Briarpatch

by Ross Thomas

  “Let me ask you something,” Dill said, his smile now almost ablaze with warmth, understanding, and compassion.

  Colder apparently didn’t believe the smile for a moment. He took his elbows off the table and leaned back in his chair. It was a defensive position. When he replied his voice had resumed its utter-stranger tone. “Ask me what?”

  “Where did Felicity live?” Dill carefully kept his smile alight.

  “Thirty-second and Texas,” Colder said without hesitation.

  The smile went out and Dill shook his head regretfully. “I guess I didn’t phrase it right.”

  “You asked where she lived. I told you. Thirty-second and Texas.”

  “That’s where she camped out,” Dill said. “I was there this afternoon. I poked around. Nobody lived there. Nobody. Somebody kept some clothes there. Somebody had a cup of coffee there once in a while. Now and then, somebody even slept there. But nobody lived there. At least, nobody named Felicity Dill. So what I’m asking, I guess, is where did Felicity really live? Your place? Is that where she spattered the stove with her rémoulade sauce, and read nine books at once and left most of them open on the floor, and smoked her two packs of Luckies a day, and weighed herself at least twice, and kept her kitchen stocked with enough food to last two months even if she knew she’d throw a lot of it out? That was my sister, Captain. That’s how she lived. She wasn’t obsessively neat. She didn’t hang mail-order Impressionist prints on her wall. Give Felicity five minutes in a room, any room, and she made it look like she’d lived there forever. She was a nester, Captain, and she built her nests with things—odd things, funny things, even dumb things like the fire hydrant she bought when she was fifteen, welded the cut-down washtub on top of, and turned it into the frontyard birdbath.” Dill took a deep breath, held it for a long moment, then let it out and asked in a quiet, reasonable voice, “So where did she live, Captain?”

  Lucille the waitress arrived with two beers and served them. She started to say something to Colder, but changed her mind when she saw his expression, and hurried away. Colder, still staring at Dill, put his left hand in his pants pocket, picked up his beer with his right hand, and drank several swallows.

  After Colder put the beer down, he said, “Fillmore and Nineteenth. Know it?”

  Dill ran the map of the city through his memory. The map proved to be indelible. “Fillmore dead-ends at the park, Washington Park, and then picks up on the other side. There’re some old houses on the corner there. Very large old houses.”

  “Southwest corner. Seventeen thirty-eight Fillmore. An architect bought it and turned it into apartments. There’s a garage apartment out back. On the alley. That was Felicity’s.” His left hand came out of his pocket and placed a single key on the table next to Dill’s beer. “That’s the key.”

  Dill looked at the key and then up at Colder. He thought that for a second he saw something in the other man’s eyes. Perhaps pain. But it went away almost immediately. “Why two places?” Dill asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you knew about both places.”

  “Christ, yes, I knew. Look, friend, maybe you should try to get something straight: I was going to marry her. Not because she could do my career any good. Not because she was rich. Not because she—aw hell. I loved her. That’s why I was going to marry her.”

  The pain, Dill saw, was back in Colder’s eyes. It didn’t go away this time. “What’d she say—about having two places?”

  “She said the other one, the duplex, was an investment for you and her. She said you were thinking of coming back here to live. She said you’d helped her buy it.”

  “She said that?”

  Colder nodded, the pain in his eyes threatening to spread across the rest of his face.

  “She lied,” Dill said.

  “Yeah,” Colder said. “We both know that now, don’t we.”

  CHAPTER 14

  After leaving Captain Colder, Dill went back down into the hotel’s basement garage, retrieved the file on Jake Spivey from the Ford’s glove compartment, and took the elevator from the garage up to the ninth floor. He planned to call Timothy Dolan in Washington and read him some of the more relevant passages from Spivey’s deposition.

  Dill unlocked the door to 981, pushed it open, and entered the room. He turned to close the door and the arm went around his neck. It was a thick arm, very muscular, very strong. Dill just had time to think chokehold and to notice that the arm’s owner was neither panting nor breathing hard. Maybe he does it for a living, Dill thought, and then, with his oxygen and carotid artery shut off, and without enough air going down into his lungs and not enough blood flowing up into his brain, Dill lost consciousness and came to nine minutes later.

  He found himself lying on the floor beside the bed. The first thing he did after opening his eyes was swallow. Nothing had been crushed. Nothing even hurt very much—only a slight soreness in his throat that he felt would soon disappear. It’s not much worse than it was when Jake and I found out how to do it to each other in the fifth grade, Dill thought. Except we didn’t know it was called the carotid then. We just thought it was a neat way to pass out.

  He sat up slowly, even warily, and looked around to see if the chokehold expert was still present. He wasn’t. Dill patted his jacket breast pocket for his wallet. It was there. He took it out, looked inside, and counted the money. None had been taken. His watch was still on his left wrist. Dill got to his knees, then to his feet, and looked around for the file on Jake Spivey. It was only a brief glance, devoid of hope. He knew the file would be gone and it was.

  Dill sat down on the bed and gingerly explored his throat with his right hand. The slight soreness was already going away. The brain damage would be minimal, he told himself, a few hundred thousand cells lost at most, but there are millions more and since you don’t use them very much anyway, you’re just as smart as ever, which means you can still cross wide streets by yourself.

  He tried to remember all he could about the attacker. He remembered the forearm. It was one hell of a forearm, the right one probably, because the left hand would have been locked around the right wrist, exerting the pressure. Then there had been that easy, normal breathing. He didn’t exactly panic while waiting for you to show up. His nerves, if he has any, are in fine shape. And his pulse rate probably shoots up to around seventy-two when he gets excited—if he ever does. Dill didn’t need to feel his own pulse to know it was racing.

  And since his attacker had done it so smoothly and with so little apparent effort, Dill decided he must have done it frequently in the past, which possibly indicates, Inspector, that before turning to his life of crime, he may well have been an honest policeman, or even a dishonest one, possibly from Los Angeles, where all chokehold champions are said to dwell. And this one could easily have qualified for the chokehold Olympics. There was the chance, of course, that he could have picked up his craft elsewhere. He could be a slightly crazed veteran of the Special Forces, a graying Green Beret, who’d learned all about chokeholds and silent killing down at Bragg, practiced them to perfection in Vietnam, and now peddled his hard-won skills to whoever would buy. Learn a trade in the army, they’d advised him, and he had.

  Dill rose from the bed, crossed to the bottle of Old Smuggler that still sat on the writing desk, opened it, sniffed its contents suspiciously (for what? he asked himself. Cyanide?), poured slightly more than two ounces into a glass, and drank it down. It burned slightly and made him shudder, but no more so than usual.

  After putting the glass down, Dill picked up the telephone, closed his eyes, remembered the number he wanted, and dialed it. It was answered on the third ring by the voice of Daphne Owens, who again recited the phone number’s last four digits.

  “This is Ben Dill again. I’d like to speak to Jake for a minute.”

  “Just a moment,” she said, and ten seconds later Spivey was on the line, brimming with his usual good cheer. “I was about to call you, good buddy.”
/>   “What about?”

  “Sunday. You’re still gonna be in town Sunday, right? Well, the weatherman says it’s gonna be another scorcher so I thought you might like to come out here and barbecue some ribs and jump in the pool and goggle some half-naked ladies. Spend the day.”

  “Sounds good,” Dill said. “Maybe I’ll bring one.”

  “A half-naked lady?”

  “Right.”

  “I sure admire the way you smooth city boys operate.”

  “I’ve got a problem, Jake.”

  “Big or little?”

  “Little. I lost your deposition.”

  Spivey was silent for several moments. “Lost it?”

  “Through carelessness.”

  “I guess I should ask where you lost it, and then you could say if you knew where you lost it, you’d go find it. So where’d you lose it?”

  “I had it in my attaché case,” Dill lied. “I put the case down at the newsstand here in the hotel to look at some magazines and when I reached down for it, it was gone.”

  “Lot of that going on downtown,” Spivey said. “What else was in your case?”

  Dill decided to embroider his tale. “My airline ticket, some papers, but nothing important. I was wondering if you could come up with another copy of your deposition.”

  “Nothing to it. All I have to do is ask one of the girls to push a button and the printer’ll spit out another one. Goddamn computers are something, aren’t they?” Before Dill could reply, Spivey went on, his tone musing. “Nothing in that deposition anyway. I mean nothing I gotta worry about. Tell you what, I’ll have ’em print up another copy, get Daffy to notarize it, and send it down by one of my Mexican folks. Should be there in about an hour in case you’ve gotta call your people back in Washington and tell ’em what a fine job of work you’re doing down here.”

  “You’re a brick, Jake.”

  “Sure wish I knew how you spelled that. Now Sunday, why don’t you come on out here about noon, you and your lady friend?”

  “That sounds fine.”

  “See you Sunday then.”

  Dill thanked Spivey again and hung up. He stood, staring down at the phone, carefully memorizing the lies he had told Spivey, picked up the phone again, dialed eleven numbers, listened to the long-distance crackles and beeps, the ringing phone, and then the voice of Timothy Dolan saying, “Dolan.”

  “It’s Ben, Tim.”

  “I’ve got some news. Clyde Brattle’s back.”

  “Back where?”

  “In the States. He crossed over from Canada.”

  “But they didn’t spot him, right?”

  “Not until two days later when one of them finally decided, hey, that guy looked kinda familiar, went through his mug book, and recognized Brattle.”

  “Where was this?”

  “Detroit.”

  “When?”

  Dolan either sighed or blew out some cigar smoke. “Ten days ago, but nobody ever got around to letting us know until this afternoon. The Senator’d already taken off for Santa Fe and some weekend politicking and I haven’t been able to reach him yet. He’s gonna raise all kinds of hell. I’ve raised my fair share already.”

  “Why do you think Brattle came back?”

  “I’d say he might need to clear up a few loose ends.”

  “Like Spivey?”

  “Maybe. You talk to him yet?”

  “This afternoon.”

  “He agree to give you a deposition?”

  “He already gave it to me, fully sworn.”

  “Anything in it?”

  “It’s what’s not in it that’s interesting.”

  “What’s he want for what’s not in it—immunity?”

  “Right.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “I nodded.”

  “Well, he can’t get a nod on tape.”

  “There’s something else,” Dill said.

  “I don’t like your tone, Ben. It hints of calamity and unmitigated disaster.”

  “I got mugged.”

  “Jesus. When?”

  “About fifteen minutes ago in my hotel room. They got the file on Spivey.”

  “What else?”

  “That’s all they wanted.”

  “They?”

  “He was big enough to be a they. He used a chokehold on me, and no, I’m not hurt, but it was kind of you to ask.”

  “I’m thinking,” Dolan said. “The file itself isn’t important. We’ve got copies.”

  “And Spivey’s going to send me another copy of his deposition. I told him somebody’d stolen my attaché case.”

  “You haven’t got an attaché case.”

  “Spivey doesn’t know that.”

  There was silence from the Washington end until Dolan said, “I was thinking some more. What was in the deposition—between the lines?”

  “Between the lines, if I heard and read it right, Jake Spivey could hang Clyde Brattle, if he wanted to, and if we’d grant him immunity so he wouldn’t hang himself at the same time.”

  “After Detroit,” Dolan said slowly, “I wonder where Brattle went.”

  “You’re not wondering, you’re suggesting he’s right here and that he wanted a quick peek at Spivey’s file.”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  “Maybe I’d better warn Jake.”

  “Go ahead, but if Clyde Brattle wants him dead, he’s dead. Our problem is to keep Spivey alive long enough to—” Dolan broke off. “Look, if I can get it cleared up here, talk to the chairman and to that shit, Clewson, well …” His voice trailed off. Clewson was Norman Clewson, the subcommittee’s majority counsel. Dolan despised him. “I can do it,” he said suddenly.

  “Do what?”

  “Schedule a subcommittee hearing down there for next Tuesday or Wednesday. The Senator can chair it. Hell, it’s on his way back. I’ll come down and we’ll hold it in the federal building, give Spivey immunity, and let him talk his head off while he’s still alive.”

  “They’ll never clear it,” Dill said.

  “They’ll clear it,” Dolan said, his tone confident. “They won’t have any fucking choice after I tell ’em if they don’t, they’ll never get Jake Spivey’s unvarnished testimony because he’ll goddamn well be dead.”

  “You really believe that?”

  Dolan paused a short moment before answering. “Sure. Don’t you?”

  “You don’t know Jake as well as I do.”

  “You mean Brattle might be the dead one?”

  “He might.”

  “What the hell, Ben. If you’re right, we still come out ahead.”

  CHAPTER 15

  At three minutes to six that Friday evening, Anna Maude Singe, the lawyer, answered her office phone with a crisp and businesslike “Anna Maude Singe.”

  “This is Ben Dill.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well. Hi.”

  “I wasn’t sure I’d catch you.”

  “I was just leaving.”

  “The reason I’m calling is that they—they being the cops—are sending a limousine for me tomorrow, and I was wondering if you’d care to go with me to the services and then on out to the cemetery.”

  There was a brief silence until Singe finally said, “Yes. I’d like that.” There was another pause and then she said, “I need to talk to you anyway.”

  “What about tonight?” Dill said.

  “Tonight?”

  “Dinner.”

  “You mean like a real date?”

  “Reasonably close.”

  “With real food.”

  “That I can promise.”

  “Well, it sounds better than Lean Cuisine. Where’ll I meet you?”

  “Why don’t I pick you up?”

  “You mean at home?”

  “Sure.”

  “Christ,” she said, “it really is like a real date, isn’t it?”

  Anna Maude Singe lived at Twenty-second and Van Buren in a seven-story apartment building that had been
built in early 1929 by that same syndicate of oil men who later bought the bankrupt speculator’s skyscraper. Ostensibly, the oil men built the faintly Georgian building to house the parents of the new oil rich who didn’t want the old folks underfoot anymore. It was a well-thought-out, carefully designed building, and the new oil rich promptly snapped up long leases—only to discover that their parents balked at the idea of apartment living (most thought it wicked) and refused to set foot in the place.

  The syndicate members, stuck in 1930 with what seemed to be a white elephant, had shrugged and lodged their own girl friends and mistresses in what came to be known derisively as the Old Folks Home, although its real name was the Van Buren Towers.

  It was a solid, extremely well-built structure that employed a lavish amount of Italian marble, especially in the rather gaudy bathrooms. Later, as the oil men and their paramours aged, parted, and died, the apartments began commanding premium rents, with two-bedroom units going in late 1941 for as much as a hundred dollars a month. To the delight of the lucky tenants at the time, it was there that rents were frozen by wartime controls until late in 1946.

  Dill had been in the building only once, and that was back in 1959 when evil Jack Sackett had invited him and Jake Spivey up to meet Sackett’s “Aunt Louise,” a thirty-three-year-old beauty who turned out to be the well-kept girl friend of Sackett’s father, then the Speaker of the state House of Representatives. Aunt Louise had served her young gentlemen callers Coca-Cola and bourbon and later led them one by one into her bedroom. Dill and Spivey were not quite fourteen. Sackett, the future premier pool hustler of the West Coast, was fifteen. It remained for Dill a memorable summer afternoon.

  As he waited in the Van Buren’s marble lobby for the lone elevator that would lift him up to the fifth floor, Dill noticed how the lobby’s rugs were now a bit frayed, its walls soiled by sticky fingers, and its thick glass door in need of washing. In the elevator, which smelled of dog urine, he tried to remember Aunt Louise’s apartment number, but couldn’t. Dill knew better than to hope Anna Maude Singe’s number would be the same.

  She was wearing a striped, nubby cotton caftan when she opened the door after he pushed the ivory-colored button. She smiled and stepped back. As he went in, she said, “Welcome to faded splendor.”