Salem's Lot

  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 pupillary 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.

  SIX

  "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, lit 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.

  SEVEN

  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 M.E.

  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 R&I 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 paperwork 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 mad
man'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.

  EIGHT

  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.

  NINE

  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 clearheaded 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.

  TEN

  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 wraparound 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.

  Chapter Nine

  Susan (II)

  Susan arrived home from Portland a little after three in the afternoon, and came into the house carrying three crackling brown department-store bags--she had sold two paintings for a sum totaling just over eighty dollars and had gone on a small spree. Two new skirts and a cardigan top.

  "Suze?" Her mother called. "Is that you?"

  "I'm home. I got--"

  "Come in here, Susan. I want to talk to you."

  She recognized the tone instantly, although she had not heard it to that precise degree since her high school days, when the arguments over hem lines and boyfriends had gone on day after bitter day.

  She put down her bags and went into the living room. Her mother had grown colder and colder on the subject of Ben Mears, and Susan supposed this was to be her Final Word.

  Her mother was sitting in the rocker by the bay window, knitting. The TV was off. The two in conjunction were an ominous sign.

  "I suppose you haven't heard the latest," Mrs Norton said. Her needles clicked rapidly, meshing the dark green yarn she was working with into neat rows. Someone's winter scarf. "You left too early this morning."

  "Latest?"

  "Mike Ryerson died at Matthew Burke's house last night, and who should be in attendance at the deathbed but your writer friend, Mr Ben Mears!"

  "Mike...Ben...what?"

  Mrs Norton smiled grimly. "Mabel called around ten this morning and told me. Mr Burke says he met Mike down at Delbert Markey's tavern last night--although what a teacher is doing barhopping I don't know--and brought him home with him because Mike didn't look well. He died in the night. And no one seems to know just what Mr Mears was doing there!"

  "They know each other," Susan said absently. "In fact, Ben says they hit it off really well...what happened to Mike, Mom?"

  But Mrs Norton was not to be sidetracked so quickly. "Nonetheless, there's some that think we've had a little too much excitement in 'salem's Lot since Mr Ben Mears showed his face. A little too much altogether."

  "That's foolishness!" Susan said, exasperated. "Now, what did Mike--"

  "They haven't decided that yet," Mrs Norton said. She twirled her ball of yarn and let out slack. "There's some that think he may have caught a disease from the little Glick boy."

  "If so, why hasn't anyone else caught it? Like his folks?"

  "Some young people think they know everything," Mrs Norton remarked to the air. Her needles flashed up and down.

  Susan got up. "I think I'll go downstreet and see if--"

  "Sit back down a minute," Mrs Norton said. "I have a few more things to say to you."

  Susan sat down again, her face neutral.

  "Sometimes young people don't know all there is to know," Ann Norton said. A spurious tone of comfort had come into her voice that Susan distrusted immediately.

  "Like what, Mom?"

  "Well, it seems that Mr Ben Mears had an accident a few years ago. Just after his second book was published. A motorcycle accident. He was drunk. His wife was killed."

  Susan stood up. "I don't want to hear any more."

  "I'm telling you for your own good," Mrs Norton said calmly.

  "Who told you?" Susan asked. She felt none of the old hot and impotent anger, or the urge to run upstairs away from that calm, knowing vo
ice and weep. She only felt cold and distant, as if drifting in space. "It was Mabel Werts, wasn't it?"

  "That doesn't matter. It's true."

  "Sure it is. And we won in Vietnam and Jesus Christ drives through the center of town in a go-cart every day at high noon."

  "Mabel thought he looked familiar," Ann Norton said, "and so she went through the back issues of her newspapers box by box--"

  "You mean the scandal sheets? The ones that specialize in astrology and pictures of car wrecks and starlets' tits? Oh, what an informed source." She laughed harshly.

  "No need to be obscene. The story was right there in black and white. The woman--his wife if she really was--was riding on the backseat and he skidded on the pavement and they went smack into the side of a moving van. They gave him a breathalyzer test on the spot, the article said. Right...on...the spot." She emphasized intensifier, preposition, and object by tapping a knitting needle against the arm of her rocker.

  "Then why isn't he in prison?"

  "These famous fellows always know people," she said with calm certainty. "There are ways to get out of everything, if you're rich enough. Just look at what those Kennedy boys have gotten away with."

  "Was he tried in court?"

  "I told you, they gave him a--"

  "You said that, Mother. But was he drunk?"

  "I told you he was drunk!" Spots of color had begun to creep into her cheeks. "They don't give you a breathalyzer test if you're sober! His wife died! It was just like that Chappaquiddick business! Just like it!"

  "I'm going to move into town," Susan said slowly. "I've been meaning to tell you. I should have done it a long time ago, Mom. For both of us. I was talking to Babs Griffen, and she says there's a nice little four-room place on Sister's Lane--"

  "Oh, she's offended!" Mrs Norton remarked to the air. "Someone just spoiled her pretty picture of Mr Ben Big-shot Mears and she's just so mad she could spit." This line had been particularly effective some years back.

  "Mom, what's happened to you?" Susan asked a little despairingly. "You never used to...to get this low--"

  Ann Norton's head jerked up. Her knitting slid off her lap as she stood up, clapped her hands to Susan's shoulders, and gave her a smart shake.