Robert Walker - Scalpers

"Dean ... Dean.... “It was Sid's voice coming through to him, and Dean pulled open a door in his mind to an exam room in which all the students in the class were large-headed, puffy-eyed dwarfs staring back at him and grinning. The teacher was a shadow man with Sid's voice and now, coming into focus, Sid's face!

Dean awoke with a start, Sid shaking him gently, calling his name.

"Damn!” Dean muttered to himself, his hand instantly registering the fact that he'd not been scalped in his sleep, that it was all a nightmare. What the hell would the experts say to an exam dream that ended in a bloody scalping? His breath came short and his body was damp with perspiration.

"You were having a bad one, Dean ... thought I'd better wake you. You okay?"

Dean was a bit disoriented, but tried not to let Sid see how shaken he'd become. It all seemed to have come over him in an earthshaking, violent instant. One moment he was having an uneasy but familiar bad dream, one so familiar that he'd begun analyzing it in his sleep, wondering when he would awaken. Then, suddenly, he was sure that he'd awakened to find himself scarred and bloodied. But his familiar nightmare had simply taken on a new and bizarre twist, responding, he assumed, to his present troubles. “I'm okay ... okay, Sid. Bad dream.” He tried as best he could to make light of it, but Sid, knowing something about bad dreams himself, wasn't convinced.

"Just sit down here a minute, Dean. Want some coffee? Jean, get us a cup over here, will you?"

Dean's massive chest heaved with a great intake of air, and he found his way to a window, taking the coffee from the lab tech as he went, but the window was sealed; there was no way to open it. “Could use some real air,” he moaned.

"Come on, I know where there's some,” said Sid, escorting Dean to a room with oxygen tanks in it. He hooked one up to a mask and Dean took in a few breathfuls, making him feel better instantly.

"Working too hard, my man,” said Sid. “Not enough sleep."

"Yeah, I suppose so."

"I played a part in your bad dream, huh?"

"No, can't recall that you were—"

"You called out my name."

"For help, I suppose."

Sid smiled and nodded. “Count on it, pal. Oh, yeah, your breathalyzer on Peggy?"

"Yes?"

"Traces of chloroform, just like the magician predicted. You're good, Dean ... damned good."

Dean shook his head, “You'd have caught it yourself if—"

"No, not a chance!"

"—if you'd been there sooner and seen the condition that Peggy was in. When I could smell no alcohol on her—"

You're just damned good at what you do, doctor. I would have missed it, and it does support your contention that someone else, a third party, came into that room where Park died. That, with our combined belief that Park had to have been dead earlier, had to have been moved in and out of the room—I mean, we've got Peggy and Park off their respective hooks, but it still leaves us with who done it? Who is the Scalper—"

"Or Scalpers, Sid."

"Right, Scalpers."

Tom Warner located them. “Dr. Corman, Dr. Grant, I thought you'd like to see this.” He handed Sid the morning paper. Dean stood and looked over Sid's shoulder. It was pretty much as Dean had predicted. The story hinted at a liaison between Carson and Park, and did more than hint at the possibility that Park was the deadly Orlando Scalper. Dean scanned for anything in quotes with his name behind it. He was mildly pleased to see that he was kept out of it, except to be mentioned, along with Sid, as an investigating coronor who would be performing an autopsy on Park.

* * * *

Time passed, and still they ran test upon test on the Park murder evidence.

As they worked, Dean asked Sid, “Any truth to Peggy and Park's having had a thing going?"

"Let's just say that Peggy Carson doesn't like sleeping alone, Dean. I mean, she's not a whore, but she doesn't care for long nights alone."

"She ever ... you ever..."

"She wouldn't take me up on the offer. But you weren't the only one she said yes to."

"How'd you know about it?"

"This ain't Chicago, Dean ... word gets around a smaller operation like ours, you know, as to who's going with whom. The only secret I've ever been able to keep is me and Karen the judge, and now that's been blown to hell."

"And Diana, does she know?"

Sid frowned, “Di and me, we've sorta drifted apart—quietly but effectively drifted way apart. Kids are interested in other things, too. Take a lot to get us all into the happy niche we were in when I returned from Korea, let me tell you...."

Sid sounded deeply saddened over the condition of his family, a trace of guilt in his voice. Dean thought again of Jackie and his relationship, which had, until the Floaters case, been so strong he'd felt nothing on earth could wedge them apart. Things fall apart, people change; it was funny how all the old clichés suddenly took on powerful meaning in a crisis, Dean thought. Words seemed empty until you were drowning in a quagmire of them, in a situation out-of-hand, a circumstance that screamed for fast, sure ropes to bind a man's wounds.

Life was filled with wounds.

Wounds and pitfalls: deep and gaping wells into which people plummeted without the slightest notion they'd ever been near the edge. The condition of marriage—or any relationship, Dean believed—was a microcosm of the larger, dangerous territory of life. A relationship between a man and a woman was peppered with minefields, large or small, but often deadly. Mind fields, actually, since most were linked to emotional time bombs ticking away, ready to explode over the weakening of some small detail.

It wasn't something the therapists or the manuals were likely to help people with, but rather one of the countless truisms people learned by experience. Getting out of the situation was done either with finesse or with foolishness. For many, the easy way out was a word shouted in anger: divorce. It presented a quick-fix route to tying off the loosened and severed ropes of one's mental balance and emotional needs. Remove the object—in this case a person—of distress from sight, and pretend it never existed.

For Dean himself, it was an ugly word to be ranked alongside cancer: it was a cancer of relationships.

The very thought of divorce for him brought on an image of a barbed corkscrew that turned hideously round and round in his stomach. The awful instrument was turned on memories, and it made an ever-widening cut.

Dean decided he could not waste a moment more in telephoning Jackie to tell her he loved her, and that he planned to be on a plane for home tonight. Sid could now finish up this case without him, regardless of the fact that somewhere in the city, or maybe far from the city now, the Scalpers had left a trail to a man named Park in order to escape. It might very well mean that their scalping days were over, for now if Dean and Sid kept quiet to the press, the killers could do as they wished, so long as no one was ever again mutilated for a scalp. No, they didn't have the guilty parties behind bars. No, they had not yet identified the killers. No, justice was not served, and yes, an innocent man and his memory had been destroyed in the process. So what, Dean's exhausted mind told him, so what? He was no avenging angel. He was only one man, a man who had more pressing personal and professional problems awaiting him at home.

Sid's face drained of color when Dean told him of his plans, but he understood. In a controlled fashion, he thanked Dean for all he'd done. “You've been a considerable godsend, Dean. You saved my ass and put my mind right. I needed your support, and you gave it."

A look at Dean's watch told him it was already late afternoon. Sid had allowed him to sleep much more than he should have. He had much to do if he was going to make his way back to Chicago and Jackie.