Book of Shadows (21 page)

Felix Plante’s hand shot out and his large fist grabbed a handful of the Puerto Rican’s T-shirt, twisted and pulled.

“Say what?” demanded Felix.

“My woman, she’s sick. I gotta get this medicine to her.”

“Later for that. Let’s me and you take a walk. Car’s over there. Now you give me an attitude and I’ll take your ass downtown and you don’t get to give your lady shit.”

“She sick, man, she need—”

“Car’s over there. Sooner we get this over, the sooner you get to see your woman.”

At the car, Felix Plante opened a back door, motioned the Puerto Rican in first, then slid in behind him.

In the front seat, Joseph Bess turned around and said, “How’s it going, Israel? Heard you been away. How was Puerto Rico?”

Israel Baez kept quiet.

Felix Plante, using his wrist cast, gently tapped Israel on his knee. “Speak up, my man. You are the star. We come all this way to listen to what you got to say.”

“So I been to Puerto Rico, so what? That ain’t no crime. I got family there.”

“You had family here,” said Joseph Bess. “Two of ’em were found dead in Central Park. We looked around for you and couldn’t find you. Wanted to ask you a few questions.”

“’Bout what? I don’t know nothin’.”

“Oh, but you do. That’s why you hauled ass out of New York and hid down in Puerto Rico until you decided to take a chance and sneak back to see Toni. This is her first baby, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. So?”

“And she’s only fifteen. Bet she’s scared. You love her, don’t you, Israel? Yeah. It’s written all over your face. Love, love, love. Makes the world go round. Sure would be nice if you could be with her when she has the baby. At the moment, it looks like you’re going to be somewhere else. Like the joint.”

“Hey, man, I didn’t do nothin’. It was my brother and my cousin that got wasted.”

Joseph Bess aimed a forefinger at him. “And you know who did it.”

Israel looked down at the car floor.

Bess said, “That makes you an accessory after the fact. You know and you won’t talk. You’re hiding information concerning a crime. Naughty, naughty.”

Felix Plante said, “It’s getting late. Your lady’s starting to worry about you. Man shouldn’t be out late at night in a neighborhood like this. You don’t want sweet Toni to get upset now, do you?”

Joseph Bess studied the Puerto Rican. “Someone else was in the park that night, Israel. We found blood on the ground leading away from the bodies. The blood wasn’t from the perpetrators who iced Crazy Horse and Ivan. The knives belonging to your people were still on the ground without a drop of blood on them. The killer or killers were good. Your people didn’t have a chance to pick their nose.”

Israel looked out the window. There were tears in his eyes.

Joseph Bess lowered his voice. “Get even, Israel. Get even. Forget that shit about not talking to cops. Be smart. You saw what went down that night. But what do you do? You run and hide. So what do we do? We sit on your girlfriend and we wait and sure enough you come sneaking back into town. Israel, you want to live the rest of your life knowing the people who did this thing are still walking around free?”

The Puerto Rican used his T-shirt to wipe away tears. “Them people were crazy, man. They cut me, too. You ain’t ever gonna catch ‘em. Nobody cares about a couple of dead Ricans.”

Bess said, “Israel, if I didn’t care would I be here tonight?”

Felix Plante said, “Be smart, dude. We ain’t asking you to give up your friends or your relatives. We just want you to tell us who killed your own brother and cousin. You people think it’s cool not to talk to cops. Well, keeping your mouth shut ain’t going to cut it. If you’re man enough to make babies, you’re man enough to take care of your own, you get where I’m coming from?”

Israel Baez looked out of the car window. “There were two of em, a man and a woman. They was old—well, kind of old. Man had white hair and he wasn’t too tall. The woman she tall, with thick eyeglasses. Both had knives. They was strange.”

“What do you mean by strange?” asked Joseph Bess.

“Like before they come near us, they put they arms in the air and say weird things. It was like they was mad at us for cuttin’ on the tree. Yeah, that was it. They killed my brother and my cousin just because they was playin’ around with that little tree.”

Felix Plante shook his head. “Man, I heard a lot of jive talk on this job but I ain’t never heard no jive like that.”

“I have,” said Joseph Bess. He shifted nervously in the front seat. “I have,” he repeated.

T
HE MORNING AFTER SHE’D
picked him up at Kennedy Airport, Marisa stole the
Book of Shadows
from Robert’s apartment. It was Saturday, a day made solemn and gray by a late June rain.

While Robert slept, a nude Marisa carefully gathered her clothes, boots, and purse from the bedroom then tiptoed into the living room. She dressed quickly, listening for sounds indicating that Robert might be waking up. He had been exhausted and depressed and she’d had no trouble convincing him to take a couple of sleeping pills.

Still, when she finished dressing she walked back to the bedroom and looked inside. He slept on his back, arms wide, as though waiting to be crucified. The sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach reminded Marisa of the first time she’d ever forgotten her lines onstage. She’d been seventeen and there had been a stench to the panic she’d felt then and there was that same smell in her nostrils now.

And the same dampness behind her neck, along with perspiring hands, Flop sweat, actors called it. The sweating you did when your act wasn’t going over.

Wiping her hands on her thighs, she backed away from the bedroom and walked to the living room, stopping in front of a low coffee table whose glass top was hidden under piles of books. Robert didn’t believe in Druids or their vengeance, so there wasn’t any need for him to hide the
Book of Shadows.
It was on the coffee table, under a dictionary and Bartlett’s
Quotations.
Marisa pulled it from beneath the pile and stared at it.

The
Book of Shadows
was an ugly thing, its thick brown binding cracked and peeling. The pages were discolored, a faded yellow covered by an almost illegible scrawl written in pale brown ink. Spells, rituals, and incantations, Jack Lyle had said. Marisa turned a few pages, frowning at the peculiar smell of the old paper. She couldn’t understand one word in the book. She wondered if Robert did. Since the book had fallen into his hands he’d become prosperous and a celebrity, the two things he’d hungered for. Was he using the power Jack Lyle had said was in the book, or had Robert merely gotten lucky?

Marisa, the book under her arm, left Robert’s apartment. Pressed against her flesh the book seemed to burn her skin, and when she got outside in the rain, she ducked into a delicatessen, bought milk and orange juice, and asked the clerk for a shopping bag.

She put the book in the bag with her purchases and carried the bag by its straps, feeling better now that the book no longer touched any part of her.

The rain began to come down harder, suddenly turning colder.

Marisa said, “I suppose I should have telephoned first. But I was in a hurry to see—”

“Oh, that’s all right. I’m just sorry Joseph’s not here. Something came up, some sort of emergency that’s always happening with police work, and he had to go out.”

“It was Princess Grace,” said Gina, interrupting her aunt. “Daddy got a call from Princess Grace and he had to go out and meet her.”

Edith, Bess’s sister-in-law, smiled knowingly at Marisa. “Sometimes I think it’s better to just let things be, if you understand what I’m saying.”

Marisa, who sat on the couch beside her, fingered the hem of a rain-wet skirt. She smiled at Edith. “I agree. Explanations can be confusing.”

“I can’t tell you how excited I am to meet you,” said Edith. “I watch your show every day and Joseph, well he talks about you all the time. Did you two have an appointment today?”

Marisa shook her head. “No, no. I’m here unannounced and unexpected. Did he say when he’d return?”

Edith threw her head back, rolling her eyes toward the ceiling. “Now that’s one thing you never ask a cop. He shows up when he shows up. There’s no telling how long he’ll be gone. Was there something special you two had on for today? Oh, I’m sorry. You said you didn’t have a date.”

Marisa looked at the small, birdlike woman who sat up straight on the edge of the couch, her knees pressed tightly together and arms folded across her breasts as though keeping the world safely at a distance. Her name was Edith Gupta and she was married to an Indian doctor, who Joseph Bess said was the quietest man he’d ever met. The detective claimed that Edith and her husband often went days without speaking to one another and were perfectly content this way.

Marisa had taxied downtown through the rain to bring the
Book of Shadows
to Bess, to see if he could make some sense out of it, to give him more proof that she was telling the truth about the terror that now filled her life. But he wasn’t here. There was only Gina, his skinny blond daughter, and Edith, who’d offered Marisa coffee and a towel to dry her hair.

Maybe she should have telephoned first and saved herself a trip to the Village, but she’d wanted to get rid of this book as quickly as possible. That was it. She was here because she wanted to let someone else hold on to the book, to let them live with what she’d been living with. But Joseph Bess wasn’t at home and Marisa couldn’t leave the book with Gina and Edith. The Druids and their friends had ways of finding out anything they wanted to know. If the book was in this apartment, sooner or later the Druids would know it.

Marisa hoped Joseph Bess would figure out what to do with it. She sure as hell couldn’t. Bess was a cop, a man who could take care of himself. He knew what he was getting into. Marisa couldn’t give the book to Gina and Edith, not without speaking to Joseph Bess first. A woman and a child against the Druids wasn’t much of a fight. Gina had already been through hell once in her young life. Marisa couldn’t put her through more.

The telephone rang in the bedroom and Edith stood up. “Excuse me. It might be Joseph or some of his friends. He does have unusual friends.”

And then she was gone. From the bedroom she called out, “It’s not Joseph.”

Marisa wanted to cry. Instead she sighed and looked at the shopping bag on the floor near her feet.

“Daddy likes you,” said Gina. “He won’t come out and say it, but he does. I can tell.”

Marisa smiled weakly. Joseph Bess wasn’t the type to talk much and apparently neither were Edith and Doctor Gupta. No wonder they all got along with each other.

“Your daddy’s a nice man. I have to leave now. Would you tell him I was here? Tell him … tell him I have the book.”

Gina leaned her head to one side and narrowed her eyes. “What book?”

“He’ll know. Tell him I have it, that I’ll be home all day. I’m not on the show Monday and Tuesday, so I can meet him any time that’s convenient for him. Can you remember that?”

Gina shrugged. “Sure. I’m smart. I’ll be twelve next month. I’ll call the precinct and leave a message. I do that all the time. Daddy always calls in. He has to. You came all this way to give Daddy a book?”

“It’s a special book.”

“Can I see it?”

“Uh, it’s … it’s wrapped. There’s nothing to see.”

Edith Gupta returned with a shake of the head. “You wouldn’t believe the calls he gets. This one is from a very strange man—”

“Lester,” said Gina. “I can tell. You’ve got that icky look on your face.”

“Lester calls here all the time,” said Edith. “He claims he has some news for Joseph, but he doesn’t really. He, uh, he …”

The little woman hesitated.

Gina waved her away. “Aw, Aunt Edith, you know I know, so why don’t you just come out and say what’s really happening?”

The girl looked at Marisa. “Lester’s a snitch, an informant, except he’s a chump, a loser. He doesn’t really have anything to tell Daddy but he keeps calling him anyway. Lester’s in love with my father. I mean it’s not real icky or anything. There are certain kinds of guys who fall in love with cops and Lester’s one. He just uses this informant bit to call up and talk to Daddy. Daddy’s not interested.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” said Marisa. “How did your father meet Lester?”

“Busted him for stealing ladies’ underwear off clotheslines. Lester would sneak into people’s backyards and just rip off brassieres, corsets, parity hose, stuff like that.”

Edith walked forward and put an arm around Gina’s tiny shoulders as a means of silencing her. The birdlike woman said, “Gina knows things most children never encounter in their entire lives.”

The girl giggled, showing a mouthful of braces. “Yeah. I think it’s neat.”

Marisa stood up. “I have to leave now. Thanks very much for the coffee and the towel.”

She looked down at the shopping bag as though it contained a cobra. “Please have Joseph call me as soon as he can. I would really appreciate it.”

After hanging up the phone, Anthony Paul Bofil lifted the receiver and carefully began to dial. The phone was safe. Twice a week Bofil had the phones in his homes and offices electronically “cleaned,” searched for wire taps. It was shortly before noon and, in addition to having read all of the Saturday newspapers, he had also read the political and financial sections of the New York and Washington Sunday newspapers. Both were delivered to him twenty-four hours prior to publication, no matter where he happened to be. Bofil prided himself on being well informed and as far in advance of others as possible.

He was a large, handsome man of forty-four, with thick black hair and fastidious taste in clothes and grooming that allowed him to spend two thousand dollars on a bathrobe and three hundred dollars an ounce on a bottle of imported scent. This morning he’d used the scent for the first time and decided that the fragrance bored him. Rather than give it away to someone he knew and thus encounter the fragrance again, he’d poured the bottle down the toilet. Bofil also knew that sooner or later he’d tire of the expensive robe.