The Witch District was populated by a wide variety of shops that catered to customers with more than a casual interest in witchcraft, not to mention communication between the living and the dead. One displayed a number of T-shirts in its window that read GHOSTS ARE AWESOME, I WILL HAUNT YOU, WITCHY WOMAN, and THE WITCH DISTRICT KEEPS IT WEIRD. Another featured a library filled with books on magic and tarot cards and magazines like Sabat, which claimed to fuse witchcraft with feminism. I’m not sure why, but the fact that the area was also well decorated for Christmas made me go “Hmmm.”
LaToya Cane’s store was called Good Spirits, and my first thought was that it was schizophrenic. On one side, it sold most of the stuff that I had seen at the Twin Cities Psychic and Healing Festival; I wondered if it had a display there and I hadn’t noticed. There were lavender and frankincense incense cones, astro dice sets, crystals, healing stones and jewelry, chrome altar bells, lunar calendars, tarot cards and books that teach you how to read them, Wiccan guidebooks, charcoal, small cast-iron cauldrons, single-spell kits with instructions, and all kinds of potions, including love spells—anything and everything needed to contact spirits and enlist their aid.
On the other side, though, a wide assortment of electronic gear including spirit boxes and EMF meters was displayed next to all the things one might buy to combat ghosts, including palo santo wood splinters, sage smudge sticks, smoky quartz and black tourmaline chips, white candles, salt, brick dust, white roses, prayer cards, religious talismans like rosaries and crucifixes, holy water, and banishing-spell kits.
I met an African American woman in the aisle between the two sides. She was about as old as me and wasn’t dressed witchlike at all. She looked like a floor rep for Macy’s.
She smiled and asked, “How may I help you?”
“I’m McKenzie.”
She kept smiling.
“Are you LaToya Cane?” I asked.
“Have we met before?”
“No, but I met your son last night.”
I noticed that her skin was darker than his.
“Jackson?” LaToya said. “Did he send you to me?”
“Not exactly.”
LaToya kept smiling.
“This is going to sound ridiculous,” I said.
Her eyes flitted right and left at the merchandise surrounding us and settled back on my face.
“People come to me with all kinds of troubles,” she said. “I don’t think they’re ridiculous.”
“I’m the former police officer who shot Leland Hayes in the head. Now he’s using psychic mediums to tell people that he will show them where he hid the money he stole if they kill me.”
LaToya’s smile didn’t diminish one bit. If anything, it grew even brighter.
She shook a finger at me. “I have to admit, of all the stories I’ve heard since I opened this place…” She shook her finger some more. “I knew Hayes.”
“I know. That’s why I’m here.”
“Step this way.”
LaToya led me toward the back of her store, where there was a counter with a cash register. Behind the counter was a single stuffed swivel chair in front of a long desk stacked with several CCTV monitors so she could watch her customers without being intrusive about it. There was also a laptop, plus wire baskets filled with invoices that made me wonder if LaToya trusted it. Next to the desk was an old-fashioned percolator set on a small table.
“Coffee?” she asked.
“Bless you.”
She filled two cups and gave me one.
“Mr. McKenzie?”
“Please, just McKenzie is fine.”
“Call me Toy.”
“Thank you, Toy.”
“Do you actually believe that Leland Hayes is threatening you from the grave?”
“I’m just telling you what I heard.”
“From whom?”
“A psychic medium named Hannah Braaten.”
“She’s a lightweight,” Toy said. “I’m not sure how seriously I would take anything she says.”
“Kayla Janas?”
“I don’t know her.”
“Okay.”
“Why did you come to me?”
“You said you knew Leland Hayes.”
“Yes. I lived next door to him for I don’t know how long, a few years anyway.”
“You told the FBI that you never heard of him,” I reminded her.
“Did I?”
“According to the report.”
“The FBI report?”
“No,” I said. “Actually, I’m working off a file generated by Midwest Farmers Insurance Group. A field agent wrote that you were uncooperative when they went to see you after Leland was killed.”
“I don’t remember the FBI, but I remember them. They all but accused me of stealing Leland’s money, the bank’s money, actually. Stealing it and hiding it in the house I was renting. They demanded that I let them search it. When I refused, they said they would come back with a warrant.”
“They didn’t, though, did they?”
“No,” Toy said. “They were just trying to intimidate me. It nearly worked. I was twenty-two years old and living alone and they were threatening prison and whatever. But you grow up poor and black in neighborhoods like Ventura Village, you learn when people are bullshitting you and when they’re not.”
“What can you tell me about Hayes?”
“He was a vile, despicable sonuvabitch. Loudmouth—some of the things he said to me, screaming at me over his fence just to hear the sound of his own voice. He was the only person who ever called me nigger to my face.”
“Did he have any friends?” I asked.
“Sure. Men just as loathsome as him hangin’ around, doin’ their shit. The cops knocked on his door at least a half-dozen times that I know of. He always blamed me for calling them, although I never did. Another thing you learn when you’re young and black.”
“Do you remember any of their names, Leland’s friends?”
“Just one. Bastard named Stuart Moore. He caught me once out by the curb and told me that he wasn’t a bigot like the rest of them, and to prove it, he offered to pay twenty dollars if I would take him around the world. I slapped his face. He slapped me back. He hit me harder than I hit him, but it was satisfying just the same.”
“Yet you told the Feds and the insurance investigators that you barely knew Hayes and his friends.”
“What part of young, poor, black, and living alone in the projects did you not get?” Toy asked.
Good point, my inner voice said.
“Hayes had a son,” I said aloud.
“Ryan.” Toy made the name sound filled with sadness. “Poor kid. Leland beat him down, not just physically; he was always carrying bruises, but mentally, too, emotionally. He walked around like a zombie. He didn’t even have the strength to run away. When Leland was gone, and he was gone a lot, I’d make Ryan come over to my house. I’d feed him, talk to him. I found out his mother had died a couple of years before I moved there. It just shattered him. And then his father … I was only five years older than him, but I became—I was going to say his substitute mother, but no, that’s not right. Friend is better.
“McKenzie, I didn’t have the best childhood myself; one of the reasons I was living alone. Nothing like what he had to go through, though. He went through it alone, too. He contacted me after he was convicted of the truck robbery and asked if I would find a photograph of his mother that he had hidden from Leland. He said I could give it to his public defender, but I brought it to him personally. ’Course, they wouldn’t let him keep the frame, only the picture. I met him in the jail where they were holding him before they sent him to Kentucky. Seeing him like that—it made me cry. I still get sad when I think about him.”
“He’s out, you know.”
Toy’s head came up and she looked hard into my eyes. “I didn’t know,” she said. “When?”
“About six months ago.”
“Have you seen him?”
“Yes, just the other day.”
“How’d he look?”
“Good. Strong.” I told her that he was working, that his employers named him Employee of the Month. “He seems to be doing all right.”
Toy nodded her head as if it was what she had expected to hear. “Do you have a phone number, an address?” she asked. “I’d like to see him again.”
Normally I’d keep private information like that to myself, but the expression on her face told me that I would be a real jerk if I kept Ryan and Toy apart. My notebook was in the inside pocket of my leather coat. I pulled it out and recited Ryan’s current address and where he worked. I didn’t have a phone number. Toy scribbled it down on a notepad.
“Thank you,” she said.
“My pleasure.”
“So are you going to tell me why we’re talking about Leland Hayes, or what?” Toy asked.
“I’m trying to find the money he stole before he can pay it to someone else.”
“Is that why you went to see Ryan?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he wanted nothing to do with it.”
“Good for Ryan.”
“Anything you can tell me…”
“I probably already told you everything I know,” Toy said. “Leland and I were not friends.”
“The day of the attempted robbery…”
“What did the report say?”
“It said you caught the bus on Franklin Avenue at seven thirty in the morning and got home at six that night just in time to meet the Feds when they knocked on your door.”
Toy spread her hands wide.
“Yeah, that’s what I was afraid of,” I said.
“Tell me about Hannah,” Toy said. “Tell me about the reading.”
I did.
“Do you believe her?” Toy asked.
“Don’t you?”
She wagged her hand as if to say it was fifty-fifty.
“Toy,” I said, “I am in desperate need of enlightenment.”
“I believe in the paranormal,” she said. “I believe that ghosts walk the earth. My experiences living next door to Leland’s house after he was killed, that’s what got me interested. Well, not my experiences. My neighbors. There were a lot of them, too, moving in and out of that place over the years. One by one they told me about being haunted by him.
“So, yes, I believe in the paranormal, McKenzie. I believe there are psychic mediums that can communicate with the dead. I do not believe, however, that it’s anywhere near as common as it appears to be on TV and in the movies. Hannah and her colleagues—there is no doubt, at least I have no doubt, that a blessed few of them can and do communicate with the spirits of the dead every single day of their lives. But the rest? I don’t believe their gifts are as substantial. Some can do it most of the time; others can do it some of the time; still others can’t do it all.
“Except they have a product to sell, don’t they?” Toy added. “People pay them for readings, pay them to contact their loved ones. Often a great deal of money. What are they going to say if the spirit doesn’t come through? Sorry, better luck next time? Some of these psychic mediums do group readings in huge halls, casinos even. What if they can’t actually contact a spirit or if they can only contact a few? What do they tell a thousand people who paid, what, a hundred dollars or more to see a show?”
“Toy,” I said, “are you telling me that the less gifted psychic mediums will investigate the lives of some of their customers so they have something to fall back on if they can’t give them the real deal?”
“If a customer comes in and asks for a Come to Me Love Spell Kit and I’m all out, I might steer her to a bottle of Self-Love Potion #9 or even my Vibrant Pulse Pussy Tonic if I thought that’s the way she was leaning.”
I flashed on Karl Anderson.
He said the Braatens hired him the day before they did the reading that brought Leland into your life, my inner voice reminded. But he could have been feeding information to Hannah about the people she was reading long before then, couldn’t he?
“Tell me about Hannah Braaten,” I said.
“I don’t know her. We’ve never met.”
“You said she was a lightweight.”
“Yes, but I didn’t say she was a fake, did I?”
No, she didn’t.
“Toy, I’m not a cop anymore. I’m not a lawyer or a journalist. Nothing you say to me will be held against you. I won’t even repeat it.”
She stared at me over the brim of her coffee cup for a few beats, took a sip, and set it down on her desk.
“McKenzie, no psychic medium has ever told me that they cheat,” Toy said. “No friend or acquaintance of a psychic medium has ever told me that they cheat. I have no tangible evidence to prove that they cheat. We’re just talking.”
“Okay.”
“People come in all the time and they tell me things. They tell me when a psychic was spot-on and when the psychic got a few things right and some things wrong and when a psychic was just plain faking it. A woman came in Sunday and told me about a reading where her grandfather was supposed to have come through. The psychic gave the woman specific details about the grandfather that rang true, but then she said that he was sitting next to his wife. The woman asked, ‘Which one?’ The psychic answered, ‘The second one.’ The woman said, ‘Funny, I had tea with her last week.’ See what I mean?”
It was my turn to stare over the brim of my coffee cup. I also took a sip and set the cup down.
“Hannah Braaten,” I said again.
“Hannah is exciting and beautiful; people are talking about her. She’s the next big thing, and I’m sure she’s enjoying the moment. For what it’s worth, no one has ever told me that she was a phony. What they have said was that she usually delivers the readings people expect, but sometimes she doesn’t, and when that happens she’ll apologize.”
“She’s convinced certain people that Leland Hayes will pay a lot of money to see me dead without apology.”
“What people?”
“Your son, for one.”
That jolted her.
“What are you talking about?” Toy wanted to know.
“Jackson came looking for me last night. He wanted me to help him find Leland’s stash. He believes the money rightfully belongs to him.”
“Jacks said that?” Toy said.
“Yes.”
Toy moved her head quickly to her left, looked down, and became very still. “I can’t imagine why,” she said.
She’s lying, my inner voice told me.
“He tracked me down,” I said aloud. “I found it very disconcerting. It makes me think others might try to do the same thing.”
“McKenzie, I don’t know why Jackson wants to find Leland’s money after all of these years, why he thinks it belongs to him—except maybe he heard about it so many times while growing up, while living next to Leland’s house, that it seems like his. What I do know is he would never hurt you. Or anyone else. Not because of this.”
“Okay.”
“Jacks spent his first twelve years in Ventura Village; this was before we moved over near Roosevelt High School. I gave him everything I could, a good education and the discipline to benefit from it. I made sure he stayed out of the gangs, that he didn’t get involved with drugs. I taught him not to feel sorry for himself or think that he was entitled, like the world owed him something. You know how hard that was to do, a single mother? Now he’s studying economics at Macalester College while interning at an investment bank in downtown St. Paul. Every time I see him I feel like I might cry, he makes me so proud.”
Toy waved at her store. “At the same time, Jackson thinks all of this is silly. Well, not the profits, only the idea behind them. I worked retail all my life, McKenzie, behind God knows how many counters and eventually behind the desk. When Jackson and I finally got a little bit ahead, I took that experience and what I learned studying all that paranormal stuff and opened this place. I was in the right place at the right time because of the explosion in TV shows about paranormal activities, the movies, the books, the websites—did you know there’s a Facebook page devoted strictly to haunted houses?”
“Of course there is,” I said.
“It all generated an enormous amount of customer interest. Even people who don’t believe a word of it, who think the paranormal is a joke, will come in to buy love potions for Valentine’s Day and spirit boxes for Halloween. They think it’s fun. And it is.”
“I used to think so, too,” I said.
“But Jacks believing that Leland Hayes is talking from the other side—I doubt that, I really do. Maybe he heard the story and that got him thinking about the missing money.”
Maybe he heard it at Macalester, my inner voice suggested.
“Did you know he carried a gun?” I asked aloud.
“I tell him not to. A young black man carrying a concealed weapon the way the police are today…” Toy shook her head as if she could see the future and it terrified her. “I know he doesn’t carry it all the time. He doesn’t carry it at school or work. Even so … It comes from growing up where he did. I can’t make him understand that the whole world isn’t Ventura Village or even South Minneapolis.”
“Toy, I’m not here because of your son. If he finds the money, God bless him. I hope he buys his mother something nice. I just want all of this to go away.”
“You shouldn’t be talking to me, then,” Toy said. “Or Jackson. You should be talking to Hannah.”