Briarpatch

by Ross Thomas

  As he turned the pages, Dill saw that the Tribune no longer contained a Society section—at least it was no longer called such. It was now called Home instead—but it still meant six pages of parties, weddings, engagements, recipes, and Ann Landers. Dill decided that on the whole the Tribune was still the same rotten prosperous newspaper it had always been.

  There was a knock at the door and Dill let in the room-service waiter, who put the breakfast tray on the writing table and smiled when Dill tipped him two dollars, instead of the one dollar he usually got. Dill dawdled over breakfast until nine o’clock, drinking coffee from the large silver Thermos carafe even after the coffee had grown cold. At nine he rose, went over to his suitcase, took out the Jake Spivey file that had been handed to him by Betty Mae Marker, opened it, noted a telephone number, crossed back to the desk, and dialed the number. It was answered at the beginning of the third ring by a woman’s voice that gave only the phone number’s last four digits. Dill had always found the practice irritating.

  “Mr. Spivey, please.”

  “Mr. Spivey isn’t available at the moment, but if you’ll leave your name and number, I’m quite sure he’ll return your call.” She had a young voice, Dill thought, cool and professional and faintly Eastern, from up around Massachusetts somewhere.

  “Would you do me a favor?” Dill said.

  “I’ll try.”

  “Would you please tell Mr. Spivey that this is Mr. Dill and that unless he comes to the phone right this very minute he’s going to be the sorriest son of a bitch who ever lived.”

  The woman said nothing. It sounded over the line as if she had pressed the hold button. And then the big loud voice came roaring joyously over the phone. “That you, Pickle, no shit?”

  “I whipped your ass in the fourth grade for calling me that and I expect I can still do it.”

  The laugh came then, a marvelous honking hoorah so infectious that Dill felt it should be quarantined. It was the totally uninhibited laugh of a man who found life an all too brief passage made up of rainbows, blue skies, bowls of cherries, plus a long head start in the pursuit of happiness. The honking hoorah belonged to John Jacob Spivey. Suddenly the laughter stopped. “I didn’t watch the news last night, Pick. Was it on?”

  “I don’t know,” Dill said.

  “I just read about it five minutes ago in the Tribune. I was stunned. By God I was. I just sat there and read it and then I thought, No, they gotta be talking about somebody else. Not Felicity. Then I read it again, real slow, and, well, I had to believe it. I was just fixing to call you in Washington when you called me. Goddamn, I’m sorry.”

  Dill said thank you. It was all there was to say. Apparently, no one ever expected him to say anything else.

  “Felicity,” Spivey said, stretching the name out, pronouncing each syllable with care and affection. “Talk about your hog on ice. She was one independent little old gal even when she was real little right after your folks died. One minute she was ten or eleven and then all of a sudden she was acting eighteen, well, sixteen anyway.” Spivey sighed. “Where you at, boy?”

  “The Hawkins.”

  “Shoot, Pick, nobody stays there.”

  “I do.”

  “You would. When’d you get in?”

  “Last night,” Dill lied. “Late.”

  “How soon can you get yourself out here?”

  “Well, I don’t know, Jake. I’m—”

  Spivey interrupted. “Lemme guess. Except it ain’t no guess, at least it’d better not be, not with all the money I’m paying those jackass lawyers of mine up in Washington. You’re down here on business for the kid Senator, right? Goddamn if that ain’t just like you, Pick, mixing business with sorrow. Well, we can tend to all that later. Right now you oughta be with your friends and you ain’t got any friend older’n me, right? None older and none better, for that matter.”

  “You’re a brick, Jake.”

  “Don’t you still use old-timey words though. Brick! Sure you got that spelled right? I ain’t heard anyone say brick in twenty years. Maybe thirty. Maybe ever. But then you’re the only man I ever heard, white or colored, who called somebody Toots. You used to call Lila Lee Cady that back in what?—the eleventh grade? You remember Lila Lee.”

  “I remember her.”

  “Went and got fat as Pat’s pig. Saw her going down the street week before last. Waddling—know what I mean? I ducked down so she wouldn’t see me.” There was the laugh again followed by a question. “You want me to send for you?”

  “I rented a car.”

  “How soon can you get here?”

  “I don’t even know where you are, Jake. All I’ve got is your phone number and a post-office box.”

  “My God, we have been out of touch. Well, at least I won’t have to give you directions. Guess what I went and done?”

  “No telling.”

  “About six months back I went and bought the old Dawson place.”

  “Jesus God.”

  “Something, idn’t it? Little old Jake Spivey living in Ace Dawson’s place.”

  “The Dawson mansion,” Dill said.

  “Yeah, that’s right—that’s what they always called it in the Tribune, wasn’t it? The Dawson Mansion with a capital M. Goddamn place had termites, can you imagine? Cost me a fortune to fix it up livable.”

  “You can afford it, Jake—and enjoy it. I can’t think of anybody who’d enjoy it more.”

  Spivey again laughed his marvelous laugh. Dill smiled. It was impossible not to. Still chuckling, Spivey said, “It’s got thirty-six rooms. Thirty-six, by God! What in hell do I need with thirty-six rooms?”

  “You can hide in them.”

  “You mean when they come looking for me.”

  “Sure.”

  “It’ll never happen.”

  “Let’s hope not,” Dill said.

  “How soon you gonna get out here?”

  “About an hour. I’ve got to stop and pick up something.”

  “What?”

  “A tape recorder.”

  “You won’t need it,” Spivey said. “You can use one of mine. I got a dozen tape recorders.”

  “All right,” Dill said. “We’ll use one of yours.”

  CHAPTER 9

  In 1915, two years before America’s entry into the First World War, a prosperous dentist who went by the name of Dr. Mortimer Cherry bought seven sections of scrub land 6.7 miles north of the city limits and proceeded to lay out what eventually would become the state’s most exclusive suburb. He called it Cherry Hills.

  There would be, Dr. Cherry decided, no straight streets—only gently curving drives, twisting lanes, and perhaps two or three sweeping boulevards. Furthermore, all street names would have a pronounced English lilt: Drury Lane, Sloane Way, Chelsea Drive, and so on. The minimum lot—for the merely affluent—would be 100 feet wide and 150 feet deep. The rich could build on parcels as large as ten, even fifteen acres.

  By 1917, the lots were plotted, the streets surveyed, and grading was about to start when the country entered the war. Dr. Cherry wisely decided to postpone further development until after the war’s end.

  In early February 1919, the Tribune ran a front-page story revealing that Dr. Cherry had been born into what it called the Hebrew faith as Mordecai Cherowski in either Poland or the Ukraine. The Tribune never did pinpoint the exact location. But it managed to convince nearly everyone that Dr. Cherry was no real dentist. True, the Tribune admitted, he had pulled a lot of teeth down in Texas, but that had been when he was a medical-orderly trusty in the Huntsville State Prison, serving two years for fraud. Released in 1909, Dr. Cherry had changed his name and moved to the city where he set up practice. His credentials consisted of a diploma from a Wichita Falls dental college that hung proudly in his reception room. His practice thrived and almost everybody agreed he was an awfully good dentist. The Tribune revealed that the diploma was a fake. On March 1, 1919, Dr. Cherry drove home from his now nonexistent practice, locked the bathr
oom door, and shot himself in the head. He was forty-nine years old.

  In the late summer of 1919, the development known as Cherry Hills was acquired for next to nothing by the oil millionaire Philip K. “Ace” Dawson, an ex-bootlegger and card sharp from Beaumont who had once done a six-month stretch in Huntsville himself. Ace Dawson held a two-thirds interest in the development. The remaining third was owned by his silent partner, James B. Hartshorne, the twenty-nine-year-old editor and publisher of the Tribune.

  By 1920, the streets of Cherry Hills were paved, the utilities in, construction of the Cherry Hills Golf & Country Club was nearing completion, and Ace Dawson’s thirty-six-room prairie Tudor mansion was rising on fifteen acres of prime land where only blackjack oak and bois d’arc had stood before. Ace Dawson lived in the mansion until Christmas Day 1934, when he was kidnapped by the twins, Dan and Mary Jo McNichols, who demanded and got a $50,000 ransom and then shot Ace Dawson nine times in the back. Dan and Mary Jo were themselves shot to death in Galveston by Texas Rangers on June 3, 1935, shortly after the twins’ twenty-fifth birthday and long after they had spent all the money.

  The widow Dawson had had a ten-foot-high serpentine brick wall built around the entire estate after her husband’s body was eventually found just outside Liberal, Kansas, in the back of an abandoned 1929 Essex Super Six sedan. She and her seventeen-year-old son, Ace, Jr., lived in the mansion alone except for the servants. She died at the age of eighty-five in 1973, leaving everything, including the thirty-six-room mansion, to Ace, Jr., who had long since fled to Marin County in California. Ace, Jr., tried for years to unload the old home place without success until Jake Spivey came along and took it off his hands for an undisclosed price that some said was less than two million and some said more. Much more.

  Dill knew most of the history of Cherry Hills and the suicide dentist and Ace Dawson and the rest. It was part of the folklore he had grown up with. He even thought about some of it as he drove north on Lee Boulevard. Lee—along with TR and Grant boulevards—were the three winding thoroughfares that broke up the city’s boring grid. As he drove automatically, not needing to think about where he was going, Dill tried to remember if he had ever heard anyone express sympathy for the ill-fated Dr. Cherry. He thought his father might have done so once, almost in passing, but then Dill’s father had been a sentimental soul who, despite his lengthy foreign education, drew most of his day-to-day philosophy from the popular songs of the thirties and forties. The senior Dill had considered the lyrics of “September Song” to be especially profound and poignant. Son was glad Dad had died before hard rock really got going.

  When he turned off North Cleveland Avenue, which also ran south all the way to Packingtown, Dill saw they had finally torn down the gatehouse. The gatehouse had been built at the Grand Boulevard entrance to Cherry Hills shortly after Ace Dawson was kidnapped. Up until 1942, uniformed private guards had made random spot checks of all cars entering the suburb. But then the war came along and the guards all quit and either joined the army or went out to Lockheed and Douglas in California. The old gate-house, which looked as if it might have been designed by a Disney disciple, had stood vacant after that, but now it was gone, and Dill guessed it must have been torn down recently because the land still looked raw.

  The trees along Grand Boulevard had thrived, he noticed. They were taller, ten years taller. The poplars had shot up the most, followed more slowly by the elms, the pecans, the persimmons, and the sycamores. As he crossed Cherry Hill Brook, which once was called Split-Tail Creek, he saw that the cottonwoods had also flourished and this, for some reason, pleased him most of all.

  Dill turned east off Grand Boulevard into Beauchamp Lane. The lots were larger here, beginning with three acres and rising to five, eight, and finally, fifteen acres, which was what the old Dawson mansion stood on. The houses along Beauchamp Lane (pronounced the way it looks: beau as in bo and champ as in champion) were an eclectic bunch, ranging from sprawling ranch to plains Mediterranean and having almost nothing in common other than their size, which was uniformly immense.

  Dill drove alongside the Dawson estate’s serpentine brick wall, now capped with shards of glass, until he came to a locked iron gate. He pushed a button on a speaker and a woman’s voice said, “Yes.” Dill said, “Ben Dill.” The gate swung open. Dill drove through and up the curving asphalt drive past the sprinklers that were keeping the rolled bluegrass lawn green even in the August heat that the radio said had already reached 98 degrees and was expected to hit 100 by noon. There were enough tall leafy trees to make the huge old mock Tudor look almost cool. None of its mullioned windows was open, and Dill knew Spivey would have the air-conditioning going full blast.

  As he drove past the open six-car garage he counted a Rolls, a Mercedes 500 SEL coupe, a high-sprung Chevrolet pickup, an old open Morgan, a Mustang convertible, and a big Country Squire Ford stationwagon. None of the cars, except the Morgan, looked more than six months old.

  Dill stopped his own car in front of a wide carved-oak front door with hammered black metal hinges. He came out of the 75-degree Ford into the 98-degree sunshine and immediately shed his seersucker jacket. He draped it over the left arm that also pressed the manila envelope to his side. The envelope contained the file on Jake Spivey. With his right forefinger, Dill rang the doorbell. Somewhere, far inside, chimes played “How Dry I Am.” Dill wondered who had put them in, Ace Dawson or Jake Spivey, and finally decided it could have been either.

  To Dill the woman who opened the door would have looked unattainable, if his ex-wife hadn’t looked much the same. He had since concluded that all such unattainable appearing women are not quite lean, not quite rangy, and not quite beautiful. They do look smart and easily bored. They also look rich, or as if they had once been that way. And, he was nearly convinced, they all gave off a certain faint scent, which, if only he could bottle it, he would have called Class Distinction.

  This one, who seemed to be mostly long tanned legs and bare tanned arms, stared at Dill for several seconds and finally said in a drawl that sounded both Eastern and expensive, “You are Mr … . Dill, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You were awfully rude over the phone.”

  Dill smiled. “I was trying to get Jake’s attention.”

  “Yes, well, you certainly did that.” She opened the big door all the way. “I suppose you’d best come in.” Dill went in.

  She was wearing brief white shorts, a blue-and-white striped sleeveless top with scooped-out armholes, and nothing else as far as Dill could see, not even shoes. Her toenails were done in a quiet coral. She had sun-streaked, honey-colored hair, appraising brown eyes, a faintly amused mouth, and a slightly sunburned nose. She wore no makeup. Dill guessed she never did because she never needed any. She turned to look at him again and he stared back, deciding that she had the look of old money long gone.

  “You’re staring,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I remind you of someone?”

  “Of my ex-wife—a little.”

  “Was she nice?”

  “She sighed a lot and sprinkled sugar on her sliced tomatoes.”

  “Yes, I can see why she would—sigh a lot, I mean. I’m called Daffy.” She didn’t offer a hand.

  “As in Duck or in Daffodil?”

  “As in Daphne. Daphne Owens.”

  “Of course. I should’ve known.”

  “I work for Mr. Spivey.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m his executive assistant, if you dote on titles.”

  “It must be pleasant here—the informal atmosphere and all.”

  “Yes. It is. I live here, too, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, I suppose we’d best go find Jake.” She turned and started down a long wide paneled hall lined with long narrow tables that held unused glazed vases. It was a very long hall, and if rest were needed, there were a dozen straight-back, dark wood chairs with faded red plush seats. On both wa
lls were hung nicely done oil portraits of bearded men in nineteenth-century dress. The men all looked extremely proper and Dill was quite sure none of them was related in any way to either Ace Dawson or Jake Spivey.

  “Do you know the house?” Owens asked over her shoulder.

  “Jake and I were here once a long time ago.”

  “Really? When?”

  “Every Christmas up until 1959, I think. Mrs. Dawson used to throw a party for the city’s hundred neediest kids. Jake and I talked our way onto the list.” He paused. “It was Christmas, 1956.”

  “But you weren’t really, were you?”

  “What?”

  “Two of the one hundred neediest.”

  “Who’s to say?”

  “It makes a charming story anyway.”

  “Ask Jake about it,” Dill said.

  She stopped and turned. Surprisingly, Dill found that she looked older out of the sun. Nearer to thirty than to twenty-five. “I’d like to ask you another question,” she said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Do you intend to cause him any trouble?”

  “I don’t know,” Dill said. “I might.”

  CHAPTER 10

  At the end of the long hall Daphne Owens stopped before an eight-foot-high pair of double doors and slid them back into the walls. Dill followed her into a large room, which obviously was the mansion’s library, with shelves of books lining three sides. Six tall leaded windows at the room’s far end were rounded into fan tops. The windows overlooked a garden, rather an elaborate one, where three Mexicans were digging something up. As Dill watched, two of them stopped digging, wiped their dripping faces, and started supervising the third man. Beyond the Mexicans and through some fading white roses could be seen the blue of the pool.