Briarpatch

by Ross Thomas

  He looked around the room and then said in a firm loud clear voice, “I wasn’t kidding him, Jake. I really would.”

  CHAPTER 30

  The party at Jake Spivey’s began breaking up when the sun went down, and it was a little after 9 P.M. when Dill and Anna Maude Singe arrived at the yellow brick duplex on the corner of Thirty-second and Texas Avenue. Lights were on in the ground-floor apartment. The rented Ford’s radio said the temperature had fallen to 93 degrees, but Dill thought it was still much hotter than that.

  “Well, he’s home,” Singe said, looking at the lights in Harold Snow’s apartment.

  “Keep her in the living room if he and I go in the kitchen,” Dill said. “If she goes in the kitchen, you go with her and make sure she stays there for at least two or three minutes.”

  “Okay.”

  They got out of the car and moved up the walk to the door with the blistered brown molding. Dill rang the bell. Seconds later, the door was opened by Harold Snow, who wore a T-shirt, tennis shorts, and a cross look. Before Snow could say anything, Dill said in a too-loud voice, “We’ve come about the rent, Harold.”

  There was a brief puzzled look that lasted for less than a second until the coyote eyes signaled their understanding. Snow turned his head to make sure his voice would carry back into the living room. “Yeah. Right. The rent.”

  Snow led them through the small foyer and into the living room, where Cindy McCabe was applying pink polish to her toenails and watching a television program that featured elderly British actors. Dill introduced the two women and Cindy McCabe said, “Hi.”

  “Turn that shit off,” Snow said. “They’re here about the rent.”

  McCabe recapped the nail-polish bottle, rose, and in an effort to protect her freshly painted toes, walked awkwardly on her heels over to the large television set and switched it off. “What’s with the rent?” she said.

  “God, it’s hot outside,” Dill said, hoping he wouldn’t have to add: It sure makes you thirsty.

  He didn’t. The cleverness again flitted across Harold Snow’s face and he said, “You want a beer or something?”

  Dill smiled. “A beer would be great.”

  “Get us four beers, will you, doll?” Snow said to Cindy McCabe. Before she could reply, Anna Maude Singe said, “Let me help, Cindy.” McCabe nodded indifferently and started toward the kitchen, still walking awkwardly on her heels. Singe went with her.

  “Where’s my thousand bucks?” Snow said in a low hurried voice.

  “Did you put it in, Harold?”

  “I put it in, just like you said—in the living room. Where’s my money?”

  Dill took the ten folded hundred-dollar bills from his pants pocket and handed them to Snow, who counted them quickly. “Jesus,” he said, “couldn’t you even’ve found an envelope?” He counted the bills a second time and then stuffed them down into the right pocket of his tennis shorts.

  “You’re sure it works, Harold?” Dill said.

  “It works. I checked it. Voice-activated, just like before. Funny thing is, though, I found something else.”

  “What?”

  “What comes extra.”

  Dill shook his head wearily. “The rent, Harold. You don’t have to pay this month’s rent.”

  “What about next month?”

  Dill scowled. “Remember your knee, Harold.”

  The warning made Snow take a quick step back. It was almost a skip. “But I don’t have to pay this month’s rent, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, what I found was that somebody else’d wired the place. The living room, I mean. Looked like maybe a cop job.”

  “What d’you mean, cop job?”

  “I mean a pro did it. Not as slick as me, but he still knew what he was doing. So I left it in place, but what I did was, I squirted some piss into the mike. It’ll still pick up sound, but it’ll take a week to get the distortion out. If they can’t, all they’ll have is funny noise.” He frowned. “You don’t look too surprised.”

  Dill assumed that Clyde Brattle had ordered the wiring of the place where the meeting with Senator Ramirez would take place, and nothing Brattle might do would ever surprise Dill. He smiled at Snow and said, “Harold, just to show how much I appreciate your efforts, you don’t have to pay next month’s rent either.”

  Instead of looking pleased, Snow again frowned. He has to work the angle, Dill thought. He has to give it another twist. “Don’t tell Cindy,” Snow said. “I mean, we’ll tell her about not having to pay this month’s rent, but not about next month’s. Okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “Well, I guess we might as well sit down,” Snow said and waved Dill to the cream-colored chair where Cindy McCabe had sat painting her toenails. After Dill sat down, Snow sat on the couch opposite. The couch wore a slipcover patterned with monarch butterflies. Snow leaned forward, his elbows on his bare knees, his expression and tone confidential. “All this has got something to do with your sister, right?”

  “Wrong,” Dill said.

  Snow’s expression went from confidential to skeptical. But before he could outline his doubts, Cindy McCabe came back, carrying a tray with four open cans of beer. Anna Maude Singe followed with two glasses in each hand.

  “I brought glasses, if anybody wants one,” she said.

  Nobody did. McCabe served the beer and sat next to Harold Snow on the couch. Singe sat in the room’s only other easy chair. Cindy McCabe looked at Snow. “What about the rent?” she said.

  “We don’t have to pay this month’s.”

  “No shit. How come?”

  She asked the question of Dill, but Harold Snow answered. “He wants us to sort of look after the place until he decides what to do with it. Even show it maybe, you know, to people who might wanta buy it.” He looked at Dill. “Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Hey, that’s okay,” Cindy McCabe said and smiled.

  “But we gotta pay next month’s,” Harold Snow said.

  “Well, sure, but one month free’s nothing to sneeze at.” Something else occurred to her. “You thank him?”

  “Of course I thanked him.”

  “Well, sometimes you forget.”

  The doorbell rang and Harold Snow said what everyone says when the doorbell rings after the sun goes down. He said, “Who the hell can that be?”

  “Bill collectors maybe,” Cindy McCabe said and tittered.

  Snow rose, holding his beer, crossed the living room, and disappeared into the small foyer. They could hear him opening the front door. They could also hear him say, “Yeah, what is it?”

  Then they heard the first shotgun blast. Then the second one. After that, it was absolutely quiet until Cindy McCabe began to scream. She didn’t get up off the couch. She simply sat there, slowly crushing her beer can with both hands, and screamed again and again. The beer spilled out of the can and onto her bare legs. Anna Maude Singe rose quickly, hurried over to McCabe, and slapped her across the face. The screaming stopped. Singe knelt by McCabe, pried away the crushed beer can, and held the now sobbing woman in her arms.

  Dill was up. He moved slowly to the foyer. I don’t want to look at him, he thought. I don’t want to see how he looks. He swallowed when he saw Harold Snow and then took four very deep breaths. Snow lay on his back in the foyer. The beer can was still in his left hand. The right side of his face was gone, although the left eye remained, still open. But it no longer looked clever. Much of Snow’s upper chest was a red wet depression. The blood, bone and flesh had splattered the walls and the mirror that hung on the farthest one. Dill knelt by the body and tried to remember which pocket Snow had put the thousand dollars in. He decided it was the left one. But after he put his hand into it, he discovered he was wrong, tried the right pocket, and found the money. He put it into his own pocket and rose, realizing he had not breathed once since kneeling by Harold Snow. You didn’t want to smell him, he thought. You didn’t want to smell the corruption and the blood.
You didn’t want to smell the death.

  Dill went back into the living room. Cindy McCabe, still sobbing, lifted her head from Anna Maude Singe’s shoulder. “Is … is he …”

  “He’s dead, Cindy,” Dill said.

  “Oh shit, oh God, oh shit,” she wailed, dropped her head back down on Singe’s shoulder, and started sobbing again.

  Dill looked around the room and spotted Cindy McCabe’s purse on top of the television set. He walked over, opened the purse, took the ten hundred-dollar bills from his pocket, made sure there was no blood on them, and tucked them down into the purse. Then Dill went to the phone and called the police.

  First to arrive were two young uniformed officers in a green-and-white squad car. They arrived with siren blaring and bar lights flashing. Neither was much over twenty-five. One of them had a large handsome nose. The other had an out-sized chin. They told Dill their names, which he promptly forgot, and thought of them as the Chin and the Nose. The Chin took one glance at Harold Snow’s body and then looked quickly away—as if for a place to vomit. The Nose stared at the body with fascination. He finally looked up at Dill.

  “Sawed-off, huh?”

  “Sounded like it,” Dill said.

  “Gotta be,” the Nose said and turned to his partner, who now seemed extremely interested in the small crowd of neighbors who had gathered outside at a safe, respectful distance. “Go talk to ’em,” the Nose told his partner. “Get their names. See if they heard or saw anything—and check around in back, too.”

  “What for?”

  “Maybe the whoever with the sawed-off’s still back there.”

  “The whoever’s long gone.”

  “Check anyhow.”

  After the Chin headed for the neighbors, the Nose looked at Dill. They were still standing in the foyer. “Who’re you?” the policeman asked.

  “Ben Dill.”

  “Bendill?”

  “Benjamin Dill.”

  “Right,” the Nose said and wrote it down. “Who’s he?”

  “Harold Snow.”

  After he wrote that down, the young policeman indicated the living room. “Who’s in there making all the noise?”

  “His girl friend and my lawyer.”

  “Your lawyer?” That made the Nose suspicious momentarily, but he passed over it and turned his attention back to the body of Harold Snow. It still seemed to fascinate him. “What’d he do—the deceased?”

  Dill shook his head. It was a small commiserative gesture. “He answered the doorbell after dark, I guess.”

  The real questioning didn’t begin until the homicide squad arrived, headed by Detective Sergeant Meek and Detective First Grade Lowe. After Dill identified himself, Meek looked at him quizzically. “Felicity’s brother?”

  Dill nodded. “You knew her?”

  Meek stared thoughtfully down at the floor before answering. Then he looked up at Dill and said, “Yeah, I knew her pretty good. She was—well, Felicity was okay.”

  It was Meek who took over the interrogation and Detective Lowe who handled the technical side. Meek was a tall, almost skinny man in his late thirties. Lowe was not much more than thirty-one or thirty-two, of a bit more than medium height and weight, and if he had one distinguishing characteristic, it was his completely bored expression—except for his eyes. His gray-blue eyes seemed interested in everything.

  The medical examiner had come and gone, the photographer had finished, and they were about to cart away the body of Harold Snow when Homicide Captain Gene Colder came into the living room dressed in a navy-blue jogging outfit and Nike running shoes and carrying a pint of ice cream that he said was fudge ripple. He handed the sack to Detective Lowe and told him to put it in the freezer. The Chin volunteered to do it and Detective Lowe looked grateful.

  Cindy McCabe had at last stopped sobbing. She sat on the couch with her hands in her lap and her knees primly together. She spoke only when spoken to. Her voice was low and almost indistinct. Once again, for the benefit of Captain Colder, she told her story. Dill then repeated his, and Anna Maude Singe hers. Colder looked questioningly at Sergeant Meek, who by then had already heard the same stories three times. The Sergeant gave the Captain a small nod.

  Colder looked thoughtfully at Dill. “Let’s you and me go in the kitchen.”

  “Officially?” Dill said.

  “What d’you mean, officially?”

  “If it’s official,” Dill said, “she goes with me.” He nodded at Anna Maude Singe.

  “You want your lawyer along, bring her along,” Colder said and started toward the kitchen. Dill and Singe followed. They stood and watched Colder open the freezer, remove his pint of ice cream, find a spoon, sit down at the kitchen table, twist the top off the pint, and begin eating the fudge ripple, offering them only the explanation “I didn’t have any dinner.”

  They also stood and watched as Colder finished almost half the pint, rose, put the top back on, and replaced the container in the freezer. As he sat back down at the table, he looked up at Dill and asked, “What d’you know about Harold Snow?”

  “Not much.”

  “Felicity ever write you about him?”

  “No,” Dill said and turned to Singe. “You want to sit down?”

  She shook her head. “I’d just as soon stand.”

  Colder pushed a chair out from the kitchen table, but neither Singe nor Dill sat in it. “We started checking into Harold right after Felicity died,” Colder said. “And guess what we found?” He answered his own question. “Harold was all bent out of shape.”

  “Dishonest, you mean,” Singe said with a small polite smile.

  “Very,” Colder said.

  Dill shook his head in apparent disbelief. “He told me he was a home-computer salesman.”

  “He was, part of the time,” Colder said, “but he worked strictly on commission, and if he didn’t feel like working some days, well, he didn’t have to. He could stay home. Or go somewhere else and be what he was really good at, which was a thief.”

  “What’d he steal?” Dill said.

  “Time.”

  “Time?”

  “Computer time,” Colder said, “mainframe, which is pretty valuable.”

  “So I understand,” Dill said.

  “Well, Snow would locate it, figure out how to steal it, and sell it. He was sort of a computer and electronics genius. Some people are like that. They might not be too bright about most things, but they’re real technical geniuses. You’ve known guys like that, haven’t you, Dill?”

  “I don’t think so,” Dill said.

  “What about you, Miss Singe?”

  “I haven’t either.”

  “Huh. I thought everybody had. Well, when Snow wasn’t stealing and selling computer time, he was doing something else that wasn’t too nice either. He was tapping people’s phones and bugging their offices and bedrooms and stuff like that, although I doubt if we could really prove it now. But guess who his last customer was?”

  “You don’t want me to guess,” Dill said.

  “You’re right. I don’t. Well, his last customer was Clay Corcoran—who dropped dead at your feet yesterday in the cemetery. And now poor old Harold drops dead at your feet here tonight. How’s that for coincidence, Mr. Dill?”

  “Strange and rare,” Dill said. “But let me ask you this: what the hell’ve Snow and Corcoran got to do with who killed Felicity?”

  Colder stared for several seconds at Dill. It was a stare that Dill felt contained nothing but distrust and dislike. “We’re working on that,” Colder said finally. “In fact, we’re working on that very, very hard.”

  Colder rose from the table, took his pint of fudge ripple out of the freezer, and headed back toward the living room. Dill and Singe followed. Cindy McCabe was still seated on the couch, her hands in her lap, her knees pressed tightly together. Colder went over to her.

  “Miss McCabe?”

  She looked up at him. “Yes?”

  “Is there anyone we can ca
ll for you—about Harold?”

  She dropped her eyes. “There’s his brother,” she said.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Jordan Snow.”

  “Do you have his number?”

  “No, but you can get it from long-distance information. Back home, he’s the only Jordan Snow in the book.”

  Colder turned to Sergeant Meek. “Have somebody call the brother and tell him what happened.”

  “Where’s back home?” Sergeant Meek asked.

  “Kansas City,” Colder said.

  “Right,” Sergeant Meek said.

  CHAPTER 31

  They argued all the way to the Hawkins Hotel. It turned nasty as they got out of the rented Ford in the hotel basement garage and headed toward the elevator. They fought in the elevator. They were still fighting when Dill unlocked the door to room 981 and held it open for Anna Maude Singe, who sailed into the room, trailing the accusation “goddamned fool” behind her.

  “It’ll work,” Dill said, closing the door.

  “Never,” she snapped.

  “Watch,” he said and crossed to the phone. After picking it up he looked at her questioningly. “Well?”

  “What is it with you anyway?” she demanded, her tone furious, her face pink and angry beneath the tan. “Do I owe you something? For what? Because we fooled around a couple of times? I don’t owe you anything, Dill. Not one damned thing.”

  Dill was dialing now. “Sure you do,” he said. “You’re my sweetie.”

  “Your sweetie! Christ, I don’t even like you anymore. I’m your lawyer. That’s all. And all I have to do is give you sound advice. Well, here’s some: don’t make that call. You want to call somebody, call the FBI.”

  “Somebody’s already called them,” Dill said as he listened to the phone ring. “In Washington. If I called them and I’m wrong, it would just screw up the deal the Senator’s got with them. This way—well, if I’m wrong, nothing happens.”

  “Nothing good,” she said as Daphne Owens answered the phone on its fifth ring. Dill identified himself and a few seconds later Jake Spivey came on with “I got your message, Pick, there at the tail end of the tape. I think you kinda shook old Chief Strucker up some. You really think he knows who killed Felicity?”