The King of Swords (max mingus) (23 page)

'But, as with all pacts, there was a downside, a price to pay. Every month de Villeneuve had to make a human sacrifice to retain his powers. Young women-young girls, actually, because the Devil would only accept virgins. He killed several society women, some say up to ten or twelve before he was caught. The bodies would be found with their throats cut ear to ear, and there'd be a brand over their hearts-a long upright, medieval sword, very similar to the one in the card. The hearts would be missing, although no one knew how because the only injuries the victims had were to their necks.'

'How d'he get caught?' Max asked.

'Well, one day, the king decided to honour de Villeneuve by exhibiting his favourite paintings of himself and his cronies. The portraits were hung in the Grand Trianon-an outbuilding in the Palace of Versailles. Hundreds of guests were invited. They wined, dined and danced in the main palace ballroom and then Louis led them over to see the portraits. There they got the shock of their lives. Instead of seeing portraits of the monarch and themselves, they saw what looked to be a hundred variations of the same painting: a naked young girl, sitting in a chair with her feet in a bucket and her hands tied behind her back. A man in black robes was standing behind her with a raised sword. And all around them, in a circle stood these very tall men with dead-white faces.

'No one knew how the paintings got in there, or what had happened to the original portraits. Then one of the nobles recognized the girl in one of the paintings as his murdered daughter. And then another nobleman saw his child in another of the paintings.

'They arrested de Villeneuve and put him in the Bastille, but he escaped. That was in 1785. In 1789 the French monarchy was overthrown and de Villeneuve resurfaced, this time in Haiti.

'Haiti was then a French slave colony. No one knows how, but de Villeneuve had become a wealthy plantation owner; coffee and cane were his main trade. He owned over a hundred African slaves, although, for the times, he was enlightened. He treated them well and gave them a kind of freedom. He paid them and even built a village for them away from his estate. Of course, there was a reason for this. At night, the slaves practised their religion.'

'Voodoo?' Max suggested, mentioning one of the four things he knew about Haiti, outside of Papa and Baby Doc, and the fact that the island was a hundred miles away from Miami.

'No. De Villeneuve's slaves practised black magic, a series of rituals revolving around human sacrifice and the conjuring up of evil spirits. The high priest of the slave village was a man called Boukman. He was said to have all kinds of supernatural powers, including the ability to see far into the future. He used playing cards in his divination.

'De Villeneuve used to attend the ceremonies, both as participant and painter. He and Boukman were good friends, as well as followers of the same master. De Villeneuve designed a set of cards for Boukman to use.'

'And that's the origin of the famous five-grand deck?' Max asked.

'Yes. But it's said that it wasn't really de Villeneuve who was the cards' creator, but Lucifer himself. All the cards are said to bear his signature in the lower left-hand corner: a falling star, symbolizing his fall from grace. And the cards are only really meant to be used by those who follow him, or who are at least familiar with his ways. I can't verify this because I've only seen the cards in photographs, and those weren't close-ups.'

They both studied the card in the morgue pictures, but all four corners were eroded.

'What happened to de Villeneuve?'

'He lived in Haiti until 1805, when once again he disappeared. This time for good. No one knows what happened to him.

'As for Boukman, in 1791 he led the first slave uprising against the colonial masters-a very bloody and violent campaign. De Villeneuve and his property were of course untouched. Although Boukman was eventually captured and executed by the French, the rebellion continued and became a sophisticated military campaign led by Toussaint L'Ouverture. Haiti declared its independence in 1804.

'De Villeneuve is known to have fathered many many children by slave women, including several with Boukman's sister, by whom he had six-all twins. Many of his descendants are still in Haiti and Switzerland, of course, where they produce the cards every October, which was the month they were originally created.'

'So this King of Swords card. What do you think it was doing in someone's stomach?'

'What did the person do?' Phyllis asked.

Max told her about Lacour.

'It sounds like he was possessed and under a spell, to do something like that,' Phyllis said. 'Just like Kathleen was, God rest her soul.'

Max checked his watch. It was past 9 p.m.

He asked Phyllis for the names of shops where they sold tarot cards. She told him she had a list of suppliers and distributors in her files and went out to make him a copy.

She came back with three sheets of paper. He thanked her for her time and help. She walked him outside.

When they were shaking hands and saying goodbye, Max saw her expression change from pleasant to fearful.

'I know you don't yet believe, Detective, but I have to tell you to be very careful,' she said gravely. 'You're heading out on a dark road. It's going to be very dangerous-not just for you, but those close to you, people you care about the most.'

'Where does it end, the road?' Max asked.

'It's not where, it's how,' she said, looking at him with concern one final time.

'Could you be any more specific?'

She shook her head and walked quickly away, back into the motel.

E
arly the next morning, Max drove to Miami-Dade PD headquarters and went to the library. He looked up micro-fiche articles on Kathleen Reveaux's suicide. It had made the front page of the Herald on Thursday 11 May 1978. She'd jumped from the top of the Freedom Tower in the early hours of Wednesday morning. There were no witnesses. The body had been discovered by construction workers.

The following day the story had been bumped down to a third-page column: Reveaux was identified, and her family and friends were quoted as saying she'd become increasingly disturbed since her return from a trip to New York the previous month.

By Friday 26 May, another column, again on the third page, said the police had ruled out foul play and were marking her death as a suicide. The report mentioned that 'numerous occult objects' had been found in her house on South Miami Avenue, before going on to describe her career as a celebrity fortune teller.

Max then went down to Records.

Kathleen Reveaux's file was thin: incident report, coroner's report, witness statements (two) and twenty photographs.

A Detective Billue had caught the case. His report stated that, based on the damage to the victim's body-head, legs and arms all fractured in multiple places-the victim had fallen from a considerable height, estimated to be the upper floors of the Freedom Tower.

The victim was wearing blue Levi's, a white blouse, white socks and one Adidas tennis shoe on her left foot. Recovered near the scene was the right tennis shoe. Screwed up in her hand was a tarot card: the King of Swords.

Max made a photocopy of the file and took the elevator down to evidence to see if they'd kept anything from the case. All personal effects in suicides were usually destroyed if the next of kin didn't claim them.

There was nothing, but Kathleen's sister had signed for her belongings-her bloodstained clothes and shoes, and the tarot card.

Her address was in Gainesville.

Max called her up and made an appointment to go by her house that evening.

J
oe sat back on the busted up couch and stretched out his long legs as he finished up reading through the NYPD witness reports on the Wong family murders. He was in the disused garage behind North West 9th Street in Overtown, which he and Max were using as their base. His cousin Deshaun had hooked them up with it for fifty bucks a month. Apart from the couch, a wall of empty metal shelves, a refrigerator, their three boxes of paperwork, a blackboard and a corkboard, the place was empty. Max and Joe went there once a day, sometimes together, but more often individually, before the beginning or at the end of their shifts. They never talked about the case at MTF. Any calls they made were on outside payphones.

The place could have been much better-light came from a single bulb hanging off a flex, and the power supply was temperamental, going off for minutes at a time; plus there was no ventilation, so it was always stifling hot, and the stench of old oil made Joe's head hurt and his clothes stink like a mechanic's overalls. But it was on a deserted side road, and was one of a dozen identical-looking, brown metal-shuttered garages with rusted padlocks, completely anonymous.

Joe liked it here, doing real police work instead of framing patsies. He and Max had spent all of the past week putting together an imaginary case against Philip Frino, an Australian dope runner who brought Colombian cartel coke in on a small fleet of cigarette boats. Frino had a place in the Bahamas. The idea was to link Grossfeld to him and then him to Carlos Lehder's middle management. It was something they could've done in ten minutes, but Sixdeep wanted the whole thing carefully documented, a paper trail that would stand up in court, so he'd pulled them both off their eight ongoing investigations and made them go at Moyez full time; so far they'd put Frino under surveillance and photographed him meeting numerous people. Joe was glad he was in on the joke.

This was his third time going through the Wong file, making sure he hadn't missed anything. The NYPD officers had been diligent and conscientious, interviewing damn near everyone who lived on the street. Several witnesses had reported a dark blue Ford transit van with New Jersey plates parked across the road from the Wong house, and three people had described the same man hanging around on the kerb by the Ford-tall, fat and wearing a black bowler hat. The van hadn't been recovered. They'd run the plates, but they'd turned out to be fake.

The candy wrapper had been dusted for prints, but nothing had come up. It was the same with the one found at the Lacour house.

Joe put the file away and got himself a Coke from the fridge. He turned his attentions to the twelve-page computer printout of missing persons reported in Miami between June 1980 and May 1981. Forty-six names per page, 552 in total.

He scanned the printout for families living at the same address. Nada.

He scanned it again for matching family names. It was laborious, because the list wasn't in alphabetical order. Twice the light went out and he lost his place and had to start again.

He persevered. He sweated through his shirt.

He got to the twelfth page and swore he'd missed something.

He went back to the beginning.

Spanish names dominated, then English. The French and Jewish ones stood out.

Nothing matched.

He did it by address.

Nine pages in, he hit the jackpot.

Madeleine Cajuste, 3121 North East 56th Street, Lemon City; reported missing: 30 April.

Sauveur Kenscoff, 3121 North East 56th Street, Lemon City; reported missing: 30 April.

That was it. Two people living in the same house had disappeared just before the Moyez shooting. It was too late to check it out now; he'd go the next morning.

Joe wrote it down on the blackboard, which they'd divided in two, Joe on the right, Max on the left. That way they kept track of their current and upcoming tasks, as well as any leads they'd generated.

Max had written that he was currently talking to tarot card sellers and distributors. So far nothing. The de Villeneuve family in Switzerland had refused to divulge their list of buyers, saying they prided themselves on their secrecy and considered their clients an extension of the family. Some family, thought Joe, who'd heard all about their history from Max.

At the bottom of the board, in capitals, Max had written: 'DEVIL WORSHIPPERS/BLACK MAGIC?'

Max had been to Bridget Reveaux's house in Gainesville and photographed her late sister's tarot card. He'd blown up his picture to A3 size and tacked it to the corkboard. Every detail was visible, including the supposed mark of the Devil in the bottom left-hand corner-an inverted five-pointed star with an elongated tip, which, to Joe, looked more like a badly drawn plummeting eagle.

Joe didn't buy into any of that hocus-pocus bullshit, but the card sure freaked him out. The King of Sword's may have had a blank face, but it didn't feel that way. The thing had some kind of presence-and a human presence at that. It was like having someone in there with him. Even with the lights off. He wanted to turn the fucking thing around, but that was a pussy thing to do. It wasn't even a card, but a picture of a card.

Fuck it! He turned the damn thing around.

After he was done, Joe locked up the garage and went to his car, parked close to the Dorsey house.

When he was a kid his granddaddy used to take him by there and point it out to him. It was a fine two-storey wooden gingerbread house, with tall trees in the back yard and red rose bushes in the front. D. A. Dorsey was Miami's first black millionaire. He'd made his fortune in real estate and done a lot of good for Overtown, including, among other things, helping build the Mount Zion Baptists church. Joe's granddaddy told him that every black man should aspire to being a little like D. A. Dorsey-help yourself first and then, when your pockets are full, give some of it back to the people around you.

The house had long since fallen into disrepair and neglect. The front entrance and all the windows were boarded up, the white paint was greying, bubbling, cracked and peeling. In some places it had been replaced with gang graffiti.

A bunch of kids were hanging around on the sidewalk outside it, smoking and drinking liquor out of bottles in brown bags. They eyed Joe up, immediately made him for a cop and one by one started to disperse, shu?ing off slowly, a dip in their walks, left arms swinging lower than the right.

'Yeah, go on, walk off,' Joe muttered under his breath. They didn't know shit about where they'd been standing.

He looked up at the sad old house, dirt under the slats, smashed roof tiles in the grass. There should've been a statue of Dorsey in Overtown, but the city wouldn't spring for that and who'd come see it anyway? Nobody came to Overtown any more unless they lived here, had a score to settle or a crime to commit. It hadn't always been that way, but it sure was now.

Overtown was one of the oldest neighbourhoods in Miami. In the 1930s it had been called Colouredtown, and its entertainment district, known as the Strip or the Great Black Way on North West 2nd Avenue had almost rivalled Harlem's, right down to the Lyric Theatre, Miami's very own version of the Apollo, where all the greats had played. His granddaddy had talked about seeing Nat King Cole, Cab Colloway, Lady Day, Josephine Baker and many others at the Lyric. The area had been home to the Cola Nip Bottling Company, as well as dozens of hotels, grocery stores, barber-shops, markets and nightclubs. It had been a happening place, and a happy, prosperous one too-or as happy and prosperous as black people were allowed to get in the Jim Crow era.

Ironically, Overtown had started dying when segregation laws were repealed. There was a slow exodus of businesses and talent as people relocated to other parts of town. Then the powers that be had driven a stake right into its heart by building the I-95 Expressway right through it, which devastated the already struggling community. Now the place was barely there and easy to miss; somewhere people literally drove over on their way downtown or to get their kicks at the beach.

Joe felt angry as he pulled out and got on the road. Angry at the city, angry at the world he lived in, and mostly angry at himself for burying his emotions behind his badge and uniform. He'd looked the other way and stayed quiet when he should have been pointing his finger and screaming his head off. He'd played the white man's game for the sake of his bullshit career and lost. Stevie Wonder could've seen that coming. He couldn't help but feel that he was being punished for the way he'd done things-and for the million things he hadn't done. He'd let his people down. He'd watched them take beatings and humiliations they didn't deserve, and he hadn't lifted a finger or raised his voice in protest. He'd lied for racist cops who would've done exactly the same thing to him, if he hadn't been a uniform. He could've taken a stand and done the right thing, but he hadn't because he'd thought he needed his job more than his soul and his pension more than his peace of mind. He thought of his granddaddy again, trying to instil those good values in him as he'd held his hand in front of the Dorsey house. He'd failed him.

And even now, with what he was doing in that garage-who was he fooling? Max, that was who he was fooling. His best friend-shit, his only damn friend. The guy had always been a straight arrow as far as he was concerned, always looked out for him, no matter how unpopular it made him. Max just didn't care. Joe was his friend and you didn't bail out on a friend, no matter what.

Max was helping him because he thought this was about getting some proper justice and to see Joe go out in a blaze of glory. But it wasn't really. It was about Sixdeep, about bringing him down.

With Max's help, Joe was going to build the real Moyez case, uncover the people behind it and hand every detail over to Grace Strasburg at the Herald. She was a good reporter, one of the few who didn't think Sixdeep walked on water. He'd do it the day he officially left MTF. It would be his parting shot, his farewell and by the way fuck you to Sixdeep.

It would mean the end of his and Max's careers. Max would come out of it worse-both betrayed and betrayer-and Joe felt genuinely bad about that, but Sixdeep had to be stopped, and that made the ends justify the means.