by David Fulmer
The stranger stepped around the body and bent down to spit in the dead face, then strode away, kicking at the guitar case. It flipped over and broke open and the instrument tumbled out. The edges of the cobbles gouged the polished mahogany and snapped the high strings. The stranger stalked out of the alley and hurried down Marais Street, moving through the shadows on quick legs, head bent and shoulders hunched, another weary wisp of the night, creaking away home.
SIX
Jelly Roll Morton had not nearly gotten his sleep out when someone came pounding on his St. Charles Avenue door. The dove lying stretched out next to him just let out a soft groan and burrowed under the pillow as he jerked upright, his brain going off on a jagged jaunt, picturing the police coming to arrest him for some unnamed evil deed.
The pounding continued and he heard a voice that didn't belong to any copper. It was higher, almost girlish, thin with excitement. The dove who has holding the pillow over her head muttered in annoyance and kicked a brown foot. The one who was splayed across the foot of the bed didn't make a sound, dead to the world. Morton got up and went out of the room in a woozy stagger. He threw the door wide to find Beansoup, all pink faced, sweating and gasping for air. Behind him was his shadow, the Negro boy named Louis, huffing like a little black steam engine. "What do you want?" the piano man snapped.
The kid whispered a few words. Morton's eyes went wide. He cried, "Jesus and Mary!" and told them to run to Mr. St. Cyr's.
Valentin was standing on the tiny balcony, watching the quiet Sunday morning street. He had only slept a few restless hours, and when he woke up Justine was gone, probably to early Mass. Now he saw her, approaching from the corner of Common Street. She was walking slowly, her hands folded before her as if she was still at prayer. He went back inside.
Their eyes met when she came through the door and she hesitated, wondering if he would say anything. She amused herself for a vacant moment by imagining him raging like a husband who had caught his wife dallying. She tried to picture him in a fit like that, stomping up and down the floorboards, his face red and sweating and his voice all hoarse from shouting. She couldn't do it, though, because Valentin never went in for such dramatics. She tried to recall the times that he'd allowed her a peek behind his mask. Surely she could count them on a hand. It didn't matter; she couldn't think of any now.
And he wouldn't be adding to the tally this morning. He was silent, treating her the same way he would any other suspicious person, watching and waiting for telltale signs. She decided to try to disarm him. "You missed Mass," she said, keeping her voice light. It was a small joke. He never went to church.
He gave her a vague look. "And how was it?"
"The same as always."
"Did you go to confession?"
She heard the catch in his voice and saw something behind his eyes, swimming just below the surface. She hesitated, wishing she'd never brought it up. Then she nodded.
"And do you feel better now?" he said.
When she didn't answer, he seemed to take a step back, though he didn't move an inch. She had a sudden glimmer of understanding. He thought that she had betrayed him, first by going to Basin Street, and then by not falling on her knees to beg his forgiveness over it.
Now she wanted to say something, to confess to him if that's what he demanded, but she couldn't think of any words that might soften the eyes that now judged and found her wanting. God might have forgiven her trespass. Valentin wasn't about to. She felt her blood rising and bit her tongue to keep from cursing right back at him for being so heartless.
She moved past him and into the bedroom to change, half hoping that he'd follow her. He stayed where he was, though, and the silence from the front room was thick, almost eerie. She undressed slowly, down to her camisole, then put on a cotton housedress.
When she stepped out into the front room again, he was gone. She went onto the balcony and looked down Magazine Street in time to see him disappear into Bechamin's.
She felt a clutch in her gut and there was a strange dry taste in her mouth. He knew about Basin Street. And what else? Miss Antonia's? Paul Baudel? And yet he still wouldn't accuse her. The thought of it made her breath come short and for a moment she imagined the look on his face if he came back through the door and found her waiting for him with one of the big kitchen knives. Maybe that would loosen his tongue.
She let the moment pass, catching her breath, slowing her pounding heart, and holding back the tears that were about to brim. She stepped back inside, closed the door behind her. She had an unsettling sense that something had just happened completely out of her sight, a battle fought and finished without a single shot being fired.
She sat down at the kitchen table with a glass of water and the amber bottle that held her prescription. The doctor had told her two drops, but he didn't know her, so she drew three, no, four, and watched them drip into the clear water. The potion became a snake the color of old blood, twisting and slithering downward. Then the liquids blended into faint reddish brown. She drank it down in three swallows and closed her eyes while it went to work.
Time passed, minutes or an hour, and her anger faded into a dull gray hum. More minutes went by, and she heard footsteps on the stairwell. The front door opened and closed, and he came into the kitchen with a tin of coffee and a paper sack in his hands. It occurred to her dimly that she had forgotten to leave him anything for breakfast. She thought about getting up, but she stayed where she was.
Valentin, crossing to the sideboard, saw Justine's cheeks flush crimson as she rose from her chair just a little unsteadily, then sat back down. He opened the sack, took a bite of the egg sandwich that Mr. Bechamin had fixed for him, and sipped from his coffee tin.
She pushed her chair out, grabbed the edge of the table, got up, and walked out into the front room. Valentin took another bite and decided that he wasn't hungry anymore. He heard the loose board under the rug squeak with her passing steps. He went to the doorway and watched her pace, her gaze fixed on the braided rug beneath her feet. She looked troubled, like she had dropped something and was searching the floor in distress.
He cleared his throat and said, "Justine?"
She was surprised that his voice had come out so soft and unsure, and she stopped, her brow stitching. Though he seemed to be watching her from far away, his eyes weren't so hard now. She wanted to say something to him and was working her mind to compose the right words when the street door banged. Rapid shoes came slapping up the stairwell and then a hand rapped staccato on the door.
Valentin opened it and found Louis standing there. The shy boy with the twinkling eyes and ready smile now looked all grave as he spoke a few hushed words. The detective stared at him, then nodded. He turned to Justine. She knew the look. Something had happened. Someone was dead.
"I need to..." He made a weary gesture. "I need to go out."
"All right, then," she said, and held his gaze until he turned away.
Valentin and Jelly Roll left the two boys in the cobbled alley that ran behind City Hall and went through the door. The Colored Section of the New Orleans City Morgue was one floor down, befittingly underground. The corridor of damp stone was narrow and dark. There was a light glowing farther along, and when they got to the open door of the large room, they found it brightly lit, almost cheerful by contrast. The electric lamps overhead reflected off surfaces of white enamel and polished steel. The shelves that lined the side walls were filled with vessels containing various organs, floating in murky liquids, like undersea creatures from some Jules Verne fiction. A thick door on the back wall opened into the cooler. The air was chilly and the thick, stinging odor of formaldehyde saturated every corner.
Four gurneys were lined up along one wall, and on each was a body covered with a sheet, black feet and pink soles protruding. A mulatto attendant was running water over his hands at the sink in the corner. He looked around when they walked in and said, "Gentlemen?"
Morton didn't speak up, so Valentin said, "Je
fferson Mumford."
"Uh-huh." The attendant flicked the rest of the water from his fingers as he went over to the gurneys and started checking the tags that were affixed to the protruding big toes. Valentin recognized the man. The attendant remembered him, too; he kept glancing over his shoulder with a cloying familiarity.
When he reached the third body, he pulled the gurney away from the wall to the center of the room. "Jefferson Mumford, at your service," he quipped, and drew the sheet down halfway. He looked at the two men to see if his humor had registered. They ignored him and he grunted and moved away.
At the sight of the dead face, Morton let out a soft groan, then crossed himself and whispered something under his breath. Valentin hesitated, standing back. Hadn't he seen enough corpses to last a lifetime? Beginning with his younger brother and sister in their little coffins, their tiny lives taken by Bronze John, the yellow fever epidemic of the 1880s. After that it was his father^ murdered on the banks of Lake Pontchartrain. Then this sport and that sporting girl, dozens, all told, lying dead on a Storyville street or in a room in a Storyville house. There was Eddie McTier, the one cadaver he had created, with the help of his Iver Johnson pistol. Finally, there were the victims of the Black Rose Killer. It was a ghastly parade and he had to wonder what kind of career it was that collected so many carcasses. There was no escaping the fact that he and the dirty mulatto with the grinning yellow teeth had in common their firsthand knowledge with the dead.
He looked down at Mumford, taking a moment to remember him as he had been. Then, gradually, he pushed his mind away from all that and began a clinical examination of the remains. In his experience, the departed mostly looked peaceful in repose, their torments having evaporated with their final breaths. He noticed that Mumford's handsome face was instead reshaped into a strange mask, though, as if he was in the midst of a grimace when the bell tolled for him. He could see, as well, no wounds on the head or torso.
"What was the poison?" he inquired.
"Who said it was poison?" Then a yawn. "Strychnine."
The too-quick answer was no surprise. No one would even bother examining a Negro musician, magician, or mortician. An autopsy was out of the question. So strychnine it was.
There was nothing more to see. Valentin looked over the body once more, then pulled the sheet up and turned away.
"What happens now?" Morton said quietly.
The attendant spoke up. "Investigation's over. They're done with him."
"What investigation?" Valentin said.
The mulatto gave a greasy smile. "That's what I said." He looked between the visitors. "Is one of you gentlemen claiming the body?"
Valentin said, "No, I..." He glanced at Morton, who shrugged his indecision. "We'll see about it, I suppose."
"Because if he ain't claimed in another forty-eight hours, they take and bury him outside the city," the mulatto said.
"A pauper's grave," Valentin murmured.
"That's right." The attendant's yellow smile was ghastly in the light of the bare lamp. "Hell, he don't care. I swear I ain't ever heard a one of them complain."
They walked out into a midday that was under a bank of low clouds. Valentin half expected Morton to shake a finger and start railing about how he had warned him that this was going to happen. He didn't, though, and Valentin saw that his face had gone gray with melancholy that made him look years older. The piano man had known Mumford well, and there was real grief in those green eyes.
Valentin was anguished, too. Though he hadn't known Mumford as well as Morton had, he liked him, admired his talent, thought him a young man with much promise. He was a good-natured sort, not at all troublesome. And yet he'd been brutally murdered in a back-of-town alley.
"Maybe that woman of his will claim the body," Morton murmured absently.
"What?" Valentin said, coming out of his reflections. "What woman?"
"He had a woman living with him," the piano man said. "I can find out about his family. Cornish or one of those other fellows will know. If someone don't come collect his body, I'll take care of it."
"And do what?"
"Give him a proper place." He sighed and shook his head. "Poor Jeff," he said. "It never should have happened." There was no recrimination, only weariness. He walked away. The Creole detective watched vaguely as he ambled a dozen paces in the direction of the street, then stopped and came back to stand before him.
The piano man's brow furrowed. "They played together," he said in an odd, distant voice.
"What's that?"
"Mumford and Noiret. They played together a few years back. In the Union Hall Brass Band. I thought you'd want to know that." He turned around and walked away again, and this time he kept going, passing by Beansoup and Louis, who stood waiting on the corner of the street.
Valentin dropped his gaze to the dusty cobbles, his thoughts in a jumble. He had discounted Morton's claim that there was something amiss, brushing Antoine Noiret's murder aside as everyday violence. From all accounts, the man had been a no-good rounder who'd probably gotten what he deserved. Now it didn't seem so clear. Seeing Mumford had rattled Valentin to his bones. The news that Morton had delivered sent another tremor up his spine.
Standing there in the narrow alley, Valentin felt something stirring. For eighteen months, beginning in the wake of the Black Rose murders, he had managed to muffle his instincts, his sixth sense, his detective's eye, or whatever it was that defined his skill.
Now, the combination of looking upon Mumford's dead face and hearing Jelly Roll Morton's muttered words was shattering the wall he had constructed, piece by piece.
Two musicians, both Negro, both playing in Storyville, both of whom had played together at one time, had died by violence within days of each other. There was no suspect in either case. Maybe it was a coincidence, and maybe it wasn't. It didn't signify. The murders deserved attention, if only because Mumford had died in Storyville. That made it Valentin St. Cyr's business. He needed to go to work.
He called to Beansoup and Louis to wait and went back to the side door and down to the basement.
The mulatto attendant was leaning against the doorjamb, puffing a cigarette. He cocked his head in lazy surprise when the Creole came down the corridor. "Forget somethin'?" he said.
"There was another Negro murdered, out on Philip Street, on Wednesday night," Valentin said. "Antoine Noiret."
"What about him?"
"Is the body still here?"
The attendant spat out a shred of tobacco. "What was that name?"
Valentin didn't have the time to waste. He went into his vest pocket for a Liberty half and shot it off with a snap of his thumb.
The mulatto flinched and snatched it out of the air before it hit him in the face. He sniffed, and then his smile returned. "Noiret? Yessir. I believe that citizen is still with us."
"I want to see him."
The attendant pursed his lips and examined the coin, holding it up before his eyes and flipping it around.
"There's another one when I see the body," the detective said. The attendant winked, tossed what was left of the cigarette, and jerked his head. Valentin followed him inside and to the cooler on the back wall. The mulatto grabbed an empty gurney and swung the heavy door open. "He can't walk out, so you're gonna have to come on in."
Valentin stepped into the cold room, lit only by four bare electric lamps that hung from the ceiling. There was an aisle down the middle and shelves on both sides, six feet deep and stacked with corpses that were wrapped in broad swaths of linen. Each shelf was no more than sixteen inches high, enough to accommodate all but the fattest of the departed. Those ladies and gentlemen were on the middle shelves, where they could be handled most easily. The lower shelves were the more average individuals.
It was a macabre collection that made Valentin's skin crawl a little. He couldn't wait to leave. The attendant seemed quite at home, a worm who spent his days underground with the rotting dead.
The worm went through a f
ew more toe tags. "Noiret," he said. "Here he is." He pulled a gurney over and let out a loud grunt as he dragged the body on to the cooling board. In a quick minute and a flurry of busy dirty hands, the linens were gone and everything from the sternum up was exposed. Valentin stepped closer.
Noiret's face, a broad triangular affair, was like black wax in death. He was thick bodied, heavy in the shoulders, a brawler. His mouth was slightly open in a rictus smile. Below it, on the neck, was the fatal wound, trussed crudely.
Valentin reached up to grab the nearest electric lamp and swung it to one side so he could see better. From the look of the gash, Noiret's final moments had been about as horrid as Mumford's. The knife wound hadn't come from some fight in the heat of passion. It was too precisely placed. Someone had planned it, catching the victim sleeping, just as someone had gone to the trouble of poisoning the guitar player. Which meant, hard as it was to admit, Jelly Roll Morton could be right. Though Valentin couldn't believe it was over some Negroes playing with white men. So the question remained: What was it all about?
Beansoup and Louis both came to attention when Valentin reappeared in the alleyway. When he went digging into his pocket for change, they responded like dogs hearing a whistle, hurrying to stand before him, their eyes and ears perked. Except that Beansoup hung back just a step or two, looking abashed, and Valentin realized that he was upset about Justine and Basin Street. It had to be the reason he had sent Louis to fetch Valentin that morning.
He gave them each a Liberty quarter and said, "Go find Mr. Anderson. He should be back from church by now. He might be at the Café. Or at Miss Burt's or Miss Arlington's. If he's—"
"Okay, okay," Beansoup cut in, now all business. "We'll find him. What then?"
"Tell him I need to speak to him as soon as possible."