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