Love Bites (17 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

I’d said to myself it was fine that Maral was fooling around with spells to get rid of DeWayne Carter. I hadn’t given him any thought, and she obviously wanted him gone. But discovering that tortured candle in Thomas’s bathroom started me wondering exactly what she was doing and if she was putting herself in danger. Hoodoo isn’t something to be toyed with. It’s not a religion like voodoo, but it’s a pretty powerful African-American folk practice that’s been around since the early nineteenth century. Very popular in Louisiana. Folks there consult a “two-headed doctor” or “conjure” as often as they go to a clinic, especially if they need help with something penicillin won’t treat, like falling in love or winning at cards. Rootworkers do big business around the floating casinos.

I learned about hoodoo when I was writing the script for
Mojo Working
. I rented an apartment in the Pontalba on Jackson Square and lived in the French Quarter for a month, soaking up the culture, meeting the local practitioners. One rootworker would mention another in a neighboring parish, and by the time I had the story fleshed out, I’d been through most of south Louisiana. That was before I met Maral, but it gave me a pretty good idea what Bayou Go Down must be like.

And a pretty good idea of what hoodoo can do.

I didn’t want Maral bringing any evil on herself because she didn’t understand which spells to use or how to use them. I needed to find out more about what exactly she was doing.

I called Mother Soriya.

Mother Soriya had been my technical adviser on
Mojo Working
. Her Web site says she’s available twenty-four hours a day for spiritual advisement. “Divination and Hoodoo Roots.” All I needed was a little information. She said she could see me right away.

Her real name is Sally Daniels. She was raised in South Carolina, the daughter of a Southern Baptist father and a Catholic mother. Sally’s mother, Emma, believed more in rootworkers than she did the church, and when she finally got fed up with the church folk calling her daughter a bastard (Emma hadn’t married in a Catholic service), she left and started on a spiritual quest, taking Sally with her as she tried one religion after another. Sally ended up in Haight-Ashbury in the early sixties, a little older than everyone else but happy to be dropping acid and passing out flowers. When she came out of her hippie phase, she was Mother Soriya, a
serviteur
of the loa, practicing voudon gnosticism. She knows herbs and rootwork, the tarot, and African diasporic religions. And computers. Her Web site is SoriyaSpells.com. You can buy just about everything you need there to wreak havoc on your ex-lover, without ever leaving your desk.

“Hello, dearie,” she said, unlatching the screen door to let me in. “I’ve been expecting you.”

“You have?” She had on a short silk lavender kimono with an orange obi. A lime green beret perched precariously on her gray hair. She was barefoot, her ancient toes gnarled over each other like a tree trunk pushing out of the ground. Black mascara smudged under her eyes. She didn’t look as though she’d been expecting anyone.

“Oh yes, my dear. The cards never lie. How are you? Before I forget, I loved your last movie. That fantasy sex scene was to die for. Although I thought the actor was a little stiff. I mean, he needed to be stiff, but still, he was a little stiff playing stiff. You really should have used Nick Stahl.”

Everybody’s a critic. Soriya’s seventy-five years old if she’s a day, and all she ever talks about is sex.

She went on. “He should have had a Texas toothpick with him on the set. That would have done the trick.”

“A Texas toothpick?”

“A coon dong. You know . . . a raccoon penis bone. Does wonders in the romance department.”

I’m wrong. She talks about hoodoo and sex. Well, that’s what I came to find out about, the hoodoo, at least.

She motioned me into her living room, and I stepped onto the set of a bad sixties drug movie. Every inch of wall space was covered with framed mandalas. Oils, acrylics, and watercolors. Swirling circles of color. A couple were printed on fabric; one was a batik. Seeing so many of them together that way was like getting bonked on the head in a Tweety Bird cartoon, with pinwheels spinning around.

There wasn’t an inch of living space, either. Furniture everywhere. Or if not furniture, then boxes and papers and books and plants. I counted three sofas, a daybed, a wicker chaise, and two overstuffed club chairs. She even had beanbags on the floor. Every lamp shade in the room had things hanging from it—necklaces, scarves, a handbag, a dream catcher, a pair of well-worn pink ballet slippers. One Victorian shade was strung with Christmas ornaments. And not a fire extinguisher in sight.

Along three walls of the room, about waist high, was a makeshift worktable. Plywood sheets resting on cinder blocks. That’s where Soriya had two computers, a printer, and a fax machine. Next to them was a dented sterling tea caddy on a tarnished tray, jars of dried herbs, and a ten-pound bag of kitty litter. Nestled inside the cinder blocks were stacks of brightly labeled boxes that I recognized from my research: John the Conquerer Root, Hot Foot Powder, Black Cat Sachet, Fear Not to Walk Over Evil Powder, Uncrossing Bath Crystals, Goofer Dust.

I know what goofer dust is. We’d used it to torture one of the characters in
Mojo Working
. The heroine sprinkles goofer dust across the path where she knows one of the killers has to walk. He steps in it, his legs swell up, turn greenish black, start splitting apart, and finally explode. Special effects had a great time with the gag. Real goofer dust is made up of powdered sulphur, graveyard dirt, salt, ground snake’s head or lizard or scorpion, red and black pepper, mullein or sage, powdered snails, and anvil droppings. The word comes from
kufwa,
the Kikongo word for “to die.” I don’t remember what the prop department used, colored sand most likely, but I always loved the heroine’s line “He got goofered good.” It became a catchphrase for the whole shoot.

“I need your help, Soriya,” I said, moving a cactus off the wicker chaise so I could sit down. The other sofas were scattered with drying sticks and herbs. As soon as I sat down, a mangy gray cat landed in my lap. He didn’t recognize my scent. Animals never know what to make of my kind. He scrambled to the other end of the chaise, hissed at me, and jumped down.

“Oh, Conrad,” Soriya said, “don’t be rude.”

“I’m worried about a friend of mine,” I said, ignoring the cat, who was now staring at me from the corner. “I think she’s fooling around with magick, and I’m not so sure she knows what she’s doing.”

“Oh, of course, I’ll bet I saw her in the cards. Is she young? Red-haired?”

“Yes. What did you see?”

“Not much more than that. Not about her, at least. Except that she’s important to you. But you, Ovsanna, you’ve got some danger around you. I pulled three of the major arcana: Death, the Moon, and the Tower. Transformations taking place around you. Nasty, nasty things. A lot of darkness. Maybe I should do an angel healing on you, send you home with some protection.”

“I can take care of myself, Soriya. Thank you for offering.”

“Are you sure? I did one for Bill when the House was trying to oust him.”

I smiled. “I own the studio, Soriya, I don’t think I’m in danger of losing my job.”

“Of course. Excuse me a minute, I’ve got something cooking on the stove.”

I didn’t have a lot of time; I needed to get back to the office. I followed her into the kitchen. No mandalas in this room, but a silkscreen I recognized from the conjure shops in New Orleans. JFK, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy in black and white on a yellow background.

The kitchen was as crammed as the living room, only instead of papers and books and boxes, there were empty bottles and jars and margarine tubs. It smelled foul. The stench was coming from whatever was cooking in the spaghetti pot. The fetid smell of a dead rat decaying in the wall.

“Sorry about the smell, dear, I’m boiling cat bones.”

“To eat?” I knew there was a reason I trusted this woman.

“No, no. Well, not really. They’re for a client I have coming this evening. She’ll have to try each of them under her tongue until we find the one that makes her essence disappear. Then, I’ll use that one for the reconciliation spell she wants. I boil them till the meat falls off, then I add a little of this and a little of that. White seeds and willow wood. It’s like chewing on rabbit bones, I suppose. Some of the clients have a hard time—Bobby Brown did a lot of gagging and spitting—but, believe me, they’re clean. I strain them real good. And I don’t kill the cat. I never do. I just wait until they die peacefully and then I freeze the carcasses. It works just as well as boiling them alive and you don’t have to listen to the screeching. This one here was Conrad’s aunt. I’ve had her in the freezer for months.” She scooped a pile of bones out of the cauldron with a strainer and held them over the sink to drain.

“Soriya, my friend had a devil pod hidden in her room. She’s been burning candles that smell like motor oil and taking baths in the middle of the night. I can hear her chanting. And this morning, she buried something in a cemetery—part of a burned candle in the shape of a man. I don’t think it was the first time she’s gone to a graveyard to do something.”

“Can you hear the words she’s saying?”

“No. When she first started, I thought she was praying. I didn’t want to pry. I think she’s trying to get rid of someone she hired to work for us. She wants him gone, but she’s afraid to fire him because she doesn’t know what he’ll do. She’s worried he’ll retaliate by hurting her brother. He already got him into drugs.”

“Has she worked with magick before?”

“No. Not that I know of, and I know her very well. But her grandmother has the gift of sight; she may have learned something from her. And I just noticed she’s got one of the Harry Middleton Hyatt books in her office. I’ve never known her to do anything like this before. I can’t believe she knows what she’s doing.”

“Those books are expensive, Ovsanna. Hundreds of dollars for the later volumes and several thousand for the earlier ones. She may not know what she’s doing, but she’s serious about it.”

“Well, what’s it for? Why is she burying a broken candle in a cemetery?”

“I’m not going to be able to tell you for certain, my dear. We use candles in so many spells. Divorce candles, offertory candles, figural candles. Tail-up black cat candles. She could be trying to get laid or trying to lose weight. Burying the candle in the cemetery, though, she could definitely be trying to send someone away. And the devil pod, well, that tells me she at least knows there’s a danger in what she’s doing. The devil pod will repel any evil directed back at her by the person she’s tricking. The same with the baths. If she’s doing an enemy trick, she could be cleansing herself for protection against retribution.” She laid out the cat bones on a linen napkin to dry. “What you’re going to have to do, Ovsanna, if you don’t want to ask her directly—and I don’t recommend that; if she’s hoodooing someone, she’s not going to want you to know—is to look for her mojo hand and then call me and tell me what’s in it. I wouldn’t do this for anyone else, but I can feel you’re worried about her and I didn’t like what I saw in the cards. There’s danger around you both, and she could be bringing it on with her spells. Especially if she doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

“And if you know what’s in her mojo bag, you’ll be able to tell what spells she’s using?”

“That’s right, my dear. And then maybe we can help her out. There are lots of ways to get rid of someone you don’t want around anymore.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

I’d told Ovsanna I’d meet her in Silver Lake around eight thirty, in time to stakeout The Lair before Smooch’s honey got there. That left me all afternoon to work on the identity of the dead girl. I reached Tom Atkins on his cell phone, hoping he was at the Sportsmen’s shooting the shit with Ritchie Wollensky. He wasn’t. He was in his trailer on the set, about to film a scene. He was pretty sure Ritchie was spending the day at Santa Anita again. He told me where to look for him.

My mother took me to Santa Anita when I was seven years old. She had two girlfriends with kids my age, and the three moms loved to gamble, so they took us with them and taught us how to bet. I won twenty dollars on a trifecta and decided the track was better than Disneyland.

It’s a beautiful track, built in 1934, and it’s still got its original art deco façade. They shut it down in 1942 so the government could use it as an internment camp for Japanese-Americans—not our shining hour—and then in the sixties renovated the grandstand so that now it seats twenty-six thousand people. I think all of them were at the betting booth when I got there.

I scanned the crowd for fifteen minutes before I found Ritchie. He was standing in a betting line, a handful of twenties clenched in his fist, nuzzling the breasts of the tall drink of water standing next to him. He didn’t seem that surprised to see me.

“Hey, Officer, hey, how ya doin’? You gonna bet? Let me help ya. I can help ya, I’m tellin’ ya. I’m real good at this. I been doin’ it for years. Ain’t I, honey?” He looked up at the woman who was draped over him like a serape.

Her name was Nancy, he said, and she was his little gal pal. Except nothing about her was little. She had the biggest feet I’ve ever seen on a woman, and arms like a gorilla. Straight hair, more gray than brown, cut like Mary Martin’s in
Peter Pan
. And a glass eye. At least, I think it was glass; it was hard to see through her blue-framed bifocals. But her left eye was slightly larger than her right and it didn’t track, so I figured it was glass. She had an eighteen-ounce plastic beer cup in her hand, almost empty. From the way she was hanging on to Ritchie, it must have been her third or fourth.

“Tommy said you was lookin’ for me.” Ritchie hadn’t taken a breath since I got there. “Ya like the horses, huh? Well, I’m the man to help ya. Who do ya like in the fourth? Ah man, you ain’t even got a program. Nancy, honey, show him what you got.”

“I’m not here to bet, Ritchie. I’m here to ask you some questions.”

Nancy peeled herself off his shoulder and pointed her finger in his face. She was having a little trouble staying upright. “Not for nothing, babycakes, I told you. Didn’t I tell you? You gotta tell this detective here what you know.” She turned to me. “He knows who that gal is, Detective. He just don’t want to get in trouble ’cause a how he knows her. Not for nothing, but I told him, he’s gotta do the right thing. You gotta do the right thing, Ritchie. You want me to keep sleepin’ with you, you gotta.”

Ritchie looked like he was going to puke. “Aw man, Nancy. Can’t you keep your mouth shut? Look, Detective . . . I . . . I . . .”

We’d gotten to the front of the line while Ritchie was bouncing around. The teller was giving him a dirty look. “I gotta make my bet, you guys, you know? I know what I’m doin’ here and you’re gettin’ me all distracted. Just give me a minute, will ya?”

“I’ll tell you what, Ritchie,” I said, handing him a twenty, “you put this where you think it’ll do the most good and then you start talking to me. Otherwise, I’m going to have to take you back to Beverly Hills and you’re going to miss the rest of the action. You don’t want that, do you?”

Ritchie made his bet and we moved over to watch the race. His horse was a California stallion named Saved by Julie, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t come in by two lengths. What a beauty. Ritchie walked back from the teller with four hundred dollars and tried to give me my share. I took twenty from him, bought us all sausage and peppers—knowing I’d regret it later—and coaxed the story out of him.

“So what’s the deal, Ritchie?” I said, wiping red sauce off my chin. “You knew the dead girl, right?”

“Hey, look, man, I didn’t do nothin’ wrong. I mean, I didn’t do nothin’ havin’ to do with her bein’ dead, you know what I mean? I mean, I might
know
somethin’ about her, you know, but I don’t know nothin’ about her gettin’ dead or anything. I mean, man, I wasn’t anywhere around. You can ask Nancy. I don’t remember where I was, but I wasn’t around, I know that.”

“Ritchie, it’s cool. Calm down. I just want to know who the girl is. If I’m going to figure out who killed her, I need to know who she was. I need a name.”

“Oh, her name. Well, I didn’t know her
real
name, you know. I mean, I really didn’t know her too good at all. And she coulda been usin’ a fake name.”

“Why would she do that?”

“Well, you know how it is with these ladies. I mean, I don’t think she had a green card or anything. She wasn’t doin’ anything where they’d be lookin’ her up on E-Verify, you know, to see if they should hire her.”

“What was she doing, Ritchie? Where was she from, and what was her name? At least, what was the name she gave you? That’s all I need to know.”

“For Christ’s sake, Ritchie,” said Nancy, “tell the detective who she is.” She turned to me. “Not for nothin’, Detective, but he’s scared to death he’s gonna get in trouble.” And back to Ritchie: “Babycakes, you can be a hero. I know you can. Just tell him what you know. He bought you sausage and peppers, he ain’t gonna arrest you.”

“She’s right, Ritchie. I’m not interested in anything but the girl.”

“Okay, man, okay. Well, I think she was from Colombia. You know . . . the country, not the school. She said that once. And the name she told me was Graciella de la Garza. Like her nickname was Gracie, you know? Man, she was a good-lookin’ woman.”

“And how did you meet her? What did she do for a living?”

Ritchie looked at Nancy. She elbowed him in the ribs.

“All right! All right! She was dealin’,” he said.

“Drugs?”

“Yeah.”

“How’d you hook up with her? Do you know where she lived?”

“Nah. She had a cell phone. I called her a couple of times and she’d meet me here at the track. Shit, man, it’s a shame what happened to her. She had some really high-quality stuff.”