The Fourth Durango

by Ross Thomas

  Adair paused to finish his beer and continued. “I’m told it was a kind of half-whispered, half-shouted demagoguery. Lawyers flew in from all over, a few for the entire trial, but most just to hear Combine’s summation. And it must’ve sounded like implacable, irresistible logic-unless you studied it closely, as I eventually did, and found it not much more than visceral rhetoric, but brilliantly organized and beautifully told. Kelly was there. He can tell you.”

  The two half sisters and the Iranian looked at Kelly Vines. But it was B. D. Huckins who asked the question all three were thinking. “What were you doing there?”

  “Representing a client-the same Short Mex and Big Mick outfit Jack mentioned earlier. They’d sent me down because they thought they might be able to nibble around the edges, or at least catch a few crumbs that might fall from the table, if the verdict went the way they had hoped.”

  “And did it?” Huckins asked.

  “No.”

  She looked at Adair. “Well?”

  “After the prosecutor was all done, and after Combine had finally closed his mouth, and after the judge’s dubious instructions, the jury went out and stayed out for an hour and fifteen minutes, just long enough to make it look halfway decent, then came back in and found both Jack and Jill Jimson guilty of first-degree murder.”

  Chapter 19

  Dessert was a sin-rich flan and after Merriman Dorr himself served it to everyone except Kelly Vines, who said he didn’t care for any, Dorr asked whether the two of them could speak privately.

  Vines rose from the table and followed him out into the hall, where Dorr looked left, right and left again, the way he might look if he had come to a stop sign.

  “Enjoy your lunch?” he asked Vines.

  “The trout was good.”

  “Think the salad had a smidgeon too much tarragon?”

  “The salad was fine, too. How much?”

  “One thousand cash,” Dorr said. “No checks. No plastic.”

  “The trout wasn’t all that good.”

  “You’re paying for what it costs to bring the help in on a Saturday. Then there’s the liquor and the room. But what really jacks up the price is the privacy and that’s sort of hard to cost out because there’s none better anywhere.”

  “Cash only must simplify your bookkeeping,” Vines said, took a none-too-plump roll of one-hundred-dollar bills from his pants pocket, peeled off ten of the hundreds slowly enough for Dorr to keep up with the count and handed them over. Dorr counted them again, even more slowly, and said, “I don’t know what you and B. D.’ve got going, but-”

  “Let’s keep it like that.”

  Dorr ignored the interruption. “But whatever it is, if she or maybe even you ever need to go some place quick, I know where I can get me a Cessna.”

  “What do you charge-two hundred dollars per mile?”

  “You might practice up on your listening,” Dorr said, shoving the now folded $1,000 into a hip pocket. “I’m offering you a service through her. I mean, if she tells me you’ve got to go someplace in a hurry, that’s fine, I’ll fly you there although it’s got to have her okay because I don’t know you or your partner, if that’s what he is. But if there’s anything at all I can do for B. D., I’ll do it for free gratis because to me she’s the case ace.”

  “Why?” Vines said.

  “Why what?”

  “Why’s everyone so willing to jump off tall buildings for her?”

  “Because if you offer to jump today, you might not get pushed off tomorrow.”

  When Kelly Vines returned to his seat at the round table, Jack Adair was already well launched into his account of the million-dollar bribe: “…so when the state court of appeals upheld their convictions, it also revoked their bail. The boy was sent to the state penitentiary at Goldstone and the girl to the Female Correctional Institution, which is what they’d named the state prison for women when they built it back in nineteen eleven.”

  “And the sentence?” Parvis Mansur asked. “You never said.”

  “Death by lethal injection.”

  “Really. Both of them?”

  “Both.”

  “Who would administer it-a doctor?”

  “A medical technician.”

  Suspecting that her brother-in-law had a long list of other questions to ask about the mechanics of the execution, B. D. Huckins broke in with: “Let’s get to the bribe.”

  With an agreeable nod, Adair said, “The attorney general himself appeared before us for the state. He isn’t much of a lawyer but he is a damned fine politician, which is why he’s now governor. Then came Combine Wilson and that’s when all of us on the court sat up and took notice because this was Combine the legal scholar, not Combine the crowd pleaser. And if some of us hadn’t been careful, we’d’ve found ourselves nodding along with him and maybe even amening now and again as he told us what the law really was and not what some semiliterate county judge down in Little Dixie thought it ought to be.”

  “Little Dixie?” Dixie Mansur asked.

  “That’s what they call the section of my state where the Jimson kids were first tried.”

  “Is it meant to be a compliment or a slam?”

  “It started out one way but ended up the other.”

  “That’s what I figured,” she said.

  Adair looked at each member of his audience. “Any other questions?” When no one had any, Adair continued. “But despite Combine’s brilliance, I could sense that at least four of the brethren weren’t buying his argument. It could’ve been because three of them were up for reelection and figured that voting to put two rich kids to death wouldn’t do them any harm with the voters in my state, who, on the whole, are rather partial to executions. The fourth vote belonged to the lone weirdo on the court, who got and, I guess, still gets a kind of kinky pleasure from upholding death sentences. At least he’s never yet voted to overturn one. But then I have to admit I got plenty of satisfaction-of a different kind, I hope-from voting just the opposite.”

  “You’re opposed to the death penalty then?” Mansur asked.

  “Yes, sir, I am. Unalterably.”

  “How peculiar.”

  “Ever see one carried out, Mr. Mansur?”

  Before Mansur could reply, which he obviously wanted to do, B. D. Huckins again interrupted with an impatient, “Let’s get on with it.”

  Adair smiled at her. “With my account rather than my philosophy, I take it?” Not waiting for an answer, he said, “After I did my vote-counting, I came up with what appeared to be a four-to-four tie with old Justice Fuller holding the swing vote.”

  Parvis Mansur couldn’t resist another interruption. “When you say old, is that a colloquialism or a statement of fact?”

  “Justice Fuller was then eighty-one, which made him not only old but aged. His full name was Mark Tyson Fuller and he’d served on the court for thirty-six years and liked to call himself its institutional memory, although for a quarter of a century the clerks had been calling him The Weathervane because of his voting with the majority eighty-nine percent of the time.”

  “Was he competent?” Mansur asked.

  “He wasn’t much of a legal scholar and he was lazy, but he had a facile mind, all of his marbles, and he was the best vote-counter on the court-even better than I was and I was more than a fair hand. But he was also determined to stay on the court till he died because his wife had Alzheimer’s and the constant care she required had almost ruined him financially.”

  “How much does a supreme court justice make in your state?” Dixie Mansur asked.

  “Sixty-five thousand,” Adair said. “The chief justice gets seventy.”

  “Huh,” she said. “Law clerks down in L.A. make almost that much.”

  “I’m sure they do,” he said. “But some of us could afford to serve on the court. Others thought a term or two would help them politically or when they returned to private practice. And some of us enjoyed the prestige. There’s an old saw about how a state j
udge is a lawyer who knows a governor. But in my state, being elected a supreme court justice means you’re a political animal who ranks just above the lieutenant governor and only a rung or two below a U.S. senator.”

  B. D. Huckins glanced at her watch and said, “Could we-”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Adair said. “No more digressions.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the dining table, and stared at Parvis Mansur, who stared back with brown-velvet eyes that would have looked as mild as a doe’s had it not been for a slight cast in the right eye, which managed to give the Iranian’s entire countenance a look of profound skepticism. The rest of Mansur’s face was also slightly out of kilter, Adair decided. The eyes themselves were set too far apart in the thin-nosed and big-jawed face that seemed to be missing some essential component, possibly a mustache, and Adair found himself wondering how many times Mansur had grown one only to shave it off.

  “To continue,” Adair said. “Justice Fuller made his approach a few days after we’d finished hearing the Jimson case. He dropped by my chambers and hinted how he was kind of leaning toward overturning the two kids’ conviction and ordering a new trial. So I told him fine, I was leaning that way myself. Then he switched to what a tough reelection he had coming up, which was utter nonsense, but I let him prattle on till he came to what was really on his mind.”

  “Which was what?” Mansur asked.

  “He asked me to let him write the majority opinion because he said he had a real feel for the case, and also because he thought it might give him a little political boost, which was more nonsense. But I’d counted the votes by then and couldn’t see any harm in it, so I said, ‘Okay, Mark, you write it.’ So he eventually did and the court voted five to four to overturn the verdict and order a new trial for the Jimsons.”

  Adair paused to look at Kelly Vines. “Okay so far, Kelly?”

  “So far.”

  “About a month after that an investigator for the state attorney general’s office got an anonymous phone call from some guy with an obviously disguised voice who claimed Justice Fuller and I had split a million-dollar bribe to make sure the Jimson appeal went the way it did.”

  “Just like that?” B. D. Huckins said. “Out of the blue.”

  “Just like that,” Adair said. “Thirty minutes after the call came in, the attorney general himself was in my chambers, playing me a tape cassette of the call, which was a damn fool thing for him to do. But with the primary just a few months away, I expect he was thinking more about his gubernatorial campaign and political fallout than he was about the law. So I listened, thanked him kindly and asked whether somebody else was playing a copy of the tape for Justice Fuller.”

  “And were they?” Mansur asked.

  “I don’t think it’d even occurred to the A.G. because he looked surprised, maybe even shocked, and said no, of course not, because he’d wanted to talk to me first. I had to point out that I didn’t think the two of us should discuss the matter any further. He remembered his law then and left. It was about ten-thirty in the morning and he left all hunched over like the sky was falling, which, in a sense, I suppose it was. It was then I decided I’d better get myself a good cheap lawyer. So I called my son-in-law.”

  Mansur looked at Kelly Vines. “You, of course.”

  “Me,” Vines said.

  Jack Adair, looking suddenly tired, leaned back in his chair and said, “I think Kelly should tell you what happened next.”

  After talking to Adair, Vines had telephoned the home of Justice Fuller only to get a busy signal. He kept redialing for fifteen minutes, then called the operator, claimed it was an emergency, and asked her to find out whether the Fuller phone was in use or off the hook. She checked and said it was off the hook.

  The Fuller house was a large old two-story frame monster, painted white, with a deep covered porch that advertised it had been built back in the 1920s before air-conditioning. It was also in the heart of a steadily deteriorating neighborhood that had been designated a “Historical Section” by the city in a vain attempt to maintain property values.

  Kelly Vines rang the doorbell repeatedly. When no one responded, he tried the door itself and found it unlocked. His first impulse was to get back in his car and return to his office. Instead, he entered the house out of what he described as “curiosity and an ill-defined sense of obligation.”

  A wide center hall led to the stairs. To the right was the living room. To the left, the dining room, which adjoined the kitchen. Vines walked into the living room and found Mrs. Mark Fuller, the Alzheimer’s victim, sitting in a rocking chair much like the one John Kennedy had popularized, dressed in a long pink flannel nightgown and dead from what seemed to be a gunshot wound in her chest. Her hands, folded in her lap, still held a pair of silver-rimmed eyeglasses.

  Vines left the living room, crossed the hall and entered the dining room. Justice Fuller sat in an armchair. It matched the dining table that was made from some very dark, almost black wood, possibly Philippine mahogany. The table was part of a suite composed of eight matching chairs, a carved sideboard and a glass-fronted china cabinet.

  Seven of the eight chairs were drawn up to the long table. The one Justice Fuller sat in had been shoved back three feet from the head of the table, almost to the wall, apparently to keep blood from splattering the one-page handwritten letter that lay on the table just in front of two open shoeboxes that were filled with packets of one-hundred-dollar bills, each packet bound by a red rubber band.

  Justice Fuller sat sprawled in the armchair, his head thrown back. An inch or so above the bridge of his nose was a black hole whose diameter was about that of a pencil. On the floor beside the chair was a small semiautomatic pistol.

  Vines stared at the dead supreme court justice for either seconds or minutes, he could never remember which, then turned to read the handwritten letter. It lay centered on the table and anchored by a full lower set of dentures that served as a paperweight.

  Using a ballpoint pen to push the false teeth aside, Vines read the looping handwriting of the to-whom-it-may-concern letter:

  After receiving a disturbing call this morning from the state attorney general’s office, I have decided to end my life and also that of my incurably ill and much beloved Martha.

  The reason for these drastic measures is that Chief Justice Jack Adair and I each accepted a $500,000 (five hundred thousand dollars) bribe from a party or parties unknown to vote as we did on the Jack and Jill Jimson appeal. It was Chief Justice Adair, heretofore one of the most honorable men I have ever known, who, fully cognizant of my precarious financial condition, approached me with the offer to divide $1,000,000 (one million dollars) in bribe money evenly. But now the burden has simply grown too great and Martha and I have grown too old. I am dreadfully sorry.

  The letter was signed, “Sincerely, Mark Tyson Fuller.”

  Kelly Vines used his ballpoint pen to push the false teeth back to where they had been, went to the phone in the living room and called a newspaper reporter he knew. He then waited exactly five minutes and called the police. The reporter, accompanied by a photographer, arrived first. The photographer, having quickly taken pictures of the dead justice, his murdered wife and the suicide note, was taking pictures of the two shoeboxes full of one-hundred-dollar bills when the police arrived.

  “There were four of them,” Vines said. “Two homicide detectives and two uniforms. First, they threw out the reporter and the photographer. Next they yelled at me for a while. Then they made sure that both Justice and Mrs. Fuller were really dead. After that, they read the suicide note. And finally, they counted the money. But no matter how many times they counted it-and it was at least six or seven times-the total still came to only four hundred and ninety-seven thousand dollars.”

  Chapter 20

  As Vines expected, it was Parvis Mansur who asked the first and most pertinent question. “Were two enough?”

  “Two shoeboxes? Yes.”

  “Is that an estimate-a guess?” />
  “Neither.”

  “May I ask how you knew?”

  “From some ex-clients who carried large chunks of cash around in shoeboxes.”

  “How much American money will fit into one?”

  “In hundreds?”

  “Yes. In hundreds.”

  “The average shoebox is twelve inches long, six inches wide, three and a quarter inches deep and can hold up to three thousand U.S. bills, if they’re tightly packed. But the people I knew didn’t pack more than twenty-five hundred bills into one. By using hundred-dollar bills, they had a convenient, portable container that held a quarter of a million dollars and weighed only five point one pounds.”

  “How do you know how much it weighed?” B. D. Huckins asked.

  “Because there are four hundred and ninety U.S. bills to the pound.”

  “You also learned this from your former clients?” Mansur said.

  “Where else?”

  “They must’ve been exceedingly prosperous.”

  “They were pot smokers who became dealers, grew into major wholesalers and eventually took in so much cash they had to weigh it to count it.”

  “What happened to them?” Dixie Mansur asked.

  “Who cares?”

  “Let’s return to the reporter and the photographer,” Mansur said. “As soon as you read the suicide note and looked at the two shoeboxes, you realized they could, in fact, contain no more than half a million dollars, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So to preserve everything on film before the police arrived, you called the reporter and urged him to bring a photographer along. Also true?”