The King of Swords

by Nick Stone

  A man shu?ed up behind her, red-eyed, half awake, a pair of orange Bermuda shorts barely clinging to his skinny pelvis, golfball for a navel. He had an old man’s face, craggy, lined and droopy, but an anorexic teenager’s body, bone breaking through skin, zero fat.

  ‘Morning, sir. Police.’ Joe held up his badge. ‘You speak English?’

  The man nodded silently.

  ‘Do you know a Neptune Perrault? Apartment twenty-nine?’

  The man nodded again.

  ‘Have you seen him today?’

  The man shook his head,

  ‘What about yesterday? Or recently?’

  Another negative shake of the head.

  ‘When was the last time you saw him?’

  ‘April,’ the man said with a cough.

  ‘Beginning, middle, end?’

  ‘End.’

  ‘End?’

  ‘That’s what I said,’ the man replied. He had an island accent–one of the smaller ones, Trinidad or Barbados.

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘I just am.’ He shrugged, like Joe was stupid.

  ‘Where d’you see him?’

  ‘Outside Emmanuel’s–barbershop across the road. He was getting in a car. He worked at Emmanuel’s.’

  ‘What kinda car?’

  ‘Black limousine.’

  ‘Was he well dressed?’

  ‘Better than normal, sure. He was in a suit.’

  ‘Did you talk to him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Were you friends?’

  ‘He was a friendly person.’

  ‘But were you friends? Did you like him?’

  ‘He was OK. I didn’t really know him too well, you know.’

  Joe looked at him hard and then looked past him into what he could see of his home. Curtains drawn, several kids in the background crowding around a doorway to see what was happening.

  ‘Did Neptune live with anyone?’

  ‘Sure. Crystal. His girl.’ He smiled lazily. Island Man liked her–probably why he hadn’t been friends with Neptune, Joe reasoned: jealousy. Joe even went as far as to guess that Neptune might have warned Island Man off his woman.

  ‘Tell me about this Crystal–she got a last name?’

  ‘Never asked her that.’

  ‘What she look like?’

  He smiled again. Yellow, tobacco-stained teeth. ‘Pretty lady,’ he said. ‘Built, you know.’

  ‘Pretty lady, built. Very descriptive.’ Joe stepped up to him. ‘Height?’

  ‘About mine. She was big down below. I like that.’

  ‘Was she Haitian?’ Joe asked, realizing that if he asked the man to describe her face he’d get a cell by cell fotofit of ebony booty. Exactly the way Max described three-quarters of his conquests and crushes.

  ‘No. I think she said she was Dominican. Spoke Spanish only.’

  ‘They have any kids?’

  ‘Just them.’

  ‘Visitors?’

  ‘A few all-night parties.’

  ‘You go?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ever see a tall fat guy with a hat around here?’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just asking.’

  ‘Arthur Jones.’

  ‘How long you lived here, Arthur?’

  ‘Two years this May past.’

  ‘What about Neptune?’

  ‘The same. We move in about the same time.’

  ‘Was he friendly with anyone else around here?’

  ‘Whole project knew him, mon. He cut everyone hair.’

  ‘He cut yours?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Arthur Jones smiled again.

  ‘You fuck her?’ Joe asked.

  ‘Every night. In my dreams,’ Jones said.

  Emmanuel Polk was wiping down one of the three chairs in his barbershop when Joe walked in and introduced himself.

  ‘Yeah, Neptune worked here,’ he said. ‘I was the guy made the call when he didn’t show up for work on the Monday. In the eighteen months he worked for me, he was always early and always stayed late to help me clean ’n’ close. Like they say, “a model employee”.’

  ‘Any police come by?’

  ‘Sure.’ He read from a card wedged into the mirror frame opposite the chair he was cleaning. ‘Detective Matt Brinkley.’

  ‘Right.’ Joe nodded, not surprised they’d sent the worst guy in Missing Persons into Liberty City. Brinkley couldn’t find snow in Alaska if it was pointed out to him. His specialty was helping old ladies cross the street.

  The barbershop was small and cramped, two work stations on the right, one on the left, with a bench right next to it for waiting customers. On the wall were pictures of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, O. J. Simpson, Jim Brown, Bernie Casey, Leon Isaac Kennedy and Carl Weathers in his Apollo Creed costume.

  ‘When d’you last see Neptune?’

  ‘Sunday, 26 April. Around midday. Came by to get his hair cut. Said he was goin’ to some party his cousin was throwin’. I was cool with that, you know. I live just above this place and I was happy to do him a favour.’

  ‘Was he well dressed?’

  ‘Yeah, in a suit. Looked fly.’

  ‘Anyone with him?’

  ‘His girl, Crystal. Dominican. Didn’t speak much English, but I know a little espaol, so we got along good. Nice girl.’

  ‘What was her last name?’

  ‘Taíno. She said it’s the same name as the tribe of Indians that lived on the island when Columbus discovered it. She had that look too. Like Pochahontas, only darker.’

  ‘What else do you remember about that day?’

  ‘They got picked up outside-a here in a black car. A black Mercedes. Tinted windows.’

  ‘Did anyone get out?’

  ‘No. The passenger door opened. Neptune knew the people in there. Said hello and was laughin’, all happy, like he ain’t seen them people in a while.’

  ‘He say where this party was at?’

  ‘Somethin’ ’bout Overtown. I think it was 2nd in Overtown.’

  ‘You tell the detective this?’

  ‘Sure. He wasn’t writin’ nothin’ down though. He ain’t called me back neither. I left six, seven messages fo’ him.’ Polk looked disgusted. He was a bald man of medium height, with grey chest hairs curling over the open collar of his yellow polo-necked shirt and white sparkles in his stubble.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that, sir,’ Joe said, meaning it.

  ‘You one of the good ones, I know, I can tell. Got your book out.’ Emmanuel looked at him, paused, then frowned. ‘I been cuttin’ folks’ hair here since ’65. Seen boys grow up into men, those same men grow old. I was cuttin’ hair of all the construction guys built Baldwin. You know Neptune’s the best employee I ever had? He’s better than that. I ain’t hired no one else to take his place, ’cause you know, he might be back. That’s where he works right there.’ He pointed to the single chair on the left. ‘Used to be mine, but I let him have it on account of how popular he is with everyone.’

  Emmanuel stopped and looked at the space behind the chair for a long moment, as if he was seeing Neptune there. Then he caught sight of his sad face in the mirror and saw Joe studying him and snapped out of it.

  ‘You didn’t see a tall fat guy with a hat around here, did you?’ Joe asked. ‘No.’

  Joe went over to look at Neptune’s work station. There was a colour photograph propped up under the mirror. It showed five people–four women and a man in the middle–standing together, arms around each other’s shoulders. ‘This Neptune?’ Joe asked, pointing to the man.

  ‘That’s him. See the way he smilin’ there? Way he always is. I never seen him unhappy. Girl next to him?’ Emmanuel pointed to a stunning, dark-skinned woman with long straight black hair. ‘That’s Crystal. Prolly the reason he’s so happy. The woman at the end? That’s his cousin Madeleine.’ Madeleine Cajuste
was tall and stout with glasses and a shoulder-length perm. Emmanuel pointed to the other two women–an older one in a green blouse, and, beside her, a younger girl in a dark blue Port of Miami T-shirt. ‘That’s Neptune’s aunt–Madeleine’s mamma–with Neptune’s cousin. I think the aunt goes by the name of Ruth. Way he said it sounded like “root”.’

  ‘I’m gonna have to take this, if you don’t mind,’ Joe said. ‘I’ll make sure it comes back.’

  ‘You already doin’ more than the last guy was here,’ Emmanuel replied.

  Joe smirked.

  Then Emmanuel took a couple of steps back and tilted his head a little.

  ‘Say? You that cop been on TV? ’Bout the County Court murder?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s me.’

  ‘You used to live round here too, right?’

  ‘I came up here, yeah.’

  ‘In Pork ’n’ Beans?’

  ‘I look that young?’

  Emmanuel laughed. Joe slipped the photograph into his notebook.

  ‘Neptune got somethin’ to do with that courthouse thang, right?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Joe said. ‘Different case.’

  ‘That so?’ Emmanuel frowned, disbelief in his voice. ‘How come you ain’t IDed the shooter then?’

  ‘I can’t comment–’

  ‘On an ongoin’ investigation. Spare me the man’s line, brother. I knew the shooter–’

  ‘What?’

  ‘OK, I didn’t know know him, but he came by here maybe two, three times, right when Neptune started.’

  ‘They were friends?’

  ‘They was cousins. That shooter is Madeleine’s older brother, Jean. Jean Assad. They had different daddies. His daddy was some kinda Ay-rab.’

  ‘How d’you recognize him?’

  ‘Face was clear as day on TV. I’m good with faces. Part of the trade, you know. Faces, first names, names of the kids. Everyone needs a haircut some time.’

  ‘Did you tell the police this?’

  ‘Sure I did. Called them right away.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘They said thank you very much for your information, took my name and number. When I see you comin’ in I figured it was ’bout that.’

  ‘Did you talk to Jean Assad?’

  ‘Didn’t get beyond “Hello” and “See you again”. He talked to Neptune mostly. It was Neptune cut his hair.’

  ‘Neptune talk about him much?’

  ‘Not much. He mentioned one time that the guy was mixed up with some bad people.’

  ‘Did he say who?’

  ‘Haitians.’

  ‘Any names?’

  ‘Yeah, just the one.’ Emmanuel smiled. ‘Solomon someone. I can’t remember his last name. Guy had a real bad rep. Neptune was scared just talkin’ ’bout him.’

  ‘What kind of things did he say?’

  ‘You know what a shapeshifter is?’

  ‘Sure,’ Joe said, ‘that’s like a person that can take on all different kinds of forms–human, animal, whatever. I’ve seen the movies.’

  ‘That’s what Neptune said this Solomon guy is. But you know how in Haydee they got all that voodoo they do?’

  ‘So this guy Solomon is some kind of voodoo gangster?’ Joe smiled. ‘I seen that movie too. It’s called Live and Let Die.’

  ‘What I thought too.’ Emmanuel laughed. ‘I didn’t say nothin’ though, you know. Respect for the man’s beliefs ’n’ all.’

  ‘And Jean Assad was working for this guy?’

  ‘Yeah. I don’t know what he was into zactly, but one day Neptune said Jean had just upped and left town.’

  ‘Right,’ Joe said. And then he suddenly came back and killed Moyez in the courtroom, probably after he’d killed his family.

  ‘Anything else you remember?’

  ‘Not offhand.’

  ‘You think of anything, call me here.’ Joe wrote down his home number in his notebook and tore out the page. ‘If you get the machine, leave a message. I’ll get right back to you.’

  ‘You think Neptune’s dead, don’tcha?’

  ‘It doesn’t look good,’ Joe said.

  32

  Raquel Fajima–day-shift manager at the forensics lab–smiled broadly when she saw Max standing at her office door, miming a knock. They’d known each other for ten years and still laughed about the night they’d first met, when she was still working call-outs and Max was in uniform. A group of frat boys had blown themselves up in their car with a grenade, and Raquel and Max had had to look for ID in all the gore. Raquel had made a bunch of tasteless wisecracks while Max–still new to gruesome kinds of death–had been trying to hold on to the contents of his stomach because he didn’t want to appear weak. Raquel had found a useable index finger stuck to an eight-track tape. She’d bagged the finger and, after she’d seen the tape was Deep Purple’s In Rock, looked all around at the mess in the car and said, ‘Serves you right,’ which had made Max laugh so hard he’d puked anyway. She could have slipped into fairly cosy gear as lab manager, spending her time delegating, juggling and going to meetings; instead she played an active role in cases, working on samples that came in, writing them up and testifying in court.

  Max and Raquel had remained friends over the years, occasionally meeting up for all-night drinking and bitching sessions, but these were few and far between now she was married and had a two-year-old son.

  It was 8.15 in the morning. Raquel was drinking a cup of jasmine tea at her desk. Max could tell she hadn’t been in the lab long because she wasn’t wearing her white coat, her dark brown curly hair was still down to her shoulders, and she was seated. Every time he saw her he usually had to compete for her attention with the microscope she was hunched over.

  They kissed each other on either cheek and Max sat on the chair opposite her desk, which was completely clear of everything bar a phone and lamp. All the shelves were full of files and thick leather-bound medical books, and there were more files on the windowsill. She had no photographs or personal items of any kind anywhere in the office. Here she was all about work. Her personal life stayed at home.

  They exchanged pleasantries. Her boy was well, as was her husband. She understood he was in a hurry and cut to the chase.

  ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘You know the samples you took out of the courtroom shooter’s stomach? What’ve you isolated and IDed so far?’

  ‘The tarot card everyone remembers.’ Raquel stood up and went over to a filing cabinet and opened a drawer marked ‘Ongoing’. She ran her finger along a series of hanging files, then pulled out an orange wallet folder, which she ri?ed through to find a list. She then stooped down to the ‘Links’ drawer and pulled out a grey folder.

  ‘Some meal he had!’ she quipped, sitting down and looking through it. ‘Shooter’s first course was a soup of Kool Aid, sand, crushed sea shell and bone–we’re fairly sure it’s human, that’s still tbt–to be tested. Next, diced sirloin of tarot card. The card was high-quality cardboard and coated with a plastic seal, making it harder to digest. He had that with a tasty side salad of cashew leaves, bressilet–poison ivy–two kinds of stinging nettle, mandrake and a bean, also tbt. Not common. His third course consisted of a side order of choice creepy crawlies: a tbt snake, a few millipedes, tarantula legs, bouga toad and–’

  ‘A what toad?’

  ‘Bouga toad. B-O-U-G-A. Their gland secretions are toxic. Cause catatonia in large doses. Shooter’s liver and kidneys contained traces of tetrodoxin. Tetrodoxin’s another toxic substance commonly found in puffer fish. A large enough dose can put you in a coma or plain kill you.

  ‘This was all in some kind of potion designed to render the person who took it incapable of controlling his own actions,’ Raquel said, tapping at the grey files. ‘I’ve seen this kinda stuff before. Look at this.’ She slid over the grey file.

  It was an autopsy report on a black man, aged thirty-five, who had wandered into incoming trafficon US1 on 13 February 1979. He’d been hit and killed by a
Buick, which had turned over, killing the driver and his passenger. The contents of the collision victim’s stomach were almost identical to those in Moyez’s killer–except for the bean and the tarot card.

  And then he noticed something else–the man had been registered deceased on 8 July 1977. He was called Louis-Juste Gregoire, a Haitian resident, who’d lived in Overtown. His grave was in the City of Miami Cemetery. His first death certificate stated he’d died of natural causes.

  ‘I’m sure you’ve heard of zombies,’ Raquel said.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Forget what you think you know–Night of the Living Dead and all that. In Haiti, Louisiana, certain parts of West Africa and South America they practise two kinds of voodoo. There’s the traditional kind called rada, which is peaceful and harmless, and there’s the Hollywood-movie kind–the dark variant called petro or hoodoo. This is all about worshipping evil spirits, putting death spells on people, human sacrifice, orgies. Zombies stem from hoodoo.

  ‘What basically happens is a witchdoctor will administer a potion on a person either orally or topically. This paralyses them and shuts down key parts of the brain. They look clinically dead. No breathing, really weak pulse, slow heartbeat. They get buried.

  ‘A few days later, the witchdoctor digs them up and brings them back to life with an antidote. Except they don’t fully return to the land of the living. They’re very much alive, but their minds are gone. They don’t recognize anyone they know: friends, family, whoever.

  ‘You see, the potions they’ve been given also contain powerful hallucinogens which make the person believe they’re dead. The zombie then becomes the witchdoctor’s personal slave, doing everything their master orders.’

  ‘Like killing someone in a courtroom?’ Max asked.

  ‘Sure. It’s highly possible. A mixture of hallucinogens and hypnosis alone could turn a person into a killer. In fact, the levels of scopolamine found in the brain and blood of the shooter indicate that he was tripping when he killed Moyez.

  ‘Scopolamine is found in mandrake, which was in his stomach. Mandrake belongs to a class of plants called “deliriants”–very powerful hallucinogens. Under their influence people have been known to talk to themselves, believing they’re addressing someone else. Except that there’ll be dialogue instead of monologue, because people under the influence take on the characteristics of the person they’re talking to–accent, patterns of speech, you name it.’