Cities of the Dead Read online

  “Maybe?” Spraggue prompted.

  “Well …” Armand seemed reluctant to continue, but then the words started pouring out in a rush. “I just wondered, I thought maybe some deal of his had fallen through, either the cookbooks or a bank loan or something.”

  “What made you think he’d had a disappointment?” Mary asked. “I thought he seemed fairly pleased with himself at the banquet.”

  “Oh, he did. No doubt about that,” Armand said. “But that could’ve been pride. Joe was one proud man. A flamboyant man. Never missed a chance to talk about how he came from nobody and nothin’ to be the best chef in New Orleans. It was after he died, you know. I kept thinkin’ about who could’ve done it. And comin’ up empty. And I wondered if the police weren’t missin’ the point. It’s a terrible thing to say, terrible as murder, but I keep wonderin’ if Joe did it himself. I mean, he worked so hard for that restaurant and if he knew something was gonna keep him from opening it … Money trouble, maybe. Or if he had some awful disease. Cancer …”

  “Suicide by knife isn’t all that common,” Mary said.

  “I know. But Joe was familiar with knives, used to knives.”

  “Was he the kind of man who’d stage his own death to get somebody else in hot water?” Spraggue asked. Fontenot had been at the seminar; he could have taken Dora’s knife. He’d have to check on the angle of the wound.

  “Was he a vengeful man, you’re askin’? I guess I’d have to say so. Joseph wasn’t your easy-goin’ forgive-and-forget type of guy. He remembered a slight. But I wasn’t thinkin’ that. I was thinkin’ maybe he left a note and nobody found it. Or somebody found it, but they didn’t want to—”

  There was a murmuring noise. Heads turned. It was almost a repeat performance of the jostling and whispering that had greeted Armand’s appearance, except that this wave of movement began not at the kitchen door but at the outside door. A personage had entered.

  He looked vaguely familiar to Spraggue, the way that someone seen only on television looks familiar. The man was heavy, almost wider than he was tall. He had a sallow complexion, startled blue eyes, a tiny childish nose, and wispy brown hair, parted low on the left side and brushed over a balding scalp. Some TV-critic galloping gourmet clone. Hampton something. He was coming their way, beaming a television smile. His teeth were fine.

  Mary said, “Oh, here he is. I invited Harris Hampton to join us—”

  It was the look on Armand’s face that stopped her. The restaurant owner was out of his chair in a flash, jarring his coffee. He waited until the fat man was close enough to hear a whisper, then bellowed, “Get out!”

  The man froze in his tracks. Diners paused, forks in midair.

  Armand lowered his voice, but his fury was visible. “Go on. Get out!”

  Mary stood, tiny beside Armand. “I’m sorry,” she said, bewildered. “I had no idea—”

  “You couldn’t have known.” Armand absolved Mary with a wave of his hand. “But this phony, this recipe thief, this hausfrau’s helper, he knows he’s never to enter any restaurant of mine.”

  “Not even—” Mary began.

  “I’m sorry,” Armand said, with hauteur that would have done credit to an emperor. “My decision is absolute. Thomas!”—this to the headwaiter—“show this person out.”

  As he watched the scene, Spraggue thought Fontenot wasn’t the only chef around who held a grudge.

  Aunt Mary said, “Please, Mr. Hampton, if you could stop by my hotel—in half an hour, perhaps. The Imperial Orleans. I’d like to buy you a drink …”

  There was nothing Harris Hampton could do but nod and make as dignified a retreat as his red cheeks and waddling derriere would allow.

  “I’m sorry,” Mary ventured again, when the diners had gone back to their food and the buzz of whispered conversation had died.

  Armand righted his coffee cup and nodded for a waiter to place a clean napkin over the offending brown stain on the tablecloth. “That man! It was pure mischief that made Denise seat him with Joe and me that night. She knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “How much I hate that man. But Denise Michel, well, she hates all men, and maybe it seemed damned funny to her, putting us together and waiting for the sparks to fly. There’s a devil in that Denise.”

  “But surely—” Mary began soothingly.

  “You want yourselves a murderer?” Armand said. “Well, there he goes. ‘Murderer’ is a gentle word, a kind word for a man who would publish a recipe, call it mine, from my restaurant, cooked by the great Fontenot, and call for margarine in the preparation! Margarine!”

  Spraggue kept his eyes averted from Mary’s. He knew he would laugh if she did, knew she was about to burst.

  “I mean, who is that man? Who does he think he is? An upstart nothing, that’s who. No credentials. Cooks from a can. Even his name is a phony. Sticks out a mile. Made up for a newspaper column. Where’s he from? What’s he know about anything?” Armand took a long sip of coffee, a deep breath, and continued in a lower tone. “I tell you, if Harris Hampton had been killed that evening, I would take the credit myself. I’d have to stand in a long line at the police station, understand, all full of cooks boastin’ that they’d done a great service to the culinary world. It would have been justifiable homicide.”

  “Did Joe Fontenot feel the way you do about Harris Hampton?” Spraggue asked.

  “It was his perch and redfish coo-bee-yon that Hampton ruined, publishin’ that fake garbage. Fontenot hated the man.”

  Coo-bee-yon? Spraggue glanced at Mary, and she whispered “Courtbouillon” so faintly it just reached his ears.

  Spraggue said, “You think Joe might have tried to avenge his stolen recipe?”

  “I think that if the two of them had a fight, Hampton and Fontenot, it would have been one hell of a screaming match right at the table. But Joe was on his best behavior that night, for the judges.”

  Mary raised her eyebrows, and Spraggue understood that she had a low opinion of Fontenot’s best behavior.

  “No,” Armand said, “much as I would love to think of Hampton in prison, cooking slop for prisoners for the rest of his life, I don’t think he would have had the nerve to attack Joseph all alone, away from the crowd.”

  “But suppose they met in the display room, suppose Fontenot threatened Hampton—” Mary began.

  “Well now,” Armand said. “That’s not bad. Not bad at all. Maybe that could get your cook out of jail. Because if Joe accosted that fool, if they had a brawl, then the only way Harris Hampton would have come out on top would have been to use a knife. And plenty quick, too. But …”

  “But?”

  “Well, it sounds strange, I know, but the more I think about it, the more likely it seems that nobody killed Joe Fontenot.”

  EIGHT

  The lamplit French Quarter streets were filled with tight knots of revelers toting paper cups of booze from bar to bar. They strolled nonchalantly in front of the cab, invincible inebriates, slowing progress to a crawl. Early drunks sagged against lamp posts. The crush thinned out toward the back of the Quarter.

  Albert Flowers parked the Oldsmobile three-quarters of the way up onto the sidewalk—the “banquette,” he called it—and pointed across the street. Spraggue read the sign over the red door: WITCHCRAFT. A wooden board affixed to the doorjamb listed services: GOOD LUCK CHARMS, RITUAL ALTARS, SACRED SEALS, HEXES REMOVED, TALISMANS, CONSULTATIONS.

  “We may be too late,” Spraggue said. “The lights are off.”

  “They can’t do that,” Flowers protested. “We got an appointment. Let’s bang the door down.”

  Spraggue knocked. Nothing. He leaned his forehead against one of the grimy windows off to the side, peered in. Way at the back of the shop he could see two flickering eyes of light. One detached itself from the other and danced toward the door.

  Candles, he thought. The stage is set.

  The woman who opened the door, lit taper in hand, wore shoes soft enough to make no
noise on the wide wooden floorboards. She was dark-skinned, plump, exotic, with sharply inverted Vs for eyebrows, so thin and precise they must have been painted on her forehead. A parrot-green scarf was wrapped around her head. Her dress was bright, layered color, long and flowing to the ground.

  “You Mistah Spraggue?” she said with a touch of clipped island tang in her deep voice.

  “Yes. And this is Mr. Flowers.”

  “You both want reading?”

  “Just me.”

  “Then your friend wait outside. His aura disturb the reading.”

  “I don’t like that much,” Flowers interjected.

  “He could wait in the shop,” the woman offered. “I do reading in the back room.”

  “Sounds okay,” Spraggue said.

  Flowers nodded.

  The woman opened the door wide and motioned them in with her candle.

  The shop was crowded, with things not people, dark and mysteriously fragrant. The woman floated silently around the room, touching her flame to various candles, illuminating a wall covered with eerily staring masks and bookcases stuffed with old battered volumes held in place by Nefertiti bookends. The floor sloped gently downward toward a heavy desk burdened with more fat books and a brazier puffing out perfumed smoke. Shelves and counters were jammed with candles, dolls, jars and bottles of herbs: stinkwort, buckthorn, bloodroot, orris powder, black mustard seed, rue, yarrow, Dittany of Crete. One bottle was labeled “Graveyard Dirt.”

  “Here’s some gris-gris,” Flowers said, motioning Spraggue over to a central counter.

  They were disappointing, just three-inch squares of colored flannel that had been tied into tiny balls with stingy ropes of yarn and tossed in a basket in a jumble of different colors. Spraggue smelled a white one and found it sweet and pungent. Herbs, seeds, roots, maybe. There was a sign over the basket:

  Gris-Gris

  black—cursing

  white—protection & purity

  gold—money

  blue—love

  They didn’t look anything like the leather pouch Mary had lifted from Sergeant Rawlins’ desk drawer, the pouch now in Spraggue’s pocket.

  “These just tourist trash,” Flowers whispered. “No harm in ’em though. You gonna dig up nasty things for the police, maybe you should get one of them white ones.”

  “Maybe one of each,” Spraggue said.

  The woman motioned Flowers to a chair, and handed him a stack of books to browse through. Her movements were economical. She spoke only when necessary, using one bare arm, one tiny hand with long red-painted talons, for soundless gestures. When Flowers was situated, she led Spraggue through a curtained archway into another room.

  The walls were black, covered with some sort of material that absorbed the light and made dimensions difficult to ascertain. An oil lamp sat in the middle of a round table covered with a black cloth. As they entered the circle of muted lamplight, the woman blew out her candle with a hissing drawn-out exhalation.

  The room reeked of spices and herbs. Incense. She said, “You can call me Sister Delores.”

  “Thank you,” Spraggue replied gravely.

  She fiddled with something at the base of the lamp and the circle of light grew. The table was in the center of a pentagram taped onto the wooden floorboards with wide gaffer’s tape. Sister Delores took a candle from the table, muttered at it, set it aflame, then placed it in a holder on a small high platform against the far wall.

  Candlelight transformed the platform into an altar. Against the wall, a brass cross. Before it, a figure that could have been the Virgin Mary, or Mother Nature, stood on a scrap of blue satin. A Bible was open in front of the figure. Two statues flanked the book, but Spraggue couldn’t identify them. A brass bell sat to the left of the Bible, the candlestick to the right.

  “Enter the holy configuration,” said Sister Delores, “and sit you down.” She raised her hand and touched cool fingertips to his forehead. “These creases speak to me of troubles, mistah. You look like a man with troubles.”

  Spraggue sank into a metal chair. It tilted under his weight; one leg was shorter than the others.

  “If the good luck evades you, mistah, I make you a charm. Many herbs here with healing powers. Loadstone, John the Conqueror Root, Devil’s Shoe String Root. Put those in conjunction with a bit of Adam Root, a bit of Eve Root, in the right time, in the right way, they bring back your luck.”

  “What about a gris-gris?” Spraggue asked.

  “Gris-gris? That a fine charm, a hoodoo bag. Some call them mojo, some wanga. You want a gris-gris to change your luck?”

  “I already have a gris-gris. It was given to me. And I wonder if maybe it’s the wrong kind, if it’s putting bad luck on me instead of good luck.”

  “You get it from a practitioner? Somebody who knows this stuff? Plenty bad practitioners. Don’t know roots from herbs.”

  Spraggue drew the leather pouch from his pocket. “Can you tell me what this charm does? Who made it?”

  “Put it on the table, man. I don’t want touch it yet. You think this be giving you bad luck? You think you got a curse on you?”

  “I don’t know,” Spraggue said. “I was hoping you’d tell me.”

  “This ain’t what I do, for a psychic reading.”

  “I know. But my friend said you were a very powerful practitioner. He thought you might be able to tell me things others wouldn’t know. I would make it worth your while.”

  Sister Delores settled back in her chair, a faint smile on her placid face. “First, you tell me about who gave you this gris-gris.”

  “It’s a little complicated. The man is dead.”

  “Good.” She nodded her head several times, her expression fixed. “It’s important you tell me this. You handle the property of dead men different than you handle the property of men still alive.” Sheathing one hand in a fold of her dress she moved the gris-gris bag closer to her. “No smell of the graveyard,” she said. “Still, I think if it belong to your dead man, it was taken from him after his death. He die by violence?”

  “Yes,” Spraggue said. Her voice was hypnotic. He wondered if the herb incense was fogging his brain.

  “You want to know how he died?”

  “I already know that. He was stabbed.”

  “Then you want to know who kill him?”

  “Yes. I would. Very much.”

  “I can’t tell you that.” Sister Delores leaned back in her chair, her hands spread flat on the tablecloth. “I can tell you a way to find out.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Very old voodoo wanga. They use it in New Orleans long ago. I tell it to you. Let me remember.” She closed her eyes and hummed a single plaintive note. “You break an egg, a fresh egg, in the palm of your dead man’s right hand, see? Then you bury him just the same you bury anybody die peaceful in their bed. But on top of the freshly turned earth in the center of the grave, you put the eggshell. Then the killer he come and seek you out. He tell you everything. He confess his sins. This happen either in seven hours or in seven days. Very old wanga and good one, too.”

  Not the slightest hint of a smile lightened the woman’s voice or demeanor. Spraggue stared at her eyes, trying to guess her age. Thirty to fifty. Ageless. Young skin and old eyes.

  Spraggue wondered how the coroner would react to the eggshell business, and had to bite the inside of his cheek. He said, “Could you tell me where the dead man got this gris-gris?”

  “Ah.” She sat still a long time, a fixed and staring statue. “I can’t tell you that. Some mojo, some gris-gris, I can tell you right off who made them, who the practitioner be. But not this one. This one old.”

  “What can you tell me about it?”

  “I have to open it up to tell you anything. Mostly I can tell a bit from the outside because gris-gris usually from cotton material, different colors. But a leather bag like this mean a fine gris-gris. Maybe your man be a practitioner himself?”

  “I don’t know.”


  She bent over the table, and after muttering something to herself, inhaled audibly, her nose barely an inch from the leather bag. “Ah,” she murmured.

  Spraggue raised one eyebrow.

  “The smell is sweet. I will open it. If it had an evil smell I would not touch it. A gris-gris from a dead man may have caused his death, you know. But such a curse would not smell sweet.”

  She smiled, her teeth a flash of brilliance in the shadowy room. “I say a few words over the bag, to protect myself from evil. Mostly the power of the bag die with the owner, but I take no chances.” She chanted, swaying slightly in her chair. The oil lamp’s circle of light cut the table off from the rest of the room; it seemed to float in a dark pool.

  Delores stood in one fluid motion, left the circle of light, and disappeared. Spraggue strained to hear faint footsteps. She was gone only an instant, then reappeared carrying a silver knife as delicate as a letter-opener and a square of red silk. The blade glinted in the lamplight as she sliced the heavy threads that bound the gris-gris. Muttering, she spread the silk on the table, dumped the leather bag’s contents in the center.

  A cloud of fragrant dust hit Spraggue’s nostrils.

  “Oh, very good,” she said. “Fine. This powerful gris-gris for protection. Most powerful. This bag should protect this man.”

  “It didn’t,” Spraggue said. “What’s in it?”

  Her red talons pried through the pile of herbs. “John the Conqueror Root. Loadstone. A tooth, maybe from an alligator. That mighty strong luck charm. They say Marie Laveau herself wore an alligator tooth ’round her neck till she died. Plenty unusual, an alligator tooth.”

  “Expensive?”

  “You bet. Plenty expensive. Leather bag. Alligator tooth. I think this man knows who his enemy is and has this made special, a long time ago.”

  “How old would you say it is?”

  “Oh, very old. This a man with a longtime worry. He know somebody’s after him and he go to a practitioner and he tell her and she make him a powerful charm. Or maybe he try something very dangerous and he know he need big help. Maybe he be going off to war and he be afraid he won’t come back. This man owned this gris-gris, he one worried man.”