CHAPTER 26
AS IF THEY WERE THE DEGENERATE ELITE OF ancient Rome, reclining in midbacchanal, their togas scandalously disarranged, the nameless dead revealed here a smooth and creamy shoulder, here the pale curve of a breast, here a blue-veined thigh, here a hand with the fingers curled in a subtle obscene gesture, here a delicate foot and slender ankle, and here half a profile in which one open eye stared with milky lust.
The least-superstitious witness to this grotesque display might be inclined to suspect that in the absence of a living observer, these unidentified vagrants and teenage runaways would visit bunk to bunk. In the most lonely hours after midnight, might not the restless dead pair up in a cold and hideous parody of passion?
If Corky Laputa had believed in a moral code or even if he had believed that good taste required certain universal rules of social conduct, he might have passed his two-minute wait by rearranging these carelessly draped shrouds, insisting upon modesty even among the deceased.
Instead, he enjoyed the scene because in this chamber was the ultimate fruit of anarchy. Besides, with considerable excitement, ?he [178] anticipated the arrival of the usually unflappable Roman Castevet, who would be fully flapped on this occasion.
Almost two minutes to the tick, the lever-action door handle clicked, creaked, and eased down. The door cracked open, but only an inch.
As though he expected to discover that Corky awaited him with a camera crew and a pack of muckraking reporters, Roman peered through the gap, his one revealed eye as wide as that of a startled owl.
?Come in, come, come,? Corky encouraged. ?You?re among friends here, even though it is your intention eventually to dissect some of them.?
Opening the door only wide enough to accommodate his thin frame, Roman slipped into the cadaver vault, pausing to peer back worriedly at the hallway before closing himself in with Corky and the twenty naughty members of the toga party.
?What the hell are you wearing?? asked the nervous pathologist.
Corky turned in place, flaring the skirt of his yellow slicker. ?Fashionable rain gear. Do you like the hat??
?How did you slip by security in that ludicrous outfit? How did you slip by security at all??
?No slipping necessary. I presented my credentials.?
?What credentials? You teach empty-calorie modern fiction to a bunch of self-important sluts and brain-dead, snot-nosed wonder-boys.?
Like many in the sciences, Roman Castevet held a dim view of the liberal-arts departments in contemporary universities and of those students who sought, first, truth through literature and, second, a delayed entry into the job market.
Taking no offense, in fact approving of Roman?s nasty antisocial vitriol, Corky explained: ?The pleasant fellows at your security desk think I?m a visiting pathologist from Indianapolis, here to discuss with you certain deeply puzzling entomological details related to the victims of a serial killer operating throughout the Midwest.?
[179] ?Huh? Why would they think that??
?I have a source for excellent forged documents.?
Roman boggled. ?You??
?Frequently, it?s advisable for me to carry first-rate false identification.?
?Are you delusional or merely stupid??
?As I?ve explained previously, I?m not just an effete professor who gets a thrill from hanging out with anarchists.?
?Yeah, right,? Roman said scornfully.
?I promote anarchy at every opportunity in my daily life, often at the risk of arrest and imprisonment.?
?You?re a regular Che Guevara.?
?Many of my operations are as clever and shocking as they are unconventional. You didn?t think I wanted those ten foreskins just for some sick personal use, did you??
?Yeah, that?s exactly what I thought. When we met at that boring university mixer, you seemed like the grand pooh-bah of the demented, a moral and mental mutant of classic proportions.?
?Coming from a Satanist,? Corky said with a smile, ?that could be taken as a compliment.?
?It?s not meant as one,? Roman replied impatiently, angrily.
At his best, groomed and togged and breath-freshened for serious socializing, Castevet was an unattractive man. Anger made him uglier than usual.
Slat-thin, all bony hips and elbows and sharp shoulders, with an Adam?s apple more prominent than his nose and with a nose sharper than any Corky had ever seen on another member of the human species, with gaunt cheeks and with a fleshless chin that resembled the knob of a femur, Roman appeared to have a serious eating disorder.
Every time that he met Castevet?s bird-keen, reptile-intense eyes, however, and whenever he caught the pathologist, for no apparent reason, sensuously licking his lips, which were the only ripe feature [180] of that scarecrow face and form, Corky suspected that a fearsome erotic need spun the wheels of the man?s metabolism almost fast enough to cause smoke to issue from various orifices. Had there been a betting pool regarding the average number of calories that Roman burned up every day in obsessive self-abuse alone, Corky would have wagered heavily on at least three thousand-and he would no doubt have ensured a comfortable retirement with his winnings.
?Well, whatever you think of me,? Corky said, ?nevertheless, I would like to place an order for another ten foreskins.?
?Hey, get it through your head-I?m not doing business with you anymore. You?re reckless, coming here like this.?
Partly as a profitable sideline, but also partly from a sense of religious duty and as an expression of his abiding faith in the King of Hell, Roman Castevet provided-only from cadavers-selected body parts, internal organs, blood, malignant tumors, occasionally even entire brains to other Satanists. His customers, other than Corky, had both a theological and a practical interest in arcane rituals designed to petition His Satanic Majesty for special favors or to summon actual demons out of the fiery pit. Frequently, after all, the most essential ingredients in a black-magic formula could not be purchased at the nearest Wal-Mart.
?You?re overreacting,? Corky said.
?I?m not overreacting. You?re imprudent, you?re foolhardy.?
?Foolhardy?? Corky smiled, nearly laughed. ?All of a sudden you seem awfully prissy for a man who believes plunder, torture, rape, and murder will be rewarded in the afterlife.?
?Lower your voice,? Roman demanded in a fierce whisper, though Corky had continued to speak in a pleasant conversational tone. ?If somebody finds you here with me, it could mean my job.?
?Not at all. I?m a visiting pathologist from Indianapolis, and we?re discussing your current manpower shortage and this deplorable backlog of unidentified cadavers.?
[181] ?You?ll ruin me,? Roman moaned.
?All I?ve come here to do,? Corky lied, ?is to order ten more foreskins. I don?t expect you to collect them while I wait. I just placed the order in person because I thought it would give you a chuckle.?
Although Roman Castevet appeared too emaciated, too juiceless to produce tears, his feverish black eyes grew watery with frustration.
?Anyway,? Corky continued, ?there?s a bigger threat to your job than being caught here with me-if someone discovers you people have mistakenly penned up a living man in this place with all these dead bodies.?
?Are you wired on something??
?I already told you on the phone, a few minutes ago. One of these unfortunate souls is still alive.?
?What kind of mind game is this?? Roman demanded.
?It?s not a game. It?s true. I heard him murmuring ?Help me, help me,? so soft, barely loud enough to hear.?
?Heard who??
?I tracked him down, peeled the shroud back from his face. He?s paralyzed. Facial muscles distorted by a stroke.?
Hunching closer, bristling like the collection of dry sticks in a bindle of kindling, Roman insisted on eye-to-eye conversation, as if he believed the fierceness of his gaze would convey the message that his words had failed to deliver.
Corky blithely continued: ?The poor guy was probably comatose when they brought him in here, then he regained consciousness. But he?s awfully weak.?
A crack of uncertainty breached Roman Castevet?s armor of disbelief. He broke eye contact and swept the bunks with his gaze. ?Who??
?Over there,? Corky said brightly, indicating the back of the vault, where the light from the overhead fixture barely reached, leaving the recumbent dead shrouded in gloom as well as in white cotton cloth. [182] ?Seems to me I?m saving all your jobs by alerting you to this, so you ought to fill my order for free, out of gratitude.?
Moving toward the back of the vault, Roman said, ?Which one??
Stepping close behind the pathologist, Corky replied, ?On the left, the second from the bottom.?
As Roman bent to peel the shroud off the face of the corpse, Corky raised his right arm, revealing the hand that until now had been concealed in the sleeve of his yellow slicker, and the ice pick in the hand. With judicious aim, great force, and utter confidence, he drove the weapon into the pathologist?s back.
Placed with precision, an ice pick can penetrate atriums and ventricles, causing such a convulsive shock in cardiac muscle that the heart stops in an instant and forever.
With a rustle of clothes and a quiet knockety-knock of folding limbs, Roman Castevet collapsed without a cry to the floor.
Corky didn?t need to check for a pulse. The gaping mouth, from which no breath escaped, and the eyes, as fixed as the glass orbs in a fine work of taxidermy, confirmed the perfection of his aim.
Preparation paid off. At home, using this same ice pick, Corky had practiced on a CPR dummy that he had stolen from the university medical school.
If he?d needed to stab twice, three, four times, or if Roman?s heart had continued to pump for even a short while, the assault could have proved messy. For that reason, he?d worn the stainproof slicker.
In the unlikely event that one of the vault?s properly chilled treasures sprung an unfortunate leak, the tile floor featured a large drain. Near the door, a collapsible vinyl hose on a reel was attached to a wall spigot.
Corky knew about this janitorial equipment from the articles that he had read two years ago, when the rat scandal had made the front page. Happily, he didn?t need the hose.
He lifted Roman into one of the empty bunks along the back wall of the vault, where the shadows served his scheme.
[183] From a deep inner pocket of his slicker, he withdrew the sheet that earlier he?d purchased in a department store at the mall. He draped the sheet over Roman, being careful to cover him entirely, for he needed to conceal both the identity of the corpse and the fact that, unlike the others here, it was fully clothed.
Because death had been instantaneous and the wound had been minute, no blood seeped forth to stain the sheet and thus call attention to the freshness of this carcass.
In a day or two, or three, Roman would most likely be found by a morgue employee taking inventory or withdrawing a cadaver for an overdue autopsy. Another front-page story for the medical examiner.
Corky regretted having to kill a man like Roman Castevet. As a good Satanist and a committed anarchist, the pathologist had served well in the campaign to destabilize the social order and hasten its collapse.
Soon, however, ghastly events at Channing Manheim?s estate would make big headlines worldwide. Authorities would commit extraordinary resources to discover the identity of the man who?d sent the taunting gifts in the black boxes.
Logic would send them to private mortuaries and public morgues, in search of the source of the ten foreskins. If Roman had come under suspicion during that investigation, he would have tried to save his own hide by fingering Corky.
Anarchists labored under no obligation of loyalty to one another, which was as it should be among champions of disorder.
Indeed, Corky had other loose ends to tie up before the yuletide celebrations could begin.
Considering that his hands were sheathed in latex gloves, which had been hidden from his victim in the roomy sleeves of his slicker, he could have left the ice pick in the vault without worrying that he might provide police with incriminating fingerprints. Instead, he returned it to its sheath and then to a pocket not only because it might serve him well again, but also because it now had sentimental value.
[184] Leaving the morgue, he said a friendly good-bye to the night security men. They had a thankless job, protecting the dead from the living. He even paused long enough to share with them an obscene joke about an attorney and a chicken.
He had no fear that eventually they would be able to provide the police with a useful description of his face. In his droopy hat and tent-like slicker, he was an eccentric and amusing figure about whom no one would remember more than his costume.
Later, in a fireplace at home, while he enjoyed a brandy, he would burn all the ID that had established him as a pathologist from Indianapolis. He possessed numerous additional sets of documentation for other identities if and when he needed them.
Now he returned to the night, the rain.
And so the time had come to deal with Rolf Reynerd, who by his actions had shown himself to be every bit as unfit for life as he had proved to be unfit for soap-opera stardom.