by Jaye Maiman
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Table of Contents
Cover
Synopsis
Title Page
Copyright Page
Other Books by Jaye Maiman
Dedication
About the Author
Note to the Reader
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Postscript
Bella Books
Synopsis
From the murky bayous of New Orleans to the rat-infested subways of New York City, P.I. Robin Miller is trapped in a heartpounding race against time…and evil. A brilliant and brutal serial killer is on the loose and, with a new love unfolding, Robin has her own urgent reason to find the murderer—before he finds her!
Robin Miller Mystery Book 6
Copyright © 1997 by Jaye Maiman
Bella Books, Inc.
P.O. Box 10543
Tallahassee, FL 32302
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
First Published by Naiad Press 1997
First Bella Books Edition 2018
eBook released 2018
Editor: Christine Cassidy
Cover Designer: Sandy Knowles
ISBN 13: 978-1-64247-024-6
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
Other Bella Books by Jaye Maiman
I Left My Heart
Crazy for Loving
Under My Skin
Someone to Watch
Baby, It’s Cold
For the miracle boys, Evan Alexander and Jacob Lev, and The Force, my sweet Emma
About the Author
Jaye Maiman has written five romantic mysteries featuring the private investigator Robin Miller: I Left My Heart, the Lambda Literary Award winner Crazy for Loving, Under My Skin and Lambda Literary Award nominees Someone to Watch and Baby, It’s Cold. A native of New York City, Jaye Maiman enjoys an amazingly maintenance-free and delightful existence with her partner, playmate, editor, co-neurotic and magic-maker Rhea.
Note to the Reader
Writing a series is immensely satisfying and infinitely infuriating. No matter how many Twinkies and Yoo-Hoos she consumes, Robin Miller never gains weight as easily as I do. More maddening yet, she ages more slowly. In I Left My Heart, the first book in the Robin Miller series, my protagonist is 29 years old and the year is 1989. Old Black Magic takes place four years later, in 1993. The gap between my age and Robin’s, meanwhile, has grown to a full six years. Despite these trespasses, I remain fond of her. Back by popular demand in these pages is K.T. Bellflower, the sexy chef with a southern accent. Many of you have asked—no—ordered me to bring her back, so here she is in all her butter-scented glory.
Old Black Magic is set in New Orleans, Louisiana, and New York City. I owe much thanks to Beth Miller, Robin Martin and Manina Dolores Duborca, who showed me the best of the Big Easy, while graciously allowing me to portray the worst. I have taken some liberties in describing that exuberant city. Similarly, anyone who knows Brooklyn and travels via the subway will instantly recognize the creative license I’ve taken in describing the Carroll Street train station. My apologies to anyone who takes exception.
As usual, I must thank the incredible universe of people who make my life so rich and magical: my dearest friends (if you don’t know who you are by now, shame on you!), my family of origin and my extraordinary powerhouse of a partner, Rhea, whose hope, love, commitment, kindness and passion bring me to tears of astonishment and gratitude.
This book will also forever be linked in my mind with the loving memory of Teaka Balboa Cleopatra. One name could never have described you. Enjoy the mint garden, sweet queen.
Prologue
He’d been following her so long, her perfume had soaked into the fabric of his shirt, mingled with his sweat. This would be the best one yet. He’d take his time, do it right. Maybe it wouldn’t even happen at the hotel. He could’ve done her right outside the restaurant, after she stopped yapping with that copperhead. Oh, he could’ve done them both right then, the two of them whispering like they were queens of the earth. But no, she had to be alone. Patterns had to hold. He chuckled to himself. What fools they were.
She dropped a cigarette and ground it, beneath her heel. Their eyes almost met for an instant as she turned the corner, and he grew hard in response. This one had long legs, thick calves. But she didn’t walk fast. She walked like she had time on her hands, like life was waiting for her. Maybe they’d end up near Congo Square, Armstrong’s armpit, oh, it’d be so right. He could carve “Widow of Paris” on her back.
No, that would be too much, too soon. The game had to be played right.
The knife was cold in his pocket, the statue the perfect size. He hefted it in his hand and floated after her shadow.
Chapter One
Monday, May 3
Sunlight cut through the shutters and ran soft, hot fingers over my cheeks. I half-opened an eye and smiled. From the room service cart at the foot of the bed rose the spicy aroma of last night’s Café BrÛlot. I could still taste the rich combination of cloves, cinnamon, citrus, cognac and strong, black coffee. I burrowed my face into the sheets and remembered the abandon of the last twelve hours.
In the French Quarter of New Orleans, sensory overload is a daily mandate. Days begin with a deceptive quiet: a click of solitary heels on flagstone, clear and distinct. The cough of a solitary car motor. The squeak of a window pressed open against the damp morning air, which instantly beads up on the cold glass and leaves glistening trails, each as slender as a frog’s tongue. By early afternoon, Bourbon Street begins to percolate again, a slow boil that builds into a scalding, inescapable steam. Moody jazz, pounding rock and exuberant zydeco collide into one another and make music of a fifth dimension. The air smells of stale beer, fried oysters and sweat.
New Orleans is at once one of the most exhilarating and one of the most depressing cities. It is the experiential equivalent of cocaine: a narcotic that dulls pain and induces paper-thin elation. The city fools even the most sex-phobic men and women into believing they have the potential for bestial eroticism. The first hit of the city is intoxicating, producing a thrilling sense of abandonment. You have the sense you’ve entered the biggest party of your life, a Disneyland of decadence. But then the high wears o
ff and you see the squalor, you feel the emotional void at the center.
Lovemaking takes on a different heat. Frenzied, desperate and unbridled, people fall into bed and grind limbs as if passion itself existed only here, in the dark, throbbing heart of the French Quarter. As if sunrise threatened to slice through the fervor and expose the hollowness beneath. I should know. I’ve been under the knife a few times myself. On my last trip here, many years ago, I fooled around with a woman on a park bench in Jackson Square, both of us so drunk it didn’t matter whether we climaxed or not. Neither of us expected to remember sensation by morning. My father had just died and my lover, Mary, had announced her decision to leave me and move out West. My grief and outrage at the time loomed too large for Yoo-Hoos and Twinkies to vanquish. New Orleans had provided me with a black hole in which I could lose my discontent, or, at least zone it out.
Since then, I’ve found that there are different kinds of happiness. One you can apply superficially, like a coat of gawdy cosmetics, and another that your body, heart and soul assimilates like nutrients drawn from food. New Orleans supplies people with a feel-good sensation akin to cheap, dime-store cosmetics. Now, cosmetics don’t always look as good to others as you think they do. And after a day, even the best makeup job looks like crap. But as my L.A. buddies would say, that was then and this is now. And now felt a lot closer to Elysian Fields than I’d ever been.
I was in New Orleans to celebrate the debut of Les Enfants, the new restaurant run by PBS cook K.T. Bellflower and the renowned Cajun chef Winston Hawkins. In truth, K.T.’s only contribution to Les Enfants was a lockbox of coveted recipes, two former sous chefs and a check that carried more 0s than you need to win tic-tac-toe.
It was nearly noon, which meant we must’ve had less than six hours of sleep. K.T. was already in the shower, humming some God-awful country tune. I couldn’t be sure, but it sounded as if she was singing about the hubcaps of her heart. She’d been doing that a lot lately, singing. Yesterday it was “Let Me Entertain You,” sung with a rose clasped between her teeth, a scarf her only adornment. K.T’s a big Gypsy fan. Me, I’m just learning to appreciate the score. By the way, K.T. did not need a gimmick to get applause.
I should point out that my relationship with K.T. didn’t have one of those picture-perfect launches, the kind of stranger-across-a-crowded-room romances that causes the eyes of close friends to roll in mock disgust. The truth is, witnessing someone else’s unbridled new love can make even the strongest stomach kick around a few olive pits. Panic fists into your brain as you clamp down a second too late on the question: Did I ever feel that way about—? Go ahead, fill in the blank. We’ve all been there. Not that I didn’t suffer whiplash from my first glance at K.T. I did. But we had danced one of those dysfunctional tangos, tripping all over each other’s best intentions, until finally, the band packed up its instruments and went home. I came to my senses in the dead of winter, just as I was about to nail a kidnapper and succumb to pneumonia. Days later I woke up in a hospital. K.T. reentered my life just as my I.V. drip ran out.
Maybe it was the rattle in my lungs she found irresistible. Or it could’ve been the way my skin took on the sheen of overcooked tuna. Whatever it was, K.T. fell back in love with me while I was stretched out butt-naked on a hospital bed. At any other time, I would’ve resisted. But there’s something amazingly sobering about those little plastic name tags hospital clerks snap onto your wrists to distinguish you from other chattel. Somewhere around three in the morning, in a dim hospital room that smelled of dead flowers and dirty linen, I realized that the harder I ran, the faster I ended up where I began. So Robin Miller, one-time famous romance writer and now fearless private eye, decided to settle down.
There was a snag, of course.
* * *
The bathroom door opened and K.T. emerged, a teal towel wrapped around her torso and another turbaned on her head. Under the guise of sleep, I scrutinized the woman I’d been seeing exclusively for eleven weeks. She stood before a floor-length mirror, delightfully unselfconscious, and shook out her hair. It’s naturally curly, shoulder-length and the color of lion fur in an African sunset. Her eyes are hazel and her nose freckled. She has strong, square shoulders and farmer-stock hands. At that moment, the skin covering her five-seven curvaceous frame had a just-scrubbed luster. Ah, but when she dropped the second towel, the snag revealed itself.
Her belly had the slightest swelling, one that I might not have noticed if last night had been our first time together. More telling yet was the color and size of her nipples: dark as coffee beans and very pronounced. K.T. was almost exactly twelve weeks pregnant.
We had just started round two of our relationship when the EPT dipstick turned blue. If you think I kicked up my heels in jubilation, you probably believe in fairy tales and J.F.K.’s monogamy. I went absolutely slack-jawed. Sure I knew K.T. had been trying to get pregnant. She’d been trying all the months we’d been separated. Seven, to be exact. Long enough for her to start worrying that it was never going to happen. Long enough for me to pretend everything would stay the way it used to be. After all, at thirty-seven and counting, K.T.’s no young puppy, at least in terms of fertility. But fate has the humor of a bad Saturday Night Live skit. Just one week into new-relationship heaven, an embryo dug into my honey’s uterus and thumbed its nose at me. Sure, I could’ve booked. But I was, and am, hopelessly in love. So K.T’s going to be a mother, and I’m going to be something as yet undetermined.
She patted herself dry and reached into the closet for her jeans. I propped myself up on one elbow and said, “Hey, no underwear?”
Those leaf-green eyes smiled at me. “Honey,” she said, “this is the Big Easy, remember?” Her voice normally carried a mere trace of her West Virginia origins, but when she wanted me to melt, she turned it on like a roaring campfire.
I said, “Come back to bed.” The purr I tried to emit sounded like a ’64 Chevy idling. My mouth needed toothpaste and coffee, preferably in that order.
“Can’t. I’m on a mission.” She spiked her arms into an Opera in the Park T-shirt. “I woke up craving beignets from Café du Monde. And I am bound and determined to get us some.”
“You’re hungry?”
“First time in ten weeks, so you can understand why there’s no time for donning undies.”
I threw aside the sheets as she wiggled into her sandals. “Wait for me. I’ll come with you.”
“With you looking like that? No way. Besides, I’m feeling energetic this morning. If I wait even half a second, I may revert to my previous slug state.”
I edged onto my knees and checked out my reflection. I’m five-nine, olive-skinned and, at thirty-four, not as tautly muscled as I used to be. The two months I’d spent in bed while recouping from pneumonia had added a stubborn ten pounds to my frame. My dark hair is cut in short, choppy locks, all of which were pointing straight up at the moment. My breasts bore imprints of the sheets. Capping the picture, the ragged scar above my left eye had sunburned on yesterday’s paddleboat ride down the river.
KT. almost cackled. “I love you, but I don’t want to be seen with you. At least, not yet. Shower. Order some coffee. Become human.” She opened the door, knelt down and tossed me a copy of the New Orleans Times-Picayune. “I’ll be back before you finish your first cup of café.”
I scampered to the door, tucked myself to one side so my naked butt wasn’t visible to the hall, and grabbed her by the waist. Our kiss was sweet, the good-bye kiss of an established couple.
“Save some room for me,” she said with a wink.
If I had known what was coming, I would’ve never let her out that door. But that’s how life works. One minute, you’re humming a tune and basking in sunshine, and the next minute, splat! You’re crud under someone else’s shoe. I don’t care if you call that someone else God, kismet, your ex-lover or a serial killer. All I know is that when the drop comes, you go down hard.
Some people are terrified of roller coasters. Not me. A
t least you know when you’re going to take a nosedive. What terrifies me is happiness.
I called room service, took a quick shower and put on a pair of shorts and a tank top. The coffee arrived a minute later. I sprawled on the unmade bed, took a hefty sip of the chicory-laced brew and spread out the newspaper. The entertainment section featured a full-page spread on Les Enfants. K.T. and Winston looked exuberant, clinking together vintage Flintstones glasses bubbling with sparkling cider. The restaurant reflected the owners’ personalities. Both had contributed items from their individual collections of toys from the Fifties and Sixties. Every table had a Slinky or an Etch-A-Sketch. The menu featured new spins on old classics: clumpy mashed potatoes laced with rosemary and whole cloves of garlic, an amazing gumbo that smelled of sassafras and andouille sausage, wood-oven roasted lamb shank with sundried tomatoes, Creole ratatouille and a Bananas Foster equal to foreplay. I should have stopped with the rave review, but instead I flipped back to the main section.
DEAD HERO COP’S EX FOUND SLAIN IN HOTEL ALLEY
The headline caught my eye immediately. Blood rushed into my belly as I read on. The woman’s name was Lisa Rubin, 39, a journalist from Berkeley, California. She was in town to settle the estate of her ex-husband, Peter Strampos, a local beat cop. He’d been killed a week ago while attempting to stop a thirteen-year-old from raping his next-door neighbor. Rubin was found tucked between garbage cans in an alley behind the Hotel Roi, on the outskirts of the French Quarter. She was sodomized, clubbed, then stabbed to death. An egg was cracked open on the back of her head.
My hand shot to the phone. I dialed so fast the first time, I got the wrong number. The next time, I got the station.