John Case - The Murder Artist

“His father.”

“Yes.” Diment nods slowly. “I teach him the ways. But he not really learn.”

“What do you mean?”

But Diment just shakes his head. “He use everything only for Byron. That not the way. That the very first thing I try to teach him, with the little dog. He pretend to learn. But he stay the same way. The same Byron.” I see tears in Diment’s eyes. He shakes his head hard, as if to dispel them. “He come by here when he gets out, you know that?”

“From Port Sulfur?”

“Yes.” He wags his head. “After those many year. He spend a few days with me. I hope… he’s changed. So many years, he’s a man now. But-” He shakes his head. “He the same Byron, only stronger. I am happy when he go away again.” Abruptly, Diment stands up.

“You come.”

I follow him inside, into the room with the altar. He steps forward, mumbles something, and plucks from the crowded array of objects what looks like a postcard. He hands it to me.

The light is bad – just a couple of candles and the Christmas tree lights. And what I’m looking at reminds me of the cards opticians use to test for color blindness.

“What is this?”

“You look,” Diment says.

It still seems to be no more than a smear of colors. I have to stare at it for three or four minutes before it gives up its secret. Concealed within a field of bloodred blobs are a pair of clownlike faces, their eyes gazing implacably at the viewer.

“What is this?”

“Turn it over.”

A printed note identifies the painting as

The Marassa by Petit Jean,

Port au Prince, Haiti, 1964.

“The twins,” Diment replies. “You see?”

“Right.”

“And you see it’s addressed to me. And look what Byron say.”

In the message box, across from the address, is a handwritten note:

Finished with the Castle.

Doing real magic now.

“What’s ‘real magic’? What does he mean?”

“The twins,” Diment says. “They guard the gates to les Mystères. Without them, you can’t do real magic.”

“But what is real magic?”

But the old man ignores me. He taps the postmark with his forefinger:

Aug. 10, 2000

Point Arena, CA

“For vaudoo people, this a most important day. Sacred to the Marassa. This is why Byron sends the card that day. August tenth. You might say” – Diment smiles his terrifying smile – “this is our vaudoo Easter.”

“You think Byron lives there? Point Arena?”

“I don’t know. This is the last card I get from him.”

Three years ago. I’m not exactly hot on his heels.

I look at the signature, which is a scrawl. I squint, but there’s no way it looks anything like Byron .

Diment looks over my shoulder. “The name?” he asks. “That’s ‘Maître Carrefour.’”

“Who’s that?”

“It’s the name Byron used when he worked as a magician. On the stage,” Diment adds.

“ Worked. But not anymore?”

Diment shakes his head.

“Why not?”

“You saw the postcard. He says he’s doing real magic, now.”

“But what does that mean?”

Diment inclines his head, frowns. “What it means is you make the world do your bidding, with the help of the spirit. You come to be one with them, they work with you, you make thing happen.” He wags his head, a slow steady motion, like a metronome, his eyes closed. “That what it mean to me. With Byron, I don’t know,” he says.

“This thing about a castle…”

Diment shrugs. “I don’t know what he means wi’ that, either.”

“And Carrefour ?”

“Ah, yes. That I can tell you. Maître Carrefour is like… you would say a patron saint,” the old man tells me.

“Of what?”

Diment looks at me, shakes his head. “Sorcery,” he says.

Icatch up with Pinky in the Holiday Inn’s breakfast room. He’s drinking coffee and looking at USA Today ’s weather page. The map is bright orange, the whole country caught in a heat wave.

“Hell,” he says, as I slide into the seat across from him. “You don’t look half bad for someone got hisself buried alive. What was that like?”

“Dark.”

Pinky lets out a peal of laughter that makes everyone in the room look our way. Somehow, dark strikes his funny bone and he ends up wheezing for breath. “I bet,” he says finally. A sigh. “Well, I hope to God you found out something useful.”

I shrug. “The bottom line is that Diment doesn’t know where Byron is.”

“Doesn’t know? Or wouldn’t tell?”

“I don’t think he knows. There’s something about twins and voodoo – I didn’t quite get it, but twins are a big deal. I think he wants to help.”

“But he can’t?”

“He told me a couple of things. He told me that after Byron got out of the bin, he worked as a magician under the name Maître Carrefour. Made a living that way.”

Pinky nods, and pulls out an index card from his pocket. “ Carrefour, huh? We can put out an APB on that, so to speak. A magician. Got to be magicians’ societies, professional associations, booking agents. Anything else?”

“Byron’s retired – he’s not performing anymore.”

“So what is he doin’?”

“Diment didn’t know. Last he heard, Byron said he was doing real magic .” I bracket the phrase in the air with my index fingers.

“And what the hell is that? What’s the difference between magic and real magic ?”

“Diment couldn’t really explain it, or maybe I couldn’t understand. Byron went through the process of becoming a houngan – you know, a voodoo priest. And the faithful, including Diment, believe that the curtain between the natural and the supernatural, between the living and the dead, is porous. And that someone like Byron can more or less fuse with a loa and perform supernatural acts.”

“Hunh. Thinka that. What else you got?”

“Byron sent postcards to Diment from time to time. The last one was from California.”

“Whereabouts?”

“Point Arena.”

“Doesn’t sound like a big town. The witch doctor – he think Boudreaux lives there?”

I shrug. “Byron sent other postcards, but Diment threw them away when he got a new one. And he didn’t pay attention to the postmarks. This was just the last one – and it came almost three years ago.”

Pinky frowns, taps his pink fingers on the table. The fine white hair on the back of his hands catches the light. “So this is it?” he says. “Maître Carrefour. Real Magic. A postmark on a three-year-old card.” Pinky shakes his head, looks at me. “For someone who spent the night in a coffin, you got fuck-all, buddy.”

On the drive back to New Orleans, Pinky tries to soften his take on things. “We may get something out of the Carrefour thing. One thing you got going for you – at least far as we know – is that you know a lot about Byron, including his name, but he doesn’t know he’s even on your radar screen. Maybe he lives in this Point Arena. We can hop on that right away. Guy like that – he might just be arrogant enough to use his own name. Until we look, there’s no way to know if he was just passing through or maybe he lived in this town for a while. Maybe long enough to leave tracks.”

I’m so tired I can’t stop yawning. “Maybe I should go to Point Arena.”

“Maybe so,” Pinky says.

Another huge yawn.

“Not restful, hunh?” Pinky said. “Sleeping in a coffin? I coulda told you that. You’re probably all ripped up with cortisol.”