Murder On the Way!

by Theodore Roscoe

  Master Tousellines indicated the next step. “We proceed, ma’mselle, in the carriage.”

  Pete appraised the vehicle dubiously. “If that’s an example of Uncle Eli’s estate — ”

  “The only means of travel in this section, I fear. The roads about Morne Noir are exceedingly difficult.” He mined from his redingote a silver watch as old as the buggy, the night, the tree and himself; snapped open the lid. “Tiens! We have a trifle over an hour. A thousand pardons, but we must hurry.”

  That was when something wet splashed on my nose, and away off in the dark I was aware of muted thumping. “It’s going to rain,” I reported. “What’s that sound?”

  “It is the season of the avalasse, the bad weather,” was the intoned response. “One may at any moment be caught in a torrent. The sound, m’sieu, is that of a Haitian drum.”

  “I could do without it,” I confessed.

  “So could I,” Pete admitted, watching the departure of the Buick (a trifle uneasily, I thought) and edging closer on the buggy cushions. “Cart, did you ever see a night as black as this?”

  I never had. Nor a black as black. It began to rain India ink. The buggy lamp was Futility on the dashboard, hissing in defeat. We were drawn by the steaming hind-quarters of a horse into the darkness of a waterfall. Maître Tousellines became the Invisible Man. He vanished. There didn’t seem to be any profile left between the rim of his collar and the brim of the stovepipe hat. His cuffs were empty. The reins and the whip appeared to float in mid-air of their own volition. Eyes and teeth were all that remained of his face save when lampshine touched with a radiumlike luminosity his swollen lower lip.

  The lower lip moved solemnly. “The drums you hear, they are of the funeral ceremony. The plantation hands will be at the dance. It was so requested by the uncle of ma’mselle. You are unacquainted with the tambour-Rada?”

  “I’m not acquainted with anything around here.”

  The white eyes rolled in their unseen sockets. “There are three of them, you comprehend. Maman, papa and boula. Mamma drum, papa drum, baby drum. The drums are asked to ward off evil spirits from the dead, and you hear them replying, mamma, papa and baby.”

  “Cute,” Pete said.

  We jiggled along in the pitchy rain listening to mamma, papa and baby warding off evil spirits. Water flogged the buggy-top, beating mist through the fabric like rain through a cheap umbrella, slashed at the side-curtains, squirted in brown showers over the dashboard. The buggy was a flimsy trap of wheels and sticks swimming uphill through the downpour. I made three attempts to fire a cigarette in the wet, and gave it up. I could feel Pete getting mad. There wasn’t any road; only the clop, clop, clop of our amphibious dobbin and that tumpy-bum-bum incessant in the black.

  “Myself,” said the Invisible Man beside me, “I do not believe in such things. I am, if you will pardon me, an educated man, and have studied law in both Paris and New Orleans. Unfortunately the Haitians of the district about Morne Noir are of a peasant class. Allow me to assure you I have no faith in their primitive beliefs and will do all possible to felicitate the business of ma’mselle at hand.”

  “You don’t expect any troublesome delays?” I snapped.

  “Not at all, m’sieu. Only Haiti is, I am sad to confess, a country the somewhat negligent. In the matter of this homicide, for example.”

  “You started to tell me about Uncle Eli’s murder,” Pete reminded. “You didn’t trust the police?”

  The white eyes revolved slowly in the blank between top-hat and collar. “It is the ability of the local gendarmerie that invites my skepticism, ma’mselle. The, what you would call Police Inspector, the officer of the Garde d’Haiti, who was working on the case when I left. A clear case of suicide, he declares. But the facts are as I have described. M’sieu Proudfoot had retired to the library. The household was out. Dr. Sevestre found M’sieu Proudfoot seated in a chair, book in lap, face streaming blood and a bullet in the head. I entered not ten minutes later and was horrified to discover the doctor plucking the bullet from the forehead of the deceased. Dr. Sevestre covered the face with a handkerchief, together we carried the corpse to a bedroom where the doctor set about preparing it for the burial. It was, I assure you, an unhappy task.”

  “It doesn’t sound like Uncle Eli to commit suicide,” Pete suggested.

  “And then, as I pointed out, ma’mselle, where was the gun? Non! Dr. Sevestre had the bullet which was later determined to be of nine millimeter caliber. But no gun. I made a tour of the library and a brief survey of the grounds. Nothing. I have learned by phone call that there has been an enquête (which corresponds to the inquest of your country) during which a hint was cast at Dr. Sevestre. Perhaps the physician had fired the fatal shot. But I, myself, saw the doctor enter the house, and I remained for some moments on the verandah and heard no shooting. Alors, the body as we moved it was stiff with rigor mortis. I repeat, an unhappy affair.”

  Pete made a small sound in her throat. “I’m sure it was.”

  “The Garde? In this region a constabulary capable of arresting only chicken thieves. That Inspector! His decision was one the most pompous. If there are no traces of a murderer to be found, he deduces, then who can say there is murder? I asked about the gun, you comprehend. Alors, is his reply, perhaps one of the servants entered the library, saw the dead man, picked up the gun and fled with it in fright.”

  My own faith wavered on the local police, and I said as much.

  “Gentlemen of color, m’sieu, on occasion are thickheaded. So I reminded the good Inspector. The case is to be closed as suicide, he told me. That, he said, was the only possible explanation. That and”— breath whispered in over the lower lip — “and one other explanation.”

  Rain swirled through the buggy and gave us a dousing. The lamp ssszzzzzed and went out, and everything disappeared. “Whoosh,” Pete spluttered dismally. “And what explanation was that?”

  “He said” — the voice beside me lowered, seemed to sink into something hollow — “the Inspector said your Uncle Eli might have been murdured by a zombie!”

  “What’s a zombie?” Pete questioned.

  “A zombie” — the hollowed voice sank a whole octave — “a zombie, ma’mselle — but understand that I, Maître Tousellines, a man of education, do not believe such things. Consider the Haitians of this district, ma’mselle — in a case like this — though it is scarcely conformant for me to speak thus of a client, your Uncle Eli was a hard man. Of a temper, that is so. Shall we say in matters of discipline. There were several whom he punished with a severity, and two, I believe, he killed in self defense — ”

  “‘What’s a zombie?” I demanded.

  “A zombie, m’sieu,” — the sinking voice bassooned to a gurgle — “a zombie is one who has died but is not yet dead. A corpse resurrected by witch doctor’s magic from the grave. A living dead man who returns as the slave of some master, who may labor in the field or walk with silent steps on errands of revenge. It is the foolish belief of the Haitian Inspector, ma’mselle, that your Uncle Eli — but I do not believe such nonsense — that your Uncle Eli may have been murdered by a zombie.”

  There was a violent spate of rain through which the buggy seemed to go sweeping into clouds of surf; then an abrupt and stealthy drizzle ending in blindness filled with the booming of drums.

  “But here,” said Maître Tousellines, “we are.”

  I looked up and saw an angel!

  It was standing beside the buggy, its head aloft in upper mist, a giant of a fellow some twenty feet tall, arms folded, chin thoughtful on chest, wet robes hanging in limp columns to the sandals, wings swooped together at rest. Sentinel on a massive cube of granite. Light, sifting watery through a fan of black patent leather palm-fronds, made glisten the brook that wept from the angel’s nose; touched an eldritch shine to the massive, sad face. The sightless statue eyes brooded down at me with gloom. The thing must have weighed in easily at six tons. Too heavy for wings, this celestial got
around on rollers that stuck out from under his granite platform and were attached to a handy block and tackle. The Jovian power that had stranded him here by the wayside was not in evidence.

  Pete looked out at the angel. “Well, hallelujah. That’s not Uncle Eli’s ghost?”

  Our lawyer said no, the angel standing watch in the weeds beside the road was not Uncle Eli’s shade. It was, said Maître Tousellines, Uncle Eli’s pierre tumulaire.

  “His tombstone, ma’mselle. Some months ago he ordered the marble and had the cutters contrive this monument. M’sieu Proudfoot was given to, one might say, the eccentric. It is my opinion that death, these last several years, had been preying on his mind.”

  “Not going religious, was he?”

  “Then he ordered a coffin, a rosewood coffin, built by the local carpenter. He locked it in his private storeroom and often, I am told, would sit alone with the casket, reading the Bible and sometimes other — other books. About the grave, the interment, his instructions, in writing, are most explicit. Himself, he marked out the spot. On the morne, half a mile from the house, a place overlooking the sea. Under an old silk cotton tree, and the grave must be ten feet deep.”

  “Cart,” Pete whispered to me, “does it strike you this affair is verging on the morbid?”

  That was how it impinged on me. The old black lawyer was musing to himself. “I have instructed the gravediggers.”

  “Let’s get on with it,” I prodded. “Do we get out here?”

  Maître Tousellines nodded.

  We got out. I squashed up to my shoetops in mud and helped Pete from the buggy while the dripping stone angel looked on. All this time the drums were thumping louder and louder, and no matter the pale shine sneaking through the trees, there wasn’t enough light to see a match by. I could hear sly water guttering and draining, and the air was vaporous with the smell of woods, dank green. Then a lantern came swimming through gloom, bringing into focus a spindly, cordovan-leather Negro in a flag-striped cotton suit, a floppy sombrero, with whiskers like a goat’s tuft on his chin. He bleated Haitian at Master Tousellines, who obliged by snatching the lantern.

  “This is Cornelius. Your Uncle Eli’s house boy.”

  “Then he didn’t kill Uncle Eli.” Pete nudged me in nervous humor. “Servants never turn out to be the murderer in mystery plays.”

  I discovered myself wishing we were at something as innocuous as a mystery play. In that woodsy smell where the stone celestial loomed in gloom, it was like disembarking late in a cemetery. Our lawyer consulted his time-piece. “Please, it is nearing midnight. If you will follow me.”

  Single file we ascended a soggy path through a corridor of mossy trees flanked by tall, wet ferns, the tufted Cornelius bringing up the rear, towing the dilapidated rig.

  “Ugh,” Pete breathed. “I feel as if I were stepping on frogs.”

  The air perspired as it boomed. That newlywed couple of drums and their infant were breaking a lease, and I didn’t fancy the neighborhood. Our path made a wriggle; entered a valley that was like a great dark bowl scooped out of the night, a crust of jungle timber on its upper rim, its curved sides smoky with mist. A row of pale mud-walled huts had hugged together alongside the path; dim outbuildings, cookhouses, hencoops, servants’ quarters. The largest hut in the huddle was agog with sound and light.

  Bonfire yellow streamed from the crooked windows; the boom-thumped dampness shook a parade of dancing shadows across the bright door. I glimpsed a roomful of blacks, crones and children cavorting around what seemed to be an altar. Candles winked in sooty fists, dark arms grabbed at the ceiling, shadows leapt, and a white goat stood on the altar, an expression of alarm in its eyes and said, “Baaaaaa!” One couldn’t spy the drums, but the whole valley vibrated with the racket. The place smelled.

  “Voilà!” our conductor informed us, revolving his mobile eyes. “It is a temple of mystery. I do not, myself, approve of this Voodoo. But the château, it is not far — ”

  We hustled through what once had been a garden of some sort and was now a steamy ruin of shrubs, muddied cornstalks, unkempt orchards of limes and breadfruit, and jungly flower beds, passing a weedy-smelling pond outlined by a concrete walk. The bassin where we might bathe, Master Tousellines lectured. The swimmg pool.

  “Don’t they ever stop drumming?”

  “The ceremony, m’sieu, will last for one day after the burial. Alors” — we were crunching up a gravel driveway — “here is the château. Welcome to Morne Noir.”

  We couldn’t see much of that manse in the coagulated night, but my first impression was of a ship that had somehow drifted inland on the rain and keeled on its beam against the valleyside. Two stories of ramshackle and gingerbread, fronted with upper and lower verandahs which lost themselves around either end, the wings blotted out in the dark. Walls of shadowy, pock-pitted plaster; Spanish moss and bougainvillea dripping from the upper gallery; vines screening the lower verandah like weeds on the hull of a sunken vessel. Shrubs were barnacles clumped around the lower part of the house, and to one side I made out a Poinciana and a thicket of coconut palms. One inhaled old lumber and decay, and mosquitoes rose in clouds out of the damp.

  A melancholy coach-dog that had ossified to green iron stood guard on the terrace among the white bones of iron garden urns and stone pedestals. Pete smacked a mosquito, and pointed to the door which was lighted by a red globe such as one used to see on fire-boxes. The feverish glow sifted out through the verandah glooms; and I didn’t need to invade the reception hall to know it would take a heap of living to make this house a home.

  The hall smelled like an old Carolina hotel and did not disappoint my misgivings. Frescoes and mold. An Imperial staircase that swooped down from a mezzanine, an upper gallery not unlike the one on the outside of the place. I craned my neck at electric grape chandeliers clustered under the barn-high ceiling, then looked at sliding doors that were closed near our entryway, and had a quick glance at more closed doors on either side of the hall.

  Pete said, “Whoo,” taking off her hat and shaking her hair. Cornelius bell-hopped the bags up the staircase; I flipped my blotted hat at a horsehair settee, listening to Master Tousellines distribute us into “spacious front rooms on the upper floor,” the whole upstairs having been “delegated to us in deference to the lady guest.”

  Pete was interested in the colored tile flooring this lobby, and the wall paneling. “Real mahogany, too. Look at that old tapestry, Cart. It’s — what’s that sound?”

  It was not the inescapable drumming, which stayed with us despite the closing of front doors, but an oddish, clicking sound that issued from a door down the hall. Tousellines waved his hat.

  “The billiard room. The other guests are there. I have taken the liberty of assigning them rooms off this lower hall, the upstairs is for yourselves. But attend! We have only five minutes before the funeral.”

  Pete hurried her lipstick into her bag. “Where — is Uncle Eli?”

  “All is quite ready, ma’mselle. In the library. I suggest you and m’sieu enter at once while I summon the others.” He bustled to open the sliding doors. I took a breath and Pete’s arm, and we marched into a cavernous, misty-lit room of tall, blinded windows, walls regimented to the ceiling with dark books, everything exuding a nostril-clogging aroma of plant life and damp plaster. A spare man in a white linen suit was standing engloomed at the elbow of a wing-backed leather-and-buttons armchair.

  Maitre Tousellines introduced, “Dr. Sevestre.”

  The man looked up. His face, in grayed light, was mulatto-saffron, Aryan-featured. He wore a black, toothbrush mustache. His eyes were direct, black, sharp. He tossed something from hand to hand idly as he offered Pete and me a quick scrutiny, nodded at the lawyer.

  “It is time, Maitre Tousellines?”

  “In one moment. This is M’sieu Proudfoot’s niece, Miss Dale; also her fiancé.”

  “You’re the doctor who found Uncle Eli?” Pete said.

  “He was seated in
this very chair, ma’mselle. It may have been suicide,” the doctor said loudly, “but,” — his voice lowered to an alto whisper, and I could see his eyes following Maitre Tousellines’ footsteps down the hall — “but such is hardly my opinion. Your uncle’s spirits were good, his health excellent. Barring, a slight cirrhosis of the liver and a beginning aortic aneurism, only disclosed, by my autopsy, his condition was sound — ”

  Pete backed away from the chair.

  I saw that the object this doctor so indifferently tossed in his hands was a bullet.

  Only it wasn’t the doctor capturing my attention just then. It was the scene mounted at the far end of the library; the long rosewood coffin biered before a silent half-circle of empty chairs.

  It was stark. No flowers. Nothing. Simply the coffin and the chairs and the four giant candles that stood, two at the head, two at the foot of the casket. When the candle-light wiggled, the waxy glow flickered on the wan, green face of an old man. It was not a genial countenance, even in death at a distance. The eyes were tightly shut, the blue mouth closed like a trap, the head quite bald save for a few spidery wisps, and the nose stood up sharp as a blade. The skin was stretched tight as writing paper on the cheekbones, and on the bulging prominence of the forehead was a strip of pink adhesive tape.

  The coffin dwarfed its occupant; the body looked an unwholesome doll in a box too large for it. The head was pillowed, so that the profile, uplifted above the cowling, cast a goblin shadow on the wall, like a silhouette scissored from black paper and pasted there.

  Drums muttered beyond the shuttered windows, and I found my eyes staring at the strip of pink adhesive. It was too late at night for this sort of thing.

  “Poor Uncle Eli,” Pete said quietly.

  “I told those mourners not to start a game of billiards,” Dr. Sevestre scolded.