“My wife,” Colder began, “well, my wife was giving me a rotten time long before I ever met Felicity. In fact, I moved out on her.”
“Before you met Felicity.”
“Well, right after anyway.”
“I see.”
“I don’t want you to get the idea that Felicity broke up any happy home.”
“I’m sure she wouldn’t’ve.”
“My wife and I don’t have any kids. So the only hassle I had when I moved out was with her.”
“She’s here?”
“Right. She’s here.”
“How old is she?”
“A little older’n I am. Thirty-eight.”
“Almost too late for kids anyway.”
“I don’t think she really ever wanted any,” Colder said and took a glum sip of the beer that Dill thought must be flat by now. Colder didn’t seem to think so.
“So what happened then?” Dill said. “I mean after she found out about Felicity?”
“You’ve already heard, haven’t you?”
“Heard what?”
“That my wife threatened to kill Felicity.”
“No, I didn’t hear that.”
“You will.”
“Did she?”
“Threaten to? Sure.”
“No,” Dill said. “That’s not what I mean.”
“You mean did she kill Felicity?”
“Yes.”
“No,” Colder said. “She didn’t.”
“How’d your wife threaten her?”
“She’d call her up and yell at her. She’d call her up at home and say, ‘If you don’t keep away from my husband, I’ll kill you.’ She’d call her up at work, too. If Gertrude — that’s her name — couldn’t reach Felicity, she’d leave a message with whoever answered. Messages like ‘This is Captain Colder’s wife. Tell Detective Dill I’ll kill her if she doesn’t leave him alone.’ That went on for a couple of weeks.”
“Then what?”
Colder lit another one of his menthol cigarettes. He inhaled and made a face at what he tasted. Or at what he was about to say. “In this state, two doctors can commit. The department has two of them sort of on standby — guys that could have a little trouble with the state medical board, if we wanted to do something about it. We keep them on tap.” He paused. “Isn’t that awful?”
Dill nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “It is.”
“So I tucked her away for a month.”
“Gertrude.”
“Yeah. Gertrude.”
“When was this?”
Colder ran time through his head. “A year ago in September.”
“So she’s been out — what? Ten or eleven months?”
“Right.”
“And?”
“She’s calmed down. They’ve got her on Valium. She’s even seeing some guy she met in that place. I checked him out. He’s an on-again, off-again juicer and they were drying him out when she met him. He’s got a trust fund, which is what every juicer ought to have, so he doesn’t have to worry about money. It brings him in a couple of thousand a month and sometimes he sells a little real estate. But what he does mostly is hang around Gertrude. He brings her flowers and takes her to the pictures and the plays, whenever one of them gets here, and she likes that kind of thing. He’s older. In his early fifties, and I imagine he’s fucking her, but not too often, and that’d sure be all right with her, too.”
“She’s agreed to the divorce then?” Dill said.
“Oh, yeah. She finally agreed to that after she got out.”
“Where was she?”
“Millrun Farm. Ever hear of it?”
Dill nodded. “It used to be old Doc Lasker’s place when he was the resident abortionist here. They’d come from all over back then — from New York, L.A., Memphis, Chicago. It used to be a pretty nice place, but that was years ago.”
“It still is,” Colder said. “Lasker died, you know.”
Dill shook his head. “I didn’t.”
“He was old and his business had gone to hell anyway when they legalized abortion, so he sold it to a couple of young shrinks and they’ve made a go of it. God knows they charge enough.”
Dill finished the last of his beer. “I wonder why Felicity never told me she was going to be married.”
Colder shook his head as though bewildered. Dill didn’t believe the gesture. Bewilderment had no more room in Colder’s makeup than did humility. And whatever you are, Captain, you are not humble.
“She said she wrote you about it,” Colder said.
“She didn’t.”
“Maybe it was because of Gertrude and everything.”
“Maybe.” Dill decided he wanted another beer. He looked toward the bar, caught the eye of Lucille, the waitress, and made a circular motion over the table with his forefinger pointing down. Lucille nodded her understanding. Dill turned back to Colder and smiled his most pleasant smile.
“Let me ask you something,” Dill said, his smile now almost ablaze with warmth, understanding, and compassion.
Colder apparently didn’t believe the smile for a moment. He took his elbows off the table and leaned back in his chair. It was a defensive position. When he replied his voice had resumed its utter-stranger tone. “Ask me what?”
“Where did Felicity live?” Dill carefully kept his smile alight.
“Thirty-second and Texas,” Colder said without hesitation.
The smile went out and Dill shook his head regretfully. “I guess I didn’t phrase it right.”
“You asked where she lived. I told you. Thirty-second and Texas.”
“That’s where she camped out,” Dill said. “I was there this afternoon. I poked around. Nobody lived there. Nobody. Somebody kept some clothes there. Somebody had a cup of coffee there once in a while. Now and then, somebody even slept there. But nobody lived there. At least, nobody named Felicity Dill. So what I’m asking, I guess, is where did Felicity really live? Your place? Is that where she spattered the stove with her rémoulade sauce, and read nine books at once and left most of them open on the floor, and smoked her two packs of Luckies a day, and weighed herself at least twice, and kept her kitchen stocked with enough food to last two months even if she knew she’d throw a lot of it out? That was my sister, Captain. That’s how she lived. She wasn’t obsessively neat. She didn’t hang mail-order Impressionist prints on her wall. Give Felicity five minutes in a room, any room, and she made it look like she’d lived there forever. She was a nester, Captain, and she built her nests with things — odd things, funny things, even dumb things like the fire hydrant she bought when she was fifteen, welded the cut-down washtub on top of, and turned it into the frontyard birdbath.” Dill took a deep breath, held it for a long moment, then let it out and asked in a quiet, reasonable voice, “So where did she live, Captain?”
Lucille the waitress arrived with two beers and served them. She started to say something to Colder, but changed her mind when she saw his expression, and hurried away. Colder, still staring at Dill, put his left hand in his pants pocket, picked up his beer with his right hand, and drank several swallows.
After Colder put the beer down, he said, “Fillmore and Nineteenth. Know it?”
Dill ran the map of the city through his memory. The map proved to be indelible. “Fillmore dead-ends at the park, Washington Park, and then picks up on the other side. There’re some old houses on the corner there. Very large old houses.”
“Southwest corner. Seventeen thirty-eight Fillmore. An architect bought it and turned it into apartments. There’s a garage apartment out back. On the alley. That was Felicity’s.” His left hand came out of his pocket and placed a single key on the table next to Dill’s beer. “That’s the key.”
Dill looked at the key and then up at Colder. He thought that for a second he saw something in the other man’s eyes. Perhaps pain. But it went away almost immediately. “Why two places?” Dill asked.