City of Masks

by Daniel Hecht

  Ronald went to the next window but stopped before yanking the drapes there. Instead he turned back to Cree. "There's another thing. You're a psychologist - tell me how healthy it would be, living where you're afraid to sit down because you might wear out the genuine Louis Quinze upholstery? She going to keep the drapes drawn all the time? Put plastic runners over the rugs, or just never walk on 'em? You gonna tell me that's any way to live?"

  "I hear you lost a bundle in the stock market last year. That liquid assets would be nice for you just now."

  That stopped him cold, and for a moment anger flared in his eyes. But he got it under control quickly, shaking his head ruefully. "Momma. My dear, loving mother. Why's she telling you this stuff? What on God's green earth does it have to do with what we got you down here for? You want to see my stock portfolio, too? My tax forms?"

  Cree shrugged, letting him hang for a moment.

  Ron waited, too, and then made a dismissive gesture. He pulled the next drapes shut, bringing back yet another shade of gloom. He walked past Cree, then turned again with an expression she had never seen on his face: a discomfort, an urgency, as if something really did, after all, matter to him. His irritation was only the surface of a deeper disturbance, she sensed, a frustration and confusion. She felt a pang of sympathy for him.

  "See, there're things here you don't understand. You've got me pegged now, the bad brother who wants to sell the house out from under his poor sister. Well, believe whatever you care to. But sometimes people don't know what they really want or what they really need. Lila'd be a lot better off leaving the past lie. Getting a new life, not trying to reclaim her old one."

  "Why's that?"

  "You are one irritating female, you know that? You won't let go of a goddamned thing! I can't even - "

  Cree put a hand on his arm, wanting to defuse the antagonism between them. "Ron, you may well be right about what's good for Lila. But to really start a new life you have to make some kind of peace with the old, don't you? If there's anything in particular you think she should 'leave lie,' I'd like to know about it. So I can help her put it behind her."

  Ronald brushed away her hand and strode past her to the entrance hall.

  Cree followed. "You said Lila had a hole in her life. What's missing?"

  "I'm not a headshrinker. You tell me." He opened the front door and fished in his pocket. He pulled out a key ring, pointed it at the Jaguar parked sloppily at the curb, and thumbed the door lock button. The car's lights flashed.

  "You said she's been this way since she was fifteen - these fits and starts. Are you saying she was different before then? Did something happen to change her?"

  Ron just headed out onto the front gallery without looking back.

  Cree felt close to something, but she had no idea what it might be. Suddenly she was desperate to keep him there, to know what he might tell her. "You were very close to her once, weren't you? You loved your sister very much. What changed that?"

  That hooked him. Halfway across the gallery, he turned. "'Course I did. And what makes you think anything changed? Where the hell do you get off even asking a question like that?"

  "Then why do you hide your best feelings? Why don't you want people to know who you are?"

  His eyes rolled in angry disdain, and he turned away again. "Why don't you go to hell, Ms. Black."

  So many questions to ask. "Were you also close to Josephine Dupree? As close as Lila was?"

  He wheeled on her one more time, his suspicion hardened into dislike now. "Now what the hell's this about? What've you got cooking now?"

  His hostility hurt her, as did the vulnerability that hid just behind it. All she could think of was wanting to end the dissonance between them. Ron, truly, I'm not trying to oppose you. I really have no wish to be your enemy, I'm just — "

  He shook his head, done with her, and headed on down the steps. "I think it's a little late to worry about that," he tossed over his shoulder.

  20

  CREE DROVE TOWARD THE Times-Picayune offices, unsettled by the incidents at Beauforte House. A lot to think about but no time. Ronald: so much hidden there, so much to understand. He was obviously motivated to sell the house and self-interested enough to do so in spite of his sister's desires. Could he be a hoaxer, faking a haunting to scare Lila away? The Gaslight scenario - where someone faked supernatural phenomena with the goal of upsetting someone else, making them appear "crazy" - was a possibility any serious paranormal researcher had to consider. But Cree had already encountered Lila's haunt herself, twice, and the damned thing was for certain no living human. No, Ronald was weak and narcissistic and many things she disliked, but he was not a hoaxer so much as an opportunist. And there was something touching about him, something wounded and compelling, perhaps even a grain of real nobility buried beneath the bullshit. The dynamic of hostility between them was so painful and so unnecessary.

  It was her own fault. She hadn't dealt with him well. She'd been off balance, surprised and frightened at hearing someone in the house, and disoriented from pulling so suddenly out of that daydream. No doubt its detail and vividness were the result of doing historical reading in her hotel every night, of absorbing the history-drenched atmosphere of New Orleans.

  But its poignancy, and her reluctance to let go of that time and those images - that was a potential problem. It was another indication of just how much the stresses of this case were adding up, how unstable and malleable she was right now.

  But she was getting close to the Times-Picayune building. Time to put on the act of being sane and competent, to stuff her sense of urgency into a compartment of her thoughts and keep it there for now, She wound her way around and under a tangle of highway entrance ramps, parked in the visitors' lot, checked herself over in the visor mirror, and did her best to muster a pretense of professionalism.

  Delisha Brown emerged from the depths of the building, crossed the modern, marbled lobby to where Cree waited at the reception desk. She was a woman of middle height, with skin a deep chocolate color and hair done in cornrows that ended in dozens of short braids lined with turquoise-blue beads and tipped with wads of tinfoil. Though she had a chunky, big-busted build, she was only in her late twenties and moved with an active woman's forceful stride that made the beads swing and rattle softly. She wore black slacks, a red blouse, striped jogging shoes, and a no-nonsense frown that she panned up and down Cree as they shook hands.

  "I'm Brown," the reporter said, "and you're Black. Uh-huh. Right."A grin twitched the corners of Delisha's lips. She turned and beckoned for Cree to follow her. "Everybody calls me Deelie, you might as well, too."

  "Thank you for returning my call. And thanks for finding time for me on such short notice."

  Deelie's plump shoulders shrugged. She led Cree down a long corridor, through several sets of glass doors, and into the quiet bustle of the great paper's newsroom. It was a huge room containing dozens of cubicles and desks, about half of which were occupied by reporters or writers working in the state of sustained panic required to put out the paper every day. Computer monitors glowed from every littered desk. Along the far wall, a row of glassed-in offices faced the big room; inside, knots of harried-looking editorial staff bent their heads together over big tables. Cree had to jump out of the way of a cart pushed at a run by a young clerk who seemed oblivious to her existence.

  Deelie's desk was messier than most, with a rusted automobile muffler encircled by an uneven wall of stacked papers and file folders. She gestured Cree to a plastic chair, took her own seat, and frowned at the muffler. "Temp Chase murder, huh. What's your interest?"

  "I'm writing about the case - maybe an article, maybe a book. I saw your byline on most of the articles I read, and then Detective Guidry said you'd done a lot of research, so — "

  "Bobby G. That little midget! Fie give you anything useful?"

  "Mainly, your name."

  "Flattering." Deelie's face split in a wide grin that took Cree by surprise with its warmt
h and energy. "Hey, come on, girl. Tell me the truth. You're no freelance writer - nobody writes on spec and doesn't know if it's a book or an article. Internet says you're a Ph. D. in psychology who does research on ghosts." When she said more than three words in a row, Delisha had a musical rhythm to her voice that charmed Cree.

  Cree chuckled. "I guess I shouldn't be surprised an investigative reporter did some detective work before an interview."

  "No, you should not. So, what, you trying to see if Temp turned into a ghost or something?"

  "Maybe. It's a long story, and most of it's confidential."

  "Ooooh, tempt me!" Deelie laughed, but the lines of her face quickly turned businesslike again. "Tell you what. We trade. I give you something, you give me something. I trade you Temp for some ghost-hunting material I can maybe put together for a feature later on. This town loves ghosts. And anything else good for tourism."

  A young man came to the desk, slipped a file folder onto it with a meaningful raised eyebrow, and left without a word. "Shit," Deelie said.

  "Doesn't look like you have time for such a trade," Cree said.

  Deelie looked thoughtfully at Cree for a moment, then pondered her watch. "I got an hour for lunch - that'll give us a start, anyway. And for this, I think let's go out. I got about one good thing to tell you, and unless I'm mistaken it's right up your alley. But it got some context go with it, so we gonna serve the Seattle girl a slice o' life along with lunch. You drive, my car's waiting for an organ transplant to be flown in." She gestured at the muffler with disgust.

  Deelie grabbed a small shoulder pack and the muffler as they left. Out in the parking lot, she paused to toss the muffler into the seat of a low-slung, beat-up maroon sports car, then gave the car a whopping kick that rattled its rusted quarter panels. "It's what I get, buying an Alfa Romeo. Vanity. Stupidity. Twelve-year-old import, can't find the parts. Where's your wheels?"

  They got into Cree's rented Taurus and Deelie instructed Cree to head up Broad Avenue. As soon as they were rolling, the reporter worked the dashboard knobs and brought the air-conditioning up to maximum.

  "Where are we going?" Cree asked.

  "My home neighborhood. A fine culinary establishment called Chez Henri."

  From Broad they turned left onto St. Bernard Boulevard, through the poor neighborhoods Cree had sought solace in the day before. Deelie explained the hubris and naivete that had prompted her to take the Alfa Romeo junker as collateral on a loan to a now long-gone boyfriend, and the ongoing grief it gave her. Then, at Deelie's prodding, Cree talked about her profession, some of the hauntings she'd investigated. Cree could sense a sharp mind clicking away behind the laconic questions and disinterested expression, the reporter snapshotting, underlining, filing points for future reference.

  After a few minutes more, Deelie told her to pull over. They had come to a block of tenements built of yellow-brown brick, two and three stories tall, each fronted by a green-painted stoop. The project stretched out of view to the north and east. Almost every window was covered from the inside with foil-faced insulation that reflected the merciless sun: With no air-conditioning and no shade, the foil was all that kept the apartments from turning into ovens. The atmosphere of decay and poverty was rich and deep here, as was the dense aura of human experience.

  "This here's my home turf. Born and raised in St. Bernard Development. Figured that you looking into Temp Chase and the Beaufortes and their crowd, you're gonna get the uptown perspective. You're gonna need some thesis-antithesis here, a little dialectic - the AfricanAmerican side of it. These people here? They've been in N'Orleans as long as any Beauforte, but their names ain't in no history books or social registers. Main exports from here're back labor, jazz, and boys to fill the prisons. Your tourists go to the Quarter and the Garden District, but they ain't coming here anytime soon, you can bet. Pull up there, le's park."

  Cree took in the feel of the place. It seemed heat-beaten. The ground between buildings was flattened grass and bare earth, litter-strewn. People lounged on some of the stoops, avoiding the direct sun, or stood in pairs or trios looking bored and exhausted. Here and there, men squatted with their backs to the brick, hands loose on their knees, just smoking or doing nothing whatever. Mothers strolled lethargically on the sidewalks, kids toddling along behind or riding plastic trikes. Just down the block, a police cruiser had stopped and a pair of NOPD officers were talking with a group of teenagers. From behind the nearest foil-covered windows came the muffled pulse of warring beats, mostly rap music.

  Deelie got out of the car, settled a strap of the backpack over her shoulder, and then stretched and breathed deeply as if luxuriating in the humid air and urban grit. She tipped her head to a couple of old men who sat in aluminum lawn chairs and they returned the greeting with gap-toothed grins. When Cree got out and joined her, heads turned to look her over: stranger, white woman off her turf.

  Deelie led her down the street, her beads rustling as she walked. "Le's take a stroll. There's method to my madness, don't worry, this's all part of my half of our bargain. You know much about voodoo?"

  "Voodoo? Not much. Sticking pins in dolls, that kind of thing."

  Deelie looked at her incredulously. "No shit! You in the supernatural business an' all, I thought. . . Well, then, this's just right. See, people up north think voodoo's this fringe thing - weird cult, holdover from another century? Has to do with murdering people or, what, biting heads off snakes or something, right? Fact is, it's a belief system that's concerned with reverence and doing good and protecting against bad, just like any religion. It's always been here, and it's growing. You just can't see it unless you know what to look for. But I'll show you. See there?"

  This side of the street was lined with sagging wood-frame houses, fronts to the tenements of St. Bernard, backs to the roaring highway overpass a block away. Deelie had pointed to the left front window of a double shotgun, where a mournfully placid plastic figurine of Mary stood on the windowsill, bracketed by stubby candles in the shape of crosses.

  "If you're thinking Catholic, you're half wrong. Voodoo, it's grabbed onto Jesus and Mary, and most believers mix and match 'em. It's all about belief, see, so voodoo appropriates what people are gonna believe in, that's where it gets its power. Look at the door. See that corner of dark cloth up in there? Means there's curtains just inside the door, got stuck in there when it was shut. The curtains keep bad spirits out. Whoever lives here's a believer or a practitioner."

  They moved on. For Cree, what Deelie said explained one of the unfamiliar strains of the whispers here: the rich, dark, Caribbean-spiced undertone, the faintest echo of long-ago drums of Africa. Yet another thread of the ancient past weaving seamlessly into the present.

  "And this has something to do with the Chase murder?"

  "Yes, ma'am, it does." Deelie nodded, grinning broadly. "I'm about to tell you. But here we go, lunch at Chez Henri."

  The gray-stained stucco two-story building housed several businesses that fronted the street with mesh-covered windows. They went through a doorway beneath a sun-bleached magnetic sign that advertised £L4Tin big letters, with Henri's Po'boys spelled out beneath.

  "Yo! On-ree!" Deelie cried joyfully.

  Behind the counter at the back, a man reading a newspaper lifted his head, then stood up. He smiled at Deelie without taking the cigarette from his mouth, the butt remaining magically suspended on his lower lip and bobbing as he answered, "Hey, Deelie."

  "Henri, this here's my friend, brought her all the way from Seattle to sample your fine cuisine. She looks white, but she's black. Ironically speaking."

  Henri shrugged. "Sho'," he said noncommittally.

  "Henri's the master chef. I recommend the oyster, that's the best. Oyster po'boy for me, Henri."

  Cree scanned the hand-lettered menu board above the counter. Po'boys were available with meatballs, sausage, ham, catfish, crab, squid, even beans and greens. "I guess I'll have the same," she said.

  It was well after lunc
h hour, and they were the only customers. Henri's was a grimy place about sixteen feet square with a gray linoleum floor and five masonite-topped tables. A film of cooking grease made every surface sticky, so that Cree had to peel her feet up for each step, but the smell from the kitchen was delicious. She and Deelie sat at the table nearest the door, where through the service window to the kitchen they could see Henri working on their order.

  "Okay, Chase murder, here's the connection," Deelie said. "Popular media personality murdered in historic house in Garden District. I'd won a couple journalism prizes the year before, so I got the story, you know? Great assignment, good for lots of follow-ups locally and likely to get syndicated all around, get my byline some national exposure. Lot of what I did was the background, the human interest angle. Oh, I followed out anything forensic Bobby G.'d give me, but I did a lot of other stuff besides — talked to their friends, family, associates. Sniffed around good."

  Deelie glanced up as Henri lowered a basket into a deep fryer, making a tremendous sizzling. When she went on, she lowered her voice: "But everything I fished up didn't make it to the paper. That was the deal I cut with Bobby G. for him giving me a little inside track on his end - police had to have some say in what went in the paper? Standard procedure, they don't want the killer to know everything they're working on. One thing I found, I believe was a significant contribution to the case. Problem is, nobody can connect it back in yet."

  "And it has to do with voodoo."

  "You got it, girl." Deelie dug in her backpack and came up with a packet of photos. "I's walking around the house, trying to maybe take some shots I could use in my articles, you know? I'm out on the sidewalk, looking for an interesting angle of view, something atmospheric, so I push aside some leaves on one corner of the fence. And what do you think I see? There's a little hoodoo hex tied to the corner pillar!"

  Cree took the photos out of their envelope and saw a number of views of Beauforte House. "There's really such a thing as hoodoo? I thought it was . . . I don't know, a vaudeville term. Like 'hocus-pocus.'"