Red Dragon - Страница 26

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"How do I know Mr. Pilgrim has done anything I'm interested in. Has he?"

"Let's say, yes."

"Are you Mr. Pilgrim?"

"I don't think I'll tell you that."

"Are you his friend?"

"Sort of."

"Well, prove it then. Tell me something that shows me how well you know him."

"You first. You show me yours." A nervous giggle. "First time you're wrong, I hang up."

"All right, Mr. Pilgrim is right-handed."

"That's a safe guess. Most people are."

"Mr. Pilgrim is misunderstood."

"No general crap, please."

"Mr. Pilgrim is really strong physically."

"Yes, you could say that."

Graham looked at the clock. A minute and a half. Crawford nodded encouragement.

Don't tell him anything that he could change.

"Mr. Pilgrim is white and about, say, five-feet-eleven. You haven't told me anything, you know. I'm not so sure you even know him at all."

"Want to stop talking?"

"No, but you said we'd trade. I was just going along with you."

"Do you think Mr. Pilgrim is crazy?"

Bloom was shaking his head.

"I don't think anybody who is as careful as he is could be crazy. I think he's different. I think a lot of people do believe he's crazy, and the reason for that is, he hasn't let people understand much about him."

"Describe exactly what you think he did to Mrs. Leeds and maybe I'll tell you if you're right or not."

"I don't want to do thaL"

"Good-bye."

Graham's heart jumped, but he could still hear breathing on the other end.

"I can't go into that until I know-"

Graham heard the telephone-booth door slam open in Chicago and the receiver fall with a clang. Faint voices and bangs as the receiver swung on its cord. Everyone in the office heard it on the speakerphone.

"Freeze. Don't even twitch. Now lock your fingers behind your head and back out of the booth slowly. Slowly. Hands on the glass and spread 'em."

Sweet relief was flooding Graham.

"I'm not armed, Stan. You'll find my ID in my breast pocket. That tickles."

A confused voice loud on the telephone. "Who am I speaking to?"

"Will Graham, FBI."

"This is Sergeant Stanley Riddle, Chicago police department." Irritated now. "Would you tell me what the hell's going on?"

"You tell me. You have a man in custody?"

"Damn right. Freddy Lounds, the reporter. I've known him for ten years… Here's your notebook, Freddy… Are you preferring charges against him?"

Graham's face was pale. Crawford's was red. Dr. Bloom watched the tape reels go around.

"Can you hear me?"

"Yes, I'm preferring charges." Graham's voice was strangled. "Obstruction of justice. Please take him in and hold him for the U.S attomey."

Suddenly Lounds was on the telephone. He spoke fast and clearly with the cotton wads out of his cheeks.

"Will, listen-"

"Tell it to the U.S. attomey. Put Sergeant Riddle on the phone."

"I know something-"

"Put Riddle on the goddamned telephone."

Crawford's voice came on the line. "Let me have it' Will."

Graham slammed his receiver down with a bang that made every-one in range of the speakerphone flinch. He came out of the booth and left the room without looking at anyone.

"Lounds, you have hubbed hell, my man," Crawford said.

"You want to catch him or not? I can help you. Let me talk one minute." Lounds hurried into Crawford's silence. "Listen, you just showed me how bad you need the Tattler. Before, I wasn't sure – now I am. That ad's part of the Tooth Fairy case or you wouldn't have gone balls-out to nail this call. Great. The Tattler's here for you. Anything you want."

"How did you find out?"

"The ad manager came to me. Said your Chicago office sent this suit-of-clothes over to check the ads. Your guy took five letters from the incoming ads. Said it was 'pursuant to mail fraud.' Mail fraud nothing. The ad manager made Xerox copies of the letters and envelopes before he let your guy have them.

"I looked them over. I knew he took five letters to smokescreen the one he really wanted. Took a day or two to check them all out. The answer was on the envelope. Chesapeake postmark. The postage-meter number was for Chesapeake State Hospital. I was over there you know, behind your friend with the wild hair up his ass. What else could it be?

"I had to be sure, though. Thats why I called to see if you'd come down on 'Mr. Pilgrim' with both feet, and you did."

"You made a large mistake Freddy."

"You need the Tattler and l can open it up for you. Ads, editorial, monitoring incoming mail, anything. You name it. I can be discreet. I can. Cut me in, Crawford."

"There's nothing to cut you in on."

"Okay, then it won't make any difference if somebody happened to put in six personal ads next issue. All to 'Mr. Pilgrim' and signed the same way."

"I'll get an injunction slapped on you and a sealed indictment for obstruction of justice." "And it might leak to every pape in the country." Lounds knew he was talking on tape. He didn't care anymore. "I swear to God I'll do it, Crawford. I'll tear up your chance before I lose mine."

"Add interstate transmition of a threatening message to what I just said."

"Let me help you, Jack. I can, believe me."

"Run along to the police station, Freddy. Now put the sergeant back on the phone."

# # #

Freddy Lounds's Lincoln Versailles smelled of hair tonic and aftershave, socks and cigars, and the police sergeant was glad to get out of it when they reached the station house.

Lounds knew the captain commanding the precinct and many of the patrolmen. The captain gave Lounds coffee and called the U.S. attorney's office to "try and clear this shit up."

No federal marshal came for Lounds. In half an hour he took a call from Crawford in the precinct commander's office. Then he was free to go. The captain walked him to his car.

Lounds was keyed up and his driving was fast and jerky as he crossed the Loop eastward to his apartrnent overlooking Lake Michigan. There were several things he wanted out of this story and he knew that he could get them. Money was one, and most of that would come from the paperback. He would have an instant paperback on the stands thirty-six hours after the capture. An exclusive story in the daily press would be a news coup. He would have the satisfaction of seeing the straight press – the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the sanctified Washington Post and the holy New York Times – run his copyrighted material under his byline with his picture credits.

And then the correspondents of those august journals, who looked down on him, who would not drink with him, could eat their fucking hearts out.

Lounds was a pariah to them because he had taken a different faith. Had he been incompetent, a fool with no other resource, the veterans of the straight press could have forgiven him for working on the Tattler, as one forgives a retarded geek. But Lounds was good. He had the qualities of a good reporter – intelligence, guts, and the good eye. He had great energy and patience.

Against him were the fact that he was obnoxious and therefore disliked by news executives, and his inability to keep himself out of his stories.

In Lounds was the lunging need to be noticed that is often miscalled ego. Lounds was lumpy and ugly and small. He had buck teeth and his rat eyes had the sheen of spit on asphalt.

He had worked in straight journalism for ten years when he realized that no one would ever send him to the White House. He saw that his publishers would wear his legs out, use him until it was time for him to become a broken-down old drunk manning a dead-end desk, drifting inevitably toward cirrhosis or a mattress fire.

They wanted the information he could get, but they didn't want Freddy. They paid him top scale, which is not very much money if you have to buy women. They patted his back and told him he had a lot of balls and they refused to put his name on a parking place.

One evening in 1969 while in the office working rewrite, Freddy had an epiphany.

Frank Larkin was seated near him taking dictation on the telephone. Dictation was the glue factory for old reporters on the paper where Freddy worked. Frank Larkin was fifty-five, but he looked seventy. He was oystereyed and he went to his locker every half-hour for a drink. Freddy could smell him from where he sat.

Larkin got up and shuffled over to the slot and spoke in a hoarse whisper to the news editor, a woman. Freddy always listened to other people's conversatious.

Larkin asked the woman to get him a Kotex from the machine in the ladies' room. He had to use them on his bleeding behind.

Freddy stopped typing. He took the story out of his typewriter, replaced the paper and wrote a letter of resignation.

A week later he was working for the Tattler.

He started as cancer editor at a salary nearly double what he had earned before. Management was impressed with his attitude.

The Tattler could afford to pay him well because the paper found cancer very lucrative.

One in five Americans dies of it. The relatives of the dying, worn out, prayed out, trying to fight a raging carcinoma with pats and banana pudding and copper-tasting jokes, are desperate for anything hopeful.

Marketing surveys showed that a bold "New Cure for Cancer" or "Cancer Miracle Drug" cover line boosted supermarket sales of any Tattler issue by 22.3 percent. There was a six-percentile drop in those sales when the story ran on page one beneath the cover line, as the reader had time to scan the empty text while the groceries were being totaled.