The Devil in Gray (7 page)

“I want to help you find that So-Scary Man. He looked like this.” With that, Sandra lowered her chin and frowned, and then she made her eyes roll up into her head, so that only the whites showed.

“
Sandra!
” Eunice Plummer protested. “You mustn't make faces! If the wind changes, you'll stay like that!”

Sandra clapped her hands in excitement. “He looked just like that! Look at my drawing—
look!
”

She handed Decker a rolled-up piece of art paper. Decker sat down next to her and unrolled it. He had expected a stick person in a hat. What she had actually drawn was a highly detailed pencil rendition of the front of 4140 Davis Street, with its iron railings and its Doric-pillared porch and even its carriage lamp. She had included every single brick, and shaded everything. She had even included the decorative lace curtains behind the front parlor window.

“She has a wonderful memory,” Eunice Plummer said, proudly.

Decker shook his head in admiration. “Not just that, she's
very
talented. I know some professional artists who can't draw anything like as good as this.”

Sandra pointed to the tall figure standing on the porch. “That's him. That's the scary man.”

Her impersonation of the So-Scary Man's face had been disturbingly close to the face she had drawn. He was very tall. He was wearing what looked like a wide-brimmed slouch hat, with straggly black feathers around it, and his beard was black and wild. But it was his eyes that made him look so terrifying. They had no pupils, only whites, like the eyes of a boiled codfish, and yet they had a stare of concentrated fury, as if he were calling down every curse in the world on whoever he was looking at.

“You're right.” Decker nodded. “He
is
pretty scary, isn't he?”

The So-Scary Man was wearing a long gray overcoat with a cape, and now Decker understood what Sandra had meant by “wings.” The overcoat was unbuttoned at the front to reveal a long scabbard hanging from the man's belt. He wore dark britches and knee-length leather boots.

Decker studied the drawing for a long time. Then he asked Sandra, “You saw the So-Scary Man—but do you think he saw
you?
”

Sandra thought about that and then said, “Yes … I think so. He was looking right at me.”

“Could that be dangerous?” Eunice Plummer asked, realizing what Decker was asking.

“I don't know. This is a very weird situation. This drawing—this likeness—it's totally amazing. I wish all of our witnesses could draw like this, we wouldn't need computer composites. But the fact remains that Sandra was the only person who saw this guy, nobody else. We've interviewed over thirty people who were walking along Davis Street at the same time you were, and not
one
of them reported seeing anybody who looked like this … and, let's face it, he's pretty darn distinctive, isn't he?”

Eunice Plummer took hold of Sandra's hand and gave it a protective squeeze. “What are you going to do?” she asked, worriedly.

“I'm going to assume for now that he
was
real. I have to say that it's very unlikely that anybody was able to walk out of the Maitland house without being seen by any other passersby, but it's not one hundred percent impossible. I'm going to assign an officer to keep an eye on Sandra for the next few days, just to be on the safe side.”

“You don't think that this man would try to hurt her?”

“I don't think she's in any real danger, Ms. Plummer, to tell you the truth. But I'm going to issue this drawing to the media this afternoon, so that if he
does
exist he's pretty soon going to find out that he's a suspect. If he's innocent, he'll most likely come forward so that we can eliminate him from our inquiries. If he's guilty of any involvement in Mrs. Maitland's murder, the chances are that he'll shave off his beard and go on the lam, if he hasn't done it already. But if he's aware that Sandra was the only person who actually saw him … well, like I say, there's no harm in being careful.”

He turned to Sandra and said, “You turn on your TV tonight, Sandra, and you'll see your drawing on the news.”

Sandra smiled and gave him an unexpected high five.

Decker took them down to the lobby. “I want to thank you again, Sandra. I'll make sure that you get a special police badge for this.”

“Thank you,” Sandra said. “I hope you catch the So-Scary Man.”

“Sure, well, me too.”

Outside, there was a deafening collision of thunder. Sandra raised her head and said, “Something's going wrong, isn't it?”

“No, no. That's just an electric storm. Nothing to be afraid of.”

Sandra shook her head. “I don't mean that. Something's going wrong.”

“I don't understand what you mean. What's going wrong?”

“I don't know. Not yet.”

“She gets feelings sometimes,” Eunice Plummer explained. “Premonitions, I suppose you'd call them. She had a very bad feeling the night before her father died.”

Decker put his arm around Sandra's rounded shoulders. “Don't you worry, Sandra. Everything's going to be fine. Come through to the garage and I'll have a squad car take you and your mommy home.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

As he came jogging along the street, his new Nike sneakers slapping on the sidewalk, George Drewry saw lightning flicker in the distance, over the city center. He turned into his driveway and bent over double, his hands on his knees, gasping for breath. He was still bent double when the thunder reached him, and he thought that it sounded like distant cannon fire. This is what it must have sounded like here in Highland Springs in 1864, when Sherman was advancing from Williamsburg.

The front door opened and Jean came out, in a bright green tracksuit, her white hair wound up in rollers. “George? Are you all right?”

George slowly straightened his back. He was a big man, six feet three inches, and since his retirement from the army last August he had put on at least twenty pounds. His balding, sunburned head was tied with a red bandanna and he was wearing a khaki T-shirt and a drooping pair of gray jogging pants, both drenched in sweat. He limped toward the house, wiping his forehead with his hairy forearm. “All this exercise is going to be the death of me, do you know that?”

“Dr. Gassman told you to keep in shape, didn't he?”

“I know, but he didn't actually specify
what
shape, did he? I mean, pear-shaped is a shape, isn't it?”

George limped inside, with Jean following him. He was sixty-two years old, with a long face and wobbly jowls, and very large ears, like a mournful dog. He went into the kitchen, opened up the icebox and took out a large bottle of mineral water.

“How about a Caesar salad?” Jean asked, watching him gulp.

“How about some fried chicken and gravy?”

“You know what Dr. Gassman said about your arteries.”

“Dr. Gassman is a miserable bastard who is doing everything possible to make me as miserable as him. Why can't I enjoy my life once in a while?”

“What's the point in enjoying your life if you're dead?”

George put the water bottle back and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “All right, Caesar salad, but don't be stingy with the ham.”

He walked along the corridor to the bathroom. The walls were covered with military memorabilia—framed photographs of Wofford's brigade during the Civil War, engravings of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, as well as three muskets and pennants and badges from TRADOC—the Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe. George had been a soldier since the age of nineteen, ending his career as a major at the Office of the Command Historian, which kept records of U.S. Army history dating back to the earliest colonial militia. He had even written a short history book himself—
The Boys In Gray
, about the Regulars who fought the British at Chippewa and Lundy's Lane.

In the bathroom he stripped off his bandanna and his T-shirt and jogging pants and voluminous Bugs Bunny boxer shorts. He was damned if all this galloping around the neighborhood was doing anything more than making him look like a prize asshole. He always felt like shit when he came back from a run, and he wasn't even allowed to have a beer. He looked at himself in the mirror and his face was crimson.

“Look at you,” he told himself. “You're no damn good to anyone. Not even you.”

He climbed into the shower and turned on the faucets. He knew that Jean was only trying to take care of him, but her endless fussing was like nettle rash. It was bad enough, not having an office to go to anymore, and no staff to order around. He had always imagined that he would relish his retirement, reading and fishing and giving occasional well-received lectures on military campaigns. But when he had opened his eyes on that very first morning and realized that he wasn't going to be dressing in uniform anymore, and that he wouldn't be saluted by everyone he met, he had felt as if he were rendered impotent during the night.

Now he spent his days moping around the house, while Jean pursued him from room to room with the Hoover.

“You should take up golf.”

“Golf is for people who don't have anything else to do.”

“But you
don't
have anything else to do.”

“I know, but I'm damned if I'm going to advertise it.”

Far from bringing him peace and self-fulfillment, retirement had taken away the only thing that had made him proud of himself. He felt so useless sometimes that it made him gasp for breath, as if he were going to start sobbing.

He was soaping his chest when he felt something cold sliding down his left inside leg. Looking down, he saw that he was bleeding from a long thin cut that ran all the way from his testicles to the side of his knee. Blood was already running down his calf, mingled with foam and water, and swirling into the shower tray.

How the hell …?

George reached out of the shower cubicle for his towel. He could tell that the cut must be deep as well as long, because the blood was a rich arterial color, and it was flowing out in thick, warm surges.

“Jean!” he shouted. “Jean, I need some help here!”

He tugged his towel off the rail and wound it around his thigh as tightly as he could. All the same, it was soaked scarlet in a matter of seconds. “Jean!” he called. “Jean, I've cut myself!”

He lifted his right hand toward the faucets to turn off the water, but as he did so he felt an intense slice across his knuckles, and another cut appeared, so vicious that it almost severed his little finger. He cried out in bewilderment more than pain, and thrust his hand into his mouth, so that it was filled up with the metallic taste of fresh blood.

Then, with terrible swiftness, his left hand was cut, too, so that he dropped the towel that he was holding against his thigh. The towel blocked up the drain, and it took only a few seconds before the shower tray was brimming with blood and water.

George staggered sideways. He felt giddy already, as if he had just climbed off a carnival roundabout. The inside of the shower cubicle suddenly went dark, with swarming pinpricks of light. “
Jean, I need you
!” he shouted, but his voice sounded as if it were coming from the end of a very long pipe.

He felt a cut across the bridge of his nose, and then three more cuts on his shoulders. He slid down the wall until he was on his knees, leaving a wide streak of blood on the pale green tiles. The water pelted into his face and almost blinded him.

His back was cut in a series of diagonal slices that went right through to his shoulder blades and his ribs. He actually felt the blade sliding against the bone. He flailed around with his bleeding hands, trying to stop his invisible assailant from cutting him anymore, but there was nobody there, and all he succeeded in doing was decorating the shower cubicle in a ghastly scarlet parody of an action painting.

“
Jean
,” he whispered.

With a soft
pop
, the point of a blade broke his skin just above his pubic hair. There was a moment's hesitation, and then the blade itself was pushed in deep through the layers of subcutaneous fat and into his stomach muscles. He cried out, “
No-no-no-no-no!
” because the blade was so cold and the pain was too much for him to bear. He tried to climb to his feet, his bloody hands sliding frantically against the tiles, and he almost succeeded. But then he slipped and fell down onto his knees again, and as he did so the blade cut his belly wide open all the way to his breastbone, where it stuck for a second before it was pulled out.

His intestines slithered out of his stomach cavity and piled up into a sloppy heap in the overflowing shower tray. He looked down at them, all yellowish and glistening and streaked with blood, and wondered if he should try to gather them up and stow them back in. He had seen a marine try to do it in Dong Ha. But his large intestine was sliced in half, and maybe it wasn't worth it.

He leaned one shoulder against the side of the shower. The best thing to do was sleep for a while, and
then
try. All that jogging around the block had made him feel so tired. That goddamn Dr. Gassman would be the death of him. He closed his eyes for a while, while the warm shower water poured into his face and filled his opened-up belly with a hollow gurgling noise. It reminded him of summer rain, gurgling down the gutters.

CHAPTER EIGHT

A different nurse was on duty when Decker and Hicks arrived at the hospital to question Jerry Maitland—a severe fortyish woman with a World War Two helmet of iron-gray hair. “I don't want my patient agitated,” she warned them. “He's in a very depressed state, and we wouldn't like to exacerbate his condition, would we?”

Decker laid his hand on her shoulder and smiled. “Do you like Mexican food?” he asked her.

Jerry was sitting up watching the news channel with an untouched lunch tray in front of him, pale chicken salad with watery tomatoes and lime-green Jell-O. Decker sat on the end of the bed and helped himself to one of Jerry's saltines. “How's it going, Jerry?” he said, snapping the cracker in half. “I brought my partner, Sergeant Hicks, to see you.”