Dill took a deep breath, let some of it out, and said, “Is she dead or just hurt?”
There was no pause before the answer came — only a long sigh, which was an answer in itself. “She’s dead, Mr. Dill. I’m sorry.”
“Dead.” Dill didn’t make it a question.
“Yes.”
“I see.”
And then, because Dill knew he had to say something else to keep grief away for at least a few more moments, he said, “It’s her birthday.”
“Her birthday,” Strucker said patiently. “Well, I didn’t know that.”
“Mine, too,” Dill said in an almost musing tone. “We have the same birthday. We were born ten years apart, but on the same day — August fourth. Today.”
“Today, huh?” Strucker said, his harsh voice interested, overly reasonable, and almost kind. “Well, I’m sorry.”
“She’s twenty-eight.”
“Twenty-eight.”
“I’m thirty-eight.” There was a long silence until Dill said, “How did—” but broke off to make a noise that could have been either a cough or a sob. “How did it happen?” he said finally.
Again, the chief of detectives sighed. Even over the phone it had a sad and mournful sound. “Car bomb,” Strucker said.
“Car bomb,” Dill said.
“She came out of her house this morning at her regular time, got into her car — one of those all-tin Honda Accords — threw out the clutch, and that’s what activated the bomb — the clutch. They used C4 — plastic.”
“They,” Dill said. “Who the hell are they?”
“Well, it might not’ve been a they, Mr. Dill. I just said that. It could’ve been only one guy, but one or a dozen, we’re gonna get who did it. It’s what we do — what we’re good at.”
“How quickly did she—” Dill paused and took a deep breath. “I mean, did she—”
Strucker interrupted to answer the incomplete question. “No, sir, she didn’t. It was instantaneous.”
“I read somewhere that it’s never instantaneous.”
Strucker apparently knew better than to argue with the recently bereaved. “It was quick, Mr. Dill. Very quick. She didn’t suffer.” He paused again, cleared his throat, and said, “We’d like to bury her. I mean the department would, if it’s okay with you.”
“When?”
“Is it all right with you?”
“Yes, it’s all right with me. When?”
“Saturday,” Strucker said. “We’ll have a big turnout from all over. It’s a nice ceremony, real nice, and I’m sure you’ll want to be here so if there’s anything we can do for you, make you a hotel reservation or something like that, well, just let—”
Dill interrupted. “The Hawkins. Is the Hawkins Hotel still in business?”
“Yes, sir, it is.”
“Make me a reservation there, will you?”
“For when?”
“For tonight,” Dill said. “I’ll be there tonight.”
Chapter 2
Dill stood at one of the tall, almost floor-to-ceiling windows that lined the north side of his living room and watched the old man with the Polaroid take a photograph of the blue Volvo sedan that was illegally parked near the corner of Twenty-first and N Streets.
The old man was the owner of a vacant four-story apartment building across the street from Dill’s windows. At one time the old man had leased his bile-green building to a District program that had filled the apartments with drug addicts who were trying to break their habits. After the program’s funds ran out, the addicts moved away, no one quite knew where, leaving behind a sackful of drawings that fell off the garbage truck and blew about the neighborhood.
Dill had picked up one of the drawings. It had been done with crayons in harsh primary colors and seemed to be a self-portrait of one of the dopers. There was a purple face with round eyes that had crosses in them and a big green mouth with fangs for teeth. The drawing was on the level of a bright first- or second-grader. Underneath the face was the laboriously printed legend: I AM A NO GOOD FUCKING DOPE FEIND. Dill sometimes wondered if the therapy had helped.
After the addicts moved out of his building, the old man lived in it alone, refusing either to sell or rent the property. He kept busy by taking Polaroid snapshots of the cars that parked illegally in front of it. He angled his shots so that they included both the No Parking sign and the offending car’s license plate. Evidence in hand, the old man would then call the cops. Sometimes they came; sometimes they didn’t. Dill often watched the old man at work and marveled at his rage.
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.