RHYS BOWEN
VOODOO
November 2004
RHYS BOWEN GREW up in Bath, England, but draws on her childhood visits to Wales for her award-winning mystery series featuring Welsh policeman Constable Evan. A second series featuring turn-of-the-century Irish immigrant Molly Murphy as she carves her way in New York City has also garnered awards. Before turning to mysteries, Ms. Bowen was a writer for the BBC in London and a children’s book author. Her first story for AHMM, “Voodoo” exhibits a keen sense of place and skillfully plays off common misperceptions about Voodoo. Sadly, the New Orleans neighborhoods she captures so beautifully here may have been lost forever in 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.
Voodoo isn’t often the cause of death listed in modern police reports, but that was what Officer Paul Renoir had written on the sheet that reached my desk at the New Orleans Police Department headquarters. Probable cause of death: Voodoo.
I was intrigued enough by this to take on the investigation myself rather than handing it over to one of my juniors. After twenty years in the homicide division of a big city police department, I had had it up to here with gang bangs, drug deals gone wrong, and men who had smashed in their old lady’s head simply because they felt like it after a night at the bars.
I called Renoir into my office. He was a serious-looking young man—shorter than cops used to be when I first joined the force, but broad shouldered and with a round, earnest face. He’d only been on homicide duty for a couple of months and was clearly ill at ease in my presence.
“What’s this about, Renoir?” I waved the report in his direction. He shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. “What is it—some kind of joke?”
“Oh no, sir.” His face became even more serious. “I know it sounds really strange, but the widow was so insistent. She said there was no other explanation. And the doctor was equally baffled.”
I indicated a steel and vinyl chair opposite my desk. “You’d better take a seat and fill me in on the details.”
He perched on the edge of the chair, still clearly nervous. “Officer Roberts and I got a call to go to the Garden District, possible homicide. It was one of those big mansions, sir.”
“Mansions are usually big, Renoir. Learn to be brief, okay?”
“Sorry, sir. One of those big—uh—houses on St. Charles. We were met at the door by the distraught wife. She led us upstairs to the master bedroom, and there was this man lying there dead. No sign of struggle, nothing to indicate he hadn’t died of natural causes. I asked her when he had died and if she had sent for her doctor, and she said the family doctor had already been there and he’d been as upset as she was. He couldn’t find any other explanation for it either.
“Other than what?”
“That’s what I asked her, sir. She looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Voodoo.’ Then she told me that a month ago he had offended a voodoo priestess. She had cursed him and told him that if he didn’t change his mind, he’d be dead within the month.”
“I gather he didn’t change his mind about whatever it was.”
“He didn’t, sir, and he started going downhill from that very moment. The wife said it was almost as if he were fading before her eyes.” Renoir’s own eyes were peering at me earnestly, willing me to believe him. “I really think you ought to go and speak to her yourself, sir. I came out of there feeling really spooky.”
“Renoir, police officers are not allowed to feel spooky, even in the presence of a dismembered and partly eaten corpse.”
He flinched. “No, sir.”
I got up from my chair. “The best thing you can do is go straight back out there.”
“Me, sir?”
He tried to keep his expression composed, but the words came
out as a croak.
I had to smile. “It’s like falling off a horse. You have to get right back on, or you’ll be spooked forever. You can drive me.”
His face lit up. “You’re coming too, sir?”
“Why not? God knows I need a good laugh.”
“I don’t think you’ll be laughing, sir,” Renoir said as he left my office.
AN HOUR LATER Renoir drove as we followed the streetcar tracks out along St. Charles Avenue to the upscale Garden District. Here was where New Orleans Old Money was concentrated. We passed an antique streetcar with tourists hanging out of the windows, videotaping the mansions as they passed. They glared at us as we got in their way.
“Here we are, sir.” Renoir pulled up outside the home of John Torrance III and his wife, Millie. When Renoir had told me that he liked to be called Trey, the lightbulb went off in my head. Trey Torrance was a familiar name to me, appearing regularly in the newspapers at some charity event or other. I had looked him up in the files before we set out and found out that Mr. Torrance had been fifty-nine years old and still very active in his business life as well as in various philanthropic organizations. He was, for example, a leading sponsor of the Bacchus Carnival Krewe. He had been born to an old plantation family across the river, inherited a sizeable estate of local land, and made himself even richer by putting subdivisions on it and selling it off.
I couldn’t fault his taste in houses. Trey Taylor lived in a solid, square brick mansion with white shutters at the windows and an enormous magnolia grandiflora shading it. Nothing too fancy, no Southern-style pillars and porticos. But the gardens were beautifully kept and the place had an air of prosperity about it. We parked under one of the live oaks that draped in a canopy over the street.
“Thank God for trees,” I said. “At least the car won’t have turned into an oven while we’re away.”
I had expected the front door to be opened by a maid, but it was Mrs. Torrence herself who stood there, looking quite frail but elegant in a black-and-white-striped dress and pearls. How many women wear pearls at home in the afternoon these days, I wondered. Especially when their husband has just died. I introduced myself.
“I’m so grateful you’ve come, Lieutenant Patterson,” she said. “Do come inside, and you too, Officer Renoir. Can I fix you gentlemen a glass of iced tea or lemonade?” Even the death of her husband had not robbed this lady of her Southern manners.
“Nothing, thank you, ma’am,” I said as we stepped into the delightful coolness of a marble-tiled front hall. She led us through to a sitting room that was decorated with understated good taste—good old mahogany furniture and some classy-looking paintings on the walls. One of these was a portrait of a man with a bulldog face of almost Winston Churchillian tenacity. Chin stuck out defiantly, brow set in a perpetual frown. Trey Torrance had clearly been a man who expected to get his own way and dared anybody to cross him.
“You don’t have a maid, Mrs. Torrance?” I couldn’t help asking.
She was holding a dainty lace handkerchief, and she put it up to her mouth. “She didn’t feel comfortable staying here after—after what happened. She said she could still feel the spirits flying around. So I had to let her go home, even though I’m not very comfortable here myself, I can tell you.”
I gave her a long, sympathetic look. “Voodoo, Mrs. Torrance?” I asked. “What makes you think it was voodoo that killed your husband?”
“What else could it have been?” She almost snapped at me. “He saw that woman and she cursed him and he died, just like she said he would.”
“Whoa—go back a little. What woman are we talking about?”
“Trey owned land across the river. Swampy land. No good for anything. But then he managed to get his hands on some landfill, and he was going to have it brought down in barges from Missouri. He planned to build up that land and put another of his subdivisions on it. Like I said, it was mostly swamp and grass, but there were a few shacks down by the river, and this old woman lived in one of them. She refused to move out, even though she had no right there. Trey owned the title to that land. Trey went to see her and she warned him. She said if he kept on with this, he’d regret it.”
“And what did your husb
and do?”
“He laughed, naturally. He told her he was bulldozing the place and it didn’t matter to him whether she was in it or not.”
“So your husband didn’t take her threat seriously?”
“Of course not. Trey didn’t take kindly to threats, and he wasn’t the kind of man who would believe in anything as ridiculous as voodoo. He came home and told me about it. ‘Silly old bitch,’ he said—I’m sorry for the language. Trey was rather outspoken. ‘If she thinks she can scare me off with her mumbo jumbo, she can think again.’”
“And then what happened?”
“Then the doll arrived.” She looked up at me with hollow, frightened eyes and pressed the handkerchief to her mouth again.
“A voodoo doll?”
She nodded.
“May I see it?”
She disappeared and came back almost immediately with something wrapped in a cloth. Inside was a simple doll, made of coarse unbleached muslin. It was faceless and featureless and might have been some child’s toy, except there were red-tipped pins stuck in its heart and stomach and throat. I examined it then handed it on to Renoir, who looked as if he didn’t want to touch it.
“I wanted to throw it away, but somehow I couldn’t. I thought it might speed up the curse or something,” Mrs. Torrance said. “Naturally I didn’t show it to Trey.”
“This was how long ago?”
“Just under a month. She told him he’d be dead within the month and he was.”
“Is the body still upstairs?” I asked.
She nodded, her eyes darting fearfully.
“You’d better take me up to see it.”
She led us up a graceful curved staircase to an enormous master bedroom. The drapes were closed, and the room had an aquariumlike quality. I turned on the light. The man lying in the bed looked peaceful enough, but nothing like the fierce bulldog in that portrait. He looked small and shrunken.
“Your husband lost a lot of weight since that portrait was painted,” I said.
“Since the curse,” she said. “He just shrank before my eyes.”
“He didn’t eat?”
“He started vomiting the next day, and after that he couldn’t keep food down. He’d feel fine, he’d eat something, and the vomiting would start again. He got so weak he couldn’t stand.”
“You called a doctor?”
“He said it was probably a virus. He didn’t take it too seriously.”
“I understood it was a heart attack that killed him?”
“That’s what the doctor said. The vomiting did stop after a few days, but Trey was as weak as a baby and he found it hard to swallow. Then he started having heart palpitations. He had had previous heart trouble, you know, and he was on medication. The doctor upped his dose of digoxin, but it didn’t do any good, did it? I begged him to go to that woman and tell him he’d leave her in peace, but he was so stubborn, he wouldn’t do it. Even with his life on the line, he wouldn’t do it.”
She started to sob quietly.
I stared down at the man lying in the bed and cleared my throat. “Mrs. Torrance, I’m sorry your husband died, but I’m not sure what you think the police can do for you.”
She glared at me. “Arrest that woman. Make her pay for what she has done.”
I tried not to smile. “Mrs. Torrance, you seem like a sensible woman. I’m sure you’ll understand that there is no court in this state that would convict someone of killing via a curse. It would be thrown out before it came to trial.”
“But she’s just as guilty as if she stabbed him or forced poison down his throat,” she said angrily. “You should have seen my husband before. He was a powerful, aggressive man—full of life. The moment her curse struck, he just melted away until his heart gave out. And even if you couldn’t prove the voodoo curse, surely harassing him and making threats is against the law, isn’t it?”
I shook my head. “If we hauled in folks every time they said ‘I could kill you,’ the parish jails would be even more crowded than they are now. And sending one doll through the mail doesn’t amount to harassing. Did she send anything else?”
“One doll was enough.” She looked at me coldly. “It worked, didn’t it?”
I started to make my way toward the door. There was something strangely cold and uncomfortable about that dark room with its drawn blinds. I wondered if I was succumbing to the voodoo hysteria myself. “Look, Mrs. Torrance. I’ll have the body autopsied to verify the cause of death. If it was a heart attack, I don’t think there’s anything we can do. I’m really sorry. I’m sure this is most disturbing for you.”
“It’s even more disturbing to know that people like Maman Boutin can kill at will and nobody is going to stop them,” she said.
“Okay,” I said with a sigh. “Tell me where I can find this Maman Boutin and I’ll go talk to her.”
She described where we’d find the shacks. I had Renoir call and arrange for the body to be taken for autopsy, then we paid a call on the family physician.
“I understand that you were uncomfortable about the cause of death,” I said to him.
He was a dapper, fussy little man, the kind who wears blazers and has his shirts starched and ironed. He had a gold signet ring on his left pinkie. “The cause of death was a heart attack,” he said.
“Brought on by—”
He shook his head. “The man was a walking time bomb. He’d had heart trouble for several years and yet he wouldn’t slow down. He loved his beignets and coffee, and his bourbon-and-Seven-Up. Typical type-A personality. Very short fuse. Upset him and he’d explode. The heart attack was only a matter of time.”
“So you don’t agree with his widow that it was caused by voodoo.”
“Is that what she told you?” He looked amused, then shook his head. “She was very upset. She had told me several times that some woman had cursed him, and I agree that he did become sick immediately after the supposed confrontation took place, but as a physician I’m not trained to recognize the symptoms of voodoo. I’d reiterate what I put on the death certificate. He was weakened by a nasty stomach virus and finished off by a heart attack.”
“I’m having an autopsy done,” I said. “Just in case.”
“I don’t know what you think you’re going to find,” he said, “other than a severely damaged heart muscle.”
He escorted us to the door and opened it. I paused on the doorstep.
“So in your estimation there was nothing unexpected about this man’s death?”
“Only that he went downhill so fast,” he said. “He was a big bull of a man, and apart from that heart condition, he was never sick. He caught some little bitty virus and it didn’t seem like anything helped.”
“You’re sure it was a virus?”
“If you mean was it a voodoo curse, all I can tell you is that there is a nasty stomach bug going around this city at the moment, and Trey Torrance’s symptoms were consistent with the other cases I’ve treated. A little more violent and severe, perhaps, but Trey also overindulged in his food and drink. And he probably didn’t stick to the bland diet I prescribed for him. He wasn’t exactly good at taking directions, as his wife will tell you.”
“Thank you, Doctor.” I nodded to him and we took our leave.
IT WAS CLOSE to rush hour and it took us awhile to cross the river and get free of the city sprawl. Then we were driving up Highway 18 with water meadows and the occasional horse swishing its tail in the shade of a live oak on one side of us and the great brown expanse of the Mississippi on the other. It was times like this when I asked myself what the hell I was doing shutting myself up in a big city. I was born in Kentucky, came down to New Orleans to attend Tulane, and stayed. But I was still a country boy at heart.
The last mile to the shacks across the river was on a dirt track. It had rained earlier in the week, and the potholes were full of puddles. We splashed, bumped, and slithered our way out to the shacks with Renoir apologizing each time we bottomed out in a particularly b
ig pothole. That boy was going to have to develop some balls if he wanted to survive in the NOPD.
The dirt track ended, and Renoir parked the car under a sorrylooking half-dead tree. We got out and immediately I heard the whine. I barely had time to remember to roll down my shirtsleeves before the mosquitoes descended on us in a cloud. Renoir wasn’t so lucky; he was wearing short sleeves. He slapped and waved his arms and cursed under his breath.
“Why would anybody want to live out here, sir?” he muttered. “This is a hellhole if ever I saw one.”
“Some people like the peace and quiet, I guess,” I said. “And they like to be left alone.”
“I’d leave them alone, all right, if I got my blood sucked dry every time I came to visit.”
We followed a narrow track through some bushes until it brought us out to a field of saw grass running alongside a bayou. Where the bayou emptied into the river there was a cluster of shacks huddled together in the shade of a tree. The shacks looked as if they had been built in haste by a gang of boys wanting a clubhouse. There were holes in the walls, half-collapsed front porches, and boarded-up windows. A sorrier-looking sight I have never seen.
Renoir echoed my sentiments. “I can’t see why this place was worth fighting over. You couldn’t pay me enough to stay here.”
There was a rustle in the tall grass to our left, and a big old gator slid down the muddy bank and plopped into the bayou. An egret rose from the water and drifted to a safer spot. The mosquitoes kept up their whining symphony. I could feel them biting through my pant legs, but as a senior officer, I was too dignified to slap the way Renoir was doing.
A skinny dog slunk out from beneath the nearest of the shacks and started barking at us. At this signal an old black man poked his head out of the door.
“Good afternoon, sir,” I said. “We’re looking for Mrs. Boutin?”
“Maman Boutin you’s wanting?” he asked in a voice that sounded like a wheel that needed oil. “She don’t take kindly to strangers.”
“We’re policemen. We just need to ask her some questions.”
“She don’t take kindly to questions,” he said.
Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine Presents Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense Page 59