“Around in there,” Colder said.
“Which left her about six or seven hundred a month to live on. Well, figuring in the tax break it could be done, I guess, with supermarket coupons and Junior League thrift-shop clothes and library books and TV for entertainment. But then there was that balloon payment — the creative financing. Her lawyer says it’s due the first of next month, which will be exactly eighteen months after she bought the place. That balloon payment is for forty-eight thousand dollars — plus interest.”
Dill turned from the window and looked down at Strucker. “How much did my sister have in her checking account?”
“Three hundred and thirty-two dollars.”
“So how do you figure she was going to come up with fifty thousand or so by the first of next month?”
“That’s what we need to talk about, Mr. Dill.”
“Okay,” Dill said, moved back to the bed, sat down, and leaned against the headboard. “Let’s talk.”
Strucker cleared his throat, puffed on his cigar, waved some smoke away, and began. “Detective Dill had a fine record, an exceptional one. For her age, none better — male or female. Now I gotta be the first to admit we transferred her outta bunco into homicide as sort of our token woman, along with three coloreds and a couple of Mexicans. It was either that or lose some federal grant money. But by God she was good. And we jumped her up to second-grade over a raft of other guys, some of ’em with a hell of a lot more seniority. In two more years, maybe less, she’d’ve made sergeant easy. So what I’m saying, Mr. Dill, is your sister was one damn good cop, a fine one, and she got killed in the line of duty — at least, that’s what we believe — so we’re gonna bury her on Saturday just like I told you and then we’re gonna find out just what the hell went wrong.”
“You mean why she went bad,” Dill said.
“We don’t know that she did, though, do we?” Captain Colder said. Dill looked at him. Colder’s half-smile was back in place — an almost hesitant smile full of diffidence. Or deception, Dill thought, for there was absolutely nothing diffident about Colder other than the smile. It’s his disguise, Dill decided. He wears it like a false beard. The smile failed to hide the true skeptic’s face with its inquisitive nose, wise forehead, cold blue doubting-Thomas eyes, and the chin that almost said, “Prove it.” It was a face that, with a slightly different coloring, might have found happiness in the Inquisition. Dill felt its owner was reasonably content as a homicide captain.
When Chief Strucker cleared his throat again, Dill turned back to him. “We’re gonna get to the bottom of this, Mr. Dill,” he said. “Like I told you over the phone: it’s what we do. It’s what we’re good at.”
Dill nodded, rose, and held out his hand, first for Colder’s empty glass, then for Strucker’s. Both men hesitated. Then Strucker sighed and said, “I shouldn’t, but I will, thanks.”
After Dill poured the fresh drinks and served them, Colder said, “What exactly do you do in Washington, Mr. Dill?”
“I work for a Senate subcommittee.”
“Doing what?”
Dill smiled. “Getting to the bottom of things.”
“Must be interesting.”
“Sometimes.”
Strucker drank half an inch of his Scotch, sighed his pleasure, and said, “You and Felicity were close.”
“Yes. I think so.”
“Your parents are dead.” It wasn’t a question either.
“They were killed in a one-car crash up in Colorado when I was twenty-one and she was eleven.”
“What’d your daddy do?” For the first time, Strucker asked as if he didn’t already know the answer.
“He was an army fighter pilot during the war,” Dill said. “And after that he was a professional student for four years, which was as long as his GI Bill lasted. He studied at the Sorbonne, the University of Mexico, and at the University of Dublin. He never got a degree. When all that finally ended, he became a crop duster, then a Kaiser-Frazer salesman, and once in a while he would be Mr. Peanut — you know, for Planter’s Peanuts. Then he turned promoter — junk-car racing, donkey baseball, stuff like that, and finally he bought out an almost bankrupt foreign-language correspondence school. He was still running that when he went up to Colorado to see about investing in a ghost town. That’s when the accident happened. It killed them both. I sometimes think my mother must’ve been relieved.”
Strucker nodded sympathetically. “Didn’t leave much then.”
“Not a dime.”
“You must’ve almost raised Felicity.”
“I was in my first year at law school down at the university. I dropped out and got a job with UPI covering the state House of Representatives. Felicity was eleven and I tried to make sure she went to school and did her homework. By the time she was twelve she was doing the shopping and the cooking and a lot of the housework. At eighteen she won a full scholarship to the university and I got an offer to go to Washington. After that, she was pretty much on her own.”
“Well, sir,” Strucker said, “I’d say you did a real fine job of bringing her up. Real fine.”
“We always liked each other,” Dill said. “We were… well, good friends, I guess.”
“Did you stay in close touch?” Colder asked.
“I usually called her every week or ten days. She almost never called me. She wrote letters instead. Letters from back home, she called them. She thought everyone who moved away should get letters from back home and that’s what hers were. Gossip. Base rumors. Mild scandal. Who went broke and who got rich. Who died. Who got divorced and why. It was a kind of diary, I suppose, not about her so much, but about the city. She actually loved this place for some reason.”
“I take it you don’t,” Colder said.
“No.”
“You didn’t happen to save those letters, did you?” Strucker asked.
“I wish I had.”
“Yeah. So do we. She didn’t save copies either. We went through her place today. Nothing.”
“What about cancelled checks?”
“Another zero,” Colder said. “Utilities, house payments, phone bills, groceries from Safeway, car payments, a couple of department store charge accounts. The usual.”
“No record of that down payment she made on the duplex?”
“The thirty-seven thousand in cash?” Colder said. “All we know is that it was all in hundred-dollar bills, which are getting to be about as common as twenties used to be.”
“No trace, huh?” Dill said.
“None.”
“Who holds the mortgage?”
“The former owner, who didn’t object in the least to all that cash money,” Colder said. “She’s a sixty-seven-year-old widow who sold the place to Felicity and then moved down to Florida. St. Petersburg. I talked to her today. She’s got no complaints. The monthly payments were almost always on time, but she is a little worried now about that balloon payment.”
“I don’t blame her,” Dill said.
Strucker fished around in his pants pockets and came up with a key. He offered it to Dill.
“What’s this?” Dill said.
“Her house key. The upstairs is sealed off right now, but our people will be all through before noon tomorrow so there’s no reason you can’t go in after that and, well, look around — stay there, if you want to.”
Dill rose, took the key, and sat back down on the bed. He looked first at Strucker and then at Colder. “What was she working on?”