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 –
