Red Dragon (6 page)

Crawford was griping about having to testify at a trial in Washington in the morning. He was afraid the trial could tie him up for several days. As he lit another cigarette, he peered across the flame at Graham’s hands and his color.

“Atlanta and Birmingham can run the thumbprint against their known sex offenders,” Crawford said. “So can we. And Price has dug a single print out of the files before. He’ll program the FINDER with it—we’ve come a long way with that just since you left.”

FINDER, the FBI’s automated fingerprint reader and processor, might recognize the thumbprint on an incoming fingerprint card from some unrelated case.

“When we get him, that print and his teeth will put him away,” Crawford said. “What we have to do, we have to figure on what he
could
be. We have to swing a wide loop. Indulge me, now. Say we’ve arrested a good suspect. You walk in and see him. What is there about him that doesn’t surprise you?”

“I don’t know, Jack. Goddammit, he’s got no face for me. We could spend a lot of time looking for people we’ve invented. Have you talked to Bloom?”

“On the phone last night. Bloom doubts he’s suicidal, and so does Heimlich. Bloom was only here a couple of hours the first day, but he and Heimlich have the whole file. Bloom’s examining Ph.D. candidates this week. He said tell you hello. Do you have his number in Chicago?”

“I have it.”

Graham liked Dr. Alan Bloom, a small round man with sad eyes, a good forensic psychiatrist—maybe the best. Graham appreciated the fact that Dr. Bloom had never displayed professional interest in him. That was not always the case with psychiatrists.

“Bloom says he wouldn’t be surprised if we heard from the Tooth Fairy. He might write us a note,” Crawford said.

“On a bedroom wall.”

“Bloom thinks he might be disfigured or he may believe he’s disfigured. He told me not to give that a lot of weight. ‘I won’t set up a straw man to chase, Jack,’ is what he told me. ‘That would be a distraction and would diffuse the effort.’ Said they taught him to talk like that in graduate school.”

“He’s right,” Graham said.

“You could tell something about him or you wouldn’t have found that fingerprint,” Crawford said.

“That was the evidence on the damn wall, Jack. Don’t put this on me. Look, don’t expect too much from me, all right?”

“Oh, we’ll get him. You know we’ll get him, don’t you?”

“I know it. One way or the other.”

“What’s one way?”

“We’ll find evidence we’ve overlooked.”

“What’s the other?”

“He’ll do it and do it until one night he makes too much noise going in and the husband gets to a gun in time.”

“No other possibilities?”

“You think I’m going to spot him across a crowded room? No, that’s Ezio Pinza you’re thinking about, does that. The Tooth Fairy will go on and on until we get smart or get lucky. He won’t stop.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s got a genuine taste for it.”

“See, you do know something about him,” Crawford said.

Graham did not speak again until they were on the sidewalk. “Wait until the next full moon,” he told Crawford. “Then tell me how much I know about him.”

Graham went back to his hotel and slept for two and a half hours. He woke at noon, showered, and ordered a pot of coffee and a sandwich. It was time to make a close study of the Jacobi file from Birmingham. He scrubbed his reading glasses with hotel soap and settled in by the window with the file. For the first few minutes he looked up at every sound, footsteps in the hall, the distant thud of the elevator door. Then he knew nothing but the file.

The waiter with the tray knocked and waited, knocked and waited. Finally he left the lunch on the floor outside the door and signed the bill himself.

Hoyt Lewis, meter reader for Georgia Power Company, parked his truck under a big tree in the alley and settled back with his lunch box. It was no fun opening his lunch now that he packed it himself. No little notes in there anymore, no surprise Twinkie.

He was halfway through his sandwich when a loud voice at his ear made him jump.

“I guess I used a thousand dollars’ worth of electricity this month, is that right?”

Lewis turned and saw at the truck window the red face of H. G. Parsons. Parsons wore Bermuda shorts and carried a yard broom.

“I didn’t understand what you said.”

“I guess you’ll say I used a thousand dollars’ worth of electricity this month. Did you hear me that time?”

“I don’t know what you’ve used because I haven’t read your meter yet, Mr. Parsons. When I do read it, I’ll put it down on this piece of paper right here.”

Parsons was bitter about the size of the bill. He had complained to the power company that he was being prorated.

“I’m keeping up with what I use,” Parsons said. “I’m going to the Public Service Commission with it too.”

“You want to read your meter with me? Let’s go over there right now and—”

“I know how to read a meter. I guess you could read one too if it wasn’t so much trouble.”

“Just be quiet a minute, Parsons.” Lewis got out of his truck. “Just be quiet a minute now, dammit. Last year you put a magnet on your meter. Your wife said you was in the hospital, so I just took it off and didn’t say anything. When you poured molasses in it last winter, I reported it. I notice you paid up when we charged you for it.

“Your bill went up after you did all that wiring yourself. I’ve told you until I’m blue in the face: Something in that house is draining off current. Do you hire an electrician to find it? No, you call down to the office and bitch about me. I’ve about got a bait of you.” Lewis was pale with anger.

“I’ll get to the bottom of this,” Parsons said, retreating down the alley toward his yard. “They’re checking up on you, Mr. Lewis. I saw somebody reading your route ahead of you,” he said across the fence. “Pretty soon you’ll have to go to work like everybody else.”

Lewis cranked his truck and drove on down the alley. Now he would have to find another place to finish his lunch. He was sorry. The big shade tree had been a good lunch place for years.

It was directly behind Charles Leeds’s house.

 

 

At five-thirty P.M. Hoyt Lewis drove in his own automobile to the Cloud Nine Lounge, where he had several boilermakers to ease his mind.

When he called his estranged wife, all he could think of to say was “I wish you was still fixing my lunch.”

“You ought to have thought about that, Mr. Smarty,” she said, and hung up.

He played a gloomy game of shuffleboard with some linemen and a dispatcher from Georgia Power and looked over the crowd. Goddamned airline clerks had started coming in the Cloud Nine. All had the same little mustache and pinkie ring. Pretty soon they’d be fixing the Cloud Nine English with a damned dart board. You can’t depend on nothing.

“Hey, Hoyt. I’ll match you for a bottle of beer.” It was his supervisor, Billy Meeks.

“Say, Billy, I need to talk to you.”

“What’s up?”

“You know that old son of a bitch Parsons that’s all the time calling up?”

“Called me last week, as a matter of fact,” Meeks said. “What about him?”

“He said somebody was reading my route ahead of me, like maybe somebody thought I wasn’t making the rounds. You don’t think I’m reading meters at home, do you?”

“Nope.”

“You don’t think that, do you? I mean, if I’m on a man’s shit list I want him to come right out and say it.”

“If you was on my shit list, you think I’d be scared to say so to your face?”

“No.”

“All right, then. If anybody was checking your route, I’d know it. Your executives is always aware of a situation like that. Nobody’s checking up on you, Hoyt. You can’t pay any attention to Parsons, he’s just old and contrary. He called me up last week and said, ‘Congratulations on getting wise to that Hoyt Lewis.’ I didn’t pay him any mind.” “I wish we’d put the law on him about that meter,” Lewis said. “I was just setting back there in the alley under a tree trying to eat my lunch today and he jumped me. What he needs is a good ass-kicking.”

“I used to set back there myself when I had the route,” Meeks said. “Boy, I tell you one time I seen Mrs. Leeds—well, it don’t seem right to talk about it now she’s dead—but one or two times she was out there sunning herself in the backyard in her swimming suit. Whooee. Had a cute little peter belly. That was a damn shame about them. She was a nice lady.”

“Did they catch anybody yet?”

“Naw.”

“Too bad he got the Leedses when old Parsons was right down the street convenient,” Lewis observed.

“I’ll tell you what, I don’t let my old lady lay around out in the yard in no swimming suit. She goes ‘Silly Billy, who’s gonna see me?’ I told her, I said you can’t tell what kind of a insane bastard might jump over that hedge with his private out. Did the cops talk to you? Ast you had you seen anybody?”

“Yeah, I think they got everybody that has a route out there. Mailmen; everybody. I was working Laurel-wood on the other side of Betty Jane Drive the whole week until today, though.” Lewis picked at the label on his beer. “You say Parsons called you up last week?”

“Yep.”

“Then he must have saw somebody reading his meter. He wouldn’t have called in if he’d just made it up today to bother me. You say you didn’t send nobody, and it sure wasn’t me he saw.”

“Might have been Southeastern Bell checking something.”

“Might have been.”

“We don’t share poles out there, though.”

“Reckon I ought to call the cops?”

“Wouldn’t hurt nothing,” Meeks said.

“Naw, it might do Parsons some good, talk with the law. Scare the shit out of him when they drive up, anyhow.”

Graham went back to the Leeds house in the late afternoon. He entered through the front door and tried not to look at the ruin the killer had left. So far he had seen files, a killing floor and meat—all aftermath. He knew a fair amount about how they died. How they lived was on his mind today.

A survey, then. The garage contained a good ski boat, well used and well maintained, and a station wagon. Golf clubs were there, and a trail bike. The power tools were almost unused. Adult toys.

Graham took a wedge from the golf bag and had to choke up on the long shaft as he made a jerky swing. The bag puffed a smell of leather at him as he leaned it back against the wall. Charles Leeds’s things.

Graham pursued Charles Leeds through the house. His hunting prints hung in the den. His set of the Great Books were all in a row. Sewanee annuals. H. Allen Smith and Perelman and Max Shulman on the bookshelves. Vonnegut and Evelyn Waugh. C. S. Forrester’s
Beat to Quarters
was open on a table.

In the den closet a good skeet gun, a Nikon camera, a Bolex Super Eight movie camera and projector.

Graham, who owned almost nothing except basic fishing equipment, a third-hand Volkswagen, and two cases of Montrachet, felt a mild animosity toward the adult toys and wondered why.

Who was Leeds? A successful tax attorney, a Sewanee footballer, a rangy man who liked to laugh, a man who got up and fought with his throat cut.

Graham followed him through the house out of an odd sense of obligation. Learning about him first was a way of asking permission to look at his wife.

Graham felt that it was she who drew the monster, as surely as a singing cricket attracts death from the red-eyed fly.

Mrs. Leeds, then.

She had a small dressing room upstairs. Graham managed to reach it without looking around the bedroom. The room was yellow and appeared undisturbed except for the smashed mirror above the dressing table. A pair of L.L.Bean moccasins was on the floor in front of the closet, as though she had just stepped out of them. Her dressing gown appeared to have been flung on its peg, and the closet revealed the mild disorder of a woman who has many other closets to organize.

Mrs. Leeds’s diary was in a plum velvet box on the dressing table. The key was taped to the lid along with a check tag from the police property room.

Graham sat on a spindly white chair and opened the diary at random:

 

 

The page was flecked with detective’s cigar ash.

Graham read on as the light faded, through the daughter’s tonsillectomy, and a scare in June when Mrs. Leeds found a small lump in her breast.
(Dear God, the children are so small.)