Husbands And Lap Dogs Breathe Their Last (12 page)

As he reached the door Cummings saw an old-fashioned brass buzzer. He leaned in and depressed it, noticing something in his peripheral vision on the corner of the top step: a small, bloody bird carcass carved with some sort of primitive symbols.

Winky, wearing a tight T-shirt and gym shorts that revealed his musculature to advantage, opened the door. His eyes immediately darted to the avian corpse.

“Oh, my! I’m afraid we have another special delivery.”

“Why would someone leave a dead bird at your door?”

Winky shrugged. “Being pagan doesn’t necessarily mean you have good manners.”

“Does this happen often?” Cummings asked.

“I’m afraid so.”

“Who do you think might have done this?”

“It’s so hard to say! It’s intended to be a curse, but I can’t say more than that. There are so many occult people in the neighborhood. Astrologers and Tarot readers, of course. There’s a hoodoo group. There’s a gay men’s brotherhood, the Maze of the Minotaur. Crandall calls them the Maze of the Mindless, but he’s just being mean. I know there are several Druids. They always paint themselves blue on Easter, which I don’t understand, because everyone just thinks they’re giant Easter eggs. There’s a Kabbalah study circle and a couple of Viking guys that like to hang from trees in the park because that’s how their God Odin received enlightenment. Also, there are two or three Traditional Witchcraft groups. They hold rituals in the park in the middle of the night. You’re here to talk about the Mathers Society, aren’t you? Crandall’s expecting you. I hope you’ll excuse me, but I was just on my way to see some clients. I walk dogs for a living.”

“That must be pleasant,” Cummings suggested.

“Oh, yes,” Winky said, smiling, “I find them easy to communicate with.”

“Do you mean that literally? Like Doctor Doolittle?” Cummings probed.

“I wish, but it doesn’t work like that. Animals don’t use words. But you already knew that. So what you do is, you think of an image and then project it mentally to the animal, and if the animal wants to talk to you, it responds by projecting an image back. You’ve got to pick something the animal understands, something in the animal’s world that matters to him. And only some animals like to communicate with people this way. Or maybe are able to do it. I don’t really know. I tried to talk to all the animals at the Brookfield Zoo, and only an alligator and an owl responded.”

“What did they say?”

“The alligator told me he didn’t like his food, and the owl said it was very unhappy in its cage and wanted to be let free. That was really sad! Lately, I’ve been trying to communicate with insects, but so far I haven’t made any progress. I’ve always liked insects. That’s what brought Crandall and me together.”

“How so?”

“Crandall is a beekeeper. Did you know that? We met when I was massaging a bee at a farmers market.”

“Massaging a bee?”

“Maybe massaging isn’t the right word. I don’t mean, you know, like Shiatsu. The bee flies into your hand, and you gently stroke it. If you do it very carefully, it goes to its happy bee place. I should go see my clients now. Our apartment is the third door on the left.”

“Could you spare a little more time? I have a few more questions.”

“You want to talk about Surendra, right? I don’t really have anything to tell you. I only go to Mathers because Crandall goes. I’m not magickal. You have to be really smart to be magickal — like Crandall.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Magick is hard! Way too hard for me! We live in the apartment with the purple door. Just knock.”

Winky let Cummings into the building, and Cummings walked down the hall to an apartment with a door painted a dizzying shade of lavender. He knocked. Crandall, wearing jeans and a T- shirt, answered. Even out of Edwardian clothes, his Eurasian features, gray dreadlocks and goatee gave him a sort of Neo-Rastafarian look. His appearance was more Bob Marley than Merlin. Cummings had no idea what to expect when he entered the apartment, but the decor was conventional in a gay, urban way. The rooms were large and had dark wooden floors and oak moldings. The furniture was mostly from the 1940s, restored with period reproduction fabrics. Except for the presence of a television and computers, the entryway and living room could have appeared in a 1947 women’s magazine.

There was a pervasive decorative presence of bees on ceramics, throw pillows, several lithographs, even buzzing among flowers on the drapes.

“I understand you keep bees,” Cummings said as Crandall ushered him to the sofa.

“I run an organization called Beehold. We’re an urban honey producer. We have hives all over the city on roof tops, in abandoned lots, in small gardens. We hire and train people who are unemployed or homeless to tend to the hives and collect the honey.”

“That sounds commendable.”

Crandall shrugged. “It represents a logical intersection between the collapse of the economy and the collapse of the natural environment. But you’re not here to discuss beekeeping, are you?”

“No. Otto asked me to investigate Surendra Hitchcock’s death informally.”

“Informal though it may be, Otto might have discussed his plans with the Mathers Board of Trustees.”

“He didn’t?”

“No, though I consider this a breach of protocol rather than poor judgment. I have no objection to speaking with you.”

“I understand the Chicago occult community is rather contentious.”

“Are there communities that are not contentious?”

“There’s a dead bird on your stoop.”

“It’s a nuisance, nothing more. Most occultists are more addle-brained than menacing. I think of them as sweet little puppies — the lap dogs of the mysterious, if you like. Or if you prefer a human metaphor, they’re wedded to silly ideas. Only a small percentage of us are doing the real work.”

“And what is the real work?”

“The search for the deeper synergies. I translate obscure works from obscure languages, looking for implicit and explicit relationships. I do not live on a mountaintop, smiting flying reptiles with my wand. This work requires a honed intellect, not super-human skills. As Marion Zimmer Bradley once said, ‘I’m not a medium, I’m a large.’ Though truthfully, I do own several wands just to keep up appearances, you understand,” he added, with a hint of impishness.

“With all due respect, there are more conventional ways to understand the world. The sciences. Mathematics.”

“Those are very important pursuits; but did you know that up to the beginning of the seventeenth century, the great scientists were often also occultists? Brahe, Galileo and Kepler studied astrology, for example. Alchemy is what Isaac Newton did — the rest was a hobby. I think such men had a unified approach in their search for the divine plan. Subsequently, for good and ill, the scientific method triumphed, and today we think with bifurcated minds. Very few of us think holistically, and even fewer have a strong intuitive awareness. Those who don’t, which is just about everyone, think the occult is at best a waste of time.

“I like to remind the arrogant rational — that’s how I refer to such people — that the trouble in the world does not result from the pursuit of the irrational but from certainty. Would you like a few examples of the influence of certainty? The Khmer Rouge, Stalinists, the English Civil War,
Pamela,
the Inquisition, slavery, the conquest of the Americas, the defenestration of Prague,
Pilgrim’s Progress,
holy wars, Wall Street bankers,
Valley of the Dolls,
orthodox American psychoanalysts, twelve-tone music, pesticides, every puerile brush stroke of Jacques Louis-David and any number of ferries whose captains let on too many people and tipped the boats.”

“Let’s talk about the Mathers Society. Can you tell me anything that might prove useful in understanding Surendra’s death?”

“I’m afraid the answer is no. I have not observed anything that suggests her death was more than odd, though I must say also that I’m doubtful about spontaneous human combustion. I haven’t studied it in depth, but I’m not aware of any cases in which natural causes have been conclusively ruled out.”

“How do you think Surendra caught on fire?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think someone in Mathers might have some reason to kill her?”

“As I said, I’ve observed nothing suspicious.”

“I understand you and Surendra had an argument.”

“My argument was with Therese, which is her real name, not her Mathers persona.”

“What did you disagree about?”

“Therese was in the public relations business. One of her clients was a hotel chain. Her assistant arranged for them to feature my honey in their Midwestern locations — sell it at the front desk, feature it in the breakfast buffet, that sort of thing. But for no apparent reason, Therese quashed the plan. As you might imagine, I was quite angry.”

“How angry were you?”

“Mister Wanamaker, I am not the sort of man who suffers fools gladly, but that doesn’t mean that I am inclined to murder them.”

“One last thing. Beeswax is highly flammable, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

Cummings walked up the stairs to the apartment of Lolita and Rothwell, more commonly known as Mary and Glen. Mary opened their door, which was beige. Her hair, which was pink at the Mathers meeting, had been redyed a shade of turquoise. She was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt screened with an Anime unicorn.

Like Crandall and Winky’s flat, this apartment was also large, dark and oaken. It was sparsely furnished. A few pieces of 1950s furniture were placed haphazardly around the living room. In the dining room Cummings could see a long table with five-gallon carboys and, in one corner, a replica suit of armor. The room was also dotted with assorted pieces of lumber, woodworking tools and pieces of scrap metal.

“Do you like to be called Mary or Lolita?” Cummings asked.

“Mary’s my everyday name.”

“Thanks for seeing me, Mary. I’ve been asked to investigate Therese’s death.”

“Are you a detective?”

“Something like that,” Cummings replied, “but my inquiry is entirely informal. Will Glen be joining us?”

“He’s in the bedroom, doing school work.”

“School work?”

“He’s finishing his master’s degree. I’ll get him. Sit down anywhere you like.”

Cummings sat on a beat-up Mies van der Rohe knockoff. Mary returned with Glen, also in jeans and wearing an unadorned black T-shirt. He shook Cummings’s hand; then he and Mary sat on floor pillows opposite Cummings.

“Let’s start with some basics,” Cummings began. “How do you happen to be living in the same building as Crandall and Winky?”

“We needed a place, and they told us this apartment was vacant,” Mary answered.

“We’ve been here three years,” Glen added.

“Almost four,” Mary corrected.

“What do you do, Mary?”

“I’m a tattoo artist. I work at Guns and Leather Tattoo. I also moonlight, doing small stuff like temporary tattoos, just to get my name out there. My long-term plan is to open my own tattoo shop.”

“She’s going to do the tattoos, and I’m going to run the business,” Glen contributed.

“And what do you do, Glen?”

“I’m an accountant. I’m finishing my master’s in taxation.”

“I would guess there aren’t too many accountants in the Mathers Society.”

“Being an accountant is not who Glen really is,” Mary insisted.

“No way. It’s just a means to an end because I’m good with numbers,” Glen explained. “I’m really all about medieval history. I’m the Vice President of the Shire of the Mossy Turrets. We reenact medieval battles in dormant corn fields.”

“Trebuchets and all that?”

“Yeah, but we only hurl foam rubber rocks at plywood castles. We don’t want to get anybody killed.”

“Glen’s also an entrepreneur,” Mary said proudly.

“I have two side businesses,” Glen explained. “One is historical torture devices. Mostly the small stuff, thumb screws and like that. But I do larger custom items. Last month I made a rack for a couple in New Jersey. I’m going to have a booth at the Renaissance Faire next summer as a way to build word-of-mouth.”

“Does the other business involve brewing?” Cummings suggested.

“How did you know?”

“The carboys,” Cummings said, pointing to the dining room. “They’re used for fermentation.”

“I make mead. It comes in two flavors, Black Death and Pestilence. That’s orange and mint,” Glen continued. “I just make a little right now. The Illinois laws are designed to keep small businesses out of the liquor industry.”

“What can you tell me about Therese?”

“She was a very matter-of-fact sort of person,” Glen said.

“Not the kind of person who talked about herself,” Mary continued.

“We didn’t know her well,” Glen added.

“We didn’t like her much either,” Mary confided. “She lied to us.”

“About what?” Cummings asked.

“It’s a bit complicated. You see, we’re polyamorous,” Glen explained.

“What does that mean?”

“We’re open to outside loving relationships. We had threesomes with her.”

“Only a few times,” Mary said. “She told us her husband knew, but he didn’t. That’s Rutley Paik. I think that’s his real name. They’re divorced, I think.”

“We don’t go in for deceit,” Glen commented.

“I see,” Cummings said. “Mary, could you tell me about the inks you use to do tattoos?”

“That’s an odd question,” Mary responded, seemingly a bit startled. “I use different inks for different purposes—you know, permanent inks, temporary inks, different colors and what not.”

“Don’t some tattoo inks contain phosphorous?”

“Some, I guess. Why is that important?”

“It’s highly flammable,” Cummings explained. “In fact, it’s used in matches.”

The next afternoon, Cummings visited Tom Daniels. Tom lived in a modest bungalow in Lincoln Park, one of Chicago’s most fashionable neighborhoods. The front yard was in disarray. The grass had not been mowed recently, and there were two chaotic perennial beds in desperate need of weeding.

Tom answered the door, wearing a Victorian dressing gown. He looked pallid.