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 turned 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.
There was one thing he hadn't been able to pawn, and it occupied a place on top of a stained orange crate next to a bed with grease-stained sheets.
The book had been put together with skill and great care, with inscribed metal covers and leather thongs for binding.
My stomach muscles fluttered as I opened the metal cover and began to leaf through the book. There were about thirty pages; the writing at the beginning was neat and concise-the handwriting of the Bobby Weiss who'd been one of my students. The last twenty pages were almost totally illegible, obviously scrawled under the influence of heavy drugs. But there was more than enough in the first few pages to tell me that I'd stumbled over much more than I'd expected to find.
I felt wounded and very tired as I put the heavy book under my arm and walked from the room. I was leaving behind the wasted body of a boy who, to judge by the strange manuscript he'd authored, had been shot by invisible bullets of superstition; Bobby had exploded under their impact, plunged from the rarefied atmosphere of celebrity to end as a cold, gray hulk, like a falling star.
My thumb throbbed painfully, a not-so-gentle reminder that the same gunsights were undoubtedly being lined up on me.
Chapter 12
"Is that a book of shadows?"
April nodded, closed the book and handed it back to me. "Yes," she said softly. "But it's a very simple one. That's the work of a beginner." She paused, put her hand on her forehead. "It's so evil; the sex orgies and drugs, the. . animal sacrifices."
"You describe Bobby as a beginner; yet Esobus is mentioned in there a number of times-twice as leading a ceremony. Bobby was obviously a member of Esobus' coven. No mythological figure there: Esobus himself." I hesitated, then added, "I'm sure Frank was a member of the same coven."