“Who else would he be aiming at?”
“Well, there’s you and there’s Miss Singe.”
“Nobody was shooting at me.”
“What about Miss Singe?”
“Her either.”
Strucker drew in some more cigar smoke, tasted it for a moment, blew it up in the air, and said, “I made some phone calls to Washington. Not many. Two or three at the most. It seems you’re kind of well known up there, at least by some folks. From what I understand you’re nosing around after some renegade spooks — and every last one of them a real honest-to-God hard case. Maybe one of them figured you were getting too close, dressed himself up in an out-of-state-cop uniform (that sounds like a spook, doesn’t it?), took a shot at you, missed, and hit poor old Clay Corcoran instead.” He gave his big shoulders a strange almost Mediterranean shrug. “Could’ve happened that way.”
“No,” Dill said, “it couldn’t’ve.” He paused then, partly because of Strucker’s evasions, and partly because he didn’t really want to say what he was going to say next. “I understand,” Dill said, “that you’d like to be mayor.”
Strucker waved his cigar deprecatingly. “Just talk.”
“But if the talk turns into something else, Jake Spivey’s going to be awfully useful to you, right?”
“Well, yes, sir, his help would be much appreciated, if he sees fit to give it.”
Dill leaned forward, as if to examine Strucker more closely. “I can jerk the chain on Jake,” he said. “I can send him down the pipes where he won’t be of any use to anyone.”
Strucker again sucked on his cigar, took it out of his mouth, looked at it, and said, “Your oldest friend.”
“My oldest friend.” Dill leaned back in his chair. His voice turned cold and distant and nearly uninflected. “She was my sister. The only family I had. I knew her better than I’ve ever known anyone in my life. She wasn’t bent. She wasn’t on anyone’s pad. I know that. And I’m pretty sure you know it. I also think you know what happened to Felicity and why. I need to know what you know. So either you tell me or I flush my old friend and your political future right down the drain.”
Strucker nodded almost sympathetically. “Must be kinda hard, choosing between a live friend and dead kin.”
“Not all that hard.”
“For you, maybe not.” He drew in some more smoke, blew it out, and again examined his cigar thoughtfully. “How long can I have — a week?”
“Three days,” Dill said.
“A week’d be better.”
“I would say okay, but three days is all I’ve got.”
Strucker rose, stretched a little, and sighed his heavy sigh. “Three days then.” He stared down at Dill almost curiously. “You really would, wouldn’t you — dump your old friend?”
“Yes,” Dill said, “I really would.”
Strucker nodded again as though reconfirming some expected, but nevertheless unpleasant, news, turned, and walked out of the room. Dill watched him go. When the sliding door closed, Dill got up and went behind Spivey’s desk. He ran his hand beneath the well of the desk and eventually found the switch. He went down on his hands and knees to examine it. The switch was turned to “on.” Dill left it that way, pulled out the top right-hand drawer of the desk, then the middle drawer, and finally the deep bottom one. The Japanese tape recorder was in the bottom drawer, turning slowly. It obviously had been installed by an expert. Dill closed the drawer gently and rose.
He looked around the room and then said in a firm loud clear voice, “I wasn’t kidding him, Jake. I really would.”
Chapter 30
The party at Jake Spivey’s began breaking up when the sun went down, and it was a little after 9 P.M. when Dill and Anna Maude Singe arrived at the yellow brick duplex on the corner of Thirty-second and Texas Avenue. Lights were on in the ground-floor apartment. The rented Ford’s radio said the temperature had fallen to 93 degrees, but Dill thought it was still much hotter than that.
“Well, he’s home,” Singe said, looking at the lights in Harold Snow’s apartment.
“Keep her in the living room if he and I go in the kitchen,” Dill said. “If she goes in the kitchen, you go with her and make sure she stays there for at least two or three minutes.”
“Okay.”
They got out of the car and moved up the walk to the door with the blistered brown molding. Dill rang the bell. Seconds later, the door was opened by Harold Snow, who wore a T-shirt, tennis shorts, and a cross look. Before Snow could say anything, Dill said in a too-loud voice, “We’ve come about the rent, Harold.”
There was a brief puzzled look that lasted for less than a second until the coyote eyes signaled their understanding. Snow turned his head to make sure his voice would carry back into the living room. “Yeah. Right. The rent.”
Snow led them through the small foyer and into the living room, where Cindy McCabe was applying pink polish to her toenails and watching a television program that featured elderly British actors. Dill introduced the two women and Cindy McCabe said, “Hi.”
“Turn that shit off,” Snow said. “They’re here about the rent.”
McCabe recapped the nail-polish bottle, rose, and in an effort to protect her freshly painted toes, walked awkwardly on her heels over to the large television set and switched it off. “What’s with the rent?” she said.
“God, it’s hot outside,” Dill said, hoping he wouldn’t have to add: It sure makes you thirsty.
He didn’t. The cleverness again flitted across Harold Snow’s face and he said, “You want a beer or something?”
Dill smiled. “A beer would be great.”
“Get us four beers, will you, doll?” Snow said to Cindy McCabe. Before she could reply, Anna Maude Singe said, “Let me help, Cindy.” McCabe nodded indifferently and started toward the kitchen, still walking awkwardly on her heels. Singe went with her.
“Where’s my thousand bucks?” Snow said in a low hurried voice.
“Did you put it in, Harold?”
“I put it in, just like you said — in the living room. Where’s my money?”
Dill took the ten folded hundred-dollar bills from his pants pocket and handed them to Snow, who counted them quickly. “Jesus,” he said, “couldn’t you even’ve found an envelope?” He counted the bills a second time and then stuffed them down into the right pocket of his tennis shorts.
“You’re sure it works, Harold?” Dill said.
“It works. I checked it. Voice-activated, just like before. Funny thing is, though, I found something else.”
“What?”
“What comes extra.”
Dill shook his head wearily. “The rent, Harold. You don’t have to pay this month’s rent.”
“What about next month?”
Dill scowled. “Remember your knee, Harold.”
The warning made Snow take a quick step back. It was almost a skip. “But I don’t have to pay this month’s rent, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, what I found was that somebody else’d wired the place. The living room, I mean. Looked like maybe a cop job.”
“What d’you mean, cop job?”
“I mean a pro did it. Not as slick as me, but he still knew what he was doing. So I left it in place, but what I did was, I squirted some piss into the mike. It’ll still pick up sound, but it’ll take a week to get the distortion out. If they can’t, all they’ll have is funny noise.” He frowned. “You don’t look too surprised.”