“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.”
Chapter 7
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.