Jass (Valentin St. Cyr Mysteries) Read Online Free Page B

opened his copy of the
Sun.
    A presidential election was in the offing, and the paper suggested that Mr. William Jennings Bryan had such a clear lead over Mr. William Howard Taft that the result was a foregone conclusion.
    He saw that two local stories that had been the source of much chatter had come to a close. Daniel Roche, the scion of a respectable Garden District family, had pleaded guilty to embezzling nearly thirty thousand dollars from his employer, blaming his erring on a cursed addiction to opium.
    The other story was far more grim. The Lamana kidnapping had come to an end with the hanging of Antone Scalisi. The Sicilian, in a feud with the Lamana family, had kidnapped seven-year-old Carlo. The boy had died, though whether by accident or intention was never clearly established. It would have been cold comfort to Scalisi as he went to the gallows that it was the state and not the Lamana clan extracting justice.
    Valentin knew that he could have settled the dispute before it wound to its tragic conclusion. But he hadn't even been asked; yet another indication of how far he had slipped, in what little account he was held these days. With that doleful thought, he folded the newspaper, stood up, walked out of the square and down Decatur Street to catch a Canal Line car heading north.
    In another ten minutes, when the car came to a stop at Basin Street, he was greeted by a familiar—and now famous—tableau.
    The
Sun
and the politicians called it "Storyville." To everyone else in the city, it was "the District." The former moniker was the namesake of Sidney Story, the alderman who wrote the ordinance that had created it. Though this particular garden of earthly delights had been in full bloom long before Alderman Story arrived upon the scene.
    Since the battalion of prostitutes swarmed to New Orleans in the wake of Andrew Jackson's ragtag army of 1812, red lanterns had been hung in the windows of the shacks of wanton women as a sign of invitation to pleasures of the flesh. The harlots in the rough hovels and the bordellos that came later were consigned by righteous citizens to the dirt streets "back-of-town," which meant beyond the basin that had been dug over the decades by city dwellers claiming dirt upon which to more securely found their French Quarter homes.
    Through the better part of the century, the neighborhood bordered by Basin Street was a stage upon which a tawdry carnival was staged. In grand mansions along the main thoroughfares, champagne brought fifty dollars a bottle and beautiful octoroons entertained the sons of Crescent City high society and the royalty of foreign lands; while just around the corner, along the line of filthy Gallatin Street cribs they called "Smoky Row," drunken whores would lure hapless customers, spit tobacco juice in their eyes, knock them cold with bats, and steal everything of value that they carried or wore, leaving them to crawl away with their lives, if they were lucky.
    Though it was a vicious, sinful, disease-plagued slough that evolved beyond the basin, there were no efforts to stamp out the scarlet trade. It was a gold mine, after all, pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into the pockets of some of the city's most respectable coffers, including those of the churches that owned certain parcels of real estate. It took almost ninety years to devise Storyville, a twenty-block square attached like an afterthought to "downtown" New Orleans, beginning at Basin Street and running northeast between Canal and St. Louis streets to St. Louis Cemetery No. 2.
    This year, 1908, marked the eleventh anniversary of Storyville as the only red-light quarter ever legally chartered in the United States, its forty-odd bordellos officially licensed as "Residences for Lewd and Abandoned Women." In fact, the District was created by the kind of delicious dance at which politicians were, then as now, so cunningly adept. According to the law that Alderman Story authored, prostitution was declared