The Fourth Durango (19 page)

Kelly Vines sat behind the wheel of the Mercedes at the end of the abandoned
Durango Municipal Airport’s crumbling runway, waiting for the sound of the Cessna’s engine and wishing he had brought along the Baby Ruth candy bars.

A 9:58
P.M.
he heard the Cessna’s engine as it made a low pass over the airport. Guessing its altitude at 250 or 300 feet, Vines switched on the car’s headlights and flicked them up to bright. At 10:02
P.M.
he watched Merriman Dorr make another perfect landing.

The Cessna taxied to within seventy-five feet of the Mercedes and stopped, but Dorr kept the plane’s engine running as Jack Adair climbed out, made a wide berth of the spinning propellor and walked quickly toward the Mercedes, swinging the black cane. Before Adair reached the car, the Cessna had turned around, raced down the runway and disappeared into the night.

After Adair settled into the passenger seat, Vines switched off the headlights and asked, “How was she?”

“About like you said.”

“She recognize you?”

“No.”

“What else?”

“She thinks you’re a very silly man,” Adair said, unscrewed the cane’s handle, removed the cork and silently handed the glass tube flask to Vines, who sighed before taking a swallow.

As he passed the glass tube back to Adair, Vines said, “Mansur made contact.”

“He say who with?”

“He sent word by Dixie but she didn’t seem to know much more than that.”

“What else?”

“Well, there’s Teddy, the plumber-priest.”

“They caught him?” Adair asked, sounding less than hopeful.

“No, they didn’t catch him, but he killed Sid Fork’s bunco and fraud guy from Dallas, Ivy Settles.”

“When?”

“About an hour ago. They also say that while he was at it, Teddy killed that woman photographer who took our pictures in Lompoc.”

“Well, shit, Kelly,” Adair said and lapsed into silence. Vines also seemed to have run out of things to say and the silence continued until Adair said, “From the beginning. Everything.”

“All right.”

It took Vines fifteen minutes to tell it. He began with his purchase of candy bars, mixed nuts, whiskey and the paperback novel, and ended with B. D. Huckins’s gloomy assessment of the real purpose behind the sheriff’s proposed task force.

Adair listened, asking no questions, until he was sure Vines had finished. Then he asked, “You know what I’m having?”

“Second thoughts?” Vines said.

“Exactly.”

“Tell me about Dannie and we’ll come back to your second thoughts.”

“Well, she didn’t know me from Adam’s off ox and she thinks you’re some silly but harmless gentleman caller.”

“What about Soldier Sloan?”

“I made the mistake of asking her about Soldier P. Sloan and she immediately wanted to know what the ‘P’ stood for. I told her Pershing and suddenly she was back in junior high school, reciting the first verse of ‘I Have a Rendezvous with Death’ and asking whether I’d also like to hear the one about how poppies blow in Flanders fields.”

Vines closed his eyes and said, “Which doctor did you talk to?”

“Pease. He thinks Dannie’ll do just fine as long as we keep sending the six thousand a month. When I asked him what would happen to her if the money ran out, he said he’d see that she was placed in one of the state’s better mental hospitals where they might keep her for a week or ten days. I believe I told him Dannie wouldn’t make a very good bag lady.”

“No,” Vines said, opening his eyes, “she wouldn’t.” He drummed the fingers of his right hand on the steering wheel and asked, “Anything left in the tube?”

“Sure,” Adair said and passed it to him.

Vines had another swallow of bourbon, coughed and passed the glass tube back to Adair. “So you think there’s no possible connection between her and Soldier Sloan?”

“None,” Adair said.

“Then Dannie’s obviously not the DV in Soldier’s ‘C JA O RE DV.’”

“Obviously.”

Vines again drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as he stared out at the night that began just beyond the Mercedes’s three-pointed star atop the radiator. Finally, he stopped the drumming and said, “What about Venable?”

“Who?”

“Dixie Venable.”

Adair bit his lower lip to keep from gaping, then opened his mouth just wide enough to say, “Jesus. Her maiden name.”

“And the name Soldier first knew Dixie by.”

Adair looked at Vines with total suspicion. “When did all this dawn on you?”

“Just now,” Vines said.

“Who do we share this brilliance with?” Adair asked. “Dixie’s sister? Her husband? Maybe with the chief of police?”

“With nobody,” said Kelly Vines.

When Virginia Trice came over to their booth and said, “You got a call,” Vines was drinking a draft beer and eating a bowl of chili that he thought had too much cumin in it and not enough chili pepper. Adair, his mouth full of a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich, shrugged helplessly at Vines, who asked, “Who’s got a call?”

“Either one of you.”

“Who’s calling?”

“He wouldn’t say,” Virginia Trice replied, turned and went back to preside over the bar.

When Vines reached the bar, she had already moved the phone down to a spot in front of the last stool, which was four stools away from the nearest customer. Vines nodded his thanks, picked up the phone and said hello.

“Mr. Adair?”

“This is Vines.”

“Good. It is I, Parvis Mansur.”

“Right.”

“I’m calling from a pay telephone in Santa Barbara so please bear with me should I have to drop in more quarters.”

“How’d you know we were here?”

Vines could hear Mansur’s deep sigh. “Logic and luck. This is the fourth number I’ve called.”

“Just curious.”

“Did Dixie give you and Mr. Adair my message?”

“Yes.”

“Did you inform B. D. and Sid?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Approximately twenty-one minutes ago I received a call on my secure line, which obviously is no longer secure, hence this call from a pay telephone.”

Wondering when he last had heard anyone say “hence,” Vines said, “This call was from the same person?”

“Yes. This time a date was proposed or rather, I should say, insisted upon.”

“When?”

“Four July. Is that satisfactory to you and Mr. Adair?”

“The date’s okay. What about the place?”

“As we discussed, it must be a place to which, logically, the two of you could be lured. By that, I mean, it can’t be under a tree in the middle of nowhere.”

“Right.”

“Do you have a suggestion? If not, I do.”

Vines already had given considerable thought to where he and Adair were to be sold for $1 million. The place he had in mind featured a back door with an aluminum core sheathed in steel, but after deciding it would be prudent to listen first to Mansur’s proposal, he said, “What do you suggest?”

“Cousin Mary’s, primarily because of its location and its excellent security.”

“Sounds okay.”

“Good. I’m glad you agree.”

“Who called you, Parvis?” Vines said, using Mansur’s given name for the first time.

“The same man called both times. Obviously an American with a rather reedy tenor voice and no regional accent—at least none I could detect.”

“How’d he get your phone number?”

“I thought it best not to ask.”

The telephone buzzed and a recorded operator’s voice interrupted, requesting the caller to deposit an additional fifty cents. Vines listened to the quarters clank down into the pay phone. When the clanking was over, Mansur said, “Are you still there?”

“Still. Did you talk to him about the price?”

“Yes, of course, and he agreed to it with a minimum of grumbling.”

“No serious bargaining?”

“None.”

“That’s strange.”

“I thought so, too, which is why I stressed there would be no sale until the exact, specific amount was confirmed.”

“Until you’ve counted the money?”

“In essence, yes.”

“What’d he say?”

“He said no problem.”

“Anything else?” Vines asked.

“Did Dixie by any chance say where she was going after she left you?”

“When I last saw her she was with her sister.”

“Good,” Mansur said, sounding relieved. “That’s splendid. You might call B. D. and Sid and inform them of these new developments.”

“All right.”

“Good night then, Mr. Vines.”

“Good night,” Vines said, broke the connection with a forefinger, caught Virginia Trice’s eye and used a nod to invite her down to his end of the bar.

“You have the mayor’s home phone number?” Vines asked.

“It’s unlisted.”

“I know.”

Virginia Trice looked up at the ceiling, back down at Vines and recited the number from memory. After Vines thanked her and began dialing, she moved farther up the bar.

The mayor answered with a hello halfway through the call’s third ring.

“This is Kelly Vines.”

“You must have the wrong number,” B. D. Huckins said and hung up.

After hanging up on Vines, the mayor returned to her chocolate-brown leather easy
chair and smiled an apology at Sheriff Charles Coates, who perched on the edge of the cream 1930s couch, a cushion away from Sid Fork.

Sensitive about his average height, which he felt insufficient by southern California standards, the forty-two-year-old sheriff’s backside rarely occupied more than six inches of anything it rested on. He usually sat as he sat now, leaning a bit forward, hands clasping his knees, heels slightly lifted—obviously all set for hot pursuit.

When standing, the sheriff looked neither short nor tall, possibly because of his glistening black cowboy boots with their one-and-a-half-inch heels. Once reporters had discovered he was height-conscious, they delighted in asking him how tall he was because of his unvarying reply: “Same as Steve McQueen alive and barefoot—five-ten and a quarter.”

As B. D. Huckins sat back down in the leather easy chair, the six-foot-three, twenty-eight-year-old deputy sheriff asked whether she got many wrong-number calls. The deputy was Henry Quirt, who had been relegated to the only other chair in the living room—the one that was really more stool than chair and forced his knees up until they were almost level with his breastbone. The deputy sat on the low stool at the late night meeting in the mayor’s house not only because he policed his section of the county from a Durango base, but also because Sheriff Coates had decided a witness might prove useful—even invaluable.

The mayor answered the deputy’s question about wrong-number calls by replying, yes, she did receive quite a few of them. The sheriff said that although he couldn’t prove it, he thought unlisted phone numbers got more wrong-number calls than listed ones The mayor asked the sheriff whether she could get him and his deputy something, perhaps a beer.

“Not a thing, B. D., but thank you.”

“I’d like a beer,” Fork said, rising from the couch. “But I’ll get it myself.”

“Well, if you’re having one, Sid, I guess I will, too,” Coates said.

Fork looked at Deputy Quirt. “Henry?”

“No, thanks.”

As Fork headed for the kitchen, Sheriff Coates said, “I apologize again for dropping by so late, B. D.”

The mayor looked at her watch. “It’s only ten forty-eight.”

“But since I had to be over here in Durango anyhow—and wasn’t that a terrible thing about Ivy Settles? Just awful. How’s his wife taking it?”

“Hard.”

“If there’s anything at all I can do…” Coates left his offer dangling—incomplete, undefined and, in Huckins’s opinion, meaningless.

“That’s very kind of you.”

“But the real reason I dropped by so late, B. D., is I need to talk a little politics.”

“Who with?”

“Why, with you, of course.”

Huckins kept her expression polite, her voice neutral. “Sid’ll probably want to hear this.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised.”

They sat in silence until Fork returned with two open bottles of beer and handed one to Coates. “Need a glass, Charlie?”

“What for?”

Huckins waited until Fork was again sitting on the cream couch and had drunk some of his beer before she said, “Charlie wants to talk a little politics.”

Fork turned to examine the sheriff, as if for the first time. He inspected the glistening black boots, the tight tan whipcord pants and the forest-green Viyella shirt that was tailored to emphasize the flat stomach, deep chest and the shoulders that seemed a foot thick and a yard wide.

The chief’s slow, careful inspection finally reached the sheriff’s face with its landmark chin, bad-cop mouth, stuck-up nose that never sunburned or peeled and, finally, the blue eyes that crinkled on demand and were shaped like long teardrops. Topping all this was a wealth of dark brown gray-flecked hair that every seven days was trimmed to Marine Corps specifications.

“Politics?” Fork said after his inspection. “Christ, Charlie, you don’t even have any opposition this year.”

Coates nodded, studied the floor to demonstrate the gravity of what he was about to say, and looked up quickly, first at Fork, then at Huckins. “It can’t go beyond these walls.”

“I won’t breathe a word,” Fork said, “unless it’ll do me some good.”

Almost everything in Coates’s face smiled except his mouth. “Still the merry prankster at forty, right, Sid?”

“Thirty-nine. And before you invite yourself into somebody’s house, you oughta know if you can trust them or not.”

“B. D. knows the answer to that, don’t you, B. D.?”

The mayor said, “Get to it, Charlie.”

Coates edged forward another inch on the cream couch, leaned another inch in Huckins’s direction and spoke in the hushed tones of the seasoned conspirator. “Old man Sloop’s going to step down as county supervisor in nineteen ninety.”

“Why?” she said.

“To pursue other interests.”

The mayor shook her head. “Billy Sloop celebrated—or at least observed—his sixty-eighth birthday last week. He’s been a county supervisor for fourteen years and doesn’t have any other interests to pursue. So how much have you got on him, Charlie?”

“Enough.”

“Why tell me?”

“Because I’m going to announce for his job and I want your endorsement.”

“When’re you going to announce?”

“Two days after the election—November tenth.”

“Why then?”

“Because that’s the day Billy’s promised me he’ll let it out that he won’t be running for reelection in nineteen ninety after all, and my announcement will give me the jump on everyone else.”

“And you want my endorsement?”

“Sure do, B. D.”

“You know I never endorse anyone except at the city level.”

“Thought you might make an exception.”

The mayor sighed. “Cut the crap, Charlie. What d’you really want?”

“I want to help you clean up Durango.”

“It’s not dirty,” Fork said.

The sheriff turned to the chief of police, making no effort to hide his contempt. “Four murders in two days? A serial killer on the loose? If anybody else gets killed here, they’ll start calling it Beirut, California. I can bring my task force in and nail that sucker in ten days max, Sid, maybe even seven.”

“That’s not fast enough,” the mayor said.

Coates’s look of contempt vanished, replaced by one that made him seem honestly puzzled. “I don’t follow you, B. D.”

“It’s simple. Durango is an incorporated municipality that provides its own law enforcement.”

“I don’t need any civics lesson.”

“Politics, not civics. You said you wanted to talk a little politics so that’s what I’m doing. Let’s begin with Durango. It has an elected mayor who’s its chief executive. Me. I hire its chief of police, who’s sitting right next to you. Sid. I hire him with the City Council’s approval and he reports to me. That means law enforcement is ultimately my responsibility. That’s what I’m elected to do and if I can’t do it, the city will elect itself a mayor who can. But if I invite the county sheriff and his task force in to do what the police chief and I’re supposed to do, then even the dimmest voter’ll get the idea that B. D. Huckins and Sid Fork are incapable of maintaining law and order, which would give this same dimmest voter a fine reason to vote for a new mayor who’d hire a new chief of police. You following me so far?”

Coates only nodded.

“I like living in this town, Charlie. I like being its mayor. I know maybe two thousand people in Durango by their first names. I belong here and can’t even imagine living anywhere else. What’s more, I plan to go on being mayor for as long as I can get elected because I’m a damn good one—the best this town ever had. But what you’re asking me to do is commit political suicide by jump-starting your campaign. Charlie Coates for county supervisor—the man who cleaned up Durango in a week or maybe ten days. Well, that’s not fast enough, Sheriff, because the killer, whoever he is, will be arrested by Durango cops and put behind Durango bars in Durango’s jail by the fourth of July and that I can absolutely guarantee you.”

The mayor paused, smiled almost sweetly and said, “So there’s really no logical reason to bring in your task force, is there?”

It was B. D. at her best, Sid Fork decided. On the attack, not giving an inch, her voice low and as cold as ice water and those gray eyes drilling right through old Charlie’s thick skull. Fork decided to lend a hand.

“I don’t know about that guaranteed July the fourth deadline, B. D.,” he said.

“Why not?” Huckins said, faking a note of asperity to make it sound as if she had no idea what Fork’s answer would be.

“Because we’re going to have that sucker in jail by the second of July—the third at the latest.”

Sheriff Coates advanced another inch on the cream couch, reducing the width of his perch to approximately four inches. “How long’ve we known each other, B. D.?”

“Nineteen long years.”

“More like twenty. I remember I’d just started on the same job Deputy Quirt’s got when you and Sid and the rest of ’em rolled in here from Frisco in that old GM school bus you’d painted up like an Easter egg. You parked where you shouldn’t’ve—on Seventh next to City Park—and the next morning I just happened by, woke everybody up and told you to move it before the city cops busted you. I even told you where you could park the thing. Remember that, Sid?”

“Not really.”

“We go back a long, long way, B. D.—you, me, Sid and Dixie. You got to be mayor; I got to be sheriff; Sid got to be chief of police; and Dixie, well, I guess Dixie got to be rich. But wasn’t there another guy with you all back then? Funny-looking short guy. Ugly. Called himself Teddy, I think. Teddy Smith? Jones? Something like that.”

“Something like that,” the mayor said.

“Wonder what ever happened to him?”

“No idea.”

“After the rest of your bunch left for Colorado, the four of you all moved into that old shack out on Boatright, didn’t you? Then Teddy just sort of disappeared—like he’d jumped into the ocean and drowned or something.”

“He jumped on a bus,” Fork said.

“Wonder where he went?”

“No telling.”

Coates shook his head sadly, as if at some old friend’s mysterious disappearance, and turned to the mayor. “B. D., if I thought bringing a task force in to find a crazy killer’d hurt you politically, I’d’ve never even suggested it. I didn’t think it would then and I still don’t. But I’ll accept your judgment.”

“Good.”

“Thing is, what if something happens and our killer’s not behind bars after all come July fourth?”

“There’s another possibility, Charlie,” Fork said.

“Possibility of what?”

“Of his being dead by the fourth.”

“Shot while resisting maybe?”

Fork shrugged.

“Not as much ink and airtime in that, Sid. Thing to do is bring him to trial and let it run forever.”

The sheriff rose, placing his empty beer bottle on the coffee table that had been fashioned from the old steamer trunk. Huckins leaned forward and slipped a coaster beneath it. Staring down, watching her, Coates said, “I’d still like an answer, B. D.”

“To what?”

“To my ‘what if’ question. What if, despite all Sid’s efforts, the killer’s neither behind bars nor dead by the fourth of July? What if he’s still loose out there?”

“Then I’d reconsider inviting your task force in.”

“And if we collared him?”

“I’d have to rethink my endorsement policy.”

The sheriff beamed, crinkled his eyes and suddenly snapped his fingers as if he had just remembered something. He even said, “Damn,” causing Sid Fork to wonder whether the sheriff really had any future in politics where a modicum of acting ability is as necessary as money.

“Almost forgot, Sid, but we found that pink Ford van up on One-Oh-One at a rest stop. Wiped clean as a whistle except for what ninety-nine percent of ’em always forget—the little lever that moves the driver’s seat up and back. Got three good ones off the left hand plus a partial thumb. The state and the Feds are both checking ’em out and if we get a make back, I’ll let you know.”

The deputy, Henry Quirt, was now up and looming over Coates’s right shoulder. “You told me to remind you of that telex we got from Lompoc, Sheriff.”

Coates snapped his fingers again, causing the chief of police to decide that the sheriff’s performance really needed a lot of work. “Shit-oh-dear,” Coates said. “Forgot that, too. Seems the FBI’d like to talk to a couple of guys about something or other that happened at the Lompoc Federal pen yesterday or the day before—I forget which. But the guys’ names are Kelly Adair and Jack Vines.”

“The other way around,” Quirt said.

Coates thought, nodded and said, “Yeah.
Jack
Adair and
Kelly
Vines. Anyway, Quirt and I, just on the off chance, stopped by the Holiday Inn on our way up to your place, B. D., but it seems Adair and Vines checked out around four this afternoon right after that old guy Sloan got it—can’t say I blame ’em—but didn’t leave any forwarding. So if you bump into ’em, Sid, ask ’em to give the Federales in Santa Barbara a shout.”