Jass (Valentin St. Cyr Mysteries) Read online

  It had started with a chance meeting at the French Market one afternoon a month or so before. Miss Antonia had greeted her kindly, warmly, more like a doting aunt than a former employer. They didn't speak of anything important, just an exchange of pleasantries. The madam must have sensed something, though, because a week later the first of the three messages arrived.

  Justine had kept the notes for weeks now, so long that the first one was beginning to fray at the edges. She knew what was happening and first dismissed the idea, then found herself returning to it again and again. She threw the notes away, then went back an hour later to retrieve them from the trash bin. She had even gone so far as to ride to Basin Street, only to turn around and ride home again without crossing over. Now, without thinking about it any further, she waited calmly until another hack and a motor wagon passed by, and stepped into the street.

  Valentin woke up to the noon whistle. He rolled over and sat up slowly, feeling the kinks in his bones from sleeping too long in one position. His head was groggy, like he had a hangover.

  He dawdled and drowsed for another quarter hour, then stood up and stretched. He pulled on trousers and shuffled into the kitchen. Justine had gone out somewhere and hadn't left him anything, no coffee on the stove, nothing in the oven, no note.

  He went out the back door and down the creaky wooden stairs to the privy. When he came back inside, he ran water for a bath and munched on an apple while he waited for the tub to fill. By the time he got out, she still hadn't come back, and he wondered idly if she had stayed so long at church because she had extra sins to confess.

  He got dressed and walked over to Poydras Street to find a café where he could linger over breakfast and a newspaper.

  With the long overdue bill in hand, the desk clerk knocked and called out Lacombe's name. There was no answer, so he called again, then used his passkey. He found the Negro lying on the floor, his body as rigid as wood, his eyes and mouth open in a ghastly mockery of shock. A telltale scribble of dried blood trailed down his forearm and a syringe hung there in the graying flesh like a brass leech.

  The clerk wasn't shocked at all. He'd seen it a dozen times before. He spent a quick half minute going through the musician's pockets; if he didn't, the first copper on the scene surely would. He came up with nothing of value. No surprise there, either. He saw the clarinet case on the end of the bed and decided it would be worth something at a pawnshop. Lacombe wasn't going to need it anymore.

  The clerk put the case under his arm, locked the door behind him, and went back downstairs to call the precinct to send a wagon.

  Valentin came back to find Justine in the kitchen in one of her cotton frocks, fussing over a simmering pot. When she greeted him, he caught a flicker in her eyes that came and went in the space of a second. She was in one of her distracted moods, acting all nervous and not meeting his gaze.

  He sat down in the front room and pretended to be busy reading his Picayune. She left her pot to simmer and went into the bedroom to lie down, murmuring of another headache. She left her purse open when she dug out her prescription, and he noticed that the three pink envelopes that had been resting there for so many weeks had disappeared.

  He thought over what that might mean, then abruptly decided that he didn't want to be there when she woke up. He had some work to do anyway.

  He went down the stairs and along Magazine Street, then walked all the way through the Quarter to the corner of Conti, around the white walls of St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 and through Eclipse Alley to St. Louis Street. Four blocks north, he found the first address.

  The talk of policemen extorting money that Tom Anderson had passed on was odd business. Everyone from the commissioner to the patrolmen on the beat shared in the graft that was collected from the houses. The donations from the madams were made in an organized way, weekly, usually through the precinct sergeant, who then passed the money up and down the line. It had worked that way for decades and few ever bucked it. In the rare instance when someone did, the response was direct. Some lucky souls escaped with a brutal beating. The bodies of others who misbehaved were fished out of the muddy Mississippi days later. So anyone who knew Storyville would understand that it would be insane to step outside the bounds and risk Anderson's ire as these characters had.

  Valentin stepped up to the facade of the house, a run-down two-story brick building near the corner of Robertson Street. He wasn't familiar with the address, so along the way, he picked up a copy of The Blue Book, the pocket-sized volume that listed almost every sporting girl in the District, by race, by religion in the case of the Jew Quarter, and by certain specialties. The ladies at No. 1604 St. Louis Street were of course billed as graduates of an unnamed academy of amorous arts in Europe—even though it was unlikely that any of them had ever traveled any closer to that continent than the Georgia state line.

  He knocked on the door and was greeted by the madam herself, a fat, surly-eyed woman named Carrie Butler. She was in her stocking feet and a worn Mother Hubbard. When he stated his business, she muttered gruffly and waved him inside.

  The house was filthy, reeking from one room to the next of mildewed wood, stale cigar smoke, and close sweat. The plaster on the walls showed islands of stain and the floor was buckling on a crumbling foundation. It looked like it hadn't seen a good cleaning in years, and there hadn't even been an effort to mask the grime that had soaked into the carpets and curtains.

  Miss Butler led him to the back of the house and into the kitchen. She sat down heavily at the table and grunted for him to take the opposite chair. He told her he preferred to stand.

  The women who passed in and out while they talked were a sorry lot. Without the blessings of rouge and mascara, their faces were dry and drawn, like they suffered from unknown ailments. Girls who couldn't have been more than twenty looked twice that age in the hard light. Each one of them appeared hung-over and wrung dry from the night before, and not one even pretended to smile as she checked him up and down with cold fish eyes.

  Though the establishment was advertised in the Blue Book as a French house, the truth was that these women, working the bottom rungs of the Storyville ladder, would do almost anything for money. They were coarse and ugly and a few small steps away from one of the cribs on Robertson Street that rented for ten cents a day. For all that, they were as much a part of the District as the denizens of the grand mansions on Basin Street.

  Of course the madam understood this, because she began complaining to him the moment her vast bottom hit the chair. "You tell Mr. Tom Anderson something," she groused. "We ain't next door to his damn Café, but this is still Storyville. You tell him that." She rapped her knuckles on the table. "Ain't like we don't pay the goddamn coppers enough as it is! I hand over my envelope every Monday evening. I got chits in a jar over there that say I paid. Then these two show up at the door."

  Valentin said, "When was this?"

  "Wednesday, around suppertime. They said they was police. The one pulls out a badge, tells me I got to give him twenty dollars. Said it's a special fee or he's gonna shut me down. What the hell was I gonna do? He had a badge. So I give him the twenty dollars."

  She pulled a soiled handkerchief from her sleeve and blew her nose, a wet, noisy snort.

  "That ain't all," she went on. "I ask him for a chit to show I paid, he says, 'We don't give no goddamn chits.' Tells me to shut up about it. But they still ain't finished. One of my girls come down the stairs to see what the fuss is about, and this fellow takes ahold of her. He pushed her into the closet under the stairwell and makes her give him French right there. Then the partner takes his turn. When she's finished, they don't give her a dime."

  "Then what?"

  "Then what?" Her mouth twisted. "Then they left. Said they was gonna come back next week to collect again. Said if we tell anyone, there'd be hell to pay." She clenched both her hands into fists. "He grabs hold of me again, says, 'And you know what I mean!' When they walked out the door, they was laughing."

&
nbsp; "Can you describe them?"

  What she offered didn't help much. They were of average height, the partner slightly heavier than the one who did the talking. They both had medium brown hair, slicked with cheap-smelling pomades. She remembered that the one who showed the badge had a long nose and that his teeth were yellow. She'd never seen either one of them before.

  "The fat one had a pistol on him," the madam said. "Mary, that's the girl he took under the stairs, she saw it in his trousers."

  "What kind of pistol?"

  "I don't know. A regular revolver, I guess."

  "Was there anything else?"

  "That's all." She gave him a snide look. "Now what are you going to do about it?"

  "It sounds like a single incident," Valentin said. "Couple tramps passing through."

  "What about the badge?"

  He shrugged. "Fake."

  The madam said, "It wasn't no damn fake! I seen enough New Orleans badges to know."

  He wasn't about to argue with her. He told her he would be looking into it and that she should send word immediately if anyone saw either of the men again. She gave a grudging nod and got up to see him to the door.

  Valentin visited a second house, an even shabbier affair a block away, and got a similar story. This visit had come about an hour after they were reported at Miss Butler's. The same demand for twenty dollars was made. The men didn't force anything on any of the girls, but the madam said that they were clearly drunk.

  Valentin guessed that they had collected at Carrie Butler's, then visited the first saloon they happened upon to spend their booty. Once into their cups and with the money gone, they realized how easy the pickings had been and went out to find another likely house. They had no doubt caroused with the money they had collected there, too, and would have been throwing cash around like sailors all up and down St. Louis Street.

  He spent the next two hours visiting the saloons and sporting houses, covering three blocks south and west. The two impostors were identified at three establishments, though no one knew who they were. Then the leads dried up. The pair wouldn't have dared to venture much farther. At that point, they would be on tonier streets with finer sporting houses and better restaurants and music halls, the kind of places that kept hired toughs on the premises to deal with such problems. They'd be lucky to get past the front door.

  Valentin thought briefly about the badges and wondered if they might be rogue coppers, then dismissed the notion. It didn't make sense for a policeman to go off on his own. No, these fellows had come into the possession of a fake badge or a real one that had been stolen or lost. They would have been better off throwing it in the river. Instead, they saw a ticket and got greedy. They had gotten away with it the first time around. If they came back for more, Valentin would be waiting.

  Lieutenant J. Picot, short and thick, his skin yellowish and his dark hair oiled, slammed the telephone into its cradle and then banged his fist down with such force that it sent his stack of papers flying into the air like startled birds. With a loud grunt of irritation, he called for one of the junior patrolmen to come in and clean up the mess, then stood up and stalked to the window.

  The lieutenant had thought that St. Cyr was done poking his nose into police matters. After that Black Rose business, he had all but disappeared from sight. Now he was at it again, snooping around the east end of the District.

  No one was more incensed than J. Picot that Tom Anderson, the most powerful man in the city, one of the most powerful in the state of Louisiana, had no faith that those sworn to uphold the peace could do so. At least, that was the way Picot saw it.

  St. Cyr in particular exasperated him. For Anderson to keep a few thugs around to crack heads was one thing. Some of those fellows were off-duty coppers. Employing a private detective was something else entirely. St. Cyr wasn't even a Pinkerton. It was not just a professional slight; it was personal, too. He didn't like the Creole and never trusted what was going on behind those flat gray eyes. Just the thought of it made his blood percolate.

  He spent a moment calming himself, then gave orders to two of his men to go to St. Louis Street and deal with the problem over there.

  He turned away from the window to pace up and down while the patrolman who was trying to collect the papers dodged his steps like a clumsy pup. He knew it was his own fault. He had played the wrong hand during what the papers called the Black Rose murders. St. Cyr could have had him thrown off the force or even brought up on charges over that mess. He didn't, though he just walked away, as if Picot wasn't worth the trouble of an arrest. It left the lieutenant baffled and scared.

  After that, they had managed to stay out of each other's affairs. And now a niggling matter of crude extortion on St. Louis Street seemed to have occurred for the sole purpose of putting St. Cyr in the lieutenant's path, and Picot in his place.

  He stopped his pacing and sat down at his desk once more, thinking that crossing swords with St. Cyr again might not be such a bad thing after all. There was talk going around that the Creole detective had fallen into some kind of funk and had lost his edge. If it was true, then the lieutenant just might get a chance to even the score and put things back where they belonged.

  It was also a busy weekend at the City Morgue, and it was not until the late afternoon that one of the attendants got around to the body of Terrence Lacombe. There was a note pinned to the deceased's shirt, noting that he was twenty-five years old, had died of an apparent overdose of morphine, and that he was a "musician" by occupation. He received his toe tag forthwith, and his body was wrapped in gauze and placed on one of the shelves in the cooler. In three days, if no family or officials claimed him, he would be dropped in a wooden box that would then be loaded into a boxcar, carried off, and buried unceremoniously in an unmarked backwoods grave, erasing Terrence Lacombe from the earth as if by a stroke of God's own thumb.

  FIVE

  A few minutes after ten o'clock that evening, the front doors of the Café opened to admit two out-of-town drummers with familiar giddy looks that announced they possessed more money than sense. Valentin could almost hear predatory eyeballs shift in every corner of the room. Right behind these two came Beansoup, his gap-toothed face bobbing, a balloon on a string. His wide eyes got wider at the bright lights and happy noise that had the big room all aglitter and vibrating like a machine.

  "Are you on your way to St. Mary's?" Valentin said pointedly. The kid's attention came back around, his mouth setting in a pout. He made a rough gesture that was half a shrug, half a nod.

  "So if I send somebody over to Miss Burt's in a half hour, you won't be on the premises?"

  "No, I won't be on the goddamn premises!" Beansoup crabbed. He pointed at the bar. "How about a drink? It's a long walk."

  "You can have root beer or a Chero-Cola," Valentin said, and went into one of his pockets for a Liberty quarter. "Then you can walk or ride. A car will be by in a few minutes."

  Beansoup accepted the coin with an absent frown. He decided against a drink, given the way the detective was eyeing him. He started for the door, then turned around, his moon face brightening. "Did you see Miss Justine?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "Miss Justine ... did she come to see you?"

  "When?"

  "Tonight. I saw her..." He blinked rapidly and his voice trailed off.

  "You saw her where?" Valentin said.

  The kid swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing. "I think ... it was ... maybe it wasn't her."

  "Where did you see her?" Valentin's voice was even.

  "Out front of Antonia Gonzales's." Beansoup's face flushed and his eyes skittered away. "But maybe it wasn't her."

  Valentin said, "You better be on your way."

  A few blocks back-of-town, a six-piece band was working hard, churning out one frenetic jass tune after another. The throng that filled Abadie's on Marais Street to the rafters couldn't get enough. They drank and danced, and the more they drank, the wilder they danced, until the floor looked like a s
tormy sea of flailing arms, juking legs, and bobbing heads.

  It was an odd gumbo of a crowd: black, Creole, Italian, white, and a sampling of in-betweens. There was the usual number of rounders and whores, working their trades. The players at the card games upstairs had to raise their voices to be heard over the braying horns and stomping feet.

  The jass the band was playing had only crossed over Canal Street within the year. Before then, it would have been heard only in low-down dives and dance halls out on Rampart Street. That was where Bolden and his gang had started it all, grabbing up gutbucket, ragtime, church music, cakewalks, and anything else they could find, mixing it up, and shoving it through the bells of their loud horns. It was something no one had ever heard before, raw and raucous, noisy and fast. First the Negroes went wild for it, then it was the Creoles, and then the American New Orleans got the fever. Bolden was gone, but there was no stopping the trouble he'd started, and jass rolled across Canal Street. Now, every night of the week, a half-dozen bands were rattling windows and shaking walls.

  The band at Abadie's was among the best. Out in front was Anthony Cimonelli, a short, fat Sicilian blowing a trumpet, puffing his cheeks, and all but coming off his feet with each mighty breath. To his left was Willie Cornish, a big man, over six feet tall and as wide as a freight train, swinging his valve trombone back and forth over the heads of the gyrating dancers and leading the band with nothing more than nods of his thick brow and flicks of a free finger. A freckle-faced Creole called Little Red tootled a clarinet in crazy loops as a skinny stick of a Negro named Vedre thumped a bass fiddle and Danny Dooley, a tough-looking Irish kid who couldn't have been more than fifteen, snapped a snare drum and crashed a cymbal. Jeff Mumford, the guitar player, sat on a café chair, his legs spread as he flailed an arch-topped Kalamazoo. His head turned from one side of the room to the other in a lazy arc as his right hand smacked the strings, laying down a solid, chugging rhythm for the horns, and his left hand did a four-fingered dance of shifting chords up and down the neck.