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 clothingâwell-cut, obviously expensive clothingâbut 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 againâthat 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 oneâme, 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 hundredâexcept 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?âfourteen, fifteen hundred take-home?”
“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 paymentâthe 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 dollarsâplus 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 betterâmale 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 dutyâat least, that's what we believeâso 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 placeâan 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. Peanutâyou know, for Planter's Peanuts. Then he turned
promoterâjunk-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 wereâwell, 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.”