Red Dragon - Страница 4

A meeting was scheduled for eight A.M. at the Atlanta police headquarters. He'd have little enough to tell them.

He would try to sleep. His mind was a busy rooming house with arguments all around him, and they were fighting somewhere down the hall. He was numb and empty and he drank two fingers of whiskey from his bathroom glass before he lay down. The darkness pressed too closely on him. He turned on the bathroom light and went back to bed. He pretended Molly was in the bathroom brushing her hair.

Lines from the autopsy protocols sounded in his own voice, though he had never read them aloud: "… the feces was formed… a trace of talcum on the lower right leg. Fracture of the medial orbit wall owing to insertion of mirror shard…"

Graham tried to think about the beach at Sugarloaf Key, he tried to hear the waves. He pictured his workbench in his mind and thought about the escapement for the water clock he and Willy were building. He sang " Whiskey River " under his breath and tried to run "Black Mountain Rag" through his head from one end to the other. Molly's music. Doe Watson's guitar part was all right, but he always lost it in the fiddle break. Molly had tried to teach him clog dancing in the backyard and she was bouncing… and finally he dozed.

He woke in an hour, rigid and sweating, seeing the other pillow silhouetted against the bathroom light and it was Mrs. Leeds lying beside him bitten and torn, mirrored eyes and blood like the legs of spectacles over her temples and ears. He could not turn his head to face her. Brain screaming like a smoke alarm, he put his hand over there and touched dry cloth.

Having acted, he felt some immediate relief. He rose, his heart pounding, and put on a dry T-shirt. He threw the wet one into the bathtub. He could not move over to the dry side of the bed. Instead he put a towel on the side where he had sweated and lay down on it, propped against the headboard with a stiff drink in his hand. He swallowed a third of it.

He reached for something to think about, anything. The pharmacy where he bought the Bufferin, then; perhaps because it was his only experience all day that was not related to death.

He could remember old drugstores with soda fountains. As a boy, he thought old drugstores had a slightly furtive air. When you went in, you always thought about buying rubbers whether you needed any or not. There were things on the shelves you shouldn't look at too long.

In the pharmacy where he bought the Bufferin, the contraceptives with their illustrated wrappings were in a lucite case on the wall behind the cash register, framed like art.

He preferred the drugstore and sundry of his childhood. Graham was nearly forty and just beginning to feel the tug of the way the world was then; it was a sea anchor streamed behind him in heavy weather.

He thought about Smoot. Old Smoot had been the soda jerk and manager for the pharmacist who owned the local drugstore when Graham was a child. Smoot, who drank on the job, forgot to unroll the awning and the sneakers melted in the window. Smoot forgot to unplug the coffeepot, and the fire department was summoned. Smoot sold ice cream cones to children on credit.

His principal outrage was ordering fifty Kewpie dolls from a detail man while the store owner was on vacation. On his return, the owner fired Smoot for a week. Then they held a Kewpie doll sale. Fifty of the Kewpie dolls were arranged in a semicircle in the front window so that they all stared at whoever was looking in.

They had wide eyes of cornflower blue. It was a striking display and Graham had looked at it for some time. He knew they were only Kewpie dolls, but he could feel the focus of their attention. So many of them looking. A number of people stopped to look at them. Plaster dolls, all with the same silly spit curl, yet their concentrated gaze had made his face tingle.

Graham began to relax a little on the bed. Kewpie dolls staring. He started to take a drink, gasped, and choked it onto his chest. He fumbled for the bedside lamp and fetched his box from the dresser drawer. He took out the autopsy protocols of the three Leeds children and his measured field sketches of the master bedroom and spread them on the bed.

Here were the three bloodstains slanting up the corner, and here were the matching stains on the carpet. Here were the dimensions of the three children. Brother, sister, big brother. Match. Match. Match.

They had been in a row, seated along the wall facing the bed. An audience. A dead audience. And Leeds. Tied around the chest to the headboard. Composed to look as though he were sitting up in bed. Getting the ligature mark, staining the wall above the headboard.

What were they watching? Nothing; they were all dead. But their eyes were open. They were watching a performance starring the madman and the body of Mrs. Leeds, beside Mr. Leeds in the bed. An audience. The crazy could look around at their faces.

Graham wondered if he had lit a candle. The flickering light would simulate expression on their faces. No candle was found. Maybe he would think to do that next time…

This first small bond to the killer itched and stung like a leech. Graham bit the sheet, thinking.

Why did you move them again? Why didn't you leave them that way? Graham asked. There's something you don't want me to know about you. Why, there's something you're ashamed of. Or is it something you can't afford for me to know?

Did you open their eyes?

Mrs. Leeds was lovely, wasn't she? You turned on the light after you cut his throat so Mrs. Leeds could watch him flop, didn't you? It was maddening to have to wear gloves when you touched her, wasn't it?

There was talcum on her leg.

Ther was no talcum in the bathroom.

Someone else seemed to speak those two facts in a flat voice.

You took off your gloves, didn't you? The powder came out of a rubber glove as you pulled it oft to touch her, DIDN'T IT, YOU SON OF A BITCH? You touched her with your bare hands and then you put the gloves back on and you wiped her down. But while the gloves were off, DID YOU OPEN THEIR EYES?

Jack Crawford answered his telephone on the fifth ring. He had answered the telephone in the night many times and he was not confused.

"Jack, this is Will."

"Yes, Will."

"Is Price still in Latent Prints?"

"Yeah. He doesn't go out much anymore. He's working on the single-print index."

"I think he ought to come to Atlanta."

"Why? You said yourself the guy down here is good."

"He is good, but not as good as Price."

"What do you want him to do? Where would he look?"

"Mrs. Leeds fingernails and toenails. They're painted, its a slick surface. And the corneas of all their eyes. I think he took his gloves off, Jack."

"Jesus, Price'll have to gun it," Crawford said. "The funeral's this afternoon."

CHAPTER 3

"I think he had to touch her," Graham said in greeting.

Crawford handed him a Coke from the machine in Atlanta police headquarters. It was seven-fifty A.M.

"Sure, he moved her around," Crawford said. "There were grip marks on her wrists and behind her knees. But every print in the place is from nonporous gloves. Don't worry, Price is here. Grouchy old bastard. He's on his way to the funeral home now. The morgue released the bodies last night, but the funeral home's not doing anything yet. You look bushed. Did you get any sleep?"

"Maybe an hour. I think he had to touch her with his hands."

"I hope you're right, but the Atlanta lab swears he wore like surgeon's gloves the whole time," Crawford said. "The mirror pieces had those smooth prints. Forefinger on the back of the piece wedged in the labia, smudged thumb on the front."

"He polished it after he placed it, so he could see his damn face in there probably," Graham said.

"The one in her mouth was obscured with blood. Same with the eyes. He never took the gloves off."

"Mrs. Leeds was a good-looking woman," Graham said. "You've seen the family pictures, right? I'd want to touch her skin in an intimate situation, wouldn't you?"

"Intimate?" Distaste sounded in Crawford's voice before he could stop it. Suddenly he was busy rummaging in his pockets for change.

"Intimate – they had privacy. Everybody else was dead. He could have their eyes open or shut, however he liked."

"Any way he liked," Crawford said. "They tried her skin for prints, of course. Nothing. They did get a hand spread off her neck."

"The report didn't say anything about dusting nails."

"I expect her fingernails were smudged when they took scrapings. The scrapings were just where she cut her palms with them. She never scratched him."

"She had pretty feet," Graham said.

"Umm-hmm. Let's head upstairs," Crawford said. "The troops are about to muster."

# # #

Jimmy Price had a lot of equipment – two heavy cases plus his camera bag and tripod. He made a clatter coming through the front door of the Lombard Funeral Home in Atlanta. He was a frail old man and his humor had not been improved by a long taxi ride from the airport in the morning rush.

An officious young fellow with styled hair hustled him into an office decorated in apricot and cream. The desk was bare except for a sculpture called The Praying Hands.

Price was examining the fingertips of the praying hands when Mr. Lombard himself came in. Lombard checked Price's credentials with extreme care.

"Your Atlanta office or agency or whatever called me, of course, Mr. Price. But last night we had to get the police to remove an obnoxious fellow who was trying to take pictures for The National Tattler, so I'm being very careful. I'm sure you understand. Mr. Price, the bodies were only released to us about one o'clock this morning, and the funeral is this afternoon at five. We simply can't delay it."