Red Dragon, Page 23

  In the fall of 1979, Francis Dolarhyde withdrew part of his considerable savings and took a three-month leave of absence from Gateway. He went to Hong Kong and he took with him his grandmother’s teeth.

  When he returned, red-haired Eileen and his other fellow workers agreed that the vacation had done him good. He was calm. They hardly noticed that he never used the employees’ locker room or shower anymore—he had never done that often anyway.

  His grandmother’s teeth were back in the glass beside her bed. His own new ones were locked in his desk upstairs.

  If Eileen could have seen him before his mirror, teeth in place, new tattoo brilliant in the harsh gym light, she would have screamed. Once.

  There was time now; he did not have to hurry now. He had forever. It was five months before he selected the Jacobis.

  The Jacobis were the first to help him, the first to lift him into the Glory of his Becoming. The Jacobis were better than anything, better than anything he ever knew.

  Until the Leedses.

  And now, as he grew in strength and Glory, there were the Shermans to come and the new intimacy of infrared. Most promising.

  29

  Francis Dolarhyde had to leave his own territory at Gateway Film Processing to get what he needed.

  Dolarhyde was production chief of Gateway’s largest division—home-movie processing—but there were four other divisions.

  The recessions of the 1970s cut deeply into home moviemaking, and there was increasing competition from home video recorders. Gateway had to diversify.

  The company added departments which transferred film to videotape, printed aerial survey maps, and offered custom services to small-format commercial film-makers.

  In 1979 a plum fell to Gateway. The company contracted jointly with the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy to develop and test new emulsions for infrared photography.

  The Department of Energy wanted sensitive infrared film for its heat-conservation studies. Defense wanted it for night reconnaissance.

  Gateway bought a small company next door, Baeder Chemical, in late 1979 and set up the project there.

  Dolarhyde walked across to Baeder on his lunch hour under a scrubbed blue sky, carefully avoiding the reflecting puddles on the asphalt. Lounds’s death had put him in an excellent humor.

  Everyone at Baeder seemed to be out for lunch.

  He found the door he wanted at the end of a labyrinth of halls. The sign beside the door said “Infrared Sensitive Materials in Use. NO Safelights, NO Smoking, NO hot beverages.” The red light was on above the sign.

  Dolarhyde pushed a button and, in a moment, the light turned green. He entered the light trap and rapped on the inner door.

  “Come.” A woman’s voice.

  Cool, absolute darkness. The gurgle of water, the familiar smell of D-76 developer, and a trace of perfume.

  “I’m Francis Dolarhyde. I came about the dryer.”

  “Oh, good. Excuse me, my mouth’s full. I was just finishing lunch.”

  He heard papers wadded and dropped in a wastebasket.

  “Actually, Ferguson wanted the dryer,” said the voice in the dark. “He’s on vacation, but I know where it goes. You have one over at Gateway?”

  “I have two. One is larger. He didn’t say how much room he has.” Dolarhyde had seen a memo about the dryer problem weeks ago.

  “I’ll show you, if you don’t mind a short wait.”

  “All right.”

  “Put your back against the door”—her voice took on a touch of the lecturer’s practiced tone—“come forward three steps, until you feel the tile under your feet, and there’ll be a stool just to your left.”

  He found it. He was closer to her now. He could hear the rustle of her lab apron.

  “Thanks for coming down,” she said. Her voice was clear, with a faint ring of iron in it. “You’re head of processing over in the big building, right?”

  “Um-humm.”

  “The same ‘Mr. D.’ who sends the rockets when the requisitions are filed wrong?”

  “The very one.”

  “I’m Reba McClane. Hope there’s nothing wrong over here.”

  “Not my project anymore. I just planned the darkroom construction when we bought this place. I haven’t been over here in six months.” A long speech for him, easier in the dark.

  “Just a minute more and we’ll get you some light. Do you need a tape measure?”

  “I have one.”

  Dolarhyde found it rather pleasant, talking to the woman in the dark. He heard the rattle of a purse being rummaged, the click of a compact.

  He was sorry when the timer rang.

  “There we go. I’ll put this stuff in the Black Hole,” she said.

  He felt a breath of cold air, heard a cabinet close on rubber seals and the hiss of a vacuum lock. A puff of air, and fragrance touched him as she passed.

  Dolarhyde pressed his knuckle under his nose, put on his thoughtful expression and waited for the light.

  The lights came on. She stood by the door smiling in his approximate direction. Her eyes made small random movements behind the closed lids.

  He saw her white cane propped in the corner. He took his hand away from his face and smiled.

  “Do you think I could have a plum?” he said. There were several on the counter where she had been sitting.

  “Sure, they’re really good.”

  Reba McClane was about thirty, with a handsome prairie face shaped by good bones and resolution. She had a small star-shaped scar on the bridge of her nose. Her hair was a mixture of wheat and red-gold, cut in a pageboy that looked slightly out-of-date, and her face and hands were pleasantly freckled by the sun. Against the tile and stainless steel of the darkroom she was as bright as Fall.

  He was free to look at her. His gaze could move over her as freely as the air. She had no way to parry eyes.

  Dolarhyde often felt warm spots, stinging spots on his skin when he talked to a woman. They moved over him to wherever he thought the woman was looking. Even when a woman looked away from him, he suspected that she saw his reflection. He was always aware of reflective surfaces, knew the angles of reflection as a pool shark knows the banks.

  His skin now was cool. Hers was freckled, pearly on her throat and the insides of her wrists.

  “I’ll show you the room where he wants to put it,” she said. “We can get the measuring done.”

  They measured.

  “Now, I want to ask a favor,” Dolarhyde said.

  “Okay.”

  “I need some infrared movie film. Hot film, sensitive up around one thousand nanometers.”

  “You’ll have to keep it in the freezer and put it back in the cold after you shoot.”

  “I know.”

  “Could you give me an idea of the conditions, maybe I—”

  “Shooting at maybe eight feet, with a pair of Wratten filters over the lights.” It sounded too much like a surveillance rig. “At the zoo,” he said. “In the World of Darkness. They want to photograph the nocturnal animals.”

  “They must really be spooky if you can’t use commercial infrared.”

  “Ummm-hmmmm.”

  “I’m sure we can fix you up. One thing, though. You know a lot of our stuff is under the DD contract. Anything that goes out of here, you have to sign for.”

  “R ight.”

  “When do you need it?”

  “About the twentieth. No later.”

  “I don’t have to tell you—the more sensitive it is, the meaner it is to handle. You get into coolers, dry ice, all that. They’re screening some samples about four o’clock, if you want to look. You can pick the tamest emulsion that’ll do what you want.”

  “I’ll come.”

  Reba McClane counted her plums after Dolarhyde left. He had taken one.

  Strange man, Mr. Dolarhyde. There had been no awkward pause of sympathy and concern in his voice when she turned on the lights. Maybe he already knew she was blin
d. Better yet, maybe he didn’t give a damn.

  That would be refreshing.

  30

  In Chicago, Freddy Lounds’s funeral was under way. The National Tattler paid for the elaborate service, rushing the arrangements so that it could be held on Thursday, the day after his death. Then the pictures would be available for the Tattler edition published Thursday night.

  The funeral was long in the chapel and it was long at the graveside.

  A radio evangelist went on and on in fulsome eulogy. Graham rode the greasy swells of his hangover and tried to study the crowd.

  The hired choir at graveside gave full measure for the money while the Tattler photographers’ motor-driven cameras whizzed. Two TV crews were present with fixed cameras and creepy-peepies. Police photographers with press credentials photographed the crowd.

  Graham recognized several plainclothes officers from Chicago Homicide. Theirs were the only faces that meant anything to him.

  And there was Wendy of Wendy City, Lounds’s girl-friend. She was seated beneath the canopy, nearest the coffin. Graham hardly recognized her. Her blond wig was drawn back in a bun and she wore a black tailored suit.

  During the last hymn she rose, went forward unsteadily, knelt and laid her head on the casket, her arms outstretched in the pall of chrysanthemums as the strobe lights flashed.

  The crowd made little noise moving over the spongy grass to the cemetery gates.

  Graham walked beside Wendy. A crowd of the uninvited stared at them through the bars of the high iron fence.

  “Are you all right?” Graham asked.

  They stopped among the tombstones. Her eyes were dry, her gaze level.

  “Better than you,” she said. “Got drunk, didn’t you?”

  “Yep. Is somebody keeping an eye on you?”

  “The precinct sent some people over. They’ve got plainclothes in the club. Lot of business now. More weirdos than usual.”

  “I’m sorry you had this. You did . . . I thought you were fine at the hospital. I admired that.”

  She nodded. “Freddy was a sport. He shouldn’t have to go out that hard. Thanks for getting me in the room.” She looked into the distance, blinking, thinking, eye shadow like stone dust on her lids. She faced Graham. “Look, the Tattler’s giving me some money, you figured that, right? For an interview and the dive at the graveside. I don’t think Freddy would mind.”

  “He’d have been mad if you passed it up.”

  “That’s what I thought. They’re jerks, but they pay. What it is, they tried to get me to say that I think you deliberately turned this freak on to Freddy, chumming with him in that picture. I didn’t say it. If they print that I did say it, well that’s bullshit.”

  Graham said nothing as she scanned his face.

  “You didn’t like him, maybe—it doesn’t matter. But if you thought this could happen, you wouldn’t have missed the shot at the Fairy, right?”

  “Yeah, Wendy, I’d have staked him out.”

  “Do you have anything at all? I hear noise from these people and that’s about it.”

  “We don’t have much. A few things from the lab we’re following up. It was a clean job and he’s lucky.”

  “Are you?”

  “What?”

  “Lucky.”

  “Off and on.”

  “Freddy was never lucky. He told me he’d clean up on this. Big deals everywhere.”

  “He probably would have too.”

  “Well look, Graham, if you ever, you know, feel like a drink, I’ve got one.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But stay sober on the street.”

  “Oh yes.”

  Two policemen cleared a path for Wendy through the crowd of curiosity-seekers outside the gate. One of the gawkers wore a printed T-shirt reading “The Tooth Fairy Is a One-Night Stand.” He whistled at Wendy. The woman beside him slapped his face.

  A big policeman squeezed into the 280ZX beside Wendy and she pulled into the traffic. A second policeman followed in an unmarked car.

  Chicago smelled like a spent skyrocket in the hot afternoon.

  Graham was lonely, and he knew why; funerals often make us want sex—it’s one in the eye for death.

  The wind rattled the dry stalks of a funeral arrangement near his feet. For a hard second he remembered palm fronds rustling in the sea wind. He wanted very much to go home, knowing that he would not, could not, until the Dragon was dead.

  31

  The projection room at Baeder Chemical was small—five rows of folding chairs with an aisle in the middle.

  Dolarhyde arrived late. He stood at the back with his arms folded while they screened gray cards, color cards, and cubes variously lighted, filmed on a variety of infrared emulsions.

  His presence disturbed Dandridge, the young man in charge. Dolarhyde carried an air of authority at work. He was the recognized darkroom expert from the parent company next door, and he was known to be a perfectionist.

  Dandridge had not consulted him in months, a petty rivalry that had gone on since Gateway bought Baeder Chemical.

  “Reba, give us the development dope on sample . . . eight,” Dandridge said.

  Reba McClane sat at the end of a row, a clipboard in her lap. Speaking in a clear voice, her fingers moving over the clipboard in the semidarkness, she outlined the mechanics of the development—chemicals, temperature and time, and storage procedures before and after filming.

  Infrared-sensitive film must be handled in total darkness. She had done all the dark room work, keeping the many samples straight by touch code and keeping a running record in the dark. It was easy to see her value to Baeder.

  The screening ran through quitting time.

  Reba McClane kept her seat as the others were filing out. Dolarhyde approached her carefully. He spoke to her at a distance while there were others in the room. He didn’t want her to feel watched.

  “I thought you hadn’t made it,” she said.

  “I had a machine down. It made me late.”

  The lights were on. Her clean scalp glistened in the part of her hair as he stood over her.

  “Did you get to see the 1000C sample?”

  “I did.”

  “They said it looked all right. It’s a lot easier to handle than the 1200 series. Think it’ll do?”

  “It will.”

  She had her purse with her, and a light raincoat. He stood back when she came into the aisle behind her searching cane. She didn’t seem to expect any help. He didn’t offer any.

  Dandridge stuck his head back into the room.

  “Reba, dear, Marcia had to fly. Can you manage?”

  Spots of color appeared in her cheeks. “I can manage very well, thank you, Danny.”

  “I’d drop you, love, but I’m late already. Say, Mr. Dolarhyde, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, could you—”

  “Danny, I have a ride home.” She held in her anger. The nuances of expression were denied her, so she kept her face relaxed. She couldn’t control her color, though.

  Watching with his cold yellow eyes, Dolarhyde understood her anger perfectly; he knew that Dandridge’s limp sympathy felt like spit on her cheek.

  “I’ll take you,” he said, rather late.

  “No, but thank you.” She had thought he might offer and had intended to accept. She wouldn’t have anybody forced into it. Damn Dandridge, damn his fumbling, she’d ride the damned bus, dammit. She had the fare and she knew the way and she could go anywhere she fucking pleased.

  She stayed in the women’s room long enough for the others to leave the building. The janitor let her out.

  She followed the edge of a dividing strip across the parking lot toward the bus stop, her raincoat over her shoulders, tapping the edge with her cane and feeling for the slight resistance of the puddles when the cane swished through them.

  Dolarhyde watched her from his van. His feelings made him uneasy; they were dangerous in daylight.

  For a moment under the lowering sun
, windshields, puddles, high steel wires splintered the sunlight into the glint of scissors.

  Her white cane comforted him. It swept the light of scissors, swept scissors away, and the memory of her harmlessness eased him. He was starting the engine.

  Reba McClane heard the van behind her. It was beside her now.

  “Thank you for inviting me.”

  She nodded, smiled, tapped along.

  “Ride with me.”

  “Thanks, but I take the bus all the time.”

  “Dandridge is a fool. Ride with me . . .”—what would someone say?—“for my pleasure.”

  She stopped. She heard him get out of the van.

  People usually grasped her upper arm, not knowing what else to do. Blind people do not like to have their balance disturbed by a firm hold on their triceps. It is as unpleasant for them as standing on wiggly scales to weigh. Like anyone else, they don’t like to be propelled.

  He didn’t touch her. In a moment she said, “It’s better if I take your arm.”

  She had wide experience of forearms, but his surprised her fingers. It was as hard as an oak banister.

  She could not know the amount of nerve he summoned to let her touch him.

  The van felt big and high. Surrounded by resonances and echoes unlike those of a car, she held to the edges of the bucket seat until Dolarhyde fastened her safety belt. The diagonal shoulder belt pressed one of her breasts. She moved it until it lay between them.

  They said little during the drive. Waiting at the red lights, he could look at her.

  She lived in the left side of a duplex on a quiet street near Washington University.

  “Come in and I’ll give you a drink.”

  In his life, Dolarhyde had been in fewer than a dozen private homes. In the past ten years he had been in four; his own, Eileen’s briefly, the Leedses’, and the Jacobis’. Other people’s houses were exotic to him.

  She felt the van rock as he got out. Her door opened. It was a long step down from the van. She bumped into him lightly. It was like bumping into a tree. He was much heavier, more solid than she would have judged from his voice and his footfalls. Solid and light on his feet. She had known a Bronco linebacker once in Denver who came out to film a United Way appeal with some blind kids . . .