Burnt Black

by Ed Kovacs

  “Kate Townsend,” answered Kruger. “She used to be his grad assistant at Tulane.”

  “I hear that at colleges nowadays, the profs get to bang their students and nobody thinks twice,” I said, nonchalantly.

  Drake started to say something, but checked himself and silently simmered.

  “So Kate’s your alibi. She was with you all day?”

  “No. As I have already explained, something came up for her, so she dropped me at City Park and picked me up after a few hours.”

  “Okay, so you don’t really have an alibi,” I said.

  “Needing an alibi would connote that I am suspect.”

  “Make up your mind, Drake,” I snapped. “Are you a smart sonofabitch or are you a dumb bastard? Because anyone with half a brain knows that when the police find two naked dead guys in your house, on a stone altar built to drain off fluids into a floor drain, they’re going to ask a lot of questions and have you prove where the hell you’ve been.”

  Drake tried to compose himself. “I have no idea what happened here.”

  “Horseshit,” I said evenly.

  “Do I need to call a lawyer?”

  “Are you saying you don’t know the two dead men in your home?” I asked. “Come on,” I said, taking his arm and lifting him to his feet. “Let’s see if we can jog your memory.”

  I escorted Drake to the murder scene, followed by Honey, Mackie, and Kruger. The CSI techies were still doing their thing, and the coroner stood off to the side chatting on his cell phone.

  “Well?” I asked Drake.

  “I know them. They’re contractors. They’ve worked for me on and off for some time. They had almost completed a room addition.”

  “You talking about this room? The S-and-M sex chamber?”

  “Yes, this room.” Drake looked over to Kruger. “Is there someone else who could interrogate me other than this offensive gentleman?” he asked.

  “You’re going to get interrogated by a lot of people, Drake,” said Kruger, lighting a cigarette.

  “There’s no smoking in my home,” Drake said, irritated.

  “There is now.”

  “Did the two victims have keys to your house?” asked Mackie.

  “No.”

  “Did anybody?”

  Drake looked uncomfortable. “Only Kate.” He paused, then said, “Felix and Roscindo showed up for work as usual this morning, to finish work here in the temple.”

  “Temple?” asked Mackie.

  “Yes, temple. I left with Kate, and when I returned home I found half the New Orleans Police Department in my front yard.”

  “So you knew the Mexican guys pretty well,” I stated.

  “Well enough.”

  “And that’s all they are to you, just part-time workers?”

  “What else?”

  “Professor Drake,” said Honey, “please don’t answer a question with a question.”

  “They have always been good workers,” he said, not answering the question, as he glanced around the room.

  “How did you pay them? Check or cash, daily, weekly, or by the job?”

  “Weekly, in cash. I paid them twenty dollars per hour.”

  “So you were all caught up with the payments. You weren’t behind or anything. You didn’t owe them money.”

  “I paid them weekly, but not the full amount.”

  Honey stole a look at me. I had floated the notion of the Mexican workers being owed money as we’d pulled up to the crime scene.

  “How much do you owe them, doc?” I asked.

  “I can’t say exactly, I’d have to check.”

  “Approximately,” said Mackie. “Give us a ballpark figure.”

  “Eight or nine thousand. I got more ambitious than I’d originally planned and had to put more money into materials such as the black marble. Felix and Roscindo had no problem with carrying the debt.”

  “So you don’t know them that well, they’re just workers, they’re illegal aliens driving a beat-up pickup truck, and you’re a tenured Tulane professor with a nice house and a new, overpriced hybrid car, but they have no problem with you owing them almost ten grand?”

  Drake shifted a bit uncomfortably on his feet and didn’t answer.

  “Professor Drake, please respond,” said Honey.

  “They were also students of mine.”

  “At Tulane?” I asked, surprised.

  “No, of course not,” he said, irritated. “They attended studies here in my home.”

  “Private lessons?” asked Mackie, pointedly.

  “No. I lead a weekly … spiritual studies group.”

  “Spiritual studies. Here in the temple, right? You mean voodoo and sex and stuff like that?” I said.

  “No, I don’t mean that at all, and I can’t see why it would have any bearing on this.”

  “You’re being disingenuous, professor,” said Mackie.

  “I knew them primarily as employees,” he said, exasperated.

  “Are you feeling okay, doc?” I asked.

  “Of course not! I’m upset, as you might imagine.”

  I had quickly arranged a little surprise show-and-tell with Honey just before we came in to question Drake. I reached into a plastic bag on the floor behind me, pulled out the female decapitated head, and swung it practically into Drake’s face. “I’ll bet you’re feeling better than this lady.”

  Drake blanched at the head swinging in his face, but his gaze quickly shifted to one of morbid curiosity.

  “Friend of yours, doc?” Mackie asked.

  “No.”

  “Funny, but we found a few of these out in Felix Sanchez’s truck,” I said. “Were you buying or selling?”

  Drake suddenly look resigned to the fact that he had a major problem. The wheels appeared to be spinning in his head, but in moments, he settled down completely and looked nonplussed. “I believe you will learn that it’s not illegal for me to own one of these, either, detective,” said Drake contemptuously. “Now I want to call my lawyer.”

  “Okay,” I said, casually holding on to the head. “You call your lawyer, then we’re taking you downtown in handcuffs past the TV cameras and I’ll be walking next to you holding this lady’s head. We won’t leak a word to the press—we won’t have to. Let’s go!”

  Mackie reached to grab Drake’s arm—

  “Wait. What … what do you want to ask me?”

  “Just so we understand each other, you are going downtown. The way we take you there depends on how you answer my next few questions.”

  “All right,” he said resentfully.

  “We want the names and contact info of everyone who attended your ‘spiritual study’ group.”

  “That’s fine. That’s reasonable.”

  “So now that you can see how your students died here, care to tell us what you think happened? There are no obvious signs of death.”

  “Perhaps they didn’t do a proper banishing.”

  “A what?”

  “They might have summoned a demon but failed to control it. It could have literally frightened them to death. I can tell you that the white streak in Felix’s hair wasn’t there when I saw him this morning.”

  Honey, Kruger, Mackie, and myself all exchanged looks.

  “Demons don’t fire gunshots,” said Mackie.

  “They can create any kind of sound they want.”

  “I guess we need to call in Harry Potter,” said Kruger.

  “The Demon Defense. ‘I didn’t kill the two naked dead guys in my house I owed money to, Your Honor. An evil spirit did it,’” I said.

  “You asked me what I thought and I told you,” snapped Drake. “And you had better hope I can summon it and send it back where it belongs.”

  “Why is that?” I asked.

  “Because it might not stop with Felix and Roscindo.”

  “Thanks for your thoughts on the crime,” said Honey, bringing this line of discussion to a halt. “We’d like you to open the safe in your study. Show
us what’s inside.”

  “No, I won’t do that.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because my private affairs are my business. I’ll give you the names and contact information of my students, and then I’m calling my lawyer.”

  * * *

  Drake wasn’t bluffing and wouldn’t open the safe. He escaped the silver-bracelet treatment, but the way we manhandled him past the cameras made him look guilty as hell. Oh, and I didn’t walk out holding the head, since the chief hadn’t left and I had to be a good boy and go by the book.

  Honey took me aside as Mackie put Drake into a squad car.

  “The guy is hiding something, Honey.”

  “He’s lawyering up. We won’t be able to sweat him.”

  Honey tore off a piece of paper from her pocket spiral notebook and handed it to me.

  “Both of the victims’ driver’s license addresses are bogus. Fake Social Security cards, the usual illegal alien kit. But I called a couple of numbers on Felix Sanchez’s cell…”

  “The one with the streak of white hair?”

  Honey nodded. “Got hold of his wife. They all live together out in Kenner on Airline Drive.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her NOPD has impounded the truck. Which we have.”

  “I’ll give her the news,” I said. You always want to give the news to spouses in person, out of courtesy, but also to judge the reactions, since wives and husbands knock each other off all the time. “I’ll have Fred Gaudet meet me. He’s fluent in Spanish.”

  “Her name is Gina and she speaks English. But yeah. Maybe Fred can help. Bring her in for a statement. Then to the morgue to ID the bodies.”

  I nodded. “You know, for a while today, I wasn’t sure you thought we had homicides here.”

  “I’m trying to be open-minded. Except about the demon business. But I’m not convinced we have murders. Poison accounts for less than two percent of all homicides. And I like to play the percentages. These guys could have overdosed.”

  She turned her back to me and got into her unit.

  Great. My partner and I weren’t on the same page.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The shabby, two-story pastel stucco building housed apartments on the second floor above a Mexican restaurant called Casa de la Carne, or “House of Meat,” so my advice would be to skip the fish.

  Fred Gaudet, a burglary detective and old friend of mine, who came off more like a soft-spoken, bespectacled librarian than a cop, had met me in the parking lot. The aromas were such that we fought the urge to grab some carnitas before interviewing Gina Sanchez and informing her that her husband wouldn’t be returning home from work today. Or ever.

  Sanchez collapsed into hysterics after we informed her of Felix’s and Roscindo’s demise, allowing me to casually search the apartment as she sobbed. I sent Fred to interview the neighbors here on the second floor, who were all Mexican and probably illegals.

  We’d already been told by Alberto, the paunchy, middle-aged owner of Casa de la Carne, who was also the landlord, that Felix and Roscindo were curanderos—folk healers/bush doctors—and that they’d been living here quietly for about a year. The apartment contained, sans bones, the dollar-store version of Drake’s museum-quality collection of occult objects: dusty fossils, quartz geodes, cheap ceramic figures of Catholic saints with the paint chipping off, botanica candles, broken abalone shells, small pieces of agate, rose quartz, and lapis lazuli. Open tins on a shelf held sage, sweet grass, and small vials and bottles of lotions. There was a shaman’s rattle made from animal horn, and a stainless steel water drum. Bottles of inexpensive rum and a five-pack of cheap cigars sat on an altar containing figurines, rocks, flowers, and a glass of clear liquid.

  I noticed a Snickers bar on the floor near the front door next to a pan full of what looked like sugar. Something had been dropped onto the sugar: blood?

  I also noticed lots of dust and grime and grit, which told me that Gina Sanchez wasn’t much for cleaning. The dim rooms were the home of working shamans, and while they wouldn’t win any Good Housekeeping awards, they weren’t as eerie as Drake’s place.

  I looked over as she suddenly stood from the worn red-and-gold secondhand sofa.

  “I must cook for Felix.”

  I usually have a pretty good poker face, but she got me with that remark. I watched dumbfounded as she moved into the kitchen, wiping her eyes, the crying jag finished for now.

  “Umm, Mrs. Sanchez … I’ve been waiting to take you downtown to make a statement. And we need you to—if you feel up to it—make an official identification of your husband and Roscindo Ruiz.”

  “Okay, but I think you search my house, not waiting, okay? So I let you do, and now I must to cook. This no take long.”

  She busted me straight up on that one, and there was nothing to gain by forcing the issue, so I watched as she lit a stove burner under a pan and set about collecting ingredients from the fridge. She turned on the oven, wrapped three tortillas in foil, and put them and a canary yellow plate inside.

  Gina Sanchez was a pleasant-looking woman who I pegged for late-thirties, about five feet two, shoulder-length brown hair, dark brown eyes. Slightly flabby from bad diet and lack of exercise, but not chubby. She wore little in the way of makeup and struck me as being a very determined lady, so I decided to get the ball rolling right here in the kitchen.

  “We don’t know why Felix and Roscindo died.”

  She shot me a sharp look as if she knew. She spooned lard into the hot pan, then added tomatoes, garlic, chopped onion, oregano, roasted serrano chilies, and salt.

  “Did he have any enemies that you know of? People he owed money to, people not happy with the work he did for them?”

  “Enemies, no. But many bad people in this world.” She spooned some kind of thick sauce out of a bowl into a second pan over very low heat. “About construction, I no think he have unhappy customer. If they unhappy, Felix and Roscindo go back to fix something free.”

  “So no business records.”

  “They work for cash. No check, no credit card, no paper.”

  “Did anybody owe your husband money?”

  “I no think so. Felix, he no say that.”

  Strange. Drake said he owed the Mexicans almost ten thousand dollars. Would Felix have kept that from his wife?

  “And the other business they did? They were shamans, right?”

  “Yes, but the same—only take cash. People come to them because of what they hear, what someone tell them. They work seven days and most nighttime. Work construction or work with spirits.”

  “How long were they doing that?”

  “For many year. They help people. People come for reason of love … or hate. For health, for happiness. These days, most come for money or luck with jobs.” She quickly shelled three hard-boiled eggs and with amazing speed chopped them finely.

  “Any unhappy customers?”

  “People know is the spirits who can help them, not Felix or Roscindo. Maybe you think Felix was murder, yes?”

  “It’s a possibility we haven’t ruled out. Did they take recreational drugs, or maybe some kind of herbs or something, mushrooms, ayahuasca, as part of their work?”

  “Roscindo, I no can say. Felix, never. He no that kind of brujo.” She stirred the sauce on low heat and stuck her finger in it to test the temperature. “Now I ask you question. You find money in his truck?”

  “Money? No. His truck had some … interesting things, but no money.”

  “Maybe the witch steal it.”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “Same who probably kill him.”

  I locked eyes with her.

  “You have a name?”

  “I can no give you name, but she in class with Felix, Roscindo, and others.”

  “At Drake’s house.”

  Sanchez nodded. “He keep our money under his truck. The rear … ‘fender’ is the word?”

  I nodded.


  “Felix make some special box there.”

  “Then maybe it’s still there. How much cash are we talking about?”

  “Almost fifty thousand dollars. I show you.”

  A small green candle sat on the kitchen windowsill with a U.S. five-dollar bill behind it. Sanchez retrieved the bill and pointed out a small black symbol that had been written in the lower right quadrant.

  “Felix make a mark, like a prayer, on every dollar he save.”

  The mark looked strangely similar to the glyph I had seen painted next to Drake’s front door. I reached into my wallet and gave her a five spot. “I’ll trade you, Mrs. Sanchez, if that’s okay.” I pocketed the marked bill.

  “Yes, is okay. This money in his truck—he save everything since we come here to work after the big Storm. We illegal, so Felix no trust banks. I send little money home to Mexico, but Felix no want do that. The money is…” She choked back the tears and tightly held the countertop for support. After a three-count, she regained her composure and said, “… is for our future.”

  She bit her lip to choke back sobs. Tears gushed down her cheeks, but she concentrated on the large pan. The tomatoes had released their juices, so she turned off the heat and stirred the ingredients into what looked like a warm salsa.

  I hated like hell to ask this question but it had to be asked. “Why would Felix and Roscindo be naked on an altar in a strange room at Professor Drake’s house? And they both had orgasms before they died. You understand what that means?”

  Her eyes flashed. “If what you say is true, then she use them.” She turned off both burners and removed the yellow plate and the tortillas from the oven.

  “Who?”

  “The witch.”

  She dipped the warm tortillas into the sauce using tongs, positioned them on the yellow plate, then spooned chopped egg down the middle of each one. She rolled them up so they looked like enchiladas before pouring the remaining sauce on top. Then she poured the warm tomato salsa over the middle of the tortilla rolls and sprinkled chopped egg on top. “Is papadzules. Felix’s favorite.”

  I’d have been a liar if I said I hadn’t become hungry as hell.

  She picked up the plate, and I followed her into the living room, where she reverently set the food on an altar. She removed a photo of Felix from a shelf, then placed it on the altar behind the yellow plate. And she lit a white candle.