Falling Angel Page 10

  Sterne tucked the cigars in his breast pocket. “Where were you yesterday morning around eleven?”

  “At home. Asleep.”

  “Sure is great being self-employed,” Sterne cracked out of the side of his mouth to Deimos. The sergeant just grunted. “Why is it you’re snoozing when the rest of the world is at work, Angel?”

  “I was working late the night before.”

  “Where might that have been?”

  “Up in Harlem. What’s this all about, Lieutenant?”

  Sterne got something out of his raincoat pocket and held it up for me to see. “Recognize this?”

  I nodded. “One of my business cards.”

  “Maybe you’d like to explain how come it was found in the apartment of a murder victim.”

  “Toots Sweet?”

  “Tell me about it.” Sterne sat on the corner of my desk and tipped his grey hat back on his forehead.

  “Not much to tell. Sweet was the reason I went up to Harlem. I needed to interview him regarding a job I’m working on. He turned out to be a cold lead, which I half-expected. I gave him the card in case anything came up.”

  “Not nearly good enough, Angel. Give it to me again.”

  “Okay. What I’ve got going is a missing persons’ operation. The party in question took a walk more than a dozen years ago. One of my few leads was an old photo of the guy posing with Toots Sweet. I went uptown last night to ask Toots if he could help me out. He played cagey at first when I talked to him at the Red Rooster, so I tailed him down to the park after dosing time. He went to some kind of voodoo ceremony over by the Meer. They shuffled around and killed a chicken. I felt like a tourist.”

  “Who-all is ‘they’?” asked Sterne.

  “About fifteen men and women, colored. I’d never seen any of them before except Toots.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing. Toots left the park alone. I tailed him home and got him to talk straight. He said he hadn’t seen the guy I was looking for since the picture was taken. I gave him my card and said to call me if he thought of anything. Like it better this time?”

  “Not much.” Sterne looked at his thick fingernails with disinterest. “What did you use to get him to talk?”

  “Psychology,” I said.

  Sterne raised his eyebrows and regarded me with the same disinterest he lavished on his fingernails. “So who is the famous party in question? The one that walked?”

  “I can’t give out that information without the consent of my client.”

  “Bullshit, Angel. You won’t do your client any good downtown, and that’s just where I’ll take you if you dam up on me.”

  “Why be disagreeable, Lieutenant? I’m working for a lawyer named Winesap. That entitles me to the same right to privacy as him. If you pulled me in, I’d be out within the hour. Save the city carfare.”

  “What’s this lawyer’s number?”

  I wrote it out on the desk pad along with his full name, tore the sheet loose, and handed it to Sterne. “I told you all I know. From what I read in the paper, it sounds like some of Toots’ chicken-snuffing fellow parishioners put him away. If you make a pinch, I’ll be happy to look him over in the lineup.”

  “That’s white of you, Angel,” Sterne sneered.

  “What’s this?” It was Sergeant Deimos asking. He’d been wandering around the office with his hands in his pockets, checking things out. He was asking about Ernie Cavalero’s law degree from Yale. It was framed on the wall over the filing cabinet.

  “That’s a law degree,” I said. “Used to belong to the guy that started the business. He’s dead now.”

  “Sentimental?” Sterne muttered through his tight ventriloquist’s lips.

  “Adds a touch of class.”

  “What’s it say?” Sergeant Deimos wanted to know.

  “Beats me. I don’t read Latin.”

  “So that’s what it is. Latin.”

  “That’s what it is.”

  “What difference would it make if it was Hebrew?” Sterne said. Deimos shrugged.

  “Any further questions, Lieutenant?” I asked.

  Sterne turned his dead cop’s gaze on me again. You could tell from his eyes that he never smiled. Not even during a third-degree session. He was just doing his job. “None. You and your ‘right to privacy’ can go eat lunch now. Maybe we’ll call you, but I wouldn’t hold your breath. Just another dead jigaboo. Nobody much gives a shit.”

  “Call if you need me.”

  “Sure thing. He’s a real prince, right, Deimos?”

  We all wedged into the tiny elevator together and rode down without saying a word.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Gough’s Chop House was across 43rd Street from the Times Building. The place was packed when I got there, but I squeezed into a corner by the bar. I didn’t have much time, so I ordered roast beef on rye and a bottle of ale. Service was fast in spite of the crowd, and I was laying the ale to rest when Walt Rigler spotted me on his way out and came over to jaw. “What brings you into this scribbler’s den, Harry?” he shouted over the din of newspaper shop-talk. “I thought you ate at Downey’s.”

  “I try not to be a creature of habit,” I said.

  “Sound philosophy. So what’s up?”

  “Very little. Thanks for letting me raid the morgue. I owe you one.”

  “Forget it. How goes your little mystery? Digging up any good dirt?”

  “More than I can handle. Thought I had a strong lead yesterday. Went to see Krusemark’s fortunetelling daughter, but I picked the wrong one.”

  “What do you mean, the wrong one?”

  “There’s the black witch and the white witch. One I want lives in Paris.”

  “I don’t follow you, Harry.”

  “They’re twins; Maggie and Millie, the supernatural Krusemark girls.”

  Walt rubbed the back of his neck and frowned. “Someone’s pulling your leg, pal. Margaret Krusemark’s an only child.”

  I gagged on my ale. “You sure of that?”

  ” ‘Course I’m sure. I just checked it out for you yesterday. Had the family history on my desk all afternoon. Krusemark had a daughter by his wife. Just one, Harry. The Times doesn’t make mistakes in the vital statistics department.”

  “What a sap I’ve been!”

  “No argument on that score.”

  “I should have known she was playing me for a sucker. It was too pat.”

  “Slow down, pal, you’re way ahead of me.”

  “Sorry, Walt. Just thinking out loud. My watch says five after one, is that right?”

  “Close enough.”

  I stood up, leaving my change on the bar. “Got to run.”

  “Don’t let me stop you.” Walt Rigler grinned his lopsided grin.

  Epiphany Proudf oot was waiting in the outer room of my office when I got there minutes later. She was wearing a tartan plaid kilt and a blue cashmere sweater and looked like a coed.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I said.

  “Don’t be. I was early.” She tossed aside a well-thumbed back issue of Sports Illustrated and uncrossed her legs. On her, even the second-hand Naugahyde chair looked good.

  I unlocked the door in the pebbled-glass partition and held it open. “Why did you want to see me?”

  “This isn’t much of an office.” She picked her handbag and folded coat off the table holding up my collection of out-of-date magazines. “You must not be such a hot detective.”

  “I keep my overhead low,” I said, ushering her inside. “You pay for getting the job done or you pay for interior decoration.” I shut the door and hung my coat on the rack.

  She stood by the window with the eight-inch gold letters, staring down at the street. “Who’s paying you to look for Johnny Favorite?” she asked her reflection in the glass.

  “I can’t tell you that. One of the things my services include is discretion. Won’t you sit down?”

  I took her coat and hung it next to mine as she settled
gracefully into the padded leather chair across from my desk. It was the only comfortable seat in the place. “You still haven’t answered my question,” I said, leaning back in my swivel chair. “Why are you here?”

  “Edison Sweet has been murdered.”

  “Uh-huh. I read the papers. But you shouldn’t be too surprised: you set him up.”

  She clenched her handbag on her lap. “You must be out of your mind.”

  “Maybe. But I’m not dumb. You were the only one who knew I was talking to Toots. You had to be the one who tipped off the boys that sent the gift-wrapped chicken foot.”

  “You’ve got it all wrong.”

  “Do I?”

  “There was no one else. After you left the store, I called my nephew. He lives around the corner from the Red Rooster. It was him hid the claw in the piano. Toots was a blabbermouth. He needed reminding to keep his trap shut.”

  “You did a good job. It’s shut for keeps now.”

  “Do you think I’d be coming to see you if I had anything to do with that?”

  “I’d say you were a capable girl, Epiphany. Your performance in the park was quite convincing.”

  Epiphany bit her knuckle and frowned, squirming in the chair. She looked for all the world like a truant hauled onto the carpet by the school principal. If it was an act, it was a good one.

  “You have no right to spy on me,” Epiphany said, not meeting my gaze.

  “The Parks Department and the Humane Society would disagree. Quite a gruesome little religion.”

  This time Epiphany looked me straight in the eye, her glance black with fury. “Obeah doesn’t need to hang a man on the cross. There never was an Obeah Holy War, or an Obeah Inquisition!”

  “Yeah, sure; you’ve got to kill the chicken to make the soup, right?” I lit a cigarette and blew a plume of smoke at the ceiling. “But it’s not dead chickens that worry me; it’s dead piano players.”

  “Don’t you think I’m worried?” Epiphany leaned forward in the chair, the tips of her girlish breasts straining against the thin weave of her blue sweater. She was a tall drink of water, as they say uptown, and it was easy to imagine quenching my thirst on her tawny flesh.

  “I don’t know what to think,” I said. “You call up saying you have to see me right away. Now that you’re here, you act like you’re doing me a favor.”

  “Maybe I am doing you a favor.” She sat back and crossed her long legs, which wasn’t hard to take either. “You come around looking for Johnny Favorite and the next day a man gets killed. That’s not just a coincidence.”

  “What is it then?”

  “Look: the newspapers are making a lot of noise about voodoo this and voodoo that, but I can tell you straight out that Toots Sweet’s death didn’t have anything to do with Obeah, not a single, blessed thing.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Did you see the pictures in the papers?”

  I nodded.

  “Then you know they’re calling those bloody scribblings on the wall ‘voodoo symbols’?”

  Another silent nod.

  “Well, the cops don’t know any more about voodoo than they do about red beans and rice! Those marks were supposed to look like veve, but it just isn’t so.”

  “What’s veve?”

  “Magic signs. I can’t explain their meaning to someone who’s not an initiate, but all that bloody trash’s got as much to do with the real thing as Santa Claus has to do with Jesus. I’ve been a mambo for years. I know what I’m talking about.”

  I stubbed out my butt in a Stork Club ashtray left over from a long-dead love affair. “I’m sure you do, Epiphany. You say the marks are phony?”

  “Not phony so much as, well, wrong. I don’t know how else to put it. Be like someone describing a baseball game and he kept calling a home run a touchdown. Get what I mean?”

  I folded the copy of the News to page 3. Holding it so Epiphany could see, I pointed to the snakelike zigzags, spirals, and broken crosses in the photo. “Are you saying these look like voodoo drawings, ‘vévé,’ or whatever, but they’re used incorrectly?”

  “That’s right. See that circle there, the one with the serpent swallowing its own tail? That’s Damballah, sure enough vévé, a symbol of the geometric perfection of the universe. But no initiate would ever draw it right next to Babako like that.”

  “So, whoever drew those pictures at least knew enough about voodoo to know what Damballah or Babako looked like in the first place.”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all along,” she said. “Did you know that Johnny Favorite was once upon a time mixed up with Obeah?”

  “I know he was a hunsi-bosal.”

  “Toots really did have a big mouth. What else do you know?”

  “Only that Johnny Favorite was running around with your mother at the time.”

  Epiphany made a face like tasting something sour. “It’s true.” She shook her head as if to deny it. “Johnny Favorite was my father.”

  I sat very still, gripping the arms of my chair as her revelation washed over me like a giant wave. “Who all knows about this?”

  “No one, ‘cept you and me and mama, and she’s dead.”

  “What about Johnny Favorite?”

  “Mama never told him. He was away in the army long before I was a year old. I told you the truth when I said we’d never met.”

  “How come you’re opening up to me now?”

  “I’m scared. There’s something about Toots’ death that has to do with me. I don’t know how or why, but I can feel it deep down in my bones.”

  “And you think Johnny Favorite is mixed up in it somehow?”

  “I don’t know what to think. You’re supposed to do the thinking. I figured you ought to know. Maybe it’ll help some.”

  “Maybe. If you’re holding out on me, now would be the time to tell.”

  Epiphany stared at her folded hands. “There’s nothing more to tell.” She stood up then, very brisk and efficient. “I must be going. I’m sure you have work to do.”

  “I’m doing it right now,” I said, getting to my feet.

  She collected her coat from the rack. “I trust you meant that stuff earlier, you know, about discretion.”

  “Everything you told me is strictly confidential.”

  “I hope so.” She smiled then. It was a genuine smile and not designed to get results. “Somehow, against all my better judgment, I trust you.”

  “Thanks.” I started around the desk when she opened the door.

  “Don’t bother,” she said. “I can find my own way out.”

  “You have my number?”

  She nodded. “I’ll call you if I hear anything.”

  “Call me even if you don’t.”

  She nodded a second time and was gone. I stood at the corner of my desk, not moving until I heard the door to the outer room close behind her. In three steps, I grabbed my attaché case, wrestled my coat off the rack, and locked the office.

  I waited with my ear to the outer door, listening for the self-service elevator opening and closing before I left. The hallway was empty. The only sounds were Ira Kipnis adding up a late tax return and the electric drone of Madame Olga removing unwanted hair. I sprinted for the fire stairs and took the steps three at a time on my way down.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I beat the elevator by at least fifteen seconds and waited inside the stairwell with the fire door open just a crack. Epiphany walked past me out onto the street. I was right behind, following her around the corner and down into the subway.

  She caught the uptown IRT local. I got on the next car in line and, as the train started to move, went outside and stood on the bucking metal platform above the coupling where I watched her through the glass in the door. She sat very primly with her knees tight together, staring up at the row of advertising above the windows. Two stops later, she got off at Columbus Circle.

  She walked east along Central Park South, past the Maine Memorial top
ped with its seahorse-drawn chariot cast from the salvaged cannon of the sunken battleship. There were few pedestrians, and I stayed far enough back not to hear her heels tap on the hexagonal asphalt tiles bordering the park.

  She turned downtown at Seventh Avenue. I watched her studying the entrance numbers as she hurried by the Athletic Club and the sculpture-encrusted Alwyn Court Apartments. At the corner of 57th Street, she was stopped by an elderly lady lugging a heavy shopping bag, and I lingered in the entrance of a lingerie shop while she gave directions, pointing back toward the park without seeing me.

  I almost lost her when she darted across the two-way traffic a moment before the light changed. I was marooned at the curb, but she slowed her pace to scrutinize the shop numbers located along the side of Carnegie Hall. Even before the WALK sign turned green, I saw her pause at the far end of the block and go inside the building. I already knew the address: 881 Seventh. It was where Margaret Krusemark lived.

  In the lobby, I watched the brass arrow above the righthand elevator come to rest at “11” as its sinistral twin descended. When the car door opened an entire string quartet got off, carrying their cased instruments. A delivery boy from Gristede’s with a carton box of groceries on his shoulder was the only other passenger going up. The delivery boy got off at the fifth floor. I told the operator, “Nine, please.”

  I climbed the fire stairs to Margaret Krusemark’s floor, leaving the frenzied rhythm of a tap-dancing class behind. The soprano was still yodeling in the distance as I walked along the deserted hallway to the door wearing the brand of Scorpio.

  I unsnapped my attaché case on the threadbare carpet. A bunch of dummy forms and papers in the accordion file on top made it look official, but underneath a false bottom I kept the tools of the trade. A layer of polyurethane foam held everything in place. Nestled there were a set of case-hardened burglar’s tools, a contact mike and miniaturized tape recorder, ten-power Lietz binoculars, a Minox camera with a stand for photographing documents, a collection of skeleton keys that cost me $500, nickel-steel handcuffs, and a loaded .38 Special Smith & Wesson Centennial with an Airweight alloy frame.

  I got out the contact mike and plugged in the earphone. It was a nice piece of equipment. When I held the mike to the surface of the door, I heard everything that went on inside the apartment. If someone came along, I dropped the instrument in my shirt pocket, and the earphone looked like a hearing aid.