Lost River (6 page)

This back boundary of the District was the lowest rung on the scarlet ladder, so far removed from the broad thoroughfare of Basin Street with its grand bordellos, fine dining establishments, high-dollar saloons, and gilded music halls that it might have been in another country.

Though not a few of the women who rented the cribs for a half-dollar a day and served men for a dime a trick had once boarded in those same mansions. Once pretty, with firm bodies and all their teeth, they had fallen victim to drink, narcotics, and evil men. Other trollops were cursed from the start and never rose any higher than these foul corners. No matter how they started out, the lot of them tended to ugly and vicious, as derelict as the city had to offer.

The streets were so bad that the police rarely patrolled after sundown and then only in pairs, and any man who ventured there was on his own. The women—whether drunk, addicted, diseased, or mad—were only the most recent edition of the vicious bawds who had populated the section for decades, the type who considered it sport to lure a man into a hovel, knock him unconscious, and steal everything he carried or wore. They sometimes fought each other in fierce bouts that left puddles of blood in the middle of the cobbled streets and provided an extra bit of Saturday-night entertainment. Many ended up dead in a crib, either murdered or finished by their own hopeless hands.

The two streets should have been closed down years ago, but for all the filth and violence, they still generated plenty of cash. Not to mention that the city fathers preferred the scourge not spread to any other part of New Orleans. Like any sewer, it was better to have it contained.

The earliest-rising birds of the Quarter were up and about, and Valentin stopped every few doors to talk to a girl. It didn't take him long to pick up bits of the story, one more piece at each stop. He had only done it hundreds of times before, and he slipped back into the routine as if he'd never been gone at all.

By the time he reached Bienville Street, he'd heard several versions of a tale of young louts assaulting a woman the previous Saturday evening. There was also some chatter about a fellow carted out of a crib one block over, but that meant nothing to him.

Finding the victim of the malfeasance turned out to be easy; everyone knew Essie Gill. The detective was directed to a decrepit house halfway down the block between Conti and St. Louis, one of the structures that were cracking apart as a bad foundation settled further in the soggy New Orleans earth.

Valentin heard her first, the voice ripping through the early afternoon quiet like a rusty saw blade. She was standing halfway up the rotting steps of the house, dressed in a Mother Hubbard, once white, now stained and mottled. When he called her name, her head came around in a slow glare. Then her eyes went wide with surprise and her gap-tooth mouth stretched.

"Well, god
damn
!" she cried out, clapping clumsy hands and then pointing a finger. "Is that Mr.
Valentin
right there?"

Her cry echoed along the street and Valentin winced. Stopping at the bottom of the steps, he said, "How are you, Essie?"

Essie said, "Whatchu doin' 'round here?"

"I came to see you."

The woman blinked, dazzled by this news. "Issat right?" She hobbled unsteadily down to the banquette, bringing the odor of her unwashed body with her.

Essie was a well-known character around the streets. Once a decent-looking girl, plain featured but with a pleasing smile and good eyes, she had worked in one of the better houses, not a first-rate Basin Street address, but only two blocks back on Liberty. She might have stayed or even moved to a house down the line, save for her unfortunate problem with drink. One sip led to a second, then a third, and continued on from there.

Many was the night she shuffled to a temperance meeting at Deliverance Baptist and swore before God and the other wretches that she would imbibe no more. The pledge lasted until she encountered a bottle that held liquor. And then it would all go 'round again, a slow whirlpool of Raleigh Rye. The more she drank, the more it affected her, and she would go out of her mind on a few short glasses.

The madams tired of her, tired of opening doors on a drunken Essie and a half-dozen men, all taking their turns at her and not one paying a dime. They lost patience with her wild diatribes as she stood at a window, screeching foul curses at the neighbors and innocent bystanders alike. Time and again, she was told to pack her things and go. Each dismissal took her one step farther north and another rung down the ladder. Soon she wouldn't even be able to keep herself in a crib and would end up working on the street, which meant bending over or scraping her knees in whatever alley or entranceway was handy, lucky to earn a nickel for each act.

Her clothes were often torn from falls and spotted with spilled drink and other stains that got laughs from some and disgusted others. She bathed rarely, didn't bother to douse herself with perfume, and so appeared to be just another worthless, falling-down-drunk slut on a fast train for the bughouse or the cemetery.

Valentin had dealt with her a few times, back when she had first arrived. She had been determined to get into one of the Basin Street houses and wouldn't take no for an answer. Even then she had a wild streak that frightened the madams. They did not want the likes of her around their well-heeled customers and left it up to Valentin to deal with her.

He handled it, directly and to the point, banishing her from any decent house until she learned how to behave. Though furious over the treatment, she still appreciated the Creole's honesty and accorded him a grudging respect. For his part, he soon learned that she had an odd ability to sweep up information from the street and recall it precisely, even when she could remember little else. He had used her talents dozens of times.

She now regarded him with curious, though bleary, red eyes. "Whatchu doin' back 'round here? I thought you was long gone." Her breath reeked of sour whiskey.

"I came to see you," Valentin repeated.

Essie cocked her head. "Me?"

"I heard you had some trouble the other night."

"Trouble?" Then: "Oh, you mean with them
white
boys." She cackled. "Jesus Christ almighty!"

"What happened?"

Essie let out another raw laugh and plunged in. The way she told it, the four young men had come knocking at her door early Saturday evening.

"They come inta my crib and they say, 'We here to have some fun, and we heared you was a good sport.'" She winked, an aside. "Everybody know that. Yes, sir! Then they tole me to take off my dress, and I figgered they was wantin' to take turns, or maybe go two at a time, like that." She took a leering pause that was meant to be dramatic. "But that wa'n't it at
all
!"

A few stragglers, alerted by her screeching voice, stopped to listen.

"You know what they done?" Her voice swooped. "They dragged me out to the corner without a goddamn stitch on! You believe that shit? In the middle of the fuckin' banquette and in front of the whole goddamn
world
!"

Her bloodshot eyes widened. "One of 'em pull off his belt. I thought he was gonna give my bare ass a whuppin'. But that wa'n't what they wanted. No, sir." Pointing a shaky finger along the banquette, she said, "They went and strapped me to the fuckin'
lamppost
down there." She let out a whoop and another couple pedestrians stopped. "That fat fuck of a copper, what's-his-name, the one walks the beat 'round here, he was 'cross the street. He saw what they was doin' and just stood there laughin', like it was the funniest goddamn thing he ever saw." She stopped, sniffed mightily. "And you know what they did next?"

Valentin did know or at least could guess.

Essie said, "The one boy went into his pocket, pulls out a firecracker. You know what a 'sixteen' is? It's one of them big fuckers, six, seven inches long, and about this big around." She made a circle of a dirty thumb and index finger. "They all thought it was so damn funny, 'cause it's right 'bout the same size as they yancies. That's what they said. They
wish
it was!" She cackled again, then sobered. "The one little bastard done stuck that thing right up in my pussy, way up in there. Then another one struck a lucifer and lit the goddamn fuse! I couldn't get loose, and I was screaming and crying, but they just kept laughin'. And none these bitches out here'd help, not one bit."

Valentin said, "What did—"

"That fuckin' fuse was burnin' down!" she screeched. "I could sho'nuf feel it on my leg and I seen it smoking. Now I was cryin' like a baby, 'cause I thought they was gonna blow up my cunt. And I was prayin' to Jesus that it went ahead blowed me up all the way!"

Valentin opened his mouth, then closed it. She wasn't going to stop.

"I hear them go, 'fi', fo', t'ree, two, one,' and I jes close my eyes. And then they all start to cheer." She let out a raw shriek. "It was a goddamn
blank!
Nothin' but the tube and the fuse!" Now she coughed up a gob of phlegm, which she spit into the gutter. "I was still cryin', 'counta I was so scared, and then I was laughin' 'cause I still had my stuff left."

Valentin said, "Then what?"

Essie stopped and eyed him. "What?"

"What did they do then?"

"Oh. Then they untied my hands and took me back to my room. The people on the street be cheerin' like I won a prize. The one boy told me to blow 'em all, and I was glad to do it, just so they would get gone. I done one at a time, whilst the others watched. When I got done, they say 'You a good sport, Essie,' and left out without givin' me a goddamn nickel!"

Valentin waited an extra moment to make sure she was finished. He hated hearing such stories. He said, "You know the boys?"

Essie's gaze shifted. "No, but if I seed 'em again, I bet I would."

"What about names?"

"The one was called 'James.' Didn't hear no others." She was silent for a few seconds, then peered at him blearily. "'My in some kinda trouble, Mr. Valentin?"

"No, you're not," the detective said. "Thank you for the information." He went into his pocket and handed her a Liberty half. "And they won't bother you anymore."

Essie grinned, showing the gaps of missing teeth once more. It was a gruesome sight, and Valentin thought about young boys from good families making cruel sport of this poor slattern.

He thanked her and started back the way he had come. It had been a safe visit. He found out what he needed, and as far as he knew, no one aside from Essie had recognized him.

When he reached the next corner, he stopped to gaze across the avenue at the whitewashed wall of St. Louis Cemetery No. 2, known as "the City of the Dead" and the final resting place of those uptown citizens who could afford it. How many characters he could name resided inside those walls? Too many to count, a parade of the deceased, reaching all the way back to his childhood, beginning with the barely remembered faces of his brother and sister, taken by the yellow fever epidemic they called "Bronze John"; his father, murdered by a mob and followed by a string of villains and their victims. It was some grim procession he had left behind.

Now he felt a flush of guilt. He could say the same about whoever was still alive in Storyville. He had abandoned all of them, from the madams in their Basin Street mansions down to the poor wretches like Essie Gill.

Thinking these thoughts, he ambled south, took in the sights, finding the streets in a general state of disrepair. Tom Anderson had always made a point of keeping the District tidy, as if to belie the debauchery upon which it thrived. The banquettes were cleaned, the garbage collected, and the gutters washed, if Anderson had to pay the crews himself. Now it all seemed soiled and worn around the edges, as if someone wasn't making the effort.

A half block on, he passed a woman in a common dress, cheap wig, and a hat pulled down low. Old habit had him steal a glance. The keen planes of the woman's face and the hawk-sharp light in her eyes made a startling contrast to her tawdry shirtwaist and mess of fake hair. She returned his glance, and though it was only a flicker, he was startled by a cold hard light, as if a photograph had jumped into focus.

Then she had hurried past, and he looked over his shoulder, puzzled by what he had seen. Something was wrong about her, but he couldn't settle on what that might be. In the next moment, he considered how long he had been gone from those streets and how much he'd forgotten.

Evelyne moved off at a good clip. She sensed the man she passed casting his eyes on her and stifled her own urge to turn around. She couldn't imagine what he was doing there, in that place, at that time. And though they'd never met, she had heard enough to be able to identify him on sight. The good news was that he didn't recognize her, but it wouldn't have mattered much if he did. They'd meet up soon enough.

The door to Mangetta's Saloon on Marais Street stood open to allow cool air inside. Valentin had barely stepped over the threshold when he heard a voice call out in a whoop of surprise.

"
Managg'! Non lo credo!
Look who's here!"

Frank Mangetta hurried from behind the bar, his teeth flashing with a pleasure that lit up his round peasant face as he raised his arms in a Sicilian welcome that embraced the very air around him. The three customers at the bar, the first of the day, were used to these operatic displays and smiled before returning to their lonely drinks.