Люциус Шепард - The Best of Lucius Shepard

The door opened, the babble of the casino flowed in and a security man ushered a doe-eyed, long-legged brunette wearing a black cocktail dress into the room. She had some age on her—in her mid-thirties, I estimated—and her smile was low wattage, a depressive’s smile. Nonetheless, she was an exceptionally beautiful woman with a pale olive complexion and a classically sculpted face, her hair arranged so that it fell all to one side. A shade too much make-up was her only flaw. She came up behind Pellerin, bent down, absently caressing the nape of his neck, and whispered something. He said, “You’re going to have to excuse me, gentlemen. My nurse here’s a real hardass. But I’ll be glad to take your money again tomorrow night.”

He scooted back his chair; the brunette caught his arm and helped him to stand.

Mike, who had taken worse beats in his career, overcame his bad mood and asked, “Where you been keeping yourself, man?”

“Around,” said Pellerin. “But I’ve been inactive ’til recently.”

I smelled something wrong about Pellerin. Wrong rose off him like stink off the Ninth Ward. World class poker players don’t just show up, they don’t materialize out of nowhere and take a hundred large off Mad Mike Morrissey, without acquiring some reputation in card rooms and small casinos. And his success wasn’t due to luck. What Pellerin had done to Mike was as clean a gutting as I had ever witnessed. The next two nights, I stayed out of the game and observed. Pellerin won close to half a million, though the longest he played at a single sitting was four hours. The casino offered him a spot in the tournament, but he declined on the grounds of poor health—he was recovering from an injury, he said, and was unable to endure the long hours and stress of tournament play. My sources informed me that, according to the county records, nobody named Josey Pellerin lived in or near Lafayette. That didn’t surprise me. I knew a great number of people who had found it useful to adopt another name and place of residence. I did, however, manage to dredge up some interesting background on the brunette.

Jocundra Verret, age forty-two, single, had been employed by Tulane University nearly twenty years before, working for the late Dr. Hideki Ezawa, who had received funding during the 1980s to investigate the possible scientific basis of certain voodoo remedies. She had left the project, as they say, under a cloud. That was as much as I could gather from the redacted document that fell into my hands. After Tulane, she had worked as a private nurse until a year ago; since that time, her paychecks had been signed by the Darden Corporation, an outfit whose primary holdings were in the fields of bioengineering and medical technology. She, Pellerin, and another man, Dr. Samuel Crain, had booked a suite at Harrah’s on a corporate card, the same card that paid for an adjoining suite occupied by two other men, one of whom had signed the register as D. Vader. They were bulky, efficient sorts, obviously doing duty as bodyguards.

I had no pressing reason to look any deeper, but the mention of voodoo piqued my interest. While I was not myself a devotee, my parents had both been occasional practitioners and those childhood associations of white candles burning in storefront temples played a part in my motivation. That night, when Pellerin sat down at the table, I went searching for Ms. Verret and found her in a bar just off the casino floor, drinking a sparkling water. She had on gray slacks and a cream-colored blouse, and looked quite fetching. The bodyguards were nowhere in sight, but I knew they must be in the vicinity. I dropped onto the stool beside her and introduced myself.

“I’m not in the mood,” she said.

“Neither am I, cher. The doctor tells me it’s permanent, but when I saw you I felt a flicker of hope.”

She ducked her head, hiding a smile. “You really need to go. I’m expecting someone.”

“Under different circumstances, I’d be delighted to stick around and let you break my heart. But sad to say, this is a business call. I was wondering how come a bunch like the Darden Corporation is bankrolling a poker player.”

Startled, she darted her eyes toward me, but quickly recovered her poise. “The people I work for are going to ask why you were talking to me,” she said evenly. “I can tell them you were hitting on me, but if you don’t leave in short order, I won’t be able to get away with that explanation.”

“I assume you’re referring in the specific to the two large gentlemen who’ve got the suite next to yours. Don’t you worry. They won’t do anything to me.”

“It’s not what they might do to you that’s got me worried,” she said.

“I see. Okay.” I got to my feet. “That being the case, perhaps it’d be best if we talked at a more opportune time. Say tomorrow morning? Around ten in the coffee shop?”

“Please stay away from me,” she said. “I’m not going to talk to you.”

As I left the bar, I saw the bodyguards playing the dollar slots near the entrance—one glanced at me incuriously, but kept on playing. I walked down the casino steps, exiting onto Canal Street, and had a smoke. It was muggy, the stars dim. High in the west, a sickle moon was encased in an envelope of mist. I looked at the neon signs, the traffic, listened to the chatter and laughter of by-passers with drinks in their hands. Post-Katrina New Orleans pretending that it was the Big Easy, teetering on the edge of boom or bust. Though Verret had smiled at me, I could think of no easy way to hustle her, and I decided to give Billy Pitch a call and see whether he thought the matter was worth pursuing.

I had to go through three flunkies before I got to Billy. “What you want?” he said. “You know this is Survivor night.”

“I forgot, Billy. Want me to call back? I can call back.”

“This is the two-hour finale, then the reunion show. Won’t be over ’til eleven and I’m shutting it down after that. Now you got something for me or don’t you?”

I could hear laughter in the background and I hesitated, picturing him hunched over the phone in his den, a skinny, balding white man whom you might mistake for an insurance salesman or a CPA, no doubt clad in one of his neon-colored smoking jackets.

“Jack, you better have something good,” Billy said. “Hair’s starting to sprout from my palms.”

“I’m not sure how good it is, but…”

“I’m missing the immunity challenge. The penultimate moment of the entire season. And I got people over, you hear?”

Billy was the only person I knew who could pronounce vowels with a hiss. I gave him the gist of it, trying not to omit any significant details, but speeding it along as best I could.

“Interesting,” he said. “Tell me again what she said when you spoke to her.”

I repeated the conversation.

“It would seem that Miz Verret’s agenda is somewhat different from that of the Darden Corporation,” Billy said. “Otherwise, she’d have no compunction about reporting your conversation.”

“That was my take.”

“Voodoo business,” he said musingly.

“I can’t be sure it’s got anything to do with voodoo.”

“Naw, this here is voodoo business. It has a certain taint.” Billy made a clicking noise. “I’ll get back to you in the morning.”

“I was just trying to do you a favor, Billy. I don’t need to be involved.”

“Honey, I know how it’s supposed to work, but you’re involved. I got too many eggs in my basket to be dealing with anything else right now. This pans out, I’m putting you in charge.”

The last thing I had wanted was to be in business with Billy Pitch. It wasn’t that you couldn’t make a ton of money with Billy, but he was a supremely dangerous and unpleasant human being, and he tended to be hard on his associates. Often he acted precipitately and there were more than a few widows who had received a boatload of flowers and a card containing Billy’s apologies and a fat check designed to compensate for their loss and his lamentable error in judgment. In most cases, this unexpected death benefit served to expunge the ladies’ grief, but Alice Delvecchio, the common-law wife of Danny “Little Man” Prideau, accused Billy of killing her man and, shortly after the police investigation hit a dead end, she and her children disappeared. It was rumored that Billy had raised her two sons himself and that, with his guidance, hormone treatments, and the appropriate surgery, they had blossomed into lovely teenage girls, both of whom earned their keep in a brothel catering to oil workers.