Old Black Magic

by Jaye Maiman

  K.T. and Beth stood by Carol’s crib, whispering. The two of them turned puzzled faces toward me as I entered.

  “I want you three to spend the next few days out of town. I don’t want to know where.” I handed over my checkbook and bank card. “Use this for payment.” Another sob broke from me. “My password’s June-seven.” The day I adopted Geeja.

  “Dinah took the car,” Beth said.

  “You have my car keys. Take it.”

  Beth’s gaze settled on the bloody rags in my arms. She crossed to me with purpose. “All right, Rob,” she said simply, “but first let me bury her.” I averted my eyes as she left the room.

  K.T. stayed behind to watch Carol. As soon as Beth shuffled out, I kissed K.T. deeply, then strode into the bathroom, showered and changed my bandages. When I returned, I heard the shovel’s blade slice into the ground. I looked out the open bedroom window and bit my lip and curled my fingers into fists. KT. had one hand on the railing of the crib, her attention focused on Carol as she slept soundly, her steady breath hissing softly. She glanced up at me. “Robin, why aren’t we calling the police?”

  “The killer appears to have been able to obtain privileged information from the police in previous homicides. Frankly, I want him to think he succeeded in scaring me off his trail.”

  Avoiding my eyes, she said in a small voice, “But he hasn’t.”

  I didn’t answer at once. Then I said, “No, K.T.”

  She pinched the bridge of her nose and nodded. “Beth sure knows you well. We’ll leave as soon as she’s done.” Her moss-green eyes fixed on me. “How will I know you’re okay?”

  “I’ll leave a message with Jill every day. Use a pay phone to call in.” I walked up behind her and folded my arms around her waist. I could smell our love-making still on her skin. “You’ll be safe as long as you’re not with me.”

  “Do you think that’s all I’m worried about?” She turned around sharply. “My God, how do you think I’ll feel if something happens…” Her voice trailed off and she lowered her eyes. When Beth came in, the two of us were lost in a kiss I never wanted to end. I heard my friend clear her throat. She was ready for escape. I pulled away from K.T. and smiled bitterly.

  A few minutes later, I was alone again. But not for long. I locked up and jogged the seven blocks to SIA’s office. At eight a.m., the only one I expected to find in the office was Jill. But this morning she had company. Tony Serra, my partner, and Thomas Ryan, my reluctant client and skeptical friend, formed a small knot near the coffeemaker in the new reception area. All three of them started when the door slammed behind me.

  Tony and Tom eyeballed me with the identical quizzical expression. It was like staring at Before and After shots of the same man. They were the same height, shared the same gnarled facial characteristics. Picture a boxer who’s lost more matches than his bruised brain can remember. Puffy eyes, bent nose, cracked upper lip, thick, wiry necks. But where Ryan was beefy, with love handles a doting mother would love, Tony had grown rail-thin. Two months ago, he had had an allergic reaction to a new medicine, one of those miracle pills that’s helping so many AIDS patients. But not Tony. I hadn’t seen my partner face-to-face in almost a month and he’d shrunken further. I knew that he’d taken to wearing pants tailored for teenage boys. But in the past few weeks, his hair had fallen out almost completely, leaving him with a thready halo around the crown. At the moment it was slick with sweat. Ryan, on the other hand, looked better than I’d ever seen him. His wavy silver-gray locks rippled back from his ears, with a few white strands brushed down over his tanned forehead. All three of them shifted uncomfortably as I approached.

  “What is he doing here?” I demanded to know, pointing to Ryan unceremoniously.

  “Hi back at ya,” he said with a sniff.

  “Ryan…” I wasn’t in the mood for games.

  “Okay, Miller,” he said. “Truth is, I didn’t like the way things were going.” At the same instant, his penetrating gaze sank to my waist. “You’re carrying.” The man was uncanny.

  Suddenly I was the center of attention. All of it unwanted.

  Tony sidled over and patted me down. “You haven’t carried since—”

  I cut him off. “Someone broke into my house and butchered Geeja.”

  Jill gasped. Tony’s lips tightened into thin anchovy-like slivers, but Ryan didn’t blink. My heart thudded. The veteran detective from San Francisco wasn’t surprised.

  “You knew he’d come after me?” I asked, a flush of anger and shock rising up from my neck.

  Ryan turned away and opened the cabinet behind him. No one spoke as he retrieved a fresh mug and poured me a cup of coffee. The burbling liquid punctuated our silence. “Here,” he said at last. “Drink this and calm down.” I took the mug, heard my stomach gurgle in response. “I didn’t know anything,” he said, “but my guts told me to get out East on the Q.T. The C of Ds wasn’t too pleased with me taking a sudden leave, but I’ve had the job up to here.” Ryan slapped the bottom of his chin for emphasis. I glanced over his shoulder, caught an uneasy look in Jill’s eyes. She shifted her focus to her fingernails. Not a good sign.

  Tony said, “What happened at the house?”

  I gave them the full story, watching their reactions with interest. Jill started to cry and excused herself. That left me alone with the bruiser boys. Tony leaned against the wall and did his best to keep from wheezing, but I could still pick up the distinct whistle of each breath. He’d grown incredibly weak. I sat down in one of the leather chairs he’d bought for the waiting room. Sure enough, he followed suit immediately. Ryan remained on his feet, one hand shoved deep into his pristine jeans, the other paw curled around a mug. He said, “You’re backing off now, right?”

  Tony started to cough, turned it into an exaggerated laugh. “Ryan, this is Miller. Do you really think she’s going to let this jerk yank her chain and walk away? Shit, even I know she’s not capable of retreat under fire.” He steepled his hands by his mouth. “ ‘The land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.’ Numbers, thirty-five, thirty-three.”

  Normally, Tony’s habit of quoting scripture rendered me capable of hurling potted plants through closed windows. But this time, I gritted my teeth and nodded woodenly.

  Ryan raised an eyebrow, slurped a mouthful of coffee, then smacked his lips and said to Tony, “Maybe I should rethink your offer.”

  My head swiveled toward my partner. Tony threw me a sideways look, then said, “We’ll discuss this later, Tom.”

  “The hell you will,” I blurted.

  “Miller doesn’t know?” Ryan asked, as if I’d disappeared into thin air like the Cheshire cat.

  “What don’t I know?” The question was directed at Tony, but Ryan was the one who answered.

  “Tony made me a partnership offer. I could quit the job, take my pension—”

  I clanked my mug down on the glass table. “You did this without talking to me first?”

  Tony stretched his neck to one side until it popped. “You’ve been out of pocket, Robin.” Then he leveled his gaze at me. I knew what was coming before he opened his mouth. “Dr. Wall says the countdown’s begun. I don’t have much time. You’re good, but you’re not the best. What you got is capital and a few years of serious experience. Ryan’s got decades. SIA needs him.”

  Before I could respond Jill scrambled into the room, waving a notepad filled with her frenzied handwriting. “I just hung up from Evan,” she announced breathlessly. “The kid is incredible.”

  Tony leaned toward me and murmured, “We’ll finish this later.”

  “He’s been calling family members and friends of the earlier victims for the past few days, probing, schmoozing, prying, praying with them, anything he could do to get them to talk,” Jill said. “Listen to this. Eileen Anderson, she was the one killed up in Cambridge.” The date clicked off in my head: August 23, 1985. The first woman murdered after Mary Ryan. “Her partner, Ma
riola, is still living in the same house in South Boston and just recently adopted a baby from China. Evan said she was thrilled someone was still looking into this.”

  A snort erupted from Tony. “Get to the meat.”

  “At the time of the murder, she and Eileen had been together seven years. Mariola said she felt like the cops thought she was the suspect, especially since there’d been anal penetration and no sperm. Then they started tailing her brother. When they came up empty there, they worked a couple of other weak leads, then finally dumped the case in the inactive file.”

  “Nothing new so far,” Ryan said.

  “Okay, here’s where it gets interesting,” she said. “At eighteen, Eileen married a neighbor she grew up with. Matthew McCarthy. She was pregnant at the time.”

  Ryan folded himself into the third leather chair with a high-pitched squeak. A pallor began spreading under his tan.

  I leaned forward. “Did they have the baby?”

  “Nope. The child died in utero, result of a car accident.” She paused for effect. “Eileen Anderson had been on the way to meet her first female lover, which wasn’t Mariola. McCarthy, by the way, is in the Air Force. So we’ve got another man in uniform.”

  My scalp sizzled. Echoes of Lisa Rubin’s story. And Mary Ryan’s. I stole a glance at Ryan. He riveted his eyes on his scuffed buckskins and cracked the knuckles of his left hand nervously. Tony scratched his chin and glared at me. He said, “Tommy, you want to check out for a while?”

  “Nah. I’m fine.” Ryan spoke to his shoes. “Go ahead, Jill.”

  “Next murder.” She scanned her notes and clucked with amazement. “God, Rob, I can’t believe you were right.”

  Tony barked, “Right about what?”

  “Hope Williams,” I said, prompting Jill to continue.

  She squinted at me, nodded, then said, “At first glance, this seems unlike every other case. Hope was twenty-two, younger than any other victim and the only African American. On top of that, she was happily married to the same man for three years.”

  “Murder happened a year after Anderson,” Ryan interrupted in a strained monotone. “Back on my turf. Williams was at the Sheraton attending a nursing conference. She lived maybe five, six miles from me.” He looked me full in the face. “Her husband was not uniformed.”

  Jill said, “He was a programmer.”

  “Yeah. A nice kid,” Ryan said. “The dee’s on the investigation concluded she’d been another random killing. No one bought my take on the parallels to Mary’s murder. She’d been raped, beaten up real bad and dropped with a bag of trash in another guest’s bathroom. The eggshells meant shit to the peach-fuzzed kids they’d pulled from Homicide. I remember one guy, Anthony Haskell was the creep’s name, he said to me, ‘They found cherry pits in the trash too, Ryan. What you make of that?’ And then he and his pals had a good chuckle on my skin.”

  Tony asked, “So what’d Evan find out. Williams was sneaking out for a rendezvous with the local butch queen?”

  Jill and I looked daggers at Tony. He huffed, stood up and headed for the coffee. Jill glowered at his back “She was straight, Tony.”

  I heard Ryan exhale loudly.

  “Evan had a hard time tracking down people who’d talk about her,” Jill went on, her tone tinged with annoyance.

  Tony brushed his fingers over the coffee pot, appeared to reconsider his need for another cup and went to the cupboard instead. His watch beeped. Time for another pill.

  “Her former husband hung up on him,” Jill said. “Her parents are dead. Finally, he used the crisscross and pulled the name of a neighbor who’d lived across the street from where she grew up. The woman there was very friendly and spoke highly of Hope. Remembered how polite and refined she’d been even as a teenager. She said that Hope’s boyfriend was the same way. Then she made some comment about how she’d always thought those two sweet kids would marry one day.”

  Ryan scratched his collarbone, a look of disgust flickering over his face. “So,” he said. “We’re talking about another childhood sweetheart, right?”

  “Right,” Jill said. “Turns out Williams dated this boy Bobby Oliveras from age thirteen to age nineteen. Then Bobby’s best friend moved in on Hope. They were married four months later. No kids. Bobby moved out to Ohio. He’s with the Cleveland Fire Department.”

  “Okay,” Ryan said. “So we’re up to Betty Galonardi. You can’t tell me this falls into the same pattern. She was forty-seven, a spinster.”

  “Actually, she was gay too,” Tony said reluctantly. I watched him pick out three pills from the case I’d given him for Christmas. “That makes three of the five vics dykes.”

  “We don’t know Betty Galonardi was gay,” Jill snapped. “You should’ve done more than settle for rumors. If Robin hadn’t pointed Evan in the right direction—”

  “Jill, it’s okay,” I said. “I can fight my own battles.”

  Tony and I made eye contact. He looked so sickly I couldn’t stand to see him chastised for events so long in the past.

  “Evan wasn’t too successful on Galonardi. He talked to colleagues of hers at the school where she worked, but Betty didn’t have many friends there. He heard much of what we already have in the files. She was a highly intellectual, reclusive woman. At some point, a librarian who’d struck up a friendship with Betty killed himself.”

  My mouth went dry. Another piece clicked into place. I listened carefully to Jill’s next words. “Everyone assumed it was about unrequited love, but there’s no hard evidence to support that theory. Personally, it sounds to me like the type of romantic gossip that permeates the education world, especially among high school teachers. You should ask K.T.’s sister about that, Rob.”

  “I don’t have to,” I said. Virginia often grumbled about the tawdry fairy tales circulating among her co-workers. Usually, there was an element of truth to the gossip. A motive snapped into place for me.

  “The one interesting note we have here,” Jill said, “comes from the super at her building. Alberto Cora. We already know Betty was throwing NeVille some odd jobs. Apparently, missing out on the opportunity to pick up some additional dollars pissed Alberto off so badly, it still burns him. He told Evan he’d confronted Betty about it. She said she’d done it at the request of a ‘friend’ she’d been seeing. The super remembered thinking it was bullshit, because—and I’m quoting Evan’s notes here, Tony—‘All the guys in the building knew she was a dyke. It didn’t matter who hit on her, she always said no.’ Clearly, incontrovertible evidence,” she concluded in a voice dripping with sarcasm. I almost grinned. Jill’s social conscience had begun to outface mine.

  Ryan jerked out of his seat and paced in a tight circle. We all stared at him, puzzled. He was muttering under his breath. All at once, he halted, dragged a hand heavily through his hair. “Did this Alberto talk to the cops?”

  Jill practically chirped. “Sure did. He remembered a young man with a funny accent.”

  I knew exactly who she meant. Clyde Peltier.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The four of us spent the next half-hour divvying up assignments. I laid out my take on the killer’s motive. No one objected, though Ryan fell quiet and remained that way. The bear of a cop I’d met in San Francisco years ago would’ve normally stomped all over our case review. Instead, he sat back, listened and nodded with a remote interest like a member of the board who’d rather be out golfing. The only time he spoke was when I said we needed to get in touch with Sweeney. He’d hawked uncomfortably, then informed me that Sweeney had flown into town this morning at his request.

  I cocked an eyebrow and said, “Thanks for the vote of confidence. Mind telling me where’s he staying?”

  “A dive in midtown,” Ryan said evasively. “I’m meeting with him later on. If none of you mind, I think I should be the one to tell him what your crew dug up.” He shoved papers into a worn satchel. “Meanwhile I better check in myself. I took the redeye in, then drove straight to Brooklyn. If
I don’t get a few zees, I’ll be worthless.”

  As soon as he left, I asked Tony what he’d made of Ryan’s odd mood.

  “Who knows? This thing’s driven him for years. Maybe he’s got the jitters about being this close to shutting it down. I’ve seen other detectives react almost exactly the same way. One guy had this open case that kept him awake at nights for ten solid years. The day we nailed the perp, he up and retired. Said he’d lost the fire.”

  I had a different theory, one I wasn’t ready to share yet.

  “I’d like to pay Clyde Peltier another visit,” I said. “Think you can arrange it for me?”

  Tony said, “Sure,” and headed into his office.

  The phone rang a few minutes later. Jill lurched for it automatically. I didn’t budge. Photographs, Evan’s files and my own paperwork had buried my lap. Four of the five victims had abandoned childhood sweethearts who eventually entered uniformed professions. My gaze fell on an illustration that Roxanne Lerebon had loaned me. Ogou Feray, the powerful warrior who’d coupled with the lwa Ezili, an archetype in which two extreme aspects of femininity converged: the Madonna and the whore. The killer had to be someone who’d suffered his own jilted love. I scratched out a note: Sic Evan on Chamelle’s romantic history.

  Jill waved a hand at me. “It’s Sweeney. You want to talk to him?”

  In response, I blew her a ripe raspberry, then gathered up my files against my chest and waddled over. She shoved the phone against my ear and I pointed my chin at the note I’d just written. Jill slipped it out, nodded and retreated to her office.

  “Hey, there,” I said, looking for a place to dump my bundle. “I understand you and Ryan are part of a conspiracy to keep me in the dark. Too bad you guys didn’t know that my team’s the only one with a working searchlight.” At a loss, I tossed the papers back onto the chair.