by Ross Thomas
“You mean have we ever done this kind of thing before?” she said.
“Yes,” Jack Adair said. “That’s exactly what I mean.”
Chapter 10
According to the mayor, it had begun ten years ago with the passage of Proposition 13 that rolled back California property taxes and virtually wrecked the budgets of many of the state’s cities, particularly the smaller ones.
“Thirteen wouldn’t even let a city like Durango issue general obligation bonds until a couple of years ago,” she said. “Not that there was anybody jumping up and down to buy them.”
“How bad did it get?” Adair asked.
“We almost went broke. And we would’ve if the economy hadn’t picked up a little, at least for a while there, and if it hadn’t been for the donations from, well, from certain benefactors.”
Adair nodded, his eyes curious, his expression bland. “How many benefactors have lined up, cash in hand, over the last nine or ten years?”
She looked at Fork. “A dozen?”
“An even dozen.”
“How much did each one-donate?” Vines asked. “On the average?”
“The first four, one hundred thousand,” Huckins said. “Then inflation kicked in so the next eight had to come up with two hundred thousand.”
“Each?”
“Each.”
“Two million all told then,” Adair said. “And in exchange for this generosity, each philanthropist was provided with a safe haven? A sanctuary?”
“A hideout,” said the mayor.
“Were any of them avoiding the law?” Vines said. “Or is that any of my business?”
“One was sort of avoiding the law,” Fork said. “But it was some weird kind of CIA thing, so B. D. and I said to hell with it and let him buy in. The rest of them were all dodging the opposition.”
“Business rivals?”
“Guys who wanted to kill ’em,” Fork said.
“Did they ever succeed?” Adair asked with obvious interest.
“Never,” the chief said.
“Never in Durango,” B. D. Huckins corrected him. “But two of them got antsy, a couple of years apart, and left before they should’ve although we tried to talk them both out of it. The one who left first fell off a building in L.A. Mid-Wilshire, I think. The other got hit by a car in north Dallas that backed up over him just to make sure he was dead. The other ten are all okay as far as we know, but…” She shrugged.
“They don’t write,” Fork said.
“They don’t even call,” said the mayor with a small smile.
“And the two million dollars?” Adair asked, looking around as though hoping to find something it had been spent on.
“It helped keep things going,” the mayor said. “The frills anyhow. The library stayed open, just barely, and so did the VD clinic and the daycare center, at least until GE pulled out and we had to close it. The center, I mean, not the clinic. The rest of the money, what there was, went for police and maintenance.”
“Nobody ever questioned these-donations?” Adair asked.
“We’ve got a mayor-city council type of government here,” she said. “And since I’ve been mayor each new council member has been, well, carefully elected.”
Although Adair nodded approvingly, she volunteered nothing else. Another silence threatened, but Vines fended it off with a question to Fork. “What about your cops, Chief?”
“Mind if I do a little bragging?”
“Why not?”
“Well, I’d say we’ve got one of the best small-city forces going. There’s me, four detectives, twelve uniforms and three clerks who double at the jail when they have to. There’s also a county deputy sheriff, Henry Quirt, who’s got a whole lot of other ground to cover so we make sure he doesn’t waste any time around here.”
“Four detectives?” Adair said, raising an eyebrow.
“Four. And every last one of ’em personally recruited by me. Tell you how I did it. I went looking for experience-guys that’d put in their twenty years and had their pensions and maybe a little baksheesh salted away, but were only forty-one, forty-five, around in there, maybe even fifty and kind of bored with sitting around the house. So I offered ’em thirty a year, God’s own climate, great hunting and fishing, cheap housing, free dental and health, light work and long vacations.”
“And they jumped at it,” Vines said.
“Who wouldn’t? Two of them’re out of homicide in Chicago and Detroit; one’s out of Dallas bunco and fraud, and the other’s a narc who wanted to get out of Miami in one piece. They’ve got about eighty-five years’ worth of collective experience and nobody slips by.” He smiled knowingly at Vines. “Absolutely nobody.”
Vines thought back to the previous night and the blond Dixie. Dixie Mansur. “Those two drunks at the bar in the Holiday Inn, right?”
Fork gave him a small proud nod.
“Congratulations,” Vines said.
It was then that Jack Adair decided to find out whether he could close the deal. Turning to the mayor and forcing a certain amount of unfelt heartiness into his voice, he said, “Well, it would seem that we are indeed in most capable hands.”
“Not yet,” she said, ignoring both the compliment and the heartiness. “Not till we discuss money.”
“Yes. Of course. How much would, say, a month or two cost us?”
“Two hundred and fifty thousand regardless of whether it’s a week, a month or a year. If somebody else is after Vines, the rate doubles. If the same guys who’re after you are after him, you get a two-fer.”
Since hearty had won him nothing, Adair turned grave and judicious, nodding at Huckins as if the sum she had mentioned, although not inconsequential, was by no means staggering. “Suppose,” he said, “your fee were to be increased substantially for only slight additional effort on your part?”
“We don’t do takeouts,” the chief said, his voice firm, his expression forbidding.
The mayor gave the chief an exasperated look, then studied Adair for several seconds. “Go on,” she said.
“I have to confess something first,” he said. “I don’t know who wants to kill me or have me killed.”
Huckins nodded impatiently. “That’s standard. None of them ever seems to know who’ll be sent to do it.”
“I can only presume,” Adair said, “that it’ll be arranged by whoever attempted to make it appear that I and another justice on the court accepted substantial bribes. He was Justice Mark T. Fuller. The ‘T’ was for Tyson.”
Sid Fork stretched, yawned without apology and gave the night sky an inspection. “We heard about that. We also heard about your son-Paul, wasn’t it? A suicide down in T.J. And just this afternoon up there in Lompoc some dude with a funny name got it. From what I hear, he was your baby-sitter.” Fork brought his gaze down from the stars. “Blessing something.”
“Blessing Nelson,” said Adair. “A friend and associate.”
Resting her elbows on the trestle table and her chin on her right fist, B. D. Huckins examined Adair curiously. “Maybe I’m just not tracking you,” she said.
“How so?”
“You’re not offering us a lot of money to do almost nothing extra.”
“No. What I’m proposing-” Adair broke off to look at Vines. “Since it’s your grand design, perhaps you’d best explain it.”
Vines nodded, stared at Fork for several seconds, nodded again, as if at some inevitable conclusion, and turned his stare on B. D. Huckins, who grew impatient and said, “I’m listening.”
Directing his remarks solely at the mayor, and choosing each phrase with care, Vines said, “What we want you to do-is send out word-that you’ll sell Jack Adair-to whoever wants him-for one million dollars.”
The mayor leaned back, picked up her tan coffee mug, had a swallow of cold coffee and put the mug down, not taking her eyes off Kelly Vines. “You want us to fake an offer-”
“The million will be real.”
“-that could damag
e our reputations.”
“Who with?” Vines asked.
“He’s got a point, B. D.,” Fork said.
“Tell me this,” she said. “Why would anybody pay a million for a Jack Adair?”
“Because of what he knows,” Vines said.
She looked skeptically at Adair. “Which is what?”
Adair sighed. “I don’t know what it is. Or maybe it’s something I do know but haven’t sufficiently analyzed.”
“Must be worth a lot-whatever it is that you don’t know you know.”
“Obviously.”
“Have you thought of faking a blackmail pass at them?”
“Alas, I’m not a blackmailer and I don’t know who they are.”
“I said fake a blackmail pass.”
“I heard what you said.”
She turned from Adair to Sid Fork. “Then it’d be up to us to set it up, wouldn’t it?”
Fork frowned. “Won’t be easy.”
She turned next to Kelly Vines, her delicate chin thrust out, her gray eyes calculating. “So how do we split the million?”
“We don’t,” Vines said.
It was obvious to Vines that the mayor didn’t like surprises, pleasant or unpleasant. She narrowed her eyes until they were almost closed and pressed her lips into their grimmest line. If she frowns, Vines thought, the deal’s off. But Huckins didn’t frown. Instead, she opened her eyes wide and let her mouth relax into a faint smile.
“We get it all then-Sid, the city and me.”
Vines nodded. “If you succeed.”
“And if we don’t?”
“You get nothing and Jack here probably gets a poorly attended memorial service.”
“Then it’s on what you lawyers call a contingency basis.”
“Which is how we lawyers get rich.”
The mayor’s faint smile was still in place as she turned to the chief of police. “Well?”
Fork gave his wing commander mustache a thoughtful brush with his left thumb, frowned at Vines and said, “I still get the cane, no matter what?”
“No matter what,” Vines said.
The chief turned to B. D. Huckins with a grin. “I think it sounds rich.”
A silence developed, which no one tried to end. It was finally broken when the mayor again looked at the chief of police and gave him an order in the form of a suggestion.
“Why not take Mr. Vines down to the Blue Eagle for a drink while the judge and I go over a few details?”
It was obvious that Fork could think of several reasons why not, but he made no protest. He merely turned to Kelly Vines and said, “Like to go have a couple of quick ones?”
Vines thought of asking if they had any choice, but what he said was, “The quicker the better.”
Chapter 11
At 11:26 P.M. on that last Friday in June, the pink Ford van, now stripped of all commercial identification, deposited a short thick man with a clerical collar in front of Felipe’s Pet Shop at 532 North Fifth Street, just four doors down from the Blue Eagle Bar’s corner location.
The pet shop had closed at its usual time of 6 P.M. In its window was a jumbled pile of four puppies asleep on their bed of shredded newspaper. The puppies were a mixed breed the pet shop owner was advertising as Sheplabs. As the pink van sped away, the man in the clerical collar glanced up and down Fifth Street, saw nothing of interest and turned to the pet shop window.
He smiled at the sleeping puppies, ignoring his reflection in the glass that revealed small, rather gray teeth and a mouth so thin it seemed almost lipless. The mouth was much too close to his small snout of a nose whose right nostril seemed half again as large as the left one. He was bareheaded and his thick black hair was going gray and had been cut, or clippered, into an uneven flattop by an apparently unsteady hand.
To complement his clerical collar he wore black shoes and a too-tight black suit made from a dull synthetic material. The suit was almost the same shade of black as his eyes, which could have been those of some old and unrepentant libertine, dying alone and bored by the process.
The man flicked his middle fingernail twice against the shop window. But when the sleeping puppies continued to ignore him, he stopped smiling, turned left, away from the Blue Eagle Bar, and hurried down the sidewalk on uncommonly short legs. After forty or fifty feet his fast walk slowed to a normal stroll, then to a hesitant saunter and finally to a full stop.
He turned quickly, not quite spinning around, his eyes raking both sides of Fifth Street. He nodded then, as if remembering the cigarettes or the dozen eggs he had forgotten to buy, and retraced his steps, hurrying past the sleeping puppies without a glance. When he reached the corner, he took one last rapid look around and ducked into Norm Trice’s Blue Eagle Bar.
Although 2 A.M. was the legal closing hour, Trice often closed his bar and grill around midnight because by then most of his customers had run out of money and gone home. But if it was payday, or the second or third of the month when the welfare, unemployment, disability and Social Security checks arrived, Trice would stay open until two and sometimes even three or, as he put it, until they drank up the government money.
There were no customers in the Blue Eagle when the man in the clerical collar walked in, took a seat at the bar and ordered a glass of beer. After Trice served him, the man paid and said in a cold thin tenor, “They say the mayor drops by here once in a while.”
“Who’s they?” said Trice, who never gave away anything except unsolicited advice.
“And the chief of police. I hear he drops in sometimes, too.”
“So?”
The man took a swallow of beer and smiled his gray smile. “So this friend of hers, the mayor’s, asked me to give her a letter and I thought maybe I’d give it to you and you could give it to her.”
“Give it to her yourself down at City Hall tomorrow.”
“I’m leaving town tonight.”
Trice sighed. “Okay, but next time buy one of those things they sell at the post office. You know-stamps.”
The man nodded, smiling his thanks, reached into the right pocket of his black suit and withdrew a five-by-seven-inch sealed manila envelope. He slid it across the bar to Trice, who looked down to read the white peel-off label. On it someone had typed: Mayor B. D. Huckins, Durango, California.
Trice picked up the envelope, noticing it contained some kind of stiffening, cardboard probably, and placed it on a shelf beneath the bar. “I’ll see she gets it.”
“You won’t forget?”
“I just said she’d get it.”
The man with the clerical collar smiled, nodded his thanks again and said, “Maybe you could do me another little favor?”
“What?”
“Could you cash this?”
He handed Trice a personal check made out to cash for $50 and drawn on a Wells Fargo bank in San Francisco. The name signed to the check was Ralph B. Farr. Up in the left-hand corner, the same name was printed above a San Francisco address that Trice thought was probably in the Mission District.
Still staring down at the check with something akin to revulsion, Trice said, “Well, maybe if you could get the Pope to endorse it, Padre, or even just a bishop, I might see my way clear to-”
Trice’s elaborate refusal collapsed as he looked up from the check and saw the.22-caliber semiautomatic in the false priest’s left hand.
“I’ll just take what’s in the register then,” the man said in his thin tenor that Trice decided was the only thin thing about him except his lips. Two hundred pounds at least, Trice memorized, maybe two-ten and no more’n five-one, if that. The fucker looks like an eight ball in that priest suit-like Father fucking Eight Ball.
Pretending to consider the demand for the cash register’s contents, Trice frowned with unfelt regret and said, “Well, Your Eminence, there’s really not a hell of a lot in there, not much more’n you’d find in Saint Maggie’s poor box, if that-fifty, maybe fifty-two bucks.”
“That’ll do nicely,
” the false priest said and shot Norm Trice in the face, once just below the left eye, and once just above the mouth, the.22 short rounds making scarcely any more noise than two doors slamming.
The short man in the clerical collar hurried out of the Blue Eagle and into the waiting pink van. Diagonally across the street from the bar, another man stepped out of the dark recessed doorway of Marvin’s Jewelry. The other man was in his mid-thirties and had graying hair. He wore a white shirt, faded blue jeans and old high-top Converse basketball shoes, the pro model, even though he was an inch or so under six feet. He also wore a sad, almost resigned look.
After he watched the speeding pink van disappear down North Fifth Street, the man stuck his hands in his pockets, turned and, with head bowed and sad expression still in place, walked slowly in the opposite direction.
Chapter 12
Kelly Vines and Sid Fork walked into the empty Blue Eagle Bar eight minutes later. Fork looked around for Norm Trice, called his name, even looked in the men’s toilet and, finally, behind the bar, where Trice lay dead on the duckboards, the $50 check, made out to cash and signed by Ralph B. Farr, still clutched in his right hand.
The chief of police said, “Aw shit, Norm,” and knelt beside the body. He noticed the check and removed it from Trice’s hand by pinching a corner of it with the nails of his right thumb and forefinger. Rising, Fork carefully laid the check on the bar and warned Vines not to touch it.
Kelly Vines twisted his head around to read what was written and printed on the check. “Fifty dollars, made out to cash and signed by a Ralph B. Farr. Wells Fargo bank in San Francisco.”
“Don’t touch it,” Fork warned again, turned to the old mechanical cash register, hit the no-sale key and glanced at the cash drawer’s contents. “About a hundred and fifty, around in there,” he said, closed the drawer and picked up the bar phone. “You want to get back here and pour us a couple?”
“Sure,” Vines said and went around the bar as Fork tapped out a number on the phone. Vines selected a bottle of Wild Turkey, found two glasses and was looking for the ice when he noticed the manila envelope. He read the mayor’s name on the peel-off label, dropped ice into the glasses, poured in the whiskey, added tap water and turned to tell Fork what he had found.
