Briarpatch

by Ross Thomas

  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.”

  “What?”

  “She worked for a man called Strucker.”

  “The chief of detectives,” Dill said. “He called me this morning.”

  “Well, he’s pretty upset about Felicity. Two hours after she died he called me and the first thing he wanted to know, even before he told me she was gone, was whether I was the executor of her estate, except he didn’t say executor, he said executrix.”

  Dill nodded his appreciation of the fine Liberationist point.

  “I told him yes, sir, I am, and then he told me she’d died and before I could ask how or why or even say oh-my-God-no, he asked me to meet him down at Felicity’s bank.”

  “Safety deposit box?”

  She nodded. “Well, I was there when they opened it, me crying and mad at the … the goddamned waste. They brought it all out of the box, one thing at a time. There was her birth certificate, then her will, then some pictures of your parents, and then her passport. She was always talking about going to France, but she never got around to it. That’s what she majored in, you know, French.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, the last thing they brought out of the box was the insurance policy. She took it out just three weeks ago. It was a term policy naming you as sole beneficiary.”

  Anna Maude Singe stopped talking and looked away.

  “How much?” Dill said.

  “Two hundred and fifty thousand,” she said and looked quickly back at Dill, as if to catch his reaction. There was none, except in the eyes. Nothing else in his face changed except the large soft gray eyes that suddenly iced over.

  “Two hundred and fifty thousand,” Dill said finally.

  She nodded.

  “Let’s have another drink,” he said. “I’ll buy.”

  CHAPTER 4

  At 5:45 P.M. Benjamin Dill was hanging his dark-blue funeral suit in the closet of room 981 in the Hawkins Hotel when they knocked on the door. After he opened it he automatically classified them as policemen. Both wore civilian clothing—well-cut, obviously expensive clothing—but the carefully bored eyes, the practiced intimidating carriage, and the far too neutral expressions around the mouths betrayed their calling.

  Both were tall, well over six feet, and the older one was wide and thick, while the younger one was rake-lean, tan, and just a trifle elegant. The wide one stuck out his hand and said, “I’m Chief Strucker, Mr. Dill. This is Captain Colder.”

  Dill shook Strucker’s heavy freckled hand and then accepted the one offered by Colder. It was slim and exceptionally strong. Colder said, “Gene Colder, homicide.” Dill said, “Come in.”

  They came into the room a little warily, the way policemen do, sweeping it with their eyes and classifying its contents and occupant, not out of curiosity, but habit. Dill waved them to the medium-sized room’s two easy chairs. Strucker lowered himself carefully with a sigh. Colder sat down like a cat. Strucker took a cigar from his pocket, held it up for Dill to see, and said, “Mind?”

  “Not at all,” Dill said. “Would you like a drink?”

  “I think I would, by God,” Strucker said. “It’s been a hard one.”

  Dill took a bottle of Old Smuggler from his suitcase, removed the plastic covers from two glasses on the writing desk, fetched another glass from the bathroom, and poured three drinks. “Water?” he asked. Strucker shook his head. Colder said no thanks. Dill handed them their drinks, took his own into the bathroom, ran some water into it, came back out, and sat down on the bed. He waited until Strucker got his cigar going and had swallowed some of the Scotch.

  “Who did it?” Dill asked.

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “Why did they do it?”

  Strucker shook his big head. “We don’t know that either.” He sighed again—that long, heavy, despairing sigh. “We’re here for a couple of reasons. One is to try and answer your questions and the other is to offer you the city’s and the department’s official sympathy. We’re goddamned sorry. All of us.”

  “Your sister,” Colder said and paused. “Well, your sister was one exceptional … person.”

  “How much did she make a year?” Dill said.

  Strucker looked at Captain Colder for the answer. “Twenty-three-five,” the Captain said.

  “And the annual premium on a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar term life-insurance policy for a twenty-eight-year-old woman in good health is how much?”

  Strucker frowned. When he did the cap of thick wiry gray hair moved down toward black eyebrows that guarded the already guarded eyes whose color was more nearly green than hazel. The eyes were set close to a wandering nose that had been broken once. Perhaps twice. Well below the nose was the tight, thin-lipped mouth that seemed to disapprove of almost everything, and below the mouth was the doorstep chin. It was a worn, lined, highly intelligent face that at fifty-three might well have been on its third owner.

  Strucker was still frowning when he said, “You heard about that, huh?”

  “I heard about it.”

  Colder smiled slightly, not enough to display any teeth, but just enough to register mild disapproval and a touch of regret. “Her lady lawyer, right?”

  Dill nodded.

  Strucker finished his glass of whisky, put it down on a table, and turned back to Dill. “According to the Arbuckle Life Insurance people, the annual premium was $518 and she paid it in a lump sum, all cash, on the fourteenth of last month.”

  “Not a very wise investment for someone with no dependents,” Dill said. “No surrender value. She couldn’t ever borrow against it. Of course, if she knew she was going to die, she might’ve wanted to leave something to a loved one—me, in this case. You don’t think it was suicide, though, do you?”

  “It wasn’t suicide, Mr. Dill,” Colder said.

  “No, I didn’t think it was.” Dill rose, walked over to the window, and looked down nine stories at Broadway and Our Jack. “Then there’s her house.”

  “The duplex,” Captain Colder said.

  “Yes. When she wrote me about it seventeen months or so back she said she was buying herself a little house. I assumed it was an old bungalow, around sixty or seventy thousand dollars. You can still buy them for that here, can’t you?”

  “Around in there,” Colder said, “but they’re getting scarce.”

  “Okay, so how much would she have to put down on a sixty-or seventy-thousand-dollar house? Twenty percent? That would be twelve to fourteen thousand. I had a few bucks to spare, not many, so I called and asked if she could use a couple of thousand to help out with the down payment. She said she didn’t need it because it was being creatively financed. She sort of laughed when she said creatively. I didn’t press. I just assumed she was putting five or maybe ten down, taking out a first mortgage of around fifty or less, and a balloon payment for the rest. On twenty-three-five a year she could just about’ve managed it.” Dill paused, drank some of his Scotch and water, and said, “But that’s not what she did, was it?”

  “No, sir,” Strucker said. “It wasn’t.”

  “What she did,” Dill said, “was to buy a fine old duplex out on Thirty-second and Texas for one hundred and eighty-five thousand. She put thirty-seven thousand cash down and took out a first mortgage of one hundred thousand at fourteen percent, which meant her monthly payments were going to be around thirteen hundred—except she was getting six-fifty a month from the guy she rented the ground floor to, so that meant she’d only have to come up with six-fifty a month, maybe seven hundred. You say she was making nineteen hundred gross a month so that would be what?—fourteen, fifteen hundred take-home?”

  “Around in there,” Colder said.


  “Which left her about six or seven hundred a month to live on. Well, figuring in the tax break it could be done, I guess, with supermarket coupons and Junior League thrift-shop clothes and library books and TV for entertainment. But then there was that balloon payment—the creative financing. Her lawyer says it’s due the first of next month, which will be exactly eighteen months after she bought the place. That balloon payment is for forty-eight thousand dollars—plus interest.”

  Dill turned from the window and looked down at Strucker. “How much did my sister have in her checking account?”

  “Three hundred and thirty-two dollars.”

  “So how do you figure she was going to come up with fifty thousand or so by the first of next month?”

  “That’s what we need to talk about, Mr. Dill.”

  “Okay,” Dill said, moved back to the bed, sat down, and leaned against the headboard. “Let’s talk.”

  Strucker cleared his throat, puffed on his cigar, waved some smoke away, and began. “Detective Dill had a fine record, an exceptional one. For her age, none better—male or female. Now I gotta be the first to admit we transferred her outta bunco into homicide as sort of our token woman, along with three coloreds and a couple of Mexicans. It was either that or lose some federal grant money. But by God she was good. And we jumped her up to second-grade over a raft of other guys, some of ’em with a hell of a lot more seniority. In two more years, maybe less, she’d’ve made sergeant easy. So what I’m saying, Mr. Dill, is your sister was one damn good cop, a fine one, and she got killed in the line of duty—at least, that’s what we believe—so we’re gonna bury her on Saturday just like I told you and then we’re gonna find out just what the hell went wrong.”