The Fourth Durango

by Ross Thomas

  When banished by the mayor, the chief would sometimes call the blond Dixie in Santa Barbara and offer to take her out for a pizza or a Mexican dinner, providing her husband was in New York or Tegucigalpa, London or Istanbul, or wherever it was that he went to make-in Fork’s opinion-more money than he and Dixie could ever spend.

  On that last Friday in June, B. D. Huckins and Sid Fork met in the corner booth of the Blue Eagle after work and ordered two gin martinis, causing Norm Trice to ask what the occasion was.

  “We just felt like it, Norm,” said the mayor.

  “Just felt like it?” Trice said to Fork, as though seeking a second opinion.

  Fork stared at him coldly and nodded.

  “You two come in here every night,” said Trice, “well, three or four nights a week anyhow, and B. D. here has her glass of white wine, maybe two, and you your couple of beers, and the only time either of you ever order a martini is when B. D. gets reelected every two years, or when you collar some guy’s wanted down in L.A. and get your picture in the paper and, come to think of it, that’s about every couple of years too. So when I say, ‘What’s up?’ I’m asking if maybe Iacocca’s called to say he’s gonna start making DeSotos again in a brand-new plant in our fine new industrial park that’s been growing weeds for three years. And if so, well, the gin’s on me and let’s all get shitfaced.”

  As Trice talked, the mayor stared down at the fifty-three-year-old wooden tabletop and the dozens of initials and dates that had been carved into it. The earliest date, she knew from previous inspections, was 12-3-35, which was the day Norm Trice’s father had opened the bar, naming it for the blue eagle that then symbolized Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration. In fact, a large old plywood NRA blue eagle, its paint fading, still hung behind the bar, clutching a gear with a few missing teeth in one claw, two and a half bolts of lightning in the other, and pointing its beak forever to the customer’s left.

  When she was sure Norm Trice was through talking, the mayor stared up at him with winter-rain eyes that, if soft and brown, would have been far too large for the delicate chin, full mouth, not quite perfect nose and a forehead that seven years ago Sid Fork had warned her was a mile too high and made her look about nineteen instead of twenty-nine.

  B. D. Huckins’s hair, which was a bit darker than honey, had then hung straight down, almost to her waist. The following morning she had had it hacked off into a Dutch-boy bob with bangs that ended just above the chilly gray eyes and camouflaged the smart high forehead. In her next campaign for mayor, she won by 56.9 percent-up 3.6 percent from the previous election. Sid Fork gave all the credit to the haircut.

  The mayor pinned Norm Trice with her gray stare for several seconds before she said, “Nobody’s called, Norm. Not Lee. Not Ronnie. Not even Mayor Sonny from down in the Springs. Nothing good’s happened. So if it’s not too much trouble, would you please go get the drinks?”

  After Trice left, mumbling about a guy having a right to ask, Sid Fork said, “I got four real nice T-bones at the Alpha Beta since he’s just out of the joint and I thought he might like a good steak.”

  “You get any charcoal?”

  “Sure.”

  “What else?”

  “Baked potatoes-big Idaho bastards.”

  “They’ll take an hour.”

  Fork nodded his agreement. “And I thought one of my Caesar salads and maybe some scratch biscuits.”

  “What about dessert?”

  “Vines doesn’t much look like a dessert eater. I don’t know about Adair.”

  “Okay. Let’s skip dessert. If they want sugar, I think I’ve got some B and B left.”

  A sullen Norm Trice returned and silently served the two martinis. After he went away, B. D. Huckins tasted hers, sighed and said, “What’s he like?”

  “Vines?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, he’s kind of low-key, more smooth than slick, and he’s still got all his hair.” Fork ran a palm over his own bald head. “About my age. Pretty good bones but not much meat on ’em. Real dark eyes, maybe black, and real dark hair with a nose not near as bad as mine or the eagle’s over there. He’s tall enough and looks-well, cagey-smart, the way a one-eyed jack looks.”

  “How long do they need?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “What about money?”

  “Vines won’t deal till he talks to Adair.”

  B. D. Huckins finished her martini, put the glass down and said, “Why was he disbarred?”

  “Some money disappeared.”

  “Whose?”

  “Adair’s.”

  “How much?”

  “They’re not sure but they say it was close to half a million. Just before the state started investigating Adair on that bribe thing, he put every dime into a blind trust and made Vines the administrator or trustee or whatever you call it.”

  “Administrator.”

  “After the bribe thing was dropped, the Feds went after Adair on tax evasion. But when they went to freeze his assets, they found he didn’t have any. Or hardly any. Vines swore he’d lost it all through imprudent investments. He even had records to show how he’d lost a lot of his own money along with Adair’s. But they brought Vines up before a hearing panel of the state bar court anyway and nailed him on four separate counts of misconduct that, from what I hear, were pretty vague. Then the state supreme court-the same one Adair’d been chief justice of-disbarred Vines. Just like that.”

  “None of them recused themselves?”

  “Nope.”

  “What really happened to the money?” the mayor said.

  “Who knows?”

  “Guess.”

  “I’d guess Vines managed to squirrel it away out of the country.”

  “Where?”

  “Jesus, B. D., I was on the phone long-distance part of the morning and most of the afternoon, finding out what I just told you. How the hell do I know what country?”

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s assume they’ve got money somewhere. The next question: who’s after Adair?”

  “That’s easy. Somebody who doesn’t want him to tell what he knows.”

  “Which is what?”

  Fork replied with a shrug and finished his martini.

  “Suppose you knew something you could blackmail somebody with,” B. D. Huckins said. “Somebody nasty as lye. You’d need a safe place to operate from, wouldn’t you? A sanctuary.”

  Fork’s mouth went down at the corners as he shook his head. “I wouldn’t want any sanctuary,” he said. “Sanctuary always sounds to me like some little locked room in the church basement with maybe an army cot and a slop jar. Or like some wildlife preserve with a ‘Keep Out-No Hunting’ sign that’s been all shot to hell. So if I was them, Vines and Adair, I wouldn’t be looking for any sanctuary.”

  “Right,” B. D. Huckins said. “So we’ll offer them just what we offered all the others. A hideout.”

  Chapter 7

  After parking the blue Mercedes in one of the four empty metered spaces in front of Figgs’ department store on Main Street in Durango, they went in just before closing and bought Jack Adair four Arrow shirts, two pairs of Levi corduroy pants, four pairs of socks and six pairs of Jockey shorts, Adair taking great pleasure in specifying his fifteen-and-half-inch neck and thirty-four-inch waist sizes.

  Vines paid in cash as a bemused Adair watched the fiftyish woman sales-clerk with the golden beehive hairdo wrap the sales slip around the twenty-dollar bills, stick everything into a metal cylinder and pop the cylinder into a pneumatic tube that shot it up to the cashier’s office on either the second or third floor.

  When they were again in the Mercedes, Adair said, “Makes you believe in time travel, doesn’t it? What do you think we warped into back there-nineteen fifty?”

  “’Fifty-three,” Vines said, “since that’s as far back as I can remember.”

  After a last stop at a liquor store, where Vines bought two bottles of Jack Daniel’s, they dr
ove to the Holiday Inn and went up to adjoining oceanside rooms on the fourth floor. Vines stood at the window in Adair’s room, again staring out at the Pacific that now seemed more green than blue. From the bathroom he could hear Adair splashing around in the tub, taking his first bath in fifteen months and singing in a surprisingly true baritone about leaving on a jet plane.

  Vines turned from the window when Adair came out of the bathroom, wearing gray corduroy pants and a blue oxford-cloth shirt that still had the fold creases in it. Adair joined Vines at the window, where they stared out at the ocean for nearly a minute. When the minute was almost up, Adair turned and went to the desk, where the whiskey stood next to the bucket of ice that Vines had fetched from the machine down the hall.

  “Want one?” Adair said as he dropped ice cubes into a glass and poured in the bourbon.

  “Not yet,” Vines said, still staring at the ocean.

  “So. When’d you last see her?”

  “Two weeks ago.”

  “And?”

  Vines turned. “I drove up to Agoura from La Jolla to pay the monthly bill. I pay it in cash every month on the fifteenth.”

  Adair nodded. “Where’s Agoura exactly-in relation to L.A.?”

  “North end of the San Fernando Valley. It’s hilly out there-low round hills that’re turning brown now but’ll turn green again when it rains. Some nice old oaks. It’s all very-” Vines searched for the word the doctor had used. “Nonthreatening.”

  “Soothing,” Adair translated.

  “Soothing. From her window she sometimes can see deer and even a coyote or two.”

  “Dannie always did like coyotes for some reason,” Adair said. Dannie was Danielle Adair Vines, wife of the disbarred lawyer; daughter of the jailbird justice. The topic of coyotes exhausted, Vines waited for Adair’s next question, confident of what it would be since it was the logical one to ask.

  “What do the doctors say?”

  “They’re guardedly optimistic,” Vines said. “But they’re being paid six thousand in cash each month, so they would be, wouldn’t they?”

  “But you’re not.”

  “What I am, Jack,” said Vines, his voice resigned, “is the messenger. I drive up there every month on the fifteenth and hand over the money envelope they’re too polite to count in my presence. While they’re counting it, I go sit in a nice little conference room with a big picture window. They bring Dannie in. She sits at the far end of the table and smiles the way she always smiled, as if you’re the most wonderful thing in her life. Then she says, ‘Who’re you? I don’t think I know you.’”

  Adair closed his eyes so he could rub them and the bridge of his meandering nose with thumb and middle finger. “No possibility of her faking it, is there?” he asked, opening his eyes and wincing as he realized that a yes would be worse than a no.

  “I wasn’t sure,” Vines said. “So after a couple of months of that who-are-you stuff, I started telling her I was Warren Beatty or Jerry Brown-who she always had half a crush on-or even Springsteen. But all she ever said was, ‘I don’t think I know you.’”

  “Well, shit, Kelly,” Adair said, turned back to the desk, started to pour himself more bourbon, thought better of it, put the glass down and again faced Vines. “Think she’d know me?”

  “We could find out.”

  “I take that for a no.”

  Vines nodded.

  Deciding he wanted another drink after all, Adair turned, picked up the glass and dropped more ice cubes into it. As he poured the bourbon, he said, “You tell her about Paul?”

  “On April thirteenth last year-one day after it happened-I drove up and handed over the money envelope two days early. She and I sat at the table in the little conference room again. There were two deer about thirty yards away and she was looking at them and smiling.”

  “When you said what?”

  “Something like, ‘Your brother, Paul, shot himself to death last night in a Tijuana whorehouse.’”

  “And?”

  “Nothing.”

  Adair sighed and sat down in a chair, slowly and carefully, as if in great and unfamiliar pain. He sat leaning forward, arms on his knees, holding the glass in both hands and staring at the carpet.

  “Darwin Loom,” Adair said.

  “The associate warden.”

  Adair nodded, not looking up. “He told me it was suicide before he even let me take that La Jolla call from you. Preparing me for the shock, I guess. Know what I told him?” Adair looked up from the carpet and cruelly parodied his own voice. “My son’d never take his own life. Not my son.” He gave his head a self-accusatory shake and resumed his examination of the carpet. After a long silence Adair again looked up and said in a suddenly weary voice, “So tell me what happened, Kelly. Not that crap you told me over the phone.”

  “You’re right. It was crap.”

  “Afraid you were being taped?”

  “Or that you were.”

  “Your letters weren’t any better. Same reason?”

  “Same reason.”

  Adair sighed. “Let’s hear it.”

  “The cops in Tijuana claim Paul was alone in an upstairs room when it happened. They also claimed he’d ordered up two girls. After I drove down there from La Jolla, one of the cops showed me what he said were sworn statements from both girls, who by then’d disappeared, apparently forever. The statements said the girls were on their way up to Paul’s room when they heard the shots.”

  “Why’d they call you-the Tijuana police?”

  “Paul had one of those ‘in case of emergency notify’ cards in his billfold. Your name, old address and phone number had been typed in and crossed out. Mine was written on the back of the card.”

  “So how’d they lay it out for you-the Tijuana cops?”

  “They said he poked a forty-five in his mouth and pulled the trigger twice.”

  “Twice?” Adair said.

  Vines nodded.

  “You saw him, I guess.”

  “I saw him, Jack. Most days I still see him. It was twice.”

  Shaking his head in disbelief, Adair gave the carpet a final inspection with blue eyes that once had seemed as innocent as a nine-day-old kitten’s. But when he looked up now it was obvious all innocence had either died or moved away. They look like blue dry ice, Vines thought, and if he moves them fast enough, I’ll get to hear them click.

  Below the bleak eyes and the meandering nose was Adair’s wide mouth that, in the past, was always twitching its ends up, as if at some cosmic joke. Now the joke was over and the mouth was clamped into a thin line that Adair pried open just wide enough to say, “Okay, Kelly, now you can tell me the real bad stuff.”

  Chapter 8

  The real bad stuff began a little less than fifteen months ago just after Vines was disbarred and Adair was sent to prison. It was then that Vines had packed one large suitcase, left his native state and driven the blue Mercedes to La Jolla, California, where he moved into a more or less rent-free beachfront condominium at Coast Boulevard and Pearl Street.

  The expensively furnished two-bedroom apartment belonged to a former client, the oil exploration firm of Sanchez & Maloney-usually referred to by those in the oil business as Short Mex and Big Mick. When oil was nudging $30 a barrel the firm had bought the condominium as a weekend retreat the two partners could be whisked to by company jet.

  They had managed to use it three times before offering it to Kelly Vines at the bargain rent of $3,000 a month, which he was to deduct from the $39,000 the wildcatters’ firm still owed him but couldn’t pay because oil by then was around $15 a barrel.

  The $39,000 fee was what Vines-prior to his disbarment-had billed Sanchez & Maloney for persuading a vice-president of one of the majors to drop a $5-million lawsuit. The suit charged that Joe Maloney had knocked the vice-president down in the Petroleum Club bar and stomped him with an almost brand-new pair of lizardskin cowboy boots as a half-drunk Paco Sanchez had olé-ed his partner on.

  Th
e major oil company vice-president withdrew his suit after Kelly Vines let him examine photocopies of registration forms obtained from a motel down in Houston near the Intercontinental Airport.

  “The young woman who shared these rooms with you on seven different occasions,” Vines had said in what he always thought of as his iced-snot voice, “does, in fact, bear your surname, although she would seem to have been not your wife, but your sixteen-year-old niece.”

  Six months after the suit was dropped, which was two days after Vines’s disbarment, Paco Sanchez and Joe Maloney came by to offer him the keys to the condominium.

  “You can stay there as long as talk’s cheap and shit stinks,” Sanchez had said.

  “Or until oil’s back up to twenty-five a barrel,” said Maloney.

  Sanchez smiled sadly. “Like I said, Kelly. Forever.”

  Kelly Vines gave away or abandoned most of what he still owned, packed the one large suitcase and drove to California. This was a month after Jack Adair had entered the Federal penitentiary at Lompoc and two weeks and three days after Vines’s wife had emptied her personal E. F. Hutton Cash Management fund of $43,912 and told friends, if not Vines, that she was flying to Las Vegas for a divorce.

  She spent only four hours in Las Vegas-just long enough to buy twenty-four Seconal capsules from a hotel bellhop and lose $4,350 at blackjack-before flying on to Los Angeles, where she checked into the Beverly Wilshire. Up in her room she searched the telephone directory and called the first psychiatrist she found who had a Beverly Hills address. With the use of only minimum guile, she talked him into giving her a same-day appointment.

  Danielle Vines convinced the psychiatrist during their nine-minute session that she was very nervous, extremely depressed and unable to sleep because of her father’s imprisonment and her husband’s disgrace. The psychiatrist gave her an evaluation appointment for 7 A.M. the following Tuesday, his first free hour, and wrote her a prescription for twenty-four Seconal capsules.

  Danielle Vines thanked him, had the prescription filled at the nearest pharmacy, returned to her room at the Beverly Wilshire and ordered up cinnamon toast, a bottle of wine and some Dramamine, the sea-and motion-sickness remedy. She ate the toast first, washing it down with the wine. Then she swallowed some Dramamine. After that she used what was left of the wine to wash down her hoard of four dozen Seconals, confident that the toast and Dramamine would help keep them down. After that she picked up the phone and called her brother, Paul Adair, in Washington, D.C., to tell him exactly what she had done.