From a Whisper to a Scream

by Charles de Lint

  He supposed it was that respect of the old ways that his brother shared with him that made him sound half-serious to Frank.

  “Let’s just hope Papa Jo-el feels I’m all the way serious,” he said to Frank, “and maybe he’ll keep his curses to himself.”

  Frank laughed. “Hey, wouldn’t it be great if you could cook up a bunch of curses and shit that we could just lay on a perp when we read him his rights? Like it would be a kind of retribution thing: a rapist’d have his dong fall off, a pickpocket would get like a bad case of arthritis …”

  Frank really began to warm up to his subject as the two of them headed out the back door of the precinct to where they’d parked their car, elaborating ever more fanciful curses until all Thomas could do was shake his head in weary amusement. The TV camera crews and other press never even looked their way as Thomas steered the unmarked police car out onto the street and across town to the nightclub where Papa Jo-el held court.

  The Good Serpent Club was in Upper Foxville. From the outside it looked like a dive, a squat brick two-floored structure sandwiched between a pair of taller sandstone office buildings. Inside, it was just a step or two up from run-down, but that didn’t seem to bother the customers. During business hours, handfuls of uptown yuppies rubbed shoulders with the predominantly black clientele in an atmosphere that was more a set designer’s idea of Creole decor than the real thing. But the bands that played from the club’s small stage were authentic, the drinks were mostly laced with rum and cheap, and the dance floor was always crowded.

  The club was downstairs; upstairs were the offices from which Papa Jo-el ran his rackets—drugs, loansharking, and prostitution—and his voodoo church.

  The club was dark when Thomas pulled the unmarked car over to the curb. The only space was by a hydrant. He flipped down the visor, so that the laminated NPD identification could show, and got out of the car. Frank was already on the pavement, waiting for him. He offered Thomas a stick of gum.

  Thomas shook his head.

  “So what do you think?” Frank asked, his voice muffled as he worked his gum.

  Thomas looked up at a lit window on the second floor. “Someone’s home.”

  There were two entrances. The one leading into the club was an alcove with an iron gate pulled across the front of it. A few yards down from it was a plain unmarked door. Frank tried the knob and it turned. The door swung open into a small foyer. They could see stairs leading up.

  “Are we announcing our visit?” he asked.

  Thomas smiled. “You think they don’t already know we’re here?”

  Frank gave a quick look up and down the darkened street.

  “What do you see that I don’t?” he asked.

  “Just a feeling,” Thomas replied.

  He went up the stairs, Frank trailing along a couple of steps below him. At the top there was a long hall with doors leading off it on either side. Halfway down, one stood open. Light spilled from it out into the hall.

  “A feeling,” Frank muttered.

  Thomas led the way down to the lit doorway and paused in its threshold. The man behind the desk smiled and waved him inside, large gold rings glinting on his fingers. He was a small black man, skin so pale it was hard to tell he was black unless you knew. His hair was brushed back from his high forehead in a thick, dark wave. He wore a tailored beige suit jacket over a white T-shirt.

  “I’ve been expecting you,” Papa Jo-el said.

  “What?” Frank asked as he followed Thomas into the room. “You got a snitch at the 12th?”

  “The loa told me you would be coming.”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  They took seats across from the desk. Papa Jo-el leaned his elbows on its scratched wooden surface and cupped his chin.

  His real name was Joseph Eli Pilione. His priors sheet placed him as a native of New Orleans, where he’d been arrested a half-dozen times, no convictions. Since his arrival in Newford, he’d made a quick rise from the small-time racketeer he’d been in New Orleans to his present more elevated status of mob boss and voodoo priest.

  “What can I do for you, officers?” he asked.

  His voice had an accent that Thomas could never quite place.

  Frank turned to Thomas. “His loa didn’t tell him that as well?” he asked in a stage whisper.

  Thomas gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head, knowing that Frank would get the message. He did. Leaning back in his chair, Frank chewed his gum and took in the office’s sparse furnishings. There was a safe in one corner, a beat-up sofa against another wall. With the desk and chairs they were using, that was it. The walls were bare, plaster flaking in the corners. The overhead light didn’t have a bulb in it. The illumination came from the tarnished brass lamp on the desk.

  “There’s been another killing over in the Zone,” Thomas said.

  Papa Jo-el nodded. “I heard. It was on the news. You don’t think I had something to do with it, mon cher?”

  Thomas shook his head, but didn’t speak. For long moments there was only the sound of Frank chewing his gum. Papa Jo-el finally stirred, sitting back in his chair. He indicated some papers that were on the desk.

  “I have work to do,” he said.

  “Flynn’s people seem to think you’re responsible,” Thomas said finally.

  “Don’t be stupid. What would be the point?”

  Thomas glanced at his partner.

  “You tell us,” Frank said. “The way these girls are buying it looks an awful lot like some kind of ritual killing. You know—like, say, voodoo?”

  “Voudoun is a religion, not a cult,” Papa Jo-el replied. “Our ceremonies do not include sacrifice.”

  “Of people,” Frank said.

  Papa Jo-el paused, then nodded in slow agreement. “Of people.”

  “Well, we all know you’re trying to muscle in on Flynn’s turf. His boys think you’re trying to lay some voodoo shit on them with these killings.”

  “I told you—”

  “Yeah, yeah. We heard you. Your religion doesn’t kill people.” Frank paused for a beat. “But how about your business?”

  Anger flickered in Papa Jo-el’s eyes. He turned to Thomas.

  “I don’t have to listen to this,” he said. “Unless you have something constructive to say, I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

  “The point is,” Thomas said, “Flynn’s people think you’re responsible. You know as well as I do what happens when Mickey Flynn decides someone’s putting the screws to him.”

  “So you’re warning me?” Papa Jo-el asked, eyebrows raised.

  Thomas shook his head. “We’re here to ask you if you have any ideas as to what’s going on.”

  “You see,” Frank added, “we’ve got a sick fuck out there on the streets. One way or another, we’re going to stop him from killing any more girls.”

  Papa Jo-el ignored Frank. His eyes, so dark they seemed black, fixed their gaze upon Thomas.

  “I believe you are sincere, mon cher,” he said.

  “Now what’s this shit—” Frank began, but he broke off as Thomas lifted a hand.

  “What can you tell us?” Thomas asked.

  Papa Jo-el gave a small shrug. “I don’t think you’re ready to hear what I have to say.”

  “Try me.”

  A smile touched Papa Jo-el’s lips, but it never reached his eyes.

  “You look for a man,” he said. “For a man who walks the Zone with a knife in hand and murder in his heart. But what stalks the night streets is a guédé—a spirit of the dead. An evil spirit, what we call a baka.”

  “Oh, fercrissakes,” Frank said.

  The other two men ignored him.

  “You know how that sounds?” Thomas said. He spoke softly, without expression.

  Papa Jo-el nodded. “To one who is blind to the ways of the invisible world, it has the ring of madness.”

  “But you believe?”

  Papa Jo-el’s gaze never left Thomas’s features as he slowly
shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “I know. If you would stop your killer, you must look to how you can lay the dead to rest.”

  “So now what?” Frank said as they got back into the car. “Are you going to tell me you’re half-serious about that crap as well?”

  Thomas shook his head. “But the thing is, he’s serious. I know a con when it’s being laid on me. He believes what he’s saying.”

  “Which was crap.”

  Thomas looked out through the windshield at the darkened street. He thought of his brother, of the Kickaha shaman on the reserve, of that feeling of connectedness he sometimes felt with the world around him, the sense that there was an invisible world, sensed, felt, but not seen. Unless, perhaps, you were a shaman. Or a voudoun houngan.

  He wasn’t as close to it as his brother. He wasn’t even sure it wasn’t something he just wanted to believe in, rather than something that actually existed. But there was something … .

  “I’m not sure,” he said softly. Then he shook his head and gave Frank a grin.

  Frank chuckled.

  “The guy really had you going there for a minute, didn’t he?” he said.

  “He was definitely … persuasive.”

  “What we need to do is grab some shut-eye and meet this thing head-on with a fresh perspective in the morning.”

  Thomas glanced at his watch. “Who’s going to feel fresh with only three or four hours of sleep?”

  “Hey, you take what you can get.”

  Thomas nodded. Frank was right. You took what you could get. But he couldn’t help wondering, did that include the cockeyed advice of a known con man?

  If you would stop your killer, you must look to how you can lay the dead to rest.

  He’d never been able to fully accept the pacific spirits of the land as his brother had. The manitou, the little mysteries. But somehow he’d never had trouble believing in evil. People. Places. Even spirits … .

  How the hell did you lay the dead to rest?

  SIX

  There were three of them, lounging on the front stoop of the Grasso Street tenement in the afternoon sun, as Jim McGann walked by. Two were girls with jeans artfully torn at the knees and rump; both wore white T-shirts. One had short blonde hair; the other was a brunette, all curls and tangles hanging past her shoulders. The boy wore baggy black shorts and a muscle shirt. He had five gold earrings in one ear, one in the other. His dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail and was longer than that of either of his companions.

  Two blocks west of the Men’s Mission on Palm Street, this whole area was prime panhandling district—a fact that made Palm Street’s name all too apropos, never mind that the street took its name from Allan Palm, a Newford city council member from the thirties.

  “Spare change?” the blonde asked.

  Jim showed them a wallet-sized picture of Niki instead, one that he’d printed up this morning at the paper, before he hit the streets.

  “Do you know her?” he asked.

  “What are you? A cop?”

  They were all so tough, Jim thought. Fourteen, fifteen tops, and they’d seen it all.

  “No,” he replied. “A photographer.”

  The brunette took the photo from him. Jim looked down at her fingers holding the picture. There was dirt under the nails; the fingers themselves were grubby. Charming.

  “What do you want her for?” the boy asked.

  “To sign a release form. I want to use the photo in a show I’m putting together.”

  The blonde took the photo from the other girl.

  “Is there any money in this?” she asked.

  “In what?”

  “Being a model for a guy like you.”

  “Some,” Jim admitted. He started to feel hopeful. Maybe the girl knew Niki and was hoping for a cut of whatever action came Niki’s way. “But it’s nominal.”

  “Shit,” the blonde said. “Why don’t you take my picture?”

  Preening, she put a hand behind her head and stuck out her overdeveloped chest. Jim found the resulting pose so grotesque he was almost tempted to take a picture. He shook his head.

  “I’ve already got all the shots I need,” he said.

  The blonde let her hand drop. Her shoulders returned to their earlier drooping posture.

  “She’s got nothing on me,” she said.

  She shook the photo disdainfully in the air between them, then flipped it back at him. He caught it awkwardly by scooping his hand through the air and trapping the photo against his chest. The kids laughed. Jim kept his temper—barely.

  “Yeah, well thanks anyway,” he told them.

  He’d been going through variations on this routine for the better part of the afternoon now, and he was sick to death of it. Everybody thought he was a cop or and this truly irritated him—Niki’s father. Like he was old enough to have a kid that old. And of course a few had to think he was her pimp, or sugar daddy.

  “What’d she do?” an Oriental girl with a skateboard under her arm had asked him. “Take off with your credit cards?”

  A little farther down Grasso, near the subway entrance at Palm, he stopped to listen to a young woman with honey-colored hair playing an alto sax. He put her at about twenty-five, a slim, boyish figure in a short, black sleeveless dress and footless leotards, no shoes. There was a backpack, with a bedroll tied to it, by the wall near her feet, two sturdy walking shoes in its shadow.

  The tune she was playing seemed vaguely familiar, but Jim couldn’t put a name to it. Maybe she was just jazzing it up too much for him to recognize. She leaned against the side of the building, eyes closed, just playing her heart out. There were a couple of bills in the open sax case at her feet, but mostly coins.

  He waited until she’d finished the tune, then dropped a couple of bucks’ worth of change into the case. Her eyes flicked open at the sound of coin hitting coin. Her gaze tracked up from the case to his face. When she smiled her thanks, her whole face lit up, transforming her from simply an attractive street performer into an oddly ethereal mix of a contemporary woman and a model from some Pre-Raphaelite painting. The look was so naturally disarming that it washed away the past few hours of frustration as though they’d never been. Jim held up his camera.

  “Do you mind if I take a couple of shots?”

  She shook her head. “You’re from out of town—right?”

  With her look and sound she probably had all kinds of tourists taking her picture, Jim realized.

  “No, I’m local,” he told her. “I work for The Star. How about you?”

  “Working my way to the coast,” she told him, “but I ran out of bus fare.” She paused a moment, then added, “You want me to be playing for the picture?”

  Jim nodded. “If you don’t mind. Maybe the editor’ll run it on one of the local pages.”

  She smiled. “Little bit of human interest.”

  “You’ve done this before,” Jim said. It wasn’t a question.

  “In pretty well every major city I’ve busked in since I started across the country. My favorite caption was, ‘Cindy Draper, a street musician with sax appeal.’ It was my own fault. I guess. I shouldn’t have been wearing a tank top that day.”

  Jim laughed. He took a few shots of her playing through another tune, the motor drive whirring, then another couple when she didn’t have the mouthpiece up to her lips, blocking the camera’s view of her mouth and chin.

  “You’re very photogenic,” he said when he was done. “The camera likes you.”

  “That’s what they tell me.”

  Her voice was still warm, but he could tell that she couldn’t care less about what the camera thought. Modeling wasn’t her scene. She obviously loved her music too much.

  “Have you got a place to stay?” he asked, then held up his hands at the wary look that came into her eyes. “I’ve got a friend—a lady friend—who could probably put you up for a night.”

  The smile came back. “No, but thanks for the offer.” For a mo
ment it looked as though the conversation had ended. She put her fingers on the sax’s brass keys, but then instead of playing again, she left the sax hanging from its strap and said, “I think I need a break—I’ve been at this for a couple of hours now. Do you feel like having a cup of coffee with me?”

  “I’d be delighted. My name’s Jim,” he added and put out his hand. “Jim McGann.”

  “Cindy Draper.” Her grip was firm, her hand soft and smooth.

  “It’s too nice a day to sit inside,” Jim said. “How about we walk over to the park? It’s just a few blocks south.”

  “Sounds great. Just let me pack up my stuff.”

  She stowed away her earnings and packed up the sax. When she closed the case and hefted it, Jim shouldered her backpack.

  “That thing’s heavy,” she said with a grin. “I should know. You sure you want to be a gentleman and carry it?”

  “Hey, I’m committed now.”

  She laughed. Picking up her shoes, she fell into step with him as they walked south on Palm Street to Fitzhenry Park. On the park side of the street there was a long line of concession carts selling everything from hot dogs and fresh pretzels to breaded deep-fried zucchini and shish kebabs. The air was filled with dozens of savory scents, each vying for attention—as did the vendors themselves.

  Jim bought a couple of Danishes and some coffee, then led the way deeper into the park, away from the noisy congregation of skateboarders near the War Memorial.

  Cindy settled down on the bench they chose and leaned back, stretching.

  “God, it feels great to sit down,” she said. “I’ve been walking around all morning, and then busking for most of the afternoon.”

  Jim could appreciate the bench as well, having spent the better part of the day on his feet himself, following up on his fruitless quest. He put her backpack down on the pathway by the bench and sat down beside her, handing her a coffee.