by Ross Thomas
“Fine,” Strucker said, turned back to Spivey and added, “We can go over all that this afternoon.”
Spivey rose. “We’ll work something out.”
“Guess I’d best go mix and mingle,” Strucker said, grinned and left. Spivey thoughtfully watched him go. After Strucker closed the twin sliding doors, Spivey smiled at Dill. “Thinks he’d like to be mayor. That’s for starters.”
“What’s for afters?”
“Congressman. Or governor. Or senator. One of ’em anyway. The vote bug’s done bit him.” Spivey smiled again. “Course, his wife’s been egging him on some. You meet her?”
“I saw her.”
“She’s something. Rich as greases, like we used to say till you found out who Croesus was.”
“Speaking of money, Jake, I need some. Today.”
Spivey frowned. “Jesus, Pick, it’s Sunday. How much you need?”
“A thousand in cash.”
Spivey’s frown went away. “Shit, I thought you said money.” He reached into a pocket of his faded jeans and brought out a roll of bills that was bound with a rubber band. He snapped off the band and counted ten one-hundred-dollar bills onto the desk, picked them up, and offered the money to Dill. After Dill accepted it, Spivey snapped the band back around the roll. It was still more than three inches in diameter. Dill took out his checkbook, sat down at the desk, and started writing a check.
“You ain’t short, are you?” Spivey asked. “If you’re short, just mail it to me sometime.”
“I’m not short,” Dill said, tore out the check, and handed it to Spivey, who folded and tucked it away in the pocket of his blue chambray shirt without looking at it.
“Want a beer?” Spivey asked.
“Sure.”
Spivey sat down, took two cans of Michelob from his desk refrigerator, and handed one to Dill. After opening his beer, Spivey drank several long swallows, smiled with pleasure, and said, “First one today, if you don’t count the one I had with breakfast, which I don’t.”
“Who’re all your pretty new friends?” Dill asked.
Spivey grinned. “You mean the young and the restless out there? Well, sir, lemme tell you who they are. They’re all veterans of our recent turbulent past. In sixty-five you’d’ve found a couple of ’em out in Haight-Ashbury. Or down in Selma. Or in sixty-seven marching with Mailer on the Pentagon. But when all that shit ended they came back home and went back to school, or into daddy’s oil company, or his bank, or his construction company, or married somebody who did, and registered independent and made a pot of money and voted for Reagan, or for old John Anderson anyway, and now that they’re forty, or prid near, they figure they’re ready to do some real moving and shaking. After all, they got their weight back down, and they’re doing aerobics, and they don’t smoke dope no more, except maybe a little on Saturday night, and they don’t do coke hardly at all and never ever touch hard liquor. So now, by God, they figure it’s time they went and did their civic duty and elected somebody to something. Well, I’m kind of their glorified political guru and precinct captain on account of I got the most money except for Dora Lee Strucker, who’s got more money’n anybody.”
“And Strucker’s your boy?” Dill said.
“Providing the Hartshornes’ll go along, which I reckon they will.”
“A law-and-order mayor, right?” Dill said.
Spivey grinned. “You ain’t for lawnorder?—which you notice is one word in this house.”
Dill smiled, drank some of his beer, and then gazed up at the ceiling. “You might pull it off, Jake.”
“What I figure I’m really doing is growing my own briarpatch. Grow it high enough and thick enough, there ain’t nobody gonna come poking around in it.” He paused. “Except maybe that kid Senator of yours.”
“I talked to him,” Dill said, still staring up at the ceiling.
“And?”
Dill shifted his gaze from the ceiling to Spivey. “I think he’s going to fuck you over, Jake.”
Spivey nodded calmly. “He’s going with Clyde, huh?”
“I think he thinks he can nail you both.”
“No way he can nail Brattle good without me, and he won’t get me unless I get immunity.” Spivey lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and blew smoke at the ceiling. “You see my boy on the gate?”
“I saw him.”
“And the kid parking cars?”
“I saw him, too.”
“I figure old Clyde’s gonna come after me.”
“Himself?”
“Lord, no. He’ll get Harley and Sid to find somebody.” Spivey chuckled. “Maybe they’ve already run an ad in Soldier of Fortune. Or maybe Sid’ll try it himself. Old Sid likes that kinda shit.”
“You want to talk to the Senator?”
“When?”
“Tomorrow. He and Dolan are coming in at four.”
“When’s he seeing Brattle?”
“At seven.”
“What d’you think, Pick, should I go first or last?”
Dill didn’t hesitate. “First.”
“Why?”
“Because maybe I can get you some insurance.”
“What’ll it cost me?”
“How much leverage have you got with Strucker?”
Spivey shrugged. “Enough, I reckon. What d’you want?”
“I want him to sit down and tell me the facts.” Dill paused. “Whatever they are.”
“About Felicity?”
Dill nodded.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Jake Spivey said.
Dill did not meet Dora Lee Strucker until after he performed a not quite perfect half gainer off the twelve-foot board. As he went into the water he thought his back could have been a trifle straighter, but he also knew it was still a fairly good dive. Diving was the only sport Dill had ever participated in seriously—probably because it was essentially a solitary sport. He had pursued it through junior and senior high school, and well into his freshman year in college, when he realized he would never be any better than he was at that instant, which was not quite good enough. He had abandoned it without regret and even with some sense of relief. The only diving he did now was into the pool at the Watergate gym when the mood seized him, as it did fitfully every two weeks or so.
When he climbed out of the pool, Anna Maude Singe clapped mockingly three times and said, “Show-off.” She was wearing a dark-red swimsuit consisting of two small triangles up above and a mere suggestion of something down below.
If she took everything off, Dill thought, she would look a lot less naked. He said, “I just wanted to see if the brain could still tell the body what to do.”
“I don’t think you’ve met Mrs. Strucker, have you?” Singe said and turned to the woman in the one-piece black suit. “Ben Dill.”
Mrs. Strucker held out a hand. Dill found she had a firm strong grip and a firm strong voice that said, “I thought it was a beautiful dive.”
Dill thanked her and sat down next to Singe, who was seated crosslegged on a large towel. Mrs. Strucker was in a chair made out of aluminum tubes and plastic webbing. She had long tanned solid-looking legs, not quite heavy hips, a very small waist, large firm-looking breasts, and magnificent shoulders. An abundance of ink-black hair was piled up on top of her head. Below it was a bold face: high-cheekboned and black-eyed and wide-mouthed. There was also a touch of the hawk in her nose, an attractive touch, and Dill wondered if she’d had some Indian ancestors and how she had come to be so rich. He guessed her age at forty-three, although she could easily shave five years off that should the need arise. Chief of Detectives Strucker, he decided, had married well.
Singe said, “I was telling Mrs. Strucker—”
Mrs. Strucker interrupted. “Dora Lee, please.”
“Right. I was telling Dora Lee here how you and Jake Spivey go back years.”
“Eons,” Dill said.
Singe grinned. “How long’s an eon anyway?”
“Two or more eras, I believe,” Mrs. Strucker
said, and since that had a faintly geological ring to it, Dill decided she must have made her money in oil. Or her ex-husband had. Or her father. Or somebody. She smiled and added, “Which is quite a while.”
“That’s about how long I’ve known Jake,” Dill said. “Quite a while.”
“Has he always been so—well, so damned optimistic?” Mrs. Strucker asked.
Dill made a small gesture that took in the pool and the house and the grounds. “Maybe he’s got good reason to be,” he said with a smile. “It’s the Micawber syndrome. Something’s bound to turn up, and for Jake it always does and always has.”
“You don’t sound in the least envious, Mr. Dill—or Ben, if you don’t mind sudden old-pal familiarity.”
“Not at all,” Dill said. “I mean, I’m not at all jealous of Jake and I don’t at all mind being called Ben.”
“I’ve noticed,” she said, “that one old friend’s good fortune is sometimes another old friend’s despair.”
“You’re probably right,” Dill said. “When somebody you know fails, your immediate reaction is, Thank God it’s him and not me. But when somebody you know succeeds, it’s, Why him, Lord, and not me? But as for Jake—well, I think of Jake as sort of a walking miracle: you don’t quite believe it, but you sure as hell hope it’s true.”
“You’re very fond of him, aren’t you?”
“Of Jake? Let’s say Jake and I understand each other and always have. It goes a little beyond fondness.”
“Johnny—that’s my husband—says Jake Spivey’s the smartest man he ever met.”
“I’m not sure what your husband means by smart. I think Jake may be the shrewdest man I ever met, the most cunning, the most—”
“Wily?” Singe suggested.
“And the most wily.”
Mrs. Strucker examined Dill carefully, a half-smile on her lips. “I also have the feeling that you trust him implicitly.”
Before Dill could tell her she was dead wrong, Jake Spivey’s voice boomed from twenty feet away. “Who’s that pretty little half-naked thing there that nobody’s introduced me to yet?”
Dill turned and said, “She’s not so little.”
When Spivey reached them, he grinned down at Anna Maude Singe and said, “By God, you’re right, Pick, she ain’t.”
“Jake Spivey,” Dill said, “meet Anna Maude Singe, my sweetie.”
“Sweetie!” Spivey said. “Damned if you don’t use old-timey words.” He was still grinning down at Singe. “You know what he calls me sometimes? He calls me a brick, except you gotta listen real close to make sure how he’s pronouncing it.” Spivey shifted his grin to Mrs. Strucker. “How you doing, Dora Lee?”
“Quite nicely, Jake; thank you.”
“Well, that’s fine. We’re gonna eat in about thirty minutes so lemme know if there’s something you all need.”
“There is one thing,” Singe said.
“What’s that, darlin’?”
“If I stand on my head and eat a bug, will somebody give me a tour of your house?”
Spivey cocked his head and smiled down at her. “You grow up rich or poor, Anna Maude?”
“Sort of poor.”
“Then I’ll give you Jake Spivey’s personally escorted poor folks, lawdy-lookit-that tour of the Ace Dawson mansion.”
Singe rose quickly to her feet. “No kidding?”
“No kiddin’.” He turned to Dill. “By the way, Pick, that fella you wanted to see. I think he’s waiting for you in the library.”
“Thanks.”
Spivey turned back to Singe. “Let’s go, sugar.”
Chief of Detectives Strucker didn’t smile or even nod this time when Dill, dressed again in shirt and slacks, came into the library. Strucker was seated in front of Spivey’s large desk and Dill, for a moment, thought of sitting behind it, but immediately discarded the idea as silly. Strucker was also wearing casual clothes—an expensive dark-blue sport shirt, ice-cream slacks, and a pair of new-looking Top-siders with thick-ribbed white socks. Dill thought Strucker wore the outfit like a new and uncomfortable uniform.
As soon as Dill sat down in the other chair in front of the desk, Strucker said, “Your sister was on the take.”
Dill said nothing. The silence grew. They stared at each other and the older man’s gaze somehow managed to be both impassive and unforgiving. It was the gaze of someone who had long ago determined the real difference between right and wrong—and who should get the blame. It was a gaze without pity. It was the law’s gaze. Finally, Dill said, “How much?”
Strucker looked up at the ceiling as if trying to do a difficult sum in his head. He also fished a cigar from his shirt pocket. “In eighteen months,” he said, and lit the cigar with a wooden match. “Give or take a week.” He made sure the cigar was going well. “We figure ninety-six thousand two hundred and eighty-three dollars passed through her hands.” He waved the match out and dropped it into an ashtray on Spivey’s desk. “About one-two-five-o a week or a little less if you wanta average it out.” He paused to reexamine the cigar’s burning tip. “We also know where some of it went: on the duplex; on the insurance policy she took out; the rent for that other place she had—the garage apartment—but there’s still about fifty thousand missing.” He puffed on the cigar. “The fifty grand’s kind of interesting.”
Dill nodded. “It’s just about what she’d’ve needed for the balloon payment.”
“Just about.”
“Why’d you feed all that crap about her to the Tribune and then make damn sure they ran it?”
Strucker shrugged. “Publicity is often the most useful tool in any investigation. You know that, Dill.”
“Old Fred Laffter told me he wrote a harmless cutesy feature about Felicity some time back. They say you killed it. Why?”
Again, Strucker shrugged. “We thought it was premature, that’s all. That it might’ve done her more harm than good.”
“Whose pad was she on?”
“We don’t know.”
“Why was she killed?”
“We don’t know that either, and before you ask me who killed her, or what she was doing to earn her one-two-five-o a week, I’ve got to remind you this is an ongoing homicide investigation and there’s not much more I can tell you than I’ve told you already.”
“Tell me how Clay Corcoran’s death is tied in with my sister’s.”
“It isn’t.”
“Bullshit.”
“Bullshit,” Strucker said thoughtfully, much as if he had just stumbled across a new and interesting synonym. “Well, here’s some more of it: Corcoran was killed with a twenty-five-caliber softnosed slug at a range of approximately twelve yards. I’m surprised the hole in his throat wasn’t bigger than it was. I’m even more surprised that whoever shot him hit him. He must’ve been the best fucking shooter in the world if, in fact, he was aiming at Corcoran.”
“Who else would he be aiming at?”
“Well, there’s you and there’s Miss Singe.”
“Nobody was shooting at me.”
“What about Miss Singe?”
“Her either.”
Strucker drew in some more cigar smoke, tasted it for a moment, blew it up in the air, and said, “I made some phone calls to Washington. Not many. Two or three at the most. It seems you’re kind of well known up there, at least by some folks. From what I understand you’re nosing around after some renegade spooks—and every last one of them a real honest-to-God hard case. Maybe one of them figured you were getting too close, dressed himself up in an out-of-state-cop uniform (that sounds like a spook, doesn’t it?), took a shot at you, missed, and hit poor old Clay Corcoran instead.” He gave his big shoulders a strange almost Mediterranean shrug. “Could’ve happened that way.”
“No,” Dill said, “it couldn’t’ve.” He paused then, partly because of Strucker’s evasions, and partly because he didn’t really want to say what he was going to say next. “I understand,” Dill said, “that you’d like to be mayor.”
Strucker waved his cigar deprecatingly. “Just talk.”
“But if the talk turns into something else, Jake Spivey’s going to be awfully useful to you, right?”
“Well, yes, sir, his help would be much appreciated, if he sees fit to give it.”
Dill leaned forward, as if to examine Strucker more closely. “I can jerk the chain on Jake,” he said. “I can send him down the pipes where he won’t be of any use to anyone.”
Strucker again sucked on his cigar, took it out of his mouth, looked at it, and said, “Your oldest friend.”
“My oldest friend.” Dill leaned back in his chair. His voice turned cold and distant and nearly uninflected. “She was my sister. The only family I had. I knew her better than I’ve ever known anyone in my life. She wasn’t bent. She wasn’t on anyone’s pad. I know that. And I’m pretty sure you know it. I also think you know what happened to Felicity and why. I need to know what you know. So either you tell me or I flush my old friend and your political future right down the drain.”
Strucker nodded almost sympathetically. “Must be kinda hard, choosing between a live friend and dead kin.”
“Not all that hard.”
“For you, maybe not.” He drew in some more smoke, blew it out, and again examined his cigar thoughtfully. “How long can I have—a week?”
“Three days,” Dill said.
“A week’d be better.”
“I would say okay, but three days is all I’ve got.”
Strucker rose, stretched a little, and sighed his heavy sigh. “Three days then.” He stared down at Dill almost curiously. “You really would, wouldn’t you—dump your old friend?”
“Yes,” Dill said, “I really would.”
Strucker nodded again as though reconfirming some expected, but nevertheless unpleasant, news, turned, and walked out of the room. Dill watched him go. When the sliding door closed, Dill got up and went behind Spivey’s desk. He ran his hand beneath the well of the desk and eventually found the switch. He went down on his hands and knees to examine it. The switch was turned to “on.” Dill left it that way, pulled out the top right-hand drawer of the desk, then the middle drawer, and finally the deep bottom one. The Japanese tape recorder was in the bottom drawer, turning slowly. It obviously had been installed by an expert. Dill closed the drawer gently and rose.
