Salem's Lot

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.