Carrion Comfort (13 page)

“And this was the same weapon used to kill Mrs. Drayton.”

“Yup.”

“Were there witnesses to that shooting?”

“Not quite,” said Gentry. “But a couple of folks saw Albert get onto the elevator. They remember him because he was headin’ away from the room where the shouting was coming from. Someone’d just discovered Mrs. Drayton after the shooting. Funny thing, though, none of the folks remember seeing the revolver in the boy’s hand. That’s not unusual, though. You could probably carry a hog leg into a crowd ’n’ no one’d take notice.”

“Who was it that first saw Mrs. Drayton’s body?”

“We’re not sure,” said the sheriff. “There was a lot of confusion up there and then the fun began in the lobby.”

“Doctor Laski,” said Haines, “if you cannot help us with any information about Mrs. Drayton, I’m not sure how useful all of this is.” The FBI agent was obviously ready to terminate the interview, but he was interrupted by the secretary who bustled in with coffee. Haines set his Styrofoam cup on the file cabinet. Laski smiled gratefully and sipped at the lukewarm brew. Gentry’s coffee came in a large white mug that said BOSS on the side. “Thank you, Linda Mae.”

Laski shrugged slightly. “I wished only to offer any help that I could,” he said softly. “I realize that you gentlemen are extraordinarily busy. I will not take up any more of your time.” He set the coffee cup on the desk and rose to his feet.

“Whoa!” cried Bobby Joe Gentry. “Since you’re here, I want to get your ideas on a coupla things.” He turned to Haines. “The professor here was a consultant for the NYPD during that Son-of-Sam stuff a coupla years ago.”

“Just one of many,” said Laski. “We helped to put together a personality profile on the murderer. In the end, that was largely irrelevant. The killer was apprehended through fairly straightforward police work.”

“Yeah,” said Gentry. “But you wrote a book on this kind of mass murder stuff. Dick an’ me sure’d like your opinion on this mess.” He rose and walked over to a long chalkboard. There was a piece of brown wrapping paper attached with masking tape. Gentry flipped up the paper to reveal a board covered with chalky diagrams and scrawled names and times. “You probably read about the rest of our little cast of characters here.”

“Some,” said Laski. “The New York papers gave special attention to Nina Drayton, the little girl, and her grandfather.”

“Yes, Kathy,” said Gentry. He rubbed a knuckle on the board next to her name. “Kathleen Marie Eliot. Ten years old. I saw her fourth grade school picture yesterday. Cute. Lot nicer to look at than the crime scene photos over in the file there.” Gentry paused and rubbed at his cheeks. Laski took another sip of coffee and waited. “We got four basic scenes here,” said the sheriff and tapped at a street diagram. “One citizen killed here in broad daylight on Calhoun Street. Another one dead here a block or so away in the Battery Marina. Three bodies in the Fuller residence here . . .” He tapped at a neat little square in which three “X’s” clustered together. “And our grand finale with four dead here at the Mansard House.”

“Is there a common thread?” asked Laski. “That’s the hell of it,” sighed Gentry. “There is and there ain’t, if you take my meaning.” He waved at the column of names. “Mr. Preston here, he’s the black gentleman found slashed to death on Calhoun, he’s been a local photographer and merchant in the Old Section for twenty-six years. We’re working under the assumption that he was an innocent bystander, killed by the next corpse we got here . . .”

“Karl Thorne,” Laski read from the list. “The missing woman’s servant,” said Haines. “Yeah,” said Gentry, “but despite what was on his driver’s license, his name wasn’t Thorne. Or Karl. Fingerprint identification we got back from InterPol today says that he used to be known as Oscar Felix Haupt, a cheap little Swiss hotel thief. He disappeared from Berne in 1953.”

“Good heavens,” muttered the psychiatrist, “do they usually keep fingerprints of ex-hotel thieves on file for so long?”

“Haupt was more than that,” interjected Haines. “It seems that he was the prime suspect in a rather lurid 1953 murder case involving a French baron visiting a spa. Haupt disappeared shortly after that. The Swiss police thought at the time that Haupt had been murdered, probably by European syndicate types.”

“Guess they were wrong,” said Sheriff Gentry. “What made you query InterPol?” asked Laski. “Just a hunch,” said Gentry and looked back at the chalkboard. “OK, we got Karl Oscar Felix Thorne-Haupt dead here at the marina and if the craziness had stopped there we could’ve cobbled together some motive . . . boat theft, maybe . . . the bullet in Haupt’s brain came from the night watchman’s gun, a thirty-eight. Problem is, Haupt was all beat to hell besides being shot twice. There were two kinds of bloodstains on his clothes, besides his own, I mean, and samples of skin and tissue under his fingernails that pretty well cinches that he was Mr. Preston’s assailant.”

“Most confusing,” said Saul Laski. “Ah, Professor, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” Gentry rapped his knuckles next to three more names: Barrett Kramer, George Hodges, Kathleen Marie Eliot. “You know this lady, Professor?”

“Barrett Kramer?” echoed Laski. “No. I read her name in the paper, but other than that I don’t recognize it.”

“Ah, well. Worth a try. She was Mrs. Drayton’s traveling companion. ‘Executive assistant,’ I think the New York people who claimed Mrs. Drayton’s body called her. Woman in her mid-thirties. Brunette. Sort of a muscular build?”

“No,” said Laski, “I do not remember her. She did not come with Mrs. Drayton to either of the sessions. She may have been at my lecture on the evening I met Mrs. Drayton, but I did not notice her.”

“Hokay. Well, we got Miss Kramer who was shot by Mr. Hodges’s S&W thirty-eight. Only the coroner’s pretty sure that that didn’t kill her. She appears to have broken her neck in a fall down the stairs at the Fuller house. She was still breathin’ when the paramedics got there but was pronounced dead at Emergency. No brain waves or something.

“Now, the damn thing is, forensic evidence suggests that poor old Mr. Hodges didn’t even shoot the lady. He was found
here
”—Gentry tapped another diagram—“in the hallway of the Fuller house. His revolver was found
here
, on the floor of Mrs. Drayton’s room at Mansard House. So what do we have here? Eight victims, nine if you count Albert LaFollette, five weapons . . .”

“Five weapons?” asked Laski. “Excuse me, Sheriff. I did not mean to interrupt.”

“No, hell, that’s OK. Yeah, five weapons that we know about. The old forty-five that Albert used, Hodges’s thirty-eight, a knife found near Haupt’s body, and a goddamned fireplace poker that the Kramer woman used to kill the little girl.”

“Barrett
Kramer
used to kill the little girl?”

“Uh-huh. At least her fingerprints were all over the goddamned thing and the girl’s blood was all over Kramer.”

“That is still only four weapons,” said Laski. “Umm, oh, yeah, there’s also a wooden walking stick we found at the back door of the marina. There was blood on it.”

Saul Laski shook his head and looked over at Richard Haines. The agent had his arms crossed and was staring at the chalkboard. He looked very tired and very disgusted.

“A real can of worms, huh, Professor?” finished Gentry. He walked back to his chair and collapsed into it with a sigh. He leaned back and took a sip of cold coffee from the large mug. “Any theories?”

Laski smiled ruefully and shook his head. He stared intently at the chalkboard as if trying to memorize the information there. After a minute he scratched at his beard and said softly, “No theories, I am afraid, Sheriff. But I do have to ask the obvious question.”

“What’s that?”

“Where is Mrs. Fuller? The lady whose house was the scene of such carnage?”

“
Miz
Fuller,” corrected Gentry. “From what the neighbors tell us, she was one of Charleston’s grand old spinsters. And that title of Miz has been used around here for almost two hundred years, Professor. And to answer your question— there’s no sign of Miz Melanie Fuller. There was one report that an unidentified older woman was seen in the upstairs hall at the hotel right after the shooting of Mrs. Drayton, but no one’s confirmed that it was Miz Fuller. We have a three-state alert out for the lady, but not a word so far.”

“She would seem to be the key,” suggested Laski diffidently. “Uh-huh. Maybe. Then again, her torn-up purse was found stuffed behind the toilet down at the Battery Marina. Bloodstains on it matched those on Karl-Oscar’s made-in-Paris switchblade.”

“My God,” breathed the psychiatrist. “There’s no sense to it.”

There was a moment of silence and then Haines stood. “Perhaps it is simpler than it appears,” he said and tugged at his cuffs. “Mrs. Drayton was visiting Mrs. Fuller . . . excuse me, Miz Fuller . . . the day before the murders. Fingerprints in the house confirm that she was there and a neighbor saw her enter on Friday evening. Mrs. Drayton had the poor judgment to hire this Barrett Kramer as an assistant. Kramer was wanted in Philadelphia and Baltimore for charges dating back to 1968.”

“What kind of charges?” asked Laski. “Vice and narcotics,” snapped the agent. “So somehow Miss Kramer and Fuller’s man— this Thorne— meet to plot against their elderly employers. After all, Mrs. Drayton’s estate is said to come to almost two million dollars and Mrs. Fuller had a healthy bank account here in Charleston.”

“But how could they have . . .” began the psychiatrist. “Just a minute. So Kramer and Thorne— Haupt, whatever— murder your Mrs. Fuller and dispose of her body . . . the harbor patrol is searching the bay right now. Only her neighbor, the old security guard, interrupts their plans. He shoots Haupt and returns to the Fuller home only to encounter Kramer there. The old man’s granddaughter sees him across the courtyard and rushes over in time to become a victim with him. Albert LaFollette, another conspirator, panics when Kramer and Haupt don’t show up, kills Mrs. Drayton, and runs amok.”

Gentry pivoted back and forth in his chair, his hands clasped over his stomach. He was smiling slightly. “What about Joseph Preston, the photographer?”

“As you said, an innocent bystander,” replied Haines. “He may have seen where Haupt dumped the old lady’s body. There’s no doubt that the kraut killed him. The skin and tissue samples under Preston’s fingernails match up perfectly with the claw marks on Haupt’s face. What was left of Haupt’s face.”

“Yeah, what about his eye?” asked Gentry.

“His eye? Whose eye?” The psychiatrist looked from the sheriff to the FBI man.

“Haupt’s,” answered Gentry. “It’s missing. Someone did a job on the left side of his face with a club.”

Haines shrugged. “It’s still the only scenario that makes any sense. We have two employees, ex-felons, who work for two rich old ladies. Their attempted kidnapping or murder or what ever backfires and ends up as a chain of killings.”

“Yeah,” said Gentry. “Maybe.”

In the silence that followed, Saul Laski could hear laughter from the other offices in the County Building. Somewhere outside a siren howled and then fell into silence.

“What do you think, Professor? Any other ideas?” asked Gentry.

Saul Laski slowly shook his head. “I find it most baffling.”

“What about the idea in your book of a ‘resonance of violence’?” asked Gentry.

“Mmmm,” said Laski, “this was not exactly the kind of situation I had in mind. There certainly appears to be a chain of violence, but I fail to see the catalyst.”

“Catalyst?” repeated Haines. “What the hell are we talking about here?”

Gentry set his feet up on the desk and mopped at his neck with a red bandanna. “Dr. Laski’s book talked about situations that program people into murder.”

“I don’t get it,” said Haines. “What do you mean, ‘program’? You mean that old liberal argument about poverty and social conditions causing crime?” It was apparent by the tone of the agent’s voice what he thought of that point of view.

“Not at all,” said Laski. “It was my hypothesis that there are some situations, conditions, institutions, even individuals, which set up a stress response in others that will culminate in violence, even homicide, when there seems to be no immediate causal relationship.”

The FBI agent frowned. “I still don’t get it.”

“Hell,” said Sheriff Gentry, “you seen our holding tank back there, Dick? No? Jeez, you gotta look into it before you leave. We painted it pink last August. We call it the Pepto-Bismol Hilton. But the damned thing works. Violent incidents have been down about sixty percent since we slopped that paint on and we haven’t exactly been getting a better brand of clientele. Of course, that’s sort of the opposite of what you’re talking about, isn’t it, Professor?”

Laski adjusted his glasses. As he raised his hand, Gentry caught a glimpse of faded blue numbers tattooed on his forearm just above the wrist. “Yes, but aspects of the same theory may apply,” said the psychiatrist. “Color-environment studies have shown measurable attitudinal and behavioral changes in subjects. The reasons for the decrease in violent incidents in such an environment are vague, at best, but the empirical data stand . . . as you yourself attested, Sheriff . . . and seem to imply a modification of psycho-physiological response simply through altering the color variable. My thesis suggests that some of the less comprehensible incidents of violent crime are the result of a more complex series of stimulus factors.”

“Uh-huh,” said Haines. He glanced at his watch and looked at Gentry. The sheriff was sitting comfortably with his feet propped on his desk. Irritated, Haines brushed imaginary lint from his gray slacks. “I’m afraid I don’t see how this can help us, Dr. Laski,” said the agent. “Sheriff Gentry is dealing with a messy series of murders here, not some lab mice that will run through a maze for him.”

Laski nodded and shrugged slightly. “I was visiting,” he said. “I decided to tell the sheriff of my association with Mrs. Drayton and to offer any assistance I could give. I realize that I must be taking up precious time of yours. Thank you for the coffee, Sheriff.”

The psychiatrist stood and moved toward the door. “Thanks for your help, Professor,” said Gentry and blew his nose into his red handkerchief. He rubbed the cloth back and forth as if to scratch an itch. “Oh, there is one other question I meant to ask.”