by Ross Thomas
Dill looked around. “You’re right. It is.”
“You know its lurid history? The building, I mean.”
He nodded.
“Well, this particular apartment was occupied from 1930 till early last year by one Eleanor Ann Washburn, but then Miss Ellie up and died, leaving it all to me—furniture, clothing, books, paintings, everything—including her memories. It went condominium, you know.”
Dill said he didn’t.
“Back in seventy-two,” she said.
“Why’d she leave it to you?”
“I helped her straighten out the royalties on some oil leases that old Ace Dawson gave her back in the early thirties. She was Ace’s fancy lady. He gave her what she called a slop jar full of leases that played out in the fifties, but when the oil crisis came along—not the one in seventy-three, but the one in seventy-nine—well, it became profitable to start stripping those old wells. So after the oil-company man came around, Miss Ellie sent for me because she said she never met a land man in her life who wasn’t crooked as cat shit and she claimed she ought to know. I got her the best deal I could, which wasn’t bad, and then she went to another lawyer and changed her will and left me her condo and everything in it.”
“And she was Ace Dawson’s girl friend?”
“One of them. She told me he had a half-dozen or so scattered all over the state.”
“I know the guy who bought his house.”
“Jake Spivey,” she said.
“You know Jake?”
“Everybody talks about him, but not too many seem to know him.”
“Like to meet him?”
“You’re serious.”
“Sure.”
“When?”
“Sunday. They’re going to barbecue some ribs and jump in his pool.”
“Sunday,” she said.
Dill nodded.
“What time?”
“We’d start out there about noon.”
“All day then?”
“Probably.”
“Well, I’m no star-fucker, but I’d kill to see the inside of that house.”
Dill grinned. “You think Jake’s a star?”
She shrugged. “In this town he passes for one.” She glanced around the room and frowned. “What’re you standing up for anyway? Sit down.” She indicated an easy chair that was covered in an unworn but faded floral fabric. The flora seemed to be intertwined red and yellow roses with sharp thorns and very pale green stems. Dill sat down. Anna Maude Singe smiled. “Like I said, faded splendor.” She turned and moved toward the hall entrance. “I’ll be back.”
While she was gone, Dill examined the sizable living room and its ten-foot ceiling. The walls were of thick combed cream plaster. The furnishings all smacked of the thirties and forties. There was even a Capehart record player, the automatic kind that picked up the 78-rpm records after they were played and dropped them gently down a padded slot. Dill remembered seeing one in operation at a friend’s house in Alexandria, Virginia. The friend had called it an antique.
The rest of the furniture had sharp angular lines, and it all seemed to be either seldom used or recently upholstered. The colors, except for the faded floral easy chair, were muted shades of brown and tan and cream and off-white, although there were a lot of bright red, yellow, and orange pillows scattered about. Dill thought the pillows went nicely with the large Maxfield Parrish print of Daybreak. He got up to inspect it more closely, trying to figure out whether the teenage figures in it were boys or girls. He was still undecided when Anna Maude Singe returned wearing a cream silk dress whose hem ended just below her knees. Dill thought the dress looked both elegant and expensive. He smiled and said, “You look awfully nice.”
She glanced down at the dress, which had a scooped neck and very short sleeves. “This old thing. I can honestly say that because it’s either forty-eight or forty-nine years old and it’s real Chinese watered silk. Miss Ellie and I were just about the same size—at least, way back then she was. Later, she got a little fat.”
On the way down in the elevator, Anna Maude Singe laid out in succinct fashion what steps Dill should take to collect on his dead sister’s two hundred and fifty thousand-dollar insurance policy. On the way to his parked car, she outlined the obstacles he might encounter if he tried to sell the yellow brick duplex. Dill found her review both concise and objective. As they got into the Ford, he said, “I think I might need a lawyer.”
She shrugged. “You might.”
He put the key in the ignition and started the engine. “You can be my lawyer.”
She said nothing. Dill pulled away from the curb. After driving a block, he said, “Well?”
“I’m thinking.”
“About what?”
“About whether I want to be your lawyer.”
“Christ, I’m not asking you to marry me.”
“It’s not you,” she said. “You’d make a nice dull client. It’s Felicity.”
“Felicity’s dead.”
“I still represent her estate.”
“So?”
“There might be a conflict of interest.”
“My one year of law school, though dimly remembered, tells me that’s just so much bullshit.”
She turned to look at him, resting her back against the door and tucking her feet up beneath her on the seat. “Felicity used to talk to me—confide in me, actually, as both her friend and attorney. Sometimes it’s hard to decide where legal confidentiality begins and ends.”
“You’re not making sense.”
“That’s because I don’t think I should say anything else.”
Dill glared at her and returned his attention to the road ahead. “I’m her goddamned brother,” he said, “not the fucking IRS. My sister’s been killed. She was leading a pretty strange life before they blew her away. She bought a duplex she hardly lived in with money she didn’t have. She took out a two hundred and fifty thousand dollar life insurance policy, paid cash for it, and died three weeks later—right on schedule. Doesn’t anyone wonder—you, for instance—where the hell the money was coming from? Doesn’t anyone, for God’s sake, think the money and the killer might be connected? But all you do is sit there and talk about confidentiality. Jesus, lady, if you know something, go tell the cops. Felicity’s dead. She won’t mind if you reveal her confidences. She won’t mind about anything at all.”
“That’s a red light,” Singe said.
“I know it’s a red light,” Dill said, jamming on the brakes and locking the Ford’s wheels.
They sat at the red light silently until she said, “Okay. I’ll be your lawyer.”
Dill shook his head dubiously. “I don’t know if you’re even smart enough to be my lawyer. After all, I’ve got some awfully complicated affairs that need untangling. I’ve got to sell a house and collect on an insurance policy. That might require some pretty fancy legal footwork. It might even involve writing one letter and making two, maybe even three phone calls.”
“The light’s green,” she said.
“I know it’s green,” Dill said, and sent the car speeding across the intersection.
“Well?” she said.
“Well what?”
“You want me to be your lawyer?”
Dill sighed. “Aw, hell. Why not. What d’you want to eat?”
“Sweetbreads.”
He looked at her and grinned. “Really?”
“I crave sweetbreads,” she said.
“That means Packingtown. Chief Joe’s?”
“Where else.”
“Jesus,” Dill said happily. “Sweetbreads.”
Everything south of the Yellowfork was called Packingtown even though Armour had long gone, as had Swift, and now only Wilson remained to butcher the hogs and the steers and the occasional lamb—occasional because eating lamb was generally held to be kind of a sissy thing to do. The Yellowfork, of course, was the river that everyone described as being a mile wide and an inch deep—not a very original descr
iption, but the city had never placed much of a premium on originality.
Sometimes there was water in the Yellowfork, quite a lot of water, but at other times, like now, it was only a wide meandering river of bright yellow dry sand lined with willows and cottonwoods.
For years the Yellowfork had served the city as a convenient line of economic and social demarcation. South of it lived the poor white and the other, variously colored poor. Although the lines became somewhat smudged after World War Two, it was largely out of convenience and habit that everything south of the Yellowfork was still called Packingtown. JFK High School actually called its football team the Kennedy Packers. And even though all but one of the abattoirs were now gone, there were times, Dill knew, when on a hot summer evening with the wind from the south just right, you could still smell the stench of the doomed and dying cattle. You could even smell it as far north as Cherry Hills.
Dill felt he was almost on automatic pilot as he drove south on Van Buren, east on Our Jack, then turned south again at the Hawkins Hotel onto Broadway. South of the hotel, Broadway maintained its respectability fairly well until it reached South Fourth Street, or Deep Four, as the natives called it. After Deep Four, South Broadway was a mess. South Fourth, Third, Second, and First Streets had once comprised almost the only black enclave north of the Yellowfork. The former ghetto was now fully integrated and populated largely with the dregs of all races, creeds, and sexes—the last being sometimes rather ambiguous. Both the respectable and the not-so-respectable blacks had long since moved as far uptown as they could afford, abandoning the Deep Four area to the lowlife and their often grisly pursuits. Dill remembered his sister had worked the South Broadway—Deep Four area shortly after she transferred into homicide. The area was mostly bars, dives, liquor stores, porno flicks, and small cheap hotels with fancied-up names like the Biltmore, the Homestead, the Ritz, and the Belvedere. There were also a large number of elderly tacked-together frame houses with wide front porches. The people who sat out on the porches looked hot, mean, sullen, and desperate enough to revolt, if only it would cool off some. The temperature shortly after 7 P.M. was 95 degrees. The sun had not yet gone down. A lot of the front-porch sitters drank beer from cans and wore nothing but their underwear. There was no breeze.
“Where’d all the whores come from?” Dill asked as they neared South First Street.
“From the unemployment office,” Singe said. “Felicity used to talk to them sometimes. They all told her it was either fuck or starve.”
They stopped at a red light. A man staggered off the curb, made his way around the front of the Ford, and halted at Dill’s window. The man was about thirty-five. He wore a soiled green undershirt and khaki pants. Dill couldn’t see his shoes. He had blue eyes that seemed to float on small ponds of pink. He needed a shave. Something white and nasty was caked around his mouth. He tapped on Dill’s window with a large rock. Dill rolled the window down.
“Gimme a quarter, mister, or I’ll bust your goddamn windshield,” the man said with absolutely no inflection.
“Fuck off,” Dill said, and rolled up the window. The man stepped back and took careful aim at the windshield with his rock. Dill sped off, running the red light.
“I should’ve given him the quarter.”
“You shouldn’t even have rolled down your window,” Singe said.
Just past South First Street, Broadway started curving right to where the bridge over the Yellowfork began. The four-lane concrete bridge had been built in 1938 and named after the then Secretary of the Interior, Harold F. Ickes. When Truman fired Mac-Arthur in 1951, the city council—almost alight with patriotic glow—had renamed the bridge after the five-star general, but nearly everybody still called it what they had always called it, the First Street Bridge.
As they started up the bridge’s steep approach, Dill asked, “Why didn’t they tear down Deep Four and South Broadway when they were tearing down everything else?”
“They thought about it,” Singe said. “But then they got scared.”
“Of what?”
“Scared all the creeps and weirdos would move someplace else—maybe even next door.”
“Oh,” Dill said.
CHAPTER 16
For dinner they had sweetbreads and okra and black-eyed peas and cole slaw and cornbread, buttermilk to drink, and for dessert, lemon meringue pie. They sat under the bearded head of a bison that had been dead for thirty-nine years. The walls of Chief Joe’s were covered with the stuffed heads of bison, deer, elk, moose, bobcat, mountain lion, coyote, wolf, bighorn sheep, and three kinds of bear. After Dill and Anna Maude Singe finished their dinner they agreed it would be what they’d both order if ever they had to order the last supper.
The restaurant had been started by Joseph Maytubby, who was part Cherokee and part Choctaw with a little Kiowa thrown in. Everyone had called him Chief because that’s what all Indians were called. Maytubby had been an army cook in France during the First World War. He stayed on after the war, married a twenty-three-year-old Frenchwoman, brought her back to the city, and together they started Chez Joseph in 1922. It was only a counter and four tables to begin with, but the food was superb, and once the cattlemen discovered what Madame Maytubby could do with mountain oysters, it became one of the two most popular restaurants in Packingtown. The other was Puncher’s, which specialized in steaks. You could also order a steak at Chief Joe’s, but few ever did, and asked instead for such specialties as sweetbreads, mountain oysters, brains and eggs, lamb stew, real oxtail soup, and the wonderful no-name dish the restaurant prepared from wild duck when it was in season.
The mounted animal heads had begun when a cattleman customer shot a grizzly up in the Canadian Rockies in 1927. He had the head stuffed and presented it to Chief Joe. Not knowing what else to do with it, Chief Joe hung it on the wall. Then everyone else who shot anything started presenting him with their prey’s mounted heads until the walls were covered with glass-eyed animals. Chief Joe died in 1961; his wife in ’66. Their only son, Pierre Maytubby, took over and a few old customers tried to call him Chief Pete, but he wouldn’t stand for it. Under Pierre, the restaurant’s quality remained the same as did the sign outside, which still read Chez Joseph, although no one had ever called it that except Madame Maytubby.
When the coffee and cognac came, Dill leaned back and grinned at Anna Maude Singe. Their table was in front of one of the banquettes, and Singe was seated against the wall directly under the dead bison, who was beginning to look a bit motheaten.
“You like buttermilk with your dinner,” Dill said. “I’m not sure I ever went out with a woman who liked buttermilk with her dinner.”
“I’ve even been known to drink it for breakfast.”
“That takes a certain amount of guts.”
“What do you have for breakfast?”
“Coffee,” Dill said. “It used to be coffee and cigarettes, but I quit smoking. Remarque called coffee and a cigarette the soldier’s breakfast. I read that at an impressionable age.”
“Were you ever a soldier?”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “You were about the right age for Vietnam.”
“I wasn’t in Vietnam.”
“But you were overseas.”
“I was abroad. Civilians go abroad; soldiers go overseas.”
“So you weren’t a soldier.”
“Not.”
“Some guys say they feel guilty now about having missed out on Vietnam.”
“Middle-class college-educated white guys?”
Singe nodded. “They feel they missed out on something they’ll never get another chance at.”
“They did,” Dill said. “They missed out on getting their butts shot off, although I don’t think they would have. You didn’t find too many middle-class college-educated white guys in the line companies.”
“You don’t seem to feel guilty,” she said.
“I had a deferment. I was the sole support of an eleven-year-old orphan.”
“Would you have gone?”
“To Vietnam? I don’t know.”
“Suppose they said, ‘Okay, Dill, you’re drafted. Report down to the Post Office for induction next Tuesday.’ What would you’ve done?”
“I would’ve either gone down to the Post Office or up to Canada. One out of conviction; the other out of curiosity.”
She studied him for several moments. “I think you would’ve gone down to the Post Office.”
Dill smiled. “Maybe not.”
“What’d you do overseas? I mean abroad?”
“Didn’t Felicity tell you?”
“No.”
“I thought she used to talk about me.”
“About when you all were growing up. Not about when you were in Washington or overseas.”
“Abroad.”
She smiled. “Right. Abroad. What’d you do over there?”
“I poked around.”
“Who for?”
“The government.”
Anna Maude Singe frowned, and when she did, Dill smiled. “Don’t worry, I wasn’t with the agency, although I used to bump into them from time to time.”
“What’re those CIA folks really like?” she said. “You read about them. They make picture shows about them. But I never met one. I don’t think I ever came close to meeting one.”
“They were …” Dill paused, trying to remember just how they really had been. He recalled sharp noses and close-set ears and bitten fingernails and prim mouths with self-important expressions. “I guess you’d have to say they were sort of … like me. Stuffy.”
“Stuffy?”
He nodded.
“All of them?” she asked.
“I didn’t know all of them. But Sunday you get to meet one who wasn’t very stuffy.”
“Who?”
“Jake Spivey.”
“Jake Spivey was with the CIA. Good Lord!”
“They won’t admit it, but he was. Maybe Jake’ll tell you some stories. He went to Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia, but he didn’t go out of patriotism, or because he got drafted, or even out of curiosity. Jake went because at twenty-three they were the only outfit around who’d pay him a thousand bucks a week to do whatever he did.”
