An Evil Shadow - A Val Bosanquet Mystery Read online

  “The Haitians have a saying,” he said. “Petit tig se tig. The child of a tiger is a tiger.”

  Marcus looked away, his face momentarily displaying the derision he bore the unenlightened − which usually included anyone who disagreed with him.

  Val carried on. “You still haven’t explained what all this has to do with you offering me a job.”

  Marcus turned back to face his brother. “Cards on the table. I’ve met Duval and was impressed with her determination. She has been turned down by half-a-dozen universities — she applied to out-of-state colleges at first. They’re keen enough to interview her, but the moment they learn of her background ...”

  “Who can blame them? Who would fancy sharing a dormitory room with a convicted axe-killer? I can’t see your student body being thrilled when it learns who their latest freshman is.”

  “On the contrary. We anticipate very little opposition from that quarter; they would be more likely to protest if we announced that we had rescinded Duval’s acceptance — not that it’s been officially announced yet. It’s the parents of the students who concern us.”

  “The ones who stump up the tuition you mean?”

  Marcus nodded solemnly. “We have negotiated extra state and private funding to offset any shortfall that would accrue should parents start withdrawing students. The governor is keen for Marie to attend a Louisiana college.”

  “This funding. What form will it take?”

  “Grants, endowments, a new Chair. Marie is being sponsored by the Assist Haiti charity, which has been lobbying strenuously on her behalf.”

  “And all this extra funding is dependent on her starting classes in two weeks’ time?”

  Marcus nodded hesitantly.

  “And if you could find a way to limit the financial fallout, the university would come out in front, and you would be doing your career prospects a power of good at the same time. I was right when I sensed Angie’s devious hand behind this. She threw the towel in on me when I left the department, so now she wants to see you make Chancellor.”

  “Why do you always think the worse of her? She’s too fine a woman for that,” Marcus said, his face slightly flushed.

  “Maybe it’s because I know her better than you.”

  “Still doesn’t give you the right to denigrate her at every opportunity.”

  “It may not be the way of a gentleman, but chivalry died out the same day alimony was invented,” Val said, grinding his teeth hard to stop himself striking Marcus. “You want me to apply for the post, so the university can reassure concerned parents that the homicide detective who arrested Duval originally will be around to keep a close eye on her. In the hope — and to me it’s a long shot — some of them think twice before transferring their kids to Baton Rouge. Am I right?”

  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. Drawings of veves, symbols of the lwa, done in charcoal, covered the sheets of paper. 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 hardpan. 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.

  “Move the light off her,” Val barked at the young officer “She’s terrified enough as it is and may drop if we frighten her any further.”

  “I’ve already tried talking to her,” he said defensively. “She won’t answer and hasn’t budged an inch since I first found her.”

  Williams suggested that they call the firehouse.

  “No,” Val said. “She could fall before they arrive
. If she’s a witness to what happened inside, she has to be on the verge of catatonia.”

  Val took the flashlight and shone it at the base of the tree. Several wire nails had been driven into the trunk. Each one had three inches left protruding out from the bark. The girl would have used them to reach the lowermost branches, but it was unlikely they would bear his weight. He lifted his left foot onto one and exerted some pressure. It bent as easily as rubber.

  “No use.”

  “There’s something we could use,” the crime scene tech said, pointing back up the yard to a rusty oil drum lying on its side against the wooden wall of Duval’s shack.

  The drum was half-full of rainwater, which sloshed from the plughole, soaking their shoes as they rolled it across the compacted earth. It took them less than a minute to get the drum upended at the base of the tree.

  Nixon would have been President the last time Sergeant Williams climbed a tree, and his partner was four inches shorter than Val. The crime scene tech held Val’s jacket and gun while he slipped his ID and the flashlight into a trouser pocket. Williams steadied the drum as Val climbed on top. Expecting the rusty metal to give way at any moment, he stood up shakily. A desiccated turkey hen carcass knocked against his face. Snapping the cord that was holding it, he tossed the stinking, maggot-infested bundle to the ground. Val reached above his head and felt for a branch he could wrap his hands around. Grabbing hold of one and kicking his legs in the air, he managed to haul himself up. He found a stout branch to sit on.

  The girl was three branches further up. Val called out to her, trying to sound reassuring. “It’s okay, Marie. I’m a police officer. Nobody’s going to hurt you, but we have to help you down, so we can have a talk.”