by Ross Thomas
“This would be when?” Adair asked. “’Seventy-one?”
“Late ’seventy-one.”
“And you were nineteen or twenty then?”
“Just turned twenty.”
“So how’d it go after he got back?”
“We had a talk and after that it went okay.”
When Sid Fork returned from his three one-year tours with the Military Police in Saigon, she said he had a specialist six rank on his sleeve and a money belt around his waist that contained $15,000 in black market profits. Adair guessed that a specialist six was the equivalent of a staff sergeant in the army he had once served in long ago. Three stripes and a rocker, he remembered.
“Why’d the chief sign over for those two extra tours?” Adair asked.
“He liked being an MP. He also liked that black market money.”
Huckins said Fork wanted to pick up right where they’d left off. He even wanted to move down to Los Angeles, where he figured he could join its police department. She asked him what he thought he’d be in ten years-an LAPD sergeant? Fork said he didn’t see anything wrong with that until she told him he could be Durango’s chief of police in six or seven years if they followed her plan.
B. D. Huckins broke off again to ask Adair whether he would like a brandy or something. Adair said he didn’t want any brandy, but he certainly did want to hear how she’d managed the rest of it.
Huckins said she’d managed it by making herself indispensable to the three members of the sex co-op. All three were still city councilmen, so after she’d learned enough shorthand, she offered to take the minutes of the weekly council meetings. Until then the chore had been rotated among the five members. All of them hated it, she said, because it meant the note-taker had to listen to what the others said.
They snapped up her offer, Huckins recalled, and told her how much they appreciated it, especially since it didn’t cost the city anything. She told them she liked doing them a favor and if they wanted to do the old chief of police one, they ought to tell him how he could hire himself a big tough ex-MP and Vietnam vet for almost next to nothing. And that, she said, was how Sid Fork joined the Durango police force.
Jack Adair decided to ask some more questions. “Who served as city treasurer? That CPA you worked for?”
“Yes. It was a part-time job. Now it’s full-time.”
“He turn a lot of the routine stuff over to you?”
“As much as he could get away with.”
“So you took the council minutes and, in effect, kept the city’s books.”
She nodded.
“Was that sex co-op still in operation?”
“They all still paid and dropped by once or twice a week. But by then it was more therapy than sex. They liked talking to me about almost everything.”
“And everybody.”
“And everybody,” she agreed.
“I assume you remembered what was said.”
“I wrote it down.”
“A CPA, a lawyer and a pharmacist,” Adair said, as if thinking aloud. “They must’ve poked their noses into the closets of every skeleton in town.”
“If they missed any, Sid didn’t.”
“You two were still close?”
“He got Sunday nights.”
Adair nodded his appreciation, if not approval, of the arrangement, looked at her shrewdly and asked, “So which one of them died on you?”
“The pharmacist.”
She said he died in 1973 of an aneurysm not long after her twenty-first birthday. Because it was an off-year, the city charter required the mayor to appoint a successor to the unexpired term, although a majority of the council had to approve the mayor’s choice.
“With only a four-man council left, there could’ve been a tie vote,” Adair said.
“The mayor could break a tie.”
“You must’ve had yourself two solid votes on the council-the CPA and the lawyer.”
“I also had the mayor. The other two council members wanted him to nominate some young, sharp and ambitious lawyer. But my two guys told him he’d be smart to nominate a very young female who’d go on taking the minutes and totting up the books like always.”
“So how long’d it take to dump the mayor?”
Huckins said it took her five years. She served out her appointed term and was reelected to the council in 1974 and 1976. In 1978, she formed a slate and ran against the incumbent mayor, Richard Handshaw, charging that he was superannuated, negligent and incompetent until Sid Fork advised her to boil it down to baby talk.
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.
Chapter 14
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.
&
nbsp; 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.”
Chapter 15
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 ta
lked.”
“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.
Chapter 16
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.
