Cities of the Dead Read online

  “Sounds serious,” Spraggue murmured.

  “Oh, man,” Sister Delores said earnestly, “don’t underestimate the power. This serious protection, this charm. This belong to a man afraid of death.”

  “Aren’t we all?”

  “Not like this, mistah. The man owns this gris-gris afraid of special kind of death. Early death. Unnatural death. Like he got.”

  NINE

  “She say you gonna meet a dark-haired beautiful woman?” Albert Flowers asked as Spraggue emerged from the back room of the witchcraft shop.

  “Is that the usual spiel?”

  “Nope. But meetin’ a fine lookin’ woman is what you’re gonna do. It’s early yet, but not too soon to start bar-hoppin’.”

  “Sorry—” Spraggue started to say.

  Flowers halted his protest with an upraised hand. “And Fontenot’s daughter,” he said pointedly, “she start work at ten. Second shift.”

  “Sorry.” The word was the same but Spraggue’s intonation took a hundred-and-eighty-degree spin. “Where does she work?”

  “Place on Bourbon. Not one of your more refined ones, neither. Crummy kind of joint. Strippers. Boys and girls. I don’t think she takes her clothes off, but she’s probably a semi-pro, if you know what I mean. She’s a waitress there.”

  “Not someplace Daddy would approve of.”

  Flowers grinned. “Depends on what kinda Daddy she got.”

  Abandoning the cab, they strolled up Bourbon Street. The humid night air, just breezy enough to warrant his tweed sports jacket, made Spraggue wonder what streak of masochism had kept him North so many winters.

  While they walked Flowers spun the tale of his pursuit of Mrs. Fontenot’s daughter, of her dauntless green VW Rabbit, and her atrocious driving habits.

  “I’ll stick with you in the bar until I can point her out,” he said. “Then—”

  “Then you call it a night. You do good work.”

  “Thanks.”

  The flashing neon sign out front said The Creole Strip. The place was tiny, a narrow alley tarted up for Mardi gras. Gaudy striped bunting, purple, yellow, and green, creased from storage and spotted with beer, hung limply from the scratched imitation-walnut bar. The lighting was erratic—dim at the bar so the patrons wouldn’t realize how much water was mixed with the booze, glaring near the elevated plank stage, bright enough to count the freckles blotching the chest of the impersonally naked woman who wriggled and sweated under the searching spotlight. Two hugely muscled bouncers flanked the stage and kept the men who nursed their watered drinks from leaping up onto the platform and counting the dancer’s freckles with their fingertips.

  Spraggue and Flowers ordered drinks at the bar. It took the cabbie about the same time to locate Fontenot’s daughter as it took the bartender to fetch two pale Scotches.

  “There,” Flowers said softly. “She’s that dark-haired lady in the shiny red shirt. I’m gonna stay here till she gets close to us, and you drink your stuff fast. When I get offa the stool, if I time it right, she’ll climb aboard and try to get you to take a table and stand her some champagne. It ain’t your pretty face. That’s what these chickies are paid to do. It’ll cost ya.”

  Spraggue nodded and drank. The stuff was terrible. He turned to stare at the swaying woman on the stage. Framed in the dirty mirror over the bar, his profile was strong-jawed, the nose long, thin, and faintly crooked, the forehead high. His profile was his best angle, the one resume photographers chose. It disguised the asymmetrical features that made his face “interesting” rather than “handsome,” kept him a “character actor” instead of a “leading man.”

  Flowers managed his exit with the grace of a Bolshoi principal.

  The dark-haired woman slipped onto the barstool with an aggressive display of leg. She wasn’t much more than a girl, maybe eighteen, maybe less. She didn’t look anything like her mother. Jeannine Fontenot worked to make herself attractive. The younger woman had beauty in spite of herself. Nature, not the cosmetic industry, had shadowed her dark smudgy eyes. Her high cheekbones were innocent of powder or rouge. She was striking, possessing an off-beat, quiet kind of beauty that was more attractive because it wasn’t on public display. It left you wondering if you were the only one who had noticed it.

  She lifted a cigarette to her mouth and tilted her head in his direction, waiting for a light. It was such a practiced, mechanized come-on that Spraggue wondered whether she had to get herself doped up before heading for work.

  “Hi,” he said faintly, scrambling for a matchbook, and deciding that the wariness of the traveling businessman, with a pocket full of credit cards and a wife safely in Dubuque, was called for.

  She raised the heat of a calculated smile an eighth of a degree. “You can hardly see from here,” she said. “This isn’t the best seat in the house.”

  “Crowded,” he mumbled, looking a little embarrassed. What would they say in Dubuque about him being in a strip joint? “I just came in to look around.”

  The smile got warmer. “If you wanted to do some serious drinking, say a bottle, I could get us a table down front. Claudine’s dancing now and she’s not bad, but Annette, the woman who’ll be on in fifteen minutes, she is totally hot, and she really can dance, if you like that sort of stuff.”

  “Uh …” Spraggue said. Dubuque would think it over.

  “I’m Aimee. Spelled French, with two e’s.”

  “You work here?”

  “Sort of.” She licked her bottom lip in a gesture that was a parody of all the come-ons in all the B-movies he’d ever seen.

  “I see,” he said, and his voice matched her licked lips, saying more than his words.

  “I sort of have an arrangement with the management,” she went on. “Want that table?”

  “Sure,” he said bravely, recklessly. “Why not?” A sucker performance. Well and truly hooked.

  Her smile was different this time, tinged with scorn and a certain amount of relief. She led the way to a table not much bigger than an oil drum that was filled with dirty bar glasses and wadded napkins. The music pulsed in his right ear, wailing rock and roll by Tina Turner. Claudine lifted her arms high over her head and shook her heavy breasts.

  “Is Aimee your real name or, uh, your stage name?” Spraggue asked. He moved his chair closer to Aimee’s, leaned forward and spoke in her ear. It was the only way to be heard over the blaring music. He didn’t mind. In the stink of spilled beer and tobacco smoke, her hair smelled unexpectedly sweet.

  She let her eyelashes drop demurely. “You mean do I, uh …” She flicked a nod in Claudine’s direction. “No. I don’t dance, here.” Her voice left open the possibility that she gave private performances, maybe even lessons.

  Spraggue let his eyes slide down the V of her shiny red blouse. It was cut deep both front and back and only good posture seemed to keep the sleeves on her shoulders. There was a tracing of white lace ornamenting the curve of her breasts. A camisole, probably. Too much action when she walked for a bra.

  He said, a little husky-voiced, “You could dance in better places than this.” By this time Dubuque would be moist-palmed and breathing hard. “With your looks, I mean,” he stammered on, “uh, if you’ve got the moves.” He felt his face redden as he spoke. Actor’s tricks.

  “You’re cute,” she said, squeezing his hand and smiling with bored eyes. “Aimee’s my real true name. A good Cajun name. Right from the bayou to New Orleans.” She pronounced it “N’Awlins.”

  Champagne came, New York State at Dom Perignon prices. Hick champagne and squat flat glasses. They clicked glasses before drinking.

  “Uh, you work here long?” Spraggue shouted in her ear, when the silent eyeplay had gone on long enough. Her knee made contact with his right leg. She leaned closer as he spoke to her. Definitely a camisole.

  She had the good sense to look offended at his question. “Hell, no,” she said. “I’m here part-time, helping out a friend. I’m a student, really. I take classes at Tulane.”<
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  Flowers hadn’t mentioned that. Spraggue wondered if it was truth or fantasy. Made up to raise the price, maybe. To go with the unexpected vulnerability of those wide eyes, so at odds with her classic hooker ploys.

  “In dance?” he asked.

  “Anthropology,” she said abruptly, shutting down that avenue of discussion. “Now tell me about you. You haven’t even told me your name and you know all about me.” Her face settled into a frozen mask of rapt attention. Her eyes died. Time for the John to talk about himself. Tune out.

  Without thinking, he gave his understudy’s name at the Harvard Rep. “Jonah Turner, from, uh, Dubuque. Plumbing supplies.” Spraggue realized that he’d been doing Jonah all along. The flat Midwestern accent. The earnest, embarrassed blushes. Dubuque, that’s where Jonah hailed from. Plumbing supplies—with better sense that’s what Jonah would have gone into.

  “And you’re here for a convention,” Aimee said, pressing closer.

  “How’d you guess?”

  “You look like a businessman.”

  Spraggue swallowed the blow to his self-esteem. “Your last name as pretty as your first, Aimee?” He’d better start getting some information out of her and stop putting himself into Jonah Turner’s character, because Jonah Turner would have just tried to get the girl out of there fast, back to some hotel. He wouldn’t have worried about the fact that she was young enough to be his daughter, and probably underage.

  “Aimee Fontenot,” she said.

  “And that’s your real name?” He made it sound as if he knew she was putting him on.

  “A lot of the, uh, dancers, here don’t go by their real names. You know, in case Momma or Daddy find out. Me, I don’t care. I’d use my own name even if I stripped.”

  “You that proud of it? Or you want to hurt somebody?” The comment was out of character for Jonah Turner. Spraggue hoped she’d drunk enough not to notice.

  “Nobody left to hurt,” she muttered. “Come on. Drink up. Champagne’s getting warm.” She touched her glass to her lips, but barely sipped at it. He didn’t blame her.

  “You gotta boyfriend, or a husband, or something?” Spraggue said, draining his glass and looking around warily. Dubuque was panicking a little.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “What you said. About nobody left to hurt. I mean if you were using your husband’s name, like, to, uh, dance under, I bet it would piss him off good. And I don’t want to—”

  “Relax,” she said. “No husband.”

  “Than who’s not left to hurt?”

  He waited for the “none of your business” his query deserved. But he didn’t get it.

  “My old man, my father, died.”

  “Hey, I’m sorry,” Spraggue said, taking her hand and giving her that special, sincere actor-look that Jonah did so well. On stage it wasn’t bad. In real life, it always made him want to puke.

  “You don’t have to be.” She started to shake off his hand, but then she must have remembered her job. She ran her fingers lightly over his palm.

  “My dad died this past fall,” Spraggue lied. “I know just how you feel.” His parents had died in a fiery car crash two days after he’d turned fourteen. It had taken the medical examiner almost a week to identify the bodies.

  “No way,” Aimee said, turning her eyes toward the stage. “My papa and me, we had a real special relationship. I hated his guts.” She was looking at the stage, but she was seeing something else.

  “Hey, you don’t want to say a thing like that,” Spraggue said, releasing her hand as if it had given off a surge of electricity.

  “Drink up,” she said. “Not everybody’s dad is as nice as your daddy was. My papa was a louse. He got what he deserved.”

  “He die badly?” Spraggue asked. “Cancer?”

  The applause, shouts, and jeers hit a crescendo. Claudine’s routine ended with a clash of cymbals. The stage lights dimmed.

  “They’ll take a five-minute break and then Annette’ll come on,” Aimee said. “She’ll heat the place up, I guarantee. Unless you’re warm enough already?” She reminded him of an actress doing the three-hundredth performance of the same role.

  Jonah Turner would have stared down that blouse, said he was plenty hot enough and why didn’t they go back to his hotel for awhile? Or better still, her place, since some of his co-conventioneers might lack discretion once they were back home.

  Spraggue wondered if he’d get more information out of her in bed. Or forget all about information. Or get picked up for soliciting an underage hooker.

  Aimee stared at him from beneath her full dark eyelashes. Spraggue took a deep breath and decided he’d better stay put.

  “You know, I just read about some guy named Fontenot in the newspapers,” he said.

  One of her high black heels started tapping the floorboards. Her knee rubbed against Spraggue’s leg, but the rhythm was angry, not seductive.

  “I remember,” Spraggue said. “The guy who got killed at that restaurant thing. You read about that?”

  “I don’t read the papers. Nothing but bad news.”

  “That’s a good idea. Some of the news is real upsetting. Like this guy getting stabbed. I don’t know why it bothered me. Maybe because I was hoping to eat at his restaurant. Maybe because he was killed on Thursday night. You know how you sometimes remember exactly what you were doing on the day somebody died?”

  “No,” she said bluntly.

  He hoped she was still listening. He got the feeling that something deep inside her had turned completely off, that she would smile and nod no matter what he said.

  He’d planned to mention the day Kennedy was shot as an example, but realized he was talking to a girl who probably hadn’t been born then.

  “Were you working here Thursday night?” he asked. “Or do you have a class Thursdays?”

  She rested her chin on her hand and shook her head slowly. “Shit,” she said finally. “I shoulda known. Momma described you to me real good. You’re the man from that awful newspaper.”

  “No,” Spraggue said. “I’m no journalist.”

  “She said you were from the Star. How can you work for that shit-pile paper?”

  He thought it was a great comment coming from a woman typecast to be asked that deathless question, “What’s a nice girl like you?” et cetera. He opened his wallet and displayed his P.I. photostat.

  “Oh,” she said. “I see. This must have something to do with my dear daddy’s untimely death.” Her tight mouth and sarcastic tone didn’t express loving filial sentiment.

  “It does.”

  “Well, get lost. Dear old daddy didn’t have a lot of time for me when he was alive, and I haven’t got a lot of time for him now that he’s dead.”

  “I’m impressed,” Spraggue said. “Too bad your old man isn’t around to listen in.”

  “He was never around when I wanted him. I didn’t even know I had a daddy until I was practically grown up.”

  “Look,” Spraggue said in a conciliatory tone, “I’m sure it was hard. I’d like to hear about it.”

  “It’s a bore. My shrink says if he’d been home when I was really little, he wouldn’t have—he might have—he would have treated me more like a daughter.”

  “And less like a …?” Spraggue prompted.

  “Who are you working for? Do you have a client or are you trying to hook up to one? Because neither me or my momma is going to pay you one red cent to avenge old Joe.”

  “I’ve got a client.”

  “Who?”

  “The woman who’s in jail for killing your father.”

  “Yeah?”

  “She didn’t do it.”

  “Too bad.”

  “What?”

  “I’d be a lot more sympathetic if she had.”

  The music revved up, louder than before. Hooting catcalls were drowned out by shrieking brass as a Chinese woman clad in a silky, brief kimono and spiky heels tottered out to center stage.

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sp; “Maybe we could talk about this someplace else,” Spraggue shouted over the cacophony.

  “I’m sure we could,” she said with a sweet smile. “For a price.” She waved the check at him, and waited for him to put enough cash on the table to cover the tab. Then she daintily lifted two fingers to her mouth and let go with a piercing whistle. A minute earlier it wouldn’t have been heard, but now it carried easily over a drumroll.

  Spraggue never did get to see Annette dance.

  The two lumbering bouncers knew the signal well. They lifted him out of his chair.

  “I get the idea,” Spraggue said.

  Two hundred pounds of muscle latched onto each of his arms.

  “Hey,” he said. “I can walk.”

  They heaved him out the front door. He missed hitting a Lucky Dog hot dog vendor by a good inch, then staggered into a crowd of Bourbon Street drunks. Half of them cursed; half of them didn’t even notice.

  TEN

  The door to the suite swung open before Spraggue could finish fishing the key out of his pocket. Pierce bobbed his head in formal greeting, then winked to undermine the formality. The spine of the Spraggue mansion staff since time immemorial, Pierce had streaks of gray icing his shiny black hair, and a hairline that was rapidly retreating from shaggy eyebrows. Tall and spare, almost grim, he had the underappreciated ability to fade into the background. Pierce rarely called Spraggue by name anymore. He thought “Michael” too familiar, in spite of Spraggue’s insistence, and sometimes fell back on the “Master Mike” of twenty years ago.

  “Your aunt is—” Pierce began, taking no apparent notice of Spraggue’s rumpled appearance.

  “Darling,” Mary’s voice fluted through the archway. “Do join us.”

  “Company?” Spraggue murmured.

  “Denise Michel,” Pierce whispered. “The cookbook lady. Formidable! And a friend of hers.” Pierce hesitated a second before choosing the word “friend,” but his face, as usual, gave nothing away.

  So much for a long hot bath laced with the baking soda he’d picked up at the all-night drugstore. Soaks the stiffness right out, a stage-fighting instructor had once enthused while discussing cures for muscles stretched in pursuit of the perfect fencing-match riposte. Not panaceas for barroom brawls. Spraggue shrugged, and then regretted the movement. The bouncers had been brusque and professional. No arguments brooked, no bones broken. His left shoulder protested when he tossed his jacket on the sofa.