by Ross Thomas
Strucker nodded.
“How much do you think Brattle paid Colder to kill Jake?” Dill asked. “A million?”
Strucker nodded. “At least. Well, we—Jake and I—we decided if we could just keep Jake alive, Brattle’d show up sooner or later to find out how come he wasn’t getting what he paid for. And when he showed, well, I’d collar him and that sure wouldn’t hurt my political future any. Jake and I’d already talked some about that.”
“And you just let Felicity dangle,” Dill said.
“Colder hadn’t done anything yet,” Strucker said. “You’ve gotta keep that in mind.”
“And you’re saying he killed Felicity when he found out what she was up to.”
Strucker nodded somberly. And after the nod came another of his long sad sighs. “We couldn’t prove it though. We had no case.”
“Bullshit,” Dill said. “You could’ve nailed Colder for Felicity. Or for what’s his name, her ex-boyfriend, Clay Corcoran. Or for poor old Harold Snow. Jesus. Harold was the real easy one. But you didn’t, did you, because you were still waiting for Brattle. You guys traded my sister for Clyde Brattle.”
Strucker in two quick strides was at Dill’s side. He grabbed Dill by the left arm and spun him around. The chief of detectives pointed down at the floor. His face was an angry wrinkled knot. His voice a rasp. “Who’s that lying down there in his own blood and piss and shit? That’s Gene Colder, Captain Gene Colder, who was the best fucking homicide cop I ever knew. He killed your sister without leaving a trace and then preached at her funeral. He shot Clay Corcoran through the throat from thirty-six feet away with a twenty-five automatic and six hundred other cops standing around with their thumbs up their ass. He used a sawed-off on Harold Snow and then waltzed back in carrying a pint of ice cream, took over the investigation, and planted the evidence that would prove Snow killed Felicity. You think he didn’t know what he was doing? Why the fuck d’you think a guy like Clyde Brattle’d pay him a million dollars? And if Gene’d been just a little luckier tonight, he could’ve nailed Brattle, kept the money, and the law’d never touch him. But there he is. On the floor. Dead.”
Dill reached over and removed Strucker’s grip. He then stepped over to the coffee table. “What if he didn’t do it?” Dill asked.
Strucker glanced quickly over at Jake Spivey who seemed puzzled. “What’s he getting at?” Strucker said.
“Something,” Spivey said.
“You say you can’t prove he killed Felicity—or Corcoran, or even Harold Snow. So if you can’t prove he killed them, he’s innocent.”
“He killed them,” Strucker said. “All of them.”
“You think he did.”
“So do you, Pick,” Spivey said.
“Maybe,” Dill said, reached down, picked up the tape player, snapped out the cassette, and put it away in a pocket.
Spivey rose. “You ain’t fixing to walk out the door with that tape, are you?” he said.
“It was supposed to be your briarpatch, Jake. The ultimate one. But now it’s mine.” Dill looked at Strucker and then back at Jake Spivey, who reached down and picked up the .38 Colt automatic from the coffee table. “I worry about you two,” Dill said. “I worry about how high you’ll rise and what you might do when you get there. And if you go far enough and high enough, then someday you might start remembering me and how I was here in this room on the night you did what you did. And then maybe you might start wondering if maybe you shouldn’t do something about me. So when you start thinking like that, remember this: I’ve got the tape.”
Spivey shook his head sadly and brought the automatic up until it was aimed at Dill. “Pick, I can’t let you go through the door with that tape.”
“What’s on it?” Strucker said.
“Everything we need to keep me out of jail and make you mayor and then senator.”
“Well, now,” Strucker said.
Dill said, “I’m leaving, Jake.”
“We’re just gonna have to stop you one way or other,” Spivey said, his voice sad and troubled. He looked over at Strucker.
The chief of detectives slowly shook his head. “No.”
“What d’you mean no?” Spivey said.
“If we take that tape away from him, he’ll talk,” Strucker said. “About tonight. If we let him walk, he won’t.” He looked at Dill. “Right?”
“Right.”
“Unless, of course,” Strucker said to Spivey, “you want to plug him and get it over with. We could fix it up somehow.”
Dill waited for Spivey to say or do something. Spivey again looked down at the automatic and again aimed it carefully at Dill. As he aimed it, an expression of genuine sorrow spread slowly across his face. Dill wondered whether he would hear the gun fire. The sorrow then left Spivey’s face and regret seemed to replace it. He slowly lowered the automatic and said, “Shit, I can’t do it.”
Dill turned, opened the door, and left.
CHAPTER 39
As he strode down the corridor toward the elevator, doors opened cautiously and frightened middle-aged faces peered out. Dill glared at the faces and snapped, “Police.” The doors slammed shut.
In the lobby there were only the two Mexicans who worked for Jake Spivey. Both wore neat, very dark-gray suits. They looked at each other as Dill came out of the elevator and the older of the pair shook his head, as if to say, Don’t bother. Dill went up to him and said in Spanish, “Where are the other two men—the big one and the thin one with the dead eyes?”
The Mexican smiled. “When we arrived we persuaded them they had important business elsewhere. They left to attend to it.”
The Mexican was still smiling contentedly as Dill went through the lobby door and out into the rain. He ran across the street, edged through the narrow space at the Ford’s rear, and opened the front passenger door. “You drive,” he told Anna Maude Singe.
She slid over behind the wheel as Dill got in. “If this is the getaway,” she said, “it’s going to take an hour just to get unparked.”
“Slam into the car behind you, cut the wheel all the way to the left, hit the car in front of you, and keep doing that till you clear your right front fender.”
“You mean do it the way I always do it,” she said.
It took her only twenty seconds and five bumps to work the Ford out of the confined space. She sped down Van Buren until she came to Twenty-third Street, heard the siren, pulled over to the right, and stopped. A green-and-white squealed around the rain-slick corner, siren screaming, bar lights flashing. Singe took her foot off the brake and once more started cautiously around the corner. But again she hit the brake at the sight of a dark unmarked sedan that came speeding down the opposite side of the street, a red light flashing from behind its grille.
Singe sat behind the wheel without moving until Dill said, “Let’s go.” The car slowly moved off.
“The cops,” she said. “They’re going to my place, aren’t they?”
“Yes.”
“I saw Jake Spivey and those two Mexicans of his go in. Then three more men went in and a few minutes later two of them ran out.”
“That was Harley and Sid. They worked for Clyde Brattle.”
“Then Strucker and Gene Colder went in together.”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
“Brattle and Colder are dead.”
“Where?”
“In the living room.”
“My living room?”
“Yes.”
“Aw damn, damn, damn.” She automatically speeded up. “Don’t tell me about it. I don’t want to know. Why should I? I don’t even know where I’m going.”
“The airport.”
“What about your stuff at the hotel?”
“It’ll keep.”
He reached into his pocket and brought out the cassette. “See this?”
She glanced at it and nodded. “You didn’t give it to Spivey then?”
“No. I’m putting it in your
purse.” She saw him do it and then went back to her driving. “You know where you can get copies made?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Get six copies made tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” she said. “What about tonight? Where the hell do I sleep tonight?”
“There’s a Holiday Inn near the airport, isn’t there?”
“Yes.”
He took out his wallet, removed three one-hundred-dollar bills—almost the last of them, he saw—and tucked the money down into her purse next to the tape. “Pay cash for your room. Use an assumed name—Mary Borden.”
“I don’t look like a Mary Borden.”
“Use it anyway. Keep the Ford and tomorrow go out only to get the tapes copied. Then go back to your room. I’ll call you by noon.
“Noon.”
“Yes.”
“What if you don’t?”
Dill sighed. “If I don’t, take the tape and go to the FBI.”
At the entrance to Gatty International Airport, Benjamin Dill and Anna Maude Singe kissed goodbye. It was a brief kiss, hurried, and almost without tenderness. She watched him get out of the car. “Call me, damn you,” she said.
In the airport Dill walked around studying the scheduled departures. He finally picked a Delta flight that would be leaving for Atlanta in forty-five minutes. He bought a one-way first-class ticket, paying cash and using the name E Taylor. In Atlanta, he knew he would be able to get a flight into Washington’s National Airport.
Dill spent most of the time before the flight in a stall in the men’s room. There he carefully wiped off Harold Snow’s revolver with a handkerchief, wrapped the gun up in a newspaper he had bought, and dropped it in a trash can on his way out of the men’s room. On board the plane, he found himself seated on the aisle next to a cheerful-looking man of about fifty. The man looked like a talker. Dill hoped he wasn’t. The plane took off, banking over the city. The man stared down at the lights through the rain and then turned to Dill.
“Now that’s one hell of a sight,” the man said. “Wanta take a look?”
“No,” Dill said. “I don’t think I really do.”
At 9:46 A.M. on Tuesday, August 9, the taxi let Dill out in front of his apartment building on the corner of Twenty-first and N Streets, Northwest. He glanced around and saw them, two Mercury sedans, plain and unmarked, that might as well have had U.S. Government stenciled across their doors. One of them, dark blue, was parked on N Street. It had two men in it. The other one, dark gray, was parked in the No Parking zone in front of the old man’s bile-green apartment building on Twenty-first. There were also two men in it.
Dill entered the apartment building and checked his mailbox. There were three bills, nine pieces of junk mail, a copy of News-week, and a letter from his dead sister.
Wednesday, Aug. 3
Dear Picklepuss:
The only real juicy item I’ve got for you this week involves your old high school flame, the very snooty, very stuck-up Barbara Jean Littlejohn (née Collins). And if you don’t quite recall what she had to be snooty about, you need only remember she was president of her high school sorority, the Tes Trams. For God’s sake, Pick, spell it backward! Now married to Art Littlejohn, manager of the city’s largest TG&Y, lovely Barbara Jean was picked up for shoplifting last week at—are you ready?—Sears! She was trying to walk out the front door with a fake marten stole she’d slipped on. Now who would ever notice that in July with the temperature 101°?
As for your little sister, the ace detective, she’s coming to the end of a long and rather sordid escapade that some day I’ll tell you about in detail. Tomorrow morning I go down and reveal all to the cleancut & boring FBI. Why don’t I, you may well ask, reveal all to my top cop boss, Honest John Strucker, chief of detectives and wedder of a rich widow? Well, I no longer trust old Honest John, or his newly acquired best friend, who is none other than your old asshole buddy, Jake Spivey, who now dwells in marbled halls. Can you imagine raggedy-ass Jake rattling around in the old Ace Dawson manse?
For the past year and a half I’ve been either a double or a triple agent of the down-home variety. I have trouble with the triple-agent concept because it’s a mathematical abstraction and I, as you well know, am of an intuitive bent that simply abhors abstractions, especially Algebra 3, which I flunked twice.
The major players in this unsavory melodrama have been me (starring, of course), Honest John Strucker, Jake Spivey (in the wings so far), and my current paramour, Captain Gene Colder of Homicide, who—although fearful of mien—is actually a real domp, which down here is what they call a cross between a dope and a wimp. Money’s involved. Tons of it. And politics. And some mysterious international misterioso called Clyde Brattle who you must’ve heard of. I’ve learned just enough to get scared and maybe just enough to land Colder the domp in jail. Maybe. So this evening I mail this and tomorrow I rise bright and early and head for the FBI where I shall Tell All.
By the way (which is easier to spell than incidentally), I have taken out a $250,000 life-insurance policy naming you as sole beneficiary. If anything happens to me, call my lawyer, Anna Maude Singe, who has both looks and brains and you could do worse, which, as we both know, you often have.
Oh. One more thing. If anything does happen to me, don’t believe one goddamn word they tell you down here. And now that I’ve cheered you up and got you interested, I’ll say goodbye and also send you—
—all my love,
Felicity
The letter had been written on his sister’s favorite stationery: ruled sheets from a yellow legal pad. The two sheets were not quite filled with the beautiful copperplate she had taught herself from a book during that summer vacation when she was twelve years old. Before that she had printed everything. Or almost everything.
Dill read the letter as he stood at his tall, almost floor-to-ceiling windows that gave out on the old man’s apartment building across the street. When he looked up, he saw the old man was outside with his Polaroid, taking a picture of the dark-gray government Mercury that was parked in the No Parking zone. Two men got out of the Mercury and moved toward the old man. They seemed to be protesting. The old man yelled at them and pointed at the No Parking sign. The two government men pointed at the old man’s camera and said something else. He quickly hid the camera behind his back and again yelled at them. Dill couldn’t hear what he was yelling. Threats and curses probably.
A Metropolitan Police car pulled up and two black-uniformed cops got out to see what the trouble was. The uniformed cops blurred and Dill realized his eyes were wet. He turned from the window and wiped away the tears.
They all killed her in a way, he thought, and now all will pay just a little something on account. Otherwise, the preacher was wrong and she will have died in vain, although dying in vain isn’t really all that bad since nearly everyone does it. It’s the living in vain you really have to watch out for, and Felicity never wasted a day doing that.
He decided he had about five or ten minutes before the government agents, whoever they were, came knocking. He went to the wall phone in the kitchen and called long-distance information for the number of the airport Holiday Inn where Anna Maude Singe was waiting. As the phone rang, Dill wondered how good a lawyer she really was, and whether she would like Washington. Most of all he wondered whether she could keep him out of jail.
also by Ross Thomas
The Cold War Swap
The Seersucker Whipsaw
Cast a Yellow Shadow
The Singapore Wink
The Fools in Town Are on Our Side
The Backup Men
The Porkchoppers
If You Can’t Be Good
The Money Harvest
Yellow Dog Contract
Chinaman’s Chance
The Eighth Dwarf
The Mordida Man
Missionary Stew
Out on the Rim
The Fourth Durango
Twilight at Mac’s Place
Voodoo,
Ltd.
Ah, Treachery!
BRIARPATCH.
Copyright © 1984 by Ross E. Thomas, Inc. Introduction copyright © 2003 by Lawrence Block.
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. www.minotaurbooks.com
First published by Simon & Schuster in 1984
eISBN 9781429981651
First eBook Edition : June 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Thomas, Ross, 1926–1995.
Briarpatch / Ross Thomas.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-29031-4
1. Sisters—Death—Fiction. 2. City and town life—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3570.H58 B75 2003
813’54—dc21
2002032503
