Unsympathetic Magic Page 5

  “Of course,” Lopez said wearily.

  I said, “I’d like to leave now.”

  “My partner and I will take you home, Miss Diamond,” Thompson said.

  “No, not home,” I said.

  Lopez gave me a suspicious look. “Where are you going?”

  “I have to go look for . . . for someone.”

  Lopez’s gaze locked with mine. I could see him trying to decide whether it was even worth arguing with me, and whether he could trust me if I gave in and agreed to go straight home and stay there. He came to the inevitable conclusion, sighed, and said, “All right. Fine. I’m coming with you.”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “It’s the middle of the night, Esther.” He shoved me none too gently into the back of the squad car and got in beside me. “And you’ve already been arrested once in that outfit. As well as attacked.”

  “Darius was the one who was attacked. I just—”

  “Whatever.”

  As Officer Thompson and his partner—a slightly chubby white man whose name I didn’t catch—got into the front of the car, Lopez motioned for me to tell them where to take us.

  When I did, though, the two cops in the front seat balked.

  “Miss Diamond, we’re the ones who searched that area after you were picked up. Your friend isn’t there.”

  “He’s not my friend,” I said. “And I need to see for myself.”

  “But, ma’am, there’s no—”

  “Let’s go,” Lopez said firmly.

  He was wearing shorts and flip- flops, and he was from outside the precinct, but he outranked them, and he spoke with authority. The cops shut up, and the squad car pulled away from the curb.

  “Thank you,” I said quietly to Lopez.

  I heard him mutter, “I don’t even get sex for this.”

  “You’d have to date me for that,” I snapped.

  “Huh?” He looked at me in surprise. “Oh. Sorry. Tired. Didn’t realize I was talking out loud.”

  “Hmph.”

  I folded my arms and stared out the window while we rode the few blocks between the station house and the dark sidewalk where I had last seen Darius, not far from Mount Morris Park. Since the streets were practically empty, it took almost no time to get there. As we approached, I recognized the spot and said, “This is it! I’ll get out here.”

  “We’ll get out here,” Lopez said.

  “We’ll all get out here,” Officer Thompson said, bringing the car to a halt. “My orders were clear, detective. I am to make sure Miss Diamond departs this precinct. So I can’t leave her here.”

  “Great,” Lopez said to me as he nudged me out of the car. “Now there’s a whole precinct that doesn’t want you.”

  Ignoring him, I exited the car, frowning as I examined the site. “These garbage cans were all tumbled over when I left here.”

  Thompson’s plump partner said, “We straightened them when we were looking for the dead guy.” When we all looked at him, he added, “Darius Phelps.”

  While the cops hung around the squad car looking bored, I showed Lopez where Darius had been lying when I went to get help.

  “You’re sure this was the spot?” he said.

  “Positive.”

  He glanced over his shoulder at the cops, then said quietly to me, “Then you didn’t see a severed hand.”

  “I did,” I insisted.

  “Not a real one.” Still keeping his voice low, he said, “It was only a few hours ago. If you saw a real dismemberment here, there would still be blood all over the sidewalk. It would be dry by now, but there’d be a lot of it.”

  “Oh.” I blinked in surprise, suddenly remembering the absence of blood as I had gazed at the terrible injury. “Oh.”

  “You see my point?”

  “Yes.” I lowered my voice, too. “But I’m telling you, those gargoyles were real. I fought with one of them.”

  “It sounds like a very good costume worn by someone chosen—maybe even hired—for their size.”

  I looked at him. “You mean a little person?”

  “Could be. I think the staging sounds too elaborate to have involved young children.” He continued reasonably, “It was dark. You were startled and scared. You’d already had an ominous warning from the guy with the sword. Everything happened fast. So you saw what someone wanted you to see. What the whole scene was orchestrated for you to see.”

  “A prank . . .” I mused. Lopez was making it sound very plausible.

  “A well-executed one.” He gestured subtly to the cops waiting by the squad car. “Thompson didn’t sound too happy about The Dirty Thirty filming here. Maybe some of the guys in this precinct decided to discourage the show from doing more location filming here. Or maybe someone else is messing with the show, and the cops are just willing to look the other way.” He paused before saying, “Anyhow, whatever the original plan for tonight was, it probably went off course when filming stopped unexpectedly after Nolan collapsed and you all started leaving the location.”

  “So these various, er, people that I encountered . . . You think they were improvising? Trying to squeeze something out of the evening, so to speak?”

  “Probably.”

  “But why use a dead man’s name?”

  Lopez shrugged. “Maybe it was supposed to be the punch line: You report what you saw, you find out the ‘wounded’ man has been dead for weeks, and you realize you’ve been had.”

  “Hilarious,” I said sourly.

  “But, of course,” he said, “they didn’t count on their victim getting arrested, which put yet another kink in whatever the original plan was.”

  “Hmm.” I thought over the whole episode. “You could be right.”

  He sensed my lingering doubt. “But?”

  “But Darius—or whoever he was—seemed genuinely injured. Or disoriented. Or something. Not at all well, anyhow. And the attack on him seemed so vicious! So genuine.”

  “You of all people should know that disorientation, injury, and vicious attacks can be convincingly simulated,” he pointed out. “Haven’t you ‘died’ onstage?”

  “Well, yes . . .”

  He was making a valid argument. I supposed that the pranksters’ violent interaction with an unwitting, unrehearsed audience member—me—was also a feasible part of the theory. After all, participatory murder mystery weekends, where actors following a plot interacted with paying guests who didn’t even know the plot, were a popular form of entertainment. And despite my own perception that I’d been in real danger when fighting the gargoyles, I hadn’t been hurt at all—just scared.

  I looked at Lopez, feeling a little embarrassed now. “I guess I really got played, huh?”

  He smiled and smoothed a strand of hair away from my shoulder. “Well, it sounds like they put on a hell of a show.”

  “It was so real,” I murmured. Even now, I couldn’t shake off my shocked fear upon confronting those growling gargoyles, or my horrified panic upon seeing Darius’ severed hand.

  After a moment, Lopez asked, “Can I take you home now?”

  I nodded and turned toward the squad car as he took my elbow. But after a few steps, I halted, recalling Darius’ prone, helpless body and his dazed voice. I closed my eyes, struggled with myself briefly, then gave a sigh and let my shoulders sag.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t go. Not yet. I have to . . .”

  “You want to look around for him?” Lopez guessed.

  “Yes.” I said again, “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” he said. “This was upsetting for you. If searching the area will make you feel better, then that’s what we’ll do.”

  “Thanks.”

  He gave my arm a gentle squeeze, then told the two cops that we were going to have a look around. They declined to assist us.

  I started walking down the dark street, with Lopez at my side, looking in every stairwell, poking around every garbage can, and peering under several SUVs, as if I migh
t find Darius’ large frame concealed there. Rather than merely watching me, my companion looked in stairwells and under SUVs, too.

  Given the various strange problems that had beset our short-lived relationship, Lopez was so often exasperated with me that I sometimes forget that patience was actually one of his virtues. He was obviously convinced there was nothing here to find, but nonetheless willing to poke around the dark street as long as it would take for me to feel more comfortable with the bizarre images that the night’s events had inflicted on me.

  And considering how rattled I still was, I appreciated his calming presence.

  Lopez and I had first met when he was a precinct detective handling a missing persons case; Golly Gee, a surgically-enhanced, D-list pop star had vanished in the middle of an off-Broadway musical that I was in.

  During those events, I had also met Dr. Maximillian Zadok for the first time. Max was Manhattan’s resident mage and local representative of the Magnum Collegium—a secret, worldwide organization dedicated to fighting Evil. (Yes, Evil.)

  The circumstances of Golly Gee’s disappearance were deeply weird—and the ultimate explanation for her disappearance even weirder. Eventually, Max saved half a dozen lives—including mine—by defeating the demented sorcerer who was causing a series of supernatural disappearances throughout New York City.

  As one might suppose, those events drastically altered my previously mundane worldview.

  Lopez, however, thought Max’s theories about the case were crazy. He also thought that I was crazy—or at least alarmingly gullible—for believing those theories.

  A lot had happened since then (such as Max and I subsequently getting involved in a series of supernatural mob slayings in Little Italy shortly after Lopez was transferred to the Organized Crime Control Bureau), but one thing remained constant: Lopez thought that Max was dangerous—especially to me—and that I might be insane.

  This had put quite a damper on our abortive attempt to have a relationship.

  Meanwhile, when I say that Max “defeated” the sorcerer who had tried to make me, Golly Gee, and a number of other performers vanish in a permanent and fatal way, I mean that Max killed him. And I helped.

  This was something that I was perpetually anxious to keep secret from Lopez.

  In fact, what Max had done to Hieronymus, the demented sorcerer (and, incidentally, Max’s apprentice), was actually “dissolution,” not murder; but since Hieronymus’ life was over, either way, I tended to view that distinction as being theoretical rather than—oh, for example—legal.

  There was also no denying that, while more recently trying to avert a mystically-manipulated mob war in Little Italy, I had said and done some very strange things. In context, those things made perfect sense—that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. But since Lopez didn’t accept the context, he simply thought Max and I were . . . well, lunatics.

  So, all things considered, it was pretty nice of him to humor me tonight—after I had dragged him out of bed, embarrassed him with other cops, and told him such a bizarre tale—by searching a darkened street in Harlem in the middle of the night for a body or some other evidence that he was certain didn’t exist.

  Despite the haunting images in my mind, I was also starting to doubt there was anything to find. I was just beginning to entertain the idea of telling Lopez I was ready to quit when I rounded the bumper of a car and startled a small flock of birds that were gathered near the vehicle’s curbside front wheel. I flinched and made a sound halfway between a gasp and a shriek as they cawed and flew away in a noisy flutter of black wings that gleamed darkly under the streetlights.

  Lopez quickly rounded the other end of the car to see what had frightened me. “What it is?”

  “Nothing.” I put a hand over my pounding heart as I looked down at the spot the birds had just vacated. Feeling silly, I added, “Some birds. Crows, I think. They were eating something.”

  Lopez was standing on the sidewalk staring at the same spot. “Eating . . . something.”

  The peculiar tone of his voice made me take a closer look at the small, inert object lying in the dark shadows. I leaned over, trying to see it better.

  He stepped forward. “No, don’t.”

  The instant I recognized the object, I screamed.

  Lopez pulled me away from the sight of Darius’ severed hand, mangled by carrion feeders, lying on the sidewalk. He pressed my face against his shoulder as he turned his head and shouted, “Thompson! Over here! And bring a flashlight.”

  Shuddering with revulsion, I tried to get control of my frantic breathing as I heard footsteps approach us.

  “Find something, detective?” It was Thompson’s voice.

  “Look.” Lopez tightened his hold on me and added, “Not you,” as I reflexively moved to look again at the thing lying on the sidewalk.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and kept my face pressed against his shoulder as one of the cops drew in a sharp breath and the other let out a startled exclamation.

  Lopez said coldly to them, “You’re the ones who searched this area?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “Um.”

  “Nice job, officers,” Lopez said.

  “Hey, detective,” Thompson protested, “we were looking for a body. Or an injured guy.”

  “And that makes it okay that you overlooked a severed hand lying on the sidewalk?” Lopez said.

  “Well, er—”

  “A severed hand that I believe Miss Diamond mentioned in the statement that she gave after being arrested for trying to get help for the victim?”

  Even I winced at his tone now.

  “Look, detective, we . . . um . . .”

  “Call it in,” Lopez snapped. “And you can thank your lucky stars that Miss Diamond isn’t going to make your precinct’s mess any bigger by filing a complaint about tonight.”

  “I’m not?” I said against his shoulder.

  He goosed me to make me shut up. “I’m taking her back to Lexington to find a cab.”

  I lifted my head. “I can’t take a cab. I don’t have any money.”

  Thompson said, “We can call another squad car to take her home.”

  The chubby cop said, “So do we need to search the area again for the dead guy? Um, the injured guy, I mean?”

  “Everyone shut up,” Lopez said.

  We all felt silent. Pressed up against his body, I felt him take a deep breath as he struggled to control his temper.

  “You’re not looking for an injured man,” Lopez said with forced patience.

  “We’re not?”

  “Take a good look at that hand. It wasn’t recently attached to anyone living.”

  “Oh?” Thompson said.

  I looked up to see the young cop bending over the hand, studying it curiously as he trained his flashlight on it.

  His partner stood a few feet away and squinted at the appendage, clearly reluctant to get any closer to it. I suspected that squeamishness was a bit of a handicap in his profession.

  Lopez continued, “And if a hand had been torn off someone’s arm here, there would be blood. Plenty of it.”

  “Oh. Right,” said the chubby cop. “I knew that.”

  Thompson squatted down to get an even better look at the hand. “So you’re saying this came off a corpse?”

  “Yes,” Lopez said.

  “Hmm. Any idea how old?”

  “Probably a few days. Less than a few weeks.”

  “How can you tell?” Thompson asked curiously. “Especially now that it’s partly eaten?”

  The other cop made a sound.

  “No decomposition,” Lopez said. “It looks fresh, and it doesn’t stink.”

  I swallowed my revulsion.

  Still absorbed in his study of the mangled body part, Thompson said, “But what if—”

  “Call it in,” Lopez ordered again. “I’m going to put Miss Diamond in a cab, and then I’ll be back.” He added, “Right back.”

  The chubby cop said, “But
we might need her statement.”

  “You’ve got her statement,” Lopez said tersely, turning me away from the scene. “Let’s go.”

  As soon as we were out of earshot, I said to him, “So I did see . . . see . . . Uh, what did I see?”

  With his arm around me as he hustled me toward Lexington Avenue, he said, “You saw exactly what we talked about. Only whoever pulled this stunt went way too far.”

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “They stole my purse!”

  “They also desecrated a corpse.”

  “Desecrated . . . Oh!” I realized what he was saying. “That hand! It was real. And it was from . . . from . . .”

  “From someone’s body.” His voice was tense.

  “Oh, yuck,” I said with feeling.

  “So where the hell is the rest of that person?” He sounded as if he was thinking aloud. “And who is it?”

  “Was, you mean?”

  “Was,” he agreed.

  “Do you think some jerk raided the morgue to add a disgusting touch of reality to this whole thing?”

  “That’s one of the possibilities.”

  “You really think some cops did this?” I asked, appalled now.

  He shook his head. “I sure hope not. Scaring a woman alone in the dark and then stealing her purse was bad enough. But snatching body parts? And leaving a severed hand lying around on the sidewalk where any neighborhood kid might have found it in the morning, if you hadn’t insisted on searching the area now?” He said grimly, “There had better not be any cops involved.”

  But now it bothered him, and he had to know for sure. So he was going to go back to where we’d found the severed hand and work the crime scene, whether or not the local cops wanted him there.

  Given the late (or very early) hour, we had to wait a couple of minutes on the corner of Lexington before we saw a cab. I was exhausted, and Lopez was preoccupied, so we didn’t talk. Then, in response to Lopez’s wave, a cab pulled up to take me home. The driver smirked when he saw Lopez hand me twenty dollars, which made me realize once again how I was dressed.

  Lopez kissed me absently on the cheek and told me to go home and go to bed. “I’ll take care of this. And I’ll let you know if I find your purse. Okay?”