Red Dragon

  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 thumbtips 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.

  “Three months. Didn’t you know?”

  “They tell me the minimum.”

  She grinned. “You probably stepped on some toes when you laid out the darkrooms. Listen, the techs love you for it. The plumbing works and there are plenty of outlets. Two-twenty wherever you need it.”

  She put the middle finger of her left hand on the toothpick, her thumb on the edge of the tin and cut him a slice of pie, guiding the knife with her left index finger.

  He watched her handle the bright knife. Strange to look at the front of a woman as much as he liked. How often in company can one look where he wants to look?

  She made herself a stiff gin and tonic and they went into the living room. She passed her hand over a floor lamp, felt no heat, switched it on.

  Dolarhyde ate his pie in three bites and sat stiffly on the couch, his sleek hair shining under the lamp, his powerful hands on his knees.

  She put her head back in her chair and propped her feet on an ottoman.

  “When will they film at the zoo?”

  “Maybe next week.” He was glad he had called the zoo and offered the infrared film: Dandridge might check.

  “It’s a great zoo. I went with my sister and my niece when they came to help me move in. They have the contact area, you know. I hugged this llama. It felt nice, but talk about aroma, boy . . . I thought I was being followed by a llama until I changed my shirt.”

  This was Having a Conversation. He had to say something or leave. “How did you come to Baeder?”

  “They advertised at the Reiker Institute in Denver where I was working. I was checking the bulletin board one day and just happened to come across this job. Actually, what happened, Baeder had to shape up their employment practices to keep this Defense contract. They managed to pack six women, two blacks, two Chicanos, an Oriental, a paraplegic, and me into a total of eight hirings. We all count in at least two categories, you see.”

  “You worked out well for Baeder.”

  “The others did too. Baeder’s not giving anything away.”

  “Before that?” He was sweating a little. Conversation was hard. Looking was good, though. She had good legs. She had nicked an ankle shaving. Along his arms a sense of the weight of her legs, limp.

  “I trained newly blind people at the Reiker Institute in Denver for ten years after I finished school. This is my first job on the outside.”

  “Outside of what?”

  “Out in the big world. It was really insular at Reiker. I mean, we were training people to live in the sighted world and we didn’t live in it ourselves. We talked to each other too much. I thought I’d get out and knock around a little. Actually, I had intended to go into speech therapy, for speech-and-hearing-impaired children. I expect I’ll go back to that, one of these days.” She drained her glass. “Say, I’ve got some Mrs. Paul’s crab-ball miniatures in here. They’re pretty good. I shouldn’t have served dessert first. Want some?”

  “Um-hmmm.”

  “Do you cook?”

  “Um-hmmm.”

  A tiny crease appeared in her forehead. She went into the kitchen. “How about coffee?” she called.

  “Uh-huh.”

  She made small talk about grocery prices and got no reply. She came back into the living room and sat on the ottoman, her elbows on her knees.

  “Let’s talk about something for a minute and get it out of the way, okay?”

  Silence.

  “You haven’t said anything lately. In fact, you haven’t said anything since I mentioned speech therapy.” Her voice was kind, but firm. It carried no taint of sympathy. “I understand you fine because you speak very well and because I listen. People don’t pay attention. They ask me what? what? all the time. If you don’t want to talk, okay. But I hope you will talk. Because you can, and I’m interested in what you have to say.”

  “Ummm. That’s good,” Dolarhyde said softly. Clearly this little speech was very important to her. Was she inviting him into the two-category club with her and the Chinese paraplegic? He wondered what his second category was.

  Her next statement was incredible to him.

  “May I touch your face? I want to know if you’re smiling or frowning.” Wryly, now. “I want to know whether to just shut up or not.”

  She raised her hand and waited.

  How well would she get around with her fingers bitten off? Dolarhyde mused. Even in street teeth he could do it as easily as biting off breadsticks. If he braced his heels on the floor, his weight back on the couch, and locked both hands on her wrist, she could never pull away from him in time. Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch, maybe leave the thumb. For measuring pies.

  He took her wrist between his thumb and forefinger and turned her shapely, hard-used hand in the light. There were many small scars on it, and several new nicks and abrasions. A smooth scar on the back might have been a burn.

  Too close to home. Too early in his Becoming. She wouldn’t be there to look at anymore.

  To ask this incredible thing, she could know nothing personal about him. She had not gossiped.

  “Take my word that I’m smiling,” he said. Okay on the S. It was true that he had a sort of smile which exposed his handsome public teeth.

  He held her wrist above her lap and released it. Her hand settled to her thigh and half-closed, fingers trailing on the cloth like an averted glance.

  “I think the coffee’s ready,” she said.

  “I’m going.” Had to go. Home for relief.

  She nodded. “If I offended you, I didn’t mean to.”

  “No.”

  She stayed on the ottoman, listened to be sure the lock clicked as he left.

  Reba McClane made herself another gin and tonic. She put on some Segovia records and curled up on the couch. Dolarhyde had left a warm dent in the cushion. Traces of him remained in the air—shoe polish, a new leather belt, good shaving lotion.

  What an intensely private man. She had heard only a few references to him at the office—Dandridge saying “that son of a bitch Dolarhyde” to one of his toadies.

  Privacy was important to Reba. As a child, learning to cope after she lost her sight, she had had no privacy at all.

  Now, in public, she could never be sure that she was not watched. So Francis Dolarhyde’s sense of privacy appealed to her. She had not felt one ion of sympathy from him, and that was good.

  So was this gin.

  Suddenly the Segovia sounded busy. She put on her whale songs.

  Three tough months in a new town. The winter to face, finding curbs in the snow. Reba McClane, leggy and brave, damned self-pity. She would not have it. She was aware of a deep vein of cripple’s anger in her and, while she could not get rid of it, she made it work for her, fueling her drive for independence, strengthening her
determination to wring all she could from every day.

  In her way, she was a hard one. Faith in any sort of natural justice was nothing but a night-light; she knew that. Whatever she did, she would end the same way everyone does: flat on her back with a tube in her nose, wondering “Is this all?”

  She knew that she would never have the light, but there were things she could have. There were things to enjoy. She had gotten pleasure from helping her students, and the pleasure was oddly intensified by the knowledge that she would be neither rewarded nor punished for helping them.

  In making friends she was ever wary of people who foster dependency and feed on it. She had been involved with a few—the blind attract them, and they are the enemy.

  Involved. Reba knew that she was physically attractive to men—God knows enough of them copped a feel with their knuckles when they grabbed her upper arm.

  She liked sex very much, but years ago she had learned something basic about men: Most of them are terrified of entailing a burden. Their fear was augmented in her case.

  She did not like for a man to creep in and out of her bed as though he were stealing chickens.

  Ralph Mandy was coming to take her to dinner. He had a particularly cowardly mew about being so scarred by life that he was incapable of love. Careful Ralph told her that too often, and it scalded her. Ralph was amusing, but she didn’t want to own him.

  She didn’t want to see Ralph. She didn’t feel like making conversation and hearing the hitches in conversations around them as people watched her eat.

  It would be so nice to be wanted by someone with the courage to get his hat or stay as he damn pleased, and who gave her credit for the same. Someone who didn’t worry about her.

  Francis Dolarhyde—shy, with a linebacker’s body and no bullshit.

  She had never seen or touched a cleft lip and had no visual associations with the sound. She wondered if Dolarhyde thought she understood him easily because “blind people hear so much better than we do.” That was a common myth. Maybe she should have explained to him that it was not true, that blind people simply pay more attention to what they hear.

  There were so many misconceptions about the blind. She wondered if Dolarhyde shared the popular belief that the blind are “purer in spirit” than most people, that they are somehow sanctified by their affliction. She smiled to herself. That one wasn’t true either.

  32

  The Chicago police worked under a media blitz, a nightly news “countdown” to the next full moon. Eleven days were left.

  Chicago families were frightened.

  At the same time, attendance rose at horror movies that should have died at the drive-ins in a week. Fascination and horror. The entrepreneur who hit the punk-rock market with “Tooth Fairy” T-shirts came out with an alternate line that said “The Red Dragon Is a One-Night Stand.” Sales were divided about equally between the two.

  Jack Crawford himself had to appear at a news conference with police officials after the funeral. He had received orders from Above to make the federal presence more visible; he did not make it more audible, as he said nothing.

  When heavily manned investigations have little to feed on, they tend to turn upon themselves, covering the same ground over and over, beating it flat. They take on the circular shape of a hurricane or a zero.

  Everywhere Graham went he found detectives, cameras, a rush of uniformed men, and the incessant crackle of radios. He needed to be still.

  Crawford, ruffled from his news conference, found Graham at nightfall in the quiet of an unused jury room on the floor above the U.S. prosecutor’s office.

  Good lights hung low over the green felt jury table where Graham spread out his papers and photographs. He had taken off his coat and tie and he was slumped in a chair staring at two photographs. The Leedses’ framed picture stood before him and beside it, on a clipboard propped against a carafe, was a picture of the Jacobis.

  Graham’s pictures reminded Crawford of a bullfighter’s folding shrine, ready to be set up in any hotel room. There was no photograph of Lounds. He suspected that Graham had not been thinking about the Lounds case at all. He didn’t need trouble with Graham.

  “Looks like a poolroom in here,” Crawford said.

  “Did you knock ’em dead?” Graham was pale but sober. He had a quart of orange juice in his fist.

  “Jesus.” Crawford collapsed in a chair. “You try to think out there, it’s like trying to take a piss on the train.”

  “Any news?”

  “The commissioner was popping sweat over a question and scratched his balls on television, that’s the only notable thing I saw. Watch at six and eleven if you don’t believe it.”

  “Want some orange juice?”

  “I’d just as soon swallow barbed wire.”

  “Good. More for me.” Graham’s face was drawn. His eyes were too bright. “How about the gas?”

  “God bless Liza Lake. There’re forty-one Servco Supreme franchise stations in greater Chicago. Captain Osborne’s boys swarmed those, checking sales in containers to people driving vans and trucks. Nothing yet, but they haven’t seen all shifts. Servco has 186 other stations—they’re scattered over eight states. We’ve asked for help from the local jurisdictions. It’ll take a while. If God loves me, he used a credit card. There’s a chance.”

  “Not if he can suck a siphon hose, there isn’t.”

  “I asked the commissioner not to say anything about the Tooth Fairy maybe living in this area. These people are spooked enough. If he told them that, this place would sound like Korea tonight when the drunks come home.”

  “You still think he’s close?”

  “Don’t you? It figures, Will.” Crawford picked up the Lounds autopsy report and peered at it through his half-glasses.

  “The bruise on his head was older than the mouth injuries. Five to eight hours older, they’re not sure. Now, the mouth injuries were hours old when they got Lounds to the hospital. They were burned over too, but inside his mouth they could tell. He retained some chloroform in his . . . hell, someplace in his wheeze. You think he was unconscious when the Tooth Fairy bit him?”

  “No. He’d want him awake.”

  “That’s what I figure. All right, he takes him out with a lick on the head—that’s in the garage. He has to keep him quiet with chloroform until he gets him someplace where the noise won’t matter. Brings him back and gets here hours after the bite.”

  “He could have done it all in the back of the van, parked way out somewhere,” Graham said.

  Crawford massaged the sides of his nose with his fingers, giving his voice a megaphone effect. “You’re forgetting about the wheels on the chair. Bev got two kinds of carpet fuzz, wool and synthetic. Synthetic’s from a van, maybe, but when have you ever seen a wool rug in a van? How many wool rugs have you seen in someplace you can rent? Damn few. Wool rug is a house, Will. And the dirt and mold were from a dark place where the chair was stored, a dirt-floored cellar.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Now, look at this.” Crawford pulled a Rand Mc-Nally road atlas out of his briefcase. He had drawn a circle on the “United States mileage and driving time” map. “Freddy was gone a little over fifteen hours, and his injuries are spaced over that time. I’m going to make a couple of assumptions. I don’t like to do that, but here goes. . . . What are you laughing at?”

  “I just remembered when you ran those field exercises at Quantico—when that trainee told you he assumed something.”

  “I don’t remember that. Here’s—”

  “You made him write ‘assume’ on the blackboard. You took the chalk and started underlining and yelling in his face. ‘When you assume, you make an ASS out of U and ME both,’ that’s what you told him, as I recall.”

  “He needed a boot in the ass to shape up. Now, look at this. Figure he had Chicago traffic on Tuesday afternoon, going out of town with Lounds. Allow a couple of hours to fool with Lounds at the location where he took him, and then the tim
e driving back. He couldn’t have gone much farther than six hours’ driving time out of Chicago. Okay, this circle around Chicago is six hours’ driving time. See, it’s wavy because some roads are faster than others.”

  “Maybe he just stayed here.”

  “Sure, but this is the farthest away he could be.”

  “So you’ve narrowed it down to Chicago, or inside a circle covering Milwaukee, Madison, Dubuque, Peoria, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Toledo, and Detroit, to name a few.”

  “Better than that. We know he got a Tattler very fast. Monday night, probably.”

  “He could have done that in Chicago.”

  “I know it, but once you get out of town the Tattlers aren’t available on Monday night in a lot of locations. Here’s a list from the Tattler circulation department—places Tattlers are air-freighted or trucked inside the circle on Monday night. See, that leaves Milwaukee, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Detroit. They go to the airports and maybe ninety newsstands that stay open all night, not counting the ones in Chicago. I’m using the field offices to check them. Some newsie might remember an odd customer on Monday night.”

  “Maybe. That’s a good move, Jack.”

  Clearly Graham’s mind was elsewhere.

  If Graham were a regular agent, Crawford would have threatened him with a lifetime appointment to the Aleutians. Instead he said, “My brother called this afternoon. Molly left his house, he said.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Someplace safe, I guess?”

  Graham was confident Crawford knew exactly where she went.

  “Willy’s grandparents.”

  “Well, they’ll be glad to see the kid.” Crawford waited.

  No comment from Graham.

  “Everything’s okay, I hope.”

  “I’m working, Jack. Don’t worry about it. No, look, it’s just that she got jumpy over there.”

  Graham pulled a flat package tied with string from beneath a stack of funeral pictures and began to pick at the knot.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s from Byron Metcalf, the Jacobis’ lawyer. Brian Zeller sent it on. It’s okay.”

  “Wait a minute, let me see.” Crawford turned the package in his hairy fingers until he found the stamp and signature of S. F. “Semper Fidelis” Aynesworth, head of the FBI’s explosives section, certifying that the package had been fluoroscoped.