Puppets (19 page)

All in all, a crappy day, ending in a stuffy, humid night. The Southern Gothic feel had returned. Mo got to the house after dark and immediately took a walk through the place, just something it felt good to do. He turned on lights as he went, revealing empty rooms, glaring oak floors, dark, bare windows. When he'd toured all three floors, he shut off the unnecessary lights and went to make a sandwich from some pastrami and rye bread he'd picked up. The food helped, gave his stomach something to do besides clench. He wanted a beer but didn't want to impair his reflexes with alcohol. And he had a lot to think about, needed a clear head.

The phone at his elbow went off and made him jump. He grabbed the receiver.

"Morgan, hi—it's Detta. How are you, honey?"

Detta was Carla's mother. She was a small, dark-haired, energetic woman who looked a lot like her daughter. With all the rental real estate she owned, she had made some money, and she'd used a good share of it for face-lifts, fitness training, cosmetics, a youthful wardrobe. Seeing her and Carla together, most people took her for an older sister.

"Not so good. You've talked to Carla? You know we're, uh, we're having some trouble—"

"She told me she moved out, honey. I'm so sorry. You know how much I've always liked you. I've told Carla that many times."

"Thanks." Mo was thinking feverishly. Detta was okay, but when someone prefaced what they were going to say with how much they liked you, you were usually in trouble. "Detta, I know I've got to move, I've already checked out a couple of places, and—"

"Morgan. Is
that
why you think I called? To give you your eviction notice? Honey, you know I think of you
as family."

"Well, thanks—"

"Really, I was calling about Carla." Detta's chipper suburban real estate agent's voice picked up a note of concern. "I'm worried about her, Morgan. She doesn't look well. I'm concerned about that book she's writing, those
people
she's seeing. How did she seem when you saw her?"

Mo dodged the question. "Haven't seen her in a few days. Was there something in particular?"

"She was here yesterday, and, honestly, I don't think I've ever seen her so . . . troubled, um, distant.
Different.
At first I thought it was you two, I know how hard that can be. But she was talking this
spooky
talk. She's seeing
voodoo
people, she's seeing every kind of crazy psychic, I don't know all the details. The scariest part is, she sounds as if she
believes
all this supernatural business! She told me she's been seeing an old woman in Brooklyn, what did she call her—a
mudda-woman.
That's some kind of a Jamaican witch, I think. I've called her at Stephanie's, late in the evening, and Stephie just tosses off, 'Oh, she's down in Brooklyn,' as if she's, she's taking a night secretarial class instead of. . . slaughtering goats and drinking blood, or whatever they do."

Detta's voice had risen until it had a nearly hysterical ring to it. Now she lapsed into silence, and Mo heard her draw desperately on a cigarette.

"And every time I talk to her," Detta went on, "she makes these mysterious comments, she's had these bad, what,
visions
or prophecies, I don't know what you call them. Morgan, isn't that one of the symptoms of schizophrenia? That scares me to death! It runs in our family, I never told you this, but my sister—"

"What do you want me to do?"

"The last time I saw her, we were drinking cranberry juice at my kitchen table, and Carla was telling me all this hocus-pocus. And she was squeezing her glass so tightly it
broke
in her hand! And there was red juice all over, and she cut her fingers. And I thought, oh, my God—"

"Detta, I'm convinced. But what do you want me to do?"

"Morgan, honey, I know you're not, you know,
responsible
for her anymore. But I don't know who else to ask. I was just thinking, I know you still care about her, maybe you could talk to her. You're a
policeman,
maybe you could go to Brooklyn? But in such a way that, whatever Carla's involvement is, it doesn't get her . . . you know. In trouble. With the law." She smoked for a moment, then finished craftily, "I just think so highly of you, honey, and I'm sure we can work something out with the house."

So she was bribing him: Make sure Carla's all right and you can stay on. Mo felt like telling her how much he liked the goddamned place. And yet the thought of Carla having a hard time—that was painful. A lot of tenderness still there, a well of it inside him.

"Detta, I'll talk to Stephie tomorrow, I'll try to see Carla, I'll do what I can about the Brooklyn thing. I'll call you soon, okay?"
Like I
need this right now,
he was thinking.

She was grateful. She'd always thought of him as family. She was just a little desperate, that's all.

As Mo hung up, the last thing he heard was Detta sucking on her cigarette.

26

W
EDNESDAY AFTERNOON. Mo had always liked Brooklyn, but he had only been to this section of Bed-Stuy maybe twice
in his life. It was generally avoided if you weren't local, weren't black. He was glad Ty had agreed to come with him, and he wondered briefly how Carla had managed to connect with the Jamaican voodoo circle here. How she ever got in and out: white girl in a cute red Honda Civic. For once he almost didn't mind wearing the cop look, the indelible brand. Between him and Ty, a white guy and a black guy cruising the streets in a Crown Vic, they'd look like some kind of heat from a mile away and people would keep a respectful distance.

He'd met Ty at his Bronx PD precinct station, and they'd driven in Ty's car down the Bruckner, across Hell Gate, and through Queens. Brooklyn always seemed to Mo a nation unto itself, four times the size of Manhattan, with plush residential neighborhoods, small-town shopping districts, devastated warrens of crumbling masonry, chic big-city downtowns, you name it, and every color and nationality and persuasion of human being.

Ty drove in stony silence. Man of few words most of the time, but Mo had once observed him addressing his troops, an hour-long harangue that demonstrated Ty had hidden talents as an orator. Ordinarily Mo would have tried to pry a word out of him, but for once he didn't mind his silence. It gave him a chance to just look at the sights of Brooklyn sliding by. Brooklyn had this unique ambience, this
moxie,
that he never got tired of looking at.

Another dead-end day. It was a phase of investigations that Mo dreaded—the sense of stalling, of time passing and the trail cooling. He and St. Pierre had compared notes on their interviews with Irene Bushnell's clients and agreed that nothing looked promising. There were a few more interviews to run down, but he didn't have a lot of hope for any of them.

Ty broke into his thoughts: "That looks like it." He jutted his chin at a three-story brick building with a cement stoop covered by graffiti. It was one of a row of similar buildings, not too run-down, but it stood out because the metal front door was painted yellow and green. Plywood had been nailed up behind the bars on the first-floor windows. A tall young man lounged on the stoop, wearing a Rasta tarn and a T-shirt that revealed weight-trained muscles. His sunglasses made him look like a praying mantis and did nothing to conceal his alertness: a sentinel. Mo spotted Carla's red Civic at the curb just down the street.

The guard's head swiveled to watch them as they parked and approached the stoop. Mo was conscious of the neighborhood's attention, people pausing to watch these two intruders.

"What up?" the guard asked. He still half-leaned against the doorway, arms crossed on his chest, giving them his eyeless gaze.

"We're looking for Carla Salerno," Ty said. "She here?"

"Wrong place," the guard said. He didn't move a muscle. A group of teenagers at the next stoop had turned and were watching them with a lot of interest.

Mo felt Ty's body go tense. Ty had limited patience for attitude, especially when his teeth were hurting. Mo knew that though he was four inches shorter and thirty years older than the guard, Ty could and would have the guy in the gutter on his face if his next word was less than cooperative.

Mo moved so that he was in front of Ty. "Not a police thing," he said. "She's a friend of mine. Do me a favor, just tell her it's Mo."

The sunglasses glistened at him for a moment. Without turning away, the guard gave a short rap on the door. It opened a little, and the guard conferred briefly with someone through the crack. Then the door closed and he turned back and leaned against it again. "Chill an' we see," he said.

When the door finally opened again, Ty opted to stay outside. "I don't need to get involved in relationship stuff. I'll just stay out here and keep an eye on Junior." He sat on the railing of the stoop and gave the guard the evil eye. "But call me if you need me, huh?"

Mo was ushered inside by a slim black woman who locked the heavy door behind them.

The building had obviously been built as a six-flat, but the interior walls of the entry area had been removed so that they stood in a much larger room, lit only by electric light. It was empty except for about a dozen folding chairs scattered along two walls, occupied by three middle-aged women and a gray-haired old man. From their look of patient expectation, Mo understood this was a waiting room, something like a country rail station or a doctor's lobby.

The young woman led Mo up the stairs, toward the echoing sound of television theme music. "Mudda Raymon, she very old," she explained. "We take care of her. But I tell her what you want, she say she waiting for you. She say she happy to see you." A musical Caribbean accent.

"I don't need to take her time," Mo said. "I'm just here to see Carla."

She led him into another room that had been made bigger by knocking out walls, this one set up as a combination living room and bedroom. The air was hot, thick with the smells of cooking and body odor, and the only light came from a big-screen television at one end of the room and a number of candles around an altarlike assemblage of portraits and curios. An old person's room, Mo decided: An aluminum walker stood near the bed, and one table held a blood-pressure cuff, a bunch of prescription bottles, a hairbrush thick with white strands. Around the room stood pots of flowers, some fresh and some dead and hanging from dry stems.

Mudda Raymon sat in a Barcalounger in front of the television. She was a tiny old lady, skeletally thin, with a fog of white hair around her narrow, mottled skull. She wore a flowery quilted robe from which her corded neck and wrists emerged like dried twigs, and she didn't look up as they came in, just watched the credits passing on the big screen. An oxygen tank on a wheeled cart stood next to her chair along with a hospital tray table that held a glass of water, the television remote, eyeglasses, a box of Kleenex, an ashtray full of cigarette butts.

"Mudda, this the policeman of Carla," the young woman said. Mudda Raymon didn't move or say anything, just watched the credits flowing up the screen, her lips drawn back in a toothless smile.

They waited like this for a full minute. As his eyes adapted to the dim light, Mo saw that there were other people in the room: an old gentleman in a three-piece suit, apparently asleep in another chair, and a tall teenage boy and another older woman who were sorting seeds or beads at a little table. Another bodyguard type, big and alert, in a chair near the back wall. A half-closed side door led to a well-lit kitchen, from which Mo could hear the sounds of dishes, murmured voices, a baby crying.

The film ended and the screen went into a haze of static and then flipped bright flat blue, the blank screen of the video. Still the old woman stared at it.

"Okay," Mo said finally, his voice loud in the muffled air. "This is great. Now where's Carla Salerno?" He had given up on the old woman and directed his scowl at the others.

But there was Carla, coming out of the kitchen, carrying a tray. She looked at Mo with disapproval as she passed him to set the tray on the table next to Mudda Raymon. A smell of jerk spice wafted in with her.

"Hey, Carla," Mo said. She was wearing a kitchen apron over jeans and a halter top, and suddenly he felt stupid with his mission to rescue her from the voodoo infidels on the basis of Detta's neurotic, racist worry. For all that it was dark and stuffy in here, it was a pretty ordinary room, no sign of dead goats or bowls of blood, a lot cleaner and more together than his own rooms. Then he saw the way Carla's hand shook as she set a spoon in the bowl. And he thought, yeah, maybe this was bad for her, maybe she was tangled in something here, maybe she wasn't quite all right. She seemed to have taken a role as some kind of nurse or servant for the old woman.

"Mudda, do you want to eat now?" Carla asked.

For the first time, Mudda Raymon moved. Her little head shook decisively twice. "No. Talk to policeman now." Her voice was surprisingly deep, almost a man's voice. She turned to face Mo more directly, beckoned him with a flip of her mummy's hand. "Come 'ere, boy. Come on, don' be 'fraid ol' mudda-woman." When Mo didn't move immediately, she went on, "You be 'fraid of me? Huh?" The thought made her laugh. "Shit," she said. "Big man 'fraid of everyt'ing. Shit." She snorted derisively and turned back to stare at the blue screen. Her eyes were lightly cataracted with blue-white veils that reflected the cathode light.

Across the room, Mo noticed, the nattily dressed old man had opened his eyes and was watching them intently. He hadn't stirred, his chin was still on his chest, but his eyes were sparking in the blue glow. Since the old woman had begun speaking, everybody seemed very alert, very focused.

"Mudda Raymon," Mo began, "I don't want to bother you. I just—"

"Dis differn't kind o' church, huh," Mudda said disinterestedly. "Dis not Jew synagogue, not Mother Mary church, you half-half bastard. You don't know dis church. Big man, 'fraid everyt'ing, shit. Oh, you 'fraid inside your head, you 'fraid of black-old Mudda, you 'fraid yourself. You 'fraid to be 'lone, 'fraid bad man eat the world up, what else." She shook her head and clacked her tongue in disdain.

"Mo," Carla said quietly, "I've told Mudda Raymon about you, and she would like to give you a session. You should know, it's quite an honor, Mo, she's a very . . . special person. I think you should listen."

"I appreciate the offer," Mo said, "but I didn't come here for that.

Your mother called me, she was worried about you, I promised her I'd check up on you. Tell me you're all right and I'll go."

Even in the dim light, Mo could see Carla's anger flare. "God
damn
Detta! So you come down here like a good little Boy Scout, embarrassing me, insulting these people, barging in—what, is this something you cooked up to—"

Mo knew she was going to say something like
to try to get me back.
But she was interrupted by a sudden roar of static from the television. Mudda Raymon had found the remote on the tray table and thumbed it, and the screen flashed from blue to a field of fine rainbow-gray static. Mudda Raymon adjusted the noise level, watching the volume tracker on the screen. When the sound had subsided, she put down the remote and half-turned to Mo.

"I like de TV," Mudda Raymon said conversationally. "You like to watch de TV? Got good shows?"

Mo hesitated, then answered, "Once in a while."

"See, dis show." Mudda Raymon leaned forward, reached a gnarled finger toward the screen. She traced a shape in the snowstorm of static. '"Bout a man, he got trouble. You see him dere?"

She was crazy, Mo was thinking. Somehow all these gullible, desperate, superstitious people had granted her some kind of mystical authority, and here she was just a shrunken, senile, old mummy. But despite himself he followed her finger, and, yes, there were larger moving shapes in the static, as if the TV were one channel off the station and picking up just a ghost of some show. Maybe people moving in a room or trees tossing in a storm. Or no, maybe boxing or pro wrestling.

"See, he got all kinds trouble." Mudda Raymon's blue-white eyes were locked wide on the screen. "Look, he fight, now he fight himself, now he fight 'nother man. Now he fight big giant man, he kill big giant man. Now he fight himself again, always fighting. You see him now? You know him?"

So we're getting a session whether we like it or not,
Mo realized. He wondered why Carla had told the old woman so much about him, even to the Big Willie thing. On the screen, phantom shapes swam in the static, vehement ghosts, whirlwinds in a sandstorm.

"All de deads," she droned on. "He have so many deads. See dere? An' de deads hurt his heart, make his heart sick. Make him always 'fraid, make him sad like he gon' die. Poor man, first he t'ink he can fix de bad men. But bad men like a river, no end, bad men like de ocean. So he t'ink,
all
men bad men,
nobody
no good, he heartsick. Oh! An' now he got new trouble."

Mudda Raymon shook her head and laughed, her eyebrows going up on her forehead in delighted surprise, as if she really were watching a TV sitcom or family drama. Mo started to say something to cut this off but then stopped. She was quite a show, no doubt about it, might as well see it through to its end.

Mudda Raymon's brows came down, and she leaned toward the screen with a little more urgency. Her milky eyes never wavered from the static snowstorm, but she looked dismayed now, her head shaking on its stalk of neck. "Now, dis part bad. Oh, yah, de puppets! De dancing puppets. Everybody damn' puppet. Poor bastard."

Mo felt the skin contract on the back of his neck. Carla had come up with something like puppets in her vision, too, and he could swear he'd never told her a word about those cases. The heat of the room was insufferable, how did these people stand it?

The deep voice rasped on in its monotone: "And dere de dump-yard, dat bad. De old dump-yard. Oh, and dis—dis so bad. See! De
puppet-puppetl
See
de puppet-puppet, de
bones puppet-puppet." She leaned back now, pulling away from whatever she saw in the haze of static. "You got to watch him. He watch you. He come get you! De puppet-puppet gon' come get you! Dis so bad! Okay, no more dis, no more." Suddenly Mudda Raymon was groping on the tray table for the remote, and she knocked the water glass onto the floor. The crash of breaking glass startled everyone in the room. Even the old man snapped his head off his chest. Then Mudda Raymon found the box and the screen went black.