Roots of Misfortune

by Seth Pevey

  She passed a hand over the two root balls on her desk, said nothing.

  “And lady. Isadore, if that is your real name. I want you to know that I will never, never, give up this case. I don’t care how many ‘spirits’ come out of the woodwork. Or how many people try to poison my dog… or strand me in the swamp…or stab my partner with a spear. This is personal now. And I will figure this thing out or I will die trying. Clear?”

  Isadore leaned back in her chair.

  “Now it is your turn to speak,” Felix said, pointing an accusatory finger her way.

  She gave him a half-hearted smile. “John the Conqueror was a prince. An African prince who was enslaved and brought to America in chains. But his spirit was never broken by his masters. Always playing tricks. Always escaping. Always winning against the forces of bondage.”

  She paused, looking heavily into Felix’s eyes. A clove cigarette appeared from under her desk and she leaned forward to light it on the candle. The strange smell filled the room.

  “The story is that he once upon a time fell in love with the Devil’s daughter. Mad, crazy love. But, he was an honorable man, slave or no. In order to have permission to court her, he had to get the Devil’s agreement. Of course, the Devil wasn’t about to agree to that. The Princess of all darkness married to a slave? So, Old Scratch, he set some tasks for John that he well knew John wouldn’t be able to do. Clearing sixty acres in half a day. Things like this.”

  She blew out a perfect ring of smoke, and they both watched it for a moment, hypnotized. Felix glanced again out the window, to see his partner still standing at attention, a wildly defecating dog at his feet.

  “But John, he outsmarted the Devil. He cleared those acres with a magic axe, stole the Devil’s own horses, and eloped with his daughter. Ran away with her and made her his wife.”

  Felix rubbed a hand over the desk, glanced again at the bean-shaped head in the old photograph.

  “So a folk hero. John Henry type? And this root what...symbolizes him? All those blues songs? That’s what all this is about?

  “It is a magical herb. One that contains all the power of John himself. Power for those who want to rebel against forces much greater than themselves, for those who want to trick their masters. Also power for those who wish to fall in love, to be fertile. It is used for luck, as an aphrodisiac, and for those who harbor a secret lust. But of course, you wouldn’t believe any of all that would you? A cynic at your age.” She shook her head.

  Felix raised a chin to her. “Well, is there any science to the fertility claim? Because these girls were all pregnant.”

  Finally, a smile broke on Isadore’s face. “Science?” she scoffed. “My young, cynical, baby-faced boy. Science is just another religion, after all. Just another way of…how was it you put it? Making things seem not so bad. Order to the world.”

  The young man squinted his eyes at her and leaned forward. Outside the rain streaked by the streetlamps and pooled in the neutral ground, where Melancon was now bent low inspecting Scrappy’s progress.

  “So what does this have to do with Landry kidnapping, raping, and killing women?”

  Isadore winced. “Women? Landry couldn’t find a woman to look his way in a thousand years. Have you seen the man? My late husband was no looker, sure, but he had charm to compensate. It seems Landry got his father’s looks, but all the grace and charm of that whore he came out of. He doesn’t kill women, boy. He couldn’t get close enough to one to do that.”

  “I don’t get it. Why are you protecting him? Is it because you raised him?”

  She lowered her face, eyes up at the boy.

  “You will never stop this digging, will you?”

  “I already told you. Never.”

  “There is nothing that can convince you? If I told you…told you that I have it on good authority that it may mean the death of you, your partner, and who knows how many others?”

  “I told you I don’t believe that shit.”

  She sighed, palmed the photograph of her late husband lovingly, running her fingers around the rim of the frame.

  “It isn’t the spirits who told me this, Felix,” she whispered.

  “Then who?”

  A long sigh, a scrunching of the features, as if in response to a deep pain.

  “I know Landry is not the killer, because I know the one who is.”

  “You know?”

  She nodded. “I know.”

  “Then tell me!”

  But she went silent. Felix kept his eyes on her, stood up, went to the door and cracked it open. He leaned out into the weather and yelled for his partner.

  “No, I told you I would only speak to you!” Isadore cried.

  Felix looked over his shoulder at her. “But you aren’t speaking. You said you knew who the killer was and then you stopped.”

  “Because…I cannot say his name.”

  Felix put a hand up to the window to relax Melancon, who’d come running through the rain.

  He turned on her. “Jesus lady, are you really going to play this game with me? When lives are on the line? If you know who is killing women, and you refuse to tell me, I’ll make sure you get called into all this when we finally crack the case. I’ll make sure you are dragged in to court, put on the stand, made to tell everybody why you thought it was such a good idea to…”

  “You will have your answer!”

  “When?” Felix demanded, grinding his teeth, his rage filling up the little herb-smelling room.

  But Isadore did not reply. She looked at him, and yet seemed to peer past him somehow, seemed to be looking at something behind him.

  But they were alone in the shop. He was sure of it. What was she looking at?

  He snapped his fingers in front of her gazing eyes. “If you won’t tell me his name, can you tell me where the missing Korean girl is at least? So that my partner and I can save her life?”

  She sighed again, still staring out into nothing. “The past is a dark place, Felix.”

  She picked up the little bundle of root he had left on her desk and fondled it between her palms before handing it back to him.

  “You keep these Felix. You may need them. I cannot tell you what you need to know. Only the spirits can.”

  “Fuck the spirits, lady. No more games. Tell me right now.”

  “This is not the right place for that.”

  He balled his fists. “Where then?”

  “You must meet me tonight…In one hour. Down the street at St. Louis Cemetery one. Midnight at the grave of Marie Laveau. That is the place where the spirits speak most loudly. We will ask your questions there and you will have your answers. They will speak his name.”

  “This is just a bunch of drama, lady. I don’t have time for it. Neither does Min Ji. You’re stalling and I can see it. There are no spirits. When you’re dead it means rotting in the ground. Gone. And that’s where Min Ji is going to be too if you don’t start making sense.”

  She clucked her tongue at him.

  “You, boy. So full of anger. Do you think you know everything? You are nothing but a cat tied up in a burlap sack. Now, I’ve spoken my last to you here and now. The spirits, they will speak at midnight. At the grave of the Voodoo Queen and no place else. You may bring your drunken friend. But tell no other soul.”

  “And if I don’t? What if I don’t trust you?”

  “Then you don’t,” she replied. “But you will.”

  The young detective gave her one final sizing up, before turning on his heels to leave.

  “Oh, and I will take payment for the dog now,” she called to him. “You never thanked me but you are welcome, anyway. It wasn’t me who put the poison there.”

  Felix reached into his pocket once again, threw a wad of crumpled bills on the carpet.

  “See that you leave the thing home tonight. He needs his rest.”

  Fifteen

  Back at the office, Felix watched Scrappy peacefully curl up and fall asleep on the old down jacket. He
covered the animal with a ratty towel and put two fizzing aspirin in a glass of water for his human friend.

  “The graveyard at midnight? Tonight? And she’ll give up the killer?” The old man was incredulous.

  Felix nodded. “That’s the story I got.”

  “Sounds…well I don’t have to tell you. You know damn well what it sounds like.”

  The young man nodded again, handed Melancon his bubbling glass. “I’m for going.”

  A quizzical look from the old man. He shook his head and sipped the medicine, used a towel around his neck to dry himself from the rain. “Well you’re just a damn the torpedoes type tonight, aren’t you?”

  “I’m ready to try anything, Melancon. Honestly, I think this old woman knows. I think she has some information on all this. But she wants something in return. Wants us to have to play along with her little song and dance in order for her to tell us. Wants us to drink a bit of her snake oil as a kind of tit for tat.”

  “So, explain again, one more time,” Melancon went on, draining the white powder from the bottom of his water glass and smacking his lips. “She said that Landry wasn’t the killer?”

  “Yup. Said it was someone else.”

  “And you’re sure she was Landry’s mother?”

  “Sort of. Not his real mom. At least that is what she said. Landry’s her husband’s bastard child. Damned if she didn’t have an old photograph of a man that looked just like him.”

  Melancon grunted. The rain outside seemed to be settling down. Midnight was coming on fast, and a big decision was on the table. “Real mother or no,” the old man said, “her word that Landry isn’t a killer ain’t worth shit. It’s a common thing for those closest to psychos to miss all the red flags. Ted Bundy’s mom was always saying he was a little angel, right up until they sat him in The Chair.”

  “Well…”

  “And you think she can give us the real killer?” Melancon squinted at his partner, fiddled with the wet hair plastered on his forehead.

  Felix had gone searching in the closet now, looking for a rain jacket, umbrellas, anything.

  “I have a feeling she can get us a step closer at least, partner,” he said, loosing an avalanche of old shoeboxes, towels, cassette tapes that came rattling out on the cypress floor.

  Melancon shook his head, chewed his fingernail. “I don’t like it.”

  “I don’t either. But let’s just assume it is a trap and go in ready. I’m tired of hunting some shadowy figure. If someone wants a scrap, a confrontation…well, let’s give it to him. Either way, we will have our answer.”

  “I can’t figure out if you are brave or just stupid, Felix. But damned if I’m not about to follow you.”

  They checked and double checked their revolvers, prepared flashlights and raincoats, and left Scrappy sleeping off the poison.

  Outside, the rain had stopped falling. Now rivers and streams raced down the gutters and funneled into sewage drains, all of which had backed up and formed isolated lakes along Basin Street. A fog had risen and wrapped itself around the streetlamps and fire hydrants, hiding the world’s details under an eerie shroud.

  The two detectives had a quick look around. Visibility was poor in the mist, but they assured themselves that this stretch of road, at least, was deserted. A moment later and they were headed down to the old 18th century burial ground: St. Louis Cemetery Number One. It was only a short walk, but punctuated by the tension of every sound, flash of movement through the fog, every ghost of uncertainty swirling in Felix’s mind as he tried to put that mask of bravery on once again.

  They arrived in minutes.

  It was walled, as most of the city’s above-ground graveyards were. The gate, usually locked, hung open on its iron-wrought hinges. It rocked and squeaked in the post-rain breeze, which took up plumes of fog and rolled them through the bars. The two detectives stood there, trying to peer inside. A car passed slowly down basin Street, sending up waves of rainwater, and both men turned to regard it suspiciously.

  But it was just a car, passing in the night.

  Standing there and facing the eerily squeaking gate, Felix attempted to dredge up what local history he had learned over the course of his short life. Merely the size of a residential block, this city of the dead was home to thousands of New Orleans’s most famous ghosts, many of them grown to legendary status. If he recalled correctly, it had functioned as the original cemetery for the 78-square-block settlement of the French Quarter, back when it was just a small trading port at the mouth of the Mississippi.

  Melancon nodded. Felix took a deep breath of the fog as they stepped inside—the smell of wet bricks, steak-soot from the Quarter kitchens, soaked spring soil.

  They lingered close to the exit at first, getting their bearings. Watching, listening, smelling.

  There were walls of coffins, raised mausoleums decked with classical frieze, tombs of all sort. Gothic and run down, it was a maze of crypts guarded by wilted flowers and marble gods, palm trees leaning out of grimy puddles. The ancient dead were stacked on top of each other in endless rows—a barrack of memory and bone. Legions of the past.

  “It’s easy to get lost in here, Felix. Don’t let the small size fool you,” Melancon whispered.

  They took some tentative steps deeper into the yard. Everywhere, the cement and mortar and brick of a pitiful, plague-filled past were crumbling out onto the ground. Some tombs could even be peered into. Their gaping, concrete maws were as black as infinity in the foggy night. Felix couldn’t help but look in at one desecrated corner with his flashlight. The ruined skull that peeked back at him had no objection to his rude intrusion, but he shivered at the sight of it regardless.

  “Lot of famous people buried here?” Felix said, more to break the eerie silence than anything.

  “That’s Homer Plessy there, and over there the old mayor, Morial.”

  “If I did believe in spirits, which I don’t…I reckon this would be the spot for every spook and shade in the city,” Felix said. “But I don’t… I don’t believe in ghosts or spirits or Voodoo.”

  “I don’t,” he said again to the countless dead, a bit too loudly.

  Melancon put a finger up to his lips for silence and they soldiered on.

  They wound down a stone path, following a glow in the distance that looked to be candle light. The wind howled through the stone throats and swept some of the fog away. Felix made sure he stayed within arms-reach of his partner as they advanced, and kept his right palm on the reassuring cold steel at his side.

  His left hand, however, seemed to be a creature of its own. He found it worming down into his other pocket, where it gripped the John the Conqueror roots in a sweaty embrace.

  They found the non-descript, three-coffin-high tomb littered with all sorts of things, but no other living being. Aside from the candles someone had lit, which were now twisting in the wind and threatening to blow out, there were unsmoked cigarettes, airplane bottles of single-serve rum, dead roses, lipstick cylinders, hand lotion, an assortment of bundled herbs and even a little red bag, of the very same type they had found in Min Ji’s room. Voodoo dolls of all sort littered the steps leading up to the mausoleum, some tied with human hair, pins and needles poking out the eyes of others. The tomb itself had been the victim of quite a bit of graffiti.

  “If I remember, the Xs are to ask for a blessing,” Melancon said.

  Indeed, there were swarms of Xs marked all over the surface of the crypt. All colors of chalk and permanent markers were represented, some places blotting out the cement itself entirely.

  As Felix was bending down to satisfy himself that this was indeed the correct grave, the first shot rang out.

  Damn, damn, damn. He found himself floundering in the wet and grimy earth, cursing his foolish instincts, his naïve and misplaced trust.

  His ears rang and the world spun. For a second, he imagined he’d been hit. Damn that Voodoo woman.

  But the bullet hadn’t struck him. Instead, it hit Mrs. La
veau’s mausoleum behind him, right at the level his head had been, where it exploded in a cloud of dust and mortar.

  He rolled in the mud, listening close to the echo as the ringing in his ears faded. From that, he was able to suss out a vague sense of the direction the bullet had come from. His body tensed as the adrenaline did its work—tightening his muscle, drying his mouth and throat, and sending him shakily clutching for the revolver at his side.

  Melancon was down behind another small tomb in an instant, just alongside him. The two made eye contact as they crouched there.

  “You hit?” Felix yelled. But the detective shook his head that he wasn’t. The old man had his pistol out already and was pointing it over the top of the stoop leading up to the tomb, using the stone steps to balance his arms. Even so, the point of the pistol revolved wildly in his unsteady hands.

  Felix peeked over the lip of the mausoleum, but could make out no enemy in the darkness.

  The silence seemed interminable as they crouched among the dead. Perhaps as long as thirty seconds had passed before another shot rang out, this one seemed half-hearted and far off-target, hitting somewhere well behind the detectives. In the ringing silence afterwards, Felix heard the unmistakable sound of tennis shoes scrapping against the tiny pebbles that littered the graveyard.

  As the scraping grew closer, louder, Melancon released a salvo of shots towards the sound.

  One, two, three. The loud clap of three loads combusting.