The Dead Play On (8 page)

Natasha deserved the title of queen. She was statuesque, with coffee-and-cream skin, and large dark eyes that seemed to read a person’s soul. She usually kept her hair swept up in a scarf, much like the famous voodoo queen Marie Laveau. Natasha wasn’t against using any trick that helped her.

She gave Danni a kiss on the cheek and told her to sit.

“What have you heard?” Danni asked her.

“Well, naturally I’ve seen the news, but my flock speaks, as well. Gary Carter plays with a group on Frenchman Street, and he was well aware of that attack on those musicians. When the news got out that Holton Morelli had been killed it was upsetting, but it was easy to say it might have something to do with his involvement in the drug trade. But now...do you know more?”

“I do,” Danni said.

She went on to explain about her conversation with Tyler Anderson about Arnie Watson, and their visit to Arnie’s parents. Natasha listened attentively.

“I knew Arnie Watson, heard what happened to him. His parents are devout Baptists, so I can’t say they’ve been in the store often, but they’re not crazy anti-voodoo crusaders or anything. They’ve brought out-of-town friends by, and even though she’s Baptist, Mrs. Watson loves to buy rosaries for an aunt of hers. She gets one every year. But I must say, reading between the lines, Arnie’s death seemed suspicious. Never knew him to use drugs, and I think I would have heard if he did,” Natasha said.

“According to his parents, friends and bandmates, you’re right. They all said he never did drugs and was happy to be home. And according to Quinn, you don’t just go out one day and inject yourself with a lethal dose of heroin right out on Rampart Street.”

“He could have been moved.”

“The ME doesn’t think so, but thankfully we’re on good terms with Ron Hubert, so if necessary, we could get more facts.”

“Exhume the body?”

“If necessary,” Danni said. “Meanwhile, I was hoping you might have heard something on the street.”

“I’ve heard a great deal of fear. But even when they’re afraid, people have to work for a living. And people always talk—especially when they’re afraid. It doesn’t take a psychic or a Sherlock Holmes for people to figure out that this killer isn’t just after musicians, he’s looking for something specific. And since we’re talking musicians, that pretty much has to mean a certain instrument. Word is, Arnie Watson had a special sax. Is that true?”

“Yes.”

“And no one knows where it is?” Natasha asked.

“Tyler Anderson, Arnie’s friend, thought he had it and brought it to us. But it wasn’t the special sax after all. That sax disappeared the night that Arnie died, and no one knows where it is.”

“Well, someone knows where it is—the person who has it. But what will you do if you find it?”

“Once we find it, we’ll set a trap. But how the hell do you find one sax in the city of New Orleans?”

Natasha smiled. “You join a band.”

“A band?”

“Quinn plays guitar.”

“Quinn does. I don’t.”

“You can fake some songs. Your father gave up on you learning the bagpipes, but I know you took piano. And if you can play the piano, you can master a keyboard. And if the band plays loud enough, no one will care whether you can play or not, anyway.”

“Such faith! How will I live up to it?” Danni asked her.

“I’m telling you, that’s what you need to do.”

“Quinn
is
fairly decent on the guitar. My friend Jenny LaFleur—you know Jenny, she and her boyfriend, Brad, play with a group called the Nightwalkers—told me that he’s actually pretty good.”

“There you go. There’s your opening. This city
is
music. You want to get into the heart of the music scene, join a band.”

“I’ll talk to Quinn when he gets back. But Natasha—”

“Give me your palm,” Natasha said.

“You’ve read my palm before.”

“Hand it over,” Natasha said, grinning. “You heard me. Hand over the hand!”

Danni complied.

With an elegant finger and a long, manicured nail, Natasha traced the lines in her palm. “This...is your life line,” she said. “You should have a long life. But see these? These little striations off the main line? They seem to be deepening. Danni, this is a dangerous situation. We don’t walk away from these things, but you need to listen to what I’m saying. You need to find that sax quickly—
and
the killer. I’m telling you, do what I say. And don’t worry. I’ll come and clap for you no matter how bad you sound.”

* * *

“Naturally there was no one else in sight,” Jeff Braman said. “There’s always someone on the street and plenty of cops around. But not that night.”

Braman was about thirty-five and looked like a holdover from the sixties. His beard was long, and as he’d told Quinn earlier, his hair would have been long, too, but the doctors had needed to shave his head so they could treat the wound he’d received from the butt of the attacker’s gun.

“It was late. We’d been clowning around with the waitstaff as they cleaned up,” Lily Parker, an attractive woman with short-cut dark hair, told him. Quinn thought she was in her late twenties to early thirties.

The third member of the group was Rowdy Tambor; he was the oldest of the three, as well, probably in his midfifties.

Lily leaned over and tapped the city map Larue had spread out on his desk. “We were there—right on the corner. The guys were walking me home. I’m on Decatur, so we always head there when we’re done, and then Rowdy gives Jeff a ride home.”

“I live in the Garden District,” Jeff said.

“I checked the records, and a patrol officer was a few blocks over right when you needed him,” Larue said, shaking his head. There was no way to have a cop on every block at all times, and everyone there knew it.

“Forgive me if I’m asking you to repeat details you’ve already covered in the past,” Quinn said, “but this guy who held you up at gunpoint and demanded your instruments... How did he manage to wield the gun, beat Jeff and take your instruments? I’m trying to figure out the logistics,” he added quickly, so they wouldn’t think he disbelieved them. “Every little detail is important.”

“It’ll be easier if we act it out,” Lily said. She didn’t appear to be offended. She stood up, and though they looked a little surprised, her bandmates joined her.

“So,” she said then paused. “You want to be him?” she asked Quinn.

“Okay.” He stood, as well.

Larue leaned back in his chair and tossed Quinn a pencil. “Your gun,” he explained, when Quinn shot him a puzzled look.

Quinn caught the pencil and pointed it at the three musicians. “Okay—give me your instruments.”

“I’m glad you didn’t go into acting,” Lily said. “Never mind. Give me the pencil. You be me. I’ll tell you what to do.”

Quinn handed her the pencil, and they changed places.

“You three are walking down the street,” she said. “I had my ukulele that night, so my case was small, and even though he took it, I don’t think he was much interested in it, honestly.”

“Not my guitar case, either,” Rowdy said.

“Okay,” Lily said. “You three are just laughing and joking, and suddenly—I’m there. In front of you. In a black trench coat. And my face is all weird, as if it’s made of plastic, but it’s really a mask. Then I say, ‘Stop! Hand me those cases now—right now—if you want to live.’”

Lily had made her voice harsh, guttural—and muffled.

“He talked like that?” Quinn asked.

“Yeah. I think the mask made his voice funny. I don’t really know how to describe it. It wasn’t a cool Mardi Gras mask. It was like those featureless white faces you see in Venice at Carnevale, except it wasn’t white. It was opaque and shiny, skin-colored, and it made him...faceless,” Lily said.

“She’s described it perfectly,” Rowdy said.

“What about the gun?” Quinn asked. “How did you know it was real?”

“Because he fired it,” Jeff said drily. “When he came up to us, I said, ‘What the hell?’ And the next thing I knew, he’d bashed me in the head and fired.”

As he described the action, Lily rushed between them and pretended to slam her “weapon” against Jeff’s head.

Jeff’s reflexes were strong; he ducked even though he must have known that she wouldn’t hit him. And even if she did, it was just a pencil. But Quinn noted the way that, the second she’d made her move, she hurriedly pointed the gun at them again.

Jeff cleared his throat. “He fired when Rowdy made a move toward me. Maybe he couldn’t tell that Rowdy was trying to help me and not tackle him. I was about out. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I just heard the shots.”

“Shots?”
Quinn asked.

“Yeah, two of them,” Lily said.

“I suspect he fired in a panic, thinking Rowdy was going for him, especially because he shot twice, and he wouldn’t have wanted to draw attention to his presence.”

“Maybe, but he knew what he was doing,” Rowdy offered. “He told us to put our instruments down and move. Lily was sobbing by then and asking him how Jeff was supposed to move, but he said we’d better get him up somehow or he’d never move again. So we dropped our instruments and headed toward Esplanade as fast as we could, dragging Jeff and screaming for help. A cop heard us and called an ambulance for Jeff, and Lily and I went to the police station.”

Larue had the report on his desk. He looked at Quinn. “Officers were sent out right away to search the area, but they didn’t find anything.”

“You guys can take your seats again,” Quinn said, sitting down himself and turning to Larue. “No bullets? No casings?”

Larue shook his head.

“We’re not lying!” Lily said angrily.

“I’m not suggesting you are. How many shots, again?”

“Two,” Rowdy said. “And I’m sure of that. As certain as I am that we’re sitting here in this room.”

“Okay,” Quinn said. “I need to know because I’m going to try to find those bullets and casings. I need your help, though. First, he took your ukulele, Lily, your guitar, Rowdy, and Jeff, your sax?”

“Yeah, he took my sax. How did you know?” Jeff asked.

“It’s in the report,” Larue said quickly.

“What about the gun? Do you know what make or model it was?” Quinn asked.

“It was a gun. It fired bullets,” Rowdy told him. “I’m sorry, but I’ve never held a gun in my life.”

“Me, neither,” Lily said.

“I went skeet shooting once at a casino in Mississippi,” Jeff said. “And I still couldn’t tell a rifle from a water pistol.”

“All right, big? Small?” Quinn asked.

“About the size of the one Detective Larue has,” Rowdy offered, pointing to Larue’s shoulder holster. “But different.”

“Okay, let’s go in a different direction. How tall was he?” Quinn asked.

“Tall,” Rowdy said.

“Medium,” Lily said at the same time.

Jeff laughed ruefully. “I thought the bastard was a short little shit. But then, he was on me like a bat out of hell, so I’m not a good judge.”

“About how long was it from the time you were attacked to the time the cop found you and sent someone to the scene?” Quinn asked.

“Just a few minutes,” Rowdy said.

“Felt like forever, though,” Lily added.

“I couldn’t begin to tell you,” Jeff said. “Those two were half carrying me, half dragging me, and the world seemed to be a blur. Why?”

“I’m trying to figure out if he might have had an accomplice—someone to help him with the instruments, maybe someone with a car—or if he had a place in the area to stash them and himself,” Quinn said. An accomplice could even have come back later to pick up the bullets.

“Oh!” Lily’s brown eyes went wide. “Let me think. I wish I could be more helpful, but the whole thing happened so quickly. And we were afraid we were going to die. Once he went after Jeff, we just complied as fast as we could.”

“You did the right thing. No instrument is worth your life,” Quinn told her. “Were those the instruments you usually played?”

“I play drums, too, but they stay at the club,” Lily told him.

“Harmonica—and I didn’t even think of it. It was in my pocket,” Rowdy said.

“Sometimes I play keyboards,” Jeff said. “But the bar has a piano, and I never take that home with me, either—obviously.”

“But you always take your sax home?” Larue asked, looking at Quinn as he spoke.

“Always,” Jeff said.

“You’re pretty friendly with a lot of the other musicians in the city, yes?” Quinn asked them.

“Sure,” Rowdy said. “Have been for thirty years. You never know when you’ll need someone to cover you, and you never know when work might go sour and you’ll be looking to cover for other people.”

“Did you know the two men who were killed? Holton Morelli and Lawrence Barrett?”

“I knew them both,” Rowdy said quietly.

“I knew Holton,” Lily said.

“And I knew Larry,” Jeff told them.

“What about a musician named Arnie Watson?” Quinn asked.

“Arnie? Of course,” Lily said softly.

“Sure. Great guy. Terrible thing,” Jeff said.

“He would have known what the gun was,” Rowdy said. He frowned, looking at Quinn. “They found him with a needle in his arm. Are you saying you think...?”

“We don’t know what we think,” Quinn said. “We just know we have a lot of dead musicians.”

Lily trembled and swallowed audibly. “You think the guy who did this to us...that he’s the same guy who broke in and murdered Holton and Larry?” she asked.

“Maybe,” Quinn said.

“Shit!” Jeff said. “I’m lucky as hell I was just pistol-whipped.”

“We’re all lucky as hell,” Lily said.

“Well, there’s one bright spot,” Rowdy said. “At least it wasn’t someone who thought our music stank.”

He was trying for levity, and the others tried to smile.

“Whoever he is, he’s still out there,” Jeff said.

“Let’s not panic,” Quinn said. “We’re investigating every angle, and we
will
put a stop to this. But even though he’s already taken your instruments, you have to be more careful than you’ve ever been. Don’t let anyone into your house—well, unless it’s your mother.”

“And even then, be careful,” Lily murmured.

“One more thing,” Larue said. “Will the three of you work with a sketch artist and see if you can agree on what the ‘faceless’ man looked like to the best of your recollection?”