The Witch's Key Read online

  “Lilith! You conniving little—”

  “What?”

  “That envelope, it was another one of your whisper boxes, wasn’t it?”

  “What? That wasn’t a box.”

  “Lilith?”

  “Okay, so it was. But you promised me you would help me rearrange my room.”

  “And I will, just as soon as you decide how you want it!”

  She crossed her arms at her chest. “How am I supposed to know how I want it if I can’t see it first?”

  I threw my hands up and headed to the kitchen for a beer. I expected that Lilith would follow me, but what I did not expect was that she would actually apologize for anything. She caught up with me just as I reached the fridge.

  “Tony, wait. Listen.” She threw her arms around my waist and hugged me from behind. “That was wrong of me. I’m sorry.”

  I turned around, careful not to break her hold. “You mean it?” I looked into her eyes, those beautiful, rich dark ebony eyes. What mysteries they veiled, I could but wonder. I had gazed into their depths so many times, yet never reached the bottom to gauge the person within. “Lilith,” I said, only, it came out a little choked-up sounding. “I never know how to read you.” She leaned in closer. Our noses touched. I felt her warm breath on my lips and her fingers tightening around my waist. “Do you know what you do to me?” I whispered.

  Her lips thinned. She wet them lightly. “Yes.” Her eyes began to flutter. I could feel her chest rise on a staggered breath of air and fall like quilted fleece. My heart beat faster. My peripheral vision began to blur. I had never known that side of Lilith, a side she had managed to hide so skillfully from others, and probably even herself.

  I slid my hands into her back pockets, palming her cheeks and pulling her in tighter. “Lilith?”

  She teased the tip of my nose with hers. “Yes.”

  “Do you want to...”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you want to—”

  “Tony! Lilith! Anyone home?”

  “Spinelli!” I said, and as I did, Lilith palmed my chest and drove me into the fridge. She fell back against the sink and immediately began fixing her hair, which, incidentally, still looked as perfect as a picture. It always does.

  “In here, Spinelli!”

  Dominic rounded the corner into the kitchen, carrying a large manila envelope. “Hey, the door was open. I let myself in. I hope you don’t mind. I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

  Lilith and I exchanged glances. I could see in her eyes that that sensitive, vulnerable woman I had somehow reached was now gone. But at least I knew she was in there, somewhere. And she knew I knew, which, at the moment, I couldn’t decide if it was a good thing or bad.

  “No, Dominic, you’re not interrupting. Lilith and I were just, ahm…”

  “Feeling one another out,” she said, and she walked past me, brushing my cheek with her hand. “Weren’t we, Tony?”

  I watched her stroll into the living room, the imprint of my fingertips still pressed into her back pockets. When she sat down on the couch, she made it a point to look at me before crossing her legs. In the short time that I had lived with Lilith, I had come to learn that almost everything she says and does has an underlining message or meaning. In the sport of relationship decoding, it did not take a stretch of imagination to decipher the meaning of that move.

  I reached out and snatched the envelope from Spinelli, caring little about the look of violation on his face. “Whatcha got there, Dom?”

  He pointed. “They’re photos of victims from the case we’re working.”

  I looked at him in disgust. “What, like coroner’s pics?”

  He grimaced. “No! Come on, that would be gross. Besides, you wouldn’t recognize most of them anyway. There wasn’t much left of some, but shredded dog meat.”

  “Lunch, anyone?”

  “Lilith!”

  “The photos of at least four of the guys are from mug shots,” Spinelli said. “The rest are blow-ups of driver’s licenses.”

  I spilled the photos out onto the counter top and reviewed them. “So, what’s your take? Do these guys have anything in common?”

  “You mean, except age, race, sex and the fact they’re all transients?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nope.”

  “Nothing?”

  “We’re at a loss.”

  “What’s Carlos think?”

  “He doesn’t know.”

  “So, why didn’t he come with you?”

  “He had a thing to do.”

  “A thing.” I peered over Spinelli’s shoulder and called out to the living room. “Did you hear that, Lilith. I told you. He’s still angry with me.”

  “No, he’s not,” she said.

  “He is. You saw how he worked me at the café. He looked me right in the eye and he did something. He reached down in me and he stole something, like a piece of me. I don’t know. I can’t explain it.”

  I thought Lilith might rag me about being paranoid or something. She knows I have a tendency to do that in the face of witchcraft, especially when it concerns a body’s freewill. I guess that’s why I resented her using the whisper box on me. But it’s something I feel strongly about, and that I felt like Carlos had somehow employed his own newfound version of witchcraft on me, didn’t help matters any. I cranked in with more complaints about Carlos, when I saw Lilith rise and start in my direction. Again, and as always, that weird tingle in my stomach began to churn as she neared me. It’s almost as if two magnets with oscillating polarities were drawing together. I can feel her energy and mine pulling and pushing simultaneously. It is actually pretty cool. It fills me with both dread and anticipation, and the best thing of all is I believe she feels it, too.

  Spinelli, in his perceptive wisdom, stood back a bit, giving berth for Lilith’s approach. It is not that she needed it, but to err on the side of caution is a sign of good police instincts. Lilith toed up to me almost as close as we were before Spinelli interrupted us. Her eyes narrowed, searching mine, as they had never done before. I knew she was not looking for me to kiss her, sadly, I know that look all too well now. But she was looking for something. I had almost pushed her away, fed up with her voodoo manipulation, when she smiled and slapped me hard on the chest.

  “Yup! I knew it. You son-of-a-bitch,” she said. “Look at you. You got it! Don’t you?” Her smile grew wider now and definitely contagious.

  “What?” I said. “I don’t have anything.”

  “Yes you do. You got it. I’ll be a monkey’s ass. What do you think of that, Spinelli?”

  Spinelli shrugged. “Think of what?”

  Again, Lilith hit me on the chest. This time closed fist. “You’re a witch! You little stinker! I see it in there. It’s in your eyes. You can’t hide it.”

  “I ain’t try`na hide it,” I said. “I didn’t even know I had it.”

  “Oh, you knew. You had to know. You had to feel it. Don’t tell me you didn’t.”

  “Feel what?”

  “It!”

  “You mean, like a tingle?”

  “Yes. It could feel like a tingle.”

  “I thought that was…”

  Her smile locked in anticipation. “What?”

  I shook my head. “No, it’s silly.”

  “What’s silly?”

  “Forget it. What made you think to look in my eyes, anyway?”

  “You did.”

  “What did I do?”

  “It’s what you said earlier. Honestly, I should have suspected. That wasn’t Carlos taking from you down at the café. That was you giving to Carlos. You opened your soul to him so that he could see how sorry you were. You gave him quite a dose, too. If I hadn’t taken your hand and squeezed it like I did, you might have given up some very dark secrets.”

  “I don’t have dark secrets.”

  “Everyone has dark secrets.”

  “Maybe every witch does.”

  “You’re a witch.” />
  “Stop saying that!”

  “Come on. It’s a good thing. Spinelli, tell him.”

  “No, Spinelli. Don’t tell me.”

  “Why are you fighting this?”

  “I’m not.”

  “You are.”

  “All right, I am.”

  “Then, why?”

  “Because….”

  “Because why?”

  “Because I love you! That’s why. And I wanted to think that these feelings I had were genuine, not some supernatural manifestation of star alignment and witchcraft. And I guess also…I wanted you to feel the same way.”

  It is an awkward moment when you tell a woman that you love her, and you are not sure that you are going to hear those same words back. It is especially awkward when you are sure, as I was when I looked into Lilith’s eyes and realized that’s exactly what was happening. I did not blame her, though. I understood that Lilith was a complicated woman. I knew that from the very beginning when I first laid eyes on her in Doctor Lieberman’s psychic workshop. She is a woman who knows what she wants and gets it when she wants it. I also knew that she was not ready for me, and that I would know when and if she decided she was. So, I drank down the silence that followed our little exchange, showered in its humility and pulled myself up by the bootstraps. I turned to Spinelli to tell him I was sorry, but he waved me off, showing more understanding for a man in my position than I gave him credit for.

  I went up to Lilith, took her hand in mine and squeezed it gently. Then I leaned down and whispered to her softly, “I’m sorry.”

  She rocked her head back, Pressed her lips to my ear and uttered back, “Me, too.”

  What should have happened next, did not. In a Hollywood ending, I would have carried Lilith over the bedroom threshold and shut the door, leaving Spinelli out in the hall feeling like the perfect fool. Instead, it was I who played the fool. No graceful exit could save me from myself. So, I grabbed my jacket off the back of the living room chair, hooked Spinelli by the sleeve and walked out unceremoniously.

  Five

  The justice center is an enormous complex downtown. It not only houses the courthouse, jails and the entire New Castle PD, but it also serves as satellite offices for all the police departments in the county. From there, every essential agency from first responders to code enforcement can access a database of crucial information and, if necessary, link into vital state and federal resources, as well. This is the place that opened the year I retired, which did not hurt my feelings any, seeing that I am an absolute moron when it comes to all things technical. But for Carlos and Spinelli, it is seventh heaven.

  Although most aspects of business carried out there are conducted under minimum security, for some reason, the planners and architects of the building felt it necessary to fortify the detective’s block like Fort Knox. To get to where Carlos and Spinelli worked, one needed to pass through multiple layers of security that even the Pentagon doesn’t require. For this reason, I met up with Spinelli in the lobby and followed him upstairs to Carlos’ workstation. He had just returned from his ‘thing’ and was now feeling so stuffed that he could barely move.

  “That’s it?” I said. “Eating? That’s the thing you had to do that was so important?”

  “No. It wasn’t just eating. I was working. I met a contact who had some Intel.”

  “A contact?”

  “Yes, a transient, a hungry transient. He said he wouldn’t meet me unless I bought him lunch.”

  “Did you get anything?”

  “I went for the smorgasbord.”

  “No! I mean Intel.”

  “Oh, sure. Plenty.”

  I crossed my arms to my chest. It would have ticked me off if I thought that Carlos had gone off to eat while Spinelli and I worked the leads to his case. It’s not that I hadn’t paid for my fair share if Intel with a thick steak or a few martinis. But I knew how much Carlos liked to eat. The man is a garbage disposal in wingtips. I tried to remind myself that I was not a cop anymore, and that I especially was not the lead cop in this investigation. This was Carlos’ baby and if he wanted to conduct the show from a buffet line, then who was I to say differently?

  “Well?”

  Carlos kicked back, wearing his smile like a crown. Of course, I suppose it could have been gas. It is hard to tell with him sometimes. “There’s a witness to one of the murders,” he said.

  “You’re kidding?”

  He leaned forward, showing more eagerness to talk now. “No. This guy saw the entire thing.”

  I sat up on the edge of my chair. “And?”

  “Well, first he saw these two hobos talking, and one of them had something in his hand.”

  “A gun?”

  “I don’t know. He couldn’t say. But that’s when the second one climbed up on some trestlework and jump off in front of an oncoming train.”

  “That’s great! We need to get this witness in here right away.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “We don’t know who he is.”

  “But you just had lunch with him.”

  “No I didn’t.”

  “You said—”

  “It wasn’t him.”

  “Then, who…”

  “Some other guy who knows a guy that knows the witness.”

  I rolled back into my chair. “Carlos, what you have is a he-said-she-said, only without a description of the perpetrator.”

  “At least we know for sure now that these deaths weren’t suicides.”

  “No, we know nothing for sure. We have a guy that may know a witness to someone that may have witnessed somebody committing a murder or suicide.”

  “It’s a start.”

  “It’s a waste of the fifteen bucks you spent on lunch.”

  “Thirty,” he said. “And the department reimburses me.”

  “Thirty! The guy’s a bum. Couldn’t you have taken him to the Burger Barn?”

  He pulled back some, embarrassed and deflated. “So, what did you come back with? Any luck with Mister Marcella?”

  I shook my head. “No. You were right about him being old school. He doesn’t know any of the younger guys hopping freights these days.”

  “Were you able to tell if he’s your…you know. Father?”

  “He is,” I said. “He told me about my real mother, too, and why he abandoned me on the doorstep of the orphanage.”

  “So, you told him?”

  “What, that I’m his son? Of course not. How on earth could I explain something like that to him.”

  “You could write him a letter,” said Spinelli. “Tell him that you’re all right and that you—”

  “What, miss him? Maybe tell him that I’d love to be there with him in his dying days, but that I’m just a little busy right now?”

  “No! I didn’t mean that. I just thought, I don’t know.”

  Sure, his intentions were good, and I knew that Carlos’ concerns were genuine, too. And it’s not as though I had all the answers, either. I wanted my dad to know who I was, and that I didn’t harbor any ill feelings towards him. But how could that make anything better for him? Wasn’t it possible that meeting me, knowing about me, could only make matters worse? I mean, there he was at the end of his life, reconciling all the good and bad things he had ever done and coming to terms with them before his final judgment day. Meeting me could unearth a graveyard of skeletons that he thought had been put to rest decades ago. No, deciding what to do about dad was not a simple matter, but neither was doing nothing.

  “I know what you meant, Dominic,” I said. “And I know you both mean well, but this is something I must deal with on my own.”

  “So, you’re not angry with him,” asked Carlos. “About leaving you, I mean.”

  “No. He had his reasons. I guess my mother was a real whack job. She left him little choice.”

  “Was she?”

  “Yeah, shame, too. He really loved her. They were both hobos, riding the freight
s together, living under the stars. He said he compared their adventures to those of Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman in the movie, To Whom the Bell Tolls. But then when I came along, she sort of wigged out on him. She just got up and walked out, leaving him holding the bag, or should I say, the little bundle of joy?”

  Carlos shook his head. “That’s terrible.”

  “I know. What is a hobo to do, right? But old dad did his best. He raised me to age five, but with the war overseas raging, he was eventually called to go fight in it. That’s when he left me with the orphanage.”

  “Man, that makes me want to cry,” said Carlos. “He’s really an upstanding guy, your dad. Isn’t he?”

  “I think so.”

  It is funny. I am usually better with details than most. It is a gift, something I have honed through years of police work, gathering clues and conducting interviews. So it took me by surprise a bit when Spinelli was able to jump on a few of the obvious inconstancies in my story that I totally missed.

  “It was ‘43’,” he said, almost inaudibly. Carlos and I looked at him strangely.

  “What’s that?”

  “The movie, To Whom the Bell Tolls. It came out in ‘43’.”

  “So?”

  “You were born in 42, weren’t you?”

  “I’m not following.”

  “You said that your mom and dad related their adventures to Bergman and Cooper, but that’s impossible. If she left him after you were born, then they couldn’t have known about the movie because it wasn’t out yet.”

  I agreed, explaining the mix-up as an oversight. “So, dad was confused. He’s an old man. Maybe he meant another movie.”

  “What about the war?”

  “What about it?”

  “You said he left you to go fight in Europe. By the time you were five, World War II had been over nearly two years. I don’t suppose the Axis took to kindly to that.”

  “No,” I said, retreating in a shell of denial. “I don’t suppose they did. Maybe my dad’s medications had him confused about some things.”

  “Yeah, I bet that’s it,” said Carlos, and when he shot his young partner the look, Spinelli hopped aboard.

  “Of course, that’s probably it. An old man on morphine will ramble on if you let him.”