The Fourth Durango (9 page)

After that she called Dicky Handshaw old, slow and lazy. She also beat him with a 52.3 percent of the vote and renamed City Park after him just three days before she fired the old chief of police and appointed Sid Fork in his place.

Adair shook his head in awe and admiration. “Named a park after him, by God.”

“It had been a rough election and I thought it would calm things down a little.”

“And maybe serve as a constant reminder of what happened to poor old Dicky.”

B. D. Huckins smiled for the first time in what must have been thirty minutes. “Yes, I suppose it could, but I never really thought of it that way.”

“Of course not,” said Jack Adair.

Shortly before midnight on that last Friday in June, Kelly Vines and Sid Fork pulled
up in front of a floodlit three-storied Victorian showplace that boasted two scalloped cupolas, eight gables (by Vines’s quick count) and a veranda that wrapped around two sides of the house and part of a third.

“What’s she do,” Vines asked, “charge admission?”

“The floodlights stay on till he gets home. She’s in there all by herself and the lights are sort of burglar insurance. Besides, the place is on the city’s scenic tour.”

“You have a scenic tour?”

“Yeah, but it only takes ten minutes.”

The floodlights revealed a new coat of rich cream paint that contrasted rather biliously, in Vines’s opinion, with the two shades of dark green that had been applied to the trim. A fairly new shingle roof had been left to the weather. The house itself sat well back on a deep two-hundred-foot-wide lot and was surrounded by a carefully thinned-out forest of elderly pines. At the rear on the alley was a two-story building, also floodlit, that Vines assumed had once been the stable and was now the garage.

As they followed a serpentine brick walk to the veranda, Sid Fork explained how Norm Trice had inherited the house from his father, who had inherited it from
his
father, who had built the place in 1903.

Fork rang the bell. The woman who opened the door was younger than Vines had expected. When she saw that her late night callers were the chief of police and a stranger, she assumed the worst and automatically denied it by slowly shaking her head. It was an “I don’t want any whatever it is” gesture that went on and on until Sid Fork said, “I’m sorry, Virginia, but I’ve got bad news. Norm’s been shot and he’s—well, he’s dead.”

At the word “dead,” Virginia Trice’s head stopped shaking and her eyes began to blink rapidly as she fought the tears. They were large dark brown eyes, very wet now, and spaced far apart in a narrow tanned face that was crowned with short thick straw-colored hair. The face also offered a small, possibly pert nose and a firm, possibly stubborn chin. In between nose and chin was a perfect mouth whose full lower lip was being bitten. Virginia Trice stopped biting her lip, opened her mouth, sucked in an enormous breath, stopped blinking and held the breath until it finally escaped in a long sad sigh. When the sigh was over, she said, “Come on in.”

They followed her down a wide hall, past an elaborately carved oak staircase, through a pair of sliding doors carved from the same wood, and into what Vines thought must once have been the parlor. Much of the polished oak floor was covered with a red and purple rug—the purple so dark it seemed almost black. The red in the rug clashed with the pink in the tiny climbing roses that formed the pattern on the wallpaper.

Also on the walls were what Vines assumed to be California seascapes, painted in oils by obvious amateurs who, while competent, were less than gifted. In two corners of the room were heavy carved tables with ball-and-claw feet and round marble tops. Fat porcelain lamps sat on both tables, wearing orange silk shades that had faded and now looked more quaint than gaudy.

Virginia Trice was tall, at least five-ten, and wore tight old jeans that made her long legs look even longer. She also wore a man’s white button-down shirt with its tails out and its sleeves rolled up above her elbows. The collar was frayed. On her bare feet were scuffed Topsiders.

She lowered herself slowly into an armless chair with a worn plush seat. With knees together and hands folded primly in her lap she seemed to listen carefully as Sid Fork introduced Kelly Vines as “a friend of mine.” She greeted Vines in an almost inaudible voice as he and Fork sat down side by side on a couch with a cane back.

The short silence that followed ended when Virginia Trice cleared her throat and said, “Who shot him?”

“We don’t know yet,” Fork said.

“Was it a stickup—a robbery?”

“I don’t think so, but it could’ve been.”

“Well, was he shot once, twice, lots of times—what?”

“Two times. In the head.”

“Must’ve been quick then. I mean, Norm didn’t have to lie there, hurting and bleeding and yelling for help.”

“It was quick, Virginia.”

She sighed again. “What a shitty thing to happen.”

Fork nodded his solemn agreement and asked, “Is there anyone you’d like me to call? Maybe somebody you’d like to come over and stay with you.”

Instead of answering Fork, she looked at Kelly Vines. “You and Sid old friends?”

“Not really.”

“I’ve lived here four years and I don’t know hardly anybody I’d like to come over and stay with me. We’ve only been married three years. I’m his second wife. What he calls squaw number two. I used to be the waitress at the Eagle and I guess that’s why people didn’t like us getting married.”

“Who didn’t like it?” Fork said in mild protest.

She ignored him and continued speaking to Vines. “They didn’t like it because of me being a waitress and our ages. I was twenty-three and Norm was forty-three. Twenty years difference. You think that’s too much?”

Vines said no, he didn’t think it was too much.

There was a silence until she looked at Fork and said, “Now what the fuck do I do, Sid?”

Fork edged forward on the couch, rested his elbows on his knees and let a look of compassion spread over his long face. “First thing you do is get a good night’s sleep.”

“What’s sleep?”

“I’ll get Joe Emory to send over some pills.”

“Even with pills I won’t sleep.”

“You’ve got to so you can get up in the morning.”

“What for?”

“I don’t much like mentioning money at a time like this, but everyone’s gonna want to see where Norm got killed. You go down there and open up in the morning and you’ll take in a thousand, even fifteen hundred.”

Not even avarice could erase the grief and sadness from her face. “That much?” she said and quickly answered her own question. “Yeah, I guess maybe we could take in that much.” She frowned at Fork. “You think Norm’d mind?”

“Virginia,” Fork said, his tone kind and patient, “Norm won’t give a damn one way or the other.”

Fork and Vines entered Mayor B. D. Huckins’s house without knocking at 12:46
A.M.
to find Jack Adair on the cream couch with a bottle of beer and the mayor in her chocolate-brown leather chair. She turned to say something as they came in but Sid Fork preempted her with: “Somebody shot Norm Trice dead about an hour ago and left us a message.”

Huckins nodded, as if at some mildly interesting news, and rose slowly, turning away from the three men. She walked over to one of her Monet prints and seemed to examine it carefully. Still staring at the print, she said, “How’s Virginia taking it?”

“Hard.”

“You get somebody to stay with her?”

“She didn’t want anybody.”

Huckins turned from the slice of “On the Seine at Bennecourt,” her face composed, eyes almost dry, voice steady. “I’ll call her. See if she’d like to stay here a few days.”

The mayor moved to the rear of the leather chair and leaned her thighs against its low back, as if she found the support reassuring. Folding her arms across her chest, she said, “What message?”

Vines took the five-by-seven-inch manila envelope from his hip pocket, crossed the room and handed it to Huckins. “It’s addressed to you,” he said, “but it concerns all four of us.”

“I see you opened it,” the mayor said, her tone making it clear she didn’t like anyone opening her mail. She removed the photographs and examined them quickly. When she began to go through them more slowly, Jack Adair asked, “Who’re Norm and Virginia?”

“Virginia’s the wife of Norm Trice,” she said, putting the photographs back in the envelope. “He owned the Blue Eagle Bar and some other property around town. He was also my earliest backer.” She looked at Adair. “Financial backer.”

Adair used a sympathetic headshake to demonstrate how fully he appreciated the mayor’s loss. She walked around the leather chair to hand him the envelope. “I’ll miss Norm,” she said.

“I can imagine,” said Adair as he removed the photographs and went through them slowly. When he finished he looked up at Vines. “You hid and I stuck out my tongue.”

“The chief thinks it’s a metaphor.”

Fork shook his head. “You said that, not me.”

Adair looked at B. D. Huckins, who had moved over to a window and was staring out at the night. “Where and when did they take this one of you and the chief?” he asked.

Without turning, she said, “Just after six in the evening two days ago in the parking lot behind City Hall.”

Adair looked at Fork for confirmation. The chief tugged at an earlobe, frowned and said, “By God, that’s right.”

B. D. Huckins turned from the window to look at Adair. “Sid and I were talking—maybe even arguing—about whether to have a drink. We didn’t. Have a drink, I mean.”

“You didn’t notice the photographer either,” Vines said.

The mayor shook her head. “Those pictures of you two. Where were they taken?”

“Downtown Lompoc,” Vines said. “Less than an hour after Jack got out of jail.”

She looked at Fork. “I’d like a drink, Sid. Some brandy.”

“Anybody else?” Fork asked. Vines said he’d like a beer and Adair said he’d finish what he had. After Fork left for the kitchen, the mayor sat back down in her favorite chair, tucked both feet up beneath her and smoothed the black skirt down over her knees.

No one said anything until Fork returned with two beers and the brandy. He served Huckins, handed Vines an open bottle and asked if he needed a glass. Vines said he didn’t.

After she tasted her brandy, B. D. Huckins asked the room at large, “What could be the point of killing Norm?”

“To make sure we understand the message,” Vines said.

“Which is what—in plain English?”

“That’s easy,” Fork said, taking the only other chair in the room, which was really more stool than chair. “They used those photos to tell us they know all about how you and I’re going to supply the judge and Vines here with a hideout. Then they killed poor old Norm to tell us they’re the worst kind of folks to fuck with.” He looked at Vines. “That about it?”

“Just about.”

In the silence that followed, Jack Adair leaned back on the couch’s cushions and examined the ceiling. Finally, he said, “I wonder how they discovered the connection between you and us so quickly.”

After another, briefer silence, B. D. Huckins said, “Somebody talked.”

“I told no one,” Adair said. “And Kelly spoke only to Soldier Sloan.”

“Then he talked to one person too many,” she said.

“Who’d you tell?” Vines asked her. “Other than your sister?”

“Nobody.”

Vines and Adair looked at Sid Fork, who said he hadn’t told anyone either.

Adair returned his gaze to the mayor. “And who would your sister tell?”

“Her husband,” Fork said before the mayor could say anything.

“I hope she did,” B. D. Huckins said, indifferent to the three bleak stares she drew. When she spoke again, it was to Jack Adair. She leaned forward a little and stared at him with cool gray eyes that—Adair later swore to Vines—“peeped right down into the basement of my soul where it’s all dark and dirty and crawling with bugs.”

“Understand this,” she said. “If I’m to negotiate with these people—whoever they are—I’ll need an intermediary. A go-between.”

“Makes sense,” Adair said.

“And a rich go-between’s far better than a poor one because a rich one won’t be nearly so tempted to cross us, if the occasion presents itself—which, in this case, it sure as hell will. And God knows Parvis is rich enough.”

“Parvis your brother-in-law?” Adair asked.

“Yes.”

“Thought you said his name was Mansur.”

“Parvis Mansur.”

“When do Kelly and I get to meet him?”

“What about tomorrow?”

“Are you talking about Saturday or Sunday?”

“Saturday. Today.”

“Today’d be fine,” said Jack Adair.

Although the name chiseled into the polished granite slab above the entrance read,
“Durango Civic Center,” no one ever called it anything except City Hall. Built on the site of the old City Hall, which went up in 1887 and fell down in 1935 during the earthquake, the new City Hall had been completed with WPA money in June of 1938, its golden anniversary now slipping by ignored and unremarked.

It was a solid-looking three-story granite building that B. D. Huckins liked to describe as a gray footlocker with windows. Including its parking lot and Fire Engine Co. No. 1 (there was no Engine Co. No. 2), the Civic Center took up nearly half a block of prime real estate on Noble’s Trace.

The Trace, as everyone called it, was the only thoroughfare in Durango that resembled a boulevard and the only one that curved, twisted and wandered through the city from its eastern limits to the Southern Pacific tracks on the west. All other streets—except those up in the foothills—ran straight as a stripe from east to west and north to south.

Noble’s Trace took its name from a Louisiana gambler called Noble Clark, who, with his Mexican prostitute wife, Lupe, had founded the settlement 148 years ago, naming it Durango after the one in Mexico from which Lupe had fled during the 1835 plague of scorpions.

With the reluctant and lackadaisical help of some Chumash Indians, the couple built the first structure in Durango to have four walls and a roof. It was a half-timber, half-adobe building that contained a combination trading post, tavern and bawdy house. It burned to the ground under mysterious circumstances twenty-three months later, roasting to death both Noble and Lupe Clark and two unidentified male customers.

The old trail that had wound through the mountains, the foothills and down to the ocean was still called the Trace because no one had ever thought there was any real need to name it anything else.

As its chiseled-in-stone name asserted, the Civic Center was home to all of Durango’s municipal services. The mayor, the chief of police and the city treasurer were all up on the third floor along with the treasurer’s hive of bookkeepers. On the second floor were the courtroom and the chambers of the city’s municipal judge who was elected every four years. Down the hall from him were the elected city attorney and his two appointed deputies—plus two clerks, a bailiff, three secretaries and the aging part-time court reporter and full-time gay activist who, although growing deaf, was still too vain to wear a hearing aid. The fire chief worked out of his office in Fire Engine Co. No. 1.

The Civic Center’s ground floor was reserved for the city’s walk-in trade. Nearly a third of it was occupied by the police force and the jail itself, which afforded six cells and a drunk tank. The rest was given over to bureaus where citizens could pay taxes, fines and water bills; obtain marriage licenses and file for divorce; register births and deaths; apply for building permits and easements; and, if so inclined, which few were, attend the weekly meetings of the Durango City Council.

Shortly after 9:30
A.M.
on that last Saturday in June, Chief of Police Sid Fork was leaning back in his banker’s swivel chair, his feet up on his walnut desk, listening to a report from his two homicide detectives, Wade Bryant, the too-tall elf, and Joe Huff, who, to Sid Fork, was always the professor.

After Bryant stopped talking, the chief said, “Twenty-twos, huh?”

“First choice of the dedicated professional,” said Huff.

“It’d kind of help if we had a motive,” Fork said. “I mean, why would some pro-hitter, up from L.A. or maybe down from San Francisco, pump a couple of rounds into old Norm and not even bother to empty the register?”

“What a good question,” Bryant said.

“My, yes,” said Huff.

“Well?”

“Because somebody paid him to,” Huff said.

“So who’s the somebody?”

“Now there you’ve got us,” Bryant said. “Joe and I’ve been worrying about that very thing. So this morning we get up early, even though it’s Saturday, and drop in on the new widow to, you know, make sure she’s okay and hasn’t stuck her head in the oven or anything, and maybe even ask her a question or two. Well, we get there about eight this morning and guess what?”

Fork yawned. “She wasn’t there.”

“Right,” said Bryant. “So Joe here says, ‘Let’s try the Blue Eagle because maybe she’s down there either going over the books or drowning her sorrows.’ So we drive down to the Blue Eagle and guess what?”

“That’s guess what number two,” Fork said.

“We almost couldn’t get in is what,” Huff said.

Fork nodded, as if pleased. “Packed, huh?”

“Four deep at the bar,” said Bryant. “Well, two anyway. And behind it was Virginia herself, drawing beers, pouring shots, smiling through her tears and playing a lively tune on the cash register.”

“I told her she’d probably take in at least a thousand,” Fork said. “Maybe even fifteen hundred.”

“Your idea then?”

“Better than staying home, wandering around those fourteen rooms and chewing holes in her hankie.”

“Well, we finally make it up to the bar,” Huff said, “catch Virginia’s eye and Wade says something commiserative such as ‘How’s tricks, Ginny?’ and she tells us how grateful she is we’ve dropped by and that the first round’s on the house.”

“So you never got around to asking her about who might’ve sent the shooter?”

“Didn’t seem like the moment,” Bryant said, “what with Condor State Bank on one side of us and Regent Chevrolet on the other.”

“Kind of a wake, was it?” Fork said.

“Kind of.”

Sid Fork turned his head to stare out the window. “I can remember when a guy died, his relatives and neighbors and friends’d gather round after the funeral with a ton of food, a lot of it fried chicken and baked ham, and the widow’d be standing there, all in black, shaking every hand and agreeing that yes, indeed, the late Tom or Harry sure did look natural and weren’t the flowers just beautiful?”

“When the hell was this?” Bryant asked.

“Twenty-five, thirty years ago,” Fork said, turned his gaze from the window and asked Bryant, “So what’d you come up with—if anything?”

Bryant licked his lips, as if pre-tasting his answer. “A possible eyewitness.”

Fork dropped his feet to the floor and leaned forward. “Who?”

“Father Frank from St. Maggie’s.”

“Wonderful,” Fork said, putting his feet back up on the desk. “Our whiskey priest.”

“He’s been dry awhile,” Joe Huff said. “Going to AA and everything.”

“How’d you get on to him?”

“He was hanging around outside the Eagle this morning, afraid to go in, when Wade and I came out.”

“Afraid of the booze, huh?”

“Probably,” Bryant said. “So Joe asks how’s it going, Father? And he says just fine except he thinks maybe he’ll come back and pay his respects when Virginia’s not so busy. Then he looks at me and I can see him telling himself no, yes, no, yes—until finally he says he thinks he noticed something oddish last night. Don’t think I ever heard anybody say oddish before.”

“Me either,” Joe Huff said.

“Anyway, it seems he’d been to a meeting—”

“AA meeting?” Fork said.

Bryant nodded. “But it didn’t take, or something somebody said rubbed him the wrong way, or maybe the bishop’d sent him a cross little note. Who knows? But anyhow he was kind of upset so he decided to walk off whatever was bothering him. And he’s down there on North Fifth when he sees this other priest looking at the puppies in Felipe’s window.”

“Sheplabs, aren’t they?” Fork said. “Cute little fellows.”

Joe Huff took over the report. “Well, you know how Father Frank goes around in a T-shirt and jeans most of the time. But he says this other priest is all in black and has a wrong-way collar on and everything. So Father Frank thinks the other guy’s visiting or just passing through because he’s never seen him before. And he also thinks the other priest might like to drop by Pretty Polly’s for coffee and doughnuts. So he’s about to cross the street and invite him when the other priest turns and almost runs the other way.”

“Toward the Eagle?”

“Away from it. So Father Frank sort of steps back into Klein’s doorway, which is pretty deep, because he doesn’t want the other priest to get the wrong idea.”

“What wrong idea?”

“I’m a Baptist,” Huff said. “How the hell should I know? You want to hear some Bible Belt stuff about what priests and nuns do? Curl your toenails.”

“Just tell me what happened, according to Father Frank.”

“What he claims he saw and heard is this,” Wade Bryant said. “He says the other priest scoots down the sidewalk, stops, spins around like he’s just remembered something, then makes a beeline for the Blue Eagle.”

“What time is this?”

“He thinks about eleven-twenty.”

“What time the AA meeting end?”

“Nine-thirty, but he hung around another half an hour or so for the cookies and coffee.”

“And then went on his hour-and-a-half walk.”

“Walking past bars, I expect,” Huff said. “Testing temptation.”

“But this other priest,” Fork said. “He went in the Blue Eagle.”

Huff nodded.

“So what’d Father Frank do?”

“He hung around some more,” Bryant said, “waiting for the other guy to come out because he still thought they might go have coffee and doughnuts together.”

“Where’d he hang around?”

“Cattawampus across the street from the Eagle,” Huff said.

Fork closed his eyes, as if drawing himself a map of the intersection. “Marvin’s Jewelry,” he said. “Another deep doorway.”

“Father Frank says he uses doorways like that because he doesn’t like to be seen hanging around street corners at night,” Bryant said.

“Let’s get to the odd stuff,” Fork said. “He see anything?”

Bryant shook his head.

“He hear anything?”

“He thought he heard somebody clap inside the Eagle.”

“Clap?”

“Clap.”

“Once?” Fork asked. “Five times? Fifty times? What?”

Bryant grinned. “You know, Sid, that’s exactly what I asked him myself.”

“And?”

“And he said they clapped just twice.”

“Then what?”

“Then the stranger-priest hurries out of the Eagle and jumps in a van that drives off in a hurry.”

“What’d Father Frank do then?”

“He says since he didn’t have anybody to drink coffee with, he went home and went to bed.”

“What’d this other priest look like?”

Bryant nodded at Joe Huff, who pulled out a small notebook, turned some pages and read what he had written. “Short. Very short legs. About five-one. Forty to forty-five. Also fat. Round like a ball. Gray hair, cut short. And ugly. Porcine.”

“Porcine?”

“Piggy-looking. He had one of the noses that turn up and aim their nostrils right at you.”

“What color were his eyes?”

“Father Frank says he wasn’t close enough to tell,” Bryant said. “But he was close enough to see that the guy looked piggy.”

“What about the van?”

Bryant shook his head with regret. “No license number or make because Father Frank says he can’t tell a Buick from a Ford. But he did say it was pink.”

“Pink?”

Bryant nodded.

“Well,” Fork said. “That’s something.”