The Clairvoyant Countess

by Dorothy Gilman

  Madame Karitska frowned. “But you are speaking of the past, of something that happened two years ago.”

  “Yes, but we begin to suspect the scenario is about to be repeated.”

  “And this Carlos Torres?” asked Madame Karitska, glancing through the memo. “Who is this Carlos Torres?”

  “He paid a call on Luis twelve hours before Luis took to his bed. In fact he was the only stranger who ever paid a call on Mendez. He lives just off Fifth Street and he’s Puerto Rican.”

  “Ah,” murmured Madame Karitska. “A link—I see … and he led you to these others? But this Tortorelli and Robichaud … do they seem to you the sort of men learned in voodoo?”

  Pruden laughed. “Absolutely not, but we’ll get to that eventually.”

  “This Carlos Torres then, perhaps he would kill by voodoo?”

  “Carlos?” He shook his head. “Not likely.”

  Madame Karitska said with a hint of exasperation in her voice, “You are no longer investigating what has happened to the Mendez brothers, then?”

  Pruden sighed. “Look, you’re missing the point. This has broadened into Syndicate stuff. It’s big, bigger than the Mendez brothers. It could turn into the biggest case I’ve uncovered.”

  She said gently, “On the contrary, I think you are missing the point, Lieutenant. You speak of patterns and scenarios and what took place two years ago but you do not see that suddenly a very original mind has become involved now. The past is not repeating itself. You speak of bombings and kidnappings, but someone has entered the picture who side-steps physical violence. Now there is violence against the spirit. One cannot help admire the originality, do you not agree? The perfect crime.”

  “You keep saying that,” he said crossly, and gave her a resentful glance. He was tired and he had expected approval, even admiration; instead she insisted on returning him to Luis Mendez, who was only a link to something greater.

  “You do not feel,” she went on crisply, “that the mind of a man who could conceive of such a murder is infinitely more subtle, infinitely more sophisticated and dangerous than your Syndicate criminal?”

  “We’re only starting,” he pointed out defensively. “It’ll all unwind like a spool of thread. Luis is still alive, isn’t he?”

  “Yes,” she said, “but so is the willow tree, and gives every evidence of remaining alive. Why do you believe they want the Jack Frost ice-cream business, or any ice-cream business?”

  “We don’t know yet but we’ll find out.”

  “This Ramon,” Madame Karitska said, glancing at the list. “You have looked into him too?”

  “Oh yes. No record. Clean as a whistle,” said Pruden, and was glad to have the subject changed. “I visited his shop first thing this morning.”

  “Yes?”

  “You’d love it,” he told her with a smile. “Books on the supernatural, books on haunted houses. Some spectacular hand-carved masks from Africa and South America.”

  “Hey, I’d love to have one of those,” Gavin said eagerly. “Could you take me on Saturday, Madame Karitska? The kids would get a real bang out of something wild hanging on our dorm wall.”

  She smiled at him. “I will take you on Saturday, yes, but I think I may stop in there tomorrow to first make certain it is—how do you say?—okay for a young boy?”

  “She’s tough,” Gavin said to Pruden, nodding. “She doesn’t want me to know about porno and all that.”

  “She’s not tough, she’s cagey,” said Pruden, finishing his coffee and standing up. “She’ll walk in and check out Mr. Ramon for you, admire the ring he’s wearing, ask to hold it, and tell us later what he eats every day for breakfast.”

  But it was not a ring that Madame Karitska succeeded in holding when she visited the Bazaar Curio Shop on Tuesday afternoon; it was a fountain pen, and it was only with considerable finesse that she managed this. When she arrived at the shop there were already several customers there, and Madame Karitska moved quietly among the books, from time to time glancing covertly at the man behind the counter. A strange little man, she thought. He gave every evidence of being amiable but she came to the conclusion that of all the masks on display in the shop, his was the most formidable. In the meantime she waited, and when the others had gone she moved toward the counter carrying a copy of Crowley’s Magick in Theory and Practice. She had moved quietly and Ramon’s back was turned. She reached for the pen he had been writing with and it was in her hand when he turned and looked at her. Their glances met and locked, and Madame Karitska found it necessary to steady herself against the counter.

  He said softly, “You will put down my pen.”

  She placed the pen back on the counter.

  “Thank you,” he said and with an amused glance at the book in her hand he said, “Aleister Crowley, I see.… You’re interested in black magic, perhaps?”

  “Perhaps.”

  But he had lost interest, and his mask was back again. “It will be seven-fifty, please,” he said.

  She paid him, took the book, and walked out, her heart beating very quickly. She felt curiously drained of energy, as if recovering from a bout of fever that had left her nerves trembling and her body weak. She went at once to a telephone booth and dialed Pruden’s number. When he answered she said, “Lieutenant, I think you should—I think you must—check out Mr. Ramon again.”

  “Is this Madame Karitska?” he said. “Your voice sounds changed. Look, I’m in the middle of a conference but if you can explain—”

  A wave of nausea swept her; she dropped the receiver and stumbled outside, Pruden’s voice following her through the open door. Outside she stood drawing in deep breaths of air, her hands trembling as she clung to the door for support. It was necessary for her to remain there several minutes before she felt well enough to return the receiver of the phone to its hook and to begin her walk back to Eighth Street.

  Pruden found Madame Karitska’s call frustrating, coming as it did in the middle of a planning session with the Chief, Swope, Benson, and a man named Callahan. He said, “Excuse me a minute,” and called Madame Karitska back at her apartment, but when there was no answer he hung up and turned back to the others. “All right, tell me what you found out about the Hy-Grade Laundry,” he asked Swope.

  “Something very interesting.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “Right.” Swope picked up his reading glasses and put them on. “Back in November of last year there was an explosion at the laundry.”

  “Bomb?”

  “No, the investigators traced it to a boiler, but the odd thing is that the owners sold out after it happened, and rather fast. It wasn’t a bomb, it was a boiler blowing up and yet they sold.”

  “Sabotage?”

  “It has that smell,” said Swope. “A boiler doesn’t need a bomb to blow it up—there are a dozen things you can do to accomplish the same thing—but in any case they sold. Now it’s under new management, a family named Torres, and guess who the youngest son is.”

  Pruden felt a prickling of excitement. “Carlos?”

  “You’ve just won the box of Crackerjack. And,” he added, “the attorney who handled the purchase was John Tortorelli.”

  “Good Lord,” said Pruden. “The Syndicate is moving in.”

  “Looks like it. Same pattern.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Callahan, baffled. “The Syndicate goes where the money is, and I wouldn’t have thought there was anything to tempt them around Fifth Street. Of course there’s crime there—gambling, drugs, prostitution, numbers—but it’s all smalltime, petty. Nothing worth organizing.”

  “Looks like it’s getting organized now,” Pruden said grimly. “I take it the laundry is headquarters, and Carlos their bag man. What’s the latest on him, by the way?”

  The Chief handed him a sheet of paper. “Same pattern. He moves between his hotel, the laundry, Robichaud, Tortorelli, and the Caballeros Club.”

  “So what do we do?” asked Benson.

/>   Pruden said, “I’d like to see Robichaud and Tortorelli placed on round-the-clock surveillance, informers rounded up and questioned, and a camera put on Hy-Grade Laundry twenty-four hours a day.”

  “We’ve already got Jack the Lip downstairs,” Benson said. “The guys thought you’d want to question him, although Jack insists he doesn’t know anything about a Syndicate moving into Fifth Street.”

  Pruden nodded and rose. “I’ll go down and see what I can get out of him. I don’t,” he said wearily, “think we’re going to get much sleep for the next few days.”

  “So what else is new?” asked the Chief in a kindly voice.

  It was seven o’clock before Pruden finished interviewing the handful of informants that had been brought in, and the only thing he’d learned was that an ice-cream vendor out in the northern section of Trafton had been taken ill and was dying. He was a Jack Frost man, and his name was Raphael Alvarez, and he was six months out of Puerto Rico. “Enough to give a guy the whammies,” the informant said with a shiver. “Just says he’s going to die and lies there.”

  Like Luis, he thought.… It reminded Pruden of Luis and then of Madame Karitska’s aborted phone call during the afternoon. She’d said Ramon ought to be checked again—that much he’d heard, and then they’d been cut off before she could explain why. He stood on the steps at headquarters debating whether to eat, grab a few hours’ sleep, or visit the Bazaar Shop.

  Swope, coming up behind him, said, “Where you off to now, Lieutenant?”

  Pruden made his decision. “I think I’ll just take a look at the Bazaar Shop again. Look around a bit. Care to come along?”

  “Why not?” said Swope affably, falling into step beside him as he began walking. “I told the wife she wouldn’t be seeing much of me for a few days. Place is closed, though, isn’t it?”

  Pruden nodded. “Yes, but on Sunday night it was closed and Torres went around to the back. I thought—”

  “I dig,” said Swope. “How much further?”

  “Next block, on the left.”

  As they neared the store a small truck passed them and slowed down, signaling a turn to the left. Its sides were painted bright scarlet; in gold carousel script were printed the words BAZAAR CURIO SHOP—Everything Bizarre—1023 Broad Street, R. Ramon, Prop. The van turned into the alleyway beside the shop and disappeared.

  “Not altogether closed,” pointed out Swope.

  “No,” said Pruden.

  Crossing the street they reached the alley in time to see the scarlet truck park in the dilapidated garage at the end of the driveway. Two young men climbed out, picked up their caps and lunch boxes and began walking down the alley toward the street. “Hey,” one of them said sharply, turning and pointing, and his companion hurried back to the garage and swung the doors closed; then they continued out to Broad Street, passing Pruden and Swope, and walked up the street and turned the corner.

  “They didn’t lock those doors. I wouldn’t mind taking a look inside,” Pruden said hopefully.

  “It does seem like a gift from heaven,” agreed Swope. “Let’s go.”

  The layout of the building was surprisingly simple: it had once been an old house to which the shop had been added in the front. The rear contained a yard, a side porch, a garage, and all the accouterments of a conventional frame house, including an ancient apple tree. No lights shone in the windows; the place looked deserted. They very casually swung open one unlocked garage door and slipped inside.

  Swope, testing the back doors of the van, said, “Locked.”

  Pruden peered into the front seat of the truck. There was a bunk behind the driver’s seat for sleeping on long trips, but the wall behind it was windowless and seemed to be solid, with no point of entry into the storage behind it. He decided to climb inside and make certain of this, and had one foot on the floor of the garage and the other in the cab of the truck when he lost his balance and fell against the door.

  Behind him he heard Swope exclaim, “What the hell!”

  Pruden, looking down, realized to his astonishment that the floor of the garage was moving. He regained his balance, looked for Swope, and found him several feet above him: the garage doors were suddenly at a level with his waist as the floor slowly descended like an elevator. Swope had jumped clear and was standing in the doorway. He shouted, “For God’s sake jump, Lieutenant!”

  Pruden stood paralyzed, wanting to run, wanting to join Swope, but wanting also to see what the hell lay below him. A moment later his decision was made for him as the threshold of the garage doors passed out of sight. Pruden turned back to the door of the van, climbed inside and crawled up on the sleeping shelf. There were several blankets piled in one end: he curled up in a corner and drew the blankets over him.

  The descent of the truck slowed, and he and the truck emerged into a lighted room below. He heard a low murmur of voices and the clink of keys unlocking the rear of the van. Two men jumped inside; he could hear the hollow sound of their feet walking around a few feet away from him, separated only by the wall against which he lay. A dolly was wheeled up, objects began being unloaded, and then came a new sound: a hammering on the sides of the truck.

  “Okay, Carlos, bring the Freezee signs,” a man shouted, and the sides of the truck were assaulted again. Pruden kept himself small and quiet as he drew certain conclusions: Carlos Torres was here, and signs were being switched. An old hijacking trick, he reflected, but what did it mean? They’d mentioned Freezee signs. Presumably the Bazaar Shop truck would drive away as a Mr. Freezee delivery truck, but why, and with what?

  A loud, irritating buzzer interrupted the hammering.

  “Trouble at the back door,” a man called sharply, and Pruden heard footsteps racing away into the distance, echoing as if in a hall of some kind. After listening for a minute he concluded that he was the only person left in the garage. He crawled gingerly down from the bunk and stuck his head out of the door and looked around him. He was in a very neat underground cement-walled room with an exit that led up a long ramp-like hall, dimly lighted, to three doors at the end. He guessed that the ramp connected with the basement of Ramon’s house and shop.

  Stealthily Pruden emerged and crept around to one side of the truck: it was still a blaze of scarlet, with BAZAAR CURIO SHOP emblazoned on it in gold. He walked around to the other side and was met with a blue panel and jagged white letters that read MR. FREEZEE. Neat, he thought, very neat. He moved around to the back of the truck and bent over the cartons that had been removed from the van and were stacked on the dolly. Drawing out his penknife he slit open the top of one and looked inside.

  The box held Mr. Freezee popsicles.

  He thought it damned careless of them to abandon the load here when ice cream melted so fast, and then he realized there was no dry ice anywhere in sight. He looked into the interior of the truck and ran a hand over its walls: this was not a refrigerated truck, and there was no sign of ice here, either. He went back to the carton and drew out a popsicle, pulled aside its blue-and-white wrapping, and examined it. It gave every evidence of being a coconut-cherry popsicle: it was red, and it was flecked with shreds of white, but it was warm to the touch, not cold. He tapped it with a finger; it was plastic.

  A plastic popsicle … Carefully he knocked it against the side of the dolly and then slipped the wooden stick out of the plastic rectangle. The interior was a honeycomb of thin plastic: in the very center he found a cellophane envelope filled with white powder. He removed it. Tearing aside the cellophane he sniffed the white substance and then wet his finger and placed a few grains on his tongue. It was heroin, no doubt about it.

  He thought he’d seen everything during his years on the force but the enormity of this numbed him. It seemed the ultimate insolence, selling drugs on the street from innocent ice-cream trucks, those Pied Pipers of the neighborhood that brought music, bells, and laughter with them on hot mucky days, the one touch of innocence left to kids. The crowds would gather, real ice cream would be exch
anged for coins and then a guy with the right password, the right gesture would get this … this obscenity.

  It filled him with a manic fury. He thought that if Carlos and his friends came back now he would delight in taking them apart one by one. At the same time all his instincts told him to leave now, look for the right switches to the hydraulic lift, crawl into the truck and ride back upstairs into the world again. But he didn’t feel wise, he felt incensed and murderous. He looked at the three doors at the far end of the ramp and then he began running up the ramp toward them, not caring whether he was seen or heard. Two of the doors had small windows in them. Through the center door he saw steps leading to the upper floor; behind the left door lay a storage and workshop room with cartons of masks and a carpenter’s bench. The door on his right had no windows; he opened it and walked inside.

  He had entered some kind of office or study: Ramon’s, he decided, because it looked like him. The walls were hung with maps and charts—astrology charts, he guessed—and fierce-looking masks. The center of the room was occupied by a huge desk covered with drawings and diagrams. A small click-click sound troubled him until he moved to the desk and saw that beside it stood a teletype machine. Ramon certainly did himself well, he thought. A second machine in the corner caught his eye and he walked over and discovered it was a computer, an honest-to-God king-sized computer with winking lights.

  Then he saw the map of Trafton on the wall behind the computer, a map with every street and alley rendered in detail, and he felt a small chill. In this room incalculable plans were being made for Trafton; he’d stumbled across some kind of command post where something was being plotted and organized for his city. He went back to the desk and studied the papers and charts on its surface. Horoscopes, he saw, staring at a thick sheaf of papers with houses of the zodiac marked off. Beside these lay a pack of tarot cards and over here … he peered closer. A list of typed names: Arturo Mendez, Luis Mendez, Raphael Alvarez … He remembered that Alvarez was the name his informant had mentioned tonight. The list was long, and Arturo’s name at the top had been crossed off with red ink.