Jass (Valentin St. Cyr Mysteries) Read online

  She knew that all she had to do was open her eyes again and it would all go away. She kept them shut tight, though, and now the picture broadened until she could see the entire clearing, and the children, filthy and ragged, running this way and that. Only the occasional sweet peal of laughter broke the grim quiet.

  She heard footsteps. Someone was coming. Her breath got short as a shadow blocked the sun. Then a key rattled in the lock and the vision in her mind melted away, taking all the details with it, as the four white walls of the living room rose up again.

  Valentin stepped inside wearing a strange face, his dark gray eyes spiked with hard light. It startled her back to the day they had first met, when he pushed into the room where the fellow from the traveling show had trapped her. She was in the corner, a sheet pulled up to cover her, a knife in her hand that she was ready to use.

  Valentin had resolved the mess by knocking the man cold with an offhand violence that frightened and excited her. Afterward, he told her to Come to his room if she wanted, and that's where it all began. She hadn't forgotten the look on his face that day, like he saw nothing and everything in the same instant, and now there it was again.

  Some moments passed. "There's a hack waiting downstairs," he said, sounding ruminative, as if he was mulling this bit of news for himself.

  That finally brought her out of it. She knew where she was and what she was doing. She felt her heart sliding into her gut and she wanted to say something, but there was nothing she could think of that wouldn't sound empty or foolish, so she stayed silent. She couldn't meet his gaze, either, and dropped her eyes.

  "He's waiting," he said gently, and moved one step to the side, out of her path, then out of her line of sight.

  She gathered herself and made for the door. She still didn't look at him, didn't offer him any words of farewell. He watched her go by. She closed the door behind her and went down the stairs.

  The Negro driver had been standing on the banquette, enjoying a smoke. When he saw her, he tossed the butt into the gutter, straightened his cap, and offered her a hand up. He pulled himself into the seat and snapped the reins. The hack rolled into the cobbled street, the nags giving out little snorts and the wheels clattering in the still afternoon. Justine sat very straight in the seat. Though she felt him watching from the balcony, she kept her eyes fixed dead ahead. She was afraid if she looked up and met his gaze, she'd go back and then she'd never get away from him.

  As they turned the corner onto Common Street, she entertained a vague pang of guilt about Beansoup. She could just imagine the look on that elfin face when he realized that she had left. He might think it was all his fault. She was sorry she hadn't taken the time to find him and try to explain that there was no way she could stay on Magazine Street anymore.

  Valentin stood in the doorway that led onto the balcony and watched the hack move off down Magazine and turn the corner, heading north onto Common Street. He went into the bedroom, took off his shoes, and stretched out on the bed. It was very quiet. Though he was bone tired, he didn't fall asleep right away. He held the image of the hack rolling away down the street. She hadn't looked back at all.

  The hours passed into the evening. Every now and then, he thought he heard footfalls. She didn't appear, though. No one did. Magazine Street was quiet. More rain came, this time a slow and steady drizzle that cast a soft mist over the entire city, downtown and up.

  By eleven o'clock, he'd had enough. He dressed and walked down to Canal Street to catch a car heading north. He walked through Storyville, right past Antonia Gonzales's mansion. He wondered if she was already entertaining a gentleman and thought what a shout it would cause if he was to walk inside and catch her in the act.

  He thought better of it. It was too rainy anyway, and there was almost no one about. If she was behind those lamp-lit curtains, she was most likely sipping brandy and telling Miss Antonia her woes with the Creole detective who had run her off.

  He turned onto Bienville and made his way to the Frenchman's on the corner of Villere Street. It was closed Mondays, but the door was unlocked, and when he ducked inside, he was not surprised to find a group of musicians there, including some of the best in the city, with Morton at their center, also not a surprise. When the piano man saw Valentin, he stopped in midsentence, his hand lofted.

  He said, "Well, now. Speak of the devil."

  Valentin took a quick glance at the brown and olive faces, recognizing about half of them. Buddy Carter and Freddie Keppard were there. Frankie Dusen and Anthony Cimonelli. A few others he recognized vaguely. A fellow serving as bartender. Two whores who had closed their cribs and wandered by slouched at the end of the bar.

  Those he knew recalled his friendship with Bolden and the part he had played in that business. They always treated him with a certain deference and now nodded their heads in greeting. The rest just stared. He pulled up a chair, feeling two dozen curious eyes fixing on him.

  "We were just now talking about Jeff," Morton said as he sat down.

  The gazes that had shifted from the piano player went back to the detective, who didn't speak. Frankie Dusen said, "It was a goddamn shame what happened, Mr. Valentin. Him, of all people."

  Valentin guessed that Morton had been bending their ears when he walked in, probably announcing to one and all that it appeared Mr. St. Cyr couldn't be bothered investigating the murder of the likes of Jefferson Mumford. The small cloud of accusation that was closing in around him made him think about standing up, offering a good-night, and heading back out the door. Speak of the devil, indeed.

  Instead of making an exit, though, he settled in a chair. Someone passed a signal, a clean glass appeared, a cork popped, and he was handed a short tumbler of Raleigh Rye, the uptown beverage of choice. He nodded a thank-you and took a short sip. The musicians continued to watch him carefully.

  No matter what Jelly Roll said, he probably owed these fellows something. "I don't suppose there's anything going around about what happened to him," he asked momentarily.

  Now glances were exchanged, but no one spoke up. For once even Morton exhibited the sense to keep his mouth shut.

  Finally, Freddie Keppard cleared his throat. He always acted a little uncomfortable around Valentin, as if he thought the detective held him to blame for the bad business with the Bolden Band. He shrugged his round shoulders and said, "None of us here knows nothin'."

  "He wasn't having any trouble?"

  "Everything seemed to be good with him," Anthony Cimonelli said. "We was working regular. He had plenty of money."

  "What about at home?"

  "He kept a nice little house," the Sicilian went on. "And his woman ... You ever seen that woman of his?"

  Valentin shook his head.

  "He was doing fine," Cimonelli said, bringing a gurgle of quiet laughter.

  "What about trouble with anyone on the street?" the detective said.

  Frankie Dusen spoke up. "Jeff got along with everybody." The others in the room murmured assent.

  "Any gambling debts?" Valentin went on. "Problems with dope?" The questions met with denials. "Then maybe it was just a random crime. Like a robbery that went bad."

  "He had everything left on him," Morton reminded him quietly. "Every dime was still in his pockets."

  "Sounds like a regular angel, all right," the detective said. He took another sip of his whiskey. It was so quiet he could hear the rain falling on the cobblestones outside. "He had a problem with someone, didn't he?" he said, now looking from face to face. "Or he'd be sitting in this room right now."

  The line had been delivered in his detective's voice, clipped and cool, the one he used when he was working an investigation. The men were watching him and perking their ears, trying to mask their expectancy. He sat back and folded his arms.

  This was not what he had come for. He had been looking only for some relief from his thoughts and had stumbled into a trap. He glanced at Morton, imagining the self-satisfied smirk that was lurking beneath his innoc
ent expression. The other men in the room were as sober as judges, though not one of them was exactly meeting his eyes. They all wanted the same thing, for him to speak up for them, to be their lance. In other words, for him to give in and do their bidding. He decided to hang on to a shred of his dignity and wait them out. For a distracted moment, he wondered if any of them knew about Justine. It wouldn't take long until they did. Then he thought about waking up in the morning to face empty rooms.

  Freddie Keppard said, "So what now, Mr. Valentin?"

  "What now?"

  They all knew what was going on. He wanted someone to say it.

  "You think you can find out what happened to Jeff?" Keppard's voice was hushed.

  He let the silence hang for a moment. "You all understand that the trail is cold. When a murder case doesn't get solved quickly, it's more than likely that it doesn't get solved at all." No one said a word, as if they had nothing to do but wait for the next words to drip from his tongue. As it was, he held out until the last second. "I'll see what I can find out," he offered grudgingly.

  There was a murmur and the air in the room seemed to lighten in a collective sigh. One of the fellows reached out with the bottle to top off his drink. He looked over the rim of the glass to see Morton watching him. Then the piano man broke the gaze, swung around abruptly on the little stool, flexed his fingers, and began hammering out a raggedy blues on the stained and chipped keys. After a short introduction, he began to sing, his mouth curling around the lyrics.

  Mama bought a chicken, yeah, and mama bought a duck

  Put 'em on the table just to see if they would fuck...

  There were hoots of laughter as the other men put their glasses down and picked up their horns. By the tenth bar, they were riding the train, blowing raw and funky.

  The two whores who had been hanging at the end of the bar and cursing musicians and their worthless yancies came staggering over and started to dance. One was pale white and ugly, with stringy black hair, sunken eyes, and a witch's hooked nose. She was too far into the bottle to do much but stumble around and push her bony pelvis against the nearest solid object, human or otherwise. Her scarlet sister was a fair-looking, young mulatto, chubby and bright eyed, with heavy hips and melon breasts that heaved so mightily under her thin cotton shirtwaist that fellows had to duck every time she shifted her weight.

  Valentin stretched his feet out and took it all in. This was the way it had been since aught-one. These middle-of-the-night joints where the musicians got to put down the music they played and the masks they wore for white audiences and for the folks back in the neighborhood. Here they could unwind and blow off all the steam they wanted to. It must have been something like this in Africa, where his mother's descendants had lived for untold centuries, raising a raucous noise to get the attention of the gods. It was what Bolden and a few other lesser lights had created, in these same low-down saloons and worse.

  There were nights that he thought the band was going to blow the building right off its pilings, they played so fast and so loud, to the sheer besotted delight of the sports and rounders and whores and drunks who came to see them. That was at first. No one could contain that much excitement, though, and it wasn't long before more respectable Negroes and Creoles were wandering down Rampart Street. The music and the men who played it were cursed roundly by preachers and politicians, which of course made it all the more enticing. So some brave white folks, college boys mostly, had to find out what it was all about.

  That caused some trouble. A bunch of no-account niggers and dirty wops raising hell from dusk until dawn was one thing. If white sons went chasing these rude pied pipers, could their fair sisters be far behind? The saving grace was that all the sober heads agreed that it couldn't last and that sanity—and decent music—would soon prevail.

  They called it nothing at first. Then they started calling it "jass." Some said it was from jaser, French for "chatter," which a newspaperman had used in an article. Others swore it wasn't that at all and that it had come from jasi, or "party," in the Mandingo language of West Africa.

  The name stuck and the music stayed. It was more than a passing fancy, as if it had slithered north from Rampart Street and jumped Canal into Storyville, and not just at saloons like Nancy Hanks's and Joe Lala's on the back end of the District anymore. Lately, jass was stirring up half-a-dozen establishments, edging ever closer to Basin Street. These rough Joshuas blew their horns and the walls were tumbling down. If you believed Jelly Roll Morton, someone was taking exception to that and making their point with the blade of a knife and a vial of poison. Valentin wondered if anyone would really go that far over some no-account musicians.

  He didn't believe it, even though he had to admit that more than a few people who'd see colored and white playing together would wonder where would the niggers show up next. The churches? The schools? The sporting teams? It was melodramatic to believe that these players that now surrounded him were starting something that large, but even to Valentin it was not so far-fetched as to be impossible.

  It was coming up on dawn when they stopped and put down their horns. Valentin stood, stretched, and headed out the door. He ambled south to Canal Street in the company of the first of the laborers on their way to work. He caught a car and hopped off at Magazine Street as the bells of St. Boniface tolled six.

  The players at the Frenchman's went home. Morton wanted to leave with Valentin, but he sensed that the detective would just as soon do without him and lingered. Singly or in pairs, they headed off for their flats, their shotgun homes, their dingy hotel rooms. By the time the morning sunlight was haloing the rooftops, the last one had gone out and the bartender had crept up the steps to find his cot. The white sporting girl wandered away as if she had somewhere to go, leaving the chubby mulatto, who had fallen asleep at one of the tables, her head drooping upon one of her substantial breasts.

  Some minutes passed and the door creaked open again. A figure, huddled in a long coat, crossed the sawdust floor and stood over the sleeping woman. A finger prodded her soft flesh until her groggy head came up, and she blinked at a face that seemed to be out of focus.

  After a dead second, a voice that was soft yet stern said, "Start talking."

  EIGHT

  Valentin was not fully awake and yet he sensed the difference, like there was a quiet pocket in the air of the room. He had known Justine for almost three years and she had shared his rooms for almost two. Now she was gone, and from the hollow space that lingered about the bed, it appeared she had left a ghost or at least a bit of a shadow behind.

  Rather than lay there and brood on it, he got up and moving. He fumbled getting his coffee and a midday breakfast of Italian bread toasted on the stove and buttered, a chunk of provolone that was getting hard at the edges, and some mortadella that was turning gray, along with a piece of melon that she had left wrapped in waxed paper. When he was finished, he cleaned the table and washed his dish. It was all very precise and mechanical, and he took some satisfaction in completing the task.

  He sat back down at the table to finish his coffee. The twenty-four hours came back to him like a series of pictures. He pushed his mind past the images of Justine walking out and disappearing down Magazine Street and arrived at the late-night scene at the Frenchman's and the faces, black, brown, and olive, watching him.

  If his recollection was accurate, he had announced to one and all that he was going to investigate the murder of Jefferson Mumford, though the details of how he had reached that point, and why, were hidden in some corner of his brain. It had something to do with an unspoken rebuke in the air, the seeds ably planted by Jelly Roll Morton. There was something else hovering, too: a sense of alarm that was stirring up among the players over who would be next.

  He grumbled over giving in like that, and in public. He could have worked the case quietly, privately. It was most likely all smoke anyway. Of course, he could do nothing, and sit around his rooms and see the pictures and listen to the echoes over and ov
er again. As he finished his coffee and headed off to the bathroom, he uttered a small word of thanks that on this of all days, he had something to occupy his mind.

  Lieutenant J. Picot was standing at his second-floor window, watching the early afternoon traffic on Royal Street when he saw St. Cyr step to the corner of Conti, glance left and right, then cross over, heading directly for the building. He stared down at the Creole detective for another startled second, then came away from the window with a rough gesture for his desk sergeant to follow him into the corridor.

  The two coppers were planted like sentinels at the top of the marble stairs when the Creole detective appeared.

  "Well, well, well." The lieutenant had his hands on his hips and was wearing a thin smile as he looked down at his visitor. "If it ain't Valentin St. Cyr, the famous private detective. New Orleans' own damn Sherlock Holmes." His eyes, dirty pennies, slid sideways. "Sergeant, did you know that this here fellow used to be a police officer? That's right. Didn't stay with us very long, though. And he's the one cracked that Black Rose murder case." Though there was much venom mixed with this honey, Valentin kept his expression placid. Which of course irritated Picot all the more. "What's your business here?" he snapped.

  The detective stopped on the third step. "I'm looking into the killings of Jefferson Mumford and Antoine Noiret."

  Picot said, "Who?"

  "Two men who died in the past week," Valentin said evenly. "Noiret was murdered in a rooming house on Philip Street. Mumford was found in an alley off Marais on Sunday morning."

  Picot's expression said, So?

  "Are you investigating either one?" the detective asked.

  The lieutenant's jaw clenched. "And just what the hell do you care about a couple of dead nigger jass players?" His lips twisted. "Oh, yes, I forgot. They're all friends of yours, ain't they?" He made it sound like it was a crime.