Briarpatch Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  introduction

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  also by Ross Thomas

  Copyright Page

  introduction

  by Lawrence Block

  Three or four times over the years, I got to hear Ross Thomas tell how he got started in the writing game. It was a pretty good story all by itself, but the best part about it for me was watching the faces of the wannabes in the audience.

  Ross would explain that he’d been at loose ends after a job ended—maybe he’d just finished running a political campaign for a friend in Jamestown, North Dakota, or maybe he had recently returned from Africa—and he’d decided to try his hand at a novel. So he sat down and wrote one, and after a month or two he was done. It occurred to him that it might be nice to have it published, but he wasn’t sure how to proceed. So he called up a knowledgeable friend.

  “I’ve written a book,” he said, “and wondered what I ought to do next.”

  “Have a drink,” the friend suggested. “Take an aspirin. Lie down, put your feet up.”

  “I thought I’d try to have it published,” Ross told him.

  “It has to be typewritten. And double-spaced.”

  It already was, Ross said. Whereupon, he told his listeners, the fellow told him how to proceed. He was to get some brown wrapping paper, wrap the manuscript neatly in it, and send it to a particular editor at a particular publishing house.

  So he did.

  And, two weeks later, there was a letter in his mailbox, from the editor to whom he’d sent the manuscript in its plain brown wrapper. “He said they would like to publish my novel,” Ross reported, “and that they would be sending a contract.”

  No wannabe wants to hear a story like that. If you want to win the hearts and minds of struggling writers, you’re better advised to tell them of your own struggles—the failures and false starts, the endless parade of rejections, the paralyzing bouts with writer’s block and alcoholism and the heartbreak of psoriasis. Finally, against long odds, after enduring and somehow surviving more perils than Pauline and more tsuris than Job, finally the writer prevails, the book is published, and can’t you hear the violins?

  Well, tough. Ross told it as it happened, and he could have been a lot harder on them. He could have gone on to say that the manuscript in question was published as The Cold War Swap, that it was widely praised and won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best first novel of the year, and that it launched a career that brought him no end of awards, an army of fiercely loyal readers, and a whole shelf of books with his name on them, in none of which one will ever encounter an ill-chosen word, an infelicitous phrase, or a clunky sentence.

  Because Ross was far too modest to say any of that, some of those wannabes shook their heads and told themselves how lucky he’d been. Yeah, right. The way Ted Williams was lucky at baseball, or Nijinsky at ballet. Lucky bastards, the lot of them.

  When Ross died, many years sooner than anyone would have wished, one of the things we told each other at his memorial service was that, while we wouldn’t have the presence of this dear friend, wouldn’t have a new book to look forward to each year, we’d still have the books he’d written.

  I suppose we always say that when a writer dies, and, while it’s as inarguable as that Bogie and Bergman will always have Paris, it’s generally about as much comfort. Because most books, however enjoyable and compulsively readable as they are first time around, don’t offer that much when reread.

  But there are exceptions. I’m not sure what it is that makes a writer rereadable, but I do know that I especially cherish those writers whose books I can read with pleasure over and over and over. There aren’t many of them, and I’m grateful for every one.

  Ross Thomas is high on that short list. I’ve read some of his books three and four times, and expect to read them again.

  Briarpatch, as it happens, was one I’d read only once. It was published in 1984, and I bought it as soon as it came out, and must have read it as soon as I had an uninterrupted evening. My library has been purged several times since then, in the course of several relocations, but I always kept all of Ross’s books, so my copy was on the shelf when Ruth Cavin invited me to write an introduction for it. (The opportunity to read it again was not the least of my reasons for agreeing.)

  And, wonder of wonders, I did not remember one single word of it!

  While I’m not entirely thrilled with what this may imply about my ongoing mental capacity, it meant I had the great pleasure of reading a new Ross Thomas novel. And it was a pleasure indeed, and one I shoud cease to detain you from having for yourself. I don’t know if I have more treats of this nature in store for me—a quick glance at my Ross Thomas shelf would seem to suggest that I have retained at least a little of all the others, but who’s to say what a few more years of senescence might not accomplish for me?

  Enough! I invite you to enjoy Briarpatch, whether for the first or the tenth time. It’s a wonderful book by a man who wrote no other sort.

  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.”

  CHAPTER 1

  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.”

  CHAPTER 2

  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.