Hannibal - Thomas Harris [26]
“Well, I'll be. Let me ask you this, Inelle, did he keep the records in his office, or were they out in reception where your desk -”.“They were in the wall cabinets in his office and then they got so many we got big filing cabinets out in the reception area. They was always locked, of course. When we moved out, they moved in the methadone clinic on a temporary basis and a lot of stuff was moved around.”
“Did you ever see and handle Dr Lecter's file?”
“Sure.”
“Do you remember any X rays in it? Were X rays filed with the medical reports or separate?”
“With. Filed with. They were bigger than the files and that made it clumsy. We had an Xray but no fulltime radiologist to keep a separate file. I honestly don't remember if it was one with his or not. There was an electrocardiogram tape Fred used to show to people, Dr Lecter - I don't even want to call him a doctor was all wired up to the electrocardiograph when he got the poor nurse. See, it was freakish - his pulse rate didn't even go up much when he attacked her. He got a separated shoulder when all the orderlies, you know, grabbed aholt of him and pulled him off of her. They'd of had to Xray him for that. They'd have give him plenty more than a separated shoulder if I'd had something to say about it.”
“If anything occurs to you, any place the file might be, would you call me?”
“We'll do what we call a global search?”
Ms Corey said, savoring the term, “but I don't think we'll find anything. A lot of stuff just got abandoned, not by us, but by the methadone people.”
The coffee mugs had the thick rims that dribble down the sides. Starling watched Inelle Corey walk heavily away like hell's own option and drank half a cup with her napkin tucked under her chin.
Starling was coming back to herself a little. She knew she was weary of something. Maybe it was tackiness, worse than tackiness, stylelessness maybe. An indifference to things that please the eye. Maybe she was hungry for some style. Even snuffqueen style was better than nothing, it was a statement, whether you wanted to hear it or not.
Starling examined herself for snobbism and decided she had damn little to be snobbish about. Then, thinking of style, she thought of Evelda Drumgo, who had plenty of it. With the thought, Starling wanted badly to get outside herself again.
Hannibal
Chapter 11
AND SO, Starling returned to the place where it all began for her, the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, now defunct. The old brown building, house of pain, is chained and barred, marked with graffiti and awaiting the wrecking ball.
It had been going downhill for years before the disappearance on vacation of its director, Dr Frederick Chilton. Subsequent revelations of waste and mismanagement and the decrepitude of the building itself soon caused the legislature to choke off its funds. Some patients were moved to other state institutions, some were dead and a few wandered the streets of Baltimore as Thorazine zombies in an illconceived outpatient program that got more than one of them frozen to death..Waiting in front of the old building, Clarice Starling realized she had exhausted the other possibilities first because she did not want to go in this place again.
The caretaker was fortyfive minutes late. He was a stocky older man with a builtup shoe that clopped, and an eastern European haircut that may have been done at home. He wheezed as he led her to a side door, a few steps down from the sidewalk. The lock had been punched out by scavengers and the door secured with a chain and two padlocks. There were fuzzy webs in the links of the chain. Grass growing in the cracks of the steps tickled Starling's ankles as the caretaker fumbled with his keys. The late afternoon was overcast, the light grainy and without shadows.
“I am not knowing this building well, I just check the fire alarums,” the man said.
“Do you know if any papers are stored here? Any filing cabinets, any records?”
He shrugged. “After the hospital, they had the methadone clinic here, a few months. They put everything in the basement,