The Fourth Durango (13 page)

“Very prudent,” Vines said.

“The thing is,” Adair said, “I forgot to file my state and Federal returns that first year. When I finally remembered, I just kept putting it off. And when nothing happened, I just kept on putting it off.”

“For how long?”

“As I said, four years now.”

“They’ve got you, Jack.”

“I know.”

“You could’ve gone to H and R Block, for Christsake. You could’ve let Eunice handle it for you. You could’ve—aw, shit—it just doesn’t make sense.”

“Procrastination rarely does.”

There was nothing ominous or threatening about the new silence that developed. Rather it was the sad kind sometimes experienced at graveside services when no one can think of anything to say, good or bad, about the dead. Finally, Kelly Vines said, “Maybe I can make a fancy move or two and rig up some kind of a trust that’ll salvage something, if we’re lucky.”

“Can you keep me out of jail?”

“I can try.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I’m not in the miracle business, Jack.”

“Would it take a miracle to find out who stuck those shoeboxes in my closet?”

“No,” Vines said. “That won’t take a miracle.”

After Parvis Mansur had listened to what Adair and Vines had to say about disbarment,
Lompoc penitentiary life, the death of Blessing Nelson and murder in the Blue Eagle Bar, the Iranian took over the discussion and aimed it right at what obviously disturbed him most.

Making no effort to disguise his skepticism, he said, “In effect, Mr. Adair, you’re saying that nobody really wants to kill you—at least not yet. If they did, they could easily have done when they photographed you from the rear of that pink van. After all, an Uzi’s as simple to operate as a Minolta. Some say simpler.”

“Or they could’ve had me killed in prison.”

“But since they didn’t, you believe you’re still alive because of what you know, correct?”

“Because of what they
think
I know.”

“Is there a possibility that your memory might improve at some propitious moment?”

“If there really is something to remember, it could come to me one of these days. Or nights.”

“What if someone were to put a gun to your head and say, ‘Reveal or die’?”

“That might jog the memory. Then again, it might not.”

After permitting himself a fleeting look of utter disbelief, Mansur turned to Vines. “I assume Mr. Adair’s enemies are also yours?”

“That’s a safe assumption.”

“Not exactly pussycats, are they?”

“Apparently not.”

Mansur grimaced and closed his eyes, as if at some sudden pain, which Vines thought was probably mental. When he opened them to look at Vines again, they still appeared as skeptical as ever. “If I understand my sister-in law correctly,” Mansur said, sounding almost bored or possibly resigned, “you want me to winkle these enemies of yours out of their concealment. And to do this I’m to spread the word that the pair of you can be purchased from your putative protectors, Mayor Huckins and Chief Fork, for one million dollars in cash. Correct so far?”

“So far,” Vines said.

“May I ask how you arrived at that nice round sum?”

Adair said, “I decided a million’s just small change to them. Respectable change, of course, but still small.”

“One other item,” Vines said. “We also want you to make it look like a setup—as if you’d tricked us into it.”

“Well, now,” Mansur said, sounding interested and pleased for the first time. “A touch of humbug. Marvelous. It could work nicely, providing…” The sentence died as he gave Huckins an amused look. “Well, B. D.?”

“Sid and I want a straight switch, Parvis,” she said. “You pass the word and Mr. Mysterious makes his approach. When the time and place are agreed to, you trade Adair and Vines for the million any way you can. After that, they’re on their own.”

Mansur cocked a questioning eyebrow at Adair. “Satisfactory?”

“Sounds fine.”

Mansur leaned back in his chair to study Adair. “For some reason, neither you nor Mr. Vines look like a couple of guys who’d willingly walk through death’s front door.”

“We’re not,” Adair said.

“So you have some…contingency plan.”

Adair only stared at him.

“Which is none of my affair, of course. My only task is to establish contact and make sure no one is cheated or harmed—at least until the money is safely in my hands.”

“That’s what you’re good at, isn’t it?” Vines asked.

“Arranging things?” Mansur said. “Yes. That’s what I’m very good at.” He looked around the table, wearing a bright smile, and said, “Any other questions, comments?”

“Only one,” Adair said. “I’m always curious why a man takes on a lousy job. Since we’re not paying you anything and, as far as I know, the mayor and the chief aren’t either, my question’s the usual crude one: What’s in it for you?”

Mansur turned to his wife with a fond smile and covered her hand with his. “Continued domestic bliss,” he said.

“Which we all know is beyond price,” said Adair.

“Precisely.”

Dixie Mansur withdrew her hand from her husband’s, looked at Kelly Vines and said, “You forgot something.”

“What?”

“You told the judge—or said you told him anyway—that you thought you could find out who put those two shoeboxes full of money in his closet. Well. Did you? Find out?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I asked the doorman at Jack’s condo building.”

“The one you went to high school with who didn’t remember you?”

“He remembered me,” Kelly Vines said.

The doorman looked down at the fifty-dollar bill in his right hand, then up at Vines. “What’s this for, Kelly, old times’ sake?”

“Some friends played a joke on Judge Adair and he’d like to find out how.”

“What kind of joke?” the doorman asked. “Sick? Funny? Practical? What?”

“Practical.”

“Tell me about it. I could use a giggle.”

“They put something in his apartment—or had somebody put it there.”

“What?”

Vines used his hands to indicate something about the size of a breadbox. “About this big—maybe a package.”

“You’re a lawyer now, right? I remember in school how you were always on the debate team. I even remember how you got to go to Washington, D.C., one time and debate some other team from Wisconsin. I think it was Wisconsin. Is that how come you decided to be a lawyer—because you like to get up in front of everybody and argue about stuff?”

“Probably,” Vines said.

“Something about yea-big, huh?” the doorman said, using his hands to shape his own breadbox. “What was in it that was so funny?”

“Dead fish.”

“I don’t get it.”

“It had to do with a fishing trip the judge had to cancel at the last minute.”

The doorman frowned, as if he still couldn’t quite appreciate the humor. “So the guys who went on the trip dropped off some of their catch to show him what he missed, right? But by now the fish’re kind of old and beginning to stink.” He thought about it some more, nodded grudgingly and said, “Yeah, well, I guess some people’d think that was funny.”

The doorman’s gray-blue eyes widened, then narrowed, as if he suddenly remembered something—or wanted it to appear that way. “Hey, is that what you brought down from his apartment this afternoon in that Hefty bag you tossed into your Mercedes trunk—the fish?”

“We had a good laugh,” Vines said.

“You and the judge, huh?”

“Right. And now we’d like to play one back on whoever dumped the fish on him.”

The doorman took off his Ruritania guards cap with the shiny black visor, examined the fifty-dollar bill he still held in his right hand and tucked it behind the cap’s sweatband. But instead of putting the cap back on, he held it waist-high and upside down, as if waiting for alms. When none was dropped in, he said, “You know, I seem to remember somebody that had a key to the judge’s place.”

Vines sighed, reached into a pocket, brought out another fifty and dropped it into the cap.

“I’m trying to remember if it was a real big package or a real little one.”

Vines put another fifty in the cap.

“Or if it was a man or a woman.”

When Vines’s hand came out of his pocket this time, it held three fifty-dollar bills. “You just bumped the ceiling,” he said, dropping them into the cap.

The doorman immediately covered his head with the cap and its treasure of $300 in fifty-dollar bills. “A short guy,” he said. “With what looked like a sack full of groceries. He had a key to the judge’s place and said the sack had legal documents the judge wanted dropped off. Funny-looking guy. Short—like I said. Five-two and chunky fat. He was also mud-ugly and had this funny nose with one hole twice as big as the other. That nose was something you couldn’t help noticing because it sort of turned up and took aim at you. Well, anyway, he had a key and slipped me a twenty, so I told him to go on up.”

“You didn’t ask for some ID?”

“Well, shit, Kelly, you don’t ask a priest for ID.”

Sid Fork finally found what he had been searching for in the larger bedroom of his
measle-white two-bedroom house up on Don Domingo Drive. The bedroom contained what he regarded as the Fork Collection of American Artifacts. Some of them—his sixty-two pre-1941 Coca-Cola bottles, for example—were preserved inside glass-door cabinets. Less fragile treasures, such as his 131 varieties of barbed wire, were neatly displayed on fiberboard panels that took up a third of one wall.

Among the other displays was a nicely mounted collection of the ninety-four varieties of “I Like Ike” buttons that were handed out during the presidential campaigns of 1952 and 1956. The political buttons, carefully arranged by size, were next to a dramatic display of the last copies ever printed of
Collier’s, Look, Liberty, Flair
, the old
Saturday Evening Post
, the old
Vanity Fair, McClure’s
and a half dozen other extinct magazines.

Much of the stuff Fork had collected over the years had yet to be sorted and catalogued and was stored in splintery wooden crates and stained cardboard boxes that were stacked to the ceiling in one corner of the bedless bedroom. But Fork’s special pride was his collection of glass insulators that once had graced electric powerlines, both rural and urban, from Florida to Alaska. The green, purple, brown and gray spool-like insulators were lined up on two long high shelves and illuminated by track lighting. It was behind the insulators on the top shelf that Fork finally found the snapshot album.

He took it over to his eighty-one-year-old rolltop oak desk, switched on the fifty-two-year-old gooseneck lamp, dusted the album’s black leatherette cover with a woman’s lace handkerchief, whose provenance escaped him, and went through the album page by page until he came to a large color photograph—a jumbo print—of two young men and two young girls, one of the girls scarcely more than a child.

Fork stared at the photograph for seconds before he removed it from the album and rummaged through the junk mail on his desk for the X-acto knife. He used the knife and a ruler to cut out the head and shoulders of one of the young men in the snapshot. After another brief search, he located the bottle of rubber cement and carefully mounted the cut-out head and shoulders on a plain three-by-five-inch index card. From the right pocket of his old tweed jacket, Fork took nine other index cards and slipped the new one among them. After shuffling all ten cards, he dealt them out on the desk.

The cards displayed full-face color photographs of ten men whose ages ranged from twenty to forty. None of the men was handsome or even good-looking and a few were actually ugly. All stared straight at the camera. None was smiling.

Fork gathered up the ten cards, stuck them back into his jacket pocket and left the room, pausing only to admire a framed four-color magazine advertisement, at least fifty-five years old, that portrayed a pretty young woman in a big shiny roadster somewhere west of Laramie. The ad’s illustration was Sid Fork’s favorite folk art; its copy his most beloved poem.

The chief of police found the whiskey priest at 3:13
P.M.
on that last Saturday in June. He found Father Frank Riggins sitting on a bench under a eucalyptus tree not far from the bandstand in Handshaw Park. The priest wore old blue jeans, some new Nike walking shoes without socks and a green T-shirt with a line of yellow type that proclaimed: “There Are No
Small
Miracles.”

“Thought you might be here,” Fork said as he sat down on the bench, took a small white paper sack from his jacket pocket and offered it to Riggins. “Joe Huff’s wife made it. Calls it her Vassar recipe.”

Father Riggins stared at the paper sack, shook his head sadly and said, “I shouldn’t.”

“Got pecans in it.”

“Don’t tempt me, Sid.”

“One piece won’t hurt.”

“Substitutions are a cop-out,” Riggins said as his right hand dived into the sack and came up with an inch-thick, two-inch square of pecan-studded fudge. He took a large bite, chewed slowly, smiled gloriously and said, “It hurts my teeth more than my conscience.”

“Take the sack,” Fork said, offering it to Riggins.

“Aren’t you having any?”

“Never much cared for fudge.”

The priest took the sack, peered inside to count the remaining pieces and looked up at Fork with a faint smile. “Now that you’ve compromised me, what d’you want to know—more about what I told Joe Huff and Wade Bryant this morning?”

Fork nodded.

“I didn’t get a good look at him.”

“Why not? You don’t wear glasses.”

“It was dark.”

“Felipe keeps that pet shop window pretty well lit and there’s a street-lamp right out in front of the Blue Eagle.”

“He was dressed like a priest—or the way we all used to dress.”

“Can’t swear he wasn’t one though, can you?”

“Of course I can’t. There’ve been all kinds of priests—crazy ones, rapists, embezzlers, thieves, deviates and, of course, drunks. Lots and lots of drunks. So why not a killer?”

“We both know he wasn’t any priest, Frank.”

Riggins sighed. “I suppose we do.”

“Could you recognize him again?”

“Probably.”

“What’d he look like?”

“I can only tell you what I told Joe and Wade this morning.”

“That’ll do fine.”

Riggins thought about what he was going to say, then nodded, as if reassuring himself, and said, “Well, he was short. That’s what you noticed first. No more than five-one, if that. And very heavy—you know, almost round. And he had those very stubby legs and gray hair cut short. Not just a crew cut, but as if somebody’d grabbed a pair of scissors and just whacked it off. I was too far away to see the color of his eyes, but he was no beauty.”

“Why?”

“Well, he had this strange nose that looked a little like a pig’s snout with its bottom all turned up so you could see his nostrils even from across the street.”

“I brought some pictures I’d like you to look at.”

“A rogues’ gallery?”

“Something like that,” Fork said, removed the ten index cards from his jacket pocket and handed them to Riggins, who went through them slowly, stopped at the seventh one and said, “Well…I don’t quite know.”

“Don’t quite know what?”

“He looks so much younger here.”

The chief of police took the index card from the priest and glanced at the face of the man he had cut out of the jumbo print with the X-acto knife.

“That’s because he was younger then,” Fork said, still looking at the photograph. “Twenty years younger.”

Seated in the chocolate-brown leather chair in her living room, B. D. Huckins put down the glass of wine so she could go through the ten index cards Sid Fork had handed her.

“How am I supposed to know which one Frank Riggins picked?” she said.

“You’ll know,” Fork said, drank some of his beer and watched as the mayor glanced at seven of the index cards without expression. She stopped at the eighth, narrowed her eyes and clamped her lips into the thin grim line that helped form her pothole complaint look. Her expression remained grim when she looked up from the photograph and said, “It can’t be.”

“You know better’n that, B. D.”

She tapped the man’s face on the index card with a forefinger. “Where’d you get a picture of Teddy?”

“Remember the day we all moved into that shack he’d rented out on Boatright?”

The mayor nodded reluctantly, as if she found the memory disturbing.

“And the landlord, old man Nevers, came by to see if he could bum a drink and Teddy lined all four of us up—you, me, him and Dixie—and made Nevers take our picture with your Instamatic before he’d give him a drink?”

“I don’t remember any of that,” she said.

“Well, I do. And I also remember getting jumbo prints made of that roll and pasting them in my album.”

“I don’t understand why.”

“Why what?”

“Why you’d even think of Teddy or show his picture to Frank Riggins.” She grimaced, as if at some bad taste. “Teddy. Jesus.”

“What’d I use to call him?”

“Teddy? Snout.”

“And if I didn’t call him Snout, I called him Porky. So this morning, those two ace homicide detectives of mine came up with an eyewitness—Father Frank—who claimed he saw some real short guy of around forty who looked like Porky Pig go into the Blue Eagle and come out just about the time poor old Norm got shot. So I started thinking about whether I knew any short mean guys with piggy noses who might go around shooting people for money or just for the hell of it and I came up with Teddy. I mean, he just popped into my mind.”

“After twenty years?” she said.

“Teddy sort of sticks in the mind—even after twenty years.”

The mayor closed her eyes and leaned back in the leather easy chair. “We should’ve drowned him.” When she spoke again several seconds later her eyes were still closed and her voice sounded weary. “Was Teddy dressed up like a priest?”

“I just told you that.”

“No, you didn’t.”

Fork replayed the last few minutes of conversation in his mind. “You’re right. I didn’t. So who did?”

“Kelly Vines—indirectly.”

“When?”

“Today. Out at Cousin Mary’s.”

“Let’s hear it,” Fork said. “All of it.”

Huckins’s account of the lunch was condensed yet comprehensive and included Kelly Vines’s recollection of his conversation with the doorman who was reluctant to ask a priest for identification. When she had finished, Sid Fork’s first question was, “What’d you all have for lunch?”

“Trout,” Huckins said and quickly recited the rest of the menu, knowing Fork would ask if she didn’t.

“How was it—the trout?”

“Very good.”

“Who paid?”

“Vines, I think.”

“Tell me again what Vines said the doorman said about the short guy in the priest suit.”

“You mean what he looked like?”

Fork nodded impatiently.

“Let me think.” Huckins closed her eyes again, kept them closed for at least ten seconds, opened them and said, “The doorman told Vines the priest was short and mud-ugly and had one nostril twice as big as the other one. He said the nose turned up and aimed what he called the two holes right at you.”

“And that didn’t make you think of Teddy right off?”

“No.”

The nod that Fork had intended to be sympathetic was betrayed by its condescension. “Well, you’re not a cop.”

“But since you are, tell me this. What’ll the cops do about Teddy?”

“Whatever’s within the law.”

“And Sid Fork? What’ll he do?”

“Whatever’s necessary.”