Old Black Magic

by Jaye Maiman

  Lerebon handed two twenties to the driver and asked him to wait. I had a feeling Chuckie wasn’t too keen about the idea, but he agreed anyway. I stomped outside, stumbled over tree roots that had exploded through the pavement, and demanded to know where we were in a voice that reminded me of Lois Lane in the arms of a supersonic Superman. Okay, maybe I was a little high-strung.

  “Have you ever come down here for the Jazz Festival?” he asked, escorting me through an aluminum gate that clanged so loud I wondered if the neighbors had dived for cover. “We’re not far from the fairgrounds,” he explained. “And no, I wouldn’t recommend your coming here alone. Ironic, though. A block or so away, it’s yuppie town. Beautiful homes, organic food grocery stores. My aunt lives here. Please—” He gestured toward the front door with a flourish.

  It swung open before I got there. The shotgun welcome I’d half-expected didn’t come. Instead, I stared at an attractive woman with hair as white as Dr. Lerebon’s and almost as short. She was close to six feet, had skin smooth as pudding and dark penetrating eyes. She peered at me through tortoise-shell glasses, lowered her double chin and asked Lerebon if I was the one.

  I wasn’t sure how I felt about being the one. Through the doorway I could see a human skull sitting nonchalantly on top of a broad shelf, as if it were a planter filled with daisies. It was flanked by candles, a miniature cane chair criss-crossed with ropes, a gild-edged mirror and gourds. To the left of the doorway stood a fish tank large enough to hold a swarm of lobsters for a mid-size restaurant. Instead, it held two snakes, as thick in circumference as my forearm. A reel of B sci-fi flicks from the Fifties played in my head. Zombies. Shrunken heads. The woman invited me in, but my feet wouldn’t carry me past the threshold.

  She shot me a lightning-bolt of a smile, glanced back over her shoulder, then winked at me. “That’s Marie altar. I haven’t touched a thing since she died. Come on, hon, we don’t have much time. I’m a nurse at Saint Jude’s and my shift’s coming up” She pulled me inside. “My name’s Roxanne, by the way. I don’t expect that Jake gave you that piece of information. He’s a brilliant doctor, or as my sister used to say, the last of the great dokté-fey, which means leaf doctor or some such thing, but he tends to favor mystery a bit too much. For the record, I’m not the expert on voodoo that Jakey thinks I am, but I know a lot more than he does. My sister made sure of that. If I can help, I will.”

  My head was pounding. Since arriving in New Orleans, I’d poured more alcohol into my body than I had the previous six months. To my surprise, I found myself craving another drink. I rubbed my temples and asked, “Will someone please tell me what’s going on?”

  “Aunt Rox inherited my mother’s asson and her understanding of the lwa-Ginen.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” She stopped short and wagged a finger at her nephew. “Next you’ll have me talking in tongues. Don’t make it sound so exotic. Your mama was the manbo. Me, I’m not much more than a librarian.”

  “Right. Tell the neighbors that.”

  “I do…not that they listen. They still miss Marie, angel that she was. Come on through here.”

  We marched through a long, dim hall lined with old photographs, none of which I had time to examine. Roxanne had the gait of a soldier anxious to charge. We ended in a dining room that had clearly seen a lot of action. The wooden floors were scuffed clear of varnish, the pine table bore knife marks and pools of candle wax, and the cane-seat of the chair in which I sat held a butt-friendly indent. I wiggled forward and waited for someone to talk.

  “As I started to explain at the bar,” Dr. Lerebon began in a ponderous tone, “Voodoo is an ancient religion in which animism and magic—”

  His aunt broke in. “Lordy, if your mama could hear you.” To me, she said, “Honey, can you pass me the notebook that so disturbed Jakey? Thanks.”

  I exchanged looks with Lerebon. He retrieved my notebook from his pocket and slid it across the table. The veins on the back of his hand bulged, thick as well-fed earthworms. I could almost read his heartbeat in their pulse. Lerebon was pumped.

  While she read my notes, I asked Lerebon about the word he’d used earlier at the bar. He spelled it for me.

  “I suppose I do resort to less than accessible terminology when discussing voodoo, but for me the language itself is magic. Especially when those words materialized on my mother’s lips. She was an extraordinary woman. Lwa is a word we use to describe the spirits who mediate between humans and God.”

  “Close enough,” Roxanne muttered, still reading my notes and nodding to herself:

  A smile played over his lips. I could tell that he enjoyed being corrected by his aunt. “The lwa are present in trees, rivers, the flame of a candle, sometimes even the human body. There is nothing and no one beyond their reach. Some people mistakenly call them gods. They’re not. Voodoo believes in a supreme being who uses the lwa as his intermediaries—”

  “Jakey, you talk too much. Excuse me, Robin, are the dates of these murders correct?” Roxanne extended the notebook to me, her fingers tapping the page.

  I stared at the page, then her, then back at the page, the hairs on the back of my neck rising. She had the earlier list of homicides, the one I’d gotten from Sweeney. “Why do you ask?”

  “Something’s wrong here. I expected the murders to have all been on a Friday, Saturday or Monday. This here woman was killed on a Thursday and this one on a Sunday.” A pinkie slid along Allen’s name and then circled Galonardi’s. “Now, that doesn’t make sense given the rest of what I’m reading.”

  “Which is?” Dr. Lerebon had moved behind his aunt. The two of them harumphed and nodded at the notebook while I sat opposite, my hands raking my hair in disbelief.

  “Hey, remember me?”

  They glanced over to me at the same time. Roxanne said, “If you expect me to start jerking my limbs and wailing out the name of the murderer, you’ve been watching too much television.”

  Impatient, I blurted, “Galonardi was murdered on a Monday. The date there is wrong. And Allen’s murder has been closed.”

  “All right!” She slapped her hands together. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Come on over here.”

  The three of us squeezed into a narrow hallway studded with bookcases. She dragged a thick volume down from the top shelf, thumbed through it and slapped the book over one forearm so hard the spine snapped.

  “Ogou Feray,” she announced with satisfaction.

  I stared down at a graphic symbol that resembled a man constructed from asterisks, bars, triangles and curlicues.

  “This is called a vèvè, a symbolic drawing unique to a specific lwa,” Lerebon explained, breathing hard over my shoulder.

  “Oh, shush, Jake,” Roxanne said. “What’s important for you to know is that Ogou is a warrior and overseer of the fire realm. Red is the color associated with him. See this painting? The red scarf around his neck is a common fixture in drawings. He has many connections among the lwa, including sexual relations with Ezili, who represents love. This illustration on this page…right here…depicts her as a mulatto. A beautiful, alluring woman, known to be rather free with her affections. Are you Catholic?”

  I said, “No,” and reflected on my earlier conversation with Dreyer Carr about Pete Stramlpos’ family. I wondered if traditional religion somehow factored into the murders.

  “Good, then you shouldn’t be too offended. In some circles, she is seen as the Vodoun counterpart to the Virgin Mary.”

  “Roxy—” Jacob sounded a warning note.

  “Okay, darling boy, I’ll get back to Ogou.” She closed the book and pulled a small pamphlet from another shelf. “Offerings to him typically included the sacrifice of a bull, ram or a red rooster. He is often symbolized by trees, most commonly pine or calabash. The predominant symbol for Ogou, however, is a saber driven into the earth. An image with many violent connotations, especially among those who do not fully understand voodoo.”

  “Why are you telling me all this
?” I asked, still puzzled.

  “Ogou’s special days—” She drew the words out, teasing us both. “His special days are Friday, Saturday and Monday. These killings match the pattern.”

  She attributed more significance to her pronouncement than I did. “With all due respect, couldn’t the timing just be a coincidence? I’m more interested in finding out if there’s anything in those books that connects Ogou to eggs or eggshells?”

  “As far as I can tell, the eggshells are irrelevant. Maybe they’re supposed to distract you. A decoy of sorts, or a private joke. To anyone not familiar with the attributes of lwa, the eggshells would appear to be the only shared characteristic among these killings. But the rest of what he left behind at the crime scenes is far more telling. Whoever committed these murders is familiar with voodoo, I can guarantee that.” We headed back into the dining room. “Read your own notes now that you have this new information.”

  She thrust the book back into my hands and planted her hands on her hips as I read.

  Unexplained artifacts found on or near the victims included:

  A knotted red neckerchief (Mary Ryan)

  A pipe made from a tropical American tree called calabash (Eileen Anderson)

  A bottle of pine needles and bark shavings (Hope Williams)

  Three slices of bull’s testicles wrapped around ice and placed in a sterilized glass mason jar (Betty Galonardi)

  A new snake-skin wallet filled with packets of ground coffee (Andrea Allen)

  None identified for Lisa Rubin, as yet.

  Suddenly, the connection among the homicides appeared undeniable. My knees buckled. Lerebon caught me and lowered me into a chair. After nine years, we’d finally caught the scent of Mary Ryan’s murderer.

  Ten minutes later, I was sliding back into the passenger side of the taxi, biting my nails. NeVille was looking better and better to me as a suspect. Perhaps his daft, inarticulate manner had been a con, another joke on the stupid investigators who’d missed the blatant clues left behind at each and every murder. A native of New Orleans, he certainly had ample opportunity to learn about voodoo. The only problem was, I hated to think that Sweeney had been right about anything.

  “You’re pretty quiet,” Lerebon said, leaning over my shoulder from the back seat.

  “Your aunt’s given me a lot to think about.” I needed more information on NeVille. Where he was born. What kind of family life he had. What exposure he might’ve had to voodoo while growing up. The list of basic investigative requirements clicked off in my head. Childhood traumas. Romantic disappointments. Psychiatric history. Criminal records. I’d been, so ready to dismiss Sweeney’s theories that I hadn’t asked the right questions.

  The doctor squeezed my shoulder. “You’re exhausted. Now is not the time to think. Do you have any friends in the city?”

  I had much better than that. I had K.T. And his words made me yearn for a night spent curled up in her arms. I angled my wrist so that the ambient light from the car next to us shone on my watch. It was close to eleven. At that time, two long days ago, I’d watched K.T. plop down on a stool at the prep table and lustily indulge in a glass of icy milk and an enormous plate of warm bread pudding. Given the tension between us since then, the odds were high I’d find her there tonight. I asked the driver to drop me off at Les Enfants. Lerebon and I shook hands formally. My emotions were stretched too thin for anything else and he appeared to recognize that. At another time, I’d thank him appropriately. For now, I needed K.T.

  Despite the hour, the restaurant was bustling. Dinner had metamorphosed into liquor-laced coffees and butter-drenched desserts. One of Winston’s specialities was a soup of coffee laced with vanilla ice cream, Bailey’s and Amaretto. The scent wafted to me from the nearest table.

  “How many?” I didn’t recognize the maitre d’ from the other night.

  “Not tonight. Too full.”

  She didn’t take no for an answer. “Well, luckily you have two stomachs, the one that says I’m full and the other that’s reserved for dessert.”

  “No, thanks. I’m here to see K.T. Bellflower. Is she here still?”

  Her solicitude kicked up a notch. “Why, I’m not sure. Why don’t we go and see.”

  I thrust my arm out to stop her. “I know the way.”

  The restaurant was organized around an open kitchen, with a variety of prep stations. To get to the back, you had to pass a porthole near the wood-burning stove. Heidi, the Swedish giant with a flare for fish, was stoking the fire. She shouted, “Hot potato!” as I passed by, a plank of blackened salmon balanced precariously on a pizza paddle she thrust in my direction. The heat seared my cheek. I wondered if she was warning K.T. about my arrival.

  I overestimated my importance. K.T. wasn’t in clear sight and no one even glanced up at my unannounced entrance. They were too busy filling orders, cleaning and sneaking out for smokes. An order of boiled shrimp with gazpacho buzzed by my head. I dodged and turned the corner. Two waiters were picking through a basket laden with the remains of focaccia and jalapeno corn bread.

  I slid over and asked, “Is K.T. around?”

  One of them wiped his mouth and said, “Haven’t seen her since that newspaper guy left here.”

  “When was that?”

  “Around seven, I think. Maybe earlier. Could’ve been six. Things were hopping.”

  The other waiter chimed in. “My feet are burning up. I’ve never seen a place catch on like this before. You see the look on Winnie’s face?”

  Only good friends call Winston Hawkings by his nickname. I asked the waiter for his name.

  “Bobby. I’ve worked with Winnie for years.”

  “Where can I find him?”

  A frown puckered his eyebrows. “Geez, now that you mentioned it, I haven’t seen Winnie for a few hours either.” He yanked on the tails of his vest and shouted over my head, “Melinda, you see K.T. or Winston?”

  The woman he called to was at the sink, scrubbing pans. She shut the faucet and wiped her hands on her apron. “What’s that, Bobby?”

  “K.T. or Winston around?”

  She shook her head and strode over. “Winston ran out a few hours ago to see his lawyer. A problem about the liquor license. K.T. I haven’t seen since that creepy black guy left here.”

  My flesh started to tingle. I wasn’t sure why.

  “What was creepy about him?” I asked.

  “Don’t know, exactly.” She stared up at the ceiling as if expecting to find the answer etched in plaster. “I just got the heebie-jeebies from him.”

  Bobby laughed. “Fitzhugh Chamelle,” he said, mockingly. “He looked like a comics-book villain, didn’t he? I swear his hair was the color of Reggie’s, you know, from the Archie comics.”

  Melinda shrugged. “You’re showing your age, Bobby. Mine too. He did have that blue-black sheen like Reggie.”

  Blood fled from my limbs. Blue-black hair. That’s how K.T. described the man who had followed her back from Café du Monde. “Can I use a phone?” The new urgency in my tone was hard to miss.

  “Who are you anyway?” The second waiter interrupted.

  I told him my name. Bobby and Melinda exchanged private glances. Clearly, they knew about our relationship. Melinda led me into an office and left me alone. I dialed our hotel room. On the fifth ring, the voice-mail service kicked in. My message was short: “If you get back to the room before me, don’t leave until I get there.”

  All at once a fever swept over me. My hands shook as I walked back out into the kitchen. Where had K.T. gone? I leaned on the refrigerator handle, trying to catch my breath. Surely I was overreacting, my rising panic the cost of a long, grueling day. Measuring each step, I sought out Melinda. She was once again immersed in cleanup, this time loading the dishwasher with impressive efficiency.

  “Do you have another minute?”

  “Sure. Is it about K.T.?”

  I swallowed first, watched the dishwasher liquid rise to the fill line, then asked, “Can y
ou tell me anything else about this Chamelle guy? What paper he writes for or—”

  I cut off my own words. Bile erupted into my throat. The name snapped into place. F.B. Chamelle. The crime writer who had covered each and every one of the eggshell homicides. The name that Evan Alexander had highlighted in yellow. A wave of nausea swept over me and I darted toward the bathroom. I barely made it through the door before my guts repelled everything I’d consumed in the last five hours. Clinging to the bowl, my body jerking with each heave, my imagination painted horrors for me. The image of Mary Ryan’s battered and bloody torso. Click. Lisa Rubin’s twisted limbs, the gaping wounds crimson mouths screaming from her flesh. Click.

  I sank to my knees, grasped the rim so hard my wrists started to throb. Please, God, please, God. Bouncing my forehead against the seat, prayers rushing through me with the speed of sobs. After a short eternity, I finally lifted my head and wiped my eyes. Then the real nightmare began. Gulping hard, I raised the lid of the toilet. A smudge of blood lined the rim. I shot to my feet and scanned the, bathroom with widened eyes. Blood in the sink. Small droplets, but bloodstains nonetheless. On the floor, brown smears like so many others I’ve seen in recent years.

  No. Not like others I’ve seen. Not like anything I’ve seen.

  Chapter Nine

  Wednesday, May 5

  I couldn’t remember how I made it back to the hotel. Did I run the whole way? No, that was impossible. My ankle still hurt too much. I must’ve called a taxi. The phone cord wound about my fingers, cutting off circulation. Somehow, it felt good.

  “Robin, are you listening?”

  My eyes tightened. Little stars burst in the darkness. This was a dream. I was dreaming. Why was someone screaming in my ear?

  “Robin, I’m sending Sweeney over there right now. I called him on the other line. He should be there in fifteen, twenty minutes tops. Don’t leave the hotel. Do you understand?”