Red Dragon (20 page)

“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. attorney.”

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. attorney. Put Sergeant Riddle on the phone.”

“I know something—”

Crawford’s voice came on the line. “Let me have it, Will.”

Graham slammed his receiver down with a bang that made everyone 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. That’s 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 I 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 paper 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 transmission 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 apartment 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 longing 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 oyster-eyed 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 conversations.

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.

Marketing experts discovered it was better to have the big cover line in color on the front and play the story in the middle pages, where it was difficult to hold the paper open and manage a purse and grocery cart at the same time.

The standard story featured an optimistic five paragraphs in ten-point type, then a drop to eight point, then to six point before mentioning that the “miracle drug” was unavailable or that animal research was just beginning.

Freddy earned his money turning them out, and the stories sold a lot of
Tattlers
.

In addition to increased readership, there were many spinoff sales of miracle medallions and healing cloths. Manufacturers of these paid a premium to get their ads located close to the weekly cancer story.

Many readers wrote to the paper for more information. Some additional revenue was realized by selling their names to a radio “evangelist,” a screaming sociopath who wrote to them for money, using envelopes stamped “Someone You Love Will Die Unless . . .”

Freddy Lounds was good for the
Tattler
, and the
Tattler
was good to him. Now, after eleven years with the paper, he earned $72,000 a year. He covered pretty much what he pleased and spent the money trying to have a good time. He lived as well as he knew how to live.

The way things were developing, he believed he could raise the ante on his paperback deal, and there was movie interest. He had heard that Hollywood was a fine place for obnoxious fellows with money.

Freddy felt good. He shot down the ramp to the underground garage in his building and wheeled into his parking place with a spirited squeal of rubber. There on the wall was his name in letters a foot high, marking his private spot. Mr. Frederick Lounds.

Wendy was here already—her Datsun was parked next to his space. Good. He wished he could take her to Washington with him. That would make those flatfeet’s eyes pop. He whistled in the elevator on his way up.

 

 

 

Wendy was packing for him. She had lived out of suitcases and she did a good job.

Neat in her jeans and plaid shirt, her brown hair gathered in a chipmunk tail on her neck, she might have been a farm girl except for her pallor and her shape. Wendy’s figure was almost a caricature of puberty.

She looked at Lounds with eyes that had not registered surprise in years. She saw that he was trembling.

“You’re working too hard, Roscoe.” She liked to call him Roscoe, and it pleased him for some reason. “What are you taking, the six-o’clock shuttle?” She brought him a drink and moved her sequined jump suit and wig case off the bed so he could lie down. “I can take you to the airport. I’m not going to the club ’til six.”

“Wendy City” was her own topless bar, and she didn’t have to dance anymore. Lounds had cosigned the note.

“You sounded like Morocco Mole when you called me,” she said.

“Who?”

“You know, on television Saturday morning, he’s real mysterious and he helps Secret Squirrel. We watched it when you had the flu. . . . You really pulled one off today, didn’t you? You’re really pleased with yourself.”

“Damn straight. I took a chance today, baby, and it paid off. I’ve got a chance at something sweet.”

“You’ve got time for a nap before you go. You’re running yourself in the ground.”

Lounds lit a cigarette. He already had one burning in the ashtray.

“You know what?” she said. “I bet if you drink your drink and get it off, you could go to sleep.”

Lounds’s face, like a fist pressed against her neck, relaxed at last, became mobile as suddenly as a fist becomes a hand. His trembling stopped. He told her all about it, whispering into the buck jut of her augmented breasts; she tracing eights on the back of his neck with a finger.

“That is some kind of smart, Roscoe,” she said. “You go to sleep now. I’ll get you up for the plane. It’ll be all right, all of it. And then we’ll have a high old time.”

They whispered about the places they would go. He went to sleep.

Dr. Alan Bloom and Jack Crawford sat on folding chairs, the only furniture left in Crawford’s office.

“The cupboard is bare, Doctor.”

Dr. Bloom studied Crawford’s simian face and wondered what was coming. Behind Crawford’s grousing and his Alka-Seltzers the doctor saw an intelligence as cold as an X-ray table.

“Where did Will go?”

“He’ll walk around and cool off,” Crawford said. “He hates Lounds.”

“Did you think you might lose Will after Lecter published his home address? That he might go back to his family?”

“For a minute, I did. It shook him.”

“Understandably,” Dr. Bloom said.

“Then I realized—he can’t go home, and neither can Molly and Willy, never, until the Tooth Fairy is out of the way.”

“You’ve met Molly?”

“Yeah. She’s great, I like her. She’d be glad to see me in hell with my back broken, of course. I’m having to duck her right now.”

“She thinks you use Will?”

Crawford looked at Dr. Bloom sharply. “I’ve got some things I have to talk to him about. We’ll need to check with you. When do you have to be at Quantico?”

“Not until Tuesday morning. I put it off.” Dr. Bloom was a guest lecturer at the behavioral-science section of the FBI Academy.

“Graham likes you. He doesn’t think you run any mind games on him,” Crawford said. Bloom’s remark about using Graham stuck in his craw.

“I don’t. I wouldn’t try,” Dr. Bloom said. “I’m as honest with him as I’d be with a patient.”

“Exactly.”

“No, I want to be his friend, and I am. Jack, I owe it to my field of study to observe. Remember, though, when
you
asked me to give you a study on him, I refused.”

“That was Petersen, upstairs, wanted the study.”