The Silence of the Lambs Read online

  O wrangling schools, that search what fire

  Shall burn this world, had none the wit

  Unto this knowledge to aspire

  That this her fever might be it?

  I’m so sorry about Bella, Jack.

  Hannibal Lecter

  CHAPTER 8

  Everett Yow drove a black Buick with a De Paul University sticker on the back window. His weight gave the Buick a slight list to the left as Clarice Starling followed him out of Baltimore in the rain. It was almost dark; Starling’s day as an investigator was nearly gone and she didn’t have another day to replace it. She dealt with her impatience, tapping the wheel in time with the wipers as the traffic crawled down Route 301.

  Yow was intelligent, fat, and had a breathing problem. Starling guessed his age at sixty. So far he was accommodating. The lost day was not his fault; returning in the late afternoon from a week-long business trip to Chicago, the Baltimore lawyer had come directly from the airport to his office to meet Starling.

  Raspail’s classic Packard had been stored since long before his death, Yow explained. It was unlicensed and never driven. Yow had seen it once, covered and in storage, to confirm its existence for the estate inventory he made shortly after his client’s murder. If Investigator Starling would agree to “frankly disclose at once” anything she found that might be damaging to his late client’s interests, he would show her the automobile, he said. A warrant and the attendant stir would not be necessary.

  Starling was enjoying the use for one day of an FBI motor pool Plymouth with a cellular telephone, and she had a new ID card provided by Crawford. It simply said FEDERAL INVESTIGATOR—and expired in a week, she noticed.

  Their destination was Split City Mini-Storage, about four miles past the city limits. Creeping along with the traffic, Starling used her telephone to find out what she could about the storage facility. By the time she spotted the high orange sign, SPLIT CITY MINI-STORAGE—YOU KEEP THE KEY, she had learned a few facts.

  Split City had an Interstate Commerce Commission freight-forwarder’s license, in the name of Bernard Gary. A federal grand jury had barely missed Gary for interstate transportation of stolen goods three years ago, and his license was up for review.

  Yow turned in beneath the sign and showed his keys to a spotty young man in uniform at the gate. The gatekeeper logged their license numbers, opened up and beckoned impatiently, as though he had more important things to do.

  Split City is a bleak place the wind blows through. Like the Sunday divorce flight from La Guardia to Juárez, it is a service industry to the mindless Brownian movement in our population; most of its business is storing the sundered chattels of divorce. Its units are stacked with living room suites, breakfast ensembles, spotted mattresses, toys, and the photographs of things that didn’t work out. It is widely believed among Baltimore County sheriff’s officers that Split City also hides good and valuable consideration from the bankruptcy courts.

  It resembles a military installation: thirty acres of long buildings divided by fire walls into units the size of a generous single garage, each with its roll-up overhead door. The rates are reasonable and some of the property has been there for years. Security is good. The place is surrounded by a double row of high hurricane fence, and dogs patrol between the fences twenty-four hours a day.

  Six inches of sodden leaves, mixed with paper cups and small trash, had banked against the bottom of the door of Raspail’s storage unit, number 31. A hefty padlock secured each side of the door. The left-side hasp also had a seal on it. Everett Yow bent stiffly over the seal. Starling held the umbrella and a flashlight in the early dark.

  “It doesn’t appear to have been opened since I was here five years ago,” he said. “You see the impression of my notary seal here in the plastic. I had no idea at the time that the relatives would be so contentious and would drag out the probate for so many years.”

  Yow held the flashlight and umbrella while Starling took a picture of the lock and seal.

  “Mr. Raspail had an office-studio in the city, which I closed down to save the estate from paying rent,” he said. “I had the furnishings brought here and stored them with Raspail’s car and other things that were already here. We brought an upright piano, books and music, a bed, I think.”

  Yow tried a key. “The locks may be frozen. At least this one’s very stiff.” It was hard for him to bend over and breathe at the same time. When he tried to squat, his knees creaked.

  Starling was glad to see that the padlocks were big chrome American Standards. They looked formidable, but she knew she could pop the brass cylinders out easily with a sheet metal screw and a claw hammer—her father had showed her how burglars do it when she was a child. The problem would be finding the hammer and screw; she did not even have the benefit of the resident junk in her Pinto.

  She poked through her purse and found the de-icer spray she used on her Pinto’s door locks.

  “Want to rest a second in your car, Mr. Yow? Why don’t you warm up for a few minutes and I’ll give this a try. Take the umbrella, it’s only a drizzle now.”

  Starling moved the FBI Plymouth up close to the door to use its headlights. She pulled the dipstick out of the car and dripped oil into the keyholes of the padlocks, then sprayed in de-icer to thin the oil. Mr. Yow smiled and nodded from his car. Starling was glad Yow was an intelligent man; she could perform her task without alienating him.

  It was dark now. She felt exposed in the glare of the Plymouth’s headlights and the fan belt squealed in her ear as the car idled. She’d locked the car while it was running. Mr. Yow appeared to be harmless, but she saw no reason to take a chance on being mashed against the door.

  The padlock jumped like a frog in her hand and lay there open, heavy and greasy. The other lock, having soaked, was easier.

  The door would not come up. Starling lifted on the handle until bright spots danced before her eyes. Yow came to help, but between the small, inadequate door handle and his hernia, they exerted little additional force.

  “We might return next week, with my son, or with some workmen,” Mr. Yow suggested. “I would like very much to go home soon.”

  Starling was not at all sure she’d ever get back to this place; it would be less trouble to Crawford if he just picked up the telephone and had the Baltimore field office handle it. “Mr. Yow, I’ll hurry. Do you have a bumper jack in this car?”

  With the jack under the handle of the door, Starling used her weight on top of the lug wrench that served as a jack handle. The door squealed horribly and went up a half-inch. It appeared to be bending upward in the center. The door went up another inch and another until she could slide the spare tire under it, to hold it up while she moved Mr. Yow’s jack and her own to the sides of the door, placing them under the bottom edge, close to the tracks the door ran in.

  Alternating at the jacks on each side, she inched the door up a foot and a half, where it jammed solidly and her full weight on the jack handles would not raise it.

  Mr. Yow came to peer under the door with her. He could only bend over for a few seconds at a time.

  “It smells like mice in there,” he said. “I was assured they used rodent poison here. I believe it is specified in the contract. Rodents are almost unknown, they said. But I hear them, do you?”

  “I hear them,” Starling said. With her flashlight, she could pick out cardboard boxes and one big tire with a wide whitewall beneath the edge of a cloth cover. The tire was flat.

  She backed the Plymouth up until part of the headlight pattern shone under the door, and she took out one of the rubber floor mats.

  “You’re going in there, Officer Starling?”

  “I have to take a look, Mr. Yow.”

  He took out his handkerchief. “May I suggest you tie your cuffs snugly around your ankles? To prevent mouse intrusion.”

  “Thank you, sir, that’s a very good idea. Mr. Yow, if the door should come down, ha ha, or something else should occur, would you be ki
nd enough to call this number? It’s our Baltimore field office. They know I’m here with you right now, and they’ll be alarmed if they don’t hear from me in a little while, do you follow me?”

  “Yes, of course. Absolutely, I do.” He gave her the key to the Packard.

  Starling put the rubber mat on the wet ground in front of the door and lay down on it, her hand cupping a pack of plastic evidence bags over the lens of her camera and her cuffs tied snugly with Yow’s handkerchief and her own. A mist of rain fell in her face, and the smell of mold and mice was strong in her nose. What occurred to Starling was, absurdly, Latin.

  Written on the blackboard by her forensics instructor on her first day in training, it was the motto of the Roman physician: Primum non nocere. First do no harm.

  He didn’t say that in a garage full of fucking mice.

  And suddenly her father’s voice, speaking to her with his hand on her brother’s shoulder, “If you can’t play without squawling, Clarice, go on to the house.”

  Starling fastened the collar button of her blouse, scrunched her shoulders up around her neck and slid under the door.

  She was beneath the rear of the Packard. It was parked close to the left side of the storage room, almost touching the wall. Cardboard boxes were stacked high on the right side of the room, filling the space beside the car. Starling wriggled along on her back until her head was out in the narrow gap left between the car and the boxes. She shined her flashlight up the cliff face of boxes. Many spiders had spanned the narrow space with their webs. Orb weavers, mostly, the webs dotted with small shriveled carcasses tightly bound.

  Well, a brown recluse spider is the only kind to worry about, and it wouldn’t build out in the open, Starling said to herself. The rest don’t raise much of a welt.

  There would be space to stand beside the rear fender. She wriggled around until she was out from under the car, her face close beside the wide whitewall tire. It was hatched with dry rot. She could read the words GOODYEAR DOUBLE EAGLE on it. Careful of her head, she got to her feet in the narrow space, hand before her face to break the webs. Was this how it felt to wear a veil?

  Mr. Yow’s voice from outside. “Okay, Miss Starling?”

  “Okay,” she said. There were small scurryings at the sound of her voice, and something inside a piano climbed over a few high notes. The car lights from outside lit her legs up to the calf.

  “So you found the piano, Officer Starling,” Mr. Yow called.

  “That wasn’t me.”

  “Oh.”

  The car was big, tall and long. A 1938 Packard limousine, according to Yow’s inventory. It was covered with a rug, the plush side down. She played her flashlight over it.

  “Did you cover the car with this rug, Mr. Yow?”

  “I found it that way and I never uncovered it,” Yow called under the door. “I can’t deal with a dusty rug. That’s the way Raspail had it. I just made sure the car was there. My movers put the piano against the wall and covered it and stacked more boxes beside the car and left. I was paying them by the hour. The boxes are sheet music and books, mostly.”

  The rug was thick and heavy and as she tugged at it, dust swarmed in the beam of her flashlight. She sneezed twice. Standing on tiptoe, she could fold the rug over to the midline of the tall old car. The curtains were drawn in the back windows. The door handle was covered with dust. She had to lean forward over cartons to reach it. Touching only the end of the handle, she tried to turn it downward. Locked. There was no keyhole in the rear door. She’d have to move a lot of boxes to get to the front door, and there was damn little place to put them. She could see a small gap between the curtain and the post of the rear window.

  Starling leaned over boxes to put her eye close to the glass and shined her light through the crack. She could only see her reflection until she cupped her hand on top of the light. A splinter of the beam, diffused by the dusty glass, moved across the seat. An album lay open on the seat. The colors were poor in the bad light, but she could see Valentines pasted on the pages. Lacy old Valentines, fluffy on the page.

  “Thanks a lot, Dr. Lecter.” When she spoke, her breath stirred the fuzz of dust on the windowsill and fogged the glass. She didn’t want to wipe it, so she had to wait for it to clear. The light moved on, over a lap rug crumpled on the floor of the car and onto the dusty wink of a pair of man’s patent leather evening shoes. Above the shoes, black socks and above the socks were tuxedo trousers with legs in them.

  Nobody’sbeeninthatdoorinfiveyears—easy, easy, hold it baby.

  “Oh, Mr. Yow. Say, Mr. Yow?”

  “Yes, Officer Starling?”

  “Mr. Yow, looks like somebody’s sitting in this car.”

  “Oh my. Maybe you better come out, Miss Starling.”

  “Not quite yet, Mr. Yow. Just wait there, if you will, please.”

  Now is when it’s important to think. Now is more important than all the crap you tell your pillow for the rest of your life. Suck it up and do this right. I don’t want to destroy evidence. I do want some help. But most of all I don’t want to cry wolf. If I scramble the Baltimore office and the cops out here for nothing, I’ve had it. I see what looks like some legs. Mr. Yow would not have brought me here if he’d known there was a cool one in the car. She managed to smile at herself. “Cool one” was bravado. Nobody’s been here since Yow’s last visit. All right, that means the boxes were put here after whatever’s in the car. And that means I can move the boxes without losing anything important.

  “All right, Mr. Yow.”

  “Yes. Do we have to call the police, or are you sufficient, Officer Starling?”

  “I’ve got to find that out. Just wait right there, please.”

  The box problem was as maddening as Rubik’s Cube. She tried to work with the flashlight under her arm, dropped it twice, and finally put it on top of the car. She had to put boxes behind her, and some of the shorter book cartons would slide under the car. Some kind of bite or splinter made the ball of her thumb itch.

  Now she could see through the dusty glass of the front passenger’s side window into the chauffeur’s compartment. A spider had spun between the big steering wheel and the gearshift. The partition between the front and back compartments was closed.

  She wished she had thought to oil the Packard key before she came under the door, but when she stuck it in the lock, it worked.

  There was hardly room to open the door more than a third of the way in the narrow passage. It swung against the boxes with a thump that sent the mice scratching and brought additional notes from the piano. A stale smell of decay and chemical came out of the car. It jogged her memory in a place she couldn’t name.

  She leaned inside, opened the partition behind the chauffeur’s seat, and shined her flashlight into the rear compartment of the car. A formal shirt with studs was the bright thing the light found first, quickly up the shirtfront to the face, no face to see, and down again, over glittering shirt studs and satin lapels to a lap with zipper open, and up again to the neat bow tie and the collar, where the white stub neck of a mannequin protruded. But above the neck, something else that reflected little light. Cloth, a black hood where the head should be, big, as though it covered a parrot’s cage. Velvet, Starling thought. It sat on a plywood shelf extending over the neck of the mannequin from the parcel shelf behind.

  She took several pictures from the front seat, focusing with the flashlight and closing her eyes against the flash of the strobe. Then she straightened up outside the car. Standing in the dark, wet, with cobwebs on her, she considered what to do.

  What she was not going to do was summon the special agent in charge of the Baltimore field office to look at a mannequin with its fly open and a book of Valentines.

  Once she decided to get in the backseat and take the hood off the thing, she didn’t want to think about it very long. She reached through the chauffeur’s partition, unlocked the rear door, and rearranged some boxes to get it open. It all seemed to take a long time. Th
e smell from the rear compartment was much stronger when she opened the door. She reached in and, carefully lifting the Valentine album by the corners, moved it onto an evidence bag on top of the car. She spread another evidence bag on the seat.

  The car springs groaned as she got inside and the figure shifted a little when she sat down beside it. The right hand in its white glove slid off the thigh and lay on the seat. She touched the glove with her finger. The hand inside was hard. Gingerly she pushed the glove down from the wrist. The wrist was some white synthetic material. There was a lump in the trousers that for a silly instant reminded her of certain events in high school.

  Small scrambling noises came from under the seat.

  Gentle as a caress, her hand touching the hood. The cloth moved easily over something hard and slick beneath. When she felt the round knob on the top, she knew. She knew that it was a big laboratory specimen jar and she knew what would be in it. With dread, but little doubt, she pulled off the cover.

  The head inside the jar had been severed neatly close beneath the jaw. It faced her, the eyes long burned milky by the alcohol that preserved it. The mouth was open and the tongue protruded slightly, very gray. Over the years, the alcohol had evaporated to the point that the head rested on the bottom of the jar, its crown protruding through the surface of the fluid in a cap of decay. Turned at an owlish angle to the body beneath, it gaped stupidly at Starling. Even in the play of light over the features, it remained dumb and dead.

  Starling, in this moment, examined herself. She was pleased. She was exhilarated. She wondered for a second if those were worthy feelings. Now, at this moment, sitting in this old car with a head and some mice, she could think clearly, and she was proud of that.

  “Well, Toto,” she said, “we’re not in Kansas anymore.” She’d always wanted to say that under stress, but doing it left her feeling phony, and she was glad nobody had heard. Work to do.