The Legend of Marie Laveau Mystery Trilogy

by Jewell Parker Rhodes

  She overheard Severs apologizing for her behavior, intoning about the stress of ER, dedicated doctors, and sleep deprivation. She didn’t hear Allez’s response.

  “What’ve you got for me, El?”

  “An unwed mother with no prior prenatal care. A drunk who had a bottle smashed into his head. A boy with burns on his hands. Said he’d been playing with matches. Looks like cigarette burns to me.”

  “Hell.” Marie took the charts. “Call Social Services.” She hoped Marie-Claire’s baby—no, her baby—wasn’t being hurt.

  She turned. Allez was by the elevator, still watching her.

  An unbidden thought: Jacques would never have hurt her—this man—would.

  She thought about calling Reneaux. What would she say? This man frightened her? No more than a handshake and she felt inexplicable terror.

  Since being in New Orleans, her dreams made her feel weak, disoriented. Thoughts she couldn’t control multiplied in her mind like worms.

  She looked back over her shoulder.

  It was Allez who’d orchestrated the meeting. Allez—who’d used Severs as the pawn.

  Allez clasped Severs’s hand, and the diamond on his right finger glinted down, then up. Light fractured on the ceiling.

  She turned with a vengeance. “You were at Breezy’s. This morning. Hiding in the back room.”

  His expression hardened. “I don’t hide.”

  “Why wouldn’t he be at Breezy’s? He owns it,” said Severs.

  Allez slowly smiled, but the effect was grotesque. A smile ill-suited to his eyes that dared—what? Dared her to be his adversary? Dared her to call him a liar?

  She was scared. But Allez reminded her of all the men and boys who’d tried to take advantage of a vulnerable foster care girl.

  “I don’t believe you.” She felt his fury, tangible like smoke in the air.

  “Welcome to my world,” he murmured, and she walked away, slowly, sedately. Inhale, exhale. Swallowing bile, quelling her nausea, Marie wondered how it’d come to this—all she wanted to do was to love a child.

  arie ached from lifting, bending over bodies, from scurrying from one crisis to the next. The burned boy confessed: “Ramie did it.” A teenager bullying an eight-year-old. Marie was relieved. No parental abuse. No foster care. Instead, a sweet boy with two parents swearing he wouldn’t be harmed again.

  Marie was happy for him. He was loved. Too bad no one had loved the murdered girls. At least loved them enough to protect them. They’d only been loved enough (or abused enough) to become pregnant.

  Reneaux called. They’d all been pregnant. One, six weeks. Another eight. One, thirteen, entering the second trimester. Coroners had filed it in their reports. Of the three, only Marie-Claire had had a viable babe.

  But other than the usual flood of get-well calls, no one called the hospital looking for an underage girl. A missing daughter? An absent niece? A cousin lost with no ID? Just unidentified cases of good girls (or, maybe, bad girls?) gone dead.

  Reneaux said there’d been no missing person reports filed. Bad or good, saint or sinner—how could so many women die and nobody care?

  Easy. She remembered her own history. None of the neighbors cared about her and her mother. No relatives claimed her. No one wore black and sang about the righteous Lord. Or flying off to glory.

  Social Services had buried her mother in a pauper’s grave. No memorial. No newspaper photo and obituary. Her foster mother just announced, “It’s done,” like her mother was so much dirt. Thrown away, cast off. “Done.” Encased in wood. Baked in soil. No one in the world would ever know she existed. No one would ever know a soul was lost during Chicago’s driest heat, or know about a little girl’s memory of arriving home too late and holding her mother’s still-wet hand.

  When she was eighteen, her caseworker gave her a copy of her file, a box with her mother’s effects and the location of her grave. The “L” trip was far—way beyond the city’s edge. Past picket fence suburbs, rural shacks, plants spewing smoke and the city dump.

  Trudging over snow-packed ground, she’d searched for her mother. She, too, was Marie. With her bare hands, she wiped headstones, pulled back dry weeds, scratched crusted dirt. Marie Winters. Marie Pulaswoski. Marie Ann. Old women—one, dead in the 1920s; another, dead in 1983; and an infant, dead in 1885.

  Nearing sundown, she found the small brick square pressed into the ground, covered with snow, pebbles, and twigs. MARIE LEVANT NÉE CROSS, 1948–1980. On her knees, her nose blue, her hands and feet tingling with pain, she tried to feel her mother’s spirit.

  She opened the mahogany box. Inside was a pin, snakes entwined about a tree, and a drawing of a snake eating its own tail. Her birth certificate listed Father: Unknown. Mother: Marie. Her place of birth: scratched out. Hospital: covered in black ink. A piece of paper saying nothing.

  Did her mother or someone else alter the birth certificate? Was it done before or after her mother died?

  There was another sheet: her mother’s death certificate. Marie never looked at it but she couldn’t bring herself to throw it away. She lay the paper face down atop her birth certificate.

  She dug inside the velvet pouch and pulled out a rosary. Black pearl. On the crucifix, Christ had a snake—the Devil, the same Devil who’d tempted Eve, taunted Him in Gethsemane, entwined about His feet. There were two pictures—one of a pink Virgin, blonde and blue-eyed. The other brown—not a traditional Virgin, but still compelling, posed like a goddess, a would-be saint. Sitting slightly in profile, her hair pulled into a chignon, her eyes slanted, casting a sideways glance, Marie felt she drew upon some supernatural power. Voudon Marie was written on the back of this picture; Mary, on the other.

  Her mama had raised her to be a good Catholic. Yet the crucifix and the brown Virgin were blasphemous. Evil.

  There was a folded note; inside it, her mother’s flowing script:

  All things alive.

  She dropped the rosary in the pouch, slid in the wrinkled pictures, and as she replaced the note, she saw more writing, less neat, elegant, as if the writer’s hand had been trembling:

  Snakes are stirring in my blood. Yours, too.

  She’d closed the box, feeling she’d some sin to repent. She swore she’d never open it until she did some good in the world. Became a doctor. Fully certified. She’d make her mother proud. Dispel the terror of snakes and a brown Virgin’s eyes.

  But remembering it all now, she’d become a doctor not to help others but to cure her helplessness . . . to cure her guilt at not being able to save her mother. Her mother never should’ve died. People were complicated. Ten years old, screaming and crying, massaging her mother’s chest, blowing air into her mouth, trying to do the CPR she’d seen on TV. Ultimately, the only power she had was to sit, hold her mother’s hand, and watch over her still body. Day became night, night, day, then night again. Then, the cycle began again. Only when a disgruntled chauffeur came to see why the maid wasn’t cleaning his mistress’s home did the police come and drag her, kicking and screaming, away.

  Thinking about her mother, Marie—the murdered girl, Marie-Claire, thinking about herself, another plain Marie—she knew she’d have to name her baby girl Marie-Claire. After her mother.

  Like mother, like daughter. Four Maries.

  Surely, this was fate.

  * * *

  “Heh, Almost-Doctor.”

  “Heh, Sully.”

  “Got a good dog here.”

  Kind Dog, tail wagging, limped out of Sully’s cubicle, rounding the corner with a grin.

  Marie felt her spirits lift. She stooped, rubbing the dog’s ears. “I missed you.”

  The dog licked her cheek.

  It was true. Seeing the dog made her feel she had a defense against loneliness.

  “I’ll keep him any time you want.”

  “He’s sweet, isn’t he?”

  “Likes my harmonica music.”

  “Did he sing?”

  “A few howls. Took h
is solo like a pro.”

  “Come on, Kind Dog.” He hopped beside her, out the door, into the damp night air. She reached into her purse for keys. Damn. She’d done it again. Forgotten she was without a car.

  Two bright lights rounded the corner. “Here.” Reneaux, from the inside, pushed open the door. Before she could say anything, Kind Dog scooted into the car and leaped onto the backseat.

  “Come on. Your car’s been dusted for prints. It’s with a friend of mine. It’ll be as good as new tomorrow.”

  Marie felt reluctant, didn’t want to keep being beholden to Reneaux. “DuLac said his home wasn’t far. I can walk.”

  “Your dog can’t.”

  Marie looked at Kind Dog, his head out the window, his tongue lolling.

  “Thanks again.”

  Kind Dog pushed his head between two bucket seats, his teeth nipping at a white package.

  “What’s in the bag?”

  “Marrow bones. Beef ribs. Thought Dog might like it for dinner.”

  “Cooked or raw?”

  “Gonna be cooked,” said Reneaux, lifting the bag away from Kind Dog. “DuLac’s boiling the water. Making a stew.”

  Kind Dog barked. Marie couldn’t help but laugh.

  * * *

  DuLac’s home surprised her. It was serene, elegant, filled with French antiques.

  “La Belle Epoque,” he said. He was dressed in a velvet smoking jacket; no doctor whites.

  “What?”

  “Paris, 1900s. Turn of the century. But the era started long before that—the mid-1800s. America was still in the throes of slavery, cotton, and gin. Proust was writing Remembrance of Things Past. Saint-Saëns and Fauré were making music to “awaken in us the mysterious depths of our soul.” Massenet was creating Thaïs, his great opera about a tortured monk falling in love with a prostitute. The monk becomes a madman; the prostitute becomes a saint. Irony. Sophistication, non? The French know about life and love.”

  “Listen.” He pressed the CD button. A baritone soared; the melancholy was invasive. Marie felt uneasy. The warm tones ended in a scream.

  El came out of the kitchen. “Just give me blues.” She hugged Marie, patted Kind Dog. She hugged Reneaux, too. Marie felt jealous of their easy friendship.

  “Eat. Eat.” DuLac gripped her hand. “No business ’til after dinner. Right, Reneaux?”

  “Right. Just lead me to the food.”

  DuLac slid open the dining room doors. It was breathtaking. French linens, candelabras on the table, plush velour chairs. There was gold flatware, gold-trimmed china. Napkins tied with ribbons. Sparkling Waterford crystal. A centerpiece of flowers: freesia with white calla lilies. The scent was heady, overpowering.

  A chandelier and candelabra held red, beeswax candles. On the walls were paintings of nudes: cream-colored women lounging in boudoirs; a voluptuous blonde standing boldly under a tree; nymphs cavorting by a stream. On the fourth wall was a huge gilt-trimmed mirror, echoing the image of the table, the decadent nudes, and Marie, standing at the table’s center. Reneaux looked at her, amused.

  El scowled. “Looks like a brothel, don’t it?”

  “El’s just jealous of my good taste.” DuLac set down his first gold-plated bowl of food: gumbo, thick with okra and rice; next, collard greens with fatback, black-eyed peas, then platters of cornbread and yams.

  “Slave food. On nineteenth-century French plate,” DuLac snorted, delighted. “The wine is Château Lafite. A rare bottle for a rare evening. No moonshine. Eat. Eat. Drink.”

  “When’d you have time to cook, DuLac?”

  “I always have good food waiting. My table set.” He grinned, and Marie saw not the half-drunk, cynical doctor but a generous man, expansive with hospitality and fellowship.

  She murmured, “I’m starved,” and dug into the best food she’d ever tasted.

  Kind Dog gnawed on bones.

  Between bites, Reneaux, El, and DuLac teased one another. All old friends. Her mama would have liked this. Liked them. Reneaux was in middle school when DuLac and El were in high school.

  “He was bad,” chortled El.

  “Full of trouble,” echoed DuLac.

  “Don’t be telling tales on me.”

  “Reneaux was the trouble man, gangster then, Marie. Always tearing up screens, throwing balls through windows. Even stole penny candy from the corner store.”

  “I did not.”

  “Did, too. You were best at hustling. Playing sax in the Quarter.”

  “I didn’t know you played,” said Marie.

  “Lots you don’t know,” said DuLac.

  Reneaux laughed. “Some days I made ten bucks.”

  “On your raggedy-ass music?”

  “No, the boy’s music is good,” El defended. “Sometimes, though, not enough soul. Flat improvisations.”

  “Y’all watch out now. I’ll have to arrest you for disrespecting an officer.”

  “I’m scared,” said DuLac. “So scared I think I’ll get dessert.”

  “I’ll help,” said El, picking up dishes. Marie stood. El winked. “I can handle this, Marie. You and Reneaux stay here. Relax.”

  “They seem like an old married couple, don’t they?” asked Reneaux. “I’m not sure but DuLac may have asked El to marry him. They went to high school together. He’s a good six years younger. El was a backwoods girl. She lied about her age to get an education. She looked young even then.”

  “Did she lie about you? About your childhood?”

  “Naw. All her tales about me are true. I was a punk but I played good music.”

  Marie smiled. She liked this man.

  “Here ’tis. Pièce de résistance.”

  El carried the bowls of ice cream. DuLac poured rum over the sautéed bananas and lit it with a candlestick. Blue flames leaped upward. “Maman Marie.” DuLac scooped the bananas over ice cream.

  Marie cleaned her bowl like a starving girl. Reneaux let Kind Dog lick his spoon. El had two servings. Reneaux, three. DuLac smiled, pleased with himself. His spoon slowly stirring a café au lait.

  “Now. Brandy.”

  Marie groaned. She was satiated.

  “Its customary. Tell her, Reneaux.”

  “He does love his rituals, Doc.”

  “Brandy after every meal. Including breakfast,” quipped El.

  “I’ll light the fire.”

  “Isn’t it too hot?” asked Marie.

  “Never. Where’s your romance? Adventure?”

  Reneaux sat on a pillow on the floor. Marie joined him. Kind Dog rested his head in her lap. El complained about her bad back and chose a chair.

  DuLac brought brandy swirling in crystal. “VSOP. My finest.”

  Marie felt pleasant, no, more than that—this was the nicest evening she’d ever had in New Orleans or anywhere. DuLac, who rarely smiled, seemed happy. El looked regal in her straight-back chair. Reneaux looked desirable, the flames highlighting the contours of his face. Still, he stared into the flames like there was something there to find.

  Five minutes. Maybe ten. Soothing fellowship—a moment when all seemed right with the world.

  Then, Reneaux sighed, reaching in his jacket for his notepad. “This is what I know.” His intonations were clipped.

  El perched forward. DuLac clasped his hands, his chin resting on the steeple of fingers. Marie shook her head, trying to focus. She’d have an aching head tomorrow. She set her empty glass on the fire grate.

  “The girl found today. No name yet. All the girls were pregnant. Innocents.”

  “How innocent can they be if they were pregnant? With no wedding rings?”

  Marie was surprised by El’s question—it was mean-spirited.

  DuLac shrugged. “Two high-school girls. Runaways, maybe. All of them underage, like the DeLaCroix girl. None twenty-one. All of them had something not identified in their system.”

  “Like what?” Marie heard her voice slurring.

  “That’s it. We don’t know. Something.”

&
nbsp; “Marie-Claire, too?”

  “Don’t know yet. Need the family’s permission to disturb the tomb.”

  “They buried her?” asked DuLac.

  Reneaux shook his head. “City charity. But since we now know who she is, legally, we need the family’s permission.”

  Hands trembling, Marie wiped sweat from her brow.

  “We’re still investigating the connection to Jacques Paris. He might’ve known the first girl—they went to high school together. On the other hand, Jacques was known to pick up women.”

  “I’m not embarrassed, Reneaux.”

  “Some say he wasn’t too particular. I mean, he just seemed to love women. Didn’t matter whether they were young or old, fat or slim. Everyone agrees he enjoyed women.” Reneaux cleared his throat.

  “That’s a good thing, isn’t it?” asked Marie. “Liking women?”

  “Yeah. Good thing,” said Reneaux. “Real good thing.” He cleared his throat again. “Jacques died of an overdose. Massive infusion of heroin.”

  “He died in Breezy’s. The back room,” said Marie.

  “How do you know this?” asked DuLac.

  Marie shrugged. Her tongue felt thick in her mouth.

  Reneaux jotted notes. “I’ll get a search warrant.

  “We’ve also lifted prints from Marie’s car. Thugs. A man named Arnaud, wanted for armed robbery. Assault with a deadly weapon. The others, petty thievery. Handles like Hammer, Reggae, and Pip.”

  DuLac, his elbows on his knees, swirled the brandy in his glass. “Two women thrown at Charity’s door. Killed elsewhere, dropped in Emergency. Think my hospital is a trash dump? Folks dying every day. Murdered. Car accidents. Suicides. Not sick, just dead. Some fool killing women and dumping them like trash.”

  “How do you know it’s one person?”

  “What you mean?” asked El.

  “I mean, how does DuLac know it’s one person?” murmured Marie. “Maybe it’s people? People wanting women murdered.”

  “Maybe the unidentified substance had something to do with it,” said Reneaux.

  “That’s stretching—don’t you think?” DuLac was insistent, probing. “Substance or not, the dead can’t be revived.”