Before the negative was shattered, the subject's face had been scratched out by, it is said, Bellocq's brother, a Catholic priest, for reasons known only to himself and, presumably, his God.
—Al Rose, "STORYVILLE"
The late afternoon light came through the window and onto a purple dress that hung on the wall like a storefront display. The door opened with barely a sound and the woman on the dirty, mussed bed looked around and smiled. She was happy to see the visitor slip inside, close the door and cross the floor to stand over her. A few murmured words and all in a nervous rush, her visitor reached for the silk sash and pulled it away. The kimono fell open on lumps of soft white tit hanging down, a fat roll of a belly, her thing down there.
The woman laughed, a dry, rheumy sound, as the kimono slipped to the floor to spread out in a silk swirl of cherry blossoms on dark branches. She slipped off the bed, went down on stiff knees and started fussing with buttons. This whatchu want, honey?
Her tongue was a wet tickle. She was doing it when she felt the sash from the kimono drape down on her shoulders, the soft silk sliding this way and that. She looked up, smiling, and at that moment the hands crossed in a jerking motion. The woman's eyes went wide as the silk wound tight, then tighter. Now there was another quick, trembling pull on the sash and her face passed from white to pink. But she still didn't resist at all.
It was just a rough game; they'd done it before. She didn't think to fight back until it was too late and her tongue came out all wide and red, till she started spitting-up white, till she was kicking, her bare feet sliding on the wood floor that was slippery with her own piss and then she went to flailing with her fat white arms, but they were too weak and in another half-minute, the last of the light in her eyes went out. The body was lowered to the floor. The whole house was quiet as a nervous hand pushed the black rose into the woman's palm and folded her dry white fingers around its thorny stem.
E.J. Bellocq made his way down Iberville Street as the soft sepia evening descended. He dragged a tripod along under one arm, gripped his bulky black Bantam Special camera tight to his other side, and kept his eyes fastened fiercely on the banquette ten paces ahead. He didn't—he wouldn't—look left or right. Across the street, on this corner and that, young sports stared, pointed and laughed. A glance would be open invitation to these louts. The Frenchman wouldn't tolerate it, even if he had the time. He had a paid appointment to photograph a sporting woman named Gran Tillman who worked in a house on Bienville, Lizzie Taylor's. She had told him to come by at seven o'clock, no sooner and no later. She was a woman of means these days and not to be kept waiting, or so she said. Bellocq hurried as fast as his legs would shuffle him along, looking like a crippled insect on the Saturday evening street.
Ernest J. Bellocq was one of the District's more grotesque citizens, a pale, almost translucent creature of French descent. He stood a little over five feet tall, but his head was as large as a pumpkin because of a medical condition called hydrocephalia. He had a broken little body and bent legs so that he walked like a duck. A contortion of bone and muscle clutched his throat, so that he also talked like a duck, and a French duck at that.
Bellocq was not a happy gnome, like some storybook character. He did not have a kind heart or pleasant disposition. He was not eager to please. He was a churlish and unfriendly man. He was ugly and misshapen and in poor health and the butt of cruel taunts by those who knew no better. Those few who knew him well enough called him Papá.
To earn his living, he took photographs for the Foundation Company of New Orleans shipbuilders. He recorded with mechanical precision the components of ocean vessels weighing tens of thousands of tons and made formal portraits of the stuffy and respectable white men who ran the firm that built them. In his off hours, he took photographs of the prostitutes of the District.
There was a certain windowless room in a certain house on a certain uptown street that was lined, wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor, with a catalogue of "French" photographs, mostly crude studies that captured women and couples in every conceivable pose and coupling. All for sale, of course; when cash money was involved, there was not much that man, woman or beast could not be persuaded or forced to do.
E.J. Bellocq's photographs would not be found in this collection; his forte was something quite apart. The portraits of Papa Bellocq were also not in the florid, romantic style of the day. With crabbed hands and milky blue eyes and a soul that was twisted with private torments, he revealed small stories on 8x10 inch plates treated with silver salts. His subjects were not beautiful. They were for the most part hollow-eyed, vacant-looking women, even if barely beyond childhood. But Bellocq saw things in their faces and their bodies, and captured them on film.
He caught his subjects as they teetered like clumsy dancers between chastity and sin, smiling their vague smiles, hearing promises. On others, he found desperate, haunted looks, as if they sensed their lives beginning to dim and go out like flickering candles. And some displayed no expression at all, their faces blank as stone as they leaned against a white wall or lay naked on a bed, their fates already drawn in the scars that brutal lovers left scrawled across their pallid breasts. The broken and crippled Bellocq trapped the faces beneath their fleeting masks, caught the dying light in empty eyes, fixed in silver crystals the looks of forever saying good-bye to something.
He arrived at Lizzie Taylor's one minute before seven-thirty. He had to ask three times before the stupid girl at the door understood him. She then informed him that Miz Tillman hadn't been seen all day. Bellocq chattered a string of angry syllables in a squirrel voice, as one of the girls would later remember it. Despite the young lady's protests (Miss Taylor was not in the house), he pushed his way inside and clambered up the steps, camera and tripod banging along behind. It took him all of five minutes to struggle like some tottering mechanical toy to the upper floor. He stomped from one room to the next, pushing open doors and generally raising a row all over the house. And so it was Papa Bellocq, the photographer of prostitutes, who opened the door at the end of the hall and came upon the body of Gran Tillman. She was lying on the floor, half-hidden behind a dressing screen. She was naked, her skin a pale, sickly yellow. The silk sash from a kimono was wrapped around her neck and in her right hand she held a black rose.
***
A street urchin came to fetch Valentin at the Café. He walked into the room at eight-thirty. His eyes took in everything: Picot standing there, hands on hips, looking like he had digested something that didn't agree with him; Papa Bellocq hugging the wall, his big eyes stark with fear; the two uniformed patrolmen standing by, one of them holding an electric lamp. Then he saw the body of the white woman, the sash and the tattered kimono, a puddle of urine and a black rose. And hanging on the wall, looking out of place in that tawdry room, a dress, a gown really, deep purple sateen, with swaths of fabric, lace, and bows. Valentin stared at it for a moment, then turned his attention back to the body.
"You aren't here by any choice of mine," Picot said by way of greeting. Valentin kept his eyes on the victim, avoiding Picot's glare in the process. The police detective made a sound in his throat. "Someone downtown got a call from your friend Mr. Anderson, and here you are." Valentin didn't comment and the copper gave up. "Looks like maybe we have a repeat killer, don't it?" He pointed. "This business with the rose mean anything to you?" Valentin said no, nothing. "What about that?" he said, jerking a thumb at the dress.
Valentin shrugged, and on the edge of his vision, saw Bellocq open his mouth. He made the slightest shake of his head and the little Frenchman remained silent. Picot glanced between the two men with narrowed eyes. "The crip says this is how he found her." He smiled lewdly. "Says he was just coming here to make her photograph."
"I've seen his work," Valentin said. "What he says is reasonable."
"Well, I don't think it's reasonable," Picot hissed in sudden irritation. "We got nothing but what he says to go on, do we? That ain't enough for me. So we're just going to take him on downtown."
Bellocq's eyes grew wider still, like blue china saucers, and he gaped at St. Cyr in a mute plea. Valentin stepped around the body on the floor and murmured something to Picot. The copper listened and, after a grudging moment, nodded once, curtly. Valentin waved the Frenchman toward the door and Bellocq scuttled out like some frantic metallic crab. The two men waited as he made his noisy way along the hall and down the stairs. After the clattering faded away, Picot said, "Well, Mr. Detective, why don't you have a look and tell me what we got here?" As usual, there was a sneer lurking.
Valentin took the lamp from the policeman's hand and knelt over the body of Gran Tillman. Picot yawned and leaned languidly against the wall, but Valentin could feel the copper's stare boring into his back.
She was a short, plain woman with liverish skin. Her face was round, her mouth full-lipped and filled with crooked teeth, her nose short and squat. Her body was just as round, except for where the flesh was already sagging. At thirty-five or so, Gran Tillman was a senior citizen in Storyville years. Indeed, her dead face looked weary and somehow not ungrateful for the long rest that was now hers.
Picot fidgeted impatiently and muttered as Valentin lifted the black rose from the palm of her hand, noting the absence of the iron grip of death. It slipped away easily, leaving no thorn pricks on her pink palm. He had only half-listened to Picot, but he got the message: though the sash was in plain view and there was a reddish tinge about the woman's neck (not to mention the amber puddle that had soaked into the floorboards), the policeman was going to report it as a death by undetermined causes. After another few minutes and a half-dozen curt words directed at St. Cyr's bent back, Picot called for a wagon to carry the body downtown. He gave the Creole detective a hard glance. "If you're all through, you can go," he said.
Valentin stood up and turned to leave, stopping to study the purple sateen gown, so out of place in those shoddy digs. He had just reached the doorway when he thought of something. "That other girl," he said.
Picot frowned absently as he stared down at Gran Tillman's body. "What? What girl?"
"From Cassie Maples'."
"Yeah, what about her?"
"Was a cause of death established?"
"Oh. Yeah, it was." Picot sounded bored, '"phyxiated. Probably with a pillow or something like that."
"Then it was murder."
"No tellin'," the copper said, barely listening.
Valentin frowned. "There weren't any signs of a struggle."
"Then it wasn't no murder," Picot snapped irritably. Valentin took a step into the hallway, dropping the subject. "But it's funny you should mention it," he heard Picot say. There was a deliberate note in the copper's voice and Valentin stepped back into the doorway. "I found out who was the last man she saw that night." The copper's lips stretched in a smile that the rest of his face didn't join. "It was that horn player Bolden." He laid his cold penny eyes on St. Cyr. "Friend of yours, ain't he?"
Just before the policeman left with the body, Lizzie Taylor, the madam of the house, appeared downstairs. Though she wrung her hands and could barely stifle her wails of grief over the poor woman's death, she was genuinely appalled that Picot wanted the house shut down for the night. "Tonight?" she kept saying between sobs, "The whole house?" But Picot was firm and, so, in the manner of a wake, Miss Taylor led her girls across Iberville Street to Fewclothes' Cabaret, where they all got properly drunk in Gran Tillman's sainted memory.
Valentin hurried down Conti Street to Antonia Gonzales'. He found Justine dancing in the parlor with another girl while three well-dressed sports watched and whispered amongst themselves. He pulled her into the foyer and she pressed against him, grinning eagerly, a tan imp.
He held her at arm's length. "Listen to me," he said. "Be careful. Please. No strangers."
Justine's eyebrows went up and she smiled a little girl smile. "Are you jealous over me now?"
He said, "I mean it!" and the smile disappeared. "And tell the other girls. They ought not to be careless." He turned for the door.
"Valentin?" She was watching him, waiting. He moved a hand and she ran to get her shawl.