Bell, book, and murder Page 3

  I caught the Uptown train. When I got to Miriam's apartment

  26 Bell, Book, and Murder

  I took the police notice off the door and used Lace's keys to get in. Crime number one.

  Inside, the place looked and smelled like an abandoned hotel room. I had a flash of Stephen King-land cyanotic zombies shambling out of closets, which was stupid. Death is a part of life. If the dead interact with the living at all (insufficient data), it is not reasonable to think that they will be any more antisocial than they were while they were alive. Miriam had been my friend, sort of, and anything else on a day-trip from Between The Worlds I could deal with.

  Meanwhile, here was a quick introduction to Death, Twentieth Century-style. You die, and two weeks later the landlord rents your apartment. Everything you scraped to buy or collect is suddenly worthless, and all people can think of is how to get rid of it gracefully.

  There's something to be said for the old custom of funerary goods. One big bonfire and all the fuss would be over.

  I opened the windows and put on the kettle. Miriam's purse was still on the microscopic fold-down Conran's kitchen table. I left it there and rummaged around a little until I found about what I expected: two joints wrapped in foil in the freezer compartment of the fridge and half a Baggie of magic mushrooms in a recycled Skippy jar in the cupboard next to the vervain. The Sixties are alive and well and living in the Craft in New York City.

  I threw the 'shrooms and the pot into the trash and hoped there wasn't anything worse around—£ind if there was, that I'd recognize it. The vervain went, too —not that it's illegal; it's a harmless herb used in a lot of Wiccan and Pagan banishing rituals. On the other hand, I only had Miriam's word for it that the gray-green stuff in the jar marked "Vervain" was vervain and not, say, oregano.

  The tea-water boiled while I finished denuding the kitchen of occult and counterculture additives. The stuff that was legal, semi-mundane, easily identifiable, and still useful I left lined up on the counter for later collection. Then I took my tea out to the living room.

  I'd never been in Miriam's apartment before last night. Whatever her day job was she'd made decent money on it or had outside financial help; this place probably rented for between six and seven hundred a month. I wondered if there was any way on earth to collect her security deposit for Shelbyville.

  It was a typical New York apartment: kitchen on the right,

  bathroom behind it down a hall, bedroom opening off the hall, and living room straight ahead.

  The living room looked like everybody else's I hung out with. Not much here to excite Shelbyville: the couch was a curbside rescue, the end tables were wooden crates, the coffee table was an old trunk. The room was a first-class job of urban scavenging, but the standards of Fly-Over Country are not our own. All Rachel Seabrook would see was junk.

  Across from the couch was the staindard brick and board bookcase, with the standard authors: Adler, Valiente, the Farrars, Buckland. Some Crowley, and even a copy of the Sumerian-style Necronomicon somebody published as a stunt a few years back. It's a complete grimoire of Sumerian magic, all right, but it doesn't contain any banishing rituals. The system was written without them, and so it's worthless. Who ever heard of drawing without an eraser?

  Records and tapes, all harmless. A pile of magazines: Gnostica and Green Egg and Fireheart. A few copies of Ms. and Mother Jones, for variety.

  Copies of The White Goddess and The Golden Bough, both paperback and full of Miriam's marginal notes. But nothing here you couldn't show your mother, if your mother happened to be Sybil Leek.

  On the right-angle wall there was another, lower, bookcase that had her altar on it. Most Pagans have one—it's just a flat surface, sometimes covered with a cloth, where you keep chatchkis that are meaningful to you. Light a candle, bum some incense, reaffirm your personal belief system.

  Like everything else in the room, Miriam's could have been issued stock from Pagan Central Supply: A blue pillar candle, an incense burner, some big quartz crystals, a Goddess figure. Hers was a museum shop replica of the Goddess of the Games, from Crete.

  The little Goddess was dusty, and so was the top of the candle. Well, we aren't any of us demon housekeepers. To coin a phrase.

  But the coffee table wasn't dusty. Neither were the tapes piled on the bookshelf. So Miriam did clean.

  But not her altar. Not even so much as you'd expect from handling the things—lighting the candle, and so on.

  Theory: Miriam hadn't been near her altar in weeks.

  28 Bell, Book, and Murder

  Miriam, if you can hear me, the next time I see you I'm. going to thump your punkin' haid in. What the hell were you up to?

  The answer, of course, was in the bedroom.

  I felt the energy as soon as I crossed the threshold. It's not a particularly witchy trick—you do it all the time: Ever walk into a room full of people and know a fight's in progress? Or come home, and not even bother to give a yell because you know there's nobody there? Maybe you don't talk about things like that, but Witches do, and we have to call the reason-for-knowing something. So we call it energy, most of us. Whatever it is, it's the thing that changes.

  The energy in Miriam's room was not good. I thought about Stephen King again. But I'd been here yesterday and the only energy I'd felt was Miriam being dead.

  This was not that.

  1 went back out to the living room and stopped at Miriam's dusty altar. There were matches on a lower shelf. I lit the candles and got out the charcoal. I couldn't find any incense around the altar, but I'd seen some in the kitchen.

  I went back in and came out with a self-seal Baggie of something that looked like coarse saind. The grains were red, yellow, and black. I'd saved it because I knew what it was. Russian Church incense—the heavy smoky stuff, all copal and frankincense and myrrh. It made a nice familiar smell as the smoke made Jacob's Ladders up to the ceiling. The little Goddess seemed to shine brighter, as if she liked being remembered. And I knew that nothing bad could get at me while She watched.

  Most adults lose that sense of serenity, the idea that somebody else is going to shoulder the load and do the looking-out-for. Maybe wives had it before Women's Lib, when Hubby took all the heat, or maybe that's another myth of the Golden Age that there's no way to check. But it's one of the things that religion has always promised to provide.

  Not, mind, that I'm going to leave my door unlocked and expect the Great Goddess to keep the muggers away. She encourages independence.

  But I felt better now.

  I went back into the bedroom and opened the window, and a bunch of Austrian crystal suncatchers that Shelbyville might like went spinning. They sent little light-flies spinning over the walls that Miriam had lovingly painted with a pastoral landscape in shades of violet, and wickedness popped like a bubble.

  I'd known Miriam was a wannabe artist as well as a wannabe Witch. I hadn't known she had this much talent. It made her death worse, somehow, which is unfair.

  I looked around. Mattress on a platform. One nightstand a salvage job with a drawer, the other one of those cheap metal foot-lockers from Lamston's. There were another two footlockers at the foot of the bed.

  Bedside lamps —cheap copies of Art Nouveau. You used to be able to buy them down at the Canal Street Flea Market. Mirror (cracked) and discard-chest of drawers, a gift of the Garbage Goddess, painted lavender and decorated with painted vines. A straight chair and a square hassock, also secondhand.

  The closet, as always, was tiny, narrow, and deep. It held sneakers, Tibetan tie-dye vests, and one or two suits of mundane clothes that had that indefinable look of being a couple of years out of style. For the second time today I wondered what Miriam did for a living. There wasn't enough in the way of "straight" clothes here for a work wardrobe. Of course, maybe she had a job like mine, in which case they wouldn't care if she showed up naked, so long as she got the work done.

  But Miriam wasn't going to be working an5miore. Miriam was
dead.

  Why?

  And what had left that bogeymonster feeling in the room?

  The actuad cause of death in every case is the same: The heart stops. What coroners call the proximate cause is why the heart stops. Miriam was young (thirtysomething), not overweight by more than a few pounds, in fair-to-good physical condition, and if she was seeing Lace she was certainly watching what she ate — Lace is a combat vegetarian. From the way she'd looked when I found her I ruled out those nineties charmers, AIDS and cocaine.

  Which left what?

  Forget it. Bast. Lots of people die of lots of things.

  Poison, for example.

  But that would make it suicide, unless Lace had killed her.

  "There's this weird stuff, and I've got to see you."

  And I didn't think someone who'd left a message like that on my answering machine would kill herself a few hours later. She'd meant to be at the Revel's TGIF. She'd said so.

  I went back to the closet and did a thorough job this time. Nothing but clothes, nothing in the pockets. A standard-issue black polyester ritual robe like The Snake sells. Miriam —or somebody—

  30 Bell, Book, and Murder

  had embroidered it all around the yoke, hem, and sleeves. Silk thread. I took it out and laid it on the bed.

  The top of the dresser was covered with more of the usual stuff: New Age cosmetics from the Revel and elsewhere, half a dozen bottles of essential oils. Hairbrush, earrings, bracelet, watch, ring. Little ceramic Ho-Tei with his fat celadon belly.

  The top drawer of the dresser held more jewelry, some unopened mail, and a passbook and checkbook from Chemical with the ATM card stuck in the passbook. A set of numbers that 1 was betting was Miriam's access code was written on the card in gold ink—and, damn it, they tell you and tell you not to do that.

  She had about two hundred in checking and nearly a thousand in savings, no recent withdrawals. Her last paycheck was also in the drawer, already endorsed. 1 made a note to deposit it. 1 also took out Miriam's address book and made a note in the back: Chastain Designs, up on West 47th. The Diamond District, for you out-of-towners.

  Nobody calls West 47th "Diamond and Jewelry Way," just as nobody calls Sixth Avenue the "Avenue of the Americas." We started with numbers and we'll stay with them. Or maybe numbers are just easier to spell.

  At least the paycheck explained Miriam's lifestyle. Chastain Designs —1 knew from my Saturdays at The Snake—was a wholesale jeweler; from the hourly rate on Miriam's paycheck she did some kind of scut work—probably assembly—that netted her about enough to pay her rent and utilities without too much left over. Assembly-line jewelers aren't paid a lot—they're just hired hands—but if Miriam was doing any freelancing at all she could be making good money. Could have been.

  I wondered if she did design. If she did, it was a good bet she'd asked the Revel to handle some of her pieces on consignment. I wondered if Carrie'd turned her down.

  1 started a second pile on the bed: Jewelry, bank stuff. I put the paid bills and the letters on top of the ritual robe. Triage. After a minute I opened the nightstand and added the chicken foot to the robe pile.

  One of the lockers at the foot of the bed held correspondence. Miriam kept everything. There were copies of Pagan newsletters and flyers for festivals and membership applications for groups and catalogs and, occasionally, personal correspondence with members of this group or that. There was no insurance except an

  on-again-off-again policy with Blue Cross that didn't seem to be on right now.

  My tea got cold while I read through the antique mail, and after an hour or so 1 had an empty footlocker, a full wastebasket, two more neat piles, and an urge to raid Miriam's kitchen.

  You get to know the groups that are taking the risk of going public. 1 recognized all the names from their notices in the back of all the Pagan newsletters that Miriam got and 1 get, too. All innocent. All mainstream (for Neopaganism). Nothing here that could explain the look on Carrie's face last night at the Revel when she mentioned Miriam. Gentle Carrie, who never wanted to say anything bad about anybody.

  I went off to the kitchen and made more tea and a sandwich and congratulated myself that Miriam didn't have a cat. If she did I'd probably end up adopting it, and I didn't want to do that.

  Don't get me wrong. I like cats; what Witch doesn't? (Although, if you want to get technical, the historic and traditional familiar for practitioners of northwest European-based non-Christian religion traditions is the toad, because the English garden toad secretes the same hallucinogen—bufotenin—when upset as that found in Carlos Casteneda's favorite mushroom, Amanita mus-coria—which is why so many ancient potions call for toad sweat as one of their ingredients.)

  But 1 digress. The trouble with cats versus me is that cats, like £dl animals, are looking for something. Their range. The other members of their pack. A warm spot in the sun. Company. Locking a cat up alone for twelve hours a day in a coffin-shaped and coffin-sized apartment is not my idea of giving an animal these things.

  Stewardship is a pretty outmoded word these days, but if you love something—or even if it just belongs to you—you take care of it, right?

  An)nvay, I was glad Miriam didn't have a cat.

  While I ate 1 went through her purse. Wallet first. Miriam had a Macy's card, a secured Visa, a New York Public Library card, and was a member of the Park Terrace East Neighborhood Watch and her building's tenant association and Greenpeace.

  Everything so normal it hurt. 1 kept digging. It was a big purse.

  More letters. I made a note to write all these people and tell them why Miriam wasn't going to be writing anymore. A pair of Chastain Designs earrings still on their showcard—very upmarket. A candy bar. More nameless keys. Wallet, paperback, comb,

  32 Bell, Book, and Murder

  hand mirror, Tarot cards (Walte design), stubs of a couple candles, Ziploc bag of granular incense. I opened it and sniffed. More Russian Church incense.

  And down at the bottom, the pay dirt I didn't want to find. A little brown book.

  In the olden days, around 1500 c.e. (Christian Era), most books were this size. In modem days, a.x. (after xerographic replication), lots of books aire this size again. The Book OJThe Law, say, or The Sayings of Chairman Mao. The size ofanS I/2x II sheet of paper, cut in fourths.

  The book in Miriam's purse, however, had never seen the light of copier, Xerox or otherwise.

  It was, as previously intimated, about four by five. It was a thin book, maybe a quarter of an inch thick, and the front cover was much thicker than the back—maybe half the total thickness. The book was bound in pale grainy leather—pigskin, maybe. The covers and spine were blank, but it had the look of a professional binding job.

  I opened it. The inside front cover was thick because it had a thin sheet of painted wood bound into it: color on black, and the colors faint and hard to see. It reminded me of an icon, but their backgrounds are gold.

  Got it. Russian lacquerwork. There used to be a display of it up at the Crabtree & Evelyn in Citicorp Center, and Brentano's (when there was a Brentano's) used to cany it. Gorgeous stuff, fabulously expensive and all done in the traditional manner, right down to the final polish with a wolfs tooth.

  I wondered if this piece I was holding had been polished with a wolfs tooth.

  Had Miriam gone bonkers and converted to the Eastern Orthodox Church?

  I flipped through the book.

  The first page said: "Khazar Wicca—Invokations" (sic), in fake-medieval illumination. The rest of the pages were plainer, but they were all hand-done, calligraphed in brown ink. I recognized Miriam's penmanship from the samples I'd seen in her bedroom. Every few pages there was a large four-color initial; the last two were just pencil ghosts and their pages were blank. The book seemed to be a series of poems or prayers (or even, as the title almost said, invocations), with the occasional word in a different alphabet lettered painstakingly in. I read what I could.

  * * * As I have
said before and will continue to say, I know just about enough about the history of worship on this planet not to judge religions on the basis of their window dressing and not enough to judge them in spite of it. Religious art consisting of pictures of horrible tortures and a liturgy celebrating blood and slaughter does not mean that the priests or congregation of said religion intend anyiJiing similar. Case in point: the modem Catholic Church, whose dogma would be truly hair-raising if you thought they meant any of it. Or the Tibetan Buddhists, some of the gentlest people I know, despite their raokshas.

  Having said that, I proceeded to judge Miriam's latest religion on precisely that basis. Because it was calling itself Wicca, emd there are some things that are simply not Wiccan. Any spiritual path that celebrates them, and calls itself Wicca anyway, is doing so with intent to deceive. And a religion that starts out lying to you about what it is isn't likely to be healthy for seekers and other living things.

  The poems were all about death. Not death as an inevitable and sometimes frightening stage in the Great Cycle of Rebirth, but death as an end in itself — something to be celebrated.

  And the death the poems were celebrating was the planet's.

  "When winter comes forever and the dream of green is gone— "

  "Black sky bleak with no stars rising, where the sun is found no more—"

  "Come, Wintermother, bring an end to all that lives—"

  The literary level was about what you'd expect—rather silly re-warmed Kipling—but the subtext was spooky and nasty. This was one artifact that wasn't going to make its way back to Shelbyville.

  Before 1 closed it 1 took one last look at the icon. Someone other than Miriam had done the work on it, trying hard to fake a traditional lacquerwork style. Now that I knew what to expect I could make out the design, but somehow the poems had more power. In a world where the Nightmare on Elm Street movies are light entertainment, visual images no longer have the power to shock. Two monsters —one red, one blue—tearing a naked woman in half in the middle of a blasted heath was strictly amateur hour.