CHAPTER EIGHT

Big Mo

Norma walked up the marble steps to 1026 Conti Street. The afternoon sun washed the façade of the three-story town house to a light moss green. Pots of brilliant red geraniums lined the second- and third-floor galleries behind the filigreed ironwork adorned with fleurs-de-lis.

Norma was wearing an expensively tailored cocoa-colored wool suit, matching high-heeled pumps, and a small-brimmed hat, a feminine version of a fedora. She wore it jauntily askew, the brim slanting across her right eyebrow. She carried her brown handbag and a folded newspaper tucked under her arm. Thrown casually over one shoulder was a fur stole, which she’d needed earlier to ward off the December chill. The temperature, though, was climbing, and Norma felt uncomfortably warm.

She unlocked the ornate iron gate between the gleaming white, fluted columns flanking the recessed front door, stepped into the foyer, and entered her apartment through the French doors. Inside it was cool and dark. She kicked off her shoes and stripped down to a cream-colored silk slip. Barefoot, she crossed the red Oriental rug in her bedroom, picked up the newspaper she’d tossed on the bed, and went out into the sunroom off the courtyard, her office. She sat at the desk and opened the newspaper to the section devoted to city news. On the top page were two rows of photographs, the fall graduating class of the police academy. From the desk drawer Norma took a pair of scissors and cut out the photos, trimming closely around each face. She lay the head shots, widely spaced, on pieces of blank white paper. Carefully, she studied each one. Then, with a pencil, she began to draw hats on the paper over their heads, mustaches on some of the faces. She tried a full beard on one, a goatee on another. She switched the faces to different hats and facial hair. After a while she sat back, satisfied.

She checked the diamond watch hanging around her neck on its long gold chain. Nearly coffee-break time. She went back to her bedroom and sat at her dressing table. Artfully, she applied a coat of pale pink lipstick, coloring outside the natural lip line to make her lips look fuller. She rubbed two small spots of rouge on each cheekbone the way old ladies do, as if they can’t see well enough to blend the color properly. Next she put on a cheap pastel blue suit with a boxy jacket that made her large breasts look matronly, and a frumpy skirt, a little too long to be fashionable, that covered most of her shapely legs. She completed the outfit with white net gloves, a pair of low-heeled, black, sensible shoes, and a brimless blue hat, a few shades darker than the suit, which she perched squarely on top of her head, bringing its little blue veil down over her brows. She let her shoulders slump. The image in the mirror was of a woman twenty years older, undistinguished and, she hoped, unrecognizable.

Norma walked through the Quarter to Canal Street. She headed for the corner of University Place, to the Meal-a-Minit. She went in—taking mincing, old-lady steps—and sat at a table in the back where she could see the door and most of the restaurant. Opening the newspaper to the society section, she perused the pages for Dorothy Dix’s advice column and pretended to read while she watched the door.

They started swaggering in, the men in blue, shiny silver badges, black-strapped nightsticks. They sat at the tables, talking, smoking, slurping coffee, giving the waitresses the eye. Some of them, even the young ones, Norma knew because they’d visited the house; she scrunched lower in her seat, her head bent over the paper. A few new ones came in, and from under her veil she memorized their faces. Half an hour later they drifted out, no bills to pay, just tips for the waitresses.

Norma waited until they were back on the street, paid for her coffee, and walked with her little, halting steps across Canal Street. As soon as she was in the Quarter, she threw her shoulders back and lengthened her stride. She’d done a good day’s work. Now she was ready for whatever the night would bring.

Captain Joseph Guillot was the reason Norma began memorizing the faces of policemen. Big Mo, as he was called because his voice boomed as loud as the guns on the battleship Missouri, had been dispatched to the French Quarter by Superintendent Joe Scheuring soon after the Nashville contractor died to “break the Quarter loose,” Norma said.

At one point during Aaron Kohn’s hearings early in 1953, Norma had realized that she was the only madam operating. Everyone else had shut down, frightened by the depth of the SCIC probe. So she sold the house on Girod and Saratoga and bought one at 520 Governor Nicholls Street, one house up from where she had lived with Bill Carver. She and Mac moved in and began renovations while Norma continued to rent the apartments at 1026 Conti to Blue Room musicians. Mac was happy with this arrangement. Then one day Norma ran into one of the Good Men on Canal Street. He said, “Why don’t you call me a girl?”

She couldn’t stand it: She just had to “cheat” a little, her term for arranging tricks during times of intense police activity. She cheated whenever Mac played golf. He didn’t know a thing about it until she kicked all the musicians out of 1026 and went back to work. “It was just too slow,” Norma said. “I had to have action.”

Then Big Mo Guillot did all the landladies a big favor: “He ran all the pimps out of the French Quarter so fast it wasn’t funny,” Norma said. “They were all scared to death.”

The word went around that Captain Guillot was a “good” policeman. For the landladies that meant business as usual. The following Christmas many of them decided to show their appreciation by sending the captain a gift. Norma did not join in. She told Jackie, “Those idiots didn’t keep the sense they were born with.” Norma knew that if you called your man wrong, you went to jail, and she didn’t know Guillot well enough yet.

Big Mo was not amused. He packed all the gifts in a police wagon and hauled them back to the houses. It was more than a warning: He began “the inspections,” as Norma termed them—entering the houses, peering into every nook, checking under every rug. He came to Norma’s at all hours of the night, arriving with a policeman so small that Norma wondered how he’d ever gotten into the police academy. They’d ring the side doorbell, and when Norma opened the door, Big Mo would lift the tiny policeman in and they’d go through the house. They tapped on the pecky cypress walls of the parlor, checked each room, and searched the depths of every armoire. Sometimes this could take hours. Not only that, but the inspections occurred routinely, often more than once a week. Big Mo suspected that Norma had a hideout, and she was afraid he would find it; she decided it was time for elaborate security measures.

The hideout was behind the parlor, the entrance to it in the courtyard, to the side of the stairway. At one time there had been a dungeon “with a wall where slaves were shackled, and the hideout had been a runway to the dungeon. It needed a new, undetectable door. The inside wall of the courtyard was tongue in groove; her carpenter made the door fit so flush that it was difficult to see any lines where it met the wall. Once the iron bar inside was slid into place, it was nearly impossible to find a crack. For extra camouflage, Norma put tall tropical trees—palms, ficus, hibiscus, and banana—in rolling boxes. When the door to the hideout was bolted, she rolled the trees in front of the entrance.

She also had a buzzer system installed. A girl was stationed at the window in the entrance hall during operating hours. If she spotted a police lookout or a suspicious looking car drove into the alley, she threw the buzzer, which meant, Get to the hideout as quickly as possible!

Norma developed a system of spies. Her spies kept Big Mo’s house under surveillance until his car was in the driveway and all lights were out, then called Norma to tell her that the captain was away for the night.

As another precaution, she rented a condemned building around the corner on North Rampart Street. When Big Mo and the little policeman arrived, the girls could escape through the gate at the end of the Conti Street driveway and into the boarded-up building until the inspection was over.

One night a police lookout was across from the house when a regular customer, weaving a little with all the drinks he’d had over on Bourbon Street, came up the driveway and rang the back doorbell. Norma slid open the little barred window she’d installed in the door.

“You idiot,” she said, “don’t you see that policeman across the street?”

“But, Norma,” the date slurred, “I wanna come in!”

Norma nearly took his nose off when she slammed the little window in his face. She turned to Jackie. “Tricks don’t have a lick of brains!” Jackie nodded.

Another night the girl at the front window threw the buzzer—Big Mo was driving up the alley. Norma led two other girls and their dates through the gate to Rampart Street. The dates took off; she and the girls entered the condemned building through a specially rigged piece of plywood. But this time Big Mo got Norma. Norma was arrested three times in 1953, twice by Big Mo. He personally took her to be photographed and fingerprinted.

The young sergeant behind the desk asked Norma her age. As usual, she lied. “Thirty-eight,” she replied.

Big Mo laughed. “Oh, come on, you old bitch,” he taunted, “you’re as old as I am. Don’t tell that boy that!”

“Okay, forty-seven,” Norma said, and Big Mo laughed some more.

Norma made a hundred-dollar bail and left while the night was still young. The story was on the front page of The Times-Picayune the next day, October 13, 1953. The second time Big Mo got her was four days later, in a surprise ambush at 1026 Conti—he had the door down before anyone could respond to the buzzer and get to the hideout. As always, though, Norma didn’t spend so much as a night behind bars.

One night shortly afterward, Elmo called Norma from the Moulin Rouge, as he often did, wanting to know if he could send a customer over. Norma decided she’d better send a girl to the Roosevelt to meet him. She chose a new girl, unknown in town. The girl dressed up in her hat and gloves and carried her overnight case up the steps to the hotel. Big Mo happened to be driving by and called out to her from his police car before she could get through the door. Norma said to Jackie after she paid the girl’s fine, “That man can smell a whore!”

Big Mo sabotaged Norma’s spies. One evening Norma got a call that he was down for the night, and no sooner did that spy hang up than another called saying he was on the way. She went to the foyer window just in time to see him wheeling into the driveway. She threw the buzzer; he jumped out and rang the side bell.

Norma had trained her girls to act fast. It took only a couple of minutes for them to get into the hideout. She opened the door and said pleasantly, “You’re always coming here when I’m changing clothes, Captain.” Big Mo laughed.

He lifted his tiny partner inside. Jackie was sitting in the courtyard, her long, stockinged legs crossed at the knees, wearing a low-cut black sheath with a wide, leopard-print belt. Big Mo asked her what she was doing there.

“I live here, Captain,” Jackie answered.

“Then where’re your flimsies?” He meant her clothes.

Jackie explained that she occupied a room upstairs. A girl named Mary actually lived in the room; Jackie was living with a doctor by that time. Guillot went upstairs and came down with two tiny dresses, a top, and a kimono that belonged to the petite Mary.

“Do these things fit you?” he asked Jackie. “Let’s see you try them on.”

Jackie waved her hand at the skimpy dresses Big Mo held. “Oh, Captain, I outgrew all those clothes.”

Big Mo and the little policeman laughed; Norma and Jackie laughed. “You know,” Big Mo said to Norma, “I’ll never frame you, but if I get you fair and square, I’ll get you good.”

“Oh, I believe you, Captain,” Norma said demurely. And in one way, she did. Big Mo was interested in her—she knew all the signs—but so far he’d made no moves.

The cat-and-mouse game continued. Norma sometimes wondered how she managed to survive it, but it was exciting—she couldn’t deny that. Big Mo made it exciting. One night, though, he gave her nerves more of a workout than even he knew.

Norma had a regular Saturday night customer, a very good customer. He would take one girl right after another, five or six of them, buy drinks for everyone, and run up an exorbitant bill. But he was also a very unusual customer: He didn’t want to take any of the girls to bed; instead, he wanted to dress up in their clothes—their bras, girdles, dresses, even their shoes. Every Saturday he ruined most of the clothes he wore, stretching them out so they were useless to the girls. After a few weeks Norma bought him his own wardrobe—a padded lace bra, a boned corset, high-heeled shoes, a black silk kimono, and, best of all, a wig of long curly black hair. He dressed up, the girls combed his hair, and he danced in front of the wall of mirrors in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Norma’s girls clapped and whistled and told him he was beautiful. After the last dance he masturbated, paid, and went home.

This man amazed Norma. He was one of the Good Men, with a wife and family Uptown. She thought perhaps he was looking for a man, and this would have been no problem. Many people came to Norma’s for something other than straight sex. Norma knew one man in particular she could have called for him, a cabdriver who liked to make a little money on the side. He was so well endowed that the girls called him Frankenstein. But when she suggested such a possibility, the man turned her down. All he wanted was to look in the mirror and see a girl.

One Saturday night while this man was upstairs, Big Mo, reportedly tucked away for the evening, drove into the alley. Norma threw the buzzer. The girl with the man from Uptown grabbed his hand and led him down the stairs. He was dressed in his underwear and flimsy silk kimono, his long, black hair flying as the girl hurried him into the hideout. Norma heard them when they reached the patio, her high heels and his high heels on the blue Mexican tiles—clickety-clickety-click. As she rolled the plant boxes in front of the door, the girl told her the trick’s male clothes were still lying on the bed.

“Hurry, Jackie,” Norma said, “go hide them. I don’t have the nerve to tell Guillot you like to dress in men’s clothes.”

Norma was frightened as she let Big Mo in that night, but not of the friendly, flirtatious policeman with the booming voice. She was afraid her Good Man from Uptown, who’d been coming to the house for a little over a year, would never come back. She whispered to Jackie while Big Mo was tapping all the walls and checking each room in the house, “We’ve lost a customer, and what a customer! We’ll never see him again, I just know it.”

Big Mo was in a particularly expansive mood that night, and any other time Norma would have found herself enjoying the game. But that night all she could think about was her good customer imprisoned in the dark hideout, four feet wide and twenty feet long, its brick walls damp with condensation. She thought Big Mo would never leave; he even accepted a drink, something he rarely did, saying her house was his last stop that night, and sat in the courtyard—only a few feet from the entrance to the hideout!—to drink it.

When he finally left and Norma’s girl opened the hideout, she expected the trick to go clickety-click-click off into the night. Instead he came out aflutter with happiness. “Oh,” he breathed, “I’ve been in a raid! I’m Madeleine, a girl in a raid!” He went directly up the stairs and carried on with the night.

But Norma and Jackie held their breath during the following week. Norma said, “He’ll think about it and we’ll lose him, I bet you.”

The next Saturday night, though, the doorbell rang, and there he was. On the off chance he’d come, Norma had bought him a new pair of red satin high heels, the biggest size she could find. When he saw those shoes, he went into ecstasy.