“I’ll bet. Tender, I imagine.” Dolarhyde’s voice was muffled by his hand. When seated, he always pressed the knuckle of his forefinger under his nose.
“Pardon?”
“I think you’re good for him, Eileen.”
“I think so, I really do. He’s not drinking but just on weekends. He just starts to relax and his wife calls the house. He makes faces while I talk to her, but I can tell he’s upset after. A woman knows.” She tapped Dolarhyde on the wrist and, despite the goggles, saw the touch register in his eyes. “Take it easy, Mr. D. I’m glad we had this talk.”
“I am too, Eileen.”
Dolarhyde watched her walk away. She had a suck mark on the back of her knee. He thought, correctly, that Eileen did not appreciate him. No one did, actually.
The great darkroom was cool and smelled of chemicals. Francis Dolarhyde checked the developer in the A tank. Hundreds of feet of home-movie film from all over the country moved through the tank hourly. Temperature and freshness of the chemicals were critical. This was his responsibility, along with all the other operations until the film had passed through the dryer. Many times a day he lifted samples of film from the tank and checked them frame by frame.
The darkroom was quiet. Dolarhyde discouraged chatter among his assistants and communicated with them largely in gestures.
When the evening shift ended, he remained alone in the darkroom to develop, dry, and splice some film of his own.
* * *
Dolarhyde got home about ten P.M. He lived alone in a big house his grandparents had left him. It stood at the end of a gravel drive that runs through an apple orchard north ofSt. Charles,Missouri, across the Missouri River fromSt. Louis. The orchard’s absentee owner did not take care of it. Dead and twisted trees stood among the green ones. Now, in late July, the smell of rotting apples hung over the orchard. There were many bees in the daytime. The nearest neighbor was a half-mile away.
Dolarhyde always made an inspection tour of the house as soon as he got home; there had been an abortive burglary attempt some years before. He flicked on the lights in each room and looked around. A visitor would not think he lived alone. His grandparents’ clothes still hung in the closets, his grandmother’s brushes were on her dresser with combings of hair in them. Her teeth were in a glass on the bedside table. The water had long since evaporated. His grandmother had been dead for ten years.
(The funeral director had asked him, “Mr. Dolarhyde, wouldn’t you like to bring me your grandmother’s teeth?” He replied, “Just drop the lid.”)
Satisfied that he was alone in the house, Dolarhyde went upstairs, took a long shower, and washed his hair.
He put on a kimono of a synthetic material that felt like silk and lay down on his narrow bed in the room he had occupied since childhood. His grandmother’s hair dryer had a plastic cap and hose. He put on the cap and, while he dried, he thumbed through a new high-fashion magazine. The hatred and brutishness in some of the photographs were remarkable.
He began to feel excited. He swiveled the metal shade of his reading lamp to light a print on the wall at the foot of the bed. It was William Blake’s The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun.
The picture had stunned him the first time he saw it. Never before had he seen anything that approached his graphic thought. He felt that Blake must have peeked in his ear and seen the Red Dragon. For weeks Dolarhyde had worried that his thoughts might glow out his ears, might be visible in the darkroom, might fog the film. He put cotton balls in his ears. Then, fearing that cotton was too flammable, he tried steel wool. That made his ears bleed. Finally he cut small pieces of asbestos cloth from an ironing-board cover and rolled them into little pills that would fit in his ears.
The Red Dragon was all he had for a long time. It was not all he had now. He felt the beginnings of an erection.
He had wanted to go through this slowly, but now he could not wait.
Dolarhyde closed the heavy draperies over windows in the downstairs parlor. He set up his screen and projector. His grandfather had put a La-Z-Boy recliner in the parlor, over his grandmother’s objections. (She had put a doily on the headrest.) Now Dolarhyde was glad. It was very comfortable. He draped a towel over the arm of the chair.
He turned out the lamps. Lying back in the dark room, he might have been anywhere. Over the ceiling fixture he had a good light machine which rotated, making varicolored dots of light crawl over the walls, the floor, his skin. He might have been reclining on the acceleration couch of a space vehicle, in a glass bubble out among the stars. When he closed his eyes he thought he could feel the points of light move over him, and when he opened them, those might be the lights of cities above or beneath him. There was no more down or up. The light machine turned faster as it got warm, and the dots swarmed over him, flowed over furniture in angular streams, fell in meteor showers down the walls. He might have been a comet plunging through the Crab Nebula.
There was one place shielded from the light. He had placed a piece of cardboard near the machine, and it cast a shadow over the movie screen.
Sometimes, in the future, he would smoke first to heighten the effect, but he did not need it now, this time.
He thumbed the drop switch at his side to start the projector. A white rectangle sprang on the screen, grayed and streaked as the leader moved past the lens, and then the gray Scotty perked up his ears and ran to the kitchen door, shivering and wagging his stump of a tail. A cut to the Scotty ranning beside a curb, turning to snap at his side as he ran.
Now Mrs. Leeds came into the kitchen carrying groceries. She laughed and touched her hair. The children came in behind her.
A cut to a badly lit shot in Dolarhyde’s own bedroom upstairs. He is standing nude before the print of The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun. He is wearing “combat glasses,” the close-fitting wraparound plastic glasses favored by hockey players. He has an erection, which he improves with his hand.
The focus blurs as he approaches the camera with stylized movements, hand reaching to change the focus as his face fills the frame. The picture quivers and sharpens suddenly to a close-up of his mouth, his disfigured upper lip rolled back, tongue out through the teeth, one rolling eye still in the frame. The mouth fills the screen, writhing lips pulled back from jagged teeth and darkness as his mouth engulfs the lens.
The difficulty of the next part was evident.
A bouncing blur in a harsh movie light became a bed and Charles Leeds thrashing, Mrs. Leeds sitting up, shielding her eyes, turning toLeedsand putting her hands on him, rolling toward the edge of the bed, legs tangled in the covers, traying to rise. The camera jerked toward the ceiling, molding whipping across the screen like a stave, and then the picture steadied, Mrs. Leeds back down on the mattress, a dark spot on her nightdress spreading and Leeds, hands to his neck and eyes wild rising. The screen went black for five beats, then the tic of a splice.
The camera was steady now, on a tripod. They were all dead now. Arranged. Two children seated against the wall facing the bed, one seated across the corner from them facing the camera. Mr. and Mrs. Leeds in bed with the covers over them. Mr. Leeds propped up against the headboard, the sheet covering the rope around his chest and his head lolled to the side.
Dolarhyde came into the picture from the left with the stylized movements of a Balinese dancer. Blood-smeared and naked except for his glasses and gloves, he mugged and capered among the dead. He approached the far side of the bed, Mrs. Leeds’s side, took the corner of the covers, whipped them off the bed and held the pose as though he had executed a veronica.
Now, watching in the parlor of his grandparents’ house, Dolarhyde was covered with a sheen of sweat. His thick tongue ran out constantly, the scar on his upper lip wet and shiny and he moaned as he stimulated himself.
Even at the height of his pleasure he was sorry to see that in the film’s ensuing scene he lost all his grace and elegance of motion, rooting piglike with his bottom turned car
elessly to the camera. There were no dramatic pauses, no sense of pace or climax, just brutish frenzy.
It was wonderful anyway. Watching the film was wonderful. But not as wonderful as the acts themselves.
Two major flaws, Dolarhyde felt, were that the film did not actually show the deaths of the Leedses and that his own performance was poor toward the end. He seemed to lose all his values. That was not how the Red Dragon would do it.
Well. He had many films to make and, with experience, he hoped he could maintain some aesthetic distance, even in the most intimate moments.
He must bear down. This was his life’s work, a magnificent thing. It would live forever.
He must press on soon. He must select his fellow performers. Already he had copied several films of Fourth of July family outings. The end of summer always brought a rush of business at the film-processing plant as vacation movies came in. Thanksgiving would bring another rush.
Families were mailing their applications to him every day.
Chapter 10
The planefromWashingtontoBirminghamwas half-empty. Graham took a window seat with no one beside him.
He declined the tired sandwich the stewardess offered and put his Jacobi file on the tray table. At the front he had listed the similarities between the Jacobis and the Leedses.
Both couples were in their late thirties, both had children—two boys and a girl. Edward Jacobi had another son, by a previous marriage, who was away at college when the family was killed.
Both parents in each case had college degrees, and both families lived in two-story houses in pleasant suburbs. Mrs. Jacobi and Mrs. Leeds were attractive women. The families had some of the same credit cards and they subscribed to some of the same popular magazines.
There the similarities ended. Charles Leeds was a tax attorney, while Edward Jacobi was an engineer and metallurgist. TheAtlantafamily were Presbyterian; the Jacobis were Catholic. The Leedses were lifelongAtlantaresidents, while the Jacobis had lived inBirminghamonly three months, transferred there fromDetroit.
The word “random” sounded in Graham’s head like a dripping faucet. “Random selection of victims,” “no apparent motive”—newspapers used those terms, and detectives spat them out in anger and frustration in homicide squad rooms.
“Random” wasn’t accurate, though. Graham knew that mass murderers and serial murderers do not select their victims at random.
The man who killed the Jacobis and the Leedses saw something in them that drew him and drove him to do it. He might have known them well—Graham hoped so—or he might not have known them at all. But Graham was sure the killer saw them at some time before he killed them. He chose them because something in them spoke to him, and the women were at the core of it. What was it?
There were some differences in the crimes.
Edward Jacobi was shot as he came down the stairs carrying a flashlight—probably he was awakened by a noise.
Mrs. Jacobi and her children were shot in the head, Mrs. Leeds in the abdomen. The weapon was a nine-millimeter automatic pistol in all the shootings. Traces of steel wool from a homemade silencer were found in the wounds. The cartridge cases bore no fingerprints.
The knife had been used only on Charles Leeds. Dr. Princi believed it was thin-bladed and very keen, possibly a fileting knife.
The methods of entry were different too; a patio door pried open at the Jacobis’, the glass cutter at the Leedses’.
Photographs of the crime inBirminghamdid not show the quantity of blood found at the Leedses’, but there were stains on the bedroom walls about two and one-half feet above the floor. So the killer had an audience inBirminghamtoo. TheBirminghampolice checked the bodies for fingerprints, induding the fingernails, and found nothing. Burial for a summer month inBirminghamwould destroy any prints like the one on theLeedschild.
In both places were the same blond hairs, same spit, same semen. Graham propped photographs of the two smiling families against the seat back in front of him and stared at them for a long time in the hanging quiet of the airplane.
What could have attracted the murderer specifically to them? Graham wanted very much to believe there was a common factor and that he would find it soon.
Otherwise he would have to enter more houses and see what the Tooth Fairy had left for him.
* * *
Graham got directions from theBirminghamfield office and checked in with the police by telephone from the airport. The compact car he rented spit water from the air-conditioner vents onto his hands and arms.
His first stop was the Geehan Realty office onDennison Avenue.
Geehan, tall and bald, made haste across his turquoise shag to greet Graham. His smile faded when Graham showed his identification and asked for the key to the Jacobi house.
“Will there be some cops in uniform out there today?” he asked, his hand on the top of his head.
“I don’t know.”
“I hope to God not. I’ve got a chance to show it twice this afternoon. It’s a nice house. People see it and they forget this other. Last Thursday I had a couple fromDuluth, substantial retired people hot on the Sun Belt. I had them down to the short rows—talking mortgages—I mean that man could have fronted a third, when the squad car rode up and in they came. Couple asked them questions and, boy, did they get some answers. These good officers gave ‘em the whole tour—who was laying where. Then it was Good-bye, Geehan, much obliged for your trouble. I try to show ‘em how safe we’ve fixed it’ but they don’t listen. There they go, jake-legged through the gravel, climbing back in their Sedan de Ville.”
“Have any single men asked to look at it?”
“They haven’t asked me. It’s a multiple listing. I don’t think so, though. Police wouldn’t let us start painting until, I don’t know, we just got finished inside last Tuesday. Took two coats of interior latex, three in places. We’re still working outside. It’ll be a genuine showplace.”
“How can you sell it before the estate’s probated?”
“I can’t close until probate, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be ready. People could move in on a memorandum of understanding. I need to do something. A business associate of mine is holding the paper, and that interest just works all day and all night while you’re asleep.”
“Who is Mr. Jacobi’s executor?”
“Byron Metcalf, firm of Metcalf and Barnes. How long you figure on being out there?”
“I don’t know. Until I’ve finished.”
“You can drop that key in the mail. You don’t have to come back by.”
* * *
Graham had the flat feeling of a cold trail as he drove out to the Jacobi house. It was barely within the city limits in an area newly annexed. He stopped beside the highway once to check his map before he found the turnoff onto an asphalt secondary road.
More than a month had passed since they were killed. What had he been doing then? Putting a pair of diesels in a sixty-five foot Rybovich hull, signaling to Ariaga in the crane to come down another half-inch. Molly came over in the late afternoon and he and Molly and Ariaga sat under an awning in the cockpit of the half-finished boat and ate the big prawns Molly brought and drank cold Dos Equis beer. Ariaga explained the best way to clean crayfish, drawing the tail fan in sawdust on the deck, and the sunlight, broken on the water, played on the undersides of the wheeling gulls.
Water from the air conditioner squirted on the front of Graham’s shirt and he was inBirminghamnow and there were no prawns or gulls. He was driving, and pastures and wooded lots were on his right with goats and horses in them, and on his left was Stonebridge, a long-established residential area with a few elegant homes and a number of rich people’s houses.
He saw the realtor’s sign a hundred yards before he reached it. The Jacobi house was the only one on the right side of the road. Sap from the pecan trees beside the drive had made the gravel sticky, and it rattled inside the fenders of the car. A carpenter on a ladder was installing window guards. The workma
n raised a hand to Graham as he walked around the house.
A flagged patio at the side was shaded by a large oak tree. At night the tree would block out the floodlight in the side yard as well. This was where the Tooth Fairy had entered, through sliding glass doors. The doors had been replaced with new ones, the aluminum frames still bright and bearing the manufacturer’s sticker. Covering the sliding doors was a new wrought-iron security gate. The basement door was new too—flush steel and secured by deadbolts. The components of a hot tub stood in crates on the flagstones.
Graham went inside. Bare floors and dead air. His footsteps echoed in the empty house.
The new mirrors in the bathrooms had never reflected the Jacobis’ faces or the killer’s. On each was a fuzzy white spot where the price had been torn off. A folded dropeloth lay in a corner of the master bedroom. Graham sat on it long enough for the sunlight through the bare windows to move one board-width across the floor.
There was nothing here. Nothing anymore.
If he had come here immediately after the Jacobis were killed, would the Leedses still be alive? Graham wondered. He tested the weight of that burden.
It did not lift when he was out of the house and under the sky again.
Graham stood in the shade of a pecan tree, shoulders hunched, hands in his pockets, and looked down the long drive to the road that passed in front of the Jacobi house.
How had the Tooth Fairy come to the Jacobi house? He had to drive. Where did he park? The gravel driveway was too noisy for a midnight visit, Graham thought. TheBirminghampolice did notagree.
* * *
He walked down the drive to the roadside. The asphalt road was bordered with ditches as far as he could see. It might be possible to pull across the ditch and hide a vehicle in the brush on the Jacobis’ side of the road if the ground were hard and dry.
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