Free Dead and Buried by Barbara Hambly Page B

fact close to noon when he finally woke, emerging from one of the unused attic bedrooms to find the last guests from the wake helping Rose clean up downstairs – he was greeted by the information that the City Guards had arrested Viscount Foxford for murder.

SEVEN
    ‘ T hat’s ridiculous,’ said Hannibal. He looked terrible – no surprise, considering the amount of liquor he’d imbibed the previous day – but there was nothing in his person, or his hollowed dark eyes, that pointed to a resumption of drinking after January had left the Broadhorn’s attic. He had shaved, bathed, and wore a clean shirt, and if his hand shook as he raised the cheap tin coffee-cup to his lips, January guessed that this was because the fiddler had been up all night. It was two o’clock now, the suffocating glare of the morning giving way to the onset of the day’s inevitable thunderstorm.
    ‘You haven’t laid eyes on the boy since he was five.’
    Hannibal avoided his look. ‘They have nothing against him . . .’
    ‘Aside from Derryhick’s watch under his bed with blood on it?’
    ‘Which could have been put there by anyone.’
    Around them, in the dense shade of the market hall, women in bright-colored tignons stacked baskets of unsold vegetables on to handcarts, to be taken home and tossed into stews for their families. Rich voices called jests to Old Aunt Zozo at her coffee stand. A fisherman shouted with laughter at a friendly insult.
    ‘There’s something askew about this whole affair,’ Hannibal said after a long silence. ‘Diogenes Stuart could have signed papers to buy a cotton plantation before getting on the boat for Bengal. He’d let his own mother hang rather than get up out of his chair and cross the room to sign her pardon. The man’s never had the slightest interest in the family lands – at least, from everything Patrick ever said of him – or how the Foxford money was invested, so long as he had enough to spend on Oriental manuscripts, kif and nautch-boys. Yet here he is crossing three thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean, with old Droudge harping on him day and night about how much his way of life costs—’
    ‘Not to mention traveling with the man he believes murdered his son.’ January rose from the rickety little table beneath the market arcade. Everyone in New Orleans, at one time or another in the day, came to this place to get some of Aunt Zozo’s coffee; walking down here at the proper time for Hannibal was a good deal safer than another expedition to the Swamp.
    ‘Good God, Uncle Diogenes wouldn’t care about that. Not really. Patrick was good company, and that’s what the old boy wants most: someone to play cards with him and keep him amused. But I’ll tell you another thing: he wasn’t at La Sirène’s Thursday night, and neither, so far as I can tell, was Foxford.’
    January raised his eyebrows. The Siren was well known for discretion regarding customers.
    ‘After spending a good portion of last night going from gambling den to gambling den along Rue Royale, attempting to account for Uncle Diogenes’s movements, I fetched up at La Sirène’s in the small hours, far less intoxicated than I seemed to be – at least, I hope that was the impression that I gave – and claiming that the man owed me part of the money he’d won at cards at that establishment Thursday night. This immediately elicited the information that he hadn’t even been on the premises Thursday, though he had been there – and apparently made quite an impression – the night before. I apologized and fell artistically down the steps on my way out . . .’
    He absently rubbed a bruised shoulder. ‘Someone at Lafrènniére’s remembered seeing a man who looked like Patrick come in, sometime after ten. Came in, looked around, and left . . .’
    ‘That’s a good deal of trouble,’ January observed gently, ‘on behalf of a boy you knew as a child, and a man you haven’t seen for seventeen