Murder In New Orleans

By G. R. Roberts

After five long years, Mark Johnson returned to New Orleans to find his lost love, Marie Twain, who he was still in love with, and wanting no other. Mark was determined to find his Marie.

Mark met up with his brother Roger, only to be caught up in a war for control of liquor sales in New Orleans between his brother and the Irish Mob, who in turn was connected to city officials.

Meanwhile, Sgt Bill Booth, with the New Orleans police department, investigates a series of murders committed by a person known as the ‘Night Creeper.’

Follow Mark Johnson as he seeks out his lost love and Sgt Bill Booth as he tracks down the ‘Night Creeper.’

• Language: English
• Publisher: Desert Wind Books
• Release date: May 10, 2011
• ISBN: 9781936062171

Book preview

Murder In

New Orleans

by

G. R. Roberts

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Copyright 2011 by G. R. Roberts

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PUBLISHED BY

Desert Wind Books on Smashwords

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

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Visit G. R. Roberts on the web at

www.grroberts.desertwindpublications.com

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CAUTION

This novel is of a graphic nature and contains profanity which may offend some readers.

NOT SUITABLE FOR YOUNG CHILDREN

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Foreword

My name is Frank Miller. I came over here to New Orleans from Alabama along with my two brothers, Sam and John. These had been bad years in the South, and we came here looking for work. As it turned out, like many other men in the 1920s, we got caught up in bootlegging and whiskey running.

This story came about when I was working for one of the bootleggers.

La Maison De La Se Repent. I think that is French for The House of La Rue. I read some place that La Rue means sorrow or regret, which makes it a good name for that house. As I look back at it now, I can see a lot of sorrow and regret still in me. I also heard that La Rue meant place of women, and that could be true.

The place where the house of La Rue once stood is a vacant lot now, sitting there in the Quarter. If you look closer, you can almost see the smoke still rising up out of her ashes. It wasn’t always that way. In 1920, there was a speakeasy on the main floor known for its gambling and good liquor. People would come from around the world just to play high-stakes cards there in the La Rue Casino. You could also find a clean woman on the second floor, right above the speakeasy. The Madame, whom we all called Mom, was the law, and her word ran the La Rue’s business.

On the first floor of the three-story building, you could lay your money on cards or other house games, or you could watch the stage shows that changed weekly. Alternatively, you could come up to the second floor and partake of the house special, one of the twenty or so young women who lived and worked there. You could purchase a copper token for twenty-five dollars that entitled you to a full night of pleasure from one of three women the house would send up to your room. The only rules were that you couldn’t beat the woman, and she had to be back by eight the next morning, no exceptions.

Mom was a stickler on the rules; if you beat one of her women, you got a good beating yourself, if they didn’t kill you. They were to love, not beat. The La Rue women knew where all the dancehalls and speakeasies were located, and if you had the token, your girl was yours to do with as you please until eight o’clock in the morning.

Uptown New Orleans was north of the central business district; downtown was south and downriver from the business district. The French Quarter, known locally as The Quarter was downtown.

In New Orleans, you could take a streetcar ride over the two hundred miles of tracks that crisscrossed the city, to go to a job or to shop or to one of the many places to eat and play. You could take a ride in one of the many hacks, what the people in New York called a taxicab. It was no more than a buckboard with a top on it pulled by one or two horses.

The upper classes liked to call the house of La Rue a hotel casino, except for Mark Johnson’s mother; you’ll be meeting him soon. His mother would say, You can paint a polecat red if’n you like, but under that red paint, it’s still a polecat. Meaning, you could call the house of La Rue a hotel casino all you liked, but it was still a whorehouse.

Most of the women who worked there had been sold into the life by their parents or had no place else to go. Mark Johnson’s mother had been one of the house prostitutes since she was thirteen-years-old. Her mom and dad borrowed five hundred dollars on her, a goodly amount in those days, and never came back to pay it off. She was sold into servitude at thirteen, and she never knew anything else but lying back and spreading her legs.

Mark Johnson’s mother had five children before she turned twenty-five: two boys and three girls. She never contemplated bestowing her kids on someone else. I’m not sure she even knew where the kids had been coming from. Every time she or one of the other ladies at the La Rue had a baby, they would take the new baby in and feed it like the rest of the kids. There was a room in the back where the children would stay when their mothers were working. They could play with each other or eat until their moms finished. One of the women taught Mark to read in that room, along with his younger brother Roger. You’ll get to know Roger later.

As Mark got older, he knew something was wrong with this way of life, but it was all his mother knew, and it worked for her. Anyway, his mother died of the yellow fever at twenty-five years old, a dried-up old woman with only her kids to show for her living. Mark lost two of his sisters to the same fever that year, and a rich man from uptown took his little sister Ella home with him. Some say it was only her father stepping forward, is all.

Like I said, Mark had a brother named Roger. The boys were too old at the time of their mother’s passing for anyone to take them in outside the La Rue, so the two of them just worked around the hotel casino repairing things that needed it for their room and board.

The two brothers didn’t know who their daddies were for sure, but some of the women said Roger’s dad was a Creole dentist over across the Mississippi River in Algiers, which would have explained Roger’s darker skin. They said Mark’s dad was a gambler by the name of William Johnson, who was so hardheaded he could take a whisky bottle and crack it over his head without cutting himself. I don’t know if William Johnson was Mark’s father or not, but he was killed with forty other gold miners by an avalanche at Chilkoot Pass in the Alaska Territory in 1898, one year after Mark’s birth.

To call Mark when he was a boy, people just yelled, Boy! and he would come running. In the year of 1912, he took Mark Johnson as his name of choice. He was fifteen-years-old, standing around six feet tall and weighing something like one hundred and forty-five pounds, with black hair and brown eyes.

In 1914, when Mark was seventeen, a new girl by the name of Marie Twain came to the La Rue. She was just fifteen-years-old then, five feet tall and weighing a hundred pounds or so. She had red hair and green eyes. Her daddy borrowed five hundred dollars on her and said he would be back before the next day’s light to fetch her, but he never did come back. She cried for two days, never once leaving the window on the second floor of the La Rue through which she watched for her father’s return.

Marie Twain was the most beautiful girl Mark had ever seen, and he fell in love with her almost immediately. The two of them spent many nights together that first year. She told Mark she loved him, and Mark told her the same.

At first, it didn’t concern Mark that she was working as one of the house prostitutes. Being an insider, and having been raised in the La Rue, he saw nothing wrong with it. That is until a deep love for Marie came over him. He took it upon himself to repay her debt by working for other establishments in the Quarter, so he could raise the five hundred dollars it would take to set her free.

After they had worked for more than a year, Marie and Mark pooled their money and only had one hundred and fifty dollars. Mark offered the money to Mom as a down payment with the understanding that he would work the rest of Marie’s debt off, but Mom said, No! You be needing to bring me all of my money.

Five hundred dollars was hard to come by for young people at that time in New Orleans, so they decided to runaway and start new somewhere else. Late one night in the early spring of 1916, the two of them got all their things together and walked down the back steps of the La Rue to the narrow brick street below, and what they thought to be their freedom.

Someone had found out what the two of them were up to because two of Mom’s house attendants were waiting when Mark and Marie walked out the door. It didn’t take them long to get the two runaways back inside the La Rue, where they beat Mark within an inch of his life and then threw him out the front doors into the street.

Mom didn’t have Mark killed because of her memories of his mother, and him being birthed there. He could find no work after that, what he’d done was on everyone’s lips in the Quarter. He had become an outcast in the only place he knew and called home. Even his brother Roger wouldn’t help him at first because Mark hadn’t invited him along. Mark became a vagrant in the Quarter, living off the garbage thrown away by the eateries.

Then, one night, Roger came to see Mark and said he was friends with a captain on a towboat going up the Mississippi to St. Louis. He said he could get Mark a job on the boat, if he was ready to leave the Quarter.

Mark left New Orleans that night and worked his way up the Mississippi River to St. Louis, where he got off the boat. He found work in East St. Louis at the stockyards, hoping to make enough money to pay off Marie’s obligation to the house of La Rue. However, it didn’t take Mark long to realize that he would be an old man by the time he saved five hundred dollars working in that place. He joined the Army, along with forty other men from St. Louis, and after training, they all headed off to Europe to fight in what became known as the Great War against the Germans along the Somme Line.

It was trench warfare, with rats the size of cats running everywhere and mud slowing you down to a crawl. Mark didn’t worry about some German shooting him as much as about getting trench foot from having wet feet all the time. Some of the men’s feet swelled to two or three times the size they should have been.

The fighting with the Germans went back and forth over the same ground so many times that Mark forgot about the war and concentrated on keeping his feet dry. He sat in the mud scraping the lice off himself and watching the frogs in the pools of water that collected in the bottom of the trench when the machine guns stopped firing.

In 1918, the Great War was over, and Mark went back to New Orleans, to the Quarter where this all began, to find his one love, Marie Twain.

* * * * *

1

You would think coming home after the war would have been easy, but for Mark Johnson, it was not. Some of the troops had to stay behind and be in the occupation forces, and he was one of them. The only thing good about this duty was that it was easy, and by easy, I’m referring to being out of the mud of the trenches. These men were nothing more than barracks soldiers, mostly kept out of sight while the generals ironed out the terms of the peace treaty with the Germans. Because the officers could count on Mark to follow orders, it was his unfortunate duty to stay behind as the rest of the 39th Combat Engineers moved back to England on their way home.

All that time he spent standing around in the foxholes and trenches, and even now in the safety of the barracks, Mark had one thing and one thing only on his mind, Marie Twain. She was his first love. Mark had never had feelings like that for any other woman, and the thought of her still burned deep within his chest. Like an animal, Mark couldn’t get her scent out of his nose or get over her red hair, and green eyes; and the feel of her soft, warm body lying next to his.

Mark wondered what Marie had gone through after they made her watch the beating he got for trying to leave the House of La Rue Hotel and Casino with her. Mom had thrown him out of the La Rue that night with only the clothes on his back. Mark hoped his brother Roger had been watching out for Marie since then.

After being so far away for all this time, Mark knew he would have to go back to New Orleans and find her or die trying.

How he would go about doing that was still running around in his head. No one could just walk in and take a woman out of the La Rue with the idea of keeping her. He knew he couldn’t go head to head with Mom. She had too many troops at her command, and they only needed one lucky bullet, while Mark would need a lot of luck to pull one of Mom’s women away from her. Of course, there was another way, the way of fear. Mom would respect you if she feared you, and Mom feared very few people.

It was late 1920 by the time Mark returned to New Orleans, gambling, prostitution, and liquor smuggling was running out of control thanks to the outlawing of liquor in January of that same year. It seems that the good people of his country had passed the Eighteenth Amendment, a nationwide ban on the manufacturing, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquor. They also had laws against saloons and houses of ill repute.

However, all the laws the good folks back home had made up were far from Mark’s mind as he stepped off the train onto the wooden platform in New Orleans for the first time in more than five years.

Mark had come home on the Panama Limited out of Chicago with a stopover in St. Louis, Missouri where he picked up his Army discharge and mustering-out money. A strange feeling comes over Mark as they crossed Lake Pontchartrain and down Front Street to the station on Canal Street, across from the ferry over the Mississippi to Algiers Point. As the train slowly made its way into the station house, Mark had seen a mixture of automobiles and horses on the streets, with people walking every which way.

The one thing besides Marie that Mark missed most about the Quarter was the Cajun cuisine that could only be found in New Orleans. After securing himself a room with a balcony on Trem Street, Mark walked back to Canal Street and to Bailey’s restaurant. He was surprised at how different Canal Street looked. The city had removed all the cast-iron balconies from the buildings for safety reasons, giving the area a strange new look.

Bailey’s was almost as it had been when he had last seen it, with its hanging potted plants and bright wall colors. However, the second and third floor balconies were gone, and modern electric lights and fans had been installed to replace the gas and oil lamps and paddle fans.

Mark’s server at Bailey’s was of Franco African blood with blue eyes and black hair; he could smell her fragrant scent as she served his food. It was a pleasure for him to sit there in the Quarter after a five-year absence and listen to the people around him talking in their odd mixture of English and French. For the first time in a long time, Mark felt at home.

He had just finished eating his boiled crawdads, potatoes, and onions and was pulling his flask out to add liquor to his coffee when a big hand grabbed the back of his neck, thumb on one side and fingers cutting deep into the other side, catching Mark by surprise.

The man forced Mark’s head down onto the wooden tabletop. Mark struggled, knocking dishes off the table as he tried to get free.

What are you doing back here in New Orleans? His captor asked in a Northern accent.

Out of the corner of his eye, Mark saw a man in a brown wool suit walk around in front of him and sit down at his table. He seemed not to care that people around them were staring.

You are Mark Johnson? The stranger asked, looking down at his well-manicured fingernails. He glanced at Mark from under his hat, which he had pulled down onto the side of his head.

Mark pointed to the hand holding his neck. The man in the brown suit nodded, and the ape standing behind Mark let go. Mark coughed to clear his throat and take in some air.

I came back to see Mom. Mark said, rubbing his neck and looking over his shoulder. The man with no neck stood there, just waiting to pounce on him if he got the signal.

Mom does not care to converse with you on any subject. She has already said all she has to say. You need to leave this city and not come back, the stranger said, leaning forward with his elbows on the table and his hands flat against the tabletop.

I came back looking for something, and I have no intention of leaving until I find it. Mark said, still rubbing his numb neck.

What are you looking for? Maybe my friend and I can help you find it and get you on your way out of town. The man opened the front of his coat, revealing a dark blue pistol.

I’m looking for a woman. Her name is Marie Twain.

I don’t know any Marie Twain around here. He said, shaking his head and resting his hands once again on the tabletop.

I have a thousand dollars for you if you come up with her, Mark said.

The stranger looked at Mark, thinking over his offer. I said we don’t know any Marie Twain, but I’m thinking I’ll take the money from you before you leave this city today.

Mark knew then that this talk was going nowhere. They couldn’t make a deal and the men wouldn’t abandon their mission.

Mark picked up his hot cup of coffee, as if to take a drink from it. Instead, he tossed the contents of the cup over his shoulder into the ape’s face, at the same time picking up a fork from the table. He stabbed the fork into the hand of the stranger sitting across from him.

The man screamed in pain, jumping up and looking at the fork sticking out of his hand, as Mark reached over and pulled the pistol from his belt. Then Mark knocked him down onto the floor with his own pistol.

Mark turned, aiming the newly acquired pistol at the man with no neck. He was being pushed off some people at the next table, still rubbing the hot coffee from his eyes.

Okay boys, go back and inform Mom that I got the message she sent me, and tell her that I have the five hundred dollars she required for Marie. Tell Mom she should know to have Marie ready when I come by the House of La Rue to pick her up.

Mark knew now that Mom would be ready all right, not with Marie, but for him, and coming by the House of La Rue would not be the hard part.

The stranger lay on the floor with the fork in his hand, still squirming; he could not get his body up off the floor with the fork sticking out of his hand.

Get the hell over there and help your friend out of here. Mark ordered the ape, who had been wiping the hot coffee off his face.

Kicking through some overturned chairs, the big man reached down with one of his large hands and without removing his eyes from Mark, he picked his friend up off the floor, fork, and all.

Mom is not going to like this. The man stabbed with the fork said as he stepped toward Mark, holding out his good hand for his pistol.

That’s okay. I’ve been a big disappointment to her already. Mark said, sticking the man’s pistol into his belt.

The two men stood there for a moment, then turned to leave.

Could I please have one more cup of coffee? Mark asked, righting the table and chairs and sitting back down.

The server came over with a new cup of fresh coffee and set it in front of him with a shaking hand. She was shaking so badly, that she dropped her order pad onto the floor. Mark reached down, picked the pad up, and handed it back to her.

Coffee is on the house, mister, and so is this. They will be coming back. You need to get out of here and hide someplace. She said, with urgency in her voice.

‘If only I could.’ Mark thought. ‘If only I could.’

I have a room upstairs in a building across the street if you need a place to go, the server offered. She had seen a few men wandering around lately, and Mark looked like he had nowhere to go.

That, uh, that’s real kind of you. Mark said, pulling his flask out and pouring some of the strong, clear liquor into his coffee. He stirred the mixture together before drinking it halfway down, all the time thinking about her offer. Thanks. That’s very kind of you. He finally said again, looking into her blue eyes and shaking his head to banish the thoughts forming in it.

Mark had not been romantic with another woman after Marie Twain entered his life. He wondered if he could love another woman, but that thought left him fast as he looked out the large front window of the restaurant.

She had been right: two black touring cars with ragtops and open windows pulled up in front of the restaurant, taking Mark’s thoughts away from the warm embrace of this woman.

The server came back to his table. They’re here. She whispered.

I know. Mark answered as he gulped the rest of his coffee. What’s your name?

Mary.

Thanks, Mary. He handed her some money and walked to the already open front door, pulling the pistol out from under his coat and checking the load. It seemed that Mark would be trying fear out on Mom as a way to get Marie back. He cocked the hammer back, letting the cylinder turn and bringing a bullet around under the hammer.

‘I haven’t been away from the war long enough to turn and run.’ Mark thought as he walked up to the second black car. Without warning, he began firing into it as the occupants begin screaming and yelling.

If he had any questions about who these men were they were answered, when one of them pulled a sawed-off shotgun up from the floor. Mark blocked it with his arm, taking it away from the man and then hitting the man in the face with the now-empty pistol. Without stopping, Mark whirled around and fired both barrels from the sawed-off shotgun into the ragtop of the lead car, leaving a big steaming hole in it. Two men got out of the car, shooting pistols at everything and trying to hit something, before Mark knocked them down onto the sidewalk, using the shotgun like a bat.

Mark stood there, looking at the carnage through the gray-blue gunpowder smoke. It reminded him of a scene from the war.

Bystanders came out of their hiding places and surrounded him, slapping their hands together. Mark picked up two forty-five caliber automatic pistols from the sidewalk and then made his way out of there. He couldn’t help but think the war was on as someone yelled, Don’t worry, we not see anything here, and God bless you!

The people were happy someone had finally made a stand against the dark side of town. Mom was going to be mad as hell when she heard about this. Mark found out later just how mad she did get, and at whom.

* * * * *

Mom was sitting at her desk in her office on the third floor of the La Rue Hotel and Casino, going over papers. She had aged somewhat over the last few years, and her hair, which she always wore down around her shoulders, had turned white, but her eyes were as sky blue and cold as ever, standing out on her face with her rouge-red cheeks and lips. She wore a dark long-sleeved, high-necked dress that stopped right below her knees, with a white belt around her narrow waist.

Mom was a small woman, but it wasn’t her hitting power you had to worry about; she could say the word and have someone simply drop off the face of the earth, and she had said that word a few times in her career as the madam of the La Rue.

Her office still had the old gaslights and big windows, and bookshelves and filing cabinets lined the wooden wall behind her desk. There was a large round table with chairs around it in the center of the room, and a couch off to one side beside the door. Mark said later that he heard she’d used that couch in her younger days to entertain customers.

Right outside Mom’s office were the desks of two accountants who worked ten or more hours a day to record the money coming in and going out of the La Rue. Her personal receptionist also sat there, and to see Mom, you had to see her first.

The main floor of the La Rue had electric lighting and overhead fans, as did some of the hotel rooms, but not all of the rooms had been converted to electricity. The bar and casino area on the main floor had its own entrance on the east side of the building. The hotel, which took up half of the second floor and the entire third floor, had its own entrance on the west side of the building; a long hallway ran from the hotel lobby through the building to the barroom. The brothel was located on the second floor right above the bar area. A stairway came down from that floor to street level on the south side, ending in a small lobby where male guests could wait for their ladies of choice. That was where Marie and Mark had made their ill-fated escape attempt five years before.

Nothing happened in the La Rue without the madam’s direct knowledge. As Mom sat reading a report from the night before, her receptionist, a middle-aged woman in a long, modest dark dress with buttons down the front, entered the office without knocking.

The superintendent of the police is here, she said. He would like a word with you, Mom.

Mom looked up at her. Did he be saying what about? she asked in a crisp voice.

No.

Oh. Well, by all means, you be sending him in," she said, getting up and walking to the round table in the center of the room. She sat down and picked up a tobacco pouch just as Superintendent Millburn walked into her office, wearing his dark blue uniform with gold buttons and wiping his head with a white handkerchief.

Mom poured golden brown tobacco from her pouch onto a white sheet of rolling paper and moistened the edge of the paper with the tip of her tongue, rolling the cigarette with one hand as she watched the short, stocky man with amusement.

Help yourself to a drink. She said, holding the unlit cigarette between her red lips.

Superintendent Millburn took a stick match from his pocket and lit it with his thumbnail. Like a gentleman, he let the match burn a short time, allowing the sulfur toxins to burn away, before lighting her cigarette. She drew a large amount of smoke into her lungs and blew it out as Millburn poured himself a drink from one of the bottles in the middle of the table.

Mom, I must say you’re looking alluring today, Millburn said.

Don’t be telling Mom you be coming here to use the couch? Mom said.

Oh no! Millburn said, laughing and looking over toward the couch, his round face turning a little pink.

What can I do for you today? She asked, brushing his compliment aside. She had been expecting him to be asking for a donation of money for a cause going on uptown. He drinks the shot of liquor down and sets his glass upside down onto the tabletop.

You haven’t heard about what happened over on Canal Street today? Millburn said with surprise, wiping his mouth with the back of his fat hand.

What be you going on about? she said, twitching her shoulders.

There was a shooting around three o’clock this afternoon on Canal Street. One man was killed, three others badly wounded, a fifth man with his nose all over his face, and like always, no one saw or heard anything, the superintendent said hurriedly.

News to me, Mom said, sucking on her cigarette.

We understand that in your business, you may need to take care of trouble from time to time. The mayor told me to come down here and tell you this city doesn’t need it happening out in the open. You need to take care of this trouble.

Trouble? I be not knowing until now that I be having trouble, she said.

Look, now you know. You have a bad man out there looking for something, and he has obviously just sent you a message. Give him whatever he’s looking for and cut your losses.

How you be knowing he sent me a message?

Your men getting shot is how. Mom, he could have killed them all, from what the ones left alive say. He had them all on the ground and left without doing it. To me, that is a message to someone, and I’m speaking for the rest of the mayor’s office. We don’t need this kind of publicity in this city. People are starting to come here from around the world to play. Take care of it!

Millburn got up and turned to leave. Mom, we have a good thing going here. Let’s not do anything to jeopardize it, okay?

As the door closed behind him, Mom went to her telephone. She put the earpiece to her right ear and clicked the holder up and down three times, waiting for the operator to come on.

Number, please. the operator said.

Yes, operator, you will please give me this number: A-G-4-7-2-3. Mom said.

After about three rings, a man’s voice came on the line. Yes. he said in a deep tone.

Put Roger on. Mom said.

* * * * *

Mark was sitting in his room with the