by Ross Thomas
The chief of police was still on the phone, talking in that low and confidential tone often used either to announce deaths or spread rumors. After Fork hung up, Vines handed him a drink and said, “I found an envelope addressed to the mayor.”
“Where?”
Vines pointed. “You touch it?” Fork asked.
“No.”
Fork walked over and bent down to read the stick-on label. “It’s to B. D., all right.” He straightened and had a long swallow of his drink. “Maybe I oughta open it.”
“You’re the chief of police.”
“I don’t want to mess up any fingerprints.”
“There won’t be any fingerprints,” Vines said.
“Why not?”
“Let’s say the shooter comes in and orders a beer.”
“Why a beer?”
Vines pointed to the two-thirds-full glass of beer on the bar that still had condensed water beads on it. Fork gave the glass a grudging nod. Vines said, “He orders the beer, drinks some of it, hands the bartender-”
“The owner,” Fork said. “Norm Trice.”
“He hands the owner the envelope and-”
“How do you know about the envelope?”
“I’m guessing,” Vines said. “Anyway, he hands it to him and now we’re supposed to have fingerprints on a manila envelope and maybe on a beer glass. Then he asks the owner to cash a check. More fingerprints on the check-plus yours all over the phone and the cash register. When the owner tells him he won’t cash his rotten check, the guy shoots him. Twice. In the face. The shots go in six inches apart, maybe five, which tells us the shooter’s either very lucky or very good. The owner drops and the shooter empties the cash register.”
“Except he didn’t.”
“I know,” Vines said. “Which means that although he may’ve left the mayor a message-the envelope and the body-I wouldn’t bet on any fingerprints.”
“A pro, huh?”
“Open the envelope and find out.”
“It’s evidence.”
“That’s why you should open it,” Vines said. “Before somebody else does.”
Fork put his glass down, picked up the manila envelope and ripped its flap open with a thumb. He pulled out a piece of gray cardboard with six glossy black-and-white photographs bound to it by a tan rubber band. Fork stripped away the rubber band and, one by one, dealt the photographs onto the bar.
Five of the six photographs had been taken through the windshield of Vines’s blue Mercedes. The first showed a startled Vines, raising his hands to his face. The second showed him with his hands over his face, peering through his fingers. The third showed a startled Jack Adair. The fourth showed Adair smiling. The fifth showed Jack Adair sticking out his tongue. The sixth and final photograph showed Sid Fork and B. D. Huckins standing beside a car, the driver door open, deep in conversation, Fork doing the talking and Huckins looking up at him.
“Whose car?” Vines asked.
“B. D.’s.”
“When was it taken?”
“Beats me,” Fork said. “When’d they take the ones of you?”
“Today.”
“Where?”
“Lompoc.”
“Who took ’em?”
“A girl photographer from the back of a pink Ford van with a green sign on it that said, ‘Floradora Flowers, Santa Barbara.’”
“You hid and Adair stuck out his tongue.”
“A metaphor, you think?” Vines said.
“Beats me,” said Fork and bent over to look more closely at the photographs of Mayor Huckins and himself. “This one of me and B. D.’s not bad.”
Vines heard a car door slam, then another one. He scooped up the photographs, stuffed them into the ripped-open manila envelope and shoved it down into his right hip pocket just before the Blue Eagle’s front door banged open and two men in their forties strode in, wearing the proprietary air that marks a policeman almost as plainly as his badge or uniform.
Vines assumed they were the two homicide detectives Fork had recruited from Detroit and Chicago. He also recognized them as the pair of mock-drunks from the Holiday Inn cocktail lounge. One was of average height, black, scholary-looking and egg-bald. A leather gadget bag hung by a strap from his left shoulder. The other resembled a too-tall elf with nimble brown eyes and a long sly face. The brown eyes walked up and down Vines as the man moved slowly toward Fork. Vines remembered the too-tall man as the one who had climbed down from the barstool and said, “Fuck California,” in a clear and pleasant voice.
When the tall man reached Sid Fork, he said, “Old Norm, huh?”
“Shot,” Fork said. “Twice.”
The detective leaned over the bar and peered down at the body on the duckboards. The bald detective didn’t bother to look. Instead, he put the gadget bag on the bar, unzipped it and took out a Minolta camera with a built-in flash. He went behind the bar and began photographing the dead Norm Trice. After taking six or seven photographs, he looked at the tall detective and said, “Looks like somebody with a twenty-two.”
Fork decided it was time for introductions. He indicated the detective with the camera and said, “Joe Huff, Kelly Vines.” They nodded at each other. Fork then introduced the too-tall detective as Wade Bryant. After the tall detective and Vines exchanged hellos, Fork said, “We got here about seven, maybe eight minutes ago.”
“Where was the check then?” Bryant asked. Although the check still lay on the bar, Vines couldn’t recall Bryant even giving it a glance.
“It was in Norm’s hand,” Fork said. “The right one.”
“Take a look in the till?”
Fork nodded. “About a hundred and fifty there.”
Bryant shook his head and frowned, as if disappointed so far by what he had seen and heard. He reached into the pocket of his white short-sleeved shirt, took out a pack of Lucky Strikes and lit one, blowing the smoke to his left and away from the others. “It doesn’t parse,” he said.
“Why not?” said Fork.
“Guy comes in and orders a beer,” Bryant said, giving the two-thirds-full glass of beer a brief look. “He drinks a swallow or two and then asks to cash a personal out-of-town check. That means he sure as shit didn’t know Norm. So when Norm turns him down, the guy takes out a twenty-two or maybe even a twenty-five and plinks Norm twice in the face, which is pretty fair country shooting. Then the guy takes off, leaving behind what’s in the till and also the check with his name, address and phone number on it just in case we want to call the San Francisco cops and have ’em go pick him up.”
Joe Huff, the detective with the camera, came around the bar, glanced at Vines, started putting the Minolta back into the gadget bag and said, “You have any theories, Mr. Vines?”
“Does Trice have a wife?” Vines said, more or less answering the question with one of his own.
“He’s got a wife,” Sid Fork said and looked at Huff. “You want to go tell Virginia?”
“Not me,” Huff said.
“That’s what they pay chiefs of police for,” Bryant said. “To bear the bad news-especially when it’s to Virginia Trice.”
Fork looked at Vines. “You want to come along?”
“No, but I will.”
“Before you go, Sid,” Bryant said, looked closely at the Wells Fargo check, went around the bar, picked up the phone and tapped out a long-distance number. He waited through what Vines decided were five rings before the call was answered.
“May I speak to Ralph B. Farr, please?…Mr. Farr, this is Detective Bryant with the Durango police department…Durango, California…I’m calling to ask if any of your Wells Fargo checks were lost or stolen recently?”
After five minutes of conversation, most of it spent reassuring Ralph B. Farr that if his stolen wallet and checkbook were found, they would be promptly returned, the call ended. Bryant turned to Sid Fork.
“Somebody lifted them out of his hip pocket somewhere on Geary two weeks ago. He reported it to the cops. Which means
what we’ve got here is either a wacko or a pro. If it’s a pro, he’s long gone. If it’s a wacko, well, who knows?”
“Maybe he’s both,” Vines said.
Bryant’s eyes again made their trip up and down Kelly Vines. “A professional wacko? Now that’s something to bite into.”
“I like it,” Joe Huff said.
Fork looked at his watch. “Well, we’ve got to go. You guys know what to do.”
“Yeah, we know.”
“While I’m consoling the widow Trice, get Jacoby down here and see if he can lift some prints.”
“Prints,” Bryant said and chuckled. “Prints,” he said again, as if repeating a punch line, and laughed out loud as he turned to Joe Huff. “Hear that, Joe? The chief just got off another of his zingers.”
“I’m not laughing,” Huff said, “but only because a loud laugh bespeaks a vacant mind.” He paused. “Goldsmith.”
“Paraphrased,” Vines said.
“And improved,” said Joe Huff with no trace of a smile.
Chapter 13
When they went from the kitchen into the living room after doing the dishes-he washed, she dried-B. D. Huckins waved Adair to the long cream couch and asked whether he’d like a brandy.
“No, thanks.”
Adair waited until she was seated in the chocolate-brown leather club chair before he lowered himself to the couch. When she crossed her legs, not carelessly, but indifferently, he glimpsed the tops of the stockings she wore instead of panty hose, which made him wonder whether garter belts had made a comeback during his fifteen months in prison.
“Tell me about that cane,” she said. “The one Sid wants.”
“It was my grandfather’s.”
“An heirloom?”
“A curiosity. He won it off a gambler in nineteen twenty just after Prohibition began. The handle unscrews and there’s a stoppered glass tube inside that holds about four ounces of hooch. That’s what he always called his liquor-hooch. After repeal in ’thirty-three our state stayed dry and my grandfather passed the cane on to my old man, who eventually passed it on to me. I would’ve given it to my son except he thought it was dumb.”
“So you passed it on to Vines.”
“For safekeeping.”
“He was more reliable than your son?”
“Just closer. Geographically. My son was in Washington; Kelly was in La Jolla.”
“And you were in Lompoc.”
“I was in Lompoc.”
“What business was he in?”
“Paul? He was a lawyer like Kelly and I, but he was never in private practice. By the time he was eighteen, maybe nineteen, he’d already decided on a career with the Federal government.”
“Your going to jail couldn’t have helped his career much.”
“Didn’t hurt it. Right after I was sentenced he got jumped up from the civil service equivalent of light colonel to brigadier general.”
Huckins’s full mouth went into its wry smile. “Washington must’ve liked his politics.”
“The current brand and Paul’s made a snug fit.”
“And yours?”
“In my family the politics of the sons has always been opposite their fathers’. My grandfather, who won the cane off the gambler, was a Debs socialist. His son-my old man-sat down and cried when Taft lost the nomination to Eisenhower in ’fifty-two.”
She leaned back in the leather chair. “So when did the vote bug bite?”
“In high school. I was a pretty fair debater and I got the notion of becoming a lawyer and maybe going into politics after I discovered how good winning made me feel. Winning anything. Later, I discovered there’s nothing like winning an election. Absolutely nothing.”
“How old were you?”
“When I first ran? Twenty-seven. I got elected county attorney, served a couple of two-year terms, sent some rich crooks to jail, got my name in the paper and then went back into private practice where I made a nice living defending the same kind of rich crooks I’d once prosecuted. When I thought I’d made enough money, I ran for the supreme court and won.”
“How much was enough?”
Adair shrugged. “Two or three million, around in there.”
“How’d you get to be chief justice?”
“The members of the court elect one of their own every four years.”
“Sounds weird.”
“It’s a weird state. After I’d served on the court four years, they always elected me for some reason.”
“For some reason,” she said.
Adair nodded and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. He made no attempt to hide his curiosity when he said, “I’m obliged to hear about it.”
“About what?”
“How you really got elected mayor.”
Huckins examined Adair dispassionately, as if he were some just-caught fish that she could either keep or toss back into the lake. Finally, after almost twenty seconds, she said, “All right.”
Adair edged forward on the couch and used his gravest voice to say, “When you come to the part where it gets nasty, Mayor, as it always does, just keep on going and don’t worry about my sensibilities.” He gave her a small smile. “Such as they are.”
B. D. Huckins said there were nine of them in the Day-Glo General Motors school bus that pulled into Durango that night in 1968. The next morning, four of them decided to stay. The other five wanted to keep heading for the Rocky Mountain Durango in Colorado. A coin was tossed. Those who were Colorado-bound called heads and won both the toss and the psychedelic bus.
Staying on in the California Durango, she said, were herself, then sixteen; her twelve-year-old half sister, Dixie Venable; Sid Fork, eighteen; and a twenty-year-old nut case who some days said his name was Teddy Jones and other days Teddy Smith.
Huckins said Teddy was a drinker and a doper who fried and pickled his brain with acid and gin and anything else he could inhale, swallow or stick in his arm. But Teddy was also the only one who had any money. When he rented a four-room house (more shack than house, she claimed) on Boatright Street out on the eastern edge of Durango in what even then was a rural slum, the other three moved in with him.
She said the communal living lasted three weeks, maybe four. It ended when she and Fork came back from the beach one afternoon. It was a real beach then, she said, with plenty of sand and not anything like it is now. Anyway, she and Fork went in the house and found the twelve-year-old Dixie naked and tied to the bed. Teddy was equally naked and drunk on gin and apparently trying to do it to Dixie with the gin bottle because, Huckins said, he probably couldn’t do it any other way.
Sid Fork picked up something, a sash weight, she thought, and knocked Teddy down with it and kicked him senseless. When he woke up, Fork had all of Teddy’s money, which she remembered as being about $300-almost a thousand in today’s dollars. Fork told Teddy he could have his money back after he got the next bus out of town. She said there were still two bus lines serving Durango then-Greyhound and Trailways.
So that’s what Teddy did, she said. Sid Fork walked him into town, bought his ticket, put him on the bus, gave him back his money and told him if he ever saw him in Durango again, he’d drown him in the ocean.
Although that was the last of Teddy Jones or Smith, she, Fork and Dixie still had to eat. So she and Fork got jobs-he in a gas station and she in a drugstore where the owner-pharmacist, a nice enough old guy of about forty-five, started hitting on her until she told him if he didn’t cut it out, she’d tell his wife.
The three of them managed to get by until late August of 1968 when the gas station where Fork worked was burgled. The owner suspected Fork, of course, she said. But being a class-A shit, didn’t accuse him or fire him or even go to the cops. What he did, she said, was worse. Much worse.
Huckins thought it was two or possibly three weeks later when two FBI suits from Santa Barbara drove up to a gas pump. Sid came out and they asked him for his draft card. That tore it, she said. The gas station owner had
turned Fork in for draft evasion and three weeks later he was in the Army and four or five months after that he was an MP in Saigon.
After Fork left, Huckins said she went to the owner of the drugstore and told him if he still wanted to go to bed with her on a regular basis, it would cost him $200 a month on top of what he was already paying her. The pharmacist-owner said he’d like to think about it. Three days later, he asked her to stay after work.
The pharmacist told her he’d maybe come up with a solution. There were these two friends of his, both real nice guys, one of them a lawyer and the other a CPA, and both of them, like him, members of the Durango City Council. And they, all three of them, he meant, were willing to set up a kind of cooperative.
What they wanted to do, she said, was pay her $150 a month each. The pharmacist would get Monday and Wednesday nights; the lawyer, Tuesdays and Fridays; and the CPA, Thursdays and Saturdays. Huckins said they thought she ought to have Sundays off.
Huckins said she made the pharmacist a counterproposal. She told him she’d agree, providing they’d fix it so Dixie could enter school in September without any hassle about a transcript of previous school records. Her second condition was that since she didn’t see any future in selling aspirins and Kotex, she wanted a job with either the lawyer or the CPA so she could learn something practical.
She said it took a week of negotiations before they agreed. The CPA gave her a job as file clerk and relief receptionist and Dixie enrolled in the seventh grade. Later, she said, when the CPA noticed his new file clerk’s head for figures, he started teaching her basic bookkeeping and even sent her to shorthand and typing classes at the Durango High School’s afternoon continuation program that, due to Proposition 13, got discontinued nine years ago.
After she’d been with the CPA for about three years, Huckins said, he made her office manager. And it was just about then that Sid Fork came back from Vietnam.
