Carrion Comfort

by Dan Simmons

  TWELVE

  Charleston

  Thursday, Dec. 18, 1980

  It seems as if it should be snowing,” said Saul Laski.

  The three were sitting in Sheriff Gentry’s car: Saul and Gentry in the front seat, Natalie in the back. It was raining softly and the temperature was in the high fifties. Natalie and Gentry wore jackets, Saul had put on a thick blue sweater under an old tweed sports coat. Now he used his index finger to push his glasses up onto the bridge of his nose and squinted out through the rain-streaked windshield. “Six days before Christmas,” he said, “and no snow. I don’t know how you Southerners get used to it.”

  “I was seven years old, the first time I saw snow,” said Bobby Joe Gentry. “They let school out. Wasn’t even an inch on the ground, but all of us ran home like it was the end of the world. I threw a snowball . . . first one I ever made . . . and proceeded to bust ol’ Miz McGilvrey’s parlor window. It almost was the end of the world for me. When my daddy got home I’d been waiting ’nigh onto three hours, missed my supper an’ all. I was glad to get the whippin’ an’ have it over with.” Gentry touched a button and the wiper blades beat once, twice, and fell back into place with a clunk. The suddenly cleared arcs of windshield once again began to mottle with rain. “Yessir,” said Gentry in that deep, somehow pleasant rumble that Laski was getting to know very well, “I see snow, I always think of getting whipped and trying not to cry. Seems to me that the winters’re gettin’ colder, the snow comin’ more often.”

  “Is that doctor here yet?” asked Natalie from the backseat. “Nope. Still three minutes before four,” said Gentry. “Calhoun’s gettin’ old, slowin’ down a bit, I hear, but he’s as punctual as grandma’s old clock. Regular as a cat full of prunes. He says he’ll be here at four, he’ll be here.”

  As if to punctuate the comment, a long, dark Cadillac pulled to a stop and began backing into a parking space five cars in front of Gentry’s patrol car.

  Saul looked up at the building. Several miles from the chic Old Section, the development was attractive, combining the elegance of age with the allure of modern convenience. An old cannery had been turned into an array of town houses and offices— windows and garages added, the brick sandblasted clean, and woodwork added, repaired, or painted. To Saul’s eye, it looked as if great care had gone into the restoration and redesign. “Are you sure Alicia’s parents are willing to do this?” he asked.

  Gentry removed his hat and ran his handkerchief around the leather band inside. “Real willin’,” he said. “Mrs. Kaiser’s worried sick about the girl. Says Alicia hasn’t been eating, wakes up screamin’ when she tries to sleep, and just sits and stares a lot of the time.”

  “It has only been six days since she saw her best friend murdered,” said Natalie. “Poor child.”

  “And her best friend’s granddaddy,” said Gentry. “And maybe some other folks, for all we know.”

  “You think she was at the Mansard House?” asked Saul. “Folks don’t remember her being there,” said the sheriff, “but that don’t mean didley. Unless they’re trained otherwise, most folks don’t notice most of what’s goin’ on around them. Course some do— notice everything. They’re just never the ones who happen to be at the scene of a crime.”

  “Alicia was found close to the scene, wasn’t she?” asked Saul. “Right between the two biggies,” said Gentry. “A neighbor lady saw her standin’ on a street corner, cryin’ and lookin’ sort of dazed, about halfway between the Fuller home and Mansard House.”

  “Is her arm healing?” asked Natalie.

  Gentry turned to look at the woman in the backseat. He smiled and his small, blue eyes seemed brighter than the weak, winter light outside. “Sure is, ma’am. Simple fracture.”

  “One more ma’am from you, Sheriff,” said Natalie, “and I’ll break your arm.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Gentry with no apparent guile. He looked out the windshield again. “That’s ol’ Dr. C, all right. He bought that darn black bumbershoot when he went over to En gland before World War Two. Summer lecture series at London City Hospital, I think. He was part of the prewar disaster planning team. I remember he tol’ my Uncle Lee years ago that the British doctors were ready for about a hundred times the weekly casualties than they really got once the Germans started bombin’ ’em. I don’t mean they were all that prepared for more . . . but they expected more.”

  “Does your Dr. Calhoun have much experience with hypnosis?” asked Saul.

  “I’d say so,” drawled Gentry. “That’s what he went over to advise the Brits about in 1939. Seems some of the experts there thought the bombin’d be so traumatic that all the civilians would go into shock. They thought Jack might help ’em out with his posthypnotic suggestion ’n’ all.” He started to open the car door. “Comin’, Miz Preston?”

  “Absolutely,” said Natalie and stepped out into the rain.

  Gentry stepped out and paused. The soft rain tapped on the brim of his hat. “Sure you don’t want to come in, Professor?” he asked.

  “No, I do not want to be there,” said Saul. “I want there to be no chance of my interference. But I do look forward to hearing what the child has to say.”

  “Me, too,” said Gentry. “I’ll try to keep an open mind, no matter what.” He closed the door and ran— ran gracefully for so heavy a man— to catch up with Natalie Preston.

  An open mind, thought Saul. Yes, I do believe you will have that. I truly do.

  “I believe you,” Sheriff Bobby Joe Gentry had said when Saul finished telling his story the day before.

  Saul had condensed the story as much as possible, reducing the narration that had taken much of the morning and previous evening into a forty-five-minute synopsis. Several times Natalie had interrupted to ask him to tell a part that he had skipped over. Gentry asked a few concise questions. They ate lunch while Saul spoke. In an hour the story was finished, the lunch was consumed, and Sheriff Gentry had nodded and said, “I believe you.”

  Saul had blinked. “Just like that?” he asked.

  Gentry nodded. “Yep.” The sheriff turned to look at Natalie. “Did you believe him, Miz Preston?”

  The young woman hesitated only a second. “Yes, I did.” She looked at Saul. “I still do.”

  Gentry said nothing more.

  Saul tugged at his beard, took his glasses off to wipe them, and set them back in place. “Don’t you both find what I say as . . . fantastic?”

  “I sure enough do,” said Gentry, “but I find it pretty fantastic that I got nine people murdered in my hometown here and not a clue as to how their deaths tie together.” The sheriff leaned forward. “Haven’t you told anyone about it before this? The whole story, I mean.”

  Saul scratched at his beard. “I told my cousin Rebecca,” he said softly. “Not long before she died in 1960.”

  “Did she believe you?” asked Gentry.

  Saul met the sheriff’s gaze. “She loved me. She had seen me just after the war, nursed me back to sanity. She believed me. She said that she believed me, and I chose to believe her. But why would you accept such a story?”

  Natalie said nothing. Gentry sat back in his chair until his back made the wood creak. “Well, speaking for myself, Professor,” he said. “I got to confess two weaknesses. One, I tend to judge people by how I feel about what they say, how they come across. Take that FBI man you met in my office yesterday— Dickie Haines— I mean, everything he says is right an’ logical an’ up front. He looks right. Hell, he smells right. But there’s some-thin’ about that guy that makes me trust him ’bout as much as I would a hungry weasel. Our Mr. Haines just isn’t fully with us somehow. I mean, his porch light is on an’ all, but nobody’s home, if you know what I mean. Lot of folks like that. When I meet somebody I believe, I tend to believe ’em, that’s all. Gets me into heaps of trouble.

  “Second weakness, I tend to read a lot. Not married. No hobbies but my job. Used to think I wanted to be a historian . . . then a pop u lar writ
er of history like Catton or Tuchman . . . then maybe a novelist. Too lazy to be any of them things, but I still read tons. I like junk. So I make a deal with myself— for every three serious books I read, I indulge in some junk. Well-written junk, y’understand, but junk all the same. So I read mysteries— John D. MacDonald, Parker, Westlake— and I read the suspense stuff— Ludlum and Trevanian and le Carré and Deighton and I read the scary stuff— Stephen King, Steve Rasnic Tem . . . those guys.” He smiled at Saul. “Your story’s not so strange.”

  Saul frowned at the sheriff. “Mr. Gentry, you’re saying that because you read fantastic fiction, you do not find my fantastic story fantastic?”

  Gentry shook his head. “Nossir, I’m saying that what you told me fits the facts and is the first thing I’ve heard that ties these murders together.”

  “Haines had a theory about Thorne,” said Saul. “The old woman’s servant— and the Kramer woman conspiring to steal from their employers.”

  “Haines is full of shit, pardon the language, ma’am,” said Gentry. “And there’s no way in the world that little Albert LaFollette, the bellboy who went nuts at the Mansard House, was in cahoots with anybody. I knew Albert’s father. That boy was barely bright enough to tie his shoelaces, but he was a nice kid. He didn’t go out for football in high school and he told his dad it was because he didn’t want to hurt anybody.”

  “But my story goes beyond logic . . . into the supernatural,” said Saul. He felt foolish arguing with the sheriff, but he could not accept the South-erner’s immediate acceptance.

  Gentry shrugged. “I always hate in those vampire movies where they got corpses stacked up all around ’em, with two little holes in their necks ’n’ all, and some of them corpses are comin’ back to life ’n’ all, and it always takes the good guy ninety minutes of the two-hour movie just to convince the other good guys that the vampires are real.”

  Saul rubbed his beard. “Look,” Gentry said softly, “for what ever reasons you have, you did tell us. So now my choices are— one, you’re part of this somehow. I mean, I know you didn’t kill any of these folks personally. You were on a panel at Columbia on Saturday afternoon and evening. But you could’ve been involved. Maybe you hypnotized Mrs. Drayton or something. I know, I know, hypnosis doesn’t work like that— but people don’t usually take over other folks’ minds either.

  “Two, you could be crazy as a bedbug. Like one of those yahoos that comes out of the woodwork to confess each time there’s a murder.

  “Three, you could be telling the truth. I’ll go with number three for now. Besides, I got some weirdness of my own goin’ on here that fits your story and nothing else.”

  “What weirdness?” asked Saul.

  “Like the guy following me this morning who kills himself rather’n talk to me,” said Gentry. “And the old lady’s scrapbook.”

  “Scrapbook?” said Saul. “What scrapbook?” asked Natalie.

  Gentry took his hat off, creased it, and frowned at it. “I was the first law on the scene when Mrs. Drayton got shot,” he said. “Paramedics was takin’ the body away, city hom i cide plainclothesmen were still downstairs doing a body count, so I poked around the lady’s room for a minute. Shouldn’t’ve done it. Lousy procedure. But what the hell, I’m just a hick cop. So anyway, there was this thick scrapbook in one of her suitcases and I happened to glance through. All these clippings about murders— John Lennon’s and a lot of others. Most in New York. Went back to last January. Next day the real police are conducting the investigation, the FBI’s all over the place even though it isn’t their kind of case, and by the time I get down to the morgue on Sunday evening, no scrapbook, no one’s seen it, no crime scene record of it on the city’s books, no morgue receipt, nothing.”

  “Did you ask about it?” asked Saul. “Sure did,” said Gentry. “Everybody from the paramedics to the city hom i cide boys. Nobody saw it. Everythin’ else was taken out at the morgue and listed on Sunday mornin’— the lady’s underwear, clothes, blood pressure pills— but no scrapbook with newspaper accounts of twenty or so murders.”

  “Who did the inventory?” Saul asked. “City hom i cide and FBI,” said Gentry. “But Tobe Hartner— clerk down at the morgue— says that our Mr. Haines was lookin’ at the impounded stuff about an hour before the hom i cide team arrived. Dickie went straight from the airport to the morgue.”

  Saul cleared his throat. “You think the FBI is involved in concealing evidence?”

  Sheriff Gentry gave a look of wide-eyed innocence. “Now why would the FBI want to go and do something like that?”

  The silence stretched. Finally Natalie Preston said, “Sheriff, if one of those . . . those creatures was responsible for the death of my father, what do we do next?”

  Gentry folded his hands across his stomach and looked at Saul. The sheriff’s eyes were very blue. “That’s a real good question, Miz Preston,” he said. “What about it, Dr. Laski? Say we caught your Oberst or the Fuller woman, or both of ’em. Don’t you think it might be sorta hard to get a grand jury indictment?”

  Saul spread his hands. “It sounds insane, I agree. If one believes in this, then no logic seems safe. No convicted murderer stands convicted beyond a shadow of a doubt. No evidence is ample to separate the innocent from the guilty. I understand what you are saying, Sheriff.”

  “Naw,” said Gentry. “It isn’t that bad. I mean, most cases of murder are still murder, correct? Or do you think that there are hundreds of thousands of these mind vampire people runnin’ around?”

  Saul closed his eyes at the thought. “I sincerely pray that that is not the case,” he said.

  Gentry nodded. “So what we have here is sort of a special case, ain’t it? Which brings us back to Miz Preston’s question. What do we do next?”

  Saul took a deep breath. “I need your help in . . . watching. There is a chance— a slim chance— that one or the other of the two survivors will return to Charleston. Perhaps Melanie Fuller did not have time to remove things of great importance from her home. Perhaps William Borden . . . if he is alive . . . will return for her.”

  “And then what?” asked Natalie. “They can’t be punished. Not by the courts. What happens if we do find them for you? What could you do?”

  Saul bowed his head, adjusted his glasses, and ran shaking fingers across his brow. “I have thought about that for four decades,” he said in a very low voice, “and I still do not know. But I feel that the Oberst and I are destined to meet again.”

  “They’re mortal,” said Gentry. “What?” said Saul. “Yes, of course they’re mortal.”

  “Someone could walk up behind one of them and blow their brains out, right?” said the sheriff. “They don’t rise with the next full moon or something.”

  Saul stared at the lawman. After a minute, he said, “What is your point, Sheriff?”

  “My point is . . . accepting your premise that these folks can do what you say they can do . . . then they’re the scariest damn critters I’ve ever heard of. Goin’ after one of ’em would be like searchin’ around for cottonmouths in the swamps after dark with nothing but your bare hands ’n’ a gunnysack. But once they’re identified they’re as much a target as you or me or John F. Kennedy or John Lennon. Anybody with a rifle and a good sight could take one of them out easily enough, correct, Professor?”

  Saul returned the sheriff’s placid gaze. “I do not own a rifle with a sight,” he said.

  Gentry nodded. “Did you bring any sort of gun down from New York with you?”

  Saul shook his head. “Do you own a gun, Professor?”

  “No.”

  Gentry turned to look at Natalie. “But you do, ma’am. You mentioned that you followed him into the Fuller house yesterday and were prepared to arrest him at gunpoint.”

  Natalie blushed. Saul was surprised to notice how dark her coffee-colored skin could become when she blushed.

  “I don’t own it,” she said. “It was my father’s. He kept it at his photography st
udio. He had a permit for it. There had been robberies. I stopped by and picked it up on Monday.”

  “Could I see it?” Gentry asked softly.

  Natalie went into the hall closet and removed the weapon from her raincoat pocket. She set it on the table near the sheriff. Gentry used his forefinger to turn the barrel slightly until it aimed away from everyone.

  “You know guns, Professor?” asked Gentry. “Not this one,” said Saul. “How ’bout you, Miz Preston?” said Gentry. “You familiar with fire-arms?”

  Natalie rubbed her arms as if she were cold. “I have a friend in St. Louis who showed me how to shoot,” she said. “Aim and squeeze the trigger. It’s not too complicated.”

  “Familiar with this gun?” asked Gentry.

  Natalie shook her head. “Daddy bought it after I went off to school. I don’t think he ever fired it. I can’t imagine he would have been able to shoot at a person.”

  Gentry raised his eyebrows and picked up the automatic, pointing it at the floor and holding it carefully by the trigger guard. “Is it loaded?”

  “No,” said Natalie. “I took all of the bullets out before I left the house yesterday.”

  It was Saul’s turn to raise his eyebrows.

  Gentry nodded and touched a lever to release the magazine from the black plastic grip. He held the clip out to show Saul that it was empty.

  “Thirty-two caliber, isn’t it?” said Saul. “Small frame Llama thirty-two automatic,” agreed the sheriff. “Real nice little gun. Probably cost Mr. Preston about three hundred dollars new. Miz Preston, nobody likes advice, but I feel like I should give you some, all right?”

  Natalie nodded tersely. “First,” said Gentry, “don’t point a firearm at somebody unless you’re willing to fire it. Second, don’t ever point an empty gun. And third, if you’re gonna have an empty gun, make sure it’s empty.” Gentry pointed to the weapon. “See that little indicator, ma’am? Where the red’s showin’ there? That’s called a loaded indicator, and the red’s tryin’ to tell you something.” Gentry racked the slide and a round ejected from the chamber and fell to the tabletop with a clatter.