Chasing the Devil's Tail (20 page)

He tracked down Beansoup and sent him on an errand. Then he went home to get some sleep. Later in the afternoon, the
ragged kid stood breathless at his door, telling how he had traveled all the way to the home of Willie Cornish at the Negro end of Ursulines Street. And then how the trombone player had growled out the answer to the question. Valentin wasn't at all surprised to learn that, once again, Bolden had not shown up to play with the band, this time at Masonic Hall. No one had seen him at all on the night of Jennie Hix's death.

Valentin ate rice and beans in a workmen's Café on Common Street, a block east of Fulton, where Chinatown began. After he paid his ten cents, he went out onto the darkening street. From where he stood, he could see the river, see the lights of the tugboats on their slow swim to the docks and hear their mournful horns.

Jennie Hix, the Jewish prostitute, would have walked this same banquette, coming south from Storyville. He wandered past laundries, restaurants and tiny grocery stores until he found the narrow alleyway where the girl's body had been found. He looked around. Diagonally across the street was a shop that was almost invisible unless someone was looking for it. He stepped closer to examine the tiny cove, with its narrow door and its one tall window with herbs and powders on display behind yellowed glass. Hanging from the door was a banner of rice paper decorated with a painting in red and black of two dragons entwined, their heads facing inward, eyes bloody, mouths wide open, tongues flailing, fangs like curved needles.

A tiny bell tinkled when Valentin pushed inside. He felt the eyes on him before he saw the old Chinaman. The man stood stiffly behind the counter, his wrinkled chestnut of a face and wisps of gray hair framed in a small jungle of hanging herbs and shelves lined with ceramic jars and glass bottles. The parchment hands had stopped in the act of grinding something in a pestle made of alabaster. He muttered something under his breath.

"My grandfather wants to know are you lost," a child's voice said.

Valentin peered into the shadows to the right of the counter and detected a thin Chinese boy with a round, calm face. He was standing in a doorway that led to a back room, wearing a white shirt buttoned at the collar and loose black trousers. His feet were bare.

"My grandfather asks are you lost?" the boy repeated.

The detective's gaze moved to the grandfather, who was keeping his eyes averted. He bowed his head politely. "No, not lost. I'm here to ask a question." The boy translated in a voice just above a whisper. The old man said nothing and Valentin went on. "A girl came here last night. For opium."

A few words into the translation, the grandfather began to shake his head. "My grandfather says no opium here. Opium no good."

"A girl with dark hair. Dark eyes," Valentin said.

The old man chattered rapidly. "No," the grandson said. "No girl like that here."

"She was the one who was killed in the alleyway," Valentin said.

The grandfather's black opal eyes were fixed on the contents of the pestle. He whispered to the young boy. "He asks are you from the police?" Valentin shook his head. The old Chinaman said something that had a ring of finality about it. "No opium," the boy translated. "No Jew girl. No nigger man. Nothing."

The grandfather returned to his grinding. Valentin nodded a thank you and turned for the door.

He stepped onto the street and turned north once more. He now knew that the last moments of Jennie Hix's life had
been spent in the same shop where King Bolden bought his own hop.

The message came from Lulu White and at ten o'clock he walked down the alley that ran behind City Hall.

A cigarette glowed in the darkness. "Who's there?" a voice called out.

"The one you're expecting," Valentin said.

The cigarette was flicked away in a shower of tiny embers as a figure detached from the shadows. A moment later a door opened and white light poured into the alleyway. A mulatto wearing wire-rimmed glasses and dressed in a white apron covered with multi-colored stains was holding the door open. "You're goin' to make this fast, aintcha?" Valentin nodded. "C'mon this way, then," the attendant said and led him inside.

They walked along a narrow corridor with brick walls and wooden floor and electric lamps glowing overhead. Their footsteps echoed eerily in that narrow space. The attendant stopped at the first door and held it open. Valentin walked into the room.

"So, we meet again." Dr. Rall seemed to enjoy Valentin's startled look. But the smile could have been a product of rye whiskey, obvious at once from the smell of Raleigh Rye that mixed with his words and the way he swayed on his feet.

Valentin recovered and gave him a perfunctory nod. He took a moment to look around. The room was small, twelve by ten feet. Wooden shelves lined the walls, all filled with small bottles of chemicals and larger bottles containing body parts suspended in murky formaldehyde. The centerpiece was an enameled gurney with a body outlined under a sheet of muslin. The room reeked of acrid solutions, of the stale whiskey sweating sourly from the doctor, and what he recognized as the sweet, heavy odor of putrefying flesh. His eyes watered and he blinked to clear them.

"You ready?" Rall said. Valentin took off his coat and put it on a hook, then undid the top button on his collarless shirt. He nodded to Rall. The doctor pulled the cloth away and Valentin looked upon the corpse of Jennie Hix.

Her deep eye sockets, Semitic nose, and mouth painted in a cupid's bow proclaimed her one of the sporting girls who clustered in houses along the 900 block of Bienville, known as the Jew Colony. Her face was unmarked, save for creeping bruises, blue and purple and red and black. But the left side and the top of her head were all wrong, dented like a hard-boiled egg that had been bullied. Or like a doll that had been dropped and broken, a strange, unnatural sight. The curls of her thick black hair were still matted into the wounds and dried blood covered her ears and the back of her neck.

Valentin looked at the doctor, an excuse to avert his eyes for a moment. Rall was staring at the body while his left hand dove into his coat pocket to retrieve a flask. With a hypnotic motion, he pulled the cork and took a gentle swig. His eyes, bleary as ever, looked at the detective as he held the bottle in the air. Valentin shook his head and the doctor helped himself once again. "Awful, ain't it?" He replaced the bottle in his pocket. "What sort of crazy nigger would do a thing like that?" he mumbled.

"What sort of what?" Valentin said.

Rall blinked slowly. "I said, who'd do a thing like that?"

Valentin watched him for a moment, then said, "Do you have the weapon?"

"No, but I can guess what it was." The doctor clutched at the air. "Piece of pipe. Or wood, maybe. Probably pipe. Somethin' heavy, to cause them kind of contusions."

Valentin had surmised the same. Indeed, he wondered if it was the same piece of pipe that had put the lump on his own skull. "Three wounds?" he asked. Rall nodded. "Anything else?"

"No. No signs of struggle. No sexual battery." The recitation was quick, probably not much longer than the examination that had produced it.

Valentin studied the body of Jennie Hix, rubbing his forehead in concentration. "So a left-handed person would have come up from behind, swung the weapon and caught her here," he said, pointing to the left side of the prostitute's head, talking more to himself than the doctor. "Either a short person swinging upward or a taller one swinging from the hip. The wound goes upward, back to front." He straightened, but kept his eyes on the body and he moved around to get another angle.

"She would have gone to her knees," he murmured, noting red and purple bruises on her shins. "Second blow from above, to the top of the skull. That would knock her to the ground, certainly unconscious. Maybe already dead." He moved around to the other side of the body and saw a patch of scrapes on her upper arm. "So she landed on her right side. Third blow to the temple, while she was on the ground. And if the second one didn't do it, that one would have killed her."

Rall was staring at Valentin, even through the whiskey fog appreciative of the detective's attentions. "That's probably it, all right," he said. "Don't tell you who did it though..."

"No."

The doctor's gaze shifted. "Don't matter, does it?" he commented.

The attendant let Valentin out and stepped into the alley behind him, closing the heavy door. Valentin was about to walk
away when he caught the attendant staring at him. He stopped, let out a long breath, and leaned a shoulder against the brick wall of the building. The mulatto dug in the pockets of his laboratory coat and produced a package of Dukes and a box of lucifers. He offered the pack and Valentin plucked a cigarette out, muttering a thank you. The attendant held a flame in cupped hands and two plumes of gray smoke drifted into the night air. Valentin appreciated it; his nerves needed a balm and the rough tobacco partially masked the smells of the putrid fluids on the attendant's apron.

"What is it?" he said presently.

"What is what?" The attendant's voice was lazy.

"What is it you want to tell me?" The response was a crooked smile. "All right, then, what is it you want to
sell
me?" Valentin inquired and the attendant snickered, enjoying the quip.

"Bet you been wonderin' what she was doing in Chinatown," the man said.

"I know what she was doing in Chinatown," Valentin replied. The man's smile went away. "She was buying hop." He blew another little cloud of smoke. "Let me guess. You found it on her. You might even have it in your pocket right now. I mean if you haven't already smoked it or sold it."

The mulatto crossed his arms. "I got it," he admitted, sounding a little miffed.

Valentin dug into his vest pocket and came up with a half-dollar. He held it out. "You can keep it," he said. "I just want to see the package."

The attendant glanced at him sharply, as if he couldn't believe his good luck. Then he grabbed the coin with one hand while the other dipped into a pocket to produce a little rectangle wrapped in decorative gold paper embossed with a design of two dragons entwined, their heads facing inward.
Valentin felt two horse-pill-sized pieces of opium through the paper. That settled one question. He handed the package back to the attendant. "Where did you find it?"

The attendant leered. "It was hid down in her, uh, brassiere. You couldn't hardly see. She was big there. She was a Jew, y'know, and them women is often—"

"I understand," Valentin said quickly. "Did anyone else see this?"

"I was all by myself." A wink. "Just me and her."

Valentin felt a hasty need to change the subject. "Doctor Rall," he said.

"What about him?"

"You tell me."

The attendant rolled his eyes. "He ain't nothin' but a goddamn drunk. And I believe he takes a needle now and again. Good thing I got to this one before him. Hell, I bet I'm a better doctor than he is."

"So, what is he doing here?"

"He's one of them they call after hours when we got a body like this one. No one worth a shit would come in late like that. For a dead whore, I mean."

Valentin sensed something more. "Is he the type to cooperate with the police?" he said.

The attendant nodded. "Yeah, that's right. Whatever the coppers want, Rall gives 'em. You know, 'wasn't no murder, it was a
suicide.
'" He mimed a scribbling motion. "He writes it down."

Valentin thought it over for a moment. "Three weeks ago," he said. "It was a Sunday morning. Early. They brought in a black-skinned girl."

The man shook his head. "Not in here, they didn't. The nigger corpses go round the other side."

"And who examines them?" Valentin asked.

"Whoever they call."

"Then it could have been Rall?"

The attendant nodded. "Yessir, it coulda been. But I can't tell you for sure. I don't work no mornings."

Valentin nodded. "Well, then, a week after that. A Saturday night. A white woman. You remember that one?"

"I think I do," the mulatto said. "Kinda fat, was she?"

"That's right. Rall get called on that one?"

The attendant thought about it, and then came up with a half-smile. "Yessir, I believe he did. The other one, too. The one got all cut up in that house on Basin Street. Rall did hers, too."

Valentin tossed the butt of his cigarette away. "Thank you for your help," he said.

"No, thank
you,
sir," the attendant said, clicking his tongue with familiarity.

Valentin walked out of the alley and onto the street. His progress was marked by J. Picot, who stood in a third floor window and watched until the detective reached Corondolet and crossed over. There another pair of eyes followed him, the eyes of a tall man who leaned in a darkened doorway. St. Cyr's footsteps faded away and the man stepped out and walked down the alley where the morgue attendant in the filthy apron was standing, his cigarette glowing in the darkness.

Valentin was walking along, staring vacantly at the banquette, his coat slung over his shoulder, his shirt collar open, one thumb hooked in his trouser pocket. He turned right at the next street corner, lost in his thoughts, not really looking where he was going.

He heard a woman's voice yelling, "You get it the fuck outta here!" and then a harsh laugh. He glanced up to find himself on Robertson Street, but he walked on anyway. Cribs crowded the banquette and as he passed, he heard voices
muttering orders, grunts like happy pigs, curses and laughter. Shadowy forms beckoned to him from shadowy doorways. "C'mere, daddy." The woman sounded weary. "You'll like what I got." A second, all but lifeless, called out, "Twenty-fi' cents. Do what you want. Twenty-fi' cents." He passed a silhouette through an open doorway, a man standing and a woman on her knees before him.

He was almost to Canal Street when a last voice spoke out of the darkness. "Well, look who's hangin' about down here."

Valentin glanced around. A white woman was perched in a wide window frame, sallow-skinned, short black hair in curls raggedly undone, circles of dark mascara around pale blue eyes, crooked teeth with gaps between. She was naked under a worn and torn kimono. One leg hung outside, swinging in a lazy arc. It reminded Valentin of a stationary version of one of the waffle carts that rolled the New Orleans streets, dispensing tawdry sugared confections.