Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine Presents Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense

by Linda Landrigan

  The mosquitoes and the steamy heat were getting to me. “And the police don’t take kindly to being given the runaround,” I said. “We can talk to her here or have her hauled in for questioning. It’s all the same to me.”

  The old man shot us a look of alarm. “I wouldn’t do that, mister,” he said. “It don’t pay to mess with Maman Boutin. She give you the eye, and you jus’ shrivel up an’ die. I seen it for myself.”

  “I’m willing to chance it,” I said, and heard an intake of breath from Renoir standing behind me.

  The old man shrugged as if I were a hopeless case. “She in that house over there,” he said. “The one beside the tree.”

  That particular shack was half hidden under the great tree, with curtains of Spanish moss trailing down all over it. It was a pitiful structure of mismatched wood. New boards had been nailed on where old ones had fallen off. The roof had several patches of shingles missing, exposing the tar paper underneath. Being this close to the river I was surprised the place had survived at all. I had seen what spring floods could do.

  We made our way between puddles to Maman Boutin’s shack. The dog had been joined by another one, and they walked at our heels, growling softly. Not a comfortable feeling. Renoir made sure he stayed as close to me as possible.

  “Do I really have to go in there, sir?” he asked.

  “You afraid of voodoo, Renoir?”

  “It’s all right for you, sir,” Renoir said. “You weren’t born around here. We have it in our blood.”

  “If she’s a real priestess, she’ll know you don’t mean her any harm. You’ll be safe enough,” I said.

  As I started up the five rickety steps that led to Madam Boutin’s front door, there was an unearthly cackling sound. My heart did a flip-flop as several white chickens, who had been sleeping in the shade on the porch, rose up, cackling and flapping around us. The noise produced a face in the darkness behind the doorway.

  “I know why you here,” a dried-up old voice said. There was a slight twang of French accent.

  “Are you Maman Boutin?” I asked.

  “That’s what they calls me.”

  “I’m here to ask you some questions about Mr. Torrance. You remember the man who came to visit you?”

  “He dead yet?” she asked calmly.

  “He died this morning. May we come in?”

  “I suppose you can. He can stay on the porch.” She indicated Renoir, who looked visibly relieved.

  I stepped inside and was enveloped in a darkness so complete that I could only just make out the form of a table and a straight-backed chair. The place stank of a peculiar odor—a mixture of rotting vegetation and sweat mixed with maybe chicken shit and some kind of sweet incense. I coughed and tried not to breathe.

  “You can sit there.” She pointed at the chair.

  I sat. She took up position in an old armchair I hadn’t noticed before in the darkness. I could barely make out her face. What I could see was little and wizened like an old dried apple, and so dark that it blended into the darkness of the room. But her eyes were bright enough. As I became accustomed to the darkness, I could see that she had some kind of fabric wrapped around her head and several rows of beads around her neck.

  “Mr. Torrance died today,” I said.

  She nodded as if she’d been expecting it.

  “He came to see you a month ago. He told you you’d have to move out because he was going to build on this land. You threatened him.”

  “I didn’t threaten him,” she said.

  “His widow claims you put a voodoo curse on him.”

  “I just warned him,” she said. “What right did he have coming here and telling me to get off his land? What made him think it was his land, eh? I was born in this place. My mama was born here before me. I tol’ him I wasn’t goin’ nowhere. And you know what he tol’ me? He said he gonna bulldoze this place and it don’ matter to him none whether I’m in it or not.”

  “So you put a curse on him?”

  She shrugged. “I tell him if he don’t change his mind, he’s going to be sorry.”

  “And you sent him a doll.”

  “I done what?” She leaned forward in her chair.

  “A voodoo doll. You sent him a voodoo doll with pins stuck in it.”

  “I never sent him no doll. That’s just mumbo jumbo stuff for tourists. Maman Boutin don’t need no dolls to do her work, young man. If I say a man goin’ to die, he goin’ to die. I got strong magic. The loa listen to me.”

  “So you never sent the doll?”

  “I tol’ you.”

  “And you didn’t send anything else? Did you give him anything to eat or drink?”

  She laughed then, a dry, cackling laugh. “You trying to find out if I give him some kin’ of bad medicine? Maman Boutin don’ need no bad medicine. You policemen wasting your time here. If my magic made him die, ain’t no way you ever goin’ to prove it.”

  She wasn’t stupid, I thought as I got to my feet. “I know that,” I said. “But this is the United States of America. You can’t go around killing people when you feel like it.”

  “Why not?” she asked. “Don’t plenty folk do it in that city of yours? They shoot someone to get his wallet or his shoes or his jacket. That Mr. Torrance was goin’ to throw these good folks out of their homes—homes where they was born, homes he had no right to.”

  “There are courts of law for that kind of thing.”

  “Everyone know the law don’ listen to po’ folks,” she said. “That’s why po’ folks need someone like me to look after them.” She looked straight at me. In the half light her gaze was intense. “You better go now,” she said.

  She reached to pick up something. At first I thought it was a stick. Then I saw that it moved. It was a snake. I had read about hair standing on end before, but it had never happened to me until now. I could hear a humming sound that seemed to echo from the rafters above my head as if angry spirits were flying around up there.

  “I’m going,” I said, and made for the door as fast as I could without appearing to rush.

  “And don’ come back,” she called after me. “You jus’ let us live in peace, and we won’t bother no one.”

  I stepped out into the pink glow of a setting sun. Renoir was standing in the shade of the tree, and he looked very relieved to see me. The chickens were nowhere in sight.

  “Come on, Renoir. We’re going,” I said.

  He needed no urging. We crossed the compound with giant strides.

  “You think she was the real thing, sir?”

  “I have no idea, Renoir,” I said, not wanting to let him know about the hairs on my neck and the snake.

  “Did you notice those chickens were all white?”

  “I did notice that.”

  We crossed the compound. The dogs stood on the track behind us, tails still at the alert. There was no sign of the big gator or the egret. The path was narrow and we had to walk in single file.

  “Did she admit to putting a hex on him, sir?” Renoir waited until we were safely through the bushes and beside the car.

  “Not exactly. But she wasn’t surprised to find he had died, either.”

  “There’s no way we could ever prove a hex, is there?” he asked.

  “I wouldn’t even attempt to, Renoir.”

  “So this was really a waste of time coming out here?” He glanced up at me as if he might have gone too far with this question. “Or was it just to satisfy your curiosity?”

  “Actually, it wasn’t a waste of time at all,” I said. “I learned one valuable piece of information. She didn’t send the doll.”

  “She could be lying.”

  I shook my head. “That old woman might do a lot of things, but lying isn’t one of them. If she’d sent the doll, she’d have been pleased to acknowledge it. She told me she didn’t need dolls to do her work.”

  Renoir opened the car door for me. “Then who sent it?”

  “That’s your job to find out, Renoi
r.”

  “Me, sir? How do I go about finding out about voodoo dolls?”

  I gave him a long, hard look. “Renoir, you can start to show some spark of initiative or you can end up as a sorry pen pusher. Your choice.”

  He nodded. “Yes, sir. Okay, I’ll find out.”

  I took pity on the hangdog look. He really was very young. I’d probably been insecure and unwilling to tread on toes when I’d first started in the department, although it was so long ago that I truthfully couldn’t remember. I did know that I hadn’t wanted to come across as too eager or brash.

  “You can start with coming with me to question the maid.”

  “Oh, the maid.” He looked impressed. “Yeah, I’d forgotten about her.”

  “I’m curious to know why she left in a hurry. Was she really freaked out by the voodoo?”

  “Are we going to question her tonight?” Renoir steered around potholes as we bumped down the track.

  “Tomorrow morning will do. I’m in serious need of a cold beer right now.”

  “Good idea, sir.” His earnest round face lit up in a grin.

  The next morning I put in a call to the pathologist who was performing the autopsy.

  “Any news yet?” I asked.

  “Cause of death was a massive heart attack. Exactly what the attending physician had said.”

  “And tissue samples revealed?”

  “Initial studies reveal the presence of a digitalis compound, which was to be expected, since it was prescribed medication.”

  “The expected amount?”

  “I don’t have details yet. Call us back later.”

  Then I took Renoir with me to visit the maid. Her name was Ernestine Williams. She was tall, big boned, and dignified looking. The only traces of her Creole ancestry were in her dark eyes and the kink in her hair. She didn’t, at first glance, look like a maid, nor like the kind of woman who would have freaked over a voodoo curse. But as Renoir said, I wasn’t born in New Orleans. I didn’t have that fear in the blood.

  “I’m sorry about running out on Miz Torrance like that,” she said as she led us into a neat little studio apartment within spitting distance of the Superdome, “but it was just too much for me. Watching that man shrivel up and die—I never saw anything like it. And then that doll with the pins in it. I tell you, I got shivers all over.”

  “Tell us about the doll,” I said, accepting a seat on a vinyl sofa covered in a multicolored crocheted afghan.

  “Miz Torrance showed it to me. She said, ‘Would you look what she’s sent now? I’ve a good mind to burn it.’ She said she certainly wasn’t going to show it to him.”

  “Were you the one who normally brought in the mail?”

  She nodded. “Yes, sir. The mailman came at nine o’clock and took the letters through to the master’s study.”

  “So you were the one who took in the package with the doll in it?”

  She looked puzzled. “No, sir. I never saw that package until Miz Torrance showed me the doll.”

  “Wasn’t that odd, didn’t you think?”

  The puzzled look continued. “No, sir. I didn’t really think about it until now, but sometimes, if I was out on an errand, Miz Torrance took in the mail herself.”

  “So you never saw the discarded paper from the package?”

  “No, sir. I never did.”

  I leaned back in the sofa. “So tell me, Ernestine, how long have you been with the Torrances?”

  “Going on seven years, sir.”

  “You must have liked it there.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “I wouldn’t exactly say that I liked it, but they paid me well and the work wasn’t too hard. Mind you, Mr. Torrance was a tough one to please. He liked everything just so, and if they were entertaining, then he’d follow me around breathing down my neck. And he’d do a lot of yelling.”

  “He yelled a lot, did he?”

  She had to smile as she shook her head. “Oh yes, sir. He yelled a terrible lot. Anything that wasn’t quite to his liking, he’d just stand there and yell for one of us to fix it. Miz Torrance did most of the cooking, because he was so fussy about the way he liked his food.”

  “And Mrs. Torrance—was she hard to please, too?”

  “Only when she was worried that the master wouldn’t be satisfied with what I was doing. She went to great lengths to keep him happy.”

  “And how did he treat her?” I asked.

  “Let me put it this way, sir. If my late husband had treated me that way, I’d have clocked him one. Mind you, I think he really cared about her. He could be sweet as sugar to her, when he wanted. If he went too far and made her cry, then he’d show up the next day with a nice piece of jewelry or an armful of flowers.”

  I looked around the neat little room. “You didn’t live in, then?”

  “I have a room at their house,” she said, “and I stay there part of the week, especially when they want to entertain. But I needed a place of my own to get away to, if you understand me. A bit of peace and quiet.”

  “I do understand, Ernestine,” I said, rising from the sofa and watching Renoir rise from his chair by the door. “So what will you do now? Will you go back now that the body’s been removed?”

  “That all depends on what Miz Torrance decides to do next, I suppose,” she said. “Maybe she don’t want to rattle around by herself in that big old house. I can’t say I’d be too anxious to sleep there, after this. So I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.” She opened the front door for us. “I’ll do what’s best for her. She’s been through a lot, bless her heart.”

  We stepped out into the sticky heat. Even at that early hour the air was so thick and heavy that it was an effort to walk through it.

  “So what do you think, Renoir?” I asked him.

  “She seemed like a nice enough woman, sir.”

  “Yes, she did. But sometimes it’s the nice ones that surprise you. Check her out when we get back to headquarters. Find out about her late husband. I’ll take a peek at Trey Torrance’s will.”

  His eyes opened in surprise. “You don’t think, sir …?”

  “As of this moment I don’t think anything. Maybe the guy caught a virus and died of a heart attack. But somebody sent that doll. Somebody wanted him dead.”

  THE WILL TURNED out to be simple enough. After several generous bequests to charities, including a large enough sum to his Carnival Krewe to keep them in beads for years, the remainder of his estate was left to his beloved wife. Mrs. Torrance was now a rich widow. I should have left it at that. God knows I had plenty of other, more pressing cases waiting for me—a young kid gunned down outside a dance club last night, a missing mother of four. But I was still intrigued by Maman Boutin. And I still didn’t believe in voodoo.

  Guys like Trey Torrance make enemies. Had some other developer got his eye on that land? Did Trey have a rival in another business deal? I wondered who else he might have told about the voodoo curse, who had come to see him when he was sick, and who might have sent the doll. I’d set Renoir onto checking into Trey Torrance’s business deals and told him to call me the moment he came up with the goods on the doll. I wasn’t holding my breath.

  In the meantime I paid another visit to Mrs. Torrance. I wanted to inquire about Trey’s medication.

  “My husband’s medication?” She looked perplexed. “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Only that traces of digoxin were found in his system, and I need to double-check that the digoxin was what was being prescribed.”

  “The bottle’s in his medicine cabinet,” she said, and led me up to a fancy-looking bathroom. Marble tub and crystal fixtures. No expense spared here. She showed me the bottle. “Here it is,” she said.

  “Was he good about taking his medication?”

  “Terrible,” she said. “Trey thought he was immortal. He’d never have taken a single pill if Ernestine or I hadn’t brought them to him regularly.”

  “Thanks. That’s all I needed.” I handed
her back the bottle. She held on to it.

  “Do you think it’s all right to throw it away now?”

  “Why don’t you hang on to it for a while, just in case,” I said, giving her a reassuring smile.

  I was good at those. I’d practiced them for twenty years, not letting a single muscle of my face betray what I was really thinking. In this case I had noticed the name of the doctor who prescribed the pills. I had noticed that sixty were prescribed on October first. To be taken three times a day. I had noticed that ten remained. Even if he had started taking them on the date they were prescribed, there should have been at least fifteen left. So either he had lost them or somebody had helped him into the hereafter.

  I put in a call to the family physician. “Mrs. Torrance told me that you upped the dosage on his medication after his heart developed abnormal rhythms,” I said.

  “I did up it slightly.”

  “To more than three pills a day?”

  “No, same number, just an increased strength.”

  “Thanks.” I hung up again. My hunch had been correct.

  As I walked in the door at headquarters, I was met by a very excited Renoir. It was the first time I had seen him animated. “I found out who bought the doll,” he blurted out so loudly that everyone turned, for the entire length of the tiled hallway.

  “Nice going.” I patted him on the back. “Who was it?”

  “A woman.” He looked very pleased with himself.

  “Great. That rules out half of the population.”

  He ignored my sarcasm. “Did you know there are voodoo stores right here in New Orleans? You can actually go to a store and buy gris-gris and veve designs and spells!”

  “Nothing surprises me about this place,” I said. “So you traced the store?”

  “I found it on the Internet. You can search for almost anything these days,” he said. “I went in and the owner said they usually sell these dolls to tourists, but this lady was definitely a local. Bought it about three weeks ago. So that proves it, doesn’t it, sir?”

  “Proves what?”

  “That she was lying.”

  “Who was?”

  “Maman Boutin. She lied about sending the doll.”

  “And what makes you think the woman was Maman Boutin?”