The Burn Palace

by Stephen Dobyns

“Is Brantley inside?”

  “Nope.”

  “So where is he?”

  “Out at the Burn . . . out at the crematorium.”

  “What’d you call it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Tell me.”

  “The Burn Palace. That’s what Larry calls it. Digger don’t like it.”

  “Who’s Larry?”

  “He’s in charge of the Burn Palace when Digger’s not around.”

  “You been smoking dope?”

  Seymour turned, looked at Woody’s shoes, and then raised his eyes to his face. The whites of Seymour’s eyes were pinkish. “It’s medicinal.”

  “Yeah?”

  “On account of Iraq.” Seymour turned back to the window.

  “Did a doctor prescribe it?”

  “Not in so many words.”

  “What’d you do in Iraq?”

  “You know, the usual shit.”

  Briefly, Woody wanted to search Seymour for drugs and then take him to the police station, but that was the anger talking. Seymour was only fixing a window. It wasn’t exactly a capital crime.

  “I guess you don’t know how long Brantley’s going to be at the Burn Palace.”

  “No idea.”

  Just to needle Seymour, Woody asked, “Did Carl Krause break that window?”

  Again Seymour turned slowly toward him. “What the fuck would Carl break a goddamn window for?”

  “Just wondering.” Woody walked back to his truck, trying to conceal his surprise. He was almost sure that Seymour was lying. He decided to take a drive to the Burn Palace.

  • • •

  Acting chief Fred Bonaldo’s ambition was to be well liked. His passion for parades and uniforms formed part of this ambition. How could you not admire a guy in uniform? As for parades, he always tried to put himself up front; and if he got stuck in the band, he’d be the guy banging on the bass drum. Though he rarely wore his uniform as acting chief, he made sure to wear his blue suit, which was uniformlike. His glasses, he felt, gave him an intellectual look; his baldness suggested maturity; his burgeoning belly bespoke gravitas. He had a smile for one and all, kissed babies, patted small dogs. Everything was in place, he thought, to be well liked, to command respect. Yet he knew he was a dismal failure.

  And whose fault was it? That damn baby’s and that awful snake’s. They were nails in the coffin of his ambition.

  Bonaldo had a passion for charts—organizational charts, charts of rising profits—and he had a chart detailing his inexorable progression between acting chief and permanent chief. He even took into account possible setbacks and slow periods. After all, he couldn’t expect a sharply ascending line. It seemed immodest.

  Maybe he could have coped with the missing baby and the snake, but further stuff kept happening, and worst of all, or almost, had been those briefings with Captain Brotman. They’d been designed to make him look bad. The South Kingstown lieutenant, Joe Doyle, hated him, and the rest didn’t like him much.

  None of it mattered now. Acting chief Bonaldo had, metaphysically speaking, thrown up his hands. He’d kissed his ambitions good-bye. He would be happy to return to real estate. And the moment of change was perfectly clear to him. It was when he’d put his hand on that furry scalp. That was the moment the scales had fallen from his eyes. Of course he’d screamed; it made perfect sense to scream.

  These were the thoughts that came to Bonaldo as he sat at his desk Friday morning. He hadn’t signed up for having the shit scared out of him. Of course he hadn’t had a moment’s sleep, and, because of his screaming, many others had had their sleep cut short. Several had dialed 911. In no time police officers had arrived to find their acting chief having hysterics. No one blamed him, at least to his face. It wouldn’t have mattered if they did. Not anymore.

  Bonaldo understood he couldn’t just quit; rather, he would keep a low profile. He would stay in his office. He would delegate authority. He should have known when Carl pointed the shotgun at him that he was in for a rough ride. Well, now he knew.

  It was at this moment the office door opened hardly a crack and a woman slipped into the room. She was tall—over six feet—very thin, and wearing a long and fitted black dress open in a V at the top. Her face was narrow, with a straight nose, thin lips, and a narrow chin. Her black hair hung loosely past her shoulders; she wore black eye shadow and black lipstick; even her fingernail polish was black. Her skin was the color of parchment.

  Bonaldo eyed her with dread.

  The woman glided to Bonaldo’s desk; her feet hardly seemed to move. She neither frowned nor smiled. Reaching the desk, she put her long, thin hands on the surface and leaned forward. Bonaldo tried not to look down the front of her dress. Indeed, there was nothing to see. Only darkness.

  The woman spoke in a whisper. “I’m a Satanist,” she said.

  Acting chief Bonaldo clamped his jaw shut and began punching the keys on his intercom like Horowitz playing Liszt. He needed backup.

  • • •

  Detective Beth Lajoie learned late Thursday afternoon that Maggie Kelly had been arrested for prostitution in New York in early September, was charged with a misdemeanor, paid a fine in the night court’s lobster shift, and had been out on the street ten hours after her arrest. Since then she had been lucky or had kept her nose clean. Most likely the former, a Manhattan South vice unit detective had told Lajoie.

  Detective Lajoie explained that Kelly was suspected of selling her baby and she needed to talk to her as soon as possible. After Lajoie briefly described recent events in Brewster, the detective said he’d get on it right away. Actually, he’d read a story about Brewster in the Post. “Heavy shit,” he said.

  Now, on Friday morning, Lajoie was on her way to see Alice Alessio. She had decided against her emerald-green pantsuit, and wore dark gray flannel. Her only jewelry was a small pair of pearl earrings. This was her grade-school-teacher mode—respectable, unthreatening, kindly. It was all bullshit, as far as Lajoie was concerned.

  She rapped on the door of Alice’s apartment at seven o’clock, hoping she was still asleep. Alice had been temporarily suspended from her job at the hospital, though everyone assumed she’d be fired once the case was solved. Lajoie carried a bag of two coffees and four doughnuts from Dunkin’ Donuts.

  It took further knocking, but after a minute Alice opened the door. She wore baby-blue flannel pajamas and looked a wreck.

  “Hi!” said Lajoie. “I hope you take cream. They put it in without my asking.” She shoved the paper cup toward Alice, who had to grab it to keep it from falling. As Alice stepped back, Lajoie stepped forward to shut the door. “It’s wonderful to have the chance to meet you, Alice. I’ve heard so much about you.”

  Alice looked confused. After all, she’d just woken up. “You’re a cop?”

  “State police detective, actually. Let’s chat.” She led Alice to the kitchen and had her sit at the small table; then she got a fairly clean dish from the drainer for the doughnuts. She put them on the table with several paper towels. “Hungry?”

  Woody had wanted Lajoie to find out just who had seduced whom—Balfour or Nurse Spandex. Dr. Fuller had said that Dr. Balfour had seemed immune to the nurses’ occasional flirting, but Woody wanted Detective Lajoie to make sure.

  “I guess so. Why’re you here?” Alice was not only confused; she was depressed. She tugged at the collar of her pajamas.

  Detective Lajoie looked at her thoughtfully. “You know, Alice, you really should wash off your eye makeup before you go to bed. Otherwise it makes you look like a raccoon. Have you heard from Dr. Balfour?”

  Alice dabbed her smudged eyes with a napkin. “He hasn’t called.”

  “The brute. After all you did for him, too. Drink your coffee, Alice, it’ll get cold.” Lajoie took a sip of her own coffee to show how it was done.

  Alice sipped her coffee. She couldn’t imagine who this woman was or what she wanted, but she had talked to no one but her mother for several days and she w
as ready to climb the walls.

  “Tell me, Alice, I’ve been wondering about your relationship with Dr. Balfour. Just how did it start? Did you speak to him, or did he speak to you?”

  Alice broke off a corner of a glazed doughnut, studied it, and put it in her mouth. She wanted to lose weight, but if she was depressed this would be the wrong time. “He spoke to me first. I was surprised. I mean, I’d thought he was gay. He’d never shown any interest in the girls before. Like, we’d talked a few times, but not in that way, if you know what I mean.”

  Alice described a number of brief conversations with Dr. Balfour over a two-week period. Once aware of his interest, she had responded with interest of her own. “I really thought he liked me. He’d touch me or brush up against me as if by accident. We’d duck into an empty room for just a minute or two. He didn’t want anyone to know. That’s why he didn’t want to see me outside the hospital. By then I was ready to do anything. He fucked me the first time two weeks ago in a bathroom. It was rushed and not very nice. I mean, it was great, but the rushed part wasn’t very nice. I was afraid of getting caught, more afraid for him than for me. I didn’t know if I was coming or going. And the water kept turning on. It had one of those motion-sensing faucets and it kept spraying me. I got sopped.”

  Lajoie decided to ignore the motion-sensing faucet. “When did you last see him?”

  “The other day, when I left his house.” Alice put a thumb to her lips and chewed on the nail. “He said he didn’t want to see me anymore.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “He made a joke of it.”

  “What did he say?”

  “‘The thrill has gone.’” Alice lowered her head. “‘I just don’t want you, that’s all.’”

  Detective Lajoie maintained her kindly smile. “And has this sort of thing happened with other doctors?”

  Alice didn’t want to answer. She felt embarrassed. But Lajoie got it out of her.

  “There was Dr. Stone last March. We did it in the bathroom, too. He’s at Providence Hospital now. He just up and left.”

  She described their three-week relationship, the secret meetings, his fear of being found out. Twice he’d come to her apartment after dark.

  “And was he the one who initiated it?” asked Lajoie. “Like Dr. Balfour?”

  Alice blushed. “No, not really, not at all, actually. I let him know I was, like, ready. And at first it was an oral kind of thing, like down there.” She pointed downward. “But then he got more into it, at least until he grew scared.”

  The women sat quietly for a moment, nibbling their doughnuts and sipping coffee.

  “Tell me, Alice,” said Lajoie, “is that your ambition, to marry a doctor?”

  Alice began to weep. “I really don’t care anymore. I’m thirty-five years old and ready to marry just about anybody, as long as he’s nice.”

  • • •

  Bingo Schwartz had an easy morning. He had to make a bunch of phone calls and decided he might as well make them from a soft armchair in the Brewster Brew than from his car or a hard chair in police headquarters. Jean Sawyer had her radio tuned to WGBH in Boston, and classical music was almost as good as opera as long as they didn’t play Ravel’s Boléro, which drove him crazy.

  He was making calls to police departments in a hundred-mile radius—Boston and Worcester down to New Haven and Bridgeport, talking to detectives, most of whom he had talked to before, on the subject of missing homeless men. Now he asked if they had further thoughts on the matter. But it was difficult to tell if a homeless person was missing. Some got Social Security checks or medication; some saw counselors or probation officers. In those cases a missed appointment might be significant, but usually it took several before anyone began to wonder. Nearly all the departments had homeless persons who might be missing, but, on the other hand, they might turn up, which often happened. And after a significant amount of time had passed, the men might be forgotten.

  Between calls Bingo imagined the opera sets he would construct once he retired, which, he now thought, would be sooner rather than later. This Friday morning he was working on the scene toward the end of Don Giovanni when the Don is dragged down to hell. Would he have the floor open and flames erupt—often strips of red and orange silk blown by a fan—or would he have a demon swing from the rafters and grab Don Giovanni with his talons? Bingo was partial to the second option, which he had never seen before, but it would take an acrobatic demon, and the trick would be not to drop the Don back onto the stage, since the Don was really a baritone being paid a lot of money to sing the part.

  It was then that Bingo got a call from Detective Eric Degroot of the Providence Police Department, who he had talked to on Thursday.

  “I been thinking of your homeless guy, the wacko,” said Degroot. “I don’t know if I told you, but I had a dog that disappeared about five years ago—Maxie, a nice little beagle.”

  Bingo waited. He had learned to wait, rather than to say, “What the fuck does that have to do with anything?” which is what he thought.

  “I searched around for a while, but no luck. So I figured Maxie’d been hit by a car and tossed in the trash. He was a runner, know what I mean? But he always came back. Then a few months later we caught a guy who was stealing dogs. He was part of a gang that sold stolen dogs to pharmaceutical companies for research. Most likely they’d sold Maxie to a drug company that had him smoking cigars or something like that. So maybe that’s what happened to your homeless guy. He got sold to drug companies.”

  Bingo was doubtful. “A guy like that? I can’t think he’d be worth much.”

  “Perhaps, but it’s like the difference between cars and auto parts. You buy a Ford for twenty grand, but if you built it from scratch just buying the parts it could cost a hundred. So maybe your homeless guy got sold in bits and pieces. I don’t know, it’s a thought.”

  As Bingo saw it, that was his first important conversation of the day, though it didn’t seem important at first. He had to think about it.

  The second important conversation occurred at about noon, when Bingo called a Massachusetts state police detective who he had talked to on Thursday. The detective, Frank Schnell, had nothing new on missing homeless people, but he had also been involved with gathering information about Ernest Hartmann.

  “I got some stuff that might help you,” said Schnell. “Ten days ago Hartmann met with Tommy Meadows. He’s an investigator with the Department of Public Health. I don’t know what they talked about, and Meadows is on vacation in Europe. He’s supposed to be back in a week or so. I’ve e-mailed him, but he hasn’t answered. He’d been working on a bunch of different projects, his boss said, but one of them’s body brokers. You like it?”

  Bingo tried to sit up in his armchair and knocked his notebook to the floor. “Yeah, what’s that?” All he could think of was white slavery.

  “Just like Realtors, except it’s body parts. The broker gets bodies from a medical center or the morgue, even funeral homes, and then sells them to research companies that offer seminars with hands-on training. Like the medical center might have a cadaver that’s been stripped of its skin for burn patients, but the rest is still usable. So maybe it’s sold. Massachusetts medical schools get maybe fifteen thousand bodies a year. That’s more than they need, so they do some horse-trading. That’s where the broker comes in.”

  “Auto parts,” said Bingo.

  “Say again?”

  Bingo described Degroot’s auto parts analogy.

  “Yeah, that’ll do,” said Schnell. “A broker can get up to a hundred grand for body parts even though he’s bought the body from a tissue bank for five grand. Or he can get it free as a tissue donation. There’s thousands of these training seminars. The thing is, the body’s got to have a paper trail, but it’s not as strict as it should be. Say you’re selling a new kind of medical instrument and you got a lot of doctors or surgeons who want practice using it. So a salesman will set up a seminar, and he might not be too p
articular about where the body parts come from. That can be a problem. Like, I don’t know if body parts is the Hartmann-Meadows connection, but if it is, then Meadows was maybe interested in the paper trail. But we’ll know in a week or two, right?”

  But Bingo didn’t think Brewster could wait a week or two.

  • • •

  Whenever Bobby Anderson drove out of state, which was easy to do in Rhode Island, it was like playing hooky. He drove a little faster, put his seat back a little farther. Crooks could be robbing banks and he’d drive right by, or at least that’s what he thought.

  Friday morning he was on his way to see a UConn professor, Vasa Korak, who taught in the Wildlife Management program. The guy lived out in the boonies near North Ashford, half an hour north of the university. For Bobby it was seventy miles of little roads that let him practice his cornering skills.

  He had gotten Korak’s name from Gail Valetti, the Great Swamp coyote girl. It would be wrong to say he sweet-talked her, which would be Woody’s accusation, but he turned on the charm. He described his fascination with coyotes, their intelligence and ability to adapt to any environment. He explained his concern about stories of aggressive coyote behavior. Valetti had also recently heard these stories, and so their concern was a shared concern.

  “The person I know who knows more about coyotes than anyone else,” said Valetti, “is a UConn professor. He even raises them.”

  And so Bobby was on his way.

  His directions took him to Cemetery Road and then a dirt track through the woods toward Lost Pond Brook. Just when Bobby thought the bumps would rip off his muffler and he was about to give up, he negotiated a bend and came upon Vasa Korak’s farm. He heard coyotes yapping as he approached.

  Korak was about six-foot-six, with a shaved head and a thick chestnut mustache and goatee. Bobby guessed he was about thirty-five and weighed two-fifty. He wore jeans and a light blue work shirt. His voice was deep—all woofer, Bobby thought.

  “You the guy who called? What kind of cop drives a Z?”

  “A cop with discriminating tastes.”

  They shook hands. Korak’s hand was twice the size of Bobby’s, more of a paw than a hand. He seemed inclined to crush Bobby’s fingers, but Bobby disliked macho games and gave as good as he got. Korak’s eyes were also chestnut-colored. Abruptly he laughed and let Bobby go.