The Fourth Durango

by Ross Thomas

  “Leaving on the evening tide.”

  “Sid’ll be sorry he missed you,” Settles said as the elevator doors opened. He watched Sloan enter the elevator, turn and press the 4 button. “Good seeing you again, Soldier.”

  “Always a pleasure,” the old man said just before the doors closed.

  After half a lifetime in bunco and fraud, Ivy Settles watched the lighted floor indicator of the elevator Soldier Sloan was taking to the fourth floor-just to make sure, he told himself, it didn’t go sideways. The elevator had paused at three and continued on to four, where it now seemed stuck.

  The other elevator, to Settles’s right, was on its way down. It, too, had paused at three and Settles decided to ask its passenger or passengers if they knew what the trouble was on the fourth floor.

  The doors of the right-hand elevator opened and a very short, very heavy man came out. He wore a giveaway cap advertising Copenhagen snuff, thick tinted glasses and dark blue coveralls that had “Francis” stitched in red above the left breast pocket. In his right hand he carried a large black toolbox that looked old and battered.

  “What happened to the other elevator?” Settles asked.

  The man stopped, looked up at Settles, then up at the floor indicator numbers and back at Settles. “Beats me.”

  “Where’d you get on?”

  “Three.”

  “You’re not the elevator repair guy, are you?”

  The short man turned his back on Settles. An arc of two-inch-high red letters spelled out “Francis the Plumber” across the coveralls. Below the name was a phone number. The man turned to face Settles again.

  “I’m Francis and there was a backed-up toilet in three twenty-two and it’s Saturday and I’m on double time. So if somebody wants me to stand around talking about busted elevators, somebody’s gonna get charged for it.”

  “Wait here,” Settles said.

  “Why?”

  Settles brought out his badge and showed it to the plumber. “Because I said to.”

  After hurrying to the shallow alcove where the house phones were, Settles snatched one up and tapped three numbers. After two rings a man’s voice answered with a hello.

  “Mr. Adair?” Settles said.

  “This is Vines.”

  “Settles again-down in the lobby. Has Soldier Sloan showed up yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Would you go take a look at the elevator on the fourth floor-the car on your right-and then come down and tell me what’s wrong with it?”

  “Come down to the lobby and tell you?”

  “Please.”

  “All right,” Vines said and hung up.

  Settles hurried back to the elevators, where Francis the Plumber had failed to wait. The detective turned and trotted across the lobby to the hotel entrance. He went through it just in time to see a pink Ford van make a right turn out of the parking lot. On the side of the van was a large magnetic stick-on sign that advertised “Francis the Plumber” in big black letters. Beneath them, in smaller ones, was the slogan “Nite or Day.”

  Embarrassed and irritated by his own vanity, Ivy Settles fumbled his glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on. But by then, even with the glasses, it was impossible to read the license plate of the pink Ford van.

  Chapter 24

  The elevators were down the corridor and around a corner from Kelly Vines’s fourth-floor room. When he reached them he found Soldier Sloan lying face-up and half out of the right elevator, whose two automatic doors were gently nudging the old man’s waist every three or four seconds.

  It was obvious to Vines that Sloan was dead. Those too-green eyes had lost their glitter and stared up without blinking at the corridor’s vanilla ceiling. Vines knelt to put a hand to the old man’s neck, feeling for the pulse he knew he wouldn’t find.

  If there was a cause of death, Vines couldn’t see it. There were no visible wounds or blood, but he did find Sloan’s position peculiar. It was as if the old man had turned to face the rear of the elevator, then fell backward, sprawling halfway through the open doors.

  Vines explored the dead man’s pockets almost without thinking of the consequences other than to remind himself he was no longer an officer of the court. He left the watch pocket until last because he was confident of what he would find there.

  In the other pockets he found a comb, a Montblanc fountain pen and an ostrichskin wallet, well worn, that contained $550 in fifty-dollar bills. In the other pockets he found a car’s ignition key attached to a Mercedes emblem that didn’t necessarily mean anything; a small pocketknife with a gold case that Vines thought was probably fourteen carat; a handkerchief of Irish linen; and a small combination address book and pocket diary. The address section was almost filled with names and phone numbers, but very few addresses. The diary section was blank and the page for that June Saturday, the twenty-fifth, had been torn out.

  In Sloan’s watch pocket, as expected, Vines found a folded-up thousand-dollar bill, issued in 1934 and bearing the engraved portrait of Grover Cleveland and the signature of Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury. On the back of the old bill was some fancy engraving to discourage counterfeiters.

  The torn-out diary page was also in the watch pocket, folded up, like the thousand-dollar bill, into the size of a postage stamp. Vines carefully unfolded it, noticing that most of it was for a diary and about an inch at the bottom for a “memo.” At the top of the page were initials and numbers reading, “KV 431” and “JA 433,” which Vines immediately deciphered as being his and Jack Adair’s initials and room numbers.

  At the bottom of the page in the space reserved for the memo was another entry that read: “C JA O RE DV.” Vines could make nothing out of this and put everything back where he had found it, including the torn-out diary page and the thousand-dollar bill, both of them carefully refolded. After that he rose and went to tell Ivy Settles that Soldier Sloan was dead.

  Settles, the first policeman to reach Soldier Sloan’s body, watched as the Holiday Inn’s young assistant manager used a key to turn off the elevator so its two doors would stay open and stop nudging the dead man’s waist. Settles knelt beside Sloan, checked for vital signs and looked up at Vines, who, like Adair, was now leaning against the wall opposite the elevators. “He’s dead,” Settles said. “Just like you said.”

  Because Vines could think of nothing to add to this, he said nothing. Chief Sid Fork arrived a few minutes later, nodded at Vines and Adair, glanced at the dead Soldier Sloan and began questioning Settles. He was still questioning him when the two homicide specialists, Wade Bryant and Joe Huff, arrived and joined the interrogation of Ivy Settles.

  The bald, black and professorial Huff asked an occasional question as he used his Minolta to take photographs of the dead man. When he had taken enough, he interrupted Wade Bryant and said, “Let’s turn him over.”

  Once Soldier Sloan lay on his stomach, the saucer-sized bloodstain on the back of his muted plaid jacket was visible. With the help of Bryant, Huff removed the jacket and took some pictures of a bloodstain the size of a dinner plate on the back of Sloan’s pale yellow shirt.

  Out of curiosity, Kelly Vines asked, “What d’you guys do for a coroner?”

  “Because we’re ninety-two miles from the county seat, they named Dr. Joe Emory assistant deputy coroner,” Huff said, pulling out Sloan’s shirt tails and pushing the shirt itself up toward the dead man’s armpits. “The fancy title doesn’t mean much because the county pays Joe on a piecework basis.”

  “He likes doing autopsies?”

  “He likes the money,” Huff said.

  Once the shirt was up around Sloan’s armpits, the small puncture wound was visible. The wound itself hadn’t really bled much and had the diameter, in Huff’s words, “of a fat ice pick.”

  As he rose, Huff added, “He died quick anyway,” and aimed his Minolta at Sloan’s bare back.

  “If the angle was right and the guy knew what he was doing,” the still kne
eling Wade Bryant said, “then he probably didn’t feel much of anything.”

  “He felt it,” Huff said. “He felt it enough to turn around, see who’d done it and keel over backward.”

  The assistant hotel manager edged over to Fork. “Couldn’t you guys at least pull him out of the elevator, Sid? We’re going to need it.”

  “No, you’re not,” Fork said.

  “So when can we start using it?”

  “In an hour or two.”

  “Well, shit,” said the assistant manager and headed for the stairs. Bryant gave the dead Sloan a final close look and rose. “While we’re waiting for Doc Emory, Chief, I thought maybe Ivy here could tell us some more about his new pal, Francis the Plumber.”

  “I already told you,” Settles said.

  “We’d like to hear it again,” Bryant said, looking for support to Huff, who was adjusting his Minolta. The black detective looked up just long enough to nod and went back to his camera.

  “One more time, Ivy,” the chief of police said.

  Settles gave Fork a reproachful look and said, “He was about forty and short and fat-five-one and maybe two hundred and ten. Wore dark blue coveralls with Francis the Plumber across the back in red letters-and a phone number I don’t remember. He carried an old beat-up black toolbox. Had tinted prescription glasses, the kind that go from real light gray to real dark gray depending on the light. Had a gimme cap from Copenhagen snuff. Had a thin nasty mouth. Drove a pink Ford van with a stick-on ‘Francis the Plumber’ magnet sign on one side-maybe both sides, but I don’t know that for a fact. And no, I didn’t get the license number this time either.”

  “You forgot his nose,” Huff said, still working on his camera.

  “Yeah. Right. The nose. Well, it was kind of squashed up, like I told you, and had this one big nostril and this regular size one and they both looked about a mile deep. They were also hairy. He had a regular forest growing in there and most of it was gray.”

  “Tell us again why you let him skip, Ivy,” said Wade Bryant, whose increasingly sly tone matched his too-tall-elf looks.

  “I didn’t let him. I showed him my shield and told him to stay put while I went and called Vines here. The guy was a plumber and possibly-just possibly-a solid citizen. What you two guys would’ve done, of course, is make him kiss the floor right off. With all your experience you know for a fact that plumbers are automatic suspects.” Settles paused, glared at Bryant, and added, “Oh, yeah. One more thing.”

  “What?” Bryant said.

  “I watched Soldier’s elevator all the way up. I mean I watched its numbers light up. It stopped at three on the way up and the other elevator, the one the plumber rode, stopped at three on the way down. So I’d say the plumber got on Soldier’s elevator at three, killed him on the way up to four, got out, took the stairs back down to three and rode the other elevator from there to the lobby, where, for some reason, I neglected to beat the shit out of him.”

  Chapter 25

  After a grateful swallow of the bourbon and water Kelly Vines had handed him, the chief of police looked at Jack Adair and said, “Tell me something. Was Soldier ever a soldier?”

  “In two wars,” Adair said, turning from the window in Vines’s room where he had been inspecting the ocean. “And Soldier, incidentally, was his real name.”

  “Couldn’t be,” Fork said.

  “Years ago I saw his birth certificate. It was back in the early fifties when a certain Mrs. Shipley in the State Department was suspicious of almost anyone who applied for a passport, but particularly suspicious of applicants who’d served in the Lincoln Battalion in Spain and later with the OSS, which is why Soldier’d come to me.”

  Fork made no effort to hide his surprise and disbelief. “What the hell was he doing in Spain?”

  “Purely by chance Soldier’d landed a job to shepherd nine Dodge ambulances from Detroit down to Mexico and over to Spain. They’d been bought for the Loyalists by some folks who, I think, were later called premature anti-Fascists.” Adair smiled. “Soldier always said his old pal Hemingway helped raise some of the money.”

  “How old was Soldier then?”

  “When he went to Spain? He’d have been just twenty. He was born April sixth, nineteen seventeen, and I remember the date because it was the day we declared war on Germany.” Adair smiled again, rather gently, and added, “World War One.”

  Sid Fork’s impatient nod indicated he knew all about World War One. “And that’s why his folks named him Soldier?”

  Adair nodded. “His full name was Soldier P. Sloan. The ‘P’ was for Pershing. A general-in World War One.”

  “And he joined up after he got the ambulances over to Spain?”

  “So he claimed. Anyway, it was his experience there that got him commissioned a second lieutenant in the OSS just after the war started.” Adair gave Fork another almost apologetic smile. “World War Two.”

  “So what’d he do-or claim he did?”

  “In the OSS? Engaged in all sorts of hugger-mugger-at least when it didn’t interfere with his black market operations.” This time Adair’s smile was more knowing than apologetic. “Black markets and wars always seem to go hand in hand.”

  Fork neatly cut off any further discussion of black markets by asking, “Why’d he want a passport in the fifties?”

  “Debts,” Adair said.

  “Wanted to skip out on ’em probably.”

  “Something like that. So I called in a favor that a certain Republican congressman owed me and Soldier got his passport. When he came back from Europe four years later in ’fifty-five he was thirty-eight years old and suddenly a retired lieutenant colonel. He promoted himself two more times after that, impressing a never-ending series of gullible but wealthy widows who provided him with clothes, cars, cash and whatever remaining charms they had to offer.”

  “I sort of inherited Soldier from Jack,” Kelly Vines said, putting his drink down carefully on the coffee table and leaning forward to stare at Fork. “Where’d you run across him, Chief?”

  “He was our first hideout customer,” Fork said. “And afterwards he sent us about a third of our other clients, including you two. He sort of adopted the three of us-B. D., me and Dixie-and liked to take us out for Sunday dinner. Well, that got old pretty quick for me and B. D., but Dixie always went until she married Parvis. She said she liked Soldier’s manners.” He looked at Vines coldly. “Satisfied?”

  After Vines replied with a shrug, Fork asked, “So what do we do with him after the autopsy-bury him, cremate him, donate him-what? He have any kids, ex-wives, brothers, sisters, anybody?”

  Adair sighed. “He had a thousand acquaintances and Kelly and me. But from what you say, he also had you, the mayor and Dixie. So I suppose we should bury him with a headstone and all.”

  “‘Soldier P. Sloan,’” Vines said. “‘1917-1988.’ Then a line or two after that.”

  “We’ll leave the wording up to you, Kelly,” Adair said and turned to Fork. “So what’ll it cost, Chief-the plot, the stone, a cheap casket and a few words by a not overly sanctimonious priest?”

  “Soldier a Catholic?”

  “Fallen away, I’m afraid.”

  “Then I know just the priest. As for how much, well, he had about five hundred and fifty in his wallet, but that won’t quite cover what we’re talking about.” When he felt Kelly Vines’s hard stare, he hurried on. “He also had a thousand-dollar bill in his watch pocket, but I’m not sure you can spend that.”

  “It’s perfectly legal tender,” Adair said. “And since you’re the chief of police, the bank shouldn’t ask any questions.”

  “There was something else in Soldier’s watch pocket,” Fork said. He fished the folded-up diary page from his shirt pocket and handed it to Vines. “Except it doesn’t make sense.”

  Vines unfolded the page and studied the numbers and capital letters, as if for the first time. “I was never any good at crossword puzzles,” he said, “but this first notation,
‘KV 431’ and ‘JA 433’ is pretty obvious. It’s Jack’s room number and mine.” He looked up and handed the page to Adair. “The rest is gibberish.”

  Adair read the other line of capital letters silently, then aloud, “C JA O RE DV.” He read it aloud again, rose, walked to the window, as if its light might help, silently read the letters yet again, stared out at the ocean for a few moments and turned to Vines. “Maybe it’s simpler than it looks.”

  “Maybe it’s an old OSS code,” Fork said.

  “More likely it’s just the crude shorthand of an old man who didn’t trust his memory,” Adair said. “‘C JA’ could mean, ‘See Jack Adair.’ The next thing could be either a zero or a capital O. If it’s a zero, it could read, ‘See Jack Adair zero,’ which doesn’t make sense unless you translate zero into ‘alone’ or ‘by himself.’ RE probably means just what it looks like: ‘in regard to.’ The last initials are DV and the only DV I know is my daughter and Kelly’s wife, Danielle Vines.”

  Vines asked, “See Jack Adair alone in regard to Danielle Vines?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. But I’d best go see Dannie.”

  Sid Fork shook his head and said, “Dumb idea, Judge.”

  “Why?”

  “You plan to drive?”

  Adair nodded.

  “Where to?”

  “Agoura, isn’t it?” Adair said, looking at Vines, who also nodded.

  “Somebody could pull up alongside you on the freeway with a shotgun loaded with double ought and no more Jack Adair.”

  “They could walk through that door and do the same thing,” Adair said.

  Fork turned to examine the hotel room door, then turned back. “That’s why I’m moving you both in about thirty minutes.”

  “Where to?”

  “To a place with the tightest security in town.”