The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  Stan refilled his coffee cup from the individual hotserve and watched the bubbles break on the liquid’s black surface. “Strictly between you, me, and the sound-soak, I won’t be surprised if Sergeant Harvard’s chip or recorder or both glitched out during his solo interface with Crowley.”

  “I will be amazed,” Lestrade replied, “if they didn’t glitch out during his solo interface with Andy Dimaggio Smythe. Especially the moments when he broke it to Smythe about M. Pargeter’s decease.”

  “Funny, how Harvard always seems to get the bad chips and overdelicate recorders.” The assistant deputy commissioner wasn’t fully aware he had mused that thought aloud until Lestrade responded:

  “Somebody in supplies must not like the man. I wonder why.”

  He added cream to his coffee. He didn’t stir right away; he watched the milkiness billow up for a moment or two, like cumulous thunderclouds forming in his cup. It was a little, everyday phenomenon, but almost enough to help a mind understand how “magists” might self-delude even themselves. Except that, as far as he knew, fortunetelling by cream clouds in coffee wasn’t among the occult arts.

  “Crowley,” he said. “Crowley, Crowley, Crowley ... rhymes with ‘holy’ ... isn’t that a restricted surname for magists?”

  “No,” said Lestrade. “Because ‘magist’ isn’t a classification that the Occupations, Religions, and Trades Association recognizes. Priest, shaman, and alternate-creed cleric are, but not magist.”

  “What’s the distinction?”

  She started to reply, stopped before a word was out, took a swallow of phosphate, and finally said, “Doggone if I can explain it, Stan.”

  He decided to move on. “Did you give them the warning that they were being recorded?”

  “I tried to. Harvard cut me off before I could give it to Smythe, and Crowley herself cut me off when we started to interview her.”

  “Then the chips are useless as documentary evidence anyway, glitched or clear. Still, I’d like to hear yours.”

  “May I make copies for you this afternoon? I was planning to review them myself this evening.”

  “Make sure you keep some of your offduty hours for yourself, Rose. ... Kaplan’s is strictly pure-air,” he reminded her. “I didn’t know you smoked, anyway.”

  “I don’t.” She had gotten out a pipe and sat toying with it, tapping it on her fingers. “I’ve always guessed the advantage of a pipe is that you can smoke it without really smoking it. If you see what I mean. Stan.”

  “Just a prop, huh?”

  “Just a prop. To go with my name.”

  “Pretty good.” He finally stirred his coffee. “This man whom Crowley claimed to get a vision of in her mug. Did she actually name him as Smythe?”

  Lestrade shook her head. “She just gave us the picture. Which Harvard kept. No doubt saving it for the prosecution. Crowley’s prosecution. And if we asked her now, she’d probably give us permission with signature and a full set of fingerprints to go ahead and use both her drawing and our recorded chips in court or any other way we liked. She’s that eager to help hang herself. Whether she understands it or not.”

  “What about Dah Smythe?”

  Lestrade answered, with a look of disgust, “Would it make any difference?”

  “Probably not. ... But you don’t actually have a witness who saw anyone running away in a light, bloodstained jacket?”

  “No, sir. That was why I used a ‘What if.’ Besides, the chips were already rendered useless as documentary evidence. But if that kitchen of Andy Dah Smythe’s has ever seen a whole fresh carrot, let alone him dicing one, in or out of his workout jacket, I will personally cook Harvard a seven-course dinner.” Which would serve him right. Lestrade’s cooking was not exactly in high demand for potluck meals.

  “And you got the reaction you were looking for from him?”

  “I was trying hard not to preconceive any reactions. But yes, in my opinion Andy Dimaggio Smythe reacted like a guilty party. As if it didn’t even occur to him that the alleged neighbor could have seen somebody else running away. Not that it’d mean anything in court. Unless Harvard puts it in Smythe’s head to sue me for harassment. It was a bad mistake, wasn’t it? Stan.”

  He nodded heavily. “Careerwise, it wasn’t smart. It’s the kind of thing no shrewd polly should ever try without a totally sympathetic backup and so much additional evidence as to render the trick unnecessary anyway.”

  “And then you should always make sure you try it only on suspects whom nobody much cares about. Look, Stan, I don’t give a darn about my so-called career. Just as long as I can get high enough and stick high enough to swing some weight when I see it’s needed. Can today jeopardize that?”

  He looked into her eyes for a few seconds, then down again to take another swig of coffee. As an assistant deputy at twenty-nine aiming to reach commissioner or at least deputy commissioner by forty-five and long before then to have earned a joint procreational permit with his wife that read “No limit to family size,” he couldn’t really understand Lestrade’s attitude. But he believed it, and that was scary enough. She wasn’t that many years younger than he was.

  “No,” he told her at last, “it shouldn’t, in the long run. Everybody is allowed a fair share of honest mistakes throughout a career, and Reilly should be able to talk Harvard into toning down whatever he eventually puts in hardcopy. But if you ever want to be anybody’s senior partner yourself, Rosemary, you’d better be prepared to offer an abject apology. Either that, or solve this case out from under Harvard’s nose, and that won’t be easy, considering who your leading suspect is,” he added, half joking.

  She responded in a completely deadpan voice, “And who his leading suspect is. Do you think, Stan, we could maybe pull a golden age classic and pin the rap on Harvard himself?”

  At first he was afraid she meant it. But she flicked him the faint ghost of a grin. Just enough to set his mind at ease.

  * * * *

  It was a golden daydream, she thought at home alone that evening. And Harvard’s behavior vis-a-vis Dah Smythe even made him look like a plausible accomplice. But this wasn’t a time or case to practice fancy-class imagination.

  She didn’t think she was letting personal preference fog her reason. She enjoyed sports as much as the next floater. She even had her favorite teams and players. Notre Dame, for instance. In any sport. Even if that had very little to do with the quality of their teams in any given season. She’d always cheer the “Irish” because of the way the old university, under Liberal Catholic control, had made South Bend a haven of old-time American freedom of religion during the bad decades. If it hadn’t been for South Bend and other pockets like it, by some accounts Lestrade’s maternal grandparents might not have survived to raise her mother. Grandpa Carmichael even used to talk about almost sharing the martyrdom of Starwalker Jones Silverstairs.

  A lot of it had been wildly exaggerated, of course. Like all persecutions. Or most persecutions, anyway. One of those social viruses that most people hardly even noticed. Maybe that was how it managed to go on so long, a couple of generations, all through the Liberal Reaction in the late 1980s and early ’90s, the Era of Reform around the turn of the century, and the wild 2020s when most things were going crazy anyway.

  And none of the persecution had ever been officially sanctioned by the government. Neither the old U.S.A. nor the new R.S.A. Federal Government, nor any individual government. There were stories about local county and city ordinances and laws, but they usually turned out to be unverifiable.

  It was just that the pollies—”cops” in those days—and other authorities got into the habit, in most places, of wearing blinders and mufflers, not investigating the deaths of so-called Satanists when they happened. But investigating any case with a vengeance that involved an alternate religionist as a suspect, usually with the alternate religionist ending up either co
ndemned or lynched.

  For some reason the professed outright Atheists were supposed to have generally escaped all this unofficial persecution unscathed. As had most of the “Eastern” religionists—Buddhists, Taoists, Shintoists, Muslims, Hindus—whoever had enough numbers in North America or enough support from other nations. As far as Lestrade knew, Jews had come under fire mainly from NeoNazis, who themselves had come under general fire along with other small fringe groups. And most mainstream Americans had rallied to the Jews’ protection.

  But even allowing for exaggeration, it must have been as dangerous to be any kind of Pagan, Theosophist, or Amerindian traditionalist during those years in the Bible Belt and Bible Buckles of America as it was supposed to have been to be a Chocolate in the Southern states a century earlier, or a Jew in the decades building up to Hitler’s holocaust.

  Even Rationalists and Agnostics had come under fire during the worst of the Fundamentalist Fever, though not as often as liberal Abrahamists—people like Madre Rose, Rabbi Schwarzkopf, the Fitzgibbon family. At one point, just about the same years that the Founding Reformers were working their political marvels in New Washington, South Bend itself might have fallen to the Catholic Fundamentalists, if Chancellor Rockne Sienkiewicz O’Mally hadn’t stepped up his campaign to stud the university faculty with devout practitioners of every known living religion.

  Holmes Hennessey Harvard was old enough to remember some of the last witch hunts. Maybe he was nostalgic for those nights. Maybe one of his boyhood ambitions had been to wear the Cross and light a few pyres himself.

  Come on, Rosemary Lestrade! she told herself. His people probably weren’t even aware of it, except as quick fillers in the news media. Just because he’s a blowhard, just because, not being able to register “Holmes” as a final name—one of the few fictional surnames to have been placed in the American Occupations, Religions, and Trades Association’s restricted list for its particular workline—he had cheated by registering it as his first name, and then never in twenty-odd years of police service come near living up to it—does that make him a militant bigot, too? Just because of his silly Latin tags ... More likely he’d have been burned himself, back then. He certainly acts as if he considers himself a practicing Rationalist now. Self-styled, that is. I’d call what’s visible of his mind almost anything except rational ...

  She caught her thoughts again. There was always the chance that she would have been on the side of anybody Harvard targeted, would have suspected anybody Harvard considered above suspicion, simply because of her feelings about Harvard.

  Certainly her feelings about Windcrystal Crowley weren’t much more favorable. One of the best hours of her childhood had been when her mother told her they were dropping out of Mama Windcrystal’s coven and going back to Yandro Moonfire’s. Even as a preteen, Rosemary had felt that Windcrystal Gorlock Lovelace was two-thirds phony. And when Mama Windcrystal Lovelace announced that she had successfully completed a Vision Ordeal and was reregistering her final name as Crowley, that was what finally blew it for Edith Willowmartin, too.

  It was true, as Lestrade had told Lieutenant Carter, that “Crowley” wasn’t a restricted final name for Windcrystal’s profession because AORTA didn’t recognize “magist” as a professional workline. But it was a restricted final name for shamans and alternate-religion clerics, and the Craft itself recognized “magist” as a legitimate calling, even if the term had been adopted from scoffers and enemies of the Old Religion. “Magist” was still a very fluid term, but in the most nearly technical sense possible as yet it meant something between shaman, priest, fortuneteller in the carnival sense, and unlicensed scientific-medical psychomysticalist. So Windcrystal’s taking “Crowley” for a final name was roughly as brash as Harvard’s registering “Holmes” for a first name. Whether or not Windcrystal even had the right to call herself a magist in the new Craft sense, as opposed to the old, derogatory sense of “any magician, witch, fortuneteller, or pseudomystic.”

  What must have really opened Edith Willowmartin’s inner eye, however, was the surname itself. The Crowley tradition had always been regarded by Pagans of the Carmichaels’ and Jabkovskis’ preferences as questionable. Cluttered and overformalized at best, slightly sinister at worst. The pronunciation mnemonic wasn’t “rhymes with holy,” as Lieutenant Carter had quoted it, but “rhymes with unholy.”

  What the great outside majority still didn’t understand was that not all Old Religionists subscribed to every theory ever hatched by some crackpot on the fringes. Or even to every basic tenet of their own covens. It might be pretty much like dogma fights in any belief system, squabbling over vital differences of opinion where outsiders couldn’t find much if any difference at all. But Western monotheisms made bigger advertisements out of their differences than Old Religion people did. The Craft couldn’t afford major schisms and heresies. Not yet, anyway. Not when it was still climbing back to more or less where it was supposed to have been in the great flowering of the 1960s and ’70s, before the Satan scare and Fundamentalist fires steamed up social pressures into the so-called “Invisible Reign of Terror.” Maybe if it hadn’t been for the bad years, Old Religionists would have been splintering themselves up into “heretics” and “orthodox” by now. But when there were only one or two covens in town, you ignored differences or else practiced as a complete independent. Probably more towns than not didn’t have even one coven.

  None of which should have been Rosemary Lozinski Lestrade’s problem any longer. Not since she had grown up and found herself in the biggest modern majority of all, the Practical Agnostics. The floaters who didn’t take their own or any other religion all that seriously, even when they still went to church at all, which many of them didn’t. Who just wanted to get on with their lives and worklines.

  The trouble was, slide into agnosticism from Christianity or pure Atheism, even from Islam or Buddhism, and you were just another rational, nonbelieving floater. Do it from the Old Religion and you were still and always a witch and suspected Satanist in the perception of society at large. A little bit like a Jew that way, she supposed: once a Jew, always a Jew, no matter what your actual religion or lack of it.

  Fortunately, enough Christians had been saying “God is a woman,” or at least “God has both genders” for long enough that Lestrade’s occasional “Lady God!” could slip out without ruffling anyone except Second Commandment sticklers. On forms and in conversation, she stuck with the Privacy of Religious Preference Amendment. Professed Agnostics were expected to be ready to spout opinions on religious topics whether they had any brainwork behind the opinions or not, so professed privacy of preference was safest.

  And when Captain Tracy of Pollytech had wanted to rookie her near South Bend, she had talked him into slotting her far downstate instead, on grounds that it’s harder to command respect where people can remember you as a kid. Which was also true, of course. For all the respect rookies could ever command.

  She hadn’t known at the time that Mama Windcrystal had moved to this same area. All Edith Willowmartin had ever said about it was in a letter that reached her daughter at Pollytech, to the effect that Windcrystal Crowley had blanked her ad from the South Bend Yellow Directory, and rumor hinted that she had rifted with her local coven and moved “south—to Florida or Haiti, I suppose. Somebody suggested Peru or even one of the Antarctic Colonies, but I suspect that was only malicious wishful thinking.”

  It had been a shock to notice Windcrystal’s ad during a routine scrolling of the Ahbeenahbee County directory her second day on the job, but Lestrade flattered herself that her only visible reaction had been in a letter home a few weeks later: “W.G.C. didn’t go quite so far south as rumor had it. You can guess how eager I am to check out her new Ahbeenahbee coven.” That had been in the monthly envelope letter, of course. Computer patchwork correspondence was open to too many access codes.

  And now here the magist was again. Almost like a red challe
nge to Rosemary Lestrade to keep her past private from floaters like Harvard. Bona Dea Fortuna must be laughing up a storm.

  Only…damn it! Being a crowley and two-thirds phony didn’t make someone a murderer, too.

  Besides, there was that one third Lestrade guessed to be sincere magist. It wasn’t as if Windcrystal was bilking widows and orphans, doing anything illegal or actively immoral. In South Bend, and presumably here, she had always offered psychomagistical counseling at a modest price and to clients of any persuasion or preference, no religious matters broached except at the client’s own request, no recruiting for the coven from among the counselees. In fact, if clients chose to join her coven, she had made it a rule that they must stop coming to her for counseling. Since the coven was strictly voluntary donation with no passing of any collection basket, it was just common business sense on Windcrystal’s part to keep the two separate.

  As far as Lestrade knew, Mama Windcrystal was as qualified to run a “paraprofessional” counseling service as most regular psychiatrists, psychomysticalists, and “nonpro listening ears.” Odd, say “mystic” to most people and they free-associated “Svengali” or “Rasputin” or “spiritualist” back at you, but say “psychomysticalist” and they free-associated “Jung” or “mind and personality medic.”

  And Lestrade had never heard about any of Windcrystal’s psychomystical clients being dissatisfied. Of course, Lestrade had never been in a social position to hear anything much about a lot of them either way. But Debbi Pargeter must have been satisfied with her counseling. If she had been trying to contact Windcrystal for help. If it wasn’t Harvard’s pet dying clue, after all.