An Evil Shadow (2 page)

Marcus’s face flushed a deeper shade as he admitted
that that was the case.

“And how long will it be before the university decides
I’ve served my purpose and replace me? One semester? Two?”

“That wouldn’t happen. The job would be yours for as
long as you wanted it.”

Val jabbed a finger into Marcus’s sternum. “You and
your job can both go to hell.” He walked away.

“We need to move on it soon.” Marcus cried out after
him.

Val preferred to do his drinking after dark, but
sundown was too many hours away. Not really knowing who to be mad at didn’t
help. Had he honestly expected anything different from Marcus, a man as
slippery as a water moccasin? And it wouldn’t have hurt if Val had lightened up
a shade. He found an empty stool at the end of Daft Eadie’s bar on Decatur and
snarled an order for a double shot of Beam over ice.

Eadie’s thirty years of bar-keeping had equipped him
with enough nous to set up a clean drip mat, dump some ice in a glass, pour the
booze, and back off. A lesser man might have tried — as Marcus would have put
it — to establish lines of communication. He might have got a smack in the jaw
for his trouble. Val drained the glass, swirling the bourbon around his mouth
before swallowing.

In a booth against the rear wall, two uniform policemen
were finishing an early lunch. Their table was cluttered with serving dishes
overflowing with empty shrimp shells. A couple of wine bottles had been upended
in an ice bucket. One of them recognized Val and for a moment it seemed he was
going to heave his butt off the bench and come speak to him, but he must have
changed his mind because he eased back and signaled to his partner with a jerk
of his head that he was ready to go. Maybe it because Val was no longer a
member of his fraternity, or maybe it was the way Val was crunching ice between
his teeth.

The other cop pulled a wallet from his pocket and
removed two five-dollar bills. He made a show of slapping them down on the
marble counter as they left.

Eadie waved and gave the departing cops a friendly
smile, but his eyes turned cold and he let the money lie. He’d rather comp a
fifty-dollar meal to the uniforms than soil his hands accepting their derisory
tender.

Val shrugged. He had more on his mind than Eadie’s
bruised ego.

Every homicide investigation has its own reasons for
being memorable to those whose duty it is investigate, and for Val Bosanquet
there were two damn good reasons why the Duval killing stood out, number one
being that it was the first homicide he had been involved with after returning
from his Hilton Head honeymoon; his first investigation as a married man.

The shout had come through to the Homicide squad room
at the First District headquarters shortly after midnight. An anonymous male
911 caller had tipped off the uniforms at the Garden District station house and
they had dispatched a patrol car to an address on the river side of the Irish
Channel. Sergeant Williams had discovered the body and wasted little time
landing the case in Homicide’s lap.

Val averaged one homicide per week in the Channel. The
area was due south of the Garden District, but a zillion miles separated the
two it you talked average household income. Densely populated by poor African
and Hispanic Americans, it had once been home to some hundred thousand Irish who
had fled the Famine in their homeland in the 1840s only to discover that in
Louisiana they were considered more expendable than the expensive third- and
fourth-generation slaves. They found themselves in an underclass where poverty
was something to aspire to.

There was a solitary patrol car and a crime scene
technicians’ truck parked outside the run-down Victorian building when Val
pulled up. The June night was oven hot and the wind blowing off the river only
added to the high humidity. Almost all the streetlights had been smashed,
leaving the street and the building’s entrance in deep shadow. As expected, in
a neighborhood where the majority of residents are illegals, there was a
notable lack of curious onlookers.

The mortuary van arrived as Val stepped from his car.
The assistant medical examiner threw him a cheery grin and started to whistle
The Night the Lights went out in Georgia, as he rolled the gurney from
the van. Val left him to it and went in
search of Sergeant Williams.

He was standing inside the front door. Sweat had
stained his shirt dark under his arms and across his chest. Val knew Williams —
they had both worked the same shift as uniform sergeants for a fourteen-month
stretch immediately before Val had made detective. He was a racist and a bully,
who justified the evil shadow he threw by claiming it got the job done. It came
as no surprise that he was still doing the same job. Williams hitched his
leather belt up over his beer gut and flicked a half-smoked cigar past Val’s
face into the street before leading him through to an apartment at the rear of
the building.

A naked, low-wattage bulb hanging from the center of
the roof illuminated the grisly scene directly below. A thin, dark-skinned
female was lying face down in a pool of blood. She was barefoot and was wearing
a loose-fitting dress in a faded, printed fabric. There were no visible wounds
to her back, but all that blood had to have come from somewhere, Val thought.

“Was the door open when you arrived?”

“Yeah, with no sign that it had been forced, and the
light was on.”

The room was little more than a lean-to shack
constructed in the rear yard of the apartment block. Erected without
foundations, the walls were of high-density fiberboard. The roof was asbestos
sheeting; the floor was cypress planking covered in cracked linoleum. Val
guessed that, without any windows for ventilation, the temperature inside would
rarely drop below the high eighties. Clothing had been hung from protruding
nails. What little furniture there was appeared to have been salvaged from a
Dumpster. The table and chairs were resin patio furniture. A mattress was
pushed lengthwise against an outer wall, a single sheet lying in a crumpled
mess. There was a camping stove in the corner with a couple of battered
aluminum pots stacked next to it. Farther along the wall was a sink with a
single cold-water faucet. The stuffy atmosphere smelt of poverty and despair.
Robbery could be ruled out as a motive.

“Take a look at this,” Williams said, a ghoulish grin
on his face. He hunkered down on the woman’s left side, where the blood had
spread the least, placed a latex-gloved hand on either side of her head and
raised it. There was a moist, sucking sound as the head broke free from the
clinging blood. “It’s my guess somebody took a meat cleaver to her.”

It was impossible to make any sort of estimate about
the woman’s age; there wasn’t enough left of her face. White bone and gristle
showed though strips of flesh; a collapsed eyeball hung loosely from its
socket. Her upper palate and tongue had been cleaved in two and the teeth of
her bottom jaw were shattered.

“Not tonight, honey. I have a splitting headache.”

“Cut it out,’ Val snapped, sickened by Williams’s
clowning.

The crime scene technician switched on a
high-intensity portable lamp, flooding the room in brilliant light. Val wished
he hadn’t. The blood splattering had coated every surface in a five-foot arc
around the victim.

“Any witnesses?” he asked the sergeant.

“Not one nigger saw or heard a goddam thing.”

Val gave him a cold stare. “What do you have on her?”

Williams was not a man who would have balked at
extracting information from the building’s residents, by fair means or foul. He
would have relished explaining to them that, contrary to what they might think,
they had a lot more to fear from him than from the Immigration and
Naturalization Service.

He dropped the victim’s head back into the blood and
straightened up.

“Her name’s Valerie Duval. She’s a Haitian illegal.
According to the neighbors, she and her daughter arrived here from Haiti
shortly after the Duvalier regime went belly up. The husband was a Tonton
Macoute henchman for Baby Doc Duvalier. He and their son were amongst the first
to be fitted with gasoline neckties after his boss pulled out for France. Wifey
here still had enough clout, though, to get herself and her daughter passage on
the next refugee boat. She’s been supporting the two of them with income earned
from practicing voodoo. Apparently the nigger bitch was a manbo — some sort of
freaking priestess. She would call down the spirits to put a grisgris on your
enemies or cast a love spell in return for a few dollars or a good meal.”

“Lay off the racist crap,” Val warned him.

Williams sneered at him. “What are you going to do
about it? File a fucking report?”

“No. Right now I have all the paperwork I can handle
on my desk. I’d take your gun and drag your fat ass out front and 'cuff you to
the nearest street light. Then I’d let this woman’s friends and neighbors know
what you’ve been saying about her.”

Williams’s face drained of color.

“Any sign of the daughter?” Val asked after a few
moments.

The sergeant tried to give him a hard-ass stare, but
thought better of it and backed off. This lieutenant didn’t make empty threats.

“We haven’t located her yet. Her name’s Marie and the
neighbors say she’s around nine years old.”

Val walked the edges of the room, able to examine the
contents in more detail under the glare from the portable lamp. Behind the
circular table was a set of three drums, unglazed pottery bases and dog pelts
for the skins. The smallest of the trio had what could only be Golden Labrador
fur still attached. Val was aware of the central role drums played in voodoo,
being the principal means of summoning the lwa, or spirits. He was no expert,
but had picked up a working understanding of the religion. After witnessing the
influence of the oungan in the Iberville project, he had made a trip to the
city library and borrowed a couple of books on the subject.

Tacked to the fiberboard of the rear wall were three lengths
of lining paper, the sort interior decorators use when preparing a surface for
hanging heavy wallpaper. The sheets of paper were covered with drawings of
veves, symbols of the lwa, done in charcoal. More often outlined on the ground
with chalk dust or coffee grounds, the veves were to ensure that the spirits
knew exactly which of them was being summoned during rituals.

One sketch was of a heart bordered by snakes, the veve
of Ezili, the goddess of love. The next sheet had a cross drawn on it. Similar
in appearance to a Christian rood, in voodoo it represents the veve for the lwa
of the dead, symbolizing the crossing from one life to another.

Val did not recognize the third drawing. The sketch
had similar characteristics to Masonic imagery, with what could have been a set
of dividers over a square at its center, and surrounded with interlocking
curlicues. The duality of icons came as no surprise. When the
eighteenth-century colonial French attempted to abolish voodoo on Haiti, the
practitioners, mainly slaves, adopted many Roman Catholic and Masonic symbols
to help dupe their masters.

There was a collection of coffee jars and plastic
bottles on the floor under the veves
.
One
of the glass jars held a pint of evil-smelling rum, the others contained snake
vertebrae and colored pebbles. The plastic bottles were filled with dried herbs
and spices.

A baby-faced uniform officer entered, carrying a
flashlight. He was making a beeline for Williams until he spotted Val.

“I think y’all better come take a look at this,” he
said, waving the flashlight from side to side. “I was searching out back for
the murder weapon when I found the girl.”

Val asked the medical examiner to remain with the body
while the rest of them went outside.

There were some scraggly flaming-azalea and myrtle
shrubs planted along the perimeter of the yard, but little grass had survived,
the earth having been compacted to hard pan. The officer led the way to a live
oak at the far end of the yard. As they approached, not even the heady scent of
night-blooming jasmine could mask the stench of putrefying flesh. Val’s heart
sank and he prepared himself for the worse.

Relief flooded through him when he made out the shape
of several dark bundles suspended from the lowermost branches of the tree. The
Simbi lwa were reputed to take up residence in trees, and carcasses, usually
guinea fowl, are hung in the branches in offering, in the hope that the lwa
will reciprocate with the gift of clairvoyance. What remained of the
unfortunate Labrador had probably ended up the same way.

The moss-hung oak would have been planted around the
same time as the building was constructed, probably twenty years after the War
Between the States. The beam from the flashlight was directed at the bole of
the tree, and then raised slowly upwards.

A mulatto girl sat astride a branch some twenty feet
above the ground, both arms wrapped tightly around herself in an effort to
control a bout of shivering that had enveloped her despite the night’s high
temperature. She was naked apart from flimsy nylon briefs. When the light from
the flashlight struck her face, she shut her eyes and twisted her head towards
the trunk of the tree. The movement caused her to slip and she shot out a hand
to steady herself.