The Murder Artist

CHAPTER 35

Pinky and I catch lunch at Katy’s, a ramshackle place on the Bayou Boeuf that offers a bait shack and boat launch along with sandwiches and drinks.

“Now, that’s a good po’boy,” Pinky says, taking a big swig of Coke to wash down the last bite. “Good as the food is in N’Awlins, it’s gettin’ harder and harder to find a top-drawer po’boy. My personal theory is that you got to get out into the countryside, because the places in town go an’ change the grease too often. What you think, Arthur?”

Arthur is the man behind the counter, apparently an old friend of Pinky’s. (“No one ever forgets me,” Pinky explained. “That’s for damn sure.”) Arthur’s dark face opens in a sweet gap-toothed smile. He shakes his head. “This a genuine compliment or you sayin’ my grease got whiskers?”

“No, I mean it,” Pinky insists. “It’s like aged beef. Young oil’s got no bouquet. It’s just neutral. Doesn’t add anything.”

“Ça s’adonne. Comme çi ça se fait ici? Not just for Arthur’s po’boys, no.”

“My ami here,” Pinky says, indicating me, with a slow doleful shake of head, “tout mauvais. Man stole his chirren.”

“No!” He looks at me with a shocked expression, then looks back to Pinky. “Vraiment?”

The two go back and forth in a patois I can’t understand, and then Pinky says, “Little boys, friend. Not but six years old. My friend breaking his head and heart tryin’ to find them. Afraid they goin’ come to harm, you know. Looking for the man who took them, the path brings him this way.”

“To Katy’s?” His eyes check over to me.

“No, not to Katy’s, not direct. The path takes him to Berwick, where the man we lookin’ for lived. Grew up in that place.”

“You hunt this man?”

“That’s right. Boute à boute.”

“He a black man?”

“No, he’s a white man” – a laugh – “although not as white as me. Crazy man, name of Byron Boudreaux. You know him?”

Arthur shakes his head. “Not me, no.”

“Here’s the thing. We hear this Byron took up with a houngan somewhere round Morgan City. This a while back, few years back.”

Arthur’s eyes widen. “You shittin’ me?”

“That’s what we hear. We’re looking to find this houngan, see if he can tell us anything about where Byron might be now – because we think if we find Byron, we find those little boys. All we know about the houngan: he missin’ his upper lip.”

“Ain?” Arthur holds his upper lip between his thumb and two fingers. “No top lip?”

Pinky nods. “That’s what I’m told.”

“I do hear of this man,” Arthur says. “They say zombie kiss him, take his lip. Man’s famous.”

“What’s his name?” I ask.

“Diment. He the houngan without the lip. Doctor Aristide Diment. Big bizango.”

“What’s a bizango?” I ask.

“A houngan – he’s a voodoo priest, yes? And the bizango, that’s kind of his congregation only they be real close, like a family,” Arthur explains.

“More like a secret society,” Pinky says.

“You got the sickness or problem in your life,” Arthur says, “or you need advice, you go to the houngan. The houngan know how to please the loa, know how to make the mojo – keep your marriage strong, or find you a sweetheart, or get your business goin’ on its way. Some of them know the dark ways, too. Some of them serve with both the hands.” Arthur casts his eyes down, and I see him make a tiny sign of the cross. “Doctor Diment – he one of these.”

“‘Serve with both hands’?”

Arthur continues to look down. He shakes his head.

“That means the priest is a sorcerer,” Pinky says. “Got supernatural powers. Worship with one hand, do magic with the other.”

I nod. “So Diment is a magician. Now I understand Boudreaux’s interest.”

“Yes, but it’s not that simple,” Pinky says. “Voodoo is a very, very complex thing. You could spend a long time with it and never begin to understand. I only know the little bit I do because I had a case once. Supposed to be this woman died of a curse, but her relatives didn’t go for it. Came to me. Turned out she’d been murdered.”

“She poison?” Arthur asks.

Pinky nods. To me, he explains: “There are herbs that heal and potions that sicken. The houngans and manbos – that’s a female priest – study the remedies and poisons in the natural world. It’s part of their training.” He turns to Arthur. “Is that right?”

“That about right,” Arthur says, once again displaying his warm smile. “You might be sayin’ it’s the doctor part of the witch doctor.”

“Supposed to be,” Pinky says, “they only cure you of what’s got a supernatural origin.” He nods toward Arthur. “This Byron Boudreaux, Arthur – he poisoned his own daddy, got sent away for that.”

Arthur winces.

“Poison goes way back with voodoo,” Pinky says, tapping his glass against the tabletop. “Down in the Indies on the plantations, some of the slaves used slow-acting poisons against their masters. That’s what first got them worried down there about the religion of the slaves. Plus there were rumors of supernatural powers – to Christians, that was obviously the devil at work. Witchcraft. Between the poison and the magical powers – pretty soon the plantation owners running scared. You never knew where something bad might come from, who might put a curse on you or poison your food. That’s when the authorities really started trying to repress the religion.”

“Repress it?”

“Oh, they tried and they tried and they tried. Between the government and the church, they thought they could squeeze voodoo down. But what happened was repression just drove voodoo to hide itself. For the most part, it hid right in plain sight. See, the only way slaves could carry on their worship was to pretend they was Christian – which the masters encouraged. Eventually the voodoo got itself all mixed up with Christian practices. All the voodoo loa, the beings who rule the spirit world, have Christian figures or saints as counterparts. The loa Legba, for instance – he’s St. Peter.”

“I heard that once before.” I remember Scott telling me about the figure on the dime: Mercury, St. Peter, and also Legba.

“You see the point, right? Slaves could pretend they’re devout, worshiping St. Peter, and all the time it’s Legba. And then after a while – it’s both.” He turns to Arthur. “What’s another one?”

“The Virgin Mary, she’s Ezili. St. John the Baptist is Chango. St. Patrick, he’s Dambala Wedo. It go like that right down the line.”

I turn to Arthur. “What about Diment,” I ask, “you know him?”

“Jamais,” Arthur says. “Know of him, yes. He live near the cemetery in Morgan City. You go back on 182, get into Morgan City. I think it’s Myrtle street take you down toward the water. You cross over the railroad tracks, keep goin’ little way. They’s a place down there, Lasseigne’s, little corner store. You ask the man in there, Felix. Tell him I sent you. He know where to find Maître Diment.”

“Thanks, Arthur.”

“Yes,” I add, shaking the man’s hand. “Thank you very much.”

“Pas de quoi. Bonne chance.” He nods. “I hope you find your chirren.”

Felix is a small coffee-colored man. He and Pinky talk in an impenetrable Creole patois. Felix draws a crude map. And then we’re back in the Bimmer, driving past a bank thermometer that reads one hundred one. For a second, I wonder if that’s the temperature and the humidity.

“That thing about the lip,” Pinky says. “If you don’t happen to believe in zombies, they’s another explanation. Seen it before. That kind of mutilation can happen when a fellow gets caught fooling around with somebody’s daughter or wife. Father, husband – he mess up the man’s face, make him ugly so women stay away.”

“Well, at least that’s straightforward.”

At the Morgan City High School, someone is mowing the grass in the football stadium. A banner affixed to the fence advertises: OPENING GAME AUG 28. The man on the mower is bare-chested and gleaming with sweat. A bandana tied into a do-rag covers his head, and a little umbrella attached to the mower shades him as he rolls along. It’s hard to believe anybody would want to play football in this heat, but the opening game is less than a month away. Just past the school, a bunch of kids in practice jerseys stand outside a snow-cone stand that advertises SNEAUX BALLS.

“Felix said we should take a present to Diment,” Pinky says, turning a corner and pulling up in front of a liquor store. “Says the doctor has a fondness for rum.”

And then we’re on our way again until Pinky stops at a crossroads and consults the map. There’s a little wooden shack on the right, nearly swallowed up by the surrounding vegetation. The place looks as if it’s about to fall down – but there’s a bright red pickup out front and a new satellite dish protruding from the roof.

“Let’s see,” Pinky says. “I think here’s where we go to the right.”

A few more turns and we’re on a dirt road. After a mile or so, we pull up in front of a nondescript rectangular concrete building. The front yard is dirt, with a few patches of weeds and tire ruts full of standing water. One small window seems to have been added post-construction, crudely jammed into its space. The building would look like a storage shed, except for the “door,” which consists of strings of plastic beads. I’ve seen doors like this before in Africa. The beads let the air in but keep the flies out. More or less.

“This is it,” Pinky says, executing a little drumroll on the dash. “Chez Diment.”

“Right.”

We step out into the sledgehammer heat. Pinky hits a button on his key and the car lights flash.

There’s no place to knock on a beaded door, so Pinky pushes the beads aside and sticks his head in. “Hello?”

“Come in then,” a voice calls from some distance.

It’s dark inside and even hotter than it was outside. Stifling. Airless. Behind the smell of dust and eucalyptus oil is the olfactory funk of human bodies, a whiff of excrement, urine, and sweat. In the moments it takes my eyes to adjust, I become aware of sounds in the room, labored breathing, snuffling, and coughing. Someone moans. Then the dozen or so humps on the floor resolve themselves into people – mostly children from the size of them.

“I heard about this,” Pinky says. “It’s a clinic. A voodoo hospital, like.”

My immediate reaction – and I’m ashamed of it – is to breathe shallowly.

“This way,” a robust voice calls from the back of the room. I can just make out an open door, and through it, the twinkle of colored lights, the kind you string on a Christmas tree. I follow Pinky through the corridor between the patients, whose hospital beds consist of straw mats on the floor.

“This way, this way,” the voice says.

And then we pass through the open door into a separate room. It’s about half the size of my room at the Omni and it’s illuminated only by the string of lights and three or four votive candles. Facing me is a kind of altar, a stepped affair crowded with objects. My eyes skim over them: a baby’s rattle, a black comb, statues draped in beads, bottles holding liquids, ropes tied in intricate knots, crosses, many bound up with layers of string, a painted skull, various bundles of cloth tied with string, flowers, tickets (also tied up with string), brightly colored jugs draped with beads, icons of the Virgin and Child with auras of gold, plastic icicles, Matchbox cars, a small soccer ball, plastic dolls, a photograph of JFK, a wooden carving of a madman in a tuxedo puffing on a cigar.

There are five folding chairs in the room and in one of them is Doctor Diment, himself. His teeth and eyes seem to glow in the dark. The missing lip is unnerving because all his upper teeth are visible, like the teeth of a skull. “Welcome,” he says, in his rich voice. “The white man, and the not-so-white man.” He chuckles.

“Pinky Streiber,” Pinky says. “And this is Alex Callahan.”

We shake. “Mr. Streiber,” Diment says, “you so white, you almost a light source, you.” A chuckle. “Sit down and tell me what Doctor Diment can do for you.”

I hand him the bottle of Appleton rum, and he regards it and gives a little formal nod of his head. “Thank you. Appreciate it.” Another warm chuckle. “The good stuff. You spoil me for my clairin.”

“That’s rum, too,” Pinky explains to me. “Kind of white lightning.”

“You know the local way,” Diment says. “You translate for your friend. That’s good, you help your friend. But which one of you need the doctor’s help, you?”

I wipe my forehead. Sweat begins to trickle down my back. I nod. “I’m interested in Byron Boudreaux. They say he was a friend of yours. I’m trying to find him.”

“By-ron,” Diment says with a sigh. “By-ron, he’s not having any friends.”

“We heard you knew him,” Pinky says.

“Let’s have a drink,” Diment decides. He twists off the cap of the rum bottle and takes a long swig, then passes it to me. Even in the half light, I can see the spittle on his chin. The spittle, the missing lip, the coughs and moans from the back room – I don’t really want to drink from the bottle. But somehow, I know I have to. I take a long slug. The rum burns, in a pleasant way, all the way down. Pinky declines and hands the bottle back to Diment.

I can see the doctor better now that my eyes have adjusted. What I see is a very thin man (AIDS?) wearing a dirty white tank undershirt and a pair of ripped khaki shorts. He wears an old pair of plastic flip-flops on his feet.

“What’s your interest in Byron?” he asks. And then he holds up his hand, palm out. “No, don’t tell me now. Let’s look at the cards.”

He pulls out a deck of cards and deals onto a little table in front of him. There is some sequence involved, every fifth or sixth card being separated from the deck. Then he picks up the hand he’s dealt himself. When he fans the cards out, they’re so old and flexible that they fall over the back of his knuckles. I wonder if I’m hallucinating. The cards remind me of Salvador Dalí’s limp and drooping clocks. Diment supports the cards with his left hand, forcing them upright, and regards them with a squint. “Okay,” he says, pushing them back into a stack and placing them facedown on the table, “now you tell me your interest in Byron.”

“I think he’s kidnapped my sons, my two boys.”

“Yes?”

“I think he plans to kill them.”

“Hmmmmmmm.” He fingers his mutilated lip.

“I need your help…”

“I tell you this much,” Diment says. “Byron, he comes to me after he killed that little dog. You hear about that?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, wouldn’t no one talk to him after that. The parents, they tell their children stay away. Byron’s church – they turn their back on the boy. He finds me one night in the cemetery, making a veve. He’s interested; I tell him a few things. Next day, he come after school to help me out here. He do the errands for me, clean the clinic, even wipe the shit off the poor ones in there.” He nods toward the room. “In return he wants to learn what I know. The ways of the world.”

Diment takes another hit of rum and holds the bottle out toward me. I have another slug.

“That business with the dog,” Diment says, shaking his head. “We talk about that one, Byron and me. I tell him killing the dog is not so bad – not by itself. A dog is just a chicken with a tail.”

“What do you mean?”

Diment ignores my reaction. “What was bad was killing the animal just to watch it bleed. I tell him, ‘Byron, no one got anything out of that, least of all you.’ So the dog’s death was a waste. A waste of juju.”

“Then what?”

“Then nothing,” Diment announces.

“I don’t get it.”

He gestures toward the altar. “The answer you seek is right here. It’s right in front of you.”

I stare at the altar, but all I see is a panorama of weird tchotchkes.

“But I can’t tell you any more,” Diment says.

“But you haven’t told me anything. Do you know where Byron is? How can I reach him?”

Diment looks sorry about it, but he shakes his head. “Something you don’t understand, my friend. Byron is part of the bizango. We’re a closed circle. I tell you more about him, I break the faith.”

Pinky starts to list reasons why Diment should help us, including money. I plead with the doctor. But Diment is resolute. He’ll say no more.

“My lip is sealed,” he jokes.

“There’s gotta be a way around this,” Pinky suggests. “There’s always a way.”

“One way, maybe,” Diment tells us. “If the man here wants to learn more, he’ll have to become a part of the bizango. Then, we have no secrets from each other.”

“Fine,” I say. “Where do I sign up?”

Diment laughs. “It’s not that easy. There’s a ceremony. Initiation.”

“Whatever it takes.”

“Some people uncomfortable with it,” Diment tells me. “Because you have to have faith – in me, the bizango. Then you’ll be born again in vaudoo. And a part of us.”

“I have to ‘have faith’?”

“You don’t have to believe any particular thing,” Diment says. “It’s like getting on the airplane. You put yourself in the hands of the pilot and those who built the plane. You put yourself in their trust. You fasten your seat belt. You roll down the runway. You don’t understand what keeps the airplane up in the sky, you don’t know the people driving the machine, but still you get on, buckle up, and trust that you goin’ to end up where you want to go. It’s like that. You put your faith in the bizango. You go through the initiation. You trust us.” He stretches his hands out to his sides in a gesture of fairness and rationality.

“I don’t know,” Pinky says. “I’ve heard these things can be dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” Diment says. “Sure. Crossing the street is dangerous. With the loa, we call them up, we know them, but we can’t control them, no.”

“Is this the only way you’ll tell me more about Byron?”

“That is true,” Diment says, nodding.

“Then let’s go. Count me in.”

“You’re sure?” Diment asks me.

“Absolutely.”

“Then come back at midnight.”

“Tonight?”

Diment nods, and then he gets up and heads for the door. As we weave a path through the poor souls hunkered down in the heat and darkness, Diment asks a question that seems to come right out of left field. “What size you wear?”

“What size?”

“Yes!” He seems annoyed. “What size do you wear?”

“Forty-two regular,” I tell him.

“Ahhhh,” Diment says. “That’s perfect.” He pulls the beads aside. Pinky and I step through into the front yard, and the beads fall closed behind us with a kind of liquid rustle.

It’s like leaving a matinee. I’m blinded. An image from Diment’s altar seems to float before me in the sun haze: a painted icon showing two boys, each with a golden orb around his head, each holding a feather quill. Twins. I wonder what that means. I’ll have to ask Diment. Pinky’s car emits a little beep, and I hear the mechanical thunk as its door locks pop open.

“Whoa,” Pinky says, once we’re inside. “I’m not sure I’d be keeping any future appointments with Doctor D. there.”

“I don’t know. What was that question about my size?”

“I doubt he’s gonna kill you for your Gap khakis, but who knows?” Pinky says, turning the key and rolling down the windows. We lurch forward. “The guy looks like a death’s head! Don’t that worry you, pardner? And why’s he want to know what size you wear? And that stuff about ‘a puppy is just a chicken with a tail’? What’s he mean by that, huh? I’m thinking he means that anything alive is nothin’ but a life force, something that could be sacrificed. What if he’s feelin’ that way about you?”

“Yeah,” I say. But the truth is, it’s hard for me to work up any fear about Doctor Diment. Or worry about anything that might happen to me. I’m all played out on the fear front.

“You’re not really going there?”

I shrug. “I’m thinking about it.”

All the way back to the Holiday Inn, Pinky tries to talk me out of it. “It’s crazy! You don’t know this guy – or what crazy thing he might do. That lip, man. I can’t believe you, drinkin’ that rum! You see how skinny he was? Who knows what he’s got? His eyeballs looked yellow to me. You’re talking AIDS, hep C, who knows? And voodoo – it’s nothin’ you want to mess with. Not at all. It’s all blood and drugs and bullshit… I say let’s see what Maldonado says. Look, you can always go back to this guy if you have to.”

“Yeah, we’ll see,” I tell Pinky.

Pinky has a service called OnStar, which he calls his “traveling concierge.” He punches it on, secures Maldonado’s number, and then instructs the machine to call the reporter.

“Hey!” Maldonado’s voice booms from the dashboard. “Good news, Pink. I called up the doctor who admitted Claude when the ambulance brought him in. Sam Harami. If not for Sam, Byron would have got away with murder. The death probably would have gone down as ‘natural causes.’”

“You saying what, Max?”

“I’m saying this is the guy really figured out old Claude had been poisoned. He’s a friend of mine and he’s ready to join us for dinner if you’re buying.”

“My pleasure,” Pinky tells him.

While they go back and forth, figuring out where to meet for dinner, I’m thinking about how I’m going to get out to Chez Diment later tonight. Even though Pinky thinks it’s a bad idea to go, maybe he’ll lend me his car or give me a ride. If not, I guess I can take a taxi.

But I’m definitely going. I think of the dimes, the bowls of water, mementos left to me by Boudreaux. Somehow I know that if I’m going to find him, the man with the death’s head face will be the one to point the way.