Briarpatch Read online

  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 ac
ross 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?”

  CHAPTER 3

  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 discov
ered 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.