Carrion Comfort

by Dan Simmons

  “I’m looking for a friend of mine,” I said brightly. “A Mrs. Drayton.” The manager started to speak, paused, frowned without being aware of it, and tried again. “I’m sorry. No one under that name is registered here.”

  “Perhaps she registered under her maiden name,” I said. “Nina Hawkins. She’s an older woman but very attractive. A few years younger than me. Long gray hair. Her friend may have registered for her . . . an attractive young, dark-haired lady named Barrett Kramer . . .”

  “No, I’m sorry,” said the manager in a strangely flat tone. “No one under that name has registered here. Would you like to leave a message in case your party does arrive later?”

  “No,” I said. “No message.”

  I brought the girl into the lobby and we turned down a corridor leading to the rest rooms and side stairs. “Excuse me, please,” I said to a passing porter. “Perhaps you can help me.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He stopped, annoyed, brushed back his long hair. It would be tricky. If I was not to lose the girl I would have to act quickly.

  “I’m looking for a friend,” I said. “An older lady but quite attractive. Blue eyes. Long gray hair. She travels with a young woman with dark, curly hair.”

  “No, ma’am. No one like that is registered here.”

  I reached out and took his forearm. I released that girl and focused on the boy. “Are you sure?”

  “Mrs. Harrison,” he said. His eyes looked past me. “Room 207. North front.”

  I smiled. Mrs. Harrison. Good God, what a fool Nina was. Suddenly the girl let out a small whimper and slumped against the wall. I made a quick decision. I like to think that it was compassion, but I sometimes remember that her left arm was useless.

  “What’s your name?” I asked the child, gently stroking her bangs. Her eyes moved left and right in confusion. “Your name,” I prompted.

  “Alicia.” It was only a whisper. “All right, Alicia. I want you to go home now. Hurry but don’t run.”

  “My arm hurts,” she said. Her lips began to quiver. I touched her forehead again and pushed.

  “You’re going home,” I said. “Your arm does not hurt. You won’t remember anything. This is like a dream that you will forget. Go home. Hurry but do not run.” I took the pistol from her but left it wrapped in the sweater. “Bye, bye, Alicia.”

  She blinked and crossed the lobby to the doors. I looked both ways and handed the gun to the bellhop. “Put it under your vest,” I said.

  “Who is it?” Nina’s voice was light.

  “Albert, ma’am. The porter. Your car’s out front and I’m ready to carry your bags down.”

  There was the sound of a lock clicking and the door opened the width of a still-secured chain. Albert blinked in the glare and smiled shyly, brushed his hair back. I pressed against the wall.

  “Very well.” She undid the chain and moved back. She had already turned and was latching her suitcase when I stepped into the room.

  “Hello, Nina,” I said softly. Her back straightened, but even that move was graceful. I could see the imprint on the bedspread where she had been lying. She turned slowly. She was wearing a pink dress I had never seen before.

  “Hello, Melanie.” She smiled. Her eyes were the softest, purest blue I had ever seen. I had the porter bring Mr. Hodges’s gun out and aim it. His arm was steady. He pulled back the hammer until it locked in place. Nina folded her hands in front of her. Her eyes never left mine.

  “Why?” I asked.

  Nina shrugged ever so slightly. For a second I thought she was going to laugh. I could not have borne it had she laughed— that husky, childlike laugh which had touched me so many times. Instead she closed her eyes. Her smile remained.

  “Why Mrs. Harrison?” I asked. “Why, darling, I felt I owed him something. I mean, poor Roger. Did I ever tell you how he died? No, of course I didn’t. And you never asked, Melanie dear.” Her eyes opened. I glanced at the porter, but his aim was steady. It remained for him only to exert a little more pressure on the trigger.

  “He drowned, darling,” said Nina. “Poor Roger threw himself from that steamship— what was its name?— the one that was taking him back to England. So strange. And he had just written me a letter promising marriage. Isn’t that a terribly sad story, Melanie? Why do you think he did a thing like that? I guess we’ll never know, will we?”

  “I guess we never will,” I said. I silently ordered the porter to pull the trigger.

  Nothing.

  I looked quickly to my right. The young man’s head was turning toward me. I had not made him do that. The stiffly extended arm began to swing my direction. The pistol moved smoothly like the tip of a weather-vane swinging in the wind.

  No! I strained until the cords in my neck stood out. The turning slowed but did not stop until the muzzle was pointing at my face. Nina laughed now. The sound was very loud in the little room.

  “Good-bye, Melanie dear,” said Nina and laughed again. She laughed and nodded at the porter. I stared into the black hole as the hammer fell.

  On an empty chamber. And another. And another. “Good-bye, Nina,” I said as I pulled Charles’s long pistol from my raincoat pocket. The explosion jarred my wrist and filled the room with blue smoke. A small hole, smaller than a dime but as perfectly round, appeared in the precise center of Nina’s forehead. For the briefest second she remained standing as if nothing had happened. Then she fell backward, recoiled from the high bed, and dropped face forward onto the floor.

  I turned to the porter and replaced his useless weapon with the ancient but well-maintained revolver. For the first time I noticed that the boy was not much younger than Charles had been. His hair was almost exactly the same color. I leaned forward and kissed him lightly on the lips.

  “Albert,” I whispered, “there are four cartridges left. One must always count the cartridges, mustn’t one? Go to the lobby. Kill the manager. Shoot one other person, the nearest. Put the barrel in your mouth and pull the trigger. If it misfires, pull it again. Keep the gun concealed until you are in the lobby.”

  We emerged into general confusion in the hallway.

  “Call for an ambulance!” I cried. “There’s been an accident. Someone call for an ambulance!” Several people rushed to comply. I swooned and leaned against a white-haired gentleman. People milled around, some peering into the room and exclaiming. Suddenly there was the sound of three gunshots from the lobby. In the renewed confusion I slipped down the back stairs, out the fire door, into the night.

  FOUR

  Charleston

  Tuesday, Dec. 16, 1980

  Sheriff Bobby Joe Gentry rocked back in his chair and took another sip from his can of RC Cola. His feet were propped up on his cluttered desk and the leather of his gunbelt creaked as he settled his considerable bulk more comfortably into his chair. The office was small, enclosed by a cinderblock wall and by ancient wooden partitions which separated it from the noise and bustle of the rest of the County Building. The paint peeling from the old wood was a different shade of institutional green than the paint peeling from the rough cinderblock. The office was filled to overflowing with sheriff’s massive desk, three tall file cabinets, a long table stacked with books and folders, a blackboard, cluttered shelves hung on wall brackets, and two dark, wooden chairs as littered with files and loose papers as the desk.

  “I don’t believe there’s much more I can do down here,” said Agent Richard Haines. The FBI man had cleared away some folders and was perched on the edge of the table. The crease along his gray trouser leg was knife-sharp.

  “Nope,” agreed Sheriff Gentry. He belched softly and rested the soft drink can on his knee. “I don’t reckon there is much reason to hang around. Might as well head home.”

  The two law enforcement officers seemed to have little in common. Gentry was only in his mid-thirties, but his tall frame was already sagging to fat. His belly strained at his gray uniform shirt and hung down over his belt as if conforming to some cartoon caricature. His
face was florid and faintly freckled. Despite the receding hairline and double chin, Gentry had the open, friendly, vaguely mischievous sort of look in which the outline of the boy was still visible in the face of the man.

  Sheriff Gentry’s voice was soft and set into a good-old-boy drawl that had recently become more familiar to Americans through a proliferation of thousands of CB radios, countless country-western songs, and a seemingly endless series of Burt Reynolds drive-in features. Gentry’s open shirt, straining belly, and lazy drawl matched the general sense of amiable sloppiness suggested by his cluttered office, but there was a quick lightness, almost a grace, to the large man’s movements which did not fit the image.

  Special Agent Richard M. Haines of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was more consistent in looks and temperament. Haines was a good decade older than Gentry, but he looked younger. He wore a light gray, three-piece summer suit and beige shirt from Jos. A. Bank. His burgundy, silk foulard tie was number 280235 from the same catalog. His hair was cut moderately short, carefully combed, with only a trace of gray showing at the temples. Haines had a square, sober, regularly featured face to match his lean physique. He worked out four times a week to keep his belly flat and firm. His voice was also flat and firm, deep but unaccented. It was as if the late J. Edgar Hoover had designed Haines as a mold for all of his agents.

  There was more than a difference in appearance separating the two men. Richard Haines had put in three years of mediocre undergraduate work at Georgetown University before he had been recruited for the Bureau. His FBI training had completed his education.

  Bobby Joe Gentry had graduated from Duke University with dual art and history majors before going on to Northwestern to receive a Master’s degree in history. Gentry had been introduced to police work through his Uncle Lee, a county sheriff near Spartanburg, who hired Bobby Joe as a part-time deputy in the summer of 1967. A year later Bobby Joe received his Master’s degree and sat in a Chicago park and watched the police rage out of control, clubbing and beating antiwar demonstrators who had been dispersing peacefully.

  Gentry returned home to the South, spent two years teaching at Morehouse College in Atlanta, and then took a job as a security guard while working on a book about the Freedman’s Bureau and its role during Reconstruction. The book was never finished, but Gentry found himself enjoying the routine security work although it was a constant problem to keep his weight within required limits. In 1976 he moved to Charleston and joined the police force as a patrol officer. A year later he turned down an offer to fill in for a year as an associate professor of history at Duke. Gentry enjoyed the routine of police work, the daily contacts with drunks and crazies, and the sense that no day on the job was quite like any other. A year later he surprised himself by running for sheriff of Charleston County. He proceeded to surprise quite a few other people by being elected. A local columnist wrote that Charleston was a strange town, a town in love with its own history, and that the thought of an historian serving as sheriff had caught the public imagination. Gentry did not consider himself an historian. He considered himself a cop.

  “. . . if you won’t be needing me then,” said Haines. “Mmmhh? What’s that?” asked Gentry. His attention had wandered. He crushed the empty can and tossed it into the wastebasket, where it struck other crumpled cans and rebounded to the floor.

  “I said I thought I’d check with Gallagher and then fly back to Washington to night if you won’t be needing me. We’ll be in touch through Terry and the FAA team.”

  “Yeah, sure,” said Gentry. “Well, we sure do appreciate your help, Dick. You ’n’ Terry know more about this stuff than our whole department put together.”

  Haines rose to leave just as the sheriff’s secretary stuck her head in the door. The woman had a hairdo twenty years out of date and rhinestone glasses on a chain. “Sheriff, that New York psychiatrist fellow is here.”

  “Shoot, I damn near forgot,” said Gentry and struggled to his feet. “Thanks, Linda Mae. Tell him to come in, would you please?”

  Haines moved toward the door. “Well, Sheriff, you have my number if anything . . .”

  “Dick, would you-all do me a favor and sit in on this? I forgot this fellow was coming, but he may give us some information on the Fuller thing. He called yesterday. Said he was Mrs. Drayton’s psychiatrist, was in town on a business trip. Would you mind waitin’ a few more minutes? I could have Tommy run you over to the motel in one of the units after if you got to hurry to catch a plane or something.”

  Haines smiled and held his hand palm outward. “No hurry, Sheriff. Be happy to hear what the psychiatrist has to say.” The FBI agent moved to one of the two chairs and lifted a white McDonald’s bag out of the way.

  “Thanks, Dick, really ’preciate it,” said Gentry and mopped his face. He walked to the door just as there was a knock and a small, bearded man in a corduroy sports coat entered.

  “Sheriff Gentry?” The psychiatrist pronounced the name with a hard “G.”

  “I’m Bobby Joe Gentry.” The sheriff’s huge hands closed around the other man’s proferred hand. “You’re Dr. Laski, right?”

  “Saul Laski.” The psychiatrist was of normal height but seemed dwarfed next to Gentry’s bulk. He was a thin man with a high, pale brow, a salt and pepper tangle of beard, and sad, brown eyes that seemed older than the rest of him. His glasses were held together by a strip of masking tape on one hinge.

  “This here’s Special Agent Richard Haines of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” said Gentry with a wave. “Hope you don’t mind, I asked Dick to be here. He was visitin’ anyway and I figured he could probably ask more intelligent questions ’n I could.”

  The psychiatrist nodded at Haines. “I did not know that the Bureau became involved in local murders,” said Laski. His voice was soft, the English accented only slightly, the syntax and pronunciation carefully controlled.

  “Normally we don’t,” said Haines. “However, there are several factors in . . . ah . . . this situation which . . . ah . . . might fall under the Bureau’s mandate.”

  “Oh? How so?” asked Laski.

  Haines crossed his arms and cleared his throat. “Kidnapping for one,

  Doctor. Also, the violation of one or more of the victims’ civil rights. Also, we are offering the aid of our forensic experts to the local law enforcement agencies.”

  “And Dick’s down here ’cause of that plane that got blown to bits,” said Gentry. “Hey, sit down, Doctor. Sit down. Here, let me move that crap.” He transferred some magazines, folders, and Styrofoam coffee cups to the table and went around to his own chair. “Now, you said on the phone yesterday that you might be able to help in this multiple murder business.”

  “The New York tabloids are calling it the Mansard House Murders,” said Laski. He absently pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose.

  “Yeah?” said Gentry. “Well, hell, that’s better ’n the Charleston Massacre, I guess, though it isn’t too accurate. Most of the folks weren’t even in the Mansard House. I still think it’s an awful lot of noise about nine people gettin’ killed. I imagine that more ’n that get shot on a slow night in New York.”

  “Yes, perhaps,” said Laski, “but the range of victims and murder suspects is not as . . . ah . . . fascinating as in this instance.”

  “You got me there,” said Gentry. “We’d sure ’preciate it if you could shed some light on this mess, Doctor Laski.”

  “I would be very pleased to help. Unfortunately, I have little to offer.”

  “You were Mrs. Drayton’s psychiatrist?” asked Haines. “Ah yes, in a manner of speaking.” Saul Laski paused and tugged at his beard. His eyes seemed very large and heavy-lidded, as if he had not slept well for a long time. “I have seen Mrs. Drayton only three times, the last time in September. She came up to me after a talk I gave at Columbia in August. We had two . . . ah . . . sessions after that.”

  “But she was a patient of yours?” Haines’s voice had taken on the fl
at insistence of a prosecuting attorney.

  “Technically, yes,” said Laski. “However, I do not actually have a practice. I teach at Columbia, you see, and occasionally do consulting work at the clinic there . . . students that the resident psychologist, Ellen High-tower, feels would benefit by seeing a psychiatrist. And the occasional faculty member . . .”

  “So Mrs. Drayton was a student?”

  “No. No, I do not believe so,” said Laski. “She occasionally audited a few graduate courses and attended the evening seminars, such as mine. She . . . ah . . . she expressed interest in a book I had written . . .”

  “The Pathology of Violence,” said Sheriff Gentry.

  Laski blinked and adjusted his glasses. “I do not remember mentioning the title of my book when I spoke to you yesterday, Sheriff Gentry.”

  Gentry folded his hands on his stomach and grinned. “You didn’t, Professor. I read it last spring. Read it twice, to tell the truth. I didn’t recognize your name until just now. I think it’s a goddamned brilliant book. You oughtta read it, Dick.”

  “I am amazed you found a copy,” said the psychiatrist. He swiveled toward the FBI agent. “It is a rather pedantic view of certain case histories. Only two thousand copies are printed. By Academy Press. Most of the copies sold were used in courses in New York and California.”

  “Dr. Laski thinks that some people are receptive to . . . what did you call it, sir? A climate of violence. That’s it, isn’t it?” asked Gentry.

  “Yes.”

  “And that other people . . . or places . . . or times . . . sort of program these receptive folks into behaving in ways that otherwise would be unthinkable to them. ’Course that’s just my simple-minded synopsis.”

  Laski blinked again at the sheriff. “A very astute synopsis,” he said. Haines stood and walked over to lean against a file cabinet. He crossed his arms and frowned slightly. “Wait a minute, we’re getting lost here. So Mrs. Drayton came to you . . . was interested in this book . . . and then became your patient. Right?”