“Willy’s grandparents.”
“Well, they’ll be glad to see the kid.” Crawford waited.
No comment from Graham.
“Everything’s okay, I hope.”
“I’m working, Jack. Don’t worry about it. No, look, it’s just that she got jumpy over there.”
Graham pulled a flat package tied with string from beneath a stack of funeral pictures and began to pick at the knot.
“What’s that?”
“It’s from Byron Metcalf, the Jacobis’ lawyer. Brian Zeller sent it on. It’s okay.”
“Wait a minute, let me see.” Crawford turned the package in his hairy fingers until he found the stamp and signature of S. F. “Semper Fidelis” Aynesworth, head of the FBI’s explosives section, certifying that the package had been fluoroscoped.
“Always check. Always check.”
“I always check, Jack.”
“Did Chester bring you this?”
“Yes.”
“Did he show you the stamp before he handed it to you?”
“He checked it and showed me.”
Graham cut the string. “It’s copies of all the probate business in the Jacobi estate. I asked Metcalf to send it to me—we can compare with the Leeds stuff when it comes in.”
“We have a lawyer doing that.”
“I need it. I don’t know the Jacobis, Jack. They were new in town. I got to Birmingham a month late, and their stuff was scattered to shit and gone. I’ve got a feel for the Leedses. I don’t for the Jacobis. I need to know them. I want to talk to people they knew in Detroit, and I want a couple of days more in Birmingham.”
“I need you here.”
“Listen, Lounds was a straight snuff. We made him mad at Lounds. The only connection to Lounds is one we made. There’s a little hard evidence with Lounds, and the police are handling it. Lounds was just an annoyance to him, but the Leedses and the Jacobis are what he needs. We’ve got to have the connection between them. If we ever get him, that’s how we’ll do it.”
“So you have the Jacobi paper to use here,” Crawford said. “What are you looking for? What kind of thing?”
“Any damn thing, Jack. Right now, a medical deduction.” Graham pulled the IRS estate-tax form from the package. “Lounds was in a wheelchair. Medical. Valerie Leeds had surgery about six weeks before she died—remember in her diary? A small cyst in her breast. Medical again. I was wondering if Mrs. Jacobi had surgery too.”
“I don’t remember anything about surgery in the autopsy report.”
“No, but it might have been something that didn’t show. Her medical history was split between Detroit and Birmingham. Something might have gotten lost there. If she had anything done, there’ll be a deduction claimed and maybe an insurance claim.”
“Some itinerant orderly, you’re thinking? Worked both places—Detroit or Birmingham and Atlanta?”
“If you spend time in a mental hospital you pick up the drill. You could pass as an orderly, get a job doing it when you got out,” Graham said.
“Want some dinner?”
“I’ll wait till later. I get dumb after I eat.”
Leaving, Crawford looked back at Graham from the gloom of the doorway. He didn’t care for what he saw. The hanging lights deepened the hollows in Graham’s face as he studied with the victims staring at him from the photographs. The room smelled of desperation.
Would it be better for the case to put Graham back on the street? Crawford couldn’t afford to let him burn himself out in here for nothing. But for something?