When Sailor and I got out of the car, we were met with the caws of seagulls, in harmony with the industrial sounds of air brakes and idling diesel engines.
“Did you know the ancient Greeks believed the caws of seagulls were the rootless souls of those lost at sea?” I asked.
“Anyone ever tell you that you are a font of fascinating yet useless information?”
“I believe I may have been accused of that once or twice in my life, yes.” I laughed as we approached the office door, which stood ajar. “Hello? Anybody home?” I called out after rapping on the door. Each of the warehouse spaces had a regular door that led to a semifinished office, and big overhead doors that opened onto the warehouse floor.
“Maybe he’s deaf,” said Sailor.
I pushed the door open wider and called out again, louder: “Hello?”
“Maybe he’s dead,” Sailor whispered in my ear.
“Thanks so much, Sailor. You’re really helping. I’m so glad I asked you along.”
He grinned. “I’m just saying, given your track record it wouldn’t be entirely out of left field.”
“You’re mixing your sports metaphors,” I said, and poked my head in through the door.
“Trust you to worry about grammar when you’re about to stumble upon a body. See anything worrying?”
“I don’t know if it’s worrying as much as . . . depressing.” The “office” area was empty except for a cot in one corner, covered in a tangle of sheets and blankets. I wouldn’t lay any bets on the last time those bed linens had been washed.
An open doorway led to the warehouse proper, and though it was dark, enough light streamed through the grimy windows to illuminate several easels and numerous canvases.
“Hello? Fred?” I tried one more time as I stepped into the office, then proceeded toward the warehouse.
Leaning against the wall were dozens of portraits, mostly of Betty, others of famous personages. I recognized Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe, Jimmy Carter and Oprah Winfrey. All had the big-eyed look that was popular in paintings from the sixties.
“The blond woman is Betty North,” I said.
“You’re not planning on decorating Aunt Cora’s Closet with any of these, are you?” asked Sailor as he crouched and flipped through a stack of unframed canvases. “I mean, I get that you have a whole retro thing going on, but these eyes are a little much. They follow you.”
“We’re not here to buy paintings,” I said. “Just to—”
“That’s too bad,” said a new voice.
Sailor and I turned to see a frail-looking, elderly man with a pencil-thin mustache. He held a to-go coffee cup in one slightly shaky hand. Dressed in brown slacks, pulled up high, and a yellow-and-brown argyle cardigan, he wore camel-colored suede shoes. Dapper was the word that came to mind. It dawned on me that Fred was the kind of man who might well wear a brocade smoking jacket to receive guests.
“Hello,” I said, belatedly realizing that we had essentially walked right into this man’s home. I could feel the heat in my cheeks. “I’m so sorry. We called out but—”
He waved off my concern. “Don’t worry about it. I ran down the street for coffee. I always leave the door open—you never know who might wander in. I’m Frederick Worthington. Call me Fred.”
“I’m Lily Ivory, and this is my friend Sailor.”
“You sail?”
“No. It’s my name, not my avocation.”
“I see.” He set his coffee cup on a paint-splattered plank sitting atop a pair of sawhorses. “What can I do for you? You say you’re not in the market for paintings?”
“No, I’m sorry—though I really do enjoy them. I saw several at the home of Betty North. I was there to buy clothes for my vintage clothing shop.”
“Vintage, eh?” He shook his head. “You wait and see what it feels like when all your normal, everyday stuff starts being referred to as ‘classic’ or ‘vintage.’”
I smiled.
“So, you’re here about Betty, are you? What can I say about Betty . . . ?” He trailed off with a sigh.
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so, taking a page out of Carlos’s playbook, I forced myself to let silence reign.
“I miss her, you know. She was my muse.”
“Your wife was a lovely woman,” said Sailor, nodding at the portraits.
“We weren’t married. We were together for many years, but never married. As I said, Betty was my muse.” Fred fixed his watery but perceptive gaze on me. “If you’re not here to buy a painting, what is it that I can help you with?”
“I was wondering if you recognized this,” I said, carefully bringing the red flannel–wrapped doll out of my satchel. I placed the bundle on the workbench, untied the knot, and laid it open.
“That’s . . . I don’t know what that is.” Fred drew away with a frown. “That’s . . . disturbing. Please, I don’t like looking at it. Put it away.”
I covered the doll with the flannel. “So you’ve never seen this?”
Fred shook his head.
“Could it have been a souvenir? Maybe something from a cruise?”
“No.” He shook his head with vehemence. “Betty . . . I remember once when we were in Haiti, she picked up a ‘voodoo doll’ that she thought was cute. ‘Charmingly primitive,’ she called it. It disturbed me, frankly, to play around with such things, and I told her so. But Betty didn’t believe in that sort of thing.”
“So she wasn’t a client of Ursula Moreno?”
“I really don’t know,” he said with a shrug. “Ursula who?”
“She has a shop on Mission.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“The picture of Betty that’s pinned to the doll . . . it looks like a photo of one of your paintings.”
He looked blank, so I unwrapped the poppet again. He glanced at it, his little mustache quivering.
Fred nodded quickly, then looked away. “Yes, that’s the portrait I called Madonna in North Beach. I painted it after a weekend spent in San Francisco. You missed North Beach back in the late sixties—it was really something.”
“I’m sure it was,” I said. “And the portrait?”
“As far as I know it’s still at the house, hanging in the stairwell. Unless one of her kids has moved it. I hear they’re putting the house on the market.”
“Her kids?”
“Betty has a son and a daughter. Her daughter came around a little, but Betty was estranged from her son. But I’m sure that won’t keep them from buzzing around now. Death has a way of bringing family together, if only to fight over the spoils.”
I glanced at Sailor. Sounded like Fred had some stories about the North clan.
“So you have no idea where this doll could have come from?”
“Maybe . . . could it have come from one of the home health aides? A couple of them were from other countries, though not Haiti. But I guess they’re not the only ones who fool around with this sort of thing, right?”
“Do you know the names of those aides?” I asked, but Fred was already shaking his head. “Or remember where any of them came from, perhaps?”
“One was Filipina, one was Vietnamese or Cambodian, not sure. Betty’s favorite was Lupita. Young woman, probably about your age. Chubby, pretty, lots of curly dark hair. Her fiancé commissioned this portrait of her.” Fred walked over to an easel shrouded with a drop cloth and lifted the material to reveal a half-finished portrait of a nude woman.
I had seen her before: It was the woman in the photo at El Pajarito, the one pictured with Ursula and Selena.
“Do you know how to get in touch with Lupita?”
“No, sorry. I didn’t even get a chance to finish this painting, as you can see. When Betty went to the hospital. . . .well, it was left undone. Such a pity.”
Chapter 7
“He seems more broken up about his paintings than about losing Betty,” I said as Sailor and I drove through the industrial streets of China Basin. “Her dea
th apparently deprived him of a muse.”
“People grieve differently.”
I supposed he was right. I reminded myself not to be judgmental.
“So, here’s the thing,” I said. “There was a newspaper clipping featuring Ursula Moreno, her granddaughter Selena, and a woman named Lupita in the out-of-control botanica in the Mission. I saw it in the shop when I was there with Carlos.”
“You think it’s the same Lupita?”
I nodded. “The resemblance is pretty spot-on. Big eyes or no, Fred has a knack for portraiture.”
“But what does Ursula Moreno’s shop have to do with Betty North? I thought those were two unrelated situations.”
“Yeah, funny how that happens to me, right? When it comes to magical goings-on, I seemed to be a magnet for coincidences.”
“You think Lupita’s the link between them? How?”
“I have no idea, but it seems awfully interesting that Lupita would have a connection to Ursula Moreno and Betty North, and we found what looks like a voodoo doll in Betty’s place.”
“Did Moreno even deal in such things?”
“I don’t know, but I saw some little hex boxes. I’ll put that down on my list of things to find out.”
“Suppose Moreno charged the doll with magical energy, and then Lupita brought it to Betty’s house. Why would she do that? To hasten Betty’s demise?”
“Maybe.”
“I say again: Why? What motive would she have?”
“Money seems the most obvious motive. It might be worth looking at Betty’s will, see to whom she bequeathed her earthly possessions.”
“Was Betty wealthy?”
“I really don’t know. But she owned a house in San Francisco; that’s no doubt worth a lot, given the price of real estate in the city these days. And her house is full of stuff that might add up to some real money when it’s sold. Who knows what else she might have had in the bank?”
Sailor nodded, looking out the window as though deep in thought.
“Also, Maya mentioned that shortly before her death Betty put her affairs in order and wrote up a will. It isn’t unheard of for people to leave all their money to fortune-tellers.”
“I thought Moreno was a curandera. That’s a far cry from a fortune-teller.”
I shrugged, unsure what to think. By all appearances Ursula was, indeed, a curandera . . . and a powerful one, at that. But I never quite trusted those who charged for their supernatural services. I knew a lot of magical practitioners believed that demanding remuneration for using their special talents was the only responsible thing to do. But to me, exchanging money for magic could lead a person down a very dangerous path. It was only too easy to be tempted to sell out for ever greater power. Just ask my father.
On the other hand, I might well be reading too much into it. On this topic, it was possible I had a few “issues,” as they say here in California. And as Oscar once told me: “Emotional baggage doesn’t fit in the overhead compartment. You have to pay extra to check it.” Goblin wisdom.
“Anyway, it doesn’t appear that poor old Fred has gained much by Betty’s death.”
“It’s early yet,” Sailor pointed out. “Probating a will takes time. No one would have received anything from her estate at this point.”
“You think I’m jumping to conclusions?”
He shrugged. “I’m just saying there’s still a lot of investigating to be done. And I’m not all that comfortable climbing onto the blame-the-scamming-fortune-teller band-
wagon. It hits a little close to home.”
Sailor was Rom, and though he kept his distance from the more colorful members of his family, I imagined this was the sort of thing he had dealt with a lot in the course of his life. I changed the subject.
“Did you feel anything when we were with Fred?” I asked. “Pick up any vibrations about him, good or bad?”
“Nothing in particular, but then I didn’t try. I’m not supposed to be dissipating my powers with casual readings. It’s part of my training with Patience.”
“So, that’s going well, you said?” I asked.
He nodded.
“You’re seeing progress?”
“It hasn’t been that long,” he said.
When I first met Sailor he’d had some sort of unholy pact with Aidan Rhodes. I wasn’t privy to the details of their arrangement, but knew it had resulted in enhancing Sailor’s innate psychic skills to startling proportions. But once he managed to break free, Sailor’s powers had been compromised. Though he had once railed against his psychic abilities, losing them had left Sailor adrift.
So I was happy that he’d found someone to help him hone his psychic skills. Still . . . last night I’d tried to wheedle a few details out of him and his monosyllabic answers—or, more aptly, nonanswers—drove me nuts. But I supposed it was like asking someone how their psychotherapy was progressing: hard to answer and bound to be a bit loaded.
“Fred brought up one good point, though,” I said. “How come your name’s Sailor?”
“How come your name’s Lily?”
I shrugged. “My mom likes flowers. It’s probably as simple as that. I’m just lucky she didn’t name me Hyacinth or Chrysanthemum.”
“You’d be a cute Hyacinth. I would call you Hya.”
“Not unless you wanted me to turn you into a frog, you wouldn’t.”
Sailor laughed. “You little fraud, that’s a Hollywood witch move. I’ll bet you couldn’t even pull it off.”
“I could try.”
“Anyway,” Sailor continued. “I always assumed Lily was short for Lilith.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Lilith was Adam’s companion, before Eve. But she refused to be subjugated to the whims of her man and became a queen of demons instead, wreaking havoc on mere humans. Especially men.”
“And this reminds you of me?”
I braked at a stoplight and looked over to see him grinning.
“Very funny.” I gave him a dirty look. “But seriously, why ‘Sailor’?”
Now he shrugged and remained mute.
It doesn’t matter, I thought. Still, it frustrated me how closemouthed Sailor was, even about the smallest things. I knew almost nothing about his family, for instance. He knew more than he probably wanted to know about mine—he had had the misfortune to meet my father not long ago, and had heard a few too many stories about my mother’s inability to deal with her magically precocious child, how she had sent me to live with my grandmother Graciela, and then, as a teenager, how my mother had arranged for a horrific snake-filled exorcism in an attempt to scare the witchiness clear out of me. And afterward, how I was basically run out of my hometown on a rail.
But other than meeting his aunt Renna, who disliked me, I knew nothing about Sailor’s people. I knew very little about Sailor’s personal history, either, other than one fateful car accident, and Sailor’s bargain with Aidan to save the life of the wife who would later divorce him.
Sailor and I were enamored of each other, but we were entering an awkward phase in our relationship. I was getting the idea that he might be just as clueless as I was when it came to romance. The two of us could keep the self-help relationship aisle of a book superstore going strong.
If only there were advice books for the supernaturally endowed.
“So what’s next?” Sailor asked.
“I’m thinking about going by Hervé’s place to ask him about the poppet I found at Betty’s house.”
“Good idea. Also, I think you should call Romero and let him know about the connection between Betty North and El Pajarito.”
“Will do. Want to come with me to Hervé’s?”
“I’ll come if you think you need me, but I imagine even you will be safe enough with Hervé. Besides, I’m supposed to meet Patience at noon.”
“Why don’t I drop you off, then? Where to?”
I followed his directions to the corner of Folsom and Pine, and pulled up in front of an ol
d Victorian painted a dove gray with creamy trim. A large bay window was shrouded by deep blue curtains studded with gold metallic stars and moons.
A blue-and-yellow neon sign in the window read:
Patience Blix, Palm–Crystal Ball–Tarot Readings.
Love, Money, Health
Learn the Secrets to Happiness!
Speaking of charlatans conning gullible folks out of their money, Patience Blix’s lair was straight out of a B movie. No wonder Sailor had been so defensive about fortune-telling scams.
“What?” he demanded, studying my attempted poker face.
“Doesn’t this look a little . . . cheesy to you?”
“It’s all in your point of view.” Leaning over to give me a quick kiss good-bye, he graced me with a smile and gently tugged my ponytail. “To me, it looks like family.”
He climbed out of the car and I practically had to sit on my hands to keep from begging him to invite me inside to meet the mysterious Patience Blix.
Sailor mounted the front steps, let himself in without knocking, and disappeared behind a sturdy indigo door.
* * *
I headed for Madame Detalier’s Voodoo Supply Shop. Hervé’s store was located in the Mission, only a few city blocks from El Pajarito.
Hervé was a good friend and a talented voodoo practitioner who would probably be able to tell me something about the ugly little doll. Also, I could use his phone to call Carlos and let him know what I had found at Betty North’s house. Sailor was right to suggest that I let the homicide inspector know what was going on, and I don’t carry a cell phone because the vibrations weird me out. It’s a witch thing.
I focused on maneuvering the city’s congested streets, trying to ignore the strange feeling in the pit of my stomach that had been there since dropping Sailor off at his cousin’s house. But it wouldn’t be denied.
Was this a premonition? A supernatural warning of some sort? Or was I just hungry?
Spellcasting in Silk: A Witchcraft Mystery Page 6