"Not much." Sterne looked at his thick fingernails with disinterest. "What did you use to get him to talk?"

"Psychology," I said.

Sterne raised his eyebrows and regarded me with the same disinterest he lavished on his fingernails. "So who is the famous party in question? The one that walked?"

"I can't give out that information without the consent of my client."

"Bullshit, Angel. You won't do your client any good downtown, and that's just where I'll take you if you dam up on me."

"Why be disagreeable, Lieutenant? I'm working for a lawyer named Winesap. That entitles me to the same right to privacy as him. If you pulled me in, I'd be out within the hour. Save the city carfare."

"What's this lawyer's number?"

I wrote it out on the desk pad along with his full name, tore the sheet loose, and handed it to Sterne. "I told you all I know. From what I read in the paper, it sounds like some of Toots' chicken-snuffing fellow parishioners put him away. If you make a pinch, I'll be happy to look him over in the lineup."

"That's white of you, Angel," Sterne sneered.

"What's this?" It was Sergeant Deimos asking. He'd been wandering around the office with his hands in his pockets, checking things out. He was asking about Ernie Cavalero's law degree from Yale. It was framed on the wall over the filing cabinet.

"That's a law degree," I said. "Used to belong to the guy that started the business. He's dead now."

"Sentimental?" Sterne muttered through his tight ventriloquist's lips.

"Adds a touch of class."

"What's it say?" Sergeant Deimos wanted to know.

"Beats me. I don't read Latin."

"So that's what it is. Latin."

"That's what it is."

"What difference would it make if it was Hebrew?" Sterne said. Deimos shrugged.

"Any further questions, Lieutenant?" I asked.

Sterne turned his dead cop's gaze on me again. You could tell from his eyes that he never smiled. Not even during a third-degree session. He was just doing his job. "None. You and your 'right to privacy' can go eat lunch now. Maybe we'll call you, but I wouldn't hold your breath. Just another dead jigaboo. Nobody much gives a shit."

"Call if you need me."

"Sure thing. He's a real prince, right, Deimos?"

We all wedged into the tiny elevator together and rode down without saying a word.

TWENTY-FOUR.

Gough's Chop House was across 43rd Street from the Times Building. The place was packed when I got there, but I squeezed into a corner by the bar. I didn't have much time, so I ordered roast beef on rye and a bottle of ale. Service was fast in spite of the crowd, and I was laying the ale to rest when Walt Rigler spotted me on his way out and came over to jaw. "What brings you into this scribbler's den, Harry?" he shouted over the din of newspaper shop-talk. "I thought you ate at Downey's."

"I try not to be a creature of habit," I said.

"Sound philosophy. So what's up?"

"Very little. Thanks for letting me raid the morgue. I owe you one."

"Forget it. How goes your little mystery? Digging up any good dirt?"

"More than I can handle. Thought I had a strong lead yesterday. Went to see Krusemark's fortunetelling daughter, but I picked the wrong one."

"What do you mean, the wrong one?"

"There's the black witch and the white witch. One I want lives in Paris."

"I don't follow you, Harry."

"They're twins; Maggie and Millie, the supernatural Krusemark girls."

Walt rubbed the back of his neck and frowned. "Someone's pulling your leg, pal. Margaret Krusemark's an only child."

I gagged on my ale. "You sure of that?"

" 'Course I'm sure. I just checked it out for you yesterday. Had the family history on my desk all afternoon. Krusemark had a daughter by his wife. Just one, Harry. The Times doesn't make mistakes in the vital statistics department."

"What a sap I've been!"

"No argument on that score."

"I should have known she was playing me for a sucker. It was too pat."

"Slow down, pal, you're way ahead of me."

"Sorry, Walt. Just thinking out loud. My watch says five after one, is that right?"

"Close enough."

I stood up, leaving my change on the bar. "Got to run."

"Don't let me stop you." Walt Rigler grinned his lopsided grin.

Epiphany Proudf oot was waiting in the outer room of my office when I got there minutes later. She was wearing a tartan plaid kilt and a blue cashmere sweater and looked like a coed.

"Sorry I'm late," I said.

"Don't be. I was early." She tossed aside a well-thumbed back issue of Sports Illustrated and uncrossed her legs. On her, even the second-hand Naugahyde chair looked good.

I unlocked the door in the pebbled-glass partition and held it open. "Why did you want to see me?"

"This isn't much of an office." She picked her handbag and folded coat off the table holding up my collection of out-of-date magazines. "You must not be such a hot detective."

"I keep my overhead low," I said, ushering her inside. "You pay for getting the job done or you pay for interior decoration." I shut the door and hung my coat on the rack.

She stood by the window with the eight-inch gold letters, staring down at the street. "Who's paying you to look for Johnny Favorite?" she asked her reflection in the glass.

"I can't tell you that. One of the things my services include is discretion. Won't you sit down?"

I took her coat and hung it next to mine as she settled gracefully into the padded leather chair across from my desk. It was the only comfortable seat in the place. "You still haven't answered my question," I said, leaning back in my swivel chair. "Why are you here?"

"Edison Sweet has been murdered."

"Uh-huh. I read the papers. But you shouldn't be too surprised: you set him up."

She clenched her handbag on her lap. "You must be out of your mind."

"Maybe. But I'm not dumb. You were the only one who knew I was talking to Toots. You had to be the one who tipped off the boys that sent the gift-wrapped chicken foot."

"You've got it all wrong."

"Do I?"

"There was no one else. After you left the store, I called my nephew. He lives around the corner from the Red Rooster. It was him hid the claw in the piano. Toots was a blabbermouth. He needed reminding to keep his trap shut."

"You did a good job. It's shut for keeps now."

"Do you think I'd be coming to see you if I had anything to do with that?"

"I'd say you were a capable girl, Epiphany. Your performance in the park was quite convincing."

Epiphany bit her knuckle and frowned, squirming in the chair. She looked for all the world like a truant hauled onto the carpet by the school principal. If it was an act, it was a good one.

"You have no right to spy on me," Epiphany said, not meeting my gaze.

"The Parks Department and the Humane Society would disagree. Quite a gruesome little religion."

This time Epiphany looked me straight in the eye, her glance black with fury. "Obeah doesn't need to hang a man on the cross. There never was an Obeah Holy War, or an Obeah Inquisition!"

"Yeah, sure; you've got to kill the chicken to make the soup, right?" I lit a cigarette and blew a plume of smoke at the ceiling. "But it's not dead chickens that worry me; it's dead piano players."

"Don't you think I'm worried?" Epiphany leaned forward in the chair, the tips of her girlish breasts straining against the thin weave of her blue sweater. She was a tall drink of water, as they say uptown, and it was easy to imagine quenching my thirst on her tawny flesh.

"I don't know what to think," I said. "You call up saying you have to see me right away. Now that you're here, you act like you're doing me a favor."

"Maybe I am doing you a favor." She sat back and crossed her long legs, which wasn't hard to take either. "You come around looking for Johnny Favorite and the next day a man gets killed. That's not just a coincidence."

"What is it then?"

"Look: the newspapers are making a lot of noise about voodoo this and voodoo that, but I can tell you straight out that Toots Sweet's death didn't have anything to do with Obeah, not a single, blessed thing."

"How do you know that?"

"Did you see the pictures in the papers?"

I nodded.

"Then you know they're calling those bloody scribblings on the wall 'voodoo symbols'?"

Another silent nod.

"Well, the cops don't know any more about voodoo than they do about red beans and rice! Those marks were supposed to look like veve, but it just isn't so."

"What's veve?"

"Magic signs. I can't explain their meaning to someone who's not an initiate, but all that bloody trash's got as much to do with the real thing as Santa Claus has to do with Jesus. I've been a mambo for years. I know what I'm talking about."

I stubbed out my butt in a Stork Club ashtray left over from a long-dead love affair. "I'm sure you do, Epiphany. You say the marks are phony?"

"Not phony so much as, well, wrong. I don't know how else to put it. Be like someone describing a baseball game and he kept calling a home run a touchdown. Get what I mean?"

I folded the copy of the News to page 3. Holding it so Epiphany could see, I pointed to the snakelike zigzags, spirals, and broken crosses in the photo. "Are you saying these look like voodoo drawings, 'veve,' or whatever, but they're used incorrectly?"

"That's right. See that circle there, the one with the serpent swallowing its own tail? That's Damballah, sure enough veve, a symbol of the geometric perfection of the universe. But no initiate would ever draw it right next to Babako like that."

"So, whoever drew those pictures at least knew enough about voodoo to know what Damballah or Babako looked like in the first place."

"That's what I've been trying to tell you all along," she said. "Did you know that Johnny Favorite was once upon a time mixed up with Obeah?"

"I know he was a hunsi-bosal."

"Toots really did have a big mouth. What else do you know?"

"Only that Johnny Favorite was running around with your mother at the time."

Epiphany made a face like tasting something sour. "It's true." She shook her head as if to deny it. "Johnny Favorite was my father."

I sat very still, gripping the arms of my chair as her revelation washed over me like a giant wave. "Who all knows about this?"

"No one, 'cept you and me and mama, and she's dead."

"What about Johnny Favorite?"

"Mama never told him. He was away in the army long before I was a year old. I told you the truth when I said we'd never met."

"How come you're opening up to me now?"