House of the Rising Sun (Hackberry Holland 4)

“The sheriff doesn’t know. He doesn’t want Miz DeMolay in his county. He says good riddance.”

“I appreciate you coming by.”

“Look at me, Hack. Don’t think the thoughts you’re thinking. It’s 1918. We’re in modern times now.”

“Two years ago, when I was blowing the feathers off Mexican peons, I got a different impression. It must be me.”

HIS NAME WAS Mealy Lonetree. Some thought his first name was the short version of “mealymouth.” Not so. Mealy was a fixer, a man whose face made you think of a fire hydrant wearing a derby hat. He was the man you saw if you wanted to buy or sell stolen property; hire an arsonist to torch your business for insurance purposes; extort, kidnap, blackmail an enemy; or make your cheating wife or husband disappear. All jobs were subcontracted, so there was never a trail back to the client. His felonious assault price list, one his father had used in the Irish Channel of New Orleans, offered blackened eyes, a lead pipe across the nose, broken fingers, stab wounds, a gunshot in the leg, an ear chewed off, or “the big job.” There was a surcharge for photos.

Mealy ran a laundry and Turkish bathhouse in San Antonio’s old brothel district, which was now licensed and zoned and had its own directory, called the Blue Book, containing the names and addresses of more than one hundred bordellos and gambling houses. The entrance to Mealy’s office was on an unpaved alleyway, the windows blacked out, a bell on the door. Up and down the alleyway, prostitutes were smoking marijuana openly on produce crates in front of their cribs, some talking to soldiers in campaign hats and puttees, the late sun molten and dust-veiled, as it had been when Hackberry stumbled into Beatrice DeMolay’s brothel in Mexico two years earlier. He stepped across a ribbon of green sewage filled with items he would rather not think about and entered Mealy’s office without knocking.

Mealy was behind his desk, pear-shaped, dandruff on his black coat, a red paper carnation in his lapel, his eyes disappearing into slits when he smiled. A book of accounting figures was open on his blotter. “Mr. Holland, I’m so happy to see you. Please have a seat.”

“How’s life, Mealy?”

“What can I say? The world doesn’t change. So I don’t, either.”

“Know a lady named Beatrice DeMolay?”

“I know who she is.”

“Somebody tried to throw acid in her face.”

Mealy put down his pen. He flattened his hands on the blotter, deep in thought, his fingers splayed. He drummed his fingers in a long roll. “You’re not going to hurt my feelings, are you? You don’t think I’d be associated with hurting a woman?”

“No, you wouldn’t, Mealy,” Hackberry lied. “That’s why I came to you and not somebody else. I need the man’s name.”

“Ask the lady.”

“She wasn’t at her apartment. I don’t know how much she’d tell me, anyway.”

“Nobody in San Antonio is gonna throw acid at somebody without permission. And the person who asked for permission would probably be run out of town. If you want those kinds of lowlifes, go to New Orleans. She ran a house there. It was in Storyville. The House of the Rising Sun.”

“You’re from New Orleans.”

“That’s why I can speak with authority on the subject.”

“How about Arnold Beckman? You ever run into him?”

Mealy was shaking his finger in the air before Hackberry had finished his sentence, his chin raised defensively. “I have nothing to do with the man you just mentioned. I didn’t say anything about him, either.”

“He’s a pretty bad hombre?”

Mealy stood up from behind his desk. He seemed shorter and fatter, his hips wider, than when he was sitting down. “What if I buy you some supper? I know how you like Mexican food.”

“I already ate. Beckman is behind this?”

“You think a man with that kind of wealth confides in a man like me?”

“Why did you mention New Orleans?”

“Because that’s where the lady is from. Before Storyville got shut down, it was filled with the worst pimps in the country. Cut a girl’s face with a razor, put lye in her food. You name it, they’d do it.”

“All right, if the man Beckman hired to blind and disfigure Miz DeMolay is from New Orleans, what would his name be?”

“Mr. Holland, I always liked you.”

Hackberry nodded but didn’t reply.