Night Film(74)

“Everyone tends to.”

“In the next few days. That goofer stuff she was talking about. She said it can kill you without you even realizing.”

“Ex-wives do the exact same thing. The most interesting thing she said was the knowledge of dark magic passed from generation to generation.”

“You think that’s what the Cordovas are hiding? That they’re all witches or something?”

I said nothing, the notion sounding absurd. But then—Cordova was a creative eccentric holed up in an isolated estate, basically a petri dish for cultivating the weird and outlandish. Cleo had testified that Ashley was quite proficient in spells. She’d learned how to assemble those materials from someone.

But for whom had she intended this Black Bone killing curse—me? Had she laid it knowing I’d investigate her death and eventually show up at Henry Street? What about Hopper? He’d been sent that stuffed monkey and had somehow known she’d frequented Klavierhaus. Or did she intend it for someone else entirely? Iona, if she could be believed, claimed she’d seen two men outside Ashley’s door. One might have been Theo Cordova. Maybe it was her family Ashley considered the enemy and she’d put down the killing curse for them. Hopper’s inclination was to hold them accountable. Maybe they’d been chasing her, trying to find her, fearing she was on the verge of exposing them. She had, after all, been following me—which doubtless would have made the family quite nervous.

Nora was thinking it over, nibbling her thumbnail. “It could be why Ashley took her life. She couldn’t handle the guilt of what the family had done for years, practicing black magic.” She wrinkled her nose. “Maybe that’s what the housekeeper at the Waldorf noticed when she saw that mark in her eye. Maybe she could tell Ashley practiced black magic.”

“At this point, it’s all conjecture.”

Closing the metal gate behind us, I realized my phone was buzzing. I assumed it was Hopper, but instead it was an email notification from the Blackboards, indicating someone had answered my post, though to read the response I needed my laptop with the Tor browser.

“You might think this magic stuff is hogwash, but I don’t,” Nora said, scraping the soles of her boots on the curb. “This curse is like cement.”

“We need to go back to the apartment.” I stepped onto the street, hailing an approaching cab.

“What about going to Rising Dragon tattoos and asking about that receipt?”

“We’ll do it later. Someone on the Blackboards answered my post.”





47


Oubliette.

There was no mention of it as a private nightclub on the Internet, nothing to verify the claims of Special Agent Fox. According to Wikipedia, the word derived from the French verb oublier and meant forgotten place. Historically, an oubliette was the most claustrophobic and hidden section of a castle dungeon, where there was only an iron trapdoor in the ceiling and no light—a cell so minuscule, it was often impossible for the prisoner to turn around or even move, a casket for the alive but damned. It was reserved for the most reviled prisoners, those the captors wanted to forget.

My guess was it was some type of sex club. It didn’t appear to make for a particularly fun-filled Saturday night, but Iona had claimed Ashley was going to the club, so it was certainly worth a shot to try and find someone there who’d encountered her.

At eight o’clock that night, the October weather chilly and overcast, Nora and I left Perry Street to pick up Hopper. He’d finally responded to our messages and wanted to join, which was fine by me; with that coup he’d produced with Klavierhaus, he was proving to be an unexpected asset to the investigation.

He told us to pick him up at the corner of Bowery and Stanton. We waited more than twenty minutes, and just when I was thinking we’d have to leave without him—it was a three-hour drive to Montauk, the easternmost town of the Hamptons on Long Island—Hopper emerged from the Sunshine Hotel.

It was an infamous place, one of the city’s last flophouses where rooms—more like stalls suited for barnyard mules—went for $4.50 a night. I could only assume Hopper had been doing business there, dropping off candy for quite a few customers with a sweet tooth, because the men around the entrance smiled with jittery appreciation as he ambled past them.

“How’s the Sunshine?” I asked as he sank into the backseat.

Not bothering to acknowledge us, he took out a wad of crumpled bills, counted them, and then tucked them inside his coat pocket.

“Awesome,” he muttered.

Within minutes, we were speeding down the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Nora breathlessly filling Hopper in on everything we’d learned at Enchantments, including the Black Bone killing curse we’d stepped on, thanks to Ashley. She pointed out the splotches on Hopper’s own Converse sneakers—he had a sizable black wad on his left heel. His reaction was little more than cynical disbelief.

“What about that tattoo parlor?” he asked her. “Rising Dragon.”

“We didn’t make it there yet,” she said. “When we saw we’d gotten a response on the Blackboards about Oubliette, we headed straight back to Perry Street.”

Hopper said nothing, squinting thoughtfully out the window.

Three hours later, Hopper was passed out cold in the backseat and Nora was scanning satellite radio. I was doing eighty on Route 27, the empty highway like a gray tear ripping through the salt marshes and brackish meadows. I’d been out here quite a few times back in my married days, but never at five after midnight on a mission like this.