The Legend of Marie Laveau Mystery Trilogy

by Jewell Parker Rhodes

  “Voodoo.”

  The sandy-haired drummer reset his drums. Hollered, “Elroy, if you fucked with me—” He slammed down an empty leather bag on the snare. “Them’s my lucky sticks. Elroy, I’ll bust your ass.”

  “Who’s Elroy?” asked Parks as Marie asked, “You’ve lost them?”

  The drummer, skinny like a rope, stared at her. He looked pitiful, desperate.

  “Your sticks are gone,” she said.

  “I always put them back in my case. Always. Elroy, a clarinetist, is fucking with me.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  The drummer hooted. “I soaked his reeds in gin.”

  “A joker,” said Parks.

  “Look in your bag again,” said Marie.

  “I’m tellin’ you. They’re not there.”

  “I think they are. Will be.”

  The drummer slipped his hand in the bag. “Nothing.”

  “Wait.”

  JT pushed the sticks, watching them roll across the band floor.

  “I’ll be damned,” said Parks.

  “Wait,” said Marie as the drummer bent for the sticks.

  JT lifted the sticks, slipping them inside the leather bag lying on the drummer’s chair.

  The drummer’s face twisted, awestruck. “Rudy? Rudy took my sticks? Son of a bitch.”

  “No. Someone else. Another spirit.”

  Like a minstrel, JT slapped his chest and thighs.

  Parks sat backward in a chair, his head on his crossed arms; Marie patted his back.

  “I can’t believe I’m asking this,” said Parks. “Do you know why a ghost would want your sticks?”

  “Drum’s everything,” the drummer said, shrugging, palms up. “She knows. Ask her.”

  “Drums call the spirits,” said Marie, more certain than ever that this was the drummer who’d been possessed at La Mer.

  “Always been that way. Since the beginning. If a ghost had my sticks, he’s asking for someone to be called.”

  “And providing concrete evidence of the unseen.”

  “Okay, Doc. I get it. I’m along for the ride.” Parks paused in lighting another cigarette. “Why yours?”

  “Huh?” The drummer slid his sticks, lovingly, from the bag.

  “I mean, why yours? Your sticks?”

  The drummer twirled on his chair, then beat a crescendo drumroll. Cymbals crashed, punctuating a period. “My people.”

  Parks rolled his eyes, muttering, “My people.”

  “Come from a long line of drummers. Back to Africa.”

  “Where can we reach you?”

  “Algiers. Just ask. Everybody can tell you where I be.”

  “Name?”

  “Wire. As in skinny as a wire.”

  “I would’ve said rope.”

  Wire shrugged. “I prefer Cat. Like cat skins.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Parks.

  “African drums are made with animal hides,” answered Marie.

  “Ela kuku dea ’gbe wu la gbagbe. A dead animal cries louder than a live one.”

  “Anlo-Ewe? from Ghana?” asked Marie.

  “You’re the one, Maman Marie.” Wire pointed his drumstick. He tossed his sticks high. They twirled, spinning and spinning, until he snatched them and banged twice on the snare. “Interesting times,” he crowed. “Dee-vine. Dee-vine.”

  “What do you say, Detective? Enough evidence? JT took the sticks, then brought them back. Just for you.”

  “Me?”

  “You’re the skeptic. And JT wants you to believe. Drumming is the clue. Connecting the murders. Maybe even offering the cure.”

  “Better believe it,” said Wire, placing sunglasses over his eyes, beginning a slow rhythm, hypnotic on his drums. “Miz Marie, you’re gonna need me.”

  “You think so?”

  “Know so.” Beats fell fast, furious. Wire sang off-key, “Conjure woman, turn your life around. Upside down. Marie Laveau.”

  “Come on, Parks. We need to get ready.”

  “For what?”

  “A voodoo ceremony.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  Marie’s smile faded. “I wish I was. Ceremonies are meant to enlighten, heal. This one might be dangerous.” She looked at Wire. “You’ll come?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it.”

  “You know where?”

  “Everybody knows where.”

  Marie nodded. “You okay with this, Parks?” She held her breath, knowing his answer could alter everything.

  She knew as surely as she knew mosquitoes drained blood, evil didn’t necessarily disappear because of prayer. Both a voodooienne and a cop would be needed to solve this crime.

  Parks looked at the underside of his wrist. His veins, blue. A scar of a tattoo disappearing under his jacket, his shirt cuff.

  Parks looked at her coolly. “Teach me,” he said. “This world, the next. Don’t matter. Murder is still murder.”

  In the sea, it had been resting with the bones. Slaves tossed overboard, murdered pirates, drowned seafarers. Been resting among the empty shells of mollusks, snails, among coral reefs and mounds of trash. Once the water had been sparkling green, blue, and white foam, now it was muddied with silt, soil, and waste from New Orleans. It had been his city once.

  Part of the city, it still recognized—the Quarter. It didn’t recognize the tall buildings, the moving things—trolleys, cars?—was that what they were called? Buses. Strange replacements for a horse between a man’s thighs, trotting to the cadence of a whip.

  Blood fed it memories. Rudy’s blood had been sour.

  Music sweet, blood bitter. Like the man. Needle in his arm. Passed out on a floor. Forgetfulness. It dove deeper, draining blood farther away from the heart. A girl. Hair the color of dark cherries. Hands caressing, an embrace. A kiss.

  It remembered. Touch. Feel. It slowed its draining. Lulled by a remembrance—of what? Who?

  Rudy’s secret. Deep in his blood, sinews. Strangling the cherry-haired woman with his bare hands. Seconds seem like hours. She can’t get away.

  Can’t make hands release. Rudy presses, harder . . . harder still. Inside her, thrusting in and out. A welling ecstasy. Her eyes, bug eyed. Her jaw, slack. Her hands trying to pull his hands away. Her hands slip to her sides; her eyes dull. His body explodes. Joy, standing over a pliant body. He draped over her, his tongue licking her, blowing against her breast, as he would a trumpet. Her areola his reed.

  It felt Rudy’s and the woman’s life both draining, dissolving. Two deaths, satisfying its hunger. One, actual; the other, blood memories.

  It understood Rudy’s emotions. Better than JT’s.

  It remembered women.

  It understood without knowing why, how—it understood killing a woman.

  Understood how killing could be better than a kiss.

  With Rudy’s blood, it smeared, marked the wall.

  FIVE

  OUTSIDE CHARITY HOSPITAL

  LATE EVENING, TUESDAY

  Marie stood in the shadows, leaning against a wall, just outside the circle of a streetlamp’s glow. She stared at Charity, her second home, rising like a series of turreted monoliths piercing the sky.

  In 1736, it was originally called, L’Hospital des Pauvres de la Charité, Hospital for the Poor. Its mission never changed even as sites did, as it grew exponentially, becoming a storied complex with a thousand window eyes. A labyrinth of floors, dark stairwells, and whirring elevators ferrying up the living, sending down the dead.

  Marie swatted at a blood-sucking mosquito. With the back of her hand, she wiped sweat from her brow.

  DuLac had ordered her to stay home—to rest, prepare for the ceremony. But after Marie-Claire fell asleep, she called Louise to babysit, told Kind Dog to stay alert, and walked out the door in a T-shirt, tattered jeans, and sandals.

  She’d never once imagined, given an unexpected night off, the choice of sleep, she’d be yearning for her graveyard shift.

  She re
membered DuLac from new resident orientation, his eyes bloodshot, barking, “Devils find it easy to move at night. More folks shoot, stab, beat each other when the sun goes down. More than any other time.”

  As a first-year resident, she’d smothered a laugh. But she’d learned DuLac never lied. Three years later and not a night had passed when she didn’t have to change a wet, bloodied lab coat. Fight for a life. Or tell someone that a loved one had died.

  She’d learned, too, that while DuLac meant “devils” as in “bad-behaving people,” others, especially Catholics, meant “devils” literally, as in demons, Satan.

  Marie knew voodoo, in its origins, resisted simplistic definitions of good and evil. The snake in the Garden of Eden offered knowledge. Always a good. Humanity didn’t “fall” from grace into sin. Humanity was a never-ending blending of impulses: to heal and to hurt; to help and to harm.

  But, in New Orleans, African-based faiths blended with Catholicism, and linguistic, cultural shifts changed Voudu into voodoo, with resonant echoes in hoodoo, folk magick, and southern rootwork. In the New World, faith, like people, became a “mixed-blood stew.” Evil, as a concept, thrived until it turned on the faith itself—pop culture stereotypes convinced both blacks and whites that the slaves’ ancient faith was steeped in barbarism with an evil, killing intent.

  Part of her struggle was to stir, re-spice, the “stew”—reclaiming, reasserting, voodoo’s nurturing, beneficent power. “Your fa, your fate,” DuLac declared when he recognized her power. Still, it had been two centuries since Marie Laveau died, and unlike Harry Potter tales, there weren’t any schools for a Voodoo Queen.

  Marie crossed the street. A pinch-faced woman rushed a swaddled baby into the ER. Probably fever. A touch of pneumonia. But you could never be too careful. Among immigrants, it could be TB. Among citizens whose parents forgot or couldn’t afford the vaccine, it could be measles. Or chicken pox.

  Marie longed to walk into the ER. To follow the woman and her baby.

  The ER was Charity’s heart. Two ambulances were parked; another was arriving, wailing, red lights flaring. A homeless man played with the electric sliding glass doors, stepping on and off the mat.

  She saw sweet Sully speak to the man, then guide him by the hand into the ER, the glass doors sliding shut. Immediately, the glass misted with humidity, making the ER seem out of focus. She knew Sully would give the man some of his dinner, red beans and rice, chicory-spiced coffee from his thermos.

  Marie felt an itch, like red ants, trailing down her neck. She turned.

  JT and Rudy were standing behind her. Up against the convenience store’s graffiti-filled wall. Both looking patient, woeful.

  She bit her lip, turned away.

  She’d rather be inside Charity’s lighted corridors, fighting death, than outside, standing in the thick night air, trying to avoid thinking about conducting a ceremony to quell a monster. Trying to avoid the burden of unnaturally murdered ghosts.

  She was tempted to believe unquiet souls might have the capacity for pure evil. Not JT and Rudy, though. She felt sure both had been fallible, imperfect men who may have done evil; but as spirits, they were looking for justice, for peace. Unlike the spirit that had killed them.

  “Damn.” She needed to be inside Charity, where science did its best to cut life and death into digestible, bite-size pieces.

  She wanted to do what she was trained to do. Use modern medicine’s tools. Take a history. Blood pressure, temperature, pulse. Order tests. Interpret an X-ray. Stop bleeding. Suture wounds.

  Be a doctor and heal.

  The ambulance, its wail suddenly quieted, its red light still, pulled into the parking bay.

  She couldn’t help running to the van, throwing open the doors to a cursing kid, sixteen, seventeen, with a bandaged shoulder, bleeding sluggishly.

  “I’ll walk. Won’t be carried,” said the street tough, trying to peacock his courage. Only his restless eyes showed fear. Shock.

  Marie nodded at the EMTs—Luella, who’d ridden with the patient; Eddie, the driver. They both recognized her.

  “I told you, I’ll walk.”

  Exasperated, Eddie spit on the sidewalk. Luella rolled her eyes.

  “How about a wheelchair? Keep you from dripping blood on the sidewalk and floor.” Hands on her hips, Marie cocked her head.

  The glass doors slid open. Huan, her ponytail bobbing, arrived, breathless. “Hey.”

  “Hey,” Marie answered. “I’ve got him.” She swerved a wheelchair forward.

  “I sure would like to get you,” snapped the boy. “Fine as chocolate cream. You a doctor?”

  “You a patient?” Marie pointed. “Sit.”

  Wincing, the boy climbed out of the ambulance. He was handsome, lean. His sleeveless shirt, cut at the midriff, showed off his hard abs, a skull and bones tattoo identified his gang. The Buccaneers. By her guess, he’d been lucky. Shot clean through. No major damage, just a lot of blood. His baggy jeans rode low on his hips. Fruit Of The Loom underwear showed, tearing between the cotton and the elastic. His pants looked ready to fall off, just like a toddler’s. In a year or two, he’d probably be dead. His youth wasted.

  “DuLac isn’t going to like this,” whispered Huan. “He should be on a stretcher.”

  “Tell me about it,” said Luella.

  The young man’s face paled. His bandage turned crimson, flowering blood.

  Marie wheeled the chair around. The doors parted. “This isn’t all DuLac isn’t going to like.”

  DuLac walked toward her, his face grim. “I thought I told you to take the night off.”

  Staff and patients stared. K-Paul winked. Two nurses twittered behind their hands. El, with her witch’s nails, shooed them away. “Get to work.”

  DuLac pulled Marie by the arm, shouting to Huan, “Take over.”

  “Hey, give me back my doc.”

  “I’ll give you what for,” snarled El, startling the bleeding boy into submission. Huan wheeled him to Curtain Three.

  DuLac pushed Marie inside his office, slamming his door. Rigid, he stared at her. She’d never seen him so furious. Absent his Southern charm.

  “You have a ceremony to prepare for.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.” Then, defensively, “I was going stir-crazy.”

  DuLac studied her, his weight pressing into his hands, onto his desk.

  Marie willed herself not to flinch or shift her gaze.

  “Proper food?”

  “Yes.”

  “Altar candles? Offerings? Incense?”

  “Yes, they’re all ready.”

  “Then you should be preparing your mind.”

  “You tell me, then,” Marie demanded, “what should I be doing? How exactly do I prepare for a creature no one’s seen? Perhaps can’t see. But, amazingly, drains blood? All of it.

  “I’m not even sure I can call it to a ceremony. This thing. This creature. Whatever it is. Spirit loas, that’s what I know. Agwé. Ezili. Ogun. Damballah. If you know better, DuLac, then you do it. You prepare.”

  DuLac’s gaze was hooded, lids half closed, as if he were looking inside himself.

  “I’m sorry,” murmured Marie.

  Three years ago, DuLac drank heavily. Staff covered for him, making sure no one was hurt; but it was only a matter of time before he harmed someone. Lost his license. Been jailed.

  Reneaux had confided that DuLac drank because he’d dreamed of being a houngan. But the spiritual gifts weren’t his to carry.

  They were hers.

  She whispered, “DuLac—you know I love you. I’ve done all I could to prepare for tomorrow’s ceremony. Reviewed Laveau’s journal. Assembled food and costumes. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be and I just have to pray that’s good enough.” She raised her hand, forestalling his words. “I’m grateful for your training. All you’ve done for me. But I’m me. A twenty-first-century voodooienne and a doctor. I need to do what I think is right. Faith healing, science healing, I need to be useful.
Charity needs me. I’m going to work. I need to work.”

  Hands in his pockets, DuLac rocked back on his heels. “Bien. You’re more woman than I thought. Let’s go.”

  Her mouth dropped open with surprise.

  He opened the office door. The bright hall light flooded DuLac’s small, dim office. “You coming? Finish what you started? Huan might need a second opinion.”

  Marie grinned. “Don’t think you’ve got the upper hand. I won the argument.”

  “Argument? What argument? I see a Voodoo Queen, a woman who’s coming into her own. Besides, I knew you’d come here.”

  “Sure you did.”

  “You’ve got your own bloodlust.” DuLac turned, seeing Marie’s stricken gaze. He shut the door, his back against it. “That came out wrong. You’re nothing like the creature.”

  She dipped her head. But, guiltily, she felt there was some truth in DuLac’s word: “bloodlust.” She loved stemming its flow, mastering it. In surgery, blood was predictable; in the ER, on any given night, blood flowed everywhere—from any and all orifices, from all types of wounds.

  DuLac stepped forward, clasping Marie’s face with his palms. “I’m not jealous of you. I used to wallow in self-pity, wanting the gift of prophecy. Sight. No one else in Orleans seemed ready to carry it. Or those who did were pretenders. Corrupt. All I want to do is serve you.”

  “You mean teach me?”

  “After the first year, you outpaced my knowledge. Even as a doctor, your skills are beyond mine.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. Let me be proud of you.”

  Marie felt mournful, sensing their relationship was about to change irrevocably. She didn’t want DuLac thinking she was better than he was.

  DuLac kissed her brow. “It’s the way of fathers and daughters. Children outpacing their parents. Daughters scratching their rough edges on their fathers. No wonder I’m turning gray.”

  She embraced him, holding tight. Blinking back tears.

  “Sass. Too much sass.”

  She felt giddy, happy. DuLac was still her family. That hadn’t changed.

  “Get to work. Proper clothes, please.”

  “Sure, boss.” Marie flung open the door. “I’ve got a lab coat in my locker.”

  EI had been watching for her. Brow furrowed, mouth tight.