Read Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave for Free Online

January for the first time. “'Scuse me just a moment, iff'n you would, sir,” he told Tremouille, and slouched over to January.
    He smelled like his shirt hadn't been washed in weeks-January didn't know if he owned another besides that faded yellow calico-and his long hair straggled over his shoulders, ditchwater brown where his hat usually covered it, bleached to the color of tow-linen farther down.
    With his rather cold gray eyes, his linsey-woolsey trousers tucked into high-topped boots, and his skinning-knife sheathed at his belt, Shaw looked like any of the thousands of keelboat owl-hoots who populated the taverns of the Swamp or the whorehouses of Gallatin Street, looking for liquor to drink and trouble to make. January's mother wouldn't have had him in her house.
    “What can I help you with, Maestro?”
    “A murder.”
    
     January's voice was dry. “Out in the shanties, past the Swamp. According to the neighbors, it was reported just after sun-up. The victim's friends would like to get her body up off the floor and wash the ants off it so they can bury her. Sir.” He knew he was taking advantage of Shaw's tolerance in speaking this way: Shaw was, in fact, one of the few white men in New Orleans who wouldn't hit him a few licks with a cane for being uppity, and he guessed the delay in sending someone to Hesione's shack wasn't the Kentuckian's fault. But he was very angry, at Tremouille, at police in general, at Americans, and at the white French and Spanish Creoles who were becoming more like Americans every day: who looked at free men of color now as Americans did, as so much money loose on the hoof, money that could be going into their own pockets.
    Angry that it was so.
    And angry at Olympe, for being right.
    “God bless it.” Shaw spit again, this time with no particular target. “I am sorry Maestro. You talk to DeMezieres about it....”
    The lieutenant caught the eye of the burly desk sergeant, pointed significantly to January, and signed that DeMezieres should do as January asked.
    “I should be back into town tonight,” Shaw said, and scratched under the breast of his sorry coat January could only guess as to whether his concern was fleas or prickly heat. “You still boardin' with M'am Bontemps on Ursulines? I'll be to you then.”
    As Shaw ambled from the watchroom in the center of the little troop of Creole gentlemen, the backwash of their rising voices swept over January: “. . . attempted to alienate twenty arpents of land ... quarreled with his brother... account-books ... had a favorite slave of M'sieu Bertrand's sold....”
    White men with money, thought January bitterly, returning to the cool ozone-smelling tension of the prestorm air. He would have bet, had he had any money of his own, that Shaw wouldn't return until well into the following day. Avocet Plantation, if he remembered his mother's gossip correctly, was forty miles away in Plaquemines Parish. Not in the jurisdiction of the New Orleans City Guards at all.
    But somebody wanted a policeman more expert than the sheriff of Plaquemines Parish, and that somebody was almost certainly related to somebody on the City Council to whom Tremouille owed a favor. . . .
    And Hesione LeGros could lie in her own blood and rot, for all anyone cared.
    Only when the white guests were done eating did the slaves get the leftovers, if any.
    And with justice, thought January, as with food. Lightning flickered above the trees in the direction of the lake; thunder distantly growled. In his years in Paris, this was one of the things January had never forgotten about the home he hoped he had left forever, that forerunning cool kiss of warning wind, and the smell of the lightning. His dear friend Rose, he thought, smiling, would check her barometer and make notes about the direction and strength of the wind.... He wondered if the man in the stocks breathed a prayer of thanks to the gods of the upper air.
    Hesione LeGros, washed of blood and filth, lay on her