Chapter Fifteen

I’d told Joanne that I’d call Alex, but that didn’t seem possible. I was back at my cold office, bundled in two sweaters and a scarf. I’d picked up the phone at least ten times to call Cordelia, even managed to punch in several numbers a few times. But I couldn’t get beyond that.

She hadn’t called me. Of course, that could just be the lousy cell reception.

Or maybe she didn’t want me in her life. Or even if she had been considering getting back together, seeing me drinking had decided her against it. She might have decided that the Wild West dating might be a better option. Or had another girlfriend.

I put the phone down and picked up the Scotch I’d poured myself. One more night of falling apart; I’d deal with it in the morning. Or the afternoon, whenever I rolled out of bed.

Whatever. I downed a good finger’s worth of the amber liquid.

But even the booze wasn’t blurring my rough edges. I got up and paced around my apartment.

How could I have been so stupid?

Why didn’t I just walk into her arms and tell her I needed her?

Because she didn’t seem to need me anymore.

I took another drink.

I needed to think about something else. Anything. This hurt too much.

Then I remembered the papers I’d gotten from the house. They were where I’d left them, shoved under the seat of my car.

Taking only long enough to throw a jacket over my sweaters, I rushed downstairs to retrieve them.

The night air was cold, the wet chill from a city carved and surrounded by water. I quickly gathered the papers from under my seat and headed back up the stairs. My apartment was barely warmer, so I just left my jacket on as I sat behind my new desk. I had tried to clean the old one; it had so many memories, but the smell remained, perhaps only in my memory, but even that was too strong. In a fit of anger and despair, I’d shoved it down the stairs, letting it drop to the landing, watching it crack as it hit. Another heave, another few steps, another break. By the time it crashed at the bottom, it was more a pile of wood than a desk. A stinking pile of wood.

I took another sip of the Scotch, then began to sort through the papers.

At first it seemed a blur of badly copied microfilm, a jumble of ancient papers, marriage licenses, property deeds. Why would anyone kill for something that happened over a hundred years ago, I wondered as I made out the writing on a death certificate from 1905. I squinted at the smudged letters. Died of yellow fever.

I turned on my computer and did a quick Internet search. The last yellow-fever epidemic in America was in 1905 in New Orleans. Only a few years earlier they had finally discovered that mosquitoes carried the disease and that controlling mosquitoes could prevent the disease. But then, as now, myth and disbelief persisted, long enough to allow another epidemic five years later.

Someone had painstakingly combed through archives to amass these disparate documents. Why? What was so important in them? I grabbed a legal pad and started making a timeline, with the earliest date and the event on the date first.

As I slowly and laboriously constructed the timeline, a story started to emerge.

Josiah Benoit was born in 1872, as attested to by a faded copy of a page from a family Bible with his birth listed. No parents were named, but the space was cramped.

He was married in 1890 to Maria-Josephina Despaux. The marriage license had an X for his signature, although she wrote her name in a shaky scrawl. Clipped to this was census data from 1890. He was listed as white; she was black. At that time it was illegal for people of different races to marry, so someone was passing. Either Maria-Josephina was claiming to be white or Josiah that he was not.

Theirs was a fertile marriage with children born in 1890—perhaps the reason for the marriage—in 1891, 1892, 1894, and 1895.

There was another marriage license for Josiah Benoit. In 1902 he married Mary Gallier, whose census data listed her as white. Perhaps Josiah had crossed the color line.

It was Maria-Josephina who died of yellow fever in 1905—three years after Josiah had married again.

In 1898, Josiah had acquired property on Perdido Street. He added an adjacent lot in 1899 and another in 1900. The third one clearly stated it was payment for a gambling debt and, given that no sums were mentioned for the first two, it seemed possible that Josiah was a lucky man. Or a clever one with fast hands.

Perdido is now in what’s known as the CBD or Central Business District, a swath of tall, modern buildings where most of the commerce, oil, gas—and city hall—politics is as commercial as anything else in New Orleans—are located. But a hundred years ago? I had some vague memory of it being named for Perdition for a reason, that it was a rough area of bars and gambling dens frequented by the human flotsam and jetsam of the river trade.

This time the Internet was less helpful, with only brief histories of the CBD. Other than brief mentions of river rats—the human kind—it gave little information about what the area might have been like over a hundred years ago.

I sat up and rubbed my eyes. The ice in my Scotch had melted. I had been at this for a while. It was too chilly for ice to quickly melt.

I still didn’t have the answer to my main question—what was in these papers that might get someone killed after a century had passed?

Love or money. Those were the usual reasons. If Josiah Benoit had remarried without a divorce—hard to get back then—he was a bigamist and his second marriage might not be valid.

What happened to the property on Perdido Street?

I looked again at the deeds. The lots weren’t adjacent, but fairly close. Perhaps the owner had gambled away bits and pieces of the land—a common occurrence here. Josiah picked up the ones he could, maybe someone else won some other parts of it.

Josiah had obtained the property while married to Maria-Josephina. That didn’t mean she had any right to them—somehow I doubted that property laws back then recognized women as equal. But they had children, and Louisiana makes it hard to disinherit them.

I got up and stretched, then rummaged around in my desk drawer to find a magnifying glass. It was hard enough to read these copies and I could use a little extra help. Besides, isn’t a magnifying glass one of the prime tools of a private eye?

Josiah’s second wife, Mary Gallier, also had children. From these records, three of them.

I again rubbed my eyes and this time took a sip of the watered-down Scotch. Then I glanced at my watch. I had been at this for over three hours and had made it through about half of the pile of paper.

I looked at my silent phone. Cordelia hadn’t called.

Maybe she had. Maybe she didn’t get through. Or maybe she did what I did, started to dial over and over again, then got scared. It was too late to call now. Even if I could find the courage and the words.

I looked back at the pile of papers and started reading the next one.

Another hour of scanning the papers told me that Mary Gallier’s children had inherited the property. Her grandchildren had sold the land in 1955. For a lot of money.

Maria-Josephina’s children had been orphaned with her death. Two were sent to a home for wayward children. One had died in the First World War. One died at the age of five. The others were lost to history.

Using two pieces of paper, I made family trees for both lines of descendants. Whoever did the research had been thorough. She or he had searched out birth certificates, marriage licenses, death notices, and even census information.

Maria-Josephina had six children, including a pair of twins, before she died. She was only thirty-one when the fever took her. The two children sent to the orphanage were both girls. One, Eunice, married, and it seemed that the other, Eleanor, did not. Her death certificate gave her name as Eleanor Benoit, her birth name. The other woman matched her mother in fertility, giving birth to four children in as many years. She had married Alphonse Johnson, who died in the flu epidemic of 1918, leaving her to raise the children.

Mary Gallier’s children had a better life. Josiah Benoit died in 1932, she made it to 1949. Her three children, two girls and one boy, were born in 1903, 1905, and 1908. None of them were lost in time. All had marriage licenses, and their death certificates indicated they made it to a respectable old age.

I started skipping through the papers, beginning to feel like I was creating a list of “begats.”

Maria-Josephina’s line led to Alma Groome, the woman left in the abandoned house.

Mary Gallier’s great-great-granddaughter was Brooke Overhill. Oh, yes, they had done well from Josiah Benoit’s gambling. The Overhills weren’t people you read much about in the paper; they were too upper-class for that. Occasional appearances at charity events. I went to my old friend the Internet to see if my memory was correct. Yep, a few mentions of a charity work and a fairly long obituary for the patriarch of the family, Jameson Overhill, who had married Jessica Stern, Mary Gallier’s descendant. Brooke, their granddaughter, was the one who broke the family mold. She was a singer, on the upswing of a promising career. She had started out as part of a folkie duet, with a high-school friend named Lynn, and they had performed as Brooke-Lynn. I’d even seen them a few times as they did their act in clubs around here—including some of the gay bars. Although it had been the boy bars, so no indication that they were more than friends who were cool about gays, or at least the men. The Lynn part had disappeared and Brooke had reemerged as a singer on the cusp of jazz and pop. She recorded as Brooke O. Her first album had been nominated for a Grammy. Her second one had just come out.

I glanced at my watch. It was past two in the morning and exhaustion hit me. The day had been too much, one that in many ways I wished I could take back.

As I was getting ready for bed, I couldn’t stop the questions running through my head. I wasn’t a lawyer, and probably most lawyers couldn’t answer whether Alma Groome and her family had any claim to the proceeds for the sale of the Perdido properties. Just because a record of a divorce wasn’t in this stack of paper didn’t mean one hadn’t taken place. Would the laws of the time have any validity now? The Overhills were pinkish, blond people. Most likely their forebears were also on the white side of the color line. Josiah Benoit had looked like a white man to marry Mary Gallier. That meant that under the repugnant laws of the time, either his marriage to Maria-Josephina or Mary wasn’t legal.

I got into bed. It might be enough for a lawsuit to get some compensation, but given how well-heeled—and lawyered up—the Overhills were, could that in any way justify murder? Do rich people really kill over a few hundred thousand?

I turned out the light. I’d never know, since I’d never be that rich.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14