Briarpatch (16 page)

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Authors: Ross Thomas

Tags: #Mystery, #Thriller

BOOK: Briarpatch
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“It's refreshing,” Dill said. “I'm a little worried though about your arithmetic. You said three. Glander and Cour only add up to two.”
Harley chuckled from his stool in the galley. “You forgot somebody, Clyde.”
Sid made a noise deep down in his throat, which Dill interpreted
as a kind of merriment. Still making the noise, Sid winked at Dill and nodded at Brattle as if to say, Old Clyde.
Brattle himself shot his eyebrows up to register fake amazement. “My God, don't tell me I forgot Jake?”
“You forgot Jake, Clyde,” said Sid, still making the merry noise down in his throat.
Brattle lowered his eyebrows and again smiled at Dill. “And Jake makes three, plus me, which is four, as I said.”
“What've you got on Jake?” Dill asked.
“On Jake?” Brattle said. The smile faded. “In all candor, Ben—in all earnestness—I've got enough on Jake Spivey to land him three consecutive life sentences without hope of parole.”
“Three at least,” Harley said. “Maybe even four.”
“Jake is my prize package,” Brattle continued. “My ultimate quid pro quo. My gilt-edged annuity. My irresistible bait. My ticket to the golden years of well-earned rest and retirement. Jake's done terrible things, Ben—terrible, awful, shocking things.”
“Jake's bad all right,” Sid agreed.
“Unspeakable deeds,” Brattle told Dill with a new and cheerful smile. “And I can prove them all. Tell the Senator that—and young Dolan, too.”
“Okay,” Dill said.
“Good,” Brattle said. “Oh,” he added as if just remembering something. “You might want this back.” He picked up the file on Jake Spivey and held it out to Dill, who rose, put his drink down on the table, accepted the file, and sat back down. “There really is nothing in it but garbage,” Brattle said, his tone carefully disappointed.
“It's what's not in it that's important, Clyde.”
“I'm not quite sure I follow that.”
“Sure you do. Jake claims he can hang you from the highest tree. I sort of believe him.”
Brattle adopted a new expression of utter sincerity that Dill couldn't remember having seen before. The old boy's acting's improved since we last met, Dill thought. He was good then, now he's superb.
“I'm going to give you a word of advice, Ben,” Brattle said. “Some counsel. What I'm going to tell you has taken me—” He paused to compute the years carefully. “—sixteen years to learn. It's really quite simple and it's simply this: don't believe one fucking word Jake Spivey says.”
“Not one fucking word,” Sid agreed.
“If he said he was breathing, I wouldn't believe him,” Harley said.
“Not … one … fucking … word,” Brattle said, spacing his own words for emphasis. “Tell the Senator that.”
“Okay.”
“When d'you think you might be talking to him?”
“The Senator?” Dill said. “Right after I talk to the FBI and tell them where I saw you.”
“Of course,” Brattle said. “How stupid of me.” He held out his hand. Dill didn't hesitate. He rose and accepted it, turned, and moved toward the sliding door. Harley came off the folding stool to slide the door back.
“Sorry about the neck,” Harley said.
Dill looked at him and nodded. “You bet,” he said and stepped down from the van. Before Dill reached the elevator, he heard the van's engine start. He pushed the elevator button, turned, and watched the van speed up the ramp and out of sight. He didn't bother to memorize its license number.
Up in his room, Dill stood at the window and stared down at the nearly deserted two-in-the-morning streets. He could see the First National Bank's digital sign claiming the temperature had dropped to 86 degrees, and that the time was 2:09 A.M. It was also Saturday now, August 6, the day they would bury Felicity Dill, the homicide detective, second grade, deceased.
Dill was trying to decide which telephone call to make first. He thought there was a possibility that the calls, and especially the order they were made in, might affect the lives of those called in years to come. Because he was having trouble deciding on the order, Dill accused himself of philosophical flabbiness—of letting mere friendship get in the way of duty and responsibility and other such moral obligations. You've come down with a bad case of the qualms, he told himself, and the best cure for that is logic, the cold and implacable kind.
He went to the writing desk, where the whisky was, sat down, and took out a sheet of hotel stationery. Using the hotel ball-point pen he listed four names:
FBI
Sen. Ramirez
J. Spivey
T. Dolan
Dill stared at the four names for several moments, trying to decide which to call first. He reached for the bottle of whisky and poured a measure into his glass. A shot of Old Implacable blended logic should help, he thought, drank the whisky down in two gulps, and wished for perhaps the thousandth time that he still smoked.
He continued to stare at the list until he again picked up the hotel pen and wrote a single digit after each name. When done, he put the pen down, leaned back in his chair, and stared at what he had written:
FBI—4
Sen. Ramirez—3
J. Spivey—1
T. Dolan—2
You should cover your ass, he thought. You should go down to the lobby and use the pay phone because someday, maybe even years from now, a neat blue suit with a shiny plastic government-issue briefcase will drop by the hotel and demand the records of the phone calls made by a certain Benjamin Dill on that morning of August sixth—on that same hot August morning when he buried his sister and tipped off the notorious international fugitive John Jacob Spivey. Ask yourselves, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, did Dill do this for gain, for personal profit—or for any motive that you or I could possibly understand? He did not. He
did it out of something he describes as friendship, out of something he calls loyalty. And just what was the basis of this alleged loyalty? Why, Dill would have you believe that he and Spivey were once pals, mates, boyhood chums—even asshole buddies. Now I ask you, members of the jury, what kind of sociopath would be asshole buddies with the likes of John Jacob Spivey, the most wanted man in the world? And so forth and so on, Dill thought as he sighed, picked up the telephone, and dialed a number.
The phone rang nine times, then ten, and finally, on the eleventh ring, was answered with a gruff, sleepy “Who the fuck is this?”
“Your asshole buddy, Benjamin Dill.”
“You drunk?” Spivey asked.
“You awake?”
“Lemme get a cigarette.”
In the background, Dill could hear the voice of Daphne Owens asking, Who is it? and Spivey replying, Pick. What does he want at this hour? she demanded in a half-awake, half-querulous tone. How the fuck do I know what he wants until I talk to him? Spivey said, and came back to the phone with “What's up?”
“I am.”
“Yeah, I know you are, but what else?”
“Brattle's back.”
There was a silence that lasted several moments before Spivey finally said, “So?”
“Back here, I mean.”
“Here in town?”
“Right.”
“Well.” Spivey was again silent for perhaps a dozen seconds. “Who's with him?”
“Somebody large called Harley and somebody with dyed black hair called Sid.”
“Those pricks.”
“He's going to shop you, Jake. He's going to serve you up in a neat package to Ramirez along with Dick Glander and Frank Cour. He says he can drop the net over them both in twenty-four hours. He also says he's got enough on you for three consecutive life sentences—with no parole. Ever. Clyde says he'll do all this in exchange for a two-year stretch in some federal rest home and a fine of no more than two or three hundred thousand.”
“How'd he look?” Spivey said.
“Confident.”
“He always looks like that. Where'd you see him?”
“In the hotel basement. In a van.”
There was another lengthy pause and then Spivey said, “Well, thanks for calling, Pick. I appreciate it.”
That's not the right reaction, Dill thought. Where's the panic, the fear, the voice that quavers? He's thanking me for telling him where I last saw his lost dog. “That it?” Dill asked.
“I can't think of anything else.”
“Clyde sounded awfully sure of himself, Jake.”
“That's the business he's in—the trust-me business.”
“He sounded more sure of himself than usual.”
“Look, he wants a deal, that's all. You say he's willing to do two years to get it. Well, I want a deal, too, but I'm not doing any fucking two years. I want immunity. Now I suggest you go talk to that kid Senator of yours and find out who he and Justice would rather nail—me or Brattle. I got the feeling he's going to say Brattle. Well, I can give him Brattle on a platter. Tell him that. See what he says. If he agrees that he'd rather nail Brattle than me, then that's when I'm gonna have to start worrying about old Clyde because that's when Clyde'll try and—well, do something.”
“I have to call the FBI first and tell them where I saw Brattle.”
“Yeah,” Spivey said, his tone completely uninterested. “You do that.” He chuckled. “You mean you haven't called them yet?”
“No.”
Spivey chuckled again. “You know what you are, Pick? You're all mush.”
“Could be.”
“Lemme know what the Senator says.”
“All right.”
“And we can still count on you for Sunday.”
“Sure, Jake,” Dill said. “You can count on me.”
After he hung up, Dill felt as if he had spent the past hour or so wandering through a vast and largely uncharted land with one of those ancient maps that read: Here There Be Monsters. Dill knew the map was right. He had come this way before. Yet, you still don't believe they really exist—the monsters. No, that's wrong. You believe they exist all right, but after fifteen years of watching them, writing about them, and even tracking them down, you still think they're normal, harmless and domesticated. Even housebroken.
But what if they, after all, are the norm and you are indeed the aberration? The thought enchanted Dill. Its simplicity was compelling, its implicit offer of absolution irresistible. He was so pleased with the whisky-inspired notion that he poured the last of the Old Smuggler into a glass and drank it down. He then reversed the previous order he so carefully had decided on (goodbye, cold logic) and called all three telephone numbers at which Senator Ramirez might be reached in New Mexico.
 
 
Later, some were to claim that if Senator Ramirez had been where he said he would be, at any one of the three numbers, he might have prevented it from happening—or prevented at least some of it. But those who claimed this were mostly professional partisans and the Senator's political foes. Tim Dolan always argued that it
didn't really matter who Dill called that morning because nobody could have stopped what eventually happened from happening. Dill himself never claimed anything at all, and it was he who made the three calls to New Mexico and reached the three different answering machines that said, in two languages, that the Senator was not available, but would return all calls if only the caller would leave both name and number after the tone. Dill left his name and number three times and then woke Tim Dolan up in Washington.
After Dill reported on his conversations with both Jake Spivey and Clyde Brattle, he stopped talking and waited for Dolan's reaction. It didn't take long for that political mind to reach the conclusion Dill knew it would reach.
“They both want to slice each other up, don't they—Spivey and Brattle?” Dolan said in a pleased tone from which all sleepiness had fled.
“So it would seem.”
“Then we've got 'em both.”
“Tim,” Dill said, “I'm not sure you really understand these guys.”
“What's to understand? We'll let them slice each other up and then we'll serve 'em on toast to Justice. The Senator will get ninety seconds on the network news, and be a hero back home for three days, maybe even a week.”
“I think you'll have to settle for one or the other,” Dill said.
“Not both, huh?”
“No.”
“Okay,” Dolan said. “Which one?”
“That's not my choice to make.”
“You're weaseling, Ben.”
“I know.”
“Okay, I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll toss it to the Senator and let him decide. What d'you say?”
“Fine,” Dill said.
“That's settled then. He and I'll be down there late Monday or Tuesday morning.”
“The hearing still on?”
“Not exactly,” Dolan said. “We decided we don't want to go public too soon. What the Senator wants to do is meet privately with Spivey. Can you fix that?”
“Yes.”
“What about Brattle?”
“I have the feeling he'll be in touch,” Dill said.
“With you?”
“With me.”
“See if you can fix up a session for him and the Senator.”
“What about the FBI?”
“What about them?”
“Somebody has to call them. About Brattle.”
“Let me do it here,” Dolan said. “I know a couple of guys over there who're halfway reasonable.”
“You'll take care of it then?” Dill said.
“I'll take care of it,” Dolan promised. “You better get some sleep. You sound bushed.”
Afterward, no one but Dill ever had a very good answer for the question that puzzled members of the federal grand jury asked most frequently: “Why didn't you guys just call the FBI or something?”
“I thought somebody did,” Dill always replied.

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