The shop was small, twenty feet wide and thirty deep.
In the center were tables displaying knives, staffs, bells, bowls, other
implements, and articles of clothing used in various rituals. To the
right, low cabinets stood along the entire wall; Jack had no idea what
was in them.
On the other wall, to the left of the door, there were shelves nearly
all the way to the ceiling, and these were crammed full of bottles of
every imaginable size and shape, blue and yellow and green and red and
orange and brown and clear bottles, each carefully labeled, each filled
with a particular herb or exotic root or powdered flower or other
substance used in the casting of spells and charms, the brewing of
magical potions.
At the rear of the shop, in answer to the bell, Carver Hampton came out
of the back room, through a green bead curtain. He looked surprised.
“Detective Dawson!
How nice to see you again. But I didn’t expect you’d come all the way
back here, especially not in this foul weather. I thought you’d just
call, see if I’d come up with anything for you.”
Jack went to the back of the shop, and they shook hands across the sales
counter.
Carver Hampton was tall, with wide shoulders and a huge chest, about
forty pounds overweight but very formidable; he looked like a pro
football lineman who had been out of training for six months. He wasn’t
a handsome man. There was too much bone in his slablike forehead, and
his face was too round for him ever to appear in the pages of
Centleman’s Quarterly; besides, his nose, broken more than once, now had
a distinctly squashlike appearance. But if he wasn’t particularly good
looking, he was very friendly looking, a gentle giant, a perfect black
Santa Claus.
He said, “I’m so sorry you came all this way for nothing.”
“Then you haven’t turned up anything since yesterday?” Jack asked.
“Nothing much. I put the word out. I’m still asking here and there,
poking around. So far, all I’ve been able to find out is that there
actually is someone around who calls himself Baba Lavelle and says he’s
a Bocor.”
“Bocor? That’s a priest who practices witchcraftright? ”
“Right. Evil magic. That’s all I’ve learned: that he’s real, which you
weren’t sure of yesterday, so I suppose this is at least of some value
to you. But if you’d telephoned-”
“Well, actually, I came to show you something that might be of help. A
photograph of Baba Lavelle himself.”
“Truly?”
“Yes.”
“So you already know he’s real. Let me see it, though. It ought to
help if I can describe the man I’m asking around about.”
Jack withdrew the eight-by-ten glossy from inside his coat and handed it
over.
Hampton’s face changed the instant he saw Lavelle.
If a black man could go pale, that was what Hampton did. It wasn’t that
the shade of his skin changed so much as that the gloss and vitality
went out of it; suddenly it didn’t seem like skin at all but like dark
brown paper, dry and lifeless. His lips tightened. And his eyes were
not the same as they had been a moment ago: haunted, now.
He said, “This man!”
“What?” Jack asked.
The photograph quivered as Hampton quickly handed it back. He thrust it
at Jack, as if desperate to be rid of it, as if he might somehow be
contaminated merely by touching the photographic image of Lavelle.
His big hands were shaking.
Jack said, “What is it? What’s the matter?”
“I know him,” Hampton said. “I’ve . . . seen him. I just didn’t
know his name.”
“Where have you see him?”
“Here.”
“Right in the shop?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Last September.”
“Not since then?”
“No.”
“What was he doing here?”
“He came to purchase herbs, powdered flowers.”
“But I thought you dealt only in good magic. The Rada.”
“Many substances can be used by both the Bocor and the Iloungon to
obtain very different results, to work evil magic or good. These were
herbs and powdered flowers that were extremely rare and that he hadn’t
been able to locate elsewhere in New York.”