Roots of Misfortune

by Seth Pevey

  But the old man’s aim seemed horribly broken somehow, and it was immediately apparent to Felix that those three shots had been entirely wasted.

  Usually, his old partner was a crack shot, far better than Felix was even with his younger eyes and steadier hands. But tonight, in this crucial moment of survival, Melancon’s knuckles fluttered as he aimed and his arms jerked wildly with each trio of shots he threw out into the darkness.

  It would be lucky if the lumps of lead even ended up in the graveyard at all.

  In response, another bullet came flying towards Felix. This one hitting only a few feet to his right.

  The young man steadied his breath and gripped the dirt. The world had gone slow, syrupy. Flecks of granite rained down on him and the mud and damp found chinks in his raincoat, soaking into his tee-shirt beneath.

  In that moment, Felix forgot everything else. The case, and all that had happened, slowly faded from his mind. Another sound of movement across the yard, and the young man steadied himself. Deliberately, he pointed his revolver, reached around a headstone and placed a single bullet as closely as he could to the source of the sound.

  The scraping stopped, immediately. A few more shots rang out, but these were different. Their trajectory seemed reactionary, emotional. They flew well over the detective’s heads, terribly aimed, but both Melancon and Felix could now clearly see the muzzle flash from deep on the other side of the cemetery.

  “On three,” Felix said, “we stand up and unload on the flash. One, two….”

  But just then they heard a wail coming from the direction of their attacker.

  It was the unmistakable cry of pain. “I quit. I quit,” came a tiny male voice from the darkness.

  The detectives stood, guns pointed at the sound. Melancon motioned with his head that Felix should circle around. He himself began stepping forward slowly, directly towards the sound, keeping at least one piece of cover in front of his body as he moved. His face was full of stern resolve, but the pistol he held out in front of him told another story. He couldn’t seem to keep it trained on the enemy, and its silver form wavered.

  They found their assailant lying on his back, a circle of his blood seeping into the ground to mingle with the mountain of bone beneath them. It was Trombone Landry Ducet. Without his Wildman suit or his flamboyant brass, he looked a lot less of an imposing figure writhing there in the mud.

  Felix kicked the man’s gun off into the tombstones, and stooped to catch his breath a second. Once the pounding in his ears and heart had begun to slow, he crouched and inspected the wound in Landry’s shoulder.

  It was a scene of fleshy carnage there at the joint, but one familiar to the young man. Nearly the exact same spot that Felix had been tagged himself the year before.

  Landry looked up at him with wild, floundering eyes. He squirmed and his white tee-shirt showed a growing line of red advancing across his chest.

  Felix tore off the raincoat and threw it on the ground. He then pulled down the collar of his own tee-shirt, damp and splotched by the cemetery grime that had leaked in at the neck. The young man bent close and exposed his old scar to the trombone man. The bullet wound had healed over, but it was still angry, swollen and red. It looked like a pair of full, feminine lips more than anything else, puckered up for a kiss. He showed it to the man lying shell-shocked on the ground.

  “Hurts doesn’t it,” Felix said, his voice a trembling song. “You won’t be using that arm for a while, if ever. But you’ll live. If you get medical attention that is.”

  “Hell of a shot,” Melancon said, still covering Landry with his doddering revolver barrel.

  “Did Isadore tell you we would be here?” Felix demanded.

  Landry gasped and groaned. His lips fought for the air like a gaffed tuna.

  “He told me…told me it would undo the curse.”

  Felix felt a warm, tingling sense of wrong wash over him. “Who the hell is he?”

  Landry’s legs kicked at the mud and his torso twisted in agony. The bean-shaped head rolled, small pebbles sticking to the sides of it as it turned in the muck.

  “The long-armed man...”

  “The fuck does that mean? I need a name!” Felix yelled. After he did he considered kicking the man. Strongly considered it. The only thing that stopped him was the complete knowledge of exactly what Landry was experiencing—the punch, the shock, the numbness just now wearing off, transforming into searing pain and the sight of a deep abyss just over the horizon, like standing on a cliff face in the dark.

  That and a niggling doubt that Landry might be trying to tell him the truth. Or some contorted version of it, anyway.

  “You can’t understand,” the wounded man groaned, tears now clearly visible in his greenish eyes. “You can’t…not about him.”

  And then, Felix did kick him. He regretted it immediately. Felt sick to his stomach even. But another part of him was done being told what he didn’t understand, particularly by people who had just tried to kill him.

  Melancon put his gun away and gave Felix a little shove.

  “Stop it.”

  The young man stalked off into the tombs, trying to let his blood cool. Melancon kept one eye on him and the other on the gunshot victim bleeding out at his feet. He bent down to Trombone Landry. The man’s pink tongue lolled out of his head and his lips quivered in pain.

  “You’re going to be alright, Landry. Trust me. My partner and I are very familiar with this type of injury and it tends not to be life threatening. But that is only if we make a call right now. If my partner picks up his phone and makes a phone call, men will come with an ambulance and you’ll be at Tulane hospital full of morphine in fifteen minutes. Now that is one way it could go. The other way is that my partner and I could have a bout of amnesia and forget this ever happened. We will take your cell phone and your gun and you will lie here bleeding out in this Goddamn graveyard, until you start to get cold and numb and dizzy. Tomorrow some tourists will find your body, and it will be on the evening news. Everyone will shake their head and guess that it was drug related and that will be the end of Trombone Landry. Long story short…you’ll be blowing your horn in hell by tomorrow morning, unless you help us. We need to know about the Korean girl. Where is she? Where is Min Ji?”

  Landry coughed, sputtered, gagged for breath. “I always wanted to be the Big Chief,” he mumbled. “I always wanted to. But I’m not. I’m just the Wildman. And I ain’t even a good one.” His eyes were beginning to gloss over and roll towards the back of his head.

  “No!” Melancon yelled, slapping him gently on the cheek. “You stay awake! Have a shot of this,” he said, and put his flask to the man’s lips.

  “So, you are telling me Big Chief has her? Big Chief from the parade? The man in the mask with the long arms and history lessons? What is his name? Give me a name!”

  “I...” Landry’s eyes were tracing a strange revolution, as if tracking some banshee that flew around the graveyard. Melancon smacked his cheek. This time a little harder.

  “Easy partner,” the young man said, a sense of guilt already settling on him.

  “Where is he? Where is he keeping Min Ji?” Melancon cried at the man.

  “You already been out there.”

  “Where?”

  “Out on the Pearl,” Landry moaned.

  “Pearl River? What’s the address? I need specifics.”

  The man nodded his head. The fear, or pain, seemed to get the better of him them and the eyes lost their spark, rolling back into the boneyard of his skull.

  “I need an address!” Melancon shouted.

  Felix bent down and placed his engineering pad in the man’s hand. “Just give us a street name, a location, an address, an intersection. Anything. You give us the location and I call the ambulance right this second.”

  And Landry did, he scrawled the words “Oyster Shell Road” on the pad in a loopy, squiggling print. He seemed to do it with his last strength, because soon after, he lost his figh
t for consciousness and the flame went out of his eyes.

  In the dark silence of the graveyard, Felix wrapped the shoulder wound with a cut strip of the rain jacket. While they waited for the ambulance, Melancon sat down on the edge of Marie Laveau’s tomb and mumbled inaudible arguments to himself.

  Before the police car arrived, three minutes after the ambulance, at which point both detectives were taken to the police station for questioning, Felix used the pen to scrawl a giant X on the side of Marie’s infamous crypt.

  Sixteen

  Felix had slept fitfully—a brief doze after a tiresome evening spent answering questions at the Tulane station, swilling a gallon or so of terrible instant coffee in the process.

  Landry was safely incarcerated. The trombone playing Wildman would go through a surgery and then they would put him through the ringer over those fingerprints. Janine had said it just like that, as the detectives were leaving the station at around three in that morning.

  But Felix had woken up early anyway. A fitful three hours, ending with the urgent need to launch himself from the bed. That spring step of a close call, of a bullet dodged. A stirring of the blood. He’d reached for the phone without even giving it much thought.

  She answered after one ring, a lilt of happiness clear in her voice.

  They made plans to meet for a walk in Congo Square that morning. It was the same place where slaves had once danced and sang and concocted the future of American music. Felix could imagine the sounds they must have made, on those long-ago Sundays, as he sat on a bench waiting for her.

  Tina’s heartbreak curls. Her button-blue eyes. She appeared in jeans with two coffees. They walked slowly, Scrappy between them tugging on his leash. The dog seemed fully recovered, buoyant with the many smells of the park. He reveled in the oak trunks, the scrambling squirrels, the pigeons flitting in his wake.

  “So, you never seen a long armed, Big Chief type character around the club? Anyone ever talking history? Talking slaves? We didn’t get a look at his face at the parade, but he was a big man. This ringing any bells?”

  Tina watched a fat sparrow land by the fountain and hop in a circle. “So many guys pass through. I don’t really notice a certain guy, most of the time, you know? After a while they aren’t really people any more. Just customers. Does that sound terrible?”

  “Well, I suppose it is probably mutual,” Felix replied, a sad smirk bunching his lips up in the corner of his face.

  Lovers lounging in the grass. Swirls of early pollen. A happy dog plucking his forward song on the taut lead.

  “I wonder how he took her. Min Ji, I mean,” Felix wondered aloud. “You think he just followed her out of the club one night and hit her over the head? Don’t you ever worry about things like that?”

  She was quiet a moment. Her hair had frizzed up with the overnight rain, and now formed a crimson cloud around her head. She wore regular sneakers, but still walked with that long, elegant gait of a woman in heels. Scrappy whimpered up at her until she bent down and raked her nails along the back of his ears.

  “Have you ever thought maybe that…I don’t know. Have you ever thought these girls are going…you know…voluntarily?” Tina asked.

  That took Felix a minute to process.

  “What do you mean?” He asked, letting the dog now pull its leash over to the side of the pond, where it took big wet licks off the surface of the water until its shaggy face-hair was matted and wet.

  Tina shook her head. “I mean…have you ever considered that maybe some of these girls…maybe Min Ji… like, she just fell for a bad guy?”

  “You think women fall in love with serial killers?” Felix said, almost hurt by the suggestion.

  She gave him a strange smile. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  Felix wasn’t.

  “It happens a lot, Felix. There will be some high-profile murder trial, the guy will be flooded with groupies, love letters, marriage proposals. You really don’t know this? Mr. Detective.”

  He shook his head.

  “You men aren’t the only ones who are into some sick, twisted shit,” she said, and pushed him on the shoulder.

  He winced.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Did that hurt?”

  He decided against telling her about the gunshot wound. Not today, anyway.

  “So, you think Min Ji could have been seduced?” he asked.

  “Did you ever consider it?”

  “I guess…it didn’t really occur to me. How about you? You ever fall for the wrong guy?”

  She looked out across the lake, the wind blowing in her curls. “Used to happen plenty. But I got tired of it.”

  They walked on for a bit, and Felix decided he would do the brave thing and tell her what was on his mind.

  “What stops you from quitting your job there at the club?” he asked.

  She smiled, a beautiful sight that stopped short. “Wherever I go. When I get there, it will just be more of the same.”

  “Well, you could start by changing your life. You could make a change right now. Before some serial killer scoops you up and I’m reading about it in the papers.”

  She looked at him, an odd pity in her blue eyes. He took a lungful of her strange, sandalwood perfume—a green scent that reminded him of Christmas tree mornings. Strange, he thought, that she would be the one to pity him. But he could feel it, could sense it. She looked down on him.

  “Poor Felix,” she said, “Money really does sort of disconnect you from reality, doesn’t it?”

  His face reddened. He hadn’t told her a single thing about his money, had he? She just knew. She could smell it on him, see it in the way he walked and moved.

  “Maybe so. Maybe it does, Tina. I’m young and I haven’t experienced a lot of stuff. Why don’t you explain it to me?”

  She looked him in the eyes. “I didn’t finish high school. My dad was a drunk car thief who died in prison when I was twelve. I have no skills, no education, and no money. It is a choice between working in a café and stripping. What am I supposed to do? I could run away to California, and I’d end up right back in the same kind of job except it would cost ten times as much to live. And on top of all that, I’m sorry to disappoint you but…I’m not ashamed of what I do. I entertain men. Guys blowing off steam or sick of their wives or just looking to escape and have a good time. That’s every bit as noble to me as working in a cell phone store or something.”

  He considered the truth of this. She was right: there was so much about it all that he just couldn’t see. Ignorance should have made him careful but instead it made him stubborn. “You could come work for us,” he said. “We could use a secretary.”

  She laughed. Did she think he was joking? Or was it her way of blowing off the idea? They walked down the path a bit further to where the old men played chess and the sycamore leaves rattled in the breeze. Tina bent low again and rubbed the mutt between the eyes until his wet tongue lolled in pleasure and he rolled over and showed her his belly.

  “I think I mentioned it last time, but I’ve always wanted to be a vet,” she said. “I just love animals…more than I love people sometimes.”

  “It takes a lot of school, right?”

  “Yeah. Years and years. Lots of money and free time to read books I guess. Two things I ain’t got.”

  They walked further, towards the bronze statue of Louis. Satchmo loomed 12 feet over the greenspace, his music gone quietly abstract.

  “Speaking of shame, are you going to tell your partner? About his daughter?” she asked.

  He blew out air. It hurt to even consider it. A wrong that still hadn’t been fully righted.

  “There is nothing written on that photograph? The one on that cork board in your dressing room?”

  “No…here, look. I snapped a photo on my cell to show you.”

  Felix stared into the device. The same blonde haired, blue eyed girl. She was sitting with a group of drunk-faced businessmen. It was Julie alright—she lounged in a plush chair, wea
ring a slightly revealing mini skirt and a low-cut top. Nothing scandalous, but the stage could be seen clearly, elevated behind her, complete with bright yellow high heeled shoes and a set of plump lower calves.

  “That’s her. For sure,” Felix said.

  She watched him, brushing her hand against the side of his face.

  “Tell him the truth, Felix. Everyone deserves the truth.”

  The Truth. Felix could feel himself being pulled towards it. Towards her.

  It was quite a burden to carry, anyway: the truth of a dear friend’s lost daughter. Or, a fraction of that truth anyway. A piece of the puzzle he was keeping unfairly tucked away in his pocket. But Felix could also see the way it would crumple Melancon’s already stressed frame of mind.

  He could envision the hurt lines on the old man’s face deepening, the empty bottles, and maybe worse. Maybe a single bullet in the head on some lonely night of the soul.

  “I can’t tell him now. We are going out tonight. We’ve learned the name of the road. Big Chief’s place. Oyster Shell Drive by the Pearl. Melancon needs his mind in the game.”

  “That sounds…dangerous,” she said.

  “I’m a dangerous man.”

  They laughed together.

  Felix felt around on the inside of his light coat. “I almost forgot, Tina. You know I’m worried about you up there. With a killer stealing girls and all. So I dug up this little number out of one of Melancon’s drawers. Wanted you to have it.”

  He placed a small, black taser in the palm of Tina’s hand. “Just in case anymore weird stuff happens at the club.”

  She looked down at the little object, weighing it a few times.

  “You just press that button and make sure both of those metal things are touching the…well, make sure they are both jammed into whoever it is you want to shock the bejesus out of. They will be out of commission for a few seconds. You do that and then you run, and then call me.”

  She smiled up at him. “I’m afraid I’m a lot tougher than you are, Felix Herbert. But it is a good thing to have. So…I suppose I’ll just say thank you.”