“She ever talk about her work?” Dill said.
“Sometimes.”
“Was she working on anything that might’ve caused someone to plant a bomb in her car?”
Singe shook her head no. “Not that she ever told me about.” She paused, took another drink, and said, “There is something I think you should know.”
“What?”
“She worked for a man called Strucker.”
“The chief of detectives,” Dill said. “He called me this morning.”
“Well, he’s pretty upset about Felicity. Two hours after she died he called me and the first thing he wanted to know, even before he told me she was gone, was whether I was the executor of her estate, except he didn’t say executor, he said executrix.”
Dill nodded his appreciation of the fine Liberationist point.
“I told him yes, sir, I am, and then he told me she’d died and before I could ask how or why or even say oh-my-God-no, he asked me to meet him down at Felicity’s bank.”
“Safety deposit box?”
She nodded. “Well, I was there when they opened it, me crying and mad at the… the goddamned waste. They brought it all out of the box, one thing at a time. There was her birth certificate, then her will, then some pictures of your parents, and then her passport. She was always talking about going to France, but she never got around to it. That’s what she majored in, you know, French.”
“I know.”
“Well, the last thing they brought out of the box was the insurance policy. She took it out just three weeks ago. It was a term policy naming you as sole beneficiary.”
Anna Maude Singe stopped talking and looked away.
“How much?” Dill said.
“Two hundred and fifty thousand,” she said and looked quickly back at Dill, as if to catch his reaction. There was none, except in the eyes. Nothing else in his face changed except the large soft gray eyes that suddenly iced over.
“Two hundred and fifty thousand,” Dill said finally.
She nodded.
“Let’s have another drink,” he said. “I’ll buy.”
Chapter 4
At 5:45 P.M. Benjamin Dill was hanging his dark-blue funeral suit in the closet of room 981 in the Hawkins Hotel when they knocked on the door. After he opened it he automatically classified them as policemen. Both wore civilian clothing — well-cut, obviously expensive clothing — but the carefully bored eyes, the practiced intimidating carriage, and the far too neutral expressions around the mouths betrayed their calling.
Both were tall, well over six feet, and the older one was wide and thick, while the younger one was rake-lean, tan, and just a trifle elegant. The wide one stuck out his hand and said, “I’m Chief Strucker, Mr. Dill. This is Captain Colder.”
Dill shook Strucker’s heavy freckled hand and then accepted the one offered by Colder. It was slim and exceptionally strong. Colder said, “Gene Colder, homicide.” Dill said, “Come in.”
They came into the room a little warily, the way policemen do, sweeping it with their eyes and classifying its contents and occupant, not out of curiosity, but habit. Dill waved them to the medium-sized room’s two easy chairs. Strucker lowered himself carefully with a sigh. Colder sat down like a cat. Strucker took a cigar from his pocket, held it up for Dill to see, and said, “Mind?”
“Not at all,” Dill said. “Would you like a drink?”
“I think I would, by God,” Strucker said. “It’s been a hard one.”
Dill took a bottle of Old Smuggler from his suitcase, removed the plastic covers from two glasses on the writing desk, fetched another glass from the bathroom, and poured three drinks. “Water?” he asked. Strucker shook his head. Colder said no thanks. Dill handed them their drinks, took his own into the bathroom, ran some water into it, came back out, and sat down on the bed. He waited until Strucker got his cigar going and had swallowed some of the Scotch.
“Who did it?” Dill asked.
“We don’t know yet.”
“Why did they do it?”
Strucker shook his big head. “We don’t know that either.” He sighed again — that long, heavy, despairing sigh. “We’re here for a couple of reasons. One is to try and answer your questions and the other is to offer you the city’s and the department’s official sympathy. We’re goddamned sorry. All of us.”
“Your sister,” Colder said and paused. “Well, your sister was one exceptional… person.”
“How much did she make a year?” Dill said.
Strucker looked at Captain Colder for the answer. “Twenty-three-five,” the Captain said.
“And the annual premium on a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar term life-insurance policy for a twenty-eight-year-old woman in good health is how much?”
Strucker frowned. When he did the cap of thick wiry gray hair moved down toward black eyebrows that guarded the already guarded eyes whose color was more nearly green than hazel. The eyes were set close to a wandering nose that had been broken once. Perhaps twice. Well below the nose was the tight, thin-lipped mouth that seemed to disapprove of almost everything, and below the mouth was the doorstep chin. It was a worn, lined, highly intelligent face that at fifty-three might well have been on its third owner.
Strucker was still frowning when he said, “You heard about that, huh?”
“I heard about it.”
Colder smiled slightly, not enough to display any teeth, but just enough to register mild disapproval and a touch of regret. “Her lady lawyer, right?”
Dill nodded.
Strucker finished his glass of whisky, put it down on a table, and turned back to Dill. “According to the Arbuckle Life Insurance people, the annual premium was $518 and she paid it in a lump sum, all cash, on the fourteenth of last month.”
“Not a very wise investment for someone with no dependents,” Dill said. “No surrender value. She couldn’t ever borrow against it. Of course, if she knew she was going to die, she might’ve wanted to leave something to a loved one — me, in this case. You don’t think it was suicide, though, do you?”
“It wasn’t suicide, Mr. Dill,” Colder said.
“No, I didn’t think it was.” Dill rose, walked over to the window, and looked down nine stories at Broadway and Our Jack. “Then there’s her house.”
“The duplex,” Captain Colder said.
“Yes. When she wrote me about it seventeen months or so back she said she was buying herself a little house. I assumed it was an old bungalow, around sixty or seventy thousand dollars. You can still buy them for that here, can’t you?”
“Around in there,” Colder said, “but they’re getting scarce.”
“Okay, so how much would she have to put down on a sixty-or seventy-thousand-dollar house? Twenty percent? That would be twelve to fourteen thousand. I had a few bucks to spare, not many, so I called and asked if she could use a couple of thousand to help out with the down payment. She said she didn’t need it because it was being creatively financed. She sort of laughed when she said creatively. I didn’t press. I just assumed she was putting five or maybe ten down, taking out a first mortgage of around fifty or less, and a balloon payment for the rest. On twenty-three-five a year she could just about’ve managed it.” Dill paused, drank some of his Scotch and water, and said, “But that’s not what she did, was it?”
“No, sir,” Strucker said. “It wasn’t.”
“What she did,” Dill said, “was to buy a fine old duplex out on Thirty-second and Texas for one hundred and eighty-five thousand. She put thirty-seven thousand cash down and took out a first mortgage of one hundred thousand at fourteen percent, which meant her monthly payments were going to be around thirteen hundred — except she was getting six-fifty a month from the guy she rented the ground floor to, so that meant she’d only have to come up with six-fifty a month, maybe seven hundred. You say she was making nineteen hundred gross a month so that would be what? — fourteen, fifteen hundred take-home?”