Black Magic Woman (Morris and Chastain Investigations)

by Justin Gustainis

THE SECRETARY-RECEPTIONIST AT Randall and Carleton was a petite blonde named Cindy Lee Mercell, who wanted to know whether they had an appointment.

  “No we don’t,” Morris said. “Our problem came up kind of suddenly.”

  “We’d really like to see either Mister Randall or Mister Carleton for just a few minutes,” Libby said with a pleasant smile. “Whichever one might be free.”

  “Well, I don’t really know if I can—”

  “It’s about Amos Gitner,” Morris said.

  The receptionist looked at him for the space of three heartbeats. “Just a moment please,” she said, and went through a nearby door

  She was back within thirty seconds. “Mister Carleton will see you. If you folks would follow me?”

  She led them into a spacious office whose furnishings were just old enough to look comfortable. The same might have been said for the man who rose from behind the antique desk.

  Carl Carleton had a face like an old shoe, lined and seamed and showing a certain amount of wear and tear. There were smile lines around his mouth and eyes, but he did not smile as he shook hands with his visitors and invited them to sit down.

  Carleton studied them in silence for a few moments, idly running a thumb and forefinger up and down the seam of his seersucker suit jacket. Finally he said, “You know, we normally set a lot of store by polite conversation ’round these parts, which means it generally takes us just one hell of a long time to get to the point. But since you two have practically barged in unannounced, maybe you’ll forgive my manners if I ask just what the hell it is you want?”

  “Are you normally so rude to potential clients, Mister Carleton?” Libby asked gently.

  “No, ma’am, I’m not. But you two ain’t clients, are you?” He spoke with that unique accent you find in some part of New Orleans that sounds more like Brooklyn than Biloxi, at least to Yankee ears.

  Morris figured it was his turn to contribute something to the conversation. “What makes you say that?”

  “On account of that name you used to get in here belongs to a dead man, as I expect you know full well. And I’m pretty sure you ain’t relatives, since I met Gitner’s family three years ago at his funeral, and you two weren’t there at all. So I repeat my original question, which was, in case you’ve forgotten: what the hell do you want?”

  “Amos Gitner’s name came up in an investigation of our own,” Morris said. “We’re trying to locate a woman who’s been making terroristic threats against a family in Wisconsin. We had reason to believe that she might have some ties to a woman in New Orleans known as Queen Esther.”

  Carleton nodded slowly. “Esther the voodoo queen. Yeah, I recollect we talked to her, back when we were tryin’ to get a line on young Mister Gitner. She send you over here?”

  “In a way, yes,” Libby told him. “We got this from her.” She handed over the business card with Amos Gitner’s name written on the back.

  Carleton held the card delicately, turning it over with his big, square-tipped fingers. “Yeah, I like to leave cards with the folks I interview, especially if they haven’t had a lot to say. Sometimes I hear from them later on, more often not.” He shifted in his chair, causing it to creak under his weight. “You know, Queen Esther didn’t strike me as the real friendly type, that time I talked with her. Fact is, I had the distinct impression she’d as soon kill me as look at me. But you’re sayin’ she just up and give you this business card? Just like that?”

  Morris and Libby exchanged looks. After a moment, Libby said, “Not exactly. Quincey and I discovered her body earlier today, and this card was in her hand. She’d been murdered, chopped to pieces.”

  Carleton stared at her, then slowly reached for the telephone, picked up the receiver, and punched in a single number. After a moment he said into the mouthpiece, “Lex, can you come on over a minute? Yeah, if you would. Thanks.”

  Replacing the receiver, Carleton said, “I’ve asked my partner, Mister Randall, to come join us. It looks like we’re about to go swimming in some serious shit here, and I make it my practice never to go swimming alone.”

  There was a perfunctory knock at the door, which opened to admit a tall man, slim, almost skinny, with dark hair combed down flat. He looked about ten years younger than Carleton’s mid-forties. Ivy League, Morris thought. Or maybe University of Virginia, which in the South they regard as the same thing. Morris figured the man’s tropical-weight gray suit must have cost three times the price of Carleton’s seersucker, even if it did require only half as much fabric.

  Carleton performed introductions and Lex Randall shook hands with the visitors. Carleton then handed him the business card.

  “Miss Chastain here tells me that she took that from the dead hand of Queen Esther. You recollect her, don’t you?”

  “That voodoo priestess, over on Dumaine Street,” Randall said, nodding. “I haven’t seen anything in the papers about it—when did she die?”

  “Overnight, or perhaps early this morning,” Libby said.

  Randall stared at Libby, then at Morris, then looked over at his partner. “Are we talking about a natural death, here?”

  “She’d been hacked to pieces with a machete,” Morris said. “Along with a young woman named Martha who apparently worked for her.”

  “There were two other corpses on the premises,” Libby said. “Although, in a sense, they died some time earlier.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not following you,” Randall said.

  “I mean they were zombies, who returned to their natural state after the death of their reanimator. That would be Queen Esther, of course.”

  There was silence in the room that went on for some time. It was finally broken by Carleton, who said to Morris, “You know, I thought your name rang some kind of bell, and I’ve been trying to recollect where I came across it. Tell me, you ever been up to Baton Rouge?”

  Morris nodded cautiously. “A few years back.”

  “Thought you might’ve.” Carleton looked at his partner. “That professor at LSU, three, four years ago. Fella took sick, looked fit to die, and nobody could figure out the cause of it. Some folks even thought there was voodoo involved.”

  “I remember now,” Randall said. “They practically had the man measured for a casket, and then he got better. Just as suddenly as he’d taken ill.” He turned to Morris. “Was that you? The one they sent for?”

  Morris nodded again. “Uh-huh.”

  “And what about you Ms., uh, Chastain, is it?” Randall asked. “Are you Mr. Morris’s partner in these investigations he takes on?”

  “No, not exactly,” Libby told him. “I’m kind of an independent contractor, but I’ve worked with Quincey before. He calls me in when he needs me.”

  “And what is it you do,” Carleton asked, “when you’re not helping out Mr. Morris, here?”

  Libby shrugged, but her voice was polite when she said, “I do a certain amount of consulting work. Different clients have different problems. Not unlike your own profession, I would imagine.”

  “Um.” Carleton used his big forefinger to nudge the old business card with Amos Gitner’s name written on the back. After staring at it for a few seconds, he looked up at Randall and said, “I’m gonna tell ’em.”

  Randall looked closely at his partner, and Morris decided that some kind of unspoken communication was going on between them. He was sure of it a few moments later when Randall nodded slowly and said, “All right, then. Tell them.”

  Carleton swiveled his chair so that he was facing Morris and Libby squarely. “Never talked to nobody about this mess before,” he said. “Lex here knows, ’cause he was there when it all transpired. Anybody else, they’d probably think I was just funnin’ ’em. That, or they’d nominate me as a prime candidate for the booby hatch. But knowing what I do about you, Morris, I’m guessing that you just might understand. And you, Ma’am, if you hang around much with this fella, I expect you’ve had beaucoup experience of some pretty strange goings-on yourself.”
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  Libby Chastain smiled a little but said nothing.

  “Yeah, well,” Carleton went on, “you should know off top that when Amos Gitner’s mama hired us to find him, that wasn’t the first occasion he’d gone and made himself scarce for a few days. Way she told it, he’d go off somewheres every month for three, four days. Then he’d show up home again—he still stayed by his mama, even though he was in his middle twenties—and she’d say, where the hell you been, so forth, and he’d tell her he just plain didn’t remember. Some kind of amnesia, apparently, although it never seemed to show up at any other time. She wanted him to see a doctor about it, but he just wouldn’t go. Said it was his problem, and he’d work it out himself.”

  “I take it this wasn’t simply a case of Gitner sneaking off on a three-day drunk every once in a while,” Morris said.

  “I did raise that question,” Carleton told him. “But his mama said ‘No how, no way.’ Seems her own father had been an alcoholic, and she was more than a little familiar with the signs—and the smell, for that matter. And she claimed the boy was showin’ no hint of a drug habit, neither.”

  “Gitner’s mysterious absences had been going on for almost a year when his mother hired us,” Randall said. “A long-suffering woman, you might say. Plus, she’s fairly well off financially, and she was in the habit of indulging her son something awful.”

  “Spoiled rotten,” Carleton said, nodding. “Still, even Mrs. Gitner had a limit to her forbearance. One day, when she noticed sonny-boy was gone again, she came huffin’ on down here and said she wanted us to find him, drag his ass home, and report to her on what the hell it was he’d been up to.”

  “I’m no detective,” Libby said, “but it seems to me that it would have been easier for you guys to follow Gitner when he left on one of these jaunts, rather then try to track him down once he was already gone.”

  “I mentioned that to Mrs. Gitner, you know,” Carleton said with a sour smile. “Even suggested that we might best wait until the following month and get in on the beginning of her son’s next little excursion into the unknown. But she wouldn’t hear of it. Her blood was up, and she wanted us to find the little bastard now, not wait until the next time and do it the easy way.” He shrugged his meaty shoulders. “What the hell, she was willing to pay us to look for him. And so that’s what we did.”

  “How did your search bring you into contact with Queen Esther?” Libby asked.

  “Oh, his mama told us that Amos had been spending time with some of our local occultists,” Carleton said. “She recollected that he’d once said something to the effect that voodoo had a lot more to it than the tourists ever see. So we had a word with some of the more prominent practitioners, including that old sweetheart Queen Esther. But either none of the voudinistas we talked to knew young Mr. Gitner, or none of them were sayin’.”

  “But then we had some luck,” Randall said. “Mrs. Gitner had provided the license number of her son’s BMW, and a nice lady I know down at the parish DMV ran the license plate for us. Nothing unusual on his record, but there were a number of parking tickets over the last year or so. They had all been paid—Mrs. G. had seen to that—but we were more interested in when and where the tickets were issued. Almost immediately, we began to see clusters.”

  “You mean the tickets had all been written in the same area,” Morris said.

  “Yeah, you right,” Carleton said, nodding. “They were all in the Ninth Ward, down near the river. Lots of warehouses and garages ’round there, along with some abandoned buildings and burnouts. And the dates matched up, too. The tickets had all been written up during times that sonny boy was off doin’ whatever it was he did.”

  “There were a couple of other factors we might have considered, but didn’t,” Randall said. “Well, it probably wouldn’t have made any difference. Even if we had somehow reached the proper conclusion, we wouldn’t have let ourselves believe it.” His voice contained equal proportions of bitterness and regret.

  “Lex learned to talk like that at that fancy college of his,” Carleton said. “But what he means is, there’d been occasional news reports that homeless folks in that ward had been disappearing, in ones and twos, for some time. Understand, we ain’t talking banner headlines in the Times-Picayune here. Nobody makes much of a fuss about the homeless, and besides, they come and go all the time. Some poor bastard hasn’t been seen for a while, who’s to say whether he’s gone missing or just moved on to try his luck in Shreveport or someplace?”

  “You mentioned two factors,” Libby said. “What was the other one?”

  “The dates of young Mr. Gitner’s little excursions,” Carleton told her. “There was a pattern to ’em, but we missed it—until it was too late, anyway.”

  “The full moon,” Randall said quietly. “They were all during the period of the full moon.”

  Libby Chastain and Morris looked at each other but said nothing.

  Carleton explained how he and Randall started driving around the area where Amos Gitner had received his parking tickets, and on the second day spotted a blue BMW with license plates that matched what Mrs. Gitner had told them. They staked out the car, and just before dusk were rewarded with the sight of a man who looked an awful lot like the one in the photos they’d been provided with. The man drove off in the Beamer, and the two detectives followed him to what looked like an abandoned warehouse. He parked and then went inside.

  “We waited a while,” Carleton explained, “’case he was just making a quick stop for some reason. But after about a half hour, when he didn’t come out, we decided to go have ourselves a look.”

  “It was full dark by then,” Randall said, as if it meant something important.

  Carleton nodded agreement. “So we come up on this place, trying to keep to the shadows. Wasn’t hard to do, since most of what you had around there was shadows. Blacker than the boots of the High Sheriff of Hell, is all it was. Course, the moon hadn’t come out yet.”

  “No,” Randall said softly. “That was a little later.”

  Carleton then told them that he and Randall had gone through the same side door that Amos Gitner had used. With Randall’s penlight, they were able to see the trail of footprints in the thick dust on the floor. It led them to a set of metal stairs that the two men climbed slowly, carefully, and quietly.

  The second floor of the warehouse was strewn with junk—scraps of lumber, abandoned tools, and a couple of old shipping containers. “It looked,” Carleton said, “like whoever used to own the place had cleared out fast, and just left behind anything they couldn’t see a use for.”

  “And it was from behind one of those shipping containers that Amos Gitner appeared,” Randall said. “Nothing melodramatic about it. He didn’t jump out suddenly or act aggressively or anything. Just strolled right on out. Of course, he was buck naked.”

  “Like the day he was born,” Carleton said. “He had set up three of those big nine-volt flashlights in different parts of the room, along with a couple of those electric lanterns that campers use, so we could see him pretty good. Boy was hung like a stud mule, too.” He looked at Libby and inclined his head slightly. “Your pardon, Ma’am.”

  Libby gave him a pleasant smile. “References to the penis don’t usually offend me, Mr. Carleton,” she said. “Please go on.”

  “Well, I introduce myself and Lex to this naked fella, then tell him we’re private investigators his mama hired to find out what the hell he’s been up to. ‘You may as well get dressed, Mr. Gitner,’ I tell him. ‘We need to talk some.’”

  Carleton shook his head at the memory. “He just stares at us. Then he says, ‘You two have no idea what you’ve stumbled into.’ And, you know, he doesn’t say it like a threat—and take my word, I’ve heard plenty of threats in my time. Fella actually sounds like he means it. Then he glances toward the window, and I’m wondering if he’s thinking about trying to make a dash in that direction. But then he looks back at us and he says, ‘The absolute best thing y’
all could do for yourselves right now is to clear out of here just as fast as you can. And then forget you ever found this place, or that you ever saw me.’

  “So, I try to explain to him that it doesn’t work that way, that we don’t intend him any harm but that we took his mama’s money which means that we have to do the job she hired us for.”

  “He didn’t seem to find any of that very interesting,” Randall said. “He hardly seemed to be paying attention.”

  “Yeah, you right,” Carleton said. “He’s acting pretty bored by my little discussion of the ethics of our profession. Then, all of a sudden, he looks back toward the closest window. The moon must’ve come out from behind the clouds about then, because it’s suddenly a whole lot brighter in there, and Gitner just looks at us and says, ‘Too late, now.’ He sounds almost sorry about it.

  “And that’s when the real shit starts.”

  Carleton fell silent then, staring down at his desk blotter. After a bit, Morris said, “If you’re waiting for someone to feed you the next line, I’ll be happy to oblige. What started?”

  Carleton shook his head. “No, it ain’t that. I’m not tryin’ to drag this out, to make a better story of it. It’s just that I never talk about that night, and I feel like an ass tryin’ to describe something that I didn’t used to think even existed, not in real life, anyways.”

  He took a deep breath and look up at Morris. “You ever hear the term loup-garou?”

  Morris nodded. “French name for ‘werewolf,’ isn’t it? The Cajuns use it, too.” He didn’t say this as if he were surprised, because he wasn’t.

  Carleton looked at him with narrowed eyes. “You ever seen one?”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Morris told him. “But it seems pretty clear that you have.”

  Carleton shifted in his chair. “Yeah, I reckon I did,” he said finally. “Damnedest thing—maybe literally, I don’t know. But we watched the moonlight shine on young Mr. Gitner, and within a couple of seconds he started sprouting fur, claws, the whole nine yards. Nothing that you can’t find in a dozen different videos available at your local Blockbuster, but this was by God real.”