Chasing the Devil's Tail (17 page)

Valentin looked at the girl, who said, "Never had no
deal.
I went with him once, counta he did somethin' for me. Now he wants it all the time." She wiped a hand across her face, smearing mascara. "He made me do it again," she said. "Now that's all."

The white man glowered. "It's all when I say so."

Valentin looked at him. "Maybe you should leave now."

"And maybe you should fuck yourself," the man said and then made the mistake of reaching out with one rough paw to push the interloper aside. In a blur of motion, Valentin's right hand went into his back pocket and whipped out with his whalebone sap to snap the blond man just above the ear. There was a flat crack, the pale eyes rolled up, and the fellow pitched sideways, his face first colliding with the wall, then hitting the floor. Justine looked down at the still body.

"What are you doing here?" Valentin asked her. "Ain't this Mae's room?"

"She let me have it," the girl said in a low voice. "So I could make some money. I quit that show. But he wouldn't
leave me be. I don't know how he found me here." She kept her eyes on the supine form. "He ain't dead, is he?"

"No, he's not," Valentin said. "So you won't want to be here when he comes around." She nodded slowly. She didn't seem to know what to do next. "I'm in the next room," Valentin told her. "Come in there, if you like."

He was back in the room and in the bed when she knocked and stepped inside, closing the door behind her. She looked at Valentin and the girl. He whispered for the girl to move over and motioned for Justine to get into the bed. Later, when the girl left, she stayed on.

From the other side of the square, she caught his eye and smiled and waved.

She took a room with Miss Antonia and he visited her again. Each time, as he was pulling on his trousers, she said, "You comin' back?" It wasn't just a tired cadge for future business; she wanted to know. She wanted him to come back and so he did, regularly.

He learned her story. She was from southwest Louisiana, a Creole of mixed African and Cherokee blood, the daughter of a drunken tenant farmer. He was a sorry excuse for a man who kept his wife pregnant until she died birthing a ninth baby, pounded his brood bloody, and occasionally raped Justine, his sixth child and the prettiest of his girls.

One summer night when she was fourteen, her oldest brother took one beating too many, stabbed the old man clean through the heart and dumped his body in a bayou. Justine ran away to Houston and took up dancing in a traveling show that was passing through. She soon found that men would pay plenty money for what she had been giving away between the cornrows and in the back of farm wagons. And so she drifted
from show to circus to show until she arrived in New Orleans and decided to stay put for a while. That night, her first night in a sporting house, she made the acquaintance of Valentin.

Now she earned her living entertaining men at Antonia Gonzales', white men with cash in their pockets. Valentin of course understood what she did there, but they never talked about it.

The two girls looked over the Square at the Creole detective and Justine whispered something to her friend, something that caused them to laugh like schoolgirls.

At first, she figured him for just another sport, the kind who would care for nobody and for nothing but his own pleasures. One of them who would come round to her room late at night, having lost his bankroll at cards, and pound her already weary hip bones until she cried out, even slap her if the mood struck him, then get up, take all her money and walk out without a glance back.

She'd come across that type plenty. And Valentin St. Cyr seemed to fit the picture, with that flat expression and eyes cool and vacant, like he noticed little and minded less.

But he was the type of rounder she tended to latch onto, the kind who wanted one regular girl at his beck and call. It made her feel all dead and empty, living at the whim of some sport, but no way as used-up as those who took on one after the next, a dozen a night or so, until they ended up worn-out holes for any fellow with a Liberty dollar to dump his stuff into.

She thought he'd be like those others, but when she looked closer, she caught hints of something different. What she took for a hard front was stillness; and he wasn't cold; he just kept back from the world around him. She guessed this was because
he was part Dago; she had seen the Italian men working in the gangs down on the docks and they were like that, stone-faced and quiet, keeping all to themselves. As she got to know him better, she came to notice the shadow behind his eyes. Something had happened to him. She knew the look, because things had happened to her, too.

When he let her visit his rooms one night, she saw books and was all the more curious. She even asked him if he was some kind of schoolmaster, to which he laughed, all embarrassed, and shook his head. Before she ran off from home, she had liked school, liked reading stories especially. But the mere fact that an adult male in the District read real books was enough to catch her interest and fix her eye more closely upon him. The other men, most who took her for a night at a time, passed through, and she barely remembered them at all. Only Mr. St. Cyr stayed on her mind.

Valentin studied her as she watched the Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band playing their jugs and washboards and other made-up instruments for the strolling crowd. He saw her clap her hands and laugh with delight at the antics of the five white boys making music that clattered and banged and piped merrily across the square.

He found himself wanting her around. He liked the way she looked, short and lissome, milk-coffee skin, large dark eyes, full mouth, a nose small and curved like a Jewess and hair tied in an Indian braid and let down only for him. He liked her quietness, much unlike most of the sporting girls, those brash, braying types who delighted in raising a ruckus, in getting drunk and fighting.

He liked her smell. Most doves bothered only to cover their sheen of dirt and sweat with cheap perfume and went
into a bath reluctantly. But Justine bathed often and earnestly, like she was working to wash something off her skin. Valentin guessed that it was the memory of the hands of her father, or perhaps the thought of the men who fondled her now.

He didn't dwell on what she did in her room those nights when she wasn't with him; he thought himself too much the rounder to let it vex him. He knew how she earned her money, but he told himself it didn't matter; the way she tussled with him beneath the sheets, with an eager energy that threw a rush of rose to her skin and lit up deep points of light in her eyes, made it all a bit better. He believed she was never that way with her other men.

There was more that bound them. He had told her things that no one else knew.

They had frolicked until the sheets were wet with sweat and the humid air in the room was awash with the earthy smell of her body. She rolled on her side, her chest heaving. Valentin stretched his arms and legs wide, letting the night air from the window cool him. Her breathing became even again and she turned to look at him in the silver glow of the moonlight. She studied his face for a few moments and then said, "I don't know no thin' about you."

He gave her a half-smile, about to tell her there was nothing to know and that she should go to sleep. It was the middle of the night, after all. But she was watching him closely, waiting for him to tell her something. "Well, what do you want to know?" he said.

"Something about where you come from," she said. "About your family."

He thought he would just share the bare facts and be done with it. But he found himself recalling the whole tale, back into his childhood, from the first hateful sneer his olive skin
had prompted from some white man on the street to his father's murder and the terrible black weeks that followed. He ended it by describing his mother's face, a mask of bitter sadness, as she watched the train carrying her son pull out, heading north and away from New Orleans.

"Away to where?" Justine asked.

Valentin blinked, saw the image fade. "What?"

"Away to where?"

"Chicago," he said. "To a Catholic school there. She wanted me somewhere where I'd be safe." He paused. "She was a little off the mark."

He learned literature, elocution, some mathematics and science from the strict nuns, and fighting and stealing from his classmates, all rough city boys. He fell in with a pack of Italian ruffians who drank whiskey and chewed tobacco and now and then burglarized lakeshore mansions. Justine shook her head over that, then smiled a little when he mentioned losing his virtue with a young Polish girl barely off the boat. "First time I saw a fellow killed was up there," he said, then told her about three thugs beating a small-change crook to death in a West Side alleyway.

"But what about your mama?" she asked him.

Letters came once every few weeks for the first year, ordinary news at first—too ordinary. As the months passed, the pages became mostly filled with scribbled ramblings, memories of her Cherokee and African grandparents shifting suddenly to a narrative of one of her visits to St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, where his young brother and sister were interred, victims of the 1880 visit of Bronze John, and where the cement on his father's bier was still gray.

"What about the summertime?" she asked him. "You didn't come home?"

He shook his head. "She wouldn't allow it. She wrote to me and said 'Don't come back to this place. I'll tell you when it's safe.' She promised she was going to get on a train and come visit. But she never did." After another moment, he said, in a quieter tone, "I guess ... I didn't think so much about her after a while. I was chasing after girls and getting into trouble with those hoodlums up there. I was making plenty money. I had some fine clothes. I was a regular little rascal..." His voice drifted off.

"And then?" Justine prompted him.

"Well, I figured I was going to be an A-1 criminal, a real Chicago crook, and then this one pal of mine went and crossed the wrong people. They caught him and cut him till he was dead. But before he died he started telling names."

"Your name?"

"I didn't wait to find out. I packed a satchel and got on the first train heading south."

"You came back?" He nodded. "How long were you away?"

"Two and a half years," he said. "I was eighteen."

He remembered walking up to the house on Liberty Street and finding a Negro family in residence. No, they said, they didn't know nothing about a Creole woman living there. He found the landlord of the property, who told him that one day a year or so ago, he went by the house and found it deserted, every bit of furniture still in place, food molding in the icebox, but empty of its tenant. He had waited a month and then rented the place to new boarders. He sold the furniture to the junkman.

Valentin walked up and down Liberty Street and finally happened on an old neighborhood crone who told him how one morning his mother had just up and gone away. She
was wearing black and muttering prayers, another neighbor chimed in, as she wandered off in the direction of the river. He searched up and down the neighborhood, then the streets from the Quarter north and east. There was no trace of her. He checked the hospitals, the morgue, even the women's prison. There was no word and no record of her.

The next day, he went round to find Buddy, but he was off in Biloxi playing music. He visited St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, found the graves of his brother and sister and father. The flowers had long since wilted to dry ribbons.

"And that's how I knew she was either gone for good or dead," he murmured.

She watched his face. "So, what'd you do?"

"I left New Orleans. Went off, all over Louisiana, into East Texas, all around."

"And what did you do?"

"Just about everything," he said. "I worked in the fields a little bit, I was a teamster ... and I helped out with a traveling show for a while." He glanced at her. "I stole a lot, too."

"You didn't rob no banks, did you?"

He gave her a thin smile and shook his head. "No. People get shot dead robbing banks. That wasn't for me. I broke into some rich folks' houses, stole jewelry, that sort of thing."

She leaned on one elbow. "Then how'd you end up being a copper?"

He was surprised. "You know about that?"

She nodded. "'Bout the first thing I heard. 'That's Mr. St. Cyr. He used to be a copper, you know.'"

"Well, I came back here and I needed work," he said. "It was a job and it wasn't the docks." He let out a small sigh. "And the truth is I thought maybe I could find out about those men killed my father. That's what I thought."

His police training included the rudiments of the law, investigative technique, the rights of the accused, practice with firearms. On the street he learned a different set of rules, such as the proper collection and distribution of money from the brothels, the apprehension of suspects without killing them on the spot. The goal in all situations was to maintain the give-and-take of the streets while leaving nary a bruise. He listened and learned. He became a good cop and he put his skills to trying to locate his father's murderers through official files.

"But there wasn't even a record of it," he said. "Nothing. Like it never happened."

He was a good cop, but he didn't last. He was on the force less than two years when he had to resign after drawing his gun on his sergeant. The man, half-drunk at mid-morning, was beating a whore who had refused to go down on her knees at his command. He knocked the unfortunate harlot unconscious in an alley off Robertson Street, then started to kick the helpless body in a drunken fury. Patrolman St. Cyr asked the sergeant to stop, but the older cop ignored him. When Valentin heard one of the girl's ribs snap, he drew out his police revolver, placed the muzzle inside the Irish ear, and pulled back the hammer.

If the whore, a pale, consumptive girl of seventeen, had survived, Valentin would have been brought up on charges. But she died and he was cleared. The sergeant was put behind a desk after a short suspension. Valentin's police career was over. He endured the cold stares, the turned backs and dark whispers for six weeks, then handed in his resignation. Three months later, the place they called Storyville was legally mandated.