“Mr. Cresap, on that give me a moment.”
“But Captain Dorsey’s my only reference.”
“Except one,” Mignon chirped, very bright. “Me!” And then, to her father: “You don’t need any moment! He’s wonderful — look what he’s done already! And he’s not any carpetbag spellbinder!”
“I’ve now taken my moment.”
He held out his hand and ground my knuckles to ball bearings. “Mr. Cresap,” he said, “I’m a man of a hundred friends, right here in New Orleans — not one of whom could I trust. So it is when cotton is made semi-legal, and it begins coming between. And now you, whom I never saw till a half-hour ago, with my daughter, are my only reliance. I may say I count myself fortunate.”
It was very moving, so much so that I thought I owed him to say: “There’s just one thing: You’d better know this is partly a matter of principle, of seeing justice done, of clearing a man falsely accused — I hope I’m not indifferent to that. But it’s also a matter of pleasing your daughter.”
“That I had already guessed.”
“I don’t mind saying she takes my eye.”
“Sir, I find her an eyeful myself.”
“My intentions, Mr. Landry, are serious.”
“This does not displease me.”
She said: “Doesn’t his hair look like taffy?”
“Daughter, to me it looks like hair.”
He said it rather stiffly, winding that subject up. I said, after a moment: “There’s one other thing, too. Whoever this informer may be, if I’m to pin it on him, prove this thing he’s done, he must not have a suspicion that I’m on his trail. Is that understood?”
“It better be,” he said. “Daughter?”
“I’d like to murder him,” she answered.
“You’d wind up by murdering me.”
“It’s understood, of course.”
On the way back we had to walk, I bundling her into her cape and wrapping my oilskin around her, she holding her umbrella over me. She took me by way of Carondelet, to avoid the hullabaloo, and pretty soon pulled me into a doorway out of the wet, to talk. She whispered: “You caught on, Willie, of course? He suspicions Frank Burke.”
“Are you sleeping with him?”
“Am I—? Willie, how can you ask that?”
“I can ask it. I did ask it. Are you?”
“Of course not!”
“You’ve been running around with him, though?”
“I’ve gone out with him. Is that so terrible?”
“If for inveiglement, yes.”
“Willie, when my father blew in last fall, with a whole lot of warehouse receipts covering cotton in Alexandria that had been signed over to him by people he’d helped in this war, he had a trunkload of worthless paper, as he thought — and as those people up there, who’d been living off him so long, thought but they wanted to give him something in return, to keep their self-respect. But I knew about this invasion next month that would turn his worthless paper to gold, if only we could find someone, a Union man, to act for us in court — to be our godpappy, as it’s called. And Frank Burke had just got in from Mexico, where he’d been trading in Texas cotton. He was the biggest thing in sight, and knew the business too. So I worked things around to meet him. I got myself introduced. In the St. Charles Theatre lobby.”
“And inveigled him?”
“I invited him home to meet my father!”
“But you started going with him?”
“Willie, Frank Burke goes through the motions — he kisses my hand, he sends me flowers, he passes oily compliments. But what he wants is the money.”
“Then why would he turn on a partner?”
“My father figured that out, while you were there — it’s what he was telling me in French. Willie, there’s martial law in New Orleans, and do you know how they do in a case like this?”
“In Maryland, they’d confiscate.”
“Yes, and here, to get confiscated, first you must plead.”
“I don’t follow you, Mignon.”
“They’ll suspend the prison term, if you make no defense and if you declare all the assets you have.”
“Now I’ve got it. Go on.”
“Well, he can declare the store, which would probably keep him out of prison. They could seize it as soon as they occupy Alexandria. But my father’s biggest asset is his share of his partnership with Burke. You understand, Willie? The cotton has now been made over, all the warehouse receipts, to Burke as godpappy, and articles have been signed giving him half and my father half. If my father declares his share of course it’s gone, so of course he can’t declare. But if he doesn’t declare, he can never claim in court — he can’t sue Burke, even through an assignee. It’s all gone.”
“How much does this cotton amount to?”
“We have three hundred twenty-seven bales — worth a hundred twenty thousand dollars clear of charges.”
“Quite a pot to be playing for.”
“It’s worth sixty thousand dollars to Frank to do my father in.”
I’d got the point at last, but we were a long way from knowing what I could do about it. We both agreed, neither of us liking it much, that as he was supposed to take her, she must go to the ball with him as though nothing had happened at all. That left me and what she should tell him about me, which wasn’t too easy, as almost any story was bound to leave him suspicious. At last I said: “Now I think I have it. You tell it just as it happened, your coming to me, since you hadn’t heard from him, on account of Sandy Gregg’s stories and all that. But now that you’ve got me in, you’re getting cold feet. You don’t like it a bit that first crack out of the box I named myself military counsel. And you think it very peculiar the way I’m talking money — a hundred dollars cash now, and a hundred fifty later, to be guaranteed by someone before I lift a finger. If you lay it on right, he’ll not only not suspicion us, but he will suspicion me and feel that he must come to see me. Then he’ll be leading to me, and I’ll have something to go on.”
“All right, Willie, two hundred and fifty. What else?”
I said I wanted a list of stationery stores ready for me when I called at Lavadeau’s the next morning, places that might have sold a cheap tablet to an Irishman. “It’s the kind of thing,” I said, “that a clerk would be sure to remember. If I can find where he bought his paper, I’ll have something resembling proof. But I should have a great deal more. I wish I could line it up so I could demand a search by the Army of his home, to turn everything up — stationery, envelopes, memoranda, and so on. But I have to make sure the stuff is there. Where does he live?”
“The City Hotel, Willie.”
“Ah-ha. Hotel rooms are easily entered.”