Briarpatch

by Ross Thomas

  “Rinkler’s still chief of police?” There was more than a touch of incredulity in Dill’s tone.

  “Still.”

  “Hell, it’s been thirty years. At least thirty.”

  “Almost,” Levides said. “They tapped him for it when he was thirty-five and he’s at least sixty-four now. Anyway, he’ll go when he’s sixty-five. It’s the rule.”

  Dill drank some of his beer and asked, “Who’s the Trib got on the police run now?”

  “Who else?” Levides said. “Freddie Laffter.”

  “Jesus, doesn’t anything change around here?”

  The Greek seemed to give it some thought and then shrugged. “Not a hell of a lot.”

  “Laffter still come in every night?”

  “Eight on the dot—right after the bulldog.”

  “He’d know about Colder, wouldn’t he?”

  “If anybody does.” The Greek looked away before asking his next question. Dill remembered it as an affectation designed to make Levides’ questions seem offhand, even indifferent. “How come you’re so interested in Colder?” he asked in a bored voice.

  “Because he claims he was going to marry my sister.”

  The Greek looked back at Dill and smiled. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s a pretty good reason. You want another beer?”

  “Why not?” Dill said.

  Dill was still husbanding his second beer when the old man came in, seventy now at least, Dill thought, and perhaps even more. He was moving with a deceptively quick shambling gait that sped him toward the rear of the dining room. His eyes were fixed straight ahead behind steel-rimmed bifocals. On his head was a hat, a soiled Panama with a rippling brim, perhaps one of the four real Panamas in the city, or even the state, and he wore it with the brim turned down all the way around.

  The old man’s striped summer suit appeared to be made out of bed ticking. He wore a white pongee shirt that was yellowing with age and whose collar was at least two sizes too large. His tie was old and gray and looked greasy. A reporter’s notebook peeped out of the suitcoat’s left-hand pocket. The bulldog edition of the Tribune was stuck down into the right-hand one. On the old man’s feet were a pair of new Gucci loafers. Dill assumed they were counterfeit.

  “Hey, Chuckles,” the Greek called.

  Fred Y. Laffter stopped his headlong flight toward the rear, turned, and looked at Levides with contempt. “What the fuck do you want?”

  “Somebody here’d like to talk to you.”

  “Who?”

  The Greek nodded at Dill. “Him.”

  Laffter turned his head. It was an egg-shaped head, the large end fortunately up, and pale pink in color, except for the nose, which was a button of near crimson. The brows were white and almost invisible above eyes that had faded from blue into something almost colorless. The mouth was a thin mean line and surprisingly prim. A fine web of old age had etched itself across the face, but the pale, pale eyes were still alert, curious, and they now examined Dill with interest.

  “Dill,” Laffter said. “Ben Dill.”

  “Right.”

  “Used to be with UP.”

  “UPI.”

  “What the fuck, I still call it UP. What’d you wanta talk about, your sister?”

  “If you’ve got a few minutes.”

  “I haven’t eaten yet.”

  “Neither have I. Maybe we could have dinner together. My treat.”

  “I was gonna have a steak.”

  “Chuckles,” the Greek said. “You haven’t bought a steak here in five years.”

  Laffter ignored Levides. “I was gonna have a steak,” he said again. “A big thick steak with fresh asparagus and maybe a shrimp cocktail to start.”

  “Fine,” Dill said. “I’ll have the same.”

  Laffter turned to Levides. “Hear that, you ignorant pederast? Tell Harry the Waiter that the gentleman and I’re gonna have two big steaks, porterhouse, I think. Medium rare. Shrimp cocktails to start. Asparagus. A pair of vodka martinis first though to spark the appetite. Doubles, I’d say. And also a bottle of wine—something sound for a change. A Burgundy perhaps. Cognac afterward, of course, and maybe even a cigar, although I’ll decide about that later.”

  “Eat all that shit and you’re gonna wind up right back in intensive care,” Levides said.

  Laffter had already turned to Dill. “He missed his true calling, you know,” the old man said with a small backward nod toward the Greek. “He should’ve been a pimp in Piraeus, selling the behinds of little Greek boys to sailors off of Turkish ships.”

  In a bored voice, Levides said something rank about the old man’s mother and moved down the bar to see if the two lawyers wanted a refill.

  CHAPTER 6

  They sat at a corner table in the dining area. After the double vodka martinis came, Laffter took the folded edition of the Tribune from his pocket and handed it to Dill. “Page three,” he said.

  Dill turned to page three and the 36-point flush-left one-column headline at the top on the right that read:

  CAR BOMB

  KILLS CITY

  DETECTIVE

  Dill read the bylined story quickly and found it contained little he didn’t already know. He refolded the paper and handed it back to Laffter. “She was twenty-eight, not twenty-seven,” Dill said.

  “They told me twenty-seven.”

  “Today’s her birthday. She’s twenty-eight today.”

  “Oh.”

  “Tell me about Captain Colder.”

  “Your almost brother-in-law.”

  “You know about that then.”

  The old man shrugged. “They weren’t exactly trying to hide it.”

  “Had they set a wedding date?”

  Laffter looked at Dill with interest, but it died quickly. “He wasn’t divorced yet and so they were seeing each other socially, as they used to put it back in the dear dead days beyond recall. But I don’t think they’d set up light housekeeping. At least not so anybody’d notice.” The interest flared again in the old man’s pale eyes, but again died away. “She didn’t tell you about Colder, did she.”

  “No.”

  “Well, she must’ve had her reasons.”

  “Such as?”

  “How the hell would I know? Ask Colder.”

  “He says he thought she’d told me.” It wasn’t quite what Colder had said, but Dill was interested in the old man’s reaction.

  “Called her a liar, did he?”

  “In a way.”

  “That wasn’t very nice, but who pays for nice nowadays?”

  Laffter finished his martini in a gulp and looked around for Harry the Waiter. Dill picked up his own untouched martini and set it down in front of the old man. “Here,” he said. “I haven’t touched it.”

  “Jesus, if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a controlled drinker.”

  Laffter raised his new drink in a mock toast. “To our most enduring myth—the bibulous newspaperman.” He swallowed some of the drink, put it back down, took out a package of unfiltered Pall Malls, offered them to Dill, who refused, and lit one with a new Zippo.

  “Guess how long I’ve been in this business,” the old man said.

  “A hundred years?”

  “Fifty come September the third. Half a century, by God. I was twenty-two and outa work and outa college for more’n a year when old man Hartshorne hired me for seventeen-fifty a week—and that was a forty-eight-hour week back then. One day off. I got Tuesday. Who the fuck wants Tuesday off? He’s still there, you know.”

  “Who?”

  “Hartshorne.”

  Dill shook his head. “Couldn’t be.”

  The old man grinned. Dill saw that he had some very shiny new teeth. “Walks to work every morning, ninety-seven years old. Swings along Grant to Fifth and then cuts south on Our Jack, the Cadillac creeping along just behind with old Pete, that colored chauffeur of his at the wheel who’s gotta be at least eighty himself. Ninety-seven and Hartshorne’s at work every morni
ng by eight. That’s why I’m still there. He thinks of me as Young Laffter.”

  “What about Jimmy Junior?”

  “Hell of a thing, isn’t it, to be sixty-seven years old and have everybody still calling you Jimmy Junior? He’s editor and president and the old man’s still chairman and publisher and owns sixty-two percent of the stock so you can guess who calls the shots.”

  Harry the Waiter came over and served the two shrimp cocktails. Harry the Waiter, whose real name was Harold Pond, was black, forty, and fat, and had started at the Press Club as a skinny dishwasher when he was sixteen. He had turned himself into what may well have been the city’s finest waiter. The Cherry Hills Golf & Country Club had tried to hire him at least a dozen times, but Harry the Waiter always refused and stayed on at the Press Club, where he pretended to despise news people. Or pretended to pretend. He reviled their product, mocked their intelligence, and scoffed at their pretensions. The members regarded him as a treasure and repeated his insults with pride.

  After he set the shrimp cocktail down in front of Laffter, Harry the Waiter began one of his harangues: “You eat that shrimp, old man, and you’re gonna be up around two or three reaching for the Gelusil like always. Can’t for the life of me see how anyone old as you and with the gumption God gave a goose’d eat and drink stuff the doctor says is gonna kill ’im. One of these days I’m gonna serve you your chili-mac like you always eat, instead of that nice porterhouse you went and promoted yourself this evening, and you’re gonna dip your spoon in and shovel it into that big ugly mouth of yours and swallow it, and then your eyes’re gonna bulge out like this, and you’re gonna get all red in the face, even redder’n the drink’s done made it, and then you’re gonna keel over dead and guess who’s gonna have to mop it all up? Me. That’s who. The Greek said you wanted a French Burgundy. You don’t know nothing about French wine. I’m gonna give you a nice old Napa pinot noir that ought be just about right.” Harry the Waiter turned to Dill. “How you, Ben? Sorry to hear about your sister. Terrible thing. I was gonna say something about it before, but I didn’t get the chance.”

  “Thanks, Harry,” Dill said.

  “Go away,” Laffter said. “Go back in the kitchen and spit in the soup or whatever you do.”

  “Spit in the soup?” Harry the Waiter said. “Goodgawdalmighty, I never thought of that! Lemme go tell the other niggers.”

  After he left, Laffter asked, “How come he treats you like a white man?”

  “Harry and I go back a long way.”

  “How long?”

  “Fifteen, sixteen years. We were both broke back then and we’d lend each other money. Sometimes he’d give me a ride home.”

  “Why?”

  “Why’d he give me a ride home?”

  Laffter nodded, interested.

  “Because I didn’t have a car,” Dill said.

  “Oh.” Laffter speared one of the large Gulf shrimp, dipped it into the Tabasco-ketchup-and-horseradish sauce, bit off half, and chewed it thoroughly. “Your sister moved up pretty quick in the PD,” he said around what was left of the shrimp.

  “They tell me she was good.”

  Laffter shrugged. “She was all right. How come she ever became a cop anyhow?”

  “It was either that or teach French to junior high school kids who didn’t much want to learn French. Also the pension. She liked the idea of retiring at forty-two or three.”

  “She like homicide?”

  “She said it was better than bunco.”

  The old man licked some sauce from his fingers. “I did a little feature on her about a year ago—maybe a bit more—but they never ran it.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. It was a pretty good piece. Homicide’s new female whiz kid and all that good shit. I somehow managed to avoid calling her the new Sherlock Holmes, but it was a struggle. She’d just made a couple of collars, one of them kind of spectacular, and I thought she was worth a feature, but they killed it.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t ask anymore. I don’t ask because I don’t care. I think I quit caring back around 1945. After they shipped me back to New York from Stars and Stripes.”

  After several moments, Dill sighed and finally asked, “What happened in New York?”

  Laffter paused in his eating to stare at something over Dill’s left shoulder. “You ever hear of PM?”

  “It was a New York tabloid that leaned a little left until it fell over.”

  Laffter nodded and shifted his gaze back to his shrimp. He picked one up with his fingers and bit it in two. “Well, in France I’d run into Ralph Ingersoll, who’d practically founded the thing, PM, and he’d seen some of my Stars and Stripes stuff, so he made arrangements for me to see this guy on PM when I got to New York. It was my first time there.” He paused. “Last time, too.”

  The old man waited for Dill to say something. After almost a minute went by, Dill said, “And?”

  “Oh, the guy offered me a job at about three times what I’d been making down here. Even talked about a column, but that was just ‘maybe’ talk—about the column, I mean. Well, I went back to my hotel and thought about it. It was my chance at the big time. That’s what we called it back then. The big time. I didn’t think PM would ever go anywhere, but I could’ve bounced over to the News or even the Times. I wrote pretty good back then. Well, I never called the guy back. Instead, I tried to get on the next plane out, but it was full up, so I took the train. Chair car all the way back down here.”

  The old man paused and waited for Dill to say something. He wants me to ask him why, Dill thought. “Chuckles,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I didn’t really believe that story the first time I heard it fifteen years ago when I was twenty-three and you’d run out of anybody else to tell except me. But back then you were stirring in a blond New York actress who begged you to stay and when you wouldn’t, she either killed herself or went to Hollywood. I don’t remember which.”

  The old man stared at Dill coldly. “I never told that story to anyone else in my life.”

  “Never told who what?” Harry the Waiter said, materializing at the table with two large pewter steak platters on his left arm. He skillfully whisked away the shrimp cocktail bowls, placed them on another table, and served the two large steaks with a small flourish. Laffter stared at his hungrily.

  “PM, Ingersoll, and last chance in New York,” Dill said and picked up his fork and knife.

  “Shoot, I must’ve heard that one about two dozen times myself. He put the blond actress in?”

  “He left her out.”

  “He’s been doing that lately, but two, maybe three weeks ago, he cornered that new little old AP gal and had her in tears and buying him drinks half the night with his blond-actress tale and all.”

  Laffter glared at Harry the Waiter. “You forgot the wine.”

  “I don’t forget nothing,” Harry the Waiter said, reached behind his back, produced a bottle as if by magic, drew the cork, and poured a small measure into Dill’s glass. Dill tasted it and smiled.

  “Good, huh?” Harry the Waiter said, filling the two glasses.

  “Very.”

  Harry the Waiter surveyed the table carefully, nodded his satisfaction, and left. Laffter cut into his steak, forked a piece into his mouth, and said, “I’ve paid for a lot of suppers and drinks with that story.” He paused to chew and then swallow. “I never did go back to New York though. Maybe I should’ve. What d’you think?”

  Dill was surprised at the request for advice. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe you should’ve.”

  Laffter nodded and went back to work on his steak, his salad, his asparagus, and his baked potato, which he slathered with six pats of butter. He didn’t speak again until he had finished. Holding up the almost empty wine bottle, he looked questioningly at Dill, who shook his head. Laffter poured the last of the wine into his own glass and drank it. He belched softly, lit a cigarette, and settled into a new pos
ition that had him leaning forward slightly, both forearms on the table. It was a posture that invited confidences, even secrets. Dill wondered how many thousand times the old man had sat just like that.

  “Okay,” Laffter said, “what d’you really want to know?”

  Dill stared at him thoughtfully for a moment and then went back to carving the final morsel of tenderloin from the steakbone. Dill always ate the tenderloin last. For some reason, he distrusted those who didn’t. His ex-wife, he remembered, had eaten it first. “My sister,” he said. “Who do you think killed her?”

  “The generic who, you mean?”

  “Right.”

  “Somebody with money.”

  “Why?”

  Laffter blew some Pall Mall smoke into the air. “That bomb. It was done by a pro. The C4 plastic. The mercury fulminator. Very classy. That probably means out-of-state talent and that costs money. Ergo, somebody rich.”

  “Okay,” Dill said. “That’s who. What about why?”

  “A guess?”

  “Sure.”

  “She’d found out something that could stop whoever hired the bomber from being rich anymore.”

  “What?”

  “You mean, what’d she find out?”

  Dill nodded.

  “Well, she was in homicide, so maybe she found out who killed John—our generic John, of course.” He paused. “I heard about the duplex and the money and all. I didn’t use it. Not yet anyway. But I might have to.”

  “You think she was on the take?” Dill said, carving the very last sliver of tenderloin from the bone.

  “I don’t know,” Laffter said.

  “Neither do I—and she’s my sister.” Dill put the last small piece of steak into his mouth, chewed, swallowed, and then arranged his knife and fork on his plate.

  “You always eat the tenderloin last?” Laffter asked.

  “Always.”

  “Huh,” the old man said. “I always eat mine first.”