Body on the Backlot

by Eva Monteleagre

  “By who?” asked Gus.

  “Frantz, but he left for Alaska two weeks ago. Won’t be back till who knows.”

  “How did she pay?” I asked.

  She looked at me like I had way too many questions but finally relented and looked through the file.

  “Cash. You know, there was this guy she came in with, like, a bodyguard? We all thought that was kinda weird.”

  “Describe him,” said Gus.

  “He had long black hair. Looked kinda like a thug, all dressed in tight black clothes and he had to be taking some serious steroids. We were all like, dude, why don’t you try out for the Wide World of Wrestling or something, ya know? ‘Course nobody actually said that to his face.”

  “Why do you say he was a bodyguard?” I asked. “Did she introduce him that way?”

  “No, it just was, like, how they related, I guess. Oh, and he had this Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle tattoo on his bicep. I mean, what was that?”

  •••

  We walked out of the photographer’s studio and back to the gray sedan. The sun was warm and each person we passed on Sunset was in great shape, well-dressed, and wearing sunglasses. I do mean everyone. “Scratch the photographer off the list,” I said.

  “He could have given her a slow-acting poison,” said Gus.

  “Sure, but where’s the motive?”

  “Maybe he’s just a creep. What do you think about the bodyguard?” asked Gus.

  “Who knows? Could have been a friend. A Teenage Ninja Turtle tattoo…”

  “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle tattoo, you mean.”

  “Yes, but can you say that ten times fast?”

  Gus lit a cigarette. Again. I should’ve been used to it, but I quit not so long ago and it was bugging me.

  “Did you know that a doctor has made the statement that cigarette smoking shuts down the functions of the heart?” I asked.

  “Oh, really? Where’d you hear that?” Gus blew several smoke rings in the air.

  “It was on the news.”

  “That’s not news, Joan, everybody knows that.”

  “Not only the physical heart, the emotional heart,” I insisted. “Cigarette smoking stops a person from feeling.”

  “Let me just say for the record,” Gus stopped walking to emphasize his point, “that I feel plenty. Too much, in fact.”

  •••

  THAT NIGHT, I TOOK home the voodoo information I’d printed out from the Internet with the intention of getting the 411 on all that stuff. When I entered my house, I was greeted by the big box from Aunt Trish. I put away the box cutter. It would have to wait. I decided I wasn’t quite ready to unleash the past into my present reality. For me, the job always comes first, and this case promised to be challenging.

  Or maybe that was an excuse, which was just fine with me. I figured whatever was in the big box had waited for all these years, could wait until I was good and ready.

  I read over the printed-out news clippings that indicated that, in Haiti, there had been a Dr. Blanchard whose lab had caught on fire. Villagers were mourning the deaths of family members and friends who had been engulfed in the flames. Dr. Blanchard’s journal had somehow escaped the flames, and I read over some excerpts hoping to find some sort of clue to what really happened. I kept reading a certain passage over and over:

  Subject A has begun walking round and round in a circle. Subject C seems almost normal, eating and nesting and participating in other activities as if never treated. Subject B shocked me the most. When I arrived for the daily examination, he was masturbating. How is it possible to have such extremely different reactions? I can only assume the individual chemistry of each brain processed the chemical in its own unique way.

  The heat threatens to undo me. Not only have the rats eaten into my supplies, the flies have become unbearable. My only hope is that a breakthrough is near.

  I got a strong feeling that the so-called subjects were people. It wasn’t long before I was convinced that Dr. Blanchard had, indeed, been doing his research on humans, probably the native Haitians. No wonder his place caught on fire. The Haitians had probably rebelled and set it. Dr. Blanchard’s journal was offered for a fee and I ordered it to be sent to my home.

  The Cubans, as I affectionately call them, are the members of the Marquez family. I stayed with them when I first came to Los Angeles to study at the police academy. They’re French Cubans and they took me in at Donna’s request. I guess she felt I needed a change of environment. Maybe she thought I’d fit in with them because of my dark looks. She knew my mother was Native American and French. Lots of Cubans have French in their DNA. Plus, Tony Marquez was an instructor at the police academy and had been a long-time buddy of my juvie officer. Family of sorts.

  I moved out of the Marquez home as soon as possible because the emotions always ran high in that house and I found it a little too toxic or reminiscent or something, I dunno. But on this particular day, I thought it might be helpful to my investigation to reconnect. I decided to take a walk over to see them, make an unannounced visit, keep it simple. I hadn’t moved far; they only lived a couple blocks from my place.

  Tony’s wife, CC, is nicknamed after the famous Cuban songstress, Celia Cruz. Other than that, there’s no resemblance. CC’s a big-busted girl with light brown hair and tanned skin. She’s hard-edged and fairly sexy. It was eight o’clock in the evening and I knew CC would still be up and at a full roar.

  I could hear Ruben Blades blaring from the stereo as I approached. I don’t speak Spanish, but once Celia translated several songs for me as Ruben’s words blasted from the speakers. Was it the music or the way Celia recited the words? I remember being deeply affected by the lyrics.

  I crossed a courtyard of hibiscus and palm trees as I approached the front door. The pleasant fragrance of Cuban food brought back memories of culinary orgasms. Celia could whip up a gourmet meal like it was nuthin’. I was just getting the hang of cooking Cuban cuisine myself when I decided I had to move. I appeared outside her screen door and spotted Celia in the kitchen, she shouted, surprise.

  “God a mercy damn!”

  She learned that expression from me. Celia had a giant butcher knife in her hand when she came running, swung open the door with her foot and gave me a hug and a wet kiss on the cheek. I smiled like a big kid and took a seat on a leopard-print barstool in her kitchen. I peered over at her cuisine as she returned to her pots and pans on the stove. Any man who didn’t fall for her feminine charms would surely lie down for her cooking skills. She chopped onion, garlic, and multicolored peppers, all varying degrees of hot, then threw the ingredients into a pot of tiger shrimps with yellow rice. She was a choreographed performance of ruthlessness and delicate measure.

  Before I could say “Que hondas?” she launched into a rant.

  “Tony, he’s been actin’ strange. I’m going to put a big spell on him.”

  She placed saffron strings in a Mandala configuration on the top of her creation.

  “Funny, you should mention spells,” I say, “cuz’ that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  Celia strutted around in her apron, flicked a wooden spoon and waved her butcher knife to emphasize and punctuate certain statements.

  “You? You, who closes her ears on every word I say?”

  “I don’t close my ears. I listen to you.”

  She was surprised because I’ve shunned her mystic advice in the past. “My spells have failed on Tony,” she spouted angrily. “But not anymore! I met this man, very big in the craft.”

  “And then what?” I asked.

  “You must obtain a bone of your most precious ancestor,” she said. “I will get my grandmother’s thighbone!”

  “What do you need that for?” I asked. I would never desecrate my grandmother’s grave like that.

  “To have a spiritual connection with my ancestors that empowers and protects me. Makes sense, right?”

  “Oh. I never thought of that. Hmmm, I guess. But, uh Cel
ia, ever hear of the person continuing on inside you? You know, in your heart and in your thoughts?”

  “They always say that at funerals,” she said with disdain. “Intellectual crap!”

  “That’s not true. I believe in that.”

  “But I will have a spiritual divining rod. Human beings need ritual, honey. How many times I have to tell you. What, are you deaf?”

  I’d been baptized in the Missouri River holding hands with a hundred others. I remembered that day as a turning point for my soul. It was as if there might be some chance for me. In spite of all that had gone before, I accepted the cleansing and yes, I even experienced the idea that I might be blessed and held in the bosom of Mother Mary. So truthfully, I had deep beliefs regarding the power of ritual and spirituality. I might even think there was something to Celia’s divining rod, but it wasn’t something I was taught.

  “Hey, didn’t you hear? The Dodgers!” she exclaimed.

  “What about ‘em?” I asked.

  “They burned their uniforms, good gloves, and even new bats.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they can’t win! All of them did it, too. Not just the ones from the Dominican, even the white boys.”

  “They’re not boys. They’re grown men with families,” I said.

  “That’s right!” CC declared. “Not only that, but they are the highest paid in the league. All a bunch of millionaires and even all of them are participating in a ritual to better their careers.”

  “Did it work?” I asked. “No. Right?”

  “Whatever, they did a ritual, is my point. To get rid of the bad luck. And you know what the manager said?” she taunted.

  “What?” I really wanted to know.

  “He said he was glad they didn’t put him on top of the pile and burn him, too!”

  We both laughed and guffawed.

  “Hey, you know what your problem is? You’re a double Taurus. Double Taurus means very stubborn. You are very stubborn.”

  “That’s true,” I admitted with some reluctance. “Where are your grandmother’s bones, anyway?” My grandmother’s bones were on sacred ground on a Kickapoo reservation. There was a big furor over whether she qualified to be buried there. They said she didn’t have a large enough percentage of Kickapoo blood to qualify. Other people said she had heart and spirit and had done deeds that qualified her more than others.

  My mother fought, she wouldn’t rest until they accepted Gramma for this designation. But, ironically, it was my mother who died first. They buried her with my father’s family on Lambert land in the backwoods of Missouri. Later, they buried my father’s body right next to hers. I guess he got what he wanted in the end. Strange how this conversation was digging up my past and all my own buried bones.

  “New Jersey,” answered CC. “I’m going to Jersey next week. I will keep her thighbone under my bed and this will protect my marriage, keep Tony and me safe. But first, this man I met, Cavo, is going to do something very special. What, I dunno.”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s illegal, even in New Jersey, to just dig up a grave, even if it’s your own grandmother’s.”

  “Oh, shut up, you. What do you know?”

  I almost asked how the hell she thought she was going to get that thighbone and what the rest of her family would feel about her plans for her grandmother’s remains, but I let it go.

  “Well, I’m sure you’re the authority in that department. In fact, I was wondering, do you ever hear about anyone who works with dolls?”

  Her eyes widened. “Dolls? Girl, where have you been hanging out? What do you know from dolls?”

  I showed her the picture of Autumn’s doll and she insisted on taking me directly to Cavo’s Botanika. She put a lid on the pan of shrimp and rice and popped it into the refrigerator, grabbed her purse, and inspected her image in a mirror placed next to the front door.

  “Aren’t those places closed at this time of night?” I asked.

  “Cavo lives in the back and honey, he will open up for me.”

  I took that to mean that Celia was a good-paying customer, but with Celia you couldn’t be so sure. We drove over to Third and Kingsley, a mostly Korean neighborhood, and came to a storefront with a sign that read BOTANIKA. It had to be one of the last Latin businesses in the area. That meant the botanika had been located in that neighborhood since the seventies, before it became Koreatown. To me that was a good recommendation. In all that time, no unhappy customers had burned the place down and the bunko squad hadn’t closed it.

  Cavo was a small older man, Latin, in his early sixties, with a full head of wiry gray hair and a gray mustache. He answered the door in a casual manner and wasn’t surprised to see us.

  “Cavo, I want you to meet my friend, Joan.” We smiled at each other. He invited us in.

  The inside was lit by a gargantuan candle on a counter that provided the customer with every variety of oil and a short description of what it would accomplish. In one corner of the store, a white-haired old lady in a white dress gave advice to a plump young woman. A reading was taking place. The old lady tossed shells across a table. She spoke in a soft warning tone. Tears streamed down the plump woman’s face. The light and shadows from the candles cast them in a dramatic portrait like an old painting.

  I inspected the oils more closely. There were samples of “come back” oil, “go away” oil, “money” oil, and “career” oil. Some of the bottles indicated that they were samples. I tried the career oil. It smelled musky and sweet at the same time. Cavo stood behind the counter and eyed me as I dabbed the career oil behind my ears and on my wrists. He was dressed in white jeans and a white T-shirt. I peered over the counter to see his feet. He had on white sandals. “Show him your picture,” Celia said.

  I pulled out the picture of Autumn’s voodoo doll and put it under his nose. He shook his head.

  “Voodoo in America has evolved into something quite different over the years. This looks Haitian. Pure, straight from the devil’s heart, so to speak.”

  “What’s with the dolls? Why use dolls?” I asked.

  “The doll is like a power point, a focus of the energy. Basically it’s a vessel for the spiritual work to move through.”

  “Maybe someone brought this doll over from Haiti?”

  “Could be, but it’s more likely it was made here by someone who once practiced in Haiti.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because of the materials and the design on the dress. For one thing, it’s new. Also because, well, Haiti is a long way to travel. You want it for your career?” asked Cavo.

  “Is that what it’s for?” I asked.

  “Ambition, power, control,” he said.

  “Is that why there’s no pins stuck in it?” I asked.

  He laughed and said, “Maybe. But you don’t have to go to Haiti for that. Just buy that oil you tried.” He picked up a full bottle of the oil and handed it to me.

  “How much is it?” I thought it might be helpful if I played along.

  “Fifteen dollars.”

  I paid the money.

  “Rub it on your chest and stomach and the soles of your feet.”

  I nodded. Celia clicked her tongue.

  “You should have got love oil,” said Celia. I shot her a withering look.

  “Can you tell me why someone would put fingernails and blood inside a doll like this?”

  “You can tell her, Cavo. She’s like family to me.”

  I looked at Celia, touched by her declaration but not entirely sure it wasn’t merely said for effect.

  “I can’t tell you anything exactly. I don’t want to mislead you in any way. I’m not an authority on Haitian voodum but I tell you this, that shit is heavy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you can’t mess around; it gets deep fast. We’re not talking about a love spell put together by some young chick working at The Psychic Eye in Woodland Hills. We’re talking some deep roots. That shit is from Haiti, okay
?”

  “Okay.”

  He gestured for me to come closer and I leaned in so he could whisper in my ear.

  “Strong mojo in Haiti requires a sacrifice, big sacrifice.”

  “A big sacrifice,” I said. “A goat or a chicken?”

  “Really, I couldn’t say what. I just don’t know.”

  “Who knows the answers to these questions?” I demanded.

  “Nobody who would tell you, that’s for sure. Those sacred secrets are guarded, passed down to descendants, not reported to Access Hollywood. You see what I mean?”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “Things are different in Haiti. So many trespassers on their souls; people have a different slant on life.”

  “It’s in their history?”

  “The slavery, the efforts for colonization over and over again by the Spanish, the French, the English. But no! The Tianos, slaves and free people of color, rose up and defeated their oppressors. But the scars, the interruption of their culture, have left its mark.”

  We nodded at each other. I love history, even the facts that are upsetting. I’m always interested in the truth. Cavo had just named all my European ancestors as the bad guys but I could feel that in that moment he decided that I was good people.

  “Tianos?” I asked.

  “The indigenous people of Haiti.”

  “Oh.” I can’t help but admire the fact that they refused to be enslaved.

  He nodded. “They are a beautiful people. And they are strong in spirit. But, as you say, the history…terrible. The religious history of the intruders. It’s a whole different thing there. You have no idea.”

  “What do you mean, exactly?” I asked, curious as all hell.

  “Take my word. Over there in Haiti, they have ten different distinct kinds of zombies and a hundred different ways to turn you into one.”