Boogie House: A Rolson McKane Mystery (16 page)

"I figured you would shrink his head or something," I said. "She couldn't stop you from doing that, could she?"

He stared at me contemptuously. "That's an old myth," he said, leading me into the small, dark home. I followed him into a room full of recovered spear heads and bleached animal bones. "Those are people in South America. Not Africa. Understand?"

I nodded.

"You're not that stupid. I hope." He shuffled through some jars filled halfway with powder, moving this and that in and out of the way, looking for something in particular. I waited behind him, eyeballing the knickknacks.

Scanning the shelves, I saw something that made my heart seize up. An upside-down framed picture of Leland Brickmeyer leaning against the wall.

Laveau returned with a foul-smelling concoction and told me to drink it. I obeyed out of both curiosity and obedience. Already, he seemed to hold a strange sway over me.

I gave it a shot, but I couldn't down the whole thing. When I tried to bring the cup from my lips, he pressed two fingers under the base and raised it so I had to finish every drop.

"What was that?" I asked, fighting off the urge to gag. It tasted like the inside of a tree trunk dredged up from the bottom of a swamp.

He gave me a mock glum expression. "You are a sick man, Rolson McKane. Very sick. I see it all over you, inside you. This, this is a cure-all. Lord knows you could use it."

I thought he was having one over on me.

"Is that what the powders and herbs tell you?"

"It don't take a medicine man to see what’s wrong with you. It just takes a pair of eyes worth lookin' through, and I can tell there's something wrong with you."

"Well, thanks for that."

"Welcome. It ain't a secret. The troubles you're having, they work like evidence. But seeing you, my word, if that don't beat all I've seen."

"I think that's enough."

"Indeed. Just know that the sickness, you carry it with you everywhere. If you don't get it under control, it will infect everyone you know, everyone you love. Your problem is that everyone else you know is blind enough that they can’t see how fouled up with a curse you are.”

My stomach turned as though full of cider vinegar, and my mouth twisted sideways, but Kweku Laveau shook his head. "Keep it down," he said. "It's good for you. Make you live as long as me. And I been living a long time."

I nodded and swallowed hard, clenching my throat shut to prevent something embarrassing from happening. “I think I’m gonna go now,” I choked. “But this has been...educational.”

Me leaving seemed to please him very much. Mister Laveau was able to turn everything I said into something he wanted me to hear. “You don’t think you learned anything,” he said, “but it isn’t all about the clues you need to find. There are some more important things you need to discover. Trust me.”

With the way he was looking at me, I couldn’t help but trust him, so I nodded credulously. He patted me on the shoulder. I bid him farewell, left him staring at me from the door stoop.

I began my trek across the yard. The breeze kicked up again, highlighting the sweat on my neck and under my armpits. "It'll all work out, if I can help it," I said.

"Ainsi soit-il," he said. I had no idea what it meant, so I waved absently over on shoulder as I reached the car door.

"You, too," I said, turning to face him one last time. Thing was, he was already gone, and the door was shut.

*  *  *

Voodoo exists as a real practice, as much as any religion outside of Christianity can exist in the South, but it carries plenty of half-assed misconceptions. People consider it a television religion, just contrived theatrical production, nonsense superstition, and elaborate rituals. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Unfortunately, that misconception is almost true in Georgia. Money-hungry practitioners - not true followers but hacks and pretenders - had turned the sacred Caribbean practice into a profitable holistic gobbledygook.

Screamin' Jay Hawkins had once sung about Hoodoo in
I Put a Spell on You
, as did Bo Diddley in
Who Do You Love
, the song itself a play on the word
hoodoo
. That’s where most people get a conception of the religion itself, so that’s what they have come to expect from it, and that’s what those still involved have come to give them.

But Hoodoo and Voodoo are vastly different enterprises. Voodoo is a religion, Hoodoo a set of magical practices, often called rootwork. Voodoo was brought over with the slaves and was thought to be a way of protecting themselves from the white men who brutalized them. It settled in the Caribbean and expanded somewhat in Louisiana but did not pick up much anywhere else. Georgia had rootworkers, Hoodoo magicians, but the lot of them were con-artists, snake-oil salesmen of an ancient and disturbing variety, and they didn’t move far outside of Savannah.

Part of the growth of voodoo in America had to do with the relationship between what people believed it to be and what it actually was, and one fed off the other. What we think of when we think of voodoo today has a lot to do with the changes made to accommodate those beliefs. It no doubt makes sense that it has a strong foothold in New Orleans, itself a place of magic of all sorts, and that it never really picked up in rural parts of Georgia. And it didn’t, for the most part. But some people made their way to middle Georgia, just as they made their way from the French Quarter to southern Mississippi and the west coast of Florida, near the religious fanatics.

I had never seen the practice at work in Lumber Junction, but people talk. Janita's uncle was a superstitious man, but not the kind of person I figured for true, real Voodoo. Most people round here would take to calling it witchcraft or devil’s work real quick, so I imagine it stays underground so that people won’t be run out of town on rails.

Myself, I'm not a believer, but I had to give it to Janita's uncle: I did feel a hell of a lot better after drinking that horrible cocktail of his.

Even though I probably shouldn't have, when I got home I opened a High Life and drank half of it standing in the kitchen. Some of the catch-all drink’s bitterness was washed away, and after the first gulps, I stood very still and waited to see how the two drinks would react with one another, half expecting my mouth to foam over.

But the two didn't react whatsoever. Like normal, my stomach gurgled once and took to processing the alcohol. I shrugged and finished the rest of the bottle.

Outside, a slowly gathering patch of gray sky moved in toward my side of the Junction. The grass wasn't quite tall enough to be blown around, but the Devil's Walkingstick branches and creek maples swayed desultorily with the breeze’s push and pull. A storm was coming. The rain had allowed a few days' respite, but now it was on the rise again, and I couldn't help but feel uneasy. Weather like this made it easy for people to hide in plain sight.

I popped the cap on another beer and picked broken chips out of a Doritos bag, all while trying not to feel the lengthening investigation pressing down on me.

"I'm not a detective," I said to nobody in particular. "I'm playing pretend, that's all."

Then, just below the whoosh of the wind, I heard a car come to a full stop in the driveway. An engine being cut off. A door being slammed. An imperceptible, imagined set of footsteps in the grass. I closed my eyes, listening, trying to hear those footsteps draw closer. But I couldn't.

The knock at the door was so loud it was startling. I waited. My mind reeled, flipping through faces like they were photos in a dated album. Who could it be? I placed the beer on the counter and knelt down, reaching around and patting the backside of my jeans. Nothing there. My .45 was in the bedroom.

Another series of knocks echoed through the house. This time, though, the guest didn't bother to wait for an answer. I listened to the click of the latch as the door was swung open. Next, two tentative footsteps on the hardwood floor. I wanted that gun right then more than I had ever wanted anything. I held my breath and waited, opening my eyes but also preparing my feet for swift action, if necessary.

The footsteps continued down the hall and were subsequently muted when they disappeared into the bedroom. From my line of sight, getting a bead on the intruder was impossible.

Shit, I thought. The .45 was in the bedroom in plain sight, right on top of the nightstand. How stupid of me.

I heard commotion in the bedroom, of the nightstand drawer being opened and clothes being thrown about, and then nothing. Silence. I waited, moving closer to the edge of the kitchen, so that I could see all the way to the bedroom.

While moving myself into position to rush down the hall, a voice resonated through the house, as reminiscent of my past as the smell of summer or the sight of the baseball fields. "Rolson? You home?"

My heart seemed to turn over in my chest. It took me two tries for my knees to lock so I could stand. Couldn't be. "Vanessa?" I said.

Seventh Chapter

Vanessa wasn't high, but not much time had passed since she had last used. She had the frail, spent look of someone searching at midnight for something she should be looking for in daylight. The part of her I had fallen in love with had been washed away, and all that remained was a husk of a woman transparently seeking out self-destruction.

I made her a cup of coffee and had one myself while we sat on the couch and made quiet, desperate attempts at conversation, commenting on the house and the weather and how very little Lumber Junction has changed. When every other pleasantry was out of the way, I said, "Your dad has been asking about you."

Her eyes flickered. They weren't so dead, after all. "He's gonna shit when he finds out I'm back." She smiled, but it was a sad affair.

"He's been worried."

She laughed without pleasure and made a ridiculous
pffft
ing sound. "Oh, fuck him. He just don't want me out ruining his reputation. He thinks I need to be chained up, 'til I can get my act under control. To him I'm some, some goddamned sideshow freak."

I swallowed. She did
look
quite abnormal. In addition to being heart-achingly gaunt, a few yellowish scabs dotted her face. She could have passed for a zombie.

"You can't go on like this forever, Van," I said.

She glared at me. "I know that."

Like every junkie, she knew exactly what she was doing. She just couldn’t help herself. The addiction, the self-destruction, was part of her now.

Feeling the walls go up, I changed the subject. "How long are you in town?"

"I don't know. Couple days, maybe. I need to come down, get ahold of things. I was so scared, Rolson."

Like a man who watches himself slam a hand in his car door, I couldn't help but ask: "Why?"

"You're the only person'll have me," she said, and I didn't have the heart to respond:
Well, how do
you
know
I'll have you
?

*  *  *

Eventually, like most desperate-to-be-validated addicts, she launched into a story about her circumstances, embellished with sometimes ludicrous but for the most part mild exaggerations. It was an effort to elicit sympathy, though she was so drugged out she didn't realize it wouldn't really work on me. I wasn’t a mark for her to turn over for some favor.

She had taken up with a former bank manager named Jerry, who started with an all-consuming fondness for cocaine but quickly moved to freebasing meth, accounting for his obvious lack of employment. The real intense drug use started about the same time as Jerry's dad’s death. He had pulled a Hemingway. The second wife had found him wearing a single boot, the trigger guard of the shotgun wrapped around one toe.

If Jerry's drug use had been recreational before, it certainly was not now. Coke gave him a clean high, one where he could go out and party all night and then make it to work on time, but the meth treated him like a partner in a dysfunctional relationship. He claimed to have blown through thirty thousand dollars in six months' time, and when the bank finally had enough evidence to fire him, Jerry didn't realize he didn't have so much as a couch to sleep on when he got home. He'd pawned everything but his car, and the car was the next thing to go.

Vanessa didn't seem to mind. The two of them spent all of their time either high or fucking, or both. When the place in the suburbs dried up, they bounced from couch to couch in increasingly desperate situations, circling the drain, heading for that final darkness. Once - and Vanessa could not confirm if it were a hallucination or reality - she thought she had caught him in the bathroom with another man,
inflagrante delicto.

Jerry's biggest problem, turns out, was not his addiction, but the money he used to fuel it. He owed nearly a hundred large to a group of unforgiving people taking the razor to the underbelly of America, and he could not, even in the best of circumstances, have ever paid them back. They controlled a drug ring focused in inner-city Atlanta, and even in the worst economic times, their business thrived.

One day, Vanessa came home to find the lock jimmied open and Jerry's head all over the kitchen floor. She didn’t even bother to call the cops, or to close the door. She just walked away.

"Kind of a sick twist, huh," Vanessa said, finally, humorlessly. And that's about the time she broke down.

"I'm sorry," I told her, but that only made her more hysterical. I suppose she wanted me to chide her, to hate her for telling me about her boyfriend, but I couldn't.

After she stopped crying, she began to nod off. She looked at me, or at least vaguely in my direction, but her eyes were full of a strange kind of distance. So I let her drift off. Probably the first time she had slept in a day or two, maybe more. The house was drafty, and so I covered her with a blanket and left her alone for a while, going out into the backyard, walking along the treeline with my cell phone in my right hand. As much as it weirded me out to have my meth-addicted ex nodding off in my house, I figured it wouldn’t hurt anything to let her sleep off her sickness on the couch.

I called Detective Hunter and told him Ronald Bullen's brother had slithered back into town, and he didn't seem impressed. Mostly, he just mmm-hmmmed me, and though I strained to listen in on the background for any sign that he might be writing something down, I didn't hear anything but contempt.

"What I'm learning, Mr. McKane, is that there are a whole lot of snakes in the garden down here, and they're all balled up in a single mass, so I'll have to go on picking through them and avoiding fangs until I find something useful besides venom."

"H.W. has a violent past," I said. "He's dumber'n a box of penny nails, but he's sort of like a Lennie to Ronald's George."

"Have you got anything on him? On Ronald?"

"I think he might be willing to give up information on Brickmeyer, if he gets it. Dude might also think the rich guy is involved. I might not be so crazy, after all."

"But doesn’t he also hate you a great deal?"

"Like you said, 'ball of snakes.'"

He said he'd "look into it" and then hung up.

"Hey, no skin off my back," I said to the empty receiver. "Just tryin' to help." Really what I was thinking was,
Just tryin' to get the crosshair off my forehead
.

That evening, I cooked a pot of rice and tomatoes and poured a generous amount of Louisiana hot sauce and pepper in it, stirring the mixture absently until it was done, and then I slurped down a bowl of it right there by the stove. Being incapable of getting out of the kitchen with either food or beer turned out to be a common thread in my life these days.

It was too early to eat supper, but I had nothing else to do at the house but wait for Vanessa to wake up, so I ended up eating two bowls by myself. The refrigerator loomed in the corner of the room, and after a while I did end up grabbing a beer.

Van was still in the process of sleeping off whatever she was on, and she didn't so much as flinch when I kicked back in my recliner and flipped on the television.

There was a small report about Laveau's death on the evening news. Two hapless anchors introduced the story, and the field reporter in the Junction only did a small voiceover with B-roll of the Boogie House before turning over the entire clip to Leland Brickmeyer.

The press conference could have been a parody of small-town politics, or maybe mistaken for a cable access show. Brickmeyer looked comfortable but serious on-screen as he rested his hands on the podium. I watched in rapt disgust. How could they have fucked up
this
badly, to give this grease
ball the camera in lieu of the kid’s death?

"The purpose of my statement today is to offer condolences to the family of Emmitt Laveau. I've already expressed my feelings in private, but since the victim of this horrific, horrendous act was found on my land, I feel it is my obligation, my duty, to offer any culpability in the matter, if possible."

Brickmeyer clasped his hands together and stared into the camera, eyes twisted into a look of profound consternation. "The building that used to be the Boogie House will be torn down at the first possible convenience, once the investigating officers have collected all the necessary evidence. I cannot erase any of the pain levied on the Laveau family, but I can prevent such a thing from happening on my land in the future."

He paused for a beat. For effect, one might be able to say. All of it, down to the pause, was theater. Generic political theater.

He continued: "Furthermore, my family and I
fully
support the efforts of our local and state law enforcement agencies to bring the murderer to justice. I will cooperate in any way necessary to apprehend the person who committed this callous crime, even if that means using my own,
limited,
political influence. No one deserves to go through what the Laveaus have endured, and I hope, through a combined effort, we can bring this monster to justice. Thank you."

People will buy that hook, line, and sinker, I thought.

Janita Laveau called before the commercial break had even started. "You believe that shit, Rolson McKane?" she asked.

"Not at all."

“The reporters didn’t even contact
me
for this godforsaken story. And I haven't heard word one from
anybody
in the Brickmeyer family."

"It's a service to his public image and nothing else," I said. “He probably contacted
them
for the story angle, and since they’re local, they just went with it. What the hell do they know?”

We talked for a few minutes more, about what I couldn't later recall, and then said goodbye.

I covered the pot of rice and tomatoes and finished my beer. Something had begun to wiggle in my stomach, and it didn't feel pleasant. The need to lie down was urgent. I slipped past Vanessa, snoring with wild abandon, and shuffled to my bedroom.
 

The bed was soft and warm and messy, and I fell into it like I had never slept a wink in my life. I didn't even bother to undress. I just fell face-first into my pillow and willed myself to feel better.

I burped, and the taste of my stomach made me nauseous. The room tilted to one side, and I pressed my palms flat against the bed to keep my equilibrium. Normally two or three beers didn’t give me the spins. I dragged the small trash I kept under the nightstand next to me, just in case.

Thinking of the drink Uncle K had given me induced another round of convulsions, and I couldn't hold onto my food any longer. Thrusting my head over the side of the bed, I lost the bowl of tomatoes and rice, as well as the beer, in one violent heave. The harsh, acidic taste remained until wakefulness grayed and then disappeared into darkness.

*  *  *

Sometime later, familiarity washed over me as I realized I was standing, once again, in the Boogie House. Intrigued, I glimpsed the area around me, reached out and fingered the door frame - which was tilted to one side and cold to the touch - and concluded this was no dream. A bit blurry around the edges, maybe, perhaps connected to my temporary sickness. But it was real. I even thought I tasted vomit.

Darkness made it appear as though whole sections of the juke had been erased. I stepped inside and saw the body of Emmitt Laveau silhouetted like a headstone against the far wall.

I went on inside, ignoring my awkward gait and watching the human-shaped patch of darkness in the corner. For some reason, he wasn't acknowledging me. Then, the shadow moved. I blinked, half-expecting it to be a hallucination. Either the shadow of something inanimate was behaving like a person, or a person was rising out of the darkness.

As I approached, the room became awash in a hellishly orange light, casting every inch of my surroundings in a sinister glow. I stumbled. In my stupor, I couldn’t focus, save for putting one heavy foot in front of the other, so the room became a soupy mess underfoot.

Momentum dragged me forward. I could tell now that I was dreaming, but it made the physics of my world no more manageable. I overshot my target, as people in dreams often do, so I had to backtrack to meet Emmitt Laveau, who stepped forward, dressed in a suit and brandishing a tattered old acoustic guitar, plucking a boogie-woogie rhythm with his thumb and two first fingers. He was smiling, but the way it looked wasn’t right. There was something sinister in the way his lips had peeled away, revealing broken, rotting teeth.

In that moment, I saw the reflection of his uncle in him. They had identical smiles, and even the facade of death couldn’t mask their facial similarities. In fingerpicking that jumping, bouncy, up-and-down riff, he had that look, that certain slyness, and it shone through with stark clarity.

I didn’t recognize the song, but Emmitt was looking at me like I should have known it, and the longer he played it, the more it seemed as though I did know it. It built to a blurry mess of fingers and notes, and just when I thought I had the name of the song, when it was on the tip of my tongue, he slowed to a stop.