Briarpatch

by Ross Thomas

  The centerpiece of Green Glade was a none-too-complicated maze about one-quarter the size of a football field. The maze was composed of swamp privet hedge eight feet tall and a couple of feet thick. There were also gravel paths for strolling and stone benches in convenient nooks where mourners could sit and rest and think long thoughts about life and death and what it all meant. However, the gravel was hard to walk on, the stone benches uncomfortable, and the maze was usually shunned by those who visited the cemetery.

  In the past five years the police department had buried seventeen of its slain officers at Green Glade of Rest. Detective Felicity Dill would make it eighteen. Before the department had bought its own cemetery plot, KOD policemen were buried all over town. KOD stood for Killed on Duty.

  Virtually all of those who had been at the church service also attended the graveside ceremony. As promised, the ceremony was brief. A police chaplain read the Twenty-Third Psalm. A squad of sharpshooters fired a rifle volley. A bugler played “Taps” on a cornet. The stalwart honor guard, doubling as pallbearers, folded the American flag covering the casket into a neat triangle and presented it to Dill, who had not the slightest idea of what to do with it. And then it was over, the dead sister buried, and the time was not yet noon.

  The police department’s KOD plot was up on a slight knoll. With the services over, the mostly uniformed mourners began to walk slowly back down to their cars, skirting the maze. A few lingered on to shake Dill’s hand and murmur their sorrow. As Dill and Anna Maude Singe slowly made their way to the waiting limousine, he shook the offered hands and politely thanked the murmurers.

  Dill and Singe found themselves almost alone not far from the maze when someone tapped Dill on the shoulder. He turned, as did Singe. They found themselves bathed in the angelic glow of the smile that belonged to Clay Corcoran, who had loved the dead sister.

  “I just couldn’t keep away, Mr. Dill,” Corcoran said.

  “Ben,” Dill said.

  “Ben,” Corcoran agreed and turned his warm smile on Singe. “How you, Smokey?”

  Singe said she was fine. The big man’s dazzling smile went away and he turned serious. “I thought it was a swell funeral,” he said. “I think Felicity might’ve giggled a little here and there, but everything went off real nice.”

  Corcoran seemed to be soliciting Dill’s confirmation, so Dill said that he, too, thought it had all gone very well. Corcoran glanced over the heads of Dill and Anna Maude Singe. Behind them the police in their summer uniforms were moving past the maze toward their cars, although at least a fourth of them, mostly those who had brought wives, were now gathered in small gossipy groups.

  Corcoran dropped his deep voice down into what he must have hoped was a confidential mutter. “I told you I was going to snoop around a little?” He had made it a question, so Dill nodded in reply.

  “Well,” Corcoran went on in the same tone, “I think I might’ve come up with something.” Again, he glanced over their heads as if afraid of being overheard. Apparently satisfied, he added, “But I’ve got to ask you a couple of questions first.”

  “Okay,” Dill said.

  “There’s this guy called Jake Spivey who—” Corcoran never finished his sentence, and later Dill thought the big man’s reflexes had been incredible. Corcoran threw a hip into Dill that sent him sailing. He landed four feet away. It was Dill’s first brush with contact sports and he found it strangely exhilarating.

  Before Dill had even landed, Corcoran used his left arm to clothesline Anna Maude Singe and send her sprawling. The pleasant look had fled and Corcoran’s frightener’s scowl was back as he dropped to one knee and clawed at something beneath his right pants leg.

  Dill looked where Corcoran was looking. He saw the large fist and the small gun poking through the thick swamp privet hedge thirty-some feet away. Or perhaps, Dill later thought, the smallness of the gun made the fist look large. He saw the gun fire. He heard the sharp nasty crack of a single shot. Dill turned and saw that it had caught the kneeling Corcoran low in the throat. The big man dropped the small flat .25-caliber automatic he had just snatched from the ankle holster on his right leg. He pressed both hands against the wound in his throat. A moment later, he removed his bloody hands and stared at them in amazement.

  Corcoran knelt there on one knee for two seconds, three seconds, four seconds, then sighed, and slowly lay down on the grass. Blood pumped from his throat. Dill, rising, looked around. The only persons still standing were the wives of the policemen. The policemen themselves had dropped to the grass. Some had dropped flat. A dozen others knelt, their right or left pants legs up, revealing white hairy calves and the small leather holsters that were strapped to them.

  A dozen pistols, mostly flat little automatics much like Corcoran’s, had suddenly blossomed in big fists. The cops with the pistols were swiveling their heads, searching for someone to shoot, someone to arrest. But all they found was other cops—and a lot of them strangers—who were also waving pistols around.

  Dill later thought the silence after the single shot had lasted no more than three or four seconds and not the hour it seemed at the time. One of the policemen’s wives finally screamed at the sight of Corcoran lying on the grass, his knees drawn up almost to his chest, the blood still pumping from his throat. After the scream, the shouting and confusion began.

  Dill was the first to reach Corcoran. The big man’s green eyes were still open, but not quite focused, although he seemed to recognize Dill. He tried to speak, but instead blew a large pink bubble which burst with a tiny plop. Corcoran’s lips moved again and Dill bent to listen. Those watching later said they thought Corcoran managed only three or four words before the blood finally stopped pumping from the wound. Out of Corcoran’s mouth came one last sigh. It formed another pink bubble that popped almost immediately. Then the heart ran out of blood, stopped, and Corcoran was dead.

  Dill slowly rose to his feet. A policeman who seemed to have had medical training knelt quickly by Corcoran and used deft fingers to search for any signs of life. He found none and sat back on his heels, shaking his head.

  Dill helped the trembling Anna Maude Singe to her feet. When he asked if she was hurt, she slowly shook her head no, her eyes fixed on the huge curled-up body of Clay Corcoran. Dill put an arm around Singe to lead her away. He found their path blocked by Captain Gene Colder. A moment later, Chief of Detectives John Strucker rushed up. Colder glanced at Strucker, as if for permission. Strucker granted it with a nod.

  “Tell us quick, Dill,” Colder said in a crisp hard voice. “They say he said something. Could you understand what he said?”

  Dill nodded. “Sure. He said, ‘It hurts. It hurts.’ He said it twice.”

  “That’s all?” Strucker said, the disbelief in his tone, if not on his face.

  “That’s it.”

  Strucker turned to Colder. “You know what to do, Captain. You’d better get at it.”

  “Yes, sir,” Colder said, turned, and hurried away, pointing first at this policeman and then beckoning to that one. It was the only time Dill could remember having heard Colder say sir to Strucker.

  The chief of detectives took a cigar from his breast pocket and slowly stripped away the cellophanelike plastic, not taking his eyes from the body of the dead Corcoran. He wadded the cellophane up into a small ball and flipped it away. Still staring down at Corcoran, he bit off one end of the cigar, spat it out, and lit it with a disposable lighter.

  “You knew him, huh—Corcoran?” Strucker said, still staring at the dead man.

  “He said he used to go with my sister.”

  “That’s right,” Strucker said, finally shifting his gaze to Dill. “He did.”

  “He said he used to be a cop.”

  “He was. Not bad either, although he was a hell of a lot better linebacker. He say what he was doing now?”

  “He claimed he was a private detective,” Dill said. “A frightener, he called it.”

  Strucker smiled, but it was a s
mall grim one that vanished almost immediately. “He wasn’t bad at that either, although he was better at football than anything else. He just came down and introduced himself to you where—at the hotel?”

  “Right.”

  “What’d you talk about?”

  “My sister, what else?”

  “He tell you how she’d dropped him sudden-like?”

  “Yes.”

  “He still steamed about it?”

  “He seemed more resigned than anything else—resigned and sad, of course.”

  Strucker turned to Anna Maude Singe. “You knew him, too, didn’t you, Miss Singe?”

  “Yes. Quite well.”

  “What happened here—a few moments ago?”

  “I’m not absolutely sure.”

  Strucker puffed on his cigar, blew smoke up into the air and away from Singe. He nodded at her encouragingly. “Just tell me what you saw and what you remember.”

  She frowned. “Well, Clay came up to us and said he thought it was a nice funeral and everything seemed to have gone off quite well. Mr. Dill agreed and then Clay said he’d been looking around, or poking around, maybe, and that he needed to ask Mr. Dill something. But then, well, then I guess he saw something behind us—behind Mr. Dill and me—because after that everything happened awfully fast. He bumped Mr. Dill—”

  Dill interrupted. “He gave me a hip shot.”

  Strucker nodded and again smiled encouragingly at Singe.

  “Then his arm snapped out like this,” she said, demonstrating how Corcoran’s arm had moved. “And the next thing I knew I was flat on my back.”

  “Clotheslined her?” Strucker asked Dill.

  “Apparently.”

  “Then I heard the shot,” Anna Maude Singe went on, “and I looked up and saw Clay, except he was down on one knee by then, kneeling, and he had his pants leg up and a little gun in his hand. But he dropped the gun and his hands went up to his throat and came away bloody. After that, he just decided to lie down. It looked like that anyway. He lay down and his knees came up to his chest and he just—he just curled up and died.”

  She looked away then. “You all right?” Strucker asked.

  She nodded. “Yes. I’m all right.”

  Strucker turned to Dill. “What’d you see?”

  “The same thing—except I also saw a hand poking a gun through the hedge right about there.” Dill pointed to where a knot of policemen were down on their hands and knees in their dress uniforms making a careful search of the cemetery grass near the spot in the privet hedge Dill had indicated. He assumed they were looking for a spent cartridge.

  Strucker watched them for a moment and dolefully shook his head. “Look at ’em,” he said. “All in uniform and alike as peas in a pod. He could’ve got himself an out-of-town uniform somewhere, gone to the funeral, come out here, shot Corcoran, and ducked out the other side of the maze. Could’ve happened like that.”

  “Maybe,” Dill said.

  Strucker looked at him with renewed interest. “What d’you mean, maybe?”

  “The one time I talked to Corcoran, he told me he did a lot of bodyguard work. Maybe that’s what he did here—almost by reflex. He got Anna Maude and me out of the way and then went for the shooter—except it didn’t work out too well.”

  Strucker puffed thoughtfully on his cigar, coughed twice, and then nodded—a bit grudgingly, Dill thought. “And the shooter was after who?” Strucker said. “You?”

  Dill looked at Singe. “Or her.”

  Singe’s eyes went wide for a second and her mouth dropped open, but snapped shut so she could form the M in her startled “me?”

  “Maybe,” Dill said.

  “Why the hell me?”

  “For that matter,” Dill said, “why the hell anyone?”

  CHAPTER 21

  At police headquarters, Sergeant Mock waited outside in the limousine while Dill and Singe made brief statements into a tape recorder. He then drove them back to the Hawkins Hotel. The question Dill had been expecting didn’t come until he and Singe rode the elevator down to the basement garage and were seated in the rented Ford with its engine idling and its air-conditioning turned as high as it would go. Outside, the First National Bank’s time and temperature sign was reporting 101 degrees at 1:31 P.M.

  “Why didn’t you tell them what Clay said about Jake Spivey?” Anna Maude Singe asked.

  “What’d he say?”

  “He said, ‘There’s this guy called Jake Spivey who—.’” She paused. “That’s verbatim.”

  “There’s this guy called Jake Spivey who what?” Dill said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Neither do I, and that’s why I didn’t tell them. Why didn’t you?”

  “You’re my client.”

  “That’s not it,” Dill said and backed the Ford out of its parking slot.

  “Maybe,” she said, “maybe I didn’t because Clay could’ve been about to say, ‘There’s this guy called Jake Spivey who asked me to come out to his house Sunday for barbecue and a jump in his pool and I understand you all are coming, too.’ Or …” She fell silent.

  “Or what?” Dill said as he drove up the ramp.

  “I don’t know.”

  They came out on Our Jack Street, drove to a red light at the corner of Broadway, stopped, and turned right on red—a logical practice the city had come up with in 1929, which later was borrowed without acknowledgment by California.

  After driving north for two blocks on Broadway, Dill said, “You hungry?”

  “No.”

  “Finish your ‘or’ then.”

  “Or,” she said, “there’s this guy called Jake Spivey who asked me to be his bodyguard and keep somebody from killing him.”

  “That’s not bad,” Dill said.

  She shook her head, rejecting all suppositions. “The variations are endless,” she said. “And meaningless.”

  “You sure you’re not hungry?” he asked.

  “I’d like a drink.”

  “Okay, we’ll stop somewhere and you can have a drink and I’ll have a sandwich and a drink.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then,” Dill said, “well, then we’ll go see where Felicity really lived.”

  Anna Maude Singe changed her mind and had a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich along with a Bloody Mary in Binkie’s Bar and Grille. The “e” on the end of Grille had troubled Dill, but inside the place was inviting enough despite too much butcher block and too many plants. He ordered a beer and a cheeseburger. The cheeseburger turned out to be superb. Singe said her BLT was also excellent.

  After she ate the last of the sandwich and licked a little mayonnaise from a finger, she said, “What do you expect to find?”

  “In her garage apartment?”

  Singe nodded.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Haven’t the cops already been there?”

  “Yes. Sure.”

  “Then what’re you looking for?”

  “For some small trace of my sister,” Dill said. “So far, there doesn’t seem to be any.”

  The big house sat just across the street from Washington Park. The park was composed of a deeply sunken twenty-five acres that had got that way because it once had been a brickyard. The clay that had been dug out of the yard had gone into the red common brick used in the construction of most of the city’s houses prior to 1910. After that, the city grew in a sudden spurt, land prices rose, and the area around the brickyard became economically attractive to real estate speculators—except nobody wanted to live next to where bricks were made. The city quickly decided progress and profit were far more important than bricks. It condemned the brickyard and turned the twenty-five-acre hole in the ground into Washington Park. It was in the park’s public pool that both Benjamin Dill and Jake Spivey had learned to swim.

  The old brick house was a sprawling, three-story affair built in 1914 with wide eaves and a huge screened porch. Its sixteen rooms sat on a choice corner lot tha
t was two hundred feet deep and one hundred fifty feet wide. For trees there were elms, dogwood, locust, two apricots, and a peach. At the rear on the alley was the two-story carriage house where the dead detective was said to have lived.

  After parking the Ford on Nineteenth Street, Dill and Anna Maude Singe walked along the sidewalk to the alley. There Dill fished out the key Captain Colder had given him and used it to unlock the downstairs door. Inside was a steep flight of narrow stairs. There were no windows in the stairwell, which made it both dark and stifling. Dill felt around, found a wall switch, and turned it on. A forty-watt bulb provided light. He started up the stairs, followed by Anna Maude Singe.

  At the top of the stairs was a small landing, no more than three by four feet. Dill used the same key in the lock of the second door. It worked. He pushed the door open, went in, found the light switch, flicked it on, and knew immediately that Felicity Dill had indeed lived there.

  For one thing, there were the books: two solid walls of them, plus neat piles on the floor and in the deep sills of the four dormer windows that looked out over the alley. A GE air-conditioning unit was also wedged into one of the windows. Dill went over and switched it on. He picked up one of the books and noticed it had been published by a state university press. As he flipped through it he read the title aloud to Singe: “Beekeeping in Eighteenth Century New England.” The pages were underlined and annotated. Dill put the book back and turned to inspect the rest of the room.

  Near where Singe stood was a large deep winged armchair with an ottoman. A curved brass floor lamp was arranged so its light would come over the left shoulder of the seated reader. Dill remembered being taught that in grade school. The reading light should always come over the left shoulder. He had never understood why and tried to remember if he had passed on the curious notion to Felicity. He didn’t think it was still taught in school.

  “It’s her room all right,” he said.

  Singe picked up a glazed blue-and-yellow vase from the coffee table, examined it, and put it back down. “I remember when she bought this,” Singe said. “We went to a garage sale. That’s where Felicity bought a lot of her things—at garage sales. She said it gave everything a desperate air—even dramatic.”