Down Among the Dead Men

"Might be worth our taking a look up in the woods," I suggested.

Astrid looked at her watch. "It's getting late, Sam, and that road's not so good in the dark. I've got a fold-up camp-bed you can use if you'd like to sleep over."

With a pillow and a couple of blankets, the fold-up was comfortable enough although the night had turned chilly. After a half-hour or so I heard some moving around the other side of the curtain then Astrid calling out: "Hey, Malone! C'mere a minute." Dragging myself up I went to the far end of the trailer and looked past the curtain. "It's turning damned cold, Sam," Astrid said, "I don't often do this but. we'd both be warmer if we shared this bed. What say?" She threw back the comforter. She didn't have a stitch on. "Unless you've got any objections to sharing a bed with a naked lady."

I thought for a moment then replied: "Guess I could get used to it," and started to unbutton my shirt.

I don't kiss and tell but I can say that Astrid was a natural blond...

* * * * *

I was just getting on the outside of my second cup of early morning java when a furious knocking at the trailer door disturbed the early peace. I slid my .45 under a handy cushion and let my hand rest close so I could grab the weapon if necessary. Astrid took a cautious look through a peephole in the door then visibly relaxed as she unlocked. "Come on in, Willard. Coffee's fresh," she said, reaching for another cup.

It was Billy Scudamore. Willard, eh? Seemed to suit him---more dignified when his teaching career eventually took off. As he entered, he seemed to fill the trailer. I'm a big guy but at least there were a few inches to spare between my head and the ceiling. Billy---or Willard---had to crouch a little to fit.

He looked a bit surprised to see me. "Hey, Malone, what're you doing here?"

I glanced at Astrid and she nodded slightly. "It's okay, Sam, Willard's one of the good guys."

The Feds might disagree if ever they found his still but she trusted him so that had to be good enough for me. "Astrid called me because she found some suspicious papers in Bayliss's office and doesn't trust any of her fellow cops. There might be some connection to Arnie's death." I filled him in on the visits I'd had from Bayliss and Stink. "Going by the company he keeps, Bayliss is a very bad man---the only thing is, I haven't figured out what his racket is yet."

Willard nodded. "That's why I've come to Astrid. I don't trust any of the other deputies either. Those who ain't on the take are wearing blinkers or they're stupid. I remembered you were taking some vacation time, Astrid, so I came here. I found a body up in the woods near my place. It ain't a natural death so I figure a cop needs to see it, an honest cop." He grinned at me. "And maybe an honest private eye."

"Okay, but how do we get there?" Astrid objected, "My car would certainly be recognised and Sam's maybe."

"I've got my old pick-up," Willard said, "Nobody takes any notice of that so you can hide down under some sacking when we pass through the town. Folks'll likely think I'm making an early delivery to some local lush. You got any face masks here?"

"A few."

"Okay, a couple each for you and Malone. Better sprinkle them with some fancy scent. Already done mine with moonshine. As good as ether." He looked a little anxiously at Astrid. "Maybe you'd like to hang back, Astrid, it's not nice."

Astrid gave an unladylike snort. "Willard honey, I'm a cop. I've seen traffic accidents that'd make you sick to your stomach."

"You, Malone?"

"I was on Iwo Jima," I told him.

He nodded. "Semper Fi. Let's go."

* * * * *

He was right, it wasn't nice. The breeze dispersing the early morning mist was blowing in our faces and we caught the smell some time, some distance from the body. I was certainly grateful for Astrid's perfume sprinkled on my face mask. Still, it's one of these smells you can never quite forget. The naked victim hadn't been dead long---few days maybe---but his grave was shallow and there had obviously been some animal predation. There was a nasty exit wound in his head where something like a .38 or .45 bullet had torn through and there were numerous wounds on his torso. Willard pointed to several. "These look like stab wounds to you?"

I looked closely. The cuts were long and deep and had been made by something finer than an ordinary knife. "Nope."

"What I thought," he said, "Any ideas?"

"I reckon they look like surgical incisions," I replied, almost unthinkingly. And then the magic lightbulb in my head came on. Surgical incisions! Suddenly I thought understood the Claiborne connection.

"Burke and Hare," I muttered, almost to myself.

"Who are Burke and Hare?" asked Astrid, "Where do they fit into this?"

"Not who are they," I answered, "but who were they. Back around the early nineteenth century and before that, dissection was illegal in most countries including the States. A lot of towns had guys who made a living digging up freshly buried corpses and selling them to doctors for dissection and anatomy studies. Some places called the grave robbers 'resurrection men'. Burke and Hare were resurrection men in Scotland but they got to thinking that digging up bodies was too much like hard work. So they simply killed people off the streets and sold the bodies on. They had up to twenty-odd victims before they were caught."

"And you think this is a modern equivalent?"

"Looks like it," I agreed, "I think I might even know who the doctor is."

"So what now?" Willard asked.

Astrid took charge. "We get back down the hill and call in the State Police. We'd best get back to Jacobsville and make the call from there. The local telephone operators are all Bayliss's snitches."

We were halfway down to the highway when Willard said: "Gotta go back, there's something I forgot. Catch you guys up." He turned and started striding back up the hill. I stared after him, still a bit suspicious. What had he forgotten? He'd come up here with nothing and that's what he'd been going down with.

Astrid gave me a gentle elbow in the ribs. "Relax, I've told you Willard's one of the good guys."

We reached the spot where the pick-up was parked and I was just about to give Astrid a hand up into the back when there was a roar of engine followed by a screeching of brakes and a black Cadillac Fleetwood sedan with dark-tinted windows pulled up beside us. The driver scrambled out. It was an old friend. Stink. The inside of the car must have smelled rancid with him in it. He gave me a nasty grin. "Hey peeper, now who's gonna kill who?"

His bike-chain fist was wrapped in bandages and his ugly face was well-bruised, just as if someone had battered it with a pistol butt. Did my heart good to see it. That was the good news. The bad news was that he had a tommy-gun pointed directly at us. Astrid slipped a hand into mine; there was a little tremor but that was all. The girl had guts---that was the only sign of fear she gave. I wasn't feeling all that heroic myself. Neither of us would have had a chance to go for our weapons. We'd have been ripped to pieces before half-way there.

The sedan's back door opened and Sheriff Bayliss climbed out. He had a tommy-gun too. Funny the little things you notice, almost as if imminent death sharpens the senses. Both weapons had narrow box magazines rather than the drum magazines you see in gangster movies. They didn't look as dramatic but they'd do the job just as well. Bayliss turned to look in the back of the motor. "You stay there until I call you," he told an unseen occupant.

Unlike Stink, Bayliss didn't look particularly triumphant or gloating, just matter of fact. "Now here's luck. Good thing Zack was out early this morning and saw you going up the hill. Saves us the job of going looking for you. You should have listened, Malone, stayed in your cosy city office. Still, Stink's going to enjoy this." He turned to Astrid. "Sorry, Lundqvist, thought it was odd, you suddenly wanting vacation time. You're a good cop---or you were... too goddam nosy, that was your problem..."

"Okay, let's get this show over with," he said to Stink, "We can catch up with the 'shiner later. There was a double clickety-clack! noise as both men pulled back the bolts on their tommy-guns. Astrid's hand tightened on mine.

Then from somewhere close behind me came a deafening double blast like a pair of howitzers going off. Stink was thrown backwards into a mess of thick bushes and lay there, heels drumming the ground for several moments before becoming still. Bayliss was lifted as if by a giant hand and slammed back against a tree, to slide down into a sitting position at its base, open eyes opaque and staring at nothing unless it was the gateway to hell. A dead finger must have tightened on a trigger by reflex for there was an immediate chattering of a machine gun. I threw Astrid to the ground and lay on top of her although thankfully the bullets went wide. It only took a few seconds for the magazine to empty. I got to my feet and helped Astrid up.

As she dusted herself down she said: "I bet you don't get many dates if you treat all the girls like that."

"Nope, normally I just drag them around by the hair. That's why I'm a lonely old Neanderthal."

She reached up and kissed my cheek. "Thanks, Malone."

Willard Scudamore stepped out from a thicket, wisps of smoke curling from the barrels of his scatter-gun. Winking at me he grinned: "Remembered to load it this time." I looked over the bad guys. Both Bayliss and Stink had massive wounds to the chest. Neither of them would be standing trial, at least not in this world.

There was a querulous voice from the back of the Caddy. "Can I come out now?"

"Yes, come on out," I invited.

A tall skinny character carrying a surgical case clambered out of the car and stood blinking in the morning sunlight. With his thinning hair and thick-lensed glasses, he was a comic-book stereotype of an absent-minded professor or a Captain Marvel villain. He gazed around at us and something like shock and horror crossed his face. He realised the wrong people were still standing, the wrong people lying dead. I slightly altered a famous quotation from history.

"Doctor Claiborne, I presume..."

"But... but... this isn't right..." He sounded like a spoilt and petulant child deprived of a treat. "It's not supposed to be like this... you're supposed to be dead..." Almost in tears, he was still whimpering: "It's not right, it's not right..." when Astrid slapped the cuffs on. Doctor Eugene Clairborne may have been intellectually brilliant but he was definitely an emotionally stunted narcissist.

Sawed-off shotguns are illegal in many places. Willard had saved our lives so we couldn't endanger his freedom. Before calling the State Police we made him bury the gun and replace it with a legal shotgun that he owned. A couple of random shots into the trees to leave residue in the barrels and nobody could tell that this wasn't the weapon that killed Bayliss and Stink.

* * * * *

And that was more-or-less the end of it, for me anyway after the various authorities had squeezed every last jot of information from me they could. After that they had their work cut out for them and it wasn't going to be an easy ride. Before I left Malanuk I took time for a long telephone call making sure Andrew Durrance got his front-page exclusive. Good job I did. It didn't take long for the vultures to descend. There are only two pay-phones in Malanuk and I heard there were a lot of fights between reporters over whose turn it was. Then I said goodbye to Astrid and Willard and headed for home.

When I got there, I was able to stand Sal's men down. There'd been no trouble with Death's Demons. They were giving themselves so much trouble that they didn't need to bother outsiders. As soon as the bikers got word of Stink's death, internecine war broke out in the club over who would succeed him. The kill count got pretty high within several days and it looked like the end for Death's Demons. The Hell's Angels were mopping up the survivors. As polite as ever, Howard told Cara it had been a pleasure to protect her and, tipping his hat as he left, went back to see what Mulrooney had lined up for him next.

With the help of a cadaver-dog team, the State Police dug up at least a dozen corpses in the forests, from bones to almost fresh. Most had head shots, some had broken necks (Stink having fun, I guess). All of those not too far gone showed signs of expert surgical work and autopsies noted that various organs were missing. Quite a lot of specimens turned up in preserving jars in Claiborne's private lab. The way it looked: Bayliss organised the victims and the hits, Stink carried them out and likely dug the graves, and Claiborne performed the surgery and dished out the money. The police suspected that given time, more dead people might appear in other areas of the forests. Signs were that most of the dead were derelicts unlikely to be missed. Of course, the police couldn't get any information from Bayliss or Stink ---Billy Scudamore's scatter-gun had seen to that. As for Claiborne, he simply clammed up.

Officially, Arnie Scudamore's murder remained unsolved. Most---including Nestor to my surprise, and he was almost polite to me---agreed it was likely down to Stink but there was no direct evidence and the biker was dead so it went into the cold case files. The filling station guy Zack was interrogated and deemed to be innocent of any crime. All he knew was that Bayliss tipped him a few bucks now and then to report any strangers seen mooching around. No crime in accepting tips otherwise most of the country's workers would be doing time.

There had been various legal arguments over jurisdiction, some of the killings taking place in our State, others next door. To settle the matter, federal authorities took the case on under some obscure law governing medical malpractise. They had reasons to believe others were backing Claiborne's experiments and the Federal Attorney offered Claiborne a plea bargain. He would be treated as an accessory rather than an actual killer and given twenty-five years in one of the softer Federal penitentiaries if he named names. The good doctor kept his mouth very firmly zipped and was looking at the electric chair. I wasn't sure he'd ever sit in it though. He was wealthy enough to hire the best defense lawyers and you know how cunning lawyers can be when you dangle heaps of money before their greedy eyes. They could play this out for years. Claiborne would likely end up as some kind of national hero...

Just my random thought but if there were others involved and Claiborne was keeping his mouth shut, they must be either very powerful or very nasty. Or both---the two frequently went together. Still, that was the Feds' worry.

One morning a few weeks later, Cara brought me in the day's mail and there were two items of interest. The first, opened by Cara, was a letter from Claude Fenwick thanking me for clearing his name, not that it had done much good at the time. Seems a nosy neighbour had tipped him off about his wife's shenanigans. He'd caught her and the kid Jimmy Scott in flagrante and Jimmy had confessed all including how the now estranged, soon-to-be divorced, Mrs Fenwick had tried to stiff me. Claude apologised and sent me a check for five hundred to compensate. It wasn't his responsibility but checks like that are always gratefully received.

The other was a fancy envelope, thick and cream-colored, which was marked Private and Personal. When I opened it and took out the enclosed stiff card with the ornate script, I couldn't help laughing. It was an invitation headed:

WILLARD H SCUDAMORE & ASTRID ANDERSSEN LUNDQVIST

"Hey, Cara!" I called, "Guess what---we're going to a wedding!"

I thought I heard a little sigh: "If only..."

The End