by Lisa Turner
“Hey, Don. The tech with the camera over there has a question.”
Dunsford’s head swiveled toward a young woman with blocky shoulders and wide hips who was sorting through a camera bag. He ambled over, their near showdown having flown out of his head.
Billy tucked the conjure bag into his pocket and walked to the transfer-service driver who was standing next to his hearse. The driver apparently recognized him, because he stepped back from the gurney as a sign of compliance. Tech crews divide detectives into two groups—professionals and professional jerks. His partner Lou once said that only geniuses can get away with being sons of bitches on a daily basis. Lou had been a son of a bitch, but he’d pretty much kept a lid on it until the end. He wondered if Lou would’ve come here this morning with Frankie to check the scene or if he would’ve blown her off. He used to believe he could predict what Lou would do a hundred percent of the time. He’d been wrong.
The name “Davis” had been scrawled in black marker at the foot of Red’s body bag. Billy put his hand on the zipper and glanced over at the driver.
“I got some paperwork,” the driver said and walked to the front of the vehicle.
Billy ran the zipper down the side. Fermented alcohol wafted out of the airtight body bag as he folded back the edge. Instantly, he understood why Frankie had been so concerned. The expression on Red’s face made his heart grip.
It’s not unusual for a corpse that remains in a seated position for several hours to exhibit a dropped jaw, but he’d never seen anything like this gape-mouthed, Halloween mask of horror that was Red’s face. Gravity couldn’t create the distended eyeballs, the skin stretched tight around the eye sockets, or cause Red’s lips to draw back and expose his gums.
Pain on the face of a dead man was nothing new, but he wasn’t looking at pain. There was nothing natural or normal about the nature of Red Davis’s death. This was pure terror.
He rocked the head to one side then the other to establish rigor and to check for blows around the face and skull. The fingers and nails of both hands showed no sign of trauma; however, a powdery film coated Red’s face and dirt streaked the front of his shirt, something Billy didn’t recall from the night before. Was it the same as the dust in the conjure bag? They would never know, because Dunsford wasn’t going to include the bag’s contents as evidence to be tested.
He heard a door slam and the service driver came around the side of the vehicle, giving a nod that it was time to load the body. Billy reached behind Red’s head to straighten it before zipping the bag, noting the green and yellow necklace that Frankie had mentioned. As he withdrew his hand, a wad of organic material the size of a penny came away in his fingers. A piece of wasp nest.
“Hey, Don,” he called. “You need to see this.”
Dunsford broke off his conversation with the tech and came over, making grunting noises in the back of his throat at the sight of the unzipped bag. “What the hell? I told you to leave the body alone.”
“Did you see Red’s face?”
Dunsford gave him a sidelong look. “You know the deceased?”
“Everybody knows Red Davis.” He held up the gummy wad. “I found this stuck between his neck and collar.”
He brought out the conjure bag and poured some of the contents, including chunks of the nest, into his palm. “It looks like someone threw this crap in Red’s face to make him believe he was cursed. A heart attack may have killed him, but this makes me think someone triggered it.”
Dunsford stared at the dust in Billy’s palm. His mouth puckered, and his eyes took on a sly certainty. “I get it. That little gal cop put you up to this. She talked you into coming down here to mess with me because I slapped her on the ass.” He reached over and jerked the zipper closed. “I don’t give a rat’s ass what you think or what you’ve got to say, or how many cases you’ve closed, or who your granddaddy was. You’re on leave, which means you’re a neutered cop.” He swatted the gurney. “Get going,” he barked at the driver.
He turned back to Billy. “You act like you care about this bum. If you’re so broken up, why didn’t you get him off the street, huh? Now get outta my crime scene, pretty boy. And tell Mz. Thang to keep her nose and her tight little fanny out of my cases.”
Chapter 7
Nine A.M. and his day already had a crust on top.
He phoned Frankie from the scene and caught her as she was leaving Confederate Park on North Front Street. While he’d been shadowboxing with Dunsford, Frankie had signed out with dispatch and located a woman who regularly shared a park bench with Davis and Lacy. The woman said they had recently taken rooms—a polite term for squatting—on the second floor, back side of an abandoned house on St. Paul Avenue. Another vagrant had taken over the first floor. Billy agreed to meet her at the house in thirty minutes.
He had no problem locating the vandalized Greek Revival mansion with busted-out windows on the second floor and a forest of weeds in the yard. An orange laminated sign tacked to the plywood that secured the front door read CITY OF MEMPHIS INSPECTION DIVISION—PLACARD OF CONDEMNATION.
“Condemnation” is a Bible word. Bible words are Memphis words. Words like “judgment” and “damnation” had been running through his mind since he’d seen that tortured expression on Red’s corpse’s face.
Last night he’d ignored his truer instincts and walked away from Red. Now the man was dead. Maybe it had been his time to go, but that was impossible to know without looking into it further.
He walked around the side of the house. Someone had torn the plywood off a tall window on the side porch that was hidden from the street by overgrown boxwoods and was using the opening as an entrance. He peered in. Although the house had been abandoned long ago, the empty room retained an eerie elegance.
He left the porch, a mockingbird dive-bombing him from a pecan tree as he waded through the weeds to the sidewalk. Frankie had parked on the street and was leaning against the bumper of her blue Jeep Cherokee, laughing at the bird. Off duty, she’d changed into khakis and a cotton shirt.
They agreed that an inspection of the house was called for and walked together around to the side porch. Frankie pulled her duty weapon, a 9mm SIG Sauer, and ducked inside first. He followed.
Light filtered through dust-coated transoms, the room’s stagnant air smelling of boiled hot dogs, urine, and feces. The odor nearly triggered his gag reflex, but he held back. No barfing in front of a girl, especially if she’s not barfing, too.
Frankie stalked around the downstairs rooms while he stepped into the front hall. A door slammed. She joined him in time to catch sight of a large black man as he took off running through the trees in the side yard. They looked at each other and shrugged. No way to catch what had to be the house’s downstairs tenant.
Upstairs, the plaster walls had been stripped down to the lath. Patches of light from downstairs shone through the rotting floorboards. At the end of the hall, they found the musicians’ door held closed by a rusted hasp and an opened bicycle lock.
The windows of the large, square room were half boarded up, the ceiling buckled by water damage. Green and black mold streaked the walls. The air smelled of plaster dust, Irish Spring soap, and mildew. A crumbling brick fireplace and a battered armoire shoved in the corner marked this room as having once been the master bedroom.
Billy gave the space a quick once-over. What struck him more than the decay was the effort Red and Little Man had made to create order. A table pieced together out of scrap wood stood at the center of the room. On the table were two black candles. The men had cut holes in two pieces of paper and run the candles through them, the paper apparently meant to catch dripping wax. Lined against the wall was a pair of army cots, each with a neatly folded blanket and a metal pan turned upside down and placed in the middle of the mattress.
Red’s guitar case stood at the foot of one cot and Little Man’s sax case was at the foot of the other. What a relief. The instruments were safe. They represented the dead men’s
legacies.
Nothing about the room suggested the chaos of an alcoholic’s lifestyle or that Red had died for any reason other than natural causes. Billy walked over to the fireplace where a white enameled pan with five eggs floating in oil sat on the hearth. One end of a cotton wick had been immersed in the oil. The other end hung off the side. A brown powder covered the top of the oil. He leaned in and sniffed. Cinnamon.
“Look at this,” he said, expecting to find Frankie right behind him. Instead, she was standing in the doorway, rocking in her shoes like a kid about to take off running.
She pointed to a mildewed wall. “Those black patches are toxic mold.”
“Are you sensitive to it?”
“No.”
“Do you think the mold caused Red’s heart attack?” he asked.
“No . . . I don’t.”
“Then why the hell are you standing in the hall?”
Her neck flushed. “Because I’m looking at curses. Bad ones.”
She walked to the table and spread back the curled paper beneath one of the candles. “Take a look at this.”
It was a promo shot of Red. Someone had cut a hole where his face should have been and run the candle through it. The base of the candle was sitting in a nest of gray hair. The same treatment had been given to the second candle, only the photo was of Little Man.
“Light the candle and the curse ignites on the person in the photo,” she said. “Hair from the victim makes the curse even more powerful.” She pointed to the pans turned upside down on the cots. “That over there is some really nasty stuff. People who believe in Santería keep a pan of water under their bed while they sleep to trap the evil spirits. The longer the water stays under the bed, the more concentrated the evil becomes. If the water is dumped on the mattress, the spirits are released.”
“So get a new mattress.”
“Doesn’t work like that. The spirits track your scent, run you down like bloodhounds to possess your soul. Possession by evil spirits is the worst possible fate for a believer.”
“How do you know this stuff?”
She huffed. “I told you, I worked with this in Key West. A neighbor of mine drove her car into a concrete wall rather than risk being possessed by the Evils.”
“The Evils?”
“Evil spirits.”
The seriousness of her tone surprised him. “Here’s another explanation” he said. “Blues musicians set a tub of water beside them while they play. They like the sound as it passes over the water.”
“Nice story, except these tubs of water have been dumped on the cots.” She walked to the fireplace and studied the pan on the hearth. “I can tell you that the person who set up these curses knows something about palo mayombe. That’s the black arts. I think someone cursed this room then hunted down Little Man and Red with the conjure bags and finished them off. The oil and eggs are evidence that they knew they were in trouble, but they couldn’t light the wick soon enough. It has to burn for five days before a curse is displaced.”
“They could have walked in and lighted the wick then stayed at Robert House for five days.”
“No believer would enter a room this cursed. With Red’s bad heart, I’m surprised he didn’t drop dead in the doorway. No, they did the right thing. They ran with just the clothes on their backs.”
He didn’t want to hear any more about evil spells, and he sure as hell didn’t believe it. He went over to shelves the men had constructed out of concrete blocks and boards. A box of saltines and twelve cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli were stored on the lower shelf. On the top shelf was a stack of staff paper for music notation. At one end stood a framed photo of a young woman seated at a baby grand piano. Beside the frame was a votive candle and a wilting daisy in a bud vase. At the other end were two clean washcloths. On one lay a beaded necklace similar to what Red had been wearing.
Frankie joined him and picked up the necklace. “This must’ve been for Little Man. The pattern of beads belongs to Obatala.” She slipped the white beads through her fingers and laid the necklace back on the cloth.
“Who is Obatala?”
“He’s orisha, like a saint in the Catholic church only with a bit of Greek god thrown in. They eat, drink, have emotions. Every initiated believer has an orisha or, to be more accurate, is chosen by an orisha.”
“You grew up around this crazy stuff?”
“It’s not so crazy. Religious beliefs are powerful no matter who you worship. I’ve seen good and bad come from Santería just like any other religion.”
He looked around the room. “Nothing I see here indicates intentional harm. It’s more like pranks.”
Frankie wiped sweat from her forehead, frustration on her face. “I guess whoever set this up is going to get away with murder.”
She had him with that one. He didn’t like it.
He picked up notated sheets of music. One appeared to be a completed song titled “Old Fool Love.” Red had signed his name beside the title. The chorus read:
Love at the door feeling bad,
’Cause love can’t have what it needs to have.
Old fool love. That old fool . . . love.
Red had used that phrase the night before. Billy could almost hear him singing it.
He put down the pages. “You probably don’t know that Red and Little Man played big halls throughout Europe in the late eighties. In the nineties, they opened for major rock bands in Berlin, Paris, London. Red is an icon over there, a legend.”
“I didn’t realize,” she said.
“Check out Red’s guitar.” He went over to the cot, laid the case flat, and flipped open the latches.
The guitar inside looked more like a cubist painting deconstructed into parts than a musical instrument. The neck had been stomped free of the body, the fingerboard fractured in two places, the head detached with only the strings holding it to the neck. The mahogany top had been smashed, flipped over, and the back crushed.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, reading his shock.
He nodded toward the other case. “Check the sax.” He watched as she popped the latch and looked the instrument over.
“Oh, my God. It’s in pieces.”
He stood and walked to the armoire, heartsick with the realization that Frankie had been right—something terrible had happened in this room. He opened the door to the armoire, his eyes moving over the dark suits that had been worn shiny, and the white shirts with stained collars. Among them he found a camel-colored sports jacket with a Goodwill price tag attached. He pulled it from the rest and held it up for Frankie to see.
“You think it’s the cursed jacket?” she asked.
“I don’t know. This setup stinks. We’ll take the jacket, the instruments, and that sheet music, and the photograph of the girl on the shelf.”
“And Little Man’s necklace?”
“Yes, take that.”
She looked away. He caught her tiniest smile of triumph.
On the way out he clicked the bicycle lock shut. The place would be stripped by sundown, but there was nothing he could do about it.
Coming down the stairs, a window on the landing gave them a view of the street. An African-American man was on the sidewalk across from the house, arms crossed over his chest and his legs spread in a stance of defiance.
“Is that the guy we saw in the yard?” he asked.
“Not sure. And it’s too late to find out. He just took off.”
They ran downstairs but were slowed in the yard by the tangle of tall weeds. Tires squealed from around the corner. They pulled up. Billy looked at Frankie. “We need to find out who that was.”
Chapter 8
Frankie dropped Billy at Court Square, an easy walk down the bluff to his place on the river. A noontime gospel concert had just started. People wandered the square, eating hot dogs and drinking Orange Crush underneath the giant shade trees. Moms brought lawn chairs and blankets so their kids could sprawl at their feet and listen to the concert. It was all so c
omfortably familiar.
He spotted a bicycle cop in a yellow shirt and helmet surveying the crowd. Bums typically staked out the benches on the square, but they had an unspoken agreement with the cops about noontime—no panhandling, no hogging the benches, and no peeing in the bushes.
Twenty members of the Tennessee Mass Gospel Choir were deep into a snappy version of “Joy to the World.” The men and women, dressed in their summer whites, were lined up in front of the bandstand, singing and clapping to the beat. He wanted to stay for the music, but the sack of evidence from Red’s room reminded him that he needed to work up a case file.
The choir hit the chorus. A middle-aged man in a ball cap jigged through the crowd and began to whirl around in a clearing in front of the bandstand like a child on a sugar high, his startling green eyes bright with mania. He wore plaid shorts that bagged at the butt and white athletic socks bunched at his ankles. People in the crowd hurled catcalls at him. Three kids sitting on a blanket at the edge of the clearing clapped and giggled.
“Oh, good God,” Billy said under his breath as the man spun in his direction. It was Augie Poston, former all-star catcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, a onetime superstar and hero to millions of fans. At least that was true until mental illness had robbed Poston of his career. It was hard for Billy to stand there and watch a longtime friend like Augie make a fool of himself. Poston was a nice guy unless he dropped off his meds. Then he could turn volatile and run out of control. Like now.
The choir stepped it up a notch. Augie spun past Billy without seeing him. Waving wildly at the three kids, he flung his arms wide and lunged in their direction. Billy jumped into action and pushed through the crowd to grab Augie from behind, pulling him away from the kids and to the curb.
Augie shoved at Billy as a bicycle cop pulled alongside them.
“You idiot! You could’ve trampled those kids,” the cop said. Furious, he stepped off the bike.
The cop would assume Augie was drunk or high, but Augie wasn’t necessarily someone the cop would want to arrest.