The redheaded homicide detective stepped through the door at 7:30 A.M. and out into the August heat that already had reached 88 degrees. By noon the temperature would hit 100, and by two or three o’clock it would be hovering around 105. Frayed nerves would then start to snap and produce a marked increase in the detective’s business. Breadknife weather, the detective thought. Breadknives in the afternoon.

The door the detective stepped through led out onto the second-floor landing of a two-story yellow brick duplex with a green copper roof. The detective turned back, made sure the door was locked, and started down the outside staircase. The yellow brick duplex was in the still-fashionable Jefferson Heights section and had been well built fifty-two years ago on a nicely shaded sixty-foot lot on the southeast corner of Thirty-second Street and Texas Avenue. By dint of some rather dubious creative financing, the homicide detective had bought the duplex seventeen months back, lived alone in its upper two-bedroom apartment, and rented the lower floor for $650 a month to a thirtyish home-computer salesman and his girl friend, who were usually late with the rent.

It was 7:31 on the morning of August 4, a Thursday, when the detective reached the bottom of the outside staircase, turned left, stopped at the salesman’s door, and rang the bell. After thirty seconds or so the door was opened by an unshaven, sleepy-looking Harold Snow who tried his best to seem surprised and almost succeeded.

“Oh-my-God, Rusty,” Snow said. “Don’t tell me I didn’t pay it again.”

“You didn’t pay it, Harold.”

“Oh-my-God, I forgot,” Snow said. “You wanta come in while I write the check?” Snow was wearing only the stained Jockey shorts he had slept in.

“I’ll wait out here,” the detective said. “It’s cooler.”

“I already got the air-conditioning on.”

“I’ll wait out here,” the detective said again, and smiled a small, meaningless smile.

Harold Snow shrugged and closed the door to keep the heat out. The detective noticed a suspicious-looking gray blister, about two inches in diameter, on the brown molding that framed the door. With the aid of a fingernail file, the detective gently probed the blister, suspecting termites. I cannot afford termites, the detective thought. I simply cannot afford them.

The gray blister turned out to be only that, a paint blister, and the detective let out a small relieved sigh just as Harold Snow, now wearing a blue polo shirt, but still no pants, opened the door and held out the rent check. It was one of those brightly tinted checks with a pretty picture on it. The detective thought such checks were silly, but accepted it and studied it carefully to make sure Harold Snow hadn’t postdated the check or forgotten to sign it, or even, as he had once done, written in differing amounts.

“Damn, I’m sorry it’s late,” Snow said. “It just clean slipped my mind.”

The redheaded detective smiled slightly for the second time. “Sure, Harold.”

Harold Snow smiled back. It was a sheepish smile, patently false, that somehow went with Snow’s long narrow face, which the detective also found to be rather sheeplike, except for those clever coyote eyes.

Still wearing his smile, Harold Snow then said what he always said to the homicide detective, “Well, I guess you gotta go round up the usual suspects.”

And as always, the detective didn’t bother to respond, but said only, “See you, Harold,” turned, and started down the cement walk toward the dark-green two-year-old five-speed Honda Accord that was parked the wrong way at the curb. Snow shut the door to his apartment.

The detective unlocked the two-door Honda, got in, put the key in the ignition, and depressed the clutch. There was a white-orange flash, quite brilliant; then a loud crackling bang, and a sudden swirl of thick greasy white smoke. When it cleared, the Honda’s left door was hanging by one hinge. The detective sprawled halfway out of the car, the red hair now a smoking clump of fried black wire. The left leg below the knee ended in something that looked like cranberry jelly. Only the greenish gray eyes still moved. They blinked once in disbelief, once again in fear, and then, after that, the detective died.

Harold Snow was the first to race through the door of the downstairs apartment followed closely by Cindy McCabe, a thin tanned blond woman in her late twenties, who wore her hair up in green rollers. Snow had his pants on now, but no shoes. Cindy McCabe, also barefoot, wore a man’s outsized white T-shirt and faded jeans. Snow held out a cautioning hand.

“Stay back,” he said. “The gas tank might go.”

“Jesus, Hal,” she said. “What happened?”

Harold Snow stared at the sprawled body of the dead homicide detective. “I guess,” he said slowly, “I guess somebody just blew away the landlady.”

The long-distance call from the fifty-three-year-old chief of detectives reached Benjamin Dill three hours later. By then, because of different time zones, it was almost half-past eleven in Washington, D.C. When the phone rang, Dill was still in bed, alone and awake, in his one-bedroom apartment three blocks south of Dupont Circle on N Street. He had awakened at five that morning and discovered he was unable to go back to sleep. At 8:30 A.M. he had called his office and, pleading a summer cold, informed Betty Mae Marker he wouldn’t be in that day, Thursday, and probably not even Friday. Betty Mae Marker had counseled rest, aspirin, and plenty of liquids.

Dill had decided to forsake work that morning, not because he was sick, but because it was his thirty-eighth birthday. For some inexplicable reason he had come to regard thirty-eight as the watershed year in which youth ran down one side, old age the other. He had spent the morning in bed wondering, with only mild curiosity, how he had managed to accomplish so little in his more than three dozen years.

True, he told himself, you did manage to get married once and divorced twice — no mean feat. A year after his ex-wife had slipped quietly out of his life on that rainy June night in 1978, Dill had filed for divorce in the District of Columbia, charging desertion. Apparently convinced that Dill would never do anything right, she had filed in California, charging irreconcilable differences. Neither divorce was contested and both were granted. The two things Dill now remembered best about his former wife were her long and extremely beautiful blond hair and her unforgivable habit of sprinkling sugar on her sliced tomatoes. As for her face, well, it was fading into something of a blur — albeit a heart-shaped one.

During that long morning of reevaluation, which turned out to be both depressing and boring, Dill wisely ignored his financial balance sheet because it was, as usual, ridiculous. He owned no insurance, no stocks or bonds, no vested pension, no real property. His principal assets consisted of $5,123.82 in a non-interest-bearing checking account at the Dupont Circle branch of the Riggs National Bank and a recently paid for 1982 Volkswagen convertible (an unfortunate yellow) that was parked in the apartment building’s basement garage and whose sporty demeanor Dill now found disconcerting. He assumed this new attitude was yet another symptom of galloping maturity.

Dill gave up on his morning of pointless introspection when the long distance call from the fifty-three-year-old chief of detectives began its seventh ring. It was then that he picked up the phone and said hello.

“Mr. Dill?” the voice said. It was a stern voice, even harsh, full of bark and bite, gravel and authority.

“Yes.”

“Have you got a sister named Feticity — Felicity Dill?”

“Why?”

“My name’s Strucker. John Strucker. I’m chief of detectives down here and if your sister’s name is Felicity, she works for me. That’s why I’m calling.”

Dill took a deep breath, let some of it out, and said, “Is she dead or just hurt?”

There was no pause before the answer came — only a long sigh, which was an answer in itself. “She’s dead, Mr. Dill. I’m sorry.”

“Dead.” Dill didn’t make it a question.

“Yes.”

“I see.”

And then, because Dill knew he had to say something else to keep grief away for at least a few more moments, he said, “It’s her birthday.”

“Her birthday,” Strucker said patiently. “Well, I didn’t know that.”

“Mine, too,” Dill said in an almost musing tone. “We have the same birthday. We were born ten years apart, but on the same day — August fourth. Today.”

“Today, huh?” Strucker said, his harsh voice interested, overly reasonable, and almost kind. “Well, I’m sorry.”

“She’s twenty-eight.”

“Twenty-eight.”

“I’m thirty-eight.” There was a long silence until Dill said, “How did—” but broke off to make a noise that could have been either a cough or a sob. “How did it happen?” he said finally.

Again, the chief of detectives sighed. Even over the phone it had a sad and mournful sound. “Car bomb,” Strucker said.

“Car bomb,” Dill said.

“She came out of her house this morning at her regular time, got into her car — one of those all-tin Honda Accords — threw out the clutch, and that’s what activated the bomb — the clutch. They used C4 — plastic.”

“They,” Dill said. “Who the hell are they?”

“Well, it might not’ve been a they, Mr. Dill. I just said that. It could’ve been only one guy, but one or a dozen, we’re gonna get who did it. It’s what we do — what we’re good at.”

“How quickly did she—” Dill paused and took a deep breath. “I mean, did she—”

Strucker interrupted to answer the incomplete question. “No, sir, she didn’t. It was instantaneous.”

“I read somewhere that it’s never instantaneous.”

Strucker apparently knew better than to argue with the recently bereaved. “It was quick, Mr. Dill. Very quick. She didn’t suffer.” He paused again, cleared his throat, and said, “We’d like to bury her. I mean the department would, if it’s okay with you.”

“When?”

“Is it all right with you?”

“Yes, it’s all right with me. When?”

“Saturday,” Strucker said. “We’ll have a big turnout from all over. It’s a nice ceremony, real nice, and I’m sure you’ll want to be here so if there’s anything we can do for you, make you a hotel reservation or something like that, well, just let—”

Dill interrupted. “The Hawkins. Is the Hawkins Hotel still in business?”

“Yes, sir, it is.”

“Make me a reservation there, will you?”

“For when?”

“For tonight,” Dill said. “I’ll be there tonight.”

Dill stood at one of the tall, almost floor-to-ceiling windows that lined the north side of his living room and watched the old man with the Polaroid take a photograph of the blue Volvo sedan that was illegally parked near the corner of Twenty-first and N Streets.

The old man was the owner of a vacant four-story apartment building across the street from Dill’s windows. At one time the old man had leased his bile-green building to a District program that had filled the apartments with drug addicts who were trying to break their habits. After the program’s funds ran out, the addicts moved away, no one quite knew where, leaving behind a sackful of drawings that fell off the garbage truck and blew about the neighborhood.

Dill had picked up one of the drawings. It had been done with crayons in harsh primary colors and seemed to be a self-portrait of one of the dopers. There was a purple face with round eyes that had crosses in them and a big green mouth with fangs for teeth. The drawing was on the level of a bright first- or second-grader. Underneath the face was the laboriously printed legend: I AM A NO GOOD FUCKING DOPE FEIND. Dill sometimes wondered if the therapy had helped.

After the addicts moved out of his building, the old man lived in it alone, refusing either to sell or rent the property. He kept busy by taking Polaroid snapshots of the cars that parked illegally in front of it. He angled his shots so that they included both the No Parking sign and the offending car’s license plate. Evidence in hand, the old man would then call the cops. Sometimes they came; sometimes they didn’t. Dill often watched the old man at work and marveled at his rage.

Dill turned from the window, looked down, and discovered he was holding an empty cup and saucer. He could not remember either making or drinking the coffee. He crossed the room to the kitchen, moving slowly, a tall man with the lean, planed-down body of a runner, a body he had done virtually nothing to acquire, but had inherited from his dead father along with the carved-out, almost ugly face that male Dills had handed down to their sons since 1831 when the first Dill stepped off the boat from England.

The most prominent feature of the face was its nose: the Dill nose. It poked out and then shot almost straight down, not quite curving back into a hook. Below it was the Dill mouth: thin, wide, and apparently remorseless, or merry if the joke were good, the company pleasant. There was just enough chin, far too much to be called weak, but not quite enough for determined, so many settled for sensitive. The Dill ears were large enough to flap in a high wind and grew mercifully close to the head. But it was the eyes that almost rescued the face from ugliness. The eyes were large and gray and in a certain light looked soft, gentle, and even innocent. Then the light would change, the innocence would vanish, and the eyes looked like year-old ice.

At the stainless steel kitchen sink, Dill absently let water rinse over the cup for a full two minutes until he realized what he was doing, turned off the tap, and put both cup and saucer on the drainboard. He dried his wet right hand by running it through his thick dark coppery hair, opened the refrigerator door, peered inside for at least thirty seconds, closed the door, and moved back into the living room, where he stood, totally preoccupied with his sister’s death, as another part of his mind tried to remember what he should do next.

Pack, he decided, and started toward the bedroom only to notice the tan leather one-suiter standing near the door that led out into the corridor. You already did that, he told himself, and remembered the suitcase open on the bed, and his robotlike taking of socks, shirts, shorts, and ties from the drawers, the dark-blue funeral suit from the closet, and then his folding them all into the suitcase, and closing it, and lugging it into the living room. Then you made the coffee; then you drank it; and then you watched the old man. He glanced down to make sure he had actually got dressed. He found he was wearing what he thought of as the New Orleans uniform: gray seersucker jacket, white shirt, black knit silk tie, dark-gray lightweight slacks, and black pebble-grain loafers, nicely polished. He could not remember polishing the loafers.

Dill checked his wrist for his watch and patted his pockets for wallet, keys, checkbook, and cigarettes, which he couldn’t find, and then remembered he no longer smoked. He glanced once more around the apartment, picked up the airline-scuffed suitcase, and left. On the southwest corner of Twenty-first and N he hailed a cab, agreed with the Pakistani driver that it was cooler than yesterday, but still hot, and asked to be driven first to the bank, and then to 301 First Street, Northeast: the Carroll Arms.

At one time the Carroll Arms, hard by the Capitol, had been a hotel that catered to politicians and to those who worked for them and lobbied them and wrote about them and sometimes went to bed with them. Now it had been taken over by Congress, which housed some of its spillover activities there, including an obscure three-member Senate subcommittee on investigation and oversight. It was this same subcommittee that paid Benjamin Dill $168 a day for his consultative services.

Dill’s patron and rabbi, or perhaps abbot, on the three-member subcommittee was its ranking (and only) minority member, the Child Senator from New Mexico, who had been called the Boy Senator from New Mexico until someone wrote an apparently earnest letter to The Washington Post charging that Boy Senator was sexist. A syndicated columnist had seized on the issue and got a column out of it by suggesting that Child Senator might be far more fitting in these troubled times. He also had consoled the Senator with the observation that he would all too soon outgrow the appellation. However, the new nickname had stuck and the Senator wasn’t at all unhappy about the space and the air time it had earned him.

The Child Senator’s name was Joseph Ramirez and he was from Tucumcari, where he had been born thirty-three years ago. His family had money and he had married more. He also had a law degree from Harvard and a B.A. from Yale, and he had never worked a day in his life until he was named assistant county attorney a year out of law school. He made a local name for himself by helping send a county commissioner to jail for accepting a bribe that allegedly amounted to $15,000. And although everyone had known for years that the commissioner was bent as bobwire, they were still surprised and impressed when young Ramirez actually sent the old coot to jail. The kid’s a comer, they had agreed, and it was generally conceded that with all that Ramirez money (and don’t forget the wife, she’s got money too) the kid might go far.

Ramirez went to the State Senate and then leapfrogged into the U.S. Senate in his thirty-second year. He now made no secret of his desire to be the first Latino President of the United States, which he figured would be around 1992 or 1996 or maybe even 2000, when “we beaners will make up the majority of the electoral vote anyhow.” Not everyone thought the Child Senator was kidding.

To Benjamin Dill the corridors of the Carroll Arms still reeked of old-style tag-team politics, and of its cheap scent and loveless sex and hundred-proof bourbon and cigars that came wrapped in cellophane and were sold for a quarter one and two at a time. Although he considered himself a political agnostic, Dill liked most politicians — and most laborskates and consumer fussbudgets and civil rights practitioners and professional whale watchers and tree huggers and antinuke nuts and almost anyone who would rise from one of the wooden folding chairs at the Tuesday night meeting in the basement of the Unitarian church and earnestly demand to know “what we here tonight can do about this.” Dill had long since despaired that there was not much anyone could do about anything, but those who still believed there was interested him and he found them, for the most part, amusing company and witty conversationalists.

Dill walked through the door marked 222 and into the cluttered reception room where Betty Mae Marker ruled as major domo over the subcommittee’s limited precincts. She glanced up at Dill, studied him for a moment, and then let sympathy and concern flood across her dark-brown handsome face.

“Somebody died, didn’t they?” she said. “Somebody close passed on.”

“My sister,” Dill said as he put down his suitcase.

“Oh, Lord, Ben, I’m so sorry. Just say what I can do.”

“I have to fly home,” Dill said. “This afternoon.”

Betty Mae Marker already had the phone to her ear. “American okay?” she asked as she started punching the number.

“American’s fine,” Dill said, knowing if a seat was available, she would get him on the flight and, in fact, would get them to bump someone off if it was full. Betty Mae Marker had worked on Capitol Hill for twenty-five of her forty-three years, almost always for men of great power, and consequently her reputation was impressive, her intelligence network formidable, and her fund of political due bills virtually inexhaustible. Bidding for her services was often spirited, even fierce, and many of her cronies had wondered why she let the Child Senator lure her over to that do-nothing subcommittee stuck way off down there in the Carroll Arms.

“Coattails, sugar,” she had replied. “That man’s got the longest, fastest-moving set of coattails I’ve seen up here since Bobby Kennedy.” After Betty Mae Marker’s assessment got around, the Child Senator’s political stock crept up a few points on the invisible Capitol Hill index.

Dill waited while Betty Mae Marker murmured softly into the phone, giggled, scrawled something on a scrap of paper, hung up, and handed the scrap to Dill. “Leaves Dulles at 2:17, first class,” she said.

“I can’t afford first class,” Dill said.

“They’re overbooked on coach, so for the same price they’re gonna stick you up there in first class with all the free liquor and the youngest stews, which I thought might cheer you up a little.” The genuine sympathy again swept across her face. “I’m so sorry, Ben. You all were close, weren’t you? — I mean, real close.”

Dill smiled sadly and nodded. “Close,” he agreed, and then gestured toward one of the two closed doors — the one that led into the office of the subcommittee’s minority counsel. “He in?”

“Senator’s with him,” she said, picking up the phone again. “Lemme break the news and then all you’ve gotta do is poke your head in, say hello, and be off about your own sad business.”

Again, Betty Mae Marker murmured into the phone in that practiced contralto, which was pitched so low that Dill, standing only a yard away, could scarcely make out what she was saying. She hung up, nodded toward the closed door, smiled, and said, “Watch.”

The door banged open. A big blond man of around thirty-six or thirty-seven stood there in his shirtsleeves, loosened tie, and a belt that he wore down almost below hip level so his gut would have room to hang out over it. On his face he wore an expression of pure Irish grief.

“Goddamnit, Ben, I don’t know what the hell to say, except I’m goddamn sorry.” He wiped hard at the bottom half of the plump, curiously handsome face, as if to wipe away the display of grief, although it stayed firmly in place. He then shook his head sorrowfully, nodded toward his office, and said, “Come on in here and we’ll drink about it.”

The man was Timothy A. Dolan, the subcommittee’s minority counsel and a furloughed lieutenant late of one of Boston’s frequent political wars. His share of the spoils had been the job of minority counsel. “Two years down in Washington there, that won’t spoil the lad none,” it was decided up in Boston. “And then we’ll see. We’ll see.” Dill had long been convinced that Boston was to American politics what the Aberdeen Proving Grounds were to armaments.

As Dill followed Dolan into the office, the Child Senator rose and held out a hand. The expression on the young-looking face was one of deep concern. And again Dill thought what he always thought when he saw Ramirez: Smart as a Spaniard.

Senator Joseph Luis Emilio Ramirez (D.-N.M.) looked taller than he really was, probably because of his plumb-line posture and the beautifully tailored pin-striped suits he favored. Dark-brown hair swept down in a lock over a high forehead, and he kept brushing it away from glittering black eyes that sometimes seemed a mile deep. He had a perfect nose, light olive skin, and a wide mouth with a touch of overbite. His chin had a deep cleft that made most women and some men want to touch it. He was actor handsome, not quite genius smart, extremely rich, and at thirty-three he looked twenty-three, possibly twenty-four.

The voice went with the rest of him, of course. It was a low baritone with a memorable husk. He could make it do anything. He now made it offer his condolences.

“You have all my sympathy, Ben,” the Senator said, taking Dill’s right hand in both of his, “even though I can only guess at your sorrow.”

“Thank you,” Dill said, discovering there was really nothing more to say when condolences were offered. He sat down in the chair next to the one the Senator had been sitting in. Dolan, back behind his desk now, began pouring three drinks from a bottle of Scotch.

“She was a policewoman, wasn’t she?” the Senator said as he sat down next to Dill. “Your sister.”

“A homicide detective,” Dill said. “Second grade. She’d just got her promotion.”

“How’d it happen?” Dolan said, leaning over the desk to serve the two drinks.

“They say it was a car bomb.”

“Murdered?” the Senator asked, more surprised than shocked.

Dill nodded yes, drank his whisky down, and put the glass on Dolan’s desk. He noticed the Senator only sipped a small swallow and then put the glass down. Dill knew he wouldn’t pick it up again.

“I’m going to be gone a week or ten days,” Dill said. “I thought I’d better stop by and let you know.”

“Need anything?” the Senator asked. “Money?” It apparently was all he could think of.

Dill smiled and shook his head. Dolan, still standing, stared down at him thoughtfully, cocked his head to the left, and said, “You say you’ll be down there for a week, maybe ten days?”

“About that.”

Dolan looked at the Senator. “Maybe we could put Ben on the expense since Jake Spivey’s still holed up down there.”

The Senator turned to Dill. “You know Spivey, of course.”

Dill nodded.

“Hell,” Dolan said, “Ben could take Spivey’s deposition, save us from flying him back up here, and then we could charge Ben’s expenses off on the Brattle thing.”

The Senator nodded, almost convinced. He turned to Dill again. “Would you be willing to do that while you’re down there, take Spivey’s deposition?”

“Yes. Sure.”

“You know the Brattle thing? What a question. Of course you do.” The Senator looked back up at Dolan. “Then it’s settled.”

Dill rose. “I’ll get a copy of Spivey’s file from Betty Mae.”

The Senator also rose. “Spivey could help tremendously in resolving this… problem. If he isn’t entirely forthcoming, be — well, you know — firm. Very firm.”

“You mean threaten him with a subpoena?”

The Senator turned to look at Dolan. “Yes, I think so, don’t you?”

“Shit, yes,” Dolan said.

Dill smiled slightly at Dolan. “Could we get it out of the committee?”

“Never,” Dolan said. “But Spivey doesn’t have to know that, does he?”

It was a little more than ten years since Dill had been back to his native city, which was also the capital of a state located just far enough south and west to make jailhouse chili a revered cultural treasure. Wheat grew in the state, as did rattlesnakes, sorghum, broomcorn, cotton, soybeans, blackjack oaks, and white-faced cattle. There were also oil, gas, and a little uranium to be found, and the families of those who had found them were often wealthy and sometimes even rich.

As for the city itself, it was said that the parking meter had been invented there back in the thirties along with the supermarket shopping cart. Its international airport was named after an almost forgotten pilot-navigator, William Gatty, who had helped guide Wiley Post around the world in 1931. There were not many Jews in either the city or the state, but plenty of blacks, numerous Mexicans, two tribes of Indians, a world of Baptists, and 1,413 Vietnamese. According to the U.S. census, the city’s population was 501,341 in 1970. By 1980 it had risen to 501,872. There were, on the average, 5.6 homicides a week. Most of them took place on Saturday night.

When Dill came out of the Gatty International Airport terminal shortly after 4 P.M., the temperature had dropped to 101 degrees and a hard hot wind was whipping down from Montana and the Dakotas. Dill couldn’t remember when the wind hadn’t blown almost constantly, either up from Mexico or down from the Great Plains, searing in summer, freezing in winter, and nerve-racking always. It now blew hot and dry and laden with red dust and grit. Sudden gusts of up to thirty-five miles per hour snatched at Dill’s breath and tore at his coat as he leaned into them and plodded toward a taxi.

Dill’s native city, like most American cities, was laid out on a grid. The streets that ran east and west were numbered. Those that ran north and south were named, many after pioneer real estate speculators, and the rest after states, Civil War generals (both Union and Confederate), a governor or two, and a handful of mayors whose administrations were thought to have been reasonably free of graft.

But as the city grew, imagination had faltered, and the newer north-south streets were named after trees (Pine, Maple, Oak, Birch, and so on). When the trees were at last exhausted — ending with Eucalyptus for some reason — the names of presidents had been brought into play. These expired with Nixon Avenue a far, far 231 blocks west of the city’s main street, which, not surprisingly, was called Main Street. Main’s principal intersecting thoroughfare was, inevitably, Broadway.

As the taxi neared the city’s center, Dill discovered that most of the landmarks of his youth had vanished. Three downtown motion picture theaters were gone: the Criterion, the Empress, and the Royal. Eberhardt’s pool hall was gone, too. Located just two doors down and one floor up from the Criterion, it had been a wonderfully sinister place, at least to thirteen-year-old Benjamin Dill when he had first been lured into it one Sunday afternoon by evil Jack Sackett, a fifteen-year-old acquaintance who had gone on to become one of the premier pool hustlers on the West Coast.

The post-World War Two building boom had not reached the city’s downtown section until the mid 1970s, some thirty years late. Until then, downtown had remained much as it was when it had been caught flatfooted by the crash of ’29 with two thirty-three-story skyscrapers nearly completed and another one halfway up.

The two thirty-three-story skyscrapers had been built across the street from each other, one by a bank and the other by a speculator who was later wiped out by the crash. There was a race to completion — a dumb publicity stunt, critics said — and the bank had won. The day after the ruined speculator’s building was completed by a syndicate of oil men who had bought it for a song (some said less), the speculator rode the elevator up to the top of his broken dream and jumped off. The third skyscraper, the one that was only halfway up when the crash came, was never finished and they finally tore it down in the mid-fifties.

By 1970, the city’s downtown section still looked like 1940, except there weren’t as many people. The big department stores had long since fled to the outlying malls along with their customers. Other firms followed; urban decay set in; the crime rate shot up; and nobody came downtown. The panicked city fathers hired themselves an expensive Houston consulting firm that came up with a redevelopment plan and then pried a huge federal grant out of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington. The redevelopment plan called for the leveling of most of the downtown area and erecting in its place one of those cities of tomorrow. They razed almost everything and then the money ran out, as it usually does, and downtown was left looking rather like downtown Cologne after the war. But the demolition had not really begun until mid-1974, and by then Benjamin Dill was gone.

Dill was surprised to discover he didn’t really mind the changes that had taken place — not even the glossy new buildings that were beginning to poke up out of the erased landmarks of his youth and childhood. You should be old enough to distrust change, he told himself. Change marks time’s passage and only the young with very little past willingly embrace the new without argument — only the very young and those who stand to profit from it. And since there’s absolutely no way you’re going to make a buck out of it, maybe you’re not so old after all.

The taxi driver, a morose black in his early forties, turned right on Our Jack Street, which separated the two old skyscrapers. Originally, Our Jack Street had been named Warder Street during the second term of Jack T. Warder, the only governor ever to be impeached twice, the first time for graft, which he beat by generously bribing three state senators, and the second time for the bribes themselves. He had resigned in 1927, but not before pardoning himself. The disgraced governor had ended his final press conference with a sly grin and a long remembered, often quoted quip: “What the hell, fellas, I didn’t steal half what I could’ve.”

Forever after he was Our Jack, fondly and ruefully remembered by old-timers who still liked to quote his quip, smirk, and shake their heads. They finally changed the street’s name to United Nations Plaza, but everybody still called it Our Jack Street, although few now knew why and the rest seldom bothered to ask.

The Hawkins Hotel was located at the corner of Broadway and Our Jack Street in the heart of the downtown section. It was a somber gray eighteen-story sixty-year-old building, as steadfastly Gothic in design as the University of Chicago. For a time, the Hawkins had been virtually the only hotel in town — at least downtown — the rest having been felled by dynamite and the wrecker’s ball. But then a new Hilton had gone up, followed quickly by a Sheraton and, as always, a huge Holiday Inn.

The fare for the seventeen-mile taxi ride from the airport was a dollar a mile. Dill handed the morose driver a twenty and told him to keep the change. The driver said he by God hoped so and sped off. Dill picked up his bag and entered the hotel.

He found it not much changed. Not really. It had retained those soaring vaulted ceilings that gave it the hushed atmosphere of a seldom-visited out-of-the-way cathedral. The lobby was still a place to sit and watch and doze in reddish leather easy chairs and plump couches. There were also low tables with convenient ashtrays and a lot of fat solid lamps that made it easy to read the free newspapers that still hung on racks: the local Tribune; the News-Post, published in the rival upstate city that prided itself on its eastern airs; The Wall Street Journal; The Christian Science Monitor; and the pony edition of The New York Times, whose contents were transmitted by satellite, printed locally, and delivered by mail the same day, sometimes before noon if you had the right postman.

The Hawkins’ big lobby was far from crowded: a half-dozen middle-aged men who looked like crack salesmen; several couples; a young woman who was more than pretty; and an older woman, in her mid-sixties, who for some reason stared at Dill over her Wall Street Journal. He thought she had the look of a permanent hotel guest. The temperature in the lobby was a chilly 70 degrees, and Dill felt his sweat-soaked shirt begin to cool and dry as he moved toward the reception desk.

The young male clerk at reception found Dill’s reservation and asked how long he might be staying. Dill said a week, possibly longer. The clerk said that was fine, handed Dill a room key, apologized for not having a bellman on duty (he had called in sick), but added that if Dill needed any help with his luggage, they would somehow get somebody to bring it up later. Dill said he didn’t need any help, thanked the clerk, picked up his bag, turned and almost collided with the more than pretty young woman he had noticed earlier.

“You’re Pick Dill,” she said.

Dill shook his head, smiling slightly. “Not since high school.”

“In grade school they used to call you Pickle Dill. That was at Horace Mann out on Twenty-Second and Monroe. But all that ended one afternoon in the fourth grade when you beat up on three of your what? — tormentors?”

“My finest hour,” Dill said.

“After that they called you Pick instead of Pickle right through high school, but stopped when you went down to the university, although your sister always called you that. Pick.” The young woman held out her hand. “I’m Anna Maude Singe — like in scorch — and I’m — was, damnit — a friend of Felicity’s. I’m also her attorney and I thought you might like the family counselor on hand when you got here in case there’s something you want done.”

Dill shook Anna Maude Singe’s hand. It felt cool and strong. “I didn’t know Felicity had a lawyer.”

“Yep. Me.”

“Well, I do want something — a drink.”

Singe nodded to the left. “The Slush Pit do?”

“Fine.”

The Slush Pit’s name originally was the Select Bar, but oil men back in the early thirties had started calling it the Slush Pit because of its darkness, and the name had stuck until finally, in 1946, the hotel made it official with a discreet brass plaque. It was a smallish place, extremely dark, very cool, with a U-shaped bar and low heavy tables and matching chairs that were more or less comfortable. There were only two men drinking at the bar and another couple at one of the tables. Dill and Anna Maude Singe took a table near the door. When the waitress came over, Singe ordered a vodka on the rocks and Dill said he would have the same.

“I’m very sorry about Felicity,” the Singe woman said almost formally.

Dill nodded. “Thank you.”

They said nothing more until the waitress came back with the drinks. Dill noticed that Singe had a little trouble with her R’s, so little he really hadn’t noticed until her “sorry” came out almost like “sawwy,” but less pronounced than that. Then he saw the faint white scar on her upper lip, barely visible, that had been left by the skilled surgeon who had corrected the harelip. Her R’s were the only letter that still seemed to give her any trouble. Otherwise her diction was perfect with not much trace of a regional accent. Dill wondered if she had had speech therapy.

The rest of her, in the straight dark skirt and the candy-striped shirt with its white collar and cuffs, seemed well tanned, nicely put together, and even athletic. He tried to decide whether she went in for running, swimming, or tennis. He was fairly sure it wasn’t golf.

He also noticed that she had very dark-blue eyes, as dark as blue eyes can get without turning violet, and she squinted them up a little when looking at things far off. Her hair was a taupe color that had streaks of blond running through it. She wore it in what Dill thought was called a pageboy bob, a style that he understood from someone (who? Betty Mae Marker?) was making a comeback, or had made its comeback, and was now on its way out again.

Anna Maude Singe’s face was oval in shape and her eyebrows were just a little darker than her hair. Her nose tilted up a bit, which gave her an air of being either shy or slightly stuck-up — or both. Dill thought they often went together. Her mouth was full and reasonably wide and when she smiled he noticed her teeth had had a good dentist’s loving care. She had a long slender neck, quite pretty, and Dill wondered if she had ever danced. It was a dancer’s neck.

After the drinks came, he waited until she took a sip of hers, and then asked, “Did you know Felicity long?”

“I knew her just a little down at the university, but when she graduated, I went on to law school, and then when I came back up here and opened my practice, she was one of my first clients. I drew up her will. I don’t reckon she was more’n twenty-five or six then, but she’d just transferred into homicide and — well, she just thought she’d better have a will. Then about — oh, I’d say sixteen, seventeen months back — she bought her duplex and I helped her with that, but in the meantime we’d become good friends. She also sent me some clients — cops needing divorces mostly — and she talked about you a lot. That’s how I knew they called you Pickle in grade school and all.”

“She ever talk about her work?” Dill said.

“Sometimes.”

“Was she working on anything that might’ve caused someone to plant a bomb in her car?”

Singe shook her head no. “Not that she ever told me about.” She paused, took another drink, and said, “There is something I think you should know.”

“What?”

“She worked for a man called Strucker.”

“The chief of detectives,” Dill said. “He called me this morning.”

“Well, he’s pretty upset about Felicity. Two hours after she died he called me and the first thing he wanted to know, even before he told me she was gone, was whether I was the executor of her estate, except he didn’t say executor, he said executrix.”

Dill nodded his appreciation of the fine Liberationist point.

“I told him yes, sir, I am, and then he told me she’d died and before I could ask how or why or even say oh-my-God-no, he asked me to meet him down at Felicity’s bank.”

“Safety deposit box?”

She nodded. “Well, I was there when they opened it, me crying and mad at the… the goddamned waste. They brought it all out of the box, one thing at a time. There was her birth certificate, then her will, then some pictures of your parents, and then her passport. She was always talking about going to France, but she never got around to it. That’s what she majored in, you know, French.”

“I know.”

“Well, the last thing they brought out of the box was the insurance policy. She took it out just three weeks ago. It was a term policy naming you as sole beneficiary.”

Anna Maude Singe stopped talking and looked away.

“How much?” Dill said.

“Two hundred and fifty thousand,” she said and looked quickly back at Dill, as if to catch his reaction. There was none, except in the eyes. Nothing else in his face changed except the large soft gray eyes that suddenly iced over.

“Two hundred and fifty thousand,” Dill said finally.

She nodded.

“Let’s have another drink,” he said. “I’ll buy.”

At 5:45 P.M. Benjamin Dill was hanging his dark-blue funeral suit in the closet of room 981 in the Hawkins Hotel when they knocked on the door. After he opened it he automatically classified them as policemen. Both wore civilian clothing — well-cut, obviously expensive clothing — but the carefully bored eyes, the practiced intimidating carriage, and the far too neutral expressions around the mouths betrayed their calling.

Both were tall, well over six feet, and the older one was wide and thick, while the younger one was rake-lean, tan, and just a trifle elegant. The wide one stuck out his hand and said, “I’m Chief Strucker, Mr. Dill. This is Captain Colder.”

Dill shook Strucker’s heavy freckled hand and then accepted the one offered by Colder. It was slim and exceptionally strong. Colder said, “Gene Colder, homicide.” Dill said, “Come in.”

They came into the room a little warily, the way policemen do, sweeping it with their eyes and classifying its contents and occupant, not out of curiosity, but habit. Dill waved them to the medium-sized room’s two easy chairs. Strucker lowered himself carefully with a sigh. Colder sat down like a cat. Strucker took a cigar from his pocket, held it up for Dill to see, and said, “Mind?”

“Not at all,” Dill said. “Would you like a drink?”

“I think I would, by God,” Strucker said. “It’s been a hard one.”

Dill took a bottle of Old Smuggler from his suitcase, removed the plastic covers from two glasses on the writing desk, fetched another glass from the bathroom, and poured three drinks. “Water?” he asked. Strucker shook his head. Colder said no thanks. Dill handed them their drinks, took his own into the bathroom, ran some water into it, came back out, and sat down on the bed. He waited until Strucker got his cigar going and had swallowed some of the Scotch.

“Who did it?” Dill asked.

“We don’t know yet.”

“Why did they do it?”

Strucker shook his big head. “We don’t know that either.” He sighed again — that long, heavy, despairing sigh. “We’re here for a couple of reasons. One is to try and answer your questions and the other is to offer you the city’s and the department’s official sympathy. We’re goddamned sorry. All of us.”

“Your sister,” Colder said and paused. “Well, your sister was one exceptional… person.”

“How much did she make a year?” Dill said.

Strucker looked at Captain Colder for the answer. “Twenty-three-five,” the Captain said.

“And the annual premium on a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar term life-insurance policy for a twenty-eight-year-old woman in good health is how much?”

Strucker frowned. When he did the cap of thick wiry gray hair moved down toward black eyebrows that guarded the already guarded eyes whose color was more nearly green than hazel. The eyes were set close to a wandering nose that had been broken once. Perhaps twice. Well below the nose was the tight, thin-lipped mouth that seemed to disapprove of almost everything, and below the mouth was the doorstep chin. It was a worn, lined, highly intelligent face that at fifty-three might well have been on its third owner.

Strucker was still frowning when he said, “You heard about that, huh?”

“I heard about it.”

Colder smiled slightly, not enough to display any teeth, but just enough to register mild disapproval and a touch of regret. “Her lady lawyer, right?”

Dill nodded.

Strucker finished his glass of whisky, put it down on a table, and turned back to Dill. “According to the Arbuckle Life Insurance people, the annual premium was $518 and she paid it in a lump sum, all cash, on the fourteenth of last month.”

“Not a very wise investment for someone with no dependents,” Dill said. “No surrender value. She couldn’t ever borrow against it. Of course, if she knew she was going to die, she might’ve wanted to leave something to a loved one — me, in this case. You don’t think it was suicide, though, do you?”

“It wasn’t suicide, Mr. Dill,” Colder said.

“No, I didn’t think it was.” Dill rose, walked over to the window, and looked down nine stories at Broadway and Our Jack. “Then there’s her house.”

“The duplex,” Captain Colder said.

“Yes. When she wrote me about it seventeen months or so back she said she was buying herself a little house. I assumed it was an old bungalow, around sixty or seventy thousand dollars. You can still buy them for that here, can’t you?”

“Around in there,” Colder said, “but they’re getting scarce.”

“Okay, so how much would she have to put down on a sixty-or seventy-thousand-dollar house? Twenty percent? That would be twelve to fourteen thousand. I had a few bucks to spare, not many, so I called and asked if she could use a couple of thousand to help out with the down payment. She said she didn’t need it because it was being creatively financed. She sort of laughed when she said creatively. I didn’t press. I just assumed she was putting five or maybe ten down, taking out a first mortgage of around fifty or less, and a balloon payment for the rest. On twenty-three-five a year she could just about’ve managed it.” Dill paused, drank some of his Scotch and water, and said, “But that’s not what she did, was it?”

“No, sir,” Strucker said. “It wasn’t.”

“What she did,” Dill said, “was to buy a fine old duplex out on Thirty-second and Texas for one hundred and eighty-five thousand. She put thirty-seven thousand cash down and took out a first mortgage of one hundred thousand at fourteen percent, which meant her monthly payments were going to be around thirteen hundred — except she was getting six-fifty a month from the guy she rented the ground floor to, so that meant she’d only have to come up with six-fifty a month, maybe seven hundred. You say she was making nineteen hundred gross a month so that would be what? — fourteen, fifteen hundred take-home?”

“Around in there,” Colder said.

“Which left her about six or seven hundred a month to live on. Well, figuring in the tax break it could be done, I guess, with supermarket coupons and Junior League thrift-shop clothes and library books and TV for entertainment. But then there was that balloon payment — the creative financing. Her lawyer says it’s due the first of next month, which will be exactly eighteen months after she bought the place. That balloon payment is for forty-eight thousand dollars — plus interest.”

Dill turned from the window and looked down at Strucker. “How much did my sister have in her checking account?”

“Three hundred and thirty-two dollars.”

“So how do you figure she was going to come up with fifty thousand or so by the first of next month?”

“That’s what we need to talk about, Mr. Dill.”

“Okay,” Dill said, moved back to the bed, sat down, and leaned against the headboard. “Let’s talk.”

Strucker cleared his throat, puffed on his cigar, waved some smoke away, and began. “Detective Dill had a fine record, an exceptional one. For her age, none better — male or female. Now I gotta be the first to admit we transferred her outta bunco into homicide as sort of our token woman, along with three coloreds and a couple of Mexicans. It was either that or lose some federal grant money. But by God she was good. And we jumped her up to second-grade over a raft of other guys, some of ’em with a hell of a lot more seniority. In two more years, maybe less, she’d’ve made sergeant easy. So what I’m saying, Mr. Dill, is your sister was one damn good cop, a fine one, and she got killed in the line of duty — at least, that’s what we believe — so we’re gonna bury her on Saturday just like I told you and then we’re gonna find out just what the hell went wrong.”

“You mean why she went bad,” Dill said.

“We don’t know that she did, though, do we?” Captain Colder said. Dill looked at him. Colder’s half-smile was back in place — an almost hesitant smile full of diffidence. Or deception, Dill thought, for there was absolutely nothing diffident about Colder other than the smile. It’s his disguise, Dill decided. He wears it like a false beard. The smile failed to hide the true skeptic’s face with its inquisitive nose, wise forehead, cold blue doubting-Thomas eyes, and the chin that almost said, “Prove it.” It was a face that, with a slightly different coloring, might have found happiness in the Inquisition. Dill felt its owner was reasonably content as a homicide captain.

When Chief Strucker cleared his throat again, Dill turned back to him. “We’re gonna get to the bottom of this, Mr. Dill,” he said. “Like I told you over the phone: it’s what we do. It’s what we’re good at.”

Dill nodded, rose, and held out his hand, first for Colder’s empty glass, then for Strucker’s. Both men hesitated. Then Strucker sighed and said, “I shouldn’t, but I will, thanks.”

After Dill poured the fresh drinks and served them, Colder said, “What exactly do you do in Washington, Mr. Dill?”

“I work for a Senate subcommittee.”

“Doing what?”

Dill smiled. “Getting to the bottom of things.”

“Must be interesting.”

“Sometimes.”

Strucker drank half an inch of his Scotch, sighed his pleasure, and said, “You and Felicity were close.”

“Yes. I think so.”

“Your parents are dead.” It wasn’t a question either.

“They were killed in a one-car crash up in Colorado when I was twenty-one and she was eleven.”

“What’d your daddy do?” For the first time, Strucker asked as if he didn’t already know the answer.

“He was an army fighter pilot during the war,” Dill said. “And after that he was a professional student for four years, which was as long as his GI Bill lasted. He studied at the Sorbonne, the University of Mexico, and at the University of Dublin. He never got a degree. When all that finally ended, he became a crop duster, then a Kaiser-Frazer salesman, and once in a while he would be Mr. Peanut — you know, for Planter’s Peanuts. Then he turned promoter — junk-car racing, donkey baseball, stuff like that, and finally he bought out an almost bankrupt foreign-language correspondence school. He was still running that when he went up to Colorado to see about investing in a ghost town. That’s when the accident happened. It killed them both. I sometimes think my mother must’ve been relieved.”

Strucker nodded sympathetically. “Didn’t leave much then.”

“Not a dime.”

“You must’ve almost raised Felicity.”

“I was in my first year at law school down at the university. I dropped out and got a job with UPI covering the state House of Representatives. Felicity was eleven and I tried to make sure she went to school and did her homework. By the time she was twelve she was doing the shopping and the cooking and a lot of the housework. At eighteen she won a full scholarship to the university and I got an offer to go to Washington. After that, she was pretty much on her own.”

“Well, sir,” Strucker said, “I’d say you did a real fine job of bringing her up. Real fine.”

“We always liked each other,” Dill said. “We were… well, good friends, I guess.”

“Did you stay in close touch?” Colder asked.

“I usually called her every week or ten days. She almost never called me. She wrote letters instead. Letters from back home, she called them. She thought everyone who moved away should get letters from back home and that’s what hers were. Gossip. Base rumors. Mild scandal. Who went broke and who got rich. Who died. Who got divorced and why. It was a kind of diary, I suppose, not about her so much, but about the city. She actually loved this place for some reason.”

“I take it you don’t,” Colder said.

“No.”

“You didn’t happen to save those letters, did you?” Strucker asked.

“I wish I had.”

“Yeah. So do we. She didn’t save copies either. We went through her place today. Nothing.”

“What about cancelled checks?”

“Another zero,” Colder said. “Utilities, house payments, phone bills, groceries from Safeway, car payments, a couple of department store charge accounts. The usual.”

“No record of that down payment she made on the duplex?”

“The thirty-seven thousand in cash?” Colder said. “All we know is that it was all in hundred-dollar bills, which are getting to be about as common as twenties used to be.”

“No trace, huh?” Dill said.

“None.”

“Who holds the mortgage?”

“The former owner, who didn’t object in the least to all that cash money,” Colder said. “She’s a sixty-seven-year-old widow who sold the place to Felicity and then moved down to Florida. St. Petersburg. I talked to her today. She’s got no complaints. The monthly payments were almost always on time, but she is a little worried now about that balloon payment.”

“I don’t blame her,” Dill said.

Strucker fished around in his pants pockets and came up with a key. He offered it to Dill.

“What’s this?” Dill said.

“Her house key. The upstairs is sealed off right now, but our people will be all through before noon tomorrow so there’s no reason you can’t go in after that and, well, look around — stay there, if you want to.”

Dill rose, took the key, and sat back down on the bed. He looked first at Strucker and then at Colder. “What was she working on?”

This time Colder’s smile wasn’t his diffident one. It was the sardonic kind that lifted the left side of his mouth up and displayed three or four very white teeth. “You mean the one where the town’s major coke dealer got whacked out — or the one where they found the oil millionaire down at the bottom of his indoor-outdoor pool?”

“I don’t know what I mean,” Dill said. “But either one would do.”

Colder shook his head almost regretfully. “She was working on a liquor store owner who was shot and killed late one slow Tuesday night for thirty-three dollars. She also had the one where the wife over on Deep Four came home hot and tired from cleaning up after the white folks and found her husband in bed with their fifteen-year-old daughter. She killed ’em both with the breadknife. That one’s pretty well wrapped. Then there’s that other one Felicity was on where this guy who worked out in Packingtown pulls up for the light at Thirteenth and McKinley? And this other guy, who’s been twiddling his thumbs on the bench at the bus stop there, gets up, goes over, sticks his twenty-two target in the window, plinks the guy in the car four times, then turns and sort of ambles away. We gave that one to Felicity, too. She told me the other day she might be getting somewhere on it.”

“She had to be messed up in something,” Dill said. “Or by something.”

Strucker sighed again and heaved himself up out of the chair. “Well, Maybe yes and maybe no. But right now we’ve got to find out who killed her. We find that out, we’ll find out the rest. You know, Mr. Dill, homicide is usually the easiest crime there is to solve because the guy will call you up and say, ‘Hey, you’d better get over here on account of I just killed my girl friend with this here baseball bat.’ And when you get there he’s sitting on the edge of the bed, her next to him, with the bat still in his hands probably, and crying like a two-year-old. That’s your run-of-the-mill homicide. But then, every once in a while, you’ll get a tricky one. Like this one.”

Again, Strucker brought up one of his sighs from deep down in his chest. “They’re gonna hold the services at Trinity Baptist at ten A.M. on Saturday. There’ll be a limo for you or, if you like, you can ride with me and the Captain here.”

“I don’t know,” Dill said. “I guess I’d rather do it alone.”

“Sure.”

Dill frowned. “Why Trinity?” he said. “Felicity wasn’t a Baptist. In fact, she wasn’t much of anything.”

“I am,” Colder said. “I’m a deacon.”

“You?”

The sadness came then to Colder’s face, edging aside the chronic skepticism. “Your sister and I,” he said, “well, when my divorce comes through a couple of months from now, we were going to get married.” He studied Dill’s face. “She never told you, did she?”

“No,” Dill said. “She never told me.”

During the past ten years Dill had lived for varying lengths of time in New York, Los Angeles, London, Barcelona, and twice in Washington. He rarely dreamed about any of them, not even Washington, where he had lived the longest. But occasionally he did and his dreams of the far-off, sometimes foreign cities invariably melded themselves into the city of his birth. Wilshire Boulevard and Third Avenue and the Edgware Road and even the Ramblas somehow ran dreamily past the houses he had lived in as a child, the schools he had attended, and the bars he later had frequented.

Many years ago, some said in 1926, an immense milk bottle had been erected in the city atop a one-story building that sat on a small triangular plot of land formed by the juncture of Ord Avenue, Twenty-ninth Street, and TR Boulevard, which was what the locals called the winding thoroughfare named for the first Roosevelt. It was a gigantic milk bottle, at least thirty feet high, with the risen cream clearly visible in its neck. It had perched for almost sixty years on top of the tiny convenience food store that Dill remembered as having been owned by a dairy. Springmaid Dairy. He assumed 7-Eleven had taken over both bottle and store by now. For some reason the giant milk bottle was always popping into Dill’s dreams of foreign climes. Something Freudian there, he thought, something Freudian, funny, and phallic, pleased as always by alliteration’s artful aid.

At 7:15 that evening, the evening of the day his sister had died of a bomb, Dill was driving the big rented Ford along TR Boulevard, one of the three thoroughfares that broke up the metropolitan grid as they curved and wound their way across the city from south to north. At one time streetcars had zipped along TR Boulevard’s center divider, but they had been abandoned in the late forties. Everyone now acknowledged what a dumb mistake that had been and hinted darkly of the plot by General Motors and the oil companies to scrap the trolleys in favor of buses. It was a conspiracy theory that had endured for nearly forty years.

Dill had rented the big Ford from Budget. It was the biggest Ford they had and he would have rented a Lincoln had one been available. Dill, the VW owner, always rented large Detroit cars with power everything, because he felt it was an opportunity not to be missed — something like renting your own dinosaur.

Just around the long curve of Twenty-seventh and TR the giant milk bottle finally came into view, but it was no longer white. It was flat black instead. Dill slowed to stare. The little building was vacant except for some empty glass display counters that looked dusty. Over the entrance was a large sign in fading psychedelic colors: Nebuchadnezzar’s Head Shop, but it looked as if Neb had long since gone bankrupt. Dill decided the failed shop was yet another nail driven into the coffin of the sixties and the seventies.

Three blocks past the black milk bottle, on the corner of Thirty-second and TR, stood a large frame three-story Victorian house tarted up in two shades of pastel green paint that already had begun to peel. The house was home to what was alleged to be either the third- or fourth-oldest press club west of the Mississippi. For its first sixty years or so the club had shared a building at a convenient downtown location with the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks. But the Mayor was mad at the media (with reason) just as the city’s redevelopment plan got under way, and the downtown press and Elks Club building had been inked in as the first to fall.

The club had never really offered much other than a bar that frequently stayed open after the legal closing hour, steaks of a remarkable quality from a mysterious source over in Packingtown, and a long-running table-stakes poker game that began promptly each Saturday at noon and ended just as promptly at 5 P.M. on Sunday so everybody could go home and watch the eager victims go through their weekly self-immolation on 60 Minutes.

Members of the working press actually belonged to the club. At least thirty percent of the membership had something or other to do with the news business. The rest were in advertising, the law, politics, or public relations. These were called associate members and their dues were five times as high as those of the working press. The minority felt that if the voteless majority wanted to hang out with members of the press, they could damn well pay for the privilege. The club’s unofficial motto was engraved on a brass plaque that had hung behind the bar for years: I Used to Be a Newspaperman Myself.

Dill had not been in the club since it moved to its new location. He had been almost an habitué of the place when it shared the five-story downtown building with the Elks — the press club up on the top two floors, the benevolent and protective order down below. In fact, when he worked nightside for UPI, Dill had often closed the place up.

He parked the Ford as near to the Victorian house as possible — a block away — and tried to remember whether he had ever paid his final bar tab. If not, he was sure there would be someone to remind him. The Greek, if no one else.

There was still an hour of daylight left when Dill walked up the six steps to the screened wraparound porch. He crossed the porch to the locked door and rang the buzzer. A tinny voice, as irascible as ever, asked its usual one-word question: “What?”

“Ben Dill.”

“Jesus,” the voice said. A moment later the buzzer sounded, unlocking the door. A small foyer led into a room that, except for the kitchen in the rear, seemed to occupy the entire first floor of the large old house. Tables and banquettes were to the right. Near the foyer was a lounge area that focused on a huge bay window where, Dill thought, you could sit just like you could sit in private clubs all over the world and, as someone once said, watch it rain on the damn people. He felt it might even be why private clubs were invented.

Dill headed for the L-shaped bar that was to the left of the lounge area. He noticed it was the same mahogany bar they had used in the downtown location. They had even brought along the old brass rods that ran up above the bar. From them hung the salvaged leather trolley straps, providing convenient support for those who had nipped too long at the gin.

The man who stood behind the bar, leaning on it with both hands, had stood behind it for thirty years as both club manager and head bartender. His name was Christos Levides, or Christ, the Greek! or usually just the Greek. He was in his mid-fifties and looked not much different than he had at twenty-five. The black eyes were still as full of guile, the elegant mustache as trim, and the expression of faint disdain as crafty and Ulysses-like as ever. There were some new lines, of course, running in deep trenches down from the remarkable nose and in horizontal creases across the forehead. It was a carefully bored face that obviously had heard most of life’s lies and all of its excuses.

Levides didn’t move or speak until Dill settled himself on a stool and looked around to see if there was anyone else he still knew. There wasn’t. Two men were at the bar’s far end, but they looked like lawyers. A dozen or so diners were seated at tables.

“Well,” Levides said finally. “You’re back.”

“I’m back,” Dill agreed.

Levides nodded thoughtfully, as if Dill looked as awful as he had expected him to look. “I heard about your sister.” There was a long pause as Levides seemed to consider carefully what he should say next. “I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.”

“Hell of a thing.”

“Yes.”

“I remember when you used to bring her down to the old place, when she wasn’t more than yea-tall.” He held up a hand at shoulder height to show how tall Dill’s dead sister had been. “Ten, maybe eleven then?”

“About that,” Dill said. “Not much older anyway.”

Levides nodded somberly and, his brief mourning over, said, “What’ll you have?”

“A beer. Beck’s, if you’ve got it.”

Levides nodded again, spun, whipped a bottle out of the case, snapped its top off, spun back around, and set it down on the bar along with a frosted glass. “Two bucks,” he said, “and you still owe thirty-eight eighty-two on your tab, which you sort of forgot about paying when you took off for Washington — when was it? Ten years back?”

“Around in there,” Dill said, took a fifty-dollar bill from his wallet, slid it across the bar, and told Levides to take it all out of that.

Levides turned to the cash register, rang up the sale, and turned back with Dill’s change. “How’ve you been?” Dill said.

“Same old shit.”

Dill glanced around. “Looks pretty nice.”

“Yeah, if you like dry rot.”

“The steaks still passable?”

Levides shrugged. “I ate one day before yesterday and I ain’t dead yet.” He looked away. “Who did it?”

“They don’t know.”

“Who they got on it?”

“I talked to the chief of detectives,” Dill said. “Strucker.”

“Him I know.”

“And?”

The Greek shrugged. “Smart. Not college smart exactly, but smart-cop smart. Been on the force twenty-five years at least. Maybe more. Went to night law school. Took Dale Carnegie public speaking lessons. Married a whole lot of money the second time around. Lives good, dresses nice. And not a blot on him.”

“Captain Colder,” Dill said. “Gene Colder.”

“Him.”

“Him.”

“Well, him I don’t know hardly at all. They brought him in a couple of years ago from back east — Kansas City or Omaha, I think, someplace like that. They’re grooming him, I hear.”

“For Strucker’s job?”

“If Strucker goes, and there’s talk about him running for something, Colder might take it, but he won’t even hardly get the seat warm. Colder’s going all the way up when old man Rinkler finally retires.”

“Rinkler’s still chief of police?” There was more than a touch of incredulity in Dill’s tone.

“Still.”

“Hell, it’s been thirty years. At least thirty.”

“Almost,” Levides said. “They tapped him for it when he was thirty-five and he’s at least sixty-four now. Anyway, he’ll go when he’s sixty-five. It’s the rule.”

Dill drank some of his beer and asked, “Who’s the Trib got on the police run now?”

“Who else?” Levides said. “Freddie Laffter.”

“Jesus, doesn’t anything change around here?”

The Greek seemed to give it some thought and then shrugged. “Not a hell of a lot.”

“Laffter still come in every night?”

“Eight on the dot — right after the bulldog.”

“He’d know about Colder, wouldn’t he?”

“If anybody does.” The Greek looked away before asking his next question. Dill remembered it as an affectation designed to make Levides’ questions seem offhand, even indifferent. “How come you’re so interested in Colder?” he asked in a bored voice.

“Because he claims he was going to marry my sister.”

The Greek looked back at Dill and smiled. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s a pretty good reason. You want another beer?”

“Why not?” Dill said.

They sat at a corner table in the dining area. After the double vodka martinis came, Laffter took the folded edition of the Tribune from his pocket and handed it to Dill. “Page three,” he said.

Dill turned to page three and the 36-point flush-left one-column headline at the top on the right that read:

Dill read the bylined story quickly and found it contained little he didn’t already know. He refolded the paper and handed it back to Laffter. “She was twenty-eight, not twenty-seven,” Dill said.

“They told me twenty-seven.”

“Today’s her birthday. She’s twenty-eight today.”

“Oh.”

“Tell me about Captain Colder.”

“Your almost brother-in-law.”

“You know about that then.”

The old man shrugged. “They weren’t exactly trying to hide it.”

“Had they set a wedding date?”

Laffter looked at Dill with interest, but it died quickly. “He wasn’t divorced yet and so they were seeing each other socially, as they used to put it back in the dear dead days beyond recall. But I don’t think they’d set up light housekeeping. At least not so anybody’d notice.” The interest flared again in the old man’s pale eyes, but again died away. “She didn’t tell you about Colder, did she.”

“No.”

“Well, she must’ve had her reasons.”

“Such as?”

“How the hell would I know? Ask Colder.”

“He says he thought she’d told me.” It wasn’t quite what Colder had said, but Dill was interested in the old man’s reaction.

“Called her a liar, did he?”

“In a way.”

“That wasn’t very nice, but who pays for nice nowadays?”

Laffter finished his martini in a gulp and looked around for Harry the Waiter. Dill picked up his own untouched martini and set it down in front of the old man. “Here,” he said. “I haven’t touched it.”

“Jesus, if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a controlled drinker.”

Laffter raised his new drink in a mock toast. “To our most enduring myth — the bibulous newspaperman.” He swallowed some of the drink, put it back down, took out a package of unfiltered Pall Malls, offered them to Dill, who refused, and lit one with a new Zippo.

“Guess how long I’ve been in this business,” the old man said.

“A hundred years?”

“Fifty come September the third. Half a century, by God. I was twenty-two and outa work and outa college for more’n a year when old man Hartshorne hired me for seventeen-fifty a week — and that was a forty-eight-hour week back then. One day off. I got Tuesday. Who the fuck wants Tuesday off? He’s still there, you know.”

“Who?”

“Hartshorne.”

Dill shook his head. “Couldn’t be.”

The old man grinned. Dill saw that he had some very shiny new teeth. “Walks to work every morning, ninety-seven years old. Swings along Grant to Fifth and then cuts south on Our Jack, the Cadillac creeping along just behind with old Pete, that colored chauffeur of his at the wheel who’s gotta be at least eighty himself. Ninety-seven and Hartshorne’s at work every morning by eight. That’s why I’m still there. He thinks of me as Young Laffter.”

“What about Jimmy Junior?”

“Hell of a thing, isn’t it, to be sixty-seven years old and have everybody still calling you Jimmy Junior? He’s editor and president and the old man’s still chairman and publisher and owns sixty-two percent of the stock so you can guess who calls the shots.”

Harry the Waiter came over and served the two shrimp cocktails. Harry the Waiter, whose real name was Harold Pond, was black, forty, and fat, and had started at the Press Club as a skinny dishwasher when he was sixteen. He had turned himself into what may well have been the city’s finest waiter. The Cherry Hills Golf & Country Club had tried to hire him at least a dozen times, but Harry the Waiter always refused and stayed on at the Press Club, where he pretended to despise news people. Or pretended to pretend. He reviled their product, mocked their intelligence, and scoffed at their pretensions. The members regarded him as a treasure and repeated his insults with pride.

After he set the shrimp cocktail down in front of Laffter, Harry the Waiter began one of his harangues: “You eat that shrimp, old man, and you’re gonna be up around two or three reaching for the Gelusil like always. Can’t for the life of me see how anyone old as you and with the gumption God gave a goose’d eat and drink stuff the doctor says is gonna kill ’im. One of these days I’m gonna serve you your chili-mac like you always eat, instead of that nice porterhouse you went and promoted yourself this evening, and you’re gonna dip your spoon in and shovel it into that big ugly mouth of yours and swallow it, and then your eyes’re gonna bulge out like this, and you’re gonna get all red in the face, even redder’n the drink’s done made it, and then you’re gonna keel over dead and guess who’s gonna have to mop it all up? Me. That’s who. The Greek said you wanted a French Burgundy. You don’t know nothing about French wine. I’m gonna give you a nice old Napa pinot noir that ought be just about right.” Harry the Waiter turned to Dill. “How you, Ben? Sorry to hear about your sister. Terrible thing. I was gonna say something about it before, but I didn’t get the chance.”

“Thanks, Harry,” Dill said.

“Go away,” Laffter said. “Go back in the kitchen and spit in the soup or whatever you do.”

“Spit in the soup?” Harry the Waiter said. “Goodgawdalmighty, I never thought of that! Lemme go tell the other niggers.”

After he left, Laffter asked, “How come he treats you like a white man?”

“Harry and I go back a long way.”

“How long?”

“Fifteen, sixteen years. We were both broke back then and we’d lend each other money. Sometimes he’d give me a ride home.”

“Why?”

“Why’d he give me a ride home?”

Laffter nodded, interested.

“Because I didn’t have a car,” Dill said.

“Oh.” Laffter speared one of the large Gulf shrimp, dipped it into the Tabasco-ketchup-and-horseradish sauce, bit off half, and chewed it thoroughly. “Your sister moved up pretty quick in the PD,” he said around what was left of the shrimp.

“They tell me she was good.”

Laffter shrugged. “She was all right. How come she ever became a cop anyhow?”

“It was either that or teach French to junior high school kids who didn’t much want to learn French. Also the pension. She liked the idea of retiring at forty-two or three.”

“She like homicide?”

“She said it was better than bunco.”

The old man licked some sauce from his fingers. “I did a little feature on her about a year ago — maybe a bit more — but they never ran it.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It was a pretty good piece. Homicide’s new female whiz kid and all that good shit. I somehow managed to avoid calling her the new Sherlock Holmes, but it was a struggle. She’d just made a couple of collars, one of them kind of spectacular, and I thought she was worth a feature, but they killed it.”

“Who?”

“I don’t ask anymore. I don’t ask because I don’t care. I think I quit caring back around 1945. After they shipped me back to New York from Stars and Stripes.”

After several moments, Dill sighed and finally asked, “What happened in New York?”

Laffter paused in his eating to stare at something over Dill’s left shoulder. “You ever hear of PM?”

“It was a New York tabloid that leaned a little left until it fell over.”

Laffter nodded and shifted his gaze back to his shrimp. He picked one up with his fingers and bit it in two. “Well, in France I’d run into Ralph Ingersoll, who’d practically founded the thing, PM, and he’d seen some of my Stars and Stripes stuff, so he made arrangements for me to see this guy on PM when I got to New York. It was my first time there.” He paused. “Last time, too.”

The old man waited for Dill to say something. After almost a minute went by, Dill said, “And?”

“Oh, the guy offered me a job at about three times what I’d been making down here. Even talked about a column, but that was just ‘maybe’ talk — about the column, I mean. Well, I went back to my hotel and thought about it. It was my chance at the big time. That’s what we called it back then. The big time. I didn’t think PM would ever go anywhere, but I could’ve bounced over to the News or even the Times. I wrote pretty good back then. Well, I never called the guy back. Instead, I tried to get on the next plane out, but it was full up, so I took the train. Chair car all the way back down here.”

The old man paused and waited for Dill to say something. He wants me to ask him why, Dill thought. “Chuckles,” he said.

“What?”

“I didn’t really believe that story the first time I heard it fifteen years ago when I was twenty-three and you’d run out of anybody else to tell except me. But back then you were stirring in a blond New York actress who begged you to stay and when you wouldn’t, she either killed herself or went to Hollywood. I don’t remember which.”

The old man stared at Dill coldly. “I never told that story to anyone else in my life.”

“Never told who what?” Harry the Waiter said, materializing at the table with two large pewter steak platters on his left arm. He skillfully whisked away the shrimp cocktail bowls, placed them on another table, and served the two large steaks with a small flourish. Laffter stared at his hungrily.

“PM, Ingersoll, and last chance in New York,” Dill said and picked up his fork and knife.

“Shoot, I must’ve heard that one about two dozen times myself. He put the blond actress in?”

“He left her out.”

“He’s been doing that lately, but two, maybe three weeks ago, he cornered that new little old AP gal and had her in tears and buying him drinks half the night with his blond-actress tale and all.”

Laffter glared at Harry the Waiter. “You forgot the wine.”

“I don’t forget nothing,” Harry the Waiter said, reached behind his back, produced a bottle as if by magic, drew the cork, and poured a small measure into Dill’s glass. Dill tasted it and smiled.

“Good, huh?” Harry the Waiter said, filling the two glasses.

“Very.”

Harry the Waiter surveyed the table carefully, nodded his satisfaction, and left. Laffter cut into his steak, forked a piece into his mouth, and said, “I’ve paid for a lot of suppers and drinks with that story.” He paused to chew and then swallow. “I never did go back to New York though. Maybe I should’ve. What d’you think?”

Dill was surprised at the request for advice. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe you should’ve.”

Laffter nodded and went back to work on his steak, his salad, his asparagus, and his baked potato, which he slathered with six pats of butter. He didn’t speak again until he had finished. Holding up the almost empty wine bottle, he looked questioningly at Dill, who shook his head. Laffter poured the last of the wine into his own glass and drank it. He belched softly, lit a cigarette, and settled into a new position that had him leaning forward slightly, both forearms on the table. It was a posture that invited confidences, even secrets. Dill wondered how many thousand times the old man had sat just like that.

“Okay,” Laffter said, “what d’you really want to know?”

Dill stared at him thoughtfully for a moment and then went back to carving the final morsel of tenderloin from the steakbone. Dill always ate the tenderloin last. For some reason, he distrusted those who didn’t. His ex-wife, he remembered, had eaten it first. “My sister,” he said. “Who do you think killed her?”

“The generic who, you mean?”

“Right.”

“Somebody with money.”

“Why?”

Laffter blew some Pall Mall smoke into the air. “That bomb. It was done by a pro. The C4 plastic. The mercury fulminator. Very classy. That probably means out-of-state talent and that costs money. Ergo, somebody rich.”

“Okay,” Dill said. “That’s who. What about why?”

“A guess?”

“Sure.”

“She’d found out something that could stop whoever hired the bomber from being rich anymore.”

“What?”

“You mean, what’d she find out?”

Dill nodded.

“Well, she was in homicide, so maybe she found out who killed John — our generic John, of course.” He paused. “I heard about the duplex and the money and all. I didn’t use it. Not yet anyway. But I might have to.”

“You think she was on the take?” Dill said, carving the very last sliver of tenderloin from the bone.

“I don’t know,” Laffter said.

“Neither do I — and she’s my sister.” Dill put the last small piece of steak into his mouth, chewed, swallowed, and then arranged his knife and fork on his plate.

“You always eat the tenderloin last?” Laffter asked.

“Always.”

“Huh,” the old man said. “I always eat mine first.”

The computerized time and weather sign on the First National Bank read 11:12 P.M. and 86 degrees as Dill walked into the lobby of the Hawkins Hotel after parking his rented Ford in the basement garage. The elderly woman who looked to Dill like a permanent guest was still seated in the lobby reading a book. Dill tried to catch its title as he walked past. It was something he always did. She caught him at it, lowered the book quickly, and glared. Dill smiled at her. The title on the book’s spine had been The Oxford Book of English Verse.

A new male clerk was behind the reception counter. Dill paused long enough to see if there was anything in his box. There wasn’t, so he smiled reassuringly at the clerk and stepped over to the bank of four elevators. He touched the button, looked up at the floor indicator, and saw that the nearest descending elevator was on five. Something tapped him on the shoulder and a man’s voice said, “Mr. Dill?”

The voice was a deep, deep bass with a softened Southern R in the mister. When Dill turned he saw how nicely the voice fitted the owner, who looked as though he needed the bass to go with his size, which was as tall and wide as a garage door. He was also extremely ugly. Christ, Dill thought, he’s even uglier than I am. But then the big man smiled and he was no longer ugly. That’s not true either, Dill decided. He’s still ugly, but that smile is so glorious it blinds you.

“I bet you smile a lot,” Dill said.

The big man nodded, still smiling. “All the time. If I don’t, grown men pale and little children flee.” He stopped smiling and went back to being ugly and either mean or extremely hard.

“Clay Corcoran,” the big man said, and watched Dill’s face hopefully.

Dill shook his head. “No bell rings.”

“I was hoping it would. Then I wouldn’t have to explain how ridiculous I am.”

“Ridiculous?”

“Jilted lovers are always ridiculous. That’s me. Clay Corcoran, the jilted lover. Maybe even the cuckold, which is even more ridiculous, except I’m not sure you can be a cuckold if you’re not married.”

“We could look it up,” Dill said.

“By now you must’ve figured out I’m talking about your sister.”

Dill nodded.

“I’m more than sorry about Felicity,” Corcoran said. “I’m fucking well shattered.” And as if to prove it, a tear rolled down the tanned cheek from the corner of the left eye. Both eyes were green, although the left one had some yellow flecks in it. They were small eyes, set too far back in the skull and too far away from a nose that seemed to have been clumsily remodeled. The head itself was a squared-off chunk topped by a thinning hank of tow-blond hair that was almost white. It was hair so fine that it wafted about at the slightest movement of the big body. Even the bass voice made it float a little. Below the hair was a scant inch or so of forehead that had wrinkled itself into a permanent scowl. And far below that was the chin resembling a broken plow. The total effect could bother the brave and frighten the timid, until that blinding white smile came and bathed everything in its warm, reassuring glow.

Corcoran reached up for the single tear and absently wiped his finger off on the white short-sleeved sailcloth shirt that covered his massive shoulders and chest. “Well, I just thought I’d come by and pay my respects,” he said.

“Thank you,” Dill said.

The big man hesitated. “I reckon I’d better let you go get some sleep.”

“Would you like to talk about her?”

When the smile came back again, Dill thought he had discovered the right word for it: angelic. The huge head nodded eagerly and twisted around on the eighteen-inch neck as the eyes searched for something. “Slush Pit’s still open,” Corcoran said.

“Fine.”

They started for the bar and Corcoran said, “This is real decent of you, Mr. Dill.”

“How old are you?” Dill asked.

“Thirty.”

“Thirty and above calls me Ben.”

“Felicity was what — ten years younger’n you? Twenty-seven?”

“Twenty-eight,” Dill said. “Today was her birthday.”

“Aw Christ,” Corcoran said and stopped smiling.

They chose the same table Dill had sat at earlier that day with the lawyer, Anna Maude Singe. He ordered a cognac from the cocktail waitress. Corcoran asked for a bourbon and water. When she asked him what brand of bourbon, he said he didn’t care. Dill liked the big man’s indifference.

After the drinks came and Dill had his first sip, he said, “Where’d you meet Felicity?”

“Down at the university. I was a senior and she was a junior and I was having a little trouble with my French One-O-Two because I’d redshirted the year before and—”

“Redshirted?”

“A sports fan you’re not.”

“No.”

“I dropped out of school for a year because my knee went snap and by dropping out I maintained my eligibility.”

“To do what?”

“Play football.”

“When the knee got better. I see.”

“Well, there was a one-year gap between my French One-O-One and the One-O-Two that I needed to graduate, so I asked the head of the French department to suggest a tutor. He suggested Felicity. We went out a few times, but there was no big romance or anything, and after I graduated the Raiders drafted me and I went out there.”

“There being Oakland, right?”

“Oakland then. L.A. now.”

“They moved?”

Corcoran scowled. Despite himself, Dill wanted to draw back. Corcoran noticed and smiled. “Don’t mind me, that’s just my professional puzzled-rage scowl. Is there something about football you don’t like?”

“Nothing. It’s just that I don’t follow team sports closely, probably because I never played any.”

“Never?” Corcoran seemed almost shocked. “Not even baseball — Little League?”

“Not even that. It takes some conniving, but you can actually go through life without playing on a team.”

“You’re sort of bullshitting me, aren’t you?”

“A little.”

Corcoran smiled. “That’s okay. Not many people do. I kind of like it.”

“You were playing for Oakland.”

“Right. And this time the knee went snap-crackle-pop instead of just snap and that was the end of my career as a promising linebacker. Well, I had my degree in philosophy, a brand new Pontiac GTO, two suits, and no trade — unless I wanted to be a philosopher, which I’m really not too good at. So I came back home and signed on with the cops and there Felicity was. And then it really got started with us and it was very, very good. In fact, it was goddamn near perfect.”

“What happened?”

Corcoran snorted. “Captain call-me-Gene Colder is what happened. Felicity and I’d been, well, you know, going together—”

“Seeing each other socially,” Dill said, remembering the old police reporter’s phrase.

“That’s one way of putting it, but it was a hell of a lot more than that. We’d even talked about getting married — or something close to it anyway.” He looked at Dill curiously. “She never said anything at all about me?”

“No. Not once. For all I know, she lived like a nun. I never asked because it was none of my business. She never asked about my lady friends for the same reason, I suppose. Otherwise we were fairly close. At least, I thought we were.”

“She talked about you a lot,” Corcoran said.

Dill nodded. “So what happened between you two?”

“That’s just it. Nothing happened. One day everything was great and the next day it was over. She said she needed to talk to me, but we had conflicting shifts that week and she didn’t get off till eleven. So we met at this place we used to go to a lot, this bar, and she said I’m sorry, but I’ve met someone else and I won’t be able to see you anymore. Well, I just sat there for a minute or two trying to get used to the shock and the pain — and don’t let ’em kid you, there’s real pain — and finally I knew I had to say something so I asked her who. She said that wasn’t important and I said it was important to me. She just shook her head as if she was really sorry about everything. Well, I just sat there like a fool and couldn’t think of anything to say. She got up, leaned down, and kissed me on the forehead — on the forehead, by God! — and said, Thank you, Clay. Then she left and that was the end of it.”

“When did all this happen?” Dill asked.

“At six minutes until midnight on February twelfth a year and a half ago. Eighteen months. It was a Friday.”

“She was with homicide by then.”

“Been there for two or three months. Transferred in from bunco.”

“Did you give up?”

Corcoran shook his head. “I got drunk and tried to see her once and made a mess of it. Then I called her three times. The first time she said, ‘I’m sorry, Clay, I can’t talk to you,’ and hung up. The second time I called her I said, ‘Hi, it’s me,’ and she said, ‘Don’t call me anymore,’ and hung up. The third time I called and said it was me she didn’t say anything. She just hung up. I stopped calling.”

“I don’t blame you. Were you in bunco with her?”

“We never worked together or anything like that. She did a lot of undercover stuff when she was in bunco. I was in public affairs and about all I did was go around and talk to school kids — real little kids — about what wonderful folks policemen are. I’d worked up this funny kind of talk with slides. Public affairs figured if the kids could get used to me, they’d never have any hangups about normal-looking cops. I kind of liked it. But then I started seeing Felicity around with Captain Colder and I couldn’t stand that, so I quit.”

“What do you do now?”

“I’m a frightener.” Corcoran scowled and once again Dill wanted to shrink away. The big man smiled and chuckled a little. “What I am now is almost as ridiculous as being a cuckold. I’m a private detective and you’re gonna ask me how the hell can anybody my size stay private.”

“I was really going to go upstairs and think about it.”

“Yeah, well, I do a lot of bodyguard work, for oil companies mostly, who’re in places where the politicians are a little weird — Angola, Indonesia, places like that.”

“You go there?”

“No, they use me when those folks come here, and my job is to make sure none of the native nuts get close. They keep me on a retainer — the oil companies — and that pays the overhead, which isn’t all that high except for the phone. As a frightener, I do a lot of work on the phone.”

“Who do you frighten?”

“Deadbeats. Say some guy loses his job out in Packingtown and falls behind on his car payments. Well, he’s a deadbeat, right? Now some folks would say he’s a victim of an outmoded economic system that scraps people the way it scraps old cars, but you and I know better, don’t we? You and I know that anybody in this grand and glorious country of ours can go out and find himself a job if he’ll just put on a clean white shirt and go look. I mean a guy who’s fifty-four years old and has been wrapping bacon for seventeen years for Wilson’s out in Packingtown and gets laid off, well, hell, he can go wrap bacon somewhere else. I’d hire him if I needed some bacon wrapped, wouldn’t you? Sure you would.

“So this guy, this skilled ex-bacon wrapper, falls behind on his car payments and the finance company turns him over to me. And if his phone hasn’t been cut off, I call him up and say in my real deep scary voice, ‘My name’s Corcoran, pal, and you owe us money and if you don’t pay up, something’s gonna have to be done about it — understand?’ I’m really a pretty good frightener. Well, sometimes the guy pays up — I don’t know how, but that’s not my worry. If he doesn’t, I get hold of this kid who used to steal cars for a living and we go out and repo the car so the guy can take the bus when he goes out looking for a job wrapping bacon.” Corcoran paused. “Like I said, I’m a little ridiculous.” There was another, longer pause. “I think I’ll have another drink.”

Corcoran had only to glance over his shoulder to bring the waitress hurrying over. After she left with the order, he said, “There’re some days I just want to go out and break something, know what I mean?”

Dill nodded. “I think so.” He took a sip of his cognac. “The services are going to be at ten on Saturday in Trinity Baptist.”

“Why there? Felicity was a real let’s-not-fuck-around atheist.”

“The last I heard,” Dill said, “she was sort of a well-intentioned agnostic.”

“That was before homicide. After about two or three Saturday nights down on South Broadway she had this sudden leap of faith and went all the way. We were still together then. I remember she called me up one Sunday morning about six. I said hello and she said, ‘There is no God,’ and hung up. I found out later some guy had just wiped out his family with a Boy Scout hatchet. There were six of them, not counting his wife. Six kids, I mean. The oldest was eight. Felicity was first through the door.”

“They’re sending a limousine for me,” Dill said. “You like to ride along?”

The big man thought about it for at least fifteen seconds and then slowly shook his head no. “I don’t intend any disrespect — hell, that’s not the word. Indifference is the word. I’m not indifferent, but I don’t want to go to Felicity’s funeral. Funerals are awfully final and I don’t want to say goodbye yet. But thank you for asking me.”

“Is there anyone else I should ask — anyone close?”

Corcoran thought about it. “Well, you might ask Smokey.”

“Who’s Smokey?”

“Anna Maude Singe — singe, burn, scorch — Smokey. Felicity’s lawyer. Mine too. They were close. It was Smokey who told me you were staying here.”

“You talked to her today?”

Corcoran nodded.

“Did she tell you about the two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar life-insurance policy Felicity took out naming me as sole beneficiary?”

“No. When?”

“When did she take it out?” Dill said. “Three weeks ago.”

“Smokey didn’t tell me about it.” The big man’s expression grew thoughtful as he stared down at his drink. When he looked up Dill saw that the slightly mismatched green eyes had changed. Before they had been too small, too recessed, and too far apart, but clever. There was still too much wrong with them, but now they were more than clever. They had become smart, perhaps even brilliant. He tries to hide it behind all that size and ugliness, Dill thought, but occasionally it just seeps out. “There was no reason Smokey should’ve, was there?” Corcoran said. “Told me, I mean.”

“I guess not.”

“But it means Felicity knew, doesn’t it?”

“Knew?”

“That somebody was going to kill her.”

“Suspected.”

“Right. Suspected. If she’d known for sure, she would’ve done something.”

“What?”

Corcoran smiled, but it was a small smile that only made him look sad. “She was a cop. There were a lot of things she could’ve done and she knew ’em all.”

“Unless she was doing something a cop shouldn’t do.”

This time there was no pretense to the scowl. Corcoran leaned across the table, the green eyes angry now, the expression quite terrible. Dill sat very still, determined not to flinch. “You’re her brother,” Corcoran said, almost whispering the words, which somehow made them even more awful. “If you weren’t her brother and said that, I’d have to twist your fuckin’ head off. Maybe you’d better explain.”

“Let me tell you a story,” Dill said. “It’s about a brick duplex, a down payment made in cash, and a fifty-thousand-dollar balloon payment that’s due on the first.”

Corcoran, his expression still suspicious, leaned back in his chair. “All right,” he said. “Tell me.”

It took Dill ten minutes to tell what he knew. When he was done, Corcoran remained silent. Finally, he sighed and said, “That doesn’t sound too good, does it?”

“No.”

“Maybe I’d better look into it. You know, I really am a pretty fair snoop. It’s like research. I always liked research. Any objections if I look into it?”

“I don’t really care what she’s done,” Dill said. “I just want to find out who killed her.”

“And why.”

“Right,” Dill said. “And why.”

On Friday, August 5, Dill awoke a little after seven, rose, and went to the window. Nine floors below he could just make out the First National’s time and weather sign. The time was 7:06 A.M. The temperature was 89 degrees. As he watched, the temperature clicked over to 90 degrees. Dill winced, turned from the window, and went to the phone. He dialed room service and ordered breakfast, a meal he rarely ate. He ordered two poached eggs on whole-wheat toast, bacon, and coffee.

“What kind of juice?” the woman’s voice asked.

“No juice.”

“It comes with the breakfast.”

“I don’t want any, thanks.”

“Hashbrowns or grits?”

“Neither.”

“They’re free, too.”

“I’ll pass.”

“Well,” the woman said reluctantly, “okay.”

While waiting for his breakfast, Dill showered and shaved. Because he had no choice, other than the blue funeral suit, he again put on the gray seersucker jacket and the dark-gray lightweight trousers. He noticed the overnight air-conditioned humidity had ironed most of the wrinkles out of the trousers. When dressed, Dill went to the door, opened it, and picked up the free copy of the local Tribune, fattened nicely by ads for the weekend sales. He counted four sections and 106 pages.

The Tribune had always (and always to Dill was as far back as he could remember, which was either 1949 or 1950) devoted three-quarters of its front page to local and state news. National affairs and foreign news fought over the rest. Murders, crimes of passion, interesting battery, and other spicy items not deemed fit for breakfast reading were shunted off to page three. Dill turned to page three and saw that his sister’s murder still occupied its upper-right-hand one-column position.

Dill flipped through the rest of the paper, noting a couple of two-paragraph wire service stories on pages five and nine that would have made the front pages of both The New York Times and The Washington Post. He paused at The Tribune’s Op-Ed page to see what had changed and was perversely gratified to discover that nothing had. They were all still there: Buckley, Kilpatrick, Will, Evans and Novak — like some old law firm forever arguing its dismal case before the bar of history.

As he turned the pages, Dill saw that the Tribune no longer contained a Society section — at least it was no longer called such. It was now called Home instead — but it still meant six pages of parties, weddings, engagements, recipes, and Ann Landers. Dill decided that on the whole the Tribune was still the same rotten prosperous newspaper it had always been.

There was a knock at the door and Dill let in the room-service waiter, who put the breakfast tray on the writing table and smiled when Dill tipped him two dollars, instead of the one dollar he usually got. Dill dawdled over breakfast until nine o’clock, drinking coffee from the large silver Thermos carafe even after the coffee had grown cold. At nine he rose, went over to his suitcase, took out the Jake Spivey file that had been handed to him by Betty Mae Marker, opened it, noted a telephone number, crossed back to the desk, and dialed the number. It was answered at the beginning of the third ring by a woman’s voice that gave only the phone number’s last four digits. Dill had always found the practice irritating.

“Mr. Spivey, please.”

“Mr. Spivey isn’t available at the moment, but if you’ll leave your name and number, I’m quite sure he’ll return your call.” She had a young voice, Dill thought, cool and professional and faintly Eastern, from up around Massachusetts somewhere.

“Would you do me a favor?” Dill said.

“I’ll try.”

“Would you please tell Mr. Spivey that this is Mr. Dill and that unless he comes to the phone right this very minute he’s going to be the sorriest son of a bitch who ever lived.”

The woman said nothing. It sounded over the line as if she had pressed the hold button. And then the big loud voice came roaring joyously over the phone. “That you, Pickle, no shit?”

“I whipped your ass in the fourth grade for calling me that and I expect I can still do it.”

The laugh came then, a marvelous honking hoorah so infectious that Dill felt it should be quarantined. It was the totally uninhibited laugh of a man who found life an all too brief passage made up of rainbows, blue skies, bowls of cherries, plus a long head start in the pursuit of happiness. The honking hoorah belonged to John Jacob Spivey. Suddenly the laughter stopped. “I didn’t watch the news last night, Pick. Was it on?”

“I don’t know,” Dill said.

“I just read about it five minutes ago in the Tribune. I was stunned. By God I was. I just sat there and read it and then I thought, No, they gotta be talking about somebody else. Not Felicity. Then I read it again, real slow, and, well, I had to believe it. I was just fixing to call you in Washington when you called me. Goddamn, I’m sorry.”

Dill said thank you. It was all there was to say. Apparently, no one ever expected him to say anything else.

“Felicity,” Spivey said, stretching the name out, pronouncing each syllable with care and affection. “Talk about your hog on ice. She was one independent little old gal even when she was real little right after your folks died. One minute she was ten or eleven and then all of a sudden she was acting eighteen, well, sixteen anyway.” Spivey sighed. “Where you at, boy?”

“The Hawkins.”

“Shoot, Pick, nobody stays there.”

“I do.”

“You would. When’d you get in?”

“Last night,” Dill lied. “Late.”

“How soon can you get yourself out here?”

“Well, I don’t know, Jake. I’m—”

Spivey interrupted. “Lemme guess. Except it ain’t no guess, at least it’d better not be, not with all the money I’m paying those jackass lawyers of mine up in Washington. You’re down here on business for the kid Senator, right? Goddamn if that ain’t just like you, Pick, mixing business with sorrow. Well, we can tend to all that later. Right now you oughta be with your friends and you ain’t got any friend older’n me, right? None older and none better, for that matter.”

“You’re a brick, Jake.”

“Don’t you still use old-timey words though. Brick! Sure you got that spelled right? I ain’t heard anyone say brick in twenty years. Maybe thirty. Maybe ever. But then you’re the only man I ever heard, white or colored, who called somebody Toots. You used to call Lila Lee Cady that back in what? — the eleventh grade? You remember Lila Lee.”

“I remember her.”

“Went and got fat as Pat’s pig. Saw her going down the street week before last. Waddling — know what I mean? I ducked down so she wouldn’t see me.” There was the laugh again followed by a question. “You want me to send for you?”

“I rented a car.”

“How soon can you get here?”

“I don’t even know where you are, Jake. All I’ve got is your phone number and a post-office box.”

“My God, we have been out of touch. Well, at least I won’t have to give you directions. Guess what I went and done?”

“No telling.”

“About six months back I went and bought the old Dawson place.”

“Jesus God.”

“Something, idn’t it? Little old Jake Spivey living in Ace Dawson’s place.”

“The Dawson mansion,” Dill said.

“Yeah, that’s right — that’s what they always called it in the Tribune, wasn’t it? The Dawson Mansion with a capital M. Goddamn place had termites, can you imagine? Cost me a fortune to fix it up livable.”

“You can afford it, Jake — and enjoy it. I can’t think of anybody who’d enjoy it more.”

Spivey again laughed his marvelous laugh. Dill smiled. It was impossible not to. Still chuckling, Spivey said, “It’s got thirty-six rooms. Thirty-six, by God! What in hell do I need with thirty-six rooms?”

“You can hide in them.”

“You mean when they come looking for me.”

“Sure.”

“It’ll never happen.”

“Let’s hope not,” Dill said.

“How soon you gonna get out here?”

“About an hour. I’ve got to stop and pick up something.”

“What?”

“A tape recorder.”

“You won’t need it,” Spivey said. “You can use one of mine. I got a dozen tape recorders.”

“All right,” Dill said. “We’ll use one of yours.”

In 1915, two years before America’s entry into the First World War, a prosperous dentist who went by the name of Dr. Mortimer Cherry bought seven sections of scrub land 6.7 miles north of the city limits and proceeded to lay out what eventually would become the state’s most exclusive suburb. He called it Cherry Hills.

There would be, Dr. Cherry decided, no straight streets — only gently curving drives, twisting lanes, and perhaps two or three sweeping boulevards. Furthermore, all street names would have a pronounced English lilt: Drury Lane, Sloane Way, Chelsea Drive, and so on. The minimum lot — for the merely affluent — would be 100 feet wide and 150 feet deep. The rich could build on parcels as large as ten, even fifteen acres.

By 1917, the lots were plotted, the streets surveyed, and grading was about to start when the country entered the war. Dr. Cherry wisely decided to postpone further development until after the war’s end.

In early February 1919, the Tribune ran a front-page story revealing that Dr. Cherry had been born into what it called the Hebrew faith as Mordecai Cherowski in either Poland or the Ukraine. The Tribune never did pinpoint the exact location. But it managed to convince nearly everyone that Dr. Cherry was no real dentist. True, the Tribune admitted, he had pulled a lot of teeth down in Texas, but that had been when he was a medical-orderly trusty in the Huntsville State Prison, serving two years for fraud. Released in 1909, Dr. Cherry had changed his name and moved to the city where he set up practice. His credentials consisted of a diploma from a Wichita Falls dental college that hung proudly in his reception room. His practice thrived and almost everybody agreed he was an awfully good dentist. The Tribune revealed that the diploma was a fake. On March 1, 1919, Dr. Cherry drove home from his now nonexistent practice, locked the bathroom door, and shot himself in the head. He was forty-nine years old.

In the late summer of 1919, the development known as Cherry Hills was acquired for next to nothing by the oil millionaire Philip K. “Ace” Dawson, an ex-bootlegger and card sharp from Beaumont who had once done a six-month stretch in Huntsville himself. Ace Dawson held a two-thirds interest in the development. The remaining third was owned by his silent partner, James B. Hartshorne, the twenty-nine-year-old editor and publisher of the Tribune.

By 1920, the streets of Cherry Hills were paved, the utilities in, construction of the Cherry Hills Golf & Country Club was nearing completion, and Ace Dawson’s thirty-six-room prairie Tudor mansion was rising on fifteen acres of prime land where only blackjack oak and bois d’arc had stood before. Ace Dawson lived in the mansion until Christmas Day 1934, when he was kidnapped by the twins, Dan and Mary Jo McNichols, who demanded and got a $50,000 ransom and then shot Ace Dawson nine times in the back. Dan and Mary Jo were themselves shot to death in Galveston by Texas Rangers on June 3, 1935, shortly after the twins’ twenty-fifth birthday and long after they had spent all the money.

The widow Dawson had had a ten-foot-high serpentine brick wall built around the entire estate after her husband’s body was eventually found just outside Liberal, Kansas, in the back of an abandoned 1929 Essex Super Six sedan. She and her seventeen-year-old son, Ace, Jr., lived in the mansion alone except for the servants. She died at the age of eighty-five in 1973, leaving everything, including the thirty-six-room mansion, to Ace, Jr., who had long since fled to Marin County in California. Ace, Jr., tried for years to unload the old home place without success until Jake Spivey came along and took it off his hands for an undisclosed price that some said was less than two million and some said more. Much more.

Dill knew most of the history of Cherry Hills and the suicide dentist and Ace Dawson and the rest. It was part of the folklore he had grown up with. He even thought about some of it as he drove north on Lee Boulevard. Lee — along with TR and Grant boulevards — were the three winding thoroughfares that broke up the city’s boring grid. As he drove automatically, not needing to think about where he was going, Dill tried to remember if he had ever heard anyone express sympathy for the ill-fated Dr. Cherry. He thought his father might have done so once, almost in passing, but then Dill’s father had been a sentimental soul who, despite his lengthy foreign education, drew most of his day-to-day philosophy from the popular songs of the thirties and forties. The senior Dill had considered the lyrics of “September Song” to be especially profound and poignant. Son was glad Dad had died before hard rock really got going.

When he turned off North Cleveland Avenue, which also ran south all the way to Packingtown, Dill saw they had finally torn down the gatehouse. The gatehouse had been built at the Grand Boulevard entrance to Cherry Hills shortly after Ace Dawson was kidnapped. Up until 1942, uniformed private guards had made random spot checks of all cars entering the suburb. But then the war came along and the guards all quit and either joined the army or went out to Lockheed and Douglas in California. The old gate-house, which looked as if it might have been designed by a Disney disciple, had stood vacant after that, but now it was gone, and Dill guessed it must have been torn down recently because the land still looked raw.

The trees along Grand Boulevard had thrived, he noticed. They were taller, ten years taller. The poplars had shot up the most, followed more slowly by the elms, the pecans, the persimmons, and the sycamores. As he crossed Cherry Hill Brook, which once was called Split-Tail Creek, he saw that the cottonwoods had also flourished and this, for some reason, pleased him most of all.

Dill turned east off Grand Boulevard into Beauchamp Lane. The lots were larger here, beginning with three acres and rising to five, eight, and finally, fifteen acres, which was what the old Dawson mansion stood on. The houses along Beauchamp Lane (pronounced the way it looks: beau as in bo and champ as in champion) were an eclectic bunch, ranging from sprawling ranch to plains Mediterranean and having almost nothing in common other than their size, which was uniformly immense.

Dill drove alongside the Dawson estate’s serpentine brick wall, now capped with shards of glass, until he came to a locked iron gate. He pushed a button on a speaker and a woman’s voice said, “Yes.” Dill said, “Ben Dill.” The gate swung open. Dill drove through and up the curving asphalt drive past the sprinklers that were keeping the rolled bluegrass lawn green even in the August heat that the radio said had already reached 98 degrees and was expected to hit 100 by noon. There were enough tall leafy trees to make the huge old mock Tudor look almost cool. None of its mullioned windows was open, and Dill knew Spivey would have the air-conditioning going full blast.

As he drove past the open six-car garage he counted a Rolls, a Mercedes 500 SEL coupe, a high-sprung Chevrolet pickup, an old open Morgan, a Mustang convertible, and a big Country Squire Ford stationwagon. None of the cars, except the Morgan, looked more than six months old.

Dill stopped his own car in front of a wide carved-oak front door with hammered black metal hinges. He came out of the 75-degree Ford into the 98-degree sunshine and immediately shed his seersucker jacket. He draped it over the left arm that also pressed the manila envelope to his side. The envelope contained the file on Jake Spivey. With his right forefinger, Dill rang the doorbell. Somewhere, far inside, chimes played “How Dry I Am.” Dill wondered who had put them in, Ace Dawson or Jake Spivey, and finally decided it could have been either.

To Dill the woman who opened the door would have looked unattainable, if his ex-wife hadn’t looked much the same. He had since concluded that all such unattainable appearing women are not quite lean, not quite rangy, and not quite beautiful. They do look smart and easily bored. They also look rich, or as if they had once been that way. And, he was nearly convinced, they all gave off a certain faint scent, which, if only he could bottle it, he would have called Class Distinction.

This one, who seemed to be mostly long tanned legs and bare tanned arms, stared at Dill for several seconds and finally said in a drawl that sounded both Eastern and expensive, “You are Mr…. Dill, right?”

“Right.”

“You were awfully rude over the phone.”

Dill smiled. “I was trying to get Jake’s attention.”

“Yes, well, you certainly did that.” She opened the big door all the way. “I suppose you’d best come in.” Dill went in.

She was wearing brief white shorts, a blue-and-white striped sleeveless top with scooped-out armholes, and nothing else as far as Dill could see, not even shoes. Her toenails were done in a quiet coral. She had sun-streaked, honey-colored hair, appraising brown eyes, a faintly amused mouth, and a slightly sunburned nose. She wore no makeup. Dill guessed she never did because she never needed any. She turned to look at him again and he stared back, deciding that she had the look of old money long gone.

“You’re staring,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I remind you of someone?”

“Of my ex-wife — a little.”

“Was she nice?”

“She sighed a lot and sprinkled sugar on her sliced tomatoes.”

“Yes, I can see why she would — sigh a lot, I mean. I’m called Daffy.” She didn’t offer a hand.

“As in Duck or in Daffodil?”

“As in Daphne. Daphne Owens.”

“Of course. I should’ve known.”

“I work for Mr. Spivey.”

“I see.”

“I’m his executive assistant, if you dote on titles.”

“It must be pleasant here — the informal atmosphere and all.”

“Yes. It is. I live here, too, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Well, I suppose we’d best go find Jake.” She turned and started down a long wide paneled hall lined with long narrow tables that held unused glazed vases. It was a very long hall, and if rest were needed, there were a dozen straight-back, dark wood chairs with faded red plush seats. On both walls were hung nicely done oil portraits of bearded men in nineteenth-century dress. The men all looked extremely proper and Dill was quite sure none of them was related in any way to either Ace Dawson or Jake Spivey.

“Do you know the house?” Owens asked over her shoulder.

“Jake and I were here once a long time ago.”

“Really? When?”

“Every Christmas up until 1959, I think. Mrs. Dawson used to throw a party for the city’s hundred neediest kids. Jake and I talked our way onto the list.” He paused. “It was Christmas, 1956.”

“But you weren’t really, were you?”

“What?”

“Two of the one hundred neediest.”

“Who’s to say?”

“It makes a charming story anyway.”

“Ask Jake about it,” Dill said.

She stopped and turned. Surprisingly, Dill found that she looked older out of the sun. Nearer to thirty than to twenty-five. “I’d like to ask you another question,” she said.

“Go ahead.”

“Do you intend to cause him any trouble?”

“I don’t know,” Dill said. “I might.”

At the end of the long hall Daphne Owens stopped before an eight-foot-high pair of double doors and slid them back into the walls. Dill followed her into a large room, which obviously was the mansion’s library, with shelves of books lining three sides. Six tall leaded windows at the room’s far end were rounded into fan tops. The windows overlooked a garden, rather an elaborate one, where three Mexicans were digging something up. As Dill watched, two of them stopped digging, wiped their dripping faces, and started supervising the third man. Beyond the Mexicans and through some fading white roses could be seen the blue of the pool.

John Jacob Spivey rose from behind the large old-fashioned black walnut desk that was placed in front of the tall windows. He leaned forward, palms flat on the desk, his big head cocked slightly to the left, his shrewd blue eyes fixed on the approaching Dill. He’s still round and plump and pink, Dill thought, and from here he still looks like the neighborhood bully who’s bigger and smarter than anyone else. Then Jake Spivey smiled and chuckled and transformed himself into the most likable man in the world.

There was warmth in the smile, genuine interest in the expression, and keen anticipation in the eyes once they abandoned their calculating blue stare and began twinkling. He hasn’t got a shred of self-consciousness left, Dill thought. He’s no more aware of himself than he is of his big toe. It’s you he’s interested in, Dill. What would you like? he wants to know, and how do you feel? And what do you think? And where in the world have you been?

Spivey had begun nodding as Dill neared the desk. It was a nod of pleased confirmation. “You know what we did, Pick?” he asked. “We went and got older on each other.”

“It happens,” Dill said as he accepted the hand that Spivey extended over the desk.

“You met Daffy.”

“I met Daffy.”

“She’s from back East,” Spivey said. “Massachusetts. Went to school back there.”

“Holyoke,” Dill guessed, and smiled at Daphne Owens.

“Not even close,” she said.

“Sit down, Pick. You’re gonna stay for lunch, aren’t you?”

“All right. Thanks.”

Now settled back into his old wooden swivel chair, Spivey looked up at Owens. “Sugar, would you mind letting Mabel know there’s gonna be three of us for lunch?” He turned to Dill. “Mabel’s the cook.”

“Anything else before I go?” Owens asked.

Spivey looked solicitously at Dill. “You wanta do a little coke or something?”

“What about a cold beer?”

“I got beer right down here in this little old built-in icebox,” Spivey said as he reached down, opened the door of a small desk refrigerator, and brought out two cans of Miller’s.

“No coke, then?” Owens asked.

“Don’t believe so, sugar,” Spivey said and popped open the beer cans. “Not right now anyway.”

“I’ll see you at lunch, Mr. Dill.”

“I hope so,” Dill said.

She turned and started walking toward the double doors. Spivey watched her go with obvious appreciation, then smiled, turned to Dill, and handed him one of the cans of beer. “I think I might haul off and marry that one,” he said.

“You two’ve got a lot in common, Jake: background, taste, education, age.”

“Don’t forget money,” Spivey said. “She ain’t got any and I got a bunch.”

“That should make it a perfect match.”

Spivey leaned back in his swivel chair and examined Dill carefully. “Haven’t done all your mourning yet, have you?”

“No. Not yet.”

“Takes time, Pick. Lord, it takes time.” He sipped some of his beer. “How long’s it been now?”

“Seven years, almost eight.”

“Genoa, right?”

“Right.”

“I was with Brattle and you were with, what was her name? Lorna, Lana? Lena?”

“Laura.”

“That’s right. Laura. You all split up?”

“You heard, huh?”

“Nope. You just look sort of split up. Divorced. What happened?”

Dill shrugged. “Terminal boredom, I guess. She went out one night to see a play — Chekhov, I think — and never came back.”

Spivey grinned. “No shit? Chekhov?”

“The Cherry Orchard.”

Spivey shook his head in either amusement or commiseration. “She was one handsome woman. Know who reminds me of her?”

“Your Miss Daphne. I noticed it, too.” Dill drank from the can of beer. “Let me tell you why I’m here, Jake.”

Spivey nodded, interested.

“The Senator wants a deposition from you.”

“No problem there, but you’re gonna be plowing up the same old cotton. I’ve already talked to Justice more times than I can count. The IRS has got me on permanent audit. Even Treasury sent some tall drink of water down here, and he and I went round and round for three days. The only ones who haven’t dropped in on me is the fucking CIA, and I expect they’ll come sneaking over the wall one of these nights just to find out what I’ve been telling everybody else.”

“They’ve located Brattle, Jake.”

The blue eyes opened a little wider and the wide mouth split into a charming but skeptical grin. “Found Clyde? Clyde Brattle? Where was he this time, Cape Town? Rangoon? One of the Tripolis? Downtown Tulsa maybe? Shit, Pick, they been spotting old Clyde here, there, and over yonder for months now. You know what I think?”

“What?”

“I think old Clyde’s dead.”

“You hope so anyway.”

“Well, I can’t say I’d be in the front rank of mourners.”

“But you would be off the hook.”

“I ain’t exactly wiggling on one now. Where’d they claim to have spotted him?”

“London.”

“When?”

“Two months ago.”

“Whyn’t they pick him up? Hell, he’s extraditable.”

“They lost him.”

“Who the fuck are they?”

“The Brits.”

“Well, no wonder. Look, let’s get this thing over with. You say you want a deposition for the Senator? Let’s do her.”

Dill looked around the room. “Where’s the tape recorder?”

Spivey shook his head sadly. “Pick.”

“What?”

“It’s been running from the second you walked in.”

Dill grinned. “I should’ve known. I’ll just start then.”

“You start and then Daffy’ll give the tape to one of the girls to get typed up and Xeroxed and sworn to and all.”

“Okay,” Dill said, “here we go.” He paused, counted silently to fifteen, and then began. “This is the sworn deposition of John Jacob Spivey given freely on this day of August whatever it is, ladies, at his home at the right address on Beauchamp Lane and so forth.”

Dill put his beer on the desk and opened the file on Jake Spivey. He looked at the file and then up at Spivey.

“Your name is John Jacob Spivey.”

“Yes.”

“Your age?”

“Thirty-eight.”

“You are an American citizen, living permanently at the above address.”

“Yes.”

“Your occupation?”

“Retired.”

“Your previous occupation?”

“I was engaged in the purchase and sale of defensive weaponry.”

“For how long?”

“Seven years, almost eight.”

“And before that?”

“I was a contract employee of a government agency.”

“Which agency?”

“The Central Intelligence Agency.”

“Where were you employed?”

“You mean where did they hire me or where did I work?”

“Both.”

“I was hired in Mexico City and I worked in Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.”

“For how long?”

“From 1969 to 1975.”

“What was the nature of your duties?”

“The oath I took when employed by the CIA precludes me from revealing the nature of my duties unless I request and am given written permission by the Central Intelligence Agency.”

“Have you sought such permission?”

“Yes.”

“Was it given?”

“It was refused.”

“When was the last time it was refused?”

“On June fourteenth of this year.”

“Why did you ask for the permission?”

“I did so at the request of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

“And the permission was denied?”

“Yes.”

“Are you willing to violate your oath at this time?”

“No, sir, I’m not.”

“Why not?”

“On the grounds that it could be self-incriminating, and I cite the Fifth Amendment.”

“When did you first meet Clyde Tomerlin Brattle?”

“In 1970, around March or April. I’m not exactly sure of the date.”

“Where was this?”

“Bangkok.”

“How did you meet him?”

“He was my supervisor.”

“Your case officer?”

“My supervisor. He instructed me in the duties I performed in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia whose exact nature I am prevented by my oath from disclosing.”

Dill grimaced and drew a finger across his throat. Spivey, smiling broadly, reached beneath the desk and cut off the tape recorder.

“Jesus Christ, Jake.”

“What’d you expect?”

“It’s canned.”

“You goddamn right it’s canned — by Dump, Diddle and Squat, which is what I call those jackass lawyers of mine up in Washington who’re sucking me dry. When’s the last time you got a bill from a lawyer?”

“It’s been a while.”

“Well, here’s some advice. Sit down before you open it — or better yet, lie down, because sure as green apples give gripe you’re gonna faint dead away.”

“But all that crap about an oath.”

“I took an oath just like I said. Does Langley deny it? Hell, no, they don’t. They just deny I ever worked for ’em.”

“They don’t deny that either,” Dill said. “They just refuse to confirm it.”

“Pick, I don’t really give a fuck about any oath I took for those fuckers. I was twenty-three years old then and when I quit ’em I was thirty and an old man. I mean old up here.” Spivey tapped his forehead. “Up here, I was a hundred-and-two. They paid me one thousand bucks a week, which back then was serious money, and I did stuff I wouldn’t do now and stuff I don’t even let myself think about much anymore. But what I did I didn’t do for God, flag, or country. I did it for one thousand bucks a week cash money and believe it or not, I paid a price. What price, you’re thinking, right? Well, old buddy, I never got to be twenty-four or twenty-five or twenty-six or any of those good years, because one day I was twenty-three and six months later I was a hundred-and-two going on a hundred-and-three.”

“Poor old Jake.”

Spivey shrugged, suddenly indifferent, even bored.

“So what would happen if you violated your so-called oath?” Dill said. “I mean, what do you think would happen?”

“Not much,” Spivey said. “There might be some juicy headlines for a day or two, but there’d never be any trial or anything because Langley’d slam the lid down tight. Just like they did before — all in the interest of national security. Hell, Pick, Vietnam’s old hat now. You got a generation coming of age that thinks of Vietnam, if they think of it at all, like you and me used to think of World War Two. Ancient history. When you and me were twenty-one, the war’d been over for twenty-two years. Twenty-three maybe.” He paused. “You want another beer?”

“Sure.”

Spivey took two more cans of Miller’s from the desk refrigerator and popped their lids. Dill took a long swallow and said, “Okay, you want to start again?”

“What now — Brattle?”

“Brattle.”

Spivey moved his hand underneath the edge of the desk. “Okay, we’re rolling. Now.”

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 clothes — 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 McMullen — how 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.”

Cindy McCabe came in and sat down in the easy chair that matched the green couch. She stuck out her lower lip and blew upward, as if to blow away the light film of sweat that coated her forehead and upper lip. “Isn’t this heat something?” she said, obviously expecting no answer.

“I was about to have a drink,” Dill said. “Like to join me?”

“Well, a cold beer would be nice.”

“Sorry. No beer. Unless I find where Felicity keeps the booze, it’ll have to be plain Perrier.”

“Under the kitchen sink,” McCabe said.

“That’s what I thought,” Dill said and headed for the kitchen.

There were two bottles of green-label Jim Beam under the sink next to the liquid Ivory and the Easy-Off and the Comet. One of the bottles was still sealed. The level of the other one was down two inches. Dill remembered Felicity had always drunk bourbon, when she drank at all, because she claimed it had a more honest taste than Scotch. He also remembered that she thought vodka was a soak’s drink and gin was for those who had run out of Aqua Velva. Rum, however, was okay, especially if mixed with Kool-Aid. As Dill poured whiskey over the ice and added the Perrier, he wondered why he had found no Kool-Aid. Once again, Watson, he told himself, the dog doesn’t bark.

He carried the drinks back into the living room and handed one to Cindy McCabe, who nodded her thanks and rubbed the chilled glass across her forehead. “Gosh, that feels good.” She took a long swallow, smiled, and said, “That feels even better.”

Dill, seated on the couch, tried some of his own drink. “You’re right,” he agreed.

“Harold and me are awful sorry about Felicity, Mr. Dill. It was just so — well, awful. One minute there she was ringing our doorbell and the next minute she was gone.”

“How long’ve you lived here?”

“About a year and a half. A little less maybe. We moved in right after Felicity bought the place. She sure was a nice landlady. Some of them, you know, will raise your rent every six months, but Felicity didn’t even raise ours once because Harold helped her around the place fixing anything that went broke. He’s good at that — fixing stuff.”

“What’s Harold do?”

“Well, he’s selling home computers right now and doing okay, but he says it’s going to peter out this month or next the way they’re flooding the market again. What he really wants to do is get back into electronics. He had two years down at the university, you know, studying electrical engineering, but had to drop out. Harold’s real good at that stuff. Electronics. He likes it a lot more’n selling.”

Cindy McCabe, apparently made thirsty by talk, took a long pull at her drink. Dill watched her almost invisible Adam’s apple move up and down three times. She lowered the drink and smiled, if not nervously, at least uncomfortably. “I sorta hate to bring this up right now,” she said.

“What?”

“Well, yesterday, just before it — you know, happened, well, Felicity stopped by and reminded Harold he’d forgot to pay the rent again. Sometimes I don’t know about Harold. Things just slip his mind. He’s sorta like the absentminded professor, you know?”

Dill nodded that he did.

“Anyway, it’s embarrassing. So he wrote the check out yesterday and gave it to her and then it happened, right out front, and, well, we don’t exactly know what to do. You think we oughta stop payment on that one and write another one? And who do we make it out to? It’s sorta tacky, I guess, bothering you with this now, but we don’t want anyone coming around later and claiming we didn’t pay the rent.”

“Forget about it until the end of the month,” Dill said. “By then things should be straightened out, and Felicity’s lawyer will call and tell you where to send the rent and who to make the check out to.”

“And we’ll just stop payment on the one we gave Felicity?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Well, that’s a relief.” As if to prove it, she finished off her drink in three swallows. Dill rose and held out his hand for her glass.

Cindy McCabe frowned. “I don’t think — oh, well, one more, I guess.”

When Dill returned with the fresh drinks he saw that the blue polka-dot halter had either slipped or been tugged down an inch or so, revealing the top quarter of Cindy McCabe’s perky breasts, which seemed to be as well tanned as the rest of her. Dill handed her the drink, smiled down at her breasts, or what he could see of them, and said, “You have a nice tan.”

She giggled and looked down. “I work on it hard enough.” She gave the halter a tug up, but it was only a half-hearted tug. “There’s this hedge out back?” she said, making her statement a question.

Dill nodded that he believed it.

“Well, it goes all the way around the backyard and it’s about nine feet tall and real thick. Nobody can see through it. So this summer I just laid out there in nothing at all until the middle of last week when it got so godawful hot. I mean, it was just like lying in an oven, even with nothing on. Earlier this summer, when it was cooler, Felicity’d come out and join me sometimes when she was working nights or on the swing shift.”

“In nothing at all?” Dill said.

“Oh, no, it wasn’t anything like that.”

“Like what?”

“Well, when she came out I’d put something on. I mean, after all.”

“Did you and Harold see much of Felicity?”

“To tell the truth we didn’t, because she worked those funny hours. One week days, one week nights, and the week after that it’d be the swing shift. Sometimes we didn’t even see her for weeks at a time. In fact, we wouldn’t even hear her up here. I mean, if she was working nights, she’d get home in the morning before we got up, and then she’d usually leave while Harold was still at work and I was out back. She never made a sound up here. I told her once we never heard her and she just smiled and said she went barefoot most of the time. But anytime anything went kaflooey she’d leave a note asking me to ask Harold to take care of it. And when he did she’d be so happy and ask us both up to have a drink. But we never went out anywhere together, and like I said, we hardly knew she was up here. The only time we ever heard anything was when that big guy came around yelling and banging on her door.”

“What big guy?” Dill asked.

“I guess he was her ex-boyfriend. He sure was big, I know that. Harold said he used to play football down at the university, but if he told me his name, I forgot it because I think football sucks.”

“How often did the big guy come around?”

“You don’t think he had something to do with what — well, with what happened, do you?”

“No. I’m just curious about Felicity and who her friends were — even her ex-friends.”

“Well, he was blond and big as a barn and young, not over thirty anyway, which I still think is young and I’m twenty-eight and don’t care who knows it.”

“You don’t look it,” Dill lied.

“Well, I am.”

“How often did he come around yelling and banging on the door?”

“The big guy? Oh, that just happened once, the very first month we moved in. I thought, What in the world have we got ourselves into? It got so bad I asked Harold to do something about it, but he wouldn’t. Harold said it was none of our business what a cop did, even a lady cop. I think he was a little afraid of the big guy — and he really was big. Of course, Felicity wasn’t so little herself — five-ten at least. But I still don’t know how she and the big guy ever — well, you know.” Her expression grew a bit dreamy and Dill wondered how often she had had fantasies about the big guy.

“So what happened?” Dill said.

“Oh, I went up the next morning and saw her and told her all that fuss’d kept Harold awake, which was a lie, because he’d slept right through most of it, and it was me they’d kept awake. She was nice as pie. But then she always was, even when Harold got the rent checks fucked up — oops. Sorry. Must be the bourbon.” She giggled. Dill smiled.

“The big guy didn’t come back?” he asked.

“Nope. Never. Felicity said it’d stop and it did. Never a sound after that. She didn’t even play her TV hardly any, not even in the morning for Good Morning America, and that’s what I always watch. She’d sometimes turn it on for the evening news, but not loud.”

“Did Captain Colder come around much?” Dill said.

“Who?”

“Captain Colder. Gene Colder.”

“Oh. Him. He was here yesterday. Asking me and Harold questions and kind of pretending we’d never seen him before.”

“But you had?”

“Oh, sure. He used to come around and pick Felicity up, maybe once or twice a week.”

“Did he always bring her back?”

“Sometimes he did. But sometimes she didn’t come home at all.”

Dill thought that the look she gave him over the rim of her glass was meant to be smoldering. Instead, it was a bit glazed. He realized she was a little drunk.

“You’re saying she sometimes didn’t come home at all after going out with Colder?” he asked.

“Does that bother you?”

“No.”

“I mean, when two people are all grown up and everything, it’s the natural thing to do, right?”

“Right.”

“Take me and you, for example.”

“Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“Okay, let’s take you and me.”

“Yeah, well, if you and me had a sudden yen for each other and decided to do something about it, who’d care?”

“Harold?”

“He wouldn’t mind. He had a yen for Felicity, but he never got anywhere. Shoot, I wouldn’t have minded if he had. He was always answering the door when she knocked in his Jockey shorts and a half hard-on. That’s why I think he was late with the rent sometimes. So he could open the door for Felicity in his Jockey shorts and his half hard-on.”

“Harold sounds like quite a guy.”

“He’s about what you’d expect. Any more bourbon out there?” She waved her glass a little and Dill decided she was even drunker than he had thought.

“Sure,” he said, rose, took her glass, and went back into the kitchen, where he mixed her another drink, but filled his own up with the last of the Perrier. When he came back into the living room, the halter was all the way off. Dill handed her the drink, smiled, and said, “Looks a lot cooler that way.”

“What d’you think of them?” she asked, cupping her left breast and offering it for display.

“Nice.”

“Just nice?”

“Extremely nice.”

“This is sort of a pass I’m making at you.”

“I know.”

“Well?”

“Well, it’s a shame I have to be downtown in fifteen minutes.”

“No kidding.”

Dill nodded regretfully.

Cindy McCabe drank a third of her new drink. When the glass came down, her eyes were still glazed and also a little crossed. They stared at Dill anyway. “You know something?” she said.

“What?”

“I made a pass at Felicity once — out there in the backyard.”

“What happened?”

Cindy McCabe laughed. It was a brief harsh laugh, more sad than merry. “She brushed me off real nice.” McCabe paused, frowned, looked down at her bare breasts, looked up, and added, “Almost like the way you’re brushing me off right now.”

After he finally got rid of Cindy McCabe, Dill drove downtown, parked the rented Ford in the basement garage, and at 3:46 P.M. walked into the nicely cooled Hawkins Hotel. The temperature outside, according to the First National Bank sign, was 104 degrees Fahrenheit. There was no wind. Dill could not remember when there had been no wind.

The elderly woman, whom he took to be a permanent resident, was seated in her usual chair in the lobby working on an intricate piece of needlepoint. She looked up as Dill approached, but this time she didn’t frown or glare. Nor did she smile. She merely stared. Dill smiled and nodded. She nodded back and said, “Tornado weather.”

Dill said, “You could be right,” and continued on until he came to the reception desk, where he paused to see if there were any messages in his box. There was one on a slip of pink paper. He asked the clerk for it. The clerk, the same one who had checked Dill in, looked at his watch first, took the slip from the box, and leaned across the counter, his manner suddenly confidential or conspiratorial. Or both, Dill thought.

“Captain Colder,” the clerk said, barely moving his lips.

Dill liked melodrama, especially in the afternoon. “Where?”

“The Slush Pit.”

“How long?”

The clerk shrugged his thin shoulders. “Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes.”

“And?”

“He’s looking for you.”

“There a back way out?”

“You can go—” The clerk stopped. The tips of his ears grew pink. “Aw hell, Mr. Dill, you’re kidding me.”

“Not really,” Dill said, turned, and headed for the Slush Pit. As he walked he read the message slip. It asked him to “please call Mr. Dolan, Washington, D.C., before 6 P.M. EDT.” Dill looked at his watch again. It wouldn’t be six in Washington for another hour. But there was really no hurry. Timothy Dolan never left the subcommittee office before seven anyhow, not even on Friday nights.

The Slush Pit, living up to its name, was as oil-black as always. It took Dill’s eyes several moments to adjust. He finally located Captain Gene Colder at a table near the north wall. Colder sat with his back to the wall, a glass of beer in front of him. The beer looked untouched. Dill suspected Colder of not really being much of a drinker despite the two Scotches he had put away up in Dill’s room the previous afternoon. Dill thought those two drinks might well have used up Colder’s ration for the week.

Dill crossed to the table. Colder looked up at him and nodded. It was not a friendly nod. Neither was it unfriendly. It was the cool nod one stranger might give another, reserving all judgment until the second stranger does something strange.

“Sit down,” Colder said.

Dill nodded back his own stranger-type nod, pulled out a chair, and sat down.

“Drink?”

Dill didn’t really want anything. But he said, “Sure, I’ll have a beer. A draft.”

Colder raised his hand. The cocktail waitress hurried over. Lately, Dill told himself, you’ve been drinking with people who command instantaneous service.

“He wants a beer, Lucille,” Colder said to the waitress.

“You okay, Captain?” she asked.

“I’m fine.”

Lucille went away. Colder took out a package of Salems and offered Dill a cigarette. Dill shook his head. “I quit.”

“If I keep on smoking these things, so will I.” Colder lit the cigarette with a throwaway lighter and leaned forward, his elbows on the table. “I thought we could have a talk without the chief breathing down our necks.”

“Okay.”

“Felicity,” Colder said. “I’d like to talk about her.”

“All right.”

“It may not show, Dill, but I’m almost falling apart.”

Dill nodded in what he hoped was a sympathetic way. It apparently wasn’t, because Colder stared at him as if expecting something more.

“So am I,” Dill said. “Falling apart. Almost.”

That was better, Dill saw. Not much, but some. Colder looked away and said, “I’m married to a bitch.”

“It happens.”

“She’s the daughter of an ex-deputy chief back home. In Kansas City.” He ground the scarcely smoked cigarette out. “And that’s why I married her — because she was a deputy chief’s daughter.” He went on carefully grinding out the cigarette. “I made a mistake.”

“I make them all the time,” Dill said because he saw that Colder expected him to say something. The waitress came over, put the glass of beer down in front of Dill, and went away. Dill took an experimental swallow. Colder still hadn’t touched his.

“I’m thirty-six years old and if I play it right, I can be chief by the time I’m forty. Maybe even before. And I don’t mean chief of detectives like Strucker. I mean chief of police — the queso grande.”

“But,” Dill said.

“What d’you mean, but?”

“That’s why you’re telling me all this, because there’s a but.”

Colder stared at Dill. It’s his Grand Inquisitor’s stare, Dill decided, the one that says: Confess. Reveal. Disclose. Spill.

“Just what kind of but do you think it is?” Colder said.

Dill shrugged. “I won’t even try to guess because you’re going to tell me.” In fact, he thought, you’re dying to tell me. The Inquisitor becomes the Inquisitee, although I suspect that whatever the revelations are, Captain, they will leave you blameless.

“My wife,” Colder began, “well, my wife was giving me a rotten time long before I ever met Felicity. In fact, I moved out on her.”

“Before you met Felicity.”

“Well, right after anyway.”

“I see.”

“I don’t want you to get the idea that Felicity broke up any happy home.”

“I’m sure she wouldn’t’ve.”

“My wife and I don’t have any kids. So the only hassle I had when I moved out was with her.”

“She’s here?”

“Right. She’s here.”

“How old is she?”

“A little older’n I am. Thirty-eight.”

“Almost too late for kids anyway.”

“I don’t think she really ever wanted any,” Colder said and took a glum sip of the beer that Dill thought must be flat by now. Colder didn’t seem to think so.

“So what happened then?” Dill said. “I mean after she found out about Felicity?”

“You’ve already heard, haven’t you?”

“Heard what?”

“That my wife threatened to kill Felicity.”

“No, I didn’t hear that.”

“You will.”

“Did she?”

“Threaten to? Sure.”

“No,” Dill said. “That’s not what I mean.”

“You mean did she kill Felicity?”

“Yes.”

“No,” Colder said. “She didn’t.”

“How’d your wife threaten her?”

“She’d call her up and yell at her. She’d call her up at home and say, ‘If you don’t keep away from my husband, I’ll kill you.’ She’d call her up at work, too. If Gertrude — that’s her name — couldn’t reach Felicity, she’d leave a message with whoever answered. Messages like ‘This is Captain Colder’s wife. Tell Detective Dill I’ll kill her if she doesn’t leave him alone.’ That went on for a couple of weeks.”

“Then what?”

Colder lit another one of his menthol cigarettes. He inhaled and made a face at what he tasted. Or at what he was about to say. “In this state, two doctors can commit. The department has two of them sort of on standby — guys that could have a little trouble with the state medical board, if we wanted to do something about it. We keep them on tap.” He paused. “Isn’t that awful?”

Dill nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “It is.”

“So I tucked her away for a month.”

“Gertrude.”

“Yeah. Gertrude.”

“When was this?”

Colder ran time through his head. “A year ago in September.”

“So she’s been out — what? Ten or eleven months?”

“Right.”

“And?”

“She’s calmed down. They’ve got her on Valium. She’s even seeing some guy she met in that place. I checked him out. He’s an on-again, off-again juicer and they were drying him out when she met him. He’s got a trust fund, which is what every juicer ought to have, so he doesn’t have to worry about money. It brings him in a couple of thousand a month and sometimes he sells a little real estate. But what he does mostly is hang around Gertrude. He brings her flowers and takes her to the pictures and the plays, whenever one of them gets here, and she likes that kind of thing. He’s older. In his early fifties, and I imagine he’s fucking her, but not too often, and that’d sure be all right with her, too.”

“She’s agreed to the divorce then?” Dill said.

“Oh, yeah. She finally agreed to that after she got out.”

“Where was she?”

“Millrun Farm. Ever hear of it?”

Dill nodded. “It used to be old Doc Lasker’s place when he was the resident abortionist here. They’d come from all over back then — from New York, L.A., Memphis, Chicago. It used to be a pretty nice place, but that was years ago.”

“It still is,” Colder said. “Lasker died, you know.”

Dill shook his head. “I didn’t.”

“He was old and his business had gone to hell anyway when they legalized abortion, so he sold it to a couple of young shrinks and they’ve made a go of it. God knows they charge enough.”

Dill finished the last of his beer. “I wonder why Felicity never told me she was going to be married.”

Colder shook his head as though bewildered. Dill didn’t believe the gesture. Bewilderment had no more room in Colder’s makeup than did humility. And whatever you are, Captain, you are not humble.

“She said she wrote you about it,” Colder said.

“She didn’t.”

“Maybe it was because of Gertrude and everything.”

“Maybe.” Dill decided he wanted another beer. He looked toward the bar, caught the eye of Lucille, the waitress, and made a circular motion over the table with his forefinger pointing down. Lucille nodded her understanding. Dill turned back to Colder and smiled his most pleasant smile.

“Let me ask you something,” Dill said, his smile now almost ablaze with warmth, understanding, and compassion.

Colder apparently didn’t believe the smile for a moment. He took his elbows off the table and leaned back in his chair. It was a defensive position. When he replied his voice had resumed its utter-stranger tone. “Ask me what?”

“Where did Felicity live?” Dill carefully kept his smile alight.

“Thirty-second and Texas,” Colder said without hesitation.

The smile went out and Dill shook his head regretfully. “I guess I didn’t phrase it right.”

“You asked where she lived. I told you. Thirty-second and Texas.”

“That’s where she camped out,” Dill said. “I was there this afternoon. I poked around. Nobody lived there. Nobody. Somebody kept some clothes there. Somebody had a cup of coffee there once in a while. Now and then, somebody even slept there. But nobody lived there. At least, nobody named Felicity Dill. So what I’m asking, I guess, is where did Felicity really live? Your place? Is that where she spattered the stove with her rémoulade sauce, and read nine books at once and left most of them open on the floor, and smoked her two packs of Luckies a day, and weighed herself at least twice, and kept her kitchen stocked with enough food to last two months even if she knew she’d throw a lot of it out? That was my sister, Captain. That’s how she lived. She wasn’t obsessively neat. She didn’t hang mail-order Impressionist prints on her wall. Give Felicity five minutes in a room, any room, and she made it look like she’d lived there forever. She was a nester, Captain, and she built her nests with things — odd things, funny things, even dumb things like the fire hydrant she bought when she was fifteen, welded the cut-down washtub on top of, and turned it into the frontyard birdbath.” Dill took a deep breath, held it for a long moment, then let it out and asked in a quiet, reasonable voice, “So where did she live, Captain?”

Lucille the waitress arrived with two beers and served them. She started to say something to Colder, but changed her mind when she saw his expression, and hurried away. Colder, still staring at Dill, put his left hand in his pants pocket, picked up his beer with his right hand, and drank several swallows.

After Colder put the beer down, he said, “Fillmore and Nineteenth. Know it?”

Dill ran the map of the city through his memory. The map proved to be indelible. “Fillmore dead-ends at the park, Washington Park, and then picks up on the other side. There’re some old houses on the corner there. Very large old houses.”

“Southwest corner. Seventeen thirty-eight Fillmore. An architect bought it and turned it into apartments. There’s a garage apartment out back. On the alley. That was Felicity’s.” His left hand came out of his pocket and placed a single key on the table next to Dill’s beer. “That’s the key.”

Dill looked at the key and then up at Colder. He thought that for a second he saw something in the other man’s eyes. Perhaps pain. But it went away almost immediately. “Why two places?” Dill asked.

“I don’t know.”

“But you knew about both places.”

“Christ, yes, I knew. Look, friend, maybe you should try to get something straight: I was going to marry her. Not because she could do my career any good. Not because she was rich. Not because she — aw hell. I loved her. That’s why I was going to marry her.”

The pain, Dill saw, was back in Colder’s eyes. It didn’t go away this time. “What’d she say — about having two places?”

“She said the other one, the duplex, was an investment for you and her. She said you were thinking of coming back here to live. She said you’d helped her buy it.”

“She said that?”

Colder nodded, the pain in his eyes threatening to spread across the rest of his face.

“She lied,” Dill said.

“Yeah,” Colder said. “We both know that now, don’t we.”

After leaving Captain Colder, Dill went back down into the hotel’s basement garage, retrieved the file on Jake Spivey from the Ford’s glove compartment, and took the elevator from the garage up to the ninth floor. He planned to call Timothy Dolan in Washington and read him some of the more relevant passages from Spivey’s deposition.

Dill unlocked the door to 981, pushed it open, and entered the room. He turned to close the door and the arm went around his neck. It was a thick arm, very muscular, very strong. Dill just had time to think chokehold and to notice that the arm’s owner was neither panting nor breathing hard. Maybe he does it for a living, Dill thought, and then, with his oxygen and carotid artery shut off, and without enough air going down into his lungs and not enough blood flowing up into his brain, Dill lost consciousness and came to nine minutes later.

He found himself lying on the floor beside the bed. The first thing he did after opening his eyes was swallow. Nothing had been crushed. Nothing even hurt very much — only a slight soreness in his throat that he felt would soon disappear. It’s not much worse than it was when Jake and I found out how to do it to each other in the fifth grade, Dill thought. Except we didn’t know it was called the carotid then. We just thought it was a neat way to pass out.

He sat up slowly, even warily, and looked around to see if the chokehold expert was still present. He wasn’t. Dill patted his jacket breast pocket for his wallet. It was there. He took it out, looked inside, and counted the money. None had been taken. His watch was still on his left wrist. Dill got to his knees, then to his feet, and looked around for the file on Jake Spivey. It was only a brief glance, devoid of hope. He knew the file would be gone and it was.

Dill sat down on the bed and gingerly explored his throat with his right hand. The slight soreness was already going away. The brain damage would be minimal, he told himself, a few hundred thousand cells lost at most, but there are millions more and since you don’t use them very much anyway, you’re just as smart as ever, which means you can still cross wide streets by yourself.

He tried to remember all he could about the attacker. He remembered the forearm. It was one hell of a forearm, the right one probably, because the left hand would have been locked around the right wrist, exerting the pressure. Then there had been that easy, normal breathing. He didn’t exactly panic while waiting for you to show up. His nerves, if he has any, are in fine shape. And his pulse rate probably shoots up to around seventy-two when he gets excited — if he ever does. Dill didn’t need to feel his own pulse to know it was racing.

And since his attacker had done it so smoothly and with so little apparent effort, Dill decided he must have done it frequently in the past, which possibly indicates, Inspector, that before turning to his life of crime, he may well have been an honest policeman, or even a dishonest one, possibly from Los Angeles, where all chokehold champions are said to dwell. And this one could easily have qualified for the chokehold Olympics. There was the chance, of course, that he could have picked up his craft elsewhere. He could be a slightly crazed veteran of the Special Forces, a graying Green Beret, who’d learned all about chokeholds and silent killing down at Bragg, practiced them to perfection in Vietnam, and now peddled his hard-won skills to whoever would buy. Learn a trade in the army, they’d advised him, and he had.

Dill rose from the bed, crossed to the bottle of Old Smuggler that still sat on the writing desk, opened it, sniffed its contents suspiciously (for what? he asked himself. Cyanide?), poured slightly more than two ounces into a glass, and drank it down. It burned slightly and made him shudder, but no more so than usual.

After putting the glass down, Dill picked up the telephone, closed his eyes, remembered the number he wanted, and dialed it. It was answered on the third ring by the voice of Daphne Owens, who again recited the phone number’s last four digits.

“This is Ben Dill again. I’d like to speak to Jake for a minute.”

“Just a moment,” she said, and ten seconds later Spivey was on the line, brimming with his usual good cheer. “I was about to call you, good buddy.”

“What about?”

“Sunday. You’re still gonna be in town Sunday, right? Well, the weatherman says it’s gonna be another scorcher so I thought you might like to come out here and barbecue some ribs and jump in the pool and goggle some half-naked ladies. Spend the day.”

“Sounds good,” Dill said. “Maybe I’ll bring one.”

“A half-naked lady?”

“Right.”

“I sure admire the way you smooth city boys operate.”

“I’ve got a problem, Jake.”

“Big or little?”

“Little. I lost your deposition.”

Spivey was silent for several moments. “Lost it?”

“Through carelessness.”

“I guess I should ask where you lost it, and then you could say if you knew where you lost it, you’d go find it. So where’d you lose it?”

“I had it in my attaché case,” Dill lied. “I put the case down at the newsstand here in the hotel to look at some magazines and when I reached down for it, it was gone.”

“Lot of that going on downtown,” Spivey said. “What else was in your case?”

Dill decided to embroider his tale. “My airline ticket, some papers, but nothing important. I was wondering if you could come up with another copy of your deposition.”

“Nothing to it. All I have to do is ask one of the girls to push a button and the printer’ll spit out another one. Goddamn computers are something, aren’t they?” Before Dill could reply, Spivey went on, his tone musing. “Nothing in that deposition anyway. I mean nothing I gotta worry about. Tell you what, I’ll have ’em print up another copy, get Daffy to notarize it, and send it down by one of my Mexican folks. Should be there in about an hour in case you’ve gotta call your people back in Washington and tell ’em what a fine job of work you’re doing down here.”

“You’re a brick, Jake.”

“Sure wish I knew how you spelled that. Now Sunday, why don’t you come on out here about noon, you and your lady friend?”

“That sounds fine.”

“See you Sunday then.”

Dill thanked Spivey again and hung up. He stood, staring down at the phone, carefully memorizing the lies he had told Spivey, picked up the phone again, dialed eleven numbers, listened to the long-distance crackles and beeps, the ringing phone, and then the voice of Timothy Dolan saying, “Dolan.”

“It’s Ben, Tim.”

“I’ve got some news. Clyde Brattle’s back.”

“Back where?”

“In the States. He crossed over from Canada.”

“But they didn’t spot him, right?”

“Not until two days later when one of them finally decided, hey, that guy looked kinda familiar, went through his mug book, and recognized Brattle.”

“Where was this?”

“Detroit.”

“When?”

Dolan either sighed or blew out some cigar smoke. “Ten days ago, but nobody ever got around to letting us know until this afternoon. The Senator’d already taken off for Santa Fe and some weekend politicking and I haven’t been able to reach him yet. He’s gonna raise all kinds of hell. I’ve raised my fair share already.”

“Why do you think Brattle came back?”

“I’d say he might need to clear up a few loose ends.”

“Like Spivey?”

“Maybe. You talk to him yet?”

“This afternoon.”

“He agree to give you a deposition?”

“He already gave it to me, fully sworn.”

“Anything in it?”

“It’s what’s not in it that’s interesting.”

“What’s he want for what’s not in it — immunity?”

“Right.”

“What’d you say?”

“I nodded.”

“Well, he can’t get a nod on tape.”

“There’s something else,” Dill said.

“I don’t like your tone, Ben. It hints of calamity and unmitigated disaster.”

“I got mugged.”

“Jesus. When?”

“About fifteen minutes ago in my hotel room. They got the file on Spivey.”

“What else?”

“That’s all they wanted.”

“They?”

“He was big enough to be a they. He used a chokehold on me, and no, I’m not hurt, but it was kind of you to ask.”

“I’m thinking,” Dolan said. “The file itself isn’t important. We’ve got copies.”

“And Spivey’s going to send me another copy of his deposition. I told him somebody’d stolen my attaché case.”

“You haven’t got an attaché case.”

“Spivey doesn’t know that.”

There was silence from the Washington end until Dolan said, “I was thinking some more. What was in the deposition — between the lines?”

“Between the lines, if I heard and read it right, Jake Spivey could hang Clyde Brattle, if he wanted to, and if we’d grant him immunity so he wouldn’t hang himself at the same time.”

“After Detroit,” Dolan said slowly, “I wonder where Brattle went.”

“You’re not wondering, you’re suggesting he’s right here and that he wanted a quick peek at Spivey’s file.”

“It’s a possibility.”

“Maybe I’d better warn Jake.”

“Go ahead, but if Clyde Brattle wants him dead, he’s dead. Our problem is to keep Spivey alive long enough to—” Dolan broke off. “Look, if I can get it cleared up here, talk to the chairman and to that shit, Clewson, well…” His voice trailed off. Clewson was Norman Clewson, the subcommittee’s majority counsel. Dolan despised him. “I can do it,” he said suddenly.

“Do what?”

“Schedule a subcommittee hearing down there for next Tuesday or Wednesday. The Senator can chair it. Hell, it’s on his way back. I’ll come down and we’ll hold it in the federal building, give Spivey immunity, and let him talk his head off while he’s still alive.”

“They’ll never clear it,” Dill said.

“They’ll clear it,” Dolan said, his tone confident. “They won’t have any fucking choice after I tell ’em if they don’t, they’ll never get Jake Spivey’s unvarnished testimony because he’ll goddamn well be dead.”

“You really believe that?”

Dolan paused a short moment before answering. “Sure. Don’t you?”

“You don’t know Jake as well as I do.”

“You mean Brattle might be the dead one?”

“He might.”

“What the hell, Ben. If you’re right, we still come out ahead.”

At three minutes to six that Friday evening, Anna Maude Singe, the lawyer, answered her office phone with a crisp and businesslike “Anna Maude Singe.”

“This is Ben Dill.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well. Hi.”

“I wasn’t sure I’d catch you.”

“I was just leaving.”

“The reason I’m calling is that they — they being the cops — are sending a limousine for me tomorrow, and I was wondering if you’d care to go with me to the services and then on out to the cemetery.”

There was a brief silence until Singe finally said, “Yes. I’d like that.” There was another pause and then she said, “I need to talk to you anyway.”

“What about tonight?” Dill said.

“Tonight?”

“Dinner.”

“You mean like a real date?”

“Reasonably close.”

“With real food.”

“That I can promise.”

“Well, it sounds better than Lean Cuisine. Where’ll I meet you?”

“Why don’t I pick you up?”

“You mean at home?”

“Sure.”

“Christ,” she said, “it really is like a real date, isn’t it?”

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 parked the Ford sedan in the basement garage of the Hawkins Hotel, got out, locked it, and headed for the elevator. As he passed the second large square concrete pillar a man stepped out from behind it and said, “How’s the neck?”

Dill stopped short. His right hand moved almost involuntarily to his neck. “Still a little sore,” he said.

Another man joined the first man. The second man was thin the way a knife is thin and about six feet tall. He looked short and frail next to the first man, who was well over six-three and built like a weight lifter who had given it up when he reached forty, which Dill guessed was three years back, possibly four. The weight lifter had thinning gray-blond hair, still blue eyes, and a wide happy mouth. The knifelike man had dyed black hair the color of coal, dead blue eyes, and a tight mouth that looked either sad or mean. Mean, Dill decided.

Both men wore rumpled summer suits of tan poplin. The weight lifter wore a blue shirt; the skinny man had chosen white. Neither wore a tie. The suitcoats were buttoned and seemed a trifle large. Dill assumed that the coats concealed the pistols, since neither man looked as if he’d bother with a jacket once the temperature rose above 80 degrees. As Dill had driven down Our Jack Street on his way to the hotel, he noticed that the First National Bank sign was claiming a temperature of 87 degrees at 1:17 A.M.

“Says his neck’s still a little sore,” the weight lifter said.

The other man nodded regretfully. “I’m sorry.” He studied Dill for a moment. “We don’t want any trouble, Mr. Dill.”

“Neither do I,” Dill said.

The lean man nodded toward the far end of the garage. “We’re down there in the van,” he said and started walking toward a large blue Dodge van that was parked head-out against the wall. Dill hesitated. The weight lifter smiled pleasantly and opened his coat. The pistol was there. Dill got only a glimpse of it, but it seemed to be a short-barreled revolver. The weight lifter nodded toward the van. Dill turned and fell into step behind the lean man.

When they reached the van the lean man slid the side door back, revealing a customized interior. Dill could see the small sink, propane stove, refrigerator, and the floor which was carpeted with tan shag. The walls were paneled with what seemed to be wood, although Dill suspected it was some kind of grained plastic. There were no windows in the rear of the van.

“You’ll find a nice comfy chair on your left,” the lean man said.

“Where’re we going?” Dill asked.

“Nowhere.”

The weight lifter touched Dill’s shoulder lightly and nodded at the van’s interior. Dill stepped up and into the van, turned left, saw first the chair, and then the man who was seated at the rear of the van behind a table. On the table were some glasses, a bottle of Smirnoff vodka, a Thermos bucket of ice, three bottles of Schweppes tonic, and the file on Jake Spivey. The last time Dill had seen the man behind the table had been in Genoa. In the Hotel Plaza on the Piazza Corvetto. There had been four persons gathered in the living room of the suite on the fifth floor. Suite 523, he recalled, surprising himself with his memory. There had been Dill, the then Mrs. Dill, Jake Spivey, and the man who now sat behind the table, Clyde Brattle.

Brattle smiled. “Well,” he said. “Ben.”

“Well, Clyde,” Dill said and indicated the contour swivel chair that was covered with a very good imitation leather, “This mine?”

“Please.”

Dill sat down in the chair and found it to be quite comfortable. The two men came into the van. The lean one sat down across from Dill in a twin contour chair. Dill couldn’t see where the weight lifter sat. On the floor maybe. Dill turned to look. The weight lifter was seated on a hinged stool that swung out and down from the kitchen unit. It was for sitting on while you scrape the carrots, Dill thought.

“Remarkably compact units, aren’t they?” Brattle said after Dill turned back.

“Remarkably.”

“That’s Sid across from you and behind you is Harley.”

“Harley and Sid,” Dill said.

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” Brattle paused. “Seven years?”

“Closer to eight. Genoa. Hotel Plaza. Suite five-twenty-three. Your suite.”

Brattle smiled in appreciation of Dill’s memory. “I believe you’re right. And how’s the charming Mrs. Dill?”

“She’s fine and we’re divorced.”

“Really. I didn’t know, or if I did, I guess I forgot.” He frowned. It made him look thoughtful, solemn, almost sincere. “I read about your sister, Ben.” Brattle paused exactly long enough. “I’m sorry.”

Dill nodded.

“Funeral’s tomorrow, I understand.”

“Yes.”

“I assume that’s the real reason you’re down here.” Brattle tapped the file on Jake Spivey with a forefinger. “And not because of this garbage.” He smiled warmly. “How is Jake, anyway?”

“Jake’s fine.”

“Old Jake.” Brattle shook his head, still beaming in evident appreciation of that old rapscallion Jake Spivey’s many endearing qualities. The head that Brattle shook was handsome in the way that busts of long-dead Roman statesmen are often handsome — but not too handsome. The features are never too regular. The expressions are never too remote. The blank eyes never betray anything. Dill had once spent a long rainy Spanish afternoon studying a roomful of such busts in Merida. He had seen on those long-dead faces what he now saw on the face of Clyde Brattle: worldliness, cool detachment, and utter cynicism. He felt it must have been a useful mind-set back in Roman times, what with the Visigoths on the way down from the east and the north.

Now fifty-five, Brattle could easily have passed for one of those banished Roman consuls who had served too long in some dreary distant province. There were that same faint curl of lip, that same thin haughty nose, and those same illusionless eyes of no particular color unless winter rain has color. The shortish hair finally had gone gray — gray-sky gray — but it was still thick, unparted, and combed with the fingers only, if at all. The voice was still that scratchy overeducated drawl from which any regional trace had long since been excised.

“What would you say to a drink?” Brattle asked.

“I’d say fine.”

“Good.”

Sid, the lean one, rose and silently mixed two vodka-tonics. He set one in front of Brattle and handed the other to Dill. Brattle took a swallow, sighed, and smiled. “I suppose you heard I was back,” he said.

Dill nodded. “They say you crossed at Detroit.”

“It’s rather tedious, as you well know, Ben, being on the dodge like this.” He looked at the man called Sid. “Mr. Dill used to be with Jasper, Sid.”

“No shit,” Sid said. “Who’s Jasper?”

“It’s a what, not a who,” came the voice of the weight lifter from his perch on the stool.

“You’re right, Harley,” Brattle said. “It was a what. The Ford White House set it up shortly after Mr. Nixon’s rather sodden farewell. How much do you think he’d put away that day, Ben? The best part of a fifth?”

“I don’t know,” Dill said. “I don’t know how well he could handle it.”

“So why’d they call whatever it was Jasper?” Sid asked.

“It’s my understanding,” Brattle said, “and Ben can correct me if I’m wrong, that when the negotiations were going on for Mr. Nixon’s pardon, Mr. Ford was shocked to learn that, in his words, ‘Some Jasper’s made off with three million fucking dollars.’ From all that money that was floating around back then. The Committee for the Re-Election of the President. The CREEP money.”

“Sure,” Sid said. “I remember that. I always did wonder who got well off of that deal.”

“So they set up Jasper,” Brattle continued, “and brought some people in, outside people, untainted people, like Ben here, and set them off in pursuit of the missing swag. All extremely sub rosa. Not even Langley knew about it. Or the FBI. In fact, both were rather high up on the list of suspects, right, Ben?”

“Right.”

“So Ben here and a few other patriots spent the years of the Ford administration roaming over Europe looking for the Jaspers who’d made off with the three million fucking dollars. You had nearly a year in London, didn’t you, Ben, and then almost two years in Barcelona?”

“About that.”

“So what happened?” Harley asked from the van’s galley. “I never did hear what happened.”

“Nothing happened. Although you did come close, didn’t you, Ben?”

“Very close.”

“I like to think that Jake and I were of some help.”

“You helped, Clyde.”

“But not quite enough.” Brattle sighed. “They were dead by then — the Jaspers, I mean. There were three of them as I recall.” He looked at Dill for confirmation.

“Three,” Dill agreed.

“Two men and a woman. A messy combination when you think about it. Doomed to failure.”

“So who finally got the money — the three million?” Sid asked.

Dill looked at him. “The people who killed them.”

“Oh,” Sid said with a look of total understanding. “Yeah, well, sure. I can see that.” He nodded as if it all made perfect sense.

“And Ben here had a perfectly splendid three years or so in Europe.” Brattle looked at Dill and smiled. “They were good years, weren’t they, Ben?”

“As you say, Clyde, they were splendid.”

Brattle was wearing a white polo shirt which made his deep tan look even deeper. The shirt had no identifying brand on its pocket. Dill suspected Brattle would gladly have paid bespoke prices for the shirt as long as it bore no trademark. He now reached into the shirt’s pocket, produced a gold Swiss gas lighter, picked up a pack of Gauloises from the table, and offered them to Dill, who refused with a shake of his head. Brattle lit one of the cigarettes, inhaled gratefully, and blew the smoke out. His fifth smoke of the day, Dill thought. Maybe his sixth.

“You’ve been with the subcommittee how long now — three years?” Brattle asked.

“About that.”

“As a consultant.”

“Right.”

“Pay anything?”

“Enough.”

“Spartan habits, simple needs, right?”

“Absolutely.”

“You and young Senator Ramirez have a good working relationship, I presume.”

“Based on warm mutual respect.”

Brattle smiled at Dill’s answer and its edge of sarcasm. “And then there’s the minority counsel, young Mr. Dolan. Timothy, isn’t it?”

“Timothy.”

“Schooled by the Jesuits and the old pols of Boston. Who could wish for a sounder or more practical education? He is a man of some ambition, I suppose — young Tim?”

“He’s a professional Boston Democrat, Clyde.”

“It goes without saying then.” Brattle had another swallow of his drink and another deep drag on his cigarette, which Dill envied him. “As you no doubt suspect, Ben, I have a proposition for the Senator — and young Dolan, too, of course.”

Dill nodded.

“I’m willing to take my medicine, you might say.”

“How much medicine, Clyde?”

“Perhaps two years in one of the more relaxed federal hoosegows and a reasonable fine of, well, not more than two or three hundred thousand.” He smiled. It was a warm smile that spoke of unshakable self-confidence.

“Two years instead of life, right?” Dill said.

“Life is such an indeterminate sentence. Once the prison gates clang shut behind me — they do clang, don’t they? — I could be dead in a week, and think how cheated everyone would feel then.”

“In some joints I know,” Sid said, “you might not even last the week, Clyde, once the boogies get a look at your sweet ass.”

“What does the Senator get?” Dill asked.

“A tidy package. He could go to the Justice people with three, plus me, which equal four, if my arithmetic still serves.”

“Which three are you willing to shop?”

“Dick Glander for one and also Frank Cour. They could drop the net on both of them within twenty-four hours.”

“Glander and Cour and you go back quite a long way, don’t you? Nineteen years, twenty?”

Brattle nodded, a slight sad smile on his lips. “Nineteen.” He shrugged and the slight sad smile went away. “But the time comes in a man’s life when even the oldest friendships must be sacrificed to serve the common good. Fortunately, I have everything on them — good solid stuff — and they have virtually nothing on me. Were the roles reversed, well, I’d expect them both to make the same hard choice I’ve made. In other words, I’d expect them to do me before I did them.” He smiled again, this time with genuine amusement. “My sanctimony isn’t getting to you, is it, Ben?”

“It’s refreshing,” Dill said. “I’m a little worried though about your arithmetic. You said three. Glander and Cour only add up to two.”

Harley chuckled from his stool in the galley. “You forgot somebody, Clyde.”

Sid made a noise deep down in his throat, which Dill interpreted as a kind of merriment. Still making the noise, Sid winked at Dill and nodded at Brattle as if to say, Old Clyde.

Brattle himself shot his eyebrows up to register fake amazement. “My God, don’t tell me I forgot Jake?”

“You forgot Jake, Clyde,” said Sid, still making the merry noise down in his throat.

Brattle lowered his eyebrows and again smiled at Dill. “And Jake makes three, plus me, which is four, as I said.”

“What’ve you got on Jake?” Dill asked.

“On Jake?” Brattle said. The smile faded. “In all candor, Ben — in all earnestness — I’ve got enough on Jake Spivey to land him three consecutive life sentences without hope of parole.”

“Three at least,” Harley said. “Maybe even four.”

“Jake is my prize package,” Brattle continued. “My ultimate quid pro quo. My gilt-edged annuity. My irresistible bait. My ticket to the golden years of well-earned rest and retirement. Jake’s done terrible things, Ben — terrible, awful, shocking things.”

“Jake’s bad all right,” Sid agreed.

“Unspeakable deeds,” Brattle told Dill with a new and cheerful smile. “And I can prove them all. Tell the Senator that — and young Dolan, too.”

“Okay,” Dill said.

“Good,” Brattle said. “Oh,” he added as if just remembering something. “You might want this back.” He picked up the file on Jake Spivey and held it out to Dill, who rose, put his drink down on the table, accepted the file, and sat back down. “There really is nothing in it but garbage,” Brattle said, his tone carefully disappointed.

“It’s what’s not in it that’s important, Clyde.”

“I’m not quite sure I follow that.”

“Sure you do. Jake claims he can hang you from the highest tree. I sort of believe him.”

Brattle adopted a new expression of utter sincerity that Dill couldn’t remember having seen before. The old boy’s acting’s improved since we last met, Dill thought. He was good then, now he’s superb.

“I’m going to give you a word of advice, Ben,” Brattle said. “Some counsel. What I’m going to tell you has taken me—” He paused to compute the years carefully. “—sixteen years to learn. It’s really quite simple and it’s simply this: don’t believe one fucking word Jake Spivey says.”

“Not one fucking word,” Sid agreed.

“If he said he was breathing, I wouldn’t believe him,” Harley said.

“Not… one… fucking… word,” Brattle said, spacing his own words for emphasis. “Tell the Senator that.”

“Okay.”

“When d’you think you might be talking to him?”

“The Senator?” Dill said. “Right after I talk to the FBI and tell them where I saw you.”

“Of course,” Brattle said. “How stupid of me.” He held out his hand. Dill didn’t hesitate. He rose and accepted it, turned, and moved toward the sliding door. Harley came off the folding stool to slide the door back.

“Sorry about the neck,” Harley said.

Dill looked at him and nodded. “You bet,” he said and stepped down from the van. Before Dill reached the elevator, he heard the van’s engine start. He pushed the elevator button, turned, and watched the van speed up the ramp and out of sight. He didn’t bother to memorize its license number.

Up in his room, Dill stood at the window and stared down at the nearly deserted two-in-the-morning streets. He could see the First National Bank’s digital sign claiming the temperature had dropped to 86 degrees, and that the time was 2:09 A.M. It was also Saturday now, August 6, the day they would bury Felicity Dill, the homicide detective, second grade, deceased.

Dill was trying to decide which telephone call to make first. He thought there was a possibility that the calls, and especially the order they were made in, might affect the lives of those called in years to come. Because he was having trouble deciding on the order, Dill accused himself of philosophical flabbiness — of letting mere friendship get in the way of duty and responsibility and other such moral obligations. You’ve come down with a bad case of the qualms, he told himself, and the best cure for that is logic, the cold and implacable kind.

He went to the writing desk, where the whisky was, sat down, and took out a sheet of hotel stationery. Using the hotel ball-point pen he listed four names:

Dill stared at the four names for several moments, trying to decide which to call first. He reached for the bottle of whisky and poured a measure into his glass. A shot of Old Implacable blended logic should help, he thought, drank the whisky down in two gulps, and wished for perhaps the thousandth time that he still smoked.

He continued to stare at the list until he again picked up the hotel pen and wrote a single digit after each name. When done, he put the pen down, leaned back in his chair, and stared at what he had written:

You should cover your ass, he thought. You should go down to the lobby and use the pay phone because someday, maybe even years from now, a neat blue suit with a shiny plastic government-issue briefcase will drop by the hotel and demand the records of the phone calls made by a certain Benjamin Dill on that morning of August sixth — on that same hot August morning when he buried his sister and tipped off the notorious international fugitive John Jacob Spivey. Ask yourselves, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, did Dill do this for gain, for personal profit — or for any motive that you or I could possibly understand? He did not. He did it out of something he describes as friendship, out of something he calls loyalty. And just what was the basis of this alleged loyalty? Why, Dill would have you believe that he and Spivey were once pals, mates, boyhood chums — even asshole buddies. Now I ask you, members of the jury, what kind of sociopath would be asshole buddies with the likes of John Jacob Spivey, the most wanted man in the world? And so forth and so on, Dill thought as he sighed, picked up the telephone, and dialed a number.

The phone rang nine times, then ten, and finally, on the eleventh ring, was answered with a gruff, sleepy “Who the fuck is this?”

“Your asshole buddy, Benjamin Dill.”

“You drunk?” Spivey asked.

“You awake?”

“Lemme get a cigarette.”

In the background, Dill could hear the voice of Daphne Owens asking, Who is it? and Spivey replying, Pick. What does he want at this hour? she demanded in a half-awake, half-querulous tone. How the fuck do I know what he wants until I talk to him? Spivey said, and came back to the phone with “What’s up?”

“I am.”

“Yeah, I know you are, but what else?”

“Brattle’s back.”

There was a silence that lasted several moments before Spivey finally said, “So?”

“Back here, I mean.”

“Here in town?”

“Right.”

“Well.” Spivey was again silent for perhaps a dozen seconds. “Who’s with him?”

“Somebody large called Harley and somebody with dyed black hair called Sid.”

“Those pricks.”

“He’s going to shop you, Jake. He’s going to serve you up in a neat package to Ramirez along with Dick Glander and Frank Cour. He says he can drop the net over them both in twenty-four hours. He also says he’s got enough on you for three consecutive life sentences — with no parole. Ever. Clyde says he’ll do all this in exchange for a two-year stretch in some federal rest home and a fine of no more than two or three hundred thousand.”

“How’d he look?” Spivey said.

“Confident.”

“He always looks like that. Where’d you see him?”

“In the hotel basement. In a van.”

There was another lengthy pause and then Spivey said, “Well, thanks for calling, Pick. I appreciate it.”

That’s not the right reaction, Dill thought. Where’s the panic, the fear, the voice that quavers? He’s thanking me for telling him where I last saw his lost dog. “That it?” Dill asked.

“I can’t think of anything else.”

“Clyde sounded awfully sure of himself, Jake.”

“That’s the business he’s in — the trust-me business.”

“He sounded more sure of himself than usual.”

“Look, he wants a deal, that’s all. You say he’s willing to do two years to get it. Well, I want a deal, too, but I’m not doing any fucking two years. I want immunity. Now I suggest you go talk to that kid Senator of yours and find out who he and Justice would rather nail — me or Brattle. I got the feeling he’s going to say Brattle. Well, I can give him Brattle on a platter. Tell him that. See what he says. If he agrees that he’d rather nail Brattle than me, then that’s when I’m gonna have to start worrying about old Clyde because that’s when Clyde’ll try and — well, do something.”

“I have to call the FBI first and tell them where I saw Brattle.”

“Yeah,” Spivey said, his tone completely uninterested. “You do that.” He chuckled. “You mean you haven’t called them yet?”

“No.”

Spivey chuckled again. “You know what you are, Pick? You’re all mush.”

“Could be.”

“Lemme know what the Senator says.”

“All right.”

“And we can still count on you for Sunday.”

“Sure, Jake,” Dill said. “You can count on me.”

After he hung up, Dill felt as if he had spent the past hour or so wandering through a vast and largely uncharted land with one of those ancient maps that read: Here There Be Monsters. Dill knew the map was right. He had come this way before. Yet, you still don’t believe they really exist — the monsters. No, that’s wrong. You believe they exist all right, but after fifteen years of watching them, writing about them, and even tracking them down, you still think they’re normal, harmless and domesticated. Even housebroken.

But what if they, after all, are the norm and you are indeed the aberration? The thought enchanted Dill. Its simplicity was compelling, its implicit offer of absolution irresistible. He was so pleased with the whisky-inspired notion that he poured the last of the Old Smuggler into a glass and drank it down. He then reversed the previous order he so carefully had decided on (goodbye, cold logic) and called all three telephone numbers at which Senator Ramirez might be reached in New Mexico.

The limousine the police department sent for the somewhat hungover Benjamin Dill at 9:15 that Saturday morning was a black 1977 Cadillac, which its driver said had 163,000 miles on it and formerly belonged to the mayor.

“It didn’t really belong to him, you understand,” explained the middle-aged police sergeant in dress suntans who said his name was Mock, “but it was assigned to him, and then when they bought him his new one, this one went back into the pool. You say you wanta pick somebody up?”

“A Miss Singe over on Twenty-second and Van Buren.”

“The Old Folks Home, right?” Sergeant Mock said, holding the rear door open for Dill, who climbed into the air-conditioned car and sank into its soft cushions. “That’s what they used to call it — the Van Buren Towers, I mean,” Mock added as he got behind the wheel. “I don’t know why they called it that, but they did.”

The sergeant pulled the large car away from the curb in front of the Hawkins Hotel and drove north up Broadway. He glanced in the rearview mirror at Dill, who sat slumped in the right-hand corner, staring out at the light Saturday-morning traffic.

“I’m sorry about your sister, Mr. Dill,” Sergeant Mock said. “She was one real nice little old gal — although I reckon Felicity wasn’t so little at that — five-nine or ten, around in there.”

“Five-ten,” Dill said.

“Tall for a woman.”

“Yes.”

“You might want me to shut up?”

“It might help.”

“A little hung?”

“A little.”

“Look in that compartment right in front of you — you gotta slide it open. I put three cans of cold Bud in there, just in case.”

“You’re a saint,” Dill said, opening the cabinet and removing one of the still frosty cans. He opened it and drank gratefully.

The sergeant grinned into the rearview mirror. “I always do that on funeral details,” he said. “First thing I do when I get up in the morning is head for the kitchen and pop three or four cans in the freezer — you know, get ’em good and cold. Lotsa people need a little something when they go to a funeral. Sad things, funerals.” He paused. “Well, I’ll shut up now.”

“Thank you,” Dill said.

Led by the two dozen Harley-Davidsons, which were themselves led by a green-and-white squad car with its bar flasher on, the mile-long funeral procession rolled at a stately fifteen miles per hour toward the Green Glade of Rest cemetery that once had been a hardscrabble farm on the eastern outskirts of the city.

The centerpiece of Green Glade was a none-too-complicated maze about one-quarter the size of a football field. The maze was composed of swamp privet hedge eight feet tall and a couple of feet thick. There were also gravel paths for strolling and stone benches in convenient nooks where mourners could sit and rest and think long thoughts about life and death and what it all meant. However, the gravel was hard to walk on, the stone benches uncomfortable, and the maze was usually shunned by those who visited the cemetery.

In the past five years the police department had buried seventeen of its slain officers at Green Glade of Rest. Detective Felicity Dill would make it eighteen. Before the department had bought its own cemetery plot, KOD policemen were buried all over town. KOD stood for Killed on Duty.

Virtually all of those who had been at the church service also attended the graveside ceremony. As promised, the ceremony was brief. A police chaplain read the Twenty-Third Psalm. A squad of sharpshooters fired a rifle volley. A bugler played “Taps” on a cornet. The stalwart honor guard, doubling as pallbearers, folded the American flag covering the casket into a neat triangle and presented it to Dill, who had not the slightest idea of what to do with it. And then it was over, the dead sister buried, and the time was not yet noon.

The police department’s KOD plot was up on a slight knoll. With the services over, the mostly uniformed mourners began to walk slowly back down to their cars, skirting the maze. A few lingered on to shake Dill’s hand and murmur their sorrow. As Dill and Anna Maude Singe slowly made their way to the waiting limousine, he shook the offered hands and politely thanked the murmurers.

Dill and Singe found themselves almost alone not far from the maze when someone tapped Dill on the shoulder. He turned, as did Singe. They found themselves bathed in the angelic glow of the smile that belonged to Clay Corcoran, who had loved the dead sister.

“I just couldn’t keep away, Mr. Dill,” Corcoran said.

“Ben,” Dill said.

“Ben,” Corcoran agreed and turned his warm smile on Singe. “How you, Smokey?”

Singe said she was fine. The big man’s dazzling smile went away and he turned serious. “I thought it was a swell funeral,” he said. “I think Felicity might’ve giggled a little here and there, but everything went off real nice.”

Corcoran seemed to be soliciting Dill’s confirmation, so Dill said that he, too, thought it had all gone very well. Corcoran glanced over the heads of Dill and Anna Maude Singe. Behind them the police in their summer uniforms were moving past the maze toward their cars, although at least a fourth of them, mostly those who had brought wives, were now gathered in small gossipy groups.

Corcoran dropped his deep voice down into what he must have hoped was a confidential mutter. “I told you I was going to snoop around a little?” He had made it a question, so Dill nodded in reply.

“Well,” Corcoran went on in the same tone, “I think I might’ve come up with something.” Again, he glanced over their heads as if afraid of being overheard. Apparently satisfied, he added, “But I’ve got to ask you a couple of questions first.”

“Okay,” Dill said.

“There’s this guy called Jake Spivey who—” Corcoran never finished his sentence, and later Dill thought the big man’s reflexes had been incredible. Corcoran threw a hip into Dill that sent him sailing. He landed four feet away. It was Dill’s first brush with contact sports and he found it strangely exhilarating.

Before Dill had even landed, Corcoran used his left arm to clothesline Anna Maude Singe and send her sprawling. The pleasant look had fled and Corcoran’s frightener’s scowl was back as he dropped to one knee and clawed at something beneath his right pants leg.

Dill looked where Corcoran was looking. He saw the large fist and the small gun poking through the thick swamp privet hedge thirty-some feet away. Or perhaps, Dill later thought, the smallness of the gun made the fist look large. He saw the gun fire. He heard the sharp nasty crack of a single shot. Dill turned and saw that it had caught the kneeling Corcoran low in the throat. The big man dropped the small flat.25-caliber automatic he had just snatched from the ankle holster on his right leg. He pressed both hands against the wound in his throat. A moment later, he removed his bloody hands and stared at them in amazement.

Corcoran knelt there on one knee for two seconds, three seconds, four seconds, then sighed, and slowly lay down on the grass. Blood pumped from his throat. Dill, rising, looked around. The only persons still standing were the wives of the policemen. The policemen themselves had dropped to the grass. Some had dropped flat. A dozen others knelt, their right or left pants legs up, revealing white hairy calves and the small leather holsters that were strapped to them.

A dozen pistols, mostly flat little automatics much like Corcoran’s, had suddenly blossomed in big fists. The cops with the pistols were swiveling their heads, searching for someone to shoot, someone to arrest. But all they found was other cops — and a lot of them strangers — who were also waving pistols around.

Dill later thought the silence after the single shot had lasted no more than three or four seconds and not the hour it seemed at the time. One of the policemen’s wives finally screamed at the sight of Corcoran lying on the grass, his knees drawn up almost to his chest, the blood still pumping from his throat. After the scream, the shouting and confusion began.

Dill was the first to reach Corcoran. The big man’s green eyes were still open, but not quite focused, although he seemed to recognize Dill. He tried to speak, but instead blew a large pink bubble which burst with a tiny plop. Corcoran’s lips moved again and Dill bent to listen. Those watching later said they thought Corcoran managed only three or four words before the blood finally stopped pumping from the wound. Out of Corcoran’s mouth came one last sigh. It formed another pink bubble that popped almost immediately. Then the heart ran out of blood, stopped, and Corcoran was dead.

Dill slowly rose to his feet. A policeman who seemed to have had medical training knelt quickly by Corcoran and used deft fingers to search for any signs of life. He found none and sat back on his heels, shaking his head.

Dill helped the trembling Anna Maude Singe to her feet. When he asked if she was hurt, she slowly shook her head no, her eyes fixed on the huge curled-up body of Clay Corcoran. Dill put an arm around Singe to lead her away. He found their path blocked by Captain Gene Colder. A moment later, Chief of Detectives John Strucker rushed up. Colder glanced at Strucker, as if for permission. Strucker granted it with a nod.

“Tell us quick, Dill,” Colder said in a crisp hard voice. “They say he said something. Could you understand what he said?”

Dill nodded. “Sure. He said, ‘It hurts. It hurts.’ He said it twice.”

“That’s all?” Strucker said, the disbelief in his tone, if not on his face.

“That’s it.”

Strucker turned to Colder. “You know what to do, Captain. You’d better get at it.”

“Yes, sir,” Colder said, turned, and hurried away, pointing first at this policeman and then beckoning to that one. It was the only time Dill could remember having heard Colder say sir to Strucker.

The chief of detectives took a cigar from his breast pocket and slowly stripped away the cellophanelike plastic, not taking his eyes from the body of the dead Corcoran. He wadded the cellophane up into a small ball and flipped it away. Still staring down at Corcoran, he bit off one end of the cigar, spat it out, and lit it with a disposable lighter.

“You knew him, huh — Corcoran?” Strucker said, still staring at the dead man.

“He said he used to go with my sister.”

“That’s right,” Strucker said, finally shifting his gaze to Dill. “He did.”

“He said he used to be a cop.”

“He was. Not bad either, although he was a hell of a lot better linebacker. He say what he was doing now?”

“He claimed he was a private detective,” Dill said. “A frightener, he called it.”

Strucker smiled, but it was a small grim one that vanished almost immediately. “He wasn’t bad at that either, although he was better at football than anything else. He just came down and introduced himself to you where — at the hotel?”

“Right.”

“What’d you talk about?”

“My sister, what else?”

“He tell you how she’d dropped him sudden-like?”

“Yes.”

“He still steamed about it?”

“He seemed more resigned than anything else — resigned and sad, of course.”

Strucker turned to Anna Maude Singe. “You knew him, too, didn’t you, Miss Singe?”

“Yes. Quite well.”

“What happened here — a few moments ago?”

“I’m not absolutely sure.”

Strucker puffed on his cigar, blew smoke up into the air and away from Singe. He nodded at her encouragingly. “Just tell me what you saw and what you remember.”

She frowned. “Well, Clay came up to us and said he thought it was a nice funeral and everything seemed to have gone off quite well. Mr. Dill agreed and then Clay said he’d been looking around, or poking around, maybe, and that he needed to ask Mr. Dill something. But then, well, then I guess he saw something behind us — behind Mr. Dill and me — because after that everything happened awfully fast. He bumped Mr. Dill—”

Dill interrupted. “He gave me a hip shot.”

Strucker nodded and again smiled encouragingly at Singe.

“Then his arm snapped out like this,” she said, demonstrating how Corcoran’s arm had moved. “And the next thing I knew I was flat on my back.”

“Clotheslined her?” Strucker asked Dill.

“Apparently.”

“Then I heard the shot,” Anna Maude Singe went on, “and I looked up and saw Clay, except he was down on one knee by then, kneeling, and he had his pants leg up and a little gun in his hand. But he dropped the gun and his hands went up to his throat and came away bloody. After that, he just decided to lie down. It looked like that anyway. He lay down and his knees came up to his chest and he just — he just curled up and died.”

She looked away then. “You all right?” Strucker asked.

She nodded. “Yes. I’m all right.”

Strucker turned to Dill. “What’d you see?”

“The same thing — except I also saw a hand poking a gun through the hedge right about there.” Dill pointed to where a knot of policemen were down on their hands and knees in their dress uniforms making a careful search of the cemetery grass near the spot in the privet hedge Dill had indicated. He assumed they were looking for a spent cartridge.

Strucker watched them for a moment and dolefully shook his head. “Look at ’em,” he said. “All in uniform and alike as peas in a pod. He could’ve got himself an out-of-town uniform somewhere, gone to the funeral, come out here, shot Corcoran, and ducked out the other side of the maze. Could’ve happened like that.”

“Maybe,” Dill said.

Strucker looked at him with renewed interest. “What d’you mean, maybe?”

“The one time I talked to Corcoran, he told me he did a lot of bodyguard work. Maybe that’s what he did here — almost by reflex. He got Anna Maude and me out of the way and then went for the shooter — except it didn’t work out too well.”

Strucker puffed thoughtfully on his cigar, coughed twice, and then nodded — a bit grudgingly, Dill thought. “And the shooter was after who?” Strucker said. “You?”

Dill looked at Singe. “Or her.”

Singe’s eyes went wide for a second and her mouth dropped open, but snapped shut so she could form the M in her startled “Me?”

“Maybe,” Dill said.

“Why the hell me?”

“For that matter,” Dill said, “why the hell anyone?”

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, ‘There’s this guy called Jake Spivey who—.’” 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, ‘There’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…” 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 red — a 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 ‘or’ 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.”

Harold Snow obeyed Dill’s instructions exactly. He squatted down, his hands behind him, groped for the handle of the toolchest, found it, and rose, holding the toolchest just below the seat of his chino pants.

“Now we’re going into the living room, Harold, where it’s cooler,” Dill said. “But when I say stop, I want you to stop or I’ll slice off an ear. Got that?”

“I got it,” Snow said.

“Let’s go.”

Snow went first into the hall followed by Dill. Anna Maude Singe came last. When they reached the door to the kitchen, Dill said, “Stop, Harold.”

Snow stopped. “You know where the knives are?” Dill said to Singe.

“What kind d’you want?”

“Something that’ll impress Harold.”

“Right.”

“You don’t need any knife,” Snow said.

“Shut up, Harold,” Dill said.

Dill could hear Singe open and close a drawer in the kitchen. A moment later she was saying, “What about this one?”

Dill turned to look. She was holding up a wicked-looking breadknife. “Fine,” Dill said, took the knife and handed her the broken neck of the beer bottle.

“Okay, Harold, into the living room.”

Still carrying the toolchest behind him, Snow moved into the living room followed by Dill and Singe. She tossed the neck of the beer bottle into a wastebasket.

“You can put the chest down, Harold,” Dill said.

It was awkward going down with the chest behind him, but Snow managed it and then stood up again. “Now what?” he said.

“Sit down over there.”

“Over here?” Snow said, moving to the large easy chair with the ottoman and the brass floor lamp.

“That’s the one.”

Snow sat down in the chair. “Is your toolchest unlocked, Harold?” Dill asked.

“It’s unlocked.”

“Let’s open it and see what’s inside.” Snow started to rise. “Not you, Harold,” Dill said, motioning him back down with the breadknife.

Anna Maude Singe knelt by the toolbox and opened it. She lifted up a tray of assorted tools and inspected the bottom of the chest. “He’s either the telephone man or the man who comes to fix the hi-fi,” she said. “Except I don’t think either one would have this in his toolchest.”

Dill looked quickly to his left and then back at Harold Snow. “Is it loaded?” he asked Singe.

“It’s loaded.”

“Let’s have it.” Singe rose, moved over to Dill, and handed him the short-barreled five-shot.38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. He gave her the breadknife. Dill aimed the pistol at Snow and smiled. The smile made Snow swallow nervously.

“We’re going to tell the cops, Harold, that we surprised you in a burglary, you pulled this on us, I took it away from you, and then shot you in the knee. The right knee, I think.” Dill moved the gun so that it was pointed at Snow’s right knee.

“You wouldn’t do that,” Snow said.

“Why wouldn’t he?” Anna Maude Singe said.

“Christ, lady, people don’t just go around shooting people.”

“He’s the brother, Harold — remember? The death of his sister’s made him sort of crazy.”

“Harold,” Dill said.

Snow looked at him. “What?”

“I’m going to ask you what you’re doing here. If you lie to me, I promise I’ll shoot you — in the knee. Understand?”

“You’re not gonna shoot me,” Snow said, his tone as defiant as he could manage.

Dill squeezed the trigger of the pistol. The gun fired. The.38-caliber slug tore into the ottoman in front of Snow’s knees. Snow yelped and shrank back in the chair. Dill wondered if anyone had heard the shot. Probably not, he decided, not back here in the alley at the rear of a two-hundred-foot lot. He also decided he didn’t really care.

“Sorry, Harold,” Dill said and carefully aimed the pistol, with both hands this time, at Snow’s right knee.

“The tape!” Snow shouted. “That’s all. Just the tape.”

Dill lowered the pistol. “What tape, Harold?” he said pleasantly.

“The last one,” Snow said.

“The last one. And where is this last tape?”

Snow pointed toward the ceiling. “In the crawl space. It’s sort of an attic. You get to it by going up through the trap in the closet ceiling in the bedroom.”

“How did you know the tape is up there, Harold?”

“I put the recorder in.”

“The tape recorder?”

Snow nodded. “It’s voice-activated and I ran it off of house power so I wouldn’t have to fool with batteries.”

“When did you do all this, Harold?” Anna Maude Singe asked.

Snow looked at her, then back at Dill. “Who the hell’s she?” he said.

“She’s my witness for when I shoot you in the knee, Harold. But if you answer our questions, maybe I won’t have to.”

“Can I smoke?” Snow said.

“No,” Dill said. “When did you put the tape recorder up in the attic?”

“About six months ago.” Snow sulked. “Why can’t I smoke?”

“Because,” Dill said. “Why’d you put the recorder up there?”

“I got paid to, that’s why.”

“Who paid you, Harold?”

“Some guy.”

“I’ll bet some guy’s got a name.”

“I can’t tell you his name,” Snow said. “He’s a… a client.”

“Harold,” Anna Maude Singe said softly.

He looked at her. “What?”

“You’re not a lawyer, Harold, or a doctor, or a priest, or even a private detective, so there’s no rule of confidentiality involved here. You don’t have clients, Harold. All you’ve got are slippery customers, and if you don’t tell us who some guy is, Mr. Dill is going to shoot you in the knee. Right, Mr. Dill?”

“Absolutely,” Dill said.

Snow looked at Dill, then at Singe again, and then once more at Dill. He ran his tongue over his upper lip as if trying to lick away the sweat. His forehead was also covered with it. He used the sleeve of his soaked blue T-shirt to wipe it away. After that, he dried his hands on the legs of his chino pants. Finally, he lowered his gaze until his eyes rested on the ragged hole the.38 bullet had made in the ottoman. He spoke to the ottoman in a low, almost inaudible voice. “His name’s Corcoran. Clay Corcoran.” He looked up at Dill. “He used to be gone on your sister and he’s gonna tear my fuckin’ head off when he finds out I told you.”

Dill shook his head. “He won’t tear your head off, Harold.”

“You don’t know him.”

“Sure I know him. But he won’t tear your head off because somebody shot him. Around noon. Today.”

Snow’s surprise was obviously real. His mouth sagged open and his eyes widened. Disbelief was written across his face. He finally managed to say, “Shot him?” and there was nothing but doubt in his voice.

“Shot him dead, Harold,” Anna Maude Singe said. “In the cemetery.”

“Tell us, Harold,” Dill said almost gently. “Start way back there at the beginning and tell us all about you and my sister and Clay Corcoran.”

“Can I smoke?”

“Of course you can.”

Snow fished a package of Vantage menthols out of his pants pocket and lit the cigarette with a paper match. He blew the smoke out and looked at Dill. “You sure he’s dead?” he said.

“He’s dead, Harold. I saw him die.”

Snow’s yellowish-brown eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “You killed him?”

Dill only smiled and said, “From the beginning, Harold.”

Snow looked around for an ashtray. Anna Maude Singe found one and gave it to him. He didn’t thank her. Instead, he flicked some ash into the tray and said, “We moved in right after your sister bought the place — the place over on Thirty-second and Texas. We didn’t see much of her, me and Cindy. Then one night Corcoran came around when she wasn’t there and started raising hell up on the second floor landing.”

“When my sister wasn’t there, right?”

“Yeah. Right. He’d been there once before raising hell, but your sister’d been home that time. This time she wasn’t. Neither was Cindy. Just me. So I went up to see what the trouble was. He was drunk and talkative and he said he and your sister’d split and now she was shacking up with somebody else. He didn’t say who the other guy was but I already knew. Well, what the hell, it smelled like an easy dollar or two, so I made him a proposition. I told him I could run a spike mike up through the floor and get everything your sister and the other guy said on tape. Corcoran wanted to know who the fuck I was. I told him my name and how I was into electronics. He wanted to know how much it would cost. I told him and he said we had a deal. I told him we didn’t have no deal until I saw some money. He said come by his office the next day and we’d settle everything. So that’s what I did. I went by his office. Turns out he’s a private detective. I remember when he played football, but I didn’t know he was any private detective.”

“He had an office,” Dill said. “Where?”

“The Cordell Building, know it?”

Dill nodded.

“He was sober though when you saw him in his office,” Singe said.

“Stone sober, lady. And all business. He told me exactly what he wanted. He wanted the spike up through the bedroom floor and he wanted a tap on her phone, too. And he wanted it voice-activated. Well, that was gonna cost and I told him so and how much. He pulled out a roll and paid me in hundreds — no receipt, no questions, no nothing. So that’s what I did.”

“How often did Corcoran pick up the tapes?” Dill asked.

“Once a week,” Snow said and ground his cigarette out in the ashtray.

“What was on the tapes?” Dill said.

Snow stared at Dill for a moment, and Dill thought he saw the apprehension and fear leave Snow’s eyes. They were replaced with something that Dill finally identified as greed. He believes that somehow he’s going to make a few bucks out of this after all, Dill thought.

“You wanta know what was on the tapes, huh?” Snow said. “Well, the sound of fucking was on the tapes, I guess, but I don’t really know because I didn’t listen to them. I’ve done a lotta this kind of work and when I first got into it, I used to listen to the tapes, but after a while, you don’t because it’s just the same old crap.”

“So you didn’t listen to them?” Singe said.

“No.”

“Not even once.”

“I listened to a little bit of the first one to check the quality, but after that I just dropped ’em in an envelope.”

“Then what?” Dill said.

“Well, then Corcoran calls and says he wants to see me. And once again, he’s all business. I mean it was like doing business with IBM or somebody. He says your sister’s got another place where she spends a lotta time and he wants that wired, too. Well, he meant this place here. So I drove by and took a look and I didn’t like the setup, so I went back and told him so. You wanta know what he said? He said, How much? That’s all. How much? Well, I had a problem here. He wanted both the bedroom and the phone. Now I could do that okay and feed it all up into the attic there. But how was I gonna get the tapes? I mean, I could break in here once and install my gear, but I couldn’t bust in every week just to pick up the tapes, could I?”

“So what’d you do, Harold?” Dill said.

“Bursts,” Snow said.

“Bursts.”

“Yeah. I rigged up a sender, something like a CB?”

Dill nodded.

“I used this voice-activated low-ips tape, right? I mean, you can get hours on that stuff. So every two or three days I’d drive by in the van, park, and send the radio up there in the attic a signal. It’d rewind the tape and shoot it back to me in a burst — maybe two, three, four seconds. Never more’n five. I’d record it on my stuff in the back of the van, then rerecord it at normal speed and give it to Corcoran.”

“And it worked?” Dill said.

“Sure it worked.”

“Sounds expensive.”

“It was.”

“How expensive, Harold?” Anna Maude Singe asked.

Instead of answering, Snow again tugged the package of Vantage menthols out of his pants pocket and lit one. “You know, I’ve been thinking,” he said as he waved out the match and dropped it into the ashtray. “All this oughta be worth a little something to you guys.”

Dill sighed, bent forward, and cracked Snow across the right knee with the barrel of the revolver. Snow wailed, dropped his cigarette, and grabbed the struck knee with both hands. Dill bent down, picked up the cigarette, and stuck it between Snow’s lips. “Don’t be dumb, Harold,” Dill said. “You’re not real smart, but you’re not dumb either. How much did Corcoran pay you?”

The cigarette was still between Snow’s lips and he was still massaging the struck knee when he said, “One thousand a week.”

Anna Maude Singe whistled softly. “How did he pay you, Harold?” she asked.

“What d’you mean how’d he pay me?” Snow said and took the cigarette from his mouth. “With money.”

“Cash?”

“That’s right, cash.”

“You think it was his money, Harold?” Dill said.

Once again, the shrewdness crept back into the eyes. “You know, that’s kind of an interesting question. I think it was his money all right when I did the first stuff. But later I think he started using other people’s money. I think there was other people who wanted to find out what your sister was up to.”

“He found himself a client, huh?” Dill said.

“Yeah. A client.”

“Who?”

“How should I know? Somebody hands over a grand a week in tens and twenties to you, you ain’t gonna ask too many questions.”

“Or listen to the tapes?” Anna Maude Singe said.

“I didn’t listen to ’em, lady. What little I did hear was mostly fuck talk and that doesn’t do a thing for me.” He paused. “But I will tell you this.”

“What?” Dill said.

“He wanted me to tap in on somebody else.”

“Corcoran did?”

“Yeah. He said name your price. So I went out and took a look at it and came back and said no way. I mean, this guy was set up just like he was expecting somebody to make a move on him.”

“What’d Corcoran say when you said you wouldn’t do it?” Dill asked.

“What could he say? I didn’t tell him I wouldn’t do it; I told him I couldn’t. If you can’t, you can’t.”

“Who was it, Harold?” Dill said.

“Some guy in a big house out in Cherry Hills is all I know.”

“Was his name Jake Spivey?”

Harold Snow no longer bothered to look surprised at anything Dill said. “Yeah,” Snow said. “Jake Spivey. How the hell did you know?”

With his own pistol aimed at him, Harold Snow used the kitchen stool to go up into the crawl space above the bedroom closet and bring down the recording and sending equipment. It was smaller than Dill had expected — not much larger than a cigar box — and enclosed in a green metal case.

“That’s it?” he asked Snow.

“That’s it.”

“What about the microphones?”

Snow pointed to something in the ceiling above the bed. “See that?”

“What?”

“Looks like a nail hole.”

“I see it.”

“That’s the spike mike. I’m gonna leave it. It’s not worth the trouble to take it out. I patched in the phone up there, too.”

“You don’t think the cops found it when they went over this place?”

Snow shook his head. “Not unless they went up into the crawl space, and they didn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Talcum powder. I blew some talcum powder around after I installed it. It was still there.”

Anna Maude Singe moved over and looked down at the small green metal box Harold Snow still held. “You said there’s a final tape on there.”

“That’s right.”

“Can you play it?” she said. “I mean, can you play it so we can hear it?”

Snow looked at Dill, who had let the pistol drop to his side. “Can I keep my stuff if I do? Can I keep this?” He moved the green box around a little. Dill brought the gun up. Snow hurried with his explanation. “Look, I put it together myself and it’s worth a couple of thousand. I know where I could get at least a couple of thousand for it.”

“You can keep it, Harold,” Dill said.

They had to go back into the living room, where Snow had left his toolkit. It took him less than two minutes to splice a wall plug onto the cord that led from the green metal box. He plugged it into the wall socket and said, “This thing’s only got an inch-and-a-half speaker on it, so you’re not gonna get any quality.”

“Just play it, Harold,” Dill said.

“There’s not much on it,” Snow warned.

“Just play it, Harold,” Dill said again.

The first thing they heard was a muted click. “That’s the phone being picked up,” Snow explained.

“Why doesn’t it ring?”

“It don’t pick up on rings.”

“Hello,” the woman’s voice said. It was the voice of Dill’s dead sister. Dill felt a small cold shudder. A frisson, he thought, surprised that the word had come to him.

A man’s voice said: “Well?”

“I think the same time and place,” Felicity Dill said.

“Right,” the man said. There was a slight click. A brief silence. Another click. And Felicity Dill again said, “Hello.”

“Another phone call,” Snow said.

Dill was seated, drink in hand, on the couch in Anna Maude Singe’s living room. He again was staring at the large Maxfield Parrish print when she came in from her shower wearing a short white silk robe that was transparent enough to see through. She sat down on the couch. The couch’s large center cushion separated them.

Dill put his drink down on the coffee table and said, “I can see through that.”

“I know.”

“You got a built, as they say in Baltimore.”

“Part’s inherited, part’s acquired.”

“Dancing?”

“How’d you know?”

“The way you move mostly.”

“They thought it would help me with this,” she said and touched the slight scar on her upper lip.

“What’s that?”

“It used to be a harelip. Until I was seven I talked funny — or peculiarly, I suppose. Then I had the operation and a lot of speech therapy, and I didn’t talk funny anymore. But I thought I still did. So I was given dancing lessons — to increase my confidence.”

“Did it?”

“Not really. But at thirteen I turned pretty. It was almost overnight. It seemed that way anyhow: all of a sudden. So I decided I wanted to do something where looks didn’t much count. I decided to become a lawyer.”

“At thirteen?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“At thirteen,” Dill said, “I wanted to be ambassador to the United Nations.”

“Whatever for?”

“You got to live in New York. You didn’t have to stand up when you worked. There were always people seated behind you, whispering secrets into your ear and handing you important slips of paper. It looked like a steady job. I was very impressed by people with steady jobs when I was thirteen.”

He picked up his drink from the coffee table, swallowed some of it, put it back down, and moved over next to Anna Maude Singe. He touched the small scar on her lip. “I still have a little trouble with my R’s,” she said.

“I didn’t notice,” Dill lied and kissed the scar.

“You know why I really gave up dancing?”

“Why?”

“Because it was therapy. They said I was very good, but I figured that meant I was just good at therapy — at curing myself. So when I got to be thirteen I decided I was cured and gave it up.”

Dill’s hand went to her waist and began to untie the loosely knotted sash. She bent her head to watch. “Your robe,” he said. “It looks something like the ones in the Parrish print.”

“I know. When I was taking my shower, I thought about you and got all excited. I thought the robe might help things along.”

He slipped the robe from her shoulders. Her breasts were several shades lighter than the rest of her skin, which was nicely tanned. The nipples were erect. He touched first the right one, then the left. “In the Parrish print,” he said, “I never could figure out whether they’re boys or girls.”

“I hope you like girls or we’re going to a lot of bother for nothing.”

“I like girls very much,” he said and kissed the right nipple.

“Strawberry,” she said. “The other one’s vanilla.”

He kissed the left one. “So it is.”

As he straightened up, she said, “You’ve got too many clothes on,” and started loosening his tie. Dill worked on the buttons of his shirt. Seconds later, his clothes were on the floor. She examined him with frank interest and said, “I like looking at naked men.”

“Women are better.”

“They’re okay, but men are better — I don’t know — engineered. Take this, for example.”

“You take it.”

“All right,” she said. “It’s the most remarkable thing in the world.”

“Not quite,” he said, his hand and fingers now exploring the wet softness between her legs.

She closed her eyes and smiled, her head thrown slightly back. “We can begin on the couch and then move to the floor.”

“Where there’s more room.”

“Right. Then you can carry me into the bedroom, throw me on the bed, and have your way with me.”

“Sounds like a hell of an afternoon.”

“I hope so,” she said.

They came together then in a hot hungry frantic kiss. They remained on the couch for a while and then somehow found themselves on the floor. They were there for a long time. They never did make it to the bed.

The old man had spilled some chili-mac on his yellowing pongee shirt. He was trying to mop it off with the napkin he had dipped into his water glass when Dill and Singe sat down next to him. Laffter looked up at them and then went back to work on the chili stain. The padded bench that ran along the wall ended in the corner where the old man sat. Singe also sat on the bench, Dill in a chair across the table from her. Without looking up at Dill, the old man said, “Like my story?”

“I think I counted alleged thirteen times.”

“I used it four times, but some shit on the desk stuck in another one.” He looked up then. “What’s on your mind?”

“You want a drink?”

“If you’re buying, sure.” He nodded at Anna Maude Singe. “Who’s she?”

“My lawyer,” Dill said. “Miss Singe, Mr. Laffter, who some call Chuckles.”

Singe turned her head and nodded at Laffter coolly. “Do you chuckle a lot, Mr. Laffter?”

“Hardly at all,” the old man said.

Harry the Waiter appeared at Dill’s table with napkins and silver. As he laid them out, he asked if Dill and Singe would like fresh drinks. Dill told him they’d stick with the ones they’d brought from the bar, but added, “You can bring Chuckles a drink.”

“The old goat’s had enough,” Harry the Waiter said.

“I’ll have a cognac, old blackamoor buddy,” Laffter said. “A double.”

Harry the Waiter inspected him. “Spilled chili on your shirt, huh? Well, shoot, you only been wearing it four days now. Could’ve got another two days out of it at least, if you hadn’t spilled stuff on it.”

“Step and fetch the drink, waiter,” the old man said, his voice loud enough to make heads turn.

“I got a good mind to eighty-six you right here and now,” Harry the Waiter said.

The old man glared up at him. “A good mind? You?” He shook his head in well-feigned disbelief.

“Old broken-down reporter,” Harry the Waiter said, and clucked sympathetically. “No sadder sight in the world. Used up. Worn out. Never was. Half drunk most of the time.” He turned to Dill. “You sure you wanta buy this old fool a drink?”

“I’m sure,” Dill said.

Harry the Waiter shook his head and turned away. As he moved off, the old man spoke in a loud voice of mock apology: “Misses the jungle, you know.” He grinned without mirth at Dill. “What d’you think a double cognac’ll buy you?”

“I need to find out who wanted that story about my sister printed.” Dill smiled, but it was a cold and even heartless smile just as he had intended it to be. “That’s one,” he said. “Two, I need to find out who leaked it to you.”

“Do you now?” the old man said.

“And three, if you don’t tell me, then I’ll make you wish to hell you had.”

The old man snorted. “What d’you think you can do to me, Dill? I’m seventy-three fucking years old. It’s all been done to me already. You gonna beat the shit out of me? One knock and I’m dead and you wanta know what my last words would be? ‘Thanks very much,’ that’s what. Get me fired? I’d move to Florida and fry in the sun like I shoulda done five years back. You can’t make me wish I’d done one goddamn thing.”

Dill smiled his smile again. “My sister had an insurance policy, Chuckles. I’m the sole beneficiary. The amount she left is a quarter of a million dollars. Are you indigent?”

Laffter’s washed-out blue eyes turned suspicious. “What d’you mean, indigent?”

“Are you without funds? Broke? Busted? Flat? Tapped out?”

The old man shrugged. “I got a few bucks.”

“Good. Then you can afford a lawyer.”

“For what?”

“You’ll need him when I sue you for libel. Not the Tribune. Just you. I know my sister wasn’t on the take, Chuckles, but your story says she was. I don’t think it’ll be too hard to prove malice — do you, Miss Singe?”

“I think you’ve got an excellent case,” Singe said.

“And how much will two hundred and fifty thousand dollars buy in legal services?” Dill asked her.

Singe smiled. “Years. Simply years.”

“Now if I sue you, Chuckles, do you think the Tribune’s going to pick up your legal fees?”

“You haven’t got a case,” the old man said with a sneer. “You don’t know anything about libel, either one of you. I know more about libel than both of you put together. They’ll laugh you outa court.”

“Then we’ll appeal,” Anna Maude Singe said with another smile.

“Appeals cost money,” Dill said. “I’ve got two hundred and fifty thousand to spend, Chuckles. How much’ve you got?”

“You got shit,” the old man said, as Harry the Waiter appeared and put a balloon glass of cognac in front of him.

“Who’s got shit?” Harry the Waiter said.

“This fuck says he’s gonna sue me for libel.”

Harry the Waiter grinned at Dill. “You need a witness? You need somebody to stand up in court and say how nasty this old fool is? You do, I’m your man.”

“Go away,” Laffter said.

Harry the Waiter went away, grinning. Laffter watched him go. He remembered his cognac then, picked it up, and drank. When he put it down he smacked his lips and lit one of his Pall Malls.

“There was no libel in that story,” he told Dill. “You think I don’t know when I’m skirting the edge?”

Dill shrugged and looked at Singe. “Libel trials can be long drawn-out affairs, can’t they?”

“They can go on forever,” she said.

Dill looked back at Laffter. “You know what old man Hartshorne’ll do when I sue? He’ll hang you out to dry, Chuckles, especially if the Tribune isn’t a defendant. He won’t even remember your name. He might even fire you, but that won’t stop the suit. I’ve got both the money and the time. I don’t think you’ve got enough of either.”

Laffter finished his cognac in a gulp. “Blackmail,” he said.

“Justice,” Dill said.

“I didn’t say she was on the take.”

“You implied it. You told me you wrote another story about her once before, a feature, but they didn’t print it. It’ll be interesting to find out why.”

“They killed it, that’s all.”

“But why?” Anna Maude Singe asked. “Did they kill it — if they did — because it was inaccurate, malicious, unfair — libelous? What?”

“It was a fucking feature, lady, that’s all. It was cute, if anything. You can’t sue for cute.”

“Today’s story wasn’t cute, Chuckles,” Dill said.

The old man stared at Dill for long moments. Finally, when he sighed and said, “You really would, wouldn’t you?” Dill knew he had won and almost wished he hadn’t.

“Count on it.”

“Five years ago I’d’ve told you to go fuck yourself.”

“Five years ago you were only sixty-eight.”

“So what d’you want?”

“Who leaked you the stuff on my sister’s finances?”

“Leaked?” Laffter said. “How do you know it was a leak? I got taps down there I turn on and off like a faucet. You know how long I’ve been on police? — fifty years, that’s how long. Think about it. Fifty years — except during the war. I’ve seen rookies come on the force, grow old, and retire. Christ, I’ve even seen rookies have kids who’re damn near ready for retirement themselves. I’m a fuckin’ institution down there, Dill. Leaks!” He almost spat out the last word.

“Who’d you get it from, Chuckles?” Dill said.

The old man sighed again, picked up his empty glass, and drained the last few drops. “The chief,” he said in a resigned voice.

“You mean the chief of police — Rinkler?”

“The chief of detectives, asshole. Strucker.”

“Why?”

“Why?” the old man said, his tone incredulous. “Did you ever ask somebody why they told you something? Is that how you used to do it for UP, Dill? Somebody out at the statehouse’d let something drop and you’d say, ‘My goodness, why are you telling me all this?’ Is that how you used to work it, fella?”

“No.”

“Then don’t ask me why.”

“What’d he say to you?”

“Strucker? He said, You might find this interesting. He reeled it off and I wrote it down. And sat on it — until today when the word came down and they said, Let’s go with that Felicity Dill stuff you’ve got. It was a story, that’s all — news — and I wrote it straight as a string because that’s how I do it. And there wasn’t one word of libel in it. You know it and I know it.”

“The word came down from where — old man Hartshorne?” Dill asked.

“I don’t know,” Laffter said. “Either him or junior. What the fuck difference does it make?” He paused and then said, “That’s it! That’s all, by God!” He shoved the table away and rose. “You still wanta sue, Dill, well, you just go ahead and goddamn well sue.

Laffter started around the table, but stopped. His pale-blue eyes bulged and a dark-red flush spread across his face and it twisted itself into pure pain. He clapped his right hand to his chest and bent forward. He began to sag then and tried to support himself on the table with his left arm and hand, but they refused to cooperate. He crumpled and would have fallen if Harry the Waiter hadn’t rushed over, caught him, and lowered him gently to the floor.

Harry the Waiter looked up at Dill. “Tell the Greek to call the paramedics for the old fool,” he said.

“I’ll do it,” Anna Maude Singe said. She rose and hurried toward the bar.

“You ain’t gonna die on me, old man,” murmured Harry the Waiter, as he ripped off Laffter’s greasy gray tie. “You ain’t gonna die in my place.”

Harry the Waiter shook the old man’s shoulder and yelled, “You all right?” at him. There was no response, but he seemed to expect none. He put his left hand under the old man’s neck, lifted up, and pushed down on the now sweaty forehead with his right hand. The old man’s mouth came open. Harry the Waiter bent to listen and then shook his head, almost in disgust.

“I’m gonna have to kiss you on the mouth again, old man,” Harry the Waiter muttered. He kept his left hand under Laffter’s neck, still lifting it up, and with his right hand pinched Laffter’s nostrils until they closed. Harry the Waiter took a deep breath, opened his own mouth as wide as it would go, placed it over the old man’s mouth, and blew into it. Dill could see the old man’s chest rise. Harry the Waiter removed his mouth, checked to see if the old man’s chest was falling, and seeing that it wasn’t, blew four full quick breaths into Laffter’s mouth. This time the old man’s chest rose, fell, and then stopped.

Harry the Waiter got to his knees and checked the carotid artery in Laffter’s neck next to the voice box. “Goddamn you, old man,” he said. He placed the heel of his left hand an inch or so down from the tip of the sternum at the xiphoid, interlocked the fingers of his hands, leaned over Laffter, and pressed down. The old man’s chest seemed to sink two inches. Harry the Waiter rocked back, came forward, and repeated the process. He repeated it fifteen times and then bent down quickly and blew twice into the old man’s mouth.

A woman’s voice behind Dill said, “Isn’t that disgusting?” He looked around and saw that a small crowd of curious diners had gathered.

Harry the Waiter looked up at Dill. “Can you blow in him?”

“Sure,” Dill said and knelt beside Laffter. “Just tell me when.”

“When I hit five again,” Harry the Waiter said and began counting his compressions aloud. When the waiter reached five, Dill inhaled deeply, covered the old man’s mouth with his own, and blew.

“Again,” Harry the Waiter said.

Dill inhaled and blew again. The old man’s mouth tasted of stale tobacco smoke and cognac. And probably Polident, Dill thought as he forced himself not to gag.

“Again on five,” Harry the Waiter said.

“Right,” Dill said.

After the waiter again made a fifth cardiac compression, Dill again blew breath twice down into the old man’s lungs. They were both still at it a few minutes later when the fire-department paramedics arrived and took over. The paramedics put Laffter on oxygen, lifted him onto a gurney, and rolled him toward the front of the club. Dill and Harry the Waiter went with them. The onlookers went back to their drinks and dinners.

“He gonna make it?” Harry the Waiter asked one of the paramedics.

“Yeah, I think so. You hit him pretty good with your CPR again, Harry. Thanks.”

When the paramedics were gone, Dill asked Harry the Waiter, “You did CPR on him before?”

“Twice.”

“Jesus.”

“I told the old fool time and again he ain’t gonna die here in my place. He’s gonna die at home in bed all alone. That’s how and where he’s gonna die. Not here in my place. You really say you were gonna sue him?”

Dill nodded.

Harry the Waiter shook his head and grinned. “That’d set him off. That’d set him off for sure. You know who the old fool’s gonna leave all he’s got to?”

Dill could only stare at Harry the Waiter with utter disbelief.

Harry the Waiter went right on grinning. “That’s right. Me. Ain’t that something?” He ran his tongue over his lips and grimaced. “And don’t that old man taste bad?”

Dill found Anna Maude Singe at the small end of the L-shaped bar huddled over a glass of something that looked like vodka on the rocks. He told the Greek he would have the same, whatever it was. Levides poured the drink and indicated the silent woman. “I told her it really wasn’t anything you two said or did, but she’s not buying it.”

Dill nodded and drank. It turned out to be vodka. He looked at Singe. She continued to stare into her glass.

“I told her the old guy’s seventy-three,” Levides went on, “and that he puts away at least a fifth a day and smokes three packs of Pall Malls and eats grease and junk and walks maybe fifty or sixty steps a week, if that, and that’s what did it to him before and that’s what did it to him tonight. Not anything anybody said.” He paused. “Christ, you and Harry the Waiter saved his life.”

“If he lives,” Dill said.

“So? He’s seventy-three.” Levides paused. “Damned old fool.”

“I want to get out of here,” Anna Maude Singe said, still staring down into her drink.

Dill put a ten-dollar bill on the bar, picked up his drink, finished it in three swallows, shuddered, and said, “Let’s go.”

She silently got down from the bar stool and started for the door. Dill was picking up his change when Levides, looking somewhere else, asked in his too casual offhand voice, “What’d you say to old Chuckles anyhow?”

“I said I was going to sue him for libel.”

“No shit,” Levides said as Dill turned and went after Anna Maude Singe.

At shortly after nine on Sunday morning the telephone rang in Dill’s hotel room. He had been asleep when it began to ring and he was still half asleep when he answered it with a scratchy hello and heard Senator Ramirez say, “This is Joe Ramirez, Ben. You awake?”

“I’m awake.”

“We’ll be coming in tomorrow around four o’clock. Could you rent a car and meet us at the airport by any chance?”

“Us?”

“Dolan and me. He’ll be coming in from Washington. I’m still in Santa Fe.”

“Around four,” Dill said. “Tomorrow.”

“If it’s no bother, of course.”

“I’ll be there. Can you hold a second?”

“Of course.”

Dill put the phone down, went into the bathroom, splashed cold water on his face, came back into the room, noticed the bottle of whisky, paused, tilted it up, took a quick swallow, and got back on the phone with a question: “Did Dolan tell you about Clyde Brattle?”

“Yes, he did, and it presents a problem, doesn’t it?”

“I told Dolan you can have either Brattle or Jake Spivey — but not both.”

“I’m not quite sure I agree, Ben. I think I’ll need to talk to them both. Can you arrange it?”

“Spivey’s no problem. I’m seeing him today. But I’ll have to wait for Brattle to call me, although I’m pretty sure he will — unless the FBI’s got him.”

“You didn’t tell them he’s there, did you?” The Senator’s baritone rose in what sounded very much to Dill like alarm.

“I haven’t talked to the FBI, Senator,” he said carefully. “I was going to call them, but Dolan said he’d take care of it in Washington. Did he?”

“I’m sure he must’ve.”

“Maybe I’d better call their office here — just to make sure.”

“I don’t really think so, Ben,” the Senator said in a tone that managed to be both reasonable and stern. “I’m confident Dolan’s got everything worked out in Washington. A call from you might — well, confuse things and destroy whatever political advantage we might get out of this. I’m talking about political advantage in its broadest aspects, of course.”

“Of course,” Dill said, not bothering to hide his skepticism. “What d’you want me to tell Brattle when he calls?”

“Tell him I’m prepared for a completely off-the-record exploratory meeting either late tomorrow or early Tuesday.” The Senator paused. “Just him, Dolan, me… and you, of course.”

“What about Jake Spivey?”

“Make him the same offer, but don’t let the times conflict.”

“I’ll set it up,” Dill said.

“Good.” The Senator paused again. “And Ben?”

“Yes.”

“I read a brief wire story in The New Mexican this morning. It was about your sister’s funeral. An ex-policeman was murdered at it?”

“Clay Corcoran.”

“The same Corcoran who used to play for the Raiders?”

“The same. He also used to go with my sister.”

“I’m… well, I’m not quite sure how to ask my next question.”

“The best thing to do is just ask.”

“None of what happened to your sister or to Corcoran has anything to do with you — or with us, does it?”

“Not that I know of.”

“It could be awfully embarrassing if it did — although I don’t see how it possibly could.”

“Neither do I,” Dill said.

“Yes, well, I’ll see you tomorrow then — at the airport.”

Dill said he would be there. After the Senator hung up, Dill called down for room service. In the bathroom he stood under the shower for five minutes, shaved, brushed his teeth for another five minutes, and dressed in his gray slacks, white buttondown shirt, and the polished black loafers.

The coffee arrived just as he finished dressing. He tipped the same room waiter another two dollars and received a cheerful thank you, sir, in return. The waiter left, Dill poured a cup of coffee, hesitated, added a shot of Scotch, and sat down at the writing desk to drink it. He was on his fourth sip when the phone rang again.

After Dill said hello, Clyde Brattle said, “Have you spoken to our friend from the Land of Enchantment yet?”

“I just got through.”

“And?”

“He wants a completely off-the-record meeting either tomorrow evening or Tuesday morning. Early. Just you, him, Dolan, and me.

“A bit stacked, isn’t it?”

“What d’you suggest?”

“I’d like to bring Sid and Harley — just for a security check, of course.”

“If you bring them, I name the meeting place.”

There was a pause until Brattle said, “Providing it’s some place neutral.”

“My sister had a carriage house — back on an alley and across the street from a park. Very private. How does that sound?”

Brattle thought about it. “Yes,” he said, “that might do nicely. What’s the address?”

“Corner of Nineteenth and Fillmore — on the alley.”

“What about six tomorrow?”

“Make it seven,” Dill said.

“Until seven then,” Brattle said. “By the way, I understand you didn’t call the FBI after all. Why ever not, if I may ask?”

“How d’you know I didn’t call them, Clyde?”

“What a peculiar question.”

“Dolan’s taking care of it up in Washington.”

“Is he now? Well, that’s fine. Yes, that’s splendid. Until tomorrow then.”

After Brattle hung up, Dill recradled the phone, picked it up again, and called information. He asked for and was given a number. He dialed the number and it was answered on the third ring by a woman’s hello.

“Cindy,” Dill said with faked good cheer. “It’s Ben Dill.”

“Who?”

“Ben Dill — Felicity’s brother.”

“Oh. Yeah. You. Well, I can’t talk right now.”

“I want to talk to Harold, Cindy.”

“To Harold?”

“That’s right.”

There was a pause and Dill could hear Cindy McCabe’s muffled voice calling, “It’s Felicity’s brother and he says he wants to talk to you.”

Harold Snow came on the line with a snarling question: “What the fuck d’you want?”

“How’d you like to make a thousand dollars, Harold, for an hour’s work?”

“Huh?”

Dill repeated the question.

“Doing what?”

“Just put back into place what you took out yesterday.”

“You mean over there — across from the park and up in the attic?”

“But over the living room this time, Harold — for easier listening.”

“When?”

“Either this morning or this afternoon.”

“When’s pay day?”

“You take a check?”

“No.”

“Okay. Cash. Late today. This evening sometime.”

“Where?”

“Your place.”

“What’s going on?”

“Believe me, Harold, you don’t really care.”

“You want me to set it all up just like before — except over the living room this time?”

“Right.”

“And you’ll be over with the whatchamacallit later today?”

“By seven at the latest. I take it you don’t want Cindy to know about the whatchamacallit.”

“I don’t think that’s really necessary,” Snow said.

“I don’t either, Harold,” Dill said, and hung up.

There was a young Mexican guard on the big iron gate at Jake Spivey’s. The last time Dill had seen him, the Mexican had been helping dig something up in Spivey’s backyard. Now he sat in a canvas director’s chair beneath a Cinzano umbrella. Near his feet was a gallon Thermos jug of something cool to drink. Across his lap was a shotgun. On his right hip was a holstered revolver with a plastic pearl grip.

The Mexican rose as Dill drove the car halfway through the gate and stopped. The Mexican moved over to Dill’s side of the Ford. He carried the shotgun across his chest. Dill noticed its safety was off. The Mexican bent down to peer carefully at Dill and Singe through dark aviator glasses. He nodded thoughtfully at what he saw and said, “You are?”

“I’m Ben Dill and this is Miss Singe.”

With a forefinger still around the trigger of the shotgun, which Dill recognized now as a 12-gauge, the Mexican used his other hand to reach into a shirt pocket and bring out a three-by-five card that contained a list of typed names. He studied it for a moment, then nodded and said, “Dill,” pronouncing it very much like deal.

The Mexican used his shotgun to point toward the house. “Drive to the house,” he said. “Somebody’ll park your car.”

Dill thanked him and started up the curving asphalt drive. Once again, all the sprinklers were on and the grass looked cool and wet and very green.

“Beauchamp Lane,” Singe said almost to herself. “My God, I finally made it out to old Ace Dawson’s place on Beauchamp Lane.”

“I was eleven the first time I was out here,” Dill said. “At a Christmas party.”

“You lied and hustled your way into that, you and Spivey. Felicity told me about it. I’m really invited — well, sort of anyway.”

The asphalt drive ended just beyond the big oak front door, and then formed itself into a large square where a dozen cars were already parked. They were all new cars, mostly expensive domestic makes that included four Cadillacs, two Lincolns, one Oldsmobile 98, and a Buick Riviera convertible. But there were also two Mercedes, a Porsche, and one large BMW. Dill estimated that the small parking area contained three or four hundred thousand dollars’ worth of automobiles — and a rented Ford.

“Looks like I was right,” Singe said as another young Mexican started moving toward the car.

“About the rich folks being here?”

Singe nodded as the young Mexican hurried around the Ford and opened the door for her. He smiled politely as she got out. The Mexican then waited for Dill to get out from behind the wheel. When he did, the Mexican, still smiling, slid across the seat. He wore his squared-off white shirt outside his black pants. The sliding motion caused the shirttail to rise up just enough for Dill to see the holstered automatic. He thought it looked like a 9-mm of some foreign make. The Mexican noticed Dill’s interest in the pistol. The smile went away, then came back almost instantly, more polite than ever, as he started the engine and expertly shot the Ford into a parking space between a Cadillac and the BMW.

Before Dill and Anna Maude Singe could ring the “How Dry I Am” doorbell, it was opened by a smiling Daphne Owens who wore even fewer clothes than she’d worn the first time Dill met her. This time she had on only a pale-green bikini bottom and a kind of sleeveless top with enormous armholes that looked as if it might have been made out of an old sweatshirt, although Dill knew it wasn’t.

He made the introductions and for some reason felt gratified when the two women immediately despised each other. Although their smiles were polite, their greeting ritualistic, and their handshake casual, the encounter nevertheless produced two instant enemies.

“What should I call you,” Daphne Owens said, “Anna or Maude or both?”

“Most folks just run it together and call me both.”

“And so shall I. You must call me Daffy — as in Duck, right, Mr. Dill?”

“Right,” he said.

“Now let’s go back so you can get something to drink and meet everyone.”

They followed her down the long wide hall and through french doors that led out onto a patio that was formed, jigsaw fashion, out of large irregular pieces of black slate. Carefully trimmed and cultivated grass grew in the cracks between the pieces. Dill suspected that if he were to go high enough, perhaps up on the roof of the house, the green grass might spell out a word or a name or even a picture. Probably something bawdy, he thought, and decided to ask Spivey about it.

As he glanced around he saw there were four people splashing about in the big pool. Daphne Owens then introduced him and Singe to three different knots of guests who were in their thirties and forties. All were trim, well groomed, and held glasses of wine or Perrier in their hands, but no cigarettes. The men all looked as if they ran six miles a day; the women as if they were Jane Fonda Workout disciples. Dill immediately forgot their names.

He didn’t forget the names of the next two persons he and Singe met. Both were men and both were older. The older one was so old he might not have been able to rise from his white iron lawn chair. The other one, who was only sixty-seven, rose easily.

“I don’t believe you’ve met the Hartshornes,” Daphne Owens said. “Mr. Jim Hartshorne and this is his—”

Before she could finish, the sixty-seven-year-old man who had risen stuck out his hand to Singe and said, “I’m Jimmy Junior.”

She shook hands with him and said, “Anna Maude Singe and Ben Dill.”

“Who’s that, Junior?” the very old man said from his iron seat.

“Miss Singe and Mr. Dill, Daddy.”

“Dill? Dill?” the very old man said in a cracked voice. “Have a drink with us, Dill.”

Daphne Owens asked Dill and Singe what they would like. They told her. She said she would have it sent over and left. The older man patted the iron chair next to him and said, “You sit down here, young lady whose name I’m sorry I didn’t catch.”

“Anna Maude,” Singe said, sitting down next to the very old man, who wore gray seersucker trousers that climbed halfway up his chest. They covered most of a blue short-sleeved pullover shirt that had a little alligator on it. On his feet were blue running shoes. Purple glasses covered his eyes. His left ear, the one next to Singe, contained a tiny hearing aid. There was a little hair left just above the ears, but the rest was long gone. It had left a dome that was smooth and tan until it reached where the hairline had once been. There the wrinkles began — ridge after parallel ridge until they almost reached his nose, where they changed direction and turned into small vertical gulches that ran into short tiny fine wrinkles and others, not so fine, that wandered off in all directions. The old man’s lips were bluish in color and when he opened his mouth he revealed only a black hole. The nose was still sharp and inquisitive, but the once firm chin seemed ready to crumble. James Hartshorne Senior was ninety-seven years old.

“Dill, you sit down over here,” the old man said, patting the chair on the other side of him. “Junior, you drag up another chair.”

While his son dragged up another chair, the old man turned back to Anna Maude Singe. “I like women’s bare arms,” he said, giving Singe’s right one a quick stroke. “They turn me on, as much as anything turns me on these days, which isn’t a hell of a lot. But bare arms always did. Downed with light brown hair. Anybody read him nowadays?”

“Kids in college do, I hear,” Singe said. “You knew him, didn’t you?”

“Eliot?”

“I’m sorry. I meant Ace Dawson.”

“Old Ace. Yeah, I knew Ace. The slickest article ever to come up the Yellowfork.” The old man cawed like a crow and Dill assumed he was chuckling. “He came up from Texas somewhere and I came up from Shreveport. I used to think they don’t make ’em like Ace anymore. I thought that until I met the boy who owns this place now. Where’d you ever meet Jake anyhow?”

“I haven’t yet,” Singe said.

The old man turned to Dill just as the Mexican gardener-houseman arrived with the drinks. “Spivey’s your pal then, huh, Dill?”

“That’s right,” Dill said, accepting his drink.

“Known him long?”

“Forever.”

“If you were me, would you do business with him?”

“What kind of business?”

“Politics maybe?”

“I think politics might be where Jake’s been heading all his life.”

The old man smiled his blue-lip smile. “That distant shore, huh?”

“Maybe.”

“Daddy,” Hartshorne Junior said.

“What?”

“I think we ought to thank Mr. Dill.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” The old man cocked his head and examined Dill. “Both Junior and I want to thank you for last night.”

“Last night?”

“For trying to save young Laffter’s life — you know, blowing in his mouth and all, you and that Press Club nigger waiter, what’s his name, Harry. I already called and thanked him. Seems the hospital made some damn-fool mistake and called the nigger after Laffter died. Well, it seemed like a mistake anyway until I heard Fred’d left the nigger everything.” He looked at his son. “You sure Laffter wasn’t a nancy boy after all?”

Hartshorne Junior frowned. “He left everything to Harry, Daddy, because Harry put up with him all those years. I told you that.”

“Well, you oughta know — about nancy boys anyway.” He turned to Dill and cackled again. “Junior never married for some reason. He’s been the town’s most eligible bachelor for about forty-five, forty-six years now. Right, Junior?”

Hartshorne Junior ignored his father and turned to Dill. “Anyway, Mr. Dill, we’d like to tell you how much we appreciate what you did.”

“How much do you really appreciate it?” Dill said.

Hartshorne Senior slowly removed his purple glasses and slipped on a pair of round horn-rimmed ones. Trifocals, Dill noticed. The old man tilted his head back and examined Dill through all three focal planes. The eyes behind the glasses looked bright and black and curiously young.

“What’s on your mind, Dill?”

“Why’d you run that story on my sister?”

The old man looked at his elderly son. “What story?”

The son frowned again. “Felicity Dill. Homicide detective. Murdered. Financial irregularities. Laffter’s last story.”

“Oh,” the old man said and stared at Dill. “You’re that Dill, huh? The brother. I should’ve added that up right away. But I still don’t understand your question.”

“Why did you run that story on my sister’s finances?”

“You thinking of suing?”

“No.”

“Wouldn’t do you any good. Nothing libelous in it. We got lawyers who see to that. And why shouldn’t I run it? You trying to say somebody tells me what to print and what not to print?” Before Dill could answer, the old man turned back to his son and said, “Why did we print that fucking piece anyhow?”

Hartshorne Junior was a plump man with a big round head and a small pink face. The fat on his right bare arm jiggled as he moved his glass up to his lips. His mouth was small and usually pursed as if it were about to say, “Oh-oh!” He wore yellow slacks and a bright-green short-sleeved shirt with the tail out. Except for his eyes, he didn’t look very much like his father. Hartshorne Junior’s eyes were also black and shiny, but they didn’t seem curiously young. They seemed terribly old. He sipped from his glass of white wine. When he put it back down on a glass-topped table, the fat on his right arm jiggled again.

“We ran the story,” he said slowly, “because we were asked to by the police.” He cleared his throat. “We frequently cooperate with the police, especially when they tell us it will aid their investigations. Almost every newspaper does.”

“In their investigation of what?” Dill said.

“Your sister’s death, of course,” Hartshorne Junior said. “And also the death of the man who was killed yesterday — the ex-football player.”

“Corcoran,” Dill said.

“That’s right. Corcoran. Clay Corcoran.”

“Mr. Hartshorne,” Anna Maude Singe said. Both father and son looked at her. “Jimmy Junior, I mean.” He smiled. “May I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“Which cop told you to run it?” she asked in a cold flat voice.

Hartshorne Senior cackled again. “Now that’s the kind of question I like. Straight out. Right to the point. No futzing around. A question like that deserves an answer. Tell her, Junior. Tell her which cop told us to run it.”

Hartshorne Junior pursed his lips. “It was a request, not an order, Daddy.”

“Tell her.”

“It was Strucker,” Hartshorne Junior said. “Chief of Detectives Strucker.”

Hartshorne Senior looked at Dill. “You gonna take it up with him, with Strucker? Maybe ask him why?”

“I might.”

“He’s here, you know.”

“Strucker?”

“Yep. Last time I saw him — wasn’t more’n half an hour ago — he was heading for a parley with your pal, Jake Spivey. In the library.” The old man looked toward the pool. “That’s Mrs. Strucker over there,” he said. “The one in the black suit.”

Dill looked and saw a tall, dark-haired woman poised on the edge of the pool at its deep end. He thought she looked about forty. She dived cleanly into the water. It was an expert dive.

“Fine-lookin’ woman,” Hartshorne Senior said. “Her husband and Jake’re in there talking politics.”

“We plan to join them later,” Hartshorne Junior said.

“Talk about the chief’s future,” his father said and turned to watch Mrs. Strucker climb up out of the pool. He turned back to Dill. “What would you say is the most important thing a wife can bring to a man’s political campaign?”

“Money,” Dill said.

The old man nodded his agreement and again turned to look at Mrs. Strucker. “And she’s got just about all there is.”

“Some time back,” Dill said, “maybe a year ago, you killed a story Laffter wrote about my sister. He said it was a harmless girl-detective feature. Why’d you kill it — if you did?”

The old man was still staring at Mrs. Strucker. “I reckon you’d better ask the chief about that, too, Mr. Dill.”

The foursome was broken up by the arrival of the Mexican houseman-gardener (and putative butler), who asked Dill if he would please join Señor Spivey in the biblioteca. The notion of Jake Spivey having a butler to send with an invitation for a meeting in Senor Spivey’s very own library struck Dill as funny, but no one else even smiled, not even Anna Maude Singe, who said she thought she’d go for a swim and started unbuttoning her blouse. Hartshorne Junior said he thought he’d circulate. Hartshorne Senior cawed again and said he thought he’d take a nap as soon as Anna Maude got through shucking off the rest of her clothes.

Dill followed the houseman-gardener. They went past the spot in the garden where the three Mexicans had been digging Friday. Dill now saw that what they had been digging was an immense barbecue pit. A quarter side of beef was roasting over a bed of hickory coals. The spare ribs from at least three or four hogs were cooking on a grill. A big iron pot of sauce simmered off to one side. The chef was an elderly black with white hair who seemed to know what he was doing. The smell of the cooking meat made Dill ravenous.

Just before they entered the house, Dill looked back at the pool. He saw Anna Maude Singe chatting with Mrs. Strucker. A moment later, they were joined by Daphne Owens. Singe, laughing, said something to Mrs. Strucker and then dived into the pool. Dill, who knew something about diving, thought she dived very well.

The outside heat, which already had reached 100 degrees, made it seem almost chilly in the air-conditioned house. After the Mexican slid back the library’s twin doors, Dill went into the room, where he found Spivey seated behind the desk and Strucker standing in front of it, as if about to leave. Spivey called to Dill, “How you, Pick?”

“Fine,” Dill said.

“You know the Chief here.”

Dill said yes, and nodded at Strucker, who nodded back and said, “I was just leaving.”

“I’d like to talk to you later,” Dill said.

“Fine,” Strucker said, turned back to Spivey and added, “We can go over all that this afternoon.”

Spivey rose. “We’ll work something out.”

“Guess I’d best go mix and mingle,” Strucker said, grinned and left. Spivey thoughtfully watched him go. After Strucker closed the twin sliding doors, Spivey smiled at Dill. “Thinks he’d like to be mayor. That’s for starters.”

“What’s for afters?”

“Congressman. Or governor. Or senator. One of ’em anyway. The vote bug’s done bit him.” Spivey smiled again. “Course, his wife’s been egging him on some. You meet her?”

“I saw her.”

“She’s something. Rich as greases, like we used to say till you found out who Croesus was.”

“Speaking of money, Jake, I need some. Today.”

Spivey frowned. “Jesus, Pick, it’s Sunday. How much you need?”

“A thousand in cash.”

Spivey’s frown went away. “Shit, I thought you said money.” He reached into a pocket of his faded jeans and brought out a roll of bills that was bound with a rubber band. He snapped off the band and counted ten one-hundred-dollar bills onto the desk, picked them up, and offered the money to Dill. After Dill accepted it, Spivey snapped the band back around the roll. It was still more than three inches in diameter. Dill took out his checkbook, sat down at the desk, and started writing a check.

“You ain’t short, are you?” Spivey asked. “If you’re short, just mail it to me sometime.”

“I’m not short,” Dill said, tore out the check, and handed it to Spivey, who folded and tucked it away in the pocket of his blue chambray shirt without looking at it.

“Want a beer?” Spivey asked.

“Sure.”

Spivey sat down, took two cans of Michelob from his desk refrigerator, and handed one to Dill. After opening his beer, Spivey drank several long swallows, smiled with pleasure, and said, “First one today, if you don’t count the one I had with breakfast, which I don’t.”

“Who’re all your pretty new friends?” Dill asked.

Spivey grinned. “You mean the young and the restless out there? Well, sir, lemme tell you who they are. They’re all veterans of our recent turbulent past. In sixty-five you’d’ve found a couple of ’em out in Haight-Ashbury. Or down in Selma. Or in sixty-seven marching with Mailer on the Pentagon. But when all that shit ended they came back home and went back to school, or into daddy’s oil company, or his bank, or his construction company, or married somebody who did, and registered independent and made a pot of money and voted for Reagan, or for old John Anderson anyway, and now that they’re forty, or prid near, they figure they’re ready to do some real moving and shaking. After all, they got their weight back down, and they’re doing aerobics, and they don’t smoke dope no more, except maybe a little on Saturday night, and they don’t do coke hardly at all and never ever touch hard liquor. So now, by God, they figure it’s time they went and did their civic duty and elected somebody to something. Well, I’m kind of their glorified political guru and precinct captain on account of I got the most money except for Dora Lee Strucker, who’s got more money’n anybody.”

“And Strucker’s your boy?” Dill said.

“Providing the Hartshornes’ll go along, which I reckon they will.”

“A law-and-order mayor, right?” Dill said.

Spivey grinned. “You ain’t for lawnorder? — which you notice is one word in this house.”

Dill smiled, drank some of his beer, and then gazed up at the ceiling. “You might pull it off, Jake.”

“What I figure I’m really doing is growing my own briarpatch. Grow it high enough and thick enough, there ain’t nobody gonna come poking around in it.” He paused. “Except maybe that kid Senator of yours.”

“I talked to him,” Dill said, still staring up at the ceiling.

“And?”

Dill shifted his gaze from the ceiling to Spivey. “I think he’s going to fuck you over, Jake.”

Spivey nodded calmly. “He’s going with Clyde, huh?”

“I think he thinks he can nail you both.”

“No way he can nail Brattle good without me, and he won’t get me unless I get immunity.” Spivey lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and blew smoke at the ceiling. “You see my boy on the gate?”

“I saw him.”

“And the kid parking cars?”

“I saw him, too.”

“I figure old Clyde’s gonna come after me.”

“Himself?”

“Lord, no. He’ll get Harley and Sid to find somebody.” Spivey chuckled. “Maybe they’ve already run an ad in Soldier of Fortune. Or maybe Sid’ll try it himself. Old Sid likes that kinda shit.”

“You want to talk to the Senator?”

“When?”

“Tomorrow. He and Dolan are coming in at four.”

“When’s he seeing Brattle?”

“At seven.”

“What d’you think, Pick, should I go first or last?”

Dill didn’t hesitate. “First.”

“Why?”

“Because maybe I can get you some insurance.”

“What’ll it cost me?”

“How much leverage have you got with Strucker?”

Spivey shrugged. “Enough, I reckon. What d’you want?”

“I want him to sit down and tell me the facts.” Dill paused. “Whatever they are.”

“About Felicity?”

Dill nodded.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Jake Spivey said.

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.

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?”

“He thinks he does.”

“So what’s on your mind?”

“How would you like to get Clyde Brattle off your back for good?”

Spivey didn’t answer immediately. When he did, it was with a cautious question: “Do a deal with him, you mean?”

“Something like that.”

“What kind of deal?”

“Not over the phone, Jake. But I think I’ve got an idea you two should sit down and talk about — just you, him, and me.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow night after you’re both through with the Senator.”

“Where?” Spivey said. “Where’s gonna be important, Pick. In a sitdown with Clyde, where’s gonna be almost as important as what we’re gonna talk about. So where’s where gonna be?”

“Just a second,” Dill said. He pressed the phone against his chest and looked at Anna Maude Singe, who was now lying on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. “Well?” Dill said.

She didn’t look at him. She was still staring at the ceiling when she said, “Okay. My place.”

Dill put the phone back to his ear. “I’m thinking of Anna Maude’s place in the Old Folks Home, but there’re still a couple of details to work out. Let me call you back in fifteen or twenty minutes.”

“I’ll be here,” Spivey said and hung up.

After Dill put down the phone, he turned to Singe and said, “Let’s go.”

She asked the ceiling, “I wonder why I said yes.”

At a corner table in the coffee shop of the Hawkins Hotel, Colder explained how it wasn’t his idea to inform Dill of the department’s findings. He had come, he said, only at the insistence of the chief of detectives, John Strucker. “I’ve been here since seven,” he added.

“Who killed her?” Dill said.

The waitress arrived at that moment and Colder ordered coffee, orange juice, and rye toast. Dill said he wanted only coffee. When the waitress left, Colder brought out a small flipback notebook and began to talk, not quite reading from his notes.

“A warrant was obtained from District Judge F. X. Mahoney at 11:57 P.M., Sunday, August 7. The warrant was served and a complete search was made of the premises at 3212 Texas Avenue, which are owned by Felicity Dill, deceased, and occupied by Harold Snow, deceased, the tenant, and by Lucinda McCabe, also a tenant and the deceased Snow’s common-law wife. The search was conducted by Detective Sergeant Edwin Meek and Detective Kenneth Lowe under the supervision of Captain Eugene Colder. Chief of Detectives John Strucker was also present.”

“Who killed her?” Dill said.

Colder didn’t reply. Instead, he started to read from the notebook again, but was interrupted by the waitress, who placed coffee in front of Dill and coffee and juice in front of Colder, informing him the toast would be along in a jiffy. Colder picked up the glass of orange juice and drank it down. Then he went back to the notebook.

“At approximately 12:41 A.M., a gray steel locked toolbox was discovered. The toolbox was hidden under and behind two bedspreads and three suitcases in the closet of the bedroom occupied by the deceased Snow and his common-law wife, McCabe. Upon questioning, McCabe insisted she had no idea how the toolbox had got in the closet.”

Colder stopped his recitation because the waitress arrived with the rye toast. He put the notebook down to butter the toast. He ate one piece, drank some coffee, and picked up the notebook again. Dill watched him silently and wondered what had taken place between Colder and Strucker, and how nasty the argument had been.

Colder again read from the notebook. “The toolbox lock was forced by Sergeant Meek, who then opened the toolbox in the presence of Chief Strucker, Captain Colder, Detective Lowe, and Lucinda McCabe.” Colder looked up at Dill. “Then there’s a whole list of things we found in the top tray, but I’m not going to read those.”

Dill nodded.

“In the lower compartment of the tray, the following items were found, removed, and tagged by Sergeant Meek:

“One — Ten thousand two hundred dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills.

“Two — four fulminate of mercury blasting caps.

“Three — a.25-caliber Llama automatic pistol, serial number—” Colder broke off and looked up at Dill again. “You want the serial number?”

Dill shook his head no.

Colder closed the notebook. “Well, that’s it. The Spanish piece is at ballistics. They’re checking whether it’s the one that killed Clay Corcoran. If it is, then it means Snow wired up Felicity’s car for a price, and then killed Corcoran, who must have been on to him. Your next question is going to be, who killed Harold Snow? We don’t know yet. And that’s why I argued against telling you what we’d come up with. You’ve got a loose mouth, Dill, and you move around in pretty funny circles. I told Strucker I didn’t think you’d keep your mouth shut about this, but he told me to tell you anyway. Maybe he figures you can swing him a few votes when he runs for mayor. But that’s none of my business either. So. Any questions?”

Several seconds went by before Dill shook his head and said, “I don’t think so.”

“I don’t know if knowing who killed Felicity makes you feel any better or not. I hope it does.”

“I guess I feel about the same.”

“So do 1. Snow was just hired help. Nailing the bastard who hired him is the only thing that’ll make me feel any better.”

“Harold Snow,” Dill said thoughtfully.

“Harold Snow,” Colder agreed.

“Ten thousand bucks.”

“Ten thousand two hundred.”

“Somehow,” Dill said, “I thought killing Felicity would’ve cost a whole lot more.”

The subcommittee’s minority counsel, Tim Dolan, and Jake Spivey had never met. When they shook hands in front of the bronze statue of William Gatty, Dill was struck by the pair’s resemblance. Their clothes helped. Both wore creased and wrinkled seersucker suits (one blue and the other gray) with shirts open at the neck from which loosened ties dangled like afterthoughts. Both were fifteen to twenty pounds overweight and most of it had gone to their bellies. Both were sweating heavily despite the air-conditioning. Both looked thirsty.

Yet the resemblance was more than physical. As they shook hands, Dill sensed that each recognized in the other a kindred spirit with a commonness of attitude, approach, and flexibility. Instinct seemed to tell them that here a deal could be cut, an accommodation reached, a sensible compromise negotiated. Here, both seemed to think, is somebody you can do business with.

The banalities had to be got through first. When Spivey asked if Dolan had had a good flight, Dolan said he wasn’t quite sure because he had slept all the way from Herndon, Virginia. When Dolan asked Spivey if the weather down here was always like this, Spivey said it was, as a matter of fact, just a touch cool for August, but it’d probably hot up some toward the end of the month. Each chuckled as he recognized a long-standing fellow member of Bullshitters, International.

Dolan then turned to Dill and, after inquiring about his wellbeing, informed him the Senator’s flight would be twenty or twenty-five minutes late. He suggested that they all repair to the airport bar for something cold and wet. Dill said fine, and Spivey said he thought it sounded like a hell of an idea. At no time did Dolan display the slightest surprise at Spivey’s unexpected presence.

They sat in a round corner booth and ordered three bottles of Budweiser. Jake Spivey paid. Nobody objected. They all raised their glasses, said cheers or something equally meaningless, drank deeply, and then talked baseball, or rather Spivey and Dolan talked baseball as Dill pretended to listen. Dolan seemed impressed by Spivey’s acute analysis of how the Red Sox just might make it into the playoffs. Still thirsty, they ordered another round of beer and just as they finished that, the Senator’s plane was announced. It was then that Dill made his second move.

He turned to Spivey and said, “Jake, I’ve got a couple of things I need to talk over with Tim here and I wonder if you’d mind meeting the Senator when he comes off the plane?”

Spivey hesitated for only a moment. “Sure,” he said. “Be glad to. I’ve never met him, you understand, but I’ve seen his picture in the paper and on TV, so I reckon I’ll spot him okay.”

“Just look for the youngest kid off the plane,” Dolan said.

Spivey chuckled, said he’d do that, and left. Dolan turned to Dill and let the surprise creep into his tone, if not into his expression. “What the fuck was all that about?”

“Tell me about you and the FBI first. What kind of deal did you make with them?”

“No deal, Ben.”

“None?”

“None.”

“Why in hell not?”

Dolan frowned thoughtfully, perhaps even judiciously. Comes now the Boston dissembler, Dill thought. Dolan said, “Two reasons. One, leaks.”

“From the FBI?”

“Like a wet brown bag.”

“What’s two?”

“Two. Well, two is political leverage. If the kid brings this off all by himself, he’ll be in deep clover.”

“And if he doesn’t,” Dill said, “he’ll be in deep shit — and you with him.”

“We discussed it,” Dolan said. “We both agreed the risk is acceptable.”

“Hear me, Tim. For the record I think you both made a mistake. A bad one. I think you should’ve called in the FBI — for the record.”

Dolan shrugged. “Okay. You’re on record. Now tell me why you sent Spivey to meet the kid.”

“You notice how willingly he went?”

Dolan nodded.

“That means he’s not worried about passing through the metal detector.”

This time both surprise and shock spread across Dolan’s plump handsome Irish face. And fear, too, Dill thought. Just a trace. “Jesus,” Dolan said. “You mean it’s gonna be like that down here?”

“Exactly like that,” Dill said.

At 6 P.M. on that Monday evening, that hot August 8, the outside temperature was still 101 degrees. At a little past six they made love on the large old oak desk. The desk was in her office in the suite Anna Maude Singe shared with a certified public accountant. The CPA had given up and gone home shortly after four o’clock on what had turned out to be the hottest day of the year. The secretary he and Singe also shared lasted until four-fifteen before she, too, gave up and went home.

Dill had signed the papers first. They gave Singe his power of attorney and enabled her to collect on his sister’s life-insurance policy and, if possible, sell the yellow brick duplex. After scrawling his name for the last time, Dill put the ballpoint pen down and touched Singe on her bare tanned arm. Suddenly, they were up and kissing frantically, she working on his belt, he on her panties, sliding them down over her hips and bare legs. She got his belt undone and he paused long enough to shrug out of his jacket. His pants and shorts dropped to the floor with a clank and the pistol fell out of his hip pocket. Neither of them noticed because they were too busy with the mechanics of the thing. But they soon worked that out, and then it was all lunge and thrust and small cries and finally joint explosion and sweet release.

Dill stood up after a while, his pants and shorts still around his ankles. Anna Maude Singe sat up on the edge of the desk, tugging her skirt down over her knees and smiling, obviously pleased with herself. She looked down, prepared to laugh at the pants and shorts puddled around Dill’s ankles. But when she saw the pistol lying on the hardwood floor, her smile went away and she didn’t laugh. She said, “Aw shit,” instead.

Dill reached down and pulled up his shorts and pants, buckled his belt, bent back down, picked up the revolver, and jammed it into his right hip pocket. He then picked up his jacket from where it had fallen and slipped it on.

“Just who’re you going to shoot?” she said.

“Who do you suggest?”

“That’s smartass,” she said, sliding off the desk and moving to a window that looked down on Second and Main six floors below. “I don’t want smartass right now. What we did on that desk top there for five or ten or fifteen minutes, or whatever it was, well, it was the most erotic and satisfying fucking I’ve ever done, which, you might’ve guessed, is considerable.” She paused. “I don’t know why it was, but it was.”

Dill nodded, almost gravely. “I thought so, too.”

“Then I saw the gun lying there and it went away. The after-glow — or whatever. I’ll look at that desk now, and I’ll remember making love to you on it, but I’m not going to remember how tremendous it was. All I’m going to remember is that goddamn gun.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “About the gun.”

She turned, sat down at the desk, and opened a drawer. She took out her purse, removed a set of keys, and offered them to Dill. “The one with the dot of red nail polish opens my door.” He took them, examined the one with the red dot, and slipped them into his pocket. She looked at her watch. “You’d better go.”

“I’ve still got a few minutes,” he said.

“You’d better go.”

“All right.”

She frowned. “When can I come home?”

Dill thought about it. “Eleven-thirty, I’d say. No later than that.”

“Will you be there?”

“Sure, if you want me to.”

She was still frowning when she said, “I don’t know whether I do or not.”

“If you don’t, you can throw me out.”

She nodded and said, “You’d better go.”

“Right,” he said, turned, and moved to the door.

“Dill,” she said.

“Yes?”

“I wish you hadn’t had the gun.”

“So do I,” he said, opened the door, and left.

Dill walked Clyde Brattle down the stairs. When they reached the last step, Dill said, “Jake wants to meet. He wants to cut a deal with you.”

Brattle turned and examined Dill carefully. He started with Dill’s shoes and worked his way up to the eyes. He seemed to find Dill’s eyes particularly interesting. “When?” Brattle said.

“Tonight at ten.”

“Where?”

“My lawyer’s apartment. Here’s the address.” Dill handed Brattle a scrap of paper on which Anna Maude Singe’s name and address were written. Brattle didn’t read it. He stuck it into his jacket pocket instead.

“What’s it like?” Brattle said.

“The only way up are the stairs and one elevator. Jake’s bringing two of his Mexicans. You can bring Harley and Sid. They can all stand around and glare at each other.”

“Who else’ll be there?” Brattle asked.

“Just you, Jake, and me.”

“Why you?”

Dill shrugged. “Why not?”

After a moment or two, Brattle nodded his fine Roman head. “I’ll think about it,” he said, turned, and went through the door and out into the August evening.

Back in his room at the Hawkins Hotel, Dill showered and changed into his seersucker jacket and gray pants while Anna Maude Singe listened to the tape on the Sony. The tape was almost over when Dill slipped the jacket on, moved to the writing desk, and started putting coins, keys, airline ticket, and wallet into his pockets. The last item was the.38 revolver. He again shoved it down into his right hip pocket. She watched, but made no comment, and went on listening to the last words on the tape as they came over the earphone. When the words ended, she punched the stop button, then the rewind one, and said, “It’s dynamite.”

“I know.”

“Have you got a copy?”

“No.”

“You should have copies made.”

“I’ll let Spivey do that.”

“You’re giving it to him?”

“I think so.”

She nodded slowly. “Then you’ve made a pretty big choice, haven’t you?”

“Have I?”

“Sure. You’ve had to choose between your friend and your government, and you’ve chosen your friend.”

“That’s not a very big choice,” Dill said. “That’s hardly any choice at all.”

He picked up the phone and dialed information. When the operator finally came on — after a recorded voice first counseled him to consult the directory — Dill asked for the home number of John Strucker, the chief of detectives. The information operator told him a few seconds later that no such number was listed. Dill hung up.

“Unlisted?” Singe said.

He nodded.

“Let me try.” She took an address book from her purse, flipped through it, found a number, and dialed it. When the call was answered, she said, “Mike?” and when Mike said yes, she said This is Anna Maude. They chatted for a few moments and then she said she needed to get in touch with John Strucker at home. Mike apparently had the number handy, because she wrote it down on the back of a hotel envelope she took from the desk. She then thanked Mike, said goodbye, and hung up.

“Who’s Mike?” Dill asked.

“Mike Geary as in AP Geary.”

“The one you used to go to the Press Club with.”

“Right.”

“I’m jealous,” Dill said as he picked up the phone and dialed the number she had written on the envelope.

“No, you’re not,” she said.

The phone rang three times and was answered by a woman’s voice. Dill assumed it was Dora Lee Strucker, the rich wife. Dill identified himself, apologized for calling so late, and asked if he could speak to her husband. She said it was nice to hear from Dill at any time and that Johnny would take the call in the study.

Strucker came on with a noncommittal “Yes.”

“How would you like to collar Clyde Brattle?”

“Brattle, huh?”

“Brattle.”

Strucker sighed. It was the most sepulchral Strucker sigh Dill had heard yet. “From Kansas City?” Strucker answered, almost as if he were hoping Dill would say, No, this particular Brattle is from Sacramento or Buffalo or Des Moines.

“From Kansas City,” Dill said. “Originally.”

“Where?” Strucker said.

Dill gave him Anna Maude Singe’s apartment number and address.

“When?”

“Ten sharp.”

“Ten, huh?”

“Ten.”

“I’ll think about it,” Strucker said, and hung up. It wasn’t quite the reaction Dill had been expecting. By rights, he thought, Strucker should have jumped at it. Unless, of course, he needed to check with someone else. Dill dialed Strucker’s number again. It was busy. He cut the connection and dialed Jake Spivey’s number. It, too, was busy. Dill put the phone down slowly. They could be talking to each other, he told himself, or to any of a million other people.

“You look funny,” Singe said.

“Do I?”

“You look like he said no.”

“He said he’d think about it.”

“That’s not what a cop’s supposed to say. He’s supposed to say, Stall Brattle till I get there and don’t let him out of your sight — or something like that.”

“Unless he…” Dill let the thought die because it was only half-born and extremely ugly, even grotesque.

“Unless he what?” Singe demanded.

“He already knew Brattle would be there.”

Her eyes opened very wide and Dill again noticed how pretty they were. Concern makes them even darker, he thought. Almost true violet.

“If he knew about Brattle before you called,” she said, “that means somebody’s about to get shafted. You, probably.”

“Maybe,” Dill said. “Maybe not.”

It was then that the new fight began. Anna Maude Singe insisted on going with Dill. He refused. She asserted it was her goddamned apartment and she could go there any goddamned time she pleased. Dill replied she goddamned sure wasn’t coming with him. She threatened to phone the Senator and tell him about the tape. Dill offered her the phone. She took it, dialed 0, and asked for Senator Ramirez’s room. Dill snatched the phone from her and slammed it down. A few moments later they reached the compromise: she would come along, but she wouldn’t go inside. Instead, she would wait in Dill’s car and watch who went in and came out. She said she thought that sounded goddamned silly. Dill said if he didn’t come out in an hour, it wouldn’t be goddamned silly, it would be a goddamned shame. She wanted to know what she was expected to do if he didn’t come out in an hour. He told her she should call someone, but when she asked who, he said he didn’t know. Someone. They left it at that.

An almost ebullient Jake Spivey changed his mind about having a drink. Dill went into the kitchen and poked around until he found Anna Maude Singe’s limited liquor supply. He poured two glasses of vodka on the rocks and carried them back into the living room. He handed one of the glasses to the seated Spivey and said, “Let’s hear it.”

Spivey took a big gulp of the drink, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, shook his head and — smiling all the while — said, “You just sit back and let me handle this, Pick.”

“Trust you.” Dill didn’t make it a question.

Spivey nodded. “Trust me.”

“I don’t trust anybody, Jake.”

“Must be lonesome,” Spivey said and started to say something else, but broke off at the sound of the knock at the living-room door. Dill looked at his watch. It was exactly 10 P.M. Spivey rose and said, “Why don’t you let old Clyde in?”

Dill went to the door and opened it. Standing in the corridor, wearing a slight bemused smile, an oyster-white raincoat, a matching rain hat, and carrying a wet umbrella, was Clyde Brattle. Dill thought Brattle resembled some long-vanished Roman consul more than ever. Perhaps it was the way he wore the raincoat draped carelessly over his shoulders. Few men could wear a coat like that and not look silly. Dill didn’t think Brattle looked at all silly. If anything, he looked a bit like some patrician forced by fate to the moneylenders and determined to make the best of it.

“Come in,” Dill said.

Brattle came into the room then, and just as he entered, Spivey stepped from behind the open door and jammed an automatic pistol into the small of Brattle’s back. Brattle smiled and stopped. “Well, Jake, how nice to hear from you again.”

“Over there next to that pretty picture, Clyde,” Spivey said.

Brattle glanced around. “The Parrish, you mean?”

“The one with the two fags.”

“I think they’re girls, actually,” Brattle said, moved to the wall, and leaned against it with both hands, the umbrella still clasped in his right one.

“Take the coat and the hat and the umbrella, Pick,” Spivey said. “Slow and careful. When you’ve got ’em, put ’em all in the closet over there.” Dill did as instructed, returned to Spivey’s side, and asked, “Now what?”

“Now pat him down real good. Ankles, crotch, everywhere. We might even make him open his mouth and take a look in there.”

Brattle shook his head and sighed. “Sometimes you’re such a boor, Jake.”

“Bad manners make for a long life, Clyde.”

“An aphorism, by God. Well, almost anyway.”

Dill found the small Walther automatic when his search reached Brattle’s waist. The pistol was in a leather holster clipped to the waistband of Brattle’s beltless trousers. He’d never wear a belt, Dill thought, as he examined the weapon. Braces, perhaps, with a three-piece suit, but never a belt.

“I’ll take that,” Spivey said. Dill handed him the Walther. Spivey dropped it into his left jacket pocket.

“You can straighten up and turn around now, Clyde,” Spivey said. “Take a chair. That one over there looks comfortable. Pick here’ll even get you a drink. I know there’s vodka, but I don’t know what else he’s got.”

“Vodka will do nicely,” Brattle said as he straightened, moved over to the armchair, and sat down. Spivey resumed his seat on the couch. He put his own automatic down on the coffee table next to the Sony tape player. Dill noticed the automatic was a.38 Colt.

“On the rocks?” Dill asked Brattle.

Brattle smiled. “Perfect.”

As he poured the drink in the kitchen, Dill could hear no voices coming from the living room. When he came back with Brattle’s drink, he thought the silence seemed like that between two old, old friends who long ago had exhausted all topics of mutual interest and whose only bond now was a numbing familiarity.

Brattle raised his glass to his lips, sipped almost delicately, lowered it, and said, “Well, the rain was certainly welcome, wasn’t it?”

“Clyde,” Spivey said.

Brattle turned his head fractionally to look at Spivey. “Yes?”

“We’re gonna do a deal here tonight, you and me, but first I want you to listen to something.”

“Something interesting?”

“I think so,” Spivey said, and pushed the tape recorder’s play button. Dill watched Brattle listen — just as he had watched Spivey. At first, a slight brief frown crossed Brattle’s face, but then it vanished and his expression relaxed as though he had just identified and was listening to a piece of music, perhaps a sonata, certainly an old favorite, that he had last heard long ago. Brattle leaned his head back against the chair. He closed his eyes. He smiled slightly. He listened to every word.

When it was over, Brattle opened his eyes, looked at Dill, and asked, “Your work?”

“Yes.”

“Ingenious.” Brattle turned his gaze on Spivey. “Well, Jake, congratulations. Now let’s see what kind of deal we can work out. What’re you asking?”

“Couple of things,” Spivey said. “First, we’re gonna have to forget all about me and what I might or might not’ve done during those years you and me messed around together.”

“Of course. That’s obvious. What else — money?”

“By God, I didn’t even think of that. But no, not money. I got enough money.”

Brattle’s left eyebrow moved up to form a delicate arc. “You know something, Jake? I don’t believe I’ve ever heard anyone say that before in my life. Not and mean it anyway. But all right. I accept that. Now what is it you do want?”

“I want the name of the dumb fuck who went and killed Pick here’s sister.”

Both of Brattle’s eyebrows went up this time. He looked genuinely puzzled as he turned his head to inspect Dill. “Your sister?”

“Felicity Dill. Homicide detective second grade.”

“As I told you. I read about it. Then there was that large funeral. Someone killed at it. But aside from that, I’m totally ignorant.” He paused. “Sorry. But I am.”

“What you are, Clyde,” Spivey said, “is the best fucking liar who ever breathed.”

“You want somebody for it, Jake? Is that it? Do you need somebody? If so, you can have Harley. Or Sid. Or both. They didn’t do it, of course, but take them with my blessing. Maybe they could even leave a joint suicide note confessing all. You used to be fairly good at suicide notes, Jake.”

Spivey shook his head and smiled. “By God, you’re something, Clyde, you really are. Now lemme tell you what I think. You sent somebody after me about — oh, I’d say a year and a half back. How do I know? I know just the same way you’d know if somebody came after you. You can feel it. Smell it. Sense it. Taste it almost. Whoever you sent was taking their time, not hurrying none, waiting for the perfect spot, the right moment and all that. I kind of sensed that, too. But then Pick here’s sister stumbles on to it somehow, and she gets blown up in her car. So tell me who you hired to whack me out, Clyde, and I can tell Pick here who killed his sister.”

Brattle took another small delicate sip of his drink. As he lowered the glass, he shook his head regretfully. “I don’t know quite what to say, Jake, other than to simply deny—”

The hard knock at the apartment door interrupted Brattle. No one moved. Spivey and Brattle stared suspiciously at each other for a brief second and then, almost in unison, shifted their twin suspicious stares to Dill. The knock came again, although it was more than a knock this time, it was a loud pounding and over the pounding came a harsh voice that cried, “Police! Open up!”

It was Dill who went to the door and opened it. Gene Colder, the homicide captain, rushed through the door, his gun drawn. “Nobody moves!” he snapped. “Everybody freezes.”

No one moved. Colder was in a half crouch, both hands wrapped around the revolver. He wore a short rain jacket and brown gabardine slacks that Dill thought looked expensive. The rain jacket was damp and so were the slacks, but not wet. On Colder’s feet were lace-up brown shoes. They were partially covered by half-rubbers. Dill couldn’t remember when he had last seen someone wear rubbers in a summer rain.

Colder glanced at Dill. “Back up against that wall,” he ordered.

“Want me to put my hands up?” Dill said.

“Just keep ’em in sight.” Colder looked briefly at Jake Spivey, who was still seated on the couch. “And you, fats, you just keep sitting there. Spivey, isn’t it?”

Spivey nodded. “Jake Spivey.”

Still in his crouch, still holding his pistol with both hands, Colder turned his attention and his body toward Clyde Brattle. “And just who the hell are you?” he demanded.

Brattle was still seated in the chair, his legs crossed. He smiled and put down his drink. His left hand moved toward the inside breast pocket of his jacket as he said, “If you’ll permit me to show you some ident—”

He stopped talking when Captain Gene Colder shot him through the forehead, just above the left eye. The impact of the round slammed Brattle back against the chair. As he started to sag, Colder shot him again, this time in the chest.

No one moved for a second or two. No one said anything. Slowly Captain Colder straightened up from his crouch and put the revolver back in its belt holster under the rain jacket. He turned to Dill. “I didn’t have any choice,” he explained. “He was going for his piece.”

“Sure,” Dill said. “Absolutely.”

Spivey rose and slowly moved over to the dead Clyde Brattle. He stood looking down at him for several moments, then shook his head, and said, “Well, shit, Clyde, what’d you expect?”

He knelt down beside the body and looked from the dead Brattle to the standing Captain Colder, as if measuring distance and angle. Spivey then reached into the left-hand pocket of his jacket. He brought out the Walther automatic that had been Brattle’s. He pointed the automatic at Colder and shot him an inch or so above where the short rain jacket ended.

Colder staggered back one step, then two, pressing both hands against the wound. He sank to his knees and stared down at the blood seeping through his fingers. Slowly, he lifted his head to look at the expressionless Jake Spivey. He seemed to be searching Spivey’s face for an answer to an important question, but finding none, turned his head as far left as it would go and screamed a name. The name he screamed was Strucker.

Chief of Detectives John Strucker, looking neat and dry, strolled through the apartment’s still-open door a second later. He had a lighted cigar in his left hand. He was dressed in a gray silk suit that Dill, for some reason, put an eight-hundred-dollar price tag on. Strucker turned, closed the door, nodded at Dill, and walked over to the still-kneeling Captain Colder.

Colder stared up at him. “Spivey… it was Spivey,” he whispered.

Strucker shook his head sadly. “You know what you are, Gene? You’re a fucking disgrace.”

Strucker turned, moved over to Spivey and held out his hand. Spivey put the Walther automatic in it. Strucker removed his display handkerchief and carefully wiped off the pistol.

“This was Brattle’s?” he said to Spivey.

Spivey nodded.

“Was he right- or left-handed?”

“Right,” Spivey said.

The still-kneeling Colder groaned and muttered, “Goddamn you, Strucker, do something.”

“I’m fixing to,” Strucker said, sighed one of his heavier sighs, stuck the cigar between his teeth, and bent over the dead Clyde Brattle. He wrapped Brattle’s right hand around the Walther and inserted Brattle’s right forefinger through the trigger guard and around the trigger. He looked from the Walther automatic to the still-kneeling, staring Captain Colder. Strucker fired the automatic with the dead man’s finger and shot Captain Gene Colder through the chest, just about where the heart would be. Colder jerked back with the impact, then came forward, and fell over onto his left side. A tremor ran through his body. Then he was still.

Strucker took the cigar from his mouth and moved over to the body of the dead police captain. He stared down at it for a moment, knelt, and carefully lifted Colder’s revolver from its holster and placed it next to the lifeless right hand. Strucker rose, turned to Dill, and said, “Satisfied?”

“I don’t know,” Dill said. “Tell me about it.”

Strucker looked at his watch. “You’re gonna get the two-minute version,” he said, “because when homicide comes through that door, I’m turning Colder into a brave and dedicated cop who shot it out with the most wanted fugitive in America.” He turned to Jake Spivey. “How’s that sound?”

“Just fine,” Spivey said.

Strucker turned back to Dill. “She worked for me, your sister. For me and nobody else. Six months after they brought Colder down from Kansas City, he didn’t feel right. He changed. His attitude shifted. His interest wasn’t the same. That’s hard to explain to a civilian, but I knew he had something going. He bought a house that was just a tad too nice. His suits were a hundred dollars too expensive. He wasn’t dumb enough to buy himself a Mercedes, but he did pop for an Olds Ninety-Eight. Then there was that lousy business with his wife. You heard about that.”

Dill nodded. “He committed her.”

“So it was around in there that I called Felicity in and told her what I thought and felt and what I wanted her to do about it. Well, your sister was one brilliant woman, and beautiful, and if I wasn’t so old and so happy with Dora Lee — well, I might’ve gone courting myself, even if Felicity was poor as Job’s turkey. But she told me that was a Dill tradition — being poor.”

“She was right,” Dill said.

“So she turned herself into a honey pot and Gene Colder fell right into it and, shit, who could blame him? I couldn’t. But what I wanted to know was how much money he had, and where it was coming from, and what he was doing to earn it. It took Felicity damn near six months just to find out how much he had, and it was around seven or eight hundred thousand. He gave her the money to make the down payment on the duplex and a lot more besides, but I guess you’d already figured that out.”

“Some of it,” Dill said.

“But what your sister couldn’t find out was where the money was coming from because it wasn’t. I mean, Colder just had it, you understand?”

“Yes,” Dill said. “I understand.”

“And then, one day, she mentioned you and Jake Spivey to him and how you two had grown up together and all. Well, Colder couldn’t hear enough about that. Then, a few months later, they were at his place, Colder’s, and it was a Saturday afternoon, as I remember, and he went down to the store for some beer or something, and Felicity started snooping around. She found a ledger about so big.” Strucker’s hands measured a small seven-by-nine-inch ledger. “So she read it and what she read was everything she’d told him about Jake. Not you. Just Jake. So I went calling on Jake out at the old Ace Dawson mansion.”

“It was love at first sight,” Spivey said with a grin.

“And you two figured it out, right?” Dill said. “The Kansas City connection between Colder and Clyde Brattle.”

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.

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.”