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wouldn’t do to be seen dressed like (for example) the verminous, long-haired scarecrow currently loungingon the steps of the garçonnière, spitting tobacco and reading the
New Orleans Courier
while he waited, quite clearly, for January to come home.
    “You’re lucky my mother’s away,” January remarked, closing the gate behind him. “She’d order Bella to chase you off with a broom. Sir,” he added.
    The scarecrow spat a dark stream of expectorant onto the bricks. “I been chased off better.” He spoke in a mild, rather scratchy tenor and blinked up at January from under the wide brim of a countryman’s rough hat and a greasy curtain of hair the color of dried onion tops. “And worse,” he added, carefully folding up his newspaper and rising to a height barely half an inch less than January’s own. There was a hole in the skirts of his old-fashioned coat. “Sorta comes with workin’ for the law. Now what’s all this truck”—he gestured with the paper—“about there bein’ ‘no sign yet of any epidemic fever in the city’? These newspaper fellers live in the same town as the rest of us, or what? ‘Some few of the weak-kneed have ignominiously fled at the sound of a rumor …’ ”
    “The newspapers always say that,” said January. “The businesses in town won’t have it any other way.”
    Lieutenant Abishag Shaw of the New Orleans City Guard widened his eyes in momentary startlement at this piece of journalistic cooperativeness, then shrugged. “Well, I don’t suppose it’s any news to anybody in town.” He tucked the paper away. “I understand yore laid out, Maestro, and gotta be back at the Hospital tonight, but there’s sort of a matter I gotta take up with you.” He spat again and wiped his bristly chin. “You acquainted with a gal by name of Cora Chouteau?”
    He pronounced the French name correctly, something one wouldn’t have expected from the raspy, American flatboat-English he spoke, and January tried not to react.By the sharpening of those rain-pale eyes, he didn’t think he succeeded.
    “Chouteau?” He shook his head. “The name isn’t familiar.”
    “Little gal so high, ’bout as dark as yore ma.” Shaw had made the acquaintance of the redoubtable Widow Levesque last Mardi Gras. “Skinny. Sort of pointy chin they say. Twenty-two, twenty-three year old.”
    January manufactured furrows of thought in his brow, then shook his head again. “Why are you looking for her? A runaway?”
    “In a manner of speakin’.” Shaw gently scratched under the breast of his coat. “She did run away, yeah. But when she left she helped herself to five thousand dollars from the plantation accounts and the mistress’s pearl necklace and poisoned the master an’ the mistress both for good measure. The mistress’ll live, they say. They buried the master Friday.”

THREE

    “It isn’t true!” January thought that Cora would flee from him entirely, but in fact she only turned her back on him sharply and went a few steps, her arms folded over her breasts, hands clasping her skinny shoulders. In the dense noon shadows under the Pellicot kitchen gallery her face was unreadable, like a statue, always supposing some Greek sculptor would have expended bronze on the pointed, wary features of an urchin and a slave. A wave of trembling passed over her, an ague of dread.
    January leaned against the rail of the gallery stairs. What was it, he wondered, that she feared he would read in her face?
    “What this policeman tell you?” She flung the words back at him over her shoulder.
    “Why don’t you tell me?”
    Her breath sipped in to spit some counteraccusation, but she let it go. She rubbed one hand along her arm, as if trying to get warm.
    “Did this Otis Redfern rape you?” January asked.
    Cora sniffed. “What’s rape?” she demanded. “My … a girl I knew, a friend of mine, she was raped. She was sick after for a long time. I took care of her.…” She shook her head.