Chasing the Devil's Tail by David Fulmer Read Free Book Online

and dropped the subject. Anderson's tone became brisk. "I need you to work the floor this week."
    Their business was finished. Valentin murmured a quick thanks and walked away. The door opened just as he reached it and Billy Struve stepped nimbly inside. The young man, his blond hair parted in the middle and slicked-down, gave a glance with sharp green eyes. The detective hurried past. Struve, once a police reporter, was now Anderson's junior partner and chief spy, and his ears were open for any tidbit of news about the District. Valentin did not want any of his business turning up as a bit of gossip in
The Mascot
or, worse, in Bas Bleu's column in
The Sun.
Struve opened his mouth, ready as always with a question, but Valentin slipped out the door and into the warm spring evening.

THREE
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.
    â€”Al Rose, "S TORYVILLE "
    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