House of the Rising Sun

by James Lee Burke

  He put his sandwich on a plate and pushed the back door open with his foot and filled his mouth with meat and bread and saw Willard down at the river, lobbing pebbles in the current, his back turned. Hackberry walked down the slope, his boots crunching on the gravel. Willard’s cotton shirt was bunched where the strap of his shoulder holster angled between his shoulder blades; his back was stiff, like that of an angry man on a parade ground. The river was low, a dull green, insects hovering in clouds above the riffle in the fading light.

  “Does strange behavior intrigue you, or do you just enjoy prowling around behind people’s houses at dinnertime?” Hackberry said.

  Willard sidearmed a rock across the river and watched it bounce off the opposite slope and roll down to the water. He turned around, his badge and holstered white-handled revolver at odds with his sun-darkened skin and the shadow and gloom that seemed to surround his person.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Hackberry said.

  “Not a goddamn thing.”

  “When did you start swearing?”

  “Just now.”

  “Your wife throw you out?”

  “I’m not married.”

  “In my case, that would mean there’s at least one less unhappy woman in the world. I don’t know about you.”

  Willard dusted off his hands. “You don’t square with me, Hack. But you keep leaving your problems on my doorstep. What do you think I should do about that?”

  “I wish I knew what we’re talking about.”

  “The sheriff in Bexar called me about this woman DeMolie or whatever—”

  “It’s DeMolay. You’re an intelligent man. Stop talking like an ignorant peckerwood.”

  “The sheriff doesn’t believe she’s just an ordinary businesswoman who got rich in the oil patch. He says she ran a place called the House of the Rising Sun in New Orleans. When it got shut down, she went to Mexico. Now she’s here.”

  Hackberry sat on a stump and set his plate by his foot, making sure he didn’t kick dirt in it. “Tell me what you’re so hot about, and don’t tell me it’s because of Miz DeMolay.”

  “I’m mad because I have to protect an old, willful, blockheaded, womanizing crazy man from himself.”

  “I’m not old.”

  “You came out of the womb old. You walk around like every page in the Bible is glued on your clothes. One match and you’d go up in flames.”

  “I’ve never heard it put like that.”

  “That’s because sane people fear provoking someone who left his mush in the oven too long. What’s that red stuff floating in your milk?”

  “Hot sauce.”

  Hackberry went back to eating, pausing only to drink from his buttermilk. Willard’s face looked like smoked pig hide under the brim of his hat.

  “I’m going to tell you what the sheriff told me,” Willard said. “If you act on this information, I’m going upside your head with a two-by-four.”

  Hackberry stood up with his plate and glass in hand, then leaned down without bending his knees and set them on the riverbank. “Don’t speak to me in that fashion again, son.”

  “You test people’s charity,” Willard replied.

  “Maybe so. But I’m done on this.”

  “The sheriff said a man tried to throw acid in the DeMolay woman’s face.”

  Hackberry’s gaze drifted down the river to a canebrake where a calf was caught in the mud and bawling for its mother. His eyes were unfocused, seemingly disconnected from emotion. “Who was the man?”

  “The sheriff doesn’t know. He doesn’t want Miz DeMolay in his county. He says good riddance.”

  “I appreciate you coming by.”

  “Look at me, Hack. Don’t think the thoughts you’re thinking. It’s 1918. We’re in modern times now.”

  “Two years ago, when I was blowing the feathers off Mexican peons, I got a different impression. It must be me.”

  HIS NAME WAS Mealy Lonetree. Some thought his first name was the short version of “mealymouth.” Not so. Mealy was a fixer, a man whose face made you think of a fire hydrant wearing a derby hat. He was the man you saw if you wanted to buy or sell stolen property; hire an arsonist to torch your business for insurance purposes; extort, kidnap, blackmail an enemy; or make your cheating wife or husband disappear. All jobs were subcontracted, so there was never a trail back to the client. His felonious assault price list, one his father had used in the Irish Channel of New Orleans, offered blackened eyes, a lead pipe across the nose, broken fingers, stab wounds, a gunshot in the leg, an ear chewed off, or “the big job.” There was a surcharge for photos.

  Mealy ran a laundry and Turkish bathhouse in San Antonio’s old brothel district, which was now licensed and zoned and had its own directory, called the Blue Book, containing the names and addresses of more than one hundred bordellos and gambling houses. The entrance to Mealy’s office was on an unpaved alleyway, the windows blacked out, a bell on the door. Up and down the alleyway, prostitutes were smoking marijuana openly on produce crates in front of their cribs, some talking to soldiers in campaign hats and puttees, the late sun molten and dust-veiled, as it had been when Hackberry stumbled into Beatrice DeMolay’s brothel in Mexico two years earlier. He stepped across a ribbon of green sewage filled with items he would rather not think about and entered Mealy’s office without knocking.

  Mealy was behind his desk, pear-shaped, dandruff on his black coat, a red paper carnation in his lapel, his eyes disappearing into slits when he smiled. A book of accounting figures was open on his blotter. “Mr. Holland, I’m so happy to see you. Please have a seat.”

  “How’s life, Mealy?”

  “What can I say? The world doesn’t change. So I don’t, either.”

  “Know a lady named Beatrice DeMolay?”

  “I know who she is.”

  “Somebody tried to throw acid in her face.”

  Mealy put down his pen. He flattened his hands on the blotter, deep in thought, his fingers splayed. He drummed his fingers in a long roll. “You’re not going to hurt my feelings, are you? You don’t think I’d be associated with hurting a woman?”

  “No, you wouldn’t, Mealy,” Hackberry lied. “That’s why I came to you and not somebody else. I need the man’s name.”

  “Ask the lady.”

  “She wasn’t at her apartment. I don’t know how much she’d tell me, anyway.”

  “Nobody in San Antonio is gonna throw acid at somebody without permission. And the person who asked for permission would probably be run out of town. If you want those kinds of lowlifes, go to New Orleans. She ran a house there. It was in Storyville. The House of the Rising Sun.”

  “You’re from New Orleans.”

  “That’s why I can speak with authority on the subject.”

  “How about Arnold Beckman? You ever run into him?”

  Mealy was shaking his finger in the air before Hackberry had finished his sentence, his chin raised defensively. “I have nothing to do with the man you just mentioned. I didn’t say anything about him, either.”

  “He’s a pretty bad hombre?”

  Mealy stood up from behind his desk. He seemed shorter and fatter, his hips wider, than when he was sitting down. “What if I buy you some supper? I know how you like Mexican food.”

  “I already ate. Beckman is behind this?”

  “You think a man with that kind of wealth confides in a man like me?”

  “Why did you mention New Orleans?”

  “Because that’s where the lady is from. Before Storyville got shut down, it was filled with the worst pimps in the country. Cut a girl’s face with a razor, put lye in her food. You name it, they’d do it.”

  “All right, if the man Beckman hired to blind and disfigure Miz DeMolay is from New Orleans, what would his name be?”

  “Mr. Holland, I always liked you.”

  Hackberry nodded but didn’t reply.

  “Don’t be dragging me into trouble with this man from Austria,” Mealy said. “Thi
s Hun. That’s what he is, a Hun, right? We just fought a war with those guys. What are they doing over here?”

  “Give me a name.”

  “Jimmy Belloc. Some people call him Jimmy No Lines. Get the picture?”

  “He’s in New Orleans?”

  Mealy’s face had turned gray, his yellow tie crooked on his coat, like a snake with a broken back. “Maybe. Or maybe he’s still in town.”

  “You’re a little emotional this evening. How do you know this?”

  “I saw him two days ago. On the street, right by Alamo Plaza. He recognized me. I kept going.”

  “What’s he look like?”

  “He was in a fire. Maybe when he was a little kid. He’s been stuck with the same face all his life. Mr. Holland, I don’t like being caught between people. Don’t tell anybody what I told you, suh. We got us a deal on that?”

  “I would appreciate you not mentioning I was here, Mealy.”

  “You were here, Mr. Holland. And maybe I got to pay for it.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

  “It ain’t the way I feel. It’s the troot’.” Mealy looked seasick.

  Hackberry took a jitney across town to Beatrice DeMolay’s apartment building. This time she was home.

  HER APARTMENT COULD be entered only through a brick-paved courtyard. The beds were weedless and sprinkled with wood chips and planted with hibiscus and hydrangeas and banana stalks that grew in thick clumps, and windmill palms and caladiums and orange trumpet vine and blood-red bougainvillea that reached to the Spanish grillwork on the balcony. Her face showed no surprise when she opened the door. Inside the confines of the courtyard, the air felt suddenly cold and dank. A light rain had started to fall, and raindrops were ticking on the elephant ears and philodendron, the sun buried like a mean red eye inside a bank of dark clouds. “Heard you had some trouble,” Hackberry said.

  “Really?” she replied.

  “Thought I’d drop by.”

  She smiled. “I thought you might be around.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Come in.”

  God save me from lightning, earthquakes, flash floods, and women who can make you feel like a snail on a hot sidewalk, he thought, trying to keep his face empty, removing his hat as he stepped inside. “Why did you think I’d be around?”

  “Because you’re a thoughtful man, even though you pretend you’re not.”

  The windows of her apartment were ceiling-high, the rugs probably woven in Persia, the hand-carved antique furniture wiped and polished, darkly reflective.

  “Tell me what happened,” he said.

  “There was no moon. Someone knocked. I turned on the outside light and opened the door. The lightbulb had been unscrewed. I saw a jar in his hand. I slammed the door just as he threw it.”

  “You saw his face?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe he was wearing a mask.”

  “What kind?”

  “One that people might wear on Halloween or during Mardi Gras. Sit down, Mr. Holland. It’s good of you to look in on me. But you shouldn’t be disturbed by this.”

  “I’m not disturbed. The man who did it is going to be disturbed.”

  “Sooner or later, Andre and I will find him.”

  “Andre is the zombie?”

  “You shouldn’t talk about him like that.”

  “What’s his formal title? Voodoo priest who kills people?”

  “Would you like a glass of wine?”

  “No, have supper with me.”

  When he told Mealy he had already eaten, he had told the truth. He had not gone to the woman’s apartment intending to ask her out. The words came out of his mouth before he could think. How could he discuss in a public place what they needed to discuss? What was actually on his mind? He didn’t want to answer the question.

  “Did the mask look made of rubber? Rubber with a reddish tint?”

  “Come to think of it.”

  “I don’t believe you were looking at a mask, Miss Beatrice. Do you recognize the name Jimmy Belloc?”

  “No.”

  “How about Jimmy No Lines?”

  Her eyes were moving back and forth. The rain had turned to sleet and was hitting as hard as rock salt, sliding in serpentine lines down the fronds outside the windows. “Jimmy No Lines lived in the French Quarter. I think he did errands for Mealy Lonetree.” She paused. “Did I say something wrong?”

  “I was just wondering if there was such a thing as an honest man in the city of New Orleans.”

  “Many people ask that.”

  “Arnold Beckman is behind this, isn’t he?”

  “Of course.”

  She clicked on a lamp. The shade was hung with gold tassels and painted with multicolored flowers that glowed like moths. She sat down on the divan and pulled the crystal stopper from a decanter of sherry. She filled one glass, then started to fill another.

  “No, thank you, ma’am, I’m not good at taking one drink.” He sat on the other end of the divan, his hat on his knee, his legs too long to put in a comfortable place. “I don’t want to take up a lot of your time, Miss Beatrice. I’d like to be done with my own troubles, but I don’t know as I ever will. This stuff about a cup Jesus might have drank from is a little more than I can handle. The cup doesn’t have anything to do with my life, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let the likes of Beckman get his hands on it.”

  “He believes the only artifact that has more power is the Spear of Longinus. According to the legend, it was the one used by the Roman soldier to lance the side of Jesus.”

  “That sounds like a story out of the Middle Ages. I don’t know as it’ll quite get through the wash.”

  “I had the impression you were a believer.”

  “The question is, a believer in what?”

  “Give the cup to a church. Beckman will leave you alone.”

  “A Mexican padre in sandals and sackcloth is going to protect it?”

  “Send it to Rome.”

  “I didn’t see the Vatican’s name on it.”

  “You’re living in the wrong century, Mr. Holland. When you thought General Lupa was going to put you to death, you told him you had locked John Wesley Hardin in jail. You said you wanted that information on your grave marker. You showed a level of acceptance that probably unnerved him. The American West is gone. Beckman won’t meet you in the street with pistols.”

  “He doesn’t have anything I want. If he kills me, he still won’t get the cup. I should have been embalmed a long time ago, anyway. About dinner, Miss B.—I didn’t mean to impose myself.”

  “I have two parasols. There’s a Mexican café on the corner.”

  THE WIND WAS cold, the rain blowing in ropes off the rooftops when they reached the café. It was smoky and warm inside, most of the food prepared on an open stone pit, the walls hung with banderillas and goatskin wine bags and sombreros and piñatas wrapped with crepe paper. Rather than wine, she ordered a cup of coffee with her dinner. “Did you find your son?” she said.

  “He’s in an army hospital outside of Denver.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “He probably hasn’t had a chance to answer my letters.”

  She waited for him to continue.

  “I called the hospital. An administrator said Ishmael was inching along.” His eyes went away from hers.

  “How bad was he wounded?”

  “He was at the Second Battle of the Marne. It was the last chance for the Germans. I hear they fought like it. I wish I’d been there.”

  “What would you have done?”

  “Got him back home. Nursed him. Made up for not being there when he was little.”

  “You mustn’t talk about yourself like that.”

  “I cain’t figure you.”

  “Because of the type of businesses I’ve run?”

  “That’s not an inconsequential consideration.”

  “I’ve never been interested in people’s condemnation of me. Do you care what people thin
k about you?”

  “In my case, most of what they think is true.”

  “I respect the women who work for me. Few people realize how much courage it takes to be a prostitute.”

  He found himself glancing sideways at the other tables.

  “Do you know what a girl in the life has to endure?” she said. “The outrage men commit on their bodies. The punches in the face. Do you know how many of them are murdered each year?”

  “I think I’m going to have an ice-cold Coca-Cola. You want one?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Miss Beatrice, I went to a sporting house years ago, down on the border. I’ve always been ashamed about it. Not because I slept with a woman for hire. I was ashamed because I took advantage of her poverty and her race. I’m going to have a beer now.”

  “Sure you want to do that?”

  “No, but I’m going to do it anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I never have. Here’s our food. Boy howdy, doesn’t that look good?” He kept his eyes lowered until the cold, sweating bottle of Mexican beer was in his hand and its brassy taste in his mouth, like an old friend moving back into the house, ready to set up shop.

  “What are you planning to do, Mr. Holland?”

  “Eat this food and walk you home.”

  “Then what?”

  “Take care of business,” he replied.

  A half hour later, he stood with her at the entrance to her apartment house. The moon was up, and the banana plants and elephant ears and philodendron were beaded with water, like big drops of mercury.

  “Would you like to come in?” she said.

  “I’d like to, but I cain’t.”

  “Are you going to drink?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said.

  “Please come inside.”

  “That would make me awful happy. I want to get my boy back. But I want to get his mother back, too. Her name is Ruby Dansen. She was a good girl and deserved a lot better than me.”

  “That’s a pretty name. Good night, Mr. Holland.”

  “Goodnight, Miss B.”