Briarpatch

by Ross Thomas

  CHAPTER 7

  The computerized time and weather sign on the First National Bank read 11:12 P.M. and 86 degrees as Dill walked into the lobby of the Hawkins Hotel after parking his rented Ford in the basement garage. The elderly woman who looked to Dill like a permanent guest was still seated in the lobby reading a book. Dill tried to catch its title as he walked past. It was something he always did. She caught him at it, lowered the book quickly, and glared. Dill smiled at her. The title on the book’s spine had been The Oxford Book of English Verse.

  A new male clerk was behind the reception counter. Dill paused long enough to see if there was anything in his box. There wasn’t, so he smiled reassuringly at the clerk and stepped over to the bank of four elevators. He touched the button, looked up at the floor indicator, and saw that the nearest descending elevator was on five. Something tapped him on the shoulder and a man’s voice said, “Mr. Dill?”

  The voice was a deep, deep bass with a softened Southern R in the mister. When Dill turned he saw how nicely the voice fitted the owner, who looked as though he needed the bass to go with his size, which was as tall and wide as a garage door. He was also extremely ugly. Christ, Dill thought, he’s even uglier than I am. But then the big man smiled and he was no longer ugly. That’s not true either, Dill decided. He’s still ugly, but that smile is so glorious it blinds you.

  “I bet you smile a lot,” Dill said.

  The big man nodded, still smiling. “All the time. If I don’t, grown men pale and little children flee.” He stopped smiling and went back to being ugly and either mean or extremely hard.

  “Clay Corcoran,” the big man said, and watched Dill’s face hopefully.

  Dill shook his head. “No bell rings.”

  “I was hoping it would. Then I wouldn’t have to explain how ridiculous I am.”

  “Ridiculous?”

  “Jilted lovers are always ridiculous. That’s me. Clay Corcoran, the jilted lover. Maybe even the cuckold, which is even more ridiculous, except I’m not sure you can be a cuckold if you’re not married.”

  “We could look it up,” Dill said.

  “By now you must’ve figured out I’m talking about your sister.”

  Dill nodded.

  “I’m more than sorry about Felicity,” Corcoran said. “I’m fucking well shattered.” And as if to prove it, a tear rolled down the tanned cheek from the corner of the left eye. Both eyes were green, although the left one had some yellow flecks in it. They were small eyes, set too far back in the skull and too far away from a nose that seemed to have been clumsily remodeled. The head itself was a squared-off chunk topped by a thinning hank of tow-blond hair that was almost white. It was hair so fine that it wafted about at the slightest movement of the big body. Even the bass voice made it float a little. Below the hair was a scant inch or so of forehead that had wrinkled itself into a permanent scowl. And far below that was the chin resembling a broken plow. The total effect could bother the brave and frighten the timid, until that blinding white smile came and bathed everything in its warm, reassuring glow.

  Corcoran reached up for the single tear and absently wiped his finger off on the white short-sleeved sailcloth shirt that covered his massive shoulders and chest. “Well, I just thought I’d come by and pay my respects,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Dill said.

  The big man hesitated. “I reckon I’d better let you go get some sleep.”

  “Would you like to talk about her?”

  When the smile came back again, Dill thought he had discovered the right word for it: angelic. The huge head nodded eagerly and twisted around on the eighteen-inch neck as the eyes searched for something. “Slush Pit’s still open,” Corcoran said.

  “Fine.”

  They started for the bar and Corcoran said, “This is real decent of you, Mr. Dill.”

  “How old are you?” Dill asked.

  “Thirty.”

  “Thirty and above calls me Ben.”

  “Felicity was what—ten years younger’n you? Twenty-seven?”

  “Twenty-eight,” Dill said. “Today was her birthday.”

  “Aw Christ,” Corcoran said and stopped smiling.

  They chose the same table Dill had sat at earlier that day with the lawyer, Anna Maude Singe. He ordered a cognac from the cocktail waitress. Corcoran asked for a bourbon and water. When she asked him what brand of bourbon, he said he didn’t care. Dill liked the big man’s indifference.

  After the drinks came and Dill had his first sip, he said, “Where’d you meet Felicity?”

  “Down at the university. I was a senior and she was a junior and I was having a little trouble with my French One-O-Two because I’d redshirted the year before and—”

  “Redshirted?”

  “A sports fan you’re not.”

  “No.”

  “I dropped out of school for a year because my knee went snap and by dropping out I maintained my eligibility.”

  “To do what?”

  “Play football.”

  “When the knee got better. I see.”

  “Well, there was a one-year gap between my French One-O-One and the One-O-Two that I needed to graduate, so I asked the head of the French department to suggest a tutor. He suggested Felicity. We went out a few times, but there was no big romance or anything, and after I graduated the Raiders drafted me and I went out there.”

  “There being Oakland, right?”

  “Oakland then. L.A. now.”

  “They moved?”

  Corcoran scowled. Despite himself, Dill wanted to draw back. Corcoran noticed and smiled. “Don’t mind me, that’s just my professional puzzled-rage scowl. Is there something about football you don’t like?”

  “Nothing. It’s just that I don’t follow team sports closely, probably because I never played any.”

  “Never?” Corcoran seemed almost shocked. “Not even baseball—Little League?”

  “Not even that. It takes some conniving, but you can actually go through life without playing on a team.”

  “You’re sort of bullshitting me, aren’t you?”

  “A little.”

  Corcoran smiled. “That’s okay. Not many people do. I kind of like it.”

  “You were playing for Oakland.”

  “Right. And this time the knee went snap-crackle-pop instead of just snap and that was the end of my career as a promising linebacker. Well, I had my degree in philosophy, a brand new Pontiac GTO, two suits, and no trade—unless I wanted to be a philosopher, which I’m really not too good at. So I came back home and signed on with the cops and there Felicity was. And then it really got started with us and it was very, very good. In fact, it was goddamn near perfect.”

  “What happened?”

  Corcoran snorted. “Captain call-me-Gene Colder is what happened. Felicity and I’d been, well, you know, going together—”

  “Seeing each other socially,” Dill said, remembering the old police reporter’s phrase.

  “That’s one way of putting it, but it was a hell of a lot more than that. We’d even talked about getting married—or something close to it anyway.” He looked at Dill curiously. “She never said anything at all about me?”

  “No. Not once. For all I know, she lived like a nun. I never asked because it was none of my business. She never asked about my lady friends for the same reason, I suppose. Otherwise we were fairly close. At least, I thought we were.”

  “She talked about you a lot,” Corcoran said.

  Dill nodded. “So what happened between you two?”

  “That’s just it. Nothing happened. One day everything was great and the next day it was over. She said she needed to talk to me, but we had conflicting shifts that week and she didn’t get off till eleven. So we met at this place we used to go to a lot, this bar, and she said I’m sorry, but I’ve met someone else and I won’t be able to see you anymore. Well, I just sat there for a minute or two trying to get used to the shock and the pain—and don’t let ’em kid you, the
re’s real pain—and finally I knew I had to say something so I asked her who. She said that wasn’t important and I said it was important to me. She just shook her head as if she was really sorry about everything. Well, I just sat there like a fool and couldn’t think of anything to say. She got up, leaned down, and kissed me on the forehead—on the forehead, by God!—and said, Thank you, Clay. Then she left and that was the end of it.”

  “When did all this happen?” Dill asked.

  “At six minutes until midnight on February twelfth a year and a half ago. Eighteen months. It was a Friday.”

  “She was with homicide by then.”

  “Been there for two or three months. Transferred in from bunco.”

  “Did you give up?”

  Corcoran shook his head. “I got drunk and tried to see her once and made a mess of it. Then I called her three times. The first time she said, ‘I’m sorry, Clay, I can’t talk to you,’ and hung up. The second time I called her I said, ‘Hi, it’s me,’ and she said, ‘Don’t call me anymore,’ and hung up. The third time I called and said it was me she didn’t say anything. She just hung up. I stopped calling.”

  “I don’t blame you. Were you in bunco with her?”

  “We never worked together or anything like that. She did a lot of undercover stuff when she was in bunco. I was in public affairs and about all I did was go around and talk to school kids—real little kids—about what wonderful folks policemen are. I’d worked up this funny kind of talk with slides. Public affairs figured if the kids could get used to me, they’d never have any hangups about normal-looking cops. I kind of liked it. But then I started seeing Felicity around with Captain Colder and I couldn’t stand that, so I quit.”

  “What do you do now?”

  “I’m a frightener.” Corcoran scowled and once again Dill wanted to shrink away. The big man smiled and chuckled a little. “What I am now is almost as ridiculous as being a cuckold. I’m a private detective and you’re gonna ask me how the hell can anybody my size stay private.”

  “I was really going to go upstairs and think about it.”

  “Yeah, well, I do a lot of bodyguard work, for oil companies mostly, who’re in places where the politicians are a little weird—Angola, Indonesia, places like that.”

  “You go there?”

  “No, they use me when those folks come here, and my job is to make sure none of the native nuts get close. They keep me on a retainer—the oil companies—and that pays the overhead, which isn’t all that high except for the phone. As a frightener, I do a lot of work on the phone.”

  “Who do you frighten?”

  “Deadbeats. Say some guy loses his job out in Packingtown and falls behind on his car payments. Well, he’s a deadbeat, right? Now some folks would say he’s a victim of an outmoded economic system that scraps people the way it scraps old cars, but you and I know better, don’t we? You and I know that anybody in this grand and glorious country of ours can go out and find himself a job if he’ll just put on a clean white shirt and go look. I mean a guy who’s fifty-four years old and has been wrapping bacon for seventeen years for Wilson’s out in Packingtown and gets laid off, well, hell, he can go wrap bacon somewhere else. I’d hire him if I needed some bacon wrapped, wouldn’t you? Sure you would.

  “So this guy, this skilled ex-bacon wrapper, falls behind on his car payments and the finance company turns him over to me. And if his phone hasn’t been cut off, I call him up and say in my real deep scary voice, ‘My name’s Corcoran, pal, and you owe us money and if you don’t pay up, something’s gonna have to be done about it—understand?’ I’m really a pretty good frightener. Well, sometimes the guy pays up—I don’t know how, but that’s not my worry. If he doesn’t, I get hold of this kid who used to steal cars for a living and we go out and repo the car so the guy can take the bus when he goes out looking for a job wrapping bacon.” Corcoran paused. “Like I said, I’m a little ridiculous.” There was another, longer pause. “I think I’ll have another drink.”

  Corcoran had only to glance over his shoulder to bring the waitress hurrying over. After she left with the order, he said, “There’re some days I just want to go out and break something, know what I mean?”

  Dill nodded. “I think so.” He took a sip of his cognac. “The services are going to be at ten on Saturday in Trinity Baptist.”

  “Why there? Felicity was a real let’s-not-fuck-around atheist.”

  “The last I heard,” Dill said, “she was sort of a well-intentioned agnostic.”

  “That was before homicide. After about two or three Saturday nights down on South Broadway she had this sudden leap of faith and went all the way. We were still together then. I remember she called me up one Sunday morning about six. I said hello and she said, ‘There is no God,’ and hung up. I found out later some guy had just wiped out his family with a Boy Scout hatchet. There were six of them, not counting his wife. Six kids, I mean. The oldest was eight. Felicity was first through the door.”

  “They’re sending a limousine for me,” Dill said. “You like to ride along?”

  The big man thought about it for at least fifteen seconds and then slowly shook his head no. “I don’t intend any disrespect—hell, that’s not the word. Indifference is the word. I’m not indifferent, but I don’t want to go to Felicity’s funeral. Funerals are awfully final and I don’t want to say goodbye yet. But thank you for asking me.”

  “Is there anyone else I should ask—anyone close?”

  Corcoran thought about it. “Well, you might ask Smokey.”

  “Who’s Smokey?”

  “Anna Maude Singe—singe, burn, scorch—Smokey. Felicity’s lawyer. Mine too. They were close. It was Smokey who told me you were staying here.”

  “You talked to her today?”

  Corcoran nodded.

  “Did she tell you about the two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar life-insurance policy Felicity took out naming me as sole beneficiary?”

  “No. When?”

  “When did she take it out?” Dill said. “Three weeks ago.”

  “Smokey didn’t tell me about it.” The big man’s expression grew thoughtful as he stared down at his drink. When he looked up Dill saw that the slightly mismatched green eyes had changed. Before they had been too small, too recessed, and too far apart, but clever. There was still too much wrong with them, but now they were more than clever. They had become smart, perhaps even brilliant. He tries to hide it behind all that size and ugliness, Dill thought, but occasionally it just seeps out. “There was no reason Smokey should’ve, was there?” Corcoran said. “Told me, I mean.”

  “I guess not.”

  “But it means Felicity knew, doesn’t it?”

  “Knew?”

  “That somebody was going to kill her.”

  “Suspected.”

  “Right. Suspected. If she’d known for sure, she would’ve done something.”

  “What?”

  Corcoran smiled, but it was a small smile that only made him look sad. “She was a cop. There were a lot of things she could’ve done and she knew ’em all.”

  “Unless she was doing something a cop shouldn’t do.”

  This time there was no pretense to the scowl. Corcoran leaned across the table, the green eyes angry now, the expression quite terrible. Dill sat very still, determined not to flinch. “You’re her brother,” Corcoran said, almost whispering the words, which somehow made them even more awful. “If you weren’t her brother and said that, I’d have to twist your fuckin’ head off. Maybe you’d better explain.”

  “Let me tell you a story,” Dill said. “It’s about a brick duplex, a down payment made in cash, and a fifty-thousand-dollar balloon payment that’s due on the first.”

  Corcoran, his expression still suspicious, leaned back in his chair. “All right,” he said. “Tell me.”

  It took Dill ten minutes to tell what he knew. When he was done, Corcoran remained silent. Finally, he sighed and said, “That doesn’t sound too good,
does it?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe I’d better look into it. You know, I really am a pretty fair snoop. It’s like research. I always liked research. Any objections if I look into it?”

  “I don’t really care what she’s done,” Dill said. “I just want to find out who killed her.”

  “And why.”

  “Right,” Dill said. “And why.”

  CHAPTER 8

  On Friday, August 5, Dill awoke a little after seven, rose, and went to the window. Nine floors below he could just make out the First National’s time and weather sign. The time was 7:06 A.M. The temperature was 89 degrees. As he watched, the temperature clicked over to 90 degrees. Dill winced, turned from the window, and went to the phone. He dialed room service and ordered breakfast, a meal he rarely ate. He ordered two poached eggs on whole-wheat toast, bacon, and coffee.

  “What kind of juice?” the woman’s voice asked.

  “No juice.”

  “It comes with the breakfast.”

  “I don’t want any, thanks.”

  “Hashbrowns or grits?”

  “Neither.”

  “They’re free, too.”

  “I’ll pass.”

  “Well,” the woman said reluctantly, “okay.”

  While waiting for his breakfast, Dill showered and shaved. Because he had no choice, other than the blue funeral suit, he again put on the gray seersucker jacket and the dark-gray lightweight trousers. He noticed the overnight air-conditioned humidity had ironed most of the wrinkles out of the trousers. When dressed, Dill went to the door, opened it, and picked up the free copy of the local Tribune, fattened nicely by ads for the weekend sales. He counted four sections and 106 pages.

  The Tribune had always (and always to Dill was as far back as he could remember, which was either 1949 or 1950) devoted three-quarters of its front page to local and state news. National affairs and foreign news fought over the rest. Murders, crimes of passion, interesting battery, and other spicy items not deemed fit for breakfast reading were shunted off to page three. Dill turned to page three and saw that his sister’s murder still occupied its upper-right-hand one-column position.

  Dill flipped through the rest of the paper, noting a couple of two-paragraph wire service stories on pages five and nine that would have made the front pages of both The New York Times and The Washington Post. He paused at The Tribune’s Op-Ed page to see what had changed and was perversely gratified to discover that nothing had. They were all still there: Buckley, Kilpatrick, Will, Evans and Novak—like some old law firm forever arguing its dismal case before the bar of history.