Warlock Wolf / Bring The Night / Chapter 9

The Toymaker lay on a stainless steel table with an acrylic sheet draped over him. His feet stuck out the bottom, his head and shoulders above the top. Across the man’s bony collar Black could see the stitched yoke where earlier the coroner had opened the man up to discern the cause of death.

Black asked Boston: “Is it your toymaker?”

“It is. The toymaker goes by the name Ernest Stafford. Ernie worked for a time in the public school system so we had his prints in the database.”

They were standing in the basement level of the Emerald Hill Funeral Home, under the low red-brick bungalow that ran behind the formal Victorian home street-front of White Chapel’s only mortuary. Black stood at the side of the body, up near his head, Boston on the right of him. Across the toymaker’s body the coroner was watching, drinking coffee from a styrofoam cup. Two deputies lingered in the darker edges of the frigid room. Boston had the coroner bring the body to the funeral home almost five hours ago now to perform the autopsy, something he told Black wasn’t unusual.

Black asked, “Any criminal record?”

“Nothing. Clean as a whistle. As far as records go, this man was a model of clean living. Worked the food bank, donated a lot of his toys to Christmas charities for foster children. Well-liked in the community but mostly absent. A guy who was around but no one knew very well.”

“Born and raised in White Chapel?”

“Came twelve years ago and set up a shop on the main street.”

“So tell me,” Black said, “how such a fine and upstanding citizen breaks into somebody’s house, draws a pentagram on the floor, gets naked…? Was he performing some kind of satanic ritual?”

Boston said, “Or was he part of the ritual?”

“You mean like a sacrifice?”

“Exactly.”

Black said, “Lizzy . . . I mean the girls . . . from the sorority . . . said the spell was one used by someone working probably as an assassin of some kind.”

“No way to verify that.”

“If we’re assuming they’re right, that the toymaker was the one who drew the pentagram and all, why does he have to break into someone’s house?”

“Like he was in some kind of hurry.”

“You know how I picture it,” Black said, “of course I’m used to working robbery and crime in Tennessee, but it seems like two magicians in a bar getting in an argument. Only instead of going out to their pickup trucks to get their pistols, each of them has to run to some sort of magic book or wand or something.”

“I can see it.”

“What would two magicians have a beef over?”

“Beats me,” Boston said, “but money’s always a good bet. Or a girl.”

“You think we’re dealing with another magician? That sound right?”

“Sounds likely.”

“Another magician. You think they were here together? Both of them in the house at the same time?”

“Who knows.”

Black asked, “The Cartwrights don’t have security cameras?”

Boston shook his head.

“You seen these things before? Strange cases.”

“I’ve been here a while. But this . . . ”

Black said, “When you catch the guy, the magician, what do you do then? How do you prove in a court of law that someone cast a spell at someone else? What do we do—arrest the remnants of that doll? Maybe whatever it was, that black smoke that came out of it that Lizzy caught in the scroll—we arrest it and put it on trial?”

“We can’t even prove it killed him.”

“What do you mean?”

“The toymaker died of a heart attack.”

It stunned him. “Wait, that’s the cause of death? What about all those little stab wounds?”

“Weren’t fatal. The stabbing was postmortem.”

Black shivered. “You imagine walking in and seeing that doll standing on top of him and stabbing him in the eyeballs?”

“That’s right where I’d have my heart attack.”

“I know the feeling. Makes sense, if a man has heart trouble something like that would take him out. I saw that thing scramble out from under the bed, and I swear I’ll never un-see it. You know what I’m saying?”

“You don’t have to tell me. I was hoping the whole time it was someone else found the doll. So what are you thinking, like Ernie here was in the middle of making his own devil doll, and, pow, some other magician conjures one out of that upstairs closet, it comes down . . . ”

Black continued, “Ernie’s chanting klaatu barada nikto, turns around and that devil-doll comes at him. Ernie’s ticker pops and he goes down without a peep. The doll don’t care, just starts hacking away at the prostrate body.”

“This other magician, he doesn’t leave any pentagram on the floor anywhere?”

“Either he’s a better magician, or maybe we find a room in a Motel 6 nearby, big pentagram drawn on the floor.”

Boston said, “Is it weird I get the feeling Ernie was up against someone better than him?”

“No. I see it. Shit, maybe this other magician didn’t even mean to kill him, just scare him. Guy had a heart attack.”

“Heart attack or no, I don’t think Ernie woulda stood a chance with that doll in the house.”

Black said, “That housekeeper sure got lucky.”

“She don’t even know it.”

“Hm,” he said now, mouth fidgeting around. Here he was standing in a whole new world, a funeral-home-cum-autopsy-room, cops and a coroner, all surmising a case . . . 

Boston asked, “What’s interesting?”

“Here I am working occult and it’s just like any other case at its heart. Someone did something to someone else and you gotta figure why.”

“I got something ought to excite you, then,” Boston said.

He watched as the deputy stepped out from the cone of light over the dead body, grabbed a plastic zip bag off a steel table on wheels. Now he held the baggie up between them at eye level. Inside was a glass vial and Black leaned closer to see what it contained. “What’s in there?” he said. “Looks like a lock of hair.”

“It is. We found it under the toymaker’s body, already in the glass vial.”

Black nodded. “So what do you think it means?”

“Don’t know. Part of the puzzle.”

“What if it’s part of the spell Ernie wanted to cast?” Black said now, still studying the vial inside the plastic bag. There was a lock of greying hair, tied with a short length of red knitting yarn. “Like how you see in the movies, witches collecting personal effects of their future victims.”

Black tossed the baggie to the table, said, “I think we should go to the sorority—you haven’t met the Matriarch yet.”

“About the vial?”

“This kind of thing is their expertise.”

It was a good point, but now he had a vision of running into Lizzy there at the school and it stressed him. His heart beat faster and he could picture this Matriarch looking right through him, knowing right away what he’d done to one of her girls last night. He said, “You got someone at the toymaker’s house?”

“Got officers there now, doing a search with a warrant.”

“Why don’t we head to his store, then?”

*

Patricia Entwhistle, the woman who ran the toymaker’s main street shop, was more what Black expected Eleanor to look like when he’d first discovered the pie and read the attached note. A well-dressed woman in her sixties, kind and effusive, she was horrified when he confirmed the news that Ernie Stafford was deceased.

The deputy from the other night, the one called Nixon, was at the woman’s side. She was seated behind the counter, butt on a stool, looking a little woozy as if she were on the edge of fainting. Nixon handed her a glass of water and she took a sip, thanked him and set it down. She leaned heavily to one side, elbow on the counter.

She let out a long exhale, said, “I didn’t want to believe it.”

Boston was at Black’s side, a foot back, saying, “Some gossip going around?”

Mrs. Entwhistle touched under an eye to test the heat on her pale, sagging cheeks. “Heard someone was killed last night at the Cartwright Mansion, when Ernie didn’t check in this morning . . . ”

The toymaker’s store was in a Victorian shopfront on the sunny-morning side of White Chapel’s Main Street. It was a small quaint shop, the walls wood paneled in a deep stain, curvy-leg furniture cases to display his smaller curios, and shelving showing dolls lined up much like what he’d discovered in the Cartwright mansion. Deeper in the shop were baby strollers with clamshell lids, toy rockers in various styles . . . 

Black said, “Mr. Stafford come in every day?”

The woman adjusted her eyeglasses, big clear frame ones, dangling eyeglass chain touching at her shirt collar, steadied her gaze on him. “You say you’re with the F.B.I.?”

“I am.”

She lamented: “What did Ernie get himself into?” The question was quiet and asked to herself.

Boston fidgeted his hat against his stomach—bald head gleaming in the light from a table lamp on the wood cash counter, an ugly deep pink blown glass monstrosity with dangling gems and painted roses—waiting for the woman to answer. “You know someone who’d want to hurt him?”

“No, sir,” she said, looking to Boston now. “I heard the man in the mansion had been stabbed to death.”

Black asked, “Who told you that?”

“Well, not just one person, everybody’s saying it.”

Boston changed the subject. “He have money trouble?”

“No, sir,” she said. “He’s got more than the store. Had more, I mean.” Now she stared off at a space on the floor between Black and Boston, probably realizing not only was her boss deceased, she’d have to look for a new job, too.

“Got a workshop at his house where he makes all the toys?”

“Uh-huh,” she said, nodding, still staring at nothing, talking automatically. “Ernie does—did—custom toys for anyone who ordered. Word of mouth mostly, though he had a website, orders going everywhere, Germany, Japan, Australia . . . ”

Black asked, “What kind of toys?”

“Oh, you name it . . . that’s what it was, someone would just name what they wanted and Ernie could make it real. He could make anything.”

“Any dissatisfied customers?”

She shook her head no, reached dumbly for her water but faffing around. Black leaned forward to nudge the glass into her grip. She thanked him, took a long drink.

Boston said, “Everyone happy with the stuff he made?”

“They sure were,” she said and set the glass down, her eyes making Black think the woman might be going into shock now, all this catching up with her.

Black thought of something, said, “Hey, is it always toys—he ever make anything else?”

Patricia frowned. “No. Just toys. What else would he make?”

Boston looked his way, and he wondered if the deputy saw his line of questioning. But an uneasiness settled on him now and it got him working a finger between his neck and shirt collar, tugging and running crescents, looking to loosen and ease away a sudden queasiness. He stepped away for a moment, excusing himself, Mrs. Entwhistle lifting her glass for another sip of water.

Feet sore, shoes too tight, his suit squeezed at him. A throbbing heat worked through his body, bringing with it a deep hunger. It made him think of black magic again, though the feeling wasn’t quite the same as it had been in the foyer of Rijkdom. This was different; something summoned him. In his head, like a Top 40 ear-worm, a whispering refrain came: Don’t trust anybody. It was a sweet and light voice, one whose soughing words caressed his skin. Lizzy. Don’t trust anybody . . . 

Nixon and Deputy Boston stayed with Patricia as he wandered away from the sales counter, looking to clear his head.

Apart from them, some un-easiness faded. He flattened his hand on his tie, rubbed it up and down his chest, feeling again how he’d lost weight, felt harder. With his hands in his pockets, he toured deeper into the store to take a look at some of the toymaker’s things.

The sight of the dolls on the shelves bothered him. Whatever the girls said about the spirit that had possessed that thing that attacked him last night, one look in this store would tell you the doll had been made by Ernie. It took great nerve, but he passed the lineup staring down at him, none of them stepping forward to attack him. Then he was at the prams, putting a hand out to touch over their clamshell lids as he walked.

A door marked private stood at the back of the store. The door wasn’t closed, left ajar, the room beyond in darkness. He leaned his shoulder on the doorframe, looking toward the front of the store seeing Nixon and Boston still engaged with Patricia, looking like she might be crying again. With the first knuckle of his left hand, he nudged the door wider. No one protested, and he slipped inside, hand feeling for the light switch and turning it on.

The room was an office, parts of it organized and tidy, others waiting for attention. An office chair stood by the door stacked with papers and manila folders. There were two filing cabinets, an ornate desk mostly hidden by pending and completed paperwork. No computer—it seemed like everything was done by hand at the toymaker’s place. Behind the desk was a cork-board festooned with scraps of paper put in place with pushpins.

He would have to have somebody here, deputies maybe, or perhaps call in for some more agents, have them go through the toymaker’s things, and he wasn’t sure what Boston’s current search warrant looked like, if it applied to Ernie’s store or not, but the deputy had said there were officers doing Ernie’s house right now. So he kept his hands in his pockets and toured around the room, strolling clockwise, seeing what presented itself to the naked eye.

He paused at the cork-board, admired some of the drawings and sketches that Ernie had done, ideas that the guy’d had, maybe, or perhaps things already built. Patricia said he took orders off his website; these were probably sketches he’d sent to prospective clients. There were pencil and ink drawings of dolls with various costumes, and custom things he didn’t see on the shelves in the store. There were drawings of animals; foxes, rabbits, deer, some moths, a lizard, a big toad, a wolf, house cats… There were other things as well, not living. Skulls, a crown, a wheel with spokes, hunks of what looked like rock, maybe quartz or something like that, the way the guy had rendered it with specks and sparkles. There were order forms for materials pinned amongst the drawings, too; wood from a custom carpentry place in Oregon, varnish from Michigan, chisels from Japan…

Not much to go on really, and he continued his tour, hands clasped behind his back and studying the paperwork laid out on Ernie’s desk. More drawings, invoices, handwritten notes about ideas, a detailed paragraph on how the ball joint of a doll should work and theories on what would make it better, but he only got part way through before he was bored and moving on. It was at the filing cabinet he paused again.

There would be boatloads of information contained inside—only it wasn’t visible to the naked eye and that was the limit of what he was allowed as a law officer. But the top drawer was ajar, and he eyed the office doorway, heard nothing and saw nothing. From his pocket he withdrew the key from the Yukon, extra keys and fob dangling, and he held them back so they wouldn’t rattle on the metal drawer front as he pushed the key into the gap and slowly and quietly worked the drawer open. There were file folders within, manila ones with handwritten names on the tabs, alphabetical by last name. Now he was moving quickly.

Of course, check Cartwright…

There was indeed a folder for ‘Cartwright,’ and he could see that there were orders fulfilled for the wealthy offspring of the Cartwright robber-baron empire. There were special order dolls, prams, costumes, and other wooden toys, and it made him wonder if the current Rijkdom tenants had children who were young and interested in such things, or maybe the wife (hoping it wasn’t the elder male Cartwright who had a fetish for little dolls).

Nothing untoward that he could see, at least without pulling out all the papers and going through it sheet by sheet, but another thought had his hand moving. Scanning forward a few letters, he checked to see for the name ‘Boston.’ Nope. The deputy had placed no orders from the toymaker.

Up front, inside the drawer but tucked before the manila folders began was a check book and a batch of invoices and delivery slips not yet filed away. He indexed through them with the point of the Yukon’s key, feeling a funny tingling through it now. It got his eyes focused and reading.

But they were really just more delivery slips like what he saw on the bulletin board. There was, however, one particular distinction that had him frowning. He withdrew his phone and took a picture, quietly closed the drawer with his elbow, turned off the light and rejoined Boston.