Briarpatch (3 page)

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Authors: Ross Thomas

Tags: #Mystery, #Thriller

BOOK: Briarpatch
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“They say it was a car bomb.”
“Murdered?”
the Senator asked, more surprised than shocked.
Dill nodded yes, drank his whisky down, and put the glass on Dolan's desk. He noticed the Senator only sipped a small swallow and then put the glass down. Dill knew he wouldn't pick it up again.
“I'm going to be gone a week or ten days,” Dill said. “I thought I'd better stop by and let you know.”
“Need anything?” the Senator asked. “Money?” It apparently was all he could think of.
Dill smiled and shook his head. Dolan, still standing, stared
down at him thoughtfully, cocked his head to the left, and said, “You say you'll be down there for a week, maybe ten days?”
“About that.”
Dolan looked at the Senator. “Maybe we could put Ben on the expense since Jake Spivey's still holed up down there.”
The Senator turned to Dill. “You know Spivey, of course.”
Dill nodded.
“Hell,” Dolan said, “Ben could take Spivey's deposition, save us from flying him back up here, and then we could charge Ben's expenses off on the Brattle thing.”
The Senator nodded, almost convinced. He turned to Dill again. “Would you be willing to do that while you're down there, take Spivey's deposition?”
“Yes. Sure.”
“You know the Brattle thing? What a question. Of course you do.” The Senator looked back up at Dolan. “Then it's settled.”
Dill rose. “I'll get a copy of Spivey's file from Betty Mae.”
The Senator also rose. “Spivey could help tremendously in resolving this … problem. If he isn't entirely forthcoming, be—well, you know—firm. Very firm.”
“You mean threaten him with a subpoena?”
The Senator turned to look at Dolan. “Yes, I think so, don't you?”
“Shit, yes,” Dolan said.
Dill smiled slightly at Dolan. “Could we get it out of the committee?”
“Never,” Dolan said. “But Spivey doesn't have to know that, does he?”
It was a little more than ten years since Dill had been back to his native city, which was also the capital of a state located just far enough south and west to make jailhouse chili a revered cultural treasure. Wheat grew in the state, as did rattlesnakes, sorghum, broomcorn, cotton, soybeans, blackjack oaks, and white-faced cattle. There were also oil, gas, and a little uranium to be found, and the families of those who had found them were often wealthy and sometimes even rich.
As for the city itself, it was said that the parking meter had been invented there back in the thirties along with the supermarket shopping cart. Its international airport was named after an almost forgotten pilot-navigator, William Gatty, who had helped guide Wiley Post around the world in 1931. There were not many Jews in either the city or the state, but plenty of blacks, numerous Mexicans, two tribes of Indians, a world of Baptists, and 1,413 Vietnamese. According to the U.S. census, the city's population was 501,341 in 1970. By 1980 it had risen to 501,872. There were, on the average, 5.6 homicides a week. Most of them took place on Saturday night.
When Dill came out of the Gatty International Airport terminal shortly after 4 P.M., the temperature had dropped to 101 degrees and a hard hot wind was whipping down from Montana and the Dakotas. Dill couldn't remember when the wind hadn't blown almost constantly, either up from Mexico or down from the Great Plains, searing in summer, freezing in winter, and nerve-racking always. It now blew hot and dry and laden with red dust and grit. Sudden gusts of up to thirty-five miles per hour snatched at Dill's breath and tore at his coat as he leaned into them and plodded toward a taxi.
Dill's native city, like most American cities, was laid out on a grid. The streets that ran east and west were numbered. Those that ran north and south were named, many after pioneer real estate speculators, and the rest after states, Civil War generals (both Union and Confederate), a governor or two, and a handful of mayors whose administrations were thought to have been reasonably free of graft.
But as the city grew, imagination had faltered, and the newer north-south streets were named after trees (Pine, Maple, Oak, Birch, and so on). When the trees were at last exhausted—ending with Eucalyptus for some reason—the names of presidents had been brought into play. These expired with Nixon Avenue a far, far 231 blocks west of the city's main street, which, not surprisingly, was called Main Street. Main's principal intersecting thoroughfare was, inevitably, Broadway.
As the taxi neared the city's center, Dill discovered that most of the landmarks of his youth had vanished. Three downtown motion picture theaters were gone: the Criterion, the Empress, and the Royal. Eberhardt's pool hall was gone, too. Located just two doors down and one floor up from the Criterion, it had been a wonderfully sinister place, at least to thirteen-year-old Benjamin Dill when he had first been lured into it one Sunday afternoon by
evil Jack Sackett, a fifteen-year-old acquaintance who had gone on to become one of the premier pool hustlers on the West Coast.
The post-World War Two building boom had not reached the city's downtown section until the mid 1970s, some thirty years late. Until then, downtown had remained much as it was when it had been caught flatfooted by the crash of '29 with two thirty-three-story skyscrapers nearly completed and another one halfway up.
The two thirty-three-story skyscrapers had been built across the street from each other, one by a bank and the other by a speculator who was later wiped out by the crash. There was a race to completion—a dumb publicity stunt, critics said—and the bank had won. The day after the ruined speculator's building was completed by a syndicate of oil men who had bought it for a song (some said less), the speculator rode the elevator up to the top of his broken dream and jumped off. The third skyscraper, the one that was only halfway up when the crash came, was never finished and they finally tore it down in the mid-fifties.
By 1970, the city's downtown section still looked like 1940, except there weren't as many people. The big department stores had long since fled to the outlying malls along with their customers. Other firms followed; urban decay set in; the crime rate shot up; and nobody came downtown. The panicked city fathers hired themselves an expensive Houston consulting firm that came up with a redevelopment plan and then pried a huge federal grant out of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington. The redevelopment plan called for the leveling of most of the downtown area and erecting in its place one of those cities of tomorrow. They razed almost everything and then the money ran out, as it usually does, and downtown was left looking rather like downtown Cologne after the war. But the demolition
had not really begun until mid-1974, and by then Benjamin Dill was gone.
Dill was surprised to discover he didn't really mind the changes that had taken place—not even the glossy new buildings that were beginning to poke up out of the erased landmarks of his youth and childhood. You should be old enough to distrust change, he told himself. Change marks time's passage and only the young with very little past willingly embrace the new without argument—only the very young and those who stand to profit from it. And since there's absolutely no way you're going to make a buck out of it, maybe you're not so old after all.
The taxi driver, a morose black in his early forties, turned right on Our Jack Street, which separated the two old skyscrapers. Originally, Our Jack Street had been named Warder Street during the second term of Jack T. Warder, the only governor ever to be impeached twice, the first time for graft, which he beat by generously bribing three state senators, and the second time for the bribes themselves. He had resigned in 1927, but not before pardoning himself. The disgraced governor had ended his final press conference with a sly grin and a long remembered, often quoted quip: “What the hell, fellas, I didn't steal half what I could've.”
Forever after he was Our Jack, fondly and ruefully remembered by old-timers who still liked to quote his quip, smirk, and shake their heads. They finally changed the street's name to United Nations Plaza, but everybody still called it Our Jack Street, although few now knew why and the rest seldom bothered to ask.
The Hawkins Hotel was located at the corner of Broadway and Our Jack Street in the heart of the downtown section. It was a somber gray eighteen-story sixty-year-old building, as steadfastly Gothic in design as the University of Chicago. For a time, the Hawkins had been virtually the only hotel in town—at least downtown—the
rest having been felled by dynamite and the wrecker's ball. But then a new Hilton had gone up, followed quickly by a Sheraton and, as always, a huge Holiday Inn.
The fare for the seventeen-mile taxi ride from the airport was a dollar a mile. Dill handed the morose driver a twenty and told him to keep the change. The driver said he by God hoped so and sped off. Dill picked up his bag and entered the hotel.
He found it not much changed. Not really. It had retained those soaring vaulted ceilings that gave it the hushed atmosphere of a seldom-visited out-of-the-way cathedral. The lobby was still a place to sit and watch and doze in reddish leather easy chairs and plump couches. There were also low tables with convenient ashtrays and a lot of fat solid lamps that made it easy to read the free newspapers that still hung on racks: the local
Tribune;
the
News-Post,
published in the rival upstate city that prided itself on its eastern airs; The
Wall Street Journal; The Christian Science Monitor;
and the pony edition of
The New York Times,
whose contents were transmitted by satellite, printed locally, and delivered by mail the same day, sometimes before noon if you had the right postman.
The Hawkins' big lobby was far from crowded: a half-dozen middle-aged men who looked like crack salesmen; several couples; a young woman who was more than pretty; and an older woman, in her mid-sixties, who for some reason stared at Dill over her
Wall Street
Journal
. He thought she had the look of a permanent hotel guest. The temperature in the lobby was a chilly 70 degrees, and Dill felt his sweat-soaked shirt begin to cool and dry as he moved toward the reception desk.
The young male clerk at reception found Dill's reservation and asked how long he might be staying. Dill said a week, possibly longer. The clerk said that was fine, handed Dill a room key, apologized for not having a bellman on duty (he had called in sick), but added that if Dill needed any help with his luggage, they would
somehow get somebody to bring it up later. Dill said he didn't need any help, thanked the clerk, picked up his bag, turned and almost collided with the more than pretty young woman he had noticed earlier.
“You're Pick Dill,” she said.
Dill shook his head, smiling slightly. “Not since high school.”
“In grade school they used to call you Pickle Dill. That was at Horace Mann out on Twenty-Second and Monroe. But all that ended one afternoon in the fourth grade when you beat up on three of your what?—tormentors?”
“My finest hour,” Dill said.
“After that they called you Pick instead of Pickle right through high school, but stopped when you went down to the university, although your sister always called you that. Pick.” The young woman held out her hand. “I'm Anna Maude Singe—like in scorch—and I'm—was, damnit—a friend of Felicity's. I'm also her attorney and I thought you might like the family counselor on hand when you got here in case there's something you want done.”
Dill shook Anna Maude Singe's hand. It felt cool and strong. “I didn't know Felicity had a lawyer.”
“Yep. Me.”
“Well, I do want something—a drink.”
Singe nodded to the left. “The Slush Pit do?”
“Fine.”
The Slush Pit's name originally was the Select Bar, but oil men back in the early thirties had started calling it the Slush Pit because of its darkness, and the name had stuck until finally, in 1946, the hotel made it official with a discreet brass plaque. It was a smallish place, extremely dark, very cool, with a U-shaped bar and low heavy tables and matching chairs that were more or less comfortable. There were only two men drinking at the bar and another couple at one of the tables. Dill and Anna Maude Singe took a
table near the door. When the waitress came over, Singe ordered a vodka on the rocks and Dill said he would have the same.
“I'm very sorry about Felicity,” the Singe woman said almost formally.
Dill nodded. “Thank you.”
They said nothing more until the waitress came back with the drinks. Dill noticed that Singe had a little trouble with her R's, so little he really hadn't noticed until her “sorry” came out almost like “sawwy,” but less pronounced than that. Then he saw the faint white scar on her upper lip, barely visible, that had been left by the skilled surgeon who had corrected the harelip. Her R's were the only letter that still seemed to give her any trouble. Otherwise her diction was perfect with not much trace of a regional accent. Dill wondered if she had had speech therapy.
The rest of her, in the straight dark skirt and the candy-striped shirt with its white collar and cuffs, seemed well tanned, nicely put together, and even athletic. He tried to decide whether she went in for running, swimming, or tennis. He was fairly sure it wasn't golf.
He also noticed that she had very dark-blue eyes, as dark as blue eyes can get without turning violet, and she squinted them up a little when looking at things far off. Her hair was a taupe color that had streaks of blond running through it. She wore it in what Dill thought was called a pageboy bob, a style that he understood from someone (who? Betty Mae Marker?) was making a comeback, or had made its comeback, and was now on its way out again.
Anna Maude Singe's face was oval in shape and her eyebrows were just a little darker than her hair. Her nose tilted up a bit, which gave her an air of being either shy or slightly stuck-up—or both. Dill thought they often went together. Her mouth was full and reasonably wide and when she smiled he noticed her teeth
had had a good dentist's loving care. She had a long slender neck, quite pretty, and Dill wondered if she had ever danced. It was a dancer's neck.
After the drinks came, he waited until she took a sip of hers, and then asked, “Did you know Felicity long?”
“I knew her just a little down at the university, but when she graduated, I went on to law school, and then when I came back up here and opened my practice, she was one of my first clients. I drew up her will. I don't reckon she was more'n twenty-five or six then, but she'd just transferred into homicide and—well, she just thought she'd better have a will. Then about—oh, I'd say sixteen, seventeen months back—she bought her duplex and I helped her with that, but in the meantime we'd become good friends. She also sent me some clients—cops needing divorces mostly—and she talked about you a lot. That's how I knew they called you Pickle in grade school and all.”
“She ever talk about her work?” Dill said.
“Sometimes.”
“Was she working on anything that might've caused someone to plant a bomb in her car?”
Singe shook her head no. “Not that she ever told me about.” She paused, took another drink, and said, “There is something I think you should know.”

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