City of Masks cb-1

by Daniel Hecht

  Suddenly Cree knew she had to go help Joyce. They had to double up on the search for Josephine.

  She stood up quickly, staggered as the forgotten pain exploded in her hips and thigh, and lost her balance on the levee slope. Immediately Paul stood, too, and she grabbed his outstretched hand. She let him help her back to the path, and when he didn't let go she didn't resist the continuing contact. He put his arm around her waist, and they started back toward his car that way, hip to hip. After a moment she put her arm half around him, too, hooking a finger into a belt loop.

  She felt a little better. The open spaces had helped, and the thought that maybe in Josephine they had a resource to help heal Lila. Paul helped, too, she realized. The occasional soft bump and brush of their hips felt good, at once so casual and so intimate. Less scary and confusing than it would have been a week ago. For all her sense of urgency, she didn't mind allowing the moment to linger. They didn't race back. From a distance, Cree thought, they would look like lovers out for a stroll.

  "So what do we do?" Paul asked quietly. "Do we approach Lila with this?"

  Cree shook her head. "Not yet. I want to see if we can find Josephine. And I want to get to know Richard first. Maybe some therapeutic avenues will become clearer."

  Paul nodded. After another minute he cleared his throat as if he had something he'd been wanting to say.

  "Back at the hospital, I said I'd thought about… you know. What you told me the other night. About Mike. Is this something you're up for talking about now?"

  "I think so." She tugged at his belt loop.

  "I want to offer you a provocative suggestion, one you may not like. But I hope you'll think about it."

  Cree chuckled humorlessly. "After the events of the last forty-eight hours, Paul, I think I can probably take just about anything."

  He bobbed his head, uncertain. "Seeing Mike after his death was a huge thing. It changed your outlook, you had to radically adapt your worldview to cope with it. And it left you with… ambiguities about your marital status. If people don't exactly, totally die, is Cree Black still sort of married? Or is she single? Your situation was more extreme, perhaps, but it's not so different from the confusion that's typical of every person who loses a spouse. They grieve, and they often stay single and celibate out of respect for the dead loved one — the sense of connectedness and love, the desire for fidelity, doesn't go away. Staying loyal is a way to keep the lost one alive, just a little, and anyway, it just doesn't feel right to become close to someone else. And there's often the fear of intimacy, the fear that getting close to someone might just set you up for another such loss. Have I got all this about right?"

  Cree nodded.

  "So in searching for answers, you become, by degrees, a ghost hunter — a psychologist for the dead. Because you want to know how it works. You want to know what kind of beings we are! But you also wonder where Mike is. Some part of you has got to be hoping maybe you'll see him again? You'll find him again?"

  Cree felt each word like a body blow. It was all too true, it was all too much to bear. "This isn't what I thought you were wanting to talk about," she said hoarsely. "I've just been through five kinds of hell. I don't — "

  "Please, just let me finish. So you become a ghost hunter. Watching you dealing with Lila, I can tell your process just about kills you every time, yet you keep on doing it. Why? Just existential curiosity? I don't think so. I think the answer is right there, in what you really do with ghosts. Cree, no, don't turn away now! Listen to me! You get rid of them, you banish them! You 'free' them, you, what's your word, 'remediate' them! Don't hear this wrong, Cree, but maybe that's no accident? Maybe after nine years, part of you knows you need to 'remediate' Mike? Maybe that's the hidden truth of why you do this. You're unconsciously trying to free yourself from your own haunting. You're trying to — "

  "You are not my psychiatrist!" All the anger had returned in a blinding blaze, and she shoved him from her so hard he staggered away. "How dare you!"

  Paul stood just off the path, hands palm up, his face searching hers. "I'm just trying to — "

  "You're trying to get me into the sack! You're being self-interested and opportunistic, and you're being intolerably condescending. You're thinking of me as some kind of psychological specimen under your microscope, Paul! You're violating a basic professional precept, which is that people ask you to analyze them, you don't presume to do so unless you are asked. And I most definitely do not want you to be my psychoanalyst!"

  Furious, she strode away, leaving him standing there.

  "What would you like me to be, Cree?" he called after her. "Maybe it's time to figure that out."

  She stormed back to the car, tears burning on her cheeks. It wasn't until she saw the BMW below her that she realized that of course there were no clean exits here. She was dependent on Paul to drive her back downtown. A couple of other cars were in the lot now, trunk lids up as families unloaded picnic gear. She stumbled down the steps, ashamed of her red, tear-slicked face, of her predicament. She wanted to hide in the car, but of course the doors were locked and Paul had the keys.

  So she leaned against the hood, her arms crossed hard, occasionally wiping her eyes with the back of her hands, doing her best to swallow the sobs before they could burst out. Everything hurt. The picnickers averted their eyes as they went past her to the stairs. Paul was a little figure at the top of the levee half a block away, walking along slowly, head down, hands in pockets, kicking at stones.

  She hated him. She hated being wrenched open and exposed. She hated having to face that truth in her. She hated that Paul was right.

  Oh, Mike! she cried inwardly. The rest was right there, the part she had never been able to say or even think: Set me free! Please, my love.

  Paul came to the top of the stairs but stopped suddenly to dig his cell phone out of his pocket. He flipped it open, put it to his ear, and listened intently. His face changed.

  Then he was trotting quickly down the stairs and jogging toward her. Whatever they might have said or not said was moot, because when he was fifteen feet away he called out, "That was Jack Warren. Lila has attempted suicide — he doesn't know, maybe she's succeeded. Cut her wrists. They've just taken her to the emergency ward."

  36

  There wasn't much to be done. By the time they got to the hospital, Lila had already undergone surgery to stop the bleeding and had been sedated. Now she slept in a private room with her wrists bandaged and strapped to the sides of the bed. Paul conferred with the surgeon and came back to report that she had lost a lot of blood, but that she'd received transfusions and was expected to be fine. Physically.

  Of course, if she were really determined to do it, she'd try again.

  Cree had no standing — she wasn't family, was not Lila's physician or psychiatrist, wasn't even licensed to practice in Louisiana. If Lila woke and asked for her, she might get in to talk with her, but otherwise not. And maybe not anyway: Jack made it clear that he blamed Cree for Lila's state of mind, and he claimed that given Lila's instability, he had some presumptive power of attorney that would allow him to prohibit future contact. The attending physician looked at her with suspicion and distaste.

  Paul: She was pretty sure she'd blown it with him yet again, terminally. Or vice versa. Whatever, Cree thought viciously.

  She slipped away while Jack and Paul talked. Downstairs, she found a pay phone, called Joyce, and went outside to catch a cab.

  They met at the base of Canal Street, on the riverbank — Cree still wasn't feeling up for interiors. They found a bench in the narrow riverside park that adjoined the Aquarium of the Americas. The sun had become merciless, hard and heavy as hot bronze, so they chose a little enclosure shaded by oak trees and cooled by a weak breeze from the river. Today it carried a faint sulphur smell, pollution from some downriver chemical plant. Cree brought Joyce up to date on their discoveries in the Epicurus archives and described from a clinical perspective the many ways Pdchard's rape explained
Lila's life choices and current mental state.

  Listening, Joyce took on an old and world-weary look. But hearing about Lila's suicide attempt brought her eyes wide with urgency again.

  "Cree, we're gonna have to step back a bit here. I mean, do you really need me to tell you how you look right now? It's not just last night, either — swear to Gawd, Cree, you've lost easily ten pounds since you got here, and you did not have it to spare. But last night, do I have to tell you how bad that was? How close you've been cutting it? When you tell me you've got to kind of go crazy, and when the person you're getting this super-empathic link with slits her wrists? What am I supposed to do? I keep telling you, this is a job, okay? It's not supposed to kill you."

  "It'll only kill me if we lose — if we fail to solve the problem. If I can save Lila, I can save myself."

  "The problem is not just Lila! Look, Cree, I'm no psychologist, but it doesn't take Uncle Sigmund to tell that some of this is Cree and Mike and nine years of ambivalences. And you can't stake your survival on shedding all that in a matter of days!" Joyce shook her head, and her voice softened. "Cree. You know I'd do anything for you. I would. You're like… like a sister to me. More than a sister. We play this game, you and me, a lot of times I'm kind of the court jester with you, I'm trying to keep you happy and grounded?" Joyce's lips went into a trembling pout, and Cree realized how deep this went, how naked an admission this was. "But I can't find a way to do that here. Being the funny girl-buddy sidekick, you know, like in the TV sit-coms? It doesn't help, it's not enough. I'm scared. None of this is funny any more."

  Moved, Cree reached out to touch Joyce's cheek. "You do keep me happy and grounded. Joyce, we're getting toward the end, I can feel it. We're beginning to get a handle on this."

  "Yeah?" Joyce's anger rose again. "Well, I hope you are, because I've come up with just about squat that's gonna be useful. Richard Beauforte — there's a ton on the guy. He gave to charities. He was president of civic groups. He bought and sold properties. He entertained. He was buddies with mayors and other bigwigs. In the obits everybody called him practically a saint."

  "He was capable of raping his own daughter in the most sadistic way imaginable. There has to be some indication of that elsewhere in his life. Somewhere we're going to find what we need to undo him."

  Joyce opened her briefcase, took out a thick sheaf of photocopies, and shakily leafed through them, pulling one here and there to hand to Cree."Well, you're gonna have to read a lot between the lines, Cree. Let's see — he got caught driving under the influence twice in his life. Got himself lawyered up, no convictions. Does that mean he had an uncontrollable alcohol problem and that he was out-of-control drunk when he raped Lila? Maybe, maybe not. Okay, here we got a sexual harassment suit by a female employee at his firm. He denied everything, fought it, settled it on some unspecified terms. A valid complaint, suggesting the guy had impulse control issues with the opposite sex? Or a frivolous thing by somebody who wanted a raise and didn't get one? Oh, and here he's doing some litigation himself, suing a former business partner, seeking damages and insisting the court revoke the guy's license to practice law. Was it appropriate, or does it show our man has a nasty, vengeful streak?" Joyce shrugged, flopped the sheaf against her leg. "If you want to know who this guy is from this material, you're gonna need more than empathic talents, Cree. You're gonna need to be clairvoyant. Because to me, this doesn't add up to a hill of beans."

  Cree looked over the papers as Joyce tried to compose herself. She was right: For every little item that suggested a dark side, there were ten that showed Richard to be a pillar of the community, a good citizen, a dedicated family man.

  At last she handed them back, beginning to feel defeated. "What about Josephine Dupree? Any luck at all?"

  "Next to nothing. Her name does show up in the phone records for 1973 and 1974 — I have the service address here. Looks to me she moved there for a couple of years after she left the Beaufortes, but after that, nothing. The only other thing, I found in the Times-Picayune records exactly one, small hit for Josephine Dupree." Joyce rummaged in her briefcase again and extracted a single page.

  It was a photocopy of an obituary-page article about the death of one Souline Dupree, who had died in 1975 at the age of eighty-two. "Queen Souline" had been a moderately well-known root doctor and conjure woman in New Orleans for forty years. The article described her as the last of her generation, having learned her hoodoo charms and remedies from practitioners who had once been slaves. As such, she was a repository of knowledge of Afro-Caribbean folkcures, quasi-mystical traditions, and oral histories; her loss meant the end of an era. She had once been a fixture in a tiny shop on the northern edge of the French Quarter, selling herbs and lore and advice. A lifelong smoker, she'd died of lung cancer, survived by only two of her seven children — daughters Jasmine Tricou, sixty, and Josephine Dupree, fifty-four.

  The blurry photo showed an old woman with frizzed gray hair and pouched eyes, wearing a small crucifix on a chain around her neck and holding a cigarette in a V of gnarled fingers. She bore an unmistakable resemblance to the photos Cree had seen of Josephine — that long face with its strong jaw, downturned lips, and resolute expression.

  "So of course I looked for the sister, Jasmine Tricou, everywhere, too," Joyce said. "Nothing. Nada. I think they're both probably dead."

  "No," Cree assured her. "Josephine is alive. And we have to find her."

  The hexes, she was thinking. Here at last was a possible connection between the hexes and the Beaufortes. By all accounts, Josephine was a devout churchgoer, but as Deelie had pointed out, voodoo and hoodoo often coexisted with Christian beliefs. And Josephine must have learned something of the old arts, growing up with a mother who was a serious practitioner. Josephine had put the notched sticks at Beauforte House, Cree was sure, and had placed the one at the Warrens', with the goal of inducing "confusion of mind" in the residents there. If she knew about the rape, it made sense she'd want Lila to forget. But why the Chases? With everything she and Joyce learned, and with every new puzzle that presented itself, Josephine seemed to hold the keys.

  "Okay. But, Cree — it hurts my professional pride to admit this, but I'm kind of running out of magic here? I can't think of a lot more we can do to locate her. We could collect every phone book in Louisiana and call every Dupree to see if any of them know a Josephine. But for all we know, if she is alive, she moved to Chicago, or — "

  "I know someone who might be able to help us," Cree said.

  Deelie Brown said she had another appointment, but if they could get across town fast she'd be happy to hear them out. When they got to the Times-Picayune building, they found her waiting in the little park in front of the main entrance, sitting on a bench and pulling yards of magnetic tape from a cassette that was apparently stuck in a small recorder. Her face was folded in that glowering frown she'd first greeted Cree with, but when she saw them the smile came back, sun from behind the clouds. Cree felt a rush of affection for the solid, chunky woman, her mismatched clothes, the congruence between what she claimed to be and what Cree sensed she really was.

  "Yo, my ghost hunter sister," she said. She tossed the mess aside and stood with a rattle of hair beads.

  The highway ramps all around roared steadily as Cree kissed her cheek, introduced Joyce, and thanked her for making time to meet them.

  Deelie's frown had returned. "You know, you don't look so good, Miz Black."

  "I've been hearing that a lot lately, yeah." Cree tried to grin.

  "Fight with your man? Or just 'fall down the stairs'?"

  "Stairs."

  "Oh, uh-huh, right." Deelie shared her skeptical look with Joyce. "So, what we got today? You need my help on a ghost hunt, you're talking my language, grist for the proverbial mill. What you need?"

  Cree gave her an overview of why they wanted to locate Josephine, and she and Joyce told her the little they knew. The address Joyce had found from 1974, Deelie told them, was in Treme, like S
t. Bernard Development a low-income housing project. "What you all out east call a black ghetto," Deelie said. At first, Deelie had looked a little disappointed to hear that she was needed to help find a living person, but when Cree explained Josephine's hoodoo connection, the possibility of a link to the Chase murder, she brightened.

  "Money in the bank for me, it ties in with Temp." Deelie's eyes showed that her wheels were turning. "Yeah, see, now you're thinkin' straight. Out-of-town white girl and a Chinese not going to make a lot of headway doing a missing persons gig in black N'Orleans. You look like TV lady cops or welfare fraud investigators or something, people going to shut their faces they see you two coming. This Josephine got any connection at all to other voodoo and hoodoo people, I know where to look for her. If not, it'll be slower, but I got ways."

  "There's one more problem, though," Cree said. "We… it's important that we find her as soon as possible. There's a certain amount of risk for several of the parties involved, and — "

  "You mean like 'falling down the stairs.' " Deelie gave her a shrewd look and clearly saw the desperation in her face. "Don't want another 'accident' anytime soon? Yo, trust me, I'm on it already."

  37

  Cree sat for an hour in the relative calm of her hotel room. Joyce had ordered her to bed and then had gone off to her own room to call every Dupree and Tricou in the current phone book. For the first hour or two, she also called Cree every now and again, ostensibly to share some thought, but really, they both knew, to make sure she was staying put.

  Paul's comments about remediating Mike gnawed at Cree's stomach. Now her memory conjured only their occasional fights, the miffs and tiffs and little hurts. Mike looked at her with reproach in his eyes. She knew it was true, and she couldn't live with her betrayal. Damn Paul, she thought. Another undoing.