Conquer (The John Conquer Series Book 1)

by Edward M. Erdelac

  Conquer slipped into the driver’s seat. He could hear the siren of an approaching squad.

  He lay his head back and closed his eyes. It hurt to breathe deep.

  “Thanks,” he muttered.

  “Ain’t no thing,” said Pope, in a burst of distorted static. “What now?”

  Conquer shrugged and fished for a cigarette.

  “Aw man…,” Pope whined.

  “Relax,” Conquer said. “How about some music?”

  The radio dial turned, and the hissing static became Wah Wah Watson.

  He waited for the cops and thought.

  It took all night and the best part of the morning to sort everything out. He wound up owing Lou Lazzeroni after all. They told him he could pick up the car at the same impound lot he’d gotten it from. He considered leaving it there.

  After they taped up his ribs at the hospital, he caught one last train ride back to his place and flipped through his books, thinking on Hawla and Pope and the Popobawa. He dreamed of them all that night, and in his dreams, it came to him, what he ought to do.

  The next day he went down to the lot to claim the Cordoba. He paid the fee and popped the trunk. He stared hard at the empty interior for a bit, and ran his hand along the seams and around the spare, and found what he was looking for, exactly where he’d dreamed it would be.

  A gold tooth with a cross etched into it. Pope’s gold tooth, busted off by the Popobawa when he was raped to death. Cops hadn’t found it. Conquer grinned, and popped it into the green bag he took from his pocket. He got behind the wheel again and sat there for a bit, stitching it up with a needle and thread.

  The radio came on, though he hadn’t turned the key, and Pope said, in a burst of static;

  “Goddamn, Conquer. I didn’t think you was comin’ back. Listen, blood. I been thinkin.’ I mean, ain’t nothin’ else to do, right? I grew up hard, dig? I grew up in Tryon, graduated to Riker’s. That’s all the school I got, man. Summer vacation and spring break was years out on these here streets. That’s the only freedom I ever had. Maybe I misspent it, right? Maybe I done some bad shit. My whole life, seems like the world been stickin’ its foot in a nigga’s face. I guess when I had the change to grind somebody else down, I just took it. I’m feelin’ for Holla, yo. What she do to me, but what I woulda done myself? Just grabbed the belt to stop it fallin’ on her black ass. Just hit back. It was wrong, what I done to her. Wrong. All my bitches…all the women I done wrong. Yo, I ain’t keen on hell if it’s like you said, but I guess like, I deserve it. Anything’s got to be better than wherever I am now, yo. I can’t spend eternity in this goddamn box. So what I’m sayin’ is, if you gon’ let me go now, s’cool, dig?”

  Conquer finished his sewing and admired the mojo hand. He hung it from the rearview mirror.

  “I been thinking too, Pope,” said Conquer. “Hell’s what you deserve, sure. But you saved my ass the other night, no doubt.”

  “Yeah,” said Pope. “Least I could do right? Gotta get some black against all that red, like you said.”

  “That’s the thing, Pope,” said Conquer. “I owe you now. I can’t just let you go into the sweet hereafter all unworthy like you are now. I hate to think what the Devil’s got in store for you. I wanna do all I can to keep you out of the fire. It’s the least I can do, right? And the other thing to think about, this phrase I learned from Hawla. Shauri ya Mungu.”

  “What the fuck do that mean?”

  “Plan of God, Pope. I’m sayin,’ you’re where you are, and I found you, and we been put together for some reason only God knows.”

  “So what you sayin?”

  “You like movies,” said Conquer. “Right? The Duke. Jimmy Caan. El Dorado, right? You ever seen Ben-Hur?”

  “Say what?”

  “We keep you alive to serve this ship,” said Conquer. “So row well, and live.”

  He turned the ignition.

  “Conquer, baby, you don’t mean….you ain’t goin’ keep me like this is you?”

  He tapped the mojo hand with the back of his hand and it swung from the rearview like a speed bag.

  “In case you think about drivin’ us off a pier or into a bus,” Conquer said. “I took care of that. Forget it. You’ll stay where you are for now. Maybe you’ll come in handy. Anything happens to my gorgeous head though…well, it’s probably in your best interest to keep on like you did the other night.”

  “You son of a bitch!” Pope snarled. “Yo, Conquer, you can’t….!”

  “Row well and live, baby,” said Conquer. “Row well and live.”

  He pulled out of the lot and into traffic.

  Conquer Comes Calling

  “NYPD!”

  Lt. Lou Lazzeroni and patrolman Mike Carmody entered the dim red apartment, service revolvers drawn. The main source of light was a garish lava lamp on the table beside the door which cast slow moving red amoebas sliding across the walls and ceiling like oversized blood cells out of Fantastic Voyage.

  The only other light was through the window panes, where the slanting rain outside beat the glass like it was owed money.

  As the door banged against the wall, a surprised cat standing on the sill arched its back and hissed, merging with the shadows on the floor.

  This was apartment space converted to a business, or vice versa. The living room had been done up in fake gypsy crap the kind of sucker who shelled out his welfare check to a cat like Genie Jones would expect to see; a short table draped in a blue cloth festooned with magically delicious stars and moons, astronomy charts on the walls, astrological signs. A sparkling red and green beaded curtain lead to where the all-seeing all-knowing fortune teller kicked up his funky Aladdin slippers to watch Charlie’s Angels or roll a joint on the toilet, by the skunky scent just beneath the odor of patchouli smoldering in the ceramic Hotei Buddha incense burner, probably lifted from the counter of some Chinese restaurant.

  It was also a mess. The chairs were overturned, and the crystal ball rested on the floor, cracked. Tarot cards were strewn everywhere, like somebody had busted up the world’s strangest poker game.

  Carmody peered toward the bead curtain and listened.

  “I don’t think anybody’s here.”

  Lazzeroni wasn’t listening. He was watching a weird, plank-like black shadow moving among the red blots from the lamp. His eyes went to its source, and peering close, he gasped at what he saw.

  Carmody looked back at him, and Lazzeroni quickly took his trilby from his balding head and set it on the lamp, obscuring its light.

  He found the chord and switched it off.

  “What gives?” Carmody whined.

  “C’mere, Mike,” he said hastily, fighting to keep the panic out of his voice.

  He stepped into the outer waiting room and when Carmody stood beside him on the raunchy green shag, he pulled the inner door shut.

  Carmody put his gun away as Lazzeroni went through his own pockets and came out with his wallet, peeling a frayed and sweat-stained red and gold business card from the others and shoving it at the patrolman.

  “Here. Get on the phone. Call Conquer.”

  Carmody took the card dubiously and went to the desk with its mauve phone, barely able to contain his disgust.

  * * *

  The lights of the parked squad washed the dingy buildings hell red and Bermuda blue as the late model burgundy Cordoba pulled up behind it, wipers savagely sweeping the crystal beads from the windshield. Inside, Bobby Bland was lamenting the lack of love in the city when the driver cut the engine and the headlights winked out.

  Harlem was nearly fifty years from the heyday of Langston Hughes and W.E.B. Du Bois now. The class was out of her. Her buildings, now tattooed with pastel Krylon hieroglyphs in place of the flapping Clam House and Cotton Club playbills she’d once worn out on Saturday nights, were cracked and crumbling like tired, old faces.

  John Conquer turned up the collar of his oxblood leather coat and dashed from the drivers’ side across the slick pavement
for the shelter of the doorway of 305 West.

  The corner shop was named The All-Seeing Tarot Genie’s and promised Lucky Numbers, Fortune Telling, and Love, Conquer presumed, in order of importance.

  The foyer was cramped for two people, and one was already there, a strikingly fine, butterscotch woman with an ample afro in a trim yellow plaid jacket and mustard scarf who stiffened at his entrance and hurriedly wiped at her bleeding mascara with a tissue.

  Conquer waited for the girl to look back at him before flashing a reassuring smile.

  “What’s happening, mama?”

  She was scared, or had been just a little while ago.

  “He just barged right in past me,” she sniffled. “Then I heard the shooting, so I called the cops and I ran down here. Are you a detective?”

  She had to be Tarot Genie’s receptionist. He ignored the question.

  “Who went in there? What’d he look like?”

  “Like I told them cops up there, I never seen him before. Mean-eyed, skinny redbone with a big mustache. You ain’t a cop are you?”

  “Nope.”

  “So what are you then?”

  He shrugged.

  “How about we talk about it over drinks?”

  She smiled, and brushed at her eyes again, gunshots and intrusive redbones suddenly a fleeting concern in the heat of mutual attraction beating out the chill from the rain outside.

  “Yeah awright,” she said. “That sounds good.”

  Maybe Bobby Bland was wrong after all.

  “Wait here for me, baby,” Conquer said.

  He slid past her, letting the door swing shut as he went up the creaking stair to the office door, GENIE JONES, ALL-SEEING, ALL-KNOWING stenciled on the glass.

  The waiting room in which Genie’s receptionist sat at her shoddy little desk had a leather couch, and a few chintzy black light posters hung on the melon colored walls.

  Lt. Lou Lazzeroni was staring at one of the posters, a rainbow surfing unicorn. Rain dripped from his grey top coat on the green shag, and one of the patrolman, a grouchy cracker named Carmody was sitting on the edge of the desk, bracing the mauve telephone receiver on his shoulder and squinting at one of Conquer’s own red and gold business cards as he stirred the rotor with one finger.

  Conquer walked in and put his own finger on the phone cradle, enjoying the look of Carmody nearly jumping out of his pasty skin.

  “Hang on, Carmody,” said Conquer. “You won’t get me.”

  “Conquer! What the hell!” the cop exclaimed.

  Lazzeroni turned, looking as surprised as his subordinate.

  “John!” Lazzeroni stammered.

  “Easy boys,” Conquer said with a smile. “You’re in Harlem, remember? You’re bound to see more of us.”

  “How’d you….?” Carmody began, and Conquer plucked his business card from between the cop’s fingers.

  “My ears was burnin,” he said.

  “What brings you here, John?” Lazzeroni said, eyeing him sideways. “Just happened to be in the neighborhood?”

  That was why Lazzeroni had bars on his collar, while Carmody just had dandruff. Of course he’d come to question Genie Jones on a case he was working. But let Carmody think it was Hoodoo.

  “I’m always in the neighborhood, Lou. You wouldn’t call me unless you needed me, so what’s the story?”

  “Go watch the stairs, Mike,” Lou said to Carmody, who scowled and replaced the receiver. He went to stand on the landing, slamming the office door behind him.

  “I get the feeling he doesn’t like you,” Lazzeroni quipped.

  “You could fill a phonebook with folks Carmody don’t like. All the area codes would be 706 or 762.”

  “We got word this fortune teller was running a numbers bank for King Solomon,” Lazzeroni went on. “We were on our way to question him about something Solomon was into when dispatch calls in a 10-71 at this address. We were just parking the car when we got the call. Now you show me yours.”

  “Maybe later,” said Conquer.

  “Tease,” said Lazzeroni.

  “Who caught a bullet?” said Conquer.

  “Nobody. Receptionist said she heard ‘em arguing and then shooting. She called it in and ran out, locked the door out of habit.”

  “You’re lucky you didn’t have to call her an ambulance.”

  “I don’t get you.”

  “You said you were parking the car when you got the call,” Conquer said. “I guarantee she ain’t never seen the police show up that fast. Could’ve given her a heart attack.”

  Lazzeroni smirked.

  “Asshole.”

  He went to the inner office door and opened it.

  Only the shut window illuminated the room, and the hunched shadow of a cat on the sill arched and scrambled somewhere into the shadows.

  Conquer followed Lazzeroni in and pulled the door shut behind him.

  Lazzeroni reached over and took a trilby that matched his raincoat off a lava lamp on a table next to the door and set it on his head.

  “Funny way to keep your head warm, Lou,” said Conquer.

  “Here’s why I was gonna call you, John.”

  Conquer looked from the walls to the lamp itself. Bobbing in the glowing cylinder of the lamp like a buoy, among the islands of molten wax was a tiny body. Some kind of effigy? Somehow, he didn’t think so.

  He found the light switch on the wall and tripped it, but nothing came on. He had a mini TeknaLite in his pocket. He took it out and shined the thin beam up, saw broken glass and bullet holes.

  “There’s your second victim, Lou,” he said, then turned back to the lamp.

  “Be serious, man. Is that real?”

  Conquer pulled the plug on the lava lamp. The red blobs and the black ghost disappeared.

  “Give me something to hold this with. These things get hot.”

  Lazzeroni gave him a pocket handkerchief, and he carefully lifted the top. The bottlecap opening had been popped off and the miniscule figure had apparently been stuffed down through the opening. He could see one of the elbows bend loosely the wrong way, broken.

  “How do we get it out?”

  Conquer turned and dropped the lamp on the floor, where it smashed.

  “Jesus,” said Lazzeroni, flinching back as the wax splattered the shag throw rug and wood floor.

  Conquer hunkered down and directed the light at the swollen little body lying amid the wreckage.

  The boiled flesh bubbled with blisters, the poached eyes bulged from the puffy face. If it was a model, it was a grisly masterwork. But Conquer knew it wasn’t a model.

  He took the spindly little arm between his two fingers. It was warm from the lamp. Gingerly squeezing, he felt the little toothpick bones grinding beneath the loose skin. It was like squeezing a tender chicken wing.

  “It’s real,” he muttered, and took his penknife from his coat.

  “Jesus, man….,” Lazzeroni said, but did nothing.

  Conquer carefully pricked the naked thigh of the little doll man, and watched red blood seep out.

  “This ain’t no homunculus either,” said Conquer. “Somebody shrunk him down.”

  Conquer was no newborn when it came to magic. It ran pretty strong in his family, what he knew of its history; through Hoodoo doctors and Voudoun queens, from the bayou to the mountains of Haiti, all the way back across the Middle Passage to the motherland, to the true magic that had beat like a heart in the divine drum, before it’d all been dressed up and seasoned with Jinx Killer and rum.

  That was why when stuff like this came up in Harlem, as it sometimes did, Lazzeroni knew to call him. Lazzeroni was a Catholic, so he’d halfway believed in all this before he’d ever met Conquer. Their first case together had won him over completely, but the detective now walked a fine line on the department keeping all this out of the ears of his brothers in blue. He had a pension to think about and unwanted psych evaluations could endanger that. Conquer had no retirement plan in this world.

&
nbsp; This magic was as black as it got. Whoever had done this drove so far they might as well be Australian, and they would stop for any demon that hiked its skirt up and stuck a leg out along the way.

  “Hell, do I call a coroner for this?” Lazzeroni wondered. “I could take him downtown myself in a shoebox.”

  Conquer laid the body down and stood, shining the light warily around the apartment. Beside the table, he saw a pile of clothes. Slacks, a shirt, expensive shoes, and over those, a corny spangled robe Liberace might have lounged in.

  “I think it’s Genie’s,” Conquer said, going over and toeing the pile of clothes with the tip of his shoe till he felt a wallet. He stooped again and opened it. “State of New York says I’m right,” he said, staring at the placid face in the billfold, imagining it swollen and popeyed.

  There was a Saturday Night Special there too, and a sniff of the barrel told him it was the culprit in the case of the blown out ceiling light, so that mystery was solved at least. There were two empty cartridges in the wheel.

  “He got a couple shots off before he got got,” Conquer mused. “What’d you want him for, Lou?”

  Lazzeroni stood, knees popping like kindling in a fireplace.

  “We didn’t really want him. Like I said, we’re chipping away at King Solomon. Word was out Genie Jones was skimming from the operation. We thought maybe we could get to him before King, give him some protection in exchange for testimony.”

  He’d thought wrong. King Solomon probably knew what his bankers and runners were up to before they knew themselves.

  He went to the window. It was latched tight. He stared for a minute through the rain blurred glass, down the fire escape to the cluttered alley below.

  “The receptionist locked the door behind her?”

  “Yeah, we got the keys from her,” said Lazzeroni. “Why? You don’t think she did him?” the detective said.

  “Nah,” said Conquer, chewing his lip. “I talked to her downstairs. She was all shook up.”

  “Which means…,” said Lazzeroni, taking his .38 from his coat.

  Conquer freed his nickel plated Colt Python from under his arm in turn. There were two ways out, and both had been undisturbed.