Jass (Valentin St. Cyr Mysteries) Read online

  Jass

  A VALENTIN ST. CYR MYSTERY

  David Fulmer

  * * *

  A HARVEST BOOK • HARCOURT, INC.

  ORLANDO AUSTIN NEW YORK SAN DIEGO TORONTO LONDON

  * * *

  Copyright © 2005 by David Fulmer

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

  in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy,

  recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission

  in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be

  mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,

  6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  Map of Uptown New Orleans and Storyville

  reprinted by permission of Poisoned Pen Press.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Fulmer, David.

  Jass/David Fulmer.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Police—Louisiana—New Orleans—Fiction. 2. Jazz musicians—Crimes

  against—Fiction. 3. New Orleans (La.)—Fiction. 4. Creoles—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3606.U56J37 2005

  813'.6—dc22 2004011620

  ISBN-13: 978-0151-01025-7 ISBN-10: 0-15-101025-0

  ISBN-13: 978-0156-03191-2 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 0-15-603191-4 (pbk.)

  Text set in Sabon

  Designed by Cathy Riggs

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Harvest edition 2006

  A C E G I K J H F D B

  * * *

  As always, to my family,

  near and far, before and after me.

  * * *

  "I don't know where it come from. And I can't say what it was, 'cause it was one of them things you know without sayin'. I sure knew it when I heard it, though. I sure did. Back then it was called jass. Later on they called it jazz, but it wa'nt the same no mo'. It was somethin' else. Ain't but a few that 'members the way it was befo'. Pretty soon there won't be no one at all. Not a one."

  —D. O. DELAREAUX

  New Orleans musician, shortly before his death in 1950

  * * *

  ONE

  Antoine Noiret came awake with a start, as if he'd been jerked out of sleep by a rough hand.

  He groaned, dead tired. The crazy bitch had kept him up for two hours after they had stumbled home from the saloon, and that was after playing for six with nary a break. He thought she was going to let him pound her hips for his trouble, but all she wanted to do was rail at him, and once she got going, she screeched like she was mounted on his yancy and thrashing for all she was worth. He didn't quite understand what all her fussing was about. At one point, she pulled open her shirtwaist and hiked up her petticoats, demanding to know if that was what he wanted.

  Indeed it was; otherwise, what was she doing in his room at that hour? She was the one who had come sniffing around him, after all, first watching from the back of the hall, then coming around to whisper in his ear as she made promises with her eyes. He had hoped to finish out his grueling night with a good fuck and then sleep like a dead man through the dawn and well into the day.

  She had other ideas, and when he reached for her, she dropped her skirts and went to stalking about the room, a sweaty, half-dressed mess, her rouge and mascara running in clownish streaks, calling curses down on his worthless self. After a few minutes of this abuse, she wound down and lurched into the hall, slamming the door so hard it shook the walls. Antoine was baffled.

  It didn't matter. He grunted with relief, glad to be rid of her and her noisy, filthy mouth. It was just as well; he had no business bringing her there in the first place. Not after what had happened before.

  Her steps had barely faded off in the hallway when he dropped into an exhausted slumber, like he had fallen into black water. Time passed until he came half awake to someone moving about in the darkness. He let out a silent groan, praying that she would just go away again and leave him alone. He was done for the night.

  He pulled the damp, dingy pillow over his head, hoping she'd get the idea. The air stirred as footsteps padded up to the bed. Then he heard a dark cough and felt something push into the pillow, a finger perhaps, poking for attention, and it began to dawn on him that there was something wrong about it.

  Because it wasn't a finger at all—it was the tip of the blade of a ten-inch hunting knife. With a certain and sudden precision, the blade plummeted through the pillow and tore into Antoine's neck, just behind the jaw and below his ear. He felt a raw shock of pain and tried to bolt up off the mattress. Though he was a big man, a bigger weight held him down as the knife pinned him like some insect. He thrashed about, his thick arms going weaker and weaker as blood soaked the sheets.

  In less than twenty seconds, he had gurgled a last breath and his hands flapped a final time before dropping over the side of the mattress.

  The knife slid back through the pillow that had muffled his dying grunts. A moment later the door opened and closed like a quiet breath and the footsteps pattered away.

  TWO

  Valentin St. Cyr spent the week working the big room at Anderson's Café, keeping an eye and putting the occasional rough arm on a selection of the card cheats, pickpockets, drunkards, hopheads, and other stray scofflaws who swarmed along Basin Street every night when the sun went down.

  Come Thursday, they were serving drinks as usual and the usual crowd was there. Louis the Lifter and his partner Charlie Bow-wow huddled by the door, taking the measure of the proper gentlemen, young sports, and nervous out-of-towners who were passing inside. Coke-Eye Johnny, once known to the whores as the handsomest man in Storyville, shuffled up and down the bar, all drawn and ragged, seeking another victim upon whom to foist his woeful tale of slavery to the white powder. In the back corner, Chez Boday, sporting a mouthful of gold teeth and a razor scar from ear to chin, was employing his famous dice to relieve a fat Dallas cotton broker of his last dollar.

  Rich white men sat at the private tables drinking the good stuff. The high-rolling gamblers were at their cards, decked out in their finest, and with plenty cash in their pockets, while eager young would-be rounders worked the fringes of the room with a game or a woman and, as always, those few no-account, penny-ante hustlers, grubby sots, and dead-end dope fiends who had not yet caught St. Cyr's eye scurried in and out of the corners, as furtive as rodents.

  Up on the stage, a five-piece band chugged merrily through a bubbling jass number, and the bartenders shouted back and forth over the happy noise. All around the room, gazes shifted when some well-heeled fellow strolled by with a comely octoroon on his arm.

  At some point amidst the frivolity came a hard glance that was met with a sharp word, and, like a swirling eddy, a circle opened in the middle of the polished floor. Two rounders faced each other, one waving a straight razor, the other grasping a thin stiletto. Wicked steel gleamed under crystal chandeliers as the racket in the room dropped a startled notch or two, but it was all over before it began because Valentin stepped out of the crowd and, without a moment's pause, swung his whalebone sap one way and then the other, first catching the knife-toting rounder hard over the ear and then laying it flat against the forehead of the sport with the razor. They went down like two sacks of Louisiana rice and lay groaning on the marble tiles, blood seeping from their misbehaving skulls.

  Valentin waved a hand and a roughneck dragged the miscreants through the crowd and out to the back alley, where they could come to and spend the rest of the n
ight slicing each other like boudin, for all anyone cared. There was a rush of chatter and laughter over the added entertainment. They'd gotten their money's worth this night.

  In his second-floor office, Tom Anderson, known far and wide as "the King of Storyville," heard the commotion from the room below dip like a passing train and straightened in his chair. Ten seconds went by, and the noise resumed at its previous volume. Whatever happened had been met and dispatched.

  Anderson let out a short sigh of annoyance. Though it was exactly what St. Cyr was getting paid for, sometimes the man could be too damned efficient. It was a fine time for a distraction.

  He used it anyway, interrupting the gabbling on the other end of the line with an excuse of pressing business. With a quick promise to deal with the problem forthwith, he laid the ornate wood and brass handpiece into its cradle. He massaged his earlobe absently for a few seconds, then pushed back from the desk and stood up.

  Moving with the deliberate steps of a man who had passed fifty years and 250 pounds with power to spare, he made his way out the door, down the narrow stairwell, and along the back hall to the steamy kitchen, where a staff of eight Negro cooks and a French chef sweated over hot stoves. The waiters banged in and out, yelling for their orders. Anderson steered clear of their bustling way and stepped up to the swinging doors for a peek at the main floor of the Café.

  It never failed to stir him. The room was huge, fifty feet wide and the length of half a city block. Along one wall was the bar topped with Italian marble and fitted with a rail of polished brass, and behind it was a mirror that ran its length and reflected a rolling landscape of liquor bottles, with kaleidoscopic swirls of motion and colored lights beyond. The floor was also marble and crisscrossed with paths of thick carpeting that was spared the indignity of tobacco stains by way of spittoons that had been planted every ten paces. It was a grand sight to be sure, and there was nothing quite like it anywhere on the American continent.

  Anderson shifted his gaze. It was a good crowd, mostly heeled and well-dressed, and every time a bottle tipped, a card turned, or a tune played, he got a little richer.

  He caught sight of St. Cyr in the far corner, scanning the room, as watchful as a hawk. Whatever the earlier nuisance, it had been swept out into the night.

  So all was well. Anderson spent another few moments relishing all this grandeur. Then, with some reluctance, he started back upstairs to pour himself another small glass of brandy and ponder the problems that had been dropped in his ample lap earlier this night.

  It was 3 A.M., the band had long since stopped, and Valentin was waiting for the last of the stragglers to leave when he saw the kid they called Beansoup come strolling in the door like he owned the place. He saw the Creole detective staring at him and raised a grimy hand in greeting. "I got a—"

  "What are you doing out at this hour?" Valentin said.

  "—message from Mr. Jelly Roll," Beansoup stuttered, flinching at the Creole's rough tone.

  "I asked what you're doing out at this hour."

  The kid sniffed and jerked a thumb. "I'm helpin' out over to Miss Burt's. She gimme a job."

  Valentin eyed him up and down, taking in the moon face with the blond hint of a mustache, the pale hair oiled and plastered like wet straw, the body an assembly of angles that didn't seem to connect. With his cracked leather shoes, a suit coat and trousers that were already too small, and the dingy gray derby that perched high on his round head, he looked like nothing so much as the buffoon in a vaudeville routine.

  Valentin put down an urge to snicker at the comical facade, keeping his face stern. He said, "What about Morton, now?"

  "He told me to fetch you. He's asking could you come by on your way home."

  "You wait for me," he said.

  Beansoup gave a nod and a wink, once again all full of himself, put a foot up on the brass rail, and leaned his elbow on the bar like a regular rounder.

  Miss Burt's mansion was only two doors down from the Café. Even at that hour, when almost everything else in Storyville was closing, electric lamps still blazed from the chandeliers in the front rooms, casting arrows of gay light through the tall windows and onto the banquette.

  When Valentin stepped into the foyer with Beansoup at his heels, the two girls who were standing in the archway that led into the parlor turned around and began arranging their smiles. Then they saw who it was, and their thin smiles dissolved. The detective caught Beansoup giving the girls the eye, so he poked the kid's shoulder, pointed to the chair next to the wall mirror, and said, "Sit." Beansoup's face flushed and he huffed angrily. Then he saw the Creole detective's look and did as he was told.

  "And take off your hat," Valentin said more gently.

  He left Beansoup and went into the parlor. It was a big square room with a high ceiling that held a heavy chandelier of tinkling crystal. The floor was covered with thick Persian carpet, and curtains of heavy brocade hung by the windows. All the furniture was of French design, with rich upholstery in bloodred and gold. Lamps with tasseled shades cast a buttery glow along the walls.

  In the opposite corner, three men in evening clothes sat in café chairs, watching the doves cavort before them, their cheeks flushed giddy pink, like they were schoolboys up to some mischief. The girls, all in their evening dresses, looked plenty tired. It was no wonder; in the course of this night, each of them would have serviced as many as a dozen customers. Still, they managed to put on bright faces and make their weary limbs flutter as they performed prancing little dance steps to the music from the piano.

  Even angled into a corner, the instrument all but dominated the room: a beautiful concert grand, pearl white, custom-made to Miss Burt's exacting specifications and transported by train from New York City. Though every professor in New Orleans lusted to lay fingers on the perfect ivory keys, that privilege had for two years been accorded to Ferdinand LeMenthe, who went by the moniker Jelly Roll Morton.

  As Valentin approached, Morton looked up from the keyboard to treat his visitor to a toothy smile that glinted with gold. He winked and murmured, "'Nother minute, all right?"

  Valentin leaned on the sound box to admire the effortless ballet of fingers on keys, thinking about what a complete sport Morton had become in the few years since he had first been hired to play in the parlor of a Basin Street mansion. He had been a gangly kid of sixteen then, a gawky sack of bones who just happened to have sure fingers and a decent voice. So there he was at that tender age, entertaining the sporting women in the finest bordellos in one of the world's most notorious red-light districts and their customers, too, including some very dangerous characters. He played with equal ease the popular tunes of the day, waltzes and ragtime numbers for dancing, the occasional gutbucket blues, and of course a selection of those late-at-night bawdy songs that sent the whores and their sports off shrieking with dirty laughter.

  Young Ferdinand had started using the nickname "Jelly Roll" to hide his profession from his maman and because he thought it sounded just right. A common slang that gutbucket singers used for a certain part of the female anatomy, his moniker had been lifted from a professor he heard on a Mississippi riverboat. The fellow, a fine piano player but a falling-down drunkard who was regularly fished out of the muddy water after toppling over the rail, ended up in the bughouse from drinking too much hot whiskey. Ferdinand decided it would be a shame to let a nickname like that go to waste, and so the classically trained scion of a pious and upstanding Creole family became "Jelly Roll Morton," Storyville piano jockey.

  He had played in all the high-dollar houses at one time or another, hiding his employment from his mother and grandmother. He didn't quite escape the maternal doting, though, because the madams tried to protect his tender eyes by setting dressing screens between him and the girls and their customers. Ferdinand simply poked holes with his pocketknife and got an education that other young men could only dream about. Once he was eighteen, he was on his own and could drop the ruse. Now, at twenty-one, he was quite th
e Storyville veteran. He was, in fact, the best-known piano man in the District.

  Best known though not best. That title went to Professor Tony Jackson. Whatever Morton played, Professor Jackson could render twice as clean and twice as fast. The professor was a regular marvel and everyone in the District knew it. Morton knew it, too, and it gave him no mean distress.

  Leaning there and listening to the cascade of ragtime notes, Valentin recalled the story of a young Ferdinand swaggering up to the famously shy professor and offering to show how well he had mastered the older man's "Mississippi Crawl."

  As the tale went, Morton sat down on the bench next to Jackson without being invited, then flexed his knuckles and went to it, his fingers fairly dancing over the keys in a slick, near-flawless rendition of the intricate composition. Jackson paid polite attention to the music as his bulbous eyes flicked, taking in Morton's lank frame, tawny skin, and green eyes.

  Morton ended the tune with a magnificent crescendo and crossed his arms as if waiting for applause. The room stayed quiet.

  "That's fine." The professor spoke softly, in a lisping whisper. "Though if you want to make it right smooth, you need to practice it double time." He proceeded to demonstrate. After twelve bars, Jelly Roll let out a cry, jumped up, and ran out the door.

  He had learned his lessons in the years since. He could now double-time the "Mississippi Crawl," too, though he could never quite match the professor's fluid touch. So he contented himself with being the flashiest piano man on Basin Street, a sport and a rounder, as brash and boastful as Tony Jackson was modest and retiring. He was known to play the pimp, with sporting women at his beck and call. He could but snap his fingers and have a pill of hop or a card of cocaine delivered directly into his hand. He dressed in forty-dollar suits, tailored precisely by a Jew on Ursulines. Everyone in the District knew the name Jelly Roll Morton and he liked it that way.