Dead Water (17 page)

“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.”

THIRTEEN

Immediately upon their return to the Saloon, Davis sent for Mr. Souter from the pilot-house. “It's next to useless dealing with that arrogant boor Molloy,” remarked the Colonel, and January wondered if Molloy had seen Miss Skippen's attempts to claim the young widower's attention with dropped handkerchiefs and worshipful gazes.

By this time rain was hammering down in earnest, churning the brown water with fluttering white-edged waves. All the male cabin passengers had sought shelter in the long, gloomy room, drinking coffee or whiskey as their natures dictated, and playing cards. The sole exception was Mr. Quince. He as usual remained as a guest in the Ladies' Parlor, entertaining them—if the word could be used—with his views on Vegetarianism and the organization of the spiritual hierarchies.

Passing the open door of that small chamber, January felt a pang of sympathy for Miss Skippen, who sat in a corner by the window, gazing bleakly out at the rain, clearly bored to sobs. Mr. Quince, finding the company of his own sex unbearable and vice versa, had the option of ingratiating himself with Mrs. Tredgold and being invited to hold court among the ladies. For a woman to spend the day in the Main Saloon chatting with the men would have marked her as inerasably as if she'd sewn a scarlet A on her dress.

At least she had a dry room to sit in, thought January. Most of his pity went to Rose, sheltering among the wood-piles, and to the chained slaves and to the immigrant women huddled with their children in the doubtful cover of the bow. It did not, of course, occur to Mrs. Tredgold or anyone else to extend an invitation to them to come up and stay dry.

Nick the barkeep lit the whale-oil lamps in the Saloon, and the men pretended to talk or play cards. But the planters Roberson and Lockhart, the two slave-dealers, and the New Englander Dodd all kept glancing up from their cards or their newspapers at the corner table where Davis established his headquarters.

At least, reflected January, they'd all be in one place to be questioned.

“Molloy cursed somethin' wonderful,” asserted the junior pilot in response to Davis's question. “Went on for five minutes about unprintable expletive-deleted branches from trees that'd grown out of the Devil's toenails—although
toenails
might not have been the word he used—snaggin' up his rudder, and how if he had his way he'd turn crews of niggers loose on the banks to shave 'em to the ground five miles on either side, and him pullin' and wrestlin' with the wheel all the time, with the smoke of his cigar rollin' around his head like Satan's own breath.”

The young man chuckled, fresh-faced, long-jawed, and rather plump, with big dark eyes under long lashes, a bit like a friendly cow. “Not much trash in the river when she's low like she was last night, but now and then you'll get branches and leaves caught up on a snag. When I took over the wheel I could see what he meant, and it was a struggle, keeping to the center of the channel and easing off 'round the bends where she gets strong. . . . Even in low water she can be strong around Magna Vista Point. And it was blind foggy. Couldn't see hardly down to the nose of the boat.”

“When did the rudder snag, do you know?” asked Davis. “How soon before Molloy went off at midnight?”

“Fairly soon. I came in maybe fifteen, twenty minutes of midnight, just as we come opposite Ulee's wood-yard, and it was maybe five-ten minutes after that.”

“If it was blind foggy,” asked Davis, curious, “how do you know you were opposite Mr. Ulee's wood-yard?”

“Oh, there's an eddy backs under the point just below the yard,” replied Souter. “Even in low water you can feel her.”

“Surely there are other eddies along the shore?”

“'Course there are! But they all feel a tad different—you can tell the voices of one of your niggers from another in the dark, can't you? Well, I can feel the difference in the way she pulls, between that little eddy under Ulee's yard and, for instance, that cantankersome bull-bitch you got under Dead Man's Bend, for God's sake. Besides, where else would I be, that time of night? I'd just heard old Fergusson's dogs barking when we passed his place, we'd made the crossing over Magna Vista, so where the hell else would I be gettin' a little eddy 'cept opposite Ulee's?”

Lightning flared, a white explosion in all the high clerestories of the Saloon; thunder cracked like the sky splitting. Souter listened, then nodded approvingly. “About time we got a rise. Be a hell of a lot of trash in the stream, but the rise'll be a help.”

“Did you hear anything?” asked Davis. “You say you heard dogs barking on
the bank. . . .”

“'Bout a mile and a half the other side of the levee, actually,” corrected Souter. “Fergusson has this mastiff bitch, you see, name of Penelope. . . .”

“If you heard dogs barking a mile and a half away,” persisted Davis, “it must have been a very still night. Did you hear voices on the deck? Or the sound of argument?”

Souter frowned, then shook his head. “Oh, I heard those deck-passengers, laughin' and tellin' jokes as they played cards as I came up the stairs, and a nigger gal singin' to her pickaninny. . . . Say, it's been twenty years since I heard ‘House Carpenter.' My Grandma used to play it on her cheeks, slappin' her own face and making mouths to change the pitch. . . .”

“When did Weems leave dinner?” asked January softly, leaning down to where Hannibal sat at the other side of the table.

“Almost before the pudding was served.” The fiddler scratched a corner of his gray-flecked mustache. “And he was fidgeting throughout it like a fly in a tar-box. Mrs. Fischer was most insistent that I stay and play for them—one would almost think she'd forgotten about swearing out a warrant for my arrest in Natchez. She was overpoweringly gracious, and exerted her charms on every man at table, I think, to get them to stay on as well. I didn't think much of it at the time—well, in fact I suspected she'd had a falling-out with Weems—but now I realize she must have been trying to keep as many people as possible in the Saloon while Weems searched their staterooms.”

“That's what it sounds like.” January turned his head at the drawling whine of Ned Gleet's voice.

“I was here till about two, weren't we, Jubal?” The two slave-dealers had taken Souter's place in front of Davis's table. “Us and Byrne . . .” Gleet nodded in the direction of the gambler, who was dealing a game of whist for Roberson, Lockhart, and Dodd, none of whom had apparently learned his lesson yet about playing with the so-called “dry-goods importer,” who invariably seemed to win.

“Davis played until one,” supplied Hannibal in an undervoice. “Gleet proposed the game—he usually does—and as usual insisted that I play. As usual I dumped most of the liquor he plied me with into the spittoon. After several hours heaving at a capstan, I assure you it was not easy, but the last thing you'd need after the day you had yesterday was to wake up this morning and be told I'd lost you to Gleet at vingt-et-un.”

“Thank you,” said January dryly.

“They played vingt-et-un, all-fours, short whist and ecarte, turn and turn about—Byrne won most of the money but not so much as to be pointed at.
Si possis recte, si non, quicumque modo rem.
Gleet and Cain left together twice to check on their slaves, and were together the whole of that time. The rest of us played short whist in their absence. Roberson, Lockhart, and Davis left once apiece, to piss over the side—at least that's what they said they were going to do, and they were back quickly enough to have done no more unless they were very speedy murderers indeed. Molloy came in about twelve-thirty for a drink and a hand of whist, then left, presumably, for the perfumed delights of Miss Skippen's bower—that was just before one. Davis played another hand and left just after one, and I left just after that.”

A tremendous flash of lightning illuminated the windows; rain pounded down as if the
Silver Moon
were passing under a waterfall. In the door of the Saloon Souter rubbed his hands together and reported, “Plenty of water now!” in a pleased voice, and trotted down the hall and outside, presumably to observe the effects of the rise on every sand-bar and point within view.

“What I'm curious about,” went on Hannibal, “is what Weems was searching for in everyone's staterooms. A hundred thousand dollars in gold—not to mention Bank of Pennsylvania notes and all the rest of it—isn't something you tuck in the back of your glove drawer. Even if the trunks that contained it were stolen and hidden somewhere during the upheaval with the luggage, surely a glance through the stateroom window would have sufficed to tell him whether they were in the room or not. None of those bunks is big enough to conceal a hatbox under, let alone a trunk.”

“Which means the specie was taken out of the trunk,” said January. “Was there time for that?”

“Oh, I think so.” The fiddler's eyes narrowed as he mentally reviewed the events of the previous afternoon. “But probably only just. When the boat hung up on Horsehead Bar, there was about an hour of driving and heaving as Molloy tried to bull through, when anyone on board could see that we were going to have to unload and spar over. Afterwards Molloy turned the pilot-house over to poor Souter, and directed the deck-hands to start unloading. But he had plenty of time to come and go from the hold, pretty much unobserved in the confusion. I'm not sure how much gold he could have emptied from trunks, but it could have been transferred to sacks—God knows there are plenty of pillow-cases in the linen-room and flour-sacks in the galley—and stowed to be moved later, or simply transferred to a crate or box with his own labels on it. Molloy's certainly the only one who could have done it unobserved.”

January grunted thoughtfully. “I wonder if Weems knew that.”

At Davis's table, Kyle Outliver—even more verminous and bedraggled-looking than when he'd tried to lift Sophie's skirts a week earlier—was explaining that most of his fellow deck-passengers had been awake playing cards. . . . No, they didn't know what time they'd quit, but it was before the boat had gone over the bar. No, all the boys wasn't together playing all that time. Some of 'em crawled off to sleep behind the crates, or to have a smoke or take a piss or whatever—it wasn't his look-out what they did. Who'd played? Him and Sam Pawk and Cupid and Billy Earthquake most of the time. . . . No, they hadn't heard nuthin', 'cept Johnny Funk's snorin'. . . .

“An' you fartin' ever' time Cupid took money off you,” retorted Johnny Funk, a bear-like man with one ear bitten off.

“Either Weems didn't figure it out,” said Hannibal quietly, “or he had some information that we don't.”

Leaving Hannibal to follow the proceedings as Davis systematically questioned the deck-passengers—who seemed to have mostly gotten drunk and fallen asleep before midnight, as usual—January descended to the lower promenade to look for Rose. He found the niches among the sheltered wood-piles empty—niches considerably enlarged now because of the amount of wood burned at Vicksburg and Horsehead Bar—for all the inhabitants of the stern were bunched along the starboard rail among the male slaves, watching while Mr. Molloy rowed the skiff away toward what looked like a murky, bubbling tributary stream that broke the wall of trees.

“He ain't really gonna try and take this boat through there, is he, 'Rodus?” asked a boy in Gleet's coffle of the tall, slim Fulani who stood at his side.

“'S'a matter, Lam?” joked an older man to whom the boy was chained. “You ain't anxious to get to Memphis?”

“We could probably do it.” 'Rodus narrowed his eyes to watch the skiff maneuver through the sluicing curtains of rain. “See what he got there, that rope with the markers on it? That's a lead-line, to measure how deep the water is back there.”

“That's the thing he didn't use yesterday tryin' to run over that bar,” added Mr. Roberson's white-haired valet Winslow, and everybody laughed.

“What's goin' on up there, Michie Ben?” asked 'Rodus as January moved along the rail to search for Rose among the spectators. “They figure out anythin' yet about that poor buckra that went overside?”

And January heard in the young man's voice the false note of assumed casualness. Well hidden, of course—
blankittes
were always complaining that slaves were habitual liars, not seeming to make the connection between the necessity to tell whites what they wanted to hear and the fact that whites could flog or sell the speaker if they didn't like what they heard. As a child, January, with his open and innocent face, had been the champion liar on Bellefleur—something that hadn't saved him when old Michie Simon went on a tear with the rawhide.

Now he scanned the faces of the men chained along the wall, and he saw in all of them a wary and desperate interest.

He said quite quietly, “Colonel Davis askin' questions. I think he means to question everybody on board, probably you included.”

“Us?” The boy Lam looked scared, and put a protective arm around the younger brother chained at his side. “Why us?”

“What would a dressed-up buckra like Weems be doin' down here that time of night?” asked 'Rodus in a tone of such complete calm naturalness that January would have bet money they'd seen something, knew something.