“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.”
Chapter 9
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.