by Linda Ladd
“And you introduced her to Mr. Holliday?”
“I sure did. She was a fan of Jack’s when he played in college and wanted to meet him once she knew I was talkin’ to him, and stuff. I guess she thought he was hot, too.”
Well, that checked out with Jack’s version. “Madonna asked for the introduction, not Jack?”
“Yes, but he was fine with it until she started driving him nuts and chasing him around all over the place. He didn’t get pissed at me about it, but he finally had to get a judge to get her off his back. You know, one of those restraining things. I mean, we’re talking stalker city, you know, the old Fatal Attraction rabbit-cooking-on-the-stove-and-drowning-in-the-bathtub kinda obsession.”
“I love that movie,” said Zee.
“Me, too,” said Wendy. “Especially the part in the elevator.”
Well, even Claire remembered that part, but who wouldn’t recall that wild sex scene that probably bruised up Glenn Close pretty good in some intimate places. But it was a young and hunky Michael Douglas doing the business so she probably didn’t mind too much at the time. By Zee’s expression, Claire decided that he remembered it, also, and only too well.
“What can you tell us about Madonna’s alleged stalking of Mr. Holliday?”
“Are ya’ll gonna arrest her for stalking? Like I said, we’re BFFs, and I hate to be snitching on her like she’s some kind of stranger and getting her in trouble, and junk. Especially after what we went through when we were little. Did Doc tell you to come out here and look me up?’
“He mentioned that you introduced him to Madonna.” But Claire was curious about the other thing Wendy had just mentioned. “What did you and Madonna go through when you were little, if I might ask?”
Wendy went sober really fast. She sat up straight, avoided their eyes, and acted extremely uncomfortable. “Well, we were kidnapped by this crazy guy.”
“Kidnapped? When?”
“When we were little, both of us.” She shivered all over. She remembered it all right.
“Can you tell us what happened?”
“I can hardly talk about it now. Madonna can’t at all. I was spending the night with Madonna, you know, at her house, and he came there in the middle of the night and killed her parents, and then he tied us up and threw us in the back of his van. See, he had on this really scary mask, like voodoo guys wear.”
“God, that must’ve scared the hell outta you,” Zee said.
“It sure did. Jack thought the same thing. Asked me all about it. But it made us both real careful about things. Like all those chains on my door. We were lucky he didn’t kill us.”
But Claire knew this was important and somehow fit into the Christien murder. And she wanted to know how. “So you got away? Did they catch him?”
Claire waited for Wendy to answer, but the kidnapping had to be significant, considering the voodoo mask.
“We didn’t get away right off. He put us in a boat and took us out in the swamp to this big voodoo altar kinda thing. He laid us in front of it and lit up a bunch of candles, but then a boat started comin’, thank goodness, and he took off and left us there. The fisherman saw the candles burning and came and saved us. It was the scariest day of my life. We never got over it, either one of us.”
“How old were you then?” Claire asked.
“Around ten. Well, Maddie wasn’t ten yet, but I was.”
“And Jack asked you all about this incident, you say?”
“Yeah, he thought it was a real terrible thing and wanted to know if I remembered anything about the guy.”
“Do you?”
“No. It happened so long ago. Truthfully, we were both so scared that we couldn’t remember much. Except for the altar and the mask. That mask was terrifying. It was red and had snake scales and feathers and bones all over it.”
And once again Papa Damballah slithers back into the picture. “And they never found your abductor?”
“No, ma’am, but he’s still out there in the swamps. Everybody who lives out around there knows it, too. It’s almost a legend now. The snake man. And poor Madonna. She got real, real superstitious after that. You know, started studying voodoo and all that stuff. She’s even made a voodoo love altar for Jack. Isn’t that just pathetic?”
Well, that explained the altar at the Carondelet Street crime scene, but there were lots of voodoo rituals going on here, too many to be coincidental. Not that Claire ever believed in coincidences. Yep, Wendy’s kidnapper could be the guy they were looking for. But why wait until now? Why murder Madonna now, after so long? Or, was this another member of some cult? Maybe an initiation ritual? Wow, everything was getting unreal. She looked at Zee. He was frowning, too. Jack’s interest in the kidnapping was something they couldn’t overlook. “Okay, let’s go back to Jack Holliday. You said he showed a big interest in your abduction?”
“Yeah. He was real sympathetic to both of us. Thought it was a bad thing for little kids to have to go through.”
“And you introduced him to Madonna, is that correct?”
“Yeah. Maddie told me she thought he was real good-looking.” Wendy shook her head. “Lots of girls like Jack. You’ve seen that poster of him coming out of the water. It’s sort of old now, but he really looks good now, too.”
“A friend of mine has it.”
“He’s like some kind of glorious Greek god, don’t you think? Just like Apollo, or Adonis, or Superman.”
Claire was impressed with Wendy’s classical analogies until her last hero shattered the illusion. “And he didn’t like Madonna’s attention?”
“He was okay with it at first when he felt sorry for her because of us getting kidnapped, but then she just kept on pushing him, giving him stuff. Gifts and love letters, even roses. She’s got it really bad for him; I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Did she give him anything else?”
“Oh, yeah. Once it was this key ring, sterling silver with his initials on it.” She thought about it some more, while taking an extra second to exchange sappy smiles with the very attentive Zee. “Once she got him a black cashmere sweater with a little fleur-de-lis on it. Right here.” She tapped on her left breast. “But he gave it to me to give back to her. He gave most all that stuff back to her.”
Wendy stretched her neck from side to side, then lifted the back of her long hair up into the air as she stretched out her arms in a most languorous pose. “He didn’t want anything from her. He was pretty cool about me being the one who introduced them. I’m still real embarrassed that she’s acting this way.”
“I see.”
“Is she in trouble? I was pretty sure Jack was going to end up havin’ her arrested, or something. I guess that restraining order didn’t do much good, huh?”
Zee gave Claire a significant glance. Unfortunately, it was her cue to ruin Wendy’s day. “I’m very sorry, Wendy, but I’ve got some bad news concerning Madonna.”
“Oh, God, what?” Now Wendy looked scared. Terrified, actually.
“She was found dead on Sunday. Murdered.”
Wendy’s face actually went white under her spray-on tan, and her hands went up to cover her mouth. Yeah, she was flabbergasted, all right. She was awfully open with her feelings. “Murdered? No way, no way. Who did it?”
“That’s why we’re here. We’re trying to figure that out.”
Wendy’s big mocha-colored eyes burned a hole in Claire’s face, so wide and shocked that it wasn’t hard to read the exact instant when the truth dawned inside those heavily lined and mascara-drenched depths. “Oh, my God, ya’ll think Jack did it, don’t ya? Oh, no, uh-uh, he’s not like that, I swear to God. He’d never hurt her. She’s dead? Really? Dead? Are you sure she’s dead?”
Claire envisioned that poor girl, dressed all in white, posed on that altar, eyelids and mouth stitched together, and the way she’d looked stretched out naked on the cold steel table, dozens of ugly bruises and contusions all over her flesh. “Yes, Wendy, we’re one hundred pe
rcent sure.”
Wendy’s straight white teeth nibbled at her full, coral-tinted bottom lip, liquid spilling over her eyelashes. Some suspects could weep on cue, veritable Meryl Streeps, in fact. But Wendy’s tears were the real thing, no doubt about it.
Wendy said, “That poor little thing. She was tiny, you know, barely five feet, and she was okay, a pretty good girl, except for that sick thing she had for Doc.” She kept running splayed fingers through her silky hair. “Does her brother know yet?”
Claire perked up. Zee perked up. Claire said, “Madonna Christien has a brother?”
“Yes. He’s a few years older than her.”
“What’s his name?”
“Rafe. That’s short for Raphael. Christien.”
“Do you know where we can find him?”
Wendy hesitated. Did that hair-stroking thing some more. “Well, okay, he’s a junkie, if you must know. Crystal meth, usually. Maddie worries about him all the time. He’s got friends down in the Quarter. Some really bad guys.”
“Was Madonna into drugs?”
Wendy looked down a little too long, maybe thinking through whether she wanted to vilify her recently deceased friend. “Yeah, she was. Just weed, mostly, but other stuff, too. I’m telling you she was constantly upset about Rafe and those guys he smoked dope with. They’re real dirtbags. His friends, I mean. You know, those Skulls in that biker gang. They’re dealers and lowlifes, all of them. But she still hung around with them a lot.”
“Did Madonna ever mention to you that somebody was threatening her or that she was afraid of anybody in particular?”
She shook her head. “No, never. She dated lots of men, though. You know what I mean? Lots.”
Dated was one way to put it. Not exactly the way Claire would describe Madonna’s relationships, but it did sound better than whoring, especially when referring to an old high school BFF.
“Were any of these men into voodoo?”
“Not that I know of. But, hey, I don’t mean she’s some kind of voodoo priestess, or nothin’ like that. She just got all involved with that junk after that guy took us. Said it protected her from that snake monster. She called him Papa something or other. I handled getting abducted a lot better than she did. I’m not sure why, but I just put it behind me, as much as I could and tried to concentrate on other things. You know?”
Claire did know, but she was having trouble burying some of the demons she’d met up with, just like Madonna had.
Zee decided to join the party. “You know anybody who’s got a reason to want her dead?”
“No, except for Jack, who has a pretty good one, if you want to know the truth, but like I said, that’s downright ridiculous. All he wanted from the beginning was for her to leave him alone, once and for all, and she pretty much did that, I reckon, after he got that restraining order. She sure didn’t want to end up in jail. She told me that. Said she’d been there before and wasn’t ever going back—no matter what she had to do, she wasn’t gonna end up in jail again.”
“Where did she go to jail?”
“Downtown. It was just thirty days for possessing weed and prostitution; they went easy on her on the first offense. She toed the line after that. Said she nearly went nuts in that jail cell. She said she was scared of some of the girls locked up in there with her, and some of the cops, too.”
All that she just said fit in with the info Rene had sent to them. “Did she ever tell you that she took out a restraining order on Jack?”
Wendy actually laughed at that one, but then she stopped herself when she remembered that this was serious business. “Why in the world would she do that?”
Yeah, why, indeed? It didn’t make a lick of sense to Claire, either, especially since Jack didn’t seem to know about it. Unless he was lying to them, which could very well be the case. On the other hand, Rene had faxed a copy of that restraining order to Claire, which pretty much made it official. “Does Madonna have any other relatives that you know of?”
“I don’t think so. Like I said, her parents got killed. She and Rafe ended up living with their grandma. Now it’s just Rafe and her, I’m pretty sure, but maybe her grandma’s still around. You need to ask Rafe.”
“And her parents were murdered by this man in the mask, right?”
“It was awful. They just came in their house and shot them dead. We were there, too, Maddie and me, but we didn’t hear anything. Not until he woke us up, and then we were scared to move. We just did whatever he said.”
“Did they catch the perpetrator?”
“The what?”
“The guy who killed her parents?”
“No, the detectives never could find him. They did say they thought that guy who took us was gonna kill us, too.”
Claire had been thinking the same thing. And all of this was connected. She knew it. She just had to line up the dots and draw the lines between them. Easier said than done, unfortunately. “Was that the Golden Meadow detectives?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Was her brother there when his parents got killed?”
Wendy shrugged. “Yes, but he was older and got to sleep in a room he liked out over the garage. He said he didn’t hear anything that night. He just slept right through everything.”
“Where can we find him? We’ve got to notify him about his sister’s death. It’ll be bad if he reads it first in the newspapers.”
That idea seemed to horrify Wendy. “Oh, no, no. Wouldn’t that just suck?”
Silence reigned as we all considered that remark, but it would suck, big time, of course. Then Wendy piped up again and became a veritable font of knowledge. “I think I remember Maddie sayin’ something about him getting a job as a bouncer down at that biker dive in an alley somewhere off Magazine. Voodoo River, I think the name is, but I’m not positive. All I know for sure about Rafe is that he deals lots of drugs. That’s where Maddie always gets her stash. I tried to get her off it, but I never could get her to stop. Wish I had, though. That’s probably why she hung out with those guys.”
Zee and Claire nodded with sympathy, and Claire took some notes on all the information. Bourdain had mentioned Voodoo River, too, said Madonna might’ve done some hooking down there. Claire put that down as a target on her places-to-shake-down list. So, all said and done, and as it turned out, Wendy the Cheerleader had been more than helpful, more so than Claire had expected. Now Rafe Christien was in her sights, and his lowlife, dirtbag, druggie friends, who just might be into voodoo and killing his little sister and dumping her down on the bayou in Lafourche Parish. Whoever had set up that scary little altar was going to find out that he had discarded his murderous handiwork in the wrong neighborhood.
Chapter Eleven
The new information about Madonna Christien’s brother was the best lead they had at the moment, so they jumped on it and headed straight down to Magazine Street in search of the Voodoo River bar. As it turned out, the establishment was a real nasty little dive halfway down a real nasty little alley in a real nasty little part of town not too awfully far from the French Quarter. Not that Claire usually minded real nasty little dives down real nasty little alleys. She’d been in more than a few such places on official business. And she’d been in a few having some fun, too, and nearly always came out alive and kicking. Usually, however, at such times, she was more apt to be hauling off to jail some brutal, drunken guy who had used his wife as a punching bag and called it sport.
Zee had told her that he rather enjoyed rousting wife batterers, too, especially if he got to subdue the guy with a baton. But he only did that if absolutely necessary, of course. Sometimes, though, after seeing such a man’s beaten and bloody wife, lying on her couch with an ice bag on her lumps and bruises and two black eyes swollen shut, he tended to really, really want to teach the guy a lesson. But he was a good cop; she’d found that nobody walked a straighter line than Zee did. Just like Claire, he went by the book. Unless the perpetrator resisted arrest and threw a punch—then the guy mi
ght get as good as he dished out to his helpless, frightened wife.
Zee pulled up across the alley from the sleazy bar and shut off the engine. They got out. Claire made sure Zee zapped his door locks. Not that she expected somebody to steal his pride-and-joy red Jeep Cherokee, but such things happened a lot in these sorts of environs. That and/or a broken passenger window and the ever-popular grab-and-flee crime.
Zee bopped along beside Claire, busily punching apps on his beloved smartphone.
“You got all your phone apps up and working, Zee?”
“Yeah, and I’m gettin’ me some more. This phone is awesome. What apps you got?”
“I’ve got a cheap little Samsung TracFone, that’s what apps I got. I can call out and text and people can call in. That’s it.”
“No way. No games or music, no nothin’? No camera?”
“There might be, but I haven’t seen it. I have better things to do than stare at a little screen on my telephone all day and poke in abbreviated words that take longer than dialing a number and talking straight into somebody’s ear.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Like rounding up Rafe Christien.”
“Okay, I get it. Let’s go in.” He turned off his phone, but Claire sensed his keen reluctance. Those things were way too addictive. Black was almost as bad except that he had half a dozen for various and sundry reasons. He had given her one a couple of times, but she had a tendency to lose them. So she’d bought one at Wal-Mart for herself, one without all the bells and whistles and installment plans. Now if she lost the thing, no big deal. Zee glanced over at the pack of Harley Davidsons and other powerful motorcycles crowded together just down the alleyway. He said, “You got your weapon loaded, right? Looks like we might be crashin’ in on some major thugs and felons.”
“I’m sure you’re right. Keep your hand near your weapon, and so will I.”
Zee stopped outside the entrance. “Okay, I heard about this bar on one of my vice cases. These guys deal outta here and they kill outta here. Just sayin’.”