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.'
21
There was so much to think about, so much to try to make sense of. And the house was calling her, compelling her to return: so many questions to ask it and its secret occupant, so much to learn. But after dropping Deelie back at the Times-Picayune office, Cree knew she had a couple of other priorities.
From a pay phone, she called Paul Fitzpatrick's office to learn the whereabouts of the clinic where Lila should be safely ensconced by now. His secretary patched her through, and the moment she heard his voice Cree realized she'd been hungry to hear it, curious to explore that warmth again.
But his voice was anything but warm. 'She refused to be admitted, Cree. She's at home now. Or maybe she's back at Beauforte House, bouncing off the goddamned walls.'
'What!'
'Look, this isn't easy for me to say. But maybe we were right the first time around – you can't present a patient with two conflicting modes of therapy. She said you believed her, you knew there were ghosts, you'd seen the damned ghost. She even pointed out that your fucking credentials are better than mine! That's pretty hard for me to overcome, Cree – someone validating, endorsing, a patient's delusions – '
'Paul, I told her she should do exactly as you said! I completely supported – '
