Briarpatch

by Ross Thomas

  “Forget about it until the end of the month,” Dill said. “By then things should be straightened out, and Felicity’s lawyer will call and tell you where to send the rent and who to make the check out to.”

  “And we’ll just stop payment on the one we gave Felicity?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Well, that’s a relief.” As if to prove it, she finished off her drink in three swallows. Dill rose and held out his hand for her glass.

  Cindy McCabe frowned. “I don’t think—oh, well, one more, I guess.”

  When Dill returned with the fresh drinks he saw that the blue polka-dot halter had either slipped or been tugged down an inch or so, revealing the top quarter of Cindy McCabe’s perky breasts, which seemed to be as well tanned as the rest of her. Dill handed her the drink, smiled down at her breasts, or what he could see of them, and said, “You have a nice tan.”

  She giggled and looked down. “I work on it hard enough.” She gave the halter a tug up, but it was only a half-hearted tug. “There’s this hedge out back?” she said, making her statement a question.

  Dill nodded that he believed it.

  “Well, it goes all the way around the backyard and it’s about nine feet tall and real thick. Nobody can see through it. So this summer I just laid out there in nothing at all until the middle of last week when it got so godawful hot. I mean, it was just like lying in an oven, even with nothing on. Earlier this summer, when it was cooler, Felicity’d come out and join me sometimes when she was working nights or on the swing shift.”

  “In nothing at all?” Dill said.

  “Oh, no, it wasn’t anything like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, when she came out I’d put something on. I mean, after all.”

  “Did you and Harold see much of Felicity?”

  “To tell the truth we didn’t, because she worked those funny hours. One week days, one week nights, and the week after that it’d be the swing shift. Sometimes we didn’t even see her for weeks at a time. In fact, we wouldn’t even hear her up here. I mean, if she was working nights, she’d get home in the morning before we got up, and then she’d usually leave while Harold was still at work and I was out back. She never made a sound up here. I told her once we never heard her and she just smiled and said she went barefoot most of the time. But anytime anything went kaflooey she’d leave a note asking me to ask Harold to take care of it. And when he did she’d be so happy and ask us both up to have a drink. But we never went out anywhere together, and like I said, we hardly knew she was up here. The only time we ever heard anything was when that big guy came around yelling and banging on her door.”

  “What big guy?” Dill asked.

  “I guess he was her ex-boyfriend. He sure was big, I know that. Harold said he used to play football down at the university, but if he told me his name, I forgot it because I think football sucks.”

  “How often did the big guy come around?”

  “You don’t think he had something to do with what—well, with what happened, do you?”

  “No. I’m just curious about Felicity and who her friends were—even her ex-friends.”

  “Well, he was blond and big as a barn and young, not over thirty anyway, which I still think is young and I’m twenty-eight and don’t care who knows it.”

  “You don’t look it,” Dill lied.

  “Well, I am.”

  “How often did he come around yelling and banging on the door?”

  “The big guy? Oh, that just happened once, the very first month we moved in. I thought, What in the world have we got ourselves into? It got so bad I asked Harold to do something about it, but he wouldn’t. Harold said it was none of our business what a cop did, even a lady cop. I think he was a little afraid of the big guy—and he really was big. Of course, Felicity wasn’t so little herself—five-ten at least. But I still don’t know how she and the big guy ever—well, you know.” Her expression grew a bit dreamy and Dill wondered how often she had had fantasies about the big guy.

  “So what happened?” Dill said.

  “Oh, I went up the next morning and saw her and told her all that fuss’d kept Harold awake, which was a lie, because he’d slept right through most of it, and it was me they’d kept awake. She was nice as pie. But then she always was, even when Harold got the rent checks fucked up—oops. Sorry. Must be the bourbon.” She giggled. Dill smiled.

  “The big guy didn’t come back?” he asked.

  “Nope. Never. Felicity said it’d stop and it did. Never a sound after that. She didn’t even play her TV hardly any, not even in the morning for Good Morning America, and that’s what I always watch. She’d sometimes turn it on for the evening news, but not loud.”

  “Did Captain Colder come around much?” Dill said.

  “Who?”

  “Captain Colder. Gene Colder.”

  “Oh. Him. He was here yesterday. Asking me and Harold questions and kind of pretending we’d never seen him before.”

  “But you had?”

  “Oh, sure. He used to come around and pick Felicity up, maybe once or twice a week.”

  “Did he always bring her back?”

  “Sometimes he did. But sometimes she didn’t come home at all.”

  Dill thought that the look she gave him over the rim of her glass was meant to be smoldering. Instead, it was a bit glazed. He realized she was a little drunk.

  “You’re saying she sometimes didn’t come home at all after going out with Colder?” he asked.

  “Does that bother you?”

  “No.”

  “I mean, when two people are all grown up and everything, it’s the natural thing to do, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Take me and you, for example.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay what?”

  “Okay, let’s take you and me.”

  “Yeah, well, if you and me had a sudden yen for each other and decided to do something about it, who’d care?”

  “Harold?”

  “He wouldn’t mind. He had a yen for Felicity, but he never got anywhere. Shoot, I wouldn’t have minded if he had. He was always answering the door when she knocked in his Jockey shorts and a half hard-on. That’s why I think he was late with the rent sometimes. So he could open the door for Felicity in his Jockey shorts and his half hard-on.”

  “Harold sounds like quite a guy.”

  “He’s about what you’d expect. Any more bourbon out there?” She waved her glass a little and Dill decided she was even drunker than he had thought.

  “Sure,” he said, rose, took her glass, and went back into the kitchen, where he mixed her another drink, but filled his own up with the last of the Perrier. When he came back into the living room, the halter was all the way off. Dill handed her the drink, smiled, and said, “Looks a lot cooler that way.”

  “What d’you think of them?” she asked, cupping her left breast and offering it for display.

  “Nice.”

  “Just nice?”

  “Extremely nice.”

  “This is sort of a pass I’m making at you.”

  “I know.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, it’s a shame I have to be downtown in fifteen minutes.”

  “No kidding.”

  Dill nodded regretfully.

  Cindy McCabe drank a third of her new drink. When the glass came down, her eyes were still glazed and also a little crossed. They stared at Dill anyway. “You know something?” she said.

  “What?”

  “I made a pass at Felicity once—out there in the backyard.”

  “What happened?”

  Cindy McCabe laughed. It was a brief harsh laugh, more sad than merry. “She brushed me off real nice.” McCabe paused, frowned, looked down at her bare breasts, looked up, and added, “Almost like the way you’re brushing me off right now.”

  CHAPTER 13

  After he finally got rid of Cindy McCabe, Dill drove downtown, parked
the rented Ford in the basement garage, and at 3:46 P.M. walked into the nicely cooled Hawkins Hotel. The temperature outside, according to the First National Bank sign, was 104 degrees Fahrenheit. There was no wind. Dill could not remember when there had been no wind.

  The elderly woman, whom he took to be a permanent resident, was seated in her usual chair in the lobby working on an intricate piece of needlepoint. She looked up as Dill approached, but this time she didn’t frown or glare. Nor did she smile. She merely stared. Dill smiled and nodded. She nodded back and said, “Tornado weather.”

  Dill said, “You could be right,” and continued on until he came to the reception desk, where he paused to see if there were any messages in his box. There was one on a slip of pink paper. He asked the clerk for it. The clerk, the same one who had checked Dill in, looked at his watch first, took the slip from the box, and leaned across the counter, his manner suddenly confidential or conspiratorial. Or both, Dill thought.

  “Captain Colder,” the clerk said, barely moving his lips.

  Dill liked melodrama, especially in the afternoon. “Where?”

  “The Slush Pit.”

  “How long?”

  The clerk shrugged his thin shoulders. “Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes.”

  “And?”

  “He’s looking for you.”

  “There a back way out?”

  “You can go—” The clerk stopped. The tips of his ears grew pink. “Aw hell, Mr. Dill, you’re kidding me.”

  “Not really,” Dill said, turned, and headed for the Slush Pit. As he walked he read the message slip. It asked him to “please call Mr. Dolan, Washington, D.C., before 6 P.M. EDT.” Dill looked at his watch again. It wouldn’t be six in Washington for another hour. But there was really no hurry. Timothy Dolan never left the subcommittee office before seven anyhow, not even on Friday nights.

  The Slush Pit, living up to its name, was as oil-black as always. It took Dill’s eyes several moments to adjust. He finally located Captain Gene Colder at a table near the north wall. Colder sat with his back to the wall, a glass of beer in front of him. The beer looked untouched. Dill suspected Colder of not really being much of a drinker despite the two Scotches he had put away up in Dill’s room the previous afternoon. Dill thought those two drinks might well have used up Colder’s ration for the week.

  Dill crossed to the table. Colder looked up at him and nodded. It was not a friendly nod. Neither was it unfriendly. It was the cool nod one stranger might give another, reserving all judgment until the second stranger does something strange.

  “Sit down,” Colder said.

  Dill nodded back his own stranger-type nod, pulled out a chair, and sat down.

  “Drink?”

  Dill didn’t really want anything. But he said, “Sure, I’ll have a beer. A draft.”

  Colder raised his hand. The cocktail waitress hurried over. Lately, Dill told himself, you’ve been drinking with people who command instantaneous service.

  “He wants a beer, Lucille,” Colder said to the waitress.

  “You okay, Captain?” she asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  Lucille went away. Colder took out a package of Salems and offered Dill a cigarette. Dill shook his head. “I quit.”

  “If I keep on smoking these things, so will I.” Colder lit the cigarette with a throwaway lighter and leaned forward, his elbows on the table. “I thought we could have a talk without the chief breathing down our necks.”

  “Okay.”

  “Felicity,” Colder said. “I’d like to talk about her.”

  “All right.”

  “It may not show, Dill, but I’m almost falling apart.”

  Dill nodded in what he hoped was a sympathetic way. It apparently wasn’t, because Colder stared at him as if expecting something more.

  “So am I,” Dill said. “Falling apart. Almost.”

  That was better, Dill saw. Not much, but some. Colder looked away and said, “I’m married to a bitch.”

  “It happens.”

  “She’s the daughter of an ex-deputy chief back home. In Kansas City.” He ground the scarcely smoked cigarette out. “And that’s why I married her—because she was a deputy chief’s daughter.” He went on carefully grinding out the cigarette. “I made a mistake.”

  “I make them all the time,” Dill said because he saw that Colder expected him to say something. The waitress came over, put the glass of beer down in front of Dill, and went away. Dill took an experimental swallow. Colder still hadn’t touched his.

  “I’m thirty-six years old and if I play it right, I can be chief by the time I’m forty. Maybe even before. And I don’t mean chief of detectives like Strucker. I mean chief of police—the queso grande.”

  “But,” Dill said.

  “What d’you mean, but?”

  “That’s why you’re telling me all this, because there’s a but.”

  Colder stared at Dill. It’s his Grand Inquisitor’s stare, Dill decided, the one that says: Confess. Reveal. Disclose. Spill.

  “Just what kind of but do you think it is?” Colder said.

  Dill shrugged. “I won’t even try to guess because you’re going to tell me.” In fact, he thought, you’re dying to tell me. The Inquisitor becomes the Inquisitee, although I suspect that whatever the revelations are, Captain, they will leave you blameless.

  “My wife,” Colder began, “well, my wife was giving me a rotten time long before I ever met Felicity. In fact, I moved out on her.”

  “Before you met Felicity.”

  “Well, right after anyway.”

  “I see.”

  “I don’t want you to get the idea that Felicity broke up any happy home.”

  “I’m sure she wouldn’t’ve.”

  “My wife and I don’t have any kids. So the only hassle I had when I moved out was with her.”

  “She’s here?”

  “Right. She’s here.”

  “How old is she?”

  “A little older’n I am. Thirty-eight.”

  “Almost too late for kids anyway.”

  “I don’t think she really ever wanted any,” Colder said and took a glum sip of the beer that Dill thought must be flat by now. Colder didn’t seem to think so.

  “So what happened then?” Dill said. “I mean after she found out about Felicity?”

  “You’ve already heard, haven’t you?”

  “Heard what?”

  “That my wife threatened to kill Felicity.”

  “No, I didn’t hear that.”

  “You will.”

  “Did she?”

  “Threaten to? Sure.”

  “No,” Dill said. “That’s not what I mean.”

  “You mean did she kill Felicity?”

  “Yes.”

  “No,” Colder said. “She didn’t.”

  “How’d your wife threaten her?”

  “She’d call her up and yell at her. She’d call her up at home and say, ‘If you don’t keep away from my husband, I’ll kill you.’ She’d call her up at work, too. If Gertrude—that’s her name—couldn’t reach Felicity, she’d leave a message with whoever answered. Messages like ‘This is Captain Colder’s wife. Tell Detective Dill I’ll kill her if she doesn’t leave him alone.’ That went on for a couple of weeks.”

  “Then what?”

  Colder lit another one of his menthol cigarettes. He inhaled and made a face at what he tasted. Or at what he was about to say. “In this state, two doctors can commit. The department has two of them sort of on standby—guys that could have a little trouble with the state medical board, if we wanted to do something about it. We keep them on tap.” He paused. “Isn’t that awful?”

  Dill nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “It is.”

  “So I tucked her away for a month.”

  “Gertrude.”

  “Yeah. Gertrude.”

  “When was this?”

  Colder ran time through his head. “A year ago in September.”

 
“So she’s been out—what? Ten or eleven months?”

  “Right.”

  “And?”

  “She’s calmed down. They’ve got her on Valium. She’s even seeing some guy she met in that place. I checked him out. He’s an on-again, off-again juicer and they were drying him out when she met him. He’s got a trust fund, which is what every juicer ought to have, so he doesn’t have to worry about money. It brings him in a couple of thousand a month and sometimes he sells a little real estate. But what he does mostly is hang around Gertrude. He brings her flowers and takes her to the pictures and the plays, whenever one of them gets here, and she likes that kind of thing. He’s older. In his early fifties, and I imagine he’s fucking her, but not too often, and that’d sure be all right with her, too.”

  “She’s agreed to the divorce then?” Dill said.

  “Oh, yeah. She finally agreed to that after she got out.”

  “Where was she?”

  “Millrun Farm. Ever hear of it?”

  Dill nodded. “It used to be old Doc Lasker’s place when he was the resident abortionist here. They’d come from all over back then—from New York, L.A., Memphis, Chicago. It used to be a pretty nice place, but that was years ago.”

  “It still is,” Colder said. “Lasker died, you know.”

  Dill shook his head. “I didn’t.”

  “He was old and his business had gone to hell anyway when they legalized abortion, so he sold it to a couple of young shrinks and they’ve made a go of it. God knows they charge enough.”

  Dill finished the last of his beer. “I wonder why Felicity never told me she was going to be married.”

  Colder shook his head as though bewildered. Dill didn’t believe the gesture. Bewilderment had no more room in Colder’s makeup than did humility. And whatever you are, Captain, you are not humble.

  “She said she wrote you about it,” Colder said.

  “She didn’t.”

  “Maybe it was because of Gertrude and everything.”

  “Maybe.” Dill decided he wanted another beer. He looked toward the bar, caught the eye of Lucille, the waitress, and made a circular motion over the table with his forefinger pointing down. Lucille nodded her understanding. Dill turned back to Colder and smiled his most pleasant smile.