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.”
5
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:
December 23rd, Tuesday, Mama’s house. The children are still asleep. When Mama glassed in the sun porch, I hated the way it changed the looks of the house, but it’s very pleasant and I can sit here warm looking out at the snow. How many more Christmases can she manage a houseful of grandchildren? A lot, I hope.
A hard drive yesterday up from Atlanta, snowing after Raleigh. We had to creep. I was tired anyway from getting everyone ready. Outside Chapel Hill, Charlie stopped the car and got out. He snapped some icicles off a branch to make me a martini. He came back to the car, long legs lifting high in the snow, and there was snow in his hair and on his eyelashes and I remembered that I love him. It felt like something breaking with a little pain and spilling warm.
I hope the parka fits him. If he got me that tacky dinner ring, I’ll die. I could kick Madelyn’s big cellulite behind for showing hers and carrying on. Four ridiculously big diamonds the color of dirty ice. Icicle ice is so clear. The sun came through the car window and where the icicle was broken off it stuck up out of the glass and made a little prism. It made a spot of red and green on my hand holding the glass. I could feel the colors on my hand.
He asked me what I want for Christmas and I cupped my hands around his ear and whispered: Your big prick, silly, in as far as it will go.
The bald spot on the back of his head turned red. He’s always afraid the children will hear. Men have no confidence in whispers.
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.)
Three pages later the lump was a small benign cyst, easily removed.
Dr. Janovich turned me loose this afternoon. We left the hospital and drove to the pond. We hadn’t been there in a long while. There never seems to be enough time. Charlie had two bottles of champagne on ice and we drank them and fed the ducks while the sun went down. He stood at edge of the water with his back to me for a while and I think he cried a little.
Susan said she was afraid we were coming home from the hospital with another brother for her. Home!
Graham heard the telephone ring in the bedroom. A click and the hum of an answering machine. “Hello, this is Valerie Leeds. I’m sorry I can’t come to the phone right now, but if you’ll leave your name and number after the tone, we’ll get back to you. Thank you.”
Graham half-expected to hear Crawford’s voice after the beep, but there was only the dial tone. The caller had hung up.
He had heard her voice; now he wanted to see her. He went down to the den.
He had in his pocket a reel of Super Eight movie film belonging to Charles Leeds. Three weeks before his death, Leeds had left the film with a druggist who sent it away for processing. He never picked it up. Police found the receipt in Leeds’s wallet and got the film from the druggist. Detectives viewed the home movie along with family snapshots developed at the same time and found nothing of interest.
Graham wanted to see the Leedses alive. At the police station, the detectives had offered Graham their projector. He wanted to watch the movie at the house. Reluctantly they let him check it out of the property room.
Graham found the screen and projector in the den closet, set them up, and sat down in Charles Leeds’s big leather armchair to watch. He felt something tacky on the chair arm under his palm—a child’s sticky fingerprints fuzzed with lint. Graham’s hand smelled like candy.
It was a pleasant little silent home movie, more imaginative than most. It opened with a dog, a gray Scottie, asleep on the den rug. The dog was disturbed momentarily by the moviemaking and raised his head to look at the camera. Then he went to sleep again. A jumpy cut to the dog still asleep. Then the Scottie’s ears perked up. He rose and barked, and the camera followed him into the kitchen as he ran to the door and stood expectantly, shivering and wagging his stumpy tail.
Graham bit his lower lip and waited too. On the screen, the door opened and Mrs. Leeds came in carrying groceries. She blinked and laughed in surprise and touched her tousled hair with her free hand. Her lips moved as she walked out of the picture, and the children came in behind her carrying smaller sacks. The girl was six, the boys eight and ten.
The younger boy, apparently a veteran of home movies, pointed to his ears and wiggled them. The camera was positioned fairly high. Leeds was seventy-five inches tall, according to the coroner’s report.
Graham believed that this part of the movie must have been made in the early spring. The children wore Windbreakers and Mrs. Leeds appeared pale. At the morgue she had a good tan and bathing-suit marks.
Brief scenes followed of the boys playing Ping-Pong in the basement and the girl, Susan, wrapping a present in her room, tongue curled over her upper lip in concentration and a wisp of hair down over her forehead. She brushed her hair back with her plump hand, as her mother had done in the kitchen.
A subsequent scene showed Susan in a bubble bath, crouched like a small frog. She wore a large shower cap. The camera angle was lower and the focus uncertain, clearly the work of a brother. The scene ended with her shouting soundlessly at the camera and covering her six-year-old chest as her shower cap slipped down over her eyes.
Not to be outdone, Leeds had surprised Mrs. Leeds in the shower. The shower curtain bumped and bulged as the curtain does before a grade-school theatrical. Mrs. Leeds’s arm appeared around the curtain. In her hand was a large bath sponge. The scene closed with the lens obscured in soapsuds.
The film ended with a shot of Norman Vincent Peale speaking on television and a pan to Charles Leeds snoring in the chair where Graham now sat.
Graham stared at the blank square of light on the screen. He liked the Leedses. He was sorry that he had been to the morgue. He thought the madman who visited them might have liked them too. But the madman would like them better the way they were now.
Graham’s head felt stuffed and stupid. He swam in the pool at his hotel until he was rubber-legged, and came out of the water thinking of two things at once—a Tanqueray martini and the taste of Molly’s mouth.
He made the martini himself in a plastic glass and telephoned Molly.
“Hello, hotshot.”
“Hey, baby! Where are you?”
“In this damned hotel in Atlanta.”
“Doing some good?”
“None you’d notice. I’m lonesome.”
“Me too.”
“Horny.”
“Me too.”
“Tell me about yourself.”
“Well, I had a run-in with Mrs. Holper today. She wanted to return a dress with a huge big whiskey stain on the seat. I mean, obviously she had worn it to the Jaycee thing.”
“And what did you say?”
“I told her I didn’t sell it to her like that.”
“And what did she say?”
“She said she never had any trouble returning dresses before, which was one reason she shopped at my place rather than some others that she knew about.”
“And then what did you say?”
“Oh, I said I was upset because Will talks like a jack-ass on the phone.”
“I see.”
“Willy’s fine. He’s covering some turtle eggs the dogs dug up. Tell me what you’re doing.”
“Reading reports. Eating junk food.”
“Thinking a good bit, I expect.”
“Yep.”
“Can I help you?”
“I just don’t have a lock on anything, Molly. There’s not enough information. Well, there’s a lot of information, but I haven’t done enough with it.”
“Will you be in Atlanta for a whi
le? I’m not bugging you about coming home, I just wonder.”
“I don’t know. I’ll be here a few more days at least. I miss you.”
“Want to talk about fucking?”
“I don’t think I could stand it. I think maybe we better not do that.”
“Do what?”
“Talk about fucking.”
“Okay. You don’t mind if I think about it, though?”
“Absolutely not.”
“We’ve got a new dog.”
“Oh hell.”
“Looks like a cross between a basset hound and a Pekingese.”
“Lovely.”
“He’s got big balls.”
“Never mind about his balls.”
“They almost drag the ground. He has to retract them when he runs.”
“He can’t do that.”
“Yes he can. You don’t know.”
“Yes I do know.”
“Can you retract yours?”
“I thought we were coming to that.”
“Well?”
“If you must know, I retracted them once.”
“When was that?”
“In my youth. I had to clear a barbed-wire fence in a hurry.”
“Why?”
“I was carrying this watermelon that I had not cultivated.”
“You were fleeing? From whom?”
“A swineherd of my acquaintance. Alerted by his dogs, he burst from his dwelling in his BVD’s, waving a fowling piece. Fortunately, he tripped over a butter-bean trellis and gave me a running start.”
“Did he shoot at you?”
“I thought so at the time, yes. But the reports I heard might have issued from my behind. I’ve never been entirely clear on that.”
“Did you clear the fence?”
“Handily.”
“A criminal mind, even at that age.”
“I don’t have a criminal mind.”
“Of course you don’t. I’m thinking about painting the kitchen. What color do you like? Will? What color do you like? Are you there?”