The Burn Palace

by Stephen Dobyns

Bobby staggered out. “Jesus, I thought I was going to die in there. What took you so long?” He squeezed his arms to his chest. “I’m freezing.”

  Woody had been sure he was dead. He wanted to hug him, but instead he shook his hand. Bobby wrapped his arms around him and held him for a moment.

  “Bingo’s in there,” said Bobby. “So’s Legros. They’re dead. It’s pretty nasty.”

  Woody turned on the cooler light and went inside. When he saw Bingo, he wanted to shoot Larry again. He lowered his head and waited for the horror to pass. It didn’t, but it grew a little less. He wished he had loved Bingo more.

  Beth Lajoie called the CIU and the medical examiner’s office. Then she called an ambulance for Slovatsky. “You might as well ride in style,” she said. Last, she called Captain Brotman.

  Woody yanked Jimmy up by his hair. The rougher the better, he thought. “What’s burning in the furnace?”

  “Mannequins, that’s all, just mannequins.”

  “How d’you turn it off?”

  Jimmy told him. “I didn’t know Larry was going to shoot those cops. I’d no clue. I tried to leave, but Larry said he’d kill me. He’d shoot me and sell me.”

  Another crate of mannequin parts was waiting to be burned. Jimmy said that Brantley used them at funerals. He would sell legs, arms, even torsos, and replace them with parts from the mannequins.

  “Who killed Carl?” said Bobby. He stood by the furnace to warm himself.

  “I don’t know; I didn’t do it. Seymour brought him here from Brantley’s. Maybe Seymour did it, or Brantley. Seymour said Carl’d tried to break in. He had a gun. Fuckin’ wacko.”

  Bobby still felt cold to the bone. “Who put that stuff all over Carl’s face?”

  “I was practicing, you know, beautifying. They teach it in schools. Ronnie McBride, too—I was making them look nice. But I didn’t kill them. They’d be glad of it if they knew, looking good like that. Not Carl, I guess. The fuck.”

  “You’re fucked in the head,” said Bobby. “Where’s Balfour?”

  “He’s got a place near here, a farmhouse. He was going to pick up these bodies in a van, but I guess he changed his mind. He called Larry and told him to burn everything. They’re clearing out.”

  “And what about me?” asked Bobby.

  “Balfour first said to leave you in the freezer till you froze. They figured you’d die in there and they’d harvest you. You know, fresh parts. Then Balfour called and told Larry to shoot you and burn you. Larry was unhappy about just whacking you. Throwing good money after bad, he called it.”

  “‘Fresh parts,’” said Bobby. “I can’t wait to tell Shawna.”

  “It’s a gold mine. There might be a million bucks in parts right in this building. See that freezer over there? It’s full of skin. There’s enough to paper a house.”

  Jimmy rattled on about the fortune to be made. Bobby guessed he was a tweaker, his chat all meth-accelerated, words leaping from his mouth like lemmings from a cliff.

  Woody got Jimmy Mooney to describe where Balfour lived—a farmhouse about six miles north on Hazard Road, right at the edge of Arcadia. Jimmy offered to draw a map. He was willing to do anything except go with them. “Balfour’s even scarier than Larry,” he said. “Like he thinks he’s king, you know? He thinks he’s got a right to all this. And he took the guns from those cops.”

  “You feeling okay?” Woody asked Bobby. “We’ve got to go get Balfour.”

  Detective Lajoie called Bonaldo to see if he’d arrested Brantley. Instead she got Constantino, who said Brantley was nowhere to be found. Bonaldo was looking for his son. “That fat kid’s out trick-or-treating, and the town’s full of coyotes.”

  • • •

  Baldo’s footprints grew harder to follow. Someone had been walking a dog; someone had parked at the curb and gone into a house. Their prints messed up Baldo’s on the sidewalk. It meant Hercel had to go slowly. And each time he saw a police car, he got behind a tree. This also slowed him. And the only way he could look for Baldo was if he kept his thoughts focused on him and nothing else. Otherwise he would start thinking of the coyotes or his mother or Carl Krause, and when that happened he just wanted to give up. Several times he had seen coyote tracks. They were just crossing the sidewalk; they weren’t following Baldo or anything, at least not yet.

  When he turned onto Market Street, he saw that Baldo’s footprints were clearer. Then, when he got to the next corner, he saw a small figure toward the end of the block. He realized that Baldo had been going in a large circle and was heading back to his house. Hercel shouted and sped up. The yapping of the coyotes was louder.

  Baldo waited. When Hercel ran up to him, Baldo said, “Where’s your costume?”

  Hercel was startled by Baldo’s vampire mask, but he didn’t bother to answer. “What are you doing? It’s dangerous out here. Can’t you hear the coyotes?”

  Baldo listened. “I thought they were dogs. Do you want a bar of chocolate? Not many people are home, or they’re hiding. This has been pretty hard work. Slim pickings.”

  “Take off that frigging mask. I can’t talk to you with it on.”

  Baldo didn’t want to take it off, and they argued a little. It wasn’t until Hercel got mad that Baldo removed the mask. Hercel was relieved. The mask was so real in the dim light that Hercel worried it wasn’t really Baldo.

  Seeing Baldo without the mask, Hercel said, “You’re an idiot.” He didn’t say this as an insult; it was as if he was pointing out a likable shortcoming. “Come on, we’ve got to run.”

  “My feet hurt.”

  “Okay, stay here and let the coyotes eat you.”

  So Baldo tried to manage a slow trot. He didn’t see why Hercel was making a fuss. After all, it was only about two blocks to his house.

  But some things never happen easily, and, moments later, Hercel and Baldo saw two coyotes trotting toward them through the snow, right in the middle of the street. Baldo was ready to run despite his sore feet, but Hercel pulled him up the sidewalk to the nearest house. The house was dark, and the front walk was unshoveled. Hercel leaned on the bell.

  The coyotes paused in front of the house. At first they didn’t seem interested in the boys, just mildly curious, but then they took a few steps toward them.

  Baldo grew more frightened. “Use your trick!”

  Hercel again rang the bell and didn’t say anything.

  “Use it!” said Baldo. “You’ve got to use it.”

  “I can’t,” said Hercel angrily. “I don’t have it anymore. It’s broken.”

  “I don’t believe you. How could it be broken? If you don’t use it, we’ll be eaten!”

  “Can’t you understand? I don’t have it!”

  At that moment the portico light went on and the door opened. “You boys!” a woman said angrily. “Can’t you see the lights are out? What in the world are you doing?” Then she saw the coyotes in the street and gasped. “Goodness! Get in here right away. Wipe your feet, they’re covered with snow.”

  The woman was gray-haired and wore a blue bathrobe. “You’re that Bonaldo boy, aren’t you? The troublemaker. Don’t you dare start anything with me. I’ll call your mother; she must be worried sick. I swear you’re as dumb as posts, both of you.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  BACK IN SEPTEMBER, when Brewster was peaceful and a little dull, Jill Franklin had written a feature story on Ocean Breezes for the Brewster Times & Advertiser. She had chatted to a number of residents, including Maud Lord, and she had interviewed some of the staff. One of the people she talked to was Margaret Hanna, the nurse who worked the night shift. Margaret was energetic and, perhaps, excessively friendly—one of those people who’re afraid of being disliked and so try too hard to be liked. This, for Jill, often had the opposite effect, but she remained friendly, or tried to, and Margaret most likely never realized that the effect of her excessive warmth was to create a chill.

  Margaret appeared to be pleased with the story when it came out towa
rd the end of the month, and perhaps she really was pleased, though people like Margaret will act pleased, when they are really thinking, Why didn’t she say more about me? Jill was aware of this, and the result was discomfort. She knew that whatever she did, Margaret would be disappointed. But during the weeks after the appearance of the article, Jill sometimes ran into Margaret in a store or restaurant, and Margaret would again be effusively grateful. Then of course, toward the end of October, Jill was fired.

  So it was surprising to Jill, as she drove over to Brewster to see Hercel on Halloween, that she should unexpectedly receive a phone call from Margaret Hanna. The second thing that surprised her was that Margaret didn’t gush. She was frightened.

  “I need to see you right away,” said Margaret. “I’ve got something to tell you.”

  Margaret’s voice was so different that Jill wasn’t at first sure it was the same person. But she asked Margaret what she wanted to talk about.

  “I can’t tell you over the phone. Can we meet someplace? It’ll make a great news story for you. Really, it’ll be a big hit.”

  Jill didn’t say she’d been fired. She was struck by the fear in Margaret’s voice, and she knew if Margaret’s story was really worth writing about, Ted Pomeroy would publish it even though he had fired her a week earlier. They agreed to meet at Tony’s, a bar on Spruce right around the corner from Water Street.

  “The weather’s terrible,” said Jill. “Are you sure you don’t want to wait?”

  “It has to be tonight,” said Margaret.

  Twenty minutes later they were sitting at a back booth in Tony’s. The bar had ten other customers, nine of them men. Most looked like what Jill’s father called “heavy hitters.” The TV was showing a football game.

  Margaret ordered a Cosmo; Jill had a Budweiser.

  “Do you come in here much?” asked Margaret. “I never do, well, once I had lunch here. Greasy, you know what I mean? My clothes smelled all day long.”

  Margaret was a wispy blonde, and she kept fiddling with her hair, curling it around a finger or pushing it back. Perhaps she was in her late twenties. She wore a dark raincoat over a green turtleneck. Her face or expression was in constant motion, partly from nervousness, partly as a stab at vivacity. She was the sort of woman who tore up paper napkins, peeled the labels off beer bottles, and fussed with sugar packets. Jill wanted to tell her to relax, at least until Margaret said, “I’m afraid they’re going to try to kill me.”

  Jill winced. “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “Dr. Balfour, first of all—I was completely wrong about him.”

  In the story that followed, Jill came to understand that Balfour’s relationship with Margaret was much like his relationship with Nurse Spandex: he distracted the nurse while something awful was happening nearby, except in this case the victim wasn’t an infant but the elderly.

  “Every time I was with him someone passed, but I didn’t realize it until Thursday when three people passed, three healthy people, I mean healthy for old people. Dr. Balfour would leave and go back to the hospital or someplace, then we’d call him and he’d come back again. Three whole times.”

  Jill, too, realized that was the night when someone had broken into houses in Brewster and the police had been rushing all over town.

  “I know I’ll be arrested, but I want people to know what happened. You just can’t believe anything he says.”

  “Even though they’ll know how you behaved?”

  “Even then. You don’t understand; he’s evil. I’ve read about those Satanists in the paper, what they were doing out on that island. I’m sure he’s one of them.”

  By this time Jill had put a small digital recorder on the table. “How long have you been involved with him?”

  “I’d broken up with Marty McGuire a week earlier. Well, he dumped me. Dr. Balfour had been coming to Ocean Breezes for about two months. We’d say hello and stuff like that, but he never seemed especially friendly. He came in one night and found me weeping in the office. He asked what was wrong and he . . .” Margaret paused, as she sought the right word.

  “Comforted you?” said Jill.

  “It began like that, sure. I was so mad at Marty I let Dr. Balfour put his hands all over me. I’d been seeing Marty all summer. We’d been talking about getting engaged. But with Dr. Balfour, we didn’t do anything all that physical, like anything more than touching. I mean, it was the office. Somebody might have walked in.”

  “So when did it happen?”

  Margaret looked embarrassed. “The next night. There was an empty room.”

  She described seeing Dr. Balfour two or three times a week. Seeing—that was her word, not fucking or having sex or sleeping with. She “saw him.” And old people often died on those nights. Of course, they were old; many were weak or ill or “sinking.” They would die soon in any case, and dying at night was more common than dying during the day. They went to sleep; their breathing slowed, then it stopped. That was that. She hadn’t thought it had anything to do with Dr. Balfour. At times he was there when it happened; at times he came back later. In any case, he certified the death. Most were sent to Brantley’s; none was an organ donor.

  “I didn’t think there was anything strange about it; well, I started to think it was strange. Like there were more of them and it was on nights when me and Dr. Balfour saw each other. On Thursday night when three residents passed I really thought something was wrong and I wondered if there was some connection with Dr. Balfour; I mean first it was the baby, then that poor guy who got scalped, then Ronnie McBride and all that Satanism stuff and coyotes. And Dr. Balfour, he’d just show up at night without even calling, like he was just using me. So I said to him, I said I thought it was his fault so many of our residents were passing; he was making them pass. I didn’t think that for sure; I was mad at him, but I thought it was too much of a coincidence, him and the old people passing. He just laughed, but he looked at me funny. He didn’t look like he wanted to see me. I mean, he didn’t want me. He was, like, measuring me in some way. Then I asked what was happening to all these bodies and he laughed again and said I’d been reading too many tabloids. He laughed, but he didn’t mean it. You know, these medical businesses, they buy joints and scalps and tendons; they buy everything, even fingernails. And the body banks and tissue banks are like that—they use every little bit. That’s what I think happened to our residents. They didn’t pass; they were cut up and sent all over. That’s what I think you should write about, that and Dr. Balfour.”

  Jill recalled in college when students argued about who wrote “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” Most thought it was Shakespeare, but Jill’s boyfriend, Charlie Larkin, said it was William Congreve and what he really said was, “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.” Jill thought that summed up Margaret Hanna rather neatly.

  “I bet he never liked me; he just liked the blow jobs,” Margaret said. “That’s what he told me this afternoon. He said that having sex with me was like cold mutton, except he said ‘fucking.’ He said fucking me was like cold mutton, and he laughed and said if I told anyone about what I was thinking I’d be fired and I might even go to jail. Well, I don’t care if I go to jail. I want you to write about this. I want people to know about him.”

  The picture Margaret gave of Dr. Balfour was of a man with a sense of entitlement. His desire for a thing was the same as deserving to have it. To his mind, Alice Alessio and Margaret Hanna were just ignorant women, what did it matter if he used them? The old people he had killed were going to die soon anyway. He’d just sped up the process. Margaret didn’t say this, but Jill put it together and some of it came from what Woody had already told her.

  “He wanted me to go to this thing in the woods, this party. I was working that night, but I didn’t want to go anyway. It was cold, and it sounded too strange. It was that Satanist party, I know it was. Other times he liked to describe terrible things he saw in the paper, people being kill
ed and blown up, like in Iraq or someplace like that. He called it the Devil’s business. After a while I realized he didn’t mean it as a bad thing, but a good thing. Yesterday I said that to him, I said he thought it was a good thing. He laughed again and asked, ‘Who’s strongest?’ I asked him what he meant, but he didn’t answer. That’s when I knew he was a Satanist.”

  There was more. Margaret talked about growing up in Brewster, she talked about boyfriends and bad relationships. She talked about knowing Alice Alessio and Peggy Summers and Nina Lefebvre. She didn’t know them well, but she knew them. She’d even babysat Nina when she was in high school. But whatever she talked about always came back to Dr. Balfour and the fact that he had used her.

  A few more men came into the bar, stamped their feet and shook the snow off their coats; a few men left. Puddles formed on the floor. The ones who came in made remarks about the weather, about the slippery streets. One man described seeing a coyote in his backyard. Another man told of a neighbor who had shot at a coyote. At times Jill heard the rumble of a snowplow.

  Margaret kept interrupting her story to glance around the room. Whenever someone came in, she would peer at them doubtfully and Jill saw fear in her eyes. Margaret finished her Cosmo and ordered another—a blood-colored liquid in a martini glass. Not blood, Jill thought, cranberry juice. She still had half her beer.

  “Why do you think he’s going to kill you?”

  “He said it. I don’t mean in so many words. He said he’d change my mind, that there were ways to do it. He said I’d be doing a good deed. I didn’t understand until I remembered the body brokers. He meant he’d cut me up and sell me, I know he did.” Margaret put her hands to her face. Jill reached forward and touched her arm.

  “But who’s ‘they’?” she asked.

  “Hamilton Brantley and people who work for him. Mr. Brantley came to Ocean Breezes several times when one of our residents passed. He and Dr. Balfour talked together. Dr. Balfour gets the bodies and Ham Brantley sells them. It’s a partnership.”