House of the Rising Sun: A Novel (26 page)

She dumped the basket into the trash can by the bed, then glanced outside and saw a skinned-up motorcar canted on its frame, driving through the parking area, the back bumper wired in place, a side window that looked like it had two bullet holes in it. The driver wore a slug cap and had the tight face of a boxer or someone who had been worked over with a slapjack or a sock full of sand. The woman in the passenger seat wore a lavender and yellow dress and a bandana over her hair. She seemed to look straight at Maggie, although the sun was obviously in her eyes. Maggie stepped back from the window. She could not believe her bad luck. It didn’t matter if she had been recognized or not. Within minutes, Ruby Dansen would be inside the hospital.

Maggie’s head was spinning, her heart rising into her throat.
Do not be at the mercy of fate. Passivity and mediocrity ensure failure and belong on the same daisy chain. When challenged, there is no such thing as excess. Turn their viscera into a tangle of oily snakes.

The Gospel according to Maggie Bassett.

As though her thoughts could redirect her destiny, she caught a break. Ruby’s driver had driven through the parking area twice, drawing the attention of a uniformed policeman, a fat Irish dolt with a florid face and a mustache like rope who had cloves and whiskey on his breath by ten
A.M.
He had stopped Ruby’s driver and apparently told him to get out of the motorcar and explain the pocked holes in the side window, tapping it with his nightstick, his mustache flattening in the wind, his lips moving rapidly, the driver probably sassing him, fists balled.

Little miracles have a way of happening, don’t they, you German cunt or whatever you are.

Maggie found the orderly in the hall. “Come with me,” she said.

“And do what?” he replied, half smiling.

“You’re Mike, aren’t you? Captain Holland’s friend?”

“I don’t call him ‘nigger lover.’”

“Pardon?”

“They say that’s why he’s getting out of the army. The army didn’t treat his outfit right. He says the French gave them the credit they deserve. It’s not what people like to hear.”

Mike had a high forehead and mousy hair and thin shoulders and a nicotine odor that made her hold her breath. She pulled him into a windowless alcove that contained two chairs used by visitors; unresisting, his arm was boneless and flaccid in her grasp. She pushed him down in one chair and sat in the other, taking his hand in hers.

“What’s going on?” he said.

“There’s a woman outside named Ruby Dansen. She claims to be Captain Holland’s mother. She’s not. She’s an aunt by marriage who treated him brutally when he was a child. She’s also a Communist and has been committed twice to an asylum.”

The smile left his face. “What’s she doing here?”

“Causing trouble.” Maggie leaned forward, her gaze fixed on his, rotating her thumb inside his palm. “You have to help me. We need to move Captain Holland now.”

“What for?”

“She’ll cause a scene. She’ll convince somebody at admissions that she’s his mother. He’s being discharged today. He doesn’t need a crazy woman screaming at him. He also doesn’t need to revisit his miserable childhood.”

“I don’t know, ma’am. I don’t like the sound of this.”

She tightened her hand on his and leaned forward, her other hand settling on his thigh, the thumb working into the muscle. “Please.”

His gaze broke. “Tell me what you want me to do.”

“Put Captain Holland in a wheelchair and take him to the side door. My car and driver will be waiting. Hurry up.”

“You think we might meet up later? You and me?”

“It’s a possibility. But there’s something else you have to help me with.”

“
Have to?
”

She ignored the challenge. “You’re already aware Captain Holland has needs for certain medications the hospital doesn’t always provide.”

“No, I’m a blank on that.”

She opened her purse so he could see inside it. “I have to give him this. It’s perfectly safe. It will quiet his nerves.”

“Hypodermic needles are way above my skills, ma’am.”

She laid a twenty-dollar bill across his palm. “No, they’re not.”

“And we’re gonna see each other a little later, maybe tonight?”

“Yes, I would like that.”

“Even though you’ve got a driver and a motorcar and you’re probably going away somewhere?” His eyes crinkled at the corners.

“We’re staying close by,” she said, breathing audibly through her nose.

“I bet you forgot your fruit basket. You wouldn’t want to leave that behind, would you? The captain was sure fond of it. A couple of bites and I would have sworn he’d been on an opium pipe.”

“Well, you’re certainly an observant and enterprising little fellow, aren’t you?” she said. She took another twenty-dollar bill from her purse. “If this doesn’t work out, you’ll be visited by people who will do things to you that you thought happened only in nightmares.”

H
ACKBERRY WAS FIXING
dinner on his wood cookstove when he heard the screech of Willard Posey’s car door out in the yard. He waited for the knock on the door; it didn’t happen. He flipped the two boned pork chops in the skillet with a fork and watched them sizzle. He cut two huge slices of bread from a loaf and browned them in butter and stuffed the pork chops between them with a layer of ketchup and skillet gravy and onions and tomatoes and mayonnaise on top; then he filled a glass with buttermilk and sprinkled hot sauce in it. He looked out the front door. The car, absent the roof that had been hacksawed off, was parked on the edge of the lawn. No Willard.

He put his sandwich on a plate and pushed the back door open with his foot and filled his mouth with meat and bread and saw Willard down at the river, lobbing pebbles in the current, his back turned. Hackberry walked down the slope, his boots crunching on the gravel. Willard’s cotton shirt was bunched where the strap of his shoulder holster angled between his shoulder blades; his back was stiff, like that of an angry man on a parade ground. The river was low, a dull green, insects hovering in clouds above the riffle in the fading light.

“Does strange behavior intrigue you, or do you just enjoy prowling around behind people’s houses at dinnertime?” Hackberry said.

Willard sidearmed a rock across the river and watched it bounce off the opposite slope and roll down to the water. He turned around, his badge and holstered white-handled revolver at odds with his sun-darkened skin and the shadow and gloom that seemed to surround his person.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Hackberry said.

“Not a goddamn thing.”

“When did you start swearing?”

“Just now.”

“Your wife throw you out?”

“I’m not married.”

“In my case, that would mean there’s at least one less unhappy woman in the world. I don’t know about you.”

Willard dusted off his hands. “You don’t square with me, Hack. But you keep leaving your problems on my doorstep. What do you think I should do about that?”

“I wish I knew what we’re talking about.”

“The sheriff in Bexar called me about this woman DeMolie or whatever—”

“It’s DeMolay. You’re an intelligent man. Stop talking like an ignorant peckerwood.”

“The sheriff doesn’t believe she’s just an ordinary businesswoman who got rich in the oil patch. He says she ran a place called the House of the Rising Sun in New Orleans. When it got shut down, she went to Mexico. Now she’s here.”

Hackberry sat on a stump and set his plate by his foot, making sure he didn’t kick dirt in it. “Tell me what you’re so hot about, and don’t tell me it’s because of Miz DeMolay.”

“I’m mad because I have to protect an old, willful, blockheaded, womanizing crazy man from himself.”

“I’m not old.”

“You came out of the womb old. You walk around like every page in the Bible is glued on your clothes. One match and you’d go up in flames.”

“I’ve never heard it put like that.”

“That’s because sane people fear provoking someone who left his mush in the oven too long. What’s that red stuff floating in your milk?”

“Hot sauce.”

Hackberry went back to eating, pausing only to drink from his buttermilk. Willard’s face looked like smoked pig hide under the brim of his hat.

“I’m going to tell you what the sheriff told me,” Willard said. “If you act on this information, I’m going upside your head with a two-by-four.”

Hackberry stood up with his plate and glass in hand, then leaned down without bending his knees and set them on the riverbank. “Don’t speak to me in that fashion again, son.”

“You test people’s charity,” Willard replied.

“Maybe so. But I’m done on this.”

“The sheriff said a man tried to throw acid in the DeMolay woman’s face.”

Hackberry’s gaze drifted down the river to a canebrake where a calf was caught in the mud and bawling for its mother. His eyes were unfocused, seemingly disconnected from emotion. “Who was the man?”

“The sheriff doesn’t know. He doesn’t want Miz DeMolay in his county. He says good riddance.”

“I appreciate you coming by.”

“Look at me, Hack. Don’t think the thoughts you’re thinking. It’s 1918. We’re in modern times now.”

“Two years ago, when I was blowing the feathers off Mexican peons, I got a different impression. It must be me.”

H
IS NAME WAS
Mealy Lonetree. Some thought his first name was the short version of “mealymouth.” Not so. Mealy was a fixer, a man whose face made you think of a fire hydrant wearing a derby hat. He was the man you saw if you wanted to buy or sell stolen property; hire an arsonist to torch your business for insurance purposes; extort, kidnap, blackmail an enemy; or make your cheating wife or husband disappear. All jobs were subcontracted, so there was never a trail back to the client. His felonious assault price list, one his father had used in the Irish Channel of New Orleans, offered blackened eyes, a lead pipe across the nose, broken fingers, stab wounds, a gunshot in the leg, an ear chewed off, or “the big job.” There was a surcharge for photos.

Mealy ran a laundry and Turkish bathhouse in San Antonio’s old brothel district, which was now licensed and zoned and had its own directory, called the Blue Book, containing the names and addresses of more than one hundred bordellos and gambling houses. The entrance to Mealy’s office was on an unpaved alleyway, the windows blacked out, a bell on the door. Up and down the alleyway, prostitutes were smoking marijuana openly on produce crates in front of their cribs, some talking to soldiers in campaign hats and puttees, the late sun molten and dust-veiled, as it had been when Hackberry stumbled into Beatrice DeMolay’s brothel in Mexico two years earlier. He stepped across a ribbon of green sewage filled with items he would rather not think about and entered Mealy’s office without knocking.

Mealy was behind his desk, pear-shaped, dandruff on his black coat, a red paper carnation in his lapel, his eyes disappearing into slits when he smiled. A book of accounting figures was open on his blotter. “Mr. Holland, I’m so happy to see you. Please have a seat.”

“How’s life, Mealy?”

“What can I say? The world doesn’t change. So I don’t, either.”

“Know a lady named Beatrice DeMolay?”

“I know who she is.”

“Somebody tried to throw acid in her face.”

Mealy put down his pen. He flattened his hands on the blotter, deep in thought, his fingers splayed. He drummed his fingers in a long roll. “You’re not going to hurt my feelings, are you? You don’t think I’d be associated with hurting a woman?”

“No, you wouldn’t, Mealy,” Hackberry lied. “That’s why I came to you and not somebody else. I need the man’s name.”

“Ask the lady.”

“She wasn’t at her apartment. I don’t know how much she’d tell me, anyway.”

“Nobody in San Antonio is gonna throw acid at somebody without permission. And the person who asked for permission would probably be run out of town. If you want those kinds of lowlifes, go to New Orleans. She ran a house there. It was in Storyville. The House of the Rising Sun.”

“You’re from New Orleans.”

“That’s why I can speak with authority on the subject.”

“How about Arnold Beckman? You ever run into him?”

Mealy was shaking his finger in the air before Hackberry had finished his sentence, his chin raised defensively. “I have nothing to do with the man you just mentioned. I didn’t say anything about him, either.”

“He’s a pretty bad
hombre
?”

Mealy stood up from behind his desk. He seemed shorter and fatter, his hips wider, than when he was sitting down. “What if I buy you some supper? I know how you like Mexican food.”

“I already ate. Beckman is behind this?”

“You think a man with that kind of wealth confides in a man like me?”

“Why did you mention New Orleans?”

“Because that’s where the lady is from. Before Storyville got shut down, it was filled with the worst pimps in the country. Cut a girl’s face with a razor, put lye in her food. You name it, they’d do it.”

“All right, if the man Beckman hired to blind and disfigure Miz DeMolay is from New Orleans, what would his name be?”

“Mr. Holland, I always liked you.”

Hackberry nodded but didn’t reply.

“Don’t be dragging me into trouble with this man from Austria,” Mealy said. “This Hun. That’s what he is, a Hun, right? We just fought a war with those guys. What are they doing over here?”

“Give me a name.”

“Jimmy Belloc. Some people call him Jimmy No Lines. Get the picture?”

“He’s in New Orleans?”

Mealy’s face had turned gray, his yellow tie crooked on his coat, like a snake with a broken back. “Maybe. Or maybe he’s still in town.”

“You’re a little emotional this evening. How do you know this?”

“I saw him two days ago. On the street, right by Alamo Plaza. He recognized me. I kept going.”

“What’s he look like?”

“He was in a fire. Maybe when he was a little kid. He’s been stuck with the same face all his life. Mr. Holland, I don’t like being caught between people. Don’t tell anybody what I told you, suh. We got us a deal on that?”

“I would appreciate you not mentioning I was here, Mealy.”