The Murder Artist

by John Case

  My mood sinks. It doesn’t sound like he’s got any hard information about Boudreaux’s whereabouts.

  We’re interrupted when a woman arrives. She wears a long faded dress and has bare feet. She’s nervous and very deferential to Diment. She holds a white rooster in her arms, confining it in such a way that it does not struggle. Diment makes a little bow in my direction and gets up to inspect the bird. He pulls its wings up and pushes its feathers apart here and there. The bird makes a clucking sound every once in a while and moves its head in little jerks, its red comb wobbling, its bright eyes staring. “It’s good,” Diment says, and instructs the woman to put the chicken into an empty pen. The bird goes inside in a flurry of squawks and feathers. The woman closes the pen by inserting a stick through a double loop of vine.

  “She bring this for the sacrifice,” Diment says, when the woman leaves. “She come back later. You are here first.”

  My mind vaults to the chicken blood on Kevin’s shirt, the one the police found in my closet.

  “You’re going to sacrifice it?” Until Diment spoke of sacrifice, I’d been thinking the hen was there to lay eggs. And the rooster, was – I don’t know – a pet.

  Diment nods. “You don’t like this.”

  I shake my head as if to dismiss his idea, but he’s right, of course.

  “That don’t surprise me. You think it primitive, I’m right?”

  “I guess.”

  “Sacrifice the core to all worship, go way back, all the way back, I’m thinking. The god or the gods create the entire world and give you life in it. To honor the god, you perform the ritual, you give him back one of his creature, you give the life of thing back to nourish him.

  “Sometime, we have hard times. We have drought or the animals fall sick. Yet even then the animal for the sacrifice cannot have disease. Cannot have flaw. So to give the healthy animal back in hard times, that hard to do. But hard times when you need the loa most of all, yes?”

  “I understand the idea, but-”

  Diment makes a harsh and dismissive gesture, puts his hand on my arm. “Let me ask you one thing: You a Christian man?”

  “Sort of.”

  “The Christian faith built on sacrifice, you understanding, yes? God ask Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac, then God relent. He take a lamb, instead. He take a lamb instead of Isaac. He take a life. No, he not require the son of Abraham, but God require this of himself. He sacrifice his only son, let him to die up on the cross in the hot sun, spill his own son’s blood, take his own son’s life. Not a chicken, not a bull, not a lamb – his only son. And Jesus, he know ahead of time. Don’t he say at the Last Supper – ‘This is my body, this is my blood.’ The communion – this rite. It’s about sacrifice, no? You drink Jesus blood, you eat his body.”

  “You’re right,” I tell him. “You’re absolutely right. But-”

  “You still think to kill the chicken – this somehow backward, yes? Let me ask you: How you respect life if you don’t respect death? Let me tell you – you think I a bloodthirsty man, I like to spill the blood?”

  “No. But-”

  “You live in your head,” Diment says, shaking his own head sadly. “Alex, you must also live in your body.” He thumps his chest. “You must live in here. You must learn to live in here.”

  “I live in my body.”

  “No. Three hours out of the ground and already you back up here.” He touches his head and sighs, a deep, fatigued sound.

  “I’m sorry.”

  He shakes his head.

  “I think maybe Byron still practices sacrifice,” I tell him. “He left one of the boys’ T-shirts at my house, soaked in blood. It made the police think I’d killed my sons… until they tested the blood.”

  “Byron – he like to kill things, yes?”

  I don’t know what to say.

  He holds out a hand toward me in a gesture of… benediction. “No. Byron… like the owl or the panther.” He shakes his head. “He hunts, he spill blood for his own self, to slake his own thirst. I try to teach him how to use that, but…” He shakes his head.

  “What do you mean?”

  “That dog,” Diment says. “He come my way, about that time. I tell him that dog was a waste. I tell him, ‘you piss away your power, boy, you got nothin’ left.’ And he ask, what power is that? So I tell him: the power you get when you put the hurt on things. The power you get when creatures be dyin’. The power of the sacrifice, yes?”

  “And what did Byron say?”

  Diment shrugs. “He asked me to teach him.”

  “About what?”

  “Magic.”

  “Like card tricks?”

  Diment shakes his head. “No, no, no. He already know that kind of thing. Byron – he could make you look the wrong way, every time. He wanted to know about the Mysteries. He wanted to know about the sacrifice, what we call the ‘real magic.’”

  “And you could teach him that?”

  “Oh, yes. But I can’t talk of this with you. You don’t understand. You don’t even understand your own faith about sacrifice. I tell you this: Something look like magic, this not always so.” He taps his temple. “You can’t see what happen, you can’t see the true cause.”

  “But you could talk about it with Byron?”

  He nods. “I could teach him. I did teach him.”

  “Like what? What did you teach him?”

  “I teach him the loa, the signs and the meanings, the sacrifice, the dance, everything to bring the power of the other world into this world. How to help the spirit move on when somebody die. How every spirit have a place in this world, how to get the spirit come here without they hurt you. How to make the juju, the mojo, the veve. How to do every kind of thing I know how to do. Even how to get the spirit on your side to put the hurt on someone. I teach Byron everything I know. I teach him the herbs and leaves. And he use that to kill.”

  “His father.”

  “Yes.” Diment nods slowly. “I teach him the ways. But he not really learn.”

  “What do you mean?”

  But Diment just shakes his head. “He use everything only for Byron. That not the way. That the very first thing I try to teach him, with the little dog. He pretend to learn. But he stay the same way. The same Byron.” I see tears in Diment’s eyes. He shakes his head hard, as if to dispel them. “He come by here when he gets out, you know that?”

  “From Port Sulfur?”

  “Yes.” He wags his head. “After those many year. He spend a few days with me. I hope… he’s changed. So many years, he’s a man now. But-” He shakes his head. “He the same Byron, only stronger. I am happy when he go away again.” Abruptly, Diment stands up.

  “You come.”

  I follow him inside, into the room with the altar. He steps forward, mumbles something, and plucks from the crowded array of objects what looks like a postcard. He hands it to me.

  The light is bad – just a couple of candles and the Christmas tree lights. And what I’m looking at reminds me of the cards opticians use to test for color blindness.

  “What is this?”

  “You look,” Diment says.

  It still seems to be no more than a smear of colors. I have to stare at it for three or four minutes before it gives up its secret. Concealed within a field of bloodred blobs are a pair of clownlike faces, their eyes gazing implacably at the viewer.

  “What is this?”

  “Turn it over.”

  A printed note identifies the painting as

  The Marassa by Petit Jean,

  Port au Prince, Haiti, 1964.

  “The twins,” Diment replies. “You see?”

  “Right.”

  “And you see it’s addressed to me. And look what Byron say.”

  In the message box, across from the address, is a handwritten note:

  Finished with the Castle.

  Doing real magic now.

  “What’s ‘real magic’? What does he mean?”

  “The twins,
” Diment says. “They guard the gates to les Mystères. Without them, you can’t do real magic.”

  “But what is real magic?”

  But the old man ignores me. He taps the postmark with his forefinger:

  Aug. 10, 2000

  Point Arena, CA

  “For vaudoo people, this a most important day. Sacred to the Marassa. This is why Byron sends the card that day. August tenth. You might say” – Diment smiles his terrifying smile – “this is our vaudoo Easter.”

  “You think Byron lives there? Point Arena?”

  “I don’t know. This is the last card I get from him.”

  Three years ago. I’m not exactly hot on his heels.

  I look at the signature, which is a scrawl. I squint, but there’s no way it looks anything like Byron.

  Diment looks over my shoulder. “The name?” he asks. “That’s ‘Maître Carrefour.’”

  “Who’s that?”

  “It’s the name Byron used when he worked as a magician. On the stage,” Diment adds.

  “Worked. But not anymore?”

  Diment shakes his head.

  “Why not?”

  “You saw the postcard. He says he’s doing real magic, now.”

  “But what does that mean?”

  Diment inclines his head, frowns. “What it means is you make the world do your bidding, with the help of the spirit. You come to be one with them, they work with you, you make thing happen.” He wags his head, a slow steady motion, like a metronome, his eyes closed. “That what it mean to me. With Byron, I don’t know,” he says.

  “This thing about a castle…”

  Diment shrugs. “I don’t know what he means wi’ that, either.”

  “And Carrefour?”

  “Ah, yes. That I can tell you. Maître Carrefour is like… you would say a patron saint,” the old man tells me.

  “Of what?”

  Diment looks at me, shakes his head. “Sorcery,” he says.

  CHAPTER 40

  I catch up with Pinky in the Holiday Inn’s breakfast room. He’s drinking coffee and looking at USA Today’s weather page. The map is bright orange, the whole country caught in a heat wave.

  “Hell,” he says, as I slide into the seat across from him. “You don’t look half bad for someone got hisself buried alive. What was that like?”

  “Dark.”

  Pinky lets out a peal of laughter that makes everyone in the room look our way. Somehow, dark strikes his funny bone and he ends up wheezing for breath. “I bet,” he says finally. A sigh. “Well, I hope to God you found out something useful.”

  I shrug. “The bottom line is that Diment doesn’t know where Byron is.”

  “Doesn’t know? Or wouldn’t tell?”

  “I don’t think he knows. There’s something about twins and voodoo – I didn’t quite get it, but twins are a big deal. I think he wants to help.”

  “But he can’t?”

  “He told me a couple of things. He told me that after Byron got out of the bin, he worked as a magician under the name Maître Carrefour. Made a living that way.”

  Pinky nods, and pulls out an index card from his pocket. “Carrefour, huh? We can put out an APB on that, so to speak. A magician. Got to be magicians’ societies, professional associations, booking agents. Anything else?”

  “Byron’s retired – he’s not performing anymore.”

  “So what is he doin’?”

  “Diment didn’t know. Last he heard, Byron said he was doing real magic.” I bracket the phrase in the air with my index fingers.

  “And what the hell is that? What’s the difference between magic and real magic?”

  “Diment couldn’t really explain it, or maybe I couldn’t understand. Byron went through the process of becoming a houngan – you know, a voodoo priest. And the faithful, including Diment, believe that the curtain between the natural and the supernatural, between the living and the dead, is porous. And that someone like Byron can more or less fuse with a loa and perform supernatural acts.”

  “Hunh. Thinka that. What else you got?”

  “Byron sent postcards to Diment from time to time. The last one was from California.”

  “Whereabouts?”

  “Point Arena.”

  “Doesn’t sound like a big town. The witch doctor – he think Boudreaux lives there?”

  I shrug. “Byron sent other postcards, but Diment threw them away when he got a new one. And he didn’t pay attention to the postmarks. This was just the last one – and it came almost three years ago.”

  Pinky frowns, taps his pink fingers on the table. The fine white hair on the back of his hands catches the light. “So this is it?” he says. “Maître Carrefour. Real Magic. A postmark on a three-year-old card.” Pinky shakes his head, looks at me. “For someone who spent the night in a coffin, you got fuck-all, buddy.”

  On the drive back to New Orleans, Pinky tries to soften his take on things. “We may get something out of the Carrefour thing. One thing you got going for you – at least far as we know – is that you know a lot about Byron, including his name, but he doesn’t know he’s even on your radar screen. Maybe he lives in this Point Arena. We can hop on that right away. Guy like that – he might just be arrogant enough to use his own name. Until we look, there’s no way to know if he was just passing through or maybe he lived in this town for a while. Maybe long enough to leave tracks.”

  I’m so tired I can’t stop yawning. “Maybe I should go to Point Arena.”

  “Maybe so,” Pinky says.

  Another huge yawn.

  “Not restful, hunh?” Pinky said. “Sleeping in a coffin? I coulda told you that. You’re probably all ripped up with cortisol.”

  “Cortisol?”

  “Stress hormone.” He taps the paper. “Read about it today. No good for you.”

  We roll along for a few more minutes.

  “What’d it say on the postcard, anyway?” Pinky asks. “Besides this stuff about real magic?”

  “It said: ‘Finished with the castle. Doing real magic now.’”

  “That’s it? What castle?”

  “I don’t know. Diment didn’t know, either.”

  “Hunh,” Pinky says. “A castle. In California.”

  I’m semiconscious when it comes to me. It’s like a bubble rising to the surface: Karl Kavanaugh sitting across from me in a booth at the Peppermill in Vegas.

  He’s talking about the history of magic and how at one point, the center of magic relocated from Chicago to L.A. There was a club in L.A. The Magic Castle.

  “Karl. It’s Alex Callahan.”

  “Yeah, sure. How you doing? You back in town?”

  “No. Actually, I’m in New Orleans. I’m just… following up on something.”

  “With the Gabler murders?”

  “Right.” For a moment I can’t remember how much I told Kavanaugh. Did I tell him about the boys? I don’t think so.

  “How’s that going?”

  “I’m making progress,” I tell him. “Reason I called – remember when you were telling me about the Magic Castle? Is that still in business?”

  “Very much so. They have shows every weekend, different stages going simultaneously. Dinner and magic, that kind of thing. If you want to attend, I’d be happy to sponsor you.”

  “Is that necessary?”

  “Well, it’s a club. You can’t just buy tickets. You have to be a member or the guest of a member. Or belong to the Society of American Magicians.”

  “I don’t know about attending a show – but thanks for the offer. The thing is, the guy I’m looking for, the one who killed the Gabler twins – I think he might have worked there.”

  “Really. Got a name?”

  “Maître Carrefour. His real name is Boudreaux.”

  “Carrefour. Boudreaux. Hmmmm.” A pause. “No bells ringing, but that doesn’t mean much. The L.A. scene is kind of its own thing, pretty insular. And I don’t get over there much anymore.”

  “Do yo
u know someone at the Castle I could talk to?”

  “Sure. Let me think.” A pause. “John DeLand, the curator, he’d be your best bet. Knows everything and everyone.”

  “Got a number?”

  He gives it to me, then offers to call DeLand on my behalf. “Magicians can be a little… cliquish. There’s a tendency to circle the wagons when someone starts asking questions about one of our own. If you’d like, I could grease the tracks…?”

  I’m in a borrowed cubicle in the back of Pinky’s office in the French Quarter, checking my e-mail, when Kavanaugh gets back to me.

  “John DeLand will be more than happy to talk to you. And yes, he remembers Carrefour – who worked at the Castle off and on for a couple of years.”

  “Great. Thanks! And DeLand – he’s at this number you gave me?”

  “Yes.” A pause. “Although – if I could give you some advice…?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, I don’t know what your budget is, but if funds allow, it might be worth your while to go out to L.A.”

  “Oh?” Actually, I’d been thinking the same thing. If Boudreaux worked at the Castle on a regular basis, he must have lived somewhere. Must have had friends, a landlord, a life. Which meant footprints.

  “Thing is,” Kavanaugh says, “John’s an awfully good source, but there’ll be other magicians at the Castle who also knew Carrefour. John will be able to tell you who.”

  “Right.”

  “And then there’s John himself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well…” A laugh. “John’s simply never quite made it out of the nineteenth century. He’s one of those older guys who shouts into the phone as if it’s some kind of cups-and-wires contraption. You’d do much better to sit down with him. He’s more… ah… forthcoming in person.”

  “Hunh.”

  “We magicians,” Karl says, “we’re at our best live and in person.” A pause. “Now, isn’t that a strange phrase, when you think about it?”

  “I see what you mean,” I tell Karl, although I’m not really paying attention. I’m tapping the keyboard to see what kind of flight I can get to L.A.