The Ripper of Storyville and Other Ben Snow Stories Page 11

  Countess Lulu seemed uncertain. “She’s out right now. But if you want to wait . . .”

  “I’d like to. Thanks.” He followed her into a parlor hung with drab velvet drapes that seemed designed to shut out every vestige of light or sound. There was only one person in the parlor, a huge pale-skinned man chewing on an ugly damp cigar.

  “This here’s Piggy, our piano player. Every house has to have jazz these days to be any good.”

  Piggy munched on the cigar and mumbled a half-hearted greeting. He was slumped over a battered upright piano, almost embracing it with a sleepy sort of desire. It might just then have been a woman in his arms.

  Countess Lulu seated herself on a heavily pillowed sofa, letting her body sink within the folds of silken splendor as she spoke. “Come sit by me, sir. Bess will be back shortly.”

  “Has she been with you long?”

  “Ever since I came to Storyville. Nearly two years now. Fine girl, and very popular with the customers.”

  “Does she ever talk about her father? About her life back in Texas?”

  “Sometimes. Not often. The girls don’t live much in the past.”

  Ben was carefully rolling a cigarette. “Are you from New Orleans?”

  Countess Lulu shook her head. “Tampa, Havana, Mexico City. I move around. Right now this is the place to be.”

  “Is New Orleans that sinful a city?”

  She gave a vague shrug. “Prostitution’s been legal here for almost fifty years. And during the Civil War a Northern commander actually issued an order that any Southern lady insulting a Yankee soldier in New Orleans could be treated as a common prostitute. Things like that have done little to uplift the city’s standing. Men come to New Orleans expecting a wide-open city, and we give it to them. Wait until the Mardi Gras tomorrow night and you’ll really see something!”

  Ben had heard about the pre-Lenten festival, when all of the city swarmed into Storyville to forget the staid life of the other fifty-one weeks. Often with masks hiding their faces, the wealthy ran wild among the poor in a near orgy of drunken revelry. He hadn’t realized the time was almost upon them, but it was mid-February and Lent would begin on Wednesday.

  “Perhaps I’ll stay over for it,” Ben told her. Behind him, Piggy gave a chuckle at the piano and started running through a tune Ben didn’t know.

  “We’d put you up here if we had an extra room,” Lulu offered.

  “Sometimes between girls we’re near empty. Girls move around a lot. Here today, gone tomorrow. I came to town just after one of the houses burned down, and I was lucky to latch onto some loose ones. Well . . . I think this is Bess now.” She’d risen as the front door opened and closed. Two girls and a man entered, and he knew at once which of the ladies was the one he sought.

  Her hair was the blonde of the photograph, and if the face was different it was only the difference that aging and hardness could bring. She would be about twenty-four now, nine years older than the picture he carried in his pocket.

  “Hello, Bess.”

  She eyed him with a hard, suspicious look. “Do I know you?”

  “I’m a friend of your father. He sent me to find you.”

  She glanced uncertainly at the two who had entered with her—a handsome dark-haired girl with a look of the South about her, and an alert young man with a chipped front tooth and a thin black mustache. The girl was already going on up the stairs. “I gotta change my clothes, Bess. I’ll be in my room if you want me.”

  “O.K., Dotty. Now, mister, we can talk in here.” She motioned back toward the parlor.

  “I was thinking of someplace more private.”

  “For five silver dollars you can come up to my room. The price includes a shot of whiskey.”

  Ben hesitated only a moment. “Fair enough. Does your friend here come along?”

  The man with the mustache grunted and Bess said, “I’ll see you later, Hugo. Business before pleasure, you know.”

  She led the way upstairs carefully quilted with thick carpeting, down a narrow hallway lit by the uneven flickering of gas lamps. And Ben followed with a growing feeling of uncertainty. A simple job was becoming more complex all the time. As he entered the room she indicated, he knew the door across the hall had opened a bit, knew the girl named Dotty was watching through the crack.

  “Nice room you have,” he told her when she’d closed the door.

  “It’ll do. Now what do you want?”

  He walked over and carefully sat down on the bed. “I thought I told you. Your father sent me.”

  “What does he want after all these years?”

  “I think you know. He wants you home, back in Texas. He’s dying.”

  “I got his letter,” she admitted.

  “Will you come back with me?”

  The expression on her face was difficult to read. It might have been hesitation, it might have been fear. But she answered, “I can’t. It’s been too long.”

  “He still loves you.”

  “Did he tell you why I left? Did he tell you what happened?”

  Ben nodded. “He told me.”

  “And you think I can go back? To the man who murdered my mother?”

  “The man is your father. He’s dying.”

  She lit a cigarette. It was the first time Ben had ever seen a woman smoke. “I can’t go back. That’s all there is to it.”

  “He’s a wealthy man, Bess. A millionaire. And it’s all going to be yours. Couldn’t you even go back for a million dollars?”

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “You don’t know what I’ve become.”

  He knew, but he didn’t say it. Somehow the words didn’t fit her face. “These killings have your father worried. You must be able to understand that much, at least.”

  “I live here for six years, lead this kind of a life, and he worries now that I might get killed!”

  Ben sighed and got to his feet. He could see that further conversation would be useless. “All right. Perhaps I’ll see you again. I plan to be around for a few days.” Then, as an afterthought, “Who were the people you came in with?”

  “I don’t see that it’s any of your business, Mr.—?”

  “Snow.”

  “. . . Snow, but I’ll tell you anyway. Dotty has the room across the hall. I’ve known her for five years, almost since I first came here. Hugo is a good friend. I might even marry him someday, though I’m sure my father would never approve. Satisfied?”

  “Satisfied,” he said with a smile. “See you around. And think about it, huh? He really cares about you.”

  “Goodbye, Mr. Snow.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting the five dollars?”

  “I was being nasty. Forgive me.” For the first time there seemed something beneath the hard outer shell. He smiled as he went out the door.

  Downstairs, Piggy was playing the piano and a couple of colored youths had drifted in off the street to listen. Countess Lulu was nowhere to be seen. Ben went outside into the twilight and started aimlessly down the avenue. Already, around him, the sounds of night were swelling up, strange sounds. Happy, vibrant sounds, but still strange.

  Ben saw the man before he was near enough to speak. He came out of the gaslit gloom with a steady, certain pace, and his hands were deep in the pockets of a greatcoat oddly warm for the climate, even in February. The man smiled slightly and stopped dead in Ben’s path. “Don’t go for that gun,” he said quietly. “I mean no harm.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Police. Detective Inspector Jonathan Withers, at your service, sir.”

  “Oh?”

  “You’re a stranger in the area. A stranger in the midst of a rash of murders needs questioning. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.” The man was obviously English, but with a touch of the South in his speech. He would have been there a number of years. Inspector Withers smiled. “We’re getting along fine. Now I’ve already had some reports on you. Name, Ben Snow. Correct?”

  “Correct. I was hired by a Texas oilman to find his daughter and bring her back home, which I am attempting to do.” He went on to sketch in some brief details of his visit and the day’s movements around Storyville.

  Withers nodded and seemed satisfied. “Come in here. I’ll buy you a beer. We have more to talk about.” And a few minutes later, over their drinks, he leaned forward and asked, “Have you ever heard of Jack the Ripper?”

  “A little. A mass murderer over in London a few years back.”

  Withers nodded. “In 1888, to be exact. He killed seven women, all prostitutes, and he’s never been apprehended. There was a story he’d come to the United States, killed a couple of women up in New Jersey.”

  “You’re English,” Ben said, giving words to the obvious.

  Inspector Withers smiled thinly. “I was a London bobby in 1888. I suppose in one way or another I’ve been on the trail of the Ripper ever since.”

  “You think this is the same man?”

  “The crimes are amazingly similar. Prostitutes, struck down in the streets and alleys of the red-light district, horribly hacked with a knife. And of course if I’m right there’ll be more killings. He’ll get his courage up and go inside again, as he did in London. Right into their rooms.”

  “Who were these three women?”

  The detective counted them off on his fingers. “First, a few weeks back, was a reformed prostitute named Jane Swann. She sang at one of the bars. Killed in an alley. Then, just the other night, Sadie Stride, dead in a fountain a few blocks from here. The Ripper’s fifth victim, by the way, was named Elizabeth Stride. Maybe just a coincidence, maybe not.”

  “Could it be something else? Could there be a racial angle?”

  Inspector Withers shook his head. “The first two were white, t
he latest one colored. We’ve found no connection among them except for the fact they were all prostitutes at one time. Of course, it’s difficult to go back very far—so many people coming and going all the time.”

  The beat of a jazz piano rose and fell at intervals, like the piquant pounding of some distant surf. “You don’t really think I’m involved?” Ben asked.

  “Probably not. At least I know you’re not Jack the Ripper. There are some reports, though . . .”

  “That I might be Billy the Kid? One’s as ridiculous as the other.”

  “You carry a gun under your coat.”

  “Don’t you think it’s a good idea, with a mad killer at large?”

  Inspector Withers shrugged. “I naturally take the attitude that the police are able to provide sufficient protection.”

  “Did they provide it for the Stride girl the other night?”

  The detective stood up, signifying the conversation was ended without an answer to Ben’s final question. “I’ll be in touch with you,” he said. “If you learn anything, I can always be found.”

  Ben watched him leave and then ordered another beer. He sat for a time listening to the piano, watching the city of night awaken, stretch, and go off to live. Finally, as he knew he would, he found himself wandering back to the house three blocks from Basin. It was alight now, with all the sad joys of darkness, loud with the music and the laughter that signaled a kind of escape to the world of Storyville. It had been escape, at least, for Bess Kinsman. Countess Lulu was at the door. “Decided to come back as a customer?”

  “Not exactly. I wanted to see Bess again.”

  “Cost you cash this time. To me.”

  He handed her the money and started upstairs. The place was quiet for the moment, then he noticed that Piggy was away from his beloved piano. A black man passed him on the stairs, looking away, hurrying to be out of the place. Ben knocked on her door and entered when she gave the word. If she was surprised to see him again she made no sign of it, but only sat waiting on the bed in an air of innocence that must have started with Eve.

  “Hello again, Bess.”

  “You’re back soon.”

  “I was wondering if you’d thought about it. Going back to Texas.”

  “I’ve thought about it.”

  The hardness was there, in her eyes, on her lips. This would not be the same girl Archer Kinsman had driven away, six years earlier. “And?”

  “I told you my answer earlier. I haven’t changed my mind.”

  Hardness, even with that innocence which still clung like a veil. She had to be an amazing actress, but which mood was the act? “I was hoping . . .”

  He never finished the sentence. A scream had started, rising like the wail of the damned, to be cut off as suddenly as it began. Bess Kinsman was on her feet in an instant. “It’s Dotty, across the hall!”

  They were into the hall, pounding on the door, forcing the lock, because somehow the sudden silence was more terrifying than the scream. Countess Lulu had appeared from somewhere, and Piggy and the other girls, and on their faces was written the single fearful thought. And the door shivered and splintered under Ben’s shoulder and they were looking in on it.

  At first it didn’t seem so bad. At first she looked almost alive, sitting on the floor with her back to the wall looking at the great red gash where her stomach had been. Then, as they watched, her head started to fall to one side and they saw the thin red razor line on her throat. It was then that Bess screamed . . .

  Inspector Withers was unhappy. He paced the downstairs parlor like a caged tiger, waiting while his men completed the task in the upper room. “A fourth one,” he said, “and the day before Mardi Gras. Can you imagine what that madman will do tomorrow, when he’s free to wander masked and unnoticed?”

  Ben had settled onto Piggy’s piano bench, listening, watching, his hand never far from his gun. He had met many murderers before, but this one, so near and yet so unseen, had unnerved even him. “How did he get in?”

  Withers shrugged. “Through the window, across the roof. It would seem that the choice of Dotty Ringsome as the victim was dictated simply by the location of her room and the fact that she was alone at the time.”

  But Ben was thinking. “Her scream was cut off so quickly, though. She didn’t start screaming when she saw him coming through the window. He must have actually had the knife in her stomach before she yelled. Then he silenced her with a slash at her throat. Wouldn’t this indicate it was someone she knew? Someone she trusted?”

  “She might have been dozing on the bed with her eyes closed.”

  “I suppose so,” Ben conceded.

  He waited for a time longer, answering questions about what little he knew, watching while everyone in the house underwent the inquisition by Withers and his men. Finally, some time after midnight, they allowed him to leave. He walked the few blocks to the Arlington Palace and found there a room for the night.

  Sleep came quickly, but he kept his gun under the pillow, close at hand. His last thought was that somehow he had to get Kinsman’s daughter out of that place. The evil that had struck down four girls was very close to her . . .

  In the morning he found the Storyville blocks strangely transformed, wearing in the midst of their hidden terror the colorful streamers and gay trappings of carnival time. It was Mardi Gras, the day before Lent, and already there was a scattering of masked, costumed figures in the streets. Down the block a newsboy shouted the latest on the Ripper murders, but even this went unnoticed or unadmitted on a day set aside for gaiety.

  The Arlington Annex adjoined the hotel lobby and in the mornings provided a reasonable place to eat breakfast. A bartender was polishing glasses and one of the girls brought Ben a plate of bacon and eggs with an early morning air of bustle. At this hour the only other customer was a vaguely familiar young man with a mustache and a chipped tooth. It took Ben only a moment to place him—Bess’s friend, Hugo.

  “Hello, there,” he offered through a mouthful of food. “Snow, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right. Ben Snow.”

  “I’m Hugo Dadier. I hear Bess’s old man hired you.”

  “I guess that’s right. He wants her back in Texas.”

  Dadier had remained standing at the bar. Now he walked over to Ben’s table. “I’ve known Bess from almost her first day in New Orleans. I like to think I can take care of her.”

  “Can you protect her against the Ripper? Can you get her away from this kind of life she’s leading? Can you give her a million dollars?”

  “I can try,” Dadier said, the eternal answer of the eternal young man, even here among the sins of Storyville.

  “Do you think you’re right for her? What are you—a pimp, a drug peddler, maybe?”

  “Bess and I are two of a kind. We understand each other.”

  “I’ll bet. You should take an ad for her in the Blue Book. It might help her business.” The remark angered Dadier, but before he could reply Ben had a thought. “Say, do they keep back issues of the Blue Book here?”

  “I don’t know,” Dadier said with a shrug, controlling his anger. “Ask the bartender, not me.”

  Ben walked over to the long polished bar and interrupted the glass-wiping task. “Back issues of the Blue Book—do you have any?”

  The bartender eyed him oddly. “What good are back issues? The current one’s got all the girls listed. The girls not listed aren’t around anymore.”

  “I just wanted to see some.”

  “Didn’t start publishing it till ’95.”

  “All right. Do you have them from ’95 on?”

  “Guess I could find you a set, back in the office. Just a minute.” Ben waited and presently the bartender returned, bearing five dog-eared copies of past Blue Books. “You can look at ’em here, but I gotta have them back.”

  “Fine.”

  Hugo Dadier had resumed his position at the bar as Ben sat down and began paging through the first of the booklets, not knowing exactly what he was seeking, yet feeling somehow that he would find it here. The books had grown in size with each passing year, and in ’97 they had proudly proclaimed the official birth of the Storyville district. Gradually the ads for piano players had begun to appear, though the word “jazz” was not yet used in them.

  But right now Ben was more interested in the names. He scanned the lists, making an occasional note, and found what he wanted in a sudden flash of brilliance. The book was two years old, but it seemed to be there. Perhaps, just perhaps, the key to the Ripper murders.