Jass (Valentin St. Cyr Mysteries)

by David Fulmer

  They started at one end and worked their way west. They hit all the saloons, and at every one there was music playing. Downtown New Orleans and even Storyville might be quiet on a Sunday night, but out on Rampart Street, it just kept going. If there was any day of rest, it was Monday.

  Musicians from every corner of back-of-town New Orleans would show up because they could still play whatever they wanted there. There were few whites, some Creoles and Italians, many colored. The music they made was fast, loose, and raw, the way it was supposed to be.

  Valentin and Whaley hadn't been on the street more than an hour when Beansoup caught up with them and passed the word that a couple of brutes had showed up and looked to have mayhem in mind. They were tossing saloons, slapping customers, demanding information about a Creole named St. Cyr, who was somewhere on the street, accompanied by an Irish copper.

  For the next hour, Valentin and Whaley stayed one step ahead of Dawes and Williams. Beansoup sprinted back and forth, all red faced and sweating as he dropped hints in one direction and delivered reports of the miscreants' progress in the other.

  The two had been throwing down whiskey at every stop, getting drunker and meaner as they passed over Jackson Avenue, Freret Street, then First and Second streets.

  Now it seemed that the detective and his partner had turned into ghosts. Everywhere Dawes and Williams went, the word was "just missed them" or "just left out." Some street Arab kept chattering that St. Cyr and his partner were only one door ahead.

  They could never quite catch up, and so by the time they reached the saloon on the corner of Rampart and Fourth, they were so drunk and angry that they were ready to either kill the next person who crossed them or turn around, go home, and forget about this rich people's mess.

  Then they stepped back out onto the corner, looked across the street and saw the prey they'd been stalking, standing on the opposite banquette with his hands in his pockets. The other one, the red-faced Irishman, was nowhere in sight.

  The two criminals exchanged a greedy leer. The mulatto Williams moved a few paces to his right to cut off an escape. Though they all knew if St. Cyr ran now, he'd never live it down.

  A few doors back, a jass band started up with the merry tootle of a clarinet over a rattling drum and a thudding bass and then, like a call to battle, a braying trumpet. When Valentin heard the raucous music and realized that they were going to perform their bloody ballet to horns and drums, he couldn't help but smile.

  "What's funny, you?" Dawes called over. A half second later a hammer cracked and he jerked his head around to see Whaley standing to one side of Williams with his Colt pistol pointing directly at the mulatto's temple.

  "I think that right there is amusing," Valentin said.

  The saloon door opened and two fellows stepped onto the banquette, saw what was happening, and dove back through the door. Five seconds later it banged again, and a dozen men came tumbling out to watch the action.

  Williams croaked, "Dawes? What the hell?" Sweat was running down his face.

  "Go ahead and shoot him then," Dawes muttered with a bloodshot glare. "You think I give a good fuck?"

  Williams cried, "Shut up, goddamnit!"

  "Go ahead," Dawes repeated. "He ain't nothin' but a no-good nig—"

  The word was cut in half as Valentin stepped up in a blur that Dawes barely caught out of the side of his drunken eye to crack him on the jaw with his whalebone sap, a sweeping uppercut that fractured the bone as it tore it out of the socket and knocked him off his feet and onto his back. Then, in a motion that had both Whaley and the man he held at gunpoint in open-mouthed gapes, Valentin switched the sap to his left hand and drew his pistol with his right, leveling it at the middle of the broad forehead.

  Dawes grunted through his shattered jaw, a harsh animal sound. Valentin stared down into his eyes, saw the same hollow darkness that Dominique must have met in her last moments, without a spark of pity, indeed nothing human at all. Even now, Dawes was too stupid to be afraid, lying there and looking up with the blank gaze of an idiot.

  Now heads were poking out of saloon doors all around the intersection, and pedestrians stopped to point and stare. They were gathering a crowd. The next five seconds hung suspended, as the raging, crazy, faraway sound of jass played on. Valentin had a gripping urge to pull the trigger feel the percussion, hear the roar and see the hole explode in Dawes's brain, then watch the cold light in those eyes die.

  Instead he said something, one word that no one quite caught, and abruptly backed away. From far off came the winding wail of a police siren. He was out of time. He looked over at Whaley. "Can you hold them?"

  "I've got them," Whaley said. "And it would be my pleasure to shoot either one or both."

  A few seconds later Valentin had disappeared, evaporating into the darkness in such a sudden moment that no one on the scene could testify as to which way he had gone.

  The rain had started falling again, the sort of cool and silky drizzle that visited New Orleans in those days just beyond the end of summer's tail, but before the cold of winter set in. It fell from the night sky in thin, lazy drops, drenching the Crescent City from the Irish Channel to Metairie. Everything that was moving slowed. At any given window, a silhouette might appear as someone looked up at the misty moon. It was that kind of rain.

  Anyone who happened to be at a window near the corner of St. Charles Avenue and Fifth Street would have seen one citizen who appeared to be in a hurry, a Creole-looking fellow in a gray suit, his shoulders hunched, as he strode along the banquette in the direction of Prytania Street.

  Valentin ducked under the boughs of the live oaks, thankful that they still held some foliage and wishing for once that he wore a hat. He turned the corner at Prytania Street and walked to No. 2623.

  The gate creaked and he followed the stone walk to the gallery. He had barely set foot on the first step when the front door opened. Maybelle filled the doorway, her face severe as she looked him up and down. Thomas stood a few feet behind her, wearing an expression that was beyond wearied.

  Valentin stepped onto the gallery and waited. Thomas whispered something to his wife, and her eyes welled up and her dark face softened with a grave pity. She stood back to let the detective pass, bowing her head now, as if in prayer.

  He had stepped into a sitting room that was appointed with heavy, elegant furniture. A crystal chandelier hung overhead. There were sconces on the walls and a portrait of a respectable gentleman in midcentury dress mounted over the mantel, glowering down at the living in their foolish and hopeless travails. The dining room Valentin had seen the night before was to his left. It was as much as the detective could discern, as the room was in dim shadow, the lamps turned down low.

  Thomas spoke up. "Did you kill them two?"

  "They'll be dead soon enough," Valentin told him. "You can go to their hanging."

  "Lord, have mercy," the woman murmured.

  Valentin looked at Thomas and the Negro said, "They in the room in back, the study. Both of them." He gestured to the doorway on the other side of the room. "It's that way."

  Valentin walked to the doorway that led into a corridor. Thomas said, "She carry a gun. One of them Derringers. A two-shot."

  Valentin touched his pocket and felt the hard outline of his own revolver, the Iver Johnson that had been his firearm of choice since he was on the force. He had fired it at another person only once, and that one time had finished the life of Eddie McTier. He had come within a breath of putting a bullet in Dawes's head back on Rampart Street. Now, as he moved along the hallway and pushed the door to the study wide, he wondered if he would have to draw it—or use it—again.

  He found them seated on café chairs on either side of a small table that was set before the window. Louis Gerard was on the left side, Emilie sat opposite. The husband was turned in profile, like he was sitting for a portrait, and did not turn to look at the man in the doorway. Emilie was facing the detective, her hands folded modestly in her lap. She s
eemed neither surprised nor concerned to find him standing there dripping rainwater on her polished floors. Indeed, her face was clear of any emotion at all. Together, the two of them could have been waiting for the maid to serve tea.

  The room was as well appointed as the parlor, with not a speck out of place. Bookshelves with volumes in fine bindings occupied the walls on each end, with a library table before one of the stacks. Rain ran down the window like veins that glistened against the darkness outside. It made quite a picture.

  Valentin felt a rush of anger at these people and their privilege. There were six men and women dead because of them, and yet they sat primly, unaffected, as if secure in the knowledge they weren't going to pay. They did not plead innocence. They did not hang their heads with guilt. They did not rage or cry for mercy. They simply sat, waiting to see what would transpire next, patient, but all too ready to be done with this unpleasantness.

  Or maybe not. Looking closer, Valentin detected something lurking beneath the gray flesh of Louis Gerard's face and stirring in the eyes of his young wife. They were both working to hide tempests that were raging behind their stolid expressions.

  One way or another, Valentin didn't care anymore. It was time to finish it.

  "I've come about four musicians who were murdered. And the landlady of a house on Philip Street. And a woman ... a woman named Dominique Godet."

  Emilie now cocked her head slightly, as if he had finally said something that had caught her interest. Her husband did not move or give any sign of having heard.

  "Please put the pistol on the table," Valentin said. Neither of the Gerards moved. Valentin went into his coat pocket, pulled out his own revolver, and thumbed back the hammer. It sounded loud in the quiet room. "Put the goddamn pistol on the table," he ordered.

  Emilie frowned, all peevish, and then opened her folded hands to reveal the Remington Double Derringer she'd been concealing. She put it on the table and crossed her arms like a pouting child deprived of a favorite toy.

  Gerard gazed down at the pistol, then turned his head to look at Valentin with an expression of elegant disdain. After a baleful moment, he said, "You should have left us alone."

  Valentin said, "Those people are dead and you and your wife are responsible."

  Gerard snapped a demonstrative finger into the air. "If I'd had anything to do with those crimes, I would have been within my rights," he said. "Those niggers had at her. At a time when she was not well."

  Valentin thought it bizarre the way he spoke about her as if she wasn't sitting right across the table.

  "They took advantage of a deranged woman for their own pleasure," Gerard went on. "They held her captive and they molested her repeatedly."

  "That's not how I heard it," Valentin said.

  Emilie shot him a sudden hateful glance, her copper-colored eyes narrowing. Valentin looked at her more closely. There was something familiar—

  "And how did you hear it?" Gerard said, his thin lips tightening.

  "It doesn't matter," Valentin said. "Because even if what you say is true, you could have called in the police. There are laws against colored men consorting with white women. They would have been hanged."

  "No ... vengeance was mine," Emilie muttered darkly.

  "That doesn't account for the landlady," Valentin said, his voice thickening. "It doesn't account for Dom—"

  "They passed her around, you know," Gerard broke in, as if he hadn't heard a word Valentin had said. His wife turned to him slowly, her face darkening.

  Valentin said, "I'm sorry, what?"

  The man gazed at him, his brow stitching. "Those men passed her around," he said. "She told me about it. They took turns at her. All five of them. Sometimes they went at her two at one time. It went on for a night and a day and another night. Then they threw her out on the street. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

  In a monotone, he went on to describe the details of his wife's consort with the musicians. He spoke as if he had been there, describing how she had been undressed and then placed this way and that so that the men could do what they wanted to her. It was a bizarre recitation, delivered in a calm voice that rankled with a slight disgust. All the while, the blue eyes glittered eerily.

  "I am a state court judge," Gerard stated with firm conviction. "My family has a sound reputation in this city. Which she"—he waved an accusing hand in the direction of his wife—"would have ruined with her behavior. Those men had to be punished and they had to be silenced. If anyone had ever told..."

  He went on, now describing the damage to the family name and then switching back to the intimate recitation of the acts she had performed with the jass men in Prince John's rooms. It was Valentin's mistake to be so transfixed by it that he failed to move in time.

  The judge had turned yet another corner in his monologue when Emilie said, "That's enough, damn it!" snatched up the pistol and shot him the chest, abruptly ending the sordid tirade.

  The explosion rattled the windowpanes. There was a scream and rough shout from the front part of the house. Valentin ducked back through the doorway as Louis Gerard let out a grunt of shock, threw his thin arms into the air, and toppled sideways from the chair.

  The echo faded and smoke drifted upward from one of the Derringer's barrels. The detective peered around the jamb to see Emilie holding the tiny pistol loosely and staring pointedly away from her husband.

  Gerard gasped loudly and struggled like an insect someone had stepped on, trying to raise himself as blood blossomed on his fine white shirt. Then his head fell back on the rug again. He gurgled a final wrenching breath and was still, his eyes open and fixed on the cherubs and angels that had been carved into the cornices of the ceiling.

  Thomas came stumping down the hall, with his wife right behind him. Valentin held up a hand and they froze. He stepped back into the room, keeping his Iver Johnson leveled on the woman at the table.

  Emilie glanced at him, then looked down at her husband. "Well, that's over," she sighed ruminatively, as if she was talking about a bothersome chore. She laid the pistol carefully back on the table.

  Valentin took two steps inside the room, moving to her right side and turning her away from the weapon. He tipped the barrel of his own pistol up so as not to startle her. He heard footsteps retreat down the hall and guessed that Thomas or his wife had run to call the coppers. He wouldn't have much time before they arrived. Still, he stayed quiet until she lifted her head to meet his gaze.

  "Why are you looking at me like that?" she said in the sharp voice that superiors used to reprimand their servants.

  Valentin kept his own tone neutral. "You're responsible for those killings."

  "Those monkeys committed those crimes." She shrugged her genteel shoulders. "Dawes and Williams."

  "You got them to do it. And your husband knew about it. He participated."

  She glanced at the body on the floor. "Well, now he's paid for his sins, hasn't he?"

  "Yes, he has," Valentin said. "But you haven't."

  "I think a judge will see it otherwise." She came up with a weird smile. "I mean another judge."

  He had to allow that she might be correct. They would have friends in high places. She was, by every indication, insane. She had been molested in unspeakable ways by five low-down niggers.

  That addressed the jass men. Cora Jarrell and Dominique would be another story. She would probably claim insanity on them, too. As for her husband, she could say that he was nursing rage over the incident, and she shot him dead in order to get relief from his constant abuse. Valentin could tell by the look on her face, by the expression, almost childishly haughty, that she knew she would get away with it. It was that look that made him decide at that moment to pull her mask apart, bit by bit, and destroy her.

  "The problem for you is that the justice you're talking about applies to white people," he said.

  She jerked a little, as if she had just received a slap, and her copperish eyes narrowed. "What did you say?"


  "You know what I'm talking about." He stepped closer. "To begin with, there wasn't any rape. You went looking for those jass men. And once you got going, you didn't want to stop. You couldn't get enough of them. And they couldn't get you to leave. Prince John had to put you back on the street."

  Some of the color drained from her face and she swallowed tensely. "You don't know wh—"

  "Even if a white woman behaved like that, the men would still be guilty of a crime." Valentin went on, "They'd hang for sure. But not if the woman is colored."

  "What are you talking about?" Her voice was rising.

  "There's no record of your marriage in the newspaper. No license in the city of New Orleans. Why would that be? Either you're not married at all or you're hiding something. Like you didn't want anyone to know that you're colored."

  In one harsh moment, her shoulders shuddered once like a cold wind had just blown through and her eyes got a little wilder. She let out a soft moan and he wondered if she was going to faint on him. Then she gathered herself. She pointed down to her husband, a rude gesture.

  "He told me that it had to be done," she said. "You heard him. It was a matter of honor. I had ruined his family. He said he wanted children. But after that happened, he told me there weren't going to be any children, not ever, because he would not curse them with my blood. And he'd never know if they belonged to him or some no-good jass player." Her eyes slid sideways. "He took care of that guitar player himself. He wanted to do it. That was after Williams and Dawes got rid of that one in the house on Philip Street. He got me to bring him outside, but it didn't work because that fat man come along and called him away. He sent me home after and then he waited for him. After that, he said he wasn't about to do no more. It made him sick. He said I had to take care of the rest. He said he would put me out on the street unless I fixed it. He said he was going to send me back where I came from."

  "Which was where?"

  She stared at him with the dazed expression of an animal that has been poleaxed prior to slaughter.