Carrion Comfort

by Dan Simmons

  “I don’t think the old lady is here,” said Gentry. He told her about Arthur Lewellyn’s short drive to the cigar store on the night of the murders— a drive that had ended up with a ninety-seven-mile-per-hour impact with a bridge abutment on the outskirts of Atlanta. “Mr. Lewellyn’s cigar store wasn’t far from the Mansard House,” said Gentry.

  “So if Melanie Fuller is capable of what Saul was talking about . . .”

  “Yeah,” said Gentry. “It’s absolutely nuts, but it makes sense.”

  “So you think she is hiding in Atlanta?”

  “I wouldn’t think so,” said Gentry. “Too close. My guess is she would’ve flown or driven out of there as soon as possible. So I’ve been on the phone all week. There was a ruckus out at Hartsfield International Airport a week ago Monday— two days after the murders here. A woman left twelve thousand dollars in cash in a bag there . . . no one could describe her. A redcap there . . . a forty-year-old man with an almost perfect health record . . . died after having a grand mal seizure. I checked into all the deaths that same night. A family of six killed in an accident on I-285 when their station wagon was rear-ended by a semi; the truck driver had fallen asleep. A man in Rockdale Park shot his brother-in-law in a dispute over who owned a boat that had been in the family for years. They found the corpse of a derelict near Atlanta Stadium . . . Sheriff’s office said the body had been there almost a week. And a cabdriver named Steven Lenton committed suicide at his home. Police said his friends reported he’d been depressed since his wife left him.”

  “How can any of that relate to Melanie Fuller?” asked Natalie. “That’s the fun part,” said Gentry. “Speculatin’.” They came to a small park. Natalie sat on a swing and moved easily back and forth. Gentry held on to the chain of the next swing. “The funny thing about Mr. Lenton’s suicide is that it was while he was on duty. Most folks don’t take time out from their jobs to kill themselves. You’ll never guess where he was when he called in his last fare . . .”

  Natalie stopped swinging. “I don’t . . . Oh! The airport?”

  “Yup.”

  She shook her head. “That doesn’t make any sense. If Melanie Fuller was flying somewhere from the Atlanta airport, why would she leave money behind or bother to kill a redcap or cabdriver?”

  “Let’s just imagine that something alarmed her,” said Gentry. “Maybe she changed her mind in a hurry. The cabdriver’s personal car was missing— his ex-wife had been bugging the police about it for almost a week before it finally turned up.”

  “Where?” asked Natalie. “Washington, D.C.,” said Gentry. “Right downtown.”

  “None of this makes sense,” said Natalie. “Isn’t it more likely that the man simply committed suicide and someone stole his car and abandoned it in Washington?”

  “Sure,” said Gentry. “But the nice thing about Saul Laski’s story is that it replaces a long column of coincidences with a single explanation. I’ve always been a big fan of Occam’s Razor.”

  Natalie smiled and swung high again. “As long as you handle it carefully,” she said. “If it gets dull you can cut your own throat.”

  “Mmmm,” said Gentry. He felt very good. The evening air, the rusty, childhood sound of the swing, and Natalie’s presence all conspired to make him happy.

  Natalie stopped again. “I still want to be involved in this,” she said. “Maybe I could go to Atlanta and look into that stuff while you’re in Washington.”

  “Just a few days,” said Gentry. “You touch base in St. Louis and I’ll be in contact soon.”

  “That’s what Saul Laski said.”

  “Look,” said Gentry, “I have one of those phone-answering devices. I’ve got an instrument that lets me play back the message over the phone when I can’t get home. I always lose things, so I have two of the tone things. You take one. I’ll call my own number every day at eleven A.M. and eleven P.M. If you have anything to tell me, just leave it on the recorder. You can check the same way.”

  Natalie blinked. “Wouldn’t it be easier for you just to call me?”

  “Yeah, but if you needed to get in touch with me it might be difficult.”

  “But . . . all your private phone messages . . .”

  Gentry grinned at her in the dark. “I have no secrets from you, ma’am,” he said. “Or rather, I won’t after I give you the electronic thingamawhatsis.”

  “I can hardly wait,” said Natalie.

  Someone was waiting for them when they returned to Gentry’s house. From deep within the shadows on the long porch a cigarette glowed. Gentry and Natalie stopped on the stone walk and as the sheriff slowly unzipped his jacket Natalie caught sight of the handle of a revolver tucked in his waistband. “Who’s there?” Gentry asked softly.

  The cigarette glowed more brightly and then disappeared as a dark shape rose to its feet. Natalie gripped Gentry’s left arm as the tall shadow moved toward them, pausing by the front steps of the porch. “Hey there, Rob,” came a rich, raspy voice, “good night to be flying. Just came by to see if you wanted to go for a ride up the coast.”

  “Howdy, Daryl,” said Gentry and Natalie could feel the big man relax.

  Natalie’s eyes had adjusted to the dark and now she could make out a tall, thin man with long hair going to gray on the sides. He was dressed in cut-off jeans, thongs, and a sweatshirt bearing the legend CLEMSON UNIVERSITY in faded letters. His face had a craggy-reflective quality which Natalie found reminiscent of a younger Morris Udall.

  “Natalie,” said Gentry, “this here is Daryl Meeks. Daryl’s got himself a charter flyin’ ser vice across the harbor. Spends part of the year travelin’ with a rock and roll band, flyin’ them places and playin’ drums too. He thinks he’s part Chuck Yeager and part Frank Zappa. Daryl and I went to school together. Daryl, this here’s Miz Natalie Preston.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” said Meeks.

  The man’s handshake was firm and friendly and Natalie liked it. “Pull up some chairs,” said Gentry. “I’ll get us some beers.”

  Meeks stubbed the cigarette out on the railing and tossed it into the bushes while Natalie turned a wicker chair around to face the porch swing. Meeks sat on the swing and crossed his bony legs, allowing one thong to dangle from its strap.

  “Which school did you two go to?” asked Natalie. She thought that Meeks looked older than Rob.

  “Northwestern,” said Meeks in his friendly rasp, “but Rob graduated with honors while I flunked out and got drafted. We were roommates for a couple of years. Just two scared Southern boys in the big city.”

  “Uh-huh, sure,” said Gentry, returning with three cold cans of Michelob. “Daryl grew up in the South all right— the south side of Chicago. He was never south of the Mason-Dixon line except for one summer vacation he spent with me down here. He showed his good taste by moving down here after he got back from Vietnam. And he didn’t flunk out, either. He quit school to enlist even though he’d been a marine before he went to college and was an antiwar activist while he was in college.”

  Meeks drank deeply, stared at the beer can in the dim light, and made a face. “Jesus, Rob, you still drinking this dishwater? Pabst is the good stuff. How many times do I have to tell you?”

  “So you were in Vietnam?” asked Natalie. She thought of Frederick and his refusal to talk about his year there, his fury at the simple mention of the country’s name.

  Meeks smiled and nodded. “Yes’m. I was an FAC— forward air controller— for two years there. I just flew around in my little Piper Cub and told the fast movers, the real pilots in their jets, where to drop their ordnance. I never fired a shot in anger the whole time I was there. It was the cushiest job I could find.”

  “Daryl was shot down twice,” said Gentry. “He’s the only forty-year-old hippie I know who has a drawer full of medals.”

  “Bought them all at the PX,” said Meeks. He finished the last of his beer, burped, and said, “I guess to night wouldn’t be the best time for a plane ride, eh, Rob?”r />
  “Next time, amigo,” said Gentry.

  Meeks nodded, rose, and bowed toward Natalie. “It was a plea sure, ma’am. If you ever need crops dusted or a charter trip or a good drummer, just look me up out at the Mt. Pleasant airport.”

  “I’ll do that,” said Natalie with a smile.

  Meeks clapped Gentry on the shoulder and bounced down the steps into the dark, whistling the theme to The High and the Mighty as he left.

  Through the evening they listened to music, discussed their childhoods, played chess, talked about growing up in the South and going to school in the North, washed the dishes, and had a late brandy. Natalie realized that there was almost no tension between them, that she felt that she had known Rob Gentry for years.

  Natalie had been surprised and delighted by the beautiful guest room Gentry kept dusted and ready. The bare wood and simple string bed complemented a room as clean as a Shaker’s, but the effect was saved from Spartan grimness by colorful quilts on the bed and by a subtle stenciling of a pineapple motif on the walls.

  Gentry showed Natalie clean towels in the hall bathroom, wished her good night, made a final check of the door locks and yard lights, and went to his own bedroom. He changed into a comfortable set of clean sweat-pants and T-shirt. Over the previous eight years Gentry had been hospitalized with four kidney stones. Each time the attacks had occurred at night. They were calcium stones— not preventable although he usually followed a low-calcium diet— and invariably the incredible pain at the onset of an attack left him capable of no action except dialing for an ambulance to transport him to the emergency room. It bothered Gentry that anything could make him so helpless and that no amount of foresight or preparation could prevent that helplessness, but he had long ago traded pajamas for sweatpants and T-shirt so that on that average of one night every two years that he would be hospitalized, he would not arrive in his pajamas.

  Gentry hung his holster with the .357 Ruger Blackhawk on the chair by his bed. It was always there; he could find it with a single sweep of his hand on the darkest night.

  Gentry did not go to sleep right away. He was aware of the attractive young woman two rooms away down the hall and he was also aware that he would not make the trip down the hall to her room this night. He sensed the quality of the pleasant tension between them, was capable of separating the amount of attraction she held for him and— by a simple subtraction of that attraction from the general sexual tension between them— arrive at a rough estimate of how much that attraction was reciprocated. Gentry watched reflections of car lights march across the ceiling and frowned slightly. Not to night. What ever possibilities the relationship might hold, this was not the time. Every instinct in the sheriff’s mind and body screamed at him to get Natalie Preston out of Charleston, out of what ever insanity was being played out around them. Gentry’s instincts always had been excellent; they had saved his life more than once. He trusted them now.

  He was taking a great risk letting her stay at his house, but he knew no other way to watch over her until he could get her on a plane in the morning. Someone was following him . . . no, not someone, several someones. He had not been sure until yesterday— Wednesday, Christmas Eve. In the morning he had driven around for more than ninety minutes, confirming the fact, identifying the vehicles. It was not as crude as the week before; actually the job of trailing was so smooth and professional that only Gentry’s heightened level of paranoia tipped him off.

  There were at least five cars involved; one of them a cab, the other four as nondescript as Detroit could make them. But three of them were the same ones that he had played cat and mouse with the day before. One vehicle would follow— staying far back, never closing— until he made a sharp change in direction, at which time another would pick him up. It took Gentry two days to realize that sometimes the contact vehicle would be ahead of him. To set up a tail that elaborate, he knew, it would take at least half a dozen vehicles, probably twice that many personnel, and a radio linkup. Gentry considered the possibility of Charleston P.D. Internal Affairs being involved but quickly rejected it; one, there was nothing on his record, life-style, or current caseload that would warrant it. Two, the Charleston police bud get would not support it. Three, the cops he knew couldn’t tail a suspect that well if their lives depended on it.

  Whom did that leave? FBI? Gentry did not like or trust Richard Haines, but he knew no reason for the FBI to suspect a Charleston sheriff in either the airline explosion or the Mansard House murders. CIA? Gentry shook his head and stared at the ceiling.

  He had just gotten to sleep, was dozing lightly— dreaming that he was back in Chicago, trying to find a class at the university— when Natalie screamed.

  Gentry grabbed the Ruger and was padding down the hall before he was fully awake. There was a second, somewhat muffled cry, and then a sob. Gentry dropped to one knee beside the door, tried the knob— it was not locked— and flung the door open while leaning back, out of sight. Four seconds later he went in low, crouching, the Ruger extended and swiveling.

  Natalie was alone, sitting up in bed, sobbing, her face in her hands. Gentry scanned the room, checked to make sure that the window was locked, set the Ruger quietly on the nightstand, and sat on the edge of the bed next to her.

  “I . . . I . . . I’m sorry,” she stammered through tears. There was no affectation in her voice, only fright and embarrassment. “Ev . . . every . . . every time I st . . . start to go to sleep, that man’s ar . . . arms come over the car seat at me . . .” She forced herself to quit sobbing, hicupped, and felt around for the box of Kleenex on the nightstand.

  Gentry put his left arm around her. She remained rigid a second and then collapsed softly against him, her hair just touching his cheek and chin. For several minutes her body continued to shake with small aftershocks of the tremor of fright that had brought her awake. “It’s OK,” Gentry murmured as he stroked her back. “Everything’s all right.” Calming her was as smooth and soothing as stroking a kitten.

  It was sometime later, Gentry was almost asleep, sure that she was asleep, when Natalie slowly raised her head, lifted her arms around his neck, and kissed him. The kiss was very long, very soft, and made them both dizzy. Her breasts were soft and full against him.

  Later still, Gentry looked up at her as she straddled him, her long neck and oval face thrown back in silent passion, their fingers tightly inter-locked, and he felt again the tremors pass through her, through him inside her, but not tremors of fear this time, no, not fear . . .

  Natalie’s flight for St. Louis departed two hours before Gentry’s plane for New York. She kissed him good-bye. Each of them, Southern born, raised, and conditioned, was aware that a black woman and a white man kissing in a public place, even in the South of 1980, would raise eyebrows, bring silent rebukes. Neither of them gave the slightest goddamn.

  “Goin’ away presents,” said Gentry and gave her a Newsweek, a morning paper, and the other tone transmitter for his answering machine. “I’ll check to night,” he said.

  Natalie nodded, decided to say nothing, and turned quickly down the jetport ramp.

  An hour later, somewhere over Kentucky, she set the Newsweek down, picked up the paper, and found the article that would change her life forever. It was on the third page.

  PHILADELPHIA (AP)

  Philadelphia police still have no solid leads or suspects in the Christmas Eve slaying of four young Germantown gang members in a crime that hom i cide detective Lieutenant Leo Hartwell described as “one of the grisliest things that I’ve seen in my ten years on the force.”

  Four members of the juvenile “Soul Brickyard” street gang were found murdered on Christmas morning in the Market Square area of Germantown. While the names of the victims and the specific details of the multiple murders have not been released, it is known that all four of the victims were between 14 and 17 years old and that their bodies were mutilated. Lieutenant Hartwell, officer in charge of the investigation, will neither confirm nor deny cri
me-scene witness reports that all four of the boys had been decapitated.

  “We have launched a thorough and ongoing investigation,” said Captain Thomas Morano, chief of Germantown’s hom i cide division. “We are following up all leads.”

  The Germantown area of Philadelphia has a history of gang violence, with two prior deaths in 1980 and six murders in 1979 attributed to gang warfare. “The Christmas Eve murders are surprising,” said Rev. William Woods, director of the Community Settlement House in Germantown. “Gang violence has been on the wane during the past ten months and I am not aware of any current disputes or vendettas.”

  The Soul Brickyard gang is one of dozens of youth gangs in the Germantown area and is said to be comprised of about forty full-time members with twice as many auxiliaries. As is true of most Philadelphia street gangs, it has a long history of conflict with local law enforcement authorities, although in recent years there have been attempts to improve the image of such gangs through city-sponsored outreach programs such as Covenant House and Community Access. All four of the murdered youths were members of the Soul Brickyard Gang.

  Natalie knew immediately, instinctively, and without doubt that this had something to do with Melanie Fuller. She had no idea how the old woman from Charleston could be involved in gang warfare in Philadelphia, but she once again felt the hands on her neck and heard the warm, sibilant whisper in her right ear, “You want to find the woman? Look in Germantown.”

  At St. Louis International Airport— what the locals still called Lambert Field— Natalie decided and acted upon her decision before she became too afraid to follow through. She knew that once she phoned Frederick, saw her friends, she would never leave again. Natalie closed her eyes and remembered the image of her father, lying alone, face not yet cosmeticized, in the empty funeral home, the irritated mortician saying over and over, “We did not expect family until tomorrow.”

  Natalie used her credit card to buy a ticket on the next TWA flight to Philadelphia. She checked her billfold; she still had two hundred dollars in cash and six hundred and fifty in traveler’s checks. She made sure that she still had her press credentials from her summer job with the Chicago Sun-Times and then called Ben Yates, the photo editor there.