Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave Read Online Free PDF

'em to me just there where the path splits.”
    He pointed toward the weedy track that led from the end of Perdidio Street. The ramshackle saloons and whorehouses of the Swamp, which lay farther off in that direc tion, looked even dirtier and somehow more sinister under the brute glare of the late-July sun. Their stillness was deceptive, like a corpse teeming inside with foul activity.
    “I hadn't made much on the levee-things is so slowbut I give her a couple bits for 'em. I know she didn't have nuthin', an' ol' Mulm that owns the Nantucket Saloon pays her for cleanin' up there with liquor instead of money. I had to just about twist her arm to take it.”
    “It's funny,” said the woman Titine, with a shy gaptoothed grin. “Some days she'd come here beggin' an' cryin' to me an' Gali, 'cause she needed money for rum-that's when she was too drunk even to work for Mulm. An' last month, like Suzie said, she cut Richie up bad when she was off her head. Other days she'd give you whatever she had in her pockets.”
    “And she went on into her house?” The man Gali nodded.
    “Did you see any light burning later? Any of you?” January looked around at the little group on the gallery.
     “I had the shutters up already,” said Suzie, and nodded back into the cottage.
    “Hot nights like these been,” explained Richie, reaching over to rub Suzie's knee, “Suzie shuts up the house the minute the sun goes down, 'cause of the mosquitoes. Seems like no matter what M'am Snakebones give her, lemon or camphor or juju oil, they still come after her like buzzards on a dead cow. She just so miserable these nights I want to weep for her, and they don't bite me at all.”
    “But Suzie an' me, we was finishin' up the cookin' an' puttin' up the chickens for maybe an hour before that.” Titine hoisted her tiny daughter, naked and plump as a little loaf of brown bread, onto her shoulder, and stroked her back. Baskets dangled from every rafter-end along the cottage roof, the African way of cooping chickens away from the depredations of foxes and rats. “We'd a seen if somebody came into Hessy's house 'fore then.”
    “But not after you went in and put up the shutters?”
    “No, sir.”
    “Anyone else around?”
    Suzie and Titine looked at each other for a moment, then shook their heads. “No, sir.”
    Had Hesione let her killer in? Or had he come in and waited for her in the dark? In either case, a candle had been lit, and had been let burn for fifteen or twenty minutes.... January didn't even consciously think, It had to have been last night. No tallow drippings would have remained standing upright after a day as hot as yesterday had been. The same way he didn't consciously think, I'll bet the man was American, after seeing the extra tobacco around where the chair had been.
    She hadn't dropped the berries on the floor in surprise, upon entering. Yet neither had she carried them over to the chair, or dropped stems or leaves in eating any.
    “You hear anything later in the night?”
    The two men looked at each other, self-conscious. Then tall, thin Gali gave an embarrassed chuckle. “This gonna sound stupid, an' I'm purely sorry for it, because if either of us had thought ... See, we both heard a woman scream, Titine an' me. I thought it was Richie takin' out his mad for somethin' on Suzie, like every man does now an' then. An' he thought it was me hittin' Titine. Or maybe Titine hittin' me.”
    Titine poked him hard in the ribs. “You'da screamed louder than that, an' more than once, my friend.”
    He mouthed a kiss at her. “She cried out only once?”
    All four nodded. “Damn, I wish we'd a' gone to look.” Richie's bulldog face twisted with distress. “We might a been able to stop him, or do somethin' to help her.”
    January thought of the wax-drips of the search, and the deliberate final cut across Hesione's throat. No, you'd only have bought your own death by your helpfulness.
    He said nothing.
    By noon no one had yet