The cab had made him queasy, driving erratically as he did.
Having just finished a meal of overcooked steak and onion mash. He’d made the mistake of washing it down with a glass of cold milk since he’d completed the last of a bender the night before. He didn’t have an appetite for scotch… Not when there were this many bodies. Not when he had one thing on his mind.
The chief wanted answers. He was feeling the pinch from the brass three floors up. They in turn were feeling the squeeze from the mayor, who had it from the governor. It was an election year. All roads led to Hollywood Boulevard and the voodoo lounges that lined up and down the strip. There was a mystic presence on the sidewalks that gave off a sense of unease, as if the future had already been predicted and it involved evil and all who were in its way would suffer if this secret were exposed to the masses.
That was Spencer Raymond’s prediction. Somehow he knew his destiny lay at the end of the revelation.
He was the lead detective on a case that was rapidly going cold. The last body to be found facedown with his spirit extinguished near the Walk of Fame had long turned to ash and dust. That didn’t stop the job from being completed. Someone had got away with murder.
He lit a cigarette and exhaled a deep waft of smoke from the top of the strip and watched as it spread out and dissipated on the frosty street. Then he began his walk. He would knock on every shop door and demand these evil witches and their cantankerous attitudes spill their beans on who murdered these war veterans. They preyed on their insecurities and he was having none of it!
As he walked on he reminded himself of the beginnings of the investigation on this very street eleven months earlier.
Sergeant Donny Davito. A twenty-three-year-old veteran of the Pacific. Lying face down with a knife wound to the gut, his insides hanging out onto the nearest star on the Walk of Fame. Across from the Chinese Theatre.
A month earlier, Gunner Sergeant Sean O’Neill. Dead. Found with a similar ornamental knife to the gut. Three in the morning. No witness. No hint of a struggle. This time, the victim was butt naked but it was no crime of passion.
Detective Raymond had scoured every inch of the boulevard in the intervening months all day long… But he had never been here before at such an early hour. The hour of the crime had to coincide with the hour of abandon. Raymond had the foresight to put two and two together.
He reached the first Tarot shopfront and rattled the door. He checked his wrist in the process. Three-thirty in the morning. The streets were deserted and it was at this hour that the suspected crime had occurred twelve months earlier.
She was young, but not too young. She wore a dark dress and a black veil and she strolled to the glass door like she was floating on air. A dark magic. She glared at him through the glass partition before she made the move to unlock the latch and question him as to why he would call at such an ungodly hour.
“The name’s Raymond,” he began. “Detective Spencer Raymond, L.A.P.D”
“There something I can help you with, detective?”
“There is,” he began. “Why are you wearing a dark wedding dress at such an hour? What is it you’re up to?”
“Is it a crime to be in a dark wedding dress?” she asked.
“No, but it’s suspicious.”
“Suspicious, how so?”
“Don’t play coy with me,” he said. He stepped into her storefront, breaking the boundaries and engaging in petty trespass.
“Someone got away with murder here twelve months ago. There are thirteen fortune tellers up and down the strip. You count them with me, thirteen. Why so many? Huh? What is the racket you are all up to?” he demanded. He hadn’t realized he had the squeeze on her forearm. He was holding her tight. She winced at the pain his tight hand had inflicted. He was a gunner in the Marines. He had mowed down Nazis in Normandy. He could handle a hot instrument. He applied the same level of tension to her limb.
“Let go of me, you’re hurting me!” she demanded. He raised the back of his fist. If a grab wouldn’t make her talk, the force of his terror would, by God.
“Come in, I’ll tell you everything but just please,” she begged with a tear and whisper. “Keep your voice down. There are forces at play that are beyond your comprehension.”
She led the way and he followed. She turned back to lock the shopfront door. Her hair smelled of incense and a perfume he longed for. Her allure was captivating. He would follow her everywhere, he decided.
“It’s not safe to talk up here,” she said. “Follow me out back.”
He did as asked. They walked into the staff-only area, past the sage plants and the other exotic seedlings buried in their pots for the purposes of divination, or a spell for power or any other God-knows-clandestine, unchristian thing that people of this ilk engaged.
He didn’t realize they were venturing down a staircase and into a basement. The allure of her perfume grew stronger. He was captivated. The stairs descended further and further. Her smell grew stronger. He was beginning to fall in love.
“I’m sorry about your arm,” he felt himself saying.
“Hush,” she said in a tone of superiority. “That will be the least of your concerns soon enough.”
They continued their descent. The bottom was approaching and they found themselves in an underground amphitheater surrounded by tiki lamps. There were hundreds gathered, all wearing dark dresses with black veils. They were surrounding a priestess who wore the same attire, only she was adorned with a dark crown above her veil.
“Sisters!” the Priestess yelled. “At last, another detective has come to arrest us!” she belittled. The gathered ladies all laughed.
Raymond looked around briefly, breaking with the allure of the one whom he loved. He recognized the others as the shop owners who each ran the fortune teller fronts above. He vaguely remembered his mission: to get to the bottom of the murders. He suspected them to be the ones. They had preyed on the shellshock of the war vets who had nowhere else to turn. He hated them and their lecherous ways. They were vipers. Then he smelt a whiff of that alluring perfume and he was in love again.
“Come to me detective,” the priestess instructed. Raymond walked over. With a flick of her wrist, she instructed him to remove his hat, coat, and suit.
He stood there, amongst the chanting fortune tellers in his underwear and looked on at the one he loved as an ancient spell of witchcraft was read over him. A curse was placed on him and in twenty-four hours he would lie in the middle of the boulevard, the fourteenth victim of a crime that would remain unsolved until the gentrification of Los Angeles in fifty-three years would expose the murderous exercises of the fortune tellers.
But he did not care. He was in love.
"Why veterans?" he found himself asking. Somewhere deep down he still had a sense of himself. Who he was and what his mission was.
"Because we feed off your pain, your agony gives us strength," said the priestess in a whisper.
She breathed on him and he fell back into the trance.
A black-veiled woman from the rear proceeded up the line and edged closer to Raymond. The priestess allowed her to address him. She stood face to face with her lips parted, a foot away. Then an inch. Soon she was in kissing distance.
"You won't be needing this," she said as she reached into his weapon undergarment situated above his singlet.
She removed his revolver and pointed it at the detective.
"It's a shame you don't get to feel the sensation your agony gives to the black veil," she taunted.
"I don't mind," he replied, still under the spell. He was beginning to think he may have fallen for this one too.
"I wish I had your help," she whispered again. She moved in to his ear.
"I could really use it," she said.
"What for?"
"To assist me."
"How would I do that?"
"By giving me backup."
With a twist of her hips, the black-veiled woman raised the weapon and pointed it at the priestess. The others dropped their chants and stood back in fear.
"LAPD! You're all under arrest!" she yelled.
"Carter?" Raymond asked, the spell breaking momentarily.
"It's me Raymond, you've been drugged. I am breaking cover to get us out of here," she said.
"Donna," the Priestess said. "I'm disappointed, we had high hopes for you."
"I had high hopes for your head, ankles, and wrists to be strapped to the chair Meryl, now back off!"
An arrest was impractical.
Detective Donna Carter knew the only weapons in the vicinity were the daggers of Gozeldor. She risked calling on an arrest with no one but herself and her incapacitated partner to administer it against hundreds of witches. She thought better of it and grabbed her partner by the undershirt and led him up the tiki-lit underground path towards the stairs that ascended onto the various voodoo shops above.
"Anyone thinks about following us gets a lead sandwich!" she yelled.
This caused those gathered to step back. They did not make any moves. Donna ascended the stairs two at a time with Raymond by her side. The effects of the plants having worn off, he quickly came to his senses.
"We need backup, Carter!" he insisted.
"No shit."
"Shame you got made," he said.
"Someone had to save you."
—
Two hundred beat cops broke the doors down to thirteen fortune tellers and palm readers. It didn't take long until the secret doors that led to the subterranean ritual rooms were discovered. Carter and Raymond walked them through the remnants of the abandoned lair. The ash from the lamps being all that remained of the descendants of Salem.
"Some mysteries just won't allow themselves to be solved," Raymond said as he lit a cigarette in the dim, damp space.