“You have all my sympathy, Ben,” the Senator said, taking Dill’s right hand in both of his, “even though I can only guess at your sorrow.”
“Thank you,” Dill said, discovering there was really nothing more to say when condolences were offered. He sat down in the chair next to the one the Senator had been sitting in. Dolan, back behind his desk now, began pouring three drinks from a bottle of Scotch.
“She was a policewoman, wasn’t she?” the Senator said as he sat down next to Dill. “Your sister.”
“A homicide detective,” Dill said. “Second grade. She’d just got her promotion.”
“How’d it happen?” Dolan said, leaning over the desk to serve the two drinks.
“They say it was a car bomb.”
“Murdered?” the Senator asked, more surprised than shocked.
Dill nodded yes, drank his whisky down, and put the glass on Dolan’s desk. He noticed the Senator only sipped a small swallow and then put the glass down. Dill knew he wouldn’t pick it up again.
“I’m going to be gone a week or ten days,” Dill said. “I thought I’d better stop by and let you know.”
“Need anything?” the Senator asked. “Money?” It apparently was all he could think of.
Dill smiled and shook his head. Dolan, still standing, stared down at him thoughtfully, cocked his head to the left, and said, “You say you’ll be down there for a week, maybe ten days?”
“About that.”
Dolan looked at the Senator. “Maybe we could put Ben on the expense since Jake Spivey’s still holed up down there.”
The Senator turned to Dill. “You know Spivey, of course.”
Dill nodded.
“Hell,” Dolan said, “Ben could take Spivey’s deposition, save us from flying him back up here, and then we could charge Ben’s expenses off on the Brattle thing.”
The Senator nodded, almost convinced. He turned to Dill again. “Would you be willing to do that while you’re down there, take Spivey’s deposition?”
“Yes. Sure.”
“You know the Brattle thing? What a question. Of course you do.” The Senator looked back up at Dolan. “Then it’s settled.”
Dill rose. “I’ll get a copy of Spivey’s file from Betty Mae.”
The Senator also rose. “Spivey could help tremendously in resolving this… problem. If he isn’t entirely forthcoming, be — well, you know — firm. Very firm.”
“You mean threaten him with a subpoena?”
The Senator turned to look at Dolan. “Yes, I think so, don’t you?”
“Shit, yes,” Dolan said.
Dill smiled slightly at Dolan. “Could we get it out of the committee?”
“Never,” Dolan said. “But Spivey doesn’t have to know that, does he?”
Chapter 3
It was a little more than ten years since Dill had been back to his native city, which was also the capital of a state located just far enough south and west to make jailhouse chili a revered cultural treasure. Wheat grew in the state, as did rattlesnakes, sorghum, broomcorn, cotton, soybeans, blackjack oaks, and white-faced cattle. There were also oil, gas, and a little uranium to be found, and the families of those who had found them were often wealthy and sometimes even rich.
As for the city itself, it was said that the parking meter had been invented there back in the thirties along with the supermarket shopping cart. Its international airport was named after an almost forgotten pilot-navigator, William Gatty, who had helped guide Wiley Post around the world in 1931. There were not many Jews in either the city or the state, but plenty of blacks, numerous Mexicans, two tribes of Indians, a world of Baptists, and 1,413 Vietnamese. According to the U.S. census, the city’s population was 501,341 in 1970. By 1980 it had risen to 501,872. There were, on the average, 5.6 homicides a week. Most of them took place on Saturday night.
When Dill came out of the Gatty International Airport terminal shortly after 4 P.M., the temperature had dropped to 101 degrees and a hard hot wind was whipping down from Montana and the Dakotas. Dill couldn’t remember when the wind hadn’t blown almost constantly, either up from Mexico or down from the Great Plains, searing in summer, freezing in winter, and nerve-racking always. It now blew hot and dry and laden with red dust and grit. Sudden gusts of up to thirty-five miles per hour snatched at Dill’s breath and tore at his coat as he leaned into them and plodded toward a taxi.
Dill’s native city, like most American cities, was laid out on a grid. The streets that ran east and west were numbered. Those that ran north and south were named, many after pioneer real estate speculators, and the rest after states, Civil War generals (both Union and Confederate), a governor or two, and a handful of mayors whose administrations were thought to have been reasonably free of graft.
But as the city grew, imagination had faltered, and the newer north-south streets were named after trees (Pine, Maple, Oak, Birch, and so on). When the trees were at last exhausted — ending with Eucalyptus for some reason — the names of presidents had been brought into play. These expired with Nixon Avenue a far, far 231 blocks west of the city’s main street, which, not surprisingly, was called Main Street. Main’s principal intersecting thoroughfare was, inevitably, Broadway.
As the taxi neared the city’s center, Dill discovered that most of the landmarks of his youth had vanished. Three downtown motion picture theaters were gone: the Criterion, the Empress, and the Royal. Eberhardt’s pool hall was gone, too. Located just two doors down and one floor up from the Criterion, it had been a wonderfully sinister place, at least to thirteen-year-old Benjamin Dill when he had first been lured into it one Sunday afternoon by evil Jack Sackett, a fifteen-year-old acquaintance who had gone on to become one of the premier pool hustlers on the West Coast.
The post-World War Two building boom had not reached the city’s downtown section until the mid 1970s, some thirty years late. Until then, downtown had remained much as it was when it had been caught flatfooted by the crash of ’29 with two thirty-three-story skyscrapers nearly completed and another one halfway up.
The two thirty-three-story skyscrapers had been built across the street from each other, one by a bank and the other by a speculator who was later wiped out by the crash. There was a race to completion — a dumb publicity stunt, critics said — and the bank had won. The day after the ruined speculator’s building was completed by a syndicate of oil men who had bought it for a song (some said less), the speculator rode the elevator up to the top of his broken dream and jumped off. The third skyscraper, the one that was only halfway up when the crash came, was never finished and they finally tore it down in the mid-fifties.
By 1970, the city’s downtown section still looked like 1940, except there weren’t as many people. The big department stores had long since fled to the outlying malls along with their customers. Other firms followed; urban decay set in; the crime rate shot up; and nobody came downtown. The panicked city fathers hired themselves an expensive Houston consulting firm that came up with a redevelopment plan and then pried a huge federal grant out of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington. The redevelopment plan called for the leveling of most of the downtown area and erecting in its place one of those cities of tomorrow. They razed almost everything and then the money ran out, as it usually does, and downtown was left looking rather like downtown Cologne after the war. But the demolition had not really begun until mid-1974, and by then Benjamin Dill was gone.
Dill was surprised to discover he didn’t really mind the changes that had taken place — not even the glossy new buildings that were beginning to poke up out of the erased landmarks of his youth and childhood. You should be old enough to distrust change, he told himself. Change marks time’s passage and only the young with very little past willingly embrace the new without argument — only the very young and those who stand to profit from it. And since there’s absolutely no way you’re going to make a buck out of it, maybe you’re not so old after all.