Medusa (8 page)

“Well, he’s probably not a police detective, so that’s good news, at least. Let’s give him some rope and see what happens,” I reasoned aloud.
 

“This town is just downright creepy. It’s even got me to thinking I’m psychic or some such crap.” Tiller nodded toward the low brownstone buildings that flanked either side of the street. Across the way, a small crowd had gathered to watch some street performers.
 

“Look at those kooks. Why don’t they get real jobs?”
 

“Tiller, you can have a pretty narrow view of the world sometimes.”
 

Tiller shrugged. “It’s just that there are so many freaks out there now. Maybe this guy in the blue suit is one of them. Or maybe I’m just out of my element.”
 

I looked behind us and shook my head. “That you might be. Whoever this character is, though, we seemed to have lost him.”
 

“Maybe we were wrong.”
 

“Don’t think so. I think he must have realized we were onto him.”
 

“Well, good riddance, I say. We’re getting nowhere so far, and all we need is some lunatic shadowing us, to boot.”
 

“There’s no sign of him now. This has been a strange day, for sure.”
 

Tiller shook his head. “I guess I’m going back to the hotel. You coming?”
 

I shook my head. “I think I’ll walk around a bit. I need to think over today’s developments.”
 

“Watch out for the crazy in the powder blue suit.”
 

“Don’t worry. I’ll be careful.”
 

I wandered through the narrow streets, and everywhere I saw signs of a city on the mend—streets that had been recently resurfaced, new construction and renovation, scaffolding, fresh coats of paint. New Orleans would rise again. Something about the signs of recovery filled me with hope—as much hope as a man can have in a country where killers like Samson Fain roamed free.
 

I thought about some things that I didn’t feel comfortable talking to Tiller about, things that smacked of the Unexplained, the Supernatural, things that I knew Tiller would scoff at. I wasn’t really sure how I felt about such things myself, although I had wondered about them ever since I had seen Georgia Champion in the desert of Arizona. “Thought that I had seen her” might be a better way to put it. Even now, I couldn’t be certain. Surely Georgia Champion had been long dead by the time she had appeared to me out there.
 

The girl’s faint voice on the phone had carried me back to a very dark time and place, when I was in the back of Samson Fain’s murder van, bound and bleeding, going in and out of consciousness because of a head wound.
 

When I had seen Georgia Champion—if in fact I
had
seen her—she was not the nine-year-old who had disappeared from her birthday party four years previously; she was the thirteen-year-old that she should have been by that time. I didn’t think that I believed in ghosts, necessarily, but the idea that something inherently good in the universe existed, that there was an indelible right and wrong, that perhaps somehow something of us did survive death—that Stygian river that snaked between the world of the living and the land of the dead—and that something better lay on that other shore beyond the grave, those were comforting notions that I could not altogether discard, after that apparition in the desert.
 

The alternative explanation, which was that Georgia Champion was still living, simply couldn’t be true. The Arizona police had thoroughly searched the grounds of Samson Fain’s hideaways, and turned up no trace of her. They had assigned an explanation to my vision: delirium and exhaustion, brought on by a head wound I had received in my fight with Samson Fain. It was a conclusion that I had finally accepted. Georgia Champion was dead, and the whereabouts of her body still unknown.
 

I heard music vibrating through the night air. It emanated from a low brick building that was apparently some kind of club. As I drew closer, I could make out a clarinet, high and reedy and cultured; a tenor sax, at one moment purring with deep sensuality, the next shrieking nightmarishly; a piano emoting with quiet, stately dignity; and a bass thumping a steady mysterious rhythm, holding the whole thing together.
 

A jazz quartet within those four walls was ripping into Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” with passion and verve. True to the spirit of Jazz, while one of the musicians would anchor the music to its basic structure and melody, the others would explore the piece in endless variations, walking off down various musical alleys that took shape even as they played, an infinity of musical ideas presenting themselves, the song unfolding, blossoming the way Jazz was meant to be played. With the right musicians, Jazz plays itself.
 

I stood and listened, enraptured, and when the song began to fade, I wandered out of the touristy district of the French Quarter and found myself on a quiet avenue. I had come to a halt in front of a small house, and was preparing to turn and make my way back to the hotel, when I realized that I was standing next to a sign. I backed up and read the loopy Gothic calligraphy that proclaimed: Palmistry by Sister Ludivine. Your Destiny is in your Hands.
 

Realizing that the jazz quartet had put me in a metaphysical sort of mood, I felt drawn to the little house. I smiled to myself, walked slowly up the steps, and tried the knob. The door opened, and tiny chimes signaled my entry. I stepped into the tight enclosure of a dark, little room. There was a woman sitting there, and like so many of the women I had seen in this part of Louisiana, she was striking. Her forbearers had clearly hailed from the Mediterranean. Her hair was glossy black, her skin deep olive. Her eyes had piercing black irises, set beneath arched eyebrows. She spoke with the accent of Southwestern Louisiana, the distinctive sounds of a Cajun French accent rolling sensuously forth from her as she lifted her gaze to me and purred, “You come in search of something. It’s so very close by, but you don’t find it.”
 

I nodded and looked around. The walls were covered with strange paintings: a group of women meeting with a cloaked figure in a dark forest; a picture of the world from outer space, filtered in strange colors, so that the sea was pink and the land a deep purple; a naked woman, standing, superimposed over a great five-pointed star; a huge snake twined up around the woman’s body, his tail was between her legs, and her head was turned, so that she and the snake were turned toward each other, their faces close together, peering into each other’s eyes. The snake’s tongue was licking out, toward the woman’s lips. The woman’s face held no expression.

“Who are you?” Was all that I could think of to say to the woman seated behind the table.
 

“Sit down, child, and let Ludivine see your hand,” she said by way of introduction.
 

I stood for a second longer, and then sat. Whatever strange machines were at work, I thought, best not to gum up their works. Let them run on.
 

“I’m sure glad Tiller’s not here,” I muttered.
 

“Tiller, your friend, he’s not a believer?” The woman called Ludivine asked me with an arched eyebrow.
 

“I don’t think so, not really,” I said with a smile.
 

Across the table, Ludivine smiled. “That’s all right. Sooner or later, we all believe. Now, please . . . your hand.”
 

I shrugged and sat down across from the woman. “Why not.”
 

Ludivine looked at my palm and leaned her head back. I felt a shudder run through her, and my own body responded with a shudder of its own.
 

“You see the evil in the world. You are a strong one. You bear the scars of evil ones, but you are a good man. You don’t let the evil become part of you.”
 

Ludivine nodded at her own assertion and her head came forward again, so that she was looking into my eyes. Her eyes were black pieces of anthracite, unreadable.
 

“You look for something that cannot be found. One lost little thing that will come back to you, one and another that does not. The man you find in the wasteland, you will find again by the water. There your fates will part, and the question between you will be decided. There, you will grapple with your enemy one last time.”
 

I felt the hackles rise on the back of my neck. Across the table, the woman was serene, staring at me with her shining black eyes. I didn’t know what to say, or even to think. Her words were as uncanny as the tiny room in which we sat.
 

“Can you tell what I do?”
 

“You try to right the wrongs of the world.”
 

I longed to ask her a question that played on my mind in the wee small hours of the morning; whether a girl that I had seen in the desert a few years before was alive, dead, or a messenger from the Great Beyond, or maybe just a figment of my imagination, the product of a battered and exhausted mind. Instead I thanked her, and rose to go.
 

I put a few bills in the offering plate that sat on a table by the door. As I grasped the knob, she called out behind me.
 

“Mister.”
 

I turned, saw that she had half-risen from her seat.
 

“Yes?”
 

“You be careful, now. You find the man you look for. He is a bad man, a very bad man. But he will not be alone. He will have friends now, and they will be every bit as bad as he. God goes with the good man. You be careful.”
 

“Thanks,” I said, scarcely able to believe any of what had just transpired there in that small space. “Thank you. I’ll do that.”

Chapter 11

We were sitting in the hotel restaurant, about an hour after I got back to the hotel. I had already eaten a light meal for dinner and was sitting sideways in my side of the booth with my arm draped across the back. Tiller was sipping his ever-present coffee.
 

“I still can’t make out who the guy in the blue suit could be,” I mused.
 

“Beats me,” Tiller admitted. “He’s no cop, that’s for sure. His game is way too obvious. It’s always possible he was just some nut. This city’s full of ’em.”
 

“I don’t buy that, Tiller. It’s highly unlikely some nut, as you choose to call him, would decide to follow us around, especially dressed in a snappy suit. I think that guy knows something about this case—something we don’t know.”
 

“An interesting theory, Mr. Longville, but one utterly without supporting evidence. That a hunch?”
 

“Call it that, if you like. Intuition, maybe.”
 

Tiller smirked. “I swear, Roland, you’re getting a little spookier on me every day. I’m beginning to worry that you’re gonna try to spring some hocus-pocus theory on me.”
 

Tiller wore an uneasy expression again, and I wondered if it bothered him that he, too, had felt Fain’s presence at the LeGrandville place. Tiller was a rational man who lived and died by careful examination of the facts. If one saw hoof prints, one assumed a horse had been by, not a zebra. Or a centaur. The supernatural, if one wanted to call it that, was an address that was off any police beat, never mentioned in any police procedural, and something cops didn’t talk about.
 

But there it was, and it must have bothered Tiller.
 

If it did, he didn’t bring it up again. “Why don’t you get some rest?” he suggested abruptly, in reaction to my lengthy and heartfelt yawn. “It’s been a long day.”
 

“Maybe I’ll do that.” I rose and patted Tiller on the shoulder. See you in the morning, you ornery old goat.”
 

“Yeah, well, we ornery old goats know the ropes, junior,” Tiller said with a dry smile. As I walked away, though, I took a last look behind me, and the older man was bent over the table, his head bowed, chin resting on one knuckled fist, seemingly lost in deep thought.
 

* * *

I entered my room and switched on the light, and froze. Sitting across from me in a chair was the man in the powder-blue suit. His legs were crossed and his right hand was in his lap. In that hand was a black automatic pistol, which was leveled at me. For a moment the two of us regarded each other silently.
 

“Please, do not be alarmed,” the man in the blue suit said presently. He had a heavily accented voice, somewhere between Greek and Russian. The “please” came out “pliss.”
 

“I am Corsack, and I am here, perhaps, to assist you.” He had a light olive complexion, and was leggy and tall, probably my height or better, though of a much more slender build. He had thick, black curly hair, cropped very close on the sides, and the thinnest of mustaches.
 

“How did you get in here? What do you want?” I growled at the blue-suited man, who seemed quite unperturbed by my anger.
 

“Please, Mister Longville. Do not be alarmed. I mean you no harm. Allow me explain my intrusion. But first, if you will, come in please and shut the door.”