The Fourth Durango

by Ross Thomas

  “How’s this sound, B. D.?” Dorr asked. “Some really great trout, wild rice, maybe a little broccoli and a Cousin Mary salad followed by a flan for dessert?”

  “Fine,” she said.

  “Chief Fork not joining us?”

  “No.”

  Dorr nodded, as if at mildly disappointing news, and gave the wet bar a wave. “You all just help yourselves,” he said and left.

  The mayor was examining a fingernail on her left hand, Kelly Vines was inspecting one of the schoolhouse watercolors and Jack Adair was sipping a glass of beer when the door opened nine minutes later and the blond Dixie Mansur entered, followed by an elegant man in his late thirties who, for some reason, made Vines think of a ceremonial dagger, just waiting to be drawn.

  Dixie Mansur wore fawn slacks that looked expensive and a dark brown silk blouse whose price, Vines guessed, had been exorbitant. Her eyes skipped over Vines and Adair and stopped at her half-sister, the mayor. “I invited myself along,” she said.

  “I’m glad,” Huckins said and turned up her cheek for the kiss her sister bent down to give her. “I don’t think you’ve met Judge Adair. My sister, Dixie Mansur.”

  After they shook hands and said hello, Huckins said, “You know Kelly Vines, of course.”

  “Of course.” B. D. Huckins smiled up at her brother-in-law, who stood with a pleasant, if unsmiling expression, his right hand deep into the pocket of his tan raw-silk bush jacket, his left hand holding a cigarette down at his side. “How are you, Parvis?” Huckins said.

  “Splendid, B. D. You keeping well?”

  The mayor nodded her answer and introduced him to Jack Adair and Kelly Vines. Parvis Mansur shook hands first with Adair and then with Vines, thanking him for “rescuing my wife.”

  “It was nothing,” Vines said.

  “I’m in your debt.”

  “Not at all.”

  “At least accept my gratitude.”

  “Of course,” said Vines, wondering whether the pleasantries would ever end. They did when the door opened and a Mexican busboy hurried in with a new place setting. Right behind him came a frowning Merriman Dorr, who glared at Mansur’s wife and said, “You could’ve at least called, Dixie.”

  She ignored both the scolding and Dorr, who was now supervising the busboy. After the place setting was laid, Dorr moved a salad fork a quarter of an inch to the left, turned to give no one in particular a charming-host smile and said, “I do hope you all enjoy your lunch.”

  “I’m sure we will,” B. D. Huckins said.

  “Good,” Dorr said and left, shooing the busboy ahead of him.

  After the door closed Parvis Mansur turned to the mayor and asked, “Have we time for a drink?”

  Huckins indicated the wet bar. “Help yourself.”

  On his way to the bar Mansur asked, “Dixie?”

  “Sure.”

  All watched as Mansur dropped ice cubes into a pair of glasses, poured the Scotch and added the water. He did it with an economy of movement that was almost miserly. Vines suspected it was how he did everything, except talk, since Vines also suspected Mansur enjoyed the sound of his own voice, which was a deep baritone, verging on bass, and unaccented except for its British vowels and inflection. Wondering how early the British overtones had been acquired, Vines had a sudden mental picture, not quite a vision, of an elderly retired British Army officer, eking out his pension by spending long afternoons in Teheran, teaching received pronunciation to a squirming six-year-old Parvis Mansur, who never forgot anything.

  After everyone was settled into either the easy chairs or the long couch, Mansur looked at Adair and said, “Tell us about it.”

  “Hard to say where to begin.”

  “Perhaps with the case itself-the one involving the million-dollar bribe.”

  “The false bribe,” Adair said.

  “Very well. The false bribe.”

  Jack Adair drank the rest of his beer, put the glass down, clasped his hands over the black cane’s curved handle and examined the ceiling for a moment or two, as if gathering the threads of his narrative. He then looked at Parvis Mansur.

  “Well, sir, it came to us on appeal, of course, and it involved murder, a touch of incest and maybe a few trillion or so cubic feet of natural gas. So you could say, as such cases go, this one was kind of interesting.”

  “Yes,” Mansur said. “I can see how one might say that.”

  Chapter 18

  Jack Adair began his tale with Delano Maytubby, the fifty-two-year-old Osage Indian doodle-bugger who, equipped with nothing more than two wands of willow, had established a reputation for finding oil and gas beneath land the major oil companies had either ignored or written off. If things were slow, Maytubby, when pressed, would also look for water. But he first made it clear to whoever hired him that he was a genuine professional doodle-bugger and not some goddamn amateur dowser who believed in wood sprites and stuff.

  Maytubby had been hired to look for either gas or oil beneath the five square miles of blackjack oaks and cockleburs that sixty-three-year-old Obie Jimson ran cattle on down in the southeast corner of Adair’s state.

  The two of them would drive around the ranch in Jimson’s ancient Ford pickup until Maytubby said stop. He would then get out, armed with his two willow wands, and head off in a direction of his own choosing, Jimson following along in low gear in the pickup. They did this for nearly a month until the crossed willow wands dipped and bobbed three times, pointed straight down and Delano Maytubby said, “Oh-oh.”

  Jimson climbed down from the pickup and looked around skeptically. “Here, you reckon?”

  “Here.”

  “So what is it?”

  “Well, it ain’t oil so it must be gas.”

  “How can you tell the difference?”

  Maytubby pointed his right hand straight up. “What color’s that?”

  “What?”

  “The sky, goddamnit.”

  “Blue.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I can see it.”

  “How do you know you can see it?”

  “Well, shit, Del, I just know.”

  “And that’s how I can tell it’s gas instead of oil,” the doodle-bugger said. “I just know.”

  The primary reason Obie Jimson had hired Maytubby, other than for his reputation as the state’s preeminent oil and gas diviner, was that Maytubby couldn’t keep his mouth shut. A leasehound for one of the majors, sitting in Crazy Kate’s Coffee Shop two days later, overheard Maytubby boasting about his alleged find on Jimson’s ranch.

  The leasehound mentioned it casually to his boss, who told him to run a swab on the folks at the courthouse to see whether anyone else, besides a doodle-bugger, had been nosing around the area. When the leasehound reported back that a guy he knew from Phillips Petroleum had suddenly shown up in town, his boss told him to get out to Jimson’s place and see how hard a nut he’d be to crack.

  Obie Jimson proved to be a real tuf nut, as the oil fraternity usually spelled it. He hemmed and he hawed and he mumbled about how cattle and oil don’t mix, and about protecting the land that’d been in his family for three generations and about how disappointed he was that that doodle-bugger he’d hired didn’t find any water because cows sure as hell can’t drink oil or gas.

  After the leasehound left, promising to return with what might be an interesting proposition, Jimson telephoned Continental Airlines, which was the cheapest, and made a reservation for a flight to New Orleans. He then dug out a clipping from the Wall Street Journal, which had named the twenty best tax lawyers in the nation, and called Randolph Parmenter in New Orleans, who was listed as number sixteen.

  Jimson flew down to New Orleans the next day, had a few drinks and a good dinner, wandered around the French Quarter until 3 A.M. and showed up for his 10 A.M. appointment with Parmenter, looking relaxed and rested.

  Parmenter asked the initial question that most lawyers and doctors ask: “What seems to be the problem?”


  “The problem,” Jimson said, “is there’s a chance of me getting stinking rich and I don’t want those socialist nut cases up in Washington to get their hands on it. Well, not on most of it, anyhow.”

  Parmenter’s office was just off Canal in one of the older downtown buildings that prided itself on the respectability and stuffiness of its tenants. Its coffee shop was said to serve the best chicken salad sandwiches in town and its cigar stand prided itself on the quality of its contraband Cuban cigars.

  The lawyer gave Obie Jimson a patronizing old-money smile and asked, “And just what do you consider to be stinking rich, Mr. Jimson?”

  “Sixty, seventy million maybe-around in there. But not all at once, of course.”

  Parmenter abandoned his patronizing air. “And the source of all this new wealth?”

  “Natural gas.”

  “Well, the deep stuff is bringing nine dollars per thousand cubic feet now,” Parmenter admitted.

  (“You have to remember,” Jack Adair told his audience, “that this was all back in early nineteen eighty-four.”)

  “Won’t stay up near that high,” Jimson said.

  “Oh?”

  “It’s gonna come down ass over teacup ’fore long.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “Read in the Wall Street Journal where that Saudi Arabia guy, what’s his name, Sheek Yamani’s predicting it, and I figure he’s gotta know something I don’t.”

  “The geology on your land’s been done, of course.”

  “Don’t think I said that.”

  “Then how can you be certain the gas is there?”

  “Because the best doodle-bugger in the Osage Nation says so.”

  “A doodle-bugger,” Parmenter said. “I see.”

  “No, you don’t, Mr. Parmenter. It just so happens I’ve got me a fairly new wife, although it turns out I don’t much like her, and I also got me two young kids, a boy and a girl by my first marriage-she died, my first wife, ten years ago-and I had to raise Jack and Jill practically by myself-at least until I married Contrary Mary two years back. And I’m much obliged to you for not smiling at my kids’ names the way most folks do. Jack’s twenty and Jill’s eighteen-I married late the first time and not late enough the second-and I wanta divide up the revenue source before the gas gets proved out because I read in Money magazine that if you do that, you can save a ton on taxes.”

  Parmenter leaned back in his tall wood and leather chair and peered at Jimson through a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. Jimson, who had never worn glasses, noticed they were trifocals. “Money magazine?” Parmenter said, unable to keep the horror out of his voice.

  Jimson nodded.

  “Well, it is true that if you distribute your real property before certain natural resources are proved to be within or beneath it, you can avoid significant taxes. However, the IRS regards such prior distribution schemes with considerable skepticism. Are you quite sure there haven’t been other geological explorations or seismographic surveys done of your property?”

  “Not that I remember,” Jimson said.

  “Has there been any recent interest?”

  “Well, some old boy from a wildcat outfit they call Short Mex and Big Mick dropped by the other day. But I played the fool and he went away.”

  “So you flew down to see me solely on the faith you have placed in this Osage doodle-bugger’s proficiency?”

  “It’s not a question of me having faith in him, Mr. Parmenter. The question seems to be if the IRS would.”

  When he finally understood the elegance of Obie Jimson’s reply, Parmenter allowed himself the day’s first smile. Still smiling, he reached for a yellow legal pad, uncapped a fountain pen and said, “So how would you like to carve it up?”

  “I wanta keep two-fifths of everything for myself. I want my wife, Marie Elena Contraire Jimson, to get a fifth and I want my two kids to have a fifth each. When I die, I want my two-fifths to go to the kids since they’re blood kin and I’ve known them a hell of a lot longer than I have old Contrary Mary. And that’s about it except for one or two other things.”

  After completing his notes, Parmenter looked up and said, “I’ll need some additional details, documents and-”

  Jimson didn’t let him finish. “Got everything right here,” he said, bent over, picked up a Wal-Mart shopping bag from the floor and slid it across the lawyer’s desk. Parmenter quickly examined the papers inside and smiled for the second time.

  “It seems you’ve brought exactly what I need. Money magazine again?”

  Jimson nodded. “It’s plumb full of useful tips.”

  “I’ll have to buy a copy one of these days,” Parmenter said.

  Jimson finally accepted an offer from one of the major oil companies and flew Parmenter up from New Orleans to handle the negotiations. A little less than six months later, Obie and his son, Jack, were out quail hunting when Jill tracked them down in her old Volkswagen.

  “He just called!” she said.

  “Who?” her father asked.

  “That guy from the oil company.”

  “What about?”

  “He said we’ve got production.”

  “Didn’t say how much, did he?”

  “He said to tell you it’s a barnburner. What’s a barnburner, Daddy?”

  “It means we’re stinking rich,” Obie Jimson said, gave out a rebel yell, threw his hat to the ground and did a credible jig around it.

  That night the four Jimsons celebrated at the Stack Boys Ranch Inn with what Roy Stack later testified were “great big porterhouses, lots of eighteen-dollar-a-bottle California champagne and maybe a glass or two of whiskey apiece.”

  Then all four Jimsons-Obie, Contrary Mary, Jack and Jill-went home and went to bed. At some time between midnight and 3 A.M., Obie Jimson rose and went to his office in the old ranch house. A loaded shotgun, one of the same guns he and Jack had used to hunt quail that afternoon, was taken from the locked gun rack. Its muzzle was inserted into Obie’s mouth and the trigger pulled. He was found by his wife, the former Marie Contraire, who screamed and rushed off, still screaming, to find Jack and Jill.

  When the deputy sheriff who responded to Marie Jimson’s frantic telephone call finally thought to ask where she had found her two stepchildren, she said she’d found them where they always were at night, in bed with each other.

  The only fingerprints found on the shotgun that ended Obie Jimson’s life belonged to his son, Jack. He and his sister, Jill, by then twenty-one and nineteen respectively, were arrested and indicted for first-degree murder. Bail was set at $1 million each and posted by the president of the bank where Obie Jimson had done business. The bank president demanded and got an 18.9 percent fee on the pledged $2 million, explaining to Jack Jimson it was the same rate he’d pay if he’d put it on his Visa card.

  Barred from the ranch by their stepmother, who announced-through a recently hired media consultant-that she would not “sleep under the same roof with the incestuous fornicators who murdered my dear husband,” Jack and Jill Jimson checked into a suite at the county seat’s Ramada Inn, fired their local attorney and called Randolph Parmenter in New Orleans, who strongly recommended that they retain as defense attorney Combine Wilson of Austin, Texas, who was notorious for his brilliance, flamboyance and enormous fees.

  “Well, I reckon we can afford him, can’t we?” Jack Jimson said.

  “Jill still on the phone?” Parmenter asked.

  Assured that she was, Parmenter reminded the brother and sister of the legal documents he had drawn up for Obie Jimson, which they had both signed, as had their stepmother, Marie Contraire Jimson.

  “If Obie were to die, which, unfortunately, he has,” Parmenter said, “you two were to inherit his forty percent of the gas revenue. This means the two of you together will now receive eighty percent of all revenue and your stepmother, twenty percent. If you die, she gets your share. If she dies, you get hers.”

  “What kind of money are we talkin
g about?” Jack Jimson asked.

  “Well, you’ve got five producing wells now and so we’re talking about twelve million cubic feet of gas a day. With your three-sixteenths royalty on the five wells, that amounts to a little over twenty thousand dollars a day per well, or about three million a month. Of course, the production tax on that’ll be two hundred and twenty-eight thousand a month, but that still leaves you two with eighty percent of two point seven-seven million a month.”

  “About twenty-five million a year, huh? For Jill and me?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s kind of interesting.”

  “I’m sure Combine Wilson will find it so,” Parmenter said.

  Wilson found it so interesting that, instead of setting a fee, he agreed to represent his two young clients-or orphans, as he liked to call them-on a contingency basis, virtually unheard of in a murder case. He explained that if he got them off and out the courtroom’s front door, they would pay him ten percent of their gross incomes for the next three years.

  “But if I don’t get you two little darlin’s off,” Combine Wilson had said, “you don’t pay me a dime.”

  Jack Adair paused in his recitation, reached for his glass and drank some more beer, which had grown almost warm. “Now ten percent of the override from that much natural gas was, as Combine himself liked to admit, ‘a tidy sum.’ And to earn it, he put on a brilliant show. Most say his finest.”

  “An orator, I take it,” Parvis Mansur said.

  “Spellbinder,” said Adair. “He wept and raved about unloved children driven by loneliness, despair and criminal neglect into each other’s arms, thus giving incest a nice warm glow. He railed against an aging, indifferent and philandering father who brought home as stepmother to his children a woman who had been arrested sixteen times in Houston for prostitution. He produced expert witnesses from Detroit and Los Angeles who went after the prosecution’s physical evidence, such as it was, and ripped it to shreds. He put the sheriff’s deputy on the stand and got him so rattled he shook, and then reduced at least three other prosecution witnesses to tears. But what Combine did best was to provoke a mediocre county judge into making some awfully bad law. And finally, there was Combine’s summation that was demagoguery at its finest and most effective.”