Briarpatch

by Ross Thomas

  “You mean why she went bad,” Dill said.

  “We don’t know that she did, though, do we?” Captain Colder said. Dill looked at him. Colder’s half-smile was back in place—an almost hesitant smile full of diffidence. Or deception, Dill thought, for there was absolutely nothing diffident about Colder other than the smile. It’s his disguise, Dill decided. He wears it like a false beard. The smile failed to hide the true skeptic’s face with its inquisitive nose, wise forehead, cold blue doubting-Thomas eyes, and the chin that almost said, “Prove it.” It was a face that, with a slightly different coloring, might have found happiness in the Inquisition. Dill felt its owner was reasonably content as a homicide captain.

  When Chief Strucker cleared his throat again, Dill turned back to him. “We’re gonna get to the bottom of this, Mr. Dill,” he said. “Like I told you over the phone: it’s what we do. It’s what we’re good at.”

  Dill nodded, rose, and held out his hand, first for Colder’s empty glass, then for Strucker’s. Both men hesitated. Then Strucker sighed and said, “I shouldn’t, but I will, thanks.”

  After Dill poured the fresh drinks and served them, Colder said, “What exactly do you do in Washington, Mr. Dill?”

  “I work for a Senate subcommittee.”

  “Doing what?”

  Dill smiled. “Getting to the bottom of things.”

  “Must be interesting.”

  “Sometimes.”

  Strucker drank half an inch of his Scotch, sighed his pleasure, and said, “You and Felicity were close.”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  “Your parents are dead.” It wasn’t a question either.

  “They were killed in a one-car crash up in Colorado when I was twenty-one and she was eleven.”

  “What’d your daddy do?” For the first time, Strucker asked as if he didn’t already know the answer.

  “He was an army fighter pilot during the war,” Dill said. “And after that he was a professional student for four years, which was as long as his GI Bill lasted. He studied at the Sorbonne, the University of Mexico, and at the University of Dublin. He never got a degree. When all that finally ended, he became a crop duster, then a Kaiser-Frazer salesman, and once in a while he would be Mr. Peanut—you know, for Planter’s Peanuts. Then he turned promoter—junk-car racing, donkey baseball, stuff like that, and finally he bought out an almost bankrupt foreign-language correspondence school. He was still running that when he went up to Colorado to see about investing in a ghost town. That’s when the accident happened. It killed them both. I sometimes think my mother must’ve been relieved.”

  Strucker nodded sympathetically. “Didn’t leave much then.”

  “Not a dime.”

  “You must’ve almost raised Felicity.”

  “I was in my first year at law school down at the university. I dropped out and got a job with UPI covering the state House of Representatives. Felicity was eleven and I tried to make sure she went to school and did her homework. By the time she was twelve she was doing the shopping and the cooking and a lot of the housework. At eighteen she won a full scholarship to the university and I got an offer to go to Washington. After that, she was pretty much on her own.”

  “Well, sir,” Strucker said, “I’d say you did a real fine job of bringing her up. Real fine.”

  “We always liked each other,” Dill said. “We were—well, good friends, I guess.”

  “Did you stay in close touch?” Colder asked.

  “I usually called her every week or ten days. She almost never called me. She wrote letters instead. Letters from back home, she called them. She thought everyone who moved away should get letters from back home and that’s what hers were. Gossip. Base rumors. Mild scandal. Who went broke and who got rich. Who died. Who got divorced and why. It was a kind of diary, I suppose, not about her so much, but about the city. She actually loved this place for some reason.”

  “I take it you don’t,” Colder said.

  “No.”

  “You didn’t happen to save those letters, did you?” Strucker asked.

  “I wish I had.”

  “Yeah. So do we. She didn’t save copies either. We went through her place today. Nothing.”

  “What about cancelled checks?”

  “Another zero,” Colder said. “Utilities, house payments, phone bills, groceries from Safeway, car payments, a couple of department store charge accounts. The usual.”

  “No record of that down payment she made on the duplex?”

  “The thirty-seven thousand in cash?” Colder said. “All we know is that it was all in hundred-dollar bills, which are getting to be about as common as twenties used to be.”

  “No trace, huh?” Dill said.

  “None.”

  “Who holds the mortgage?”

  “The former owner, who didn’t object in the least to all that cash money,” Colder said. “She’s a sixty-seven-year-old widow who sold the place to Felicity and then moved down to Florida. St. Petersburg. I talked to her today. She’s got no complaints. The monthly payments were almost always on time, but she is a little worried now about that balloon payment.”

  “I don’t blame her,” Dill said.

  Strucker fished around in his pants pockets and came up with a key. He offered it to Dill.

  “What’s this?” Dill said.

  “Her house key. The upstairs is sealed off right now, but our people will be all through before noon tomorrow so there’s no reason you can’t go in after that and, well, look around—stay there, if you want to.”

  Dill rose, took the key, and sat back down on the bed. He looked first at Strucker and then at Colder. “What was she working on?”

  This time Colder’s smile wasn’t his diffident one. It was the sardonic kind that lifted the left side of his mouth up and displayed three or four very white teeth. “You mean the one where the town’s major coke dealer got whacked out—or the one where they found the oil millionaire down at the bottom of his indoor-outdoor pool?”

  “I don’t know what I mean,” Dill said. “But either one would do.”

  Colder shook his head almost regretfully. “She was working on a liquor store owner who was shot and killed late one slow Tuesday night for thirty-three dollars. She also had the one where the wife over on Deep Four came home hot and tired from cleaning up after the white folks and found her husband in bed with their fifteen-year-old daughter. She killed ’em both with the breadknife. That one’s pretty well wrapped. Then there’s that other one Felicity was on where this guy who worked out in Packingtown pulls up for the light at Thirteenth and McKinley? And this other guy, who’s been twiddling his thumbs on the bench at the bus stop there, gets up, goes over, sticks his twenty-two target in the window, plinks the guy in the car four times, then turns and sort of ambles away. We gave that one to Felicity, too. She told me the other day she might be getting somewhere on it.”

  “She had to be messed up in something,” Dill said. “Or by something.”

  Strucker sighed again and heaved himself up out of the chair. “Well, Maybe yes and maybe no. But right now we’ve got to find out who killed her. We find that out, we’ll find out the rest. You know, Mr. Dill, homicide is usually the easiest crime there is to solve because the guy will call you up and say, ‘Hey, you’d better get over here on account of I just killed my girl friend with this here baseball bat.’ And when you get there he’s sitting on the edge of the bed, her next to him, with the bat still in his hands probably, and crying like a two-year-old. That’s your run-of-the-mill homicide. But then, every once in a while, you’ll get a tricky one. Like this one.”

  Again, Strucker brought up one of his sighs from deep down in his chest. “They’re gonna hold the services at Trinity Baptist at ten A.M. on Saturday. There’ll be a limo for you or, if you like, you can ride with me and the Captain here.”

  “I don’t know,” Dill said. “I guess I’d rather do it alone.”

  “Sure.”

  Dil
l frowned. “Why Trinity?” he said. “Felicity wasn’t a Baptist. In fact, she wasn’t much of anything.”

  “I am,” Colder said. “I’m a deacon.”

  “You?”

  The sadness came then to Colder’s face, edging aside the chronic skepticism. “Your sister and I,” he said, “well, when my divorce comes through a couple of months from now, we were going to get married.” He studied Dill’s face. “She never told you, did she?”

  “No,” Dill said. “She never told me.”

  CHAPTER 5

  During the past ten years Dill had lived for varying lengths of time in New York, Los Angeles, London, Barcelona, and twice in Washington. He rarely dreamed about any of them, not even Washington, where he had lived the longest. But occasionally he did and his dreams of the far-off, sometimes foreign cities invariably melded themselves into the city of his birth. Wilshire Boulevard and Third Avenue and the Edgware Road and even the Ramblas somehow ran dreamily past the houses he had lived in as a child, the schools he had attended, and the bars he later had frequented.

  Many years ago, some said in 1926, an immense milk bottle had been erected in the city atop a one-story building that sat on a small triangular plot of land formed by the juncture of Ord Avenue, Twenty-ninth Street, and TR Boulevard, which was what the locals called the winding thoroughfare named for the first Roosevelt. It was a gigantic milk bottle, at least thirty feet high, with the risen cream clearly visible in its neck. It had perched for almost sixty years on top of the tiny convenience food store that Dill remembered as having been owned by a dairy. Springmaid Dairy. He assumed 7-Eleven had taken over both bottle and store by now. For some reason the giant milk bottle was always popping into Dill’s dreams of foreign climes. Something Freudian there, he thought, something Freudian, funny, and phallic, pleased as always by alliteration’s artful aid.

  At 7:15 that evening, the evening of the day his sister had died of a bomb, Dill was driving the big rented Ford along TR Boulevard, one of the three thoroughfares that broke up the metropolitan grid as they curved and wound their way across the city from south to north. At one time streetcars had zipped along TR Boulevard’s center divider, but they had been abandoned in the late forties. Everyone now acknowledged what a dumb mistake that had been and hinted darkly of the plot by General Motors and the oil companies to scrap the trolleys in favor of buses. It was a conspiracy theory that had endured for nearly forty years.

  Dill had rented the big Ford from Budget. It was the biggest Ford they had and he would have rented a Lincoln had one been available. Dill, the VW owner, always rented large Detroit cars with power everything, because he felt it was an opportunity not to be missed—something like renting your own dinosaur.

  Just around the long curve of Twenty-seventh and TR the giant milk bottle finally came into view, but it was no longer white. It was flat black instead. Dill slowed to stare. The little building was vacant except for some empty glass display counters that looked dusty. Over the entrance was a large sign in fading psychedelic colors: Nebuchadnezzar’s Head Shop, but it looked as if Neb had long since gone bankrupt. Dill decided the failed shop was yet another nail driven into the coffin of the sixties and the seventies.

  Three blocks past the black milk bottle, on the corner of Thirty-second and TR, stood a large frame three-story Victorian house tarted up in two shades of pastel green paint that already had begun to peel. The house was home to what was alleged to be either the third- or fourth-oldest press club west of the Mississippi. For its first sixty years or so the club had shared a building at a convenient downtown location with the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks. But the Mayor was mad at the media (with reason) just as the city’s redevelopment plan got under way, and the downtown press and Elks Club building had been inked in as the first to fall.

  The club had never really offered much other than a bar that frequently stayed open after the legal closing hour, steaks of a remarkable quality from a mysterious source over in Packingtown, and a long-running table-stakes poker game that began promptly each Saturday at noon and ended just as promptly at 5 P.M. on Sunday so everybody could go home and watch the eager victims go through their weekly self-immolation on 60 Minutes.

  Members of the working press actually belonged to the club. At least thirty percent of the membership had something or other to do with the news business. The rest were in advertising, the law, politics, or public relations. These were called associate members and their dues were five times as high as those of the working press. The minority felt that if the voteless majority wanted to hang out with members of the press, they could damn well pay for the privilege. The club’s unofficial motto was engraved on a brass plaque that had hung behind the bar for years: I Used to Be a Newspaperman Myself.

  Dill had not been in the club since it moved to its new location. He had been almost an habitué of the place when it shared the five-story downtown building with the Elks—the press club up on the top two floors, the benevolent and protective order down below. In fact, when he worked nightside for UPI, Dill had often closed the place up.

  He parked the Ford as near to the Victorian house as possible—a block away—and tried to remember whether he had ever paid his final bar tab. If not, he was sure there would be someone to remind him. The Greek, if no one else.

  There was still an hour of daylight left when Dill walked up the six steps to the screened wraparound porch. He crossed the porch to the locked door and rang the buzzer. A tinny voice, as irascible as ever, asked its usual one-word question: “What?”

  “Ben Dill.”

  “Jesus,” the voice said. A moment later the buzzer sounded, unlocking the door. A small foyer led into a room that, except for the kitchen in the rear, seemed to occupy the entire first floor of the large old house. Tables and banquettes were to the right. Near the foyer was a lounge area that focused on a huge bay window where, Dill thought, you could sit just like you could sit in private clubs all over the world and, as someone once said, watch it rain on the damn people. He felt it might even be why private clubs were invented.

  Dill headed for the L-shaped bar that was to the left of the lounge area. He noticed it was the same mahogany bar they had used in the downtown location. They had even brought along the old brass rods that ran up above the bar. From them hung the salvaged leather trolley straps, providing convenient support for those who had nipped too long at the gin.

  The man who stood behind the bar, leaning on it with both hands, had stood behind it for thirty years as both club manager and head bartender. His name was Christos Levides, or Christ, the Greek! or usually just the Greek. He was in his mid-fifties and looked not much different than he had at twenty-five. The black eyes were still as full of guile, the elegant mustache as trim, and the expression of faint disdain as crafty and Ulysses-like as ever. There were some new lines, of course, running in deep trenches down from the remarkable nose and in horizontal creases across the forehead. It was a carefully bored face that obviously had heard most of life’s lies and all of its excuses.

  Levides didn’t move or speak until Dill settled himself on a stool and looked around to see if there was anyone else he still knew. There wasn’t. Two men were at the bar’s far end, but they looked like lawyers. A dozen or so diners were seated at tables.

  “Well,” Levides said finally. “You’re back.”

  “I’m back,” Dill agreed.

  Levides nodded thoughtfully, as if Dill looked as awful as he had expected him to look. “I heard about your sister.” There was a long pause as Levides seemed to consider carefully what he should say next. “I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Hell of a thing.”

  “Yes.”

  “I remember when you used to bring her down to the old place, when she wasn’t more than yea-tall.” He held up a hand at shoulder height to show how tall Dill’s dead sister had been. “Ten, maybe eleven then?”

  “About that,” Dill said. “Not much older anyway.�
��

  Levides nodded somberly and, his brief mourning over, said, “What’ll you have?”

  “A beer. Beck’s, if you’ve got it.”

  Levides nodded again, spun, whipped a bottle out of the case, snapped its top off, spun back around, and set it down on the bar along with a frosted glass. “Two bucks,” he said, “and you still owe thirty-eight eighty-two on your tab, which you sort of forgot about paying when you took off for Washington—when was it? Ten years back?”

  “Around in there,” Dill said, took a fifty-dollar bill from his wallet, slid it across the bar, and told Levides to take it all out of that.

  Levides turned to the cash register, rang up the sale, and turned back with Dill’s change. “How’ve you been?” Dill said.

  “Same old shit.”

  Dill glanced around. “Looks pretty nice.”

  “Yeah, if you like dry rot.”

  “The steaks still passable?”

  Levides shrugged. “I ate one day before yesterday and I ain’t dead yet.” He looked away. “Who did it?”

  “They don’t know.”

  “Who they got on it?”

  “I talked to the chief of detectives,” Dill said. “Strucker.”

  “Him I know.”

  “And?”

  The Greek shrugged. “Smart. Not college smart exactly, but smart-cop smart. Been on the force twenty-five years at least. Maybe more. Went to night law school. Took Dale Carnegie public speaking lessons. Married a whole lot of money the second time around. Lives good, dresses nice. And not a blot on him.”

  “Captain Colder,” Dill said. “Gene Colder.”

  “Him.”

  “Him.”

  “Well, him I don’t know hardly at all. They brought him in a couple of years ago from back east—Kansas City or Omaha, I think, someplace like that. They’re grooming him, I hear.”

  “For Strucker’s job?”

  “If Strucker goes, and there’s talk about him running for something, Colder might take it, but he won’t even hardly get the seat warm. Colder’s going all the way up when old man Rinkler finally retires.”