CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Queen Aché lived in the Jackson Ward, in a fancy red-painted town house with white cast-iron balconies and elaborate white cast-iron railings. The house used to belong to Booker Morrison, the famous turn-of-the-century preacher, who said that “those who are bondsmen on earth will have eternal freedom in heaven; and those who enslaved them will themselves suffer slavery for ever and a day.” For that observation, he was kidnapped by Klansmen, hung up by his heels from a lamppost on the corner of Franklin and Fifth Streets, soaked in paraffin, and set alight.

It was a grillingly hot afternoon, with only a few mares’ tails streaked across a dark blue sky. Two bodyguards were standing on the redbrick sidewalk outside Queen Aché’s front steps, both of them wearing jazzy African shirts, capacious shorts, knee-length socks, and mirror sunglasses. Decker parked directly outside and climbed out of his car, squinting up at the house as if he were interested in buying it.

“Hi, George. Hi, Newton. How’s it going in the heavy business?”

“We generally axes folks not to park in that particular spot, Lieutenant, on account of security.”

“Quite right, too. Is Her Ladyship at homer?”

“She expecting you?”

“Oh, I should think so. You know that Junior Abraham has left the building.”

“Junior Abraham? Didn’t hear nothing about that, Lieutenant.”

“Didn’t think you would have, what with this deaf-and-blind epidemic going around. Now, how about telling Madame that I’d like to ask her a couple of questions?”

Newton took out his cell phone. “Mikey? We got Martin out here. Lieutenant Martin. He says he wants to talk to Queen Aché.”

He waited, and then eventually he said, “Okay,” and dropped his cell phone back into his shirt pocket.

“Well?” Decker asked.

“Queen Aché says the ase isn’t favorable today.”

“The ase? The ase my ass. Get back onto her. Tell her this is a multiple homicide investigation and if she doesn’t want to answer questions here I can arrange for her to come down to Madison and Grace and inspect our nice new shiny headquarters.”

Newton took out his cell phone again. “Mikey? Martin says he needs to talk to Queen Aché about Junior Abraham getting creamed. Yes. That’s right. Okay. That’s right.”

He dropped his cell phone back in his pocket. “Queen Aché says okay but don’t blame her if something seriously untoward happens.”

Newton led Decker and Hicks up the front steps and the door was opened by a loose-jointed young man with protruding ears and an incipient black moustache. Before he went inside, Decker turned back and called, “George! There’s a buck in it if nobody steals my hubcaps!” George flapped his fat hand in disgust.

The young man took them across a wide hallway with gilt antique mirrors and a dark mahogany floor. In the back of the house somebody was playing a Charles Mingus improvization, badly.

“Hey—you’re not Michael, are you?” Decker asked the young man. “Queen Aché’s youngest kid?”

The young man nodded.

“I don’t believe it. You were only knee high to a high knee the last time I saw you. What have they been feeding you on? Giraffe food?”

“I’m fifteen,” Michael said, defensively.

“Fifteen? How about that? Fifteen. God … I was fifteen when I was your age, too. Can you imagine it?”

Decker and Hicks followed Michael through an archway into the living room. Most of the white wooden blinds were closed, so that the sunlight was very subdued in here, and the room was filled with lazy loops of marijuana smoke.

Queen Aché seriously regarded herself as royalty, and this was her throne room. The drapes were crimson velvet, with swags and ties and gilded tassels. The chairs and couches were all gilded and upholstered in the same fabric, and a sparkling cut-glass chandelier hung from the ceiling. Yet the room wasn’t all Versailles. On the walls hung dark oil paintings of mythical African beasts, and jungles; and inscrutable ebony figures stood guard on either side of the fireplace, with spears, and attenuated faces like praying mantises. In the far corner of the room there was an elaborate Santería shrine, crowded with statuettes and lighted candles and cowrie shells and painted masks and chicken feathers.

Three men were sprawled in armchairs, all of them wearing black shirts and flappy black Armani pants and carrying half of Schwarzschild’s Jewelry Store around their wrists. Queen Aché herself was reclining next to them on a golden-striped divan. She was smoking a small ivory pipe with a face carved on it.

“What do you expect me to say to you?” she demanded, as Decker and Hicks approached her. “The ase isn’t favorable … how do you expect me to have good aba?”

“It’s up to you. Maybe you’d have better aba downtown.”

“Hey,” warned one of the men, and began to stand up, but Queen Aché waved her hand at him and he sat down again.

She was a remarkable-looking woman. Decker had known her father, King Special, and like King Special she was very tall, over six feet three inches, with long arms and long legs and wide shoulders. But there was no doubt that she had inherited the beauty of her Cuban mother. A high forehead, wide-apart eyes, and a look of sleepy aloofness. Her skin was almost pale enough to pass as white, but her hair was braided and beaded, and she spoke with African-American intonations.

She was wearing a filmy dress of white linen, through which Decker thought he could almost see the heavy curves of her breasts, and dozens of thin gold bangles. Her feet were bare, and she had gold rings on her toes, too.

“So what is all this you say about Junior Abraham?” she asked.

“Well … I was kind of hoping that you knew more about that than I do.”

She shook her beaded hair. “This is the first I’ve heard of it. I’m very sorry. Junior wasn’t such a bad man. A boaster, maybe. And not to be trusted. But he didn’t deserve to die a violent death.”

“Maybe you found out that poor old Junior wasn’t being entirely honest with you. You know, like dipping his hand in the cash register.”

“Why must we complain that the moon is slanting?” Queen Aché said. “Can’t anyone reach the skies to straighten it?”

“Well, I don’t know about the moon, but somebody sure straightened Junior.”

Queen Aché smiled. Decker thought she really did have the most erotic smile. It made you think that something very sexy and very dangerous was going to happen next. But all Queen Aché said was, “He who has a head has no cap to wear on it; and he who has a cap has no head to wear it on.”

“You said it, Your Majesty.”

She kept on smiling. “There is nothing I can help you with, Lieutenant. If Junior was cheating me, I didn’t know about it, and if I had found out about it, I would have made him pay me back, no more than that.”

“You expect me to believe that? If there’s one thing I know about you, it’s that you don’t forgive anybody anything, ever.”

Queen Aché drew on her pipe and blew out a long thin stream of smoke. “You know nothing about me at all, Lieutenant. To you my soul is a closed book. And you have no evidence whatsoever that I was involved in any way in the killing of Junior Abraham.”

“Oh, really? This was a little bit more than a straightforward hit. It happened in Jimmy the Rib’s, in case you’re interested, which you don’t seem to be, because you probably knew that already. The killer came out of the kitchen and blew Junior’s head off, which seems to happen to everybody who gets in your way. But the interesting thing is that nobody saw the killer in the kitchen beforehand.”

“I don’t understand why that should be any concern of mine.”

“Well … there are only two possible explanations,” Decker said. “One is that the kitchen staff simply failed to notice him.”

“And the other?”

“It was a Santería spell. And who is the only person in town who would arrange for a hit using a Santería spell?”

“I might make an ebbó to protect me from my enemies, but nothing more than that.”

“An ebbó?”

“An ebbó is more of a sacrifice than a spell, Lieutenant. An offering to our orishas so that they will give us the things we crave the most. Love, for instance, or money, or good luck; or protection from evil spirits.”

“How about being invisible? What’s the ebbó for that?”

Queen Aché shook her head and again her beads made a soft rattling sound. “There is no such ebbó and no such spell. All that one would ask is that one’s misdeeds went unnoticed.”

Hicks, said, “That would be quite a request, though, wouldn’t it? Like, even more all-inclusive than just being invisible.”

“What do you mean?” Queen Aché asked, without looking at him.

“Well, if your misdeeds went unnoticed, nobody would ever know that it was you, whether you were invisible or not. Like, you might leave evidence, but nobody would ever be able to see it.”

Queen Aché said nothing, but slowly turned her head and gave Hicks a hair-raising look, with slightly narrowed eyes, as if she were trying to remember not only his face, but his soul, too.

Decker said, “I want to ask you one more question, Queen Aché. Do you know of any reason why anybody should have wanted to kill Junior Abraham?”

“No. Absolutely not.”

“Well, thank you for your time. When I’ve had the chance to check out Junior’s bank account, I may ask to take a look at some of your books. You know, for comparison. It would be very educational to know how much he was taking you for.”

“If I hadn’t noticed, it couldn’t have been very much. You know how careful I am with my business affairs.”

“Oh yes.”

“Still, one can’t know everything. Some great scholars of Ifa cannot tell the way to Ofa. Others know the way to Ofa, but not one line of Ifa.”

“Some detectives don’t know who shot Junior Abraham, but they never fail to recognize bullshit, even when it’s metaphorical bullshit.”

“Good-bye, Lieutenant. Michael will show you out.”