Sandra nodded. "I like to draw and paint and I like pottery."
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The Devil in Gray
"That's good, because I'll tell you what I want you to do. I want you to draw me a picture of this man you saw walking through the door. Then when you're done, I want you to call this number and I'll send an officer around to your home tomorrow morning to collect it. Do you think you can do that for me?"
"She can do it," Eunice Plummer put in. "She's really very good."
"I'm sure she is."
The officer escorted Eunice Plummer and Sandra back to the police line. Before she ducked under the tape, Sandra turned around and gave Decker a shy little wave. Decker waved back.
"Who's your new girlfriend?" Hicks said.
"A very sweet young lady, that's all I can say."
"She really see anybody?"
"No, I don't think so. Her mother says she has some kind of extrasensory perception . . . sees people walking around that nobody else can see. Must be something to do with impaired brain function."
"So how did you leave it?"
"I've asked her to draw the man she saw, that's all. If nothing else, it might act as some kind of therapy." "Since when did you become Bruce Willis?"
35
CHAPTER FIVE
It was ten after midnight by the time Decker let himself into his loft on Main Street and closed and chained the door behind him. He had been delayed for over fifteen minutes by a construction truck parked across the street while it was loaded with asbestos stripped out of Main Street Station. The station was being renovated and the trains were being brought back into the city center, but the Virginia Board of Health still had offices in what had once been the train shed, so asbestos stripping could only be done at night.
Decker tossed his crumpled black linen coat onto the couch and eased off his heavy shoulder holster, hanging it up on the old-style hat stand. He hadn't eaten since eleven this morning and he had bought two chicken breasts with the intention of making himself a Mexican chicken stir-fry, but he was well past hunger—and he was far too tired to cook anything now. He put the chicken into the fridge and walked back into the living area.
He switched on the television, although he kept the
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sound turned off. On-screen, a witch was being burned at the stake in agonized silence. He went across to the mirrored drinks cabinet, took out a caballitos shot glass, and poured himself a slug of Herradura Silver tequila. He knocked it back in one and stood for a moment with his eyes watering before pouring himself another. It was made from 100 percent blue agave, one of the most expensive tequilas you could buy.
He could see that his answering machine was blinking red and he could guess who it was, but he didn't feel like answering it. He took his drink over to the window and looked out over Canal Walk and the James River, the water glistening as black as oil, with a thousand lights dancing in it, yellow and red and green.
He had moved to Canal Walk Lofts over a year ago, but in spite of all the pictures and personal clutter that he had brought with him he still felt as if he were a stranger, living without permission in somebody else's apartment. Come to that, he still felt as if he were living without permission in somebody else's life.
The walls were all painted gunmetal gray and the floor was shiny red hardwood, although it was badly scuffed in front of the chair that faced the television. The couch and the armchairs were upholstered in soft black leather, and there was a glass-and-chrome coffee table with dozens of overlapping rings on it where glasses and coffee mugs had stood. Amongst the rings stood a bronze statuette of an ecstatic naked dancer, her hair flying out behind her; as well as an enamel-plated shield from the Metro Richmond Police for marksmanship; heaps of TV Guides and Guns & Ammo and Playboy and newspapers; an ashtray from the Jefferson Hotel; and a well-thumbed copy of Your Year in the Stars: Capricorn.
Along one wall ran a long black mahogany bookcase,
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crammed with a mixture of John Grisham novels and technical manuals for dismantling guns and rebuilding automobiles and step-by-step guides to Mexican and southern cookery. At the far end were ten or eleven books on mysticism and life after death, including the biography of Edgar Cayce, the famous clairvoyant, and Zora Hurston, the anthropologist who had investigated the zombie cult in Haiti.
On the wall above the bookcase hung a huge brightly colored print of a Dutch girl sitting in a field of scarlet tulips, wearing a snow-white bonnet and bright yellow clogs. Her stripy skirt was lifted and her legs were wide apart, her vulva as scarlet as the tulips. Next to it were more nudes, darker and moodier, and three etchings of a couple entwined together. But on the other side of the room, close to the window, there was a gallery of more than twenty photographs framed in black, some of them color and some of them black-and-white. All of them showed the same dreamy-looking blonde with dark brown eyes and very long fine hair.
Decker, as he always did, raised his glass to her. "Another day in paradise, baby."
He drew the loosely woven drapes, and then he went through to the bedroom where his king-size bed remained exactly as he had left it that morning, the sheets twisted like the Indian rope trick and the pillows all punched out of shape. He had always been a restless sleeper, prone to nightmares, and the state of the bed was a silent but eloquent record of last night's journeys through the country of shadows—a country where faceless people murmured in his ears and strange white shapes fled ahead of him through endless arcades.
Beside the bed stood more photographs of the dreamy-looking blonde, one of them showing her arm in arm with
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Decker on the pedestrian walkway under the Robert E. Lee Bridge, her right hand raised to keep the sun out of her eyes.
Decker stripped off his clothes, dropping them onto the bed, and went through to the white-tiled bathroom. He stepped into the shower and turned it on full-blast. For some reason the Maitland case had left him feeling very tired and discouraged. All homicides were messy and disgusting, and there were always loose ends and blind alleys and confusing evidence. On its own, the disappearance of the murder weapon wouldn't have worried him unduly. The circumstantial evidence against Jerry Maitland was overwhelming. But it was hard to imagine why he should have attacked his wife so frenziedly, and killed their unborn baby. He had a great job, an idyllic house, and everything in the world to look forward to. Unless he had violent schizophrenic tendencies that nobody had guessed at, there didn't seem to be any motive for his actions at all.
And then there was Sandra's So-Scary Man in gray. Gray hat, gray coat, and wings, whatever that meant. Decker didn't believe in ghosts and he didn't believe in reincarnation. After Cathy's death, he had wanted to, desperately, almost to the point of madness. He had talked to dozens of mediums and clairvoyants and read everything he could about "psychic phenomena." Anything to touch Cathy again, anything to talk to her and smell her and wake up in the morning with her hair spread out on the pillow. Anything to tell her how sorry he was.
But after three months of sick leave and nearly a thousand dollars of savings wasted on seances and "spirit empathy sessions," he had come to accept that she was truly gone. He didn't quite know how it had happened. He had been walking through Hollywood Cemetery one afternoon, where Confederate President Jefferson Davis was buried,
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along with eighteen thousand Confederate soldiers, and he had realized how silent it was, apart from the traffic on Route 1 and the endless rushing of the James River rapids. There was nobody there. No spirits, no whispers. The dead were dead and they never came back.