Jass (Valentin St. Cyr Mysteries) Page 27

  She made a vague gesture and came up with a tiny smile. "Are you sleeping in your clothes now?"

  He looked down at his rumpled shirt and sagging trousers. "I've had a few hard days," he said.

  "But you're all right?"

  "I'm as good as I can be," he said, now peering closer. "What about you? You look..."

  "Pale?" He nodded. "I stopped taking that medicine. It doesn't feel so good."

  "I need to talk to you," he said.

  Justine sat down heavy on the love seat. "Talk about what?"

  "I need to know what Tom Anderson has on you."

  "I'm so sorry, I—"

  "What is it?" he demanded harshly. "Six people are dead in this city! Dominique was murdered because someone was trying to get to me. Tom Anderson's trying to stop me, too. And he's been using you and whatever it is you've got hidden."

  She cringed. "What good will it do if I tell you?"

  He took a breath to calm himself. "It's all tied up together, Justine. It's a piece of the puzzle. Because I have to know. Because I'm asking."

  She knew the look on his face. He wasn't going to give up. And there was something else: he was trying to keep up the hard front, and yet she detected a glimmer of concern for her. She hadn't felt that in a long time. He was looking to protect her, too. She wished she had just gone ahead and confessed a long time ago and gotten it over with.

  "I'll tell you," she said resignedly. "I'll tell you." She nodded to the armchair. "You'll want to sit down."

  Valentin sat, staring at her face.

  "Please, I ... I'm..." She bowed her head and folded her hands before her. "All right," she whispered. "All right."

  She had done this a hundred times in her dreams. She had rehearsed the way she would tell him so that he would understand. She could never bring herself to do it. Now she didn't have a choice.

  She began by going back miles and years, arriving at a clearing along the bayou outside the town of Ville Platte, and the dirt yard of the little shack with the rotting clapboards, leaking tin roof, and the smell of dead things moldering in the soggy earth.

  It happened on a Saturday in August in the steaming height of summer. Her father stood in the doorway, barefoot, in a greasy shirt, his suspenders hanging down to his knees. He wore that look, the glowering, dull-witted grimace he saved for his children. He looked like he knew that they had been sent there to torment him and he was the one to make them pay.

  She told Valentin that if the Regulators ever needed proof of what they said about the races mixing, they could point directly to her father. She had never solved the mystery of how her mother, her true mother, had ended up with such a black-hearted devil.

  She glanced at Valentin, her mouth dipping. "Course I found out later just how stupid some women could be about their men," she said. "Even some who oughta know better."

  Maybe, she said, he hadn't looked so bad courting, in his one good suit, his nut brown face scrubbed, his black hair oiled slick and shiny and parted down the middle, his mustache trimmed and waxed, his pale eyes sneakily shy. He must have been some picture, given what he became.

  It was even more puzzling that she and her brothers and sisters—each one decent-looking and not without wits—had sprung from his loins. Maybe they hadn't; maybe they belonged to the man who plowed the next field over. That would explain a lot. It could have been what made this one who claimed to be her father so evil. Or maybe it was his wife, their stepmother, a weak stick of a woman, cold and angry when she wasn't sick in bed. Their true mother had died giving birth to a ninth child. Justine barely remembered her face.

  She stopped for a moment and saw the way Valentin was watching her, cautiously, almost tense, as if he might jump up and run away at any second. She knew she could keep him there, though. Once she took him deeper into the story, he wouldn't budge. She knew that much about him. So she went back to it.

  It was a bad day. There had been many of those, too many to count, but this one was the worst. As the hours had passed, the old man had revisited his still in back of the house and worked his way through his brood, finding an excuse to lay his razor strop to each one in turn. There had been bruises and red welts, shrieks and howls, sobs and tears.

  Though Justine was the youngest girl, she tended to the others as best she could, with cool mud and embracing arms. Except for her brother James, two years her senior, she was the only one with any spirit left. The rest of them had been broken by the years of cruelties.

  The sun went down and the old man got meaner by the minute. James would be next to face his wrath. Then it would be her turn. The old man would lay the strop aside to free his hands so he could grab her by the hair, drag her around back of the house and into the shed, where he would lift up her shift and have at her. He had done it before, and she knew it would be worse if she tried to fight him. She saw that raw, hungry look in his bloodshot eyes and knew he was already fixing on it for this night.

  She looked at Valentin, saw his deep gray eyes staring.

  "But this time, it didn't go like that," she told him.

  "No?"

  She shook her head.

  Something was different that evening. There was an alien weight in the already thick air, like the electricity before a storm. The riotous scent of the wildflowers that grew along the banks of the bayou mixed with the biting odor of ozone. Even the low light over the slow-moving water had shifted to an odd ancient green. The shadowy and haunting ether had the other children huddling and rolling their eyes in fear. All the while, Justine felt a sharply bitter taste rising from her gut.

  James stood at the corner of the house, his face grim and rigid as he flexed his hands. Justine looked at him, sending a message, and he gave her the faintest nod.

  "It was a signal," she murmured. "I had to get to the old man first."

  Valentin said, "Get to him how?"

  She had moved into his field of vision, turning his vile gaze away from James. He snorted, wiped the back of his hand across his nose in one direction, then the palm across his mouth in the other. His red, dirty eyes swam as he tried to focus.

  She was wearing a cotton shift that doubled as a nightdress and clung to her supple body at every curve. She knew how she looked. When she was alone and in front of the tall mirror in the back room, she guessed that in the shift, with nothing on underneath, she could make a man slaver like a dog or rut like a pig. Especially a drunken cur like her father.

  Now she saw Valentin draw back a little, like he didn't want to hear what was coming, and yet couldn't quite tear himself away.

  The old man stood at the top of the gallery steps, watching her with those wet eyes, too drunk to see that it was a show. She gave him a small smile and moved off around the side of the house, her body swaying like a willow tree.

  "I heard him come down off the gallery and I knew I had him," she said.

  He laid the strop over his shoulder, hitched his pants, and descended the broken steps, stumbling and biting off a curse as the bottom one gave way. He walked past James as if he wasn't there, trailing Justine like he was in a trance.

  She got around back of the house and slipped into the shade of the live oaks at the edge of the bayou. She stood by the stack of firewood he had bent her over time and again. It was one of his special places.

  His mouth twisted into a vile excuse for a grin as he stepped closer, his fingers already beginning to fumble at the buttons of his trousers, thinking that she had finally gotten the idea and wasn't going to fight anymore.

  He was so mesmerized that he didn't sense James coming up from behind to his side, two paces off his right shoulder. "When he caught the movement in the corner of his vision, he stopped and swung his head to one side like a bull.

  "Goddamn you," he growled at his son. "Get around front."

  James stayed where he was.

  "I said"—he reached up to grab the strop in his fist—"get back around front until I'm done here!"

  James said, "You're do
ne now," and brought up the knife that he had been holding at his side around, and with one long stride, planted it squarely in his father's barrel chest.

  The old man's eyes bugged and his mouth dropped open in a soundless shout. Justine gaped as James jerked the knife out. Blood, bright red, bubbled and cascaded down her father's shirt and trousers. His hands flapped to the gaping chest wound, as if he could stanch the red fountain. "With a keening groan, he took two staggering steps, dropped to his knees, and then pitched forward onto his face. He tried to crawl, clawing into the gray dirt, leaving a slug's trail of red. His mouth opened and closed like a swamp turtle's.

  "Then James gave me the knife," Justine said.

  Valentin watched her. "And what did you do?"

  "What did I do?" Her face looked terrible, paling, almost ugly. "I said, 'Turn him over.' James grabbed hold of him by the shirt and put him on his back. I pulled the buttons off his trousers."

  "Oh, god...," Valentin said.

  "I'd had dreams about it," she said, her eyes glazing and her breath coming short. "Dreams that I had him like that. And I would turn him over, open his drawers, and cut him like a hog while he was still alive." Her hand was in a fist, as if she actually held the blade.

  Then her grip relaxed. "I couldn't do it."

  The old man was looking up at her in shock and horror, his hands now pawing weakly at the seeping hole in his chest. She bent over him and held the knife poised for an endless second, then straightened and threw it into the bayou. She felt her stomach revolt and bent her head away to vomit. She was sick and dizzy and had to lean a hand on the woodpile for support. Her father was gasping something, a strangled prayer for Jesus to save him. He could barely move now, though his eyes were open and staring. He was soaked in red from his chest down.

  Justine said, "James grabbed hold of him by his shirt and dragged him to the bank. The water was deep, maybe eight or ten feet. He stopped, like he was waiting for me. So I went and helped push him down the bank."

  Grunting and cursing, they shoved the heavy body until it tumbled through the slick mud, over the exposed roots, and into the oily green water. He rolled one time, so that the last thing he saw before he went under was the pitiless eyes of his son and daughter staring down at him.

  She sagged as if all the air had gone out of her. Her shoulders hunched and she clasped her hands. "So that's my secret. I took part in the murder of my father. I came this close to cutting off his yancy with a knife. Then I helped my brother push his body into the bayou while he was still breathing and I watched him die."

  Valentin waited a few seconds. "What happened after that?" he said softly.

  "My stepmama saw what was going on and she took the other children inside where they couldn't see. Later on that night, we got them all packed on the wagon and we rode into town."

  They rode through the darkness toward Ville Platte. Justine remembered that the children did not speak at all and would not look at her or at James. They huddled numbly in the back as the wagon creaked along through mist as heavy as cotton. When they got to town, they said muted farewells and they all went their separate ways.

  "Went where?" Valentin said.

  "To Lafayette. We had kin over there to care for them. James went on. He took another name and moved to Atlanta."

  "And what about you?"

  "I ran off and joined up with a show. I took Mancarre for my name. That was my grandmama's family."

  As she wound her story down, Valentin could not read anything from her face, only that she looked at once young and old.

  "So this Lieutenant Picot, he knows all about it?" she asked him.

  "Yes. And so does Tom Anderson. That's what they're using to tie my hands."

  "I wonder how they found me," she said.

  "A little bit of investigative work is all it would take," Valentin said. "You made a mistake when you took a family name. It connected you. Picot went looking to get something on me. When he couldn't find anything, he went after you and somehow he found out you came out of Evangeline Parish. He contacted the sheriff down there and got the story. Then he told Mr. Anderson."

  "And why do they care about it?"

  "Because Picot's trying to protect someone. He's using it to stop me before I find out who it is."

  "And what happens if you don't?"

  He looked at her. "Then most likely Picot will arrest you on suspicion and turn you over to Evangeline Parish. You'll be tried for murder. Maybe not in the first degree, but it would be murder." He paused, watching her face pale even more. "But ... if I do stop, they'll leave you alone. Which would be fine, except the murderer of six people goes free." He stared vacantly past her. "Six people, including Dominique."

  The clock chimed lightly the quarter hour. Justine's chin came up stubbornly and some of the color returned to her cheeks. "I don't expect you to do it, Valentin," she said in a measured voice. "You don't owe me nothing."

  He stayed quiet, staring at the swirls on the carpet. She was wondering what else she could say that—

  "The question is why," he blurted suddenly. "He's got Tom Anderson dancing to his tune. He's using this trouble from Ville Platte to keep me off the case." He stood up and started to pace. "Because he's protecting someone. A woman. I can't figure out why."

  "What woman?"

  "Her name's Emma Lee Smith."

  Justine gave him a look. "Smith?"

  He flipped his hand in the air and said, "I know, I know. That was the first thing I noticed. You'd think she could come up with something better. Anything."

  "Who is she, then?"

  "A white woman who went crazy back-of-town and got put away in the Louisiana Retreat. But then Picot went and took her out of there. She ended up killing herself in jail. So he said."

  Before he realized the words were coming out of his mouth, he was telling her about finding Prince John and his tale about the woman, followed by his own adventure breaking into the Louisiana Retreat. It was like all the times he had come home and talked to her about his work. Though she had never finished school, she loved to read his books and was plenty sharp, with a natural cunning that matched the criminals. After a while, he was talking to her about all his cases. He found her a levelheaded judge, and she enjoyed the gossip that often swirled around his work. It had been a long time since he'd done it, and he could see her whole bearing changing, like the weight on her was easing. It took her mind off her own troubles.

  "She died while the coppers had her?" she said when he finished his story. "Maybe they killed her. And now they want to cover it up."

  He considered, then shook his head. "I don't believe it. I think she's still alive. And I think she's mixed up in the murders.

  "I wonder...," he began. "Picot said she's in St. Louis No. 2. But I wonder who's really in her bier. It could be some crib whore they collected off the street. Or from the morgue. Who would ever know?" He pictured the slimy mulatto attendant with his awful yellow teeth, leering. "It would be no trouble at all."

  Justine saw the look on his face, taut with intent, his eyes sharp as blades and fixed on something invisible. His body had tensed and his breath came shorter as he walked up and down the Turkish rug. He stopped his pacing and stood there for a few moments, then started moving again, this time for the door, breaking the spell.

  "Thank you for speaking to me," he said, the familiarity evaporated and the distance was back, stretching between them.

  "Wait a minute," she said anxiously. "Now what? I mean what about me?"

  "Don't talk to anyone," he told her. "Not to Anderson, not to Picot. No one. Not even your ... friend here."

  "I've never told him anything," she said in a muted voice.

  Valentin fixed her with a look that lasted a second but seemed to cling to her. Then he opened the door and walked out. She listened to his footsteps going down the stairs in a quick patter, moving away, and yet the look in his eyes lingered behind.

  EIGHTEEN

  The sun was alm
ost down when he arrived back in the District and walked through the Saturday evening crowd on Basin Street, catching the music and laughter from windows of the mansions and the raucous jass that was bubbling out from the open doors of the saloons. Along the way, he encountered no less than a dozen familiar faces, rounders for the most part. They gave him the wary, narrow-eyed looks he expected: They'd all heard about Dominique, of course, and probably his battle with Anderson. He was damaged property, to be sure, so they all nodded and moved on.

  Frank Mangetta was installed at the end of the bar, regaling the regulars with a story of two whores who had drawn down on each other in the middle of Gallatin Street in a fight over a fancy man. Both missed their targets, as he related it, but the fellow who was so lucky to have two women doing battle over him was not quite lucky enough. He stepped into the path of one of their stray bullets and fell dead in the street, a smoking hole over his left ear. The two women swore off their dispute and at the cemetery bawled in each other's arms as the man they both loved so dearly was laid to rest.

  The Sicilian was about to launch into another no doubt even taller tale when he saw Valentin sidle up to the bar. He gaped in surprise, then excused himself and hurried to serve the detective personally.

  "You feel all right?" he murmured, his black eyes warm with concern.

  "Yes, why?"

  "Because you've been having a rough time. I heard about the girl. I couldn't—"

  "I guess I'll live," Valentin cut him off curtly, and, to Mangetta's astonishment, downed his Raleigh Rye in one swallow and grabbed the bottle to pour another glassful.

  A half hour later, he was two-thirds of the way through the bottle and three-quarters of the way to properly drunk.

  Mangetta hovered nearby, watching worriedly. The detective seemed to be dissolving by degrees into the whiskey. The saloon keeper saw all the familiar signs of a sloppy drunk: wet and bleary eyes, clumsy fingers, head nodding all loose on his neck. He heard the detective mutter, then laugh, then mutter some more, casting mean looks around the room, like he was looking for a fight.