Vieux Carré Voodoo (15 page)

“I’ve missed you.” He patted the sofa next to him. “You have
no idea.”

I crossed my arms and leaned against the wall. I shook my
head. “Uh-uh. Not going to work. Tell me about your arm.”

He stood up and stretched. “I was tailing someone when I got
shot. I didn’t see who it was, and I didn’t want to go to the hospital—they
would have had to report it to the police.” He shrugged. “So, I called Mom. If
she didn’t want to help me, I’d have to do something else, but it was worth a
shot. Besides, I wanted to see her.”

“Stop calling her that!” I snapped.
And just how long
HAVE you been in town?
I wanted to ask.
And if you hadn’t been shot,
would you have contacted us?

“Are you going to help me now?” He checked his gun, slipped
on the safety, and slid it back into the holster.

“I told you I’d decide in the morning. Now go.” I yawned. “I
want to get some sleep.”

“I really have missed you and Frank,” he said softly, just
before the door shut.

THE MAGICIAN REVERSED

The use of power for destructive ends

I was completely exhausted.

After locking the door behind Colin—and propping a kitchen
chair under the knob as a secondary precaution—I went into my bathroom and
started the shower. I stripped off my clothes, and removed the gauze from my
neck. I got close to the mirror and tilted my head back. The cut had scabbed
over, and Mom was right—it wasn’t much. Apparently, only the tip of the mugger’s
knife had cut the skin.

But damn, I’d bled like a stuck pig.

I cleaned it again with antiseptic, and climbed into the hot
shower. It felt good on my skin. I relaxed and let the water drum the tension
out of my muscles. The last twelve hours had been an insane roller-coaster
ride—and it didn’t seem like the car would be pulling into the station any time
soon.

Of all times for Frank to be away…

I dismissed that thought as I turned the shower off. I felt
much better, and I was a big boy. Sure, it would be great to have Frank
around—he
was
a trained FBI agent—but he wasn’t. I was on my own to deal with this entire
mess, and I needed to step up and take charge of the situation.

Forget the emotional fall-out from Colin’s reappearance,
and focus on the case,
I told myself as I toweled dry.
Emotion just
clouds your mind and keeps you from thinking clearly. You’ve got a good brain.
Use it. Get some good sleep, and tackle it with a clear mind in the morning.

I climbed into bed and turned off the lamp on my nightstand.
I closed my eyes and felt all my muscles relax.

But my mind wouldn’t shut off. I kept tossing and turning,
and the best I could achieve was that wretched state of half-sleep where your
body is relaxed but your mind is still aware. Every little noise made me jolt
awake. The wind was still whipping around the house. It started raining again, a
steady downpour that usually helped me sleep.

No such luck this night, though.

I debated taking something to help, but finally came down on
the side of
it’s not smart to knock yourself out with a pill.
The last
thing I needed was to be asleep should Levi come back—or anyone else for that
matter.

Finally, at about five in the morning I gave up on sleep and
got out of the bed. I put on a pair of sweatpants and made a pot of coffee.
Bleary-eyed, I put some bread into my toaster. While I was waiting for
everything to be ready, I turned on my computer and got out a new notebook. I
like to keep all of my notes from a case in one notebook, and I always start a
new one with every case. I flipped the cover and stared at the blank page while
my computer started up.

Where to start? After a moment, I wrote down
Why did
they steal the Eye of Kali?

Frank always said understanding the motivation behind a
crime was a great place to start. Once you understood that, other pieces of the
puzzle would start coming together. The motivation had been nagging at me since
Colin first mentioned the theft last night. They were three grunts from Biloxi,
Mississippi. Pleshiwar was a small postage stamp of a country—backward and hard
to get to. How had they known about the Eye of Kali in the first place, let
alone decided to steal it?

Think, Scotty, think.

Okay, the most obvious reason for stealing it was its value.
From everything I could recall about the Vietnam War, Saigon had been a hotbed
of intrigue and corruption during the war. The American-supported government had
been little more than a dictatorship. The black market had thrived. In such an
environment, it wasn’t hard to imagine black marketers from all over the world
flocking there and looting treasures from all over southeast Asia. The majority
of southeast Asians had been very poor. It would be easy to bribe people to look
the other way while treasures were smuggled out of the country. American
soldiers were risking their lives every day for the measly government
paycheck—and were held in contempt by the growing anti-war movement back home.
Under those circumstances, it wasn’t hard to see why even the most idealistic
American GI would look for ways to line his pockets. Most of the soldiers were
from poor or rural backgrounds. It was the children of the middle and upper
classes with their college deferments who were protesting back home, calling
them baby killers and spitting on them when they came home. They were just doing
their patriotic duty as American citizens, and they were reviled for risking
life and limb every day. Even Mom, who thought the Vietnam War was an
abomination, thought the way those who served were treated was a national
disgrace, one of the “worst examples of classism in the history of the country.”

“They served their country and were treated like garbage,”
she’d said once. “So many of them are now mentally disabled, homeless, and
hungry. Our government and people all should be ashamed of ourselves.”

Disillusionment was a powerful motivator.

But that didn’t answer the question of how three soldiers
from Biloxi planned on disposing of the jewel once they had it. I chewed on the
end of my pen. That was the key. I doubted they would have committed the crime
without knowing how to turn the jewel into cash. Colin had said Marty Gretsch
had paid cash for his farm when he got back from the war, and Doc had bought a
number of properties in the Quarter. They’d come back from the war a lot richer
than they’d been when they’d gone over there—but they still had the jewel. Had
they double-crossed the buyer, taken the money and not delivered?

That was also a powerful motive for killing them.

But why did it take forty years to track them down? Any
private eye worth his salt would have been able to find Marty and Doc. Even with
the name changes, there had to be a paper trail—the Veterans Administration and
social security records, just for two. Doc had gone back to school and finished
his PhD at LSU. He’d had to transfer his credits from Ole Miss in order to do
that. Marty had married and had a family.

I leaned back in my chair and tapped my pen against the
notebook. If killers were looking for you, why would you have a family to put at
risk? Who would do that?

Doc had never seemed like someone hiding something, or in
fear of his life. On the contrary, he was a pretty public person in his field.
He had written highly acclaimed books, articles, and academic criticism, and had
traveled all over the country speaking at conferences. He had been profiled
several times in the local press. Someone trying to keep a low profile wouldn’t
have done any of that. Every appearance, every time his picture was in the paper
he was risking being discovered.

Obviously, Doc wasn’t too afraid of being found out—which
meant he was certain no one was looking for him.

There was something there, but it kept dancing away from my
consciousness into the darker, inaccessible parts of my brain.

Something must have happened recently—something that made
the jewel more desirable and brought all of this bubbling back to the surface.

What could that be? What had set all of this back in motion
again after being dormant for forty years?

There was more going on than just looking for the jewel.

But I also couldn’t rule out the jewel’s value. Any number
of wealthy collectors had no scruples about buying something stolen and hiding
it away from the world. Someone had undoubtedly hired these guys to steal it—had
either paid them some money up front or paid them in full but never received the
stone. That was the only possible explanation for the money Doc and Marty came
back from Vietnam with—but at the same time, why had that person never tried to
hunt them down?

It was also possible they actually had delivered the jewel
to the buyer.

Assuming Colin was telling the truth, the man I knew as Levi
Gretsch was not who he’d said he was. He was the piece that didn’t fit into my
scenario. I wrote down
Who is Levi Gretsch?

Okay, that was easy enough to find out. I switched on the
computer and pulled up a browser. There were any number of Web sites accessible
to private eyes I could use to find out. I went to my bookmarks, and clicked on
the first one there. I logged in, and once the welcome screen popped up, I typed
Levi Gretsch + Ohio
into the search engine.

I got up and refilled my coffee cup and put some more bread
in the toaster. As I waited for it to pop up, I remembered that Levi had tied up
Millie and Velma because he’d been caught in my apartment—and had stolen their
spare set of keys.

I’d been so fried last night I’d forgotten about that. I’d
meant to look around and see if anything was missing.

I made a quick round of the apartment. If Levi had searched
my apartment, he was good. I couldn’t tell if anything had been moved, and
nothing seemed to be missing from anywhere, either.

I went back to the computer. The site had found five Levi
Gretsches. Colin hadn’t been lying. Not one of them was the right age for the
guy who’d hired me. And there was one who was twelve years old, currently living
in Carthage, Ohio.

Okay, so he was telling the truth about that
—
but
that doesn’t mean I can trust him.

I heard the toaster pop up.

I walked back into the kitchen and munched my toast. I
thought about the timeline. I’d left for the parade around two thirty. Levi had
tied up Millie and Velma shortly after three. He’d come in here and searched my
apartment, looking for something. But what could he have been looking for?
Apparently, he hadn’t found it. That was why he’d come down to hire me. I tried
to remember our conversation, word for word. He hadn’t seemed to be pumping me
for information, though.

I was refilling my cup again when it hit me.
He was
looking for information. He came down here and told me that whole story to see
how I’d react to it. It was obvious I knew nothing about what he was talking
about.

And once he knew that, he cleared out.

But why did he leave the gate open?

Duh. He didn’t need to leave the gate open. He had a
key.

I felt nauseous.
Someone without a key left the gate
open so they could get back in again.

And that didn’t bode well for Levi.

But I was also assuming Colin was telling me the truth.

I sat back down at my computer. I wrote down,
What if Colin is lying about the Eye of Kali?

Outside of the mugger, Colin was my only source that this
was about a Pleshiwarian holy jewel. Correct that—the man who’d mugged me had
simply asked me about an eye, and I was also assuming he was a subcontinental
Asian. For all I knew, he could have just been some lunatic high on crack.

For that matter, how did I know he wasn’t working with Colin
and this whole thing was some kind of crazy set-up?

Try not to let your emotions get involved. Look at this
rationally and logically.

Okay, point one: Colin was more than capable of staging some
incredibly elaborate story to cover up whatever he was really up to. Point Two:
he didn’t want to say who had supposedly hired him, and hadn’t exactly been
forthcoming with information. Point Three: his first loyalty was
always
going to be to whoever was paying him. If it was in his best interests to screw
me over to achieve whatever his final goal was, he certainly would do so without
batting an eye. Point Three: it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility Levi was
working for Colin.

I took a deep breath. Along those same lines, I also had to
consider the possibility that it was
Colin
who’d killed Doc. Even if I
could put aside our jaded history, he
was
a killer. He’d confessed that to me. He’d been a trained Mossad agent,
going out and killing enemies of Israel, infiltrating terrorist cells and
killing their leaders. He claimed he’d left all that behind him when he’d gone
to work for Angela Blackledge…and come to think of it, she hadn’t called me
back.

And his reassurances to the contrary, I still wasn’t
convinced he hadn’t killed my uncles. He’d convinced Mom, but she loved him and
would pretty much believe anything he told her, regardless of how preposterous
it might be. So, if that were indeed the case, he would probably kill again if
it were necessary for whatever his endgame might be.

Okay, Scotty, just go by facts, not what you’ve been
told. For all you know, Marty Gretsch could be alive and well and living in
Ohio, blissfully unaware someone is in New Orleans claiming to be his grandson.
Scratch that: he might not know what someone who may or may not be his grandson
is up to in New Orleans.

Easy enough to check—I typed
Martin Gretsch
into
the search engine. This time, there were only two results—one in Idaho, another
in Ohio. The one in Idaho was the wrong age. I clicked on the Ohio one, and his
information came up.