Red Dragon - Thomas Harris [110]
I'm sorry I can't come to the phone nght now, Valerie Leeds had said.
He wished that he had known her. He wished . . . Useless, childish thought.
Graham was tired, selfish, resentful, fatigued to a childminded state in which his standards of measurement were the first ones he learned; where the direction “north” was Highway 61 and “six feet” was forever the length of his father.
He made himself settle down to the minutely detailed victim profile he was putting together from a fan of reports and his own observations.
Affluence. That was one parallel. Both families were affluent. Odd that Valerie Leeds saved money on panty hose.
Graham wondered if she had been a poor child. He thought so; her own children were a little too well turned out.
Graham had been a poor child, following his father from the boatyards in Biloxi and Greenville to the lake boats on Erie. Always the new boy at school, always the stranger. He had a halfburied grudge against the rich.
Valerie Leeds might have been a poor child. He was tempted to watch his film of her again. He could do it in the courtroom. No. The Leedses were not his immediate problem. He knew the Leedses. He did not know the Jacobis.
His lack of intimate knowledge about the Jacobis plagued him. The house fire in Detroit had taken everything - family albums, probably diaries too.
Graham tried to know them through the objects they wanted, bought and used. That was all he had.
The Jacobi probate file was three inches thick, and a lot of it was lists of possessions -a new household outfitted since the move to Birmingham. Look at all this skit. It was all insured, listed with serial numbers as the insurance companies required. Trust a man who has been burned out to buy plenty of insurance for the next time.
The attorney, Byron Metcalf, had sent him carbons instead of Xerox copies of the insurance declarations. The carbons were fuzzy and hard to read.
Jacobi had a ski boat, Leeds had a ski boat. Jacobi had a threewheeler, Leeds had a trail bike. Graham licked his thumb and turned the page.
The fourth item on the second page was a Chinon Pacific movie projector.
Graham stopped. How had he missed it? He had looked through every crate on every pallet in the Birmingham warehouse, alert for anything that would give him an intimate view of the Jacobis.
Where was the projector? He could crosscheck this insurance declaration against the inventory Byron Metcalf had prepared as executor when he stored the Jacobis' things. The items had been checked off by the warehouse supervisor who signed the storage contract.
It took fifteen minutes to go down the list of stored items. No projector, no camera, no film.
Graham leaned back in his chair and stared at the Jacobis smiling from the picture propped before him.
What the hell did you do with it?
Was it stolen?
Did the killer steal it?
If the killer stole it, did he fence it?
Dear God, give me a traceable fence.
Graham wasn't tired anymore. He wanted to know if anything else was missing. He looked for an hour, comparing the warehouse storage inventory with the insurance declarations. Everything was accounted for except the small precious items. They should all be on Byron Metcalf's own lockbox list of things he had put in the bank vault in Birmingham.
All of them were on the list. Except two.
“Crystal oddment box, 4” X 3“, sterling silver lid” appeared on the insurance declaration, but was not in the lockbox. “Sterling picture frame, 9 x 11 inches, worked with vines and flowers” wasn't in the vault either.
Stolen? Mislaid? They were small items, easily concealed. Usually fenced silver is melted down immediately. It would be hard to trace. But movie equipment had serial numbers inside and out. It could be traced.
Was the killer the thief?
As he stared at his stained photograph of the Jacobis, Graham felt the sweet jolt of a new connection. But when he saw the answer whole it was seedy and disappointing and small.
There was a telephone in the jury room. Graham called Birmingham Homicide. He got the threetoeleven watch commander.