Lost River (3 page)

The fellow had turned around, startled. A pistol cracked and in the next instant his eyes flew wide in shock as he staggered and then went down in a heap. In a few gasping seconds, it was over. There was some odd comedy about getting the body into a house and leaving it on the parlor floor. William remembered sneaking back into the night and looking up to see one blazing star in an indigo sky—a good sign.

He opened his eyes and the images fluttered away. Maybe it had been a dream. He had those, wild with colors, shrieking images, and bizarre, clownish characters. Maybe so; but he wasn't imagining the stains on his clothes.

In a spike of alarm, he stripped down, rolled the greasy trousers and shirt together, and hurried to stuff the ball in the back of the closet. His pulse calmed when he closed the door, and he wandered pale naked to the window, where he stood running an absent finger over the scar on his torso. The squalid box of a room offered no view to speak of, just the flat roof of the next building, and beyond that more buildings, and more after that, shades of gray and brown, all the way to the river.

William could see a small stretch of the Mississippi, wide and olive colored, polluted with oil from the ships and barges and foul wastes of the sewers, and loud with a racket of clanging bells, screaming whistles, rude honks, and low moaning horns, all carried along on the slap of the dirty water.

There was more filth on land. The streets were crowded with automobiles, trucks, hacks, and carriages, the gutters awash in horse manure. The whole city smelled of rust and decay and the sour sweat of humanity. There were too many people, and too many of them stared with eyes that made it hard for someone like him to hide.

He knew that if he pushed his mind, he could make this world dissolve and he'd be back on the ward, gazing out over the rice fields that rippled like a gentle green ocean. On the far edge of the last verdant plot was a line of trees. Far beyond that was a ribbon of river that he remembered vaguely as a placid curve of silver that meandered from one horizon to the other as if lost.

A whistle shrieked, tearing a hole in the canvas, and William once again was surveying the dirty panorama of New Orleans. There would be salvation, and soon. Once his work was done, he could leave it forever.

Valentin descended onto Spain Street to the hooting of the barges out on the river as they floated their tonnage to the Mandeville Street wharf, not a quarter mile away. He strolled at an easy pace, enjoying the bright early autumn day. At the corner of Esplanade, he stopped at a newsstand for the morning
Picayune
and stepped outside just in time to climb on the northbound car.

The run up to St. Claude took only a few minutes, and he kept the newspaper folded under his arm until he transferred to a westbound car. It was fifteen jostling, stop-and-start minutes to the beginning of St. Charles, and he took the time to look over the front page.

The top story was the trial of several defendants in the dancehall shoot-out at the 102 Ranch six months before. Valentin remembered hearing about the gunplay and feeling a tug in his gut. He knew at the time that had he been around, he probably could have cooled the action and saved some lives. As it was, the popular saloonkeeper William Philips and a rival named Harry Parker had died and three others had been wounded.

In the aftermath, there had been grousing up and down the Storyville streets that they were falling back into the Wild West days of decades past, when such violence was a nightly occurrence, before Tom Anderson had hired an ex-New Orleans policeman named Valentin St. Cyr.

Turning some pages to find lighter fare, the detective noted that Joe Borrell (
né
Borelli) had knocked out Harry Lewis in five rounds for the middleweight title. The last few paragraphs were a compilation of other boxing news, including Jack Johnson's attempts to have his conviction for white slavery overturned so he could return to the ring.

A few more pages into the local news, Valentin came upon a small item about a Negro boy named Louis Armstrong who had been arrested for shooting off a pistol on Carondelet Street. According to the article, the boy was being placed in the Colored Waifs' Home. Valentin wondered if it was the same Louis who had roamed the streets with the kid who went by "Beansoup" for several years. The age was about right. The detective recalled that all the kid ever wanted to do was eat and ask endless questions about Buddy Bolden. The boy had heard stories and had to know if they were true. Valentin told him what he could and still spare his tender ears.

He read on, feeling guilty that his eye was wandering for any items from the District. It was a harmless vice. Hadn't he just the night before refused to travel there and help a madam? Still, he felt like someone was looking over his shoulder and whispering in his ear that Storyville was no longer his business.

The law firm of Mansell, Maines, and Velline was located in a two-story building of new brick on the corner of St. Charles and Girod. The street doors were tall and plated in brass that shone with such a polish that they always made Valentin imagine the gates of heaven. At this time of morning, with the sun up over the river, those same portals positively glowed so that he could see his reflection, a blur cast in hazy gold.

Compared to those gilded doors, the lobby beyond them held all the charm of a mausoleum. The walls were lined with shelves of law books, portraits of distinguished gentlemen from generations before. The attorneys and law clerks padded about in near silence, their faces dry and sober.

The legal work undertaken on the premises was just as arid, mostly the contracts, mergers, deeds, and other legal documents that kept wealthy New Orleanians that way. The occasional lawsuit added some spice, and delicate confidential matters arose just often enough.

Human beings were weak, no matter what their station. They made errors in judgment and fell victim to vices. The firm's clients could not afford their good names to be tarnished, their reputations to be dragged through the mud, their mistakes to be exposed on the pages of the daily newspapers or scandal sheets. And so their attorneys sometimes required the talents of a man like Valentin St. Cyr, now stepping up to the front desk, where a stiff-backed, blank-faced woman of middle years barely nodded a greeting, disapproval pinching her face so tightly that it almost folded.

The office at the end of the long corridor was occupied by Samuel Ross, one of the junior partners. Valentin knocked once and opened the door to find him standing behind his desk, fanning through a sheaf of legal-size papers as he murmured into an ornate telephone.

Ross had contacted him over a year ago about a husband and father by the name of Mayson, whose family had connections to the New Orleans diocese of the Catholic Church. Mr. Mayson had disappeared, and there were whispers that he had gone crazy and was holed up with a low-down Storyville harlot. The lawyer offered Valentin a sizable reward for locating the errant soul and returning him home.

In less than twenty-four hours, the Creole detective knocked on the door of a stifling Conti Street attic and found Mayson and the crib whore. Though the girl, a child of no more than sixteen, was thin as a stick, dog ugly, and foul smelling, Valentin saw the dreamy look of ardor in Mayson's eyes as he gazed upon his trollop. It was actually touching in a sordid way.

Touching or not, the romance was over. The girl screeched like a cat when she saw how meekly her patron surrendered to the Creole detective. Though her mouth snapped shut when Valentin fixed his stare on her, and then curved into a ghastly, gap-toothed smile once he handed her a twenty-dollar gold piece—as much as she could hope to make in a month working in a crib.

Valentin had a touring car idling in the alley behind the building, and within the hour, Mr. Mayson was delivered to the Louisiana Retreat, a private sanitarium located on Henry Clay Avenue on the west end of the city.

The detective learned some weeks later that his name had been passed to Ross by Miss Anne Marie Benedict, the daughter of one of the victims in the last major case he had investigated. It was a surprise, because he hadn't heard a word from her since the matter and their personal affair had ended. Justine knew what had gone on between him and the wealthy white woman, so he had the good sense to lie about who had recommended him for the job.

In any case, the Mayson family was relieved and Samuel Ross delighted. He referred Valentin to another attorney at the firm, this one with a well-to-do client who had suspicions about how his wife was spending her mornings. When that led to yet another job, a door to another career opened, and he decided to walk away from Storyville.

It was an abrupt departure, badly managed, and he left injured feelings in his wake. Once it was clear that he was gone for good, he was as much as shunned. Except for the occasional message from the saloonkeeper Frank Mangetta, he hadn't heard a word from anyone in the District. Not until Miss Parker's maid showed up at his door.

The attorney now laid the handset of the telephone in the cradle, pushed his papers aside, and peered over wire-rimmed glasses at his visitor.

"Good morning," he said.

Samuel Ross was a short, round man, as bald as an egg, and, unlike the other attorneys, a pleasant fellow. Never one to look down his pudgy nose at the detective, he seemed to take odd pleasure in his clients' more ridiculous scrapes. He also exhibited a never-ending fascination with the red-light district. He was the only one at the firm who knew about Valentin's past there and took full advantage.

Is it true what goes on at the Circus?
he'd whisper.
Are there really houses over there just for women? Is Tom Anderson as sharp as they say?
And so on.

"Do you want anything?" Ross asked him. "Coffee?"

Valentin shook his head and produced a notebook from his jacket pocket. Flipping it open, he proceeded to share the information he had gathered on two matters. The first concerned the young wife of a bank manager. As the detective described it, the affluent home life that Margaret Renard enjoyed did not keep her from visiting the dirty back room of a certain Chinese herb shop in an alley off Common Street.

"It's definitely an opium den, and she's been there more than once," Valentin said.

Ross frowned. "What the hell? Why doesn't she send one of the maids? Isn't that what most of those women do?"

"She wants to hide it," Valentin said.

"So she smokes her pills on the premises?"

"She's spent most of several afternoons."

"How many times?"

"Three that I know of. Probably more. I have someone watching the place."

The attorney pondered the information, his fingers caressing his shiny pate. "What can we do about it?"

"I'll tell the chink who runs the shop to stop selling to her," the detective said. "I guarantee they don't want a white woman there in the first place."

"But won't she just find another shop?" the attorney said.

"I'll put the word out," Valentin said. "They'll all heed it. No one will want the trouble."

"And what about her habit?"

"The only thing you can do is tell Mr. Renard about it," Valentin said. "Tell him he's not going to cure her overnight. He can send one of the servants from now on. It's better than having her wandering around the wrong part of town. He can threaten to have her put in an icehouse if she doesn't agree. Or he can just go ahead and have her locked up right away."

Ross nodded thoughtfully. They moved on. "All right," he said. "What else? Tremont Vines?"

Valentin came up with a small smile. "Mr. Vines's partners can stop worrying. He's not up to anything having to do with the business. I'd be surprised if he's taken an extra dime. He has a mistress, that's all. That's his secret."

They were finished, and Valentin started to close his notebook. The attorney held up a hand. "Wait a minute," he said. "I've got something else."

Valentin waited, hoping that it was something halfway interesting.

"Do you know the name James Beck?" The detective did but couldn't place it and gave a slight shrug. Whatever it was already sounded boring. "He's a state senator. Very powerful, very wealthy, and a very important client. It seems that his son James Jr. and some of his friends paid a visit to Storyville last weekend."

The detective gave Ross a blank look. Young men from good families were regular features around the District. Some lost their innocence there, delivered by a father or uncle to an able sporting girl. It was quite the ritual in certain quarters.

"Apparently there was trouble," Ross went on. "One of the senator's friends in the police department contacted him about it."

"What kind of trouble?"

The attorney shifted in his chair. "The word is that a woman was assaulted. And that James Jr. and his pals were involved."

"Where did this happen?"

Ross glanced at a slip of paper. "On Claiborne Avenue."

The detective cocked an eyebrow. Claiborne and Robertson, the District's lowest rungs, were warrens of cheap, ugly, and mean-tempered whores, a filthy and violent place after the sun went down, and far too rough for rich white boys any time of day.

"How bad is it?" the attorney said.

"It's not good. The woman was assaulted how?"

"I don't have any details," Ross said. "The senator asked that we find out what happened and if there's a problem, fix it."