The Legend of Marie Laveau Mystery Trilogy

by Jewell Parker Rhodes

  “Let’s go. Madame DeLaCroix’s no use.” Reneaux’s hand was on his gun. The men in the room had edged closer, protective of Madame.

  “No.” Marie moved close enough to smell the woman’s breath. Laudanum. A nineteenth-century opiate. Sweet and bitter.

  “You’ve got to let me have the baby. I’ll care for her. It’s a girl, did you know? Your bloodline. Ta lignée.”

  The woman sucked spittle, hissed like a cat. The jockey man stared at the floor, his head shaking from side to side.

  “Admit your family has abandoned her. Simple. That’s all. I’ll adopt the baby and care for her.”

  A hand reached out; Marie flinched. The woman stared and Marie shifted her weight into the back of her heels, feeling like the woman was draining, sucking the life out of her. The woman looked away this time, but again Marie felt she’d come out the worse. She’d lost some ground.

  “Don’t you care where the baby is?” Marie screamed.

  “Non.”

  The bar men were edging closer, looking at Marie like she was crazy.

  “Come on, Marie.”

  “No.”

  The jockey man blocked her. “Madame’s tired. Too tired for this.” His voice was soft, strangely comforting.

  “I need to make sure the baby’s fine.”

  “She’s fine. True. C’est vrai.”

  Marie wanted to believe him.

  “Vite. Go away,” screeched the woman, her hand raised midair. She began to sing:

  Guéde, Guéde, have mercy,

  Don’t let me lose my way.

  Guéde, Guéde,

  Don’t let me lose my way.

  Then, her song switched:

  Fais dodo, mon piti bébé.

  La lune toute jaune, se lève.

  Fais dodo, mon piti bébé.

  Marie kept stepping backward, like she was being pushed, a consistent pressure moving her out of the bar.

  A mist clouded her eyes, then cleared. Women in rough shifts were lying on cots: some curled, knees to their chest; some spread-eagled, bodies defenseless; some on their bellies, hands tucked beneath them. Some were crying, their mouths open with silent wails. Some, slack-jawed, rocked; some twitched, batted at the air. Women from another age.

  “Doc. Marie? You okay?”

  She felt drained. What happened?

  “Breathe.”

  The men laughed. Her heart raced, skipping beats.

  Reneaux’s arm was steadying her. “Let’s go.”

  Someone clicked off the lights. Marie felt ill-prepared.

  The old woman was gone. Disappeared like a ghost. No sound of shuffling, just absence. A depression in the shadows.

  “Did you see him?” she whispered, urgent. “He turned off the lights.”

  “Who?”

  In the back room. Something glinting between the door and frame. Her knees buckled. “I’ve lost the baby,” Marie moaned.

  “Come, let me get you out of here.”

  An ambulance wailed. A wail meant disaster, distress, but it called to Marie’s heart. Like a siren luring her upon the rocks. No doubt the ambulance was on its way to Charity. She needed to go where she’d be more useful. She was a doctor. She could heal. Or at least try.

  Reneaux led her outside into the light; Marie shielded her eyes.

  * * *

  Pandemonium both outside and in. Ambulances were lined up at the door. The hospital ER was already crowded. Sunday, 10:00 A.M. Nowhere else to go for a bad hangover, strep throat, cancer spreading through your lungs, or worsening diabetes. The halls overflowing with the poor, sick, and weary. Churches and hospital. Both guaranteed to overflow on Sundays.

  K-Paul, freckled face sweating, was shouting, directing traffic. “Morgue. He’s dead.” “Critical.” “Him up to surgery.” “Huan, stitches.”

  “Why didn’t you leave him at home?” K-Paul asked, looking at Kind Dog.

  “I said the same thing,” muttered Reneaux.

  “Never occurred to me.” Marie shrugged on her resident’s coat.

  “Knew you were strange.” K-Paul lifted a sheet. “Another morgue stop.”

  “Dogs aren’t allowed in a hospital,” complained El.

  “Seeing-eye dogs are,” said Huan, rolling a gurney into treatment.

  “Yeah. He’s helping me see.”

  “Humpf,” said El, arms crossed against her broad chest.

  “Okay, Sully, keep him out front, at your desk. Please. For me?”

  “Sure. Come on, boy.” Kind Dog looked at Marie; she nodded; he trotted off.

  “I’m glad you’re here.” DuLac’s gloves were already speckled with blood.

  “Me, too.” Be a doctor and heal.

  * * *

  She snapped on gloves.

  “Room Three,” said El. “Chest wound. Stabbing.”

  Adrenaline kicked in. Marie forgot about Reneaux, Kind Dog, and the baby. Forgot about an old woman hating her daughter and afraid to love her great-grandchild. In seconds, she was probing a wound, rough from serrated edges—a kitchen knife? The boy was unconscious, his face smooth and bland like a sleeping angel’s.

  “What happened?”

  “Brawl at Saint Mary’s High. Glad you skipped your unplanned leave.”

  Marie overlooked the sarcasm. She began packing the wound while El tackled the IV lines.

  The curtains parted. DuLac peered at her handiwork. “Call upstairs. He’ll live. Saunders, stitch him.”

  “Young.” Marie stared at the face, baby fat still in the cheeks.

  “Oui, Miz Marie. The young keep feeding on each other. Soon won’t be any left.”

  “We’ll save this one.” El dashed by, swinging open the ringed curtains.

  Marie had a wide view of the hospital. Some kids blaring boom box hip-hop. Bodies on gurneys in the halls, in rooms, treatment stations; some even stacked near the elevator doors. A blur of nurses, doctors in white, medics, technicians in blue focusing on kids wounded and dying. The ER ambulance arrival door was still flung open. Heat wafted into the ER. If he was here, Severs would be shouting, “Air-conditioning costs money, people.” But the ambulances were abandoned, parked haphazardly, their doors flung open, forlorn and empty, displaying their life-support systems. Sirens off, the emergency lights still swirled red, yellow like an odd disco ball, making eerie patterns on the hospital linoleum.

  “What is it?” DuLac was staring at her.

  Someone had been left. She was sure of it. She sprinted across the room. Looked inside the nearest ambulance, then the next, and the next. In the last vehicle, not even on a gurney, but stretched out on the metal floor, was a girl. Sixteen, seventeen? Her pale face was made up, almost grotesque with bright blue shadow, purple lips, and red circles of rouge. Her hair was in tiny cornrows. Her dress was blue with lace, old-fashioned like Marie-Claire’s. Like Madame DeLaCroix’s.

  Marie was furious. How could the medics have left her here? Dead or not, she shouldn’t have been forgotten.

  “Medic,” she screamed.

  “Need help?”

  “Aw, Reneaux. They just left her. Just left her here—”

  “—like a dog?”

  “No, worse.” Marie tugged at the girl’s arm, trying to lift her body.

  “Wait.” Reneaux squeezed into the ambulance. He squatted. “Look.” He lifted her left shoulder. “A tattoo. Similar to the dust markings on the other bodies. An inverted cross with a snake instead of Christ.”

  “Some ritual?”

  “Or made to look that way. Leave the girl here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This is a crime scene. Someone dumped the body.”

  “She wasn’t forgotten?”

  “No. Look at her. Known any medic not to use a litter? ’Sides, does she look dressed for school?”

  “No. Looks like she’s been at a costume party. Some kind of ball.”

  “It ain’t Mardi Gras,” said Reneaux.

  “She was a pretty girl,” m
urmured Marie, staring at the blue satin slippers, the cameo necklace accenting her breasts. Her appearance was out of sync, dressed for the wrong century.

  “No apparent bruises from a brawl. No knife wounds.” Reneaux scribbled on his pad.

  “Dumped?” It was DuLac.

  “Appears so,” said Reneaux. “I’ll call it into the station. We should leave her, Doc. This is a possible crime scene now. Might be some prints.”

  Reluctantly, Marie backed out of the ambulance. “Doesn’t seem right to leave her.”

  “Only way to catch her killer.”

  “Miz Marie, your sight wrought magic again.”

  “Intuition, DuLac.”

  “Yet infallible.”

  “If that were true, I’d have known you were lying to me for the last two months.”

  “I’m not your enemy, Marie. I had reasons for not telling you about the DeLaCroixs. Good reasons.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Let’s have dinner tonight. Me, you, El, Reneaux. I cook a fine gumbo.”

  “No. Not ever.”

  “Doctor Levant.” Reneaux was drawling again, the good ole southern boy charm. “Three women dead. Your friend Jacques.” He said “friend” without any sarcasm. “There’s a pattern here. At dinner, we can talk about it. Maybe solve this puzzle.”

  “Only puzzle I care about is getting Baby Doe—home. My home.”

  “I understand.”

  “No, you don’t, DuLac.”

  Reneaux bent toward her ear. “Settle down, Doc. Marie. Give him a chance.”

  DuLac looked sad-eyed, and Marie felt furious at herself for feeling sorry for him.

  “I can’t.”

  “You mean you won’t? When the baby’s yours, and it will be one day—my only prophecy—you going to tell her you didn’t help find her mother’s killer?”

  Marie trembled. DuLac’s words hurt. Part of her didn’t care about the murdered mother. She wanted the baby. Safe. With her. But how could she, a doctor, not care about death from unnatural causes? She did care. All the murdered girls could’ve been her baby, her baby grown into a young woman, then killed for no reason. Some other doctor would be pondering why another young girl had to die.

  DuLac towered over her. He whispered, “Don’t you know New Orleans be the City of Sin?”

  Wonderingly, Marie stared at him.

  Reneaux murmured, “I’m positive more people are going to die.”

  “Women,” Marie answered, knowing it was true. “More women are going to die.” Jacques was an anomaly—she was sure of it.

  Marie looked back at the body. There wouldn’t be any sirens for a forensic team. Just more men inspecting this poor girl. Inspecting? Why’d she think that?

  In her mind’s eye, she could see the girl undressed on a bed . . . undressed on a steel examining table. In each case, she was surrounded by men.

  Reneaux was watching her, sympathetic, concerned. DuLac’s face was a mask.

  “Eight o’clock?”

  The glass doors slid open. She stopped midway through.

  “Reneaux, is a pregnancy test standard procedure?

  DuLac exhaled: “You think?”

  “I don’t know what I think. The other women—” she stopped, words catching in her throat.

  “Murdered,” said Reneaux. “The ones murdered?”

  Marie nodded. “Were they checked for pregnancy?”

  “Why would you think that?” DuLac asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “If not,” said Reneaux, “we’ll get a court order to exhume them. Easy enough.”

  In New Orleans, bodies were buried above ground. Marie had never visited a Louisiana cemetery, but she imagined crypts described by Poe. Walled-off tombs; possibly babies, fetuses, dying in their mother’s abdomen. Buried twice over. Damn, she was becoming morbid.

  “See you after the shift.” The automatic doors slid shut. The air conditioner buzzed. She’d scream if she spent another second standing over a dead body with Reneaux and DuLac.

  * * *

  Tired, hungry, Marie entered notes on a little girl’s chart. Ear infection left too long. Pus-filled canals. She’d write a prescription, a recheck, then be gone, downstairs to the cafeteria for a four-o’clock lunch. Only egg salad would be left. Maybe a tuna salad. Neither her favorite. At least the coffee would be hot.

  “Doctor Levant.”

  They were exiting the elevator: Severs and a tall man, six-four, maybe even six-five, dressed splendidly in a double-breasted suit, a silk kerchief in his pocket.

  Heat washed through her. Pheromones. Cheeks flush. Her heart rate up. Body chemistry encouraging her to mate. Nothing but lust.

  Marie nudged El. Almost five hours they’d worked, side by side. Professional. Polite. More than she cared to admit, Marie missed their easy camaraderie.

  “What do you think, El?”

  El frowned. “Not my type.”

  “He’s the best-looking man I’ve seen all day.”

  “You’re a fool then. Reneaux’s got more charm in his earring than this overdressed fool.”

  “I think you’ve got a crush.”

  “Humpf.”

  “Doctor Levant,” called Severs.

  Bemused by El’s perverseness, Marie walked, taking her time, weaving between patients, wheelchairs, gurneys, and abandoned IV trees. She was being watched. Taking her time, gave her more time to watch him.

  He was midnight black. Blacker than black. Much as she admired Severs, she knew he had his own form of racial prejudice, his bias against dark-skinned folks. She’d read history. Tales explaining how New Orleanians still considered descendants of nineteenth-century free coloreds (often the bastard children of French aristocrats) as superior. A white relation and white skin seemed to insure status and wealth, property, and deference. Two hundred and fifty years later, folks like Severs were still jealously guarding their privileges, fawning over those whose light skin marked them as fellow members. The man beside Severs had some other power beyond color.

  Handsome, darker than Reneaux—almost as if in the very darkness of him, you could see shadows and images of African glory.

  Marie had always had a healthy appetite for sex. She’d lain with men, a whole host of colors. A sexual rainbow. Color didn’t matter, it was always some energy, some quality that attracted her. Jacques had been sensual on the dance floor, good-spirited, good-hearted. But she’d always been attracted to the strong, those who worked out, buffing their bodies, or even those, dressed as office men, who nonetheless exuded control, vision, adept at political, corporate power. She felt a contraction in her abdomen. This man, standing so nonchalantly beside Severs, was silently calling her name.

  Severs was speaking, his words floating away. Marie paid him no more mind than a shoo-fly. His companion was luring her. Some outrageous energy poured out of him, promising sweet nights. She stopped short. No, not sweet.

  Up close, she could see the skeleton beneath his face.

  He clasped her hand.

  She felt the violence. Like the time there’d been a storm and a wire cracked, whipping downward, twisting, snaking, snapping at her legs, her lace-tipped socks and black shoes. She’d screamed. The air was filled with a deadly charge. It was sheer luck she hadn’t been touched.

  But now she felt as though she had. Touched by a malevolent force. Electrified beyond redemption.

  She kept her expression bland.

  “Doctor,” he murmured.

  She tilted her head, listening for the sound beneath the sound, the meaning behind the word “doctor.” Subtext, nuance. Nothing was as it seemed.

  No, not sweet. This man could never, ever be sweet.

  He squeezed her hand—quick, hard. She bristled. He smiled and she had an overwhelming sense that he’d issued a challenge.

  Severs was grinning like Christmas. Much as she appreciated Severs, she deplored his tactics. This meeting had less to do with her as a doctor, more to do with her
being a woman. Why not Huan? Or Meredith?

  “I have work.”

  “Monsieur Allez, trustee president, stopped by to visit us.”

  “You mean check up on us?” Now she understood Severs’s obsequiousness. Keep Monsieur Allez happy. How many other women—doctors, nurses—had been trotted out for Allez’s inspection?

  “As you see, Monsieur Allez, we need everything. Technicians, beds, supplies. IV lines. Linens. Can’t your board provide more money? People are suffering, dying. Steal if you have to—” (She didn’t know why she said “steal.”)

  “Steal? Surely not.” Not a southern drawl, nor Creole or Cajun patois. Crisp, clear, standard English—the kind from good prep schools and New England colleges. In medical school, she’d met plenty of self-satisfied sons of privilege. Just not too many black ones.

  “As in Robin Hood. Getting the rich to provide for the poor.”

  “We hold charity balls. Auctions. Wrangle from city government.”

  “You can ask the mayor.”

  “A friend of mine.”

  “It ought to be simple, then. More effective than expensive entertainments for the rich, which may or may not raise much money for charity.”

  His gaze seemed to pinion her like a butterfly. She was under a microscope; her assets being catalogued and measured.

  Then, Allez’s body relaxed. Too much so. The opposite of Reneaux, who went still, his muscles tense. Foolishly, she couldn’t help smiling. She excited him.

  Severs spoke. “Doctor Levant, perhaps you’d like to show Monsieur Allez around.”

  “No. I’ve got work.” Never mind lunch.

  Severs coughed.

  Marie felt almost sorry for him. He was a sycophant. Dangerous, if he thought he could manipulate her. Severs’s only saving grace was his love for the hospital.

  “Please, Doctor Levant. I’d enjoy spending time with you.”

  Allez’s face was angular. Sweeping high cheekbones. A broad brow, shapely eyes, nose. Lips like soft black clouds.

  “More people need my care than you.”

  He shrugged, stretched out his hand, palm upraised. A false vulnerability.

  She’d lost her appetite. “I need to get back to work.”

  “I hope we meet again.”

  “Collector,” she thought. She could tell by the sound of his voice. She kept walking, not looking back. He might or might not have found her really attractive, but, now, since she’d rebuffed him, he’d feel compelled to collect her.