Rampart Street (Valentin St. Cyr Mysteries) (40 page)

"I'm working on behalf of the Benedict family," Valentin said.

"That's not what I asked you." He returned his attention to the scene in the side yard. "You're being paid by that empty-headed fool of a daughter. What's her name?"

Valentin didn't answer. The silence lingered until Harris looked at him again. Then Valentin said, "Anne Marie. Her name's Anne Marie. She hired me to find out what happened to her father."

"Did you?"

"Yes, I believe so."

The hard green eyes rested on him for a few moments. It was a gaze that was meant to command and Valentin had to do some work deflecting it. The stare he gave back was just short of insolent.

"You still haven't said why you're wasting my time here," Henry Harris said. "The last I heard, John Benedict was dead and buried."

"So is Charles Kane," the detective said. "And a fellow named Joe Kimball."

Valentin detected a certain light in Harris's stare.

"I know about Three V, Mr. Harris."

"Do you, indeed? Know what? It was one company of the many that I owned."

"Both of your former partners are dead. One was shot to death and the other one was abducted and drowned in the river. In the space of a week."

"That's unfortunate, isn't it?" Now Harris sounded judicious.

"I have the letter you wrote to Benedict and Kane."

"Oh? You have a
letter.
" Harris hiked his eyebrows, mocking him. "Do you think you're a smart fellow because you found a twenty-year-old piece of paper? What were you planning to do with this
letter?
"

"Turn it over to the authorities. And give it to the newspapers."

"What authorities? The police?" Harris's thin lips stretched in an indulgent grin, as if he was listening to a childish boast. "Who cares anymore? Who cares that people who didn't belong here in the first place went away?"

"Someone cared enough to murder five men over it."

There was no concealing the accusation in his tone, and Valentin wished instantly that he hadn't given that away. Harris's cold eyes narrowed for an angry moment, and Valentin sensed Nelson tensing behind him. The moment passed and now the white man's stare glittered with a certain cruel pleasure.

"I know about you," he said deliberately. "You're that
Creole detective.
You're half nigger and half dago. So is that what they call a Creole these days?" He saw the look on Valentin's face, glanced at Little and Nelson, and snickered. "Good lord, he looks like he wants to kill me right now." He brought his gaze back to the detective. "But I don't think you could. Even if Mr. Nelson there handed you his pistol. Because you're not a murderer. And that doesn't make you a very good dago, does it?"

He waited for a response, got none, and drew himself up. "You know I have scum try to cadge money from me every day of the week. If that's what you came for, I guess we can spare a dollar or two. If not, you really have wasted your time. And mine."

The sinking feeling in his gut told Valentin he had made a terrible mistake. Blinded by his intent, he had raced to this corrupt and venal man's doorstep with no hand to play. As if Harris would simply surrender, fall on his knees to beg forgiveness, and immediately begin a campaign of retribution to those he had so abused.

And Harris wasn't about to have him shot, either. He didn't consider him a threat at all, just another miscreant staging a foolhardy attempt at blackmail. Now it was over.

"Mr. Nelson?" Harris said. Nelson came to attention. "Please escort this
detective
out of the house and carry him to the train station and send him on his way back to Storyville." He turned away, dismissing him, and settled his placid gaze on the children and the pony.

Valentin turned to follow Nelson out of the room. Outside, Nelson told him to wait, then went back into the house. He wondered if maybe they were deciding to do away with him after all, just for the sport of it.

Stoneman was leaning against the side of the Buick, smoking another one of his Straight Cuts. He offered the pack again. Valentin shook his head.

"Your business finished here?" Stoneman inquired.

Valentin nodded wistfully. "Seems so."

Stoneman said, "You didn't get what you came for, did you?"

Valentin thought about throwing out some bluster, then realized it would be pointless. "I didn't, no," he said.

Stoneman nodded and blew a plume of smoke. Valentin regarded him carefully, reading his face and posture, relaxed and tense all at once. It was familiar.

"You've been away somewhere, Mr. Stoneman?" he asked momentarily.

"I was, yes, sir." "In prison?"

"Angola."

"What was your crime?"

"I killed a man," Stoneman said matter-of-factly. "Stuck a knife in his heart. I did three years." His face tightened. "He came at me. He shouldn't have done that. They called it self-defense, but they said I didn't have to kill him." He sighed quietly. "It sure felt like I had to at the time."

"I'm going to guess it was over a woman."

"It was."

"Was she worth it?"

"No, sir, she was not." Stoneman sighed. "Sometimes I think it would have been better if I'd stuck it in her heart. Except that I would have had a hard time finding it."

They both smiled over the quip. Valentin gazed at the big house in its magnificent and implacable glory. It looked like it could stand forever. He shook his head and sighed over the thrashing he had just taken. Eulalie Echo had been right, and so had Justine and Frank.

Stoneman said, "What's wrong, Mr. St. Cyr?"

"He's going to get away with something terrible," Valentin said. "And I can't touch him." Another glum moment passed and he said, "I never should have done this."

Stoneman was quiet, as if there was something going on behind his eyes. His voice dropped and he said, "Yes, sir, that probably was a mistake, all right. Rather than show up here, maybe you should have just waited for him to come outside."

Valentin emerged from his funk to give Stoneman a curious look. "Come outside where?"

"He goes to town every Sunday night," Stoneman said in a low voice. "He's got a woman he visits there."

Valentin pondered for a few seconds. It felt like there was light filling his head. "A woman."

"Yes, sir."

"On Ursulines, by chance?"

"He has a fine new Essex cabriolet," Stoneman said. "We take that automobile. Usually leave right around seven o'clock."

It was all Valentin could do to keep from pounding the fender of the Buick at his own stupidity. Sylvia Cardin told him she hadn't seen John Benedict in over a month. She was finished with him. Delouche said he'd had nothing to do with her. And yet there were no signs she was leaving out of her rooms on Ursulines. She wasn't going anywhere. Because someone else was paying the fare.

He stopped to consider the possibility that Benedict's killing was nothing but a spat over a woman. It had happened before. Mr. Stoneman said that he himself had spent three years in Angola for that very reason.

Valentin now regarded Stoneman carefully, wondering if it could be some kind of a trap. "Why are you telling me this?" he said.

Stoneman's eyes lightened at the detective's wariness. Then his jaw clenched. "Because I don't owe that rich man a fucking thing, that's why. He ain't nothing to me."

Valentin heard the bitter tone and understood. Something had happened to this fellow. He looked closer. Lurking just below Stoneman's skin was foreign blood, maybe Cherokee, or something more distant. Apparently, Mr. Nelson didn't check on his help all that well.

"This here's just a job I took," Stoneman was saying. "I don't really know Nelson, nor any of them others, either."

"You wouldn't know if they did some killings down in New Orleans."

"No, sir. It wouldn't surprise me, though. Nelson's mean and them others are too stupid to think on their own. So, yeah, they could do it, all right."

He stopped then, his face changing as his gaze lingered on the flowering fruit trees that lined the drive. "It's something to take someone's life away, ain't it?" he said.

"It is," Valentin agreed, realizing to his surprise that he and this stranger had somehow ventured into private territory. Stone-man seemed as taciturn a man as he was; and yet they were tapping a vein that ran very deep.

"That poor fellow's in the ground," Stoneman went on. "And here I stand. You know how that feels?"

Valentin nodded, thinking that maybe they both carried a mark that only certain people could discern, something drawn in blood. He didn't want to go any further down that path.

He was relieved, then, when Nelson came out the front door of the house. "Hey," he called, a warning note in his voice. "Take him to the station and leave him." He went into his pocket, pulled out Valentin's pistol, and tossed it in the air. "Give it back to him when you get there. Not before."

Stoneman snatched the pistol deftly from the air with one hand and tossed what was left of his cigarette away with the other.

They rode off the property and to the train station at Jefferson without exchanging another word. As soon as they were off Harris's property, Stoneman handed over the revolver. When they pulled up to the terminal, he offered his hand.

"Pleasure talking to you, Mr. St. Cyr," he said. "Maybe we'll meet up in New Orleans one day. Maybe one day soon. Who knows?"

Valentin hopped down. Stoneman turned the Buick around and drove off.

By the time he got back to New Orleans and walked over to Marais Street, the lamps were on, and Frank was in a rush working an early evening crowd that had the saloon buzzing.

Valentin had wanted to tell him about his visit to Nine Mile Point, and maybe the rest of it, but the bar was too busy. The saloon keeper saw him and stopped, looking relieved; then he treated him to a narrow-eyed glance.

"What's wrong?" he said, raising his voice over the noise. "Where you been all day?"

"I can tell you later," Valentin said. He looked around the merry crowd, getting a jump on Saturday night's revelry and all the loud and happy jass music that would go with it. He gave Frank a wave and edged away.

"You leaving?" Frank said. "Stay and have a drink."

"There's one more place I need to go."

"Now?"

"Yeah. I'll see you later."

The saloon keeper watched with a pronounced frown as the detective walked out the door. Then he went back to pouring drinks.

It was dark and cool when he arrived at the very spot in front of Longshoreman's Hall where he had stood three years before and watched Buddy come down the street. The look of giddy surprise on his face.
What are you doin' here?
Not knowing what was about to happen, which was the beginning of the end. In the final hours of the jass case, he had laid the trap on Rampart Street and unraveled the puzzle that had taunted him for weeks. Finally, from where he stood, he could see the place a block down where John Benedict had fallen.

He had stood there with Officer McKinney in the full light of day, when the saloons and the dance halls were all closed down, their facades looking faded and forlorn and impossibly shoddy.

The wind and rain made a mess of the street. The sanitation crews didn't get there very often. In the morning after, it would look like the circus had just left town.

It was a different place at night. Once the sun went down and the lights came on, the crowds would come, in a trickle, then a rush. First it was the regulars, stumbling out of their drunken beds. Then they came from all over the city, even from the American side. Once the music got going, it ran wild, and the fever of drinking and dancing and noisy jass lasted until just before first light. Then the dancers and the jass players, the rounders and the whores all went home, or to wherever they went when the darkness faded into daylight.

Standing there, Valentin could see that it wasn't that way anymore. It was a Saturday, and yet the crowds along the street were thin. He could hear a couple jass bands warming up, but it was only a faint echo of what was there before. All the really fine players had taken a lesson from Bolden's sad tale and had given up their evil ways, cleaned up their music, and crossed Canal Street, where the money was good.

Valentin knew that there would always be players around who couldn't mend their ways, playing that raw, fast, looping jass that had made such a rage just a few years back. They'd stay until the end, until no one was listening anymore.

It might not be long. The bright lights that had once festooned the buildings seemed muted. Indeed, a few of the former hot spots—the Little Twist and the Congo Dance Hall—were closed up for good. Another year or two, and there'd be nothing left at all.

Benedict had been lured here, then shot down, and left for the night's scavengers. Such a strange crime could only be contrived, for a reason he still didn't see.

He looked around some more. All he saw were citizens ambling around, white, various shades of Creole brown, deep black, Italian, some in between. The muted strains of real jass echoed from inside the walls of the saloons.