Jass (Valentin St. Cyr Mysteries)

by David Fulmer

  He arrived at the song's final tinkling notes and glanced over his shoulder at one of the dancing girls, who swirled to the Victrola and began to crank the handle. The record disk went around and the ornate horn gurgled out a rendition of "You, Only You." Morton stood up, stretched, and tilted his head for Valentin to follow him. They went through a doorway and into the pantry that was under the back stairwell. The kitchen door stood open and they could see the Negro cook dozing in a straight-backed chair, her arms crossed beneath her heavy bosom, nodding her head up and down as if in silent agreement with whatever dream was swirling through her drowsy mind.

  There was a bottle of sherry on the sideboard, and Morton poured a few inches each into two glasses and handed one of them to Valentin. They sipped the sweet wine and listened to the footsteps dragging up the staircase as one of the doves led a gentleman to her room. If the girl was still sharp, they would be hearing the same shoes descending in a matter of minutes. Unless, of course, the fellow had the cash and the vitality for a longer stay.

  Though he had been at the piano since early evening, Morton still looked fresh, his light cotton suit a perfect fit, his tie knotted firmly at the neck, his face as bright as if he had just come from a decent nap. He was still a kid, of course, and could do that. On the other hand, Valentin, some thirteen years his senior, was ready to go home and end his day.

  Morton eyed the detective. "'Predate you stopping by."

  Valentin said, "What's Beansoup doing hanging around here?"

  "I don't know," Morton said. "Thinks he's a sport, I guess."

  "He told me he has a job."

  Morton chuckled softly. "He ain't got no job. He won't stay away, so Miss Burt lets him run errands." He smiled wryly. "He spends most of his time trying to sweet-talk the ladies."

  "He said you wanted to see me."

  Morton nodded slowly, his face falling into a worrisome mask. "You know Antoine Noiret?"

  Valentin searched his memory and came up with a horn player, Negro or mulatto, a rough sort, with broad features and hard muscled like a gandy dancer.

  "C.C. Ramblers?"

  "That's right." Morton raised a cagey eyebrow. "Up until Tuesday night."

  "What happened Tuesday night?"

  The piano man dropped his voice dramatically. "He was murdered. In a boardinghouse over on Philip Street. He got stabbed in the throat while he was layin' in bed. I heard it was a hell of a mess."

  Valentin nodded, though he didn't understand why Morton was sharing this information. For that he had to wait for the piano man to drink off his sherry, refill his glass, sit back, and settle a pointed gaze on him.

  Valentin all but rolled his eyes to heaven. Now he understood. Lately, whenever some no-good Rampart Street jass player died or disappeared, Morton started muttering about someone hunting down and killing Negro musicians. The murder of this Noiret fellow would be yet another chapter in the grim tale.

  While there was no doubt that members of that crowd dropped with an astonishing regularity, it was also true that a good share of them were nothing but low-down rounders who, when they weren't raising a hellacious ruckus in some saloon or dance hall, could be found drinking anything they could put down their throats, smoking hop or whiffing cocaine, throwing away their dirty silver at cards and dice, laying about with the cheapest whores, or engaging in drunken, often bloody brawls. They all packed a pistol or at least a straight razor. It was a wonder more of them didn't end up murdered in dreary rented rooms.

  To Morton, it was sinister business. He had somehow gotten it into his head that these particular murders were attacks on those Negroes who had the gall to cross over Canal Street to play in bands, not with coloreds and Italians, but with white men. He saw the work of the Klan, the Regulators, or perhaps a single malcontent, depending on his mood. Valentin, on the other hand, was fairly certain that it was nothing more than band characters meeting cruel, though well-deserved fates.

  They'd argued over it before and he really didn't want to do it again this night.

  Morton did. "I tell you, there's something goin' on," he said, his whisper so cryptic that Valentin gave out a short laugh. Morton put on a pinched look of frustration and threw up his hands. "All right, forget about it, then," he sulked. "But you're gonna wish you listened to me. Something ain't right about it."

  Valentin got to his feet, leaving his drink. "It's late," he said. "I'm going home. I'll take Beansoup with me." He walked out of the pantry.

  They ambled south on Iberville Street in the dead of night. Beansoup yammered a blue streak for the first few blocks, then began to wind down as they made their way through the Quarter. By the time they turned the corner onto Magazine Street, his shoes were dragging.

  When they got upstairs, he headed for the couch without being invited, and in the time it took Valentin to creep through the bedroom, pull an old blanket from the closet, and get back to the front room, he was fast asleep and snoring like a root hog.

  Valentin went back into the bedroom. The rear window that looked out over the narrow alley was open, allowing a breeze to waft in. Justine had pulled the baire up, even though it was too late in the year for mosquitoes. He went to the bed and lifted the netting a few inches to gaze down at her sleeping face. He could just make out the outline of her scar, right above the temple at the hairline.

  As he stood watching her, she gave a little start, her eyelids fluttered, and she let out an anxious sigh. Her arm extended a few inches and her palm came out, as if to ward off something that was assailing her. Then the hand drifted down and she was quiet again.

  He put the baire back, went to the window. Nothing was moving. From up on Gravier Street, he heard a dray horse snort and the creaking wheels of a hack. As he leaned on the sill, he thought back over his evening, arriving at Morton and his crazy notion that someone was out killing jass players, complete with a hint that Valentin use his skills of detection to ferret out the guilty party. It opened a door to a roomful of thoughts and pictures that made his brain begin a busy circle, and he whispered a silent curse at the piano man for dredging it all up again. Tired as he was, he knew he wouldn't be able to sleep for a while.

  He went into the front room, walked softly past the sofa where Beansoup sprawled and snored, and slipped out the door again, locking it behind him.

  The fittings for the gaslights on Magazine Street had been removed, but the Public Works Department had yet to begin installing the electric lamps in their place. So there was only a half-moon, hanging low over the Gulf and casting swaths of pale silver amongst the long shadows, to illuminate his path.

  He headed south and east along the narrow streets. He often walked the city in the dead of night when he had trouble sleeping, sometimes all the way to the Irish Channel or Esplanade and back. He had covered most of New Orleans one step at a time and could swear he knew every dark corner, every side street and alleyway by heart.

  On other nights, like this one, he would travel only as far as the banks of the river, where he would stand watching the ships and barges ruttle past, one after another, carrying their heavy cargoes, with spectral lights and wet metallic groans and clanks, out onto the dark waters of the Gulf.

  He climbed the long slope of the levee and looked over to the other side and the little constellation that was Algiers. As he stood there, the glittering pinpoints melted into the vision of a smoky saloon, a table scattered with dirty playing cards, and the body of a good-for-nothing rounder named Eddie McTier stretched out on the sawdust floor, blood bubbling from the angry hole in his chest, a hole that had been blown open by Valentin's own Iver Johnson revolver. That had been what, two years ago? And the picture was as clear in his mind as if it had happened yesterday.

  His thoughts wandered from the dead gambler to a dead prostitute named Annie Robie, and from her to Buddy Bolden, the jass-playing madman. Valentin knew if he didn't stop right there, the whole sad tale would play out in his mind and he would once again end up judging himself guilty of
something.

  Just then he caught a wisp of motion and looked over his shoulder, but it was just another vagrant shadow. He sometimes imagined that one night he would turn around and see Buddy standing there, the silver cornet dangling loose from his hand, wearing the wide, white, wicked grin that announced he was ready to claim the city streets for his own. It had never happened, of course, and it never would.

  Out on the river, a freighter blew one low, mournful note, an echo of Bolden's down-and-dirty jass, rising and then fading into the night.

  ***

  By the time he started back, the first muted streaks of dawn were edging over the flat horizon. The earliest birds in this corner of New Orleans were beginning a new day, and here and there piles of rags, some of whom Valentin knew by name, stood up and walked. The air smelled of the rolling river and the closer and more pungent odor of gutters filled with animal and human sewage.

  He opened and closed the door and crept into the bedroom. He could make out Justine's form through the thin silk netting. She was curled around her pillow as if it was keeping her afloat on a stormy sea. She didn't move or make a sound when he slipped in beside her. He let out a long, tired breath as he felt his bones sag into the mattress. It wasn't long before day. He could sleep now.

  THREE

  Valentin heard music from somewhere, a soft tune, sweetly sung, rising and falling like a bird trilling on a far-off branch. It was such a pleasant sound that the corners of his mouth bowed in a drowsy smile as he followed the tune, up and down and around the lilting path of its melody. Then it faded, as if the bird had flown off, and he tumbled back into sleep.

  He came fully awake an hour later to the smells of coffee beans and chicory brewing. By the patterns the sunlight had cast on the wall, reaching almost to the wainscoting, it was after ten o'clock. He had slept five hours, maybe a little more. Not a bad night for him.

  He pulled on the linen trousers that were draped over the bedside chair and sat there for a moment, looking at nothing. Then he got up and ambled out the front room to stand in the kitchen doorway, his feet bare, his thumbs hooked over his waistband, his undershirt hanging loose on his lank frame.

  Justine was at the table with her head bent over one of the books he had bought for a penny at the street market. Aside from the scar at her temple, she appeared the same sporting girl he had first met two years ago. Her milk-coffee skin, long, textured hair, and small, tight body made her look younger than her twenty-four years, as pretty a dove as had ever graced Antonia Gonzales's mansion, and Valentin knew that the madam had been sorry to see her go.

  He had taken her out of the sporting house and brought her to his rooms on Magazine Street in the middle of the string of killings of prostitutes they called "the Black Rose murders." When that nightmare ended and the case had been laid to rest, she stayed on. It had been over a year and a half.

  He went to the spindly old cast-iron stove to pour a cup of coffee out of the blue enameled pot warming there.

  "What were you singing this morning?" he asked her.

  She raised her head and gave him a puzzled look.

  "I thought I heard you singing," he said. "Earlier, I mean. I was still asleep."

  "Oh, that." She blushed and smiled slightly.

  "What was it?"

  "Just something I heard somewhere. I couldn't remember the words."

  Her smile lingered for a moment, then dwindled by slow degrees into something wan and distant. She closed the book and asked him if he was hungry.

  By the time he returned from the privy and had finished in the bathroom, she had fresh coffee brewing. He sat down and she put a plate in front of him, with a buttermilk biscuit split open and topped with two eggs, sunny-side up. She took the opposite chair and picked up some sewing.

  He broke the first yolk, musing for a moment on how normal it would appear, the two of them sitting there, him quietly enjoying his breakfast while she mended socks like a dutiful wife. It had been like that for some months, and he had just begun to wonder how long it was going to go on when he noticed that there was something amiss with her.

  At first it was nothing much: odd looks, curious slips of the tongue, sudden laughter over nothing. One day she would be the woman he knew: quiet, quick to smile, busy with her days, content with her life with him, always eager to frolic on the bed. The next day she would be acting like another person, all agitated about something that he couldn't see or name. She got impatient over small things, her dark eyes flashing annoyance. She had always been on the quiet side, but sometimes she would go for the better part of a day without saying more than a few words. He studied her more closely and saw tensions hiding beneath her placid facade. When he asked her if there was something wrong, she would first look startled, then frown absently, as if the question irritated her, and so he didn't ask anymore.

  Valentin's successes as a detective had come less from his powers of deduction than from his ability to see behind masks and divine what drove people this way or that. It seemed he had a sixth sense that allowed him to untangle the sordid webs that miscreants wove. Such was the reputation he had built; though it was true that there hadn't been anything to test it in a good while.

  Justine had him bewildered. Though she had long since re-covered from her injuries, she still complained of headaches, a leftover effect from a blow to her head. Her doctor prescribed paregoric, and Valentin noticed that as the months passed, she was employing the medication more and more. That wasn't like her, either. She had never been one to drink too much whiskey or smoke hop, like so many of the sporting girls; and yet she seemed to have acquired a yen for her prescription and filled it religiously every Saturday on her way home from Mass.

  He had paid a quiet visit to her doctor, the same young Creole who had treated her at the hospital. He described her symptoms and asked if there might be any lingering effects from her injury. The doctor had at first looked dubious, as if he thought Valentin was exaggerating, then listened with growing impatience to the description of her shifting moods and odd behaviors.

  With a brusque shrug he said, "These matters of the mind are still a mystery. Most likely, it's something that will pass in time. Let's stay with the paregoric for her pain and we'll see how she progresses." Then he excused himself and hurried off.

  Nothing had passed in time. She was still behaving in such strange—

  "How were things at the Café?" she inquired, breaking into his thoughts. She was often eager for news from the circus that was Storyville.

  "The usual," he said. "Couple fellows decided to have a knife fight right in the middle of the floor, but that was all."

  She nodded toward the front room where Beansoup was sawing logs. "Where did you collect him?"

  "He was hanging around Hilma Burt's."

  She cocked a curious eyebrow. "What were you doing there?" She knew he never went into a sporting house unless he was on business.

  "Morton wanted to see me about something."

  "About what?"

  He didn't really want to go into it, so he gave her a short version of the conversation. In the light of day, it sounded all the more foolish. "This Noiret character was a bad sort," he told her. "Someone was bound to stick him with a knife or shoot him dead sooner or later. And it happened way out on the other side of Canal Street." He shrugged. "There's nothing to it, no matter what Morton thinks."

  Her blank look told him she wasn't listening anymore. He went back to his eggs. "How did you spend your evening?" he inquired presently.

  Now her eyes cut at him before she spoke. "I stayed here," she said. "Did the wash and read some. Then I went to bed." There was no mistaking the edge in her voice. He was about to say something about it, but her face closed again as she peered myopically at a stitch.

  "You aren't going to eat?" she said after a moment, her tone softening. He picked up his knife and cut into the biscuit.

  When he finished his breakfast, he put his plate in the sink and carried his coffee cup
to the bedroom to dress. Some minutes passed and he heard her singing again, the same song, a sweet melody without words.

  When it was time for him to leave, he called to Justine. If she answered back, he didn't hear it.

  Friday was payday. In addition to the regular salary he earned working five or six nights a week at the Café, Valentin received a stipend from three of the finer sporting houses on Basin Street, the mansions of Antonia Gonzales, Countess Willie Piazza, and Lulu White. He had become something of an unpaid security man at Hilma Burt's mansion as well, due to her liaison with Tom Anderson. With the King of Storyville's most recent amours, he wondered if he would be taking on duties at Josie Arlington's, too.

  He had a ritual. After his bath and shave, he would put on a light cotton shirt and dark linen trousers, attach his suspenders, lace up his brown leather walking shoes, and head out the door. He was one of the few gentlemen of the day who went on the street without a hat.

  Downstairs at Gaspare's Tobacco Store, he'd purchase a copy of the Sun and a cigarillo that had been imported from Cuba. If the weather was good, he would cross Canal Street and spend an hour smoking and reading in Jackson Square. If it was cold or raining, he'd take his paper four doors down to Bechamin's Café and grab a table there. Afterward, he would catch a Canal Belt car north to the District.

  Justine stepped out onto the balcony in time to catch Valentin as he came out of Gaspare's and sauntered toward Common Street, his newspaper tucked under his arm. He didn't look back and so he didn't see her watching him. He always used to turn around and wave, leaving her with a small smile as he went off to begin his day. He hadn't done that in some time. She tried to recall when he had stopped.

  As she stood there, with the stream of pedestrians, the bicycles, wagons, streetcars, and the occasional motorcar busying Magazine Street, thoughts that had been lurking in the corners of her mind stirred once again.