“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.”
Chapter 8
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.