Bell, book, and murder Page 2

  I pushed open the door and slid into the shop. For reasons involving rents and overhead, the Revel is located in an area that only the most depraved real estate agent could call SoHo. It's south of Houston, all right—and probably east of the sun and west of the moon as well. It's also one of the few establishments of any sort that has its own herb g£irden out back.

  It was Friday night, and ToUah, who is one-half of ToUah-and-Carrie, the Revel ownership, holds a TGIF Ritual every Friday around nine p.m., East Coast Pagan Time. Which means, in practice, around ten-thirty, but the Friday ritual is mostly for reguleirs and they don't mind.

  The Revel doesn't have indoor ritual space like The Snake does, so Fridays are held in the Revel's little back garden, or with everybody crammed inside if it rains. Tonight was going to be a back garden night, Goddess willing. People were already queuing up to drink quarter-a-cup tea and stand around and gossip.

  ToUah waved from the cash register beside the door. I headed for the tea urn. I didn't see Lace an5^where.

  1 fished my cup out of its hiding place—rank hath its privileges—and dropped a quarter in the box. I poured myself some Zinger. I had a number of reasons for wanting to see Lace, number one or possibly two on the list being that if she'd phoned the police about Miriam before 1 had and got herself on tape with it, I was probably going to have some really awkward questions to answer eventually.

  And for no good reason I wanted to ask Lace why Miriam was wearing a chicken foot around her neck when she died.

  I'm not a religious bigot, and I can't have an opinion on something I haven't studied. This leaves me voting "No Award" on a lot of New Age so-called spiritual pathways. Most people are turned off by the Santerios sacrificing chickens to their gods, but exactly how is that

  18 Bell, Book, and Murder

  different from a kosher butcher slaughtering baby goats for Passover?

  Mostly the difference is that the Jleisher is pulling down $80,000 a year and has a condo in Palm Beach, and the oshun is on welfare and lives in a fifth-floor walk-up in Queens. Never tell me money doesn't talk. Money's the left-hand path, the ruler of the things of Earth.

  So my self-image requires an open mind. Fine. And some gods require blood sacrifices. Fine. It's between them and their worshipers and the legal code of the United States. And some spiritual paths have window dressing that's a real cage-rattler (ever check out Tibetan Buddhism?). This is also fine.

  But since all these things were so fine, why was I getting grue and goose bumps because Miriam was wearing a piece of a chicken that the chicken certainly wasn't going to miss now?

  Oh, it isn't that I don't believe in evil. It's just that it's rarer than the funny-mentalist televangelists like to think. I prefer to distinguish among evil and stupid and weird. Maybe if I could talk to Lace I could be sure which category Miriam's jewelry fell into.

  And maybe I could get some kind of handle on why she was dead. It made no sense. There hadn't been a mark on her that I remembered—not AIDS, not drugs, not terminal cancer—and if she had any medical kinks from diabetes to a bad heart she would have been sure to mention it at some point as proof of her great psychic power. People do.

  Miriam Seabrook was dead. For no reason, without even the excuse of traffic accident or urban violence. 1 wanted to talk the experience to death and bury it in words and the only person I could do that with wasn't anywhere.

  If it wasn't unfair, you wouldn't know it was Life.

  I poured myself a second cup of tea and tried to distract myself with the bookshelves. There wasn't much there I wanted: I do my book buying at Weiser's or The Snake—my kind of Wicca is too masculinist and hierarchical for the good ladies of Chanters Revel, which is where I do my fraternizing. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, as someone said just after he jumped political parties.

  I took one more hopeful look around to see if Lace had come to Earth. It has often been said that a significant percentage of Grateful Dead groupies make their living by touring the country

  following the band and selling Grateful Dead memorabilia to other Grateful Dead groupies who also make their living by touring the country following the baind and . . . You get the idea. For sheer incestuous sjmibiosis, Neopagans have them beat all hollow. Without moving from my place under a "Women Hold Up Half the Sky" poster, I could count two occult silversmiths, one mail-order herbalist, a candlemaker, a guy who sandblasts mirrors with the holy symbol of your choice, a pretty good (and very expensive) astrologer, and a couple people who regularly read Tarot at The Snaike on Wednesdays. It's a wonder Tollah and Carrie don't go broke —half the customers at the Revel are their suppliers.

  No Lace.

  I suddenly reailized that I could not face a TGIF Ritual tonight. Miriam's death didn't belong in it, and I wasn't sure I wanted to tell anybody about that Just yet anj^way.

  I also realized I'd promised Ray I'd finish those damned galleys still sitting on my board at work. Before Monday.

  Weekends are for sissies.

  I decided to circulate a little more in the name of showing the flag and also to give Lace one last chance to show up and make me a great excuse for leaving. I saw everybody else but I didn't see Lace. Just as the party was starting to move outside—Tollah pulled the shade with the picture of Mama Kali and the "Closed" sign down over the glass part of the door—I managed to comer Carrie.

  "Seen Lace?"

  Carrie frowned—which made her look cute and ultramundane both and made me wonder yet again what life would be like if I weren't so painfully straight—and made a sincere effort to remember every personal interaction of the last twelve hours.

  "She left here about five. She was going to meet that Miriam Seabrook—" Carrie wrinkled her nose in a way that indicated Miriam was Not One Of Us, and from Carrie that was the equivalent of anyone else's screaming phillipic — "and go to that new Greek place to eat. Lace was supposed to bring us back some fadafel—but it's okay because Lugh brought in pizza and we split that," she finished in a rush, just in case I might think she was — Goddess avert—mad at Lace.

  That settled it. If Carrie said Lace hadn't come back, she hadn't. And in a store that measured ten feet by thirty, someone Lace's size wouldn't exactly be invisible.

  20 Bell, Book, and Murder

  "Well, okay," I said, which Carrie could take anyway she liked. 1 went out the back door of the Revel with everyone else, and then down to the bottom of the garden and through the gate and down the alley and out.

  And I wondered what Miriam Seabrook, dead space cadet, could possibly have done in life to put that look on gentle Carrie's face.

  It was pretty late when I finally got home. New York, you may have heard, is a summer festival: I'd wandered around until I fetched up in front of that bar (you know, the one with no windows and the walls painted black) that seems to be a favorite with all my friends.

  Not me. It's not that I mind five bucks for a beer. It's that for that I want light to see and room to drink it afterward.

  Despite that, I went in aind blew twenty bucks on Tsingtaos until the Real World got to be more irritating than the show I was replaying in my head and 1 headed for home sweet ungentrified home.

  Not that they aren't trying—the gentrtfiers, I mean. It was worse back in the eighties when there were still yuppies, but you can feel the hot breath of the real-estate developers panting down your neck six blocks away even now. Let's go co-op! Condo! Loft!

  And when there is nothing an)^where on Manhattan Island but studio apartments renting for $1500 a month, they'll say "Where is the charm of the old neighborhoods?"

  Sure they will—I don't think. It's the social equivalent of strip mining: They'll be laughing all the way to the bank for the twenty seconds or so it takes their jury-rigged wonderland to turn into slums that'll make Calcutta look like Westchester County, and for the New York economy to crash because nobody but drug lords and lawyers can afford to pay the kind of money that lets people live in places
that cost that much.

  It's not wanting things like that to happen that leads to block associations (and you thought they were only to stop the spread of crack), and banners across the street saying "Help Save Our Neighborhood," and large informational signs discussing New York City's tax structure as it relates to Alphabet City. And other landmarks of my neighborhood.

  Never mind what I pay in rent, or that even if I could afford to live uptown I might not. Think instead about the cultural fallacy

  that holds that the idea of making money is so sacred that the means by which it is made cannot be questioned—and that anyone saying that sometimes it isn't a good idea to get all the cash profit you possibly can would probably be arrested for heresy if there was a Holy Vehm for the First Church of Money.

  When I drink 1 think too much.

  I walked up five flights of stairs and I was home.

  The light on my answering machine was blinking as I came in— welcome to the wonderful world of consumer goods. Stupid, but it's my one techno-toy: I can't stand not knowing who wants to talk to me, and since I do a bit of freelemce artisting, it's actually a deductible business expense.

  I closed the door and flipped the three locks back into place and walked over and pushed the button next to the flashing red light before doing anything else. 1 have one window £ind it has no shade; there was enough light to do that by.

  The thing obediently played through the part about "leave your name and number after the beep" and got to the point.

  "Bast? It's Miriam. Seabrook?"

  I am not superstitious, but for a moment I wondered wildly if they had pay phones in the county morgue. But Miriam must have called earlier today, while she was still alive.

  Right. Real bright, girl.

  " — and I've got to see you," the ghost in the machine went on. "I've really got to see you. It's — " Recorded Miriam drew a shaky breath. I hit "Save" and the tape went back to the beginning and started flashing again.

  I went over and turned on the lights. White walls, cracked linoleum, kitchen table old enough to be a Deco-era collectible that isn't. One long room with a bed at the other end and a bathroom with no bath. Home.

  And Miriam on my answering machine, person-to-person from the Twilight Zone. Once I played it back she'd be gone for good; the next message coming in would record right over her.

  I thought about it for a minute or so, feeling very lucid, and rummaged around until I found my old rinky-dink Sony that I use for taping lectures and stuff. I popped out the tape—music, San-greal, live, at Rites of Spring—and stared at it while my mind helpfully provided the information that there probably wasn't another blank tape in the place and if there were I wasn't in any shape to look for it. So I flipped Sangreal over to Side B and hit "Record"

  22 Bell, Book, and Murder

  and let it tape a few seconds of my not-too-steady breathing before I went over and hit "Play" on my answering machine again.

  Sometimes I just love my life.

  "Bast? It's Miriam. Seabrook? I know it's ... I haven't been in touch, but I've really ... I need to . . . There's this weird stuff, and I've got to see you. I've really got to see you. It's — " the long pause again, and this time, listening, I could hear tears. "It's too weird. I'm scared. I think they're going to —" The voice stopped abruptly, and when it started again it was bright and upbeat and jarringly fake. "So ainj^way, call me, okay? Or I'll be down at the Revel, until eleven?"

  Clatter of phone hanging up, and then a beep and my message again and Miriam calling back to leave her number. Long hiss of open line, as if she'd waited, not hanging up, hoping I'd come in and pick up the phone and save her. But the answering machine cut her off with a little self-satisfied choodle, and there weren't any other messages on the tape.

  I stopped the recorder and rewound the tape and popped it out, and popped the answering machine tape out too, and stuck both of them in a Ziploc Baggie, and put that in a cookie jar that holds subway tokens and incense charcoal and other things that roaches won't eat.

  Then I went to bed and tried to convince myself that Miriam's death was from all-natural causes, that Lace's paranoid disappearing act had nothing to do with knowing too much about something, and that Miriam hadn't died as a direct result of being in over her head somewhere.

  And I couldn't.

  ^•^i^ SATURDAY, JUNE 16, 5:45 a.m. ^>^^

  My alarm blitzkrieged me out of bed before the sun had come down into my neighborhood, and I was already in the shower before it occurred to me that this was probably Saturday. Further investigation revealed that it was, but by this time I was curious enough to want to try to find out why I'd set my alarm.

  Somewhere over the second cup of Morning Thunder I remembered that I had to get back to Houston Graphics and finish that job for Ray. And I might as well call Rachel Seabrook from there while I was at it.

  What else I had in mind to do today I wasn't admitting even to me—at least not before breakfast. And maybe lunch.

  I got to Houston Graphics about eight and unlocked all the locks I'd locked the night before. I'm not the only one who comes in on weekends—anybody who's worked for the place five years has a set of keys—but if I wasn't the only one today at least I was first. I turned on the lights and the wax machine and the stat camera and the coffeemaker, and when the coffee was ready 1 poured myself a cup and turned on my light table and settled down to the finicking business of salvaging that type job.

  Three hours later—still alone —1 straightened up and tried to work the crick out of my lower back. Ray's bitch-kitty of a job was within shouting distance of being done; only another spread to go. And it was late enough so that I could call the Ume zone next door cind be pretty certain I wouldn't wake anyone up.

  24 Bell, Book, and Murder

  I didn't want to make that call. How do you tell somebody that their sister is dead? "Hello, I'm a total stranger and Fm calling to fuck with your head. ..." Sure.

  I pulled out Miriam's address book. The other numbers in Miriam's book were in every color of the rainbow, decorated with doodles and pentagrams and cryptic notes in massed initials. Rachel Seabrook's number was carefully written in blue-black ink, like a penance. 1 punched all eleven digits firmly, not giving AT&T a chance to get cute.

  Three rings and answer. "Hello?" The authentic Midwest sound of chronic sinus trouble. Area Code 317. Indiama.

  "Hello, this is —" I had to think about it for a minute before identifying myself " — Karen Hightower. May I speak to Rachel Sea-brook?"

  'This is she." Third person peculiair is alive and well in the Middle West.

  "I'm afraid I have some bad news for you, Ms. Seabrook. I'm afraid —" no, I'd said that already " — I'm sorry to tell you. Your sister Miriam is dead."

  "How do you know?" Hostile, but not unreasonably so. The telephone is a great leveler. You can't judge what you can't see. All she knew about me was that I knew Miriam.

  "I found her body."

  There was a pause while we both listened to the long-distance hiss.

  "I see. I'm sorry, Miss . . . ?"

  "Hightower."

  "You must think I'm very cold. But Miriam and I were never close."

  "Your number was in her address book. I gave it to the police. They have— She was lying on her bed. She died in her sleep. They should be calling you."

  Normally I put sentences together better than that. Grace, wit, charm, adverbs . . . But not today. Death is the only really rude thing anybody can do anymore, it seems. People will forgive rape, murder, theft, and arson, but dying is the unforgivable act. We don't even want to mention anyone crude enough to do it.

  "I see. I'm sorry. It must have been very difficult for you. Have you ... Do you have any idea of what I should do now?" A hesitant laugh: Fm sorry to be such a bother. . . .

  "I'm sorry," I sorried back, "I don't really know. Maybe the po-

  lice will be able to tell you. I don't think she had a will. There's her apartment—
if you like I could get together her personal papers and send them to you."

  That's right, Bast, offer to burgle dead Miriam's apartment for the sister so you have a good excuse.

  "I... I really can't just drop everything and fly out to New York. We weren't really close." Tell me it's okay to do it this way. I know Fm supposed to make a big fuss over the dead sister, but this would be easier. Tell me it's all right.

  "If you like I can send you her things."

  "Thank you. That would be very kind."

  We were never really very close. You might steal everything, but I don't really care. I can say a friend of hers in New York took care of things. We weren't really very close.

  "If there is anything you would like. A memento. Please let me know. ..."

  "Thank you, Ms. Seabrook. Let me give you my name and address and phone number. I'll need a UPS address from you."

  Thank you. You're very kind. We weren't close. I wrote letters and numbers on my blotter with a technical pen. A rural route in Shelbyville.

  By the time I hung up on Rachel Seabrook I had her permission to rummage the length and breadth of Miriam's apartment and strew her worldly goods to the four winds. It was understood that anything with a high resale value would go to Rachel. There wouldn't be much. Not by Shelbjrville standards, anyway.

  I knew somebody from Shelbjrville, Indiana once. He spent so much time beingjrom Shelbyville that he never paid much attention to where he actually was. I think he's dead now.

  And it was lunchtime, and by now it was obvious even to me how I was going to spend my afternoon. Because Miriam had been afraid when she died, and I wanted to know why.

  I finished up the work for Ray, tidied up the studio, and filled in my time sheet. Eloi came in while I was leaving—he was working on a long job, medicad textbook with lots of dead babies. He spun his hat the length of the room and made a ringer on the tensor lamp over his board. He didn't say much. He never does. I think he thinks he's Humphrey Bogart but I've never dared ask. At least because he was there I didn't have to lock up again.