Mr. Mercedes (Unnamed Trilogy #1)(46)

Sometimes, though, his ideas stick.

A chubby little boy comes running down the sidewalk, waving money. Brady pulls over.

“I want chawww-klit!” the little boy brays. “And I want it with springles!”

You got it, you fatass little creep, Brady thinks, and smiles his widest, most charming smile. Fuck up your cholesterol all you want, I give you until forty, and who knows, maybe you’ll survive the first heart attack. That won’t stop you, though, nope. Not when the world is full of beer and Whoppers and chocolate ice cream.

“You got it, little buddy. One chocolate with sprinkles coming right up. How was school? Get any As?”

15

That night the TV never goes on at 63 Harper Road, not even for the Evening News. Nor does the computer. Hodges hauls out his trusty legal pad instead. Janelle Patterson called him old school. So he is, and he doesn’t apologize for it. This is the way he has always worked, the way he’s most comfortable.

Sitting in beautiful no-TV silence, he reads over the letter Mr. Mercedes sent him. Then he reads the one Mrs. T. got. Back and forth he goes for an hour or more, examining the letters line by line. Because Mrs. T.’s letter is a copy, he feels free to jot in the margins and circle certain words.

He finishes this part of his procedure by reading the letters aloud. He uses different voices, because Mr. Mercedes has adopted two different personae. The letter Hodges received is gloating and arrogant. Ha-ha, you broken-down old fool, it says. You have nothing to live for and you know it, so why don’t you just kill yourself? The tone of Olivia Trelawney’s letter is cringing and melancholy, full of remorse and tales of childhood abuse, but here also is the idea of suicide, this time couched in terms of sympathy: I understand. I totally get it, because I feel the same.

At last he puts the letters in a folder with MERCEDES KILLER printed on the tab. There’s nothing else in it, which means it’s mighty thin, but if he’s still any good at his job, it will thicken with page after page of his own notes.

He sits for fifteen minutes, hands folded on his too-large middle like a meditating Buddha. Then he draws the pad to him and begins writing.

I think I was right about most of the stylistic red herrings. In Mrs. T.’s letter he doesn’t use exclamation points, capitalized phrases, or many one-sentence paragraphs (the ones at the end are for dramatic effect). I was wrong about the quotation marks, he likes those. Also fond of underlining things. He may not be young after all, I could have been wrong about that . . .

But he thinks of Jerome, who has already forgotten more about computers and the Internet than Hodges himself will ever learn. And of Janey Patterson, who knew how to make a copy of her sister’s letter by scanning, and who uses Skype. Janey Patterson, who’s got to be almost twenty years younger than he is.

He picks up his pen again.

. . . but I don’t think I am. Probably not a teenager (altho can’t rule it out) but let’s say in the range 20–35. He’s smart. Good vocabulary, able to turn a phrase.

He goes through the letters yet again and jots down some of those turned phrases: scurrying little mouse of a kid, strawberry jam in a sleeping bag, most people are sheep and sheep don’t eat meat.

Nothing that would make people forget Philip Roth, but Hodges thinks such lines show a degree of talent. He finds one more and prints it below the others: What have they done for you except hound you and cause you sleepless nights?

He taps the tip of his pen above this, creating a constellation of tiny dark blue dots. He thinks most people would write give you sleepless nights or bring you sleepless nights, but those weren’t good enough for Mr. Mercedes, because he is a gardener planting seeds of doubt and paranoia. They are out to get you, Mrs. T., and they have a point, don’t they? Because you did leave your key. The cops say so; I say so too, and I was there. How can we both be wrong?

He writes these ideas down, boxes them, then turns to a fresh sheet.

Best point of identification is still PERK for PERP, he uses it in both letters, but also note HYPHENS in the Trelawney letter. Bee-hive instead of beehive. Week-days instead of weekdays. If I am able to ID this guy and get a writing sample, I can nail him.

Such stylistic fingerprints wouldn’t be enough to convince a jury, but Hodges himself? Absolutely.

He sits back again, head tilted, eyes fixed on nothing. He isn’t aware of time passing; for Hodges, time, which has hung so heavy since his retirement, has been canceled. Then he lurches forward, office chair squalling an unheard protest, and writes in large capital letters: HAS MR. MERCEDES BEEN WATCHING?

Hodges feels all but positive he has been. That it’s his MO.

He followed Mrs. Trelawney’s vilification in the newspapers, he watched her two or three appearances on the TV news (curt and unflattering, those appearances drove her already low approval ratings into the basement). He may have done drive-bys on her house as well. Hodges should talk to Radney Peeples again and find out if Peeples or any other Vigilant employees noted certain cars cruising Mrs. Trelawney’s Sugar Heights neighborhood in the weeks before she caught the bus. And someone sprayed KILLER CUNT on one of her gateposts. How long before her suicide was that? Maybe Mr. Mercedes did it himself. And of course, he could have gotten to know her better, lots better, if she took him up on his invitation to meet under the Blue Umbrella.

Then there’s me, he thinks, and looks at the way his own letter ends: I wouldn’t want you to start thinking about your gun followed by But you are thinking of it, aren’t you? Is Mr. Mercedes talking about his theoretical service weapon, or has he seen the .38 Hodges sometimes plays with? No way of telling, but . . .