“Over here okay?”
“Yes, thank you, Julio.”
The man went out.
Here came Miss Harper with the solander box.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Crane. Julio’s dusting today and getting the tarnish off some frames.” She opened the case and took out a white cardboard folder. “You understand that you aren’t allowed to touch it. I’ll display it for you—that’s the rule. Okay?”
Dolarbyde nodded. He couldn’t speak.
She opened the folder and removed the covering plastic sheet and mat.
There it was. The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun —the Man-Dragon rampant over the prostrate pleading woman caught in a coil of his tail.
It was small all right, but it was powerful. Stunning. The best reproductions didn’t do justice to the details and the colors.
Dolarhyde saw it clear, saw it all in an instant—Blake’s hand—writing on the borders, two brown spots at the right edge of the paper. It seized him hard. It was too much… the colors were so much stronger.
Look at the woman wrapped in the Dragon’s tail. Look.
He saw that her hair was the exact color of Reba McClane’s. He saw that he was twenty feet from the door. He held in voices.
I hope I didn’t shock you, said Reba McClane.
“It appears that he used chalk as well as watercolor,” Paula Harper was saying. She stood at an angle so that she could see what he was doing. Her eyes never left the painting.
Dolarhyde put his hand inside his shirt.
Somewhere a telephone was ringing. The typing stopped. A woman stuck her head out of the far cubicle.
“Paula, telephone for you. It’s your mother.”
Miss Harper did not turn her head. Her eyes never left Dolarhyde or the painting. “Would you take a message?” she said. “Tell her I’ll call her back.”
The woman disappeared into the office. In a moment the typing started again.
Dolarhyde couldn’t hold it anymore. Play for it all, right now.
But the Dragon moved first. “I’VE NEVER SEEN—”
“What?” Miss Harper’s eyes were wide.
“—a rat that big!” Dolarhyde said, pointing. “Climbing that frame!”
Miss Harper was turning. “Where?”
The blackjack slid out of his shirt. With his wrist more than his arm, he tapped the back of her skull. She sagged as Dolarhyde grabbed a handful of her blouse and clapped the chloroform rag over her face. She made a high sound once, not overloud, and went limp.
He eased her to the floor between the table and the racks of paintings, pulled the folder with the watercolor to the floor, and squatted over her. Rustling, wadding, hoarse breathing and a telephone ringing.
The woman came out of the far office.
“Paula?” She looked around the room. “It’s your mother,” she called. “She needs to talk to you now.”
She walked behind the table. “I’ll take care of the visitor if you…” She saw them then. Paula Harper on the floor, her hair across her face, and squatting over her, his pistol in his hand, Dolarhyde stuffing the last bite of the watercolor in his mouth. Rising, chewing, running. Toward her.
She ran for her office, slammed the flimsy door, grabbed at the phone and knocked it to the floor, scrambled for it on her hands and knees and tried to dial on the busy line as her door caved in. The lighted dial burst in bright colors at the impact behind her ear. The receiver fell quacking to the floor.
Dolarhyde in the staff elevator watched the indicator lights blink down, his gun held flat across his stomach, covered by his books.
First floor.
Out into the deserted galleries. He walked fast, his running shoes whispering on the terrazzo. A wrong turn and he was passing the whale masks, the great mask of Sisuit, losing seconds, running now into the presence of the Haida high totems and lost. He ran to the totems, looked left, saw the primitive edged weapons and knew where he was.
He peered around the corner at the lobby.
The desk officer stood at the bulletin board, thirty feet from the reception desk.
The armed guard was closer to the door. His holster creaked as he bent to rub a spot on the toe of his shoe.
If they fight, drop him first. Dolarhyde put the gun under his belt and buttoned his coat over it. He walked across the lobby, unclipping his pass.
The desk officer turned when he heard the footsteps.
“Thank you,” Dolarhyde said. He held up his pass by the edges, then dropped it on the desk.
The guard nodded. “Would you put it through the slot there, please?”
The reception desk telephone rang.
The pass was hard to pick up off the glass top. The telephone rang again. Hurry.
Dolarhyde got hold of the pass, dropped it through the slot. He picked up his guitar case from the pile of knapsacks.
The guard was coming to the telephone.
Out the door now, walking fast for the botanical gardens, he was ready to turn and fire if he heard pursuit.
Inside the gardens and to the left, Dolarhyde ducked into a space between a small shed and a hedge. He opened the guitar case and dumped out a tennis racket, a tennis ball, a towel, a folded grocery sack and a big bunch of leafy celery.
Buttons flew as he tore off his coat and shirt in one move and stepped out of his trousers. Underneath he wore a Brooklyn College T-shirt and warm-up pants. He stuffed his books and clothing into the grocery bag, then the weapons. The celery stuck out the top. He wiped the handle and clasps of the case and shoved it under the hedge.
Cutting across the gardens now towardProspectPark, the towel around his neck, he came out onto Empire Boulevard. Joggers were ahead of him. As he followed the joggers into the park, the first police cruisers screamed past. None of the joggers paid any attention to them. Neither did Dolarhyde.
He alternated jogging and walking, carrying his grocery bag and racket and bouncing his tennis ball, a man cooing off from a hard workout who had stopped by the store on the way home.
He made himself slow down; he shouldn’t run on a full stomach. He could choose his pace now.
He could choose anything.
Chapter 42
Crawford sat in the back row of the jury box eating Redskin peanuts while Graham closed the courtroom blinds.
“You’ll have the profile for me later this afternoon, I take it,” Crawford said. “You told me Tuesday; this is Tuesday.”
“I’ll finish it. I want to watch this first.”
Graham opened the express envelope from Byron Metcalf and dumped out the—two dusty rolls of home-movie film, each in plastic sandwich bag.
“Is Metcalf pressing charges against Niles Jacobi?”
“Not for theft—he’ll probably inherit anyway—he and Jacobi’s brother,” Graham said. “On the hash, I don’t know. Birmingham DA’s inclined to break his chops.”
“Good,” Crawford said.
The movie screen swung down from the courtroom ceiling to face the jury box, an arrangement which made it easy to show jurors filmed evidence.
Graham threaded the projector.
“On checking the newsstands where the Tooth Fairy could have gotten a Tattler so fast—I’ve had reports back fromCincinnati,Detroit, anda bunch fromChicago,” Crawford said. “Various weirdos to run down.”
Graham started the film. It was a fishing movie.
The Jacobi children hunkered on the bank of a pond with cane poles and bobbers.
Graham tried not to think of them in their small boxes in the ground. He tried to think of them just fishing.
The girl’s cork bobbed and disappeared. She had a bite.
Crawford crackled his peanut sack. “Indianapolisis dragging ass on questioning newsies and checking the Servco Supreme stations,” he said.
“Do you want to watch this or what?” Graham said.
Crawford was silent until the end of the two-minute film. “Terrific, she caught a perch,” he said. “
Now the profile—”
“Jack, you were inBirminghamright after it happened. I didn’t get there for a month. You saw the house while it was still their house—I didn’t. It was stripped and remodeled when I got there. Now, for Christ’s sake let me look at these people and then I’ll finish the profile.”
He started the second film.
A birthday party appeared on the screen in the courtroom. The Jacobis were seated around a dining table. They were singing.
Graham lip-read “Haaappy Birth-day to you.”
Eleven-year-old Donald Jacobi faced the camera. He was seated at the end of the table with the cake in front of him. The candles reflected in his glasses.
Around the corner of the table, his brother and sister were side by side watching him as he blew out the candles.
Graham shifted in his seat.
Mrs. Jacobi leaned over, her dark hair swinging, to catch the cat and dump it off the table.
Now Mrs. Jacobi brought a large envelope to her son. A long ribbon trailed from it. Donald Jacobi opened the envelope and took out a big birthday card. He looked up at the camera and turned the card around. It said “Happy Birthday—follow the ribbon.”
Bouncing progress as the camera followed the procession to the kitchen. A door there, fastened with a hook. Down the basement stairs, Donald first, then the others, following the ribbon down the steps. The end of the ribbon was tied around the handlebars of a ten-speed bicycle.
Graham wondered why they hadn’t given him the bike outdoors.
A jumpy cut to the next scene, and his question was answered. Outdoors now, and clearly it had been raining hard. Water stood in the yard. The house looked different. Realtor Geehan had changed the color when he did it over after the murders. The outside basement door opened and Mr. Jacobi emerged carrying the bicycle. This was the first view of him in the movie. A breeze lifted the hair combed across his bald spot. He set the bicycle ceremoniously on the ground.
The film ended with Donald’s cautious first ride.
“Sad damn thing,” Crawford said, “but we already knew that.” Graham started the birthday film over.
Crawford shook his head and began to read something from his briefcase with the aid of a penlight.
On the screen Mr. Jacobi brought the bicycle out of the basement. The basement door swung closed behind him. A padlock hung from it.
Graham froze the frame. “There. That’s what he wanted the bolt cutter for, Jack—to cut that padlock and go in through the basement. Why didn’t he go in that way?’’
Crawford clicked off his penlight and looked over his glasses at the screen. “What’s that?”
“I know he had a bolt cutter—he used it to trim that branch out of his way when he was watching from the woods. Why didn’t he use it and go in through the basement door?”
“He couldn’t.” With a small crocodile smile, Crawford waited. He loved to catch people in assumptions.
“Did he try? Did he mark it up? I never even saw that door—Geehan had put in a steel one with deadbolts by the time I got there.”
Crawford opened his jaws. “You assume Geehan put it in. Geehan didn’t put it in. The steel door was there when they were killed. Jacobi must have put it in—he was aDetroitguy, he’d favor deadbolts.”
“When did Jacobi put it in?”
“I don’t know. Obviously it was after the kid’s birthday—when was that? It’ll be in the autopsy if you’ve got it here.”
“His birthday was April 14, a Monday,” Graham said, staring at the screen, his chin in his hand. “I want to know when Jacobi changed the door.”
Crawford’s scalp wrinkled. It smoothed out again as he saw the point. “You think the Tooth Fairy cased the Jacobi house while the old door with the padlock was still there,” he said.
“He brought a bolt cutter, didn’t he? How do you break in someplace with a bolt cutter?” Graham said. “You cut padlocks, bars, or chain. Jacobi didn’t have any bars or chained gates, did he?”
“No.”
“Then he went there expecting a padlock. A bolt cutter’s fairly heavy and it’s long. He was moving in daylight, and from where he parked he had to hike a long way to the Jacobi house. For all he knew, he might be coming back in one hell of a hurry if something went wrong. He wouldn’t have carried a bolt cutter unless he knew he’d need it. He was expecting a padlock.”
“You figure he cased the place before Jacobi changed the door. Then he shows up to kill them, waits in the woods—”
“You can’t see this side of the house from the woods.”
Crawford nodded. “He waits in the woods. They go to bed and he moves in with his bolt cutter and finds the new door with the deadbolts.”
“Say he finds the new door. He had it all worked out, and now this,” Graham said, throwing up his hands. “He’s really pissed off, frustrated, he’s hot to get in there. So he does a fast, loud pry job on the patio door. It was messy the way he went in—he woke Jacobi up and had to blow him away on the stairs. That’s not like the Dragon. He’s not messy that way. He’s careful and he leaves nothing behind. He did a neat job at the Leedses’ going in.”
“Okay, all right,” Crawford said. “If we find out when Jacobi changed his door, maybe we’ll establish the interval between when he cased it and when he killed them. The minimum time that elapsed, anyway. That seems like a useful thing to know. Maybe it’ll match some interval theBirminghamconvention and visitors bureau could show us. We can check car rentals again. This time we’ll do vans too. I’ll have a word with theBirminghamfield office.”
Crawford’s word must have been emphatic: in forty minutes flat a Birmingham FBI agent, with realtor Geehan in tow, was shouting to a carpenter working in the rafters of a new house. The carpenter’s information was relayed in a radio patch toChicago.
“Last week in April,” Crawford said, putting down the telephone. “That’s when they put in the new door. My God, that’s two months before the Jacobis were hit. Why would he case it two months in advance?”
“I don’t know, but I promise you he saw Mrs. Jacobi or saw the whole family before he checked out their house. Unless he followed them down there fromDetroit, he spotted Mrs. Jacobi sometime between April 10, when they moved toBirmingham, and the end of April, when the door was changed. Sometime in that period he was inBirmingham. The bureau’s going on with it down there?”
“Cops too,” Crawford said. “Tell me this: how did he know there was an inside door from the basement into the house? You couldn’t count on that—not in the South.”
“He saw the inside of the house, no question.”‘
“Has your buddy Metcalf got the Jacobi bank statements?”
“I’m sure he does.”
“Let’s see what service calls they paid for between April 10 and the end of the month. I know the service calls have been checked for a couple of weeks back from the killings, but maybe we aren’t looking back far enough. Same for the Leedses.”
“We always figured he looked around inside theLeedshouse,” Graham said. “From the alley he couldn’t have seen the glass in the kitchen door. There’s a latticed porch back there. But he was ready with his glass cutter. And they didn’t have any service calls for three months before they were killed.”
“If he’s casing this far ahead, maybe we didn’t check back far enough. We will now. At the Leedses’ though—when he was in the alley reading meters behind the Leeds house two days before he killed them—maybe he saw them going in the house. He could have looked in there while the porch door was open.”
“No, the doors don’t line up—remember? Look here.”
Graham threaded the projector with theLeedshome movie.
The Leedses’ gray Scotty perked up his ears and ran to the kitchen door. Valerie Leeds and the children came in carrying groceries. Through the kitchen door nothing but lattice was visible.
“All right, you want to get Byron Metcalf busy on the bank statement for April? Any kind of servic
e call or purchase that a door-to-door salesman might handle. No—I’ll do that while you wind up the profile. Have you got Metcalf’s number?”
Seeing the Leedses preoccupied Graham. Absently he told Crawford three numbers for Byron Metcalf.
He ran the films again while Crawford used the phone in the jury room.
TheLeedsfilm first.
There was the Leedses’ dog. It wore no collar, and the neighborhood was full of dogs, but the Dragon knew which dog was theirs.
Here was Valerie Leeds. The sight of her tugged at Graham.
There was the door behind her, vulnerable with its big glass pane. Her children played on the courtroom screen.
Graham had never felt as close to the Jacobis as he did to the Leedses. Their movie disturbed him now. It bothered him that he had thought of the Jacobis as chalk marks on a bloody floor.
There were the Jacobi children, ranged around the corner of the table, the birthday candles flickering on their faces.
For a flash Graham saw the blob of candle wax on the Jacobis’ bedside table, the bloodstains around the corner of the bedroom at the Leedses’. Something…
Crawford was coming back. “Metcalf said to ask you—”
“Don’t talk to me!”
Crawford wasn’t offended, He waited stock-still and his little eyes grew narrow and bright.
The film ran on, its light and shadows playing over Graham’s face.
There was the Jacobis’ cat. The Dragon knew it was the Jacobis’ cat.
There was the inside basement door.
There was the outside basement door with its padlock. The Dragon had brought a bolt cutter.
The film ended. Finally it came off the reel and the end flapped around and around.
Everything the Dragon needed to know was on the two films. They hadn’t been shown in public, there wasn’t any film club, film festi…
Graham looked at the familiar green box theLeedsmovie came in. Their name and address were on it. And Gateway Film Laboratory,St. Louis,Mo.63102.
His mind retrieved “St. Louis” just as it would retrieve any telephone number he had ever seen. What aboutSt. Louis? It was one of the places where the Tattler was available on Monday night, the same day it was printed—the day before Lounds was abducted.
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