by Baxter Clare
Kennedy named a preeminent L.A. law firm, citing a cadre of attorneys the Mother retained there.
"Another curious thing is that a lot of her associates tend to have ugly accidents. Rico Dali, Honduran coke peddler, fell off a roof in 1983."
That was Joe Girardi's frigidaire.
"Jojo Johnson, he was evidently a player in the Rollin 40's and a turf rival. He apparently electrocuted himself in his bathtub. Billy Daniels hustled for the Mother in the early '90s. Somebody doused him with gas and set him on fire in his own bed."
"Whoa," Frank said, making furious notes. "Who handled that?"
Kennedy's papers whispered together.
"Newton," she answered, referring to the LAPD division just east of Figueroa. "But wait, there's more. You get all this for only nineteen ninety-nine, plus, we'll throw in free, extra, at no charge, a pair—you heard right—a pair of Panamanians also with their throats slit."
"A double?"
"That's right. But if you act now, we'll throw in a pimp and rising ghetto star burned to death inside his car."
"What year?"
"Looks like '88."
Gough's cold one.
"Impressive, huh?"
"Back to the Panamanians. Who caught that?"
"That would be . . ." Her papers rustled again. "County. In '89."
"You done good. I owe you a Cherry coke and fries."
"That's all? A coke and fries?"
"I don't even want to know what else you have in mind."
"Aw come on, now, I know you're putting the squeeze on Doc Law, and dang don't I know you're a one-woman gal. I was just thinking dinner and maybe some gin afterwards."
Frank recollected how previous gin games had ended in the bedroom. Darcy leaned into her office, holding up the note she'd left. She waved him in.
"All right. You're on. But let me get back to you. I gotta go."
Kennedy talked to air as Frank swung the receiver into its cradle.
"Have a seat," she told Darcy and closed the door.
"How'd you know about that kid in the dumpster?"
He shrugged.
"It was like the .44."
Resettling into her old chair, Frank said, "Just another picture in your head?"
"Kind of. This was more like a feeling that there was another kid, but that he was missing."
"A feeling?"
Darcy nodded without giving anything else up.
"What are we talking here? ESP, premonitions?"
"I can't bend spoons or make doors slam," he smiled, "but I guess you could call it that."
"What do you call it?"
"Just a utilized talent. I think everybody's capable of receiving extrasensory information, but most people don't develop the requisite awareness."
"And you have?"
"Obviously."
Frank sat back with her hands behind her head.
"What about all this voodoo shit? Do I even want to know?"
Darcy's smile widened.
"My ex-wife's a Mambo priestess."
"A Mambo priestess," Frank repeated. Darcy's complexity amazed her once again. "The only thing I know about mambos is the Perry Como song."
"When you grow up in Louisiana it's almost impossible to avoid learning something about the culture. History permeates your life as surely as mold. Then when you marry into it. . ."
Aware she was opening herself up to a dissertation, Frank asked, "So what would it mean if somebody hung a black cat on your porch, left a little sack under your door mat, and sprinkled some kind of dirt all around your house? All this while your two dogs were loose in the yard."
Darcy smoothed his moustache while Frank tried to imagine him with a Mambo priestess. He was good-looking, short but powerfully built, attractive if one liked the strong, silent type. Brown hair— defiantly past regulation limits—set off baby-blues that didn't miss much. As Darcy mulled the question, she admired his self-assurance. He radiated a quiet strength and Frank thought he'd be a good man in a crisis. Despite her earlier misgivings about his temper, she was increasingly glad he was on the team. When she'd asked him on his first day if he planned on punching her out like his last supervisor he'd thought it over, answering, "Only if you're as dumb an asshole as he was." Frank had checked a smile, deciding Darcy James the Third might fit in well at Figueroa. So far, so good.
"It would appear," he answered at last, "that someone was fucking with my head. First of all, the black cat, that's a powerful hoodoo symbol. The thing about a black cat is it's universally recognized as an ill omen. The term mojo originally meant a bone from a black cat. It's come to mean a hand, or gris-gris—small bags, traditionally made of red flannel, filled with whatever ingredients the conjurer deems necessary. Mojos are usually worn under the clothing for good luck, but as in this case, they can be filled with bad things and left somewhere near the victim to emit their properties."
"What sort of bad things?"
"Oh, that's quite a list. The graveyard dirt you mentioned. Coffin nails. The victim's own hair or dried skin. Bodily fluids. Snake parts. The list goes on and on."
"So basically pretty benign stuff."
Darcy raised a finger. "Benign to you and me, but wonderfully potent to the believer."
Frank made a concessionary motion.
"Now the graveyard dirt, that's a large part of what's called laying down tricks or crossing someone. You sprinkle a prepared powder like Goofer Dust or Crossing Dust where your victim has to step on it. The theory is the powder then imparts its power to the victim and he succumbs to whatever hex the conjurer has placed on the powder."
Frank interrupted, "A prepared powder? You buy this stuff somewhere?"
"Any good botanica should carry it, yes. It's probably harder to find out here, but in Louisiana you can find powders in drugstores. I suspect you can order it on-line nowadays."
"Do you mix it with anything else or just straight powder?"
"That depends on the conjurer. Some of them won't even use the prepared mixes. They'll make their own, especially if they need it in quantity, so there can be anything in it."
"Like what?"
"Well." Darcy went back to stroking his moustache. "My guess would be you'd start with something like graveyard dust or lodestone dust, add some cayenne, ground up black cat bone, snake skin. Add a little salt, maybe some sulphur. I'm sure it varies depending on the locality."
Darcy fixed Frank with his pretty blues, asking why she wanted to know all this.
"Just trying to get a handle on the Mother. See where's she's coming from so I know what we should be looking for."
She explained about the powder in Hernandez' yard and was wondering if it might be traceable back to the Mother.
"You'd have a hard time proving that."
"I know. Circumstantial at best. But every link helps. Right now she's our best suspect but how the hell do we prove it?"
"Maybe you'd better get some Just Judge Powder." He grinned.
"They make something like that?"
"You bet. It's supposed to get the judge on your side."
"I'll be damned. You're just a walking voodoo compendium."
"Hoodoo," Darcy corrected. "Voodoo, that's something else. But I have to admit, I found it all pretty intriguing."
"Do you believe in it?"
The moustache pull and pause.
"To some degree, yes. The mind's a powerful tool. I wouldn't discount what it can do."
"So you think it's all based on power of suggestion."
"That's certainly a crucial element but I wouldn't limit it to that, no.
"What else is there?"
Darcy's smile was enigmatic.
"That's the million-dollar question, isn't it?"
They exchanged a slow, steady stare, two cops steeped in the realities of blood and bone.
"All right." She settled back. "Anything else I should know?"
Darcy rose with slow grace. Like a big jungle cat, Frank thought. He paused, se
eming to juggle his thoughts before telling her, "I wouldn't underestimate this Mother Love."
She stifled her irritation, replying to a memo she'd picked up, "I try to never underestimate anyone."
Frank had expected more objectivity from Darcy and was fast losing patience with everyone's misplaced awe of a conniving old drug dealer. As he was leaving, he added, "I'd appreciate it if it didn't get out about my ex."
"Why do you think I closed the door?" she said without looking up.
"And hey," she called after him.
Darcy popped his head back in.
"Get a haircut."
19
No longer male or female, sexless, it had even forgotten what it used to be. Once the bones had been fleshed, but now they carried only creased skin. It ate very little and until lately, was always cold. It felt as if it had been cold for generations, but recently the red rage had started a final resurgence through its ravaged, yellow bones. That lovely, self-sustaining anger was the only thing that could warm it anymore and the heat was greatest when it was near either one of them.
After so long a time, it was delirious to feel that warmth again and it tried to stay near one of the two. The dark one was consistently warm, dependably so, but the other one ... oh what an intense heat came from that one! A heat so bright, so white-hot, it could feel it sitting here against the brick wall, far from the source. Yet—it cocked its head—that blinding, beautiful sun was getting closer. Its eyes were useless, true, but yet it saw and its mouth cleaved in a toothless, puerile rictus.
They were coming together. At first their heat had touched it as tentatively as a spent wave reaches the shore, but the surges had begun to mount. Hotter and stronger now, deliciously warming, the waves lapped steadily against it, day and night.
No, the storm wasn't far off. But just as a moth couldn't think about the outcome of diving into a flame, the relic couldn't contemplate the inevitable clash of darkness meeting light. It orbited closer and closer to the center of the flame.
20
After talking to Darcy, Frank fired off a quick call to an acquaintance at the County Sheriff's department. Robbie Harris, a.k.a. Bartlett, wasn't in. She was just as happy to leave a message and bypass his endless recitation of quotes.
Done with that, she made nice to Lieutenant Tremont at the Newton Division. He assured her Billy Daniel's murder book would be waiting for her when she came by. But before that, she wanted to drop in on the one person who might know the Mother best.
Jogging down the stairs Frank glanced at a commotion in the lobby. A dreadlocked man with a striking resemblance to Dirty Old Bastard was trying to take on a knot of cops. Munoz and Romanowski were patiently talking him toward the door, the older cop placating, "Come on, Peter. Be a good boy, now. Don't let's piss off the nice policemen, okay? 'Member what happened last time you did that?"
Frank smiled, glad Peter wasn't her problem. No one knew who he was, but he'd been coming into the station since Frank was in uniform, daring the cops to kick him out while he flashed whoever was on the desk. Hence the name Peter.
Driving out of the lot, she turned into the traffic on Broadway. She passed the mini-mart and deli, the bail bond shops and botanica. She saw the pedestrians without really seeing them, until one made her stand on the brakes.
"What in the goddamn hell?" she said lurching into Park. The car was still rocking as she jumped out.
From its huddled heap on the sidewalk, the thing in rags grinned up at her.
Frank groped for an arm through the blankets.
"All right, buddy. You want to follow me around? Got more to say to me? That's fine. We'll talk. Let's go upstairs."
She jerked the old thing up and it scrabbled to its feet. It scuttled after Frank like a crab. She half-dragged it toward the Honda, guiding the reeking mass into her back seat, using the back of her hand as buffer between its matted head and the car roof. She felt contaminated again, overcome with the urge to soak in a hot bath.
Executing a U-turn she headed back to the station, wondering how long it would take to get the stink out of her car. Not the brightest move, she conceded, but she'd had it with this fucker. She should've cuffed it when it grabbed her outside the tenement, but the truth was she'd been too rattled. Now she wasn't rattled, just pissed. And curious. Unless it was a trip to jail or the ER, homeless people didn't usually travel too fast or too far. Especially blind and crippled ones.
Frank reclaimed her parking spot, hustling her passenger into the station past the holding cells. Upstairs she shoved the stinking bundle into an interview room. Darcy's voice startled her as she locked the door.
"Who've you got?"
"Cousin It. That bum that grabbed me the other day."
"Oh yeah? What for?"
"Just want to talk. See what his trip his."
It was too embarrassing to admit that this thing made her nervous, that its sudden appearances were giving her the willies.
Frank took her time in the bathroom, washing her hands, splashing a little water on her face. As she patted herself dry in the mirror, her higher brain argued with her lower, it's just some old bust with a grudge. But her lower brain wasn't buying it. She knew even as she dismissed it, that she was ignoring the primitive, irrational, information system that had evolved to keep her alive while her intellectual mind ran around on its fool's errands.
"Well, this time you're wrong," she whispered to the waiting, watching self in the mirror. "I'm just letting this thing wig me out."
Wadding up the paper towel, she hooked a rim shot over her shoulder into the garbage can. She ran into Donna from downstairs shuffling up the hall with a sheaf of papers. She handed a ream to Frank, sighing, "Inventory. You need to go through every item assigned to you and verify its condition. If an item's missing, broken, or obsolete, you need to fill out"—she showed Frank a form—"one of these."
"And you need 'em back tomorrow," Frank guessed.
"Wednesday." Donna smiled tiredly. "Have fun."
The support tech lumbered on, her two-hundred-odd pounds looking as painful as they must have felt. Frank dropped the stack off in her office. Darcy was writing at his desk and Bobby and Jill were chewing the shit. She thought to remind Jill that she was late with a half-dozen follow-ups, but she knew.
Before stepping back into the box with Cousin It, Frank peeked through the surveillance window. She looked around the tiny room. It was empty. Ceiling, corners, under the metal table, all empty. Frank stepped inside. The room was empty. She held the door open and tested the lock. It didn't open from the inside.
Frank ran back to the squad room.
"Did you let that bum out?" she demanded of Darcy.
"No," he said, surprised. "Why?"
"He's not there. You see a pile of rags walk by?" she asked Bobby and Jill.
They both shook their heads, following Frank into the hall.
"Bobby check up here, the men's room. Jill get the women's room and help Bobby. Darcy you go look downstairs. I'm gonna look out back."
She trotted down the stairway, fuming over who'd let her detainee out. In eighteen years Frank had seen that happen a number of times and always over a miscommunication. There was no misunderstanding here, no colleague to assume or misinterpret whether they should keep him, it, whatever, in the box, no one to make a mistake with. Someone had deliberately opened that door. When Frank found that someone she was going to chew them a royal new asshole. With gusto.
The good news was that it couldn't go too far. Not on those feet. She checked the holding cells, asking the occupants if they'd seen anybody go by. Couple cops, that was all.
"You missed the guy in the blankets?" she asked.
"Weren't no one in blankets," a Hispanic man claimed.
Frank stepped into the afternoon sunshine, sweeping the parking lot. A rooster crowed and she jogged to the entrance on the side street. It was the only way in or out other than through the station. She scanned the short street. It was empty. She sprin
ted to the corner. There were plenty of people on Broadway, but no one shambling around in rags. The 12-Adam-22 car was coming into the station. Frank flagged it and bent to the driver's side. Sergeant Haisdaeck was behind the wheel and the 36-24-36 new boot rode shotgun.
"Haystack, you see an old wino on your way in? All bundled up in blankets?"
"Only thing I saw," the old uniform boomed, "was a six-pack and an easy chair."
Frank shifted her eyes to the rookie who answered, "No ma'am."
She slapped the top of the car and it rolled on.
"What the fuck?" she wondered.
Frank backtracked, checking between each car on the side street. She glanced into the lot. Bobby and Jill were near the back door.
"Did you find him?" she yelled.
Jill shook her head and Frank swiveled at a sound in the bushes. It was a scrabbling noise, like someone clawing in the litter of old cellophane and dead leaves. Frank crouched, trying to see into the dark greenery. She reached to part the branches, instinctively pulling back when she heard the low growl. But too late. She saw the pit bull's square head the instant she felt the flare in her arm. Frank's left hand folded and smashed into the dog's tattered ear. The blow made her grunt in pain, but didn't faze the dog. Its teeth were buried in her wrist.
Frank dropped her weight onto its thick chest, but the dog nimbly pivoted. She swung an ineffectual kick then tried prying the jaws apart. She only impaled herself deeper. Frank thought about shooting the dog, simultaneously gauging her backdrop, the chances of shooting herself, the paperwork involved in firing her weapon, and the prospect of an IAD investigation. She pulled at the jaws again, unable to believe she couldn't get free of this fucking mutt.
She heard the feet and saw the legs. Bobby, Jill, and the boot had run over from the lot. Haystack puffed up behind them. Bobby tried to get a kick in, missing as the dog wheeled around the fulcrum of Frank's wrist.
"No!"
Bobby yelled and Frank glanced up to see Jill pointing her pistol.
"Hold still," she shouted at Frank.
"Don't shoot!" Frank shouted back. "Don't shoot!"
Frank saw the boot—what the hell was her name?—pull a 2x4 out of the back of a pickup. It ripped through the air into the dog's back. The dog yelped and spun to confront its new attacker. Frank felt the teeth give and tried pulling free. Her movements made the dog forget the pain in its spine. It locked down on her wrist, eyes snapping back onto hers.