by Ross Thomas
Adair said, “So after she called Paul, he called you.”
“No. He called the hotel back and got it organized. Doctor. Ambulance. Name of a hospital. No cops. No press.”
Adair nodded. “I can almost hear him.”
“He called the hospital then, which turned out to be in Santa Monica, and started out by talking money to them, which he said they seemed to appreciate. Once Paul had the hospital squared away-private room, round-the-clock nurses, a specialist, no visitors and all-then he called me.”
Adair examined Vines thoughtfully. “First he told you about Dannie. And after that I’d say he got around to what was really on his mind.”
Vines sighed. “He parceled out the blame, Jack.”
“Who got the most-me?”
“He was very evenhanded. We each got half.”
“Then he flew out here?”
“That same night. I met him at LAX and we went to St. John’s in Santa Monica.”
“The hospital.”
Vines nodded. “They’d pumped her stomach by then and she was out of intensive care and in the private room with a private nurse. But something had snapped or popped or fused because she didn’t know me and she didn’t know Paul. So after a few minutes we left and Paul went apeshit again.”
“Still carrying on about you and me?”
“Still. But by then I was numb and the more he ranted, the more numb I got. It was almost pleasant-something like codeine. Finally, I got tired of listening and told him to fuck off.”
Adair rose, walked to the window and looked out. “This the longest day of the year?”
“Tuesday was.”
Adair turned. “What’d Paul say exactly, during his ranting and raving-as near as you can recollect?”
“He said he was going to ask them for a six-month leave of absence and if they wouldn’t give it to him, fuck ’em, he’d quit. He said he’d use the leave to get to the bottom of the cesspool that you and I’d dragged Dannie down into. He also went on and on about the bribe and old Justice Fuller-but especially the bribe. How much was it really, and did somebody really take it, and who’d I really think put up the money? He used ‘really’ a lot.”
“So what’d you say?”
“I told him I really didn’t know, wished him well, drove back down to La Jolla and waited upon events.”
Adair again turned to the window. “I think we’re going to have one spectacular sunset.” Still staring at the ocean, he said, “How long did it take exactly?”
“To kill him? Thirty-two days.”
Adair turned from the window with a frown that was more thoughtful than puzzled. “Then he must’ve been getting somewhere.”
“That occurred to me.”
“He didn’t do anything half-smart like sending you a report or a letter about what he was up to?”
“He called once.”
“When?”
“Two days before he was killed. He said he was going to meet some guy in Tijuana who claimed to know something. I suggested he meet him instead at the San Diego zoo near the koalas with about five hundred witnesses around. Paul said he couldn’t do that because the guy said La Migra was looking for him at all border checks. I suggested a nice long phone call. He said a phone call was never as good as a face-to-face. I asked if the guy had a name. He said it was Mr. Smith, laughed, hung up and that’s the last thing he ever said to me.”
“So he went down to Tijuana and somebody shot him twice and fixed it up as a suicide,” Adair said. “If they’d shot him once, it might’ve worked, but twice meant they wanted to make it a statement-a declaration.”
“That also occurred to me.”
“Then there’s poor Blessing Nelson and that price on my head.”
“Another statement,” Vines said. “And certainly a declaration.”
“Plus the girl photographer in the back of the pink van. Floradora Flowers of Santa Barbara. When’re we going to check them out?”
“First thing tomorrow.”
Adair looked down at the carpet again. “Was there an autopsy on Paul?”
“A perfunctory one in T.J. I claimed his body. After I called his lawyer in Washington, I had it cremated. It was in his will.”
“Who got the ashes?”
Vines nodded at the window. “The ocean. That was also in his will, although he probably meant the Atlantic. But since he didn’t specify, he wound up in the Pacific. He didn’t leave much-about ten thousand in a checking account, a two-year-old BMW and a hundred-thousand whole life policy some friend had sold him. He left it all to one of those Washington think tanks that’s still trying to decide whether it’s neo-conservative or neo-liberal.”
“Not that it matters much anymore,” Adair said, turning yet again to look at the ocean. “Funny about Paul, though. He never got interested in money-at least, not the way you and I did. If he hadn’t gone into government, he could’ve made himself a ton of it.”
“Maybe.”
Adair turned to examine Vines with undisguised curiosity. “You ever like Paul?”
“I grew up with him and roomed with him for four years.”
“Evasive.”
Vines looked at something just beyond Adair’s left ear. “I don’t suppose I ever liked him. Not really. I respected his mind, envied his looks, despised his politics and very much wanted to fuck his sister.”
“Which you eventually did.”
“Which I eventually did.”
Adair, his curiosity again evident, asked, “You ever like Dannie?”
“Very much.”
“And now?”
“And now, Jack, I just love her.”
Chapter 9
It was still light that last Friday evening in June when they stopped along the outer edge of the seventh hairpin turn up on Garner Road. By raising himself slightly in the front seat of the Mercedes, Jack Adair could inspect most of Durango down below, including its five-block-long, three-block-wide business district, or downtown, which was bounded on the west by the Southern Pacific tracks. Just beyond the tracks were the ocean and what Chief Sid Fork liked to call “the longest one-foot-wide sharp-rock beach in the entire state of California.”
As Adair had predicted, the sunset was spectacular, its last rays bathing the business district, including the lone seven-story skyscraper, in a soft warm light a stranger might have compared to gold-a more knowledgeable native to brass.
Adair was still taking in the view when he asked, “How much’ve we got left in that Bahamian bank?”
“Around three hundred thousand.”
Adair turned to stare at Vines with disbelief and even shock.
“We had expenses, Jack. Your legal fees. The high cost of money laundering. Dannie’s treatment. Blessing Nelson’s mother. And me-since I ate and drank some of it up.”
“We’ll just have to make do then,” Adair said, remembered something and added, “Keep sending that five hundred a month to Blessing’s mother.”
“For how long?”
“Until we run out of money,” said Adair, and resumed his inspection of Durango down below.
Five blocks east of the SP tracks, the city’s business district had failed in its attempt, many years ago, to flow around Handshaw Park, which was two city blocks of pines, magnolias, coral trees, eucalyptus, green grass when it rained, nine concrete picnic tables, a children’s broken slide, some swings and a gray bandstand that once had been painted a glistening white.
Back when the bandstand still glistened, select members of the Durango High School marching band made a few vacation dollars by playing concerts in the park on summer Sunday afternoons. But as the city’s tax base shrank, the budget ax fell first on the summer concerts, then on the marching band itself and, finally, on its director, Milt Steed, who had also taught art and, when last heard from, was playing cornet down in Disneyland.
Handshaw Park had been called simply City Park until B. D. Huckins was elected mayor. She renamed it after Dicky Handshaw
, who had served four terms as mayor until Huckins beat him in the 1978 election, which was still remembered as the most vicious in the city’s 148-year history.
Renaming the park had seemed at first like a nice conciliatory gesture. But that was before word got around of an exchange in the Blue Eagle Bar between Norm Trice and a prominent local attorney who regarded himself as a budding political savant. The attorney had claimed that next time out B.D. Huckins could easily be defeated by almost any candidate with balls and a few brains.
“Like you, huh?” Trice had asked.
“Sure. Like me. Why not?”
“Because,” Trice had explained in a patient voice, “B. D. didn’t name that park after Dicky Handshaw so folks’d remember him. She did it so guys like you’d remember what happened to him.”
Kelly Vines said, “Seen enough?”
Jack Adair nodded, took one last look and settled back down into the leather seat. “About two dozen streets running east and west,” he said, “and maybe two and a half dozen running north and south. Too many vacant lots. No architectural landmarks to speak of, unless you count a lot of Victorian piles all tarted up in that green and cream they like to use. Probably bed-and-breakfast inns now-or lawyers’ offices. Wonder why they always use cream and green?”
After Vines said he didn’t know, Adair asked another question. “And since I sure as hell didn’t see any of them down by the tracks, where do you think the rich folks live?”
“Up here in the hills,” Vines said as he drove slowly down the cul-de-sac called Don Emilio Drive. “Where they always live.”
At the end of the dead-end street they could see Mayor Huckins’s neat blue two-bedroom bungalow and admire her fine stand of jacarandas. The other six houses that lined the short drive were no more grand than the mayor’s. Appraising each house as they drove by, Jack Adair said, “Well, if this is how the rich live, God help the poor.”
It was the mayor herself who opened the door after Vines rang the bell. She wore a black skirt, a gray silk blouse and not much makeup. Her jewelry consisted of a man’s gold tank watch that may have come from Cartier and a pair of plain gold earrings that may have come from a drugstore. Vines thought she looked as though she didn’t much care where either came from.
B. D. Huckins looked first at Adair, then at Vines and back at the older man. “You’re Jack Adair,” she said, holding out her hand. As they shook hands, she said, “How’d you like to be called-Judge, Mr. Chief Justice or Mr. Adair?”
“Jack, if it won’t make you uncomfortable.”
Huckins smiled a noncommittal smile and looked at Kelly Vines. “Mr. Vines,” she said, holding out her hand.
“Mayor Huckins,” said Vines, accepting the hand and finding that it reminded him strangely of the blond Dixie’s. The mayor’s hand was as slim and cool and firm as Dixie’s, but the handshake didn’t last nearly as long because it was of the quick squeeze and even quicker release variety favored by seasoned campaigners.
She led them from a small foyer into the living room, whose principal piece of furniture was a long cream couch from the 1930s in remarkable repair. There was also a chocolate-brown leather club chair, which, from a carefully positioned brass floor lamp, was obviously where she did her reading. Both chair and couch were drawn up to a coffee table that was actually an old steamer trunk, laid on its side and plastered with bright labels from ancient European hotels and extinct steamship lines.
On the well-polished oak floor was a large and gaudy woven wool rug that Vines suspected of being from the Yucatán. There was no television set but plenty of books and on the walls were three Monet prints and two posters.
One of the posters displayed a tasty-looking bunch of wet purple grapes with a slogan that read: “The Wrath of Grapes. Join the Boycott Again!” The other poster showed a highly stylized worker banging away at something with a couple of hammers. Below him was Bertolt Brecht’s forlorn hope: “Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.”
Vines followed Adair and Huckins around the dining area’s glass and chrome table, into the kitchen, out the back door and onto a used-brick patio where Chief of Police Sid Fork, wearing an apron made out of what looked like mattress ticking, presided over the charcoal grill.
They talked first about the weather and, after exhausting that, turned to the presidential primary campaigns whose earlier stages Adair said he had followed from behind the penitentiary walls. He introduced his fifteen-month stay in Lompoc by referring to it as, “When I was in jail.” With that out of the way, Vines noticed that both Fork and Huckins relaxed, although he thought the bourbon everyone was drinking could have had something to do with it.
“When I was in jail,” Adair had said, and went on to describe his informal, admittedly unscientific sampling of the inmates’ political preferences. He confessed he was somewhat surprised to find an overwhelming majority rigidly conservative and almost morbidly patriotic.
Sid Fork said he wasn’t surprised. “If you’d’ve asked them to come up with an ideal ticket for either party, they’d’ve said John Wayne for President and Clint Eastwood for Vice President. And if you’d’ve mentioned that Wayne was dead, they’d’ve said that’s all you know because of what they’d heard from a guy who knows a cousin of Wayne’s bodyguard. And this guy who knows the bodyguard’s cousin swore on a stack of Bibles that the Duke’s holed up in Rio Lobo, not dead at all, but just waiting for the right moment. And if you’d’ve asked them where the hell Rio Lobo is, they’d’ve said exactly twenty-nine point four miles west of Fargo.”
His analysis delivered, the chief took a long drink of his whiskey and water, set the glass down, turned to the grill, gave one of the steaks an almost vicious stab with a fork, flipped it over and turned back to Adair.
“What’d you really think of those assholes they had you locked up with?”
“I sometimes found their thought processes interesting and oddly entertaining. But then I’m partial to the odd.”
“Most of ’em stupid?”
“None too bright anyway.”
“Any of ’em smart-maybe even brilliant?”
“A few.”
“How about charming? You run into any charming assholes?”
“An even rarer bird.”
Fork seemed prepared to continue the colloquy but changed his mind when B. D. Huckins asked whether the steaks were ready yet.
“If everyone likes ’em rare, they are,” Fork said and looked at Kelly Vines, as if daring him to ask for well done. But Vines said he liked his steak rare and the ex-Chief Justice said he never ate his any other way.
They ate at the redwood trestle table on the patio, not talking much except to compliment Fork on the steaks, the Caesar salad, his scratch biscuits and the baked Idaho potatoes. When Jack Adair, a master of small talk, asked whether the potatoes had been baked in a real oven or in a microwave, Fork said a real oven because B. D. wouldn’t have a microwave in the house. He said she still thought they caused cancer although he’d bought one for his own house because who the hell wants to wait sixty minutes for a potato to bake when a microwave’ll do it in ten?
Conversation died then and nobody, not even Adair, could think of anything pertinent to say. Just before the silence grew uncomfortable, B. D. Huckins rose and asked whether everyone wanted coffee. Everyone did, so she went into the kitchen and returned a few minutes later with a tray that held a Thermos carafe, four tan mugs, cream and sugar. As she poured she announced without apology that there was no dessert, although if they’d like something sweet, she could offer Benedictine and brandy. No one wanted any.
Mayor Huckins sat back down at the trestle table, had a sip of her coffee and smiled politely at Kelly Vines. “I believe you ran into my sister, Dixie.”
Vines tried, with fair success, to conceal shock behind mild surprise. “I don’t think she said her name was Huckins.”
“Well, she wouldn’t, of course, since her name is Mansur. Dixie Ma
nsur. She married an Iranian. One of the rich ones, thank God.”
Vines nodded, as if approving of Dixie’s wise choice and good fortune. “There’s not a lot of family resemblance.”
“We had different fathers. Mine was Huckins; hers was Venable.”
“I assume Dixie turned in a report.”
“She gave you an A-plus. If she hadn’t, we wouldn’t be talking.”
Sid Fork rested his elbows on the table and leaned toward Vines, his expression perhaps a trifle too friendly. “Soldier Sloan claims you’re okay, too,” he said and leaned back to wait for Vines’s reaction.
Without expression and using only enough inflection to make it a question, Vines said, “Does he, now?”
Fork nodded. “I guess Soldier’d qualify as one of those guys I mentioned earlier-a smart and charming asshole.”
“Extremely charming, but not too smart. Where’d you meet him?”
“Mutual friends. Soldier says both you and the judge here represented him at different times. But it’s sort of hard to tell when Soldier’s lying.”
“You can believe him, at least on that point,” Adair said. “I did represent him long ago when I was still in private practice and when, I should add, both Soldier and I were considerably younger. Years after I went on the bench I heard he was in some kind of trouble whose exact nature escapes me. So I sent word for him to get in touch with Kelly, who, if memory serves, managed to get him out of whatever mess he was in.”
Turning to the mayor, Adair gave her his most winning smile and said, “So it would seem we are who we claim to be.” The smile vanished. “Are you?”