Briarpatch (14 page)

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Authors: Ross Thomas

Tags: #Mystery, #Thriller

BOOK: Briarpatch
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Dill felt he was almost on automatic pilot as he drove south on Van Buren, east on Our Jack, then turned south again at the Hawkins Hotel onto Broadway. South of the hotel, Broadway maintained its respectability fairly well until it reached South Fourth Street, or Deep Four, as the natives called it. After Deep Four, South Broadway was a mess. South Fourth, Third, Second, and First Streets had once comprised almost the only black enclave north of the Yellowfork. The former ghetto was now fully integrated and populated largely with the dregs of all races, creeds, and sexes—the last being sometimes rather ambiguous. Both the respectable and the not-so-respectable blacks had long since moved as far uptown as they could afford, abandoning the Deep Four area to the lowlife and their often grisly pursuits. Dill remembered his sister had worked the South Broadway—Deep Four area shortly after she transferred into homicide. The area was mostly bars, dives, liquor stores, porno flicks, and small cheap hotels with fancied-up names like the Biltmore, the Homestead, the Ritz, and the Belvedere. There were also a large number of elderly tacked-together frame houses with wide front porches. The people who sat out on the porches looked hot, mean, sullen, and desperate enough to revolt, if only it would cool off some. The temperature shortly after 7 P.M. was 95 degrees. The sun had not yet gone down. A lot of the front-porch sitters drank beer from cans and wore nothing but their underwear. There was no breeze.
“Where'd all the whores come from?” Dill asked as they neared South First Street.
“From the unemployment office,” Singe said. “Felicity used to
talk to them sometimes. They all told her it was either fuck or starve.”
They stopped at a red light. A man staggered off the curb, made his way around the front of the Ford, and halted at Dill's window. The man was about thirty-five. He wore a soiled green undershirt and khaki pants. Dill couldn't see his shoes. He had blue eyes that seemed to float on small ponds of pink. He needed a shave. Something white and nasty was caked around his mouth. He tapped on Dill's window with a large rock. Dill rolled the window down.
“Gimme a quarter, mister, or I'll bust your goddamn windshield,” the man said with absolutely no inflection.
“Fuck off,” Dill said, and rolled up the window. The man stepped back and took careful aim at the windshield with his rock. Dill sped off, running the red light.
“I should've given him the quarter.”
“You shouldn't even have rolled down your window,” Singe said.
Just past South First Street, Broadway started curving right to where the bridge over the Yellowfork began. The four-lane concrete bridge had been built in 1938 and named after the then Secretary of the Interior, Harold F. Ickes. When Truman fired Mac-Arthur in 1951, the city council—almost alight with patriotic glow—had renamed the bridge after the five-star general, but nearly everybody still called it what they had always called it, the First Street Bridge.
As they started up the bridge's steep approach, Dill asked, “Why didn't they tear down Deep Four and South Broadway when they were tearing down everything else?”
“They thought about it,” Singe said. “But then they got scared.”
“Of what?”
“Scared all the creeps and weirdos would move someplace else—maybe even next door.”
“Oh,” Dill said.
For dinner they had sweetbreads and okra and black-eyed peas and cole slaw and cornbread, buttermilk to drink, and for dessert, lemon meringue pie. They sat under the bearded head of a bison that had been dead for thirty-nine years. The walls of Chief Joe's were covered with the stuffed heads of bison, deer, elk, moose, bobcat, mountain lion, coyote, wolf, bighorn sheep, and three kinds of bear. After Dill and Anna Maude Singe finished their dinner they agreed it would be what they'd both order if ever they had to order the last supper.
The restaurant had been started by Joseph Maytubby, who was part Cherokee and part Choctaw with a little Kiowa thrown in. Everyone had called him Chief because that's what all Indians were called. Maytubby had been an army cook in France during the First World War. He stayed on after the war, married a twenty-three-year-old Frenchwoman, brought her back to the city, and together they started Chez Joseph in 1922. It was only a counter and four tables to begin with, but the food was superb, and once the cattlemen discovered what Madame Maytubby could do with mountain oysters, it became one of the two most popular restaurants
in Packingtown. The other was Puncher's, which specialized in steaks. You could also order a steak at Chief Joe's, but few ever did, and asked instead for such specialties as sweetbreads, mountain oysters, brains and eggs, lamb stew, real oxtail soup, and the wonderful no-name dish the restaurant prepared from wild duck when it was in season.
The mounted animal heads had begun when a cattleman customer shot a grizzly up in the Canadian Rockies in 1927. He had the head stuffed and presented it to Chief Joe. Not knowing what else to do with it, Chief Joe hung it on the wall. Then everyone else who shot anything started presenting him with their prey's mounted heads until the walls were covered with glass-eyed animals. Chief Joe died in 1961; his wife in '66. Their only son, Pierre Maytubby, took over and a few old customers tried to call him Chief Pete, but he wouldn't stand for it. Under Pierre, the restaurant's quality remained the same as did the sign outside, which still read Chez Joseph, although no one had ever called it that except Madame Maytubby.
When the coffee and cognac came, Dill leaned back and grinned at Anna Maude Singe. Their table was in front of one of the banquettes, and Singe was seated against the wall directly under the dead bison, who was beginning to look a bit motheaten.
“You like buttermilk with your dinner,” Dill said. “I'm not sure I ever went out with a woman who liked buttermilk with her dinner.”
“I've even been known to drink it for breakfast.”
“That takes a certain amount of guts.”
“What do you have for breakfast?”
“Coffee,” Dill said. “It used to be coffee and cigarettes, but I quit smoking. Remarque called coffee and a cigarette the soldier's breakfast. I read that at an impressionable age.”
“Were you ever a soldier?”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “You were about the right age for Vietnam.”
“I wasn't in Vietnam.”
“But you were overseas.”
“I was abroad. Civilians go abroad; soldiers go overseas.”
“So you weren't a soldier.”
“Not.”
“Some guys say they feel guilty now about having missed out on Vietnam.”
“Middle-class college-educated white guys?”
Singe nodded. “They feel they missed out on something they'll never get another chance at.”
“They did,” Dill said. “They missed out on getting their butts shot off, although I don't think they would have. You didn't find too many middle-class college-educated white guys in the line companies.”
“You don't seem to feel guilty,” she said.
“I had a deferment. I was the sole support of an eleven-year-old orphan.”
“Would you have gone?”
“To Vietnam? I don't know.”
“Suppose they said, ‘Okay, Dill, you're drafted. Report down to the Post Office for induction next Tuesday.' What would you've done?”
“I would've either gone down to the Post Office or up to Canada. One out of conviction; the other out of curiosity.”
She studied him for several moments. “I think you would've gone down to the Post Office.”
Dill smiled. “Maybe not.”
“What'd you do overseas? I mean abroad?”
“Didn't Felicity tell you?”
“No.”
“I thought she used to talk about me.”
“About when you all were growing up. Not about when you were in Washington or overseas.”
“Abroad.”
She smiled. “Right. Abroad. What'd you do over there?”
“I poked around.”
“Who for?”
“The government.”
Anna Maude Singe frowned, and when she did, Dill smiled. “Don't worry, I wasn't with the agency, although I used to bump into them from time to time.”
“What're those CIA folks really like?” she said. “You read about them. They make picture shows about them. But I never met one. I don't think I ever came close to meeting one.”
“They were …” Dill paused, trying to remember just how they really had been. He recalled sharp noses and close-set ears and bitten fingernails and prim mouths with self-important expressions. “I guess you'd have to say they were sort of … like me. Stuffy.”
“Stuffy?”
He nodded.
“All of them?” she asked.
“I didn't know all of them. But Sunday you get to meet one who wasn't very stuffy.”
“Who?”
“Jake Spivey.”
“
Jake Spivey
was with the
CIA.
Good Lord!”
“They won't admit it, but he was. Maybe Jake'll tell you some stories. He went to Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia, but he didn't go out of patriotism, or because he got drafted, or even out of
curiosity. Jake went because at twenty-three they were the only outfit around who'd pay him a thousand bucks a week to do whatever he did.”
“What'd he do?”
“Jake? I guess Jake probably killed a lot of people.”
“Does it bother him?”
“You mean does he feel guilty?”
She nodded.
“Jake never felt guilty about anything.”
 
 
Dill chose another route back to Anna Maude Singe's apartment building. He took South Cleveland Avenue until it turned into North Cleveland just on the other side of the Yellowfork. He followed North Cleveland for a little more than two miles until he reached Twenty-second Street, and then cut east to Van Buren and the Old Folks Home.
Singe didn't wait for him to open the car door for her. As she got out, she said, “All I've got is some California brandy.”
Dill took that for an invitation and said he thought California brandy had a lot going for it, especially the price. Up in her apartment Dill resumed his inspection of the large Maxfield Parrish print while she went for the brandy. When she returned with the bottle and two balloon glasses, Dill had almost decided the two figures in the painting were girls. He also noticed Singe had changed back into the striped nubby cotton caftan. From the way her breasts moved underneath the fabric, he was sure she was wearing nothing else. He took this for yet another invitation of sorts, and wondered whether he would accept or send regrets.
Singe sat down on the off-white couch, put the glasses on the free-form glass coffee table, and poured two brandies. While she did that, Dill took out his checkbook, quickly wrote a check for
five hundred dollars to Anna Maude Singe, added “legal retainer” in the memo space, tore it out, and handed it to her.
She read the check, put it carefully down on the table, looked at him coldly, and said, “That was a pretty goddamned rude thing to do.”
He nodded. “Yes, I guess it was.”
“This isn't my office. This is where I live—my home. Where I carry on my social life and also my sex life, such as it is. I was thinking that tonight I might even enrich both of them a little, but I guess I was wrong.”
“You accept the check?” Dill said.
She hesitated before answering. “What the hell is this?”
“You accept the check?” Dill said again.
“All right. Yes. I accept it.”
“Then you really are my attorney—retained at a modest fee, I'll admit—and if I get into trouble with the law, you'll come running, right?”
“What kind of trouble?”
“That's another question, not an answer.”
“Okay. I'll come running. What kind of trouble?”
“When I was overseas—”
“Abroad,” she interrupted.
He didn't smile. “Right. When I was over there poking around, I developed a kind of instinct. I don't know what else to call it. But I learned to depend on it. It was a kind of warning system.”
“Hunch,” she said.
“Okay. Hunch is good. But it kept me out of trouble a few times because I made sure I had both backup and a fallback position. Well, ever since I got here I've been getting those same faint signals.”
“You're talking about Felicity and all that.”
“Partly.”
She drank a little of her brandy. “You said trouble with the law.”
“So I did.”
“So what're we really talking about—plot, conspiracy, paranoia, what?”
“Let's try paranoia,” Dill said. “At around five o'clock this evening I went up to my room in the hotel. A very large arm went around my neck in a chokehold. I passed out for about nine minutes. When I came to, I still had my watch, my wallet, and all my money.”
“What was gone?”
“The file on Jake Spivey.”
“What file?”
“I work for a Senate subcommittee. It's investigating Spivey.”
“Your friend.”
“My oldest.”
“Does he know?”
“Sure he knows.”
She frowned. “You call getting mugged a hunch.” She shook her head. “No, of course you don't. That was the two-by-four somebody slammed you across the nose with to grab your attention.” Her eyes widened, not much, but just enough to make Dill relax as he congratulated himself on his choice of lawyers. She senses it, he told himself, but she's not quite sure just what it is. But neither are you.
“What else?” Singe said.
“What else,” Dill repeated, picked up his glass, and drank some of the brandy, noting that the California vintners still had a way to go before overtaking their French competitors. “Well, ‘what else' includes an old reporter on the
Tribune
who already has the whole story on Felicity's funny finances, except he's holding back on it until he gets the word.”
“From whom?”
“He didn't say and I knew better than to ask. Then there's Felicity's ex-boyfriend, the frightener and one-time football great.”
“Clay Corcoran,” she said.
“I thought he gave up on being jilted too easily, but Felicity's tenant, the female one, more or less confirms his story. The tenant's name is Cindy McCabe. She took off her halter to let me admire her bare bosom. She also claimed she'd once made a pass at Felicity, but got turned down.”
“Did you turn her down?”
“I'm afraid so. I was late for my next appointment, which I didn't know I had at the time, but which turned out to be with Captain Colder, the bereaved fiance. Captain Colder gave me the key to a garage apartment where Felicity really lived.” Dill reached into his jacket pocket, brought out the key Colder had given him, and placed it on the glass table. “The apartment's over on Fillmore and Nineteenth, not too far from here.”
“Across from Washington Park,” she said.
“You know it?” he said. “I mean did you know she had an apartment there?”
Singe slowly shook her head. “No. I didn't.”
“And you were her lawyer, her confidante, her friend. Didn't she ever invite you over?”
“Just to the duplex. I was over there quite a few times. I told her I thought it looked a little bare, even a little sterile. That it didn't look like her. She said she wasn't there much because she was spending most of her free nights with Colder.”
“Felicity tell you about Mrs. Colder?”

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