An Affair Of Sorcerers m-3

by George C. Chesbro

  "No, but I think I may be able to raise some new questions. At the outside, how much time do you think we have before Esteban won't be able to help your daughter any longer?"

  There was a long silence on the line, then: "A week, maybe ten days. She's deteriorating rapidly now. She. . she-" His voice broke, and I heard him sob. After a few moments he cleared his throat and brought his voice back under control. "It takes her most of the morning to clear her lungs. Her medication helps some, but only Esteban seems to be able to affect her condition for any length of time."

  "All right, Senator. Here's what I've got-and it's not much. I don't want to get your hopes up, but maybe-just maybe-I can raise enough questions and doubts to get Esteban a sympathetic bail hearing. But I'm going to have to get my facts straight, and that's going to take some more time. Hold off on your press conference for a couple of days. In the meantime, either bring your daughter with you to New York or leave a number where I can reach you twenty-four hours a day. It's next to impossible to get bail in a premeditated-murder case; if I can arrange a hearing based on new information, I may want you here-fast. I'll try to arrange for any hearing to be held in camera, but I can't promise anything."

  "Linda and I will be in New York this evening," Younger said tensely. "We'll stay at The Plaza. You can reach me there whenever you need me."

  "Very good. There's one other thing, and you probably won't like it. If I run into any road jams, I may need a little unethical political pressure brought to bear. If you've got any juice in the city, start getting your contacts together. Okay?"

  "I'll do whatever you say, Frederickson."

  When I hung up, spasms of pain and nausea rippled through my belly. I wasn't looking forward to the hours I was going to have to spend talking to court reporters and combing through the public trial records. And I was going to have to conserve enough energy for some fast talking.

  I started to stand up, but another spasm put me on my back with my knees drawn up to my chest. I breathed deeply, trying to relax. The deep breathing helped some, but it also made me return to the question of just how a rabid bat had ended up in my bedroom. It could have flown in a few days before, during the time when I'd left the window open; it could have holed up in some nook or cranny. Maybe. But I was finding my discomfort and the fact that I could still die of rabies-not to mention the general inconvenience of being bitten by a rabid bat-somewhat distressing. If someone had sicced the animal on me, I definitely wanted to find out who so that I could repay the kindness.

  Assuming the bat had received human help getting in, it was obviously a kind of deadly game-playing, and probably had something to do with the Esobus matter. I had no way of knowing who'd been talking to whom, or who could be responsible.

  I picked up the phone and started to dial Krowl's number, then thought better of it and hung up. I assumed that coming up with a rabid bat in the middle of Manhattan was no particularly easy task. Krowl had been shaken enough to blow someone's whistle after he'd talked to me; but unless Esobus had a private cave full of rabid bats, it wasn't likely that the little critter who'd bitten me could have been conjured up in the few hours that had passed since I'd left his house. In any case, I doubted that Krowl would talk to me, and a call would only telegraph the fact that I was suspicious.

  It suddenly occurred to me that there was someone else who'd had the time; also, to judge by his background, he was crazy enough to come up with just such a nasty gift for somebody he was unhappy with. He might not have any connection with Esobus, but at the moment I didn't feel picky. I called the Chancellor's office. Two secretaries later, I got him on the line.

  "Good morning, Dr. Frederickson," Barnum said. He sounded a lot better than he had the last time I'd talked to him; controlled and self-assured. "How are you?"

  "Actually, I'm feeling a bit tacky."

  "Oh? I'm sorry to hear that. Incidentally, I'm glad you called. I've been feeling rather embarrassed about that. . matter we discussed."

  "I don't know why you should be embarrassed. You have a legitimate concern."

  "Well, thank God you're a discreet man. You were absolutely right to back away from it, and I appreciate your good judgment. I should have handled it myself from the beginning."

  "You've talked to Dr. Smathers?"

  "Yes, I have," he said firmly. "Yesterday morning, right after you left."

  "Did you talk about the rumors?"

  "No," Barnum said, sounding a little less sure of himself. "I didn't feel I had the right. But I did ask him where all his money was-coming from." He laughed shortly, and his voice brightened again. "It seems Dr. Smathers has been getting a number of grants on his own, and you know what sloppy bookkeepers these scientists are. Very commendable of him, I think-the grants, I mean."

  "Very commendable. Did you find out what he's up to?"

  "Well, I've been through most of his complex. It seems Dr. Smathers has received grants to study certain forms of psychotic behavior. The equipment they use is very expensive, and there are potentially dangerous people on the fourth floor from time to time. That explains the need for tight security. Actually, Dr. Smathers was quite gracious."

  "Chancellor, did my name come up?"

  Barnum cleared his throat. "I'm afraid it did, Dr. Frederickson. Not that I'm indiscreet, but Dr. Smathers seems to have put two and two together. He jokingly asked me if I'd hired you to check up on him."

  "Jokingly."

  Barnum laughed nervously. "I didn't confirm or deny, but I think Smathers guessed. Actually, he seemed more amused than offended."

  "Amused," I said. "I'm glad to hear that." I added a goodbye and hung up. The phone rang almost immediately. It was Garth.

  "Hey, brother," he said. "Your phone's been busy for a half hour and it's only nine in the morning. What's up?"

  "Somebody's been driving me batty. That's a punch line. Want to try and guess the joke?"

  "What the hell are you talking about?"

  "Never mind. Have you got a line on Harley Davidson?"

  He grunted. "Yeah, and it's bad news. If you want to get anything coherent out of him, every second counts. And I'm not kidding."

  "What's the matter with him?"

  "Your friend Davidson's a junkie, and it seems he's in a bad way."

  "That doesn't sound like Bobby."

  "Well, unless there are two rock stars going by the name of Harley Davidson, this is your man."

  "How long's he been on junk?"

  "According to my sources, about a year," Garth replied. "Once he started to go, he went downhill fast. I've seen it before. He hasn't sung a note in six months, and his band's broken up. No promoter will touch him, even if he wanted to perform, which I understand he doesn't. For a while he was moving around a lot, staying with friends. Now even they don't want him."

  "Have you got a current address on him?"

  "Try 38 Farrell Street. You know where it is?"

  "Yeah," I said, feeling a little chill. "Off The Bowery. Thanks, Garth. I appreciate the information-and the speed."

  "Let me know what you find out."

  "Will do. Any further information on Daniel?"

  "Still kicking ass, from what I hear."

  "If the two of you cross paths, tell him I want to talk to him. About bats."

  "What's with the bats?"

  "I'll talk to you later, brother. Thanks again."

  After hanging up, I eased myself over the side of the bed. The pain in my stomach had eased to a kind of dull throb; now it was my thumb that burned. I managed to get dressed; I needed a shave, but decided to save my energy for what looked to be a long day. I wanted to talk to Davidson, then start pulling together my other contacts.

  I opened my apartment door and was startled to see April Marlowe, her hand raised as if to knock. We both jumped, then laughed. She was dressed as she'd been when I'd first seen her, in jeans and the steel-blue silk blouse. She looked tired, but still stunning.

  "Robert!" she said breathlessl
y, reaching out and gently touching my right hand. "I saw Dr. Greene this morning and he told me what happened to you. Are you all right?"

  "Just a little sore, April. Thanks."

  "Sore? Dr. Greene told me you were in pain and that you'd probably be in bed all day!"

  "I'm surprised you're not at the hospital."

  April looked at me oddly; something like a cloud passed across the surface of her blue-gray eyes. "After all you've done for Kathy, I thought it was time you got a little tender loving care."

  "Thank you," I said quietly, covering her hand with mine. As before, the touch of her flesh was like an electric shock, making it hard for me to breathe. This time she didn't draw her hand away. I squeezed her fingers, then quickly drew my own hand back, embarrassed by even this small intimacy. I felt like a shy schoolboy-even more so since Krowl's reading had made me intensely aware of just how much April Marlowe fascinated me. "I appreciate your coming to see me, April," I continued, resisting the impulse to look at my feet. "I know how hard it is for you to leave Kathy. You can go back now. I'm all right."

  "They're running more tests on Kathy this morning," April said softly. "I told Dr. Greene I'd be here, so he knows where to reach me. I did want to get out of the hospital for a little while. I thought I'd come over and make you something to eat, and here I find you on your way out. At least you can let me take you out to breakfast."

  The fact of the matter was that there was nothing I'd have liked better than to spend a leisurely hour or two with April Marlowe; but it was also a fact that the depth of my feeling toward her was beginning to frighten me. I was, when all was said and done, a dwarf. I didn't want to make a fool of myself. It wasn't that I lacked self-confidence: I didn't lack for female company, platonic or otherwise. But April was different; she was creating an emotional climate in me that I feared was blowing out of control. I didn't want to do or say anything that might jeopardize our relationship-whatever that relationship might be.

  April was a woman I wanted badly-and could love.

  "Uh-I can't hold anything down, April. And I have to keep moving; I have to find somebody."

  "It has something to do with Kathy, doesn't it?"

  "Maybe; I'm not sure. I feel like I'm chasing a ghost, if you'll pardon the outrageous analogy, but I have to keep after this Esobus. At the moment, I'm trying to get more information on John Krowl. I'm on my way to talk to a man by the name of Bobby Weiss. You may have heard of him as Harley Davidson."

  "The singer?"

  "He used to be a singer. Right now he's on the skids."

  "Robert, may I go with you? I. . really don't want to be alone today."

  "Where I'm going isn't exactly Park Avenue, April. It's ugly; very ugly."

  She shook her head. "I'd still like to go-as long as you don't think I'll be in the way. I'll wait in the car; just as long as there's a phone nearby so I can check in with the hospital."

  Against my better judgment, very conscious of Krowl's reading of the tarot cards, I nodded my assent.

  I drove across town on 72nd Street, turned south on the East River Drive and exited in lower Manhattan on Houston Street. The pain in my stomach persisted, as though Joshua Greene had left part of the needle there; but my weariness had vanished, chased by the excitement of being near April Marlowe. The late morning and afternoon no longer loomed as a nightmare of forced endurance; the woman beside me made everything all right, and I had to remind myself of the seriousness of the errand I was on.

  Cars were jammed up in the left lane, waiting to get onto the entrance ramp for the Manhattan Bridge. Krowl, of course, lived just across the river, and it occurred to me as I pulled into the right lane to pass that I was driving at a right angle to the problem. Looking up Bobby Weiss in order to get information on the palmist and tarot reader might well be a waste of precious time. I felt a surge of rage at Krowl for holding out on me-if he was holding out on me.

  April must have had similar thoughts. "How did your reading with John Krowl go?" she asked. "Ummm."

  "What does 'ummm mean?"

  "It means you were right: I was impressed."

  "How did the two of you get along?"

  "Not too well." I glanced over at her. "I think he knows something about Esobus, but he isn't likely to tell me what it is. The man I'm going to see had his hand cast on Krowl's wall; I want to find out what it takes to get into the Inner Sanctum, and what it means once you get there. By the way, your former husband's cast was there too."

  April half-turned in her seat, touched my arm. "Frank went to see Krowl?"

  "As Bart Stone; at least that's the way the cast is identified. Krowl may not have known his real name when the cast was made."

  "Perhaps not," April said distantly. "On the other hand, 'Bart Stone' was far more famous than Frank Marlowe; that was one of the things that bothered Frank. He wanted to produce something he could be proud to put his own name on." She paused, shook her head. "If you knew Frank, you'd realize that a tarot reader would be the last person he'd have gone to see."

  "You also said he was the last person you'd have expected to be involved in witchcraft," I reminded her gently. "And the person I'm going to see is the last person I'd expect to become a junkie, but that's what he is. I don't think I'll recommend this occult business to any of my friends."

  She looked away. "It's not all like that, Robert," she said sadly. "You've seen so much. . evil. I guess you can't be expected to understand."

  "I've met you," I said, brushing the back of my hand across her forearm. "And that makes me think wicca can't be all bad."

  I stopped for a traffic light, and two bleary-eyed members of The Bowery's vanguard looking for the day's first bottle of Thunderbird or cheap rotgut whiskey stumbled off the divider and proceeded to "clean" the lights and windshield of the car with the filthy rags they carried. I rolled down the window and managed to slip a dollar to the man nearer me before he'd smeared the entire windshield.

  "Thank you," the man said. His smile was vacant, but his voice was surprisingly clear, with precise diction. "You're probably curious about me. I used to be an engineer. It's not that people haven't tried to help me. Don't you believe it. I'm here because I'm a loser. I want to be here; I'm a bum because I want to be a bum."

  I glanced into his face and was startled to see that he was a fairly young man who only looked old. I always gave money to the street-working winos when I passed through this section, but I rarely looked at them. Now, when I did, I was shaken, not only by the wasted human being who lived from one bottle to the next, but by the research which seemed to indicate that there was no solution. As the man had said, he was on The Bowery because he wanted to be, and all the king's psychiatrists probably couldn't keep him away. Put him in the hospital, dry him out, buy him clean clothes, get him a job. . he'd be back in a week, just like the shopping-bag ladies in midtown.

  I wondered if the man thanked all his "customers" with his confession.

  April had rolled down her window and given the other man a dollar. The light changed, and I stepped on the accelerator.

  "What do you hear from your brother?" I asked.

  April, who'd been looking back, sighed and turned around to the front. "Nothing. I think he's spoken to Dr. Greene on the phone to ask after Kathy, but I haven't seen or spoken to him since you saw the two of us together at the hospital." She pointed out the window to the dirty summer streets. "I know he hasn't gone home. He's somewhere out. . there."

  "Oh, you bet he is. My brother tells me Daniel's scaring hell out of every warlock in the city. What's he doing out there, April? What does he think he can accomplish?"

  "The same thing you're doing," she said softly. "He's trying to help Kathy."

  "Then why won't he cooperate with the police? Or with me?"

  "I told you: he has to do things his own way."

  "Membership," I said quietly.

  "Excuse me?"

  "Nothing. I was just talking to myself."

  I tu
rned left on The Bowery, the quintessential "skid row"-a thoroughfare of dead dreams, drunks and wholesale appliance and lighting stores. The Bowery is the catch basin for the city's human dregs. This street is as far into the spiritual sewer as the drunks can flow. Having resisted the best ministrations of everyone from the toughest troops of the Salvation Army to flying squadrons of social workers, they are tended to in soup kitchens and flophouses, but, for the most part, left alone in their special circle of hell, like bits of human garbage moldering in the wind, snow, sun and rain, apathetically waiting for death. Those men who'd begun cleaning windows early-or who'd had some coins left from the day before-were already sprawled on the sidewalk, or huddled in doorways drinking death disguised as bottles in brown-paper bags. Of late, they'd been joined by a new breed of derelict: hopeless, wild-eyed crazies dumped on the streets under New York State's new "enlightened" program of releasing the mentally ill from the hospitals and returning them to "neighborhood care."

  It was a bad place to be looking for a friend.

  Farrell Street was narrow and litter-strewn, bounded on both sides by gutted, decaying buildings. I parked in front of the address Garth had given me; it was a rotting hulk that looked a month or so away from disintegration. April asked if she could come along, but I insisted that she stay in the car. I locked the car doors, then went up to the entrance.

  The front door of the building was half off its hinges. I pushed it to one side, stepped over an unconscious drunk and walked down a hallway that reeked of urine and garbage. The door to Bobby Weiss's apartment was locked, but a terrible stench emanated from the room on the other side. I knew what I was going to find even before I went in. The lock broke easily; I pushed open the door and entered.

  The floor of the room was littered with glassine envelopes and needle-works. Bobby Weiss/Harley Davidson was out, and he wouldn't be back. He'd left his half-naked body behind, a dirty needle stuck in its thigh, on the filthy bathroom floor. From the smell, I judged that he'd been dead at least two days.

  The odor wasn't helping my stomach any. I put a handkerchief over my mouth and nose and began looking around the apartment. There wasn't much to look at; Bobby had apparently hocked most of his possessions during the course of his addiction, or had simply left them behind in the string of places where he'd flopped.