House of Corruption (3 page)

1

Chalmette, Louisiana

Four Years Later

La Taverne du Roi
loitered under a balcony between a dank alley and Frederick’s Funeral Emporium and, by all accounts, served as a perfect go-between. Without sign or lantern the place enjoyed anonymity, known by those familiar with its reputation and happened upon by those with nowhere else to go.

Mahonri Grant sat at a table in one of the darker corners of the commons. It served him well enough; no one bothered him. The waitress gave him a quizzical look when he refused alcohol (they served the best Gullah Rum in town, after all) but her complaint faded when he ordered a hearty dinner of chicken and fried potatoes.

Grant was a big man, over six foot three in his boots, broad in his shoulders with a shock of dark hair. A large black moustache sat under his straight Cornish nose, and had he cared he might have waxed it into a fashionable handlebar. Many days had passed since he last used a razor. The result left him scruffy, a bear of a man garbed in practical clothes, scuffed Calvary boots and a worn leather overcoat.

The waitress brought him bread and sarsaparilla. He could not help but notice the lewd conversations of other customers amid clouds of tobacco, the underdressed serving girls wriggling onto drunken men’s laps. By the time his dinner arrived he had the waitress wrap it in waxed paper. This was the wrong place for much of anything. He started for the exit.

“Salut,” said a drunk, a fleshy Frenchman with a face swollen with whiskey. “Who’d you serve with?”

“What?” Grant said.

“Your boots. Calvary. Where’d you serve?”

“Tenth.” Grant continued walking.

“Apache country? Where you from?” the man asked, as Grant reached the door. “I
said
,” the drunk shouted, “...where you from?”

“Salt Lake.”

The man slapped down his mug. “Makes sense,
mes braves
,” he said. “We’ve here a More-mon from the Promised Land. How many wives you have?” More laughter erupted and spread to other patrons.

Grant stiffened.

“I hear most th’women ‘re unsullied,” the drunk said with a wink. “Get myself married to three virgins...” He grabbed the nearest serving girl around the waist, his beefy arm drifting down to her rump. She slapped him teasingly and he clutched her tighter. “...Think of what I could teach them, ay?”

“You’d marry three versions of your wife,” the serving girl drawled. “Th’ Promised Land would be Certain Hell.”

The commons burst into laughter. The drunk howled and raised his glass and spanked the girl off his lap. She wrapped her arms around his neck, planted a wet kiss on his cheek, and his fingers slid over the floppy curve of her breast. She slapped him again, this time across the face, and that only made everyone laugh louder. He raised his glass and downed another shot.

Another fleshy drunk began a loud rendition of
Jonesy and His Molly
and the tavern band (two old men with concertinas) soon struck up the note:

“—’
Twith every Bird old Jonsey meets,

He naught bu’ coos them ‘tween his sheets!”

Soon everyone was singing the chorus, bellowing each verse with drunken abandon. Customers stood on tables and added warbled voices, clapping for others to sing louder, and two men contested who could invent the bawdiest lyric. The bartender shouted a makeshift stanza in French and the room burst into raucous applause.

No one noticed Grant leave.

Colorful types still haunted the midnight streets of Chalmette: well-dressed patrons returning from ‘Orleans and its more dignified delights; clusters of sailors looking for another groggery or a woman to rent; street musicians of various skill and diverse color; fading conversations in Creole and English and Spanish. Gaslights burned in globes of moist, foggy air and pedestrians wiped at their slippery faces. Rain was coming.

The riverbank avenues became a tangle as Grant walked, one corner leading into another, until he realized he had no idea where he was going. With each passing turn, he found himself abandoned. Streetwalkers disappeared, drunkards blended into alley shadows, and decent folk long since faded behind closed shutters. At one intersection, where the buildings sat low, he saw the oily surface of the Mississippi River. He turned toward it.

A huddled shape crouched on a tenement porch, a trail of steam pouring from a heap of blankets. There sat an old man with his arms wrapped around his chest, a filthy scarf tied over his head. He glanced at Grant with rheumy eyes.

“Here grandpa,” Grant said. He pressed the packet of his supper into the old man’s hands. “You’ve a place to sleep?” The man gave a toothless smile and stuffed a wedge of potato into his mouth. In three soft bites, he crammed in some chicken and sucked the grease from his fingers. “You take care of yourself, old timer.”

He left the man to his feast. He had seen too much human flotsam, too many old men begging for alms, too many Indians and Negroes and Chinese with their haunted children hawking rugs or trinkets or baubles. Utah had its problems just the same, and he did not relish the cold justice of a noose if he returned, but—

What am I?

He was as much a spinning bit of debris as that old man, albeit better fed; when things went bad—bad as anything, worse, the blood still dry on the memory of his hands—he fled Utah and joined the Arizona Calvary. It lasted a year. The dirty name
murderer
found him, splashed across a wanted poster on the desk of his commanding officer, a man Grant called his friend.
I never knew you
, the officer said, releasing him from his commission with a horse and a head start.

Make sure no one else does either.

He took his advice. Grant fled to New Mexico and tried railroad work, blasting tunnels, hammering rails, baking under the dirty southwestern sun. When he moved  to Washington State he froze while blasting tunnels in the bitter Cascades. When the word
murderer
caught up to him he moved again—Montana to Kansas to Illinois to St. Louis, pushed onward by circumstance or cowardice or guilt or a faint stirring of Spirit. What did he expect to find? Redemption?

No. There was no repentance for him. Emily was dead. No matter how many bullets Grant emptied into a wretched sot who had sullied her, choked her,
killed
her, the shame and despair only grew larger, consuming him, until all he could do was run and run and hope he might forget. It was a fool’s hope. One did not forget such a crime. Some sins were so heavy that it crouched on a man’s shoulders and gripped him so tight he could hardly breathe.

Now he was in Louisiana, poised to work on a merchant vessel in exchange for a one-way ticket to Jamaica. Maybe there, with warm beaches and simple living, he might lose himself in fresh opportunity.

You are a coward.

He rubbed at his forehead. Time to stop thinking about it. 

At Butler Avenue a cold drop of rain found its way beneath his collar, slithering like ice down his back. Mist glazed the sidewalk as a carriage driver hurtled past, whipping at his horses. In minutes the drizzle strengthened into a downpour. Grant hurried under a balcony and hoped for a hotel, a bunkhouse, anything, until he heard it: from across the street echoed the voices of two men singing, their drunken melody punctuated with the occasional belch.

“
Alors
, More-MON!”

Grant twitched and kept walking.

“You’ve an extra wife for us?” The drunk’s familiar voice called from across the street. “
Abruti
! You gonna look at me?” When Grant did not answer his voice grew louder. “Hey, Apache killer! You look at me,
oui
?”

The two drunks crossed the street and followed half a block behind, accelerating when he did, slowing when he slowed, a trailing stream of obscene whispers. Grant’s neck tightened, his hands clenching into fists. Maybe he could work out his frustration with a few choice blows to the souse’s gut. He was tired and wet, and the last thing he needed was an idiot cat-calling in the rain.

An attractive young woman approached as he arrived at the corner of Butler and Jackson. She wore no coat or scarf, her candy-red hair swept up and pinned in a crow’s nest as was the fashion. She wore too much perfume. Her frilly dress and laced bodice reminded him of the pub’s serving-girls and their wandering hands. She flashed him a full-lipped smile. Her face was smooth and flawless, the ruddy complexion of a girl innocent to the world’s advances; he wanted to ask her name.

He kept walking. She passed by.

“
Bonsoir
,” she said to the two men following.

“Ah, sweet frenchie,” one drunk said.

“
Vous aiment une certaine compagnie ce soir
?”

Grant’s face flushed. A whore.

He kept walking, pushing the dull temptation from his mind. The rain pounded harder as she left, pulling the collar of his overcoat up against his neck. If he had to hunker down in an alley to sleep out the night, then so be it. It would not be the first time.

The sooner I’ve left this godforsaken—

A shriek echoed, high-pitched.

He turned around. The two drunks and the lady were gone. They were just behind him, weren’t they? He chided himself, not caring for whores or drunks, but the sound was a terrible cry. He backtracked up the sidewalk. Halfway up the block, he discovered an alley disappearing into the dark. He had heard no doors, saw no lights. If they had gone anywhere, this was the best option. The last thing he needed was to stumble upon a sordid scene, but he cast his doubt aside—he had heard a scream.

He knew what drunks could do to young women.

From under his overcoat he slid his Colt revolver from its holster and thumbed the hammer. He worked his way into the alley, past dripping waste bins and stacks of rotten crates. The alley opened into an uneven courtyard formed by three buildings wedged unevenly together. Refuse crowded in corners. Black rain pissed from the gutters, splashing into potholes with filthy rainwater. The air reeked of rotten fruit. He winced at the idea of finding the woman’s remains, discarded by two drunken bastards who deserved a bullet in the head for their work. He pulled back the hammer.

He stopped.

There lay the pestering drunk, a heap against the wall, his throat splayed open. Blood poured from the wound like water. The man struggled to breathe and gagged, his head lolling, his fish mouth agape and steaming. The second drunk, a man Grant did not recognize, lay sprawled nearby in unnatural directions. Over him the woman crouched, her body heaving with a deep gurgle.

“Ma’am?” he asked.

She stood. With a click-click of heels the frilly-dressed belle emerged from the shadows, her skirt and bodice streaming with rivulets of bloodied rain. Some of her hair had loosened from the bun. Crimson beads gleamed across her right cheek, caught the vague light, and water sent them oozing into her collar. 

“I’ll fetch help,” he said. “Get you dry and safe.”

“Dry and safe,” she wheezed.       

His left hand extended to lead her out of the alley. Her skeletal hand slid into his own, clammy and cold and solid. As she emerged into the wan light he saw that the flesh of her face tightened against her skull, her eyes—her
eyes
—wide, lidless and unblinking, goring into his heart, rooting his feet. Blood boiled from her mouth and down her chin.

“Mahonri,” she said.

Emily?

He felt her in his arms, his skin, alive, bright with summer and smiling. Grant felt nothing but to stand there and drink her in. He smelled the perfumed stench, saw her hideous face, and still he could not help but draw the woman closer. His discomfort became dread, the dread a panic yet he wanted—ached—to hold her, to press himself against her, to run away, to shout her name in pleasure and scream at the twisting fear in his gut.

“Let me have you,” she said.

“No.”

Her hand caressed his face, her skin cold as a fish and slippery with blood. “
Let me have you
,” she said. “Kiss your sweetheart.”

Grant tore away. He sprinted from the courtyard, scattering crates as he crashed through. He launched out of the alley into driving rain and, as he landed upon the sidewalk, his feet gave way and he fell splashing into the street. His Colt skidded into the gutter and yet he gained his feet and scrambled into a run. He did not look back. Following, a gurgling laugh croaked from the alley—

“I am here to love you, Mahonri
.
”

2

Cold. Foggy cold. Soaking through fabric, biting into the skin, clutching the bones until flesh crawled.

There was no moonlight, only orange, smoky lanterns, and the light made the snow glitter and turned the shadows into blood. Artémius Savoy walked the dirt path between the trees, joined by a silent procession of men and women in their heavy overcoats, expelling steam from their mouths, saying nothing. A coffin bobbed between six of the men in cadence to their footsteps. He expected weeping, tears on women’s cheeks—a sign of grief from the poor girl’s mother, for God’s sake—but he heard naught but his own heartbeat.

Shapes shifted and blurred. The small crowd coalesced around a plot of earth covered with snow. He tried to seem necessary but felt extraneous, standing off to one side as men chipped at the ground with the points of their shovels. Hardened earth gave way. Black soil became clay as they dug, then became stones and sterile grit, and soon the grave stretched down deep and black. Ropes creaked as the coffin was lowered into the hole. Someone tossed a sprig of hawthorn inside.

The priest said his blessing in Hungarian, a mingling of religion and superstition—
where did one end and the other begin?
—ending with a prayer over the iron coin set upon the dead woman’s tongue.

The other mourners left. He stood alone in that old place of oaks and shadows, of silent stones shrouded by dead grass and snow, memorials stretching in the wilderness in all directions. He huddled in his heavy ulster and waited. He tried to remember why he watched over the dark slash of freshly turned earth.