Briarpatch (10 page)

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Authors: Ross Thomas

Tags: #Mystery, #Thriller

BOOK: Briarpatch
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Again, Dill counted silently to fifteen and asked his first question: “Clyde Brattle worked for the CIA how long?”
“Twenty years.”
“He was a career employee?”
“Yes.”
“When did he resign?”
“He didn't resign. He was fired in seventy-five.”
“Why?”
“I'm not sure.”
“Can you guess?”
“I'm no lawyer, but I don't think a guess would be admissible.”
“Did it have something to do with funds under his control?”
“That would be pure speculation on my part.”
“Were the funds misappropriated?”
“I heard they were, but that's only hearsay.”
“Your disclaimer is noted. How much money was involved?”
“Somewhere around five hundred thousand, I heard.”
“Dollars?”
“Dollars.”
“When did you leave the employ of the CIA?”
“In April of seventy-five just after Saigon fell.”
“Where were you then?”
“When it fell? In Saigon.”
“Where was Clyde Brattle?”
“He was there, too.”
“Neither you nor Brattle made any attempt to escape?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because we were no longer in the spook trade. We were by then simple businessmen.”
“Describe the nature of your business, please.”
“We formed a company that bought surplus equipment from
the new Vietnamese government and sold it on the open market to whoever wanted to buy it.”
“What kind of equipment?”
“Defensive weaponry, transportation, communications.”
“What kind of weaponry?”
“Small arms. Mortars. Light artillery. Some rolling stock—jeeps and trucks. Field communications gear. Some helicopters. Whatever they wanted to get rid of. They needed money bad and we had some and knew where we could get a whole lot more.”
“You and Brattle put up the money to form your company?”
“Yes.”
“How much did he put up?”
“Close to four hundred thousand.”
“And you?”
“All I had. One hundred thousand.”
“And the profits were shared how?”
“A quarter for me, three-quarters for Clyde. That's because I had the contacts.”
“The Vietnamese contacts.”
“
North
Vietnamese. Except by then it was all one big happy country, North and South alike.”
“And who did you sell the surplus American weaponry to?”
“It wasn't American. It was Vietnamese. They fought a war. They won the war. The spoils were theirs.”
“But it was of American manufacture?”
“That's right.”
“So who did you sell it to?”
“Whoever would buy it.”
“For instance.”
“People in Angola, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Yemen, both South and North, Bolivia, Ecuador, and a little, but not much, to some folks in Uruguay.”
“How much of this American-made, Vietnamese-acquired equipment did you sell?”
“About a hundred million dollars' worth.”
“And your share of the profits?”
“You mean just mine?”
“Yes.”
“I cleared a little over four million after expenses, which ran sort of high.”
“And Brattle. How much did he net?”
“I'd say around sixteen million after expenses.”
“And this went on for how long?”
“You mean Brattle and me?”
“Yes, your association, your partnership.”
“For about five or six years.”
“Then what?”
“Then he wanted to get into some funny stuff and I got out.”
“What kind of funny stuff?”
“Computer technology, sophisticated weaponry, guidance systems, all kinds of new stuff you could get hold of in the States, but could never get the okay to sell. Clyde said we could sneak 'em out. I said fuck it and quit.”
“Strike the ‘fuck it' and substitute ‘no thanks,' please. And so that's what you did—you quit?”
“That's right.”
“Was Mr. Brattle upset?”
“Well, he wasn't exactly humming ‘Blue Skies.'”
“Was there any unpleasantness?”
“I had to get some lawyers and he got his and they all hemmed and hawed at each other and I came out with a net of about thirteen million, which was all reported to the IRS, where I'm under permanent audit, like I told you.”
“When's the last time you saw Mr. Brattle?”
“About a year and a half ago.”
“Where?”
“Kansas City. He had some routine papers for me to sign. I flew up there, signed them, and had a drink with him. Then I flew back here.”
“Have you seen him since?”
“No.”
“It was shortly after your meeting with him that he fled the country, right?”
Spivey laughed his loud hoorah laugh. “Yeah, I guess you'd have to say old Clyde was sort of forced to flee.”
“Strike the laughter,” Dill said. “You know why he skipped, of course.
“Because they wanted to arrest him for doing business with the wrong folks.”
“Where do you think he is now?”
“Dead,” Spivey said.
“Let's assume he isn't dead,” Dill said. “Let's assume he's arrested and brought to trial. Would you be willing to testify against him?”
“I have no comment to make at this time,” Spivey said, moved his left hand underneath the edge of the desk, and switched off the tape recorder. He studied Dill for several moments. “You offering me immunity, Pick?”
Dill nodded slowly.
“Put it in writing?”
Dill shook his head no.
“Give me a few days to think about it?”
Again, Dill nodded.
Spivey grinned. “You think I got another tape recorder going, don't you?”
Dill smiled and nodded.
They had lunch in the “family” dining room, which was large enough to hold a carved oak sideboard, a matching china closet, and a table that seated twelve—or up to sixteen with all the leaves in. To get to the family dining room, Spivey led Dill through the “company” dining room, whose table could easily seat thirty-six, although Spivey said he never used it because he didn't know three dozen people he'd actually want to sit down and eat with.
They sat at the end of the table farthest from the kitchen or—as Dill later observed—the pantry. The family dining room overlooked the pool, which was oblong in shape and had been added as an afterthought in the early thirties just before pools started taking on the forms of kidneys and boomerangs. It was a big pool, at least forty by seventy, and Dill thought it resembled the municipal one he and Spivey had learned to swim in at Washington Park.
Spivey was seated at the head of the table with Dill on his right when Daphne Owens came in. She had changed into a skirt and blouse. Dill rose when she came in. Spivey didn't. She gave Dill an amused look that made him feel a trifle gauche for some reason.
“Who taught you your manners, Mr. Dill,” she asked, “your mama or the Phi Delts?”
“My mama,” he said.
“She was one nice lady,” Spivey said. “A little—” He looked at Dill. “What's the word I want—distant?”
“Vague,” Dill said.
“That ain't it either. Ethereal's the word. But I expect it saved her a lot of heartache considering what she had to put up with, with your old man.”
Dill smiled and nodded slightly.
“What did your father do, Mr. Dill?” Owens asked.
“He was a professional dreamer.”
“What's wrong with that?”
“It implies he should've been paid for them. He seldom was.”
“Pick and me were the poorest kids in Horace Mann grade school,” Spivey said proudly. “And we would've been the poorest kids in junior high school, but they integrated it along about then and brought in some colored and Mexican kids who were even poorer'n Pick and me, but we were still the poorest white kids in Coolidge Junior High. Right, Pick?”
“Absolutely.”
Before Spivey could dredge up further memories, one of the Mexicans who had been out digging the garden came in wearing a starched white jacket and nicely pressed jeans. Everyone ordered drinks and the gardener/houseman left through the swinging door that Dill noticed led into a pantry. He also noticed that the tablecloth was Irish linen; the silverware English; the china from France—Limoges, he thought—and the two wineglasses at his plate were heavy leaded crystal and possibly Czech. Knowing Spivey, he was almost certain lunch would be Tex-Mex.
“Then you two really were out here back in the fifties when you were kids,” Daphne Owens said to Spivey.
He grinned at Dill. “You tell her about that?”
“She asked me if I'd ever seen the house before.”
“Me'n Pick were two of the city's hundred neediest kids—at least, that's how we promoted ourselves. We were what then, Pick—ten?”
“Ten,” Dill agreed.
“Well, sugar, we'd heard tales about old Ace's mansion. My God, everybody had. Solid-gold bathroom fixtures. Stuff like that. And we just
had
to see it. So Pick came up with the idea that if we got dressed up in our oldest ctothes—and there really wasn't one hell of a lot of difference between our oldest and our best—and then went down and saw the principal, old lady McMullenhow old you reckon she was then, Pick?”
“Old,” Dill said. “At least forty.”
“Older'n God to us,” Spivey said. “So that's what we did.”
“Jake gave the spiel,” Dill said. “I just looked wistful. Very poor; very wistful.”
“And the next thing you know me'n Pick're on a hired city bus with about fifty-eight cute little colored kids and thirty-five even cuter little Mexicans and five other poor whites heading out to Cherry Hills and old Ace Dawson's mansion for a Christmas party.”
“Weren't you embarrassed?” Owens asked. “I mean, didn't you find it—well, for God's sake, demeaning?”
“What's demeaning about curiosity?” Dill asked. “Ace Dawson was a myth. We wanted to see how a myth had lived.”
“And we sure as shit didn't lie, sugar,” Spivey said. “We were poor, although Pick here was sort of shabby genteel poor and I was just plain dirt poor.” He turned to Dill. “Remember what I told you that night in the bus on the way back home?” Before Dill could reply, Spivey turned back to Daphne Owens. “What d'you think I told him?”
“That some day you were going to own it, of course. The Dawson mansion.”
Spivey shook his head as if both puzzled and disappointed. “Daffy, you got a romantic streak in you I never suspected.” He turned to Dill. “Tell her what I told you that night on the bus home.”
Dill smiled. “That being rich sure looked a lot easier than being poor, and you thought you might as well take the easy way out.”
Owens stared at Spivey with almost equal amounts of awe and suspicion. “You really said that at ten?” she asked, the awe winning out in her tone.
Spivey grinned. “Well, maybe not word for word,” he said, still grinning. “But almost.”
 
 
As he pulled up in front of his dead sister's yellow brick duplex at the corner of Thirty-second Street and Texas Avenue, Dill could still taste the quesadillas and green corn tamales he had had for lunch. And the avocados, too. Dill didn't much like avocados and there had been too many pieces of them in his salad. He had eaten them out of politeness and now wished he hadn't.
He sat in the Ford sedan, the engine idling, the air-conditioning on as high as it would go, and examined the duplex. He remembered it now, not because he had ever been inside, but because he had passed it scores of times and, by merely passing, had absorbed it into his memory.
The radio was on and turned to the all-news station. Dill was waiting for a Delta Airlines commercial to end and the weather girl to come on. She had a low breathy voice that was supposed to make the weather sound lascivious. When the commercial ended, she breathed the time, which was 2:49 P.M.; the temperature, which was 104 degrees Fahrenheit; the humidity, which was
just 21 percent, and the wind which, for a change, was blowing gently out of the southwest at 5 miles per hour. When she began to suggest cute ways to beat the heat, Dill switched the ignition off and silenced the radio.
Before getting out of the car, he locked the file on Jake Spivey in the glove compartment. The file now included the sworn deposition, whose contents Dill felt were almost worthless. It had been transcribed by Spivey's unseen typists—word processors, actually—and witnessed by Daphne Owens, who had turned out to be a notary public whose commission expired on June thirteenth of the following year.
When Dill got out of the Ford, the dry scorching heat almost made him gasp. With his seersucker jacket slung over his left shoulder, he hurried toward the inviting tall green elms with their promise of cool shade. The promise was broken and the invitation proved false, for there was no respite in the shade, and Dill's shirt was soaked and his chin dripping sweat as he started slowly up the outside stairs. At the landing, he used the key the chief of detectives had given him, unlocked the door, pushed it open, and went inside.
He looked for the air-conditioning first and found a set of controls on the near wall. The controls were for both heating and cooling. He switched the system on, moved the cool indicator from medium to high, stepped to the center of the living room, glanced around, and found that there was nothing to indicate his sister had ever lived there. Nor, for that matter, had anyone else with a shred of personality.
There was furniture in the living room, of course: a dark-green boxy couch, a matching chair, and a chrome-and-glass coffee table with nothing on it except last week's copy of
TV Guide
. On the floor, because there seemed no place else for it, was a small black-and-white Sony portable television set. There were no books, not
one, which Dill found strange because he knew Felicity had despised television and as a child had read eight or nine books a week, sometimes ten, although they had been young-adult books, which at eleven she finally had dismissed as “mostly crap.” During the summer of her twelfth year she had turned to the Russian novelists and, having disposed of them, picked up Santayana's The Last Puritan from somewhere. She had spent an entire week in August reading it, a frown on her forehead and a pitcher of Kool-Aid within easy reach. She said she found Santayana both “stuffy and dull” and devoted the rest of that same August to Dickens.
Dill could still remember her seated at the card table,
Little Dorrit
open in front of her, the Big Chief tablet to her right for notes and annotations, and on another corner of the table, the seldom-used
Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.
Opposite the dictionary was the pitcher of Kool-Aid. Grape, as Dill recalled. Dickens, Felicity had informed her brother, was pretty good stuff (high praise) but a “little soupy.” Dill sometimes felt his sister was the least sentimental person he had ever known.
He examined the living room carefully, trying to find some hint of her personality, a trace of her habits. There was a rug of a neutral sand shade on the floor, a few pictures on the wall that appeared to be cheap mail-order prints of Dufy, Cézanne, and Monet, and in one corner an inexpensive-looking Korean stereo so new it looked unused. Dill didn't bother to examine the two dozen or so records. He knew if they were Felicity's, they would be Beethoven, Bach, the early Beatles, plus every song Yves Montand had ever recorded.
The living room blended into a dining area where four chairs surrounded a drop-leaf maple table that looked as if it had been ordered by catalogue from Sears. A fake Tiffany lamp hung by a heavy golden chain over the table. That's not Felicity either, Dill thought.
In the kitchen he peered into the refrigerator and found four bottles of Perrier, a stick of butter, three eggs, a jar of Dijon mustard, and a loaf of whole-wheat bread with three or four slices gone. He remembered that his sister had always kept her bread in the refrigerator. He took out one of the Perriers, twisted its top off, and drank from the bottle.
With the bottle in his left hand, Dill opened the doors to the kitchen cabinets. There were a set of dishes—fairly good Japanese imitations of Dansk—a half dozen glasses, and a few bowls. Nothing else. Where the canned goods, the spices, and the staples should have been were only two cans of Van Camp's pork and beans, a jar of Yuban instant coffee, almost empty, a round box of Morton's salt, a small box of Schilling black pepper, but no other spices, not even tarragon, which Dill remembered his sister had dumped into virtually everything.
To cook with there was only a frying pan, nearly new, and a couple of battered aluminum pots that would do to boil the eggs and heat up the beans. In one of the drawers, Dill discovered enough stainless steel knives, forks, and spoons for two. He opened the rest of the drawers, but found nothing except a few kitchen odds and ends. He wondered what Felicity had done with their mother's silver.
Still carrying his bottle of Perrier, Dill went from the kitchen back into the living room and then down a short hall. The second door on the left led into what apparently had been his sister's bedroom. There was a double bed, neatly made up, a chest of drawers, and a dresser with a mirror. It was a matched set made out of walnut veneer, and it looked both cheap and fairly new. A small table by the bed's left-hand side held a Tensor reading lamp. Dill opened the table's drawer. It contained only a round shallow plastic box of birth-control pills.
Dill opened the closet next. Hanging there were a few dresses,
some slacks, several blouses, a light trench coat, but no winter coat. Five pairs of shoes were lined up primly on the closet floor. There was one pair of black pumps and the rest were sandals, loafers, and a scuffed-up pair of green jogging shoes.
In the drawers of the dresser and the bureau Dill found only a couple of sweaters in plastic dry cleaner's bags, a few folded shirts and blouses, some underwear, panty hose, and not much else. There was just enough clothing, he decided, to last someone a month or two, possibly three. But there were no keepsakes or mementos or souvenirs or anything, for that matter, that would attest to character, personality, or bad habits—except that whoever had lived there was obsessively neat and apparently despised either cooking or eating.
Dill left the large bedroom and went down the hall into the second, smaller bedroom, which turned out to be the den of someone who had run out of money. There were a card table, a bridge lamp, and on the card table a very old Remington portable typewriter. A canvas director's chair was drawn up to the table. To the table's right was a gray two-drawer metal file. Dill stooped, opened the file's top drawer, and then the bottom one. Both were empty. He assumed the police had removed the contents. There was nothing at all in the second bedroom's closet except three wire coat-hangers.

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