For the past year and a half I’ve been either a double or a triple agent of the down-home variety. I have trouble with the triple-agent concept because it’s a mathematical abstraction and I, as you well know, am of an intuitive bent that simply abhors abstractions, especially Algebra 3, which I flunked twice.
The major players in this unsavory melodrama have been me (starring, of course), Honest John Strucker, Jake Spivey (in the wings so far), and my current paramour, Captain Gene Colder of Homicide, who — although fearful of mien — is actually a real domp, which down here is what they call a cross between a dope and a wimp. Money’s involved. Tons of it. And politics. And some mysterious international misterioso called Clyde Brattle who you must’ve heard of. I’ve learned just enough to get scared and maybe just enough to land Colder the domp in jail. Maybe. So this evening I mail this and tomorrow I rise bright and early and head for the FBI where I shall Tell All.
By the way (which is easier to spell than incidentally), I have taken out a $250,000 life-insurance policy naming you as sole beneficiary. If anything happens to me, call my lawyer, Anna Maude Singe, who has both looks and brains and you could do worse, which, as we both know, you often have.
Oh. One more thing. If anything does happen to me, don’t believe one goddamn word they tell you down here. And now that I’ve cheered you up and got you interested, I’ll say goodbye and also send you—
— all my love,
The letter had been written on his sister’s favorite stationery: ruled sheets from a yellow legal pad. The two sheets were not quite filled with the beautiful copperplate she had taught herself from a book during that summer vacation when she was twelve years old. Before that she had printed everything. Or almost everything.
Dill read the letter as he stood at his tall, almost floor-to-ceiling windows that gave out on the old man’s apartment building across the street. When he looked up, he saw the old man was outside with his Polaroid, taking a picture of the dark-gray government Mercury that was parked in the No Parking zone. Two men got out of the Mercury and moved toward the old man. They seemed to be protesting. The old man yelled at them and pointed at the No Parking sign. The two government men pointed at the old man’s camera and said something else. He quickly hid the camera behind his back and again yelled at them. Dill couldn’t hear what he was yelling. Threats and curses probably.
A Metropolitan Police car pulled up and two black-uniformed cops got out to see what the trouble was. The uniformed cops blurred and Dill realized his eyes were wet. He turned from the window and wiped away the tears.
They all killed her in a way, he thought, and now all will pay just a little something on account. Otherwise, the preacher was wrong and she will have died in vain, although dying in vain isn’t really all that bad since nearly everyone does it. It’s the living in vain you really have to watch out for, and Felicity never wasted a day doing that.
He decided he had about five or ten minutes before the government agents, whoever they were, came knocking. He went to the wall phone in the kitchen and called long-distance information for the number of the airport Holiday Inn where Anna Maude Singe was waiting. As the phone rang, Dill wondered how good a lawyer she really was, and whether she would like Washington. Most of all he wondered whether she could keep him out of jail.