Chasing the Devil's Tail (26 page)

Justine spoke up first. "Why do you say for sure it's a man?" she asked. "A woman could do it, too."

"You didn't see what I saw. What he did to those girls."

"I don't care what he did," she announced firmly. "You hear what I say. A woman could do it, too." He guessed she was right, it was possible. But then she hadn't looked upon the broken, bloodied bodies of Martha Devereaux and Jennie Hix.

The storm had passed through and now the afternoon sun cast a soft swath through the windowpanes and across the floor. He had reached the end of it. She settled back and regarded him closely for a moment. "Did it hurt your pride?"

"What?"

"What Mr. Anderson said. All them thinkin' you didn't do right."

He got up from his chair and started pacing slowly. "Yes, I suppose so," he said. "But it's more than that. There's someone out there killing women whenever he wants. It's a true wonder. Just slips in, does it and walks out. Which is another reason I think it can't be Bolden. This is either a clever, clever fellow or one of the luckiest people alive, and he ain't either of those." He stopped and glowered. "But I don't care how clever or how lucky he is. He can't get away with it forever. Sooner or later, he's going to get caught."

"And you want to be the one catches him, ain't that right?" Justine said.

He looked at her. "No," he said, "I have to be the one."

***

MANTLEY
Died
On Friday morning, May 31, 1907
at three o'clock
Florence Mantley
aged 41 years, a native of Baton Rouge and
resident of this city for the past eight years.
Mr. Tom Anderson invites her friends
to attend her funeral at
Gasquet's Funeral Parlor,
To-morrow (Saturday), June 1,
At 3 o'clock precisely.
Gasquet's, 224 Gravier

***

The preparations for Florence Mantley's last day above ground began at dawn, just as a weak, watery sun rose through the mist over the Gulf. The night of mourning was over and it was time to move on to the journey's end. The last of the visitors had left the front room of Gasquet's and stepped out onto Gravier Street some hours ago, and now the lid was closed on the coffin of heavy, dark mahogany where
she lay adorned in her finest gown, her favorite gems, and a wig of auburn curls.

When the noon bells tolled, Justine hurried out of the bed and went for a bath. By the time Valentin roused himself, she had her clothes laid out, had thrown eggs into the frying pan and pushed a tray of biscuits into the oven. He sat down at the table, crossed his arms, and announced that he wasn't going. He wasn't about to show his face, he told her, not after all that had happened. She argued with him, insisted that he had to go, because wasn't it true that the killer might appear to see what his bloody hand had wrought?

It took the better part of an hour of pacing and fuming for him to give in. Even then, he lolled about, complaining under his breath, making such a nuisance of himself that Justine said he was acting like it was
his
funeral.

But at two-thirty, he found himself stepping onto Magazine Street in his black suit to board a streetcar for uptown and Gasquet's Funeral Parlor. As they passed the busy Saturday banquettes, he reflected grumpily on the odd turns his life was taking. There he was, in the midst of a string of murders, humiliated by the killer, being herded outdoors in dark suit and stiff collar, the very picture of a hen-pecked husband.

Justine turned her face to the streetcar window. He looked so fussy and unhappy that she wanted to laugh in spite of the grave business at hand.

By the time the car stopped at the intersection of South Franklin and Gravier, there were at least a hundred men and women, Negroes and Creoles and a smattering of whites, all dressed in dark gray or black, milling about the front entrance to Gasquet's. In an empty dirt lot at the side of the building, a marching band was waiting, the brass bells of the horns sparkling in the hot afternoon sun. At dirge-like intervals, the
deep tentative thump of a bass drum punctuated the hushed murmuring voices. It was clear from the swelling crowd that Florence Mantley was a woman of some substance in the back-of-town neighborhoods on both sides of Canal Street.

Valentin and Justine joined the congregation. They saw the girls from Miss Antonia's huddled in a somber group and Justine walked over to talk to them. Valentin went along and waited by her side, his eyes scanning the crowd, noting the selection of local faces. He placed most of them as run-of-the-mill Saturday night sports and fancy men who had the respect to attend this solemn process, and tried to fix the others in his memory. But with his luck, the killer would be some common type who would disappear in this or any other crowd.

He didn't see Bolden about, but what would he be doing there? Even though he had first played music in parades like every other Uptown musician, his horn was too wild for this sober task, so steeped in New Orleans tradition. In fact, brass bands herald every part of life, but none more extravagantly than the final passage into darkness. Uptown funerals were a sight to behold and a joy to hear; and in violent, disease-riddled New Orleans, the participants all got plenty of practice.

The first slow tones trebled from the bells of the horns and the bass drum began a steady rumble. Valentin looked up as a hearse with two white horses pulled around from the back of the building and headed up Dauphine at a stately pace, surrounded by a dozen octoroons, Miss Mantley's girls. Next came the madams of the tonier Storyville houses with their coteries, dappling the street in shades of brown, yellow and black. Valentin saw Antonia Gonzales, Lulu White, Lizzie Taylor, Countess Willie Piazza. A stone-faced Tom Anderson, host of the sad ceremony, walked along with Hilma Burt at his side.
Then came two or three of the back-of-town madams, all shabbier than their Storyville sisters, including Cassie Maples with two of her Ethiopian girls and the homely maid Sally in an ill-fitting Sunday dress, clutching the madam's arm and looking startled by everything. Valentin nodded a grave greeting to all, spoke directly to no one, and was surprised when Anderson reached out and offered his hand.

But it was no polite gesture. The King of Storyville fixed the Creole detective with a blank stare, slipped a note into his palm, and then turned away. Valentin quickly recovered and stashed the paper in a vest pocket, feeling like half the crowd had witnessed the exchange. He went looking for Justine.

In the wake of the main body of the parade came the usual straggling mob of the curious, those with nothing else to do and eager for entertainment. This assembly represented a unique New Orleans brand of hellion, and their numbers would swell as the parade progressed, like a stream drawing flotsam from the banks.

He and Justine and the stragglers and this crowd—"the second line," as their number was called—fell into step as the funeral march began. The mood would remain somber for the entire twelve-block march to the cemetery as the band moved along in slow cadence, playing mournful hymns. It was a dark Mississippi of bodies, moving up the cobbled street past Charity Hospital and in the direction of the gates of "the City of the Dead," St. Louis Cemetery No. 2.

The turgid army of second-liners stayed outside the walls, milling about on Robertson Street with their hilarity, while those attending to the grim business at hand moved silently down the narrow pathways that stretched between marble mausoleums with their oven-like biers stacked four-high into walls of brick eight feet deep.

No one was laid to rest below ground in New Orleans; the below-sea-level earth was so waterlogged that in earlier times caskets had been known to surface, sometimes float, even upend and drop their ghastly cargoes into the light of day. So "the City of the Dead" resembled just that, a grid of tiny mansions and "fours" like tenement buildings, the dwellers all in the happy ranks of the deceased.

It was a show to the last, even when the dear departed was not a person of means. In which case the coffin would be reinterred later in a more modest bier. But Florence Mantley could afford the best and so her remains would remain, encased for eternity in a fine marble tomb of classic Greek design.

The service was simple. A Catholic priest said prayers for the dead. The madam's friends and her staff of octoroons wept copiously into silk handkerchiefs. Eulalie Echo stood by, eyes closed in meditation, her presence an added comfort to Miss Mantley's departed soul. Grave-faced men lifted her coffin from the back of the hearse and carried it to a bier. The band played a slow spiritual. Justine watched the ceremony, lowering her gaze respectfully and whispering softly to herself. Valentin pulled at his damp collar and continued to study the faces in the crowd.

A soft murmur swept through the mourning as the gates to the bier closed with a grating sound that was quite final. The assembled mass snaked slowly back through the gates and onto St. Louis Street. As they drew near the gates, it seemed the pace of the steps on the paths increased, as if rushing to escape the Grim Reaper once more. As soon as the first of the feet stepped onto the cobbles, there was the sudden pounding of the bass drum, as sharp and loud as thunder, and then six brass horns and two clarinets and a saxophone split the day wide open. Now the parade could begin.

***

It was Bolden, crashing down the banquette from the Poydras Street saloon where he had started his afternoon. He was waving his cornet about like a sword and his eyes were bloodshot bright as he reeled drunkenly into the tangle of second-line bodies. The ruffians turned around, ready to fight, but when they saw who it was, a cheer went up. "Let him in! Let King Bolden in!" They were yelling. But when the marchers saw who was causing the commotion, they got their backs up and wouldn't budge.

He wasn't welcome. Since he started up his own bands, he had shown himself to be too busy, too drunk, too hung-over, or too full of himself to do his duty and join in the holiday and funeral parades. It was a disrespect that the first-line marchers took seriously.

So King Bolden got nothing as he came weaving up in their midst, his cornet blowing merrily. Their eyes spit messages as they played on, trying to ignore the man and his bullying horn. They changed the key, ragged the tune, raised the volume. But he kept charging ahead.

From a vantage point on the banquette on the north side of St. Louis, Valentin saw Buddy crash into the parade, saw the angry eddy of motion, sensed a brawl in the making. He grabbed Justine's hand and began edging his way around the crowd as it moved down the street.

But it was Bolden himself who calmed the waters. The first and second lines were snarling back and forth over the rattling drums, the marchers yelling "goddamn trash" at the second-liners and that bellicose group shouting back worse. Bottles and pieces of brick were starting to fly when Buddy lurched into the ten feet of space between the two and picked up the fast, happy version of "Just a Closer Walk with Thee" that the band was playing as it went by.

The black-clad first-line marchers continued to ignore him, turning their backs and tightening their ranks as they walked on. Bolden took no notice, zigzagging behind them on juking legs, delighting the second-liners and upsetting the marchers all the more. His horn flew above their heads like a bird flushed from the grass and his loud, dirty wave of sound washed right over their tidy notes. Every time they tried to shift, he was one beat, one E-flat ahead. The rowdy noise of the crowd began to fall away as the skirmish began turning into a madman's show.

It was a Gatling gun against a wall of cannon, Bolden riddling the air with notes, the marchers firing back with their heavy brass, a momentary standoff of equal forces. Then one of the marchers, a clarinet player, succumbed to Bolden's rambunctious horn, broke ranks and started to follow it. Then a second and a third marcher fell out at the ends of the front line, caught up in his rowdy noise. And then the parade fell into a chaos that only Bolden could understand, horns and drums and bodies going off in a dozen directions.

The ranks reached the intersection and what remained of the front line tried to make a strategic turn down the crossing street. But they had taken only a few steps when someone realized that they no longer led the parade. One by one, they dropped their horns to their sides and looked around. The bass drum bumped one more time, then went silent. They turned, faces flushed. The music had gone on without them.

The jumble of bodies behind them closed, forming a huge, slow-rolling wheel. King Bolden was the hub, standing alone in the middle of the intersection while the parade orbited him. Valentin and Justine, standing just outside the circle, saw it all.

Bolden stood dead center, his horn pointed straight down at the cobblestones. A smile turned up the corners of his
mouth. The motion of the crowd was slowing from a moving stream to a still pool. Streetcars rumbled on up Canal, but the hacks and surreys and two automobiles coming up on the intersection were all forced to a stop. Dogs jumped and yelped and small children raced around the legs of the men and the women, darting in and out to get a better view. Japanese fans and dark derby hats fluttered up little breaths of wind as parasols floated about like pond lilies.

Buddy now lifted the silver bell of his horn into the sultry air. He played one loud, pealing note, then stopped. He played another note, a fourth up the scale, this one quicker. Then the seventh, like the crack of a brass whip. Then he was hitting notes from all over the scale as he started to move, going round and round in a tight circle and tottering on the edge of balance.

He suddenly snapped out with his free hand and snatched a bottle of Raleigh Rye from some drunkard's grasp. A roar of laughter went up at the red-faced citizen's look of besotted surprise. King Bolden lurched on, played a fast, one-handed, downhill run of notes, took another quick swig from the bottle, played the same notes running up the scale.

He threw the bottle over his shoulder and it smashed onto the cobbles like the crash of a cymbal and he played off that, too, as he walked faster now, almost running. The machine gun of brass sprayed the crowd and they started getting a little crazy, the second-liners dancing on the banquette and in the gutters. Bolden went faster, made his circle wider, now bent a little at the waist as if the horn was flying off on its own and he was struggling to keep up.