Bell, book, and murder

by Edghill, Rosemary

  262 Bell, Book, and Murder

  low employees that no one had been there, because Stuart Hep-bum seemed to think casual murder the ideal solution for Life's petty annoyances.

  I wondered if the police had been to see him at all, or if that tale was just the one pointless lie that had unraveled Stuart so that 1 could see what he had done.

  1 think 1 had a plan.

  The lobby was dim. I didn't bother to light it—that was a danger signal even an out-of-towner would pick up on, though in a few hours the building would be lit anyway, open for business.

  A few hours. Such a short time when you're sleeping. Such a long time, when someone's pointing a gun at you.

  We crossed the lobby. The elevator was probably locked down for the night, and habit made me choose the stairs anyway. Every step jarred my bruised jaw. Stuart, following me up, kept his gun pointed at my kidneys.

  Houston shares the building's third floor with a theatrical cos-tumer and a low-end typesetter. The door has a key lock, a snap-bolt, and a key-turn dead bolt, none of which will lock by themselves. I opened the door's three locks and stepped inside.

  "Where's this stat camera?" Stuart said.

  On some level I'd managed to forget he was with me. I jumped when he spoke and dropped both sets of keys. He smiled and followed me in, shutting the door behind him. Neither of us locked the door or picked up the keys.

  "Over there," 1 SEiid. My voice was parched and tiny. 1 flipped on the overhead lights.

  And then I turned around and looked, really looked, at what Stuart had done to the studio.

  I groaned. Stuart chuckled, pleased. He took the gun out and waved it. Firearms, the chic urban accessory.

  No one could have been here when he'd come. 1 imagined him, in his expensive, impeccable suit, ripping through everything like a spoiled child who would never be called to account for his actions.

  Mikey Pontifex's desk rose up out of a nest of trashed paperwork: letters, memos, files. Its drawers hung open like the tongues of exhaustion. Ray's worktable was similarly trashed; boards and veluxes and transparencies blown up in a willful hurricane and all the billing hopelessly pied.

  The bookshelves that line two walls of the studio were mostly empty, their books thrown on the floor, and around the white-

  painted comers of the carrels I could see a pale tide of jumbled ruined paper where Stuart had dumped the contents of everyone's storage shelves on the floor.

  "Come on, Witchie." Stuart jabbed me in the back with the gun again. "I'd hate to think you were having me on."

  What would you do if I were? I didn't say, and tried to stifle my own speculation about the answer. After two murders and two failures, I was pretty sure that Stuart was not going to shoot me until he was actually holding The Book of Moons in his hands. But there were so many other things he could do short of that.

  "It's in the stat camera," I said. "Inside."

  But it wasn't. I'd left it safely wrapped and labeled and in plain sight, as far as I could remember, and if Stuart hadn't found it, where was it?

  I couldn't look for it now.

  "Well, go on," Stuart said.

  I walked over to the comer of the room where the big blue monster crouched. The stat camera is a reducer/enlarger, a camera, and developer all in one. It's eight feet long and four feet high and about three feet across. You put your original on the gray sponge mat with the white registration lines screened onto it and lock the glass plate over it to hold it still. Then you rotate the bed into an upright position aind go back to the other end of the machine to make your stat.

  You set the exposure time (by guess and experience and—as a last resort—by the manual) and you set the percentage of original size, from 25 to 250 percent, based on what you've run up on your scaling ruler.

  The paper's loaded in twenty-five-foot rolls in a cassette that's kept inside the machine. You cut it to size by touch, with your hands stuck through rubber cuffs that keep the inside of the machine light-safe, and position it on the glass, and lock it down. When you press the button, there's a sound like main phasers firing, and the blinding light of the stat lamps. In the absence of paper, when the light is on you can stare down at a ghost image reflected onto the glass. It's helpful for positioning the photographic paper, but after a whfle you don't bother. At last—carefully, by touch, in the dark—you feed your exposed paper into the endlessly turning rollers and hope that la machine will send it through its various chemical baths and rinse and leave you, in the end, with a black-and-white photostat that you can use.

  Every Tuesday morning Royce takes the cover off, mixes new

  264 Bell, Book, and Murder

  developer, changes the chemicals, makes sure the belts are aligned, and removes tiny shreds of paper from the gears. The job takes about four hours.

  I walked over to the sink behind the camera and splashed water on my face. My face in the little mirror above the sink was red-eyed and set, unappealingly terrified, but serenity was settling over me with soft implacable weight. It would be so easy to let go of this world and robe myself in the ekstasis that made Indian warriors certain that painted shirts would stop bullets.

  And then—without fear, without judgment—I would turn to Stuart and demand that he give me the gun.

  No. Not now.

  And a small inner voice answered: not yet.

  I sorted through the wreckage at Royce's station until I found the Stat machine's tool kit. The phone was here too, for some reason, sitting placidly on Royce's stool as if divorcing itself from the chaos below.

  "What are you dawdling for?" Stuart said. He was standing by the door, waving the gun. It had a good chance of being inaccurate at this distance, not that that was any inducement to rebellion.

  "Do you expect me to open it with my fingernails?" I snapped, brave because he was standing so far away. But he was standing between me and the door and I already knew he was stronger than I was.

  The phone rang.

  Here. Go, the inner voice said.

  I lost all fear. I lost all sense of threat. I scooped it up and answered it—not for defiance, and certainly not because I thought the caller could help me—it was almost certainly, at this hour, a wrong number. But habit is that which is drilled into the nerves, beyond the grip of the mind. The phone rang, so 1 answered it.

  "Bookie-Joint-Can-I-Help-You?" my voice sang out, assured and serene.

  Stuart frowned, and shifted his weight forward, and raised the gun. I smiled brightly at him, having gone past the place where fear was.

  'This is Sam. Is Karen there?" A male voice. A nice one, but worried.

  "No," I said cheerfully, "she isn't here, can I take a message? Do you know what time it is?" I added, for verisimilitude's sake.

  The clock on the wall said 2:00 a.m. There was a long crack down its glass that I didn't remember ever seeing before.

  "Can you talk freely?" the voice asked cautiously. Stuart made "hang-up" motions at me as I smiled gaily at him. There was only the one phone; Stuart had no way of listening to what Sam-my-late-night-caller said.

  "No, of course not," I said. "What kind of a moron are you? I don't know when your job will be ready. Don't call back."

  "I understand," the voice said. Calm, alert, unknown.

  Stuart charged for me. I put the phone back in the cradle.

  "Who was that?" Stuart demanded, grabbing the phone away from me. His face was white and stretched, as masklike as mine had looked in the mirror.

  The bright hysteric defiance collapsed. I bent forward as the world grayed out and left me shaking, weak, and nauseated. My mouth was diy and tasted foul. Magic—any extraordinary effort— takes its toll.

  Stuart threw the phone across the room. It whipped to the end of its tether and landed with a jangle. The dial tone began to drone, loud in the early a.m. stillness. Stuart ran over to it and kicked it into silence. I could hear his breathing from where I was, and the sound finished anchoring me to my body and the
world.

  "Don't you do that again! Don't you ever do that again!" Stuart shouted, white-faced with fury. My eyes were drawn to the silvery flicker of the gun barrel, as if it were the most important thing in the room.

  It occurred to me, distantly, that I was banking far too much on Stuart's reasonable self-interest. After two murders and several dead ends his grip on plausible normalcy was rapidly eroding, and unlike Witches and magicians, who cross the unmarked mental borders leading to the psychic shadowland frequently, Stuart did not have a way back into the territory of his daylight mind. The strongest social taboo had been broken: he had killed, and now he might do anyi±Ling.

  I saw him drowning in that knowledge, and realized that he could shoot me at any time, for any reason.

  Or for no reason at all.

  "Who was it?" Stuart shouted.

  "Someone for Royce," I said, and closed my eyes. I felt tears in the back of my voice and the serpent-terror that could get me killed by making me too reckless to live.

  266 Bell, Book, and Murder

  "Get to work," Stuart said. He rubbed the barrel of the gun against his jaw, then seemed to remember what he held and where it should be pointing. A smile appeared intermittently on his face; utterly meaningless. He no longer looked at all human.

  I felt a megalomaniac certainty that I could handle this situation £ind I knew that I was wrong. I could wait, I could play for time, and when there was no more time I could wrap myself in the Goddess's light and let Her choose for me. That was all.

  Carefully, as if Stuart's attention were a bomb I did not wish to trigger, I took off my jacket and put it on Royce's stool.

  "I'm going to use the screwdriver to take off the cowling," I said aloud, as if I were defusing a bomb and every word was being recorded. To speak at all was an effort.

  Stuart made another meaningless smile. I hoped he wouldn't shoot me when he saw the screwdriver in my hand, but after this long, it was getting hard to care.

  Sweat poured off me as if I were desperately ill. I could smell myself; acrid and metallic. Fear sweat is different from any other kind.

  I began hunting for the screws. I had to find them quickly. I was supposed to have done this before. I'd seen Royce do it lots and lots. If Stuart got tired of watching me do this he'd shoot me, and even though the stopping power of a .22 or .25 is minimal at anything other than extreme close range, I did not want Stuairt to shoot me.

  Not because I thought he'd kill me. But because I thought that once he fired the gun he would finally snap, and I did not want to be here when he did.

  The amnesia of shock made me alternately forget my caller named Sam and obsess on him. I found myself believing that he would come and rescue me, and realized that hope was just another form of the terror that holds you still until you can be killed. He might be help, but I did not dare bet my life on it.

  And I had a plan.

  Without a plan I could not have built the fantasy of control that let me act in a way that would keep me alive. I actually managed to worry about what was happening to my unlocked apartment because I had a plan.

  I had a weapon that Stuart didn't know about.

  The photographic process requires two stages: the developer to bring the latent image out on the paper, and the fixer to halt the process before the paper turns completely black. The fixer, though

  I wouldn't want to get it into my eyes, is a faiirly mild chemical, but the developer is caustic. Once I got the camera disassembled, I'd have a bath of dilute acid in my hands.

  I was going to throw it at Stuart and run. The door wasn't locked. Small handguns are supposed to be untrustworthy. I'd take my chances on the street.

  If I could.

  I found the screws and unthreaded them. There were eight. I pulled them out and set them aside. They rolled downhill, away from the machine. I lifted the cowling off the back half of the machine. It made hollow booming noises as it was shifted.

  "Where is it?" Stuart said, shoving me aside. The cowling shifted in my fingers and cut them; it was thin metal. I set it down quickly. He stared down at what looked like a miniature printing press.

  "I don't see it; if you're lying to me, you bitch, I'll—"

  "It's in the camera," I saiid. "Underneath." Exhaustion helped make my voice flat and ultimately believable. Stuart backed off, waving his little chrome pistol.

  "Hurry up," he said.

  "If I hurry too much the book'U get wet. If that happens, it's ruined."

  I don't know where this fund of plausible invention came from; I spend so much time learning to tell the truth that lying doesn't come very easily. But it was there when I needed it; the gift of the Goddess.

  Stuart backed off.

  And perhaps it was Her will as well that Stuart should take such an implausible story as mine seriously. But the Moon is the mistress of illusion; the Elizabethans believed Her light could drive men mad.

  If I were Royce and this were any Tuesday morning, the next thing would be to lift out and clean the rollers, exposing the chemical baths. But if I did that, Stuart would see there was no place in the machine for a book to be hidden. Right now he was watching me closely; I'd never get the moment's grace I needed to work my plan while he was doing that.

  I was calm, wonderfully so. But I didn't seem to be able to think very well. And if I stood here much longer trying to decide what to do, Stuart would get suspicious. I started removing the cowling from the front half of the machine.

  Stuart retreated to the other side of the room.

  268 Bell, Book, and Murder

  I'd never seen this part done. It probably hadn't been done since the thing was assembled at the factory; it was no part of the maintenance routine, but Stuart didn't know that. The screws were frozen solid, and my fingers were slippery with blood and sweat. I finally had to wrap paper towels around my hands to get a grip on the screwdriver.

  When I started to lift the cowling loose I realized there was something still holding it in place. I pulled anyway, and felt something catch, resist, tear, and finally give.

  The sound of a footstep was loud in the room.

  I jerked toward Stuart, but he hadn't moved. He was on the other side of the studio, staring at the clock and half sitting on Mikey's desk, jogging his foot in the air as if he were waiting impatiently. The gun was resting on his knee, almost harmless.

  He hadn't heard the sound; neither had he made it.

  The sound came again. Someone walking, but if I'd heard it, Stuart had to have, and he never moved.

  There was someone else in the building, moving quietly. Moving toward me.

  I looked at the clock. It seemed as if hours had passed, but it was only two-thirty. Half an hour since we'd gotten here.

  Half an hour since the phone rang.

  The Stat camera is set along the short end of the rectangular bite out of the Houston Graphics studio space, which means that when you're standing near the sink at the head of the stat camera you're at the one place in the studio that isn't in sight of the door.

  I set the cowling down and went back to the head of the camera. Stuart looked up, but I made sure I wasn't looking toward him when he did.

  I began lifting the rollers out. They're almost three feet long and heavy; their weight is what holds the trays of fixer and developer steady. If I were a comic book hero I would have tried to bludgeon Stuart with one, but, choreography aside, I'm not certciin that I could have managed to hit him with the force required to do any more than make him mad.

  I lifted the rinse tray out and balanced it on the side of the machine.

  Someone coming closer; a palpable certainty that raised the hair on my arms. Stuart noticed it at last, or noticed something.

  He got to his feet and started toward me. I lifted the developer bath in my hands.

  The door of the studio hit the wall with the sound of an explosion.

  "Hold it!" someone shouted.

  I threw myself flat, sliding in a puddle of chem
icals. The machine blocked my view. My eyes watered with the fumes of spilled developer. I saw nothing. There were no loud sounds, only breathing and the scuff of shoes and some faint jingling sounds, and, after a moment, Stuart's voice, small and irritable:

  "I didn't do an3rthing!"

  THURSDAY, MAY 5, 2:45 a.m. ^'^^

  It was a quarter of three Thursday morning, and things were different. Sam's last name was Hodiac. He was round, chocolate brown, and balding; dark-skinned and ten years and change older than I was. There was a gold shield hung on a chaiin around his neck and a gun on his belt and he looked open and friendly and reassuring, except for the eyes.

  They were cop eyes, as giving as glass. That, too, was reassurance of a sort.

  He was Belle's cop, and he was here.

  "When Izzy mentioned Mr. Hepburn, you better believe I got moving," he said to me. "It's a good thing for you that 1 did. But we've had our eye on Mr. Hepburn for a while now," he added.

  Izzy is Isobel. Belleflower. Who had, despite all our differences, made the phone call that had saved my life. If she'd waited until morning it would have been too late, unless my plan had worked.

  I thought of telling Lieutenant Hodiac about my plan and decided he wouldn't appreciate it.

  I was sitting in Mikey's chair behind Mikey's desk at the studio. We were in the midst of a full-blown crime scene, and no one had let me make coffee, a fact that grated irrationally on my nerves. We had Lieutenant Hodiac and two uniformed patrolmen and another detective whose case this actually was. There'd actually been four uniformed officers until two of them had taken Stuart away in handcuffs and Stuart's gun away in a little plastic bag.

  Stuart maintained that he hadn't done anything.

  "Stuart Hepburn killed Ilona Saunders and Ned Skelton," I said. I'd probably said it before. It was, I'd found, an opinion also held by our friends the police—who, until The Book of Moons was added to the equation, could not understaind why Stuart would wish to do this.