the door, as was the procedure in the hells of the Swamp or Gallatin Street, but the net result was usually the same. As Shaw had asked, did those men around the tables think they were actually going to win money here?

Did they think the fever, or the cholera, would not get them, if they remained long enough in this town?

The rear door to the service wing stood open. A waiter in shirtsleeves was washing glasses in the tiny kitchen, his crimson coat hung on a peg on the wall behind him. Another arranged oysters on a tray. No gaslight burned in these rear purlieux; the gluey heat of the evening curdled with the smells of the tallow candles, with the tang of spicy sauce and the garbage in the gutters outside. The man in shirtsleeves saw January and grinned. “How you keepin’ yourself, Maestro?”

One of his mother’s greatest objections to January’s musical calling was that it put him on the same standing with servants.

“Getting by.” January accepted the lemonade that the man poured out for him. In the heat, after the hours spent caring for the sick girls on Rue St. Claude, the liquid was mouth-wringingly sweet. “Yourself?”

“Can’t complain. We’re stayin’ well, is all that counts.” Like January, the man was sufficiently dark to stand a fighting chance against the fever. His mother denied there was a difference, of course. But January suspected his mother would cheerfully succumb to the fever if by doing so it would prove her to be more white than her neighbors.

“Would you mind taking this in to Monsieur Davis?” January fished one of his cards from the breast pocket of his black wool coat. On the back he’d already written his request for a few minutes of the entrepreneur’s time. Though he couldn’t really afford it, he held out, along with the card, a two-reale bit as well. The waiter straightened his sleeves, resumed his coat, and returned a few minutes later to lead January up a narrow flight of service stairs to a smother-box of an office on the upper floor.

“Ben.” John Davis rose from his desk, held out his hand.

“M’sieu Davis.”

“Get Ben some champagne, would you, Placide? Unless you’d like something a little stronger?”

“Only lemonade, if that’s all right, sir,” answered January. “I’m going straight on to Charity Hospital tonight. To tell you the truth I’ve been so short of rest that if I had anything stronger you’d probably have to carry me out of here.”

Davis shook his head with a chuckle. “Don’t have enough men for that, Ben.” With a gesture he invited January to sit, then peered at him closely in the candlelight. “You don’t look well, and that’s a fact.” January reflected that the entrepreneur didn’t look any too well himself: stouter than when he’d seen him last and with far more white in the grizzle of his hair.

“Well, it can’t last—it never does.” Davis’s French carried an echo of the Caribbean islands, after all these years. “I’ll have something for you come November, when people start coming back to town. What can I do for you?”

“I’m not sure how to put this, sir.” January turned in his hands the cool glass of lemonade the waiter Placide had brought him. “I know you have the confidence of your
clients here, and I wouldn’t ask you to violate it. I’m only asking if you feel you can help me.”

He paused for a moment, as If marshaling his thoughts, though in fact he’d rehearsed his story with Hannibal several times. “A friend of my mother’s was robbed of three thousand dollars,” he said at last. “We have no idea who took it—the house was broken into while the woman was visiting her daughter. I know that most of those who gamble here are, of course, not the men who would do such a thing, sir, but if a petty criminal should suddenly find himself possessed of that sum of money—particularly unexpectedly—he might very well come here.”

“And paint the town bright red, eh?” Davis chuckled richly. “We get them coming in all the time. These—what do they call themselves?—these mercenaries, these filibusters, these Kaintucks from the levee, they often ‘hit it rich,’ as they say. Three thousand dollars.” His eyes, dark as café noir, sharpened, speculative, as he regarded January across the rim of the bourbon glass Placide had brought on the same tray with the lemonade. Under that keen gaze January was very thankful he hadn’t named five thousand as the sum. “Lot of money. Why didn’t your mother’s friend have credit on the bank?”

“She didn’t say, sir. She’d just sold her cook and her coachman that afternoon, a private sale. She was leaving town and needed the money pretty badly.”

Davis grimaced. “And lost it that same day? What a damn shame. This town just isn’t safe. Some people don’t trust banks. I don’t, myself, but I trust my fellow man even less.” He chuckled again, and gestured with his glass. “But fifteen hundred apiece—that’s damn good bargaining, even with prices as high as they are now. Who’d she sell to, do you know?”

January appeared to think hard, frowning. Then he shook his head. “I don’t … Redfield? Redman? Redfern? Maybe Otis Redfern?”

Davis’s eyes widened. “Otis Redfern?”