“I don’t know.”
“But you knew about both places.”
“Christ, yes, I knew. Look, friend, maybe you should try to get something straight: I was going to marry her. Not because she could do my career any good. Not because she was rich. Not because she — aw hell. I loved her. That’s why I was going to marry her.”
The pain, Dill saw, was back in Colder’s eyes. It didn’t go away this time. “What’d she say — about having two places?”
“She said the other one, the duplex, was an investment for you and her. She said you were thinking of coming back here to live. She said you’d helped her buy it.”
“She said that?”
Colder nodded, the pain in his eyes threatening to spread across the rest of his face.
“She lied,” Dill said.
“Yeah,” Colder said. “We both know that now, don’t we.”
Chapter 14
After leaving Captain Colder, Dill went back down into the hotel’s basement garage, retrieved the file on Jake Spivey from the Ford’s glove compartment, and took the elevator from the garage up to the ninth floor. He planned to call Timothy Dolan in Washington and read him some of the more relevant passages from Spivey’s deposition.
Dill unlocked the door to 981, pushed it open, and entered the room. He turned to close the door and the arm went around his neck. It was a thick arm, very muscular, very strong. Dill just had time to think chokehold and to notice that the arm’s owner was neither panting nor breathing hard. Maybe he does it for a living, Dill thought, and then, with his oxygen and carotid artery shut off, and without enough air going down into his lungs and not enough blood flowing up into his brain, Dill lost consciousness and came to nine minutes later.
He found himself lying on the floor beside the bed. The first thing he did after opening his eyes was swallow. Nothing had been crushed. Nothing even hurt very much — only a slight soreness in his throat that he felt would soon disappear. It’s not much worse than it was when Jake and I found out how to do it to each other in the fifth grade, Dill thought. Except we didn’t know it was called the carotid then. We just thought it was a neat way to pass out.
He sat up slowly, even warily, and looked around to see if the chokehold expert was still present. He wasn’t. Dill patted his jacket breast pocket for his wallet. It was there. He took it out, looked inside, and counted the money. None had been taken. His watch was still on his left wrist. Dill got to his knees, then to his feet, and looked around for the file on Jake Spivey. It was only a brief glance, devoid of hope. He knew the file would be gone and it was.
Dill sat down on the bed and gingerly explored his throat with his right hand. The slight soreness was already going away. The brain damage would be minimal, he told himself, a few hundred thousand cells lost at most, but there are millions more and since you don’t use them very much anyway, you’re just as smart as ever, which means you can still cross wide streets by yourself.
He tried to remember all he could about the attacker. He remembered the forearm. It was one hell of a forearm, the right one probably, because the left hand would have been locked around the right wrist, exerting the pressure. Then there had been that easy, normal breathing. He didn’t exactly panic while waiting for you to show up. His nerves, if he has any, are in fine shape. And his pulse rate probably shoots up to around seventy-two when he gets excited — if he ever does. Dill didn’t need to feel his own pulse to know it was racing.
And since his attacker had done it so smoothly and with so little apparent effort, Dill decided he must have done it frequently in the past, which possibly indicates, Inspector, that before turning to his life of crime, he may well have been an honest policeman, or even a dishonest one, possibly from Los Angeles, where all chokehold champions are said to dwell. And this one could easily have qualified for the chokehold Olympics. There was the chance, of course, that he could have picked up his craft elsewhere. He could be a slightly crazed veteran of the Special Forces, a graying Green Beret, who’d learned all about chokeholds and silent killing down at Bragg, practiced them to perfection in Vietnam, and now peddled his hard-won skills to whoever would buy. Learn a trade in the army, they’d advised him, and he had.
Dill rose from the bed, crossed to the bottle of Old Smuggler that still sat on the writing desk, opened it, sniffed its contents suspiciously (for what? he asked himself. Cyanide?), poured slightly more than two ounces into a glass, and drank it down. It burned slightly and made him shudder, but no more so than usual.
After putting the glass down, Dill picked up the telephone, closed his eyes, remembered the number he wanted, and dialed it. It was answered on the third ring by the voice of Daphne Owens, who again recited the phone number’s last four digits.
“This is Ben Dill again. I’d like to speak to Jake for a minute.”
“Just a moment,” she said, and ten seconds later Spivey was on the line, brimming with his usual good cheer. “I was about to call you, good buddy.”
“What about?”
“Sunday. You’re still gonna be in town Sunday, right? Well, the weatherman says it’s gonna be another scorcher so I thought you might like to come out here and barbecue some ribs and jump in the pool and goggle some half-naked ladies. Spend the day.”
“Sounds good,” Dill said. “Maybe I’ll bring one.”
“A half-naked lady?”
“Right.”
“I sure admire the way you smooth city boys operate.”
“I’ve got a problem, Jake.”
“Big or little?”
“Little. I lost your deposition.”
Spivey was silent for several moments. “Lost it?”
“Through carelessness.”
“I guess I should ask where you lost it, and then you could say if you knew where you lost it, you’d go find it. So where’d you lose it?”
“I had it in my attaché case,” Dill lied. “I put the case down at the newsstand here in the hotel to look at some magazines and when I reached down for it, it was gone.”
“Lot of that going on downtown,” Spivey said. “What else was in your case?”
Dill decided to embroider his tale. “My airline ticket, some papers, but nothing important. I was wondering if you could come up with another copy of your deposition.”
“Nothing to it. All I have to do is ask one of the girls to push a button and the printer’ll spit out another one. Goddamn computers are something, aren’t they?” Before Dill could reply, Spivey went on, his tone musing. “Nothing in that deposition anyway. I mean nothing I gotta worry about. Tell you what, I’ll have ’em print up another copy, get Daffy to notarize it, and send it down by one of my Mexican folks. Should be there in about an hour in case you’ve gotta call your people back in Washington and tell ’em what a fine job of work you’re doing down here.”
“You’re a brick, Jake.”
“Sure wish I knew how you spelled that. Now Sunday, why don’t you come on out here about noon, you and your lady friend?”
“That sounds fine.”
“See you Sunday then.”
Dill thanked Spivey again and hung up. He stood, staring down at the phone, carefully memorizing the lies he had told Spivey, picked up the phone again, dialed eleven numbers, listened to the long-distance crackles and beeps, the ringing phone, and then the voice of Timothy Dolan saying, “Dolan.”
“It’s Ben, Tim.”
“I’ve got some news. Clyde Brattle’s back.”
“Back where?”
“In the States. He crossed over from Canada.”
“But they didn’t spot him, right?”
“Not until two days later when one of them finally decided, hey, that guy looked kinda familiar, went through his mug book, and recognized Brattle.”