Heartman: A Missing Girl, A Broken Man, A Race Against Time (20 page)

“Here, hold this fo’ me a minute, Vic.” I passed the candle to him, walked over to the altar and reached for the doll, picking it up carefully so as not to disturb anything else. It was nothing to look at, but for some reason my gaze had been guided to it and I found my gut instinct had paid off as I gently squeezed at the torso of the toy and felt something hard inside. I turned it over, lifted the flap of cloth in its back and pushed three of my fingers inside the stuffing and pulled out a small pocketbook no more than three inches in length.

I pushed the stuffing back into the doll and placed it exactly where I’d found it, back into the centre of the altar.

Vic and I walked out onto the landing. He blew the candle out and shut the bedroom door behind him while I opened up the pocketbook and began to read its contents.

At the top of each page was written a date, starting in the June of 1963. Below were a series of names: women’s names, surname first, followed by Christian; then on the far right-hand side of each page behind a faint margin an amount of money allocated to each woman. None of the names were recognisable to me, but for Vic it was a different matter. He snatched the book out of my hands and ran his big index finger down each row of names, flipping over the pages and shaking his head, tutting to himself as he did so.

“JT, you got the names o’ more whores in this book than there were on the streets o’ Sodom. From the looks of it ole Clarence was taking himself a piece of each o’ these girls’ action and then passing it on to his boss, Papa.”

“How you know these ain’t Papa’s girls in the first place?”

Vic smiled at me and winked before answering.

“See this initial by each of the payments: HSD . . . That, my man, has to be Hoo Shoo Dupree.”

I took the pocketbook from Vic and stared at him gravely before putting it into the inside pocket of my duffle coat. I then went back down the hall and wiped the door handle of the bedroom to remove any of our prints from the surface and did the same for anything else we may have touched, turning out the lights of the rooms as we did, before leaving Clarence Mayfield’s mutilated carcass to begin the slow process of rotting in the dark.

I left the back kitchen door ajar, as I had found it and followed Vic down the damp, murky entry and out into the street. As we drove away, I felt the unwelcome presence of the loa seep into my superstitious psyche and I began to wish I’d left well alone back there in the dead man’s house.

Clementine “Hoo Shoo” Dupree was what my Mama called a “traiteur”, the French-Arcadian name for someone born with the ability to heal the sick or mentally infirm by laying their hands upon them. As their special gift was considered God-given, traiteurs would traditionally refuse the offer of payment and so Clementine would never take remuneration from any poor soul who sought her help. But then she didn’t need to. Hoo Shoo made her living in a far more unpleasant, dark way.

In her late sixties and originally born in Martinique, Hoo Shoo lived a solitary existence in a rented three-storey Edwardian town house on Melita Road in the St Andrews district of Bristol, about a mile and a half from St Pauls. From inside her sandstone-bricked residence she ran a discreet and highly profitable prostitution business with a large client group and countless girls on the streets, and which rivalled Papa Anansi’s in both size and monetary success. But unlike Papa, Hoo Shoo Dupree’s relationship with her staff did not require her to use the brutality of physical violence for which her competitor was infamous; women that worked for her on the streets had a different reason to dread the wrath of their employer. Clementine simply used her knowledge and reputation as a powerful voodoo mambo, which brought forth veneration and terror in equal measure.

It was after midnight by the time Vic and I pulled up outside of Hoo Shoo’s home and place of work. Sleet and hail fell out of the night sky and pinged off of the windscreen and roof of the Cortina as we sat in silence and I thought about the best way to question someone who, despite her advanced years, had a reputation for vicious malevolence through powerful magic.

“Are we gonna sit in this fuckin’ car all night or knock on that old bitch’s gate door and git some answers outta her?” Vic asked me aggressively.

“Oh no, there is no ‘we’, not in there anyway. I want you to stay in the car and wait here fo’ me. I’m gonna be twenty minutes, max . . . you hearing what I’m saying?”

My eyes bore down on my cousin as he lounged back in his seat, biting at one of his fingernails.

“Yeah, yeah . . . I hear ya. Just don’t be trying to smooth-talk that crazy old woman. She’s more on the ball than most people give her credit fo’. She’ll tie you up in knots with all her magic shit talk, so don’t you be falling fo’ it now. You have any trouble getting inside, give me the nod and I’ll come over and bust in fo’ you.”

“I’m hoping that won’t be necessary.”

“You can hope all you like . . . if Hoo Shoo don’t wanna talk, she won’t . . . You just remember that when you playing the nice guy on her stoop up there.” He nodded towards the entrance to the venerable sorceress’s home.

I got out and left Vic to sulk, and walked up the red-brick steps that cut through a well-kept front garden to the large front door that had two pretty red-stained glass panels at its centre. A table lamp behind them gave off a comforting smoulder of light, which felt quite welcoming. I grabbed hold of a brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s head and gave it a couple of heavy belts, then stood back and looked through the hardwood sash-style windows into the candlelit living room. I returned my gaze to the door and watched through the stained glass, and could see the tiny frame of an elderly woman making her way down the hall towards me to open up. She stood for a moment, looking at me through the illuminated lead lights, before drawing a bolt across from the inside and opening up a mere six-inch gap, just enough to allow her to get a better look at who was calling on her at such a late hour.

“Miss Dupree?” I asked politely.

“Yeah . . . it is. You better have a damn good reason fo’ wanting me at this time of night.”

She opened up the door a little more and steadied herself up on a slim African hardwood cane with a crystal handle shaped like a hummingbird.

“I’m hoping you can help me; I have a couple of questions I’d like to ask you.”

“You wanna ask me questions, son, then you come back when the sun’s way up higher in the sky and the cock’s crowed its last holler.”

She went to slam the door on me and I stuffed my foot inside the hall and grabbed hold of the frame.

“It’s funny you should mention a cock crowing, cos I had me a nasty experience with part of one earlier this evening. I think you best hear me out, Hoo Shoo.”

She stared up at me for a moment before releasing her grip on the door and swinging it open.

“Hear you out, should I? Well, you better come in and spill your guts, mister . . . ?”

“Ellington . . . my name’s Joseph Ellington.”

I walked on in and she shut the door behind me and leant herself against it, looking me up and down and twisting her cane in her frail fingers on the polished tiled floor.

“Well, to start with, Mr Ellington, you can start by addressing me as Miss Dupree; you don’t know me well enough to be using the name you just called me by.”

I put my hand inside of my coat and pulled out the tiny pocketbook and gently shook it in front of her. She stared at it with a jaded look on her face.

“This little old book came into my possession earlier tonight. I think you’re gonna be interested to know what’s written inside it.”

“Don’t you be too sure that I’m gonna be interested in anyting that’s scrawled on those pages. If somebody needs to be scribing ’bout me they gonna need a bigger book to tell it in. Now what you here fo’, Bajan?”

I was taken aback by the old woman’s correctly telling me my previously undisclosed nationality. I tried to stay focused, so opened up the pocketbook and slowly began to read out loud from the tiny pages.

“Freya Robertson, two pounds; Isabella Cray, t’ree pounds; Rose Williams, two pounds . . .”

The old girl stood quietly as I continued reading the women’s names to her. Finally she raised the palm of her hand to silence me. The stern gesture worked and I shut up, but a look of curiosity on the elderly madam’s face told me that I’d now got her full attention.

“Let me see that, Mr Ellington.”

She reached out her skinny arm towards me to relieve me of the pocketbook. I snapped it shut and held it like bait between my thumb and forefinger in front of her.

“I’ll hold on to it fo’ a little longer, if you don’t mind . . . Miss Dupree?”

The traiteur frowned and stood quietly for a moment, weighing me up in her suspicious mind, then, smiling, decided on a different tack.

“As you wish . . . Come on through to the sitting room, Mr Ellington . . . You’ll take a drink with me?”

It was clear that Clementine Dupree wasn’t somebody you said no to, well at least not too often.

“Why not? I could do with someting to take the ice outta my bones.”

I followed her through into an immaculately furnished and tastefully decorated lounge. Two plush red high-backed velvet armchairs sat opposite each other, and on the floor an ornate Tabriz fringed rug was laid out in front of a well-stocked coal fire that burnt fiercely. Its amber and blue-tinged flames licked around each other and a heavy plume of smoke was being dragged up the chimney. A black iron poker sat in an etched copper pot that stood next to the chiselled fireplace. The old woman stood in front of a large mahogany drinks cabinet, her back to me, pouring spirits into a couple of glasses.

“So I’m assuming that little book of yours contains more names?” Her voice was playful and I didn’t feel like I was being asked a question. Perhaps this was what Vic had meant about her tying people up in knots with her wily way of going about things.

“Yeah, and more payments by those other names too . . . and the initials HSD.”

“And you put them tings together and came up with me, yes?”

She turned to face me, a coy smile on her face and a knowing in her eyes that made me feel a little uncomfortable. She’d filled two delicate cut-glass tumblers with Jamaican white rum and raised one of the glasses for me. I walked across the room and carefully removed the glass from her frail-looking hand, feeling her cold fingers brush against mine as I did.

“Thank you, Miss Dupree.”

“Please take a seat.”

She ushered me and my glass of rum over towards one the comfy armchairs by the fire and joined me in the one opposite. I undid the old duffle coat, sat down and for the briefest of moments thought of the Reverend Southerington and our similar meeting a couple of nights previously.

“I have to say that it didn’t take much detective work on my part to work out that the names of the girls listed in this book and your initials were connected, Miss Dupree.”

I thought of Vic and his quickfire deduction as to who the initials HSD belonged to and how they linked up to the local call girls in the pocketbook. I also thought of him freezing his moody butt out in the car outside and smiled to myself as I knocked back the warming rum.

“And that’s what you are, Mr Ellington, is it . . . a detective?”

Raising her slender arm to the back of her head as she spoke, she pulled out a long wooden pin that had been holding up her grey cornrow-plaited hair. I watched as her thin mane fell around her shoulders before answering her question to me.

“Let’s just say I’m a man who’s being paid to snoop around a little.”

“So that book filled with names you think I know has brought you to my door. You said you had questions fo’ me . . . so why don’t you fire away and git along with more of that snooping.”

“The girls I mentioned from the list inside of this book: they work fo’ you?”

“They may do . . . I have a small cleaning bidness . . . Most of my staff are ladies,” she lied, then began to roll the crystal glass in the palms of her hands as she waited for my reaction to her answer. She took a sip of her rum and I noticed two crudely drawn figures that looked like stick men had been tattooed in red and black ink on the inside of her tiny wrist.

“Let’s cut the dust-and-polish routine, shall we? You know as much ’bout running a cleaning bidness as I have o’ being the next heavyweight great white hope of British boxing.”

Miss Dupree smiled, then put her expensive glass to her mouth, took another sip and let me continue.

“So these are your whores in here.” I placed the notebook on the arm of the chair and tapped the maroon fabric cover with my finger as I spoke. She gave a single nod in agreement to my question. “Have you any idea why there should be different amounts of money by each of their names?”

“No . . . makes no sense to me. Those are some of my best girls you mentioned in that book you have there. They never tried to be underhand with me, they knew better than to do that. They always paid up what they owed and if any of them were skimming off the top of what they were making outta the johns I’d have soon picked up on it.”

“Well, I’ve got a feelin’ the money listed is a record of a series of pay-offs.”

The old woman snapped at me suddenly. “Now who’d be giving my girls money I didn’t know ’bout and what the hell fo’?”

Dupree’s lip twitched.

“I don’t think anybody was giving them a ting . . . but I’m pretty sure somebody was taking cash off of ’em.”

“Would take a fool to be messing with my girls, making demands on them fo’ cash . . . Where’d you git that damn book from anyway?”

She was clearly irritated by my questions, so I asked her another, just to watch her lip twitch again.

“You know a man called Clarence Mayfield?” I asked bluntly.

“The thug that’s got a ting fo’ child flesh, he works fo’ Papa . . . What about him?”

“I found this notebook into the back of a rag doll that was the centrepiece on an altar he was keeping fo’ the loa up in his bedroom. I think he was putting the strong arm on your girls, collecting on a protection scam he decided to git going fo’ himself; he put the frighteners on them and collected a monthly fee just because he could. They didn’t tell you because they were more scared of him than of you.”