"Ahh, I wouldn't want to put her to any trouble. Besides,
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don't you want to leave your work behind you for a few hours?"
"No, I'd really appreciate it if you'd come. Maybe you can give Rhoda some idea of how important this is. How much the city needs us, you know—people like us."
"She's still hankering for Fredericksburg, huh?"
"If you could maybe just talk to her."
"All right, then," Decker agreed. He stood up and shrugged on his coat. "So long as you bear in mind that I'm not a marriage guidance counselor. My whole life has been one dysfunctional relationship after another, with a lot of floozies in between."
"Except for Cathy," Hicks said.
Decker glanced down at the photograph of Cathy in her straw hat and then he looked back at Hicks. "I think you're speaking out of turn," he said, coldly.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—"
Decker closed his eyes for a moment and then he said, "No. I know. I'm the one who should be saying sorry. It's just that—I've been feeling her presence lately, very close. Almost like she's still alive."
Hicks looked embarrassed, so Decker patted him reassuringly on the back and the two of them left the office.
In the elevator they met Detective Bill Watkins, a broad-shouldered shaven-headed man with a broken nose. He looked like a linebacker for the Richmond Speed.
"Hear you talked to Queen Ache today, Lieutenant."
"Yeah, for what it was worth."
"She didn't admit to nothing, then? That woman . . . whewf, if she wasn't so evil, she'd be bad. Give me twelve hours and a king-size bed and I'd have her confessing to anything."
"She'd eat you alive, Detective, and then she'd suck your bones."
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* * *
Hicks opened the front door. "Where the elite meet to eat." He grinned. The house was small, with a narrow hallway and a steep flight of stairs. Decker could smell frying chicken in the kitchen, and he suddenly realized how hungry he was. He hadn't eaten anything since Captain Morello had courteously but very firmly turned down his lunch invitation and he had been forced to resort to that soggy double cheeseburger.
"Tim, is that you?" Rhoda called. She came out of the kitchen in her apron, her hair tied up in a scarf, and immediately flushed in embarrassment.
Hicks said, "Hey—I know I should have called, but I thought I'd surprise you."
"Lieutenant, I'm so sorry . . . I must really look a mess." Decker smiled and held out his hand. "You look great. I
told Tim to ask you but he was afraid you'd say no."
Rhoda wiped her hand on her apron. "Of course I
wouldn't have said no. This is an honor."
"Let me take your coat," Hicks said. "How about a beer?"
"Do you want a hand in the kitchen?" Decker asked Rhoda. "I make a chili-tomato salad dressing that some people would sell their kidneys for."
"No, no, I'm fine. Go into the living room, take the weight off."
Rhoda went back into the kitchen and Decker could hear her arguing with Hicks. "—could have let me know, I would have cooked something special—"
He went into the living room. It was wallpapered with a pale brown bamboo pattern, and furnished with big beige leather chairs. A crowd of Barbie dolls sat in one corner of the couch, where Hicks's daughter had obviously been playing before she went to bed. On top of the huge wide-screen
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television were at least a dozen family photographs, as well as a vase of artificial lilies in artificial water, a china church, and a painted-plaster figure of Jesus with His hands covering His eyes.
Hicks came in with two cans of Budweiser and a plate of - tortilla chips. "Rhoda okay about this?" Decker asked him. "Sure, you know what women are like."
"I'm beginning to wonder."
They sat down and Hicks eased his shoes off. "That Queen Ache's something, isn't she?"
"Oh, for sure. She's a very astute lady. If there's any racket in Richmond that she doesn't have some kind of a finger in, I'd like to know what it is. She calls her organization the Eguns, which is the Santeria word for ancestors. Santeros worship their ancestors and she always worshiped her father. I mean, anybody who dares to insult King Special's sacred memory is lucky to end up with no teeth. But she's outdone her old man a hundred times over."
He popped the top of his beer can. "King Special started out as a fire-raiser . . . he burned down businesses when their owners were going bankrupt so that they could claim the insurance. Then it occurred to him that if he lifted some of their stock before he torched the place, he could use the stolen stock to set up his own businesses and burn them down himself.
"After that he got into extortion, money lending, dope dealing, property scams, you name it. His real name was Rufus Douglas but nobody ever called him anything but King Special."
"When did he die?"
"About three years ago. Liver cancer. I'll tell you, the funeral cortege stretched along Second Street from Jackson
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to Cary, eight blocks. Forty-eight Cadillacs, covered in flowers."
"And Queen Ache took over?"
"Not only took over but expanded—and expanded fast. King Special might have had a reputation for crushing anybody who crossed him, but believe me, he was nothing compared to his daughter. A guy from D.C. tried to muscle in on her dope trade. Charles Noone, his name was, and he always wore a yellow Derby hat, that was his trademark, that yellow Derby hat. Usually Queen Ache arranges for her victims to have their heads blown off, that's part of the Santeria thing, so they can't be recognized when they try to be reunited with their ancestors. But when Queen Ache had Charles Noone offed, she had it done the other way around. A street cleaner found his severed head right in the middle of Main Street, still with his yellow Derby hat on. Never found the rest of him."
"Shit. I seem to remember reading about that."
Decker helped himself to a tortilla chip and dipped it into a saucer of homemade salsa. "I just want you to realize what we're up against when we're dealing with Queen Ache. She has everybody around here under her thumb, one hundred percent. She does it partly by violence but mostly by Santeria. She uses their secret rituals to discourage her people from betraying her . . . if you betray Queen Ache, that's the same as betraying your religion. And she controls all the most powerful santeros. Everybody knows that if you offend Queen Ache, even a little, some santero is going to be casting a very nasty spell on you, and you're going to get the stomachache, or your hair's going to fall out, or your goldfish are all going to die."
"In that case, I'll remember to keep on her good side." Decker said, "I think we ought to look into this Santeria
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thing a little deeper. Like, we have three homicides in less than a week and in each homicide the perpetrator is invisible or partly invisible? What you said to Queen Ache about evidence going unnoticed, Hicks—that was very sharp thinking. I think the evidence is right in front of our noses but for some reason we just can't focus on it. Like Sherlock Holmes said, we're looking, but we can't see."
"Supper's on the table!" Rhoda called.
Rhoda had brushed her hair into shiny flick-ups and put on some bright red lip color. She looked almost too young to be a wife and a mother, with a round face and a little bobbed nose. She had spread the kitchen table with a red-checkered cloth, and served up fried chicken, sweet corn, flowering broccoli, candied potatoes and gravy, with a salad on the side.
"It's pretty simple Monday-night eating, I'm afraid," she apologized.
"It looks great to me. I keep planning on cooking myself all these fancy meals like polio a la vinagreta and the trouble is I'm always too tired to get around to it. And even when I do get around to it, I'm too tired to eat it."