by Ray Celestin
‘What’ll it be?’ he asked in a deep, gravelly voice.
‘You the owner?’ asked Michael, flashing his badge.
‘That’s my name above the door,’ said the bartender, jutting his chin out. Michael returned the badge to his inside pocket, took his hat off and placed it gently on the bar.
‘I heard a guy called Pietro drinks here,’ he said. ‘I need to get hold of him.’
The bartender frowned and thought for a moment, rolling the toothpick he was chewing from one side of his mouth to the other.
‘Lotta people drink here,’ he said eventually, with a nod. Michael made a show of craning his neck to look around the half-empty bar.
‘What’s he look like?’ the bartender asked.
‘My age, Italian, greased-back hair, ’bout so high,’ Michael said, holding up a hand to what he guessed was the right height. The bartender nodded his head gently as if confirming something with himself.
‘Yeah, I know him. Troublemaker,’ he said. ‘He don’t drink here no more.’
From the corner of his eye Michael could see the barflies slowly edging away from them. He tapped his fingertips against the bar and smiled.
‘You know where I can find him?’ he asked.
‘Sure,’ the barman said with a smile. ‘He works the doors at the Kitty-Kat Club over in the Tango Belt.’ The bartender grinned at him and Michael got the feeling he was happy to be sending trouble Pietro’s way. ‘Tell ’im Tito sent you.’
Michael nodded and smiled.
‘I’ll be sure to do that,’ he said. ‘Thanks for your help, Tito.’ He stood and put his hat on.
‘So what did he do?’ the barman asked as Michael was turning to leave. ‘Molest another kid?’
Michael stopped and turned back around, suddenly afraid they had been talking about a different man.
‘That’s how come he don’t drink here no more,’ the bartender explained.
Michael stared at him for a moment, then took his hat back off.
‘What happened?’
‘One o’ the other guys here, old-timer called Joe, he heard some rumors, called him out on it. The animal put him in the Charity Hospital, didn’t care that Joe’s going on sixty. I ain’t having no one like that in my bar. I got kids o’ my own,’ he continued, tapping his chest with his index finger. The man’s indignation seemed false, somehow, as if he was just playing the outraged man because he knew it was expected of him.
‘Good for you,’ Michael said, trying not to sound sarcastic.
He smiled, turned and left the bar, glad to get into the cold, wet air of the street. It was a forty-minute walk to his house, through roads that were empty and slick with reflections of an overcast sky. As he walked he mulled over this latest turn of events. He was surprised at the barman’s description of Pietro. He had expected the man to be a Mafioso, not a violent doorman for one of the city’s nightclubs. And a child molestor to boot. Was Michael wrong about the killings being orchestrated by the Family? Were they actually related to some kind of prostitution ring or Tango Belt vendetta? The case kept on changing, squirming about in Michael’s hand like a thrashing fish. But after so many weeks of disappointment, he could sense he was close to the end. Pietro had arranged for the delivery of the list of victims to the killer, and now that Michael knew where he worked, finding him would be easy. He was just a few steps away from solving the case.
36
Lewis sat in Ida’s kitchen while Ida scurried around the house looking for a couple of umbrellas to take on their journey. The kitchen was bright and cleanly furnished, and on one of the walls was a series of photographs, each one framed in thin, burnished metal. Lewis killed time by studying the photographs and reminiscing, his eye caught by one in particular. It showed, in pale shades of black and white, fifteen Negro boys sitting in rows in a dusty yard, wearing peaked caps and ill-fitting tunics. Each of the boys held an instrument, and on the bass drum at the bottom of the picture were inscribed the words:
The Colored Waifs’ Home Brass Band
None of the boys smiled, wearing instead looks of uncomfortable pride – a mixture of embarrassment, posturing and budding self-worth. At the bottom of the photograph the names of the boys had been stamped in copperplate print: Isaac ‘Ikey’ Smooth, Thomas ‘Cricket’ Walker, Gus Vanzan . . . The writing identified the boy fourth from left in the back row as ‘Little’ Lewis Armstrong. The boy in the picture was a slighter Lewis, thinner, with a look of uncertainty about him.
The whole wall was taken up with photos of the band, each from a different year. Lewis looked over the rest of the pictures, noting how the faces changed, how people flickered in and out – arriving in one frame, growing old in the next, disappearing in a third or fourth, to be replaced by a new face, a new personality to be molded. The only constant was the thin middle-aged man who sat in the middle of each group, growing a little more stooped in each photograph – Peter Davis, Ida’s father and the music teacher at the Waifs’ Home.
The home was located in a rural area outside New Orleans, an area of dairy farms, dirt-tracks and honeysuckle forests. Whenever Lewis happened to catch the fragrance of the blossom, he was instantly reminded of his time in the home. It was a time he looked back on fondly, although his arrival there was anything but pleasant. He had been sent to the home when he was twelve, in the second great wrenching of his life, arrested on New Year’s Eve for shooting a gun into the air. It was the custom in Back o’ Town to celebrate the festive season by letting off Roman Candles and guns of all descriptions. That particular New Year’s Eve, Lewis had snuck into the cedar chest that Mayann kept at the foot of her bed, taken his uncle’s .38 pistol from it, and filled it with blanks. He met up with the members of his street-corner quartet out on Rampart Street, and in the middle of the celebrations, he pointed the gun skywards and let off six shots, unaware that a grim-faced policeman was standing a few feet behind him. Eighteen hours later, after spending the night in a cell, Lewis was in the back of a police-wagon, heading out of town with a clutch of other doleful Negro boys. Without being present at his own trial, without having seen a lawyer, or even his own mother, Lewis had been convicted by the juvenile court and sentenced in his absence to an indefinite stay at the home.
Professor Davis didn’t think much of Lewis when he first arrived – Lewis was from Liberty and Perdido, the worst two streets in New Orleans, and Professor Davis expected him to be nothing but trouble. So Lewis had to wait for six months before he was allowed to join the band for practice. And when Professor Davis did let him join, he started him out on the tambourine. Lewis took the snub in his stride, and eventually the professor showed him how to play a cornet. Lewis excelled and ended up becoming the bandleader, marching the boys out on the parades they performed in at Spanish Fort, Milneburg, the West End and Front o’ Town. When they paraded through Lewis’s old neighborhood, Mayann came onto the street to watch him and the locals showered them with coins.
Professor Davis tutored them to an exceptionally high level, teaching them a repertoire that included Liszt, Haydn, Rachmaninoff, Bach and Mahler, music Lewis still listened to on the windup Victrola. On Sunday nights Freddie Keppard and his jazz band would play at a concert hall not too far from the home, close enough for some of the boys to catch the music as they lay in their bunks, listening intently, the evening air thick with the scent of the honeysuckle trees.
The kitchen door opened and Ida came sauntering in, breaking Lewis’s reminiscences. She smiled and handed him one of the two umbrellas she was holding.
‘Ready?’
Lewis nodded, and Ida noticed what had caught his attention. She joined him in staring at the photographs for a moment, but for her they were just pictures she passed every day.
‘Lewis?’ she said after a while, turning to face him with a serious look. ‘This ain’t an art gallery.’
They walked to City Park Avenue and caught a series of streetcars that took them across town. As they journeyed, Ida cast a few
furtive glances towards Lewis, who was unusually silent. She wondered if he was still mulling over the waifs’ home photographs and the memories they had provoked, or if he was still shaken from the attack in the Irish Channel. At one point during one of the walks between tram stops, he turned to her and asked her how she was getting on since the attack. Ida shrugged and told him she’d had a few sleepless nights and maybe it would take a while for her to really get over it. She also told him about how she’d thought of giving up the investigation, but that something had pulled her through, had forced her not to quit, and now she was glad she hadn’t.
She didn’t, however, tell him about her biggest fear, that she might have fatally wounded the boys when she swung the rock at their heads, or given them some kind of permanent injury. Instead she thanked Lewis for all his help, for taking her back home and comforting her. Lewis had smiled, somewhat sadly, she thought, and she took the opportunity to ask him how he was doing.
‘Just fine,’ he had said, telling her he was used to getting into scrapes, but Ida knew he was lying. She guessed that, just like her, he didn’t wanted to talk about it too much, choosing instead to process it all internally. The episode had reminded them both how much hatred there was in the city, and how much of it was directed at people like them. It was a dispiriting reminder, but they knew, from years of living within a system of organized malice, that there was no point dwelling on the venom of others.
They continued the journey in silence, trekking to and from the stops under the inadequate shelter of the moth-eaten old umbrellas Ida had fished from the back of a broom cupboard. By the time they arrived at the tumbledown building at the edge of Robertson Street, they were soaked through. Lewis checked again that they were at the address Lulu White had given him, then he knocked on the door and the two of them stepped back and inspected the building – the timbers were warped and rotting, the structure straining hard not to collapse under its own weight.
A slim octoroon girl opened the door. She was young and barefooted, wearing a ragged skirt and a white cotton vest that squeezed against her breasts. She had a pretty face, but it was marred by an eye bruised purple.
‘Carmelita Smith?’ Lewis asked, and the girl frowned as she tried to figure out who they were.
‘You the two detectives?’ she said eventually, with a patronizing smirk that made Ida instantly dislike her.
Lewis nodded and tipped his hat.
‘You can call me Leeta,’ said the girl, before turning back into the building.
She led them up a staircase and through a corridor that was lined with doors, each one leading onto the crib of a sporting girl, and Ida thought of an animal market, poultry in cages, one stacked on top of the other.
Leeta led them into a dank, shadowy room, eight feet by ten, where the wallpaper peeled off the walls in wide fern-like arcs. The furniture was utilitarian – an iron-frame bed, a cabinet and a washstand – and it made Ida think of a workroom or a factory. She noticed the rat holes in the skirting boards, and the thick stench of mold in the air, and she curled her lip without thinking. Leeta caught the expression and glared at her. Then she lit a cigarette and propped herself up against the windowsill.
‘Well, ain’t we the bruised threesome,’ she said sarcastically, nodding at Ida and Lewis’s faces. ‘Make yo’selves comfortable,’ she added, gesturing towards the bed. Lewis and Ida smiled as best they could and sat.
‘First things first,’ said Leeta. ‘I don’t like strangers poking around my business. I only said I’d talk to you cuz Lulu said you was friends o’ hers, and Lulu’s offered me a job once my face clears up. So ask your questions quick-like.’
Lewis and Ida shared a look, both of them put off by the girl’s practiced brusqueness.
‘Did he do that to you?’ Ida asked, motioning towards Leeta’s face.
‘Morval?’ said Leeta, with a sideways smile. ‘No. One o’ his johns. You could call this the last straw. Hence my moving over to Lulu’s employment. This and how I’m getting a little old for some of Morval’s clientele.’
She spoke in a matter-of-fact way, with a world-weary demeanor and a resignation that said she had accepted the way things were. But Ida sensed there was something contrived to it all, that the defiance was just bluster, a way of hiding herself from the world.
‘Lulu said Morval closed down his stable when the new ordinance came in,’ Lewis said, frowning.
‘Lulu got that wrong,’ Leeta said, turning her acid glare in Lewis’s direction. ‘He never closed it down, just made himself a whole lot more discreet.’
She blew smoke into the room and the smell of tobacco mixed with the smell of mold, making the air even more unpleasant to breathe.
‘We, uh, we’re looking into the Axeman killings, and we think Morval might be involved,’ Lewis said finally.
‘Nothing Morval does is ever on the up-and-up,’ Leeta said, raising her eyebrows. ‘He was always more into knives than axes, though. What gave you the idea?’
‘Morval’s been sending someone called Johnson to search the crime scenes,’ said Ida, and Leeta nodded.
‘Johnson’s Morval’s flunky,’ she said. ‘Morval keeps him hooked on snow and Johnson does whatever he’s told.’
Leeta took a long, heavy drag on her cigarette and Ida noticed the black dots and purple lines splayed out across her arms.
‘I hear there’s a reward,’ Leeta said abruptly. ‘Few grand, I hear. I know somethin’ might help you. How about we talk numbers?’
‘Sure,’ said Lewis, shrugging.
‘I want a grand.’
Lewis turned to look at Ida, who nodded.
‘OK,’ said Lewis, ‘if we get the reward, we’ll give you a grand.’
Leeta smiled like a child who had got her way. She took another long slow drag on her cigarette and began to tell her story.
‘I dunno what you know about Morval’s stable,’ she said, ‘but it’s kids. He pays the parents off in the hick towns he goes to buying furs. Tells ’em he needs kids for sewing and factory work in the city. I guess some of the parents are stupid and some of ’em just plain greedy. He puts ’em in houses around town. Sends ’em out to parties or to people he knows.
‘Well, one o’ these girls stayed in the same house as me for a while. Morval done brought her in from some village up north o’ town. Anna. Little slip of a thing not mo’ than ten years old – blonde hair, green eyes. Thought she was in town to work in Morval’s factory. Cried day and night till she got used to things.
‘Anyway, one morning she came back and told me about a party she went to with a few of the other girls. Some mansion somewhere. On the way back, she overheard Morval talking to some dago ’bout getting rid o’ evidence and needing a stash spot. Anna thought they were talkin’ ’bout the girls, and she got nervous she was gonna get killed. Next day, Morval moved her in with some family on the other side o’ town.
‘I got to liking the girl while she was there. Felt sorry for her, you know. And the girl looked up to me like I was the moon or something. I ain’t never had that before. So a few days later I paid her a visit. Wasn’t really a family there, just a pa and his two daughters. The pa liked the girls a lil’ too much and made extra dough having ’em work for Morval. Anna said she liked living there, what with the two daughters being the same age and all. I teased her a bit, ’bout how scared she’d been, and she said she’d seen Morval come to the house a heap, to the basement there, and that’s what he meant when he said he had to stash the evidence somewhere new.
‘I thought that was kinda odd, you know, why he was hiding things in this cat’s house? So I asked her about it. She said him or Johnson would come round some nights and mess about in the basement. Woke her and the two daughters up. The two daughters said they knew what was going on, and that it had to do with the Axeman, cuz they’d heard their father argue with Morval about it. I asked her what she meant, and she said the daughters wouldn’t tell her. Kept it a secret cuz if their father found o
ut there’d be hell to pay.
‘Day after that, Morval came round to see me, all red in the face and pop-eyed, threatening to beat the breath outta me. Asked me what in hell I was doing going over to the house and talking to Anna. I told him we got close and I was being friendly. Nothing more.’
Leeta paused and Ida saw a sorrowful look pass over her face, the first slip of emotion she had failed to keep hidden since they had been in her presence.
‘I heard from some of the other girls a couple of weeks ago that Anna had disappeared. That’s kinda why I’m telling you. I’d like to see that devil pay. If you wanna find evidence linking Morval to the Axeman, it’s plumb easy. All you gotta do is break into the basement o’ that house. I got the address.’
A few minutes later they stepped out of the building and back into the rain. As they made their way to the tram stop they both stayed silent, lost in their thoughts, spirits depressed. Despite Leeta’s barbed manner, Ida felt sorry for the girl, and she wondered how she’d tumbled into a life of violence and prostitution, living in an apartment that felt more like a prison cell than a home. Ida was not that much different to Leeta in age and looks and race, and it chilled her to think that it was only the slightest divergence in fate that had left her so much better off.
She looked over to Lewis as they trudged past the cemetery, and saw that he too was lost in thought, a frown playing across his brow. He had more experience of the sporting business than she did, but she could tell that even he was upset by the state of the girl. Ida guessed that if there was any hope for Leeta it was in her finding a better life in Lulu’s employment.
As they waited for the tram, Ida thought about the little girl Leeta had talked of, the slip of a thing with blonde hair and green eyes, and she wondered what had become of her. Then she remembered the other girl she had seen recently – the dead girl dredged from the river when Ida had been searching the docks. She’d read in the newspaper a few days afterwards that no parents had come forward to claim the body, and Ida thought about what Leeta had said, about the parents in the hick towns selling their children to Morval.