Dead water

TWELVE

“Murderer!” Diana Fischer swung around from the stern rail where she stood and stabbed a finger at January. Her rich contralto voice cut through the eager chatter of the deck-hands, deck-passengers, and servants all crowded around.

“Ask him where he was last night, and what orders his master gave him! Ask him why he followed this boat with such determination! Why he returned to re-board it, if not to accomplish his master's fell design!”

I followed this boat with such determination because I didn't want to be sold by slave-stealers in Texas, thought January, but he had better sense than to say so. He could see by the faces of the male passengers surrounding Mrs. Fischer that his sassing a white lady would not help the situation.

Instead, he assumed the most shocked and innocent expression of which he was capable, fell back a pace, and looked to Mr. Tredgold as if Mrs. Fischer did not exist. “Sir, where is my master?”

“Your master is locked up!” Mrs. Fischer stepped in front of Tredgold while the harried little man was still drawing breath to reply. “Where he belongs, and you with him, you Othello! You bloody-handed villain, with a heart as black as your hide! Oh!” She clapped her hand to her forehead and staggered back into Mr. Tredgold's arms. “Oh, that my hope of salvation should be rent from me by such monsters as these!”

Mrs. Tredgold rushed to Mrs. Fischer's side, elbowed her husband out of the way, and put her arms around the afflicted lady, who had, January noticed, had time to get her corsets and dress on—a somber confection of blue and white—but whose thick waves of raven hair still lay tumbled over her shoulders like an opera heroine's in a mad-scene. Mrs. Tredgold snapped at her husband, “Have this man locked up!”

“Now, dearest, nothing's been—”

“Thu!” bellowed Mrs. Tredgold. “Eli! Take this man and—”

“Why don't you come on up to the Saloon, where your master is?” said Mr. Lundy's buzzing monotone, and a shaky hand was laid on January's arm. “There's nothing more to see down here.”

January glanced at Rose, who nodded slightly, with an expression of calm—she had been on the deck longer than he, and perceived herself in no danger. As he followed the former pilot up the steps, January glanced back at the paddle again. It was undamaged, human bone and flesh being less fibrous and tough than waterlogged tree-stumps. Beyond that it was impossible to see anything, if there was anything to see—only what was immediately obvious. That nobody could have fallen accidentally over the elbow-high railings that surrounded the entire deck.

Ned Gleet thrust past January and Lundy on the stairway to the boiler-deck, almost knocking the fragile former pilot over the rail. At the bow end of the promenade, Molloy held Theodora Skippen pressed to the wall beside the door of the Ladies' Parlor: “Sold her?” he was saying, his voice hoarse with fury. “God damn it, girl, is that all you can do with the things a man buys you? What else that I paid for have you turned into cash?”

“Darling,” Miss Skippen whispered, raising her hands supplicatingly against his broad blue-clad chest, “darling, let me explain!” She gazed up into his blotchy face, her soft blond curls cascading over her shoulders—like Mrs. Fischer, she appeared to have gotten herself mostly dressed when the alarm went up at the finding of the body. “Oh, my beloved, it was a matter of most tragic urgency. . . .”

January would have been deeply interested to hear Miss Skippen's explanation for selling Julie—which Molloy appeared to have just heard of. He would have bet any amount of money that the tale of tragic urgency she was about to relate had nothing to do with large sums owed to Levi Christmas.

Hannibal sat at one of the card-tables in the saloon, drinking opium-laced sherry out of a wineglass. Without the warm glow of the oil-lamps the Saloon had the shadowy atmosphere of a cave. Nick and Thu were laying out plates and silverware on the buffet, and the scent of coffee filled the air. Colonel Davis was just dropping sugar into a cup—he glanced up as January's huge form blotted the light from the short hallway to the outside, and nodded as Lundy escorted him in.

Tredgold and Mr. Souter followed, with a red-faced and seething Molloy bringing up the rear moments later.

“Have I the court's permission to point out how ridiculous that woman's accusation is?” inquired Hannibal quietly.

“This isn't a court, Mr. Sefton.” Colonel Davis returned to the card-table and sat down next to Hannibal. “You aren't being accused of anything.”

“My error. I was deceived by the outstretched finger and the shrieked words There stands the murderer.”

“Surely you must make allowances for the poor woman's shattered state of mind,” replied Souter, shocked. “I understand that she and Mr. Weems were affianced.”

“She has a point, though.” Molloy walked over to the bar and fished behind it for a whiskey-glass and bottle. His blue eyes sparkled still with malice and anger, but he kept his voice judicious and calm. “Your boy wouldn't have run over hill and dale to catch us up without a damn good reason to do so. Why not just turn himself over to the sheriff at Vicksburg and wait for you to come back and pick him up?”

“According to Mrs. Fischer,” said Tredgold, propping his spectacles with a nervous finger, “you, Mr. Sefton, are in the employ of business enemies of her—er—intended. She says you were sent to prevent him from reaching St. Louis and consummating the purchase of ten thousand acres of Indian lands which your employers—the Bank of Louisiana—also wish to own.”

“What?” Hannibal set his wineglass down with a clack. “Who in their right mind would hire me to murder anyone?” He glanced across at January, asking for instructions, though they both knew that revealing the facts of the bank theft at this point would simply spread the information up and down the river like the plague.

“Mrs. Fischer says,” went on Tredgold with a hesitant cough, “that you have previously made the accusation—to the sheriff at Natchez—that her intended had stolen money from the Bank of Louisiana, and that you even had documents from one of the bank officials to back up this story.”

“You keep your money in the Bank of Louisiana, don't you, Kev?” put in Souter. “Any of this make sense to you?”

Molloy's brow creased in thought, and he sipped his whiskey with the air of a man piecing together what he knows. “Well, I know the bank directors have been trying for months to close some kind of Indian land deal, but it's none of my business.” He regarded the speechless Hannibal with half-shut eyes, a malicious smile curving one corner of his mouth beneath the red mustache. “I thought I recognized Mr. Sefton when he first came on board, and it might well be from the bank, now that I think of it. I seem to recall the Director has a secretary named Sefton, anyway.”

Through his own shock January had to admire the cleverness of the story. We might as well tear up Granville's letters now, he reflected. It would take a week or more for letters to reach New Orleans, in confirmation or denial, another week for them to return. . . .

If the story of the theft hadn't broken in the meantime and collapsed the bank anyway.

If Granville hadn't fled.

“It is nevertheless a precept of American law that a man is presumed innocent until proven guilty.” Colonel Davis's clear, sharp voice cut into the silence. “And I see no proof on one side or the other. Certainly there are no grounds to deprive anyone of their liberty, especially if the vessel makes no stops between here and Mayersville. I think it equally likely that the murder could have been done by that girl who disappeared. Our best course would be to proceed to Mayersville and turn this entire affair over to the Issaquena County sheriff.”

“But without the fares from the plantations between here and Mayersville . . .” began Tredgold, who was completely ignored.

Molloy shrugged, and tossed down the rest of his whiskey. “If you want to trust an Orangeman, it's no skin off my behind. Now, with your permission, Captain . . .” He bowed ironically to Tredgold. “Colonel, I'll be after gettin' this vessel under way.”

Tredgold and Davis followed Molloy to the door, where low-voiced conversation ensued. January fetched Hannibal a cup of coffee from the big porcelain urns, and a biscuit, at which the fiddler shook his head. Men were coming quietly into the Saloon, edging past the muttered convocation in the doorway and being careful not to look at Hannibal.

“What girl was he talking about?” asked January, standing at Hannibal's side as a good servant should. “What went on last night?”

“What didn't?” The fiddler glanced up at him from dark-circled eyes. “It appears Julie escaped last night. Her shoes were found on the starboard promenade deck just before you came down. Gleet went storming up to Miss Skippen's stateroom to ascertain that, no, she wasn't there . . . Miss Skippen was sound asleep still and Gleet was damn lucky not to run into Molloy in her stateroom. Molloy had come down to get breakfast before going on watch at six, and was—according to Rose, anyway—on the stairs from the boiler-deck down to the kitchen when Jim started shouting.”

“Jim was the first one to see the body, then?”

Hannibal nodded. “He sleeps closest to the paddle, and got up before rosy-fingered Aurora even started thinking about spreading the light of dawn o'er meadow and lea. I suppose goddesses have to get their beauty-sleep sometime. It was still foggy then, and Jim thought the body might have been a clump of branches or debris; then he realized what it was and gave the alarm.”

“And when did you get down there?”

“Almost at once. Following the usual after-supper card game I wasn't sleepy, but didn't want to wake you by lighting a candle and reading—an unnecessary precaution, as it turned out, since you never stirred when Jim raised the alarm. I don't think you moved all night.”

“I did,” said January. “Or at least I think I did. . . .” It flashed across his mind that his nocturnal visitor might have been a dream, but he shook the thought away immediately. Rose might dream about waking up in the same room she'd gone to sleep in, but January knew himself better than that. “I'll tell you later.”

“Nisi Dominus custodierit civitatem, as the Psalmist says, frustra vigilat qui custodit eam. In any case I settled myself on a quiet corner of the bow-deck and played—in spite of the fog it was a relatively warm night. Later I came to bed, but I don't think I slept more than an hour or so before the alarm was raised. Do you think Weems might have encountered Julie as she was going overside, and Julie struck him to prevent him from giving the alarm?”

“She certainly could have,” said January thoughtfully. “She's a big girl—taller than Weems, and heavier. If she shoved or thrust him, he might have struck his head on a stanchion. Did the boat go over a bar at some time during the night?”

“Around eleven.” Hannibal glanced up at the clerestory windows that ranged around the top of the Saloon; the light dimmed and faded in them, warning of gathering clouds. Thunder muttered in the distance. “They barely scraped over. Does that make a difference?”

“Only that Weems must have gone overside sometime after that, or else his body would have been scraped off entirely. Where have they put the body?”

Hannibal, who had entirely too much imagination for his own good, looked slightly green at the image this conjured up, and said a little faintly, “In his stateroom.” He poured himself some more sherry. “Though whether Tredgold will let you have a look at it is . . .”

“Mr. Sefton.” Colonel Davis withdrew a morocco-leather memorandum-book from his pocket as he approached. “I understand you claim to have been playing the violin on deck after you left the Saloon?”

“At the time I hoped I wouldn't waken anyone,” sighed Hannibal. “Now I wish that I had. My man Benjamin has pointed out that Weems probably went overboard after we crossed over that bar at eleven—providing us with a terminus ad quem, anyway.”

“More than that.” The young planter consulted his notes, a nervous tic pulling sharply at the left side of his face. “According to Mr. Souter, the rudder was dragging and pulling shortly before midnight, as it does when it's picked up a branch. Mr. Molloy was just getting ready to come off watch when it happened, and cursed at it, Mr. Souter says. When Souter took over the wheel, he felt it, and whatever it was, it pulled loose in about an hour.”

January shivered. The man might well have ruined him—and hundreds of other investors—walking away without a thought to the lives he was wrecking. . . . But it was still a horrible way to die. Even in the deserts of Algeria, a thief would lose a hand, not his life.

“Mr. Weems left supper early,” Davis went on, glancing at Hannibal, whether for reaction or confirmation January could not guess. “Almost as soon as dessert was served . . .”

“And I stayed on,” pointed out Hannibal, “to entertain the company as usual after supper was over—not wishing to play the despot, I did not demand Ben accompany me after the day he'd had. If you recall, I was continuously in the Saloon from supper until well after midnight, engaged with either music or cards.”

“Yes,” agreed Davis, “yes, of course. As for where Mr. Weems was . . .”

“Begging your pardon, sir.” Thucydides turned from preparation of a pot of tea for the ladies breakfasting in the Parlor, setting the enormous japanned tray down. “I don't know where Mr. Weems was the whole of that time, sir, but I met him on the upper starboard promenade, outside the gentlemen's staterooms, just after ten o'clock. He was standing outside a stateroom, trying to unlock the door, I thought. I spoke to him, not meaning disrespect, but thinking he'd mistaken the room, for his stateroom is the first one at the bow end of the boat, and he was trying to unlock one down at the stern end. But he turned away fast and went off down the promenade to the stern without speaking.”

“You're sure it was he?”

The steward nodded gravely. “I saw his face clear in the light of the lantern he carried, though it was black foggy.”

Davis frowned. “Now, why would he have mistaken which end of the boat his stateroom was on? Unless he was intoxicated, and I have never seen him so—though of course if he was, it might explain his falling accidentally over the rail.”

“A man would have to be more intoxicated than liquor could make him,” mused January, “to go over the railings of either the upper deck or the lower . . . sir,” he remembered to add, hoping Davis wasn't a stickler for servants not speaking unless and until spoken to. And when the planter only furrowed his brow inquiringly, he went on. “Those railings are nearly elbow-high, and the upper-deck promenades are narrow—three feet, I think, from the wall to the railing. A man falling backwards against the rail might flip over it if he hit it with sufficient force, but his feet would almost certainly strike the wall and catch him.

“And the fact is, sir, though I don't know why Weems was trying to get into one of the staterooms at the stern end of the promenade, I think he tried to get into more than one.” And he recounted the attempted intrusion into Hannibal's stateroom, ending with: “That was just about at eleven, because I heard the leadsmen calling out as the boat was coming up to the bar.”

Davis glanced sharply at Thucydides—who very properly kept his eyes lowered from the white man's gaze—then at January. “And where is your master's stateroom in relation to the stern end of the promenade?”

“Third from the end,” said January. “Sir.”

“The last four are Mr. Lundy's, Mr. Sefton's, Mr. Cain's, and Mr. Molloy's, sir,” provided Thu.

“I expect the lock-faces would bear some sign of it,” said Hannibal as the steward left the Saloon with his enormous tea-tray in hand, “if the locks of those staterooms had been picked or forced, unless Mr. Weems was extremely adept at what he was doing.” With considerable deliberation he poured the rest of his sherry-and-laudanum back into the flask and worked the cork back in. “Even if my protestations of innocence are out of order—and I do bear letters from Vice-President Hubert Granville of the Bank of Louisiana on the subject of Mr. Weems's theft of quite a substantial sum of the Bank's specie—I wonder if perhaps my man here could take a look at the body? He used to work for a surgeon—I think he's probably the best-trained medical observer on board.”

“Is he, indeed?” The Colonel's pale gaze raked up and down January as if comparing his height and size with his hands—which did not have the knotted tendons and swollen joints of a field-worker's—and his air of calm self-confidence. Then, “So you do admit to being sent by the Bank of Louisiana?”

“I was, yes, sir,” replied Hannibal. “To recover the Bank's specie—which I have no proof whatsoever that Weems took. But Weems's actions—and those of the woman he's been pretending not to know for the past week and who now claims herself as his fiancée—aren't those of a man with a clear conscience.”

“No. But they may be those of a man who knows himself to be unjustly persecuted. Mr. Tredgold?” Davis turned to beckon the Silver Moon's owner. Tredgold had returned to the card-table and was pouring a shot of brandy into his coffee with the air of a man who really needs it. “Will you accompany us to view the body?”

“Er . . . please,” replied Tredgold, fumbling a key-ring from his coat-pocket and selecting from it a stateroom key. He looked pale around the mouth beneath his drooping mustache. “I leave the matter entirely in your hands.”

With a gratified air young Colonel Davis strode from the Saloon, January and Hannibal trailing at his heels.

The door to Weems's stateroom was closed, but when Davis fitted the key into the lock, January heard sharp movement inside, followed at once by Diana Fischer's unmistakable voice. “Who's there . . . ?”

Davis opened the door to reveal the woman kneeling beside the bunk. The soaked bedclothes were dragged back and the thin mattress wrenched awry. Weems's body lay on the floor in the corner, bundled awkwardly on one side with its unbuttoned clothing half pulled off it.

Mrs. Fischer scrambled to her feet, her face first pale, then flushing red. “What is the meaning of this outrage?” She strode toward Davis like an avenging harpy, and seized him by his lapels. “I come here to pay a final farewell, to sit for a time beside my poor beloved's body, to look once more into his poor face. . . .”

Her voice caught in a sob, though her eyes bore no sign of either tears or swelling and her nose was decidedly un-red. “And what do I find? Those animals, those vile murderers have been in here! Look at what they have done!” She released Davis's lapel long enough to sweep her hand at Hannibal, and at January, who was taking note of the fact that the front of her dress was splotched with dampness across the hips, where she would have levered a sodden body off the bed.

“I'm afraid you must hold us excused, m'am.” Hannibal politely removed his hat. “Since your affianced husband was brought here, my man and I were either in the presence of Colonel Davis, or that of some of the deck-passengers—”

“That yellow hussy?” She spat the words in her contempt.

Davis said nothing.

“Then there is more happening aboard this accursed vessel than meets the eye!” She pressed the back of her hand to her forehead, with the appearance of a woman about to crumple in a faint. “For when I came into this room it was as you see it, desecrated! Well might you imagine my horror, my outrage . . .”

While she trumpted her horror and outrage, January looked around the tiny stateroom. Under Weems's half-stripped body the straw matting of the floor was rumpled and twisted, as if it, too, had been taken hastily up, section by section. The dead bank manager's portmanteau and valise were open and their contents hastily jammed back or lying strewn around. Davis's eyes narrowed and his tic twitched again. “The room has been searched,” he said.

With that grasp of the obvious, thought January, you'll go far in politics. Sir.

With some difficulty they persuaded Mrs. Fischer to leave, Hannibal going to fetch Sophie and returning, not only with the young maid—her face streaked with tears of sympathy for a grief her mistress clearly was far from feeling—but with January's small surgical kit. Outside, the thunder clouds of a summer storm were gathering and the water was growing choppy; when Sophie helped Mrs. Fischer from the room, Davis lit both lamps and brought them close to the bed.

“Did Mrs. Fischer have a key to the stateroom?” asked Hannibal, going to the corpse.

“Thu would know. Sir.” January held up his hand, and instead of going at once to lift Weems back onto the bunk, he knelt, and examined the seams of the mattress, thoroughly fingered the wet pillow for anomalous lumps or shapes, and held one of the lamps low to get a close look at every crack and crevice of the wooden frame. That done—and nothing discovered—he handed the lamp back to Colonel Davis and helped Hannibal manhandle the body onto the bed.

Most of Oliver Weems's bones had been broken by the action of the rudder and the paddle in which his body had been entangled—his left arm, when January gently disentangled the shirt and coat from the torso, proved to have been almost torn off. Because of its long submersion there was very little blood left in the veins. The head and neck were board-stiff, but it was impossible to tell how many of the other joints would have been so had the body lain undisturbed.

“Which doesn't tell us anything, really,” he said, glancing back over his shoulder at Davis as he gently probed at the joints. “Rigor can set in as soon as three hours after death if the body's undisturbed and warm, but in water it would be delayed.”

There were at least four places where the skull gave sickeningly to pressure. January supposed he should be grateful that the head hadn't been torn entirely off. There were no gashes or stabs, and the hands were unmarked by defensive wounds.

As his hands turned the mud-sodden cloth of coat, shirt, trouser-band, January noticed how some of the buttons had been nearly ripped from their holes, while others were whole, as if neatly unfastened by searching fingers. But why search? he wondered. Anything in his pockets she could have easily claimed.

Trunk-key? Notes . . . to what?

Had she suspected her confederate of holding something out on her?

Weems's long-tailed coat contained a wallet and about a hundred and fifty dollars, part in Mexican silver, part in notes: Merchants' Consolidated Bank of New Orleans, Forrest's—a private bank in Baton Rouge—Bank of Natchez, and Bank of New Orleans. No Bank of Louisiana.

“So he was not robbed,” observed Davis, standing behind January's shoulder with the lamp.

In one pocket January found a pen-knife, the stateroom door-key, and a waterlogged copy of the Liberator. Another contained a little tangle of long, stiff shanks like very slender keys, each with a single metal tooth at the end. “Pick-locks,” he explained, seeing Davis's baffled face. “Burglars' tools.”

“Not surprising,” commented Hannibal, leaning in the open doorway of the stateroom and watching the first spits of rain slant down onto the river. “On my quest for Sophie just now I paused long enough to look at the doors of the other staterooms on this side. All of them were scratched around the keyholes, not just the last four. Fresh scratches, since the last time they were polished.”

Before lifting Weems onto the bunk, January and Hannibal had pulled off the bedding, laying the body instead on the pulled-up sections of the floor's straw matting. Now January opened his surgical kit, and with Davis hunkering near to watch in businesslike fascination—and Hannibal keeping his face averted as he held the lamps close—January made an incision under the curve of Weems's ribs and gently detached and drew out the dead man's right lung. There was no water to be found in the rubbery pink mass of rough-textured globules; no mud, and no sand.

“He didn't drown, then,” he said, and handed Davis his magnifying lens so that he could look for himself. “He was dead when he went in, almost certainly from one of those skull fractures.”

“But nothing to indicate how long he was in the water?”

January shook his head. “But in addition to Mr. Souter's testimony about the rudder, both the newspaper and the money from his pocket look like they've been submerged for closer to eight hours than four.”

Since Weems's jaw and neck muscles were frozen into immobility, January had to cut into the esophagus rather than probe down it with a swab. There was neither water nor sand there, though there was both mud and sand in the nostrils.

He replaced the organ in the body and bound the incision with knotted handkerchiefs taken from one of the rifled drawers, then washed his hands in the dresser ewer, and even remembered to walk out onto the promenade and dump the water overside himself rather than hand it to Hannibal to do. Though Davis was clearly a man who respected his slaves and treated them well, January wasn't sure how the Colonel would react to the news that a man he'd been initially told was a slave was in fact a free black surgeon, or how discreet the man would be with such information. With the slave revolts of the past five years still burning in memory, and with the rise of both the Liberator and the Underground Railway, more and more men in the South were coming to distrust free blacks as fomenters of rebellion—if not actively, then by the very difference between their state and that of the slaves around them.

And slavery, January had found—as any number of ancient Roman comic playwrights had found before him—was a camouflage that caused men to act and speak with less guardedness than if they thought themselves in the presence of an equal.

When he came back into the stateroom, Davis had covered Weems's body to the neck, and was folding up the wet and muddy garments. Hannibal sat crosslegged with Weems's portmanteau in his lap, its contents heaped beside him on the floor while he probed and felt around the lining for either a hidden pocket or the ripped-open remains of one.

The Colonel set down the clothes and said, “It sounds as though Mr. Weems died shortly before midnight. Or shortly after.”

“I'd say so.” January knelt by the bunk and tucked Weems's protruding hand back under the sheet, pausing as he did so to feel the joints of the fingers. On the right hand they were stiff down to the wrist. On the left, the arm that had been caught in something, the joints of all but the smallest had been broken. That smallest finger was also locked in rigor.

“Then perhaps we had best find out,” said Colonel Davis, still turning the pick-locks over in his hands, “where Mr. Weems's enemies—whoever they might have been—were at that time.”