Black Magic Woman (Morris and Chastain Investigations)

by Justin Gustainis

“Is that what they were? I wondered.”

  They stepped into the street to avoid a group of fundamentalists who were handing out leaflets protesting against nude dancing in Bourbon Street bars. They would have done just as well to protest against the movement of the tides.

  “Yeah, they were zombies, all right,” Morris said. “The eyes are always a dead giveaway. So to speak.”

  “Wait a second,” Libby said, frowning. “You picked that jar off the shelf before we ever saw what was waiting for us.”

  “Readiness is all, as somebody once said. Remember that stuff that Queen Esther rattled off to what’s-her-name, Martha, when we first went into the back room?”

  “Yes, vaguely.”

  “I don’t really speak Creole, not well enough to carry on a conversation or anything, but I was able to pick the word for ‘zombie’ out of what she was saying. I didn’t figure old Esther was dictating her Christmas list.”

  “She was lying to us, you know. About not knowing the current descendant of Sarah Carter.”

  “Yeah, I kind of tumbled to that, myself,” Morris said. “But what the hell are we going to do about it?”

  “As it happens,” Libby told him, “I may have an idea.”

  WHEN VAN DREENAN walked in, Fenton said, without preamble, “We got a hit off that Mississippi license plate. Finally.”

  “From which?” Van Dreenan was frowning. “Oh, yes. The one from that surveillance camera at the petrol station.”

  “That’s the one. I wasn’t sure how much help it was going to be. Figured either the car or the plate had been stolen, but it looks like I was wrong, since the driver’s license photo that they sent matches up pretty well with the guy’s face that we can see on that surveillance tape. There’s something else kind of interesting, too.” Fenton worked his laptop’s keyboard for a few seconds, then turned the computer around to face Van Dreenan. “See for yourself.”

  Van Dreenan sat down and peered at the screen. “Snake Perkins?” He looked at Fenton. “That sounds like an alias, but apparently it’s his given name.”

  “Yeah, just a good ol’ boy from Hattiesburg, Mississippi.”

  Van Dreenan thought he heard an off note in Fenton’s voice. “Is there something about this town, Hattiesburg? Something I should know?”

  Fenton made a dismissive gesture. “No, nothing important. I spent six weeks there, one night, a while back. Never mind. Read on.”

  “Um. Perkins was sent to reform school for auto theft at fifteen.” He looked up again. “Reform school?”

  “It’s where we send juvenile criminals, instead of prison,” Fenton told him. “Although with some of these places, there isn’t much difference. The one Snake went to wasn’t bad, though. I checked. More like a home for wayward boys.”

  “Wayward, indeed. And while he was at this reform school, I see, someone murdered his parents. Cut their throats while they slept, then set fire to the house. And in the charred ruins of the home, the authorities found—”

  “Evidence that Mom and Dad had been in the kiddie porn business. Had a little studio in the basement, and everything. According to the arson investigators, that’s where the fire started, with the help of about five gallons of gasoline. Looks like somebody wanted to wipe out every trace of their product.”

  Van Dreenan read on. “Ummm. But someone, whoever it was, did not succeed. The parents had a large fireproof safe, whose contents survived the conflagration.” A few seconds later, he shook his head in disgust. “They used their own son in some of the... performances.”

  “Yeah,” Fenton said with a grimace. “Wish I could say I’ve never heard of that being done before, but apparently it’s pretty common in the kiddie porn biz. Fucking scumbags. Give me serial killers any day.”

  “It hardly matters now, but do you happen to know the distance between this reform school the boy was in and the family home?”

  “About forty miles, I looked it up,” Fenton said. “Looks like you and I are thinking along the same lines.”

  “And this school was not a high-security facility?”

  “Not that kind of place, no. Not impossible for the kid to sneak out, rip off a car, pay a visit to Mom and Dad with a sharp knife and a five-gallon can of gas, then sneak back into the school before he was missed.”

  “Well, if he did, one can hardly blame him,” Van Dreenan said. He shook his head again. “Fifteen years old.”

  “The start of an active, if not illustrious, career,” Fenton said. “How many arrests as an adult? Nine?”

  Van Dreenan checked the screen. “Eight. Of those, two convictions—one for manslaughter and another for sexual assault. He served a total of, let me see... six years.”

  “Involved with the occult, too, it looks like. Hooked up with some voodoo coven, or whatever they call it, down in Louisiana. A New Orleans bunch headed by somebody called Queen Esther.”

  “Yes, so I see. That led to one of his arrests, on suspicion of murder. Apparently, the voudoun cult was believed to have engaged in human sacrifice during some of their rituals.” Van Dreenan looked at Fenton. “That is very rare. Most practitioners of voudoun never sacrifice anything bigger than a chicken, or maybe a goat. They are law-abiding people, not killers. Although...”

  “Although what?”

  “Every religion seems to develop its own lunatic fringe. There have been reports, from here and there around the world, of voudoun cults devoted to gods who demand sacrifice of ‘the goat without horns.’”

  “The—oh, right, I get it.”

  Van Dreenan scratched his cheek pensively. “A very interesting chap, this Mister Perkins. At first glance, he would seem an unlikely traveling companion for Cecelia Mbwato. But the more I think about it, the better it sounds.”

  “A marriage made in Heaven,” Fenton said with a sour smile.

  “No, Fenton, not in Heaven,” Van Dreenan said. “Not there.”

  THE SUN WAS shining brightly when Morris and Libby sat down to breakfast at an outdoor café. After they’d placed their order, Libby asked, “So, did you spend a quiet night, what was left of it?”

  “Oh, sure. Thanks to those warding charms you put on the door and windows. The only zombies that bothered me were in my dreams.”

  She made a face. “I know what you mean. My subconscious seemed to spend most of the night in the middle of a George Romero film festival. Not a good time.”

  Morris took a sip of coffee and said, “You mentioned something last night about a plan for dealing with Queen Esther.”

  Libby nodded. “I think that, with proper preparation, I can cast a truth spell which should compel her to tell us what she knows about the witch we’re after.”

  “Will it work on somebody like Esther? She’s got pretty good mojo of her own, as we have reason to know.”

  “It shouldn’t matter, as long as she’s not ready for me,” Libby said. “If she had time to put together a counterspell, that might well make a difference.” She smiled tightly. “Which is why I’m not going to give her time.”

  “In other words, you’re going to overwhelm her before she has time to set up a defense.”

  “Something like that.”

  “How long will you need to get ready?”

  “I did some of the preliminary work last night. So, from this point, I figure I’ll need—” she thought briefly, “another three hours, more or less.”

  “So, if you get started right after breakfast, everything should be set to go by early afternoon?”

  “Most likely. And a good thing, too.”

  Morris looked a question at her.

  “I mean, it’s good we’re going to do this during daylight,” Libby said. “That’s when white magic is strongest.”

  “And Queen Esther, being one of the bad guys, has the edge after dark.”

  “Exactly.”

  Their order arrived, and Morris dug into his eggs. “Good thing we got up early.”

  THEY HAD NO trouble this time finding a cabbi
e willing to take them to the proper address on Dumaine Street. Apparently the light of day made a difference to the taxi drivers, too. It was a little after two in the afternoon when they stood again in front of Doctor John’s Hoodoo Shop and Apothecary.

  Morris looked at the storefront for a moment, then turned to Libby. “Is she in there?”

  Libby’s brow wrinkled. “I don’t know. I’m not sensing her the way I was able to last night, but there’s something...” She shook her head uncertainly.

  “Well, guess we may as well go on in and find out.”

  “But carefully.”

  “Don’t have to tell me. I’m the fella who was driving off zombies last night, remember?”

  There was no point in trying to sneak in. They knew that the steps would creak under their weight, and the spring in the screen door could be counted on to make a noise loud enough to wake the dead.

  No one stood behind the counter. The shop appeared as deserted as when they had left it the night before.

  But something was different, and it took Morris only a moment to realize what it was. “You smell that?”

  Libby sniffed audibly. “Yes,” she said quietly. “Yes, I do.” The coppery odor was one they had each encountered before, and they recognized it instantly.

  Fresh blood smells like nothing else in the world.

  “Better let me go first,” Libby said. “I’ve got a few things ready this time, just in case.” She took a couple of small vials out of her purse and twisted off the lids. “Come on.”

  Morris followed, a tight feeling in his chest and stomach.

  Moving slowly, carefully, Libby walked behind the counter and pushed through the beaded curtain. She turned to the right, then stopped suddenly. Morris could hear the sharp intake of her breath, and as he looked over her shoulder he saw the reason.

  The young woman called Martha lay face down in the corridor, her head toward the room where Queen Esther had held court the night before. Martha’s skull was split open, cut so deeply that gray brain tissue was clearly visible amidst the blood and bone and hair. Morris, who knew a thing or two about knife wounds, figured that you’d need something both heavy and very sharp to do that kind of damage.

  Something like a machete.

  Libby knelt and touched the back of her hand to one of the dead girl’s legs. “Cold,” she said quietly. “It’s been several hours.” Standing, she stepped gingerly over the body, careful to avoid the blood on the floor. There wasn’t a lot of it; corpses don’t bleed much.

  Morris followed Libby down the short corridor to another beaded curtain—the one that marked the entrance to Queen Esther’s chamber. He could see light coming from inside, but it was softer than he remembered from last night.

  Libby used one hand to push some of the beads aside, but she did not enter the room. Instead, she stood in the doorway peering inside, and it seemed to Morris that she stood there for a long time before giving vent to a sigh that seemed to come from deep within her. “It’s safe to go in,” she said bleakly. “There’s nothing here to hurt us.”

  Morris followed Libby into the windowless room. More than half the candles had either burned out or been knocked over, and in the gloom he almost tripped over a body on the floor. Looking closer, he saw that it was one of the zombies who’d accosted them the night before. Unlike Martha, this corpse bore no obvious wound. Ten feet away lay another dead man, and Morris thought that one looked familiar from the night before, too.

  In front of the altar, next to the overturned rocking chair, lay the bloody remains of Queen Esther. It was clear that, unlike Martha, the old woman had not died of a single, devastating wound. She must have tried to fight them. And so they had cut her to pieces. Literally.

  The windowless room reeked of blood and shit and decaying flesh. The climate of New Orleans is not kind to the dead under the best of circumstances. Martha and Queen Esther were already becoming ripe, and the two zombies appeared to be in an advanced state of decomposition—their bodies probably making up for lost time since their natural deaths. Morris knew he was going to have to get out of there soon or puke.

  Libby appeared to be having similar difficulties. She held a handkerchief over her mouth with one hand, then knelt over the body of Queen Esther. She seemed especially interested in the old woman’s severed right hand, which lay some distance away from the rest of her. Morris wondered if she was going to take it for use as a Hand of Glory—a powerful talisman, when prepared properly. You need to start with the hand of a murderer, and Queen Esther almost certainly qualified. But Libby appeared to be focused on something clutched in the dead fingers, a piece of paper or cardboard that she pried loose, glanced at, then stuffed in her voluminous purse.

  Standing, she put away the handkerchief and said, “Let’s get the hell out of here, before I lose my breakfast.”

  Once they were back on the sidewalk, Morris said, “We’d better leave the area before some tourist looking for a love potion wanders in and starts screaming for the cops.”

  Libby nodded. “Let’s walk back to Bourbon Street and find a bar, which shouldn’t be difficult to do. I need a drink, maybe a couple of them. Then we need to talk.”

  They had gone less than a block when Morris asked, “What was that you took from Queen Esther’s hand?”

  “That’s one of the things we need to talk about.”

  CHAPTER 19

  LIBBY CHASTAIN PICKED up the glass of ice-cold Stolichnaya and held it against her forehead for almost a full minute. Then she brought the glass to her mouth and downed its contents in a single gulp.

  Quincey Morris took a sip of his bourbon and branch water. “Feeling any better?”

  “A little. At least I’ve got the smell of that place out of my nostrils.” She signaled the waitress for another drink. “How about you?”

  He let his gaze wander around the room before answering. Homer’s Hideaway, like all the French Quarter bars, was doing a brisk business, even at three in the afternoon. Tourists from Kansas City and Pittsburgh sipped Hurricanes and listened to the cheesy faux-zydeco coming from the juke, telling themselves that they were doing the real Cajun thing now.

  “I’m all right, I guess,” Morris said. “Although I’m glad to be out of that slaughterhouse, too.” He waited while the waitress served Libby’s second vodka. “Damn, I bet old Esther was pissed, there at the end. Getting hacked up by zombies that you’ve created yourself has got to lend a whole new meaning to ‘Hoist by your own petard.’”

  Libby nodded pensively. “The two zombies didn’t just decide to do that all by themselves, either.”

  “No, those poor bastards have no will of their own. The resurrection spell sees to that.”

  “And Esther certainly didn’t induce them to do it.”

  “If she had, it would be the most bizarre suicide on record,” Morris said. “Doesn’t seem real likely.”

  “Then who did it?”

  “I reckon you know the answer to that one as well as I do.”

  “The mysterious Ms. Carter.” She said the name the way General Rommel used to say “Patton.”

  “Or whatever her real handle is these days. Somehow she got control of Esther’s two shamblers and turned them on her—maybe as punishment for Esther’s failure to kill us last night.” Morris sipped his drink. “Or, could be she was afraid Esther might tell us something useful.”

  “And maybe that’s just what she did, in her last few moments.” Libby took something from her purse and tossed it on the table. It was a business card.

  Morris peered at it. “This what you took from Esther’s hand, back there?”

  Libby nodded.

  “Randall and Carleton Special Services,” he read aloud. “Investigations. Got their office over on Bourbon Street.” He ran his fingertip over the engraved letters. “Not a lot to go on, is it?”

  “There’s a little more than that,” Libby said, and flipped the card over. Written in ink on the back was “Amos Gitner,” followed b
y a question mark.

  Morris frowned as he read the two words. “Amos Gitner?” He looked up at Libby. “Who the hell is Amos Gitner?”

  “I have no idea,” she said, counting money onto the table. “But I was thinking it would be a good idea for us to find out.”

  TULANE UNIVERSITY’S LIBRARY had the New Orleans Times-Picayune in one of its computerized databases. By entering “Amos Gitner” as a search term, they were able to find and read the only article containing the phrase that the paper had ever published. A few mouse clicks allowed them to print out a hard copy of the article, which was dated three years earlier:

  Sept. 6. The body of a missing Materie man was found in an abandoned building in the warehouse district yesterday, under circumstances that cause local police to suspect foul play.

  Amos Gitner, 26, had been reported missing by his mother three days earlier, authorities say. They discovered the body as the result of an anonymous telephone tip that a corpse had been seen in the building, which had been owned by Porterfield Imports until the firm went bankrupt last year.

  Police officials have declined to comment on reports that the victim may have been involved with the local occult community, and that this somehow contributed to his death. Lieutenant Pierre Premeaux of the Homicide Division would say only that the death was considered “suspicious” and that the investigation was continuing.

  Morris folded the single sheet of paper and put it in his jacket pocket. “Curiouser and curiouser,” he said. “Think Queen Esther did this poor fella in?”

  “Hard to know,” Libby said with a shrug. “I wouldn’t put it past her, but even she would need something that looked like a reason. We just don’t have enough information.”

  “I wonder...”

  “What?”

  “I wonder,” Morris said, “whether anybody is still at Randall and Carleton Special Services this late in the afternoon.”