Salem’s Lot (22 page)

5

Ben thought how apt his phrase had been:
Let the machinery take over
. It was very much like a machine-one of those elaborate German contraptions constructed of clockwork and cogs; figures moving in an elaborate dance.

Parkins Gillespie arrived first, wearing a green tie set off by a VFW tie tack. There were still sleepy seeds in his eyes. He told them he had notified the county ME.

‘He won’t be out himself, the son of a bitch,’ Parkins said, tucking a Pall Mall into the corner of his seamed mouth, ‘but he’ll send out a deputy and a fella to take pitchers. You touch the cawpse?’

‘His arm fell out of bed,’ Ben said. ‘I tried to put it back, but it wouldn’t stay.’

Parkins looked him up and down and said nothing. Ben thought of the grisly sound the knuckles had made on the hardwood floor of Matt’s guest room and felt a queasy laughter in his belly. He swallowed to keep it there.

Matt led the way upstairs, and Parkins walked around the body several times. ‘Say, you sure he’s dead?’ he asked finally. ‘You tried to wake him up?’

James Cody, MD, arrived next, fresh from a delivery in Cumberland. After the amenities had passed among them (‘Good t’seeya,’ Parkins Gillespie said, and lit a fresh cigarette), Matt led them all upstairs again. Now, if we all only played instruments, Ben thought, we could give the guy a real send-off. He felt the laughter trying to come up his throat again.

Cody turned back the sheet and frowned down at the body for a moment. With a calmness that astounded Ben, Matt Burke said, ‘It reminded me of what you said about the Glick boy, Jimmy.’

‘That was a privileged communication, Mr Burke,’ Jimmy Cody said mildly. ‘If Danny Glick’s folks found out you’d said that, they could sue me.’

‘Would they win?’

‘No, probably not,’ Jimmy said, and sighed.

‘What’s this about the Glick boy?’ Parkins asked, frowning.

‘Nothing,’ Jimmy said. ‘No connection.’ He used his stethoscope, muttered, rolled back an eyelid, and shone a light into the glassy orb beneath.

Ben saw the pupil contract and said quite audibly, ‘Christ!’

‘Interesting reflex, isn’t it?’ Jimmy said. He let the eyelid go and it rolled shut with grotesque slowness, as if the corpse had winked at them. ‘David Prine at Johns Hopkins reports papillary contraction in some cadavers up to nine hours.’

‘Now he’s a scholar,’ Matt said gruffly. ‘Used to pull C’s in Expository Writing.’

‘You just didn’t like to read about dissections, you old grump,’ Jimmy said absently, and produced a small hammer. Nice, Ben thought. He retains his bedside manner even when the patient is, as Parkins would say, a cawpse. The dark laughter welled inside him again.

‘He dead?’ Parkins asked, and tapped the ash of his cigarette into an empty flower vase. Matt winced ‘

‘Oh, he’s dead,’ Jimmy told him. He got up, turned the sheet back to Ryerson’s feet, and tapped the right knee. The toes were moveless. Ben noticed that Mike Ryerson had yellow rings of callus on the bottoms of his feet, at the ball of the heel and at the instep. It made him think of that Wallace Stevens poem about the dead woman. ‘Let it be the finale of seem,’ he misquoted. ‘The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.’

Matt looked at him sharply, and for a moment his control seemed to waver.

‘What’s that?’ Parkins asked.

‘A poem,’ Matt said. ‘It’s from a poem about death.’

‘Sounds more like the Good Humor man to me,’ Parkins said, and tapped his ash into the vase again.

6

‘Have we been introduced?’ Jimmy asked, looking up at Ben.

‘You were, but only in passing,’ Matt said. ‘Jimmy Cody, local quack, meet Ben Mears, local hack. And vice versa.’

‘He’s always been clever that way,’ Jimmy said. ‘That’s how he made all his money.’

They shook hands over the body.

‘Help me turn him over, Mr Mears.

A little squeamishly, Ben helped him turn the body on its belly. The flesh was cool, not yet cold, still pliant. Jimmy stared closely at the back, then pulled the jockey shorts down from the buttocks.

‘What’s that for?’ Parkins asked.

‘I’m trying to place the time of death by skin lividity,’ Jimmy said. ‘Blood tends to seek its lowest level when pumping action ceases, like any other fluid.’

‘Yeah, sort of like that Drano commercial. That’s the examiner’s job, ain’t it?’

‘He’ll send out Norbert, you know that,’ Jimmy said. ‘And Brent Norbert was never averse to a little help from his friends.’

‘Norbert couldn’t find his own ass with both hands and a flashlight,’ Parkins said, and flipped his cigarette butt out the open window. ‘You lost your screen offa this window, Matt. I seen it down on the lawn when I drove in.’

‘That so?’ Matt asked, his voice carefully controlled.

‘Yeah.’

Cody had taken a thermometer from his bag and now he slid it into Ryerson’s anus and laid his watch on the crisp sheet, where it glittered in the strong sunlight. It was quarter of seven.

‘I’m going downstairs,’ Matt said in a slightly strangled voice.

‘You might as well all go,’ Jimmy said. ‘I’ll be a little while longer. Would you put on coffee, Mr Burke?’

‘Sure.’

They all went out and Ben closed the door on the scene. His last glance back would remain with him: the bright, sun-washed room, the clean sheet turned back, the gold wristwatch heliographing bright arrows of light onto the wallpaper, and Cody himself, with his swatch of flaming red hair, sitting beside the body like a steel engraving.

Matt was making coffee when Brenton Norbert, the assistant medical examiner, arrived in an elderly gray Dodge. He came in with another man who was carrying a large camera.

‘Where is it?’ Norbert asked.

Gillespie gestured with his thumb toward the stairs. ‘Jim Cody’s up there.’

‘Good deal,’ Norbert said. ‘The guy’s probably jitterbugging by now.’ He and the photographer went upstairs.

Parkins Gillespie poured cream into his coffee until it slopped into his saucer, tested it with his thumb, wiped his thumb on his pants,]it another Pall Mall, and said, ‘How did you get into this, Mr Mears?’

And so Ben and Matt started their little song and dance and none of what they said was precisely a lie, but enough was left unsaid to link them together in a tenuous bond of conspiracy, and enough to make Ben wonder uneasily if he wasn’t in the process of abetting either a harmless bit of kookery or something more serious, something dark. He thought of Matt saying that he had called Ben because he was the only person in ‘salem’s Lot who might listen to such a story. Whatever Matt Burke’s mental failings might be, Ben thought, inability to read character was not one of them. And that also made him nervous.

7

By nine-thirty it was over.

Carl Foreman’s funeral wagon had come and taken Mike Ryerson’s body away, and the fact of his passing left the house with him and belonged to the town. Jimmy Cody had gone back to his office; Norbert and the photographer had gone to Portland to talk with the county ME.

Parkins Gillespie stood on the stoop for a moment and watched the hearse trundle slowly up the road, a cigarette dangling between his lips. ‘All the times Mike drove that, I bet he never guessed how soon he’d be ridin’ in the back.’ He turned to Ben. ‘You ain’t leavin’ the Lot just yet, are you? Like you to testify for the coroner’s jury, if that’s okay by you.’

‘No, I’m not leaving.

The constable’s faded blue eyes measured him. ‘I checked you through with the feds and the Maine State Police RI in Augusta,’ he said. ‘You’ve got a clean rep.’

‘That’s good to know,’ Ben said evenly.

‘I hear it around that you’re sparkin’ Bill Norton’s girl.’

‘Guilty,’ Ben said.

‘She’s a fine lass,’ Parkins said without smiling. The hearse was out of sight now; even the hum of its engine had dwindled to a drone that faded altogether. ‘Guess she don’t see much of Floyd Tibbits these days.’

‘Haven’t you some paper work to do, Park?’ Matt prodded gently.

He sighed and cast the butt of his cigarette away. ‘Sure do. Duplicate, triplicate, don’t-punch-spindle-or-mutilate. This job’s been more trouble than a she-bitch with crabs the last couple of weeks. Maybe that old Marsten House has got a curse on it.’

Ben and Matt kept poker faces.

‘Well, s’long.’ He hitched his pants and walked down to his car. He opened the driver’s side door and then turned back to them. ‘You two ain’t holdin’ nothin’ back on me, are you?’

‘Parkins,’ Matt said, ‘there’s nothing to hold back. He’s dead.’

He looked at them a moment longer, the faded eyes sharp and glittering under his hooked brows, and then he sighed. ‘I suppose,’ he said. ‘But it’s awful goddamn funny. The dog, the Glick boy, then t’other Glick boy, now Mike. That’s a year’s run for a pissant little burg like this one. My old grammy used to say things ran in threes, not fours.’ He got in, started the engine, and backed out of the driveway. A moment later he was gone over the hill, trailing one farewell honk.

Matt let out a gusty sigh. ‘That’s over.’

‘Yes,’ Ben said. ‘I’m beat. Are you?’

‘I am, but I feel… weird. You know that word, the way the kids use it?’

‘Yes.’

‘They’ve got another one: spaced out. Like coming down from an acid trip or speed, when even being normal is crazy.’ He scrubbed a hand across his face. ‘God, you must think I’m a lunatic. It all sounds like a madman’s raving in the daylight, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes and no,’ Ben said. He put a diffident hand on Matt’s shoulder. ‘Gillespie is right, you know. There is something going on. And I’m thinking more and more that it has to do with the Marsten House. Other than myself, the people up there are the only new people in town. And I know I haven’t done anything. Is our trip up there tonight still on? The rustic welcome wagon?’

‘If you like.’

‘I do. You go in and get some sleep. I’ll get in touch with Susan and we’ll drop by this evening.’

‘All right.’ He paused. ‘There’s one other thing. It’s been bothering me ever since you mentioned autopsies.’

‘What?’

‘The laugh I heard-or thought I heard-was a child’ s laugh. Horrible and soulless, but still a child’s laugh. Connected to Mike’s story, does that make you think of Danny Glick?’

‘Yes, of course it does.’

‘Do you know what the embalming procedure is?’

‘Not specifically. The blood is drained from the cadaver and replaced with some fluid. They used to use formaldehyde, but I’m sure they’ve got more sophisticated methods now. And the corpse is eviscerated.’

‘I wonder if all that was done to Danny?’ Matt said, looking at him.

‘Do you know Carl Foreman well enough to ask him in confidence?’

‘Yes, I think I could find a way to do that.’

‘Do it, by all means.’

‘I will.’

They looked at each other a moment longer, and the glance that passed between them was friendly but indefinable; on Matt’s part the uneasy defiance of the rational man who has been forced to speak irrationalities, on Ben’s a kind of ill-defined fright of forces he could not understand enough to define.

8

Eva was ironing and watching ‘Dialing for Dollars’ when he came in. The jackpot was currently up to forty-five dollars, and the emcee was picking telephone numbers out of a large glass drum.

‘I heard,’ she said as he opened the refrigerator and got a Coke. ‘Awful. Poor Mike.’

‘It’s too bad.’ He reached into his breast pocket and fished out the crucifix on its fine-link chain.

‘Do they know what-’

‘Not yet,’ Ben said. ‘I’m very tired, Mrs Miller. I think I’ll sleep for a while.’

‘Of course you should. That upstairs room is hot at midday, even this late in the year. Take the one in the downstairs hall if you like. The sheets are fresh.’

‘No, that’s all right. I know all the squeaks in the one upstairs.’

‘Yes, a person does get used to their own,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘Why in the world did Mr Burke want Ralph’s crucifix?’

Ben paused on his way to the stairs, momentarily at a loss. ‘I think he must have thought Mike Ryerson was a Catholic.’

Eva slipped a new shirt on the end of her ironing board. ‘He should have known better than that. After all, he had Mike in school. All his people were Lutherans.’

Ben had no answer for that. He went upstairs, pulled his clothes off, and got into bed. Sleep came rapidly and heavily. He did not dream.

9

When he woke up, it was quarter past four. His body was beaded with sweat, and he had kicked the upper sheet away. Still, he felt clear-headed again. The events of that early morning seemed to be far away and dim, and Matt Burke’s fancies had lost their urgency. His job for tonight was only to humor him out of them if he could.

10

He decided that he would call Susan from Spencer’s and have her meet him there. They could go to the park and he would tell her the whole thing from beginning to end.

He could get her opinion on their way out to see Matt, and at Matt’s house she could listen to his ‘version and complete her judgment. Then, on to the Marsten House. The thought caused a ripple of fear in his midsection.

He was so involved in his own thoughts that he never noticed that someone was sitting in his car until the door opened and the tall form accordioned out. For a moment his mind was too stunned to command his body; it was busy boggling at what it first took to be an animated scarecrow. The slanting sun picked the figure out in detail that was sharp and cruel: the old fedora hat pulled low around the ears; the wrap-around sunglasses; the ragged overcoat with the collar turned up; the heavy industrial green rubber gloves on the hands.

‘Who-’ was all Ben had time to get out. The figure moved closer. The fists bunched. There was an old yellow smell that Ben recognized as that of mothballs. He could hear breath slobbering in and out.

‘You’re the son of a bitch that stole my girl,’ Floyd Tibbits said in a grating, toneless voice. ‘I’m going to kill you.’

And while Ben was still trying to clear all this through his central switchboard, Floyd Tibbits waded in.