Chasing the Devil's Tail (9 page)

It so happened that at this particular moment, David Hennessy, a former New Orleans detective, wriggled his way into the office of Chief of Police after five years in exile over the suspicious shooting of a man who just happened to be a political rival. Hennessy, a personal friend of Allan Pinkerton himself, fell to the task of settling the Matranga-Provenzano feud as his first order of business. But he came to the matter with a jaundiced eye, because some distant kin of the Matrangas had murdered his cousin on the streets of Houston years before.

Hennessy's Irish backside had barely settled into his new chair when Tony Matranga was shot several times as he took his evening stroll down Conti Street. The Matranga
padrone
swore that his assailants were none other than Frank and Joe Provenzano, heads of the rival clan. Chief Hennessy stood by as the police did their duty and arrested the Provenzano brothers. But, on the second day of their trial, he stepped forward to offer the judge reason to dismiss the charges. He claimed he had investigated and had evidence that the Provenzanos were being framed.

But he never got to make his case. As he walked to his French Quarter home the evening before his scheduled appearance, a young boy ran past and whistled; a second later, a sawed-off shotgun roared from the shadows. Hennessy fell to the banquette, mortally wounded. A friend who rushed to the scene reported that Hennessy gasped out that "the Dagos" had been his attackers. Within a few hours, fourteen Sicilians, some members of the Matranga gang, some complete innocents, were rounded up as suspects. The next morning, all were charged with conspiring to assassinate Chief Hennessy.

The incident caused a mistrial to be declared for the Provenzanos, and the Matranga case now took over the front pages
of the daily papers. It was roundly deemed an open-and-shut matter, except for the bothersome fact that there was not a shred of evidence, not a single eyewitness, not a speck of circumstance that tied the Sicilians being held in Parish Prison to Chief Hennessy's murder. The judge weighed the facts, then directed the jury to find some of the defendants not guilty, while ordering a mistrial on the others.

American New Orleans boiled over. The dirty guineas were going to get away with a horrendous crime! The next morning's newspapers carried hysterical screeds and a public notice of a mass meeting near Congo Square to "remedy the failure of justice in the Hennessy case." The announcement closed with the ominous line: "Come prepared for action."

By noon, the mob that gathered at the Henry Clay Statue on Canal Street numbered fifteen thousand angry whites, a number of them armed. Local politicians mounted the base of the statue to whip the crowd into a frenzy. They marched off to Parish Prison, where the Matranga defendants were awaiting release. Guards barred the front gate, but a phalanx of hoodlums broke down a rear door and charged inside. They rushed through the prison corridors, hunting down the Sicilians, who had been released from their cells so they could hide. Eleven men were cornered and shot dead. Six more were dragged into the prison yard and hung, in what became the worst mass lynching in the history of an America that lynched like murderous clockwork.

The violence continued into the night as splinter gangs raged off into Italian neighborhoods. Valentin remembered his mother running into his bedroom and shoving him out their back door and down the alleyway to a kindly old quadroon couple who lived a few houses away.

He never forgot that night and the cold nausea of fear, the
helpless terror that gripped him as he and his parents huddled in the dark kitchen. That night, the way he understood the world changed forever. It was Friday the 13 th, in March of 1891. He was fifteen years old.

The streetcar rumbled to a stop and he climbed on. Staring out the rear window, he watched the streets of his old neighborhood grow narrow and then fade into darkness. The tall man in the derby hat remained behind.

Just before midnight, there came a knock on the door. Valentin's mother wailed and his father reached for an ax handle. But it was only Buddy. He had crawled out his bedroom window to come looking for his friend. As the night passed, they sat at the neighbors' kitchen table, talking like nothing was happening, though they could hear the shouts from the street, breaking glass, the random crack of gunfire.

It all faded into the background as Buddy told him about two local rounders getting into a big, drunken brawl outside Joe Maxie's Beer Parlor. The two of them whispered over one of the pretty neighborhood girls. And Buddy talked about Manuel Hall, the horn player who was coming round to see his mama. It was that night that Buddy announced that he was going to be a musician. They talked until dawn brought a gray quiet to the streets.

That wasn't quite the end of the story. A month later, as his father and mother strolled along the river, they were accosted by two drunken white men who loudly opined that only a nigger slut would bed down with a dirty dago. His father beat both men into the ground and might have murdered them if his mother hadn't been there to stop him. The following day, a gang of six whites cornered him in the warehouse
on the docks where he worked and the next time Valentin and his mother saw him, he was hanging at the end of a rope. None of his murderers was ever identified.

He got off the No. 12 streetcar and then rode the No. 34 down Canal Street to Magazine as the last details of the story broke off in jagged pieces and drifted away again. As always, the memories slowed him like a weight on his back.

He unlocked the street door and climbed the thirteen steps to the second floor. He undressed and slipped into his bed, ready for sleep to take him. Before he drifted off, he decided he would go round in the morning to see the doctor Nora had mentioned. His curiosity had the best of him. He had to know if there was anything more to it.

DR. MILES'
No. 150
S
PECIFIC
M
IXTURE
GUARANTEED
A Sure Cure
FOR
G
onorrhea and
... GLEET

After his coffee, Valentin caught a streetcar uptown to Villere Street, got off and walked north until the cobbles gave way to dirt. He found Dr. Rall's office in a broken-down, one-story clapboard house along a deserted alley, just as Nora had described it. He knocked, but there was no answer. He tried the door—unlocked. He turned the knob and stepped inside.

It was a typical boxcar flat. The first room held a desk, a half-dozen chairs lining opposite walls and a coat rack in one corner. There was a stack of old penny magazines on one of the chairs. A pair of sliding doors leading to the room beyond was shut tight. It was the doctor's reception area, but there was no nurse or secretary on the job, and no patients waiting,
either. Valentin slid the double doors aside and stepped into an examining room, with white enameled cabinets on the walls to his left and right, a roll-top desk pushed against the back wall and a steel table in the center of the floor. All of it looked dusty and quite unused. On either side of the desk was a door, one to a toilet, the other to a closet. A third, arched doorway led to the back rooms of the house.

He heard a muted thump from the back of the house and then silence. He waited for a few moments, then went around the table and opened the closet door. In contained one ragged winter coat on a hangar and a stack of boxes as tall as a man. Each was pasted with a small sheet of paper with the florid inscription "Dr. Miles' No. 150 Specific Mixture."

When he heard more sounds of movement from the back of the house, he quickly closed the closet door and stepped back.

The man shuffling unsteadily into the room wore a dirty white dress shirt with collar missing, baggy gray trousers spotted with dark stains, suspenders hanging down and some kind of slippers. He turned for the toilet and caught sight of the visitor. He started, then blinked groggily. He tried to say something, coughed, and then started again. His "Help ya?" floated on stale, musty breath.

"Doctor Rall?" Valentin said.

The doctor's doughy face was peppered with white whiskers and his wisps of gray hair stuck out at angles. The milky blue eyes tried to focus. "Howdja git in here?" His voice was a raw rasp.

"Valentin St. Cyr," the visitor announced himself. "Your door was open."

The doctor's gaze strayed away and he mumbled something that sounded like "potion." When he repeated it, Valentin realized the word was "appointment."

"No, I don't have an appointment," he said. "I'm here to ask about someone you treated."

Dr. Rall drew back and took a step away as if to dismiss him. '"Specting a patient." He coughed again and shuffled toward the toilet.

"I am in the employ of Tom Anderson," Valentin announced. It worked: as expected, the man stopped and stared. "This will only take a minute."

Rall glanced at the toilet door. "Well..." He made his way to his cluttered desk and sat down heavily. Valentin took the chair next to the desk.

"What's all this about?" the doctor asked as he began to flip unsteady fingers through a stack of files in the metal tray on his desk. When Valentin didn't answer, he said, "What was the patient's name?"

"Bolden," Valentin said and the doctor's fingers stopped. "Charles. They call him Buddy."

The fingers resumed their search, but it was for show, because they landed directly on the file folder that was second from the top. "Here," Rall said and opened the folder. "Bolden, Charles." He patted his shirt pocket and came up with a pair of bifocals, which he opened and perched on his nose. "Yes, I treated him."

"For what condition?" Valentin asked.

Rall looked at the sheet before him, but he wasn't reading. "He was ... having fits."

"Fits?"

"Behaving in a troublesome manner." The doctor didn't elaborate.

"Did you find a cause?" Valentin asked.

"A cause." The doctor coughed dryly and glanced at his visitor. "These kinds of cases, there's rarely a
cause.
Speaking medically, that is." The eyes ran up and down the paper, looking for
something that wasn't there. "I believe I ... uh, prescribed something for him. A mild sedative, probably. It's really all we can do. Then wait and hope to see improvement." He closed the folder and tried a smile of tobacco-stained teeth.

"What sedative?" Valentin asked.

"I don't recall," the doctor said. "Seems I lost my notes somewhere. Probably a paregoric solution. That's very common." Rall was fidgeting, plainly ill-at-ease. He placed the folder back on the stack and began to fuss about with the scraps of paper that lay about his desk like so many dead leaves. He would not meet the detective's gaze as his own kept drifting to the toilet door.

"Do you remember Nora Bolden?" Valentin said. Rall blinked a few times more. "His wife."

The doctor's attention returned. "Whose wife? Oh. What about her?"

"She came to see you."

"Did she?" It wasn't an act; he clearly didn't remember.

"It's not important," Valentin said.

The doctor ran a nervous hand over his face. "I really have to..." And he lurched suddenly out of his chair and disappeared into the toilet, locking the door behind him.

Valentin listened to hacking and coughing and the sound of water running. He got up to take a closer look around the premises. Whatever medicine was practiced there, he noted, was done without the use of medical equipment. Everything, the tables, the cases filled with instruments, the lights on their stands, was covered with dust, and cobwebs stretched across every corner.

He turned his attention to the doctor's desk. The scraps of paper contained notes scrawled in what looked like a child's hand. Valentin glanced at the toilet door and pushed a finger through the mess. He stopped, staring, and plucked one slip
from among the others. He read the single word printed there. He had just slipped the scrap into a pocket when the door to the toilet opened again.

The doctor looked much the better. He had splashed water on his face, straightened his collar, buttoned his trousers, and pulled up his suspenders. He had made a stab at putting his licks of white hair in order and had doused himself with an ungodly cologne that sent a heavy cloud of sweet magnolia before him. He sat down at his desk once more and turned to his visitor with eyes that held a hard shine. "Was there anything else?" The voice was now firm, in control.

Valentin shook his head. He thanked the doctor and let himself out.

As he walked to the streetcar stop on the corner of Villere and Canal, he dug into his pocket and extracted the card he had filched. He read again the single penciled word: "Tillman." He considered turning around, going back and confronting the nervous doctor about why the name of a recent murder victim was lying on his desk. And while he was at it, ask him why he bothered to write Bolden a prescription for paregoric when a child could buy it over the counter at any apothecary in the city.

Of course, Rall would lie to him.
What was that name? Tillman? Don't ring a bell, no.
As far as the prescription was concerned, what he gave Bolden was probably what he himself had taken in his toilet, something a tad stronger than paregoric. Valentin stopped to recall the contents of the closet, bottles of a local remedy for gonorrhea and the sores they called "gleet."

He suspected that Rall, like dozens of other "doctors" in New Orleans, wasn't an M.D. at all, but a medicine show refugee who had bestowed credentials on himself, the whole of his practice dispensing patent medicines as cure-alls and various
kinds of dope as balms to injured spirits. It was quite common, merely a matter of supply meeting demand without the complications of the law—a Storyville tradition.

On a notion, Valentin turned around and walked back toward the doctor's address. He was a hundred feet from the alley when Rall appeared suddenly, charging onto the street. The doctor hurried down two doors to a workman's diner and went inside. Valentin sidled up to one of the windows and saw Rall standing at the end of the long wooden counter with the proprietor's telephone in hand, talking to someone, his face flushed, his free hand waving in the air. Valentin watched him for a few moments, knowing there was no way to get inside and not give himself away. But of course, he knew what the call was about. He stepped back from the window and walked away.