“Nice kid,” Paris continues. “Good-looking, too.”

“Yeah,” Mercedes says, rummaging in her bag. “He’s a real thief of hearts, let me tell you. Girls have been knocking on our front door ever since Julian turned twelve. I’m just stunned he stopped by.”

“It was painless,” Paris says.

“Good. Maybe getting these pictures published will get him off his ass.” She gestures toward the city. “So, where to first, detective?”

“West side,” Paris says. “I think it’s time to visit the botanica.”

“Want me to drive?” Mercedes asks, holding up her key chain, pointing to a sparkling, midnight blue Saturn.

Paris looks at his listing, rusted car, caked with road salt, and makes his first mistake of the day when he says: “Sure.”

They are on Detroit Avenue, going thirty-five miles per hour, sliding on ice, and about to slam into the rear end of a primer-prepped old Plymouth; a Plymouth whose driver decided to pause, at a green light, to empty his ashtray into the middle of the street.

In the middle of a snowstorm.

On the way, Paris and Mercedes had stopped at Ronnie’s Famous for a few minutes and Paris had switched Thermoses. He had also turned Mercedes Cruz on to Ronnie Boudreaux’s vaunted beignets. She had agreed instantly. World’s best, no contest.

Now, though, as they hit a patch of ice on Detroit Avenue, Paris can feel the coffee and the beignets in his stomach begin to head north. They do a three-sixty. Then another. Then, the Saturn comes to a full stop, somehow pointed in the right direction, somehow just inches to the right of the Plymouth. No damage.

Yet.

Mercedes gathers herself, waits a few beats, lowers her window, smiles, gestures to the other driver to do the same. He reaches over, a confused look on his face, and rolls down the passenger window.

“Hi,” Mercedes says, all charm and innocence.

“Hi,” the driver says.

“Chinga!” Mercedes yells out the window. “Chinga tu MADRE, tu PADRE, tu ’BUELA!”

Although Paris is monolingual, having plenty of trouble with English alone, you don’t have to be Antonio Banderas to know what Mercedes just said about the other driver’s sainted mother, father, and grandmother. The driver, a fair-sized young Latino kid, promptly flips Mercedes the bird, then floors it, fishtailing his way down to West Thirty-eighth Street, where he makes a hurried left turn and disappears into the squall of falling snowflakes.

Winter silence ensues for a few moments. Mercedes looks at Paris. Paris speaks first, realizing he had just witnessed the temper Mercedes’s brother Julian had mentioned. “You okay?”

“Fine. Sorry about that.”

“No harm done.”

“I said a bad word.”

Paris laughs. “A bunch of them, actually. Nice talk for a Catholic gal.”

“You understood that?” she asks as she carefully scans her side mirror and gingerly pulls back out into traffic.

“Well, if you work the inner city, you learn the f-word in many languages. I had an Arab flip me off in Farsi once. I’m sure of it.”

“I’m so embarrassed.”

“Don’t be. I offer the same sentiment to my fellow Cleveland motorists quite often. Usually in Italian, though.”

“You’re Italian?”

“My grandfather on my father’s side was named Parisi. The i got chopped off at Ellis Island somehow. My mother’s father was Italian, too. What about you?”

“Puerto Rican on my father’s side. My mother’s family is English/Irish.”

“Which heritage do you feel more strongly?”

“I guess I consider myself Hispanic. My brother and I are both pretty close to my ’buela, my grandmother. She is a wonderful woman. My role model. I look a lot like her when she was younger. I think we’re the same type.”

“Type?”

“You know. Independent. Mysterious. Darkly exotic.”

“I see.”

“Kind of a Penelope Cruz type. No relation.” Mercedes looks at Paris, affecting a glamour pose. “What do you think?”

Paris, completely cornered, ever the diplomat, says: “I’m going to have to give it some thought, you know?”

Mercedes laughs, snaps on the radio, grabs her third beignet out of the oily white bag between the seats, and says, “I’ve got all day, detective.”

26

La Botanica Macumba occupies one corner of Fulton Road and Newark Avenue, on Cleveland’s near-west side, next to a used-shoe mart run by lay personnel at St. Rocco’s called The Deserving Sole. Beneath the botanica’s large red-lettered sign is a legend that reads: Hierbas Para Banos/Todas Clases.

Paris finds no small irony—now that he has a little background on Santeria and knows how it came into being—that the reflection in the window of La Botanica Macumba is of St. Rocco’s across the street. The botanica’s window is a patchwork quilt of brightly colored banners, decrying the shop’s exotica: Spanish Cards! Sugar Candy! Pompeia Perfume! Blue Balls! High John Root! Maja Products!

Yet there, in the center of the window, is a diaphanous cruciform, a cross reflected from the facade of St. Rocco’s. Next to the likeness, a neon sign that claims that La Botanica Macumba is a “grocery store for the body and soul.”

As Paris enters he is immediately beguiled by a seductively sweet aroma. He sees the smoldering cone on a nearby brass plate. A tented, hand-lettered card reads: nag champa.

There is one other customer in the shop, an Hispanic man in his seventies.

Paris and Mercedes look around the small store a while, waiting for the proprietor to wrap up his business with the other customer. On one wall there is a huge rack of oils, incense, and soaps, many promising a variety of benefits: from keeping away spirits to drawing money or love to keeping one’s spouse at home. “Stay With Me” one of the oils is called, Paris notes with an inner smile, thinking: Coulda used some of that. On another wall is a magazine and book rack, along with a dozen cardboard display bins of candles, herbs, voodoo supplies, gris-gris, dolls, artwork, CDs, T-shirts, tarot decks.

After a few moments, the customer leaves. Paris and Mercedes approach the counter.

“My name is Edward Moriceau,” the man behind the counter says. He is sixty, thin and wiry, dark-skinned, of indefinable heritage. North African, perhaps. There is a ring on each of his fingers, including his thumbs. “Mojuba!”

“I’m sorry?” Paris says.

“It is a Lucumí term of greeting. It means ‘I salute you.’”

“Oh,” Paris says. “Thanks.”

“How can I help you?”

Paris shows the man his shield. “My name is Detective Paris. I’m with the Homicide Unit of the Cleveland Police Department. This is Ms. Cruz. She’s a reporter with Mondo Latino.”

Moriceau nods at Mercedes, says, “Yes. I am familiar with your paper, of course.” He gestures to a wire newspaper bin near the door, where a small stack of Mondo Latino newspapers reside.

“I’d like to ask you a few questions,” Paris says.

“Certainly.”

“Do you recognize this?” Paris holds up a pencil sketch of the symbol found on both Willis Walker and Fayette Martin.

“Yes. It is the symbol for Ochosi.”

“Could you spell that for me, please?”

Moriceau does.

“What does it mean?” Paris asks.

“Ochosi is a hunter god. The bow and arrow are his tools.”

“What is it for?”

“For?”

“Why would someone pray to this god?”

“For many things, detective,” Moriceau says as he turns to the display case behind him, removing a small iron replica of the bow-and-arrow symbol. “It depends upon what is in the heart of he who prays. If you are a decent person, a law-abiding citizen, you might pray to Ochosi for bounty. If you are a thief, with the proper sacrifice, the hunter god Ochosi can ward off arrest, police, jail.”

Paris and Mercedes exchange a glance. “Sacrifice?” Paris asks.

Moriceau offers a sad, lopsided smile. “I’m afraid there are more misconceptions than truths about the Afro-Caribbean religions. The notion of human sacrifice is one of the most insidious.”