“Yeah, uh, yellow. Let’s paint it yellow.”
“Yellow is a bad color for me. I’ll look green at breakfast.”
“Blue, then.”
“Blue is cold.”
“Well goddammit, paint it baby-shit tan for all I care. . . . No, look, I’ll probably be home before long and we’ll go to the paint store and get some chips and stuff, okay? And maybe some new handles and that.”
“Let’s do, let’s get some handles. I don’t know why I’m talking about this stuff. Look, I love you and I miss you and you’re doing the right thing. It’s costing you too, I know that. I’m here and I’ll be here whenever you come home, or I’ll meet you anywhere, anytime. That’s what.”
“Dear Molly. Dear Molly. Go to bed now.”
“All right.”
“Good night.”
Graham lay with his hands behind his head and conjured dinners with Molly. Stone crab and Sancerre, the salt breeze mixed with the wine.
But it was his curse to pick at conversations, and he began to do it now. He had snapped at her after a harmless remark about his “criminal mind.” Stupid.
Graham found Molly’s interest in him largely inexplicable.
He called police headquarters and left word for Springfield that he wanted to start helping with the leg-work in the morning. There was nothing else to do.
The gin helped him sleep.
6
Flimsy copies of the notes on all calls about the Leeds case were placed on Buddy Springfield’s desk. Tuesday morning at seven o’clock when Springfield arrived at his office, there were sixty-three of them. The top one was red-flagged.
It said Birmingham police had found a cat buried in a shoebox behind the Jacobis’ garage. The cat had a flower between its paws and was wrapped in a dish towel. The cat’s name was written on the lid in a childish hand. It wore no collar. A string tied in a granny knot held the lid on.
The Birmingham medical examiner said the cat was strangled. He had shaved it and found no puncture wound.
Springfield tapped the earpiece of his glasses against his teeth.
They had found soft ground and dug it up with a shovel. Didn’t need any damned methane probe. Still, Graham had been right.
The chief of detectives licked his thumb and started through the rest of the stack of flimsies. Most were reports of suspicious vehicles in the neighborhood during the past week, vague descriptions giving only vehicle type or color. Four anonymous telephone callers had told Atlanta residents: “I’m gonna do you like the Leedses.”
Hoyt Lewis’s report was in the middle of the pile.
Springfield called the overnight watch commander.
“What about the meter reader’s report on this Parsons? Number forty-eight.”
“We tried to check with the utilities last night, Chief, to see if they had anybody in that alley,” the watch commander said. “They’ll have to get back to us this morning.”
“You have somebody get back to them now,” Springfield said. “Check sanitation, the city engineer, check for construction permits along the alley and catch me in my car.”
He dialed Will Graham’s number. “Will? Meet me in front of your hotel in ten minutes and let’s take a little ride.”
At 7:45 A.M. Springfield parked near the end of the alley. He and Graham walked abreast in wheel tracks pressed in the gravel. Even this early the sun was hot.
“You need to get you a hat,” Springfield said. His own snappy straw was tilted down over his eyes.
The chain-link fence at the rear of the Leeds property was covered with vines. They paused by the light meter on the pole.
“If he came down this way, he could see the whole back end of the house,” Springfield said.
In only five days the Leeds property had begun to look neglected. The lawn was uneven, and wild onions sprouted above the grass. Small branches had fallen in the yard. Graham wanted to pick them up. The house seemed asleep, the latticed porch striped and dappled with the long morning shadows of the trees. Standing with Springfield in the alley, Graham could see himself looking in the back window, opening the porch door. Oddly, his reconstruction of the entry by the killer seemed to elude him now, in the sunlight. He watched a child’s swing move gently in the breeze.
“That looks like Parsons,” Springfield said.
H. G. Parsons was out early, grubbing in a flowerbed in his backyard, two houses down. Springfield and Graham went to Parsons’s back gate and stood beside his garbage cans. The lids were chained to the fence.
Springfield measured the height of the light meter with a tape.
He had notes on all the Leedses’ neighbors. His notes said Parsons had taken early retirement from the post office at his supervisor’s request. The supervisor had reported Parsons to be “increasingly absentminded.”
Springfield’s notes contained gossip too. The neighbors said Parsons’s wife stayed with her sister in Macon as much as she could, and that his son never called him anymore.
“Mr. Parsons. Mr. Parsons,” Springfield called.
Parsons leaned his tilling fork against the house and came to the fence. He wore sandals and white socks. Dirt and grass had stained the toes of his socks. His face was shiny pink.
Arteriosclerosis, Graham thought. He’s taken his pill.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Parsons, could we talk to you for a minute? We were hoping you could help us,” Springfield said.
“Are you from the power company?”
“No, I’m Buddy Springfield from the police department.”
“It’s about the murder, then. My wife and I were in Macon, as I told the officer—”
“I know, Mr. Parsons. We wanted to ask about your light meter. Did—”
“If that . . . meter reader said I did anything improper, he’s just—”
“No, no. Mr. Parsons, did you see a stranger reading your meter last week?”
“No.”
“Are you sure? I believe you told Hoyt Lewis that someone else read your meter ahead of him.”
“I did. And it’s about time. I’m keeping up with this, and the Public Service Commission will get a full report from me.”
“Yes, sir. I’m sure they’ll take care of it. Who did you see reading your meter?”
“It wasn’t a stranger, it was somebody from Georgia Power.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, he looked like a meter reader.”
“What was he wearing?”
“What they all wear, I guess. What is it? A brown outfit and the cap.”
“Did you see his face?”
“I can’t remember if I did. I was looking out the kitchen window when I saw him. I wanted to talk to him, but I had to put on my robe, and by the time I got outside, he was gone.”
“Did he have a truck?”
“I don’t remember seeing one. What’s going on? Why do you want to know?”
“We’re checking everybody who was in this neighborhood last week. It’s really important, Mr. Parsons. Try hard to remember.”
“So it is about the murder. You haven’t arrested anybody yet, have you?”
“No.”
“I watched the street last night, and fifteen minutes went by without a single squad car passing. It was horrible, what happened to the Leedses. My wife has been beside herself. I wonder who’ll buy their house. I saw some Negroes looking at it the other day. You know, I had to speak to Leeds a few times about his children, but they were all right. Of course, he wouldn’t do anything I suggested about his lawn. The Department of Agriculture has some excellent pamphlets on the control of nuisance grasses. Finally I just put them in his mailbox. Honestly, when he mowed the wild onions were suffocating.”
“Mr. Parsons, exactly when did you see this fellow in the alley?” Springfield asked.
“I’m not sure, I was trying to think.”
“Do you recall the time of day? Morning? Noon? Afternoon?”
“I know the times
of day, you don’t have to name them. Afternoon, maybe. I don’t remember.”
Springfield rubbed the back of his neck. “Excuse me, Mr. Parsons, but I have to get this just right. Could we go in your kitchen and you show us just where you saw him from?”
“Let me see your credentials. Both of you.”
In the house, silence, shiny surfaces, and dead air. Neat. Neat. The desperate order of an aging couple who see their lives begin to blur.
Graham wished he had stayed outside. He was sure the drawers held polished silver with egg between the tines.
Stop it and let’s pump the old fart.
The window over the kitchen sink gave a good view of the backyard.
“There. Are you satisfied?” Parsons asked. “You can see out there from here. I never talked to him, I don’t remember what he looked like. If that’s all, I have a lot to do.”
Graham spoke for the first time. “You said you went to get your robe, and when you came back he was gone. You weren’t dressed, then?”
“No.”
“In the middle of the afternoon? Were you not feeling well, Mr. Parsons?”
“What I do in my own house is my business. I can wear a kangaroo suit in here if I want to. Why aren’t you out looking for the killer? Probably because it’s cool in here.”
“I understand you’re retired, Mr. Parsons, so I guess it doesn’t matter if you put on your clothes every day or not. A lot of days you just don’t get dressed at all, am I right?”
Veins stood out in Parsons’s temples. “Just because I’m retired doesn’t mean I don’t put my clothes on and get busy every day. I just got hot and I came in and took a shower. I was working. I was mulching, and I had done a day’s work by afternoon, which is more than you’ll do today.”
“You were what?”
“Mulching.”
“What day did you mulch?”
“Friday. It was last Friday. They delivered it in the morning, a big load, and I had . . . I had it all spread by afternoon. You can ask at the Garden Center how much it was.”
“And you got hot and came in and took a shower. What were you doing in the kitchen?”
“Fixing a glass of iced tea.”
“And you got out some ice? But the refrigerator is over there, away from the window.”
Parsons looked from the window to the refrigerator, lost and confused. His eyes were dull, like the eyes of a fish in the market toward the end of the day. Then they brightened in triumph. He went to the cabinet by the sink.
“I was right here, getting some Sweet ’N Low when I saw him. That’s it. That’s all. Now, if you’re through prying . . .”
“I think he saw Hoyt Lewis,” Graham said.
“So do I,” Springfield said.
“It was not Hoyt Lewis. It was not.” Parsons’s eyes were watering.
“How do you know?” Springfield said. “It might have been Hoyt Lewis, and you just thought—”
“Lewis is brown from the sun. He’s got old greasy hair and those peckerwood sideburns.” Parsons’s voice had risen and he was talking so fast it was hard to understand him. “That’s how I knew. Of course it wasn’t Lewis. This fellow was paler and his hair was blond. He turned to write on his clipboard and I could see under the back of his hat. Blond. Cut off square on the back of his neck.”
Springfield stood absolutely still and when he spoke his voice was still skeptical. “What about his face?”
“I don’t know. He may have had a mustache.”
“Like Lewis?”
“Lewis doesn’t have a mustache.”
“Oh,” Springfield said. “Was he at eye level with the meter? Did he have to look up at it?”
“Eye level, I guess.”
“Would you know him if you saw him again?”
“No.”
“What age was he?”
“Not old. I don’t know.”
“Did you see the Leedses’ dog anywhere around him?”
“No.”
“Look, Mr. Parsons, I can see I was wrong,” Springfield said. “You’re a real big help to us. If you don’t mind, I’m going to send our artist out here, and if you’d just let him sit right here at your kitchen table, maybe you could give him an idea of what this fellow looked like. It sure wasn’t Lewis.”
“I don’t want my name in any newspapers.”
“It won’t be.”
Parsons followed them outside.
“You’ve done a hell of a fine job on this yard, Mr. Parsons,” Springfield said. “It ought to win some kind of a prize.”
Parsons said nothing. His face was red and working, his eyes wet. He stood there in his baggy shorts and sandals and glared at them. As they left the yard, he grabbed his fork and began to grub furiously in the ground, hacking blindly through the flowers, scattering mulch on the grass.
Springfield checked in on his car radio. None of the utilities or city agencies could account for the man in the alley on the day before the murders. Springfield reported Parsons’s description and gave instructions for the artist. “Tell him to draw the pole and the meter first and go from there. He’ll have to ease the witness along.
“Our artist doesn’t much like to make house calls,” the chief of detectives told Graham as he slid the stripline Ford through the traffic. “He likes for the secretaries to see him work, with the witness standing on one foot and then the other, looking over his shoulder. A police station is a damn poor place to question anybody that you don’t need to scare. Soon as we get the picture, we’ll door-to-door the neighborhood with it.
“I feel like we just got a whiff, Will. Just faint, but a whiff, don’t you? Look, we did it to the poor old devil and he came through. Now let’s do something with it.”
“If the man in the alley is the one we want, it’s the best news yet,” Graham said. He was sick of himself.
“Right. It means he’s not just getting off a bus and going whichever way his peter points. He’s got a plan. He stayed in town overnight. He knows where he’s going a day or two ahead. He’s got some kind of an idea. Case the place, kill the pet, then the family. What the hell kind of an idea is that?” Springfield paused. “That’s kind of your territory, isn’t it?” “It is, yes. If it’s anybody’s, I suppose it’s mine.”
“I know you’ve seen this kind of thing before. You didn’t like it the other day when I asked you about Lecter, but I need to talk to you about it.”
“All right.”
“He killed nine people, didn’t he, in all?”
“Nine that we know of. Two others didn’t die.”
“What happened to them?”
“One is on a respirator at a hospital in Baltimore. The other is in a private mental hospital in Denver.”
“What made him do it, how was he crazy?”
Graham looked out the car window at the people on the sidewalk. His voice sounded detached, as though he were dictating a letter.
“He did it because he liked it. Still does. Dr. Lecter is not crazy, in any common way we think of being crazy. He did some hideous things because he enjoyed them. But he can function perfectly when he wants to.”
“What did the psychologists call it—what was wrong with him?”
“They say he’s a sociopath, because they don’t know what else to call him. He has some of the characteristics of what they call a sociopath. He has no remorse or guilt at all. And he had the first and worst sign—sadism to animals as a child.”
Springfield grunted.
“But he doesn’t have any of the other marks,” Graham said. “He wasn’t a drifter, he had no history of trouble with the law. He wasn’t shallow and exploitive in small things, like most sociopaths are. He’s not insensitive. They don’t know what to call him. His electroencephalograms show some odd patterns, but they haven’t been able to tell much from them.”
“What would you call him?” Springfield asked.
Graham hesitated.
“Just to yourself, what do you call him
?”
“He’s a monster. I think of him as one of those pitiful things that are born in hospitals from time to time. They feed it, and keep it warm, but they don’t put it on the machines and it dies. Lecter is the same way in his head, but he looks normal and nobody could tell.”
“A couple of friends of mine in the chiefs’ association are from Baltimore. I asked them how you spotted Lecter. They said they didn’t know. How did you do it? What was the first indication, the first thing you felt?”
“It was a coincidence,” Graham said. “The sixth victim was killed in his workshop. He had woodworking equipment and he kept his hunting stuff out there. He was laced to a pegboard where the tools hung, and he was really torn up, cut and stabbed, and he had arrows in him. The wounds reminded me of something. I couldn’t think what it was.”
“And you had to go on to the next ones.”
“Yes. Lecter was very hot—he did the next three in nine days. But this sixth one, he had two old scars on his thigh. The pathologist checked with the local hospital and found he had fallen out of a tree blind five years before while he was bow hunting and stuck an arrow through his leg.
“The doctor of record was a resident surgeon, but Lecter had treated him first—he was on duty in the emergency room. His name was on the admissions log. It had been a long time since the accident, but I thought Lecter might remember if anything had seemed fishy about the arrow wound, so I went to his office to see him. We were grabbing at anything then.
“He was practicing psychiatry by that time. He had a nice office. Antiques. He said he didn’t remember much about the arrow wound, that one of the victim’s hunting buddies had brought him in, and that was it.
“Something bothered me, though. I thought it was something Lecter said, or something in the office. Crawford and I hashed it over. We checked the files, and Lecter had no record. I wanted some time in his office by myself, but we couldn’t get a warrant. We had nothing to show. So I went back to see him.
“It was Sunday, he saw patients on Sunday. The building was empty except for a couple of people in his waiting room. He saw me right away. We were talking and he was making this polite effort to help me and I looked up at some very old medical books on the shelf above his head. And I knew it was him.