Cities of the Dead (10 page)

“Yes,” Spraggue said. Her voice was hypnotic. He wondered if the herb incense was fogging his brain.

“You want to know how he died?”

“I already know that. He was stabbed.”

“Then you want to know who kill him?”

“Yes. I would. Very much.”

“I can't tell you that.” Sister Delores leaned back in her chair, her hands spread flat on the tablecloth. “I can tell you a way to find out.”

“What's that?”

“Very old voodoo wanga. They use it in New Orleans long ago. I tell it to you. Let me remember.” She closed her eyes and hummed a single plaintive note. “You break an egg, a fresh egg, in the palm of your dead man's right hand, see? Then you bury him just the same you bury anybody die peaceful in their bed. But on top of the freshly turned earth in the center of the grave, you put the eggshell. Then the killer he come and seek you out. He tell you everything. He confess his sins. This happen either in seven hours or in seven days. Very old wanga and good one, too.”

Not the slightest hint of a smile lightened the woman's voice or demeanor. Spraggue stared at her eyes, trying to guess her age. Thirty to fifty. Ageless. Young skin and old eyes.

Spraggue wondered how the coroner would react to the eggshell business, and had to bite the inside of his cheek. He said, “Could you tell me where the dead man got this gris-gris?”

“Ah.” She sat still a long time, a fixed and staring statue. “I can't tell you that. Some mojo, some gris-gris, I can tell you right off who made them, who the practitioner be. But not this one. This one old.”

“What can you tell me about it?”

“I have to open it up to tell you anything. Mostly I can tell a bit from the outside because gris-gris usually from cotton material, different colors. But a leather bag like this mean a fine gris-gris. Maybe your man be a practitioner himself?”

“I don't know.”

She bent over the table, and after muttering something to herself, inhaled audibly, her nose barely an inch from the leather bag. “Ah,” she murmured.

Spraggue raised one eyebrow.

“The smell is sweet. I will open it. If it had an evil smell I would not touch it. A gris-gris from a dead man may have caused his death, you know. But such a curse would not smell sweet.”

She smiled, her teeth a flash of brilliance in the shadowy room. “I say a few words over the bag, to protect myself from evil. Mostly the power of the bag die with the owner, but I take no chances.” She chanted, swaying slightly in her chair. The oil lamp's circle of light cut the table off from the rest of the room; it seemed to float in a dark pool.

Delores stood in one fluid motion, left the circle of light, and disappeared. Spraggue strained to hear faint footsteps. She was gone only an instant, then reappeared carrying a silver knife as delicate as a letter-opener and a square of red silk. The blade glinted in the lamplight as she sliced the heavy threads that bound the gris-gris. Muttering, she spread the silk on the table, dumped the leather bag's contents in the center.

A cloud of fragrant dust hit Spraggue's nostrils.

“Oh, very good,” she said. “Fine. This powerful gris-gris for protection. Most powerful. This bag should protect this man.”

“It didn't,” Spraggue said. “What's in it?”

Her red talons pried through the pile of herbs. “John the Conqueror Root. Loadstone. A tooth, maybe from an alligator. That mighty strong luck charm. They say Marie Laveau herself wore an alligator tooth 'round her neck till she died. Plenty unusual, an alligator tooth.”

“Expensive?”

“You bet. Plenty expensive. Leather bag. Alligator tooth. I think this man knows who his enemy is and has this made special, a long time ago.”

“How old would you say it is?”

“Oh, very old. This a man with a longtime worry. He know somebody's after him and he go to a practitioner and he tell her and she make him a powerful charm. Or maybe he try something very dangerous and he know he need big help. Maybe he be going off to war and he be afraid he won't come back. This man owned this gris-gris, he one worried man.”

“Sounds serious,” Spraggue murmured.

“Oh, man,” Sister Delores said earnestly, “don't underestimate the power. This serious protection, this charm. This belong to a man afraid of death.”

“Aren't we all?”

“Not like this, mistah. The man owns this gris-gris afraid of special kind of death. Early death. Unnatural death. Like he got.”

NINE

“She say you gonna meet a dark-haired beautiful woman?” Albert Flowers asked as Spraggue emerged from the back room of the witchcraft shop.

“Is that the usual spiel?”

“Nope. But meetin' a fine lookin' woman is what you're gonna do. It's early yet, but not too soon to start bar-hoppin'.”

“Sorry—” Spraggue started to say.

Flowers halted his protest with an upraised hand. “And Fontenot's daughter,” he said pointedly, “she start work at ten. Second shift.”

“Sorry.” The word was the same but Spraggue's intonation took a hundred-and-eighty-degree spin. “Where does she work?”

“Place on Bourbon. Not one of your more refined ones, neither. Crummy kind of joint. Strippers. Boys and girls. I don't think she takes her clothes off, but she's probably a semi-pro, if you know what I mean. She's a waitress there.”

“Not someplace Daddy would approve of.”

Flowers grinned. “Depends on what kinda Daddy she got.”

Abandoning the cab, they strolled up Bourbon Street. The humid night air, just breezy enough to warrant his tweed sports jacket, made Spraggue wonder what streak of masochism had kept him North so many winters.

While they walked Flowers spun the tale of his pursuit of Mrs. Fontenot's daughter, of her dauntless green VW Rabbit, and her atrocious driving habits.

“I'll stick with you in the bar until I can point her out,” he said. “Then—”

“Then you call it a night. You do good work.”

“Thanks.”

The flashing neon sign out front said
The Creole Strip
. The place was tiny, a narrow alley tarted up for Mardi gras. Gaudy striped bunting, purple, yellow, and green, creased from storage and spotted with beer, hung limply from the scratched imitation-walnut bar. The lighting was erratic—dim at the bar so the patrons wouldn't realize how much water was mixed with the booze, glaring near the elevated plank stage, bright enough to count the freckles blotching the chest of the impersonally naked woman who wriggled and sweated under the searching spotlight. Two hugely muscled bouncers flanked the stage and kept the men who nursed their watered drinks from leaping up onto the platform and counting the dancer's freckles with their fingertips.

Spraggue and Flowers ordered drinks at the bar. It took the cabbie about the same time to locate Fontenot's daughter as it took the bartender to fetch two pale Scotches.

“There,” Flowers said softly. “She's that dark-haired lady in the shiny red shirt. I'm gonna stay here till she gets close to us, and you drink your stuff fast. When I get offa the stool, if I time it right, she'll climb aboard and try to get you to take a table and stand her some champagne. It ain't your pretty face. That's what these chickies are paid to do. It'll cost ya.”

Spraggue nodded and drank. The stuff was terrible. He turned to stare at the swaying woman on the stage. Framed in the dirty mirror over the bar, his profile was strong-jawed, the nose long, thin, and faintly crooked, the forehead high. His profile was his best angle, the one resume photographers chose. It disguised the asymmetrical features that made his face “interesting” rather than “handsome,” kept him a “character actor” instead of a “leading man.”

Flowers managed his exit with the grace of a Bolshoi principal.

The dark-haired woman slipped onto the barstool with an aggressive display of leg. She wasn't much more than a girl, maybe eighteen, maybe less. She didn't look anything like her mother. Jeannine Fontenot worked to make herself attractive. The younger woman had beauty in spite of herself. Nature, not the cosmetic industry, had shadowed her dark smudgy eyes. Her high cheekbones were innocent of powder or rouge. She was striking, possessing an off-beat, quiet kind of beauty that was more attractive because it wasn't on public display. It left you wondering if you were the only one who had noticed it.

She lifted a cigarette to her mouth and tilted her head in his direction, waiting for a light. It was such a practiced, mechanized come-on that Spraggue wondered whether she had to get herself doped up before heading for work.

“Hi,” he said faintly, scrambling for a matchbook, and deciding that the wariness of the traveling businessman, with a pocket full of credit cards and a wife safely in Dubuque, was called for.

She raised the heat of a calculated smile an eighth of a degree. “You can hardly see from here,” she said. “This isn't the best seat in the house.”

“Crowded,” he mumbled, looking a little embarrassed. What would they say in Dubuque about him being in a strip joint? “I just came in to look around.”

The smile got warmer. “If you wanted to do some serious drinking, say a bottle, I could get us a table down front. Claudine's dancing now and she's not bad, but Annette, the woman who'll be on in fifteen minutes, she is totally hot, and she really can dance, if you like that sort of stuff.”

“Uh …” Spraggue said. Dubuque would think it over.

“I'm Aimee. Spelled French, with two e's.”

“You work here?”

“Sort of.” She licked her bottom lip in a gesture that was a parody of all the come-ons in all the B-movies he'd ever seen.

“I see,” he said, and his voice matched her licked lips, saying more than his words.

“I sort of have an arrangement with the management,” she went on. “Want that table?”

“Sure,” he said bravely, recklessly. “Why not?” A sucker performance. Well and truly hooked.

Her smile was different this time, tinged with scorn and a certain amount of relief. She led the way to a table not much bigger than an oil drum that was filled with dirty bar glasses and wadded napkins. The music pulsed in his right ear, wailing rock and roll by Tina Turner. Claudine lifted her arms high over her head and shook her heavy breasts.

“Is Aimee your real name or, uh, your stage name?” Spraggue asked. He moved his chair closer to Aimee's, leaned forward and spoke in her ear. It was the only way to be heard over the blaring music. He didn't mind. In the stink of spilled beer and tobacco smoke, her hair smelled unexpectedly sweet.

She let her eyelashes drop demurely. “You mean do I, uh …” She flicked a nod in Claudine's direction. “No. I don't dance, here.” Her voice left open the possibility that she gave private performances, maybe even lessons.

Spraggue let his eyes slide down the V of her shiny red blouse. It was cut deep both front and back and only good posture seemed to keep the sleeves on her shoulders. There was a tracing of white lace ornamenting the curve of her breasts. A camisole, probably. Too much action when she walked for a bra.

He said, a little husky-voiced, “You could dance in better places than this.” By this time Dubuque would be moist-palmed and breathing hard. “With your looks, I mean,” he stammered on, “uh, if you've got the moves.” He felt his face redden as he spoke. Actor's tricks.

“You're cute,” she said, squeezing his hand and smiling with bored eyes. “Aimee's my real true name. A good Cajun name. Right from the bayou to New Orleans.” She pronounced it “N'Awlins.”

Champagne came, New York State at Dom Perignon prices. Hick champagne and squat flat glasses. They clicked glasses before drinking.

“Uh, you work here long?” Spraggue shouted in her ear, when the silent eyeplay had gone on long enough. Her knee made contact with his right leg. She leaned closer as he spoke to her. Definitely a camisole.

She had the good sense to look offended at his question. “Hell, no,” she said. “I'm here part-time, helping out a friend. I'm a student, really. I take classes at Tulane.”

Flowers hadn't mentioned that. Spraggue wondered if it was truth or fantasy. Made up to raise the price, maybe. To go with the unexpected vulnerability of those wide eyes, so at odds with her classic hooker ploys.

“In dance?” he asked.

“Anthropology,” she said abruptly, shutting down that avenue of discussion. “Now tell me about you. You haven't even told me your name and you know all about me.” Her face settled into a frozen mask of rapt attention. Her eyes died. Time for the John to talk about himself. Tune out.

Without thinking, he gave his understudy's name at the Harvard Rep. “Jonah Turner, from, uh, Dubuque. Plumbing supplies.” Spraggue realized that he'd been doing Jonah all along. The flat Midwestern accent. The earnest, embarrassed blushes. Dubuque, that's where Jonah hailed from. Plumbing supplies—with better sense that's what Jonah would have gone into.

“And you're here for a convention,” Aimee said, pressing closer.

“How'd you guess?”

“You look like a businessman.”

Spraggue swallowed the blow to his self-esteem. “Your last name as pretty as your first, Aimee?” He'd better start getting some information out of her and stop putting himself into Jonah Turner's character, because Jonah Turner would have just tried to get the girl out of there fast, back to some hotel. He wouldn't have worried about the fact that she was young enough to be his daughter, and probably underage.

“Aimee Fontenot,” she said.

“And that's your real name?” He made it sound as if he knew she was putting him on.

“A lot of the, uh, dancers, here don't go by their real names. You know, in case Momma or Daddy find out. Me, I don't care. I'd use my own name even if I stripped.”

“You that proud of it? Or you want to hurt somebody?” The comment was out of character for Jonah Turner. Spraggue hoped she'd drunk enough not to notice.