Lost River (8 page)

It took him a half minute to get around to clearing his throat. When he spoke up, it was just as the Negro attendant had described it.

***

The Hudson pulled to the curb at an address on Royal Street in the Vieux Carré, and Evelyne tossed a dime onto the front seat before stepping down to the banquette. Fishing in her purse for a brass key, she opened the wrought-iron gate and crossed the tiny brick courtyard to the French doors. She found Louis inside, lounging on the brocade sofa in the studied slouch of a young man of leisure.

As she expected, he uncoiled and tried to get fresh with her, helping her off with the old coat and using a kiss on her cheek as an excuse to caress her neck. When he reached for the top button of her day dress, she brushed him away as if he was an annoying insect.

She took his place on the sofa and made an impatient gesture. He spent a few moments nursing his hurt feelings as he went about pouring her a glass of brandy, then brought it to her with the satisfying carriage of a servant, his eyes downcast and back bent slightly. He retreated, and she allowed herself a cool smile as she nodded for him to speak up.

"People are talking about that body on Liberty Street," he began.

"Is there an investigation?"

Louis waved a vague hand. "The coppers gave up on it right away. There was this one detective on it, but he's—"

"What detective?" Evelyne said.

"Name's McKinney. He walks a beat during the day."

"Oh. A
police
detective." She sat back.

"Yes, but he's off it now. They dropped the whole thing."

Evelyne smiled slightly. "And what does your father have to say about it?"

"Well, he's in a state, that's for sure." Louis paused to glance her way. "He swears someone is out to get him."

"Well, it would make me wonder, too," Evelyne said.

"He wants to go see Tom Anderson to make a complaint," the young man went on. "I'm to pick him up in a little while and carry him over there."

Evelyne's eyes fixed on him. "I want a report on what they say. Especially Mr. Anderson. You understand?"

"Don't worry," he said, and treated her to a wink and his best sly smirk. "I won't miss a thing."

Briefly enticing, his affectations now only rankled her. She didn't need his viperish charm; and she wasn't some schoolgirl who could be swayed by his looks. What she did need was information. It was his part of their bargain, and he knew damn well that he'd better provide.

She signaled brusquely for him to continue, and he started to pace as he talked. Much of what he said was useless, so she listened with only half an ear.

She had discovered Louis when he invited himself to one of her social events, picking out his striking profile from across the room. Once she cornered him, it took no time at all to punch through his little charade. Who better than she to spot such a crude gambit?

Crashing her soiree was foolish, and if she had exposed his pretense, those gilded doors would be the last ones he'd ever breach. But he was so desperate about staying and such a pretty young man that she let it pass. She made an arrangement to meet, then allowed him to bed her. That he was at least fifteen years her junior made the experience all the more wicked.

Though deliciously handsome, he wasn't near rugged enough for her. When he realized that she was bored with him, he tried to hold her interest with gossip he'd picked up about some of her rich friends, but she already knew all those stories. She was just about to send him on his way when he mentioned Storyville, the twenty square blocks of uptown New Orleans where, for the last sixteen years, sin had been permitted by way of local ordinance.

Intrigued, she pried deeper, and in the manner of a confession, he admitted what she already guessed: that he didn't come from money in Baton Rouge or anything close to it. His last name wasn't "Jakes" but Jacob, with the French emphasis on the second syllable. Two generations back, the family had been respectable and of considerable wealth, but Louis's uncle had thrown most of it away on one foolish scheme after another. It was a grim tale his mother repeated as a bedtime story. Now all that was left was a handful of properties in the red-light district—bordellos, in fact.

Evelyne had never paid too much attention to Storyville, regarding it as nothing but a crude carnival. Now she grew fascinated by this opening into the scarlet realm, and as he pumped away at her, she pumped him for all sorts of banter about the blocks just beyond the French Quarter but a world away from the quaint Vieux Carré.

For his part, Louis was ashamed of his family background and the knowledge of the red-light district he had gathered over the years he'd worked in his father's office. At the same time, he saw that Evelyne had grown entranced; it was, in fact, the only reason she kept him around. So he told her everything he knew and more that he simply fabricated.

As Evelyne listened, an odd notion took hold of a far corner of her brain. Day after day, through long afternoons in the bed and on the sofa in this same private house, he drew her deeper into Storyville's bizarre economy of sin. It took no time at all for her to absorb the District's complex mechanisms.

When he told her about how badly things had been going lately, with business on the decline and the legendary Tom Anderson unable to turn the tide, the notion began to sprout tentacles. Her first daydreams were so crazy that she let them roll about as idle fantasies. But Louis talked on and one corner led to another, one angle turned into a second and then a third, and she began to believe that the ploy she had concocted could actually work.

She knew that decent ladies did not imagine such schemes, let alone put them in motion. But it was well into a new century and things were not the same anymore. The day of women who served at the pleasure of their men was showing signs of wear.

She was faintly astonished by her skill at working such a fiendish construction. Then Louis told her all about Miss Lulu "White, and she understood that some women just had the skills, no matter what the men of the world pronounced.

Louis discussed other characters, too, including the madams of note, certain skilled whores, and some of the better-known sports, each of them boasting a colorful name: Ace High, Johnny the Jake, Little Blue, Slow Moe. He described the vile French Emma Johnson, who operated a live show called "the Circus" that featured lurid sexual acts on display for any gentlemen who could pay the price of admission.

She had to see firsthand, and took to visiting the District incognito. No one knew about these trips. Indeed, this day's encounter on the street was the closest she'd come to being detected by the man she recognized as Valentin St. Cyr.

In the course of regaling her, Louis eventually got around to mentioning the Creole who had been Tom Anderson's right-hand man for years until he went away, leaving the King of Storyville without his best asset. That was all he could tell her, and so she availed herself of other young men to find out more. She enjoyed the fringe benefit of these spies' energies beneath the sheets while completing the private detective's biography. And then, without warning, he had appeared in her path.

Reclining on the divan, distracted by her musings, she was barely aware that Louis had finished his latest spiel and was readying to leave. She asked him to repeat the important points and found nothing more she could use. There was little new from his mouth these days, and she realized that he was fast losing his value to her.

Momentarily, she thought of something he could do and gave an instruction that brought back his cloying smile. He left, locking the door behind him.

As the pattern of the game stretched out in her mind, she settled down into the soft cushions and unbuttoned the cotton dress from neck to knees. She thought about the exotic-looking detective St. Cyr. He didn't resemble Louis Jacob or any of her other young men, with cameo profiles that would make only silly girls swoon. St. Cyr was another creature entirely.

She lay there imagining the drama to come, and as she reached the part that the Creole would play, she dropped a hand between her legs and began to caress herself with gentle fingers.

Valentin let Frank keep him in the saloon for another two hours, listening to stories that he had missed, some comical, though enough that were not so.

Finally, he managed to drag himself away and rode the streetcar south, arriving home in a soft wine haze just as the October sun was beginning to dip over the river. He trundled up the stairwell, stepped inside, and locked the door behind him. Draping his jacket over the back of a chair, he wandered to the kitchen to find Justine standing over the stove. The smells of filé and peppers drifted to his nostrils as he leaned in the doorway. With her hair tied back with a ribbon, her well-worn shift, and bare feet, she looked like nothing so much as the country girl she had been not so long ago. He smiled fixedly at the way her body shifted under the thin cotton.

She glanced over her shoulder at him. "Where have you been all day?"

Instead of answering, he reached out to grasp her lightly by the wrist, take the spoon from her hand, and lay it aside. Backing up, he pulled her through the parlor and into the bedroom and laid her down. She turned pliant and let him lift the shift over her head. She wore nothing underneath. As the evening breeze lifted the curtains, they fell into a familiar dance.

Valentin never got over his infatuation with her body, down to the tiniest crease and corner. He knew she had been with more than a few men; it had been her profession, after all. And yet he thought of her as his territory, over the years to be claimed, re-claimed, and held.

He knew that she had been waiting for him to speak up for her person, to put his name on the line and take her as his wife. At the same time, she couldn't make a demand, any more than he could on her. They had betrayed each other in the past, had repelled and attracted, and much of what drove the passion between them was the exquisite tension.

For her part, Justine sensed that he was afraid that changing the equation between them would burst a delicate bubble and that surrendering to her would somehow weaken him. But he always thought too much.

Except in moments like this. Time stopped as they entwined, sculpted beneath the cotton sheet. Valentin knew how to make her vibrate, and he pushed her ahead of him in a mounting arc of heat and noise, feeling the tension rise beneath her
au lait
skin like current running through a wire, working her faster and harder until he all but ground her into pieces.

When it was over, they lay for more minutes, not speaking. She gazed blankly toward the open window, watching night come on as he half dozed, worn down by the work and the wine. She smiled and stretched to kiss his cheek, then got out of the bed, pulled on a kimono, and stood over him.

"So what were you doing up there?" she inquired.

He should have known it wouldn't get past her. She had probably smelled it on him, the special Storyville aroma. Or maybe she caught something in his eye, that predator look that he carried when he worked the streets.

For a brief moment, his scoundrel self made an appearance and he considered lying. He could tell her he tried to find one of the other investigators to go, only to discover that they were all at the Fair Grounds. But he knew it wouldn't be worth the trouble it would cause, and anyway she was too sharp. So he explained in a few short sentences about James Beck and his friends and poor Essie Gill.

She said, "And that took you all afternoon?"

"I stopped to see Frank while I was over there."

Her expression softened slightly. As badly as she had wanted out of Storyville, she missed some people, and the Sicilian was one of them.

"How is he?" she said.

"He's fine," Valentin said. "He asked about you."

He could tell from her blank expression that the explanation didn't sway her. She stood with one languid hand resting on the bedpost and her kimono hanging open, watching him with her dark eyes. She looked so lovely in that posture that he had to wonder what kind of fool he could be to risk her ire. He made a stab at an expression of contrition.

She, however, was not inclined to throw him even the thinnest rope. She lifted her hand from the bedpost, tied the sash, and headed off for the kitchen and the dinner that she had left simmering on the stove.

Valentin reclined in the veiled light, wondering if he really was that much of a fool. Most men would not want much more than what he already had: a good woman, a decent job, a safe home.

New Orleans was full of private coppers. He could have found one to talk to Essie Gill and taken it from there, avoiding the District altogether. And once he did go, he shouldn't have lingered to encounter the woman with the strange green eyes and then to drink wine and reminisce with Frank Mangetta. He knew it had been a mistake; because he had spent more time in that place than he had in three years, and now part of him wanted to go back again tomorrow.

By the time Valentin left Storyville for home, the word that he had visited Mangetta's Saloon had already begun dribbling in the direction of Basin Street and the ears of several of the madams of the high-toned mansions.

The talk also found its way to the police precinct at Parish Prison, where Captain Picot received it with a grunt of irritation. Though it had been a good long time since St. Cyr had gone away, the captain was one person who did not believe that he was done with Storyville, or vice versa.