Cold Blood (44 page)

Rosie and Rooney sat at the garden table in the courtyard of the St. Marie with their cups of frothing cafe au lait.

“I dunno, she tells us to call in, and then she goes her own way. I mean, where is she now? Mrs. Caley said she left over an hour and a half ago,”

Rosie said, irritated.

Rooney looked at his watch and said nothing. He’d done what Lorraine had asked, checked at the morgue, but there had been no grisgris necklace on Nick’s body or listed along with the rest of his personal possessions.

“Maybe he didn’t have it on,”

he said.

“What?”

“The necklace.”

I “As far as I can remember, he was wearing it when we last saw him, he kind of liked it. I miss him, Bill.”

“Yeah, me too, he was a good guy.”

They sipped their coffee in silence, then Rosie took out her note pad.

“What we going to do about Edith Corbello? It’s a shame to waste time. I got her address, but her phone number’s not listed, so we’ll just have to turn up.”

Rooney pushed his coffee aside.

“You’re right. I’ll leave my notes under Lorraine’s door and we’ll go see this Mrs. Corbello. Might as well be doing something!”

Lorraine found the torn pages from Rooney’s notebook under her door. She sat on the bed, reading the scrawled writing. No necklace was found on Nick Bartello’s body. There was also a brief outline reiterating what the cops had said about Fryer Jones and his alibis. In brackets he added that Fryer Jones was married to Juda Salina. Coincidences! Lorraine underlined Raoul’s name, remembering him from LA.

What Rooney had not mentioned was the fact that he and Rosie were going to see Edith Corbello. He had been going to, but Rosie suggested they just go ahead and see what they could come up with and tell Lorraine later. Lorraine waited around for a while, got a sand\ich and Coke and sat outside in the garden. She checked over her notes, wondering what she should do next, deciding not to follow the Ruby Corbello lead until she had talked to Fryer Jones. Ł>

Francois was a little apprehensive about taking Lorraine to Fryer Jones’s bar. He watched her in the rearview mirror, drinking the Coke and topping it up with vodka, but she didn’t seem in any way intoxicated.

“I’m not a tourist, Francois. But you wait right outside, and if I’m not out in half an hour, you come in and get me! So just take me there!”

“Okey dokey, we’re on our way.”

The cab drew up outside the tiny dilapidated house in the old Irish Channel.

“You sure you want this address?”

the cabbie asked.

“Yep, but if you wait you got a return fare,”

Rooney said, passing over the money and an extra ten-dollar bill.

“Sure, be right out here for you, sir.”

284 Rooney and Rosie looked at the battered front door, its glass panel broken and blocked out with a piece of board. The top four panes of a French door had also been broken at some time and replaced with an almost opaque frosted glass, so that it was impossible to see into the house. Rooney took a few steps down the alleyway between the house and its neighbor and saw a broken fence enclosing a yard out back with old wrecked cars and a string hammock strung between two leafless trees. Bits and pieces of rusted car engines were scattered among ripped tires, inner tubes and bursting bags of garbage.

“If we got the right address, you leave the talkin’ to me,”

Rooney said, hitching up his pants.

“You said that three times already,”

Rosie said petulantly.

“Fine, then make sure you do, no interruptions.”

The doorbell didn’t work: Rooney banged on the front door and it creaked open.

They stood on the porch and waited before knocking again, peering into the dingy hallway.

“Yeah, what you want?”

Sugar May called out from the kitchen.

“Mrs. Edith Corbello?”

“She’s busy right now, you got an appointment?”

Rooney looked at Rosie and said quietly,

“Okay, now we do as I said, see what we can come up with.”

Rosie nodded as Rooney, smiling broadly, looked toward Sugar May.

“Hi, there. We just came, on Fryer Jones’ recommendationwe don’t have an appointment,”

he said.

Sugar May wrinkled her nose, strolling down the dark, dirty hallway.

“She don’t like being interrupted. You have to wait, see what she says.”

Sugar May pointed to a room off the hall and disappeared back into the kitchen.

Rooney and Rosie sat on a sagging sofa whose broken springs bulged beneath them. The carpet was threadbare, cigarette butts ground into the pile, and there were beer stains on every available surface. The doorway had an old beaded curtain tied up.

“What a dump,”

Rosie said quietly, then turned as a high-pitched scream from the room down the hall made her sit bolt upright.

In the room was a table covered with a cloth, a mirror propped up behind it reflecting a figurine of the Virgin and a picture of Marie Laveau on the wall behind. Incense and three blue candles smoked in front of the statue, surrounded by saucers of rainwater, a dish of bread and apples and others of special grasses and oil.

Edith had made the young girl lie on a cot while she bathed her head with an infusion of herbs; now she pressed down on the girl’s temples with both hands, her eyes shtit tight, chanting to invoke the spirits’ healing powers.

The girl’s head wobbled at the pressure of Edith’s strong hands pressing down hard on it. It felt as if her neck was going to break, and it was worse pain than any of the blinding headaches she’d been having every month.

“Oh my, we got tension in here. We got such tension. Sit up now, girl, and put your head forward so I can feel your neck.”

The young girl moaned, and Edith closed her eyes, rubbing and kneading the vertebrae down the girl’s neck until she felt a click. She twisted the girl’s head quickly and there were two more loud clicks. Edith smiled.

“Yes, that got it, you feelin’ easy now, honey?”

Rosie looked at Rooney as the moans stopped and a soft laugh could be heard, but he was immersed in an old magazine.

“Listen to this. ‘Voodoo came with the slaves from West Africa in the sixteenth century and in New Orleans the name of Marie Laveau is legendary. She is said to have been the daughter of a wealthy planter and a quadroon girl. She was part Indian, and she married a Jacques Paris, who mysteriously disappeared after the marriage, when she began calling herself Widow Paris.’ Holy shit! ‘Marie Laveau had fifflfri children and she lived in Saint Anne’s Street between North Rampart and Burgundy Street. She is said to have eliminated all other queens by her powers of the grisgris, literally voodooing them all to death. And today the doctors of respectable medical schools have consulted voodoo doctors for treatment of paranoid schizophrenics.’”

Rooney was about to continue reading from the magazine when the door farther down the hall opened, and although they couldn’t see who was coming out, they heard the deep throaty voice of Edith Corbello.

“Don’t you worry yourself about payin’. Get wellT and get employment, and then you come back and see me, Tulla.”

Sugar May yelled from the kitchen.

“Hey, Mama! You got clients in the front room, you hear me, Mama?”

Edith Corbello walked in to see Rosie and Rooney, and whatever they were expecting didn’t quite add up to the large, stout woman in an apron and old slippers, frizzy graying hair surrounding a big, round, sweating tace.

EBB

“Yes?”

Rooney stood up.

“I am Bill Rooney and this is my friend Rosie.”

Edith sighed.

“Mmm, what you be wanting?”

“Can we talk to you? You are Edith Corbello?”

“Sure, I am, but I don’t see strangers. Who sent you to me?”

“Fryer Jones,”

Rooney said.

Edith nodded, and walked back to her room.

“Come on in, but I got an appointment in fifteen minutes.”

The room was darkened by old drapes drawn across the window, and besides the bed and the altar table, it contained a large old trunk and a row of hard chairs. Even in the dim light, it was noticeably cleaner and more orderly than the rest of the house, and there were a variety of masks and pictures on the walls.

“Sit you down, get a chair for yourself,”

Edith said to Rooney. Moving behind the desk, she opened the trunk, took out cards and a stack of leaflets.

“These my prices.”

She passed two leaflets that were torn at the edges and the print faint. They listed rituals, consultations and readings that would reveal the future, as well as healing bathing with a long list of oils and herbal remedies for health and vitality. All the treatments offered cost between twenty and fifty dollars. Underlined in red pen were the items that would be extra to the cost of the sessionherbs, teas, candles and incense, plus any necessary home visits.

Rooney opened his wallet and laid out two fifty-dollar notes.

“You want a reading?”

Edith said, indicating the deck of tarot cards.

Rooney leaned over to Rosie and held her hand.

“We need advice.”

“You come to the right place.”

Edith stared at Rooney and did not touch the two fifty-dollar notes.

“Well, Mrs. Corbello, Rosie and I, this is Rosie … we want to get married.”

Rosie almost fell off her chair, and turned to Rooney with her mouth open. He planted a kiss on her cheek.

“We’re in love,”

he said.

Rosie remained speechless: Bill needed to have no further worries about her interrupting, as his words had put her in a state of shock.

“Mmm.”

Edith folded her hands over her big belly, looking from one to the other, and smiled, but her eyes remained suspicious and wary.

“A lot of people want the same thing, marriage. If you want this lady, and she wants you, where’s your problem?”

“I’m already married.”

“You get a divorce.”

“She won’t give me one.”

“Ah, so you got a troublesome wife?”

“That’s right”

“Mmm, mmm, I been one of them.”

She chuckled.

Rooney released Rosie’s hand.

“I have offered her a good settlement and she has refused, point-blank, and she won’t move out of the house, and we got no children. She is just refusing to release me out of spite.”

“That’s sadchildren make a house into a living thing, they also wreck it something bad.”

She chuckled again.

This wasn’t what he had expected. There were no evil spirits or drumbeats, just a big woman who seemed, if anything, amused by him. He was unsure how he should approach what he was working his way around to asking, when Edith leaned toward him.

“You are not impotent, are you?”

Edith said, and started to flick the tarot cards with her big, raw hands.

“No, I am not, most definitely not. But I feel like I am with a wife that won’t give me a divorce. I got to wait, maybe two years or even longer, and then she

“

“How long you married to this other woman?”

“Er, twentyfive years.”

“Long time. An’ she been a good wife?”

“Yes.”

ť

“So, she no longer good, huh? Because she is no longer wanted?”

“Yes, that’s right. So, what we were thinking about, what we’ve been told is that you might help us?”

W”

Edith nodded her head, and stifled a yawn, her hand resting on the tarot cards that she only brought out for the types like these that came to her, white tourists.

Rooney coughed; the room was stiflingly hot and claustrophobic.

“If this voodoo works, like we’ve been told it does, then we’re here to ask you to do something for us. Voodoo is what we want.”

“Mmm, mmm.”

Edith stared at Rosie and after a moment she asked,

“Don’t you talk?”

“I agree with Bill, he is speaking for both of us,”

Rosie said sweetly.

“Does he now? And so, Bill, what is it you want exactly, huh? Voodoo covers a mighty big area, you want to tell me specifically what you are wanting from me?”

“My wife to die, Mrs. Corbello, can you do that? Make us one of those voodoo dolls that make people

“

Edith slapped the table hard and she gave them a wide grimace.

“You want me to make you a voodoo doll? Make your wife afraid of her shadow?

288 Make her think she is cursed? Make her so frightened of the spirits that she lies down and just wastes away? All her limbs to go stiff and her thoughts twisted so she gets to be like a zombie? Huh? That what you are asking me for?”

Rosie began to get scared and looked at Rooney.

“Yes, now if that is more than fifty dollars, I am prepared to pay,”

Rooney said.

Edith leaned back in her chair, her big hands clasping the arms.

“You believe that I can do this for you?”

“Can you?”

Rosie asked.

“You want this doll too, do you, Miss Rosie cheeks?”

Rosie nodded, and then almost fell backward out of her chair as Edith let the lid of the trunk bang back down, scattering the cards on the bare floor. For a second they both thought she was going into a trance as she rose up on her feet, her big body looming over the pair of them.

“Get out of my house, pair of you, get out right now!”

“But Mrs. Corbello …”

Rooney said.

She moved toward him, her finger digging him in the chest.

“You know my name, but you don’t know me and I don’t know you. You take your evil thoughts out of my house and you take your money with you!”

She threw the two fifty-dollar bills in their faces and yanked open the door.

“Sugar May, Sugar Mayl These two people are leaving, an’ they are never coming back.”

Rosie and Rooney were shoved out onto the doorstep by the little girl in pigtails and rubber flipflops. The broken front door slammed hard after them and then swung back open. It was no wonder it didn’t have any glass left in it.

“Well, I left the talking to you!”

Rosie said as she walked down the path.

“I just tried it on,”

he said grumpily.

“I tried it on because of that doll Lorraine found. I mean, maybe we could have gotten her to talk.”