Red Dragon - Страница 41

“Are you all right?” Graham asked.

They stopped among the tombstones. Her eyes were dry, her gaze level.

“Better than you,” she said. “Got drunk, didn’t you?”

“Yep. Is somebody keeping an eye on you?”

“The precinct sent some people over. They’ve got plainclothes in the club. Lot of business now. More weirdos than usual.”

“I’m sorry you had this. You did… I thought you were fine at the hospital. I admired that.”

She nodded. “Freddy was a sport. He shouldn’t have to go out that hard. Thanks for getting me in the room.” She looked into the distance, blinking, thinking, eye shadow like stone dust on her lids. She faced Graham. “Look, the Tattler’s giving me some money, you figured that, right? For an interview and the dive at the grave-side. I don’t think Freddy would mind.”

“He’d have been mad if you passed it up.”

“That’s what I thought. They’re jerks, but they pay. What it is, they tried to get me to say that I think you deliberately turned this freak on to Freddy, chumming with him in that picture. I didn’t say it. If they print that I did say it, well that’s bullshit.”

Graham said nothing as she scanned his face.

“You didn’t like him, maybe – it doesn’t matter. But if you thought this could happen, you wouldn’t have missed the shot at the Fairy, right?”

“Yeah, Wendy, I’d have staked him out.”

“Do you have anything at all? I hear noise from these people and that’s about it.”

“We don’t have much. A few things from the lab we’re following up. It was a clean job and he’s lucky.”

“Are you?”

“What?”

“Lucky.”

“Off and on.”

“Freddy was never lucky. He told me he’d clean up on this. Big deals everywhere.”

“He probably would have, too.”

“Well look, Graham, if you ever, you know, feel like a drink, I’ve got one.”

“Thanks.”

“But stay sober on the street.”

“Oh yes.”

Two policemen cleared a path for Wendy through the crowd of curiosity-seekers outside the gate. One of the gawkers wore a printed T-shirt reading “The Tooth Fairy Is a One-Night Stand.” He whistled at Wendy. The woman beside him slapped his face.

A big policeman squeezed into the 280ZX beside Wendy and she pulled into the traffic. A second policeman followed in an unmarked car.

Chicago smelled like a spent skyrocket in the hot afternoon. Graham was lonely, and he knew why; funerals often make us want sex – it’s one in the eye for death.

The wind rattled the dry stalks of a funeral arrangement near his feet. For a hard second he remembered palm fronds rustling in the sea wind. He wanted very much to go home, knowing that he would not, could not, until the Dragon was dead.

CHAPTER 31

The projection room at Baeder Chemical was small – five rows of folding chairs with an aisle in the middle.

Dolarhyde arrived late. He stood at the back with his arms folded while they screened gray cards, color cards, and cubes variously lighted, filmed on a variety of infrared emulsions.

His presence disturbed Dandridge, the young man in charge. Dolarhyde carried an air of authority at work. He was the recognized darkroom expert from the parent company next door, and he was known to be a perfectionist.

Dandridge had not consulted him in months, a petty rivalry that had gone on since Gateway bought Baeder Chemical.

“Reba, give us the development dope on sample… eight,” Dandridge said.

Reba McClane sat at the end of a row, a clipboard in her lap. Speaking in a clear voice, her fingers moving over the clipboard in the semidarkness, she outlined the mechanics of the development-chemicals, temperature and time, and storage procedures before and after filming.

Infrared-sensitive film must be handled in total darkness. She had done all the dark room work, keeping the many samples straight by touch code and keeping a running record in the dark. It was easy to see her value to Baeder.

The screening ran through quitting time.

Reba McClane kept her seat as the others were filing out. Dolarhyde approached her carefully. He spoke to her at a distance while there were others in the room. He didn’t want her to feel watched.

“I thought you hadn’t made it,” she said.

“I had a machine down. It made me late.”

The lights were on. Her clean scalp glistened in the part of her hair as he stood over her.

“Did you get to see the 1000C sample?”

“I did.”

“They said it looked all right. It’s a lot easier to handle than the 1200 series. Think it’ll do?”

“It will.”

She had her purse with her, and a light raincoat. He stood back when she came into the aisle behind her searching cane. She didn’t seem to expect any help. He didn’t offer any.

Dandridge stuck his head back into the room.

“Reba, dear, Marcia had to fly. Can you manage?”

Spots of color appeared in her cheeks. “I can manage very well, thank you, Danny.”

“I’d drop you, love, but I’m late already. Say, Mr. Dolarhyde, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, could you-“

“Danny, I have a ride home.” She held in her anger. The nuances of expression were denied her, so she kept her face relaxed. She couldn’t control her color, though.

Watching with his cold yellow eyes, Dolarhyde understood her anger perfectly; he knew that Dandridge’s limp sympathy felt like spit on her cheek.

“I’ll take you,” he said, rather late.

“No, but thank you.” She had thought he might offer and had intended to accept. She wouldn’t have anybody forced into it. Damn Dandridge, damn his fumbling, she’d ride the damned bus, dammit. She had the fare and she knew the way and she could go anywhere she fucking pleased.

She stayed in the women’s room long enough for the others to leave the building. The janitor let her out.

She followed the edge of a dividing strip across the parking lot toward the bus stop, her raincoat over her shoulders, tapping the edge with her cane and feeling for the slight resistance of the puddles when the cane swished through them.

Dolarhyde watched her from his van. His feelings made him uneasy; they were dangerous in daylight.

For a moment under the lowering sun, windshields, puddles, high steel wires splintered the sunlight into the glint of scissors.

Her white cane comforted him. It swept the light of scissors, swept scissors away, and the memory of her harinlessness eased him. He was starting the engine.

Reba McClane heard the van behind her. It was beside her now.

“Thank you for inviting me.”

She nodded, smiled, tapped along.

“Ride with me.”

“Thanks, but I take the bus all the time.”

“Dandridge is a fool. Ride with me… “ – what would someone say? – “for my pleasure.”

She stopped. She heard him get out of the van.

People usually grasped her upper arm, not knowing what else to do. Blind people do not like to have their balance disturbed by a firm hold on their triceps. It is as unpleasant for them as standing on wiggly scales to weigh. Like anyone else, they don’t like to be propelled.

He didn’t touch her. In a moment she said, “It’s better if I take your arm.”

She had wide experience of forearms, but his surprised her fingers. It was as hard as an oak banister.

She could not know the amount of nerve he summoned to let her touch him.

The van felt big and high. Surrounded by resonances and echoes unlike those of a car, she held to the edges of the bucket seat until Dolarhyde fastened her safety belt. The diagonal shoulder belt pressed one of her breasts. She moved it until it lay between them.

They said little during the drive. Waiting at the red lights, he could look at her.

She lived in the left side of a duplex on a quiet street near Washington University.

“Come in and I’ll give you a drink.”

In his life, Dolarhyde had been in fewer than a dozen private homes. In the past ten years he had been in four; his own, Eileen’s briefly, the Leedses’, and the Jacobis’. Other people’s houses were exotic to him.

She felt the van rock as he got out. Her door opened. It was a long step down from the van. She bumped into him lightly. It was like bumping into a tree. He was much heavier, more solid than she would have judged from his voice and his footfalls. Solid and light on his feet. She had known a Bronco linebacker once in Denver who came out to film a United Way appeal with some blind kids.

Once inside her front door, Reba McClane stood her cane in the corner and was suddenly free. She moved effortlessly, turning on music, hanging up her coat.

Dolarhyde had to reassure himself that she was blind. Being in a home excited him.

“How about a gin and tonic?”

“Tonic will be fine.”

“Would you rather have juice?”

“Tonic.”

“You’re not a drinker, are you?”

“No.”

“Come on in the kitchen.” She opened the refrigerator. “How about… “ – she made a quick inventory with her hands – “a piece of pie, then? Karo pecan, it’s dynamite.”

“Fine.”

She took a whole pie from the icebox and put it on the counter.

Hands pointing straight down, she spread her fingers along the edge of the pie tin until its circumference told her that her middle fingers were at nine and three o’clock. Then she touched her thumb-tips together and brought them down to the surface of the pie to locate its exact center. She marked the center with a toothpick.

Dolarhyde tried to make conversation to keep her from feeling his stare. “How long have you been at Baeder?” No S’s in that one.