Red Dragon (37 page)

Grasping the pipe, he chinned himself with one arm, his toes dragging up the side of the bathtub. It was stout enough. His belt was stout enough too. He could make himself do it. He wasn’t afraid of
that.

He tied the end of his belt around the pipe in a bowline knot. The buckle end formed a noose. The thick belt didn’t swing, it hung down in a stiff noose.

He sat on the toilet lid and looked at it. He wouldn’t get any drop, but he could stand it. He could keep his hands off the noose until he was too weak to raise his arms.

But how could he be positive that his death would affect the Dragon, now that he and the Dragon were Two? Maybe it wouldn’t. How could he be sure the Dragon then would leave her alone?

It might be days before they found his body. She would wonder where he was. In that time would she go to his house and feel around for him? Go upstairs and feel around for him and get a surprise?

The Great Red Dragon would take an hour spitting her down the stairs.

Should he call her and warn her? What could she do against Him, even warned? Nothing. She could hope to die quickly, hope that in His rage He would quickly bite deep enough.

Upstairs in Dolarhyde’s house, the Dragon waited in pictures he had framed with his own hands. The Dragon waited in art books and magazines beyond number, reborn every time a photographer . . . did what?

Dolarhyde could hear in his mind the Dragon’s powerful voice cursing Reba. He would curse her first, before he bit. He would curse Dolarhyde too—tell her he was nothing.

“Don’t do that. Don’t . . . do that,” Dolarhyde said to the echoing tile. He listened to his voice, the voice of Francis Dolarhyde, the voice that Reba McClane understood easily, his own voice. He had been ashamed of it all his life, had said bitter and vicious things to others with it.

But he had never heard the voice of Francis Dolarhyde curse him.

“Don’t do that.”

The voice he heard now had never, ever cursed him. It had repeated the Dragon’s abuse. The memory shamed him.

He probably was not much of a man, he thought. It occurred to him that he had never really found out about that, and now he was curious.

He had one rag of pride that Reba McClane had given him. It told him dying in a bathroom was a sorry end.

What else? What other way was there?

There was a way and when it came to him it was blasphemy, he knew. But it was a way.

He paced the motel room, paced between the beds and from the door to the windows. As he walked he practiced speaking. The words came out all right if he breathed deep between the sentences and didn’t hurry.

He could talk very well between the rushes of fear. Now he had a bad one, he had one that made him retch. A calm was coming after. He waited for it and when it came he hurried to the telephone and placed a call to Brooklyn.

 

 

 

A junior high school band was getting on the bus in the motel parking lot. The children saw Dolarhyde coming. He had to go through them to get to his van.

A fat, round-faced boy with his Sam Browne belt all crooked put on a scowl, puffed up his chest and flexed his biceps after Dolarhyde passed. Two girls giggled. The tuba blatted out the bus window as Dolarhyde went by, and he never heard the laughter behind him.

In twenty minutes he stopped the van in the lane three hundred yards from Grandmother’s house.

He mopped his face, inhaled deeply three or four times. He gripped his house key in his left hand, the steering wheel with his right.

A high keening sounded through his nose. And again, louder. Louder, louder again. Go.

Gravel showered behind the van as it shot forward, the house bouncing bigger in the windshield. The van slid sideways into the yard and Dolarhyde was out of it, running.

Inside, not looking left or right, pounding down the basement stairs, fumbling at the padlocked trunk in the basement, looking at his keys.

The trunk keys were upstairs. He didn’t give himself time to think. A high humming through his nose as loud as he could to numb thought, drown out voices as he climbed the stairs at a run.

At the bureau now, fumbling in the drawer for the keys, not looking at the picture of the Dragon at the foot of the bed.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”

Where were the keys, where were the keys?

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING? STOP. I’VE NEVER SEEN A CHILD AS DISGUSTING AND DIRTY AS YOU. STOP.”

His searching hands slowed.

“LOOK . . . LOOK AT ME.”

He gripped the edge of the bureau—tried not to turn to the wall. He cut his eyes painfully away as his head turned in spite of him.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”

“nothing.”

The telephone was ringing, telephone ringing, telephone ringing. He picked it up, his back to the picture.

“Hey, D., how are you feeling?” Reba McClane’s voice.

He cleared his throat. “Okay”—hardly a whisper.

“I tried to call you down here. Your office said you were sick—you sound terrible.”

“Talk to me.”

“Of course I’ll talk to you. What do you think I called you for? What’s wrong?”

“Flu,” he said.

“Are you going to the doctor? . . . Hello? I said, are you going to the doctor?”

“Talk loud.” He scrabbled in the drawer, tried the drawer next to it.

“Have we got a bad connection? D., you shouldn’t be there sick by yourself.”

“TELL HER TO COME OVER TONIGHT AND TAKE CARE OF YOU.”

Dolarhyde almost got his hand over the mouthpiece in time.

“My God, what was that? Is somebody with you?”

“The radio, I grabbed the wrong knob.”

“Hey, D., do you want me to send somebody? You don’t sound so hot. I’ll come myself. I’ll get Marcia to bring me at lunch.”

“No.” The keys were under a belt coiled in the drawer. He had them now. He backed into the hall, carrying the telephone. “I’m okay. I’ll see you soon.” The /s/s nearly foundered him. He ran down the stairs. The phone cord jerked out of the wall and the telephone tumbled down the stairs behind him.

A scream of savage rage. “COME HERE, CUNT FACE.”

Down to the basement. In the trunk beside his case of dynamite was a small valise packed with cash, credit cards and driver’s licenses in various names, his pistol, knife and blackjack.

He grabbed the valise and ran up to the ground floor, quickly past the stairs, ready to fight if the Dragon came down them. Into the van and driving hard, fishtailing in the gravel lane.

He slowed on the highway and pulled over to the shoulder to heave yellow bile. Some of the fear went away.

Proceeding at legal speed, using his flashers well ahead of turns, carefully he drove to the airport.

Dolarhyde paid his taxi fare in front of an apartment house on Eastern Parkway two blocks from the Brooklyn Museum. He walked the rest of the way. Joggers passed him, heading for Prospect Park.

Standing on the traffic island near the IRT subway station, he got a good view of the Greek Revival building. He had never seen the Brooklyn Museum before, though he had read its guidebook—he had ordered the book when he first saw “Brooklyn Museum” in tiny letters beneath photographs of
The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun.

The names of the great thinkers from Confucius to Demosthenes were carved in stone above the entrance. It was an imposing building with botanical gardens beside it, a fitting house for the Dragon.

The subway rumbled beneath the street, tingling the soles of his feet. Stale air puffed from the gratings and mixed with the smell of the dye in his mustache.

Only an hour left before closing time. He crossed the street and went inside. The checkroom attendant took his valise.

“Will the checkroom be open tomorrow?” he asked.

“The museum’s closed tomorrow.” The attendant was a wizened woman in a blue smock. She turned away from him.

“The people who come in tomorrow, do they use the checkroom?”

“No. The museum’s closed, the checkroom’s closed.”

Good. “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Dolarhyde cruised among the great glass cases in the Oceanic Hall and the Hall of the Americas on the ground floor—Andes pottery, primitive edged weapons, artifacts and powerful masks from the Indians of the Northwest coast.

Now there were only forty minutes left before the museum closed. There was no more time to learn the ground floor. He knew where the exits and the public elevators were.

He rode up to the fifth floor. He could feel that he was closer to the Dragon now, but it was all right—he wouldn’t turn a corner and run into Him.

The Dragon was not on public display; the painting had been locked away in the dark since its return from the Tate Gallery in London.

Dolarhyde had learned on the telephone that
The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun
was rarely displayed. It was almost two hundred years old and a watercolor—light would fade it.

Dolarhyde stopped in front of Albert Bierstadt’s
A Storm in the Rocky Mountains—Mt. Rosalie 1866.
From there he could see the locked doors of the Painting Study and Storage Department. That’s where the Dragon was. Not a copy, not a photograph: the Dragon. This is where he would come tomorrow when he had his appointment.

He walked around the perimeter of the fifth floor, past the corridor of portraits, seeing nothing of the paintings. The exits were what interested him. He found the fire exits and the main stairs, and marked the location of the public elevators.

The guards were polite middle-aged men in thick-soled shoes, years of standing in the set of their legs. None was armed, Dolarhyde noted; one of the guards in the lobby was armed. Maybe he was a moonlighting cop.

The announcement of closing time came over the public-address system, and he went to get his valise.

Dolarhyde stood on the pavement under the allegorical figure of Brooklyn and watched the crowd come out into the pleasant summer evening.

Joggers ran in place, waiting while the stream of people crossed the sidewalk toward the subway.

Dolarhyde spent a few minutes in the botanical gardens. Then he flagged a taxi and gave the driver the address of a store he had found in the Yellow Pages.

At nine P.M. Monday Graham set his briefcase on the floor outside the Chicago apartment he was using and rooted in his pocket for the keys.

He had spent a long day in Detroit interviewing staff and checking employment records at a hospital where Mrs. Jacobi did volunteer work before the family moved to Birmingham. He was looking for a drifter, someone who might have worked in both Detroit and Atlanta or in Birmingham and Atlanta; someone with access to a van and a wheelchair who saw Mrs. Jacobi and Mrs. Leeds before he broke into their houses.

Crawford thought the trip was a waste of time, but humored him. Crawford had been right. Damn Crawford. He was right too much.

Graham could hear the telephone ringing in the apartment. The keys caught in the lining of his pocket. When he jerked them out, a long thread came with them. Change spilled down the inside of the trouser leg and scattered on the floor.

“Son of a bitch.”

He made it halfway across the room before the phone stopped ringing. Maybe that was Molly trying to reach him.

He called her in Oregon.

Willy’s grandfather answered the telephone with his mouth full. It was suppertime in Oregon.

“Just ask Molly to call me when she’s finished,” Graham told him.

He was in the shower with shampoo in his eyes when the telephone rang again. He sluiced his head and went dripping to grab the receiver. “Hello, Hotlips.”

“You silver-tongued devil, this is Byron Metcalf in Birmingham.”

“Sorry.”

“I’ve got good news and bad news. You were right about Niles Jacobi. He took the stuff out of the house. He’d gotten rid of it, but I squeezed him with some hash that was in his room and he owned up. That’s the bad news—I know you hoped the Tooth Fairy stole it and fenced it.

“The good news is there’s some film. I don’t have it yet. Niles says there are two reels stuffed under the seat in his car. You still want it, right?”

“Sure, sure I do.”

“Well, his intimate friend Randy’s using the car and we haven’t caught up with him yet, but it won’t be long. Want me to put the film on the first plane to Chicago and call you when it’s coming?”

“Please do. That’s good, Byron, thanks.”

“Nothing to it.”

Molly called just as Graham was drifting off to sleep. After they assured each other that they were all right, there didn’t seem to be much to say.

Willy was having a real good time, Molly said. She let Willy say good night.

Willy had plenty more to say than just good night—he told Will the exciting news: Grandpa bought him a pony.

Molly hadn’t mentioned it.

The Brooklyn Museum is closed to the general public on Tuesdays, but art classes and researchers are admitted.

The museum is an excellent facility for serious scholarship. The staff members are knowledgeable and accommodating; often they allow researchers to come by appointment on Tuesdays to see items not on public display.

Francis Dolarhyde came out of the IRT subway station shortly after 2 P.M. on Tuesday carrying his scholarly materials. He had a notebook, a Tate Gallery catalog, and a biography of William Blake under his arm.

He had a flat 9-mm pistol, a leather sap and his razor-edged filleting knife under his shirt. An elastic bandage held the weapons against his flat belly. His sport coat would button over them. A cloth soaked in chloroform and sealed in a plastic bag was in his coat pocket.

In his hand he carried a new guitar case.