Jass (Valentin St. Cyr Mysteries) (32 page)

The next forty-eight hours were lost in a haze. He drank and smoked and sniffed. Numbing his brain with rye whiskey, burning it with coca, and then soothing it with hop. He did not remember sleeping or eating. He stayed in the dark, save for the light of a few flickering candles. The daylight barely passed the drawn curtains.

"And that's all?" Morton asked him.

Valentin shrugged. He did not want to explain the dark cave he had entered in the thrall of the liquor, opium, and cocaine. He did not want to revisit the haunting visions of his father and mother and sister and brother, Bolden, Justine, and Dominique as they paraded through his mind and then surrounded him with their accusing eyes.

He did not want to describe the awful dark thing that grew in the pit of his gut, a terrible shape, like some serpent rising up to devour him. It was a fearful beast without form or dimension, and he had the dim sense that if freed, it would turn back and swallow him whole. Such were the insane thoughts that went rushing through his head.

But it was all too much. At one point, at the bottom of the worst hour, he burst onto Magazine Street and staggered south to the river. He stayed there under the first glimmer of dawn, aware of the ships passing, but seeing little and feeling less. He let the muddy water, deep and roiling, calm him. Then he ambled back home just before daybreak and, finally, was able to sleep. That was all, until Morton's knock on the door.

"What happened to ... What did they do with Dominique?" he asked.

"I believe she's at Gasquet's," Morton said. "Mr. Anderson's taking care of that. Gonna send her back home."

Valentin nodded slowly and then fell silent. Morton remained quiet, too. He didn't know what to say about any of it. So he just watched and waited, and for a brief, strange instant, something came across the detective's face that he had never seen before, a dark shadow that could only be grief. Morton had heard about his family and knew firsthand about Bolden. Now an innocent girl had been taken. The piano man saw all of it in those gray eyes, and for one small moment he thought something was about to break. Then, just as quickly, it was gone. Valentin's back straightened, his gaze hardened, and he let out a long breath.

Morton sat back, relieved that it hadn't gone any further. Valentin turned his head and met the piano man's worried face. "It's all right, Ferd," he said. "You did what he asked. Now you need to get away from it. Just don't say anything more."

"I feel like it's my fault."

"It's not your fault," Valentin said flatly. "If I would have been paying attention, we'd have the killer. And Dominique would be alive."

The piano man brooded for another moment. "What happens now?" he said.

"You can tell Mr. Anderson that I've been ill, but that I'm recovering."

Morton stood up. He reached out to place a hand on St. Cyr's shoulder, then thought better of it and slipped to the door and opened it.

"Ferd?" Morton stopped. "You can tell him something else. Tell him I'm going to finish what I started."

No one around uptown New Orleans ever learned his true name. He first went by the moniker "Brother John." He was small of stature, hard muscled, with skin a burned bronze color, with long straight hair that he sometimes tied back Indian style and eyes a dazzling, hypnotic shade of green. No one knew where he came from, either; he just appeared back-of-town one day in aught-five, a battered horn in hand, looking for work in a band. It turned out that he was a player of meager skills and, when he couldn't find anyone to hire him on (this was New Orleans, after all), he decided that voodoo might be a more promising career.

It certainly came easier. All a fellow needed was a good act, babbling gibberish while fussing with roots and bones, and the superstitious types would come flocking. Brother John worked a Negro and Creole clientele, helping himself to their hard-earned dollars and taking his pleasure with the young women.

It was through some of the colored maids that he first came to the attention of white ladies who were keen on the supernatural, the type who adored the Ouija, numerology, table-tapping, and ghosts, and found himself invited into American parlors on the wealthy side of New Orleans.

The trouble began when one woman in particular fell under his spell in a dramatic way. Like the spider to the fly, he drew her out of her brick antebellum mansion and into his low-down digs, a bare, roach-infested room along an alleyway off Franklin Street, not much bigger than a crib, with just enough space for the iron bed that they proceeded to press into near-constant service.

Brother John believed that his ship had come in, that he had captured a goose that would lay him a golden egg, for the woman was married to a rich Irish Channel doctor. John went about servicing her insatiable needs day after day and in every conceivable fashion, but his reward never came. The woman refused to do his bidding and bring him money, jewelry, or fine silver from her home, insisting that all the good fucking should be payment enough. At that point, it began to dawn on Brother John how deranged the woman was and what mortal danger he was inviting for nothing, save some jellyroll that was not all that sweet. So when she arrived the next day, she discovered that he had vacated his premises for parts unknown.

She was spotted wandering the Negro streets and the coppers collected her and carried her back to the Irish Channel. She didn't stay long. Now she did help herself to some of her husband's cash and threw it all over uptown New Orleans in an attempt to buy information about Brother John's current whereabouts. Most of the scoundrels who took her money didn't have the slightest idea where he'd gone, and those who did wouldn't say for fear of incurring one of his much-vaunted curses.

The crazy woman wasn't to be denied. She set up shop in the upstairs room of a saloon and took all comers. Her appetite was insatiable. There were estimates of a hundred partners in all, though this was probably a gross exaggeration. Whatever the number, the party ended when the word went out that there were Regulators on the way, their lynching ropes in hand, causing her amorous congregation to evaporate like so many puffs of smoke.

The Pinkertons her husband had hired later found her staggering around the alley off Franklin Street, a delirious mess. She was carted away, placed in a hospital somewhere far beyond the Mississippi, and was never seen or heard from again.

So Brother John escaped. Though in the beginning there were whispers that he had not been so lucky, but had been caught, strung up, his yancy sliced off like andouille, his body burned and what was left buried in an unmarked grave. Or so one rumor went around.

The fact was, no one knew how much of the tale was true. It was impossible to find anyone who could actually name the doctor's wife or point out the room where she had offered her entertainment, or to find a man who would admit to being one of the cars in the train she pulled that day. For all anyone knew, Brother John had started the talk himself just to have something so lurid attached to his name. The story swelled and made the rounds for a couple years afterward, then went up onto the shelves of Storyville's sordid lore. One thing was certain: Brother John was gone.

Most people forgot about him, too, until he showed up again in the high summer of '06, now as lean as a stick, his hair cropped short, carrying a shiny new trumpet and the new moniker
Prince
John.

He had heard about the King Bolden Band raging through uptown New Orleans, and became one of those who grabbed on to the tail of Bolden's comet for that brief period when anyone who could blow a scale got to share in the whiskey, the hop, and the willing women.

He put on an act that was a stage version of his voodoo routine, and all done up, was something to behold. Bolden saw him perform once or twice and stole a few of his more outlandish moves. That was all, though; the man didn't have anything else worth filching. He blew fast and loud to cover the fact that his skills hadn't advanced much. He was fortunate that he could put on a show and that the other players were good enough to make up for his poverty.

He landed in an ensemble that was thrown together from the pieces of other groups that went by the name Union Hall Brass Band.

They did fair business and then something happened. The rumor was it was trouble with some woman, with Prince John right in the middle of it. Whatever it was, he was there one day and gone the next. This time he didn't come back. The members of the Union Hall band drifted off to other employment and to their tragic fates.

So went the story of the notorious Prince John, the last member of the band who might still be alive.

Valentin slept another ten hours, then woke up late in the afternoon to find that the sun had gone away and clouds had come up over the Gulf. It looked like rain. He hoped so; he could use the cover for his evening's work. After he visited the privy in back, he filled the tub with hot water and soaked away the muck of his three nights and days on the back-of-town streets and holed up in a closed flat. He went to the washstand and labored to scrape the stubble from his cheeks.

He rummaged in the back of the bedroom closet for his work clothes, a pair of de Nimes cotton trousers, a thin jersey, heavy socks, and his ankle-high police brogans. From the hook on the wall, he grabbed an old railroad jacket that smelled so musty that it made him sneeze. Finally, he dug out his slouch hat. It was an outfit he kept for those rare times he had to wander off the city streets. He hadn't worn it in years.

Once he finished dressing, he spent a few minutes putting his rooms back into some kind of order. As he made ready to leave, he found a pill of hop, still wrapped in its silver paper. He thought about throwing it away, then decided it might be useful and put it in his pocket. He went out and locked the door. The city was draped in pale ocher light as the twilight sun dropped below the horizon and refracted through the rolling clouds.

He turned north on Common Street. A few blocks up, he came upon a diner he didn't know and went inside for a quick meal of fried chicken and potatoes. He ate, then ordered some more. He dawdled after he finished and was looking out the window as the first drops of evening rain tapped on the glass.

He thought about what he was doing, now that he had escaped from the nightmare of the past three days. Let Tom Anderson try to stop him if he wished, but he was going after Dominique's murderer, who had to be same person who had taken the lives of Mumford, Noiret, Lacombe, Martin, and the landlady Cora Jarrell.

He knew it would mean trouble and not just for him. Justine was going to have to fend for herself. He couldn't help that now. She had betrayed him by keeping her secret, whatever it was, then by going to Basin Street, finally by leaving him. Maybe he could have protected her before. Not now. He might have even given up on the murders of Mumford and the others, but he couldn't let Dominique's killer walk away. He was the one who had left her vulnerable. It was his fault she was dead. He at least owed her justice.

At Union Station he once again purchased a seat on the Smoky Mary and out of sheer contrariness sat in one of the "star cars" that were placed up front in the smoke and sparks from the engine and reserved for Negroes. There was only one other person on board, though, so no one bothered him over it. The train, the next to last of the day, rolled east and then north through the darkening city.

Valentin stared at his reflection in the window glass, listening to the rhythm of the wheels on the rail as he thought about the night to come and the man he was seeking out.

A half hour later, he stepped onto the station platform at Milneburg. He waited around for a few minutes to see if Anderson or Picot or whoever else took such an interest in his movements had sent another tail. The train pulled out and the last passenger disappeared. He walked through the station and turned east along the gravel road, rain dripping from the brim of his cap. When he reached the banks of the lake, he stopped again to make sure that he wasn't being followed. It was hard to tell with the steady drizzle hissing in his ears and making mist in the darkness. He would be just as hard for someone else to see as he slipped into the low brush off the side of the trail.

Following Eulalie Echo's directions, it took almost half the night to travel from the gravel road to the wagon trail that cut through the brush and trees, and then more miles of walking on the footpath that ran east along the lake. He stopped at regular intervals to rest, get his bearings, and check for a tail. If there was anyone following him, it had to be a ghost.

As he drew close, he began to think he had gotten lost, then suddenly found the site just as Miss Echo had described it, a stand of tall bamboo on two sides of a clearing and a grove of stunted willows and live oaks on the other. On the side that faced the lake, the ground was sopping and slick with mud and algae. It was inhospitable terrain that bordered shallows too stagnant for fish. It was no place for a human, in other words—unless it was a human who was looking to hide.

After five minutes of searching, he found the twisting path through the thick stalks of bamboo. When he emerged and stepped into the clearing, he was greeted by the sight of a building that tottered shakily three feet above the ground on wooden pilings. From the smell, it seemed the crawl space underneath was a combination garbage dump and latrine.

The rain had slowed to a light drizzle, lightening the night sky, and he could now see that the shack had been thrown together with clapboards that had been scavenged from the store, so the facade was a patchwork of varied colors and textures. The roof was rusty corrugated tin and a chimney pipe stuck up another four feet, wisping gray smoke. Next to the open door was one dirty window with a burlap sack hanging behind it as a curtain. The steps to the door were building stones crossed with rough lengths of plank. Valentin put his foot on the first one and peered inside. He saw only darkness.