“I was right here, getting some Sweet ’N Low when I saw him. That’s it. That’s all. Now, if you’re through prying . . .”
“I think he saw Hoyt Lewis,” Graham said.
“So do I,” Springfield said.
“It was not Hoyt Lewis. It was not.” Parsons’s eyes were watering.
“How do you know?” Springfield said. “It might have been Hoyt Lewis, and you just thought—”
“Lewis is brown from the sun. He’s got old greasy hair and those peckerwood sideburns.” Parsons’s voice had risen and he was talking so fast it was hard to understand him. “That’s how I knew. Of course it wasn’t Lewis. This fellow was paler and his hair was blond. He turned to write on his clipboard and I could see under the back of his hat. Blond. Cut off square on the back of his neck.”
Springfield stood absolutely still and when he spoke his voice was still skeptical. “What about his face?”
“I don’t know. He may have had a mustache.”
“Like Lewis?”
“Lewis doesn’t have a mustache.”
“Oh,” Springfield said. “Was he at eye level with the meter? Did he have to look up at it?”
“Eye level, I guess.”
“Would you know him if you saw him again?”
“No.”
“What age was he?”
“Not old. I don’t know.”
“Did you see the Leedses’ dog anywhere around him?”
“No.”
“Look, Mr. Parsons, I can see I was wrong,” Springfield said. “You’re a real big help to us. If you don’t mind, I’m going to send our artist out here, and if you’d just let him sit right here at your kitchen table, maybe you could give him an idea of what this fellow looked like. It sure wasn’t Lewis.”
“I don’t want my name in any newspapers.”
“It won’t be.”
Parsons followed them outside.
“You’ve done a hell of a fine job on this yard, Mr. Parsons,” Springfield said. “It ought to win some kind of a prize.”
Parsons said nothing. His face was red and working, his eyes wet. He stood there in his baggy shorts and sandals and glared at them. As they left the yard, he grabbed his fork and began to grub furiously in the ground, hacking blindly through the flowers, scattering mulch on the grass.
Springfield checked in on his car radio. None of the utilities or city agencies could account for the man in the alley on the day before the murders. Springfield reported Parsons’s description and gave instructions for the artist. “Tell him to draw the pole and the meter first and go from there. He’ll have to ease the witness along.
“Our artist doesn’t much like to make house calls,” the chief of detectives told Graham as he slid the stripline Ford through the traffic. “He likes for the secretaries to see him work, with the witness standing on one foot and then the other, looking over his shoulder. A police station is a damn poor place to question anybody that you don’t need to scare. Soon as we get the picture, we’ll door-to-door the neighborhood with it.
“I feel like we just got a whiff, Will. Just faint, but a whiff, don’t you? Look, we did it to the poor old devil and he came through. Now let’s do something with it.”
“If the man in the alley is the one we want, it’s the best news yet,” Graham said. He was sick of himself.
“Right. It means he’s not just getting off a bus and going whichever way his peter points. He’s got a plan. He stayed in town overnight. He knows where he’s going a day or two ahead. He’s got some kind of an idea. Case the place, kill the pet, then the family. What the hell kind of an idea is that?” Springfield paused. “That’s kind of your territory, isn’t it?” “It is, yes. If it’s anybody’s, I suppose it’s mine.”
“I know you’ve seen this kind of thing before. You didn’t like it the other day when I asked you about Lecter, but I need to talk to you about it.”