The Silence of the Lambs, Page 28

  Loneliness. Big lonesome girls trying to satisfy somebody.

  The police had eliminated lonely-hearts clubs early. Did Buffalo Bill have another way to take advantage of loneliness? Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness except greed.

  Loneliness might have permitted Buffalo Bill an opening with Fredrica, but not with Catherine. Catherine wasn’t lonesome.

  Kimberly was lonesome. Don’t start this. Kimberly, obedient and limp, past rigor mortis, being rolled over on the mortician’s table so Starling could fingerprint her. Stop it. Can’t stop it. Kimberly lonesome, anxious to please, had Kimberly ever rolled over obediently for someone, just to feel his heart beat against her back? She wondered if Kimberly had felt whiskers grating between her shoulder blades.

  Staring into the lighted closet, Starling remembered Kimberly’s plump back, the triangular patches of skin missing from her shoulders.

  Staring into the lighted closet, Starling saw the triangles on Kimberly’s shoulders outlined in the blue dashes of a dressmaking pattern. The idea swam away and circled and came again, came close enough for her to grab it this time and she did with a fierce pulse of joy: THEY’RE DARTS—HE TOOK THOSE TRIANGLES TO MAKE DARTS SO HE COULD LET OUT HER WAIST. MOTHER FUCKER CAN SEW. BUFFALO BILL’S TRAINED TO SERIOUSLY SEW—HE’S NOT JUST PICKING OUT READY-TO-WEAR.

  What did Dr. Lecter say? “He’s making himself a girl suit out of real girls.” What did he say to me? “Do you sew, Clarice?” Damn straight I do.

  Starling put her head back, closed her eyes for one second. Problem-solving is hunting; it is savage pleasure and we are born to it.

  She’d seen a telephone in the parlor. She started downstairs to use it, but Mrs. Bimmel’s reedy voice was calling up to her already, calling her to the phone.

  CHAPTER 53

  Mrs. Bimmel gave Starling the telephone and picked up the fretting baby. She didn’t leave the parlor.

  “Clarice Starling.”

  “Jerry Burroughs, Starling—”

  “Good, Jerry, listen I think Buffalo Bill can sew. He cut the triangles—just a sec—Mrs. Bimmel, could I ask you to take the baby in the kitchen? I need to talk here. Thank you.… Jerry, he can sew. He took—”

  “Starling—”

  “He took those triangles off of Kimberly Emberg to make darts, dressmaking darts, do you know what I’m saying? He’s skilled, he’s not just making caveman stuff. ID Section can search Known Offenders for tailors, sailmakers, drapers, upholsterers—run a scan on the Distinguishing Marks field for a tailor’s notch in his teeth—”

  “Right, right, right, I’m punching up a line now to ID. Now listen up—I may have to get off the phone here. Jack wanted me to brief you. We got a name and a place that looks not bad. The Hostage Rescue Team’s airborne from Andrews. Jack’s briefing them on the scrambler.”

  “Going where?”

  “Calumet City, edge of Chicago. Subject’s Jame, like ‘Name’ with a J, last name Gumb, a.k.a. John Grant, WM, thirty-four, one-ninety, brown and blue. Jack got a beep from Johns Hopkins. Your thing—your profile on how he’d be different from a transsexual—it rang the cherries at Johns Hopkins. Guy applied for sex reassignment three years ago. Roughed up a doctor after they turned him down. Hopkins had the Grant alias and a flop address in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The cops had a gas receipt with his tag number and we went from there. Big jacket in California as a juvenile—he killed his grandparents when he was twelve and did six years in Tulare Psychiatric. The state let him out sixteen years ago when they shut down the asylum. He disappeared a long time. He’s a fag-basher. Had a couple of scrapes in Harrisburg and faded out again.”

  “Chicago, you said. How do you know Chicago?”

  “Customs. They had some paper on the John Grant alias. Customs stopped a suitcase at LAX a couple of years ago shipped from Surinam with live ‘pupae’—is that how you say it?—insects anyway, moths, in it. The addressee was John Grant, care of a business in Calumet called—get this—called `Mr. Hide.’ Leather goods. Maybe the sewing fits with that; I’m relaying the sewing to Chicago and Calumet. No home address yet on Grant, or Gumb—the business is closed, but we’re close.”

  “Any pictures?”

  “Just the juveniles from Sacramento PD so far. They’re not much use—he was twelve. Looked like Beaver Cleaver. The wire room’s faxing them around anyway.”

  “Can I go?”

  “No. Jack said you’d ask. They’ve got two female marshals from Chicago and a nurse to take charge of Martin if they get her. You’d never be in time anyway, Starling.”

  “What if he’s barricaded? It could take—”

  “There won’t be any standoff. They find him, they fall on him—Crawford’s authorized an explosive entry. Special problems with this guy, Starling, he’s been in a hostage situation before. His juvenile homicides, they got him in a barricade situation in Sacramento with his grandmother as hostage—he’d already killed his grandfather—and it came out gruesome, let me tell you. He walked her out in front of the cops, they had this preacher talking to him. He’s a kid, nobody took the shot. He was behind her and he did her kidneys. Medical attention no avail. At twelve, he did this. So this time no negotiations, no warning. Martin’s probably dead already, but say we’re lucky. Say he had a lot on his mind, one thing and another he didn’t get around to it yet. If he sees us coming, he’ll do her right in our faces for spite. Costs him nothing, right? So they find him and—Boom!—the door’s down.”

  The room was too damned hot and it smelled of baby ammonia.

  Burroughs was still talking. “We’re looking for both names on the entomology magazine subscription lists, Knifemakers Guild, known offenders, the works—nobody stands down until it’s over. You’re doing Bimmel’s acquaintances, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Justice says it’s a tricky case to make if we don’t catch him dirty. We need him with Martin or with something identifiable—something with teeth or fingers, frankly. Goes without saying, if he’s dumped Martin already, we need witnesses to put him with a victim before the fact. We can use your stuff from Bimmel regardless.… Starling, I wish to God this had happened yesterday for more reasons than the Martin kid. They throw the switch on you at Quantico?”

  “I think so. They put in somebody else that was waiting out a recycle—that’s what they tell me.”

  “If we get him in Chicago, you made a lot of contribution here. They’re hardasses at Quantico like they’re supposed to be, but they have to see that. Wait a minute.”

  Starling could hear Burroughs barking, away from the phone. Then he was back again.

  “Nothing—they can deploy in Calumet City in forty to fifty-five, depends on the winds aloft. Chicago SWAT’s deputized in case they find him sooner. Calumet Power and Light’s come up with four possible addresses. Starling, watch for anything they can use up there to narrow it down. You see anything about Chicago or Calumet, get to me fast.”

  “Righto.”

  “Now listen—this and I gotta go. If it happens, if we get him in Calumet City, you fall in at Quantico 0800 mañana with your Mary Janes shined. Jack’s going before the board with you. So is the chief gunny, Brigham. It don’t hurt to ask.”

  “Jerry, one other thing: Fredrica Bimmel had some warmups made by Juno, it’s a brand of fat clothes. Catherine Martin had some too, for what it’s worth. He might watch fat stores to find large victims. We could ask Memphis, Akron, the other places.”

  “Got it. Keep smiling.”

  Starling walked out in the junky yard in Belvedere, Ohio, 380 long miles from the action in Chicago. The cold air felt good on her face. She threw a small punch in the air, rooting hard for the Hostage Rescue Team. At the same time, she felt a little trembly in her chin and cheeks. What the hell was this? What the hell would she have done if she’d found anything? She’d have called the cavalry, the Cleveland field office, and Columbus SWAT, the Belvedere PD too.

  Saving the young woman, sa
ving the daughter of Senator Fuck-You Martin and the ones that might come after—truly, that was what mattered. If they did it, everybody was right.

  If they weren’t in time, if they found something awful, please God they got Buffa—got Jame Gumb or Mr. Hide or whatever they wanted to call the damned thing.

  Still, to be so close, to get a hand on the rump of it, to have a good idea a day late and wind up far from the arrest, busted out of school, it all smacked of losing. Starling had long suspected guiltily, that the Starlings’ luck had been sour for a couple of hundred years now—that all the Starlings had been wandering around pissed off and confused back through the mists of time. That if you could find the tracks of the first Starling, they would lead in a circle. This was classic loser thinking, and she was damned if she’d entertain it.

  If they caught him because of the profile she’d gotten from Dr. Lecter, it had to help her with the Department of Justice. Starling had to think about that a little; her career hopes were twitching like a phantom limb.

  Whatever happened, having the flash on the dressmaking pattern had felt nearly as good as anything ever had. There was stuff to keep here. She’d found courage in the memory of her mother as well as her father. She’d earned and kept Crawford’s confidence. These were things to keep in her own White Owl cigar box.

  Her job, her duty, was to think about Fredrica and how Gumb might have gotten her. A criminal prosecution of Buffalo Bill would require all the facts.

  Think about Fredrica, stuck here all her young life. Where would she look for the exit? Did her longings resonate with Buffalo Bill’s? Did that draw them together? Awful thought, that he might have understood her out of his own experience, empathized even, and still helped himself to her skin.

  Starling stood at the edge of the water.

  Almost every place has a moment of the day, an angle and intensity of light, in which it looks its best. When you’re stuck someplace, you learn that time and you look forward to it. This, midafternoon, was probably the time for the Licking River behind Fell Street. Was this the Bimmel girl’s time to dream? The pale sun raised enough vapor off the water to blur the old refrigerators and ranges dumped in the brush on the far side of the backwater. The northeast wind, opposite the light, pushed the cattails toward the sun.

  A piece of white PVC pipe led from Mr. Bimmel’s shed toward the river. It gurgled and a brief rush of bloody water came out, staining the old snow. Bimmel came out into the sun. The front of his trousers was flecked with blood and he carried some pink and gray lumps in a plastic food bag.

  “Squab,” he said, when he saw Starling looking. “Ever eat squab?”

  “No,” Starling said, turning back to the water, “I’ve eaten doves.”

  “Never have to worry about biting on a shot in these.”

  “Mr. Bimmel, did Fredrica know anybody from Calumet City or the Chicago area?”

  He shrugged and shook his head.

  “Had she ever been to Chicago, to your knowledge?”

  “What do you mean, ‘to my knowledge?’ You think a girl of mine’s going off to Chicago and I don’t know it? She didn’t go to Columbus I didn’t know it.”

  “Did she know any men that sew, tailors or sailmakers?”

  “She sewed for everybody. She could sew like her mother. I don’t know of any men. She sewed for stores, for ladies, I don’t know who.”

  “Who was her best friend, Mr. Bimmel? Who did she hang out with?” Didn’t mean to say “hang.” Good, it didn’t stick him—he’s just pissed off.

  “She didn’t hang out like the good-for-nothings. She always had some work. God didn’t make her pretty, he made her busy.”

  “Who would you say was her best friend?”

  “Stacy Hubka, I guess, since they were little. Fredrica’s mother used to say Stacy went around with Fredrica just to have somebody to wait on her, I don’t know.”

  “Do you know where I could get in touch with her?”

  “Stacy worked at the insurance, I guess she still does. The Franklin Insurance.”

  Starling walked to her car across the rutted yard, her head down, hands deep in her pockets. Fredrica’s cat watched her from the high window.

  CHAPTER 54

  FBI credentials get a snappier response the farther west you go. Starling’s ID, which might have raised one bored eyebrow on a Washington functionary, got the undivided attention of Stacy Hubka’s boss at the Franklin Insurance Agency in Belvedere, Ohio. He relieved Stacy Hubka at the counter and the telephones himself, and offered Starling the privacy of his cubicle for the interview.

  Stacy Hubka had a round, downy face and stood five-four in heels. She wore her hair in frosted wings and used a Cher Bono move to brush them back from her face. She looked Starling up and down whenever Starling wasn’t facing her.

  “Stacy—may I call you Stacy?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’d like you to tell me, Stacy, how you think this might have happened to Fredrica Bimmel—where this man might have spotted Fredrica.”

  “Freaked me out. Get your skin peeled off, is that a bummer? Did you see her? They said she was just like rags, like somebody let the air out of—”

  “Stacy, did she ever mention anybody from Chicago or Calumet City?”

  Calumet City. The clock above Stacy Hubka’s head worried Starling. If the Hostage Rescue Team makes it in forty minutes, they’re just ten minutes from touchdown. Did they have a hard address? Tend to your business.

  “Chicago?” Stacy said. “No, we marched at Chicago one time in the Thanksgiving parade.”

  “When?”

  “Eighth grade, that would be what?—nine years ago. The band just went there and back on the bus.”

  “What did you think last spring when she first disappeared?”

  “I just didn’t know.”

  “Remember where you were when you first found it out? When you got the news? What did you think then?”

  “That first night she was gone, Skip and me went to the show and then we went to Mr. Toad’s for a drink and Pam and them, Pam Malavesi, came in and said Fredrica had disappeared, and Skip goes, Houdini couldn’t make Fredrica disappear. And then he’s got to tell everybody who Houdini was, he’s always showing off how much he knows, and we just sort of blew it off. I thought she was just mad at her dad. Did you see her house? Is that the pits? I mean, wherever she is, I know she’s embarrassed you saw it. Wouldn’t you run away?”

  “Did you think maybe she’d run away with somebody, did anybody pop into your mind—even if it was wrong?”

  “Skip said maybe she’d found her a chubby-chaser. But no, she never had anybody like that. She had one boyfriend, but that’s like ancient history. He was in the band in the tenth grade, I say ‘boyfriend’ but they just talked and giggled like a couple of girls and did homework. He was a big sissy though, wore one of these little Greek fisherman’s caps? Skip thought he was a, you know, a queer. She got kidded about going out with a queer. Him and his sister got killed in a car wreck though, and she never got anybody else.”

  “What did you think when she didn’t come back?”

  “Pam thought maybe it was some Moonies got her, I didn’t know, I was scared every time I thought about it. I wouldn’t any more go out at night without Skip, I told him, I said uh-uh, buddy, when the sun goes down, we go out.”

  “Did you ever hear her mention anybody named Jame Gumb? Or John Grant?”

  “Ummmm … no.”

  “Do you think she could have had a friend you didn’t know about? Were there gaps in time, days when you didn’t see her?”

  “No. She had a guy, I’d of known, believe me. She never had a guy.”

  “Do you think it might be just possible, let’s say, she could have had a friend and didn’t say anything about it?”

  “Why wouldn’t she?”

  “Scared she’d get kidded, maybe?”

  “Kidded by us? What are you saying, because of the other time? The sissy kid in
high school?” Stacy reddened. “No. No way we would hurt her. I just mentioned that together. She didn’t … everybody was like, kind to her after he died.”

  “Did you work with Fredrica, Stacy?”

  “Me and her and Pam Malavesi and Jaronda Askew all worked down at the Bargain Center summers in high school. Then Pam and me went to Richards’ to see could we get on, it’s real nice clothes, and they hired me and then Pam, so Pam says to Fredrica come on they need another girl and she came, but Mrs. Burdine—the merchandising manager?—she goes, ‘Well, Fredrica, we need somebody that, you know, people can relate to, that they come in and say I want to look like her, and you can give them advice how they look in this and stuff. And if you get yourself together and lose your weight I want you to come right back here and see me,’ she says. ‘But right now, if you want to take over some of our alterations I’ll try you at that, I’ll put in a word with Mrs. Lippman.’ Mrs. Burdine talked in this sweety voice but she turned out to be a bitch really, but I didn’t know it right at first.”

  “So Fredrica did alterations for Richards’, the store where you worked?”

  “It hurt her feelings, but sure. Old Mrs. Lippman did everybody’s alterations. She had the business and she had more than she could do, and Fredrica worked for her. She did them for old Mrs. Lippman. Mrs. Lippman sewed for everybody, made dresses. After Mrs. Lippman retired, her kid or whatever didn’t want to do it and Fredrica got it all and just kept sewing for everybody. That’s all she did. She’d meet me and Pam, we’d go to Pam’s house on lunch and watch ‘The Young and the Restless’ and she’d bring something and be working in her lap the whole time.”

  “Did Fredrica ever work at the store, taking measurements? Did she meet customers or the wholesale people?”

  “Sometimes, not much. I didn’t work every day.”

  “Did Mrs. Burdine work every day, would she know?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Did Fredrica ever mention sewing for a company called Mr. Hide in Chicago or Calumet City, maybe lining leather goods?”