Red Dragon - Thomas Harris [6]
The bathroom looked as though a family still used it. Mrs. Leeds's panty hose hung on the towel racks where she had left them to dry. He saw that she cut the leg off a pair when it had a runner so she could match two onelegged pairs, wear them at the same time, and save money. Mrs. Leeds's small, homey economy pierced him; Molly did the same thing.
Graham climbed out a window onto the porch roof and sat on the gritty shingles. He hugged his knees, his damp shirt pressed cold across his back, and snorted the smell of slaughter out of his nose.
The lights of Atlanta rusted the night sky and the stars were hard to see. The night would be clear in the Keys. He could be watching shooting stars with Molly and Willy, listening for the whoosh they solemnly agreed a shooting star must make. The Delta Aquarid me?teor shower was at its maximum, and Willy was up for it.
He shivered and snorted again. He did not want to think of Molly now. To do so was tasteless as well as distracting.
Graham had a lot of trouble with taste. Often his thoughts were not tasty. There were no effective partitions in his mind. What he saw and learned touched everything else he knew. Some of the com?binations were hard to live with. But he could not anticipate them, could not block and repress. His learned values of decency and propriety tagged along, shocked at his associations, appalled at his dreams; sorry that in the bone arena of his skull there were no forts for what he loved. His associations came at the speed of light. His value judgments were at the pace of a responsive reading. They could never keep up and direct his thinking.
He viewed his own mentality as grotesque but useful, like a chair made of antlers. There was nothing he could do about it.
Graham turned off the lights in the Leeds house and went out through the kitchen. At the far end of the hack porch, his flashlight revealed a bicycle and a wicker dog bed. There was a doghouse in the backyard, a dog bowl by the steps.
The evidence indicated the Leedses were surprised in their sleep. Holding the flashlight between his chin and chest, he wrote a memo: Jack - where was the dog?
Graham drove hack to his hotel. He had to concentrate on his driving, though there was little traffic at fourthirty A.M. His head still ached and he watched for an allnight pharmacy.
He found one on Peachtree. A slovenly rentacop dozed near the door. A pharmacist in a jacket dingy enough to highlight his dan?druff sold Graham Bufferin. The glare in the place was painful. Graham disliked young pharmacists. They had a middleofthelitter look about them. They were often smug and he suspected that they were unpleasant at home.
“What else?” the pharmacist said, his fingers poised above the cash register keys. “What else?”
The Atlanta FBI office had booked him into an absurd hotel near the city's new Peachtree Center. It had glass elevators shaped like milkweed pods to let him know he was really in town now.
Graham rode up to his room with two conventioneers wearing name tags with the printed greeting “Hi!” They held to the rail and looked over the lobby as they ascended.
“Looka yonder by the desk - that's Wilma and them just now coming in,” the larger one said. “God damn, I'd love to tear off a piece of that.”
“Fuck her till her nose bleeds,” the other one said.
Fear and rut, and anger at the fear.
“Say, you know why a woman has legs?”
“Why?”
“So she won't leave a trail like a snail.”
The elevator doors opened.
“Is this it? This is it,” the larger one said. He lurched against the facing as he got off.
“This is the blind leading the blind,” the other one said.
Graham put his cardboard box on the dresser in his room. Then he put it in a drawer where he could not see it. He had had enough of the wideeyed dead. He wanted to call Molly, but it was too early.
A meeting was scheduled for eight A.M. at the Atlanta police headquarters. He'd have little enough to tell them.
He would