“No.”
“Finish your ‘or’ then.”
“Or,” she said, “there’s this guy called Jake Spivey who asked me to be his bodyguard and keep somebody from killing him.”
“That’s not bad,” Dill said.
She shook her head, rejecting all suppositions. “The variations are endless,” she said. “And meaningless.”
“You sure you’re not hungry?” he asked.
“I’d like a drink.”
“Okay, we’ll stop somewhere and you can have a drink and I’ll have a sandwich and a drink.”
“Then what?”
“Then,” Dill said, “well, then we’ll go see where Felicity really lived.”
Anna Maude Singe changed her mind and had a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich along with a Bloody Mary in Binkie’s Bar and Grille. The “e” on the end of Grille had troubled Dill, but inside the place was inviting enough despite too much butcher block and too many plants. He ordered a beer and a cheeseburger. The cheeseburger turned out to be superb. Singe said her BLT was also excellent.
After she ate the last of the sandwich and licked a little mayonnaise from a finger, she said, “What do you expect to find?”
“In her garage apartment?”
Singe nodded.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Haven’t the cops already been there?”
“Yes. Sure.”
“Then what’re you looking for?”
“For some small trace of my sister,” Dill said. “So far, there doesn’t seem to be any.”
The big house sat just across the street from Washington Park. The park was composed of a deeply sunken twenty-five acres that had got that way because it once had been a brickyard. The clay that had been dug out of the yard had gone into the red common brick used in the construction of most of the city’s houses prior to 1910. After that, the city grew in a sudden spurt, land prices rose, and the area around the brickyard became economically attractive to real estate speculators — except nobody wanted to live next to where bricks were made. The city quickly decided progress and profit were far more important than bricks. It condemned the brickyard and turned the twenty-five-acre hole in the ground into Washington Park. It was in the park’s public pool that both Benjamin Dill and Jake Spivey had learned to swim.
The old brick house was a sprawling, three-story affair built in 1914 with wide eaves and a huge screened porch. Its sixteen rooms sat on a choice corner lot that was two hundred feet deep and one hundred fifty feet wide. For trees there were elms, dogwood, locust, two apricots, and a peach. At the rear on the alley was the two-story carriage house where the dead detective was said to have lived.
After parking the Ford on Nineteenth Street, Dill and Anna Maude Singe walked along the sidewalk to the alley. There Dill fished out the key Captain Colder had given him and used it to unlock the downstairs door. Inside was a steep flight of narrow stairs. There were no windows in the stairwell, which made it both dark and stifling. Dill felt around, found a wall switch, and turned it on. A forty-watt bulb provided light. He started up the stairs, followed by Anna Maude Singe.
At the top of the stairs was a small landing, no more than three by four feet. Dill used the same key in the lock of the second door. It worked. He pushed the door open, went in, found the light switch, flicked it on, and knew immediately that Felicity Dill had indeed lived there.
For one thing, there were the books: two solid walls of them, plus neat piles on the floor and in the deep sills of the four dormer windows that looked out over the alley. A GE air-conditioning unit was also wedged into one of the windows. Dill went over and switched it on. He picked up one of the books and noticed it had been published by a state university press. As he flipped through it he read the title aloud to Singe: “Beekeeping in Eighteenth Century New England.” The pages were underlined and annotated. Dill put the book back and turned to inspect the rest of the room.
Near where Singe stood was a large deep winged armchair with an ottoman. A curved brass floor lamp was arranged so its light would come over the left shoulder of the seated reader. Dill remembered being taught that in grade school. The reading light should always come over the left shoulder. He had never understood why and tried to remember if he had passed on the curious notion to Felicity. He didn’t think it was still taught in school.
“It’s her room all right,” he said.
Singe picked up a glazed blue-and-yellow vase from the coffee table, examined it, and put it back down. “I remember when she bought this,” Singe said. “We went to a garage sale. That’s where Felicity bought a lot of her things — at garage sales. She said it gave everything a desperate air — even dramatic.”
“That’s my sister,” Dill said.
“You notice something?”
“What?”
“There’s no dust.”
Dill looked around, ran his finger over the edge of the highest bookshelf, and examined it for dust. “You’re right. I guess they went through every book.”
“The police?”
He nodded.
“They were awfully neat.”
“Gene Colder probably saw to that.”
Dill again looked around. There really wasn’t much more to see: a worn Oriental rug on the floor that he guessed was machine woven; some paintings on the walls-Felicity-type paintings, Dill thought — which meant they contained more emotion than art. One was of a sad-faced woman in eighteenth-century European dress leaning on a window ledge. Dill thought her expression was what a suicide might wear. Another was of a fat, uproarious drunk seated on a three-legged stool with a stein of beer on one knee and a plump simpering barmaid on the other. It appeared to be early nineteenth century. A third was an abstract of such harsh colors that it almost screamed of rage. A couch stood against a wall. The coffee table was in front of it. There were also some chairs, a magazine rack (full), and a whatnot stand in one corner. None of the furniture matched, yet none of it seemed out of place.
A short hall led from the living room. Dill moved down it and noted that the bathroom was on the right and a small kitchen on the left. He switched on the kitchen light and saw the spices. There was a six-tier spice rack that held at least thirty or forty kinds. There was also a four-foot shelf crammed with cookbooks. He opened one of the cabinet doors and found it full of canned goods, plus a generous supply of Kool-Aid. As usual, Dill thought with a smile, there were enough canned goods to last the winter. An inspection of the refrigerator revealed that someone had cleaned out all the perishables — the police probably — leaving only six bottles of Beck’s beer. No one had turned off the refrigerator and the beer was still cold.
“You want a beer?” he asked Anna Maude Singe, who was opening and closing kitchen drawers.
“A beer would be good,” she said.
“You see an opener?”
“Here,” she said, took one out of a drawer and gave it to him.
He opened the two beers and handed her one. “You want a glass?” he asked.
“It’ll stay colder in the bottle.” She drank from the bottle, moved back to one of the drawers, and pulled it open. “Her silver is all here.”
“That was her inheritance when our folks died. All of it.”
“She kept it polished,” Singe said, and closed the drawer. “What next — the bathroom?”
“Okay.”
It was a large, old-fashioned bathroom that was covered halfway up its walls with square white tiles. On the floor were small white hexagonal ones. Both the tub and sink had separate faucets for hot and cold water. The medicine cabinet held nothing of interest.
“No prescription drugs,” Dill said, closing the cabinet door.