Empire of Sin (22 page)

Certainly the District’s excesses were becoming increasingly intolerable to Josie Arlington. Although she was by all reports making prodigious amounts of money at her palace on Basin Street, she still could not get past her persistent discomfort with her life—and her growing desperation to keep that knowledge from her adored niece Anna. According to one friend, Arlington “
was in dread fear continually that this girl would find out who she was.” In 1903, faced with the quandary that Anna would soon be returning home from convent school in Paris, Arlington used some of her brothel profits to buy a house in Covington, Louisiana, safely away from New Orleans, near Abita Springs on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain.
She named the place Anna’s Villa, and when the girl returned from Europe in July of 1904, she was sent directly there to spend the summer. Arlington then enrolled the girl in another convent school—this one in Clifton, Ohio—where she could be sheltered for another two years. But this could only be a stopgap measure; after those two years, Anna would be finished with her schooling, and she would want to come home to her family in New Orleans.

Then,
on the morning of December 1, 1905, some workmen painting the Arlington brothel’s top floor accidentally set fire to the building. It was eleven
A.M.
, and the residents of the place were all still asleep, but they were quickly roused and evacuated. According to the
Daily Picayune
, the panicky women ran down Basin Street carrying bedsheets stuffed with whatever possessions they could grab. They then assembled—“
scantily clad”—in the saloon of Tom Anderson’s Annex. Fortunately, the brothel fire burned slowly, and had only destroyed the attic and two upper floors before it was put out. But although the place was adequately insured, Josie Arlington had lost many of the beautiful paintings and furniture she had bought when traveling in Europe.

A reporter for the
Picayune
took the opportunity to engage in a bit of sermonizing. He described the overdramatic women weeping and moaning—“some of them more for the purpose of exciting sympathy and attention than for [any] actual loss.” But then he saw one woman, legitimately grief-stricken, crying in a hallway. When asked why she was so upset, she said that, in the excitement of her escape, she had forgotten to rescue a picture of her mother. It was this loss that caused the young woman such pain. “Surely there was some good left in the heart of the little woman,” the reporter oozed, “who, amidst the vices by which she was surrounded, and in her degradation, yet remembered her mother, valuing the picture far above all the diamonds, jewels, and fine dresses which she was possessed of.”

This scene from Victorian melodrama notwithstanding, Arlington and her employees were unwilling to be out of business for long, so while the house at 225 Basin Street was being repaired, they set up shop in the upper rooms of Anderson’s Annex (which henceforth became known as the “Arlington Annex”). But while the brothel’s proprietress had come through the fire physically and financially unscathed, the close call only reinforced her conviction to somehow live a more respectable kind of life. According to some reports, after the fire
she began to speak gloomily to her prostitutes of the fire and brimstone that awaited all sinners after death. And her desire to keep Anna free of the taint of Storyville just grew stronger.

By 1906, she had become prosperous enough to pull off this feat. In that year,
Arlington purchased an imposing white mansion on Esplanade Avenue, in an ultra-respectable part of town out toward the City Park. This, she decided, was where she would undertake to live her second life of sober propriety. Until this point, she and Tom Brady had lived separately, she in the brothel and he in his mother’s house (though they did also have a room at the home of Arlington’s cousin where they could rendezvous whenever necessary). This was her choice, not his. Brady had actually asked her to marry him several years earlier, but she’d refused. According to Brady, she told him that since they’d gone along this far without doing the deed, they might as well go along as they were for “the balance.” But now they would live together as ostensible man and wife for all the world to see. Josie arranged for her brother Henry Deubler’s family (including his wife and three sons, Anna’s brothers) to move in with them, and of course Anna herself would join them after leaving school. In preparation, Arlington instructed everyone they knew—everyone that her niece might have any contact with—to start addressing her not as Josie or Miss Arlington or even as Mary Deubler, but as “Mrs. Brady.” If the masquerade was to work, there could be no mistakes.

And so the Deublers and the Bradys lived the life of a normal extended family in the large house on Esplanade. Arlington put more and more of the responsibility for running the brothel on one of her surrogates, but she still enjoyed the revenue stream that made her new life possible.
Some of her more presentable Storyville associates, including Tom Anderson, would occasionally be invited to family dinners and birthday parties—at the house or at Anna’s Villa. But Anna (who apparently was not a careful reader of the New Orleans newspapers) never suspected that these people were anything other than upstanding friends of her aunt Mary and uncle Tom. The young woman would in fact live for years in the house on Esplanade in blissful ignorance of the source of her family’s prosperity on Basin Street, just a few short miles away.

But others in New Orleans did not have the luxury of being so insulated from the spectacle of Storyville. Local business reformers may still have been satisfied with the results of their 1898 experiment, but moral reformers, emboldened by the rise of organizations like the Anti-Saloon League and the Social Hygiene movement, were becoming increasingly vocal in their opposition to the goings-on in the city’s tenderloin. Drawing boundaries around sin had clearly not worked, and the impulse toward outright prohibition—of prostitution, alcohol, gambling, and other vices—was gaining ground all over the nation in the first decade of the twentieth century. In the Louisiana state legislature, support was growing (despite Representative Thomas C. Anderson’s strenuous efforts) for stronger legislative measures to put the lid on sin. Already in 1904 they had passed a law to close the state’s poolrooms. Another proposed measure would prohibit horse-track betting throughout the state. And now, as the 1908 elections approached, there was talk of an even more comprehensive anti-vice law, one that would totally revamp the way alcohol could be sold in Louisiana, at the same time placing onerous new restrictions on the ability of women and blacks to work in and patronize the establishments that served it.

For the members of New Orleans’ demimonde—the madams, pimps, saloon and dance-hall proprietors, and the prostitutes and musicians they employed—there were to be
some tough times ahead. In its first ten years of existence, the city’s segregated vice districts on both sides of Canal Street had largely been left alone, and they had thrived—far too well for the comfort of many. But now there were to be some changes in New Orleans. The city’s self-styled champions of virtue and purity were finally ready to strike back.

ON A WARM JUNE EVENING IN 1907, A SMALL, FAIR-HAIRED boy named Walter Lamana was playing outside his father’s undertaking business on St. Philip Street in the French Quarter. The boy was alone, amusing himself quietly in the alley beside the building. It was nearly eight
P.M.
and the amber evening light was waning—the time of day when the Quarter’s characteristic smells of garlic and horse dung and sweetly rotting fruit seemed momentarily to intensify in the dusk.

As Walter played under the arches, one of the establishment’s horse-drawn hearses, returning from a late Saturday funeral, turned into the alley. The driver stopped and said a few words to the boy. Then he continued down the alley to the courtyard beyond, where he busied himself unhitching the wagon and settling the horses into their stables for the night.

After a few minutes, another man—in his early forties, with sparse graying hair and a small mustache—approached Walter in the alley. Exactly what he said to the eight-year-old boy is unknown. But he produced two nickels from his pocket and offered to treat the boy to ice cream from a candy store down the street. Walter apparently saw nothing amiss in the offer. He got up from the pavement, took the man’s offered hand, and walked with him up St. Philip Street toward the store.

When they reached Bourbon Street, they came upon a covered wagon stopped at the corner. A tall man stood beside the wagon, as if waiting for them. This man took Walter’s hand and then, before the boy could protest, lifted him up to the driver, who quickly pushed Walter into the covered space behind him. The tall man then climbed into the back of the wagon and pulled the tarp closed after him. The driver spurred the horse, and the wagon began moving noisily down the poorly paved street. The first man remained standing on the banquette, watching them go in the faltering light. Then he turned away and disappeared into the warren of tenements, outbuildings, taverns, and warehouses of the lower French Quarter.

When Walter did not come back into the family’s living quarters after nightfall, his parents were at first unconcerned. The boy often liked to hide in various places around the courtyard, hayloft, and livery stables; sometimes he’d even fall asleep in his hiding place. But as the evening wore on, the Lamanas became worried. Peter Lamana, Walter’s father, searched the premises and the surrounding neighborhood, but the boy was nowhere to be found. Finally, it occurred to the father that Walter might have stowed away on the tallyho his older brother John had driven that evening to West End, the lakeside resort some six or seven miles from the city.
Lamana had one of his horses saddled up and rode out to the resort in the moonlight. But when he returned, hours later, he had nothing to report. John had not seen his younger brother.

For the rest of that night and throughout the day on Sunday, Peter Lamana searched the French Quarter for his son, enlisting friends, employees, and neighborhood children in the hunt. They talked to neighbors, shopkeepers, and anyone else they encountered, but no one seemed to have any idea what had happened to the boy. By Sunday evening, Lamana decided to go to the police. That he had waited even this long to report the disappearance was not unusual. Members of the city’s Italian community typically preferred to deal with their own problems. Besides, the police did not always respond energetically to cases involving Italians, since investigations of crimes in Italian neighborhoods were often met with a wall of mistrustful silence. But Peter Lamana’s case was an exception. As the owner of a prosperous undertaking business and the largest livery stable in the Vieux Carré—and as a member of the city’s powerful Progressive Union, a civic organization composed of the most prominent local businessmen—he was considered a very important man, worthy of the best efforts of the police. And so they responded to the report with a greater determination than they would have if the missing boy had been the son of a downtown grocer or banana handler. The search was expanded to the riverfront, the lakeside district, and throughout the “
sewers, dark alleys, back yards, and hidden courtyards” of the Quarter.

But then, on Monday morning, an anonymous letter was delivered to the Lamana residence. Written in Italian in a crude, barely legible hand, it read: “
Your boy is comfortably housed, clothed, and fed. He is well and no harm will be done him, but we will not be responsible for the consequences should you fail to comply with our demands.” What followed was a demand for a ransom of $6,000—a huge sum in 1907 dollars—to be delivered by Lamana himself. According to the instructions in the note (which Lamana kept secret from everyone except the police), the undertaker was to raise the money in gold and then take it—alone, on horseback—out along the road toward Bogalusa, a small town about seventy miles north of the city. Somewhere on the way, he would be approached by a person who would accept the money from him and tell him where his boy could be found. Unless he wanted Walter sent back to him “
cut up in pieces,” Lamana was to follow these instructions to the letter.