Creole, a woman, a widow... connected to Angelique... present in the building...
With his dirty, dead-leaf hair and lantern-jawed face, Abishag Shaw gave the impression of an upriver hayseed recendy escaped from a plow tail, but in those sleepy gray eyes January could glimpse a woodsman's cold intelligence. This man was an American and held power, for all his ungrammatical filthiness. As Froissart had said, there was a world of matters the Americans did not understand, and chief among them the worlds of difference that separated colored society from the African blacks.
"She refused to meet with my friend. She said she'd received notes before from... my friend, that she had nothing to say to... them." He changed the last word quickly from her, but had the strong suspicion that Shaw guessed anyway. "She said her father was an important man, and that my friend had best not try any... little tricks."
"What kind o' little tricks?" asked Shaw mildly. "You mean like brick dust on the back step? Or accusin' her of being uppity an' gettin' her thrashed at the jail-house?"
"One or the other," said January, wondering if he'd let the answer go at that.
Shaw nodded again. "She say anythin' to you? About you?"
Genuinely startled, January said, "No. Not that I remember."
"Insult you? Make you mad? Phlosine'..." He checked a note. "Gal named Phlosine Seurat says she heard the door slam."
"It was Galen Peralta who slammed the door," said January. "He came in-"
"Galen Peralta? Xavier Peralta's boy? One she had the tiff with earlier?" Shaw sat up and took his boots off the desk, and spat in the general direction of the office sandbox.
January regarded him with reciprocal surprise. "Didn't anyone else tell you?"
The policeman shook his head. "When was this? Last anybody saw of the boy was when he tore that fairy wing o' hers in the lobby, an' she went flouncin' off into that little parlor in a snit. Last anybody saw o' her, for that matter. This Seurat gal-an' the two or three others who was up in the upstairs lobby-say the boy stormed off down the stairs, and somebody says they seen him in the court, but they don't remember if that was before or after or when."
"There's a way in from the court to the passage outside this office," said January. "He could have changed his mind, had what they call 1'esprit d'escalier..."
"Bad case of the I-shoulda-said," agreed Shaw mildly, sitting back again. Outside, men's voices rose in furious altercation; there was the monumental thud of a body hitting the wall that made the building shake.
"I dunno how many sweethearts come to grief from one or the other of 'em comin' up with just the right coup de grace halfway down the front walk. Go on."
"If he came up the back stairs nobody in the lobby downstairs, or upstairs, would have seen him. Because he did come in, as I think she knew he would. She thought I was him, when I first came into the room, before she turned around, and she had her lines all ready for him. The boy had a temper. And there isn't a seventeen-year-old in the world with the sense to just walk away."
"God knows I didn't," said Shaw, getting up and stretching his back. "Near got me killed half a dozen times, when I came up with just the right thing to say to my pa when he was likkered. And you left then?"
January nodded. "Yes, sir. There was no reason for me to stay, and the boy would have ordered me out in any case. My sister and Marie-Anne Pellicot were hunting for Mademoiselle Crozat for the rest of the night. Galen's father, too. I thought at the time the two of them went off somewhere to have their fight in more privacy, but it may be that he left fairly soon-during the jig and reel we started up to distract everyone from Bouille and Granger-and that she was still in the room fixing her wing when the murderer came on her."
The colorless eyebrows quirked. "Now, where you get that from?"
"Here." January got to his feet, Shaw following in his wake. They climbed the dark of the back stairs, turned right at the top, to where a sleepy constable still guarded the parlor door. A cup and a half-eaten pastry lay on the floor beside his chair. He got to his feet and saluted.
"We got everything up off that rug, Mr. Shaw. The mother took the girl away, like