Roots of Misfortune

by Seth Pevey

  Melancon pulled it out of his pocket, and Janine looked at the little root in the detective’s outstretched palm. A visible shiver ran up her—whether it was from the cold, or a revulsion at the sight of these shriveled, pungent things was unclear.

  “Ipomoea Jalapa,” she said. “That’d be the one…”

  She shook her head, remembering something. “I’m not a detective though, David. I work in booking. Everything I hear is second or third hand. I’m just telling you what I know. I don’t know if Mr. Fingerprints has anything to do with our girl out on the highway, but I damn sure know he is wanted for murder in the state of Florida. So…you have twenty-four hours to do what you need to do, or you’re going to both be called in for questioning regarding this guy’s whereabouts.”

  Melancon rolled his tongue along his bottom lip. “If the police get involved, Janine…things could get ugly. He will know we are getting close. Then he is liable to run and slit this girl’s throat, if my gut is telling the truth.”

  “Quit feeding your gut so much poison and it might speak more clearly. BOLO goes out in 24 hours, only because you’re an old…friend. I’m already sticking my neck out. If word gets out that I sat on a wanted man’s prints I’ll never work in law enforcement again.”

  Melancon gave her a boozy wink of his blue eye and said, “Thanks.”

  She stared at him. “I don’t have to tell you how serious this is, do I?”

  “I’m way ahead of you.”

  Felix nudged the detective. “Oh yeah, Janine. Here is what we talked about. I know it is too much, I know you’ll try and refuse it. But let’s all save ourselves some time here. Just consider it a spring bonus.”

  He handed her the envelope.

  She snatched it and looked over her shoulder. “You are quite a fucking pair of cowboys, you know that?”

  “I think that’s why you’re so sweet on me.”

  “Fuck you, Melancon.”

  “It’ll have to be later,” he said, and cranked up the window and the blues music before she could hit back. They left her standing in the parking lot, a small grin forcing its way on her face as Melancon waved goodbye.

  Driving back towards the office, Felix turned off the music.

  “So, this is where we are at? We should operate on the idea that this guy is a killer, and involved in the same mumbo jumbo hoodoo as the Korean chick and the dead girl…That’s just fantastic.”

  Melancon frowned. “What’s even worse is we now have 24 hours before the heat comes down on him. Who knows if he’s got her locked up somewhere, doped out of her mind on pills and religion? He might just throw her out on the highway the minute he hears the cops are looking for him, dump her out in that swamp, anything. The smart play for him is to get rid of the evidence and skip town.”

  “So we just walk up to and grab him before the cops mess it up?” Felix said.

  “I think that would mean a fight.”

  “Well?

  “That’s not the way it needs to go down. We have to be smart here, kid.”

  They were silent the rest of the way back, both of them turning eventualities over, stirring them like cream into coffee. Twenty four hours: the countdown of looming time was now palpable between the two detectives.

  When they arrived at the foot of the stairs, which lead up to their second story office, Melancon smelled it first. The scent of woodland flowers, sandalwood. Not something that belonged. The air itself was out of place, an uncertainty vibrating in his spine. He pulled his pistol, crept up the old stairs, peaked up to the second-floor landing where he saw that the door to their business was indeed ajar.

  He waved at Felix to back off.

  Melancon swallowed down the fear, steadied himself against the booze, and took a few more stairs. He focused on turning the patent leather shoes under him just so on the cypress wood. That soft, swamp-grown lumber creaked in deadly protest, making him cringe with each step. Gaining the landing he crouched, easing up to the office, poking the barrel of the revolver through the crack of the door.

  From the other side of the wall, something clacked. The vibration of it bounced through the ancient wood and had Melancon pulling back the hammer. His young partner crept up slowly behind him, his gun drawn but not pointed.

  More clacks, getting closer, coming towards the open threshold. He kept the large, wooden door between his body and whoever was doing the clacking, obscuring his vision.

  Finally, when the clacks grew too close, Melancon reflexively yelled out.

  “Whoever’s on the other side of this wall. Know that Louisiana is a stand your ground state. You’re on private property now. Courts don’t look too kindly on that. Now you’ve got two pieces locked on you. So, whatever it is you found in there, I can guarantee it ain’t worth a couple bullets in the gut. Unless you want to get aerated, you best self-identify in the next three seconds.”

  “Jesus Christ, don’t shoot man!”

  Felix waved an urgent, downward hand at Melancon.

  “Oh,” Melancon said, looking at his young partner. “It’s your star witness.”

  Inside they found Tipitina, or just Tina. She looked much different without the layers of makeup—reasonable and demure, Melancon figured. She was crouched on heels and giving Scrappy an intense belly rub.

  “Jesus, y’all are jumpy,” she said over her shoulder.

  “How the hell you get in here?” Felix asked. But he didn’t sound angry. Why didn’t he sound angry? He sounded pleased. This young thing had almost gotten herself pin-cushioned by a hail of hollow points and here was Felix already sounding giddy.

  “I knocked, but the door was unlocked.”

  Felix gave the old man a long look. It was Melancon’s responsibility to secure the door, as he held the only key. It was a key that was expensive and difficult to replicate on a lock so obscure and old-fashioned as the one in that ancient Basin Street building.

  “Shit,” Melancon said. “I guess it slipped my mind.”

  “Funny how slippery a mind gets once you’ve pickled it in brown,” Felix scolded.

  The old man hung his head and walked back to his desk. He pat the dog on the head and tipped his hat to the young lady before collapsing in his chair and pouring another drink for himself.

  “You can’t leave a little guy like this locked up all day,” Tina was saying, rubbing the dog all over. “As soon as I knocked I heard him scratching at the door, so I let myself in. He needs to run and play, don’t you baby?”

  The dog seemed in agreement with just about whatever she said. So did Felix, for that matter. The young man’s smile was a foot across and he leaned against his desk with that slack, invitational posture of a fool rushing in.

  “So what can we do for you, miss?” Melancon interrupted.

  She looked down at her colorful nails. “Oh, well…I was mostly wondering if you had figured out anything about Min Ji.”

  “Why, has anything else happened up at your…um…place of employment?” Felix asked.

  “Well…I came because one of the other girls told me something, about Min Ji. Something I thought that you might want to know. Thinking it was like…possibly relevant to you guys finding her.”

  Melancon leaned back in his chair, studying the woman in his office, trying to see if there was any lying in her. She had a soft, almost squeaky voice and a slow, deliberate way of moving.

  He couldn’t sense any deceit, though. Her open eyes. The way she beamed down at Scrappy. Her sensible street clothes offset by the heels. She was clearly flirting with Felix, but so what? Young people flirted, and it wasn’t his business to protect the boy.

  Protect him from what, after all? A good-looking woman?

  Maybe he was being silly, but Melancon still found himself searching her for something, but failing to find it. Beyond the familiarity she had quickly taken, and her chosen vocation, he couldn’t quite find anything to dislike about Tina Green, despite his best efforts. He did note something…withered in her, however
. Like a once-ripe grape, left to shrivel too long on the vine.

  He told himself to turn it off for a moment, and waited for her to go on.

  “This came from another dancer, another girl. But...”

  She walked over to Melancon’s desk, looked at him more closely. She seemed to have noticed his critical eye, and now wanted to study him in return. For danger, perhaps, or something else. She probably excelled in judging the characters of men, Melancon thought. For her, it was a serious business.

  Tina squinted, surveying the distance between them. Then she looked around him, at the chaos of his desk, until her eyes landed on something there and grew suddenly wide.

  It was the tattered picture of Julie that Melancon had mistakenly left out on the mahogany, that was what she was looking at.

  “Oh my God…” she said.

  “What?” Melancon asked. “What is it?”

  “It’s just that…is that your daughter?”

  Melancon dragged the picture back towards himself, his prickling instinct to defensiveness rising once again. But he tried to summon his rational side: this was just a kid in front of him, after all.

  “She was. A long time ago. Just a few years younger than you when I lost her. You know something about her? Recognize her from somewhere?”

  A bit of heavy silence before she shook her head. “No I….must have just been mistaking her for somebody, sorry. She’s beautiful though. That’s what took me by surprise, I guess.”

  Melancon left out a breath of air. “So, what is it girl, about Min Ji?”

  Tina paced back to the center of the room, bent down to the dog again. Her shoulders went slack as she regarded the shaggy creature.

  “You know, before I started this, I had other dreams. Big dreams. I wanted to be a vet. I wanted to go to veterinary school and maybe work at the Audubon Zoo. Take care of the animals. That kind of stuff. But I could never have afforded it. Could never have stopped working and just gone to school. I’m not sure how people do that.”

  “We all got unfulfilled dreams, kid. I’m sure Min Ji has plenty of them. So why don’t you help us get to the bottom of this. Now, what did you hear?”

  “Well…one of the girls…she said that Min Ji was…late.”

  “Late for work?”

  “No I mean…well, you know all those girls working together in close quarters, those long hours, they have a way of syncing up. So if you are close with someone it can be kinda….well…obvious when they miss their…you know…”

  “Are you trying to tell us that Min Ji might have been pregnant?” Felix asked.

  Tina nodded her head. “Yeah…Yeah, I think she was.”

  “Jesus…” Melancon said.

  Ten

  So, he’d been cursed.

  It explained so much, really. Perhaps he’d been born into this world with a mark against his soul already written in the book. Perhaps it started in his brain. Just a bit of rot moldering down into the folds of him, feeding his own mind a steady drip of foolishness and poor fortune. Or maybe his gut, where it guided his hand and pointed his steps towards ruin.

  All the things that had come to pass. They were because of the curse. The gris-gris. A bane that would study evil seeds, coax them to bear evil fruit.

  It was like having a diagnosis: seeing that little stone and bone fetish, made in his likeness. The relief of a name put to his bad feeling, but coming with a certainty that your worst fears had metastasized. That’s exactly what it was like—like living with a tumor, and knowing it too. A tumor that was benign enough not to kill you right away. Instead just sitting there like a rock: ten, twenty, thirty years (and how long had it been?) of heavy burden. Most days, just an inconvenience, an irritation, a thing that had to be carried.

  But then times would come. Terrible times. Times when that tumor would threaten to erupt, to grow malignant, to twist its host into a horrible, cancerous monster.

  And this seemed to be one of those times.

  Bean-headed, green-eyed Landry Ducet sat at the Legba Lounge trying to summon his courage with strong drink and rumination. The trombone sat in its case at his feet. The lounge was a squat, brick building painted red and black and sitting at the intersection of Tonti and St. Ann. It was ten AM already on Sunday. The barroom was crowded on an important moment like this.

  On the Sunday. On Super Sunday.

  He tried to see the bright side. The curse, for all its faults, could be a beautiful thing too. It was him, after all. And like him it could shine: shine in that desperate way that tarnished coins twinkle from a gutter. Sometimes, he decided, he’d even let the curse out to dance. Sometimes, he would allow the curse to come creeping up his gullet, climb his throat, poke out through his lips.

  When that happened, he’d be sure to stick a trombone in front of it. Have that old curse force its way out through the brass or not at all. Make it sing its terrible song

  And today was a big day for him. For Trombone Landry. A big day for the whole of Tremé. Today there would be songs, dancing, drinks raised on high.

  So, he had to set his burdens aside, at least for now. Step number one: lose yourself. Put Trombone Landry in the closet. Then, pull out the new self—that second-tier suit. Become another person for the day.

  The Wildman.

  That transformation was already stirring in him, but it was a hard fight. The curse had him down, and as he worked on his third glass of Cognac, the ice tinkling to itself there at the bottom, he knew that the change wasn’t coming fast and hard enough.

  Wildman. Wild Chappepeela! Super Sunday.

  He knew he had to get there somehow, repeating the words into his glass, but he just wasn’t feeling very wild on that particular morning. Not since he’d seen that little bone fetish of himself, reeled in all its implications, had he felt much like doing anything. But a lethargic Wildman without a swagger to his step was not one who’d be back in the tribe next year. And he couldn’t bear being more lonely than he already was.

  Landry turned his attention to a group of women on the other side of the bar, to one in particular. She was olive with a round face and lips painted a shade of dark purple that matched the drapes in the place, matched the neon beer ads buzzing from above the doorway. Small and curvy and laughing in the lunar glow of the lounge: laughing loud and flaunting her arms, her hair, her skin, her appeal. The music belted against her. Landry watched. There was only one cure for loneliness.

  He’d never seen her in there before. Never seen her anywhere before, in fact. The neighborhood had changed, and you saw more new people every day. But still, it was unusual for a person who wasn’t from here to just come waltzing into the Legba Lounge, and to laugh like that: abandon in the way she moved, in the sound of her voice. She didn’t care who was looking.

  He made up his mind to try again.

  Wildman won’t back down.

  With a glass of dry champagne in one hand, and his cognac wavering in the other, he made his approach from across the room. She was still speaking to the two other women, and so had her back to him. He tapped her on the shoulder.

  “Excuse me, lovely.”

  She turned and looked down her nose at him. Gone was the lovely laugh, the arm gestures of abandon, her strange exoticism. Her nostrils flared at him, and the purple lipstick looked sickly in close-up. In one turn of her neck, her eyes sent him an armful of daggers.

  “What?” she said, her voice like the tinkling ice cubes in his drink.

  “I just thought…Well, that I’d come say hello to you. I’ve never seen you here before. What’s your name?”

  “Raven,” she said, and stared at him.

  He put the champagne down in front of her and waited for her to say something, but she didn’t.

  “That’s a pretty name. Just like the old poem. You know that one?”

  She didn’t answer. He waited for her to ask his name but she didn’t. Instead she turned her back to him and rolled her eyes to her friends, who giggled nervously in th
e periphery.

  “You know…I’m the Wildman today. At the parade. Wild Chappepeela. You ladies going to the parade?” he said, trying to include her friends.

  “We don’t like parades,” Raven said, over her shoulder.

  “You in the wrong damn neighborhood then,” he mumbled under his breath. But he could already feel his body slinking back on its own, not wanting a scene, withering under the weight of its unfulfilled needs.

  So, perhaps women could smell it. Perhaps the curse had a secret stench.

  He collected himself for his walk of shame, back to his seat.

  Why be here? Why did his hand find the smooth coolness of the cognac and push it up to his lips? Why did his legs carry him across the room to seek out frosty humiliation? Why did his mouth part open and let the filth burn its way down?

  The curse would not be brushed aside.

  Another Cognac.

  The Wildman coming on now, a tinge of anger helping him along. He had to make it happen in the next two hours. Now or never. He tried to cultivate that feeling of spite, recalling bad memories to mind.

  It wasn’t his fault, this world’s unfairness. He who hadn’t done a thing but come out of the wrong woman, put there by a kept man.

  Looking back up from his glass, Landry saw that a man had come and sat down next to him.

  The man hadn’t been there before, or Landry hadn’t noticed him, at least. Was the man laughing at him? Indeed, it seemed he was. The man with his long arms, his broad shoulders, pinched a cigar between shining teeth and laughed the smoke out the other side of his mouth. His tight face stretched against a jagged skull and he wore a red shirt and a black hat and kept a cane of some kind propped up next to him. His glass of rum sat on the bar.

  How long had he been there?

  “I saw that try. I saw them laughing at you. You thought nobody saw…but I did,” the man said.