“I had a deferment. I was the sole support of an eleven-year-old orphan.”
“Would you have gone?”
“To Vietnam? I don’t know.”
“Suppose they said, ‘Okay, Dill, you’re drafted. Report down to the Post Office for induction next Tuesday.’ What would you’ve done?”
“I would’ve either gone down to the Post Office or up to Canada. One out of conviction; the other out of curiosity.”
She studied him for several moments. “I think you would’ve gone down to the Post Office.”
Dill smiled. “Maybe not.”
“What’d you do overseas? I mean abroad?”
“Didn’t Felicity tell you?”
“No.”
“I thought she used to talk about me.”
“About when you all were growing up. Not about when you were in Washington or overseas.”
“Abroad.”
She smiled. “Right. Abroad. What’d you do over there?”
“I poked around.”
“Who for?”
“The government.”
Anna Maude Singe frowned, and when she did, Dill smiled. “Don’t worry, I wasn’t with the agency, although I used to bump into them from time to time.”
“What’re those CIA folks really like?” she said. “You read about them. They make picture shows about them. But I never met one. I don’t think I ever came close to meeting one.”
“They were…” Dill paused, trying to remember just how they really had been. He recalled sharp noses and close-set ears and bitten fingernails and prim mouths with self-important expressions. “I guess you’d have to say they were sort of… like me. Stuffy.”
“Stuffy?”
He nodded.
“All of them?” she asked.
“I didn’t know all of them. But Sunday you get to meet one who wasn’t very stuffy.”
“Who?”
“Jake Spivey.”
“Jake Spivey was with the CIA. Good Lord!”
“They won’t admit it, but he was. Maybe Jake’ll tell you some stories. He went to Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia, but he didn’t go out of patriotism, or because he got drafted, or even out of curiosity. Jake went because at twenty-three they were the only outfit around who’d pay him a thousand bucks a week to do whatever he did.”
“What’d he do?”
“Jake? I guess Jake probably killed a lot of people.”
“Does it bother him?”
“You mean does he feel guilty?”
She nodded.
“Jake never felt guilty about anything.”
Dill chose another route back to Anna Maude Singe’s apartment building. He took South Cleveland Avenue until it turned into North Cleveland just on the other side of the Yellowfork. He followed North Cleveland for a little more than two miles until he reached Twenty-second Street, and then cut east to Van Buren and the Old Folks Home.
Singe didn’t wait for him to open the car door for her. As she got out, she said, “All I’ve got is some California brandy.”
Dill took that for an invitation and said he thought California brandy had a lot going for it, especially the price. Up in her apartment Dill resumed his inspection of the large Maxfield Parrish print while she went for the brandy. When she returned with the bottle and two balloon glasses, Dill had almost decided the two figures in the painting were girls. He also noticed Singe had changed back into the striped nubby cotton caftan. From the way her breasts moved underneath the fabric, he was sure she was wearing nothing else. He took this for yet another invitation of sorts, and wondered whether he would accept or send regrets.
Singe sat down on the off-white couch, put the glasses on the free-form glass coffee table, and poured two brandies. While she did that, Dill took out his checkbook, quickly wrote a check for five hundred dollars to Anna Maude Singe, added “legal retainer” in the memo space, tore it out, and handed it to her.
She read the check, put it carefully down on the table, looked at him coldly, and said, “That was a pretty goddamned rude thing to do.”
He nodded. “Yes, I guess it was.”
“This isn’t my office. This is where I live — my home. Where I carry on my social life and also my sex life, such as it is. I was thinking that tonight I might even enrich both of them a little, but I guess I was wrong.”
“You accept the check?” Dill said.
She hesitated before answering. “What the hell is this?”
“You accept the check?” Dill said again.
“All right. Yes. I accept it.”
“Then you really are my attorney — retained at a modest fee, I’ll admit — and if I get into trouble with the law, you’ll come running, right?”
“What kind of trouble?”
“That’s another question, not an answer.”
“Okay. I’ll come running. What kind of trouble?”
“When I was overseas—”
“Abroad,” she interrupted.
He didn’t smile. “Right. When I was over there poking around, I developed a kind of instinct. I don’t know what else to call it. But I learned to depend on it. It was a kind of warning system.”
“Hunch,” she said.
“Okay. Hunch is good. But it kept me out of trouble a few times because I made sure I had both backup and a fallback position. Well, ever since I got here I’ve been getting those same faint signals.”
“You’re talking about Felicity and all that.”
“Partly.”
She drank a little of her brandy. “You said trouble with the law.”
“So I did.”
“So what’re we really talking about — plot, conspiracy, paranoia, what?”
“Let’s try paranoia,” Dill said. “At around five o’clock this evening I went up to my room in the hotel. A very large arm went around my neck in a chokehold. I passed out for about nine minutes. When I came to, I still had my watch, my wallet, and all my money.”
“What was gone?”
“The file on Jake Spivey.”
“What file?”
“I work for a Senate subcommittee. It’s investigating Spivey.”
“Your friend.”
“My oldest.”
“Does he know?”
“Sure he knows.”
She frowned. “You call getting mugged a hunch.” She shook her head. “No, of course you don’t. That was the two-by-four somebody slammed you across the nose with to grab your attention.” Her eyes widened, not much, but just enough to make Dill relax as he congratulated himself on his choice of lawyers. She senses it, he told himself, but she’s not quite sure just what it is. But neither are you.
“What else?” Singe said.
“What else,” Dill repeated, picked up his glass, and drank some of the brandy, noting that the California vintners still had a way to go before overtaking their French competitors. “Well, ‘what else’ includes an old reporter on the Tribune who already has the whole story on Felicity’s funny finances, except he’s holding back on it until he gets the word.”
“From whom?”
“He didn’t say and I knew better than to ask. Then there’s Felicity’s ex-boyfriend, the frightener and one-time football great.”
“Clay Corcoran,” she said.
“I thought he gave up on being jilted too easily, but Felicity’s tenant, the female one, more or less confirms his story. The tenant’s name is Cindy McCabe. She took off her halter to let me admire her bare bosom. She also claimed she’d once made a pass at Felicity, but got turned down.”
“Did you turn her down?”
“I’m afraid so. I was late for my next appointment, which I didn’t know I had at the time, but which turned out to be with Captain Colder, the bereaved fiancé. Captain Colder gave me the key to a garage apartment where Felicity really lived.” Dill reached into his jacket pocket, brought out the key Colder had given him, and placed it on the glass table. “The apartment’s over on Fillmore and Nineteenth, not too far from here.”