This time Colder’s smile wasn’t his diffident one. It was the sardonic kind that lifted the left side of his mouth up and displayed three or four very white teeth. “You mean the one where the town’s major coke dealer got whacked out — or the one where they found the oil millionaire down at the bottom of his indoor-outdoor pool?”
“I don’t know what I mean,” Dill said. “But either one would do.”
Colder shook his head almost regretfully. “She was working on a liquor store owner who was shot and killed late one slow Tuesday night for thirty-three dollars. She also had the one where the wife over on Deep Four came home hot and tired from cleaning up after the white folks and found her husband in bed with their fifteen-year-old daughter. She killed ’em both with the breadknife. That one’s pretty well wrapped. Then there’s that other one Felicity was on where this guy who worked out in Packingtown pulls up for the light at Thirteenth and McKinley? And this other guy, who’s been twiddling his thumbs on the bench at the bus stop there, gets up, goes over, sticks his twenty-two target in the window, plinks the guy in the car four times, then turns and sort of ambles away. We gave that one to Felicity, too. She told me the other day she might be getting somewhere on it.”
“She had to be messed up in something,” Dill said. “Or by something.”
Strucker sighed again and heaved himself up out of the chair. “Well, Maybe yes and maybe no. But right now we’ve got to find out who killed her. We find that out, we’ll find out the rest. You know, Mr. Dill, homicide is usually the easiest crime there is to solve because the guy will call you up and say, ‘Hey, you’d better get over here on account of I just killed my girl friend with this here baseball bat.’ And when you get there he’s sitting on the edge of the bed, her next to him, with the bat still in his hands probably, and crying like a two-year-old. That’s your run-of-the-mill homicide. But then, every once in a while, you’ll get a tricky one. Like this one.”
Again, Strucker brought up one of his sighs from deep down in his chest. “They’re gonna hold the services at Trinity Baptist at ten A.M. on Saturday. There’ll be a limo for you or, if you like, you can ride with me and the Captain here.”
“I don’t know,” Dill said. “I guess I’d rather do it alone.”
“Sure.”
Dill frowned. “Why Trinity?” he said. “Felicity wasn’t a Baptist. In fact, she wasn’t much of anything.”
“I am,” Colder said. “I’m a deacon.”
“You?”
The sadness came then to Colder’s face, edging aside the chronic skepticism. “Your sister and I,” he said, “well, when my divorce comes through a couple of months from now, we were going to get married.” He studied Dill’s face. “She never told you, did she?”
“No,” Dill said. “She never told me.”
Chapter 5
During the past ten years Dill had lived for varying lengths of time in New York, Los Angeles, London, Barcelona, and twice in Washington. He rarely dreamed about any of them, not even Washington, where he had lived the longest. But occasionally he did and his dreams of the far-off, sometimes foreign cities invariably melded themselves into the city of his birth. Wilshire Boulevard and Third Avenue and the Edgware Road and even the Ramblas somehow ran dreamily past the houses he had lived in as a child, the schools he had attended, and the bars he later had frequented.
Many years ago, some said in 1926, an immense milk bottle had been erected in the city atop a one-story building that sat on a small triangular plot of land formed by the juncture of Ord Avenue, Twenty-ninth Street, and TR Boulevard, which was what the locals called the winding thoroughfare named for the first Roosevelt. It was a gigantic milk bottle, at least thirty feet high, with the risen cream clearly visible in its neck. It had perched for almost sixty years on top of the tiny convenience food store that Dill remembered as having been owned by a dairy. Springmaid Dairy. He assumed 7-Eleven had taken over both bottle and store by now. For some reason the giant milk bottle was always popping into Dill’s dreams of foreign climes. Something Freudian there, he thought, something Freudian, funny, and phallic, pleased as always by alliteration’s artful aid.
At 7:15 that evening, the evening of the day his sister had died of a bomb, Dill was driving the big rented Ford along TR Boulevard, one of the three thoroughfares that broke up the metropolitan grid as they curved and wound their way across the city from south to north. At one time streetcars had zipped along TR Boulevard’s center divider, but they had been abandoned in the late forties. Everyone now acknowledged what a dumb mistake that had been and hinted darkly of the plot by General Motors and the oil companies to scrap the trolleys in favor of buses. It was a conspiracy theory that had endured for nearly forty years.
Dill had rented the big Ford from Budget. It was the biggest Ford they had and he would have rented a Lincoln had one been available. Dill, the VW owner, always rented large Detroit cars with power everything, because he felt it was an opportunity not to be missed — something like renting your own dinosaur.
Just around the long curve of Twenty-seventh and TR the giant milk bottle finally came into view, but it was no longer white. It was flat black instead. Dill slowed to stare. The little building was vacant except for some empty glass display counters that looked dusty. Over the entrance was a large sign in fading psychedelic colors: Nebuchadnezzar’s Head Shop, but it looked as if Neb had long since gone bankrupt. Dill decided the failed shop was yet another nail driven into the coffin of the sixties and the seventies.
Three blocks past the black milk bottle, on the corner of Thirty-second and TR, stood a large frame three-story Victorian house tarted up in two shades of pastel green paint that already had begun to peel. The house was home to what was alleged to be either the third- or fourth-oldest press club west of the Mississippi. For its first sixty years or so the club had shared a building at a convenient downtown location with the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks. But the Mayor was mad at the media (with reason) just as the city’s redevelopment plan got under way, and the downtown press and Elks Club building had been inked in as the first to fall.
The club had never really offered much other than a bar that frequently stayed open after the legal closing hour, steaks of a remarkable quality from a mysterious source over in Packingtown, and a long-running table-stakes poker game that began promptly each Saturday at noon and ended just as promptly at 5 P.M. on Sunday so everybody could go home and watch the eager victims go through their weekly self-immolation on 60 Minutes.
Members of the working press actually belonged to the club. At least thirty percent of the membership had something or other to do with the news business. The rest were in advertising, the law, politics, or public relations. These were called associate members and their dues were five times as high as those of the working press. The minority felt that if the voteless majority wanted to hang out with members of the press, they could damn well pay for the privilege. The club’s unofficial motto was engraved on a brass plaque that had hung behind the bar for years: I Used to Be a Newspaperman Myself.
Dill had not been in the club since it moved to its new location. He had been almost an habitué of the place when it shared the five-story downtown building with the Elks — the press club up on the top two floors, the benevolent and protective order down below. In fact, when he worked nightside for UPI, Dill had often closed the place up.
He parked the Ford as near to the Victorian house as possible — a block away — and tried to remember whether he had ever paid his final bar tab. If not, he was sure there would be someone to remind him. The Greek, if no one else.