Voodoo Dues

CHAPTER 5

I couldn't decide if Lian was being smart, or if he was just an old fashioned coward. Helping Rene seemed like the right thing to do. Setting aside the whole Voodoo Mambo thing, she was a grandmother who'd just lost her grandson. Where I came from, you helped people like that out.

I pulled into the driveway at my landlady’s house and whistled for Teddy who squeezed through the two sizes too small doggy door. It had been installed for Esther’s poodle, Mr. French in the early seventies. Teddy’s nub of a tail wiggled enthusiastically with the rest of his body as he howled a serenade to welcome me. I love my dog.

“You had a delivery today,” Esther said through a barely cracked back door. “The young man said he’d leave it by your door.” She waved and disappeared.

I hurried up the back stairs, Teddy hot on my heels. I love deliveries, since I generally forget what I ordered online before the package arrives. It’s almost like Christmas morning.

There was surprisingly no box on the landing. I didn’t see anything at first, but with a closer look, I stopped cold. The bloody chicken foot, barely visible under the dim glow of the porch light covered part of the A and the W on my ‘go away’ welcome mat and was certainly not an eBay purchase. I turned around trying to keep my furry vacuum cleaner off of the landing.

“Car ride, Teddy.” I pointed to the car and he was off, barreling down the stairs toward the driveway.

I tried the doorbell, but wound up pounding on Lian’s door before he answered in faded blue pajamas. Thankfully he was fully clothed.

“Figg? What is it?” he asked, the Irish in his voice much more pronounced when he was half asleep.

Teddy ran in as soon as the door was open enough for him to squeeze past. “No pee pee,” I told Teddy. “There is a bloody chicken foot on my welcome mat! I don’t know what it means, but it can’t be good.”

Lian expelled a long-suffering sigh. “You might as well come in.” He ran his hand through his already messy hair. Upstairs he flopped down on the couch and did the hand through the hair thing again. “I don’t know much about Voodoo.”

I sat on the other end and Teddy climbed in between us. “Mind if Teddy and I spend the night?”

“Teddy?” he asked, rubbing my reddish-brown Boxer between the ears.

“My brother named him, he thought it was hilarious. It didn’t matter that Teddy is the wrong Roosevelt.” I felt myself grimace.

He smiled as Teddy snuggled up against him. “Help yourself to the couch and food or whatever you need.” He rose and started toward the bedroom. “Good night, Eleanor.” I threw my shoe at him, missing by a good two feet.

I lay there on Lian's not so comfortable couch staring at the pressed tin ceiling. Why would anyone leave a chicken foot for me? I couldn’t understand it. It wasn’t like I killed Pierre or anything.

Giving up sleep, I booted up Lian’s laptop and ran a Google search on voodoo. With 21,700,000 search results, I could see that I was in over my head. The most I learned was that a chicken foot is probably the most over-interpreted symbol in Voodoo and tends to mean different things in different regions. Great! I thought and turned off the computer.

Teddy was nowhere in sight. I peeked into the bedroom, finding my dog where I expected. I’d been dumped for a cushy bed. Teddy and Lian were snoring, almost in perfect unison their mouths wide open, both on their backs only Teddy’s legs were sticking up in the air.

“Teddy!” I whispered. “Come here.” He cracked an eyelid then went right back to sleep. I started to rant in my mind about betrayal and taking him in off the street, but in the end, I couldn’t blame him. I didn’t want to sleep on the couch either. Why couldn’t Lian be the big fluffy grandma couch kind of guy?

Somewhere in my brain, I knew I was up earlier than usual. My alarm clock hadn't gone off yet. Slobbery doggie kisses roused me from a not so pleasant dream. Someone had me in a headlock and was demanding information about Rene, and Pierre's murder. Considering that I was sleeping on that horribly uncomfortable couch with my head at an odd angle I was lucky that bad dreams were all I had.

“Come on Teddy.” I heaved my sore body off the couch. Teddy followed me to the door.

Outside the store, my dog sniffed around the mat and then sprinted down the block. He turned to look back at me, guilt written all over his furry face as he swallowed something. Presumably the chicken's other foot.

"I hope you know, you just ate a voodoo curse." I told him.

After a good fifteen-minute wait, I carried two steaming cups of coffee back to the bar. Lian really needed to invest in an espresso machine. Teddy was no help at all, romping around me, begging to play.

I took Teddy back to Lian's and got on my phone. I had a couple of hours to kill before the bar opened and I meant to make the most of them. A reporter I’d once dated had done a story on psychics in the area. I needed information and that was the best place I knew to start.

“What’s up Figg?” Damn caller ID.

“I’m looking for a psychic,” I told him. “A good one”

“Really?” His tone dripped with mocking disbelief.

“Yes, really.”

“Clairice Thornton is really good if memory serves and near you on Davis.”

“Sweet! Thanks Vic.” I hung up before he could ask why.

The drive over took less than five minutes. Madame Clairice was in fact on Davis just as Vic said. Her little shop was stuffed between a bridal shop and an income tax place. The area might have generously been described as shabby. The little strip of stucco-clad businesses was painted bright turquoise. Each one had a small air conditioner sticking out above the door and all the windows were barred.

She was standing behind a glass display case as I entered. She, or he was the guy in purple drag from the funeral the day before.

“Madame Clairice?” I asked.

“Who wants to know?” he said, not even bothering to look at me.

“Geez” I told him/her, shaking my head. I was going to kill Vic. “Nevermind.”

“I know you.” He frowned at me in his purple majesty. The outfit was so bedazzled that I could hardly see the fabric. If there’d been any sunlight coming in through the grimy windows he might have been blinding. “Sorry to be rude, but you got the stink of a Bokor on you.” He acted like he didn’t want to get close. “You should do a cleansing.”

“What do you know about the Champtillions?”

Madame Clairice walked to a shelf and started straightening merchandise that already looked that way to me. “You stay away from that mess, that’s what I know.”

“About voodoo in general then?” I waved a twenty at him.

“What does a nice girl…” He looked me up and down. “A hussy, but still pretty nice want with that lot for?”

“Hussy?” I asked, mildly outraged.

“Should I have said slut?” He swiveled his neck like a stereotypical black woman in a sit-com. “You fuck em and leave em. What you got against love?”

“Nothing!”

“That’s not what it looks like to me.”

“Stop changing the subject,” I said. “Tell me what you know about voodoo.”

He gave me a look full of attitude and walked over to the checkout counter. He wrote something down on a piece of paper and handed it to me along with a bottle full of inky black liquid. “It smells like the devil, but it’ll get that stink off.” He walked to the door and held it open. “You stay away from that boss man of yours. He needs someone to love him not fuck him.”

“I wasn’t planning on it.” I told him and got back into my car, venting to the upholstery all the way back to the bar.

Lian was at his desk when I got back. “Gotcha something.” I shoved the paper between his nose and the book he had it buried in. “This guy is supposed to know all about voodoo.”

“Where did you get this?”

“Trust me,” I said “You don’t want to know.”

Inside Lian’s office, I perched on the desk while he sat in his chair. There was no way he was keeping me out of this. It must have been understood because Lian punched the speaker button and dialed the number.

“Religious Studies,” a perky female voice said.

Lian cleared his throat. “Is there a Dr. Miller in your department?”

“One moment please.” The phone started spewing elevator music. After a couple of beeps the call was dumped into a voice mail system. “Dr. Miller, I'm Dr. Lian Cairn. I have some questions regarding the practice of Voodoo in the southern United States. Please get back to me at your earliest convenience.” Lian left his cell number and the bar’s landline.

Less than five minutes passed before the phone rang and Lian was waving me back into his office. The voice on the other end of the line sounded like it was about a hundred years old. “My area is Caribbean Religion. Lots of slave trade from West Africa there you know.”

“Yes.” Lian said. “I am specifically interested in the use of chicken feet.”

“Ah yes, the stereotypes do come into play Dr. Cairn.” There was a long pause and some typing noise. I hoped he wasn't Googling it. “Most widely a white foot will be used to make a fetish to promote a good spell while the black is associated with the left-hand path, black magic in cursing and such.”

Great, we'd both been cursed.

“Most of the ritual is hogwash of course. The pharmacological aspects though are quite real. Such as the use of the puffer fish concoction to induce a zombie state.”

I felt light headed. What had we gotten ourselves into?

“As long as you don't ingest anything given to you by a Bokor, you should be quite alright.”

“Excuse me sir,” I interrupted his rambling. “What exactly is a Bokor?”

“The dark practitioner, the maker of the zombie and bringer of death.” I expected an evil laugh to punctuate that sentence. “Hogwash of course unless you ingest the poisons.”

Lian quickly thanked him and hung up. If he'd said ‘hogwash’ again, I was going to find him and strangle the old coot.

“It makes some sense,” Lian said. “The police detective said that he thought Pierre had been poisoned.”

“You don't think it's real magic?”

Lian sighed. “It's never been my intent to decide whether something is real or not. I just observe, collect data.”

“That's not an answer.”

“I think that it is more likely that the non-magical answer is the correct one.”

The rest of the afternoon and evening flew by with no new age lunatics coming in to see Lian and no more talk of voodoo. I spent most of the day deluding myself into believing that someone was just trying to scare us, trying to convince us that it wasn't a good idea to help Rene. Probably Charles, that guy had serious anger issues.

I left the bar at midnight. Lian offered his couch again but in the end I decided to be a big girl. I hauled Teddy and my sorry self back to my apartment, determined to deal with the chicken foot. The fact that it was gone when I got there did not make it any easier to go inside. The knob was broken off of the door and it was open a crack. Teddy growled as I pushed it open with my toe. From the look of the place, everything that could be broken was. There were dish remnants and upholstery stuffing as far as the eye could see. Stepping inside was a mistake. Symbols were drawn on the once white walls in what looked like blood.

I ran down the stairs, Teddy on my heels. “Esther!” I banged on my landlady’s door. “Esther!” I yelled.

She answered the door looking perfectly fine in a pink jogging suit and freshly tinted blue hair. “Thank God,” I said and rushed inside. “Somebody broke in upstairs,” I told her. Picking up her phone, I automatically called Lian. He was the only person I could call who might know what to do.