Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave Read Online Free PDF Page B

come from the City Guards. The air cooled a little, as it does afternoon summers when the black clouds thicken for the daily thunderstorm, and the roar of the cicadas in the trees alters its note. January took the path that skirted the worst of the Swamp's taverns and boarding-houses, circled behind the new cemetery, and followed the unpaved track that became Rue St. Louis on the other side of Rue Rampart. The streets in the old French town were hushed, reeking heat lying like a dead thing between the pastel stucco walls of shuttered-up town houses, cottages, shops. As usual, the companies, hired to clean the municipal gutters were behind on their work, and the stench of sewage and offal hung over everything, as if the town were sunk to the roof-line in a cesspool. Bloated with gases, a dog lay dead in the middle of Rue Rampart-swarms of gnats, mosquitoes, and fat black greasy flies hung over the brown standing water in gutters and streets, slashed through by the gunmetal wings of dragonflies.
    Even the Place d'Armes before the Cathedral, usually alive with the traffic of the levee and the markets which bounded it, seemed to sleep. The few steamboats at the wharves lay lifeless, like stranded whales. The only animation was that of a man in the stocks before the Cabildo: he wept with frustration and pain as he tried to jerk his head away from a persistent horsefly as big as January's thumb.
    The blue shadows of the prison's stone arcade held heat, not coolness, as January crossed through them to the open double doors. Voices echoed in the flagstoned watch room inside, where the City Guards had their headquarters. A knot of well-dressed gentlemen clustered around the desk of the man January had come to see. All of them babbled and gesticulated in fury.
    White men January recognized one of them as Arnaud Tremouille, Captain of the City Guards, and resigned himself to wait.
    “Bertrand Avocet claims he was out searching for a runaway slave at the time of the murder,” Tremouille was saying, presumably to Lieutenant Abishag Shaw, whom January could not see beyond the crowd of backs.
    “He lies, then!” interrupted another man, tall and stout and sweating profusely in a blue coat and a high scarlet neck-cloth. “His shirt was found in the woods, entirely soaked with blood!”
    “Do you say my client is a liar, M'sieu Diacre?” demanded another, whose old-fashioned pigtail was so tightly braided as to curl up over the back of his musty black coat. “I say that your client had every reason to wish his brother dead and himself in charge of the plantation, M'sieu Rabot.”
    A squirt of tobacco was spit from behind the desk, missing the sandbox a few feet away: the stone floor all around the box was squiggled with syrup-brown gouts and the whole watchroom smelled like a cuspidor. “Anybody ask where Guifford Avocet's wife was 'long about the time Guifford was kilt?”
    The question, framed in Lieutenant Shaw's appalling French, acted upon the well-dressed French Creoles like a fox thrown into a henroost. Tremouille, the two lawyers, and the State Prosecutor Cire all burst into speech at once, while Shaw-visible now that everyone had drawn fastidiously aside from the path of further expectorations-calmly drew a notebook, a carpenter's lead-pencil, a measuring-tape, a small silver-backed mirror, and a pair of long-nosed tweezers from various drawers of his desk and secreted them in the pockets of his out-at-elbows coat. The lawyers and the Captain of the Guards, January noted, all shouted at one another, but none seemed willing to lower himself to shout at a greasy-haired American who looked like he'd come down from Kentucky on a flatboat. Shaw started to rise, bethought himself of something else, dug through another drawer, and pulled out a fresh twist of tobacco.
    Then he stood, six feet two inches of stringy scarecrow homeliness, and said, “Maybe we better go have a look at the place? Maestro,” he added, surprised, seeing