by David Fulmer
Meanwhile, the police arrived at the bordello and bumbled about for a while before carting the body away. Mr. Defoor was carried to the morgue and the next of kin were notified. It was all done quietly in order to spare the family shame, a traditional courtesy whenever a man died in the District, whether he expired from an excess of amours or a bullet lodged in his chest.
There was one other curious detail: Those on the scene were saying it appeared that Defoor had been shot dead somewhere else and then carried into Miss Parker's house, all without being detected. The local wags would be snickering; Anderson didn't see any humor in it. But his mood was gray that morning, in spite of the misty sun that was casting a golden glow over the New Orleans streets.
He took a last sip of the coffee that he'd laced with a hefty shot of brandy and rose from the chair with a soft groan. A substantial man, of late his bulk had begun to drag on him. Sometimes his bones ached and he found himself short of breath. There was the gout, the itching rashes on his skin, fevers that came to stay. His appetite had faded, and not only at the dinner table.
Since his earliest days as a street Arab and the police department's most able stool pigeon, Tom Anderson had been able to perform with the ladies like a regular stag, slipping from one steamy bed to the next. Not so many months ago, he'd had his most recent wife and three or four other scarlet women hissing at each other like alley cats. But Gertrude, a former Basin Street madam whose true last name was Hoffmire, now regarded him as if he was a tired old hound that wouldn't worry a mouse. Some days, he reflected with a doleful sigh, she wasn't too far off.
He carried his coffee cup through the silent first-floor rooms of the house, Gertrude having toddled off to Canal Street to meet a friend for breakfast and shopping. Or maybe she was on her way to see a lover of her own. He didn't know and didn't care. In any case, it would have been a perfect opportunity for him to spend a half hour dallying with the maid, a young quadroon who was round, cheerful, and ready for some work in the bedroom to start the day. He wasn't in the mood.
His advancing years—he was now sixty-two—and a more general weariness had him feeling low. Though managing the red-light district had never been easy, it also had always been filled with pleasures. Lately it felt like tiresome, alien territory.
And now, playing the part of a doddering old fool, he couldn't seem to make up his mind whether the death of poor Mr. Defoor was serious. He had once been able to sense anything amiss in any corner of Storyville, as if the twenty-block square was an extension of his own nervous system. Not so much anymore; especially without the services of a certain Creole detective at his disposal.
He heard the maid calling from the kitchen and came out of his funk to find himself standing in the middle of the living room, staring at nothing at all.
"What's that?" he called back.
"Said the man's bringin' the car around. He'll be out front in a minute." It was rude for a servant to be yelling like that, but he couldn't scold her, because ... well, just because.
Instead, he muttered, "All right, then," and spent a moment fumbling to find a place to set his cup. On his way out the door, he decided that he was going to seek out a doctor who could prescribe a tonic for what ailed him, and sooner rather than later.
Justine had been drowsily aware of the knock on the door before the break of dawn and Valentin rising to see what it was about. She heard him mutter something she couldn't catch. The door closed and he was back in the bedroom.
"Who was it?"
Sounding gruff, he told her it was a girl who had been sent by a Storyville madam named Parker. He lay down, curled into her, and in the next moment lifted her nightdress. He came on her hard, rougher than usual, though she wasn't about to complain. They rattled the bed frame for a little while, and then it was over and she dropped back to a brief, sweet slumber that was interrupted by tossing and turning that ended when he got up again.
She came awake to the rich scent of coffee and chicory. The sun, slanting through the window, was the color of pale butter behind curtains that undulated in the breeze. She lay back to savor the moment, spreading languid arms and legs and thinking about how their lives had changed, welcome after her career as a prized Basin Street sporting girl and his as a detective in the employ of Tom Anderson, "the King of Storyville."
Three years before, he had investigated a string of murders of well-to-do citizens that included some of the richest men in New Orleans. Though he lingered for another year or so afterward, the cast seemed to have taken something out of him. So he walked away, leaving Tom Anderson and his scarlet battalions to get along without his special services. He surprised Justine by showing up on Miss Antonia's gallery to humbly request that she come with him to the rooms he had taken over the import business on Spain Street, not far from the river. She considered his offer for a little less than a minute before stepping back inside to pack her things.
She cut all the strings to her past, save for the posing she did for a class of student artists. She was happy and at least once a day stopped to utter a small prayer that it would last.
Valentin appeared with a cup of coffee, one of the little things he did for her. She sipped and watched him dress. Like her, he was of mixed blood, though his was an odder gumbo. She could detect his Sicilian father in the olive cast of his skin, the Mediterranean curve of his nose, and his slender peasant body; and his Creole mother in his gray eyes, curly hair, and African lips and cheekbones. Depending on the way the light struck him, he could appear to be anything from Negro to dago to white or any selection in between.
For years, and without trying, he had passed. Those who knew the truth either kept it to themselves or didn't care, because he was so good at what he did and because he had been Tom Anderson's man. Though every now and then she noticed in those eyes a hint of a longing for his former life, he had stayed put, and she was grateful.
William Brown lay on a bed in a rented room in a house on the corner of Bolivar Street, watching the dust drift in a swath of thin morning sunlight that poured in through the window. A door slammed, echoing along the hallway, startling him. He didn't know exactly how long he had been lying there, transfixed by the drifting, sparkling particles. His shirt and trousers were damp in the stuffy room, and he sat up, feeling a sticky sheen on his skin and the mild buzz of a headache. His mouth was dry.
When he swung his thin legs off the bed, he noticed dark spots splattered on his trousers above the knees and more trailing down the front of his white shirt. He got up to shuffle to the mirror over the washstand to study the dots on the drawn and grayish flesh of his face for a few puzzled moments before pouring some tepid water from the pitcher into the bowl. Using the ragged cloth, he scrubbed until he couldn't see the splotches anymore.
He lay back down on the bed and closed his eyes, reaching into the shadowy corners of his brain for some clue to how his clothes and flesh had been soiled, and a gradual pantomime came to life.
The fellow had turned around, startled. A pistol cracked and in the next instant his eyes flew wide in shock as he staggered and then went down in a heap. In a few gasping seconds, it was over. There was some odd comedy about getting the body into a house and leaving it on the parlor floor. William remembered sneaking back into the night and looking up to see one blazing star in an indigo sky—a good sign.
He opened his eyes and the images fluttered away. Maybe it had been a dream. He had those, wild with colors, shrieking images, and bizarre, clownish characters. Maybe so; but he wasn't imagining the stains on his clothes.
In a spike of alarm, he stripped down, rolled the greasy trousers and shirt together, and hurried to stuff the ball in the back of the closet. His pulse calmed when he closed the door, and he wandered pale naked to the window, where he stood running an absent finger over the scar on his torso. The squalid box of a room offered no view to speak of, just the flat roof of the next building, and beyond that more buildings, and more after that, shades of gray and brown, all the way to t
he river.
William could see a small stretch of the Mississippi, wide and olive colored, polluted with oil from the ships and barges and foul wastes of the sewers, and loud with a racket of clanging bells, screaming whistles, rude honks, and low moaning horns, all carried along on the slap of the dirty water.
There was more filth on land. The streets were crowded with automobiles, trucks, hacks, and carriages, the gutters awash in horse manure. The whole city smelled of rust and decay and the sour sweat of humanity. There were too many people, and too many of them stared with eyes that made it hard for someone like him to hide.
He knew that if he pushed his mind, he could make this world dissolve and he'd be back on the ward, gazing out over the rice fields that rippled like a gentle green ocean. On the far edge of the last verdant plot was a line of trees. Far beyond that was a ribbon of river that he remembered vaguely as a placid curve of silver that meandered from one horizon to the other as if lost.
A whistle shrieked, tearing a hole in the canvas, and William once again was surveying the dirty panorama of New Orleans. There would be salvation, and soon. Once his work was done, he could leave it forever.
Valentin descended onto Spain Street to the hooting of the barges out on the river as they floated their tonnage to the Mandeville Street wharf, not a quarter mile away. He strolled at an easy pace, enjoying the bright early autumn day. At the corner of Esplanade, he stopped at a newsstand for the morning Picayune and stepped outside just in time to climb on the northbound car.
The run up to St. Claude took only a few minutes, and he kept the newspaper folded under his arm until he transferred to a westbound car. It was fifteen jostling, stop-and-start minutes to the beginning of St. Charles, and he took the time to look over the front page.
The top story was the trial of several defendants in the dancehall shoot-out at the 102 Ranch six months before. Valentin remembered hearing about the gunplay and feeling a tug in his gut. He knew at the time that had he been around, he probably could have cooled the action and saved some lives. As it was, the popular saloonkeeper William Philips and a rival named Harry Parker had died and three others had been wounded.
In the aftermath, there had been grousing up and down the Storyville streets that they were falling back into the Wild West days of decades past, when such violence was a nightly occurrence, before Tom Anderson had hired an ex-New Orleans policeman named Valentin St. Cyr.
Turning some pages to find lighter fare, the detective noted that Joe Borrell (né Borelli) had knocked out Harry Lewis in five rounds for the middleweight title. The last few paragraphs were a compilation of other boxing news, including Jack Johnson's attempts to have his conviction for white slavery overturned so he could return to the ring.
A few more pages into the local news, Valentin came upon a small item about a Negro boy named Louis Armstrong who had been arrested for shooting off a pistol on Carondelet Street. According to the article, the boy was being placed in the Colored Waifs' Home. Valentin wondered if it was the same Louis who had roamed the streets with the kid who went by "Beansoup" for several years. The age was about right. The detective recalled that all the kid ever wanted to do was eat and ask endless questions about Buddy Bolden. The boy had heard stories and had to know if they were true. Valentin told him what he could and still spare his tender ears.
He read on, feeling guilty that his eye was wandering for any items from the District. It was a harmless vice. Hadn't he just the night before refused to travel there and help a madam? Still, he felt like someone was looking over his shoulder and whispering in his ear that Storyville was no longer his business.
The law firm of Mansell, Maines, and Velline was located in a two-story building of new brick on the corner of St. Charles and Girod. The street doors were tall and plated in brass that shone with such a polish that they always made Valentin imagine the gates of heaven. At this time of morning, with the sun up over the river, those same portals positively glowed so that he could see his reflection, a blur cast in hazy gold.
Compared to those gilded doors, the lobby beyond them held all the charm of a mausoleum. The walls were lined with shelves of law books, portraits of distinguished gentlemen from generations before. The attorneys and law clerks padded about in near silence, their faces dry and sober.
The legal work undertaken on the premises was just as arid, mostly the contracts, mergers, deeds, and other legal documents that kept wealthy New Orleanians that way. The occasional lawsuit added some spice, and delicate confidential matters arose just often enough.
Human beings were weak, no matter what their station. They made errors in judgment and fell victim to vices. The firm's clients could not afford their good names to be tarnished, their reputations to be dragged through the mud, their mistakes to be exposed on the pages of the daily newspapers or scandal sheets. And so their attorneys sometimes required the talents of a man like Valentin St. Cyr, now stepping up to the front desk, where a stiff-backed, blank-faced woman of middle years barely nodded a greeting, disapproval pinching her face so tightly that it almost folded.
The office at the end of the long corridor was occupied by Samuel Ross, one of the junior partners. Valentin knocked once and opened the door to find him standing behind his desk, fanning through a sheaf of legal-size papers as he murmured into an ornate telephone.
Ross had contacted him over a year ago about a husband and father by the name of Mayson, whose family had connections to the New Orleans diocese of the Catholic Church. Mr. Mayson had disappeared, and there were whispers that he had gone crazy and was holed up with a low-down Storyville harlot. The lawyer offered Valentin a sizable reward for locating the errant soul and returning him home.
In less than twenty-four hours, the Creole detective knocked on the door of a stifling Conti Street attic and found Mayson and the crib whore. Though the girl, a child of no more than sixteen, was thin as a stick, dog ugly, and foul smelling, Valentin saw the dreamy look of ardor in Mayson's eyes as he gazed upon his trollop. It was actually touching in a sordid way.
Touching or not, the romance was over. The girl screeched like a cat when she saw how meekly her patron surrendered to the Creole detective. Though her mouth snapped shut when Valentin fixed his stare on her, and then curved into a ghastly, gap-toothed smile once he handed her a twenty-dollar gold piece—as much as she could hope to make in a month working in a crib.
Valentin had a touring car idling in the alley behind the building, and within the hour, Mr. Mayson was delivered to the Louisiana Retreat, a private sanitarium located on Henry Clay Avenue on the west end of the city.
The detective learned some weeks later that his name had been passed to Ross by Miss Anne Marie Benedict, the daughter of one of the victims in the last major case he had investigated. It was a surprise, because he hadn't heard a word from her since the matter and their personal affair had ended. Justine knew what had gone on between him and the wealthy white woman, so he had the good sense to lie about who had recommended him for the job.
In any case, the Mayson family was relieved and Samuel Ross delighted. He referred Valentin to another attorney at the firm, this one with a well-to-do client who had suspicions about how his wife was spending her mornings. When that led to yet another job, a door to another career opened, and he decided to walk away from Storyville.
It was an abrupt departure, badly managed, and he left injured feelings in his wake. Once it was clear that he was gone for good, he was as much as shunned. Except for the occasional message from the saloonkeeper Frank Mangetta, he hadn't heard a word from anyone in the District. Not until Miss Parker's maid showed up at his door.
The attorney now laid the handset of the telephone in the cradle, pushed his papers aside, and peered over wire-rimmed glasses at his visitor.
"Good morning," he said.
Samuel Ross was a short, round man, as bald as an egg, and, unlike the other attorneys, a pleasant fellow. Never one to look down his pudgy nose at the detective, h
e seemed to take odd pleasure in his clients' more ridiculous scrapes. He also exhibited a never-ending fascination with the red-light district. He was the only one at the firm who knew about Valentin's past there and took full advantage.
Is it true what goes on at the Circus? he'd whisper. Are there really houses over there just for women? Is Tom Anderson as sharp as they say? And so on.
"Do you want anything?" Ross asked him. "Coffee?"
Valentin shook his head and produced a notebook from his jacket pocket. Flipping it open, he proceeded to share the information he had gathered on two matters. The first concerned the young wife of a bank manager. As the detective described it, the affluent home life that Margaret Renard enjoyed did not keep her from visiting the dirty back room of a certain Chinese herb shop in an alley off Common Street.
"It's definitely an opium den, and she's been there more than once," Valentin said.
Ross frowned. "What the hell? Why doesn't she send one of the maids? Isn't that what most of those women do?"
"She wants to hide it," Valentin said.
"So she smokes her pills on the premises?"
"She's spent most of several afternoons."
"How many times?"
"Three that I know of. Probably more. I have someone watching the place."
The attorney pondered the information, his fingers caressing his shiny pate. "What can we do about it?"
"I'll tell the chink who runs the shop to stop selling to her," the detective said. "I guarantee they don't want a white woman there in the first place."
"But won't she just find another shop?" the attorney said.
"I'll put the word out," Valentin said. "They'll all heed it. No one will want the trouble."