The Brain Eaters

Chapter 7

It was rumored around the offices of the Milwaukee Herald that Doc Ingersoll had once actually attended medical school. There was a variety of colorful stories about why he dropped out. Or was kicked out. Or maybe even graduated to medical practice and lost his license. Doc never discussed his past, and nobody ever asked him about it. The Herald was sort of a foreign legion among newspapers. What a man did before was his own business.

Ingersoll was a gaunt man with an unhealthy gray complexion and a cigarette seemingly growing from the corner of his mouth. He wore suits that looked like the 1940s and was the only man on the staff who wore a hat when the sun shone. Doc’s clothes, his desk, even the floor wherever he happened to be standing, were continually powdered with cigarette ash.

Doc’s title at the Herald was science editor. His job consisted largely of taking wire-service copy that could be lumped under science and medicine and chopping it to fit whatever holes were left in the page dummies. He also wrote and rewrote periodically an article warning of the dangers of drugs and alcohol. The Herald ran it whenever some authority questioned their commitment to community service. It was a subject with which Doc Ingersoll was familiar.

Corey Macklin found him Tuesday morning amid the scattered ashes, scissoring a sheet of UPI copy.

“Got a minute, Doc?” Corey said.

“If it’s important. I’m on a hot lead here, all about the wife of a farmer outside Indianapolis who claims to have been fucked by a creature from outer space.”

“No kidding.”

“Imagine that farmer’s consternation when the offspring resembles the hired hand.”

“Didn’t the Enquirer have that one last month?”

Doc crumpled the copy sheet into a ball and bounced it off the rim of a metal wastebasket. “Damn, scooped again.” He creaked around in the wooden swivel chair to face Corey, dribbling ashes into his lap. “What’s on your mind?”

“Something here I want you to take a look at.” Corey brushed ashes aside to make a clean space on the desk and spread out the stories on Hank Stransky in Milwaukee, DuBois Williamson in New York, and Andrea Keith in Seattle. Next to them he placed the sheet he had prepared with three columns, each headed by the name of one of the victims.

Ingersoll coughed around his cigarette and read rapidly and expertly through the news stories. He scanned Corey’s handwritten notes and looked up. “So?”

“What do you think?”

“I think three seemingly normal people turned inexplicably violent last Friday. Apparently you are trying to find some correlation among the three.”

“Opinion?”

Ingersoll ticked off the notations on Corey’s sheet with a yellow-stained finger. “The two men here, Stransky and Williamson, would seem to have several traits in common. Age, economic level, et cetera. The big variance is in race and geographic location. The woman doesn’t fit the pattern at all. She’s only twenty, different sex, different social environment, and still a different location. The only points common to all three are the date of their seizures, the bizarre nature of their actions, and their own violent deaths.”

“Conclusion?”

“Coincidence.”

“Maybe, but that leaves me with no story.”

“It has been my observation over the years that real life often has disappointing story values.”

“What about the way they died, Doc? Does that suggest anything to you?”

Ingersoll glanced again at the three stories. “Let’s see, you got Williamson run over by a truck, Keith impaled on a shard of plate glass, and your man Stransky dead of cranial hemorrhage, apparently the result of being hit by a pool ball. No direct relation to whatever made them flip out. Why don’t you put it down to ‘these troubled times’ and forget it.”

Corey gathered his material. “Thanks anyway, Doc, but I still think there’s something here.”

Doc lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of his old one. “Have you considered death rays from outer space?”

He started a laugh, which turned into a coughing fit. Corey left him there and returned to his desk. He shoved the three stories and his notes into a manila folder and dropped it into a drawer. He stopped at the bulletin board to scribble his name on the sign-out sheet. He entered his destination as downtown and left the building.

Vic’s Old Milwaukee Tavern was more or less back to normal. The debris from Friday night’s excitement had been swept up, broken pool cues replaced, bloodstains washed away. When Corey Macklin entered, there were only four morning drinkers seated at the bar. Unlike the evening crowd, they were quiet, self-contained, each avoiding the eyes of the others. Vic Metzger, wearing a bandage from elbow to wrist on his left arm, came over as Corey took a stool.

“How’s it going, Vic?”

“Slow. It cost me a bundle when I had to close the place up Saturday. After your story I could have charged admission. Sunday was okay, and last night, but Saturday would have been a bonanza. Everybody wanted to see blood on the floor.” He nodded toward the four silent drinkers. “Now it’s Monday, and nobody cares about Friday’s news.”

“Sic transit gloria, Vic. How’s the arm?”

Vic worked the fingers of his left hand. “No problem. They kept me in the hospital Saturday when it swelled up and they thought maybe there was an infection. It was okay by the next morning, though, so I came down and opened up for the sightseers.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“Could’ve been a lot worse if you hadn’t jumped in. Likely you saved my life. From now on your tab belongs to the house.”

“Well, thanks. In that case, you can give me a beer. Draft.”

“You got it.”

Vic poured an icy glass of beer and set it on the bar in front of Corey. He turned away and sneezed.

“Coming down with a cold?” Corey asked.

“Nah. Had a kind of forty-eight-hour flu, I guess. Aches in the joints, little fever. Got over it, though. Aftereffects, probably. Nerves.”

“I couldn’t blame you after Friday night.”

Vic nodded in silent agreement.

“What do you suppose made Hank Stransky flip out like that?”

“Beats the shit out of me. He was always easygoing in here. Never saw him come close to a fight with anybody. Damned strange.”

“Yeah.”

“The ones I feel sorry for are his wife and kids. I don’t think Hank left them with a whole lot. Usually, something like that happens to a regular, we’d get up a collection. But considering the circumstances …” Vic let a shrug finish the thought.

“I see what you mean.”

“The funeral’s tomorrow morning. I plan to close the place up so I can go. There probably won’t be a lot of friends there to comfort the widow. What happened ain’t her fault.”

“I may stop by, too,” Corey said. “Where’s it going to be?”

“At the Lujack Brothers, over by Harley Street. They do a nice job. It’ll take some real work to fix up Hank, the way he looked.”

“I guess it will.” Corey finished his beer, told Vic to take care of the arm, and left the tavern.

The Lujack Brothers Mortuary was a modest brick building with a white-pillared façade that was supposed to make it look like an antebellum mansion. The effect was largely negated by the bricked-up warehouse next door and the wholesale plumbing supplier across the street.

Corey parked out in front and entered the anteroom through heavy glass doors. He crossed the thick carpet, which was bordered by plastic palmettos, and stopped where an overweight girl sat behind a sliding panel.

“Yes, sir?” The girl gave him a sympathetic smile.

Corey showed his press card, and the smile faded. “I’d like to see Mr. Lujack.”

“Which Mr. Lujack did you have in mind? There are four brothers.”

“Give me whichever one is in charge.”

“That would be Mr. Caspar Lujack. The others are all out of town.”

“Let’s have him.”

The girl picked up a telephone, punched one of the Lucite buttons, and said something Corey could not hear. She apparently received an affirmative answer and pointed to a heavy crimson hanging at the far end of the room. “There’s a hallway behind the drapes. First door on your right.”

Corey followed her directions and walked into a comfortable office furnished in walnut and leather. Caspar Lujack sat behind a carved, deeply polished desk.

The mortician was a small-boned, precise man who wore his hair slicked down with a part that was geometrically straight from forehead to crown. His silk tie was tastefully subdued, and his gray sharkskin suit looked expensive.

“How can I be of service, Mr. Macklin?”

“I’m interested in the Stransky funeral that’s scheduled for tomorrow.”

“You’re a friend of the family?”

“Not exactly.”

“Wait a minute … Macklin. You’re the one who wrote the eyewitness story in the Herald. You were in the tavern when it happened.”

“Yeah.”

“What in the world do you think made him go wild like that?”

“I have no idea,” Corey said shortly. “I wonder if I could see the body.”

“Sorry, but that’s impossible.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He was cremated yesterday.”

“Cremated? How come?”

“As a matter of fact, I was surprised myself when the widow called back. Not that I blame her. The condition of the body made lying in state questionable. We can hide a lot of damage with clothing, but people expect the face to be recognizable. Still, I was ready to go along with her wishes until — ”

“Wait a minute,” Corey broke in. “Are you saying Mrs. Stransky changed her mind about disposal of the body?”

Lujack frowned. “That’s what I was in the process of explaining. In my opinion, it was the right decision. It certainly made more sense than trying to pretty up — ”

“And you’ve already gone ahead and cremated him?”

“Yesterday afternoon. There was no reason to wait. I had the furnace going for another client. That left me today to sift the ashes and pick out a suitable urn for the funeral.”

“Did you do any kind of examination of the body before shoving it in the oven?”

“Examination?”

“Like an autopsy.”

“That’s not my job. All I had done was drain the fluids preparatory to embalming. The cosmetic work hadn’t been started when Mrs. Stransky called to say she’d changed her mind.”

“Did anybody examine the body?”

“Not that I know about. I wasn’t authorized to do any postmortem, and I’m not about to do it on my own.”

“Did you take any pictures?”

“Of the body? Certainly not. What kind of an operation do you think this is?”

“No offense, Mr. Lujack,” Corey said. “It just seems to me somebody was in an awful hurry to dispose of Hank Stransky’s remains.”

“You’ll have to take that up with the widow,” Lujack said.

“Yeah. I think I’ll do that.”

Corey drove directly to the street where Hank Stransky and his family had lived. He had the old tense feeling in the pit of his stomach, the feeling he used to get when he was closing in on a meaty story. It had been a long time.

He pulled up across from the house and for a moment sat staring at the moving van that was parked out in front. A two-man crew was transferring the Stransky furniture from the house to the van. Corey got out of the car and walked across the street.

He climbed up on the porch and looked in through the open front door. The house looked bare and somehow sad. There was no sign of Pauline Stransky or the boys. Corey stopped one of the moving men on his way in.

“Any of the family around?”

“Nope. The lady left a key for us this morning. The papers were all signed and proper.”

“Where are you taking the stuff?”

The man eyed him suspiciously. “Who wants to know?”

“Corey Macklin. I’m with the Herald.” He took out his press card with photo and showed it to the mover. “Have you got some ID?”

The man produced an authentic-looking identification card from a reputable moving company. Corey made a note of his name.

“Where you taking the stuff?” he asked again.

“It goes into storage.”

“That’s funny.”

“Not to me. I couldn’t care less where the stuff goes. I just put it in the truck at one end, take it out at the other. I got to get back to work now, okay?”

Corey watched for several minutes as the two men carried the accumulated possessions of a lifetime out of Stransky’s house and packed them efficiently into the van. He walked to the house next door and rang the bell.

A heavy woman in a quilted robe and floppy slippers opened the door and peered at him suspiciously. When Corey identified himself, she relaxed a little.

“I’d like to talk to Mrs. Stransky,” he said. “Do you know where I can reach her?”

“Beats me. She left Sunday with the boys without so much as a good-bye — after all the years we been neighbors. You’d think she could at least’ve said something.”

“You say she left Sunday. Was she driving?”

“No, Pauline never drove nowhere if she could help it. Couple of men, banker types, came for her in a car. Big Caddy, it was. Her and the boys, suitcases and all, got in, and off they went. Not even a good-bye.”

“Banker types, you say.”

“You know — suits, ties, all like that.”

“You haven’t any idea where they went?”

“Nope. I went over there Saturday night after things were quieted down. Took a lemon meringue pie for her and the boys. Pauline never said anything about going away. She was taking it pretty well, all things considered. Making plans for the funeral.”

“Did she say anything about having Mr. Stransky cremated?”

“Not a chance. Hank didn’t believe in it, and Pauline wouldn’t go against Hank, living or dead, if you know what I mean.”

“I see. Well, thanks for your time.” Corey turned away and started down the porch steps.

“Don’t you need my name for the newspaper?” the woman called after him.

“Not this time. Maybe later.”

“It’s Lubin. Mrs. Dorothy Lubin.”

Corey took out a sheet of copy paper and scribbled on it. He gave Mrs. Lubin a wave and jogged back across the street to his car.

Back at the Herald building, he picked up the telephone and got the number listed for DuBois Williamson in Brooklyn, New York. He dialed the number and tapped a pencil impatiently against the receiver as he listened to a series of electronic buzzes and clicks. Finally, something like a human voice came through the earpiece.

“I’m sorry. The number you have dialed is out of service. Please check your directory to make sure you dialed correctly. Thank you.” Click.

“Shit.” Grinding his teeth, Corey checked his number and dialed again.

“I’m sorry. The number you have dialed is — ”

He banged down the receiver, scooped up the manila folder containing his notes, and marched into Porter Unlander’s office.

The paunchy city editor belched into his fist when he saw Corey coming and edged his chair back as though he were expecting a physical attack. Corey opened the folder and spread the contents on the desk before Uhlander.

“Remember this?”

“Yesterday’s news, Corey,” he said.

“Read it, Porter. Three strange, violent deaths, three different cities, all on the same day, all with strong similarities.”

“So do it as a feature and see if you can talk Marianne into running it in the Tuesday magazine.”

“It’s not a feature, damn it. It’s news. For the first time in years the Herald stands to break a really big story. Believe me, if the Sun-Times and the Tribune get on to this, we’re going to look damn foolish. Are you going to be the one to spike it?”

Porter Uhlander began a sigh that turned into a belch. “What do you need?”

“A fast trip to New York.”

“No.”

“Come on, Porter. Are you going to let a few dollars stand in the way of fame and fortune?”

“Whose fame and fortune are we talking about?”

“Yours. Mine. The Herald’s. Who cares? Listen, if nothing comes of this, you can take the damn air fare out of my salary.”

“You’re serious about this, aren’t you.”

Corey held up his right hand in oath-taking position.

“Tourist class on the red-eye?”

“Hell, yes. I’ll go air freight. Just get me there.”

Uhlander shook a handful of Tums from a plastic bottle on his desk and spilled them into his mouth. He chewed solemnly while he dug through his desk for the blank pad of trip authorizations:

“Remember — no story, and this comes out of your salary.”

“You got a deal,” Corey said.