Briarpatch (19 page)

Authors: Ross Thomas

Tags: #Mystery, #Thriller

BOOK: Briarpatch

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At police headquarters, Sergeant Mock waited outside in the limousine while Dill and Singe made brief statements into a tape recorder. He then drove them back to the Hawkins Hotel. The question Dill had been expecting didn't come until he and Singe rode the elevator down to the basement garage and were seated in the rented Ford with its engine idling and its air-conditioning turned as high as it would go. Outside, the First National Bank's time and temperature sign was reporting 101 degrees at 1:31 P.M.

“Why didn't you tell them what Clay said about Jake Spivey?” Anna Maude Singe asked.

“What'd he say?”

“He said, âThere's this guy called Jake Spivey whoâ.'” She paused. “That's verbatim.”

“There's this guy called Jake Spivey who what?” Dill said.

“I don't know.”

“Neither do I, and that's why I didn't tell them. Why didn't you?”

“You're my client.”

“That's not it,” Dill said and backed the Ford out of its parking slot.

“Maybe,” she said, “maybe I didn't because Clay could've been about to say, âThere's this guy called Jake Spivey who asked me to come out to his house Sunday for barbecue and a jump in his pool and I understand you all are coming, too.' Or â¦” She fell silent.

“Or what?” Dill said as he drove up the ramp.

“I don't know.”

They came out on Our Jack Street, drove to a red light at the corner of Broadway, stopped, and turned right on redâa logical practice the city had come up with in 1929, which later was borrowed without acknowledgment by California.

After driving north for two blocks on Broadway, Dill said, “You hungry?”

“No.”

“Finish your âor' then.”

“Or,” she said, “there's this guy called Jake Spivey who asked me to be his bodyguard and keep somebody from killing him.”

“That's not bad,” Dill said.

She shook her head, rejecting all suppositions. “The variations are endless,” she said. “And meaningless.”

“You sure you're not hungry?” he asked.

“I'd like a drink.”

“Okay, we'll stop somewhere and you can have a drink and I'll have a sandwich and a drink.”

“Then what?”

“Then,” Dill said, “well, then we'll go see where Felicity really lived.”

Anna Maude Singe changed her mind and had a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich along with a Bloody Mary in Binkie's Bar
and Grille. The “e” on the end of Grille had troubled Dill, but inside the place was inviting enough despite too much butcher block and too many plants. He ordered a beer and a cheeseburger. The cheeseburger turned out to be superb. Singe said her BLT was also excellent.

After she ate the last of the sandwich and licked a little mayonnaise from a finger, she said, “What do you expect to find?”

“In her garage apartment?”

Singe nodded.

“I don't know,” he said.

“Haven't the cops already been there?”

“Yes. Sure.”

“Then what're you looking for?”

“For some small trace of my sister,” Dill said. “So far, there doesn't seem to be any.”

The big house sat just across the street from Washington Park. The park was composed of a deeply sunken twenty-five acres that had got that way because it once had been a brickyard. The clay that had been dug out of the yard had gone into the red common brick used in the construction of most of the city's houses prior to 1910. After that, the city grew in a sudden spurt, land prices rose, and the area around the brickyard became economically attractive to real estate speculatorsâexcept nobody wanted to live next to where bricks were made. The city quickly decided progress and profit were far more important than bricks. It condemned the brickyard and turned the twenty-five-acre hole in the ground into Washington Park. It was in the park's public pool that both Benjamin Dill and Jake Spivey had learned to swim.

The old brick house was a sprawling, three-story affair built in 1914 with wide eaves and a huge screened porch. Its sixteen rooms
sat on a choice corner lot that was two hundred feet deep and one hundred fifty feet wide. For trees there were elms, dogwood, locust, two apricots, and a peach. At the rear on the alley was the two-story carriage house where the dead detective was said to have lived.

After parking the Ford on Nineteenth Street, Dill and Anna Maude Singe walked along the sidewalk to the alley. There Dill fished out the key Captain Colder had given him and used it to unlock the downstairs door. Inside was a steep flight of narrow stairs. There were no windows in the stairwell, which made it both dark and stifling. Dill felt around, found a wall switch, and turned it on. A forty-watt bulb provided light. He started up the stairs, followed by Anna Maude Singe.

At the top of the stairs was a small landing, no more than three by four feet. Dill used the same key in the lock of the second door. It worked. He pushed the door open, went in, found the light switch, flicked it on, and knew immediately that Felicity Dill had indeed lived there.

For one thing, there were the books: two solid walls of them, plus neat piles on the floor and in the deep sills of the four dormer windows that looked out over the alley. A GE air-conditioning unit was also wedged into one of the windows. Dill went over and switched it on. He picked up one of the books and noticed it had been published by a state university press. As he flipped through it he read the title aloud to Singe:
“Beekeeping in Eighteenth Century New England.”
The pages were underlined and annotated. Dill put the book back and turned to inspect the rest of the room.

Near where Singe stood was a large deep winged armchair with an ottoman. A curved brass floor lamp was arranged so its light would come over the left shoulder of the seated reader. Dill remembered being taught that in grade school. The reading light should always come over the left shoulder. He had never understood
why and tried to remember if he had passed on the curious notion to Felicity. He didn't think it was still taught in school.

“It's her room all right,” he said.

Singe picked up a glazed blue-and-yellow vase from the coffee table, examined it, and put it back down. “I remember when she bought this,” Singe said. “We went to a garage sale. That's where Felicity bought a lot of her thingsâat garage sales. She said it gave everything a desperate airâeven dramatic.”

“That's my sister,” Dill said.

“You notice something?”

“What?”

“There's no dust.”

Dill looked around, ran his finger over the edge of the highest bookshelf, and examined it for dust. “You're right. I guess they went through every book.”

“The police?”

He nodded.

“They were awfully neat.”

“Gene Colder probably saw to that.”

Dill again looked around. There really wasn't much more to see: a worn Oriental rug on the floor that he guessed was machine woven; some paintings on the walls-Felicity-type paintings, Dill thoughtâwhich meant they contained more emotion than art. One was of a sad-faced woman in eighteenth-century European dress leaning on a window ledge. Dill thought her expression was what a suicide might wear. Another was of a fat, uproarious drunk seated on a three-legged stool with a stein of beer on one knee and a plump simpering barmaid on the other. It appeared to be early nineteenth century. A third was an abstract of such harsh colors that it almost screamed of rage. A couch stood against a wall. The coffee table was in front of it. There were also some
chairs, a magazine rack (full), and a whatnot stand in one corner. None of the furniture matched, yet none of it seemed out of place.

A short hall led from the living room. Dill moved down it and noted that the bathroom was on the right and a small kitchen on the left. He switched on the kitchen light and saw the spices. There was a six-tier spice rack that held at least thirty or forty kinds. There was also a four-foot shelf crammed with cookbooks. He opened one of the cabinet doors and found it full of canned goods, plus a generous supply of Kool-Aid. As usual, Dill thought with a smile, there were enough canned goods to last the winter. An inspection of the refrigerator revealed that someone had cleaned out all the perishablesâthe police probablyâleaving only six bottles of Beck's beer. No one had turned off the refrigerator and the beer was still cold.

“You want a beer?” he asked Anna Maude Singe, who was opening and closing kitchen drawers.

“A beer would be good,” she said.

“You see an opener?”

“Here,” she said, took one out of a drawer and gave it to him.

He opened the two beers and handed her one. “You want a glass?” he asked.

“It'll stay colder in the bottle.” She drank from the bottle, moved back to one of the drawers, and pulled it open. “Her silver is all here.”

“That was her inheritance when our folks died. All of it.”

“She kept it polished,” Singe said, and closed the drawer. “What nextâthe bathroom?”

“Okay.”

It was a large, old-fashioned bathroom that was covered halfway up its walls with square white tiles. On the floor were small white hexagonal ones. Both the tub and sink had separate faucets
for hot and cold water. The medicine cabinet held nothing of interest.

“No prescription drugs,” Dill said, closing the cabinet door.

“Felicity was pretty healthy.” Singe looked at him curiously. “Find what you were looking for?”

He nodded. “She lived here. And she seemed to like it. That's all I was after really.”

“Shall we try the bedroom?”

“Sure.”

The bedroom was not quite as large as the living room because its size had been reduced by the addition of a large closet. There were pretty yellow curtains on the windows and a cheerful white-and-brown rug on the floor. The bed was of the three-quarter kind, quite large enough for one and even for two, providing number two didn't plan to stay the night.

The bedroom also contained an old-fashioned chaise longue, which gave it the air of a boudoir. A card table, bridge lamp, portable electric typewriter, and director's chair gave it the air of Felicity Dill.

Dill crossed to the closet and slid one of its doors back. The closet was filled with women's clothing, all neatly hung on hangers with winter clothes in plastic bags and summer clothes ready to hand. Dill shoved the hung clothing to one side to see if there was anything else worth noting and discovered the man at the back of the closet. The man had a long narrow face that wore a foolish smile. His eyes were a yellowish brown and looked trapped. Dill thought they also looked clever.

“Who the hell are you, friend?” Dill said.

“Lemme explain,” the man said.

Dill stepped back quickly, looked around for something hard, spotted the windowsill, and smashed the beer bottle against it. It
left him with a weapon formed by the bottle's neck and three or four inches of sharp jagged green glass.

“Explain out here,” Dill said.

The man came out of the closet carrying a small toolchest and still wearing his fool's smile.

“I'll tell you exactly what I want you to do,” Dill said. “I want you to put that chest down very carefully, then reach into a pocket just as carefullyâI don't care which oneâand come out with some ID. If you don't, I'm going to cut your face.”

“Take it easy,” the man said, still smiling his fixed smile. He put the toolchest down as instructed, reached into a hip pocket, and brought out a worn black billfold. He offered it to Dill.

“Give it to her,” Dill said.

The man offered the billfold to Anna Maude Singe. She approached him warily, almost snatched the billfold from his hand, and hurriedly stepped back. She opened it and found a driver's license.

“He's Harold Snow,” Singe said. “I remember that name.”

“So do I,” Dill said. “You're Cindy's roomie, aren't you?”

“You know Cindy?” the man said, his tone puzzled, the fool's smile still trying to please.

“We met,” Dill said.

“Harold's the tenant,” Singe said. “At the duplex. His name was on the lease.”

“I know,” Dill said.

Harold Snow's foolish smile finally went away. The yellowish-brown eyes stopped looking trapped and began looking wily instead.

“You guys aren't the cops then,” he said in a relieved tone.