Chasing the Devil's Tail

by David Fulmer

  "No? I thought you were interested in all kinds of things." The madam spoke deliberately as she waved a curt hand in the direction of the foyer.

  She closed the doors, shutting off the crude noise from the big room. They moved to opposite corners. French Emma fastened one cold eye on the detective while the other wandered over his shoulder. Valentin stood stiffly, his arms crossed before him. When he didn't speak up, she said, "What do you want here?"

  "I want to know if you have any information to offer about these recent murders."

  French Emma drew back. "And why would I tell you if I did?"

  "To maintain your position of respect in the community," Valentin retorted.

  A smile almost crossed Emma Johnson's features and then her face settled back into hard planes. "What information?"

  "Gran Tillman," Valentin said.

  "What about her? She worked for me for a short while. That's all."

  "What was her particular specialty?" Valentin said and again Emma Johnson almost smiled at the formality of his language.

  "Her particular specialty was the dyke act," she informed him. "She would perform with another woman for the pleasure of our customers. And occasionally she would work with Joe the Whipper." The madam's good eye glistened. "He'd bend her over this here—"

  "What else did you know about her?" Valentin broke in.

  "Nothing," the madam said flatly. "She was here and then she left. And now she's dead." She grimaced and her face went rigid, as if already regretting what little she had told him. He was about to pose another question when she said abruptly, "I know why you're here. I know what this is all about." She raised her sharp chin. "You're lookin' to save that nigger bastard Bolden."

  Valentin was surprised. "What gives you that idea?" This time French Emma did smile, though coldly. He ignored it. "Do you know something about him?"

  The madam crossed her arms. "I do. I got a skill." She stood like a statue, her arms stiff, her eyes unmatched black stones.

  "He ever come around here?" Valentin said.

  French Emma smiled again, a chilling twist of her thin lips. "I don't allow niggers on the premises." Her eyes took him in. "That one, especially. He ever tries to come around here, I'll put somethin' on him he'd never shake loose." She glared. "You understand what I'm sayin'?"

  Valentin didn't bother to answer. He wasn't about to play voodoo games. He was finished. He turned away and opened the heavy front door.

  "You hear what I'm sayin'?" the madam repeated, her voice rising jaggedly. "You just let him come round here, I'll fix him!" Her shrill bray followed him onto the gallery "I mean to say, I'll fix him good this time!"

  Valentin turned around and said, "This time?" But the door had slammed shut. He went slowly down the steps to the banquette. The madam's final words had been delivered with such venom that he felt a chill. My God, he thought as he made his way up the street, next they'll have me putting a dime around my ankle. He stuttered out a laugh at his own foolishness, but the sinister feeling didn't leave him until he turned the corner onto Magazine Street.

  Willie Cornish looked up from polishing his horn to see a fellow in a suit that was too tight for his heavy gut coming across the floor in his direction. Cornish knew he'd seen the fellow around somewhere, then suddenly remembered: a copper. He frowned, wondering what Bolden had done now.

  The copper sidled up and pulled his lapel open a few inches to let Cornish see the gunmetal badge that was pinned to his suspender. "Lieutenant Picot, New Orleans Police Department," he announced. Cornish raised his eyebrows politely. "Bolden around?"

  "No sir, I ain't seen him at all this evenin'," Cornish said in his deep rumble of a voice.

  Picot's gaze wandered. "You expect him?"

  "Couldn't say. Sometimes he comes, sometimes he don't."

  "Oh? So what does he do with himself, out there roamin' about?"

  Cornish laid his horn on the table. "I wouldn't have no idea."

  The copper cast a lazy eye on the black-skinned man. "I wonder about that," he said. "What with all's been goin' on down in the District."

  Cornish blinked slowly. "What ... you mean with them sportin' gals?" Picot hooked a thumb under each lapel and said nothing. Cornish looked troubled. "You sayin' what? Bolden have somethin' to do with all that?"

  "I don't know, my friend, but I'd sure be wonderin'," Picot said. He took another long look around the room, then nodded placidly, turned away, and strolled toward the street door.

  Willie Cornish watched him go. "Oh, Jesus," he said under his breath. "Oh, my sweet Jesus."

  A minute later, Jimmy Johnson came in through the alley door, dragging his bass fiddle in its case, banging everything in his path. He stopped when he saw the look on Willie's face.

  "What's wrong with you?" the kid said.

  "You ain't gonna believe it," Cornish said.

  Just before noon on Sunday, Valentin sat on a bench, watching Justine as she strolled the perimeter of Congo Square, talking happily with an octoroon girl from Grace Lloyd's on Conti Street. In their plain white dresses and high-buttoned shoes and their hair braided and pinned, they looked like daughters of respectable Creole families on an outing. From across the square, Justine caught his eye. She was standing by an Italian ice cart, gesturing. Want one? Valentin shook his head, but kept his eyes on her as she turned away and dug into her small purse for a nickel.

  She had come from Mass as the tolling of church bells echoed down the streets. He wanted to loll the day away in his bed with her, but she had other ideas. She waited while he washed and dressed and then hurried him outside into the midday light.

  It was a beautiful afternoon, the air dry for New Orleans, a breeze from the Gulf wafting the heat and the smell of the city away and a soft yellow sun poking out through high cottony clouds. The gray temper that had bewitched him over the past weeks had faded a bit and the shadows of the three dead women dimmed along with it.

  He had waited all Friday and Saturday for a nudge on his arm and the whisper in his ear about another corpse and another black rose. But nothing had happened, and now he found himself basking in the New Orleans Sunday like some lazy dog, idly watching Justine and her friend as they continued their stroll around the square.

  He had first met her the summer before, in the heat of August. He had been frolicking upstairs with a quadroon girl at Mary Lee's mansion on Villere Street when a ruckus began in the next room, shouts and shrieks and the sounds of furniture being tossed about. When no one came up to settle the uproar, the girl insisted that he go see to it. She urged him in his ear then pushed him out of her and crossed her legs. She said she couldn't keep her mind on business with all the noise. He pulled on his trousers and undershirt and went out into the hallway. He stood at the next door, listening to a dull, mean, rumbling voice, then shrill syllables shouted back. He knocked.

  A heavy-set white man with dark blond hair that stuck out in greasy spikes and a dirty brush mustache opened the door. He glared at Valentin with an inflamed eye. "What do you want?"

  "I want the commotion to stop," Valentin said in a reasonable tone.

  "Yeah and who the hell are you?" the man demanded.

  "I'm the person responsible for keeping the peace around here," he lied and before the fellow could stop him, he stepped inside the room. He saw the night table was overturned and a porcelain lamp had been smashed into pieces. A framed painting and a sampler that had hung on the wall had crashed to the floor. A whiskey bottle lay on its side and the reek of liquor joined the odors of an unwashed male body, a bit of sweet perfume, and the earthy scent of a woman's sex. Backed into one corner was a short girl, skin the color of latte, with wide dark eyes that had a slight Asian slant, and a small, curved nose. Her loose curls hung down in tangled, sweaty strands. In one hand she gripped a sheet to cover her nakedness and in the other she held a knife. Though her face was streaked with tears and trickles of rouge, she looked grim, angry, and ready to use the blade.

  "What
's this all about?" Valentin asked, looking between them.

  "She owes me," the man growled. "I hired her to work the revue down there at the Flying Horses. She's sposed to pay me back. I get what's between her legs whenever I want it. That's the deal. Now she says no."

  Valentin looked at the girl, who said, "Never had no deal. I went with him once, counta he did somethin' for me. Now he wants it all the time." She wiped a hand across her face, smearing mascara. "He made me do it again," she said. "Now that's all."

  The white man glowered. "It's all when I say so."

  Valentin looked at him. "Maybe you should leave now."

  "And maybe you should fuck yourself," the man said and then made the mistake of reaching out with one rough paw to push the interloper aside. In a blur of motion, Valentin's right hand went into his back pocket and whipped out with his whalebone sap to snap the blond man just above the ear. There was a flat crack, the pale eyes rolled up, and the fellow pitched sideways, his face first colliding with the wall, then hitting the floor. Justine looked down at the still body.

  "What are you doing here?" Valentin asked her. "Ain't this Mae's room?"

  "She let me have it," the girl said in a low voice. "So I could make some money. I quit that show. But he wouldn't leave me be. I don't know how he found me here." She kept her eyes on the supine form. "He ain't dead, is he?"

  "No, he's not," Valentin said. "So you won't want to be here when he comes around." She nodded slowly. She didn't seem to know what to do next. "I'm in the next room," Valentin told her. "Come in there, if you like."

  He was back in the room and in the bed when she knocked and stepped inside, closing the door behind her. She looked at Valentin and the girl. He whispered for the girl to move over and motioned for Justine to get into the bed. Later, when the girl left, she stayed on.

  From the other side of the square, she caught his eye and smiled and waved.

  She took a room with Miss Antonia and he visited her again. Each time, as he was pulling on his trousers, she said, "You comin' back?" It wasn't just a tired cadge for future business; she wanted to know. She wanted him to come back and so he did, regularly.

  He learned her story. She was from southwest Louisiana, a Creole of mixed African and Cherokee blood, the daughter of a drunken tenant farmer. He was a sorry excuse for a man who kept his wife pregnant until she died birthing a ninth baby, pounded his brood bloody, and occasionally raped Justine, his sixth child and the prettiest of his girls.

  One summer night when she was fourteen, her oldest brother took one beating too many, stabbed the old man clean through the heart and dumped his body in a bayou. Justine ran away to Houston and took up dancing in a traveling show that was passing through. She soon found that men would pay plenty money for what she had been giving away between the cornrows and in the back of farm wagons. And so she drifted from show to circus to show until she arrived in New Orleans and decided to stay put for a while. That night, her first night in a sporting house, she made the acquaintance of Valentin.

  Now she earned her living entertaining men at Antonia Gonzales', white men with cash in their pockets. Valentin of course understood what she did there, but they never talked about it.

  The two girls looked over the Square at the Creole detective and Justine whispered something to her friend, something that caused them to laugh like schoolgirls.

  At first, she figured him for just another sport, the kind who would care for nobody and for nothing but his own pleasures. One of them who would come round to her room late at night, having lost his bankroll at cards, and pound her already weary hip bones until she cried out, even slap her if the mood struck him, then get up, take all her money and walk out without a glance back.

  She'd come across that type plenty. And Valentin St. Cyr seemed to fit the picture, with that flat expression and eyes cool and vacant, like he noticed little and minded less.

  But he was the type of rounder she tended to latch onto, the kind who wanted one regular girl at his beck and call. It made her feel all dead and empty, living at the whim of some sport, but no way as used-up as those who took on one after the next, a dozen a night or so, until they ended up worn-out holes for any fellow with a Liberty dollar to dump his stuff into.

  She thought he'd be like those others, but when she looked closer, she caught hints of something different. What she took for a hard front was stillness; and he wasn't cold; he just kept back from the world around him. She guessed this was because he was part Dago; she had seen the Italian men working in the gangs down on the docks and they were like that, stone-faced and quiet, keeping all to themselves. As she got to know him better, she came to notice the shadow behind his eyes. Something had happened to him. She knew the look, because things had happened to her, too.

  When he let her visit his rooms one night, she saw books and was all the more curious. She even asked him if he was some kind of schoolmaster, to which he laughed, all embarrassed, and shook his head. Before she ran off from home, she had liked school, liked reading stories especially. But the mere fact that an adult male in the District read real books was enough to catch her interest and fix her eye more closely upon him. The other men, most who took her for a night at a time, passed through, and she barely remembered them at all. Only Mr. St. Cyr stayed on her mind.

  Valentin studied her as she watched the Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band playing their jugs and washboards and other made-up instruments for the strolling crowd. He saw her clap her hands and laugh with delight at the antics of the five white boys making music that clattered and banged and piped merrily across the square.

  He found himself wanting her around. He liked the way she looked, short and lissome, milk-coffee skin, large dark eyes, full mouth, a nose small and curved like a Jewess and hair tied in an Indian braid and let down only for him. He liked her quietness, much unlike most of the sporting girls, those brash, braying types who delighted in raising a ruckus, in getting drunk and fighting.

  He liked her smell. Most doves bothered only to cover their sheen of dirt and sweat with cheap perfume and went into a bath reluctantly. But Justine bathed often and earnestly, like she was working to wash something off her skin. Valentin guessed that it was the memory of the hands of her father, or perhaps the thought of the men who fondled her now.

  He didn't dwell on what she did in her room those nights when she wasn't with him; he thought himself too much the rounder to let it vex him. He knew how she earned her money, but he told himself it didn't matter; the way she tussled with him beneath the sheets, with an eager energy that threw a rush of rose to her skin and lit up deep points of light in her eyes, made it all a bit better. He believed she was never that way with her other men.

  There was more that bound them. He had told her things that no one else knew.

  They had frolicked until the sheets were wet with sweat and the humid air in the room was awash with the earthy smell of her body. She rolled on her side, her chest heaving. Valentin stretched his arms and legs wide, letting the night air from the window cool him. Her breathing became even again and she turned to look at him in the silver glow of the moonlight. She studied his face for a few moments and then said, "I don't know no thin' about you."

  He gave her a half-smile, about to tell her there was nothing to know and that she should go to sleep. It was the middle of the night, after all. But she was watching him closely, waiting for him to tell her something. "Well, what do you want to know?" he said.

  "Something about where you come from," she said. "About your family."

  He thought he would just share the bare facts and be done with it. But he found himself recalling the whole tale, back into his childhood, from the first hateful sneer his olive skin had prompted from some white man on the street to his father's murder and the terrible black weeks that followed. He ended it by describing his mother's face, a mask of bitter sadness, as she watched the train carrying her son pull out, heading north and away from New Orleans.

  "Away to where?
" Justine asked.

  Valentin blinked, saw the image fade. "What?"

  "Away to where?"

  "Chicago," he said. "To a Catholic school there. She wanted me somewhere where I'd be safe." He paused. "She was a little off the mark."

  He learned literature, elocution, some mathematics and science from the strict nuns, and fighting and stealing from his classmates, all rough city boys. He fell in with a pack of Italian ruffians who drank whiskey and chewed tobacco and now and then burglarized lakeshore mansions. Justine shook her head over that, then smiled a little when he mentioned losing his virtue with a young Polish girl barely off the boat. "First time I saw a fellow killed was up there," he said, then told her about three thugs beating a small-change crook to death in a West Side alleyway.

  "But what about your mama?" she asked him.

  Letters came once every few weeks for the first year, ordinary news at first—too ordinary. As the months passed, the pages became mostly filled with scribbled ramblings, memories of her Cherokee and African grandparents shifting suddenly to a narrative of one of her visits to St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, where his young brother and sister were interred, victims of the 1880 visit of Bronze John, and where the cement on his father's bier was still gray.

  "What about the summertime?" she asked him. "You didn't come home?"

  He shook his head. "She wouldn't allow it. She wrote to me and said 'Don't come back to this place. I'll tell you when it's safe.' She promised she was going to get on a train and come visit. But she never did." After another moment, he said, in a quieter tone, "I guess ... I didn't think so much about her after a while. I was chasing after girls and getting into trouble with those hoodlums up there. I was making plenty money. I had some fine clothes. I was a regular little rascal..." His voice drifted off.