Ivory and the Horn (23 page)

Angel wasn’t feeling particularly angelic by the time three
A.M
. rolled around that night. She sat wearily in her office, gratefully nursing a mug of coffee liberally spiked with a shot of whiskey, which Jilly had handed to her when she walked in the door.

“I appreciate your looking after the place while I was at the precinct,” she said.

“It wasn’t a problem,” Jilly told her. “No one showed up.”

Angel nodded. Word on the street moved fast. If the Grasso Street Angel was at the precinct,
no one
was going to keep his appointment and take the chance of running into one of the precinct bulls. The only one of her missed appointments that worried her was Patch. She’d spent weeks trying to convince him at least to look into the sponsorship program she administered, only to have this happen when she’d finally gotten him to agree. Patch was so frail now that she didn’t think the boy would survive another beating at the hands of his pimp.

“So how’d it go?” Jilly asked.

It took Angel a moment to focus on what she’d been asked. She took a sip of her coffee, relaxing as the warmth from the whiskey reached her stomach.

“We were lucky,” she said. “It was Lou’s shift. He made sure they went easy on Robbie when they took our statements. They’ve got an APB out on Macaulay.”

“Robbie. He’s the skinny little peacenik that looks like a skinhead?”

Angel smiled. “That’s one way of putting it. There’s no way he could have killed Everett.”

“How
did
Everett die?”

“He was stabbed to death—a half-dozen times at least.”

Jilly shivered. “They didn’t find the knife?”

“They didn’t find the weapon and—I find this really odd—they didn’t find Everett’s boots either. Robbie says Macaulay took them so that Everett’s ghost wouldn’t be able to come after anyone.” She shook her head. “I guess they just make them up when they haven’t got anything better to do.”

“Actually, it’s a fairly old belief,” Jilly said.

Angel took another sip of her whiskey-laced coffee to fortify herself against what was to come. For all her fine traits, and her unquestionable gifts as an artist, Jilly had a head filled with what could only charitably be called whimsy. Probably it was
because
she was an artist and had such a fertile imagination, Angel had eventually decided. Still, whatever the source, Jilly was ready to espouse the oddest theories at the drop of a hat, everything from Victorian-styled fairies living in refuse dumps to Bigfoot wandering through the Tombs.

Angel had learned long ago that arguing against them was a fruitless endeavor, but sometimes she couldn’t help herself.

“Old,” she said, “and true as well, I suppose.”

“It’s possible,” Jilly said, plainly oblivious to Angel’s lack of belief. “I mean, there’s a whole literature of superstition surrounding footwear. The one you’re talking about dates back hundreds of years and is based on the idea that shoes were thought to be connected with the life essence, the soul, of the person to whom they belonged. The shoes of murdered people were often buried separately to prevent hauntings. And sorcerers were known to try to persuade women to give them their left shoes. If the woman did, the sorcerer would have power over her.”

“Sorcerers?” Angel repeated with a cocked eyebrow.

“Think what you want,” Jilly told her, “but it’s been documented in old witch trials.”

“Really?”

“Well, it’s been documented that they were accused of it,” Jilly admitted.

Which wasn’t quite the same thing as being true, Angel thought, but she kept the comment to herself.

Jilly put her feet up on a corner of Angel’s desk and started to pick at the paint that freckled her fingernails. There always were smudges of paint on her clothes, or in her tangled hair. Jilly looked up to find Angel watching her work at the paint and shrugged unselfconsciously, a smile waking sparks of humor in her pale blue eyes that made them seem as electric as sapphires.

“So what’re you going to do?” Jilly asked.

“Do? I’m not going to do anything. I’m a counselor, not a cop.”

“But you could find Macaulay way quicker than the police could.”

Angel nodded in agreement. “But what I do is based on trust—you know that. If I found Macaulay and turned him over to the police, even though it’s just for questioning, who’s going to trust me?”

“I guess.”

“What I am going to do is have another talk with Robbie,” Angel said. “He’s taken all of this very badly.”

“He actually liked Everett?”

Angel shook her head. “I don’t think anyone liked Everett. I think it’s got to do with finding the body. He’s probably never seen a dead man before. I have, and I’m still feeling a little queasy.”

She didn’t mention that Robbie had seemed to be hiding something. That was Robbie’s business, and even if he did share it with her, it would still be up to him who could know about it and who could not. She just prayed that he hadn’t been any more involved in Everett’s death than having stumbled upon the body.

“Actually,” she said after a moment’s hesitation, “there was another weird thing that happened tonight.”

Although she knew she’d regret it, because it was putting a foot into the strange world Jilly inhabited, where fact mixed equally with fantasy, she told Jilly about her dream. As Angel had expected, Jilly accepted what she was told as though it were an everyday occurrence.

“Has this ever happened to you before?” she asked.

Angel shook her head. “And I hope it never happens again. It’s a really creepy feeling.”

Jilly seemed to be only half-listening to her. Her eyes had narrowed thoughtfully. Chewing at her lower lip, she cocked her head and studied the ceiling. Angel didn’t know what Jilly saw up there, but she doubted it was the cracked plaster that anybody else would see.

“I wonder what he wanted from you,” Jilly finally said. Her gaze dropped and focused on Angel’s. “There has to be a reason he sent his spirit to you.”

Angel shook her head. “Haven’t you ever dreamed that someone you know died?”

“Well, sure. But what’s that—”

“And did they turn out to be dead when you woke?”

“No, but—”

“Coincidence,” Angel said. “That’s all it was. Plain and simple coincidence.”

Jilly looked as though she was ready to argue the point, but then she simply shrugged.

“Okay,” she said, swinging her feet down from the desk. “But don’t say you weren’t warned when Everett’s spirit comes back to haunt you again. He wants something from you and the thing with ghosts is they can be patient forever. He’ll keep coming back until you figure out what he wants you to do for him and you do it.”

“Of course. Why didn’t I think of that?”

“I’m serious, Angel.”

Angel smiled. “I’ll remember.”

“I just bet you will,” Jilly said, returning her smile. She stood up. “Well, I’ve got to run. I was in the middle of a new canvas when you called.”

Angel rose to her feet as well. “Thanks for filling in.”

“Like I said, it was no problem. The place was dead.” Jilly grimaced as the word came out of her mouth. “Sorry about that. But at least a building doesn’t have shoes to lose, right?”

After Jilly left, Angel returned to her desk with another spiked coffee. She stared out the window at Grasso Street where the first touch of dawn was turning the shadows to grey, unable to get Everett’s stockinged feet out of her mind. Superimposed over it was an image of Everett in the rain, holding out a shadowed bundle towards her.

One real, one from a dream. Neither made sense, but at least the dream wasn’t supposed to. When it came to Everett’s boots, though…

She disliked the idea of someone believing superstitions almost as much as she did the superstitions themselves. Taking a dead man’s shoes so he wouldn’t come back seeking revenge. It was so patently ludicrous.

But Macaulay had believed enough to take them.

Angel considered Jim Macaulay. At nineteen, he was positively ancient compared to the street kids such as Robbie whose company he kept, though he certainly didn’t look it. His cherubic features made him seem much younger. He’d been in and out of foster homes and juvie hall since he was seven, but the experiences had done little to curb his minor criminal ways, or his good humor. Macaulay always had a smile, even when he was being arrested.

Was he good for Everett’s murder? Nothing in Macau-

lay’s record pointed to it. His crimes were always nonviolent: B&Es, minor drug dealing, trafficking in stolen goods. Nothing to indicate that he’d suddenly upscaled to murder. And where was the motive? Everett had carried nothing of value on his person—probably never had—and everyone knew it. And while it was true he’d been a royal pain in the ass, the street people just ignored him when he got on a rant.

But then why take the boots?

If Macaulay believed the superstition, why would he be afraid of Everett coming after him unless he
had
killed him?

Too tired to go home, Angel put her head down on the desk and stared out the window. She dozed off, still worrying over the problem.

Nothing has changed in her dream.

The rain continues to mist. Everett approaches her again, no less graceful, while she remains trapped in the weight of her flesh. The need is still there in Everett’s eyes, the mysterious bundle still cradled against his chest as he comes up to her. But this time she finds enough of her voice to question him.

Why is he here in her dream?

“For the children,” he says.

It seems such an odd thing for him to say: Everett, who’s never had a kind word for anyone, so far as Angel knows.

“What do you mean?” she asks him.

But then he tries to hand the bundle to her and she wakes up again.

Angel sat up with a start. She was disoriented for a long moment—as much by her surroundings as from the dream— before she recognized the familiar confines of her office and remembered falling asleep at her desk.

She shook her head and rubbed at her tired eyes. Twice in the same night. She had to do something about these hours, but knew she never would.

The repetition of the dream was harder to set aside. She could almost hear Jilly’s voice, I-told-you-so plain in its tone.

Don’t say you weren’t warned when Everett’s spirit comes back to haunt you again.

But it had been just a dream.

He wants something from you, and the thing with ghosts is they can be patient forever.

A disturbing dream. That shadowed bundle Everett kept trying to hand to her and his enigmatic reply, “For the children.”

He’ll keep coming back until you figure out what it is he wants you to do for him and you do it.

She didn’t need this, Angel thought. She didn’t want to become part of Jilly’s world, where the rules of logic were thrown out the door and nothing made sense anymore. But this dream… and Macaulay taking those damn boots….

She remembered Jilly asking her what she was going to do and what her own reply had been. She still didn’t want to get involved. Her job was helping the kids, not playing cop. But the image of the dream-Everett flashed in her mind, the need in his eyes and what he’d said when she’d asked him why he was there in her dream.

For the children.

Whether she wanted it or not, she realized that she was involved now. Not in any way that made sense, but indiscriminately, by pure blind chance, which seemed even less fair. It certainly wasn’t because she and Everett had been friends. For God’s sake, she’d never even
liked
Everett.

For the children.

Angel sighed. She picked up her mug and looked down at the cold mixture of whiskey and coffee. She started to call Jilly, but hung up before she’d finished dialing the number. She knew what Jilly would say.

Grimacing, she drank what was left in her mug, then left her office in search of an answer.