Old Black Magic Read online

  I did what I always do when my mind drags me down roads I don’t want to travel: I wolfed down the remainder of my beignet and went to retrieve a chilled Yoo-Hoo from the stash I’d stored in the hotel’s mini-fridge. K.T., meanwhile, was stuffing her backpack with home-made granola bars, frozen slices of lemon and recipe notes. All of a sudden she stopped short and gasped.

  I turned around so fast, Yoo-Hoo sloshed onto my feet. K.T. was staring at the newspaper I had left on the bed, one hand over her mouth and her eyes wide with shock. My stomach soured instantly. “What is it, K.T.?”

  She pointed at the newspaper. “I talked to that woman just last night. Outside the restaurant.”

  I took a step toward her, keeping my tone measured. “What about?”

  Watching her from behind, I could almost sense the speed and sweep of her mental calculations. For some reason, she made me think of a chickadee who’s just spotted a cat stalking toward her nest. With her head cocked to one side, still not facing me, she asked in a deadly monotone, “Why is the paper opened to this page, Robin?”

  The best response was none. Or so I thought.

  She spun around. “Good Lord,” she said, “can’t we go on a trip without you weaseling into some homicide investigation? New Orleans is a city of life and celebration, but you—” She snatched up the paper and tossed it at me. “You find this, this shit wherever you go.”

  “New Orleans is the murder capital of America, K.T.”

  “Fine, Robin, fine. Why do I bother?” She zipped her backpack and swung it sharply to her shoulder. The waist strap clipped my chin.

  “So,” I said, rubbing the scrape with exaggerated distress. “What did you talk about? Had you ever seen her before?”

  She waved a hand at me, as if dispersing gnats. “Don’t drag me into this. All you care about is the goddamn mystery. What’s important to me is that last night this woman, as you call her, this woman was bright, beautiful and alive. Today she’s a corpse.” A shudder ran through her.

  “See,” I said, stepping around her to block her path to the door. “That’s where we differ. For me, what’s important is that a murderer is walking around today congratulating himself on a job well done.”

  She made a sound under her breath.

  I wanted her to understand. “Okay, try this. Somewhere in this city, some psycho woke up this morning with the biggest goddamn smile on his face. The first thing he did was turn on the news. Then he went out. Maybe he stopped for a cup of coffee. Maybe not. But without question he bought the first local newspaper he could find, and there—” I snapped up the Times-Picayune from where K.T. had tossed it and waved it at her. “He found this. This is his performance review, and it’s an absolute rave.” I read to her from the article. “‘Gruesome murder…a phantom wreaking havoc in the middle of the night, while we and our children slumber…her body twisted at horrifying angles…the killer lurks among us unknown.’ This story turns him on, K.T. He sees all the attention he’s getting and he’s high. It’s better than sex. Better than anything. And he’s going to want a repeat performance. You say I’m only interested in the mystery.” A chill breeze swept over me. “That’s bullshit. I know I can help save a life. You know what that means to me?”

  Her hand was already on the knob, but she shot me a fiery glance. “Very noble, Robin. But why you? Why not the New Orleans police force? Or the FBI? Why you? I’ll let you in on a secret. No matter how hard you try, no matter how many strangers you save, you’ll never forgive yourself for your sister’s death. You’ll never forgive yourself for not rushing out to California to be by your ex-lover’s side in time to stop her death. Your guilt is etched in here.” She pounded her chest and then flinched as her own words settled in. “Oh, chew on a pig’s tail,” she muttered as she yanked the door toward her. “I don’t want to argue. Do what you want. You will anyway.” She swung the backpack onto her shoulder. “Try to stay alive until I get back.”

  I didn’t stop her, although I should have. I should have taken her in my arms and told her how much she meant to me, how much I needed her. Instead, I locked the door behind her. Of course there was truth in what she said, but it didn’t matter as much to me at that instant as the relief my work brought me. Ever since I’d become a detective, the locust of guilt buzzing inside my head had become a little less voracious. What K.T. didn’t understand and I’d only started to is that saving lives had saved mine, uncovering secrets made mine easier to escape. Tom Ryan had started me out on this path to sanity. Nailing his wife’s murderer would be more than justice; it’d close a chapter in my life.

  I stomped to the closet and unpacked my laptop. As I plugged in the modem cord and clicked the CD-ROM into place, I noticed that the base of my fingernails were blue. The damn air-conditioning was on too high. I found the thermostat, whipped the dial to Off and opened the balcony doors. The heat slammed over me like a sixty-pound dog hell-bent on dinner. I felt it lap my skin, and a strange calm settled in. With my usual finesse, I’d pushed myself into another zone, the one in which analysis replaced emotion, distance annihilated intimacy. The place was safe, but damn lonely.

  Down to business. My screen flickered at me as I opened a new investigative file. I was in the same city as the madman who’d killed six women, including Mary Ryan. A tremor shook me. Why the hell was I so cold? I rustled through the dresser until I found a sweatshirt, then I dialed in and retrieved the file Ryan had sent me. His wife’s murder was listed first. Under a grainy photograph of a woman who reminded me of my fourth-grade teacher was a caption, startling for its brevity:

  Mary Jean Ryan, age 42, red hair, blue eyes, 5’2”, freckles across bridge of nose. Murdered at approximately eight p.m. on Friday, August 3, 1984, in The Pink Clam, a residency hotel located at Jones and Eddy in San Francisco.

  I read through the document with the taste of iron in my mouth. Ryan’s biographical sketch was antiseptic, perfunctory, written by a man devoid of emotion. I knew the real story.

  Mary and Thomas Ryan married when they were just sixteen years old. My immediate assumption when first hearing this was shotgun wedding, but Ryan had been quick to correct me. The marriage hadn’t been pregnancy-induced. Amazingly, the lovesick teenagers didn’t even sleep together until their honeymoon night. They were simply kids in love, who mixed equal parts of romanticism and mischievousness, conformism and rebellion. As an end product, they conjured up the concept of marriage. They manipulated their parents into believing a child was on the way, with the anticipated results.

  Tom’s mother took them in and waited anxiously for the birth of her grandchild. She waited just a hair longer than originally expected. Mary gave birth to a daughter eleven months later. The little girl was named Shawn after Tom’s father, who had been a police lieutenant. The little girl had Mary’s flame-red hair and Tom’s sense of adventure. With doting parents and grandparents, Shawn was destined to grow up a spoiled brat. But she didn’t.

  At age three, she drowned in a lake during a family reunion. Within a week, Tom Ryan succumbed to his first alcoholic blackout. Three years passed before Mary became pregnant again with their second daughter, Casey.

  At the time of Mary’s murder, she and Tom had been married for twenty-six years, although they had separated a year earlier. Ryan readily admitted that the break-up was nine-tenths his fault. He’d been an ugly drunk, nasty, abusive and brooding. Eventually the drinking wasn’t enough. He tacked on a few prime vices, waiting for Mary to draw the line. In less than a year, he managed to throw away their entire savings on bad OTB bets and hookers he’d met on the force.

  When Mary finally drew the line, Tom was shocked to find out how deep it ran. She moved into a cheap residential hotel, the Pink Clam, and told Tom she fully intended to live there until he agreed to a divorce. Her choice was meant to humiliate him. The Pink Clam had been the site of his last liaison with a streetwalker. He refused to sign the papers and continued drinking. Living in a bourbon haze, he managed to delude himself
into believing he could call Mary’s bluff. He waited for her to give in and come back home. By August, 1984, the game folded. Mary Ryan, the woman who Tom once described to me as having “the face of Ireland and the fiery heart of a dragon,” had been robbed, sodomized repeatedly and brutally clubbed to death.

  Ryan crashed the crime scene. Only later did he recall kneeling in a pool of egg yolk and broken shells as beat cops tried to drag him away from his wife’s corpse. The chief investigator later speculated that the intruder had attacked Mary as she was putting away groceries.

  Tom’s alcoholism came to an abrupt end. The day he buried his wife, he dug a two-foot-deep trench in his backyard and buried a case of Maker’s Mark, Kentucky’s finest bourbon.

  I scanned the files on the other murders. Despite Ryan’s insistence, the connections among the cases were thinner than surgical thread. The two consistent, and possibly coincidental, elements were the presence of eggshell and the proximity to a hotel. Three of the six murders were committed inside a hotel room, one in a hotel staircase and the other two in hotel alleys. I spent the next hour jotting data into a pocket-sized notebook. In the last file, Ryan had inserted a quote from a letter he received from the FBI after the last “eggshell murder.”

  With all due respect to your professional reputation and distinguished career with the San Francisco Police Department, we conclude that your particular involvement in the 8.3.84 homicide has diminished your investigative capacity to assess any correlation, or lack thereof, among the cases in question.

  Thank you for your inquiry.

  I took a bathroom break, then rang my office. Jill Zimmerman answered with her typical efficiency.

  “So are you stuffing yourself with rich, butter-soaked food while I run this damn agency for you and Tony?”

  Jill’s style is inimitable. She’d started with us as a part-time clerk and had quickly become integral to the business. She made no secret about her desire to become a full partner, but Tony kept his hands tight on SIA’s reins and liked it that way. In truth, my partnership in SIA has more to do with the funds I have invested carefully in stocks, bonds, real estate and money market accounts than with my investigative experience, a fact Tony periodically points out to both me and Jill. Since partnership was not a current option, Jill took peculiar delight in tormenting us with her well-earned stance as the under-appreciated and indispensable underling.

  “I have a new assignment. For Thomas Ryan.”

  “Oh, boy. Tony won’t like this. Another murder?”

  “Bingo. Here’s the dirty.” We got down to business quickly. Jill and Tony were as familiar as I was with the basic circumstances of Mary Ryan’s murder. The three of us had spent many hours speculating about the case. Usually, we ended up talking about how unhealthy it was for Ryan to dedicate his life to investigating a homicide no one was likely to solve. “I want you to get me as much info as possible on the other murders. News clippings. Police reports. Interview transcripts. We have some of that in the files, the rest you’ll need to dig up. Get one of the new techno-kids to do a fresh search. We’ve all settled into a rut on this stuff. Overnight what you’ve got as soon as you get it.”

  “You sure you want to get involved in this thing? Ryan’s been pretty adamant about keeping us out of the line of fire.”

  “That’s why I want to move fast, before he changes his mind. This is the first time I’ve been in the right place at the right time. A fresh trail may make all the difference in the world.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of. Does K.T. know about this?”

  “Love ya too, hon,” I said quickly, shutting down this new line of questioning. “Check in on my cats, will you? My feuding housemates seem to be preoccupied these days. I checked in with Beth yesterday and between Carol’s colic and Dinah’s peevish rampage in the background, it sounded like round-up time at the O.K. Corral. I’m afraid my babies may be getting the short end of their short stick. And you know what Geeja’s like when she doesn’t get her daily dose of stroking and adulation.” I laughed, picturing my slick, black cat stretched out on my bed, stabbing a six-toed paw at me disapprovingly, her eyes narrow and demanding. When Geeja wanted to be petted, you didn’t disagree.

  Jill and I took care of a few more housekeeping details, then I hung up and got back to work. The laptop purred under my fingertips. Next best thing to being home, I mused.

  Just then, a crash in the hallway jerked me out of my seat. I smirked at my startle reflex. Too much mayhem on my mind. I logged off the computer and seconds later heard the sharp rap of knuckles on the door. Maybe my vigilance wasn’t silly after all. “Yeah, whatcha want?” I figured it couldn’t hurt to sound like a New York truck driver.

  “Room service.”

  I glanced through the peephole. The guy on the other side looked legit, but I hadn’t ordered anything else from room service. “Must be a mistake.”

  “No way, sir. Says right here, room four-two-two. Eggs Sardou. Decaf. You Robin Miller?”

  Opening the door the width of the chain lock, I peered out. “Let me see that.”

  After rolling his eyes, he flashed the order. I still wasn’t convinced. I’d used the room service ploy myself. “Okay, lift the lid.”

  “You want this or what?” he asked, annoyed. Strange how someone from New Orleans can sound so Bronx-like.

  I repeated my request and this time he complied. The eggs looked swell. Wielding a wood hanger as a potential weapon, I let him in and signed for the food. Then, just to be safe, I called down to room service. I was told that the other guest in my room had ordered the food on my behalf. Finally satisfied, I sat down to eat. Just as I wiped a rivulet of Hollandaise from my chin, the phone rang. I vaulted around the room service cart.

  The voice on the other end sounded like Harvey Fierstein. “How many Fats Domino hits can you name?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You even know who Fats Domino is?” The voice was thick with the southern Brooklynese accent so common to New Orleanians.

  “Who is this?”

  “Theo Sweeney. Ryan told me to call. What a joke. For years, he insists I fly solo and suddenly he’s throwing you at my propellers. You gonna help me and you don’t know nothing about de town…I thought you used to do travel writing. What’s a Zulu coconut?”

  I counted to ten. “Are you telling me coconuts and blues singers are critical to this case, or are you practicing for a Trivial Pursuit tournament?”

  “Ha. You got a sense of humor. That’s real important when you’re working homicide. But to me you’re still a cochon de lait. Understand? Sure you do.”

  He had just called me a milk something. I knew enough to know I was supposed to be offended. “Look, Sweeney, I am not interested in honing in on your case or your fee—”

  “My fee? Hey, babe, you know who you’re talking to? I was Ryan’s fucking partner. I walked the streets of San Francisco with him. When a bullet came looking for my organs, Ryan was the one who tackled my ass and let that bullet slap brick. This man’s my brother and you’re talking fee? Christ. If he offered me a buck, I’d burn it. Fees.”

  The word sounded dirty in his mouth. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so fast to accept Ryan’s offer to pay. “The bottom line,” I said, stumbling over my blip of conscience, “is that we’re on the same side. I owe him, too. Ryan’s like my father.” The silence on the other end gave me time to change into jeans and sneakers. I had a feeling Sweeney wasn’t going to be real flexible about time.

  “Yeah, he says that about you, too. Calls you his other daughter. Okay, here’s what I’m gonna do. Be downtown riverside, at the steamboat Natchez in fifteen minutes. Get there before the calliope finishes ‘Alexander’s Band,’ and you’re in. I’ll be at the ticket booth.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I’m going to check on a real bad ass,” he said at last. “La ripopée. White trash to you. Should be a real education, hon. Be there in fifteen, or I’m gone.”

&nb
sp; Before I dropped the phone back on the base, I heard him shout my name. “What?” I asked.

  “You carry?”

  “A gun? No.”

  He laughed and hung up.

  Chapter Three

  Sweeney may have sounded like Harvey Fierstein, but he sure didn’t look like him. He was five-seven, at most, with a thick waist, muscular forearms and a Burt Reynolds hairpiece. Olive-skinned, with thin lips and an incongruously aquiline nose, he wore faded jeans and a stained dungaree vest over a pristine Hawaiian-print shirt. Around his beefy neck dangled a brass medal that had probably seen polish sometime in the previous century. Through the grime I made out the image of some macho saint brandishing a sword and playing he-man bronco-buster. Ryan had set me up with another winner. I almost turned tail, but I was too beat from sprinting the distance from the hotel. With the steam rising from my sweaty limbs, I could’ve run the calliope myself. I bent over from the waist and gasped for air.

  “What happened to New Orleans’ beautiful spring weather?” I managed to say in a wan attempt at small talk. The humidity was at August levels.

  Sweeney grunted. “You’re late.” He tapped a Timex that looked like it’d been in one of those commercials I remember from childhood. It takes a licking and keeps on ticking. Actually, the same might be said of Sweeney. The man had a poorly healed puncture wound on the left side of his jaw and a thick thread of scar tissue along his forearm.

  I’d barely had time to catch my breath when he took off again. Questioning my sanity, I scrambled after him toward the parking lot.