Vieux Carré Voodoo (10 page)

He wouldn’t.

There was nothing of interest in the living room. His laptop
sat on a computer desk in the dining area, but it was password locked. The
computer desk drawers were empty, other than a bankbook from the Whitney Bank,
an old-time New Orleans bank. I opened it.

The balance showed $523,000. The account had been opened the
day Levi had moved in here. There had been two withdrawals since then, both for
twenty thousand dollars, two weeks apart.

What on earth did he spend forty thousand dollars on in
the last month?

The clothes? Maybe, but it didn’t seem like there were forty
thousand dollars’ worth of clothes in there. They were expensive, but still.

What the hell is going on?

I put the bankbook back and turned off the lights, locking
the door behind me. A cold blast of wind almost knocked me back against the
door. Shivering, I started down the stairs when I thought I heard something.

I stopped, and listened.

It sounded like it came from the roof.

I went back up to the landing and waited for a few moments.
It was your imagination,
I scolded myself, and headed downstairs.

Once inside my apartment, I headed for the couch and plopped
down. I reached for the half-joint I’d left before going to Tea Dance in the
ashtray and froze with the lighter halfway to my mouth.

Great. I’d left it sitting right there in plain sight with a
New Orleans police detective in my apartment.

“Who are you, Levi Gretsch, and where are you?” I asked out
loud as I blew a plume of smoke toward the ceiling. The money and the
clothes—they didn’t fit in with the image Levi projected. But to be fair, maybe
he wasn’t trying to project an image. I’d made assumptions, based on his age and
what he wore whenever I saw him.

And if you hadn’t invaded his privacy, you wouldn’t know
any different.

As I sat there on the couch, I started feeling overwhelmed.
Okay, some of it was probably the pot intensifying things, but still. A little
over eight hours ago I was riding in the Easter Parade, not a care in the world.
Now my client might be missing, and—

Doc is dead.

I fought the feeling off. There was nothing I could do for
Doc, but Levi was still alive—so what I should be doing was focusing on finding
him. At least, I
hoped
Levi was still alive. It was possible Venus was right—this was the French
Quarter, after all. He could have just wandered off, maybe gone barhopping, or
hooked up with some girl on craigslist. It was also possible he hadn’t pulled
his door completely shut, which was why the latch hadn’t caught. But that
explanation didn’t cover why the gate hadn’t been closed, and it was the gate
that concerned me more than anything else.

Or maybe I was just making too much out of everything. Maybe
Doc’s murder—
oh, sweet Goddess, Doc is dead—
and the similarities
between that murder and the story Levi had told me were playing havoc with my
imagination.

But I couldn’t shake the feeling there was more to Levi’s
disappearance than the simpler explanations.

I reached under the couch and pulled out the box with my
ancient deck of tarot cards. I hardly used them anymore—since the levees failed,
the few times I tried to read them had been utter failures. But I always kept
them under the couch, where I always had, and figured it was worth a shot. I’d
already had two episodes; maybe the Gift was coming back. Nothing ventured,
nothing gained.

I lit the white candles I always kept on the coffee table,
and sat down on the floor and cleared my mind. When I felt peace, I opened the
box and slipped out the deck of cards, wrapped in a white silk scarf for purity.
The deck felt warm and alive in my hands. I clasped them with both hands, closed
my eyes, and offered a prayer to the Goddess. I unwrapped the deck and shuffled.

They felt good in my hands.

I sent my question out into the universe, and laid the cards
out.

An untrustworthy figure from your past will return and
possibly cause problems.

There is danger from the past that must be faced.

A handsome young man is not who he seems.

Pray for a brave heart.

I frowned. Well, that was much clearer than many of the
other readings I’d done, but it still didn’t tell me a whole lot.
An
untrustworthy figure from your past…

My mind went back to that moment on the float as we passed
Oz. Surely—

No, I dismissed that thought immediately. That had been my
imagination, surely. Colin could never come back to New Orleans. He was wanted
for murder.

When we’d first met, Colin had told me he was a cat burglar.
That was just the first of the many lies he’d told me. Frank and I thought he
worked for an international detective agency, the Blackledge Agency, and we had
even thought we worked for them as well. It wasn’t until after Colin had
murdered two people that we found out his real name was Abram Golden, and he not
only didn’t work for the Blackledge Agency, he was actually a paid assassin.
He’d fled the country before getting caught, leaving everything he had behind
him.

It had been hard getting over that, but Frank and I had
managed. There was bitterness and anger, hurt and fury to get past. Time
actually does heal—that isn’t just an annoying platitude. When Hurricane Katrina
slammed into New Orleans and the levees failed, we all got a little perspective
over what’s important and what wasn’t. I’d always had the feeling, though, that
we weren’t done with Colin.

I picked up the cards and put them away, taking another hit
off the joint.
You need to call your mother,
an annoying little voice
reminded me. I emptied my beer and went into the kitchen to get another one. As
I opened the refrigerator door, I noticed the light on my answering machine was
blinking, and the digital 1 was lit up. Wondering if Frank had called back for
some reason, I reached over and hit the Play Message button as I took a swig
from the beer.

“BEEP. Frank, Scott, this is Angela Blackledge. I have a
business proposition for the two of you. Could you please return my call at
030-234-9876? Thank you.”

I almost dropped the beer.

Angela Blackledge. I played the message again, writing the
phone number down on the pad we kept by the phone. It was a foreign number, that
much I knew, but I didn’t know the country code. I picked up the phone, and put
it down.

I swallowed.
How weird that I was just thinking about
Colin, and here’s a message from Angela Blackledge.

When Colin’s true identity had been revealed, Angela
Blackledge had claimed she had no idea who he was—that he didn’t work for her,
never had, and our little agency here in New Orleans was not affiliated with
hers in any way. We’d had no choice but to believe her—neither Frank nor I had
ever spoken to her on the telephone, and Colin had handled all of the business
arrangements. At first, I’d been certain she was lying—but in fairness, I was
still trying to clear Colin in my head at the time. What she’d said had not been
what I’d wanted to hear at the time. What I’d hoped for was an explanation, some
magical
deus ex machina
to come down from the heavens and explain why
Colin had killed two men and kidnapped Frank.

It was very hard to accept that you were in love with a paid
killer.

But still, I hesitated. Maybe, just maybe, I’d sensed she
was going to call—and since she and Colin were so completely linked in my mind,
that put thoughts of him into my head?

And just because the cards were warning me about someone
untrustworthy from my past didn’t mean it was Colin. There were a lot of
untrustworthy people in my past.

But, I reasoned, it had been a long day, and there was no
need to call her back right away. I didn’t owe her anything. I didn’t have to
call her back at all.

I did want to know what she wanted, though.

I sat down in front of my computer and opened the Internet
browser. I pulled up a search engine and typed in
country code 30.
The little wheel spun for a few seconds, and a directory popped up. I stared at
the screen for a moment.
Greece. She was calling from Greece.
The city
code was Athens, apparently; there was a list of the different city area codes
on the page. I pulled up a time zone site. Greece was six hours ahead of New
Orleans. I glanced at the clock in the bottom right corner of my computer
screen. 12:27 a.m., which meant it was 6:27 a.m. in Athens.

What the hell,
I thought,
if it’s too early for
her she doesn’t have to pick up.

I dialed and waited as the phone rang on a scratchy
connection. On the fifth ring, voicemail picked up. It was one of those toneless
voices that come with the service that gives no information other than the
number and to leave a message at the tone. When it beeped, I said, “Ms.
Blackledge, this is Scott Bradley returning your call. Please call me
back—bearing in mind there is a six-hour time difference. It is currently 12:27
a.m. in New Orleans. I will wait up for another hour and a half. If you do not
call within that period, please wait a minimum of eight hours before calling.
Thank you.”

I hung up the phone and took another drink from my beer.
If I’m going to wait up to see if she calls, I should make use of this time a
little better.
I pulled up a search engine and typed in
Benjamin
Garrett
.

There wasn’t much there, mostly links to conference speaking
engagements and articles he’d published in academic journals.

I thought back. I couldn’t remember ever, not once, hearing
him refer to his service days in Vietnam. That wasn’t surprising, I supposed.
Vietnam had been one of those horrible times in history where public opinion was
horribly divided—between those who thought we should be there and those who
thought we shouldn’t. Mom and Dad certainly had strong opinions about our
“imperialistic intervention in Vietnamese affairs.”

I picked up Levi’s grandfather’s letter again and reread it.

“…the actions of three foolish young men in a time of
war are coming home to roost…”

I typed
Vietnam War Atrocities
into the search
engine, and clicked on the first link that came up.

It was an article for a history Web site by a woman doing
her dissertation on the Vietnam War. I started reading. I didn’t really know a
whole lot about the war, other than the brief week we spent on it in U.S.
history in high school, and movies I’d seen. As I read, I grew more and more
horrified.

In 1971, the Army began a four-and-a-half-year
investigation of the alleged torture of prisoners, rape and murder of civilian
Vietnamese women, the mutilation of bodies, murder of civilians, assault, and
dereliction of duty. No one was ever court-martialed; on the contrary, soldiers
under investigation “resigned” from the military during the investigation. The
vast unpopularity of the war at home made it necessary for the Department of
Defense to sweep any alleged American war crimes under the rug. Several American
newspapers did remarkable investigative pieces on these crimes, notably the
Toledo Blade
in 2003.

Had Doc been a war criminal?

But that didn’t make sense to me. If he and his friends had
committed war crimes, someone seeking revenge would certainly want to kill
them—but the ransacking of their homes didn’t fit into the equation. Levi’s
grandfather had been tortured, but Doc hadn’t. The only common denominators
between the two murders were the ransacking and the old photograph.

Unless—

I swallowed.
Unless they tortured Levi’s grandfather to
find out where Doc was hiding.

But they had to be looking for
something
as well.

The question was, what? And the way they’d left Doc’s
apartment, I doubted they’d found whatever it was. The whole place had been
ripped apart, which would have only been necessary if whatever it was they were
looking for had been in the last place they’d looked. What were the odds of
that?

Of course, whenever I was looking for something it was
always
in the last place I looked.

The phone started ringing, startling me out of my thought
processes. “Hello?” I said, picking it up.

“Scotty.” It was my mother, and she seemed short of breath.
My heart sank.
I should have called her and told her about Doc.

“
Hey, Mom,” I croaked out, taking another swallow
of beer to bolster my courage. “I was meaning to call you…”

She cut me off. “Scotty, I need you to come over to the
apartment, right now. I am serious. Now.”

“Mom? Are you okay?” There was something in her tone that
seemed off.

“I can’t discuss this on the telephone, Scotty. You need to
come over. Now.”

I started to protest but she’d hung up. That, too, was
unlike Mom.

I sighed, glancing at the clock. It wasn’t likely Angela
Blackledge was going to call me back anyway, and what else did I have to do? And
it would be better to tell Mom about Doc in person, anyway. She always said she
hated getting bad news over the phone.

But what was wrong? I wondered. The way this night was
going, it could be anything.

I pulled on a pair of shoes and grabbed my keys. I locked
the door behind me and went down the stairs. Millie and Velma’s apartment was
still dark. I made my way down the passage and out the front gate, making sure
it slammed shut behind me. I started walking quickly, turning the corner at
Barracks and heading up the street. It was deserted, which was normal for this
hour on a Sunday night.

I had almost reached the corner at Royal Street when I was
grabbed from behind and slammed against a brick fence, knocking all the breath
out of me. My head hit the bricks, and stars swam in front of my tearing eyes.