Red Dragon

  From his box Graham took the police photographs, lab reports on the individual blood and organic stains in the room and standard comparison plates of blood-drop trajectories.

  He went over the upstairs rooms minutely, trying to match injuries to stains, trying to work backward. He plotted each splash on a measured field sketch of the master bedroom, using the standard comparison plates to estimate the direction and velocity of the bloodfall. In this way he hoped to learn the positions the bodies were in at different times.

  Here was a row of three bloodstains slanting up and around a corner of the bedroom wall. Here were three faint stains on the carpet beneath them. The wall above the headboard on Charles Leeds’s side of the bed was bloodstained, and there were swipes along the baseboards. Graham’s field sketch began to look like a join-the-dots puzzle with no numbers. He stared at it, looked up at the room and back to the sketch until his head ached.

  He went into the bathroom and took his last two Bufferin, scooping up water in his hand from the faucet in the sink. He splashed water on his face and dried it with his shirttail. Water spilled on the floor. He had forgotten that the trap was gone from the drain. Otherwise the bathroom was undisturbed, except for the broken mirror and traces of the red fingerprint powder called Dragon’s Blood. Toothbrushes, facial cream, razor, were all in place.

  The bathroom looked as though a family still used it. Mrs. Leeds’s panty hose hung on the towel racks where she had left them to dry. He saw that she cut the leg off a pair when it had a runner so she could match two one-legged pairs, wear them at the same time, and save money. Mrs. Leeds’s small, homey economy pierced him; Molly did the same thing.

  Graham climbed out a window onto the porch roof and sat on the gritty shingles. He hugged his knees, his damp shirt pressed cold across his back, and snorted the smell of slaughter out of his nose.

  The lights of Atlanta rusted the night sky and the stars were hard to see. The night would be clear in the Keys. He could be watching shooting stars with Molly and Willy, listening for the whoosh they solemnly agreed a shooting star must make. The Delta Aquarid meteor shower was at its maximum, and Willy was up for it.

  He shivered and snorted again. He did not want to think of Molly now. To do so was tasteless as well as distracting.

  Graham had a lot of trouble with taste. Often his thoughts were not tasty. There were no effective partitions in his mind. What he saw and learned touched everything else he knew. Some of the combinations were hard to live with. But he could not anticipate them, could not block and repress. His learned values of decency and propriety tagged along, shocked at his associations, appalled at his dreams; sorry that in the bone arena of his skull there were no forts for what he loved. His associations came at the speed of light. His value judgments were at the pace of a responsive reading. They could never keep up and direct his thinking.

  He viewed his own mentality as grotesque but useful, like a chair made of antlers. There was nothing he could do about it.

  Graham turned off the lights in the Leeds house and went out through the kitchen. At the far end of the back porch, his flashlight revealed a bicycle and a wicker dog bed. There was a doghouse in the backyard, a dog bowl by the steps.

  The evidence indicated the Leedses were surprised in their sleep.

  Holding the flashlight between his chin and chest, he wrote a memo: Jack—where was the dog?

  Graham drove back to his hotel. He had to concentrate on his driving, though there was little traffic at four-thirty A.M. His head still ached and he watched for an all-night pharmacy.

  He found one on Peachtree. A slovenly rent-a-cop dozed near the door. A pharmacist in a jacket dingy enough to highlight his dandruff sold Graham Bufferin. The glare in the place was painful. Graham disliked young pharmacists. They had a middle-of-the-litter look about them. They were often smug and he suspected that they were unpleasant at home.

  “What else?” the pharmacist said, his fingers poised above the cash register keys. “What else?”

  The Atlanta FBI office had booked him into an absurd hotel near the city’s new Peachtree Center. It had glass elevators shaped like milkweed pods to let him know he was really in town now.

  Graham rode up to his room with two conventioneers wearing name tags with the printed greeting “Hi!” They held to the rail and looked over the lobby as they ascended.

  “Looka yonder by the desk—that’s Wilma and them just now coming in,” the larger one said. “God damn, I’d love to tear off a piece of that.”

  “Fuck her till her nose bleeds,” the other one said.

  Fear and rut, and anger at the fear.

  “Say, you know why a woman has legs?”

  “Why?”

  “So she won’t leave a trail like a snail.”

  The elevator doors opened.

  “Is this it? This is it,” the larger one said. He lurched against the facing as he got off.

  “This is the blind leading the blind,” the other one said.

  Graham put his cardboard box on the dresser in his room. Then he put it in a drawer where he could not see it. He had had enough of the wide-eyed dead. He wanted to call Molly, but it was too early.

  A meeting was scheduled for eight A.M. at the Atlanta police headquarters. He’d have little enough to tell them.

  He would try to sleep. His mind was a busy rooming house with arguments all around him, and they were fighting somewhere down the hall. He was numb and empty and he drank two fingers of whiskey from his bathroom glass before he lay down. The darkness pressed too closely on him. He turned on the bathroom light and went back to bed. He pretended Molly was in the bathroom brushing her hair.

  Lines from the autopsy protocols sounded in his own voice, though he had never read them aloud: “. . . the feces was formed . . . a trace of talcum on the lower right leg. Fracture of the medial orbit wall owing to insertion of mirror shard . . .”

  Graham tried to think about the beach at Sugarloaf Key, he tried to hear the waves. He pictured his workbench in his mind and thought about the escapement for the water clock he and Willy were building. He sang “Whiskey River” under his breath and tried to run “Black Mountain Rag” through his head from one end to the other. Molly’s music. Doc Watson’s guitar part was all right, but he always lost it in the fiddle break. Molly had tried to teach him clog dancing in the backyard and she was bouncing . . . and finally he dozed.

  He woke in an hour, rigid and sweating, seeing the other pillow silhouetted against the bathroom light and it was Mrs. Leeds lying beside him bitten and torn, mirrored eyes and blood like the legs of spectacles over her temples and ears. He could not turn his head to face her. Brain screaming like a smoke alarm, he put his hand over there and touched dry cloth.

  Having acted, he felt some immediate relief. He rose, his heart pounding, and put on a dry T-shirt. He threw the wet one into the bathtub. He could not move over to the dry side of the bed. Instead he put a towel on the side where he had sweated and lay down on it, propped against the headboard with a stiff drink in his hand. He swallowed a third of it.

  He reached for something to think about, anything. The pharmacy where he bought the Bufferin, then; perhaps because it was his only experience all day that was not related to death.

  He could remember old drugstores with soda fountains. As a boy, he thought old drugstores had a slightly furtive air. When you went in, you always thought about buying rubbers whether you needed any or not. There were things on the shelves you shouldn’t look at too long.

  In the pharmacy where he bought the Bufferin, the contraceptives with their illustrated wrappings were in a lucite case on the wall behind the cash register, framed like art.

  He preferred the drugstore and sundry of his childhood. Graham was nearly forty and just beginning to feel the tug of the way the world was then; it was a sea anchor streamed behind him in heavy weather.

  He thought about Smoot. Old Smoot had been the soda jerk and manager for the pharmacist who ow
ned the local drugstore when Graham was a child. Smoot, who drank on the job, forgot to unroll the awning and the sneakers melted in the window. Smoot forgot to unplug the coffeepot, and the fire department was summoned. Smoot sold ice cream cones to children on credit.

  His principal outrage was ordering fifty Kewpie dolls from a detail man while the store owner was on vacation. On his return, the owner fired Smoot for a week. Then they held a Kewpie doll sale. Fifty of the Kewpie dolls were arranged in a semicircle in the front window so that they all stared at whoever was looking in.

  They had wide eyes of cornflower blue. It was a striking display and Graham had looked at it for some time. He knew they were only Kewpie dolls, but he could feel the focus of their attention. So many of them looking. A number of people stopped to look at them. Plaster dolls, all with the same silly spit curl, yet their concentrated gaze had made his face tingle.

  Graham began to relax a little on the bed. Kewpie dolls staring. He started to take a drink, gasped, and choked it onto his chest. He fumbled for the bedside lamp and fetched his box from the dresser drawer. He took out the autopsy protocols of the three Leeds children and his measured field sketches of the master bedroom and spread them on the bed.

  Here were the three bloodstains slanting up the corner, and here were the matching stains on the carpet. Here were the dimensions of the three children. Brother, sister, big brother. Match. Match. Match.

  They had been in a row, seated along the wall facing the bed. An audience. A dead audience. And Leeds. Tied around the chest to the headboard. Composed to look as though he were sitting up in bed. Getting the ligature mark, staining the wall above the headboard.

  What were they watching? Nothing; they were all dead. But their eyes were open. They were watching a performance starring the madman and the body of Mrs. Leeds, beside Mr. Leeds in the bed. An audience. The crazy could look around at their faces.

  Graham wondered if he had lit a candle. The flickering light would simulate expression on their faces. No candle was found. Maybe he would think to do that next time . . .

  This first small bond to the killer itched and stung like a leech. Graham bit the sheet, thinking.

  Why did you move them again? Why didn’t you leave them that way? Graham asked. There’s something you don’t want me to know about you. Why, there’s something you’re ashamed of. Or is it something you can’t afford for me to know?

  Did you open their eyes?

  Mrs. Leeds was lovely, wasn’t she? You turned on the light after you cut his throat so Mrs. Leeds could watch him flop, didn’t you? It was maddening to have to wear gloves when you touched her, wasn’t it?

  There was talcum on her leg.

  There was no talcum in the bathroom.

  Someone else seemed to speak those two facts in a flat voice.

  You took off your gloves, didn’t you? The powder came out of a rubber glove as you pulled it off to touch her, DIDN’T IT, YOU SON OF A BITCH? You touched her with your bare hands and then you put the gloves back on and you wiped her down. But while the gloves were off, DID YOU OPEN THEIR EYES?

  Jack Crawford answered his telephone on the fifth ring. He had answered the telephone in the night many times and he was not confused.

  “Jack, this is Will.”

  “Yes, Will.”

  “Is Price still in Latent Prints?”

  “Yeah. He doesn’t go out much anymore. He’s working on the single-print index.”

  “I think he ought to come to Atlanta.”

  “Why? You said yourself the guy down here is good.”

  “He is good, but not as good as Price.”

  “What do you want him to do? Where would he look?”

  “Mrs. Leeds’s fingernails and toenails. They’re painted, it’s a slick surface. And the corneas of all their eyes. I think he took his gloves off, Jack.”

  “Jesus, Price’ll have to gun it,” Crawford said. “The funeral’s this afternoon.”

  3

  “I think he had to touch her,” Graham said in greeting.

  Crawford handed him a Coke from the machine in Atlanta police headquarters. It was seven-fifty A.M.

  “Sure, he moved her around,” Crawford said. “There were grip marks on her wrists and behind her knees. But every print in the place is from nonporous gloves. Don’t worry, Price is here. Grouchy old bastard. He’s on his way to the funeral home now. The morgue released the bodies last night, but the funeral home’s not doing anything yet. You look bushed. Did you get any sleep?”

  “Maybe an hour. I think he had to touch her with his hands.”

  “I hope you’re right, but the Atlanta lab swears he wore like surgeon’s gloves the whole time,” Crawford said. “The mirror pieces had those smooth prints. Forefinger on the back of the piece wedged in the labia, smudged thumb on the front.”

  “He polished it after he placed it, so he could see his damn face in there probably,” Graham said.

  “The one in her mouth was obscured with blood. Same with the eyes. He never took the gloves off.”

  “Mrs. Leeds was a good-looking woman,” Graham said. “You’ve seen the family pictures, right? I’d want to touch her skin in an intimate situation, wouldn’t you?”

  “Intimate?” Distaste sounded in Crawford’s voice before he could stop it. Suddenly he was busy rummaging in his pockets for change.

  “Intimate—they had privacy. Everybody else was dead. He could have their eyes open or shut, however he liked.”

  “Any way he liked,” Crawford said. “They tried her skin for prints, of course. Nothing. They did get a hand spread off her neck.”

  “The report didn’t say anything about dusting nails.”

  “I expect her fingernails were smudged when they took scrapings. The scrapings were just where she cut her palms with them. She never scratched him.”

  “She had pretty feet,” Graham said.

  “Umm-hmm. Let’s head upstairs,” Crawford said. “The troops are about to muster.”

  Jimmy Price had a lot of equipment—two heavy cases plus his camera bag and tripod. He made a clatter coming through the front door of the Lombard Funeral Home in Atlanta. He was a frail old man and his humor had not been improved by a long taxi ride from the airport in the morning rush.

  An officious young fellow with styled hair hustled him into an office decorated in apricot and cream. The desk was bare except for a sculpture called The Praying Hands.

  Price was examining the fingertips of the praying hands when Mr. Lombard himself came in. Lombard checked Price’s credentials with extreme care.

  “Your Atlanta office or agency or whatever called me, of course, Mr. Price. But last night we had to get the police to remove an obnoxious fellow who was trying to take pictures for The National Tattler, so I’m being very careful. I’m sure you understand. Mr. Price, the bodies were only released to us about one o’clock this morning, and the funeral is this afternoon at five. We simply can’t delay it.”

  “This won’t take a lot of time,” Price said. “I need one reasonably intelligent assistant, if you have one. Have you touched the bodies, Mr. Lombard?”

  “No.”

  “Find out who has. I’ll have to print them all.”

  The morning briefing of police detectives on the Leeds case was concerned mostly with teeth.

  Atlanta Chief of Detectives R. J. (Buddy) Springfield, a burly man in shirtsleeves, stood by the door with Dr. Dominic Princi as the twenty-three detectives filed in.

  “All right, boys, let’s have the big grin as you come by,” Springfield said. “Show Dr. Princi your teeth. That’s right, let’s see ’em all. Christ, Sparks, is that your tongue or are you swallowing a squirrel? Keep moving.”

  A large frontal view of a set of teeth, upper and lower, was tacked to the bulletin board at the front of the squad room. It reminded Graham of the celluloid strip of printed teeth in a dime-store jack-o’-lantern. He and Crawford sat down at the back of the room while the detectives took their
places at schoolroom desks.

  Atlanta Public Safety Commissioner Gilbert Lewis and his public-relations officer sat apart from them in folding chairs. Lewis had to face a news conference in an hour.

  Chief of Detectives Springfield took charge.

  “All right. Let’s cease fire with the bullshit. If you read up this morning, you saw zero progress.

  “House-to-house interviews will continue for a radius of four additional blocks around the scene. R & I has loaned us two clerks to help cross-matching airline reservations and car rentals in Birmingham and Atlanta.

  “Airport and hotel details will make the rounds again today. Yes, again today. Catch every maid and attendant as well as the desk people. He had to clean up somewhere and he may have left a mess. If you find somebody who cleaned up a mess, roust out whoever’s in the room, seal it, and get on the horn to the laundry double quick. This time we’ve got something for you to show around. Dr. Princi?”

  Dr. Dominic Princi, chief medical examiner for Fulton County, walked to the front and stood under the drawing of the teeth. He held up a dental cast.

  “Gentlemen, this is what the subject’s teeth look like. The Smithsonian in Washington reconstructed them from the impressions we took of bite marks on Mrs. Leeds and a clear bite mark in a piece of cheese from the Leedses’ refrigerator,” Princi said.

  “As you can see, he has pegged lateral incisors—the teeth here and here.” Princi pointed to the cast in his hand, then to the chart above him. “The teeth are crooked in alignment and a corner is missing from this central incisor. The other incisor is grooved, here. It looks like a ‘tailor’s notch,’ the kind of wear you get biting thread.”

  “Snaggletoothed son of a bitch,” somebody mumbled.

  “How do you know for sure it was the perpetrator that bit the cheese, Doc?” a tall detective in the front row asked.