فصل 10

Chapter 10

FINDING MEDICAL information about Dr Hannibal Lecter was not easy. When you consider his utter contempt for the medical establishment and for most medical practitioners, it is not surprising that he never had a personal physician.

The Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where Dr Lecter was kept until his disastrous transfer to Memphis, was now defunct, a derelict building awaiting demolition.

The Tennessee State Police were the last custodians of Dr Lecter before his escape, but they claimed they never received his medical records. The officers who brought him from Baltimore to Memphis, now deceased, had signed for the prisoner, not for any medical records.

Starling spent a day on the telephone and the computer, then physically searched the evidence storage rooms at Quantico and the J. Edgar Hoover Building. She climbed around the dusty and malodorous bulky evidence room of the Baltimore Police Department for an entire morning, and spent a maddening afternoon dealing with the un-catalogued Hannibal Lecter Collection at the Fitzhugh Memorial Law Library, where time stands still while the custodians try to locate the keys.

At the end, she was left with a single sheet of paper - the cursory physical examination Dr Lecter received when he was first arrested by the Maryland State Police. No medical history was attached.

Inelle Corey had survived the demise of the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and gone on to better things at the Maryland State Board of Hospitals. She did not want to be interviewed by Starling in the office, so they met in a ground-floor cafeteria.

Starling’s practice was to arrive early for meetings and observe the specific meeting point from a distance. Corey was punctual to the minute. She was about thirty-five years old, heavy and pale, without makeup or jewelry. Her hair was almost to her waist, as she had worn it in high school, and she wore white sandals with Supp-Hose.

Starling collected sugar packets at the condiment stand and watched Corey seat herself at the agreed table.

You may labor under the misconception that all Protestants look alike. Not so. Just as one Caribbean person can often tell the specific island of another, Starling, raised by the Lutherans, looked at this woman and said to herself, Church of Christ, maybe a Nazarene at the outside.

Starling took off her jewelry, a plain bracelet and a gold stud in her good ear, and put them in her bag.

Her watch was plastic, okay. She couldn’t do much about the rest of her appearance.

“Inelle Corey? Want some coffee?”

Starling was carrying two cups.

“It’s pronounced Eyenelle. I don’t drink coffee.”

“I’ll drink both of them, want something else? I’m Clarice Starling.”

“I don’t care for anything. You want to show me some picture ID?”

“Absolutely,” Starling said. “Ms Corey - may I call you Inelle?”

The woman shrugged.

“Inelle, I need some help on a matter that really doesn’t involve you personally at all. I just need guidance in finding some records from the Baltimore State Hospital.”

Inelle Corey speaks with exaggerated precision to express righteousness or anger.

“We have went through this with the state board at the time of closure, Miss-“

“Starling.”

“Miss Starling. You will find that not a patient went out of that hospital without a folder. You will find that not a folder went out of that hospital that was not approved by a supervisor. As for as the deceased go, the Health Department did not need their folders, the Bureau of Vital Statistics did not want their folders, and as for as I know, the dead folders, that is the folders of the deceased, remained at the Baltimore State Hospital past my separation date and I was about the last one out. The elopements went to the city police and the sheriff’s department.”

“Elopements?”

“That’s when somebody runs off. Trusties took off sometimes.”

“Would Dr Hannibal Lecter be carried as an elopement? Do you think his records might have gone to law enforcement?”

“He was not an elopement. He was never carried as our elopement. He was not in our custody when he took off. I went down there to the bottom and looked at Dr Lecter one time, showed him to my sister when she was here with the boys. I feel sort of nasty and cold when I think about it. He stirred up one of those other ones to throw some” - she lowered her voice - “ jism on us. Do you know what that is?”

“I’ve heard the term,” Starling said. “Was it Mr. Miggs, by any chance? He had a good arm.”

“I’ve shut it out of my mind. I remember you. You came to the hospital and talked to Fred - Dr Chilton and went down there in that basement with Lecter, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

Dr Frederick Chilton was the director of the Baltimore State I-hospital for the Criminally Insane who went missing while on vacation after Dr Lecter’s escape.

“You know Fred disappeared.”

“Yes, I heard that.”

Ms Corey developed quick, bright tears. “He was my fiancé,” she said. “He was gone, and then the hospital closed, it was just like the roof had fell in on me. If I hadn’t had my church I could not have got by.”

“I’m sorry,” Starling said. “You have a good job now.

“But I don’t have Fred. He was a fine, fine man. We shared a love, a love you don’t find everyday. He was voted Boy of the Year in Canton when he was in high school. “

“Well, I’ll be. Let me ask you this, Inelle, did he keep the records in his office, or were they out in reception where your desk -“

“They were in the wall cabinets in his office and then they got so many we got big filing cabinets out in the reception area. They was always locked, of course. When we moved out, they moved in the methadone clinic on a temporary basis and a lot of stuff was moved around.”

“Did you ever see and handle Dr Lecter’s file?”

“Sure.”

“Do you remember any X-rays in it? Were X-rays filed with the medical reports or separate?”

“With. Filed with. They were bigger than the files and that made it clumsy. We had an X-ray but no full-time radiologist to keep a separate file. I honestly don’t remember if it was one with his or not. There was an electrocardiogram tape Fred used to show to people, Dr Lecter - I don’t even want to call him a doctor was all wired up to the electrocardiograph when he got the poor nurse. See, it was freakish his pulse rate didn’t even go up much when he attacked her. He got a separated shoulder when all the orderlies, you know, grabbed a hold of him and pulled him off of her. They’d of had to X-ray him for that. They’d have give him plenty more than a separated shoulder if I’d had something to say about it.”

“If anything occurs to you, any place the file might be, would you call me?”

“We’ll do what we call a global search?” Ms Corey said, savoring the term, “but I don’t think we’ll find anything. A lot of stuff just got abandoned, not by us, but by the methadone people.”

The coffee mugs had the thick rims that dribble down the sides. Starling watched Inelle Corey walk heavily away like hell’s own option and drank half a cup with her napkin tucked under her chin.

Starling was coming back to herself a little. She knew she was weary of something. Maybe it was tackiness, worse than tackiness, stylelessness maybe. An indifference to things that please the eye. Maybe she was hungry for some style.

Even snuff-queen style was better than nothing, it was a statement, whether you wanted to hear it or not.

Starling examined herself for snobbism and decided she had damn little to be snobbish about. Then, thinking of style, she thought of Evelda Drumgo, who had plenty of it. With the thought, Starling wanted badly to get outside herself again.