The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld (12 page)

Bubba was astonished. “Hey, man,” he said, “didn’t you like that girl?”

“Yeah.”

“Well"—Bubba cleared his throat—"did you do anything?”

“Oh, yeah. Two times.”

They left, and as they were walking down the driveway Wayne said, “
Cooo-eeee!
What
is
this place?”

On his own Wayne returned to the house on Conti Street two or three times, until Jackie wouldn’t let him in. With his characteristic sangfroid, he shrugged it off and went about his business. Soon after he quit school and went to work at Avondale Shipyards. Over the next five years he saw Mrs. Patterson only rarely.

CHAPTER TEN

The Game

Big Mo Guillot and Norma continued to play cat-and-mouse through the midfifties. Norma always knew when Big Mo’s men were following her—they tailed her so closely she could spot them with no trouble. She enjoyed giving them the slip and disappearing into St. Bernard or Jefferson Parish, on either side of Orleans Parish, where they had no authority. Big Mo stepped up his inspections; Norma darkened her house and operated elsewhere for a few nights, writing Big Mo anonymous letters to specify the elusive madam’s whereabouts, which sent his men scurrying all over the city. One night Marie Bernard, a madam Norma liked, called Norma to say that a cop was watching her house (at 6975 Canal Boulevard) and preventing a trick from leaving. Norma drove by slowly in her Cadillac. The cop recognized her and left Marie’s to tail her to the St. Bernard line. But Marie, unlike Norma, was not gifted in her line of work. “She had a lot of bad luck,” Norma said, “and never did succeed in having a really fine house; she was battling it all the time.” Marie certainly didn’t know how to make friends with the federal agents; she was eventually sent to jail for tax evasion. The feds located the linen service Marie used, counted each towel as a trick, and sent her up.

Big Mo was promoted to colonel, and Presley Trosclair, nicknamed Foots because he liked to kick people in the rear end—even his own men—became the new vice squad commander. He operated very differently from Big Mo. Whereas Guillot was straightforward in his approach, Foots liked the setup. When it came to catching the prostitutes, he sent in young, eager-beaver graduates fresh from the academy. Norma spent more time studying the graduates’ pictures and drinking coffee at the Meal-a-Minit, disguised as an old lady.

One of these young cops managed to learn one of Norma’s passwords. He called the house and asked for a girl, but he wanted the girl to meet him somewhere other than 1026 Conti. At the time Norma was using a house near City Park, a couple of miles out Esplanade Avenue from the Quarter. She decided to send Terry, a petite girl of French extraction with skin like white porcelain against her deep black hair. Terry was beautiful, and she knew it. She fit Norma’s definition of a chippie, a girl who never went with any man for very long, but men loved Terry—she was known around town as Yum-Yum because of her specialty—and Norma trusted and liked Terry. She would leave the house with her, and Terry was one of the few girls Norma socialized with.

Terry met the young man at the City Park house and took him to a bedroom. He gave her money, she undressed, and he pulled his badge. Then Foots made his entrance. This would have been all there was to it, because Terry refused to talk, except that Terry liked the young cop. As Foots stormed around the house, Terry said to her handsome captor, “What a pity that you have to be a copper and pull a badge just when I thought I was going to enjoy myself.”

Norma said, “Just like all men—they think they are God’s gift to the human race—his ego swelled. I knew Terry loved me and would never betray me. She wanted to date the policeman, but she said that if he ever asked her any of my business, that would end the romance. But this Paul was a stud, bragging to other cops about his free piece of ass. I had connections; I knew what he was saying—‘I’m gonna get Norma Wallace because I’m screwin one of her girls.’

“Every boy that graduated out of the police academy, I was his ambition. I don’t know what it was with these guys. Seemed like
they thought if they could bust Norma Wallace they would be made captain.”

Norma said nothing to Terry, and Terry continued meeting Paul at her own apartment. But the next thing Norma heard from her contact within the police department was nothing short of a call to arms. “This boy,” her informer said, “knows your girl has a kid. He says she’s no good and he’s gonna rack her up and take her kid away.”

Norma had always told her girls to be on the lookout for unusual body marks on men. “Just in case a beef came up, I kept a record: What was the size of his tool? Was it especially big or little? Did it have any marks on it?”

When Terry heard what Paul had said about her child, she told Norma he had scars on one of his thighs. Norma called her connection in the department.

Paul was brought in and accused of consorting with a known prostitute. He was asked for his resignation, at which point he denied the allegation. His superior demanded that he drop his pants. Paul resigned from the department.

“Actually,” Norma said cooly, “he owes me a lot. Today he has a very fine business, has made a great success of it. If it wasn’t for me, he’d still be on his lousy little salary, might even have been killed by now. I think about him and hope he doesn’t hate me. I don’t hate him; I just wanted to show him that wasn’t how you played the game.”

On Sunday nights Norma and Terry liked to go to the Town and Country to dance and have some drinks. Norma especially liked the piano player there, Sam Adams, who was also a tenant on Governor Nicholls Street, and always stopped whatever he was playing to sing “Mona Lisa” as Norma came in, segueing into a spoof of “It’s So Nice to Have a Man Around the House.” For Terry, Sam would sing, “Don’t sit under the Yum-Yum tree with anyone but Terr-eee!” Foots thought they were soliciting men at the Town and Country, but the motel was in Jefferson Parish, out of his jurisdiction. Then Norma discovered the Black Orchid on Foy Street in Gentilly, a place with great Italian food and an intimate lounge. She and Terry often invited some
of the other girls and started the night there. So Foots sent in a good-looking young vice cop named Nick Macheca.

The first several times Macheca went to the Black Orchid, he brought a date with him and spent the city’s money on dinner and drinks. He watched Norma; he watched the girls; he didn’t see any of them working out of the lounge. But he knew they were slick, and, anyway, he liked the place—it was becoming a home away from home for him. He stopped bringing dates. He bought drinks for Norma’s girls, he danced with them, he tried to get dates with them, he put the move on Yum-Yum—that was for himself, not his job—but not one of them tumbled.

Foots demanded action. Macheca and his partner, Norman Macaluso, found out that “Mr. Royal” was one of the passwords to get into the house. They phoned and said Mr. Royal told them to call when they got to town. Jackie asked several questions, but she didn’t like the answers; they didn’t get in.

So Macheca and Macaluso decided to stake out the place. They picked a cold, drizzly night and sat in a van, nothing but a shell of metal, and shivered as they watched for men going up the driveway at 1026 Conti. A couple of hours went by. No one went in, but someone was coming out.

Marie, the maid, came down the driveway in her starched white dress, holding a red umbrella over her head. Macheca and Macaluso watched her cross Conti Street and walk toward North Rampart. She disappeared around the corner. They sat back to wait some more, hugging themselves to keep warm and fogging the windows in the van with their breath.

A half hour later a sharp rapping on the side of the van startled them. “Who the hell knows we’re here?” Macaluso whispered to Macheca. Macheca shrugged. He opened the van window.

Marie held out a silver tray. “Miss Norma says she knows it’s cold out here, so she sent y’all some chicken sandwiches and hot coffee.”

Setups and surveillance were not producing results for Foots. He seemed to be nothing more than a footnote in Norma’s life. He needed to find another way.

Straight through the fifties the fake shows continued to be popular, especially with couples. On the way to the house the cabdrivers liked to tell their fares about the dog and pony shows at Norma Wallace’s. Word got around about a show with a pony and a girl, but that the girl would only do it if the audience was large enough. When the couples got to the house, they’d ask Norma if the girl and pony were going to perform that night. Norma would say, “Oh, the girl was oversexed; she screwed the pony to death.” Then they’d want to know if the girl was there. “No,” Norma would tell them, “she’s dead from screwin too.”

Norma said, “What the hell. I was selling something. And the people kept flocking in!”

Then there were tales about the greased-girl show, in which a guy tried to catch an oil-coated girl in thirty seconds or less. Soon rumor had it that on the third floor Norma had installed a two-way mirror with four rows of bleacher-type seats behind it. Now the word was that the guy chasing the girl was some poor sap who had no idea people were watching as he tried to catch the greased girl fast enough so that he didn’t have to pay for her. Simone was the girl who screwed the pony (it’s really a small donkey, those in the know said); she was the greased girl too. She was known as Norma’s all-around girl—she’d do
anything
if the price was right. Norma did, in fact, have a girl named Simone who was called the all-around girl. Fact and legend meshed, and the legend of Norma Wallace’s house grew.

And it made Foots Trosclair hot under the collar, especially after he’d lost one of his most promising young vice cops because of Norma. He became determined to close her house down on a crime-against-nature charge. He thought of a different kind of setup; he’d use a woman this time. He sent a woman traffic cop to the Davis Beauty Salon, where Norma had been a client for nearly ten years and had a standing appointment every other afternoon. The cop made an appointment, and as she was having her hair dyed an ungodly shade of red, she chatted away to Norma.

The next time Norma saw her, the cop left the busy downtown intersection where she was directing traffic and talked to Norma through her car window. “You know, Miss Norma,” she said, “I’m out here directing traffic in the hot summer and the cold winter. I’d
sure rather work for you.” Through the grapevine Norma already knew the woman was thick with Foots.

She looked the cop up and down. She had feet like doorstops—must have worn at least a size ten shoe—and that hair! “Honey,” Norma said, “you couldn’t even be a maid in my house.” She shook her head sadly. “You look like death took a holiday.”

Norma had a good friend, Poppy, a very pretty young homosexual man who lived Uptown. One evening Poppy and his burly housemate threw a big party. Norma went with Darlene Ford, a hefty woman who owned a beauty parlor in the Quarter. Norma wore a satin moiré dress with a trumpet skirt that dragged the floor in the back and a fluffy boa so long that she had to wrap it around her neck twice so she wouldn’t trip on it—all in her favorite color, a luscious crimson. Darlene swathed her ample girth in yards of luminous purple and gold silk. But they were only pinpoints of phosphorescence in a sea of color that sparkled and glittered and waved and flowed, fabulous dresses that were jeweled and sequined and beaded and bugled, with necklines that plunged in the front and stood up in the back to showcase mile-high hairdos, many of which Darlene had created.

What a spectacle! Men dressed in women’s clothes and some of them so beautiful no one would have known they weren’t women. Everyone was drinking champagne and eating the delicious food that Poppy had spent days cooking. They were having a wonderful time—until the next-door neighbor came out on his porch and yelled that he had called the police.

The crowd broke and began running down the long steps from Poppy’s raised house, tripping on their skirts and twisting their ankles in their high heels so that it was a wonder they didn’t kill themselves. Norma’s long, gold Cadillac Coupe De Ville was parked right in front. “I jumped in my car, and you’ve never seen anything like it. Fairies with dresses on jumped in with me. Some were riding on the hood. Darlene, who weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds, couldn’t get in the car because it was so loaded. So she jumped up on the running board, and I took off. The car was tilting; wigs, high heels, and purses were flying.”

Norma drove a couple of blocks. Everyone looked back to see the cops pulling up in front of Poppy’s house; they all screamed. Norma whisked them away.

“I always did say there were three sexes—the male, the female, and the otherwise. I can guarantee you we would have made front-page headlines on that one.”

It seemed like everybody heard about it anyway. Norma’s police buddies kidded her for days. But it got Foots thinking. He had arrested a young homosexual on a crime-against-nature charge. He figured the boy knew Norma, so he offered him a deal.

A few weeks later Norma’s young friend called her: He had a couple from out of town who wanted to see a show, could he send them over? Norma turned him down flat. Jackie tried to talk her into it, but Norma refused. Later her friend leveled with her—the couple was a vice cop and a policewoman, and Foots had set it up.

“Gee, I must have been born with a veil,” Norma said.

Headlines across the front pages of the city’s newspapers charged Chep Morrison and Joe Scheuring with laxity and called for Scheur-ing’s removal as police superintendent. Scheuring had been indicted by the Orleans Parish grand jury for malfeasance in office, but Judge Bernard Cocke dismissed the charge. One of the city councilmen, Fred Cassibry, decided to take on Scheuring’s ouster as his personal cause. Morrison, more stubborn than ever in the face of this adversity, stood up for his appointee while Scheuring insisted that Aaron Kohn had gathered his information from “the scum of the underworld.” But when the Special Citizens Investigating Committee delivered its final report in April 1954, the first of its thirty-nine recommendations was the dismissal of Scheuring. Morrison, for the public record, traced the committee’s information on lotteries and prostitution to that gleaned during the early days of his administration, when Adair Watters was superintendent. He insisted that Scheuring had eradicated these problems. In November 1954 the Louisiana Supreme Court reversed Judge Cocke’s decision to dismiss the malfeasance charge against Scheuring. Still, the mayor refused to fire Scheuring.

So Judge Cocke cleared Scheuring of the charge the following January, and Scheuring immediately filed a lawsuit against Councilman Cassibry for defamation of character, asking a hundred thousand dollars in damages. Morrison and Scheuring seemed invincible.