“Where’s your swimsuit?” he asked.
“I’ve got it on underneath — what there is of it.”
Dill grinned as he started the engine and backed out of the parking space. “You advertising?” he asked.
She smiled. “I could use a rich client. That’s who’ll be there, isn’t it — rich folks?”
“At Jake Spivey’s?” Dill said and shook his head. “There’s no telling who’ll show up at Jake’s.”
Chapter 28
There was a young Mexican guard on the big iron gate at Jake Spivey’s. The last time Dill had seen him, the Mexican had been helping dig something up in Spivey’s backyard. Now he sat in a canvas director’s chair beneath a Cinzano umbrella. Near his feet was a gallon Thermos jug of something cool to drink. Across his lap was a shotgun. On his right hip was a holstered revolver with a plastic pearl grip.
The Mexican rose as Dill drove the car halfway through the gate and stopped. The Mexican moved over to Dill’s side of the Ford. He carried the shotgun across his chest. Dill noticed its safety was off. The Mexican bent down to peer carefully at Dill and Singe through dark aviator glasses. He nodded thoughtfully at what he saw and said, “You are?”
“I’m Ben Dill and this is Miss Singe.”
With a forefinger still around the trigger of the shotgun, which Dill recognized now as a 12-gauge, the Mexican used his other hand to reach into a shirt pocket and bring out a three-by-five card that contained a list of typed names. He studied it for a moment, then nodded and said, “Dill,” pronouncing it very much like deal.
The Mexican used his shotgun to point toward the house. “Drive to the house,” he said. “Somebody’ll park your car.”
Dill thanked him and started up the curving asphalt drive. Once again, all the sprinklers were on and the grass looked cool and wet and very green.
“Beauchamp Lane,” Singe said almost to herself. “My God, I finally made it out to old Ace Dawson’s place on Beauchamp Lane.”
“I was eleven the first time I was out here,” Dill said. “At a Christmas party.”
“You lied and hustled your way into that, you and Spivey. Felicity told me about it. I’m really invited — well, sort of anyway.”
The asphalt drive ended just beyond the big oak front door, and then formed itself into a large square where a dozen cars were already parked. They were all new cars, mostly expensive domestic makes that included four Cadillacs, two Lincolns, one Oldsmobile 98, and a Buick Riviera convertible. But there were also two Mercedes, a Porsche, and one large BMW. Dill estimated that the small parking area contained three or four hundred thousand dollars’ worth of automobiles — and a rented Ford.
“Looks like I was right,” Singe said as another young Mexican started moving toward the car.
“About the rich folks being here?”
Singe nodded as the young Mexican hurried around the Ford and opened the door for her. He smiled politely as she got out. The Mexican then waited for Dill to get out from behind the wheel. When he did, the Mexican, still smiling, slid across the seat. He wore his squared-off white shirt outside his black pants. The sliding motion caused the shirttail to rise up just enough for Dill to see the holstered automatic. He thought it looked like a 9-mm of some foreign make. The Mexican noticed Dill’s interest in the pistol. The smile went away, then came back almost instantly, more polite than ever, as he started the engine and expertly shot the Ford into a parking space between a Cadillac and the BMW.
Before Dill and Anna Maude Singe could ring the “How Dry I Am” doorbell, it was opened by a smiling Daphne Owens who wore even fewer clothes than she’d worn the first time Dill met her. This time she had on only a pale-green bikini bottom and a kind of sleeveless top with enormous armholes that looked as if it might have been made out of an old sweatshirt, although Dill knew it wasn’t.
He made the introductions and for some reason felt gratified when the two women immediately despised each other. Although their smiles were polite, their greeting ritualistic, and their handshake casual, the encounter nevertheless produced two instant enemies.
“What should I call you,” Daphne Owens said, “Anna or Maude or both?”
“Most folks just run it together and call me both.”
“And so shall I. You must call me Daffy — as in Duck, right, Mr. Dill?”
“Right,” he said.
“Now let’s go back so you can get something to drink and meet everyone.”
They followed her down the long wide hall and through french doors that led out onto a patio that was formed, jigsaw fashion, out of large irregular pieces of black slate. Carefully trimmed and cultivated grass grew in the cracks between the pieces. Dill suspected that if he were to go high enough, perhaps up on the roof of the house, the green grass might spell out a word or a name or even a picture. Probably something bawdy, he thought, and decided to ask Spivey about it.
As he glanced around he saw there were four people splashing about in the big pool. Daphne Owens then introduced him and Singe to three different knots of guests who were in their thirties and forties. All were trim, well groomed, and held glasses of wine or Perrier in their hands, but no cigarettes. The men all looked as if they ran six miles a day; the women as if they were Jane Fonda Workout disciples. Dill immediately forgot their names.
He didn’t forget the names of the next two persons he and Singe met. Both were men and both were older. The older one was so old he might not have been able to rise from his white iron lawn chair. The other one, who was only sixty-seven, rose easily.
“I don’t believe you’ve met the Hartshornes,” Daphne Owens said. “Mr. Jim Hartshorne and this is his—”
Before she could finish, the sixty-seven-year-old man who had risen stuck out his hand to Singe and said, “I’m Jimmy Junior.”
She shook hands with him and said, “Anna Maude Singe and Ben Dill.”
“Who’s that, Junior?” the very old man said from his iron seat.
“Miss Singe and Mr. Dill, Daddy.”
“Dill? Dill?” the very old man said in a cracked voice. “Have a drink with us, Dill.”
Daphne Owens asked Dill and Singe what they would like. They told her. She said she would have it sent over and left. The older man patted the iron chair next to him and said, “You sit down here, young lady whose name I’m sorry I didn’t catch.”
“Anna Maude,” Singe said, sitting down next to the very old man, who wore gray seersucker trousers that climbed halfway up his chest. They covered most of a blue short-sleeved pullover shirt that had a little alligator on it. On his feet were blue running shoes. Purple glasses covered his eyes. His left ear, the one next to Singe, contained a tiny hearing aid. There was a little hair left just above the ears, but the rest was long gone. It had left a dome that was smooth and tan until it reached where the hairline had once been. There the wrinkles began — ridge after parallel ridge until they almost reached his nose, where they changed direction and turned into small vertical gulches that ran into short tiny fine wrinkles and others, not so fine, that wandered off in all directions. The old man’s lips were bluish in color and when he opened his mouth he revealed only a black hole. The nose was still sharp and inquisitive, but the once firm chin seemed ready to crumble. James Hartshorne Senior was ninety-seven years old.
“Dill, you sit down over here,” the old man said, patting the chair on the other side of him. “Junior, you drag up another chair.”
While his son dragged up another chair, the old man turned back to Anna Maude Singe. “I like women’s bare arms,” he said, giving Singe’s right one a quick stroke. “They turn me on, as much as anything turns me on these days, which isn’t a hell of a lot. But bare arms always did. Downed with light brown hair. Anybody read him nowadays?”