The 5th Witch Read online

  Softly, she carried on singing. But then suddenly she stopped and stared straight ahead of her, along the hallway.

  Dan said, “Gayle, listen to me—”

  As he took another step forward, however, there was a terrible clanging sound right behind him, like a badly tuned church bell. Instinctively, Dan took a step back, just as a twenty-foot scaffolding pole came hurtling along the hallway and struck Gayle directly in the face. He heard her nose break and her cheekbones smash.

  She flew backward into the window, and then she was gone, vanished, and the scaffolding pole vanished, too.

  Dan stood in the hallway for a long time, breathing deeply to steady himself. Hallucination, no question about it. But what had made him hallucinate? His own exhaustion, his own drunkenness? Or witchery?

  Chapter Eight

  He stayed awake for the rest of the night, sitting on the couch with all the lights on and the television, too, but with the volume muted in case Gayle came back and he failed to hear her.

  Early the next day he drove out to visit his father at the Stage Performers’ Retirement Home in Pasadena. It was a hazy morning but very warm, and his father was sitting on his balcony, looking out over a steeply sloping orange grove. He had three decks of playing cards on the table in front of him, and he was obviously trying to perfect some trick. A bright yellow canary was sitting in a cage next to him, twittering and cheeping on its perch. Perversely, his father had named the canary Sylvester.

  His father was a small man with a round pugnacious face, a snub nose, and rimless spectacles. His hair was white now, but it still stuck up like one of the Katzenjammer Kids. He was wearing a yellow and red Hawaiian-style shirt with white chest hair curling out of it, red shorts, and yellow socks.

  “You don’t usually visit me on Tuesdays,” his father remarked, as Dan stepped out onto the balcony.

  “You don’t want me here? I’ll leave.”

  “Of course I want you here. I’m just saying that you don’t usually visit me on Tuesdays. Park your ass. You want a cup of coffee? The coffee here is unique. It tastes exactly like yacht varnish.”

  “What are you doing?” asked Dan, nodding toward the playing cards.

  “I’m working on a variation of Dusenfeld’s Arrangement.”

  “What the hell is Dusenfeld’s Arrangement?”

  “Didn’t I ever tell you about Victor Dusenfeld? One of the greatest card illusionists there ever was. He used to perform in Berlin in the 1930s. Hitler loved him.”

  “That’s not much of a recommendation.”

  “Oh yes, it is, because Hitler believed in magic, and he was convinced that Victor Dusenfeld was the real deal. I’ve seen some old movies of Dusenfeld’s act, and you can see why. The man was a genius. He used to ask some guy in the audience to pick a card. Then this girl would come down from the stage and drop her unmentionables, and she would have the exact same card tattooed on her tush.”

  “You’re not trying to do that, are you?”

  “I wish. No, this is Dusenfeld’s Arrangement. He took three decks of cards, asked three people to shuffle them. Then he took them back, cut them three times, and all three decks would be back in order, just like they came out of the box.”

  “So how did he do it?”

  “I could show you, but it would probably take the rest of the day, and I’m not sure that I’m doing it the same way Dusenfeld did it. But there was one trick that Dusenfeld did for Hermann Göring in 1932, and I still can’t work it out. He was performing at Horcher’s restaurant, which was one of Göring’s favorites, and he asked him to pick a card without telling him what it was.

  “When he went home to bed that night, Göring found the card on his pillow. I mean—that’s what I call a card trick. Not only do you have to guess the right card, you have to break into the mark’s house before he gets home and plant it there. Either that, or you have to be in cahoots with one of his staff.”

  “There’s a third alternative.”

  “Oh yeah? Such as what?”

  “You could put it there by magic.”

  Dan’s father took off his spectacles and stared at him narrowly. “Something tells me you’re serious.”

  “Yes, I’m serious. Some pretty strange events happened yesterday—three detectives got burned to death, and then there was some kind of freak hurricane at Chief O’Malley’s house.”

  “I saw those on the news. What are you trying to say?”

  Dan told him about the money and the witch test; and then he told him about Gayle appearing at his apartment. His father sat and listened without interrupting.

  Dan said, “I guess I came here to ask you if this really could be magic. Or maybe I’m making a prize asshole out of myself. You—you’re the best magician I ever saw. You remember that trick you used to do when you cut off a girl’s legs and they walked around the stage on their own? Or when you stuffed about twenty chickens and a dozen cats into a hatbox?”

  “Of course I do. Those were pretty amazing tricks. They were funny, too.”

  “Three detectives getting burned to death—that was amazing, but that wasn’t funny. And puking up thirty bucks worth of quarters, that wasn’t funny either.”

  “I know, son, I know. But the difference is those weren’t tricks. And it doesn’t sound like this hurricane was a trick either.”

  “Then you think this could be genuine magic?”

  Dan’s father leaned forward in his basketwork chair. “Don’t sound so surprised. The very first thing you learn when you start out to become a stage magician is that you’re not really a magician. You’re an illusionist, an entertainer—a con artist, that’s all. Even Harry Houdini never called himself a magician, though his promoters did. But you also learn that real magicians do exist. Witches, sure, if you want to call them that.”

  “You believe in them?”

  “Sure, I believe in them. I never came across many. But I saw a woman in Louisiana who could heal people who had terminal cancer, and I saw another woman in Pennsylvania who could rise clear off the floor right in front of you—no wires, no pulleys, nothing. I met an old black guy in Florida who could make a glass of water boil just by looking at it, and when I went to France I was introduced to this fellow who could set newspapers alight from fifty yards away.”

  Dan said, “I don’t know if I ought to be feeling relieved because I’m not going crazy, or even more worried because these women are for real.”

  “Let me tell you, son, you should be seriously worried. Everybody who has the gift, they’re different, depending on their personality. Some witches do nothing but potter around, mixing up medicinal potions and telling fortunes and helping lonely people find a soul mate. But most witches, they let their powers go to their head. They just love to cause havoc for the hell of it. Even that fellow in France—he used to walk past a café and before you knew it, everybody’s newspaper was on fire.”

  A redheaded young nurse came out and gave Dan’s father a plastic cupful of pills and a glass of grapefruit juice. Dan’s father peered into the cup and said, “You forgot the Viagra again.”

  “You don’t need Viagra, Mr. Fisher.”

  “Not right now. But I will tonight when you come creeping into my room wearing those black stockings and that peekaboo bra.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Fisher, I’m washing my headache tonight.”

  When the nurse had gone, Dan’s father shook his head and said, “You can tell she’s Irish, can’t you?”

  Dan said, “What I need to find out is what are these witches going to do next?”

  “Nothing good, I’ll bet you, especially since they’ve teamed up with mobsters. Think about it. A witch could rob a bank simply by hypnotizing the tellers to open the safe for her. Or maybe she could spirit the money right out of the vault and into the trunk of her getaway car the same way that woman spirited all those quarters into your stomach. She could smuggle drugs by making customs inspectors believe that they were looking at something completely d
ifferent, like cakes, for instance, or boxes of candy.

  “Worst of all, though, if you guys go after her, a witch will do everything she can to protect herself. Like setting you on fire. Or making you shoot yourself. Or having you jump off a building. I’ve heard of a witch who could literally shake people to death, until their fingers and their arms flew off in all directions.”

  Dan said, “Before I do anything else, Dad, I have to convince Lieutenant Harris that we’re up against a bunch of witches and that I’m not a prime candidate for the funny farm.”

  “I think you’ll be able to convince him, son, once he sees for himself what’s going on.”

  “I’m not so sure. You couldn’t convince Lieutenant Harris that his office was on fire until his pants caught alight.”

  “Well, he’d better take care, or else that just might happen.”

  Dan stood up and went over to the balcony railing. It was growing very hot now, and the smell of rotting oranges was almost overwhelming. The shadows under the trees were so dark that he could imagine that anything was hiding there—a black cat, a witch’s familiar; a gremlin; or a witch herself, able to turn into nothing but darkness.

  “So how do we get rid of them?” he asked his father.

  “I don’t know. Who do you think I am, Cotton Mather? You’ll have to ask that girlfriend of yours or look it up on the Internet.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend, Dad. She just happens to live downstairs and have an interest in natural healing and fortune-telling and all that stuff.”

  “They used to burn witches, didn’t they, in the Middle Ages—or women they thought were witches. Roast them over a fire. Or throw them into a pond to see if they floated or not. But most of those women weren’t witches at all. They wouldn’t have been able to catch them if they were.”

  Dan checked his watch. “I have to get back. I want to talk to Chief O’Malley about that hurricane if I can. Listen, Dad, you’ve been really helpful. I’ll call by Thursday.”

  “Dan? You listen to me. I am not kidding you when I say that going after those women could be very, very dangerous. An experienced witch can suck the air out of your lungs without even touching you and suffocate you where you stand.”

  “Dad— ‘very, very dangerous’ comes with the badge. I’ll be careful, I promise you.”

  His father nodded. “I know.”

  Dan was about to leave when his father said, “You know something—there’s one bit of real magic I wish I could do, and I can’t.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Stupid, I know. But I wish I could turn back the clock to July 12, 1979, when we were sitting on the beach—you and Katie and your mom and me—and that spotted dog came running up to you and snatched your sandwich. You ran around and around, trying to get it back, and we were laughing so much we had tears in our eyes.”

  “I was angry. I wanted that sandwich. I’m still angry.”

  “Well, so am I. The next day your mom had her stroke and two days after that the good Lord took her away from us. But we laughed that afternoon.”

  “I know, Dad. But nothing lasts forever. Especially laughter.”

  As he drove back to Hollywood, Dan got a call from Ernie on his cell.

  “We’re not making much headway, muchacho. Kevin Baleno has cremated five pig carcasses already, and he says that the fire department laboratory smells like Mr. Cecil’s California Ribs restaurant. But he still can’t work out how those three detectives burst into flame.”

  “What about Michelange DuPriz? Find anything on her?”

  “Yeah, better luck with that. She came from Jacmel, originally. That’s a seaside town on the southeast coast of Haiti, pretty much rural and run-down. Her mother ran a voodoo store, and she got herself a reputation for voodoo, too. She could help people to talk to their dead relatives and curse people who were making trouble, stuff like that.”

  “How’d you find that out?”

  “I have a Cuban friend who has a cousin in Port-Au-Prince, and he has a friend in the Haitian National Police.”

  “Now that’s what I call networking. What are you doing now?”

  “I was planning on paying a visit to the Zombie’s house, ask Ms. DuPriz some more questions.”

  “Not a good idea, El Gordo. Not yet.”

  “My friend’s cousin’s friend said that there’s a voodoo ritual in which you can light two sticks and the fire will jump into anybody you want it to, burn them alive. I think I really need to ask her about that, don’t you?”

  “Ernie, we’re not dealing with party tricks here. If you go round there, she could do the same to you. Let’s take this careful, one step at a time.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to talk to the chief about what happened at his party yesterday evening. Then I think I’m going to have a word with Orestes Vasquez. Then I think we need to sit down with Lieutenant Harris and see if we can persuade him to believe in black magic.”

  “Okay. Why don’t you pick me up? I’ll come with you.”

  Dan had arranged with his personal assistant to talk to Chief O’Malley at 12:20 PM, but when he and Ernie arrived at the Days Center on North Los Angeles Street, they were told that the chief had decided to hold an impromptu press conference, and they would have to wait.

  The media room on the fifteenth floor was crowded with reporters and cameramen, and Dan and Ernie stood at the very back.

  “I went to see my dad this morning,” said Dan. “That’s the reason I told you not to go see Michelange DuPriz. My dad believes that she’s a genuine witch and that these other women are, too. If you upset them, they’ll kill you. Or worse.”

  “I don’t suppose your dad has any bright ideas about how we’re going to deal with these ladies.”

  “No, he doesn’t. He’s a stage magician, not a witch finder.”

  “I have to tell you, muchacho, I still think that this is all bullshit. There’s a logical explanation. There has to be. The only trouble is I don’t know what it is.”

  “El Gordo, the only logical explanation is that it’s witchcraft.”

  “How can you say that? Witchcraft isn’t logical by definition. I’m only going along with you because I was trained to be open-minded.”

  “You? Open-minded? Compared to you, Pancho Villa was open-minded.”

  At that moment, Chief O’Malley entered the room along with his deputy chief, Walter Days, and three members of the police commission, one man and two women. They posed for a moment, serious faced, while scores of flashes flickered, and then they sat down.

  Chief O’Malley said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve asked you all to come here this morning because this great city of ours is facing a very grave and unusual menace. I am not yet in a position to advise you of the exact nature of this menace or who is responsible for it. But I can tell you that it involves organized crime.

  “Those of us who uphold the law in Los Angeles have been personally threatened on an unprecedented scale. Not only police officers. Not only judges and social workers and other members of the community who work so tirelessly to keep our city safe, but their friends and their loved ones, too. Even their children.

  “To put it as plainly as I can, we have been warned that if we try to interfere in the running of drug trafficking and prostitution and extortion, hundreds of us will suffer a truly terrible fate.”

  There was a deafening cacophony of shouted questions. “What kind of fate?” “Are you talking about terrorism, Chief O’Malley?” “Are you talking bombs?” “Does this have anything to do with the hurricane at your reception?” “When you say organized crime, are you talking about anybody specific?”

  Chief O’Malley waited for a while without answering. Then he raised his hands for silence. “So far, this is all that I can tell you. But I wanted you to be aware that a serious threat has been made against those of us who enforce the law and our families, too, and I appeal for your cooperation in passing on any information tha
t you might consider helpful.

  “In order to defuse a highly critical situation, I initially told the individual who made this threat that I would accede to his demands. But he needs to know now that there are some promises that are made to be broken, and this is one of them.

  “I will never bow to blackmail, ever. As far as criminals are concerned, my motto has always been ‘Never give an inch. Period.’ I repeat that motto today.”

  There was another roar of questions and a blizzard of flashes. Chief O’Malley waited until the noise had died down again, and then he said, “I promise you that I will convene another media conference as soon as—” He coughed, then coughed again. “As soon as I—”

  He slapped his hand against his chest and coughed yet again. Deputy Chief Days quickly poured him a glass of water and passed it to him, but he shook his head. He was growing redder and redder, and it was obvious that he couldn’t breathe.

  “Chief! What’s wrong? Chief O’Malley!”

  “Loosen his collar!” said one of the police commissioners. “He’s choking!”

  A black police officer pushed his way around the table and said, “Keep clear! Keep clear! Give him some air!”

  The officer tugged Chief O’Malley’s necktie loose and unfastened the top three buttons of his shirt. Chief O’Malley was in serious distress now. His eyes bulged, and his face was turning blue from lack of oxygen. The officer opened his mouth and peered into his throat. Then he said, “Help me! Help me to lift him up.”

  Between them, the officer and Deputy Chief Days heaved Chief O’Malley to his feet. The officer stood behind Chief O’Malley and wrapped his arms around him, making a fist. He punched him six or seven times under his rib cage, but still Chief O’Malley couldn’t breathe.

  “Paramedic—now!” shouted Deputy Chief Days.

  The officer gave Chief O’Malley another six punches and another. Chief O’Malley arched his head back, his mouth stretched wide open and the veins on his neck swelling. There was a moment when he stood with both fists clenched, utterly rigid. Then he let out a thin, strangulated keeeeeeee sound from the back of his throat. A greasy, yellow toad emerged from between his lips and dropped onto the floor.