“Who taught you your manners, Mr. Dill,” she asked, “your mama or the Phi Delts?”
“My mama,” he said.
“She was one nice lady,” Spivey said. “A little—” He looked at Dill. “What’s the word I want — distant?”
“Vague,” Dill said.
“That ain’t it either. Ethereal’s the word. But I expect it saved her a lot of heartache considering what she had to put up with, with your old man.”
Dill smiled and nodded slightly.
“What did your father do, Mr. Dill?” Owens asked.
“He was a professional dreamer.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“It implies he should’ve been paid for them. He seldom was.”
“Pick and me were the poorest kids in Horace Mann grade school,” Spivey said proudly. “And we would’ve been the poorest kids in junior high school, but they integrated it along about then and brought in some colored and Mexican kids who were even poorer’n Pick and me, but we were still the poorest white kids in Coolidge Junior High. Right, Pick?”
“Absolutely.”
Before Spivey could dredge up further memories, one of the Mexicans who had been out digging the garden came in wearing a starched white jacket and nicely pressed jeans. Everyone ordered drinks and the gardener/houseman left through the swinging door that Dill noticed led into a pantry. He also noticed that the tablecloth was Irish linen; the silverware English; the china from France — Limoges, he thought — and the two wineglasses at his plate were heavy leaded crystal and possibly Czech. Knowing Spivey, he was almost certain lunch would be Tex-Mex.
“Then you two really were out here back in the fifties when you were kids,” Daphne Owens said to Spivey.
He grinned at Dill. “You tell her about that?”
“She asked me if I’d ever seen the house before.”
“Me’n Pick were two of the city’s hundred neediest kids — at least, that’s how we promoted ourselves. We were what then, Pick — ten?”
“Ten,” Dill agreed.
“Well, sugar, we’d heard tales about old Ace’s mansion. My God, everybody had. Solid-gold bathroom fixtures. Stuff like that. And we just had to see it. So Pick came up with the idea that if we got dressed up in our oldest clothes — and there really wasn’t one hell of a lot of difference between our oldest and our best — and then went down and saw the principal, old lady McMullen — how old you reckon she was then, Pick?”
“Old,” Dill said. “At least forty.”
“Older’n God to us,” Spivey said. “So that’s what we did.”
“Jake gave the spiel,” Dill said. “I just looked wistful. Very poor; very wistful.”
“And the next thing you know me’n Pick’re on a hired city bus with about fifty-eight cute little colored kids and thirty-five even cuter little Mexicans and five other poor whites heading out to Cherry Hills and old Ace Dawson’s mansion for a Christmas party.”
“Weren’t you embarrassed?” Owens asked. “I mean, didn’t you find it — well, for God’s sake, demeaning?”
“What’s demeaning about curiosity?” Dill asked. “Ace Dawson was a myth. We wanted to see how a myth had lived.”
“And we sure as shit didn’t lie, sugar,” Spivey said. “We were poor, although Pick here was sort of shabby genteel poor and I was just plain dirt poor.” He turned to Dill. “Remember what I told you that night in the bus on the way back home?” Before Dill could reply, Spivey turned back to Daphne Owens. “What d’you think I told him?”
“That some day you were going to own it, of course. The Dawson mansion.”
Spivey shook his head as if both puzzled and disappointed. “Daffy, you got a romantic streak in you I never suspected.” He turned to Dill. “Tell her what I told you that night on the bus home.”
Dill smiled. “That being rich sure looked a lot easier than being poor, and you thought you might as well take the easy way out.”
Owens stared at Spivey with almost equal amounts of awe and suspicion. “You really said that at ten?” she asked, the awe winning out in her tone.
Spivey grinned. “Well, maybe not word for word,” he said, still grinning. “But almost.”
As he pulled up in front of his dead sister’s yellow brick duplex at the corner of Thirty-second Street and Texas Avenue, Dill could still taste the quesadillas and green corn tamales he had had for lunch. And the avocados, too. Dill didn’t much like avocados and there had been too many pieces of them in his salad. He had eaten them out of politeness and now wished he hadn’t.
He sat in the Ford sedan, the engine idling, the air-conditioning on as high as it would go, and examined the duplex. He remembered it now, not because he had ever been inside, but because he had passed it scores of times and, by merely passing, had absorbed it into his memory.
The radio was on and turned to the all-news station. Dill was waiting for a Delta Airlines commercial to end and the weather girl to come on. She had a low breathy voice that was supposed to make the weather sound lascivious. When the commercial ended, she breathed the time, which was 2:49 P.M.; the temperature, which was 104 degrees Fahrenheit; the humidity, which was just 21 percent, and the wind which, for a change, was blowing gently out of the southwest at 5 miles per hour. When she began to suggest cute ways to beat the heat, Dill switched the ignition off and silenced the radio.
Before getting out of the car, he locked the file on Jake Spivey in the glove compartment. The file now included the sworn deposition, whose contents Dill felt were almost worthless. It had been transcribed by Spivey’s unseen typists — word processors, actually — and witnessed by Daphne Owens, who had turned out to be a notary public whose commission expired on June thirteenth of the following year.
When Dill got out of the Ford, the dry scorching heat almost made him gasp. With his seersucker jacket slung over his left shoulder, he hurried toward the inviting tall green elms with their promise of cool shade. The promise was broken and the invitation proved false, for there was no respite in the shade, and Dill’s shirt was soaked and his chin dripping sweat as he started slowly up the outside stairs. At the landing, he used the key the chief of detectives had given him, unlocked the door, pushed it open, and went inside.
He looked for the air-conditioning first and found a set of controls on the near wall. The controls were for both heating and cooling. He switched the system on, moved the cool indicator from medium to high, stepped to the center of the living room, glanced around, and found that there was nothing to indicate his sister had ever lived there. Nor, for that matter, had anyone else with a shred of personality.
There was furniture in the living room, of course: a dark-green boxy couch, a matching chair, and a chrome-and-glass coffee table with nothing on it except last week’s copy of TV Guide. On the floor, because there seemed no place else for it, was a small black-and-white Sony portable television set. There were no books, not one, which Dill found strange because he knew Felicity had despised television and as a child had read eight or nine books a week, sometimes ten, although they had been young-adult books, which at eleven she finally had dismissed as “mostly crap.” During the summer of her twelfth year she had turned to the Russian novelists and, having disposed of them, picked up Santayana’s The Last Puritan from somewhere. She had spent an entire week in August reading it, a frown on her forehead and a pitcher of Kool-Aid within easy reach. She said she found Santayana both “stuffy and dull” and devoted the rest of that same August to Dickens.
Dill could still remember her seated at the card table, Little Dorrit open in front of her, the Big Chief tablet to her right for notes and annotations, and on another corner of the table, the seldom-used Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. Opposite the dictionary was the pitcher of Kool-Aid. Grape, as Dill recalled. Dickens, Felicity had informed her brother, was pretty good stuff (high praise) but a “little soupy.” Dill sometimes felt his sister was the least sentimental person he had ever known.