Jass (Valentin St. Cyr Mysteries) (39 page)

Justine said, "Are you sure it's her?"

"Who else could it be? The name on the house is Gerard. Maybe Smith really is her maiden name. Maybe it's all fake. I'll have to find out who she really is and how she's tied to these killings." He paused. "It might not be easy. Her tracks might already be covered. I don't know why Picot's helping her, but if there's anything in the police files, it's most likely gone."

Justine considered. "So she still might get away clean."

"Yes, she might."

She looked at his face and allowed herself a thin smile. "She won't," she said. "You won't let her. No one ever beats you, Valentin."

He didn't know what to say to that. He got a sense that she wasn't just talking about the ne'er-do-wells whom he had run to ground over the years and decided it was best to let it pass.

Justine stirred her coffee absently. "And what about after?"

"After?"

"After it's finished. Whatever happens. What will you do then?"

He got quiet, staring moodily into his cup. "I don't think I'll be able to stay in New Orleans. Not after all this. I went against Tom Anderson, the police, the mayor's office. They won't let that pass. I'll be finished here."

She nodded slowly, as if she had expected it. For a brief second, she felt her heart dropping and fought an urge to weep. "And what about Ville Platte?" she said in a muted voice.

"Nobody will touch you," he said. "I'll make sure of it."

"You think you can do that?"

He shrugged. "Nobody beats me."

She gave him a sharp look, saw that he wasn't mocking her.

He put his cup aside and stood up. "I'm sorry," he said. "I don't have much time. I have to finish this today."

"Shall I stay here?" she said, keeping her gaze averted.

"No. Go back to Girod Street." He saw her shoulders heave. "I'll come see you later."

When she got up to go, she wanted to say something, or touch him for a moment. Then she saw his eyes had turned inward, intent on the task at hand, and she left without another word.

The offices of the
Picayune
were in a block building on the corner of Camp and Poydras streets. As always, the Sunday edition was posted in the front windows of the building, and at the moment three men stood reading, two with their hats tilted back and their hands in their pockets, the third, an older gentleman who perused the front page with a magnifying glass that would have done Sherlock Holmes proud.

It was Valentin's habit to read the newspaper every morning without fail. He realized now that he hadn't seen one in days, so he stole a quick glance as he passed by. There were no screaming headlines. He hadn't missed any catastrophes. He glimpsed at a story about the Bryan-Taft race for the White House, another about problems with sugar imports from Cuba.

He hadn't come there to read the news, and he walked around the side of the building and then into the alley that ran in back. A set of stone stairs led down to the basement. He peered in through the dirty glass, then pressed the button that was mounted on the jamb. He had to ring three more times before a face appeared and then the door opened.

Valentin had known Joe Kimball for years. They traded information: Kimball picked up useful whispers from the newsroom, and Valentin passed along talk from the street, which Kimball then used for his own purposes. The man would have been a star reporter, except for his appetite for Raleigh Rye, so prolific that it put the rest of the guzzling staff of newspapermen to shame. He simply could not be trusted to put two coherent sentences together when he was into his cups, which was most of his waking hours. So he tended to the paper's morgue, dealt in information, wrote the occasional brilliant story, and drank his poor liver into oblivion.

There were those who whispered that Kimball was Bas Bleu, the mysterious and infamous scribe who wrote a column that eviscerated everyone of importance in uptown New Orleans, including, at times, Tom Anderson himself. Valentin didn't believe it. No one who drank like Kimball could keep anything secret for that long.

He was a useful source, though. Especially at times like this, when Valentin needed background in a hurry. Drunk or sober, Joe Kimball was a walking library of information about the citizens of New Orleans. What he didn't know, he could find in his basement cavern. He was a red-faced, red-haired, short, and burly sort who liked to fight almost as much as he liked to drink. Almost.

When he saw who was at his door, he grinned, crooked a finger, and led his visitor through a file room that was crowded with rows of steel cabinets and into his office. Valentin moved some newspapers off the second chair and sat down. He reached into the pocket of his suit jacket. "Something to brighten your day," he said, and handed over a pint of Raleigh Rye.

Kimball cocked an eyebrow. "Well, aren't you a kind fuck?" he said. He opened a desk drawer. "Join me?"

"Not right now," Valentin said.

"Ah, yes, you probably had your fill last night, eh?"

Valentin was startled. Kimball laughed as he put a dirty glass on the desk, unscrewed the cap from the bottle, and poured. "I heard about it, and I said, that ain't Mr. Valentin St. Cyr. No, sir." He pronounced the name the American way:
Saint Sear.
"No, no, I said, he's up to something." He took a drink, smacked his lips. "Is it about those murders?" Valentin nodded. "Something you can let an old friend in on?"

"Not yet," Valentin said, still amazed that the news had traveled so far so fast. He wondered if he had overdone it.

"So, what will it be?" Kimball said, spreading his arms to take in his little domain.

"There's a party on Prytania Street. Twenty-six hundred block. Name of Gerard."

Kimball's brow furrowed and Valentin could almost hear the pages flipping inside that round head. "That would be...
Louis
Gerard," he said. "Old French family. Their money was in ... shipping, I believe."

"Was?"

"There's not much left of it. There are three sons. Louis is the only one who amounted to anything at all. He's a state court judge, but not a very good one. It was some sort of political appointment. He takes care of the money that's left. He's a stick."

"What about his wife?"

"His what?"

"He's got a pretty young wife."

Kimball tilted his head to one side and frowned. "He does? I thought ... he was a widower. And I never heard about any second marriage. Are you sure?" His face got all serious. It wasn't often he didn't have the dope at his fingertips. He drained the last inch of liquor and stood up. "I'll be back in a few minutes."

It was closer to a half hour. Valentin spent the time reading the Sunday paper that he found on the desk.

When Kimball did come back, he didn't bring much. "Well, I still have a brain after all," he quipped. "It's like I thought. There's nothing about Louis Gerard getting married a second time. No announcement at all. No recording of a license. You sure the woman is his wife?"

"She was wearing a gold band."

"They might have been married somewhere else." He thought for a moment. "Or..."

"Or?"

"There's one other reason that licenses don't get announced," Joe Kimball said with a sneaky grin, and went about refilling his dirty glass.

Valentin knew that any stranger on the avenues of the Garden District would be noticed and reported. So he couldn't linger on the Prytania Street banquette for too long. Someone would surely call the coppers, or they might have Pinkertons on the payroll. New Orleans was full of private police forces.

He didn't have time to wait anyway. By his reckoning, the last of the murders had been committed, and he still had nothing but pieces. With every passing minute, it became more likely that the guilty party would get away clean. Valentin had come to it too late, and all he could think to do was to push on until something gave way. If that didn't work, the killer would go free, Valentin would have failed, and Justine's history would have been exposed for nothing.

His instinct told him that the woman in the house across the street was his only chance. He guessed that she was the one he knew as "Emma Lee Smith." She might have committed the murders, though he didn't think so; at least not all of them. She wouldn't possess the strength to hold down a hulking man like Noiret or to wrestle someone the size of Treau Martin over the railing of a ferry. Nor did her husband, Mr. Louis Gerard, seem up to such tasks. Of all the players, only Picot would have that ability.

In the lingering mist from the rain, 2623 Prytania Street looked like something out of a storybook. It was one of those charming bungalows that had been well kept over the years. There was still color from the flowers in the garden and in pots on the gallery.

At that moment a Negro was raking wet leaves into piles along the fence and a woman,
most
likely his wife, was sweeping the gallery. It was a common domestic tableau for a Garden District home, though not usual for a Sunday. It could be that they were expecting company later. Valentin wondered if the man had noticed any footprints in the soggy earth.

He was fidgeting about, expecting the coppers to show up at any moment to chase him away, when the front door opened and Mrs. Gerard leaned out to speak to the Negro woman. He watched for a few seconds, then stepped off the banquette and into the cobbled street. It was time to play his hand.

The man working in the front garden caught movement, raised his head, and regarded the stranger approaching the gate. The two women on the porch stopped talking and turned their heads. They all stared, though not one of them looked surprised, almost as if they had been expecting him.

The lady of the house, a mental patient who had supposedly died two years ago, looked down at him with a challenge in her eyes.

"Sir?" the Negro said, taking a step closer.

"I'm looking for a woman named Emma Lee Smith," Valentin announced.

Mrs. Gerard didn't flinch. She said, "Thomas, let the gentleman in."

Thomas laid his rake against the fence, unlatched the gate, and held it open. Valentin stepped through and walked halfway up the stone walkway. He stopped and said, "Emma Lee Smith."

"I don't know anyone by that name, sir," the white woman said.

Valentin was about to draw it out and anger the woman by asking the Negro couple if they knew such a person when there was a rustle of movement at the side of the house.

Two men came around the corner, one a high-yellow mulatto, the other dirty white. They were large men, thick in the trunk, with flat, sullen faces adorned with mustaches. Both were dressed in poor-fitting suits and each wore a derby. They fixed cold eyes on Valentin. Either a signal had been passed or some feral sense told them there was an intruder on the grounds and they had come sniffing.

As soon as Valentin laid eyes on them, he experienced a wrenching moment of clarity, as if the blanket of gray mist had been pulled back from that small plot of land.

He knew the men; or at least he knew their type. They came out of one of the city's foulest corners, places like Gallatin Street, where they grew up mean and stupid, with whatever dim conscience they might have possessed beaten out of them at an early age. They would leave school, if they ever went in the first place, roam the streets in packs like animals, and do prison farm time sooner rather than later. They would go to sea to befoul and bloody ports from Helsinki to Havana. When they were not on the water or in stir, they spent their nights in the cheapest sporting houses and saloons, and their days doing dirty work for their betters, including acts of murder.

Now two of these creatures had appeared on the Gerard property, stalking like alley dogs to stand at the bottom of the gallery steps and lock their stony stares on the Creole detective who had trespassed onto their territory.

Valentin's mind fell still with the stark realization that these two, singly or in tandem, had murdered the four musicians, the landlady on Philip Street, and Dominique. He felt his pulse quicken as he stared from one to the other, probing their faces for the one who had brutalized her. It was the white one; he had a raw and guilty look about him. Valentin knew that he was the one who had come to Magazine Street looking for a Creole detective, met a black-skinned girl who put up a fight, and proceeded to strangle her to death.

The detective ran down his chances for taking them both if it came to that. This day, he had thought to pack his full arsenal—sap, stiletto, and pistol. He could only imagine what kind of weapons they were toting and wondered how much damage he could do before they got to him. These thoughts passed in a matter of seconds, and then the tension in the air broke suddenly as the lady of the house stepped to the edge of the gallery, just back from the still-dripping eaves.

"Did you say Emilie? Why, that's my name." She spelled it out for him, enjoying the game.

Valentin pulled his gaze off the two toughs and looked up at her. "That's a coincidence," he said easily. "But this is 'Emma Lee.' The last name is Smith. Or at least that's the name she used. I'm sure it's a fake. The woman was a mental patient at the Louisiana Retreat on Henry Clay. I want to locate her."

He thought he saw the woman's face flush a shade. Her gaze never flinched, though.