City of Masks

20

Cree drove toward the Times-Picayune offices, unsettled by the incidents at Beauforte House. A lot to think about but no time. Ronald: so much hidden there, so much to understand. He was obviously motivated to sell the house and self-interested enough to do so in spite of his sister's desires. Could he be a hoaxer, faking a haunting to scare Lila away? The Gaslight scenario – where someone faked supernatural phenomena with the goal of upsetting someone else, making them appear "crazy" – was a possibility any serious paranormal researcher had to consider. But Cree had already encountered Lila's haunt herself, twice, and the damned thing was for certain no living human. No, Ronald was weak and narcissistic and many things she disliked, but he was not a hoaxer so much as an opportunist. And there was something touching about him, something wounded and compelling, perhaps even a grain of real nobility buried beneath the bullshit. The dynamic of hostility between them was so painful and so unnecessary.

It was her own fault. She hadn't dealt with him well. She'd been off balance, surprised and frightened at hearing someone in the house, and disoriented from pulling so suddenly out of that daydream. No doubt its detail and vividness were the result of doing historical reading in her hotel every night, of absorbing the history-drenched atmosphere of New Orleans.

But its poignancy, and her reluctance to let go of that time and those images – that was a potential problem. It was another indication of just how much the stresses of this case were adding up, how unstable and malleable she was right now.

But she was getting close to the Times-Picayune building. Time to put on the act of being sane and competent, to stuff her sense of urgency into a compartment of her thoughts and keep it there for now, She wound her way around and under a tangle of highway entrance ramps, parked in the visitors' lot, checked herself over in the visor mirror, and did her best to muster a pretense of professionalism.

Delisha Brown emerged from the depths of the building, crossed the modern, marbled lobby to where Cree waited at the reception desk. She was a woman of middle height, with skin a deep chocolate color and hair done in cornrows that ended in dozens of short braids lined with turquoise-blue beads and tipped with wads of tinfoil. Though she had a chunky, big-busted build, she was only in her late twenties and moved with an active woman's forceful stride that made the beads swing and rattle softly. She wore black slacks, a red blouse, striped jogging shoes, and a no-nonsense frown that she panned up and down Cree as they shook hands.

"I'm Brown," the reporter said, "and you're Black. Uh-huh. Right."A grin twitched the corners of Delisha's lips. She turned and beckoned for Cree to follow her. "Everybody calls me Deelie, you might as well, too."

"Thank you for returning my call. And thanks for finding time for me on such short notice."

Deelie's plump shoulders shrugged. She led Cree down a long corridor, through several sets of glass doors, and into the quiet bustle of the great paper's newsroom. It was a huge room containing dozens of cubicles and desks, about half of which were occupied by reporters or writers working in the state of sustained panic required to put out the paper every day. Computer monitors glowed from every littered desk. Along the far wall, a row of glassed-in offices faced the big room; inside, knots of harried-looking editorial staff bent their heads together over big tables. Cree had to jump out of the way of a cart pushed at a run by a young clerk who seemed oblivious to her existence.

Deelie's desk was messier than most, with a rusted automobile muffler encircled by an uneven wall of stacked papers and file folders. She gestured Cree to a plastic chair, took her own seat, and frowned at the muffler. "Temp Chase murder, huh. What's your interest?"

"I'm writing about the case – maybe an article, maybe a book. I saw your byline on most of the articles I read, and then Detective Guidry said you'd done a lot of research, so – "

"Bobby G. That little midget! Fie give you anything useful?"

"Mainly, your name."

"Flattering." Deelie's face split in a wide grin that took Cree by surprise with its warmth and energy. "Hey, come on, girl. Tell me the truth. You're no freelance writer – nobody writes on spec and doesn't know if it's a book or an article. Internet says you're a Ph. D. in psychology who does research on ghosts." When she said more than three words in a row, Delisha had a musical rhythm to her voice that charmed Cree.

Cree chuckled. "I guess I shouldn't be surprised an investigative reporter did some detective work before an interview."

"No, you should not. So, what, you trying to see if Temp turned into a ghost or something?"

"Maybe. It's a long story, and most of it's confidential."

"Ooooh, tempt me!" Deelie laughed, but the lines of her face quickly turned businesslike again. "Tell you what. We trade. I give you something, you give me something. I trade you Temp for some ghost-hunting material I can maybe put together for a feature later on. This town loves ghosts. And anything else good for tourism."

A young man came to the desk, slipped a file folder onto it with a meaningful raised eyebrow, and left without a word. "Shit," Deelie said.

"Doesn't look like you have time for such a trade," Cree said.

Deelie looked thoughtfully at Cree for a moment, then pondered her watch. "I got an hour for lunch – that'll give us a start, anyway. And for this, I think let's go out. I got about one good thing to tell you, and unless I'm mistaken it's right up your alley. But it got some context go with it, so we gonna serve the Seattle girl a slice o' life along with lunch. You drive, my car's waiting for an organ transplant to be flown in." She gestured at the muffler with disgust.

Deelie grabbed a small shoulder pack and the muffler as they left. Out in the parking lot, she paused to toss the muffler into the seat of a low-slung, beat-up maroon sports car, then gave the car a whopping kick that rattled its rusted quarter panels. "It's what I get, buying an Alfa Romeo. Vanity. Stupidity. Twelve-year-old import, can't find the parts. Where's your wheels?"

They got into Cree's rented Taurus and Deelie instructed Cree to head up Broad Avenue. As soon as they were rolling, the reporter worked the dashboard knobs and brought the air-conditioning up to maximum.

"Where are we going?" Cree asked.

"My home neighborhood. A fine culinary establishment called Chez Henri."

From Broad they turned left onto St. Bernard Boulevard, through the poor neighborhoods Cree had sought solace in the day before. Deelie explained the hubris and naivete that had prompted her to take the Alfa Romeo junker as collateral on a loan to a now long-gone boyfriend, and the ongoing grief it gave her. Then, at Deelie's prodding, Cree talked about her profession, some of the hauntings she'd investigated. Cree could sense a sharp mind clicking away behind the laconic questions and disinterested expression, the reporter snapshotting, underlining, filing points for future reference.

After a few minutes more, Deelie told her to pull over. They had come to a block of tenements built of yellow-brown brick, two and three stories tall, each fronted by a green-painted stoop. The project stretched out of view to the north and east. Almost every window was covered from the inside with foil-faced insulation that reflected the merciless sun: With no air-conditioning and no shade, the foil was all that kept the apartments from turning into ovens. The atmosphere of decay and poverty was rich and deep here, as was the dense aura of human experience.

"This here's my home turf. Born and raised in St. Bernard Development. Figured that you looking into Temp Chase and the Beaufortes and their crowd, you're gonna get the uptown perspective. You're gonna need some thesis-antithesis here, a little dialectic – the AfricanAmerican side of it. These people here? They've been in N'Orleans as long as any Beauforte, but their names ain't in no history books or social registers. Main exports from here're back labor, jazz, and boys to fill the prisons. Your tourists go to the Quarter and the Garden District, but they ain't coming here anytime soon, you can bet. Pull up there, le's park."

Cree took in the feel of the place. It seemed heat-beaten. The ground between buildings was flattened grass and bare earth, litter-strewn. People lounged on some of the stoops, avoiding the direct sun, or stood in pairs or trios looking bored and exhausted. Here and there, men squatted with their backs to the brick, hands loose on their knees, just smoking or doing nothing whatever. Mothers strolled lethargically on the sidewalks, kids toddling along behind or riding plastic trikes. Just down the block, a police cruiser had stopped and a pair of NOPD officers were talking with a group of teenagers. From behind the nearest foil-covered windows came the muffled pulse of warring beats, mostly rap music.

Deelie got out of the car, settled a strap of the backpack over her shoulder, and then stretched and breathed deeply as if luxuriating in the humid air and urban grit. She tipped her head to a couple of old men who sat in aluminum lawn chairs and they returned the greeting with gap-toothed grins. When Cree got out and joined her, heads turned to look her over: stranger, white woman off her turf.

Deelie led her down the street, her beads rustling as she walked. "Le's take a stroll. There's method to my madness, don't worry, this's all part of my half of our bargain. You know much about voodoo?"

"Voodoo? Not much. Sticking pins in dolls, that kind of thing."

Deelie looked at her incredulously. "No shit! You in the supernatural business an' all, I thought… Well, then, this's just right. See, people up north think voodoo's this fringe thing – weird cult, holdover from another century? Has to do with murdering people or, what, biting heads off snakes or something, right? Fact is, it's a belief system that's concerned with reverence and doing good and protecting against bad, just like any religion. It's always been here, and it's growing. You just can't see it unless you know what to look for. But I'll show you. See there?"

This side of the street was lined with sagging wood-frame houses, fronts to the tenements of St. Bernard, backs to the roaring highway overpass a block away. Deelie had pointed to the left front window of a double shotgun, where a mournfully placid plastic figurine of Mary stood on the windowsill, bracketed by stubby candles in the shape of crosses.

"If you're thinking Catholic, you're half wrong. Voodoo, it's grabbed onto Jesus and Mary, and most believers mix and match 'em. It's all about belief, see, so voodoo appropriates what people are gonna believe in, that's where it gets its power. Look at the door. See that corner of dark cloth up in there? Means there's curtains just inside the door, got stuck in there when it was shut. The curtains keep bad spirits out. Whoever lives here's a believer or a practitioner."

They moved on. For Cree, what Deelie said explained one of the unfamiliar strains of the whispers here: the rich, dark, Caribbean-spiced undertone, the faintest echo of long-ago drums of Africa. Yet another thread of the ancient past weaving seamlessly into the present.

"And this has something to do with the Chase murder?"

"Yes, ma'am, it does." Deelie nodded, grinning broadly. "I'm about to tell you. But here we go, lunch at Chez Henri."

The gray-stained stucco two-story building housed several businesses that fronted the street with mesh-covered windows. They went through a doorway beneath a sun-bleached magnetic sign that advertised?L4Tin big letters, with Henri's Po'boys spelled out beneath.

"Yo! On-ree!" Deelie cried joyfully.

Behind the counter at the back, a man reading a newspaper lifted his head, then stood up. He smiled at Deelie without taking the cigarette from his mouth, the butt remaining magically suspended on his lower lip and bobbing as he answered, "Hey, Deelie."

"Henri, this here's my friend, brought her all the way from Seattle to sample your fine cuisine. She looks white, but she's black. Ironically speaking."

Henri shrugged. "Sho'," he said noncommittally.

"Henri's the master chef. I recommend the oyster, that's the best. Oyster po'boy for me, Henri."

Cree scanned the hand-lettered menu board above the counter. Po'boys were available with meatballs, sausage, ham, catfish, crab, squid, even beans and greens. "I guess I'll have the same," she said.

It was well after lunch hour, and they were the only customers. Henri's was a grimy place about sixteen feet square with a gray linoleum floor and five masonite-topped tables. A film of cooking grease made every surface sticky, so that Cree had to peel her feet up for each step, but the smell from the kitchen was delicious. She and Deelie sat at the table nearest the door, where through the service window to the kitchen they could see Henri working on their order.

"Okay, Chase murder, here's the connection," Deelie said. "Popular media personality murdered in historic house in Garden District. I'd won a couple journalism prizes the year before, so I got the story, you know? Great assignment, good for lots of follow-ups locally and likely to get syndicated all around, get my byline some national exposure. Lot of what I did was the background, the human interest angle. Oh, I followed out anything forensic Bobby G.'d give me, but I did a lot of other stuff besides – talked to their friends, family, associates. Sniffed around good."

Deelie glanced up as Henri lowered a basket into a deep fryer, making a tremendous sizzling. When she went on, she lowered her voice: "But everything I fished up didn't make it to the paper. That was the deal I cut with Bobby G. for him giving me a little inside track on his end – police had to have some say in what went in the paper? Standard procedure, they don't want the killer to know everything they're working on. One thing I found, I believe was a significant contribution to the case. Problem is, nobody can connect it back in yet."

"And it has to do with voodoo."

"You got it, girl." Deelie dug in her backpack and came up with a packet of photos. "I's walking around the house, trying to maybe take some shots I could use in my articles, you know? I'm out on the sidewalk, looking for an interesting angle of view, something atmospheric, so I push aside some leaves on one corner of the fence. And what do you think I see? There's a little hoodoo hex tied to the corner pillar!"

Cree took the photos out of their envelope and saw a number of views of Beauforte House. "There's really such a thing as hoodoo? I thought it was… I don't know, a vaudeville term. Like 'hocus-pocus.'"

Deelie reached across the table and fingered through the stack until she found the one she wanted. "Here – this one."

It was a close-up of a short stick lashed with strands of long grass or some other plant fiber to a bar of the fence at the corner pillar. Beyond, out of focus, Cree could see the green of foliage and a blur of yellow that was probably a wall of the house.

"Deelie, I don't know wiiat this means. What's hoodoo?"

"Shame on you, girl! You come down here, don't do your homework? Call yourself a researcher?"

"Order up," Henri called. He pushed a couple of paper plates onto the counter. "Som'in' drink wi' dat?"

They both asked for Cokes. Cree got the food and insisted on paying. A po'boy, she saw, was a big sandwich, like a sub, but in this case a crusty baguette stuffed with deep-fried, battered oysters, mayonnaise, and shredded lettuce. Back at the table, Deelie grabbed hers and took a huge, rapturous bite. So did Cree. It was delicious, the oysters crisp on the outside but hot and juicy inside.

"Didn't I tell you, best thing you ever ate?" Deelie leaned close and confided, "But you gotta come in early in the week, 'cause he change his fryin' grease on Mondays. By end of the week it get a little funky, you know what I'm saying?" She tipped her head toward Henri, who had settled back behind his paper, motionless but for the cigarette smoke curling up.

They ate in silence for a moment, and then Deelie was ready to go on."Okay. Hoodoo's folk cures and conjuring. It's not a coherent form of religious observance, like voodoo, but it's connected. It's just the folklore of cures, hexes, charms, potions, herbs, curses, and shit that goes along for the ride with voodoo, about like Santa Claus and Easter Bunny go with Christianity. Roots go back to western African medicine and mysticism of the sixteenth century and probably much earlier. There's traditional general ways of doing things, but hoodoo doesn't have a fixed form, and every old root doctor or conjo woman got a slightly different set of remedies and charms."

"What does this one mean?"

"Hold on, I'm getting there!" Deelie held up a hand as she attacked her sandwich, chewed, swallowed. "Take a look at that close-up of the stick, you can see it's about as long as a stubby cigar, and it's got those two notches? I found one on three outside corners of the fence around the Beauforte lot. So I told Bobby G. about it, and, ooh you should have seen that white boy's face wrinkle up! He didn't want another problem to figure in. But he had his boys go retrieve the three outside, and then after I got some advice from this ol' conjo woman I knew about, they went through the house with an eye out for more signs of hoodoo. They found one more stick, up under the overhang of the mantel in the parlor. Just where the old woman said it'd likely be!"

They ate in silence for a moment as Cree pondered the hex. "So what's it supposed to do?" she asked at last.

"Oh, man, Bobby G., he wanted so bad for it to be a killing hex! Some person of the colored persuasion put a hex on Chase, then popped him when the hex didn't work? But the old conjo woman, she says it's a hex for 'confusion of mind,' like insanity or maybe forgetfulness. She said if someone got inside to put that fourth stick there, the police should look for other things, too – maybe something like burnt hair from Temp's head, maybe some graveyard dust or these commercial hoodoo oils and shit you can buy. But this was like a month after, they'd had so many people in and out, it was too late for Bobby's techs to go after that. The scene inside had been pretty well compromised."

"So, Deelie, let me get this straight – do you believe in hoodoo?"

Delisha hooted and turned toward the counter. "Yo, On-Ree! You believe in hoodoo?"

Henri's newspaper dropped and with his cigarette he pointed to the air-conditioner above the front door. A fist-sized cloth sack lay flopped there, dust frilled. "B'lieve in b'lievin'," Henri said mysteriously. The newspaper came up again.

"That his gris-gris bag," Deelie explained. "His protection charm. Got different herbs and powders and stuff in there. Wards off attack and theft. What he means is, he don't exactly believe, but he believes hoodoo got power over those who do believe, so he keeps his gris-gris there to protect him. You can see he keep a crucifix on the cash register, too. That's how most people do."

Henri's newspaper dropped. "Tha's how mos' people do," he confirmed. "And I ain't never been robbed by a b'liever yet!" Then he reached under the counter and with a wide grin pulled up a chunky, snub-nosed revolver. "For the rest, I got this here!"

Back on the baking sidewalk, stomachs happily full, they strolled toward Cree's car. There was a walk you did here if you didn't want to die of the heat, Cree realized, an energy-conserving, keeping-cool walk – slow, rolling, loose. It explained the seemingly lethargic gaits of the people on these sidewalks, so different from the comparatively tight, jerky strides of the sweating Northern tourists on Canal Street. An African walk, a Caribbean gait, sensible in this climate.

She had probed Deelie about the Beaufortes as they finished their sandwiches. Deelie said she'd never met Lila or Charmian, but she had interviewed Ronald to get a little color on owning a house where a prominent murder had occurred. She said she couldn't really imagine any connection between the Beauforte family and the murders or the hex. As for the organized crime connection, Deelie thought Chase definitely had a few shady friends, but she'd never turned up anything sufficient to provide a motive for murder.

Deelie was an amazing person, Cree decided, an amalgam of the innumerable cultural strains that came together here. Beyond the particular ancestry she brought to this city where French, Spanish, Afro-Caribbean, Acadian, English, and German history converged, she was a woman poised between two modern worlds as well: one predominantly white, relatively affluent, educated, the other black, poor, streetwise. Even her accent and vocabulary reflected the diverse social worlds she moved through, readily mixing academic terms and concepts with Southern black patois. It couldn't be an easy balance to maintain. Yet Deelie walked at her ease here, proud, her beads swinging and clattering softly.

"So, the hex. What do you think it says about the murder?" Cree asked.

"Bobby G., he'd say either there's a nigger in the woodpile somewhere, or there's somebody smart trying to make it look that way. Either way, it says this thing's more complex than anybody bargained for."

And none of it might bear on the haunting at all, Cree thought. So far, nothing she'd picked up seemed to have any connection to Temp Chase. But again, you never knew.

When they opened the doors to the Taurus, a belch of blast-furnace heat came out, and both women stood back to give it a moment before getting inside.

"We didn't get too far on your end of the deal," Deelie said. She slapped the sizzling metal of the car roof. "Means you owe me, right? In my line of work, this quid pro quo thing is serious."

"Girl, you just tell me when," Cree said.

Deelie grinned at her over the roof. "Not quite," she said. "But you gettin' there. Accent's still a little ironical, but you definitely gettin' there."