The Fourth Durango

by Ross Thomas

  Vines nodded and Mansur nodded back contentedly. The silence that followed was finally broken by B. D. Huckins with an exasperated sigh. “I don’t understand.”

  “Don’t understand what?” Vines said.

  “Any of it. Especially the money thing. Was there a million or only five hundred thousand? Did the judge, what’s his name, Fuller, kill himself and his wife, or did somebody else do it? And finally,” she said, turning to stare at Jack Adair, “did you take the half million or not and, if so, who from?”

  Vines also looked at Adair and said, “Well?”

  Adair decided to examine the ceiling. He was still examining it when he came to his decision and said, “Tell ’em, Kelly.”

  “Everything?”

  “Everything.”

  After infuriating the two homicide detectives by refusing to answer any of their questions unless he had legal counsel present, Kelly Vines enraged them even more when he handed each a business card and suggested in his most imperious tone that if they wished to question him further, they should call his secretary and arrange an appointment.

  The two detectives were still sputtering when Vines walked out of the Fuller house, got into his car and drove immediately to a three-year-old, seven-story condominium building that now occupied the site of the demolished grade school he had attended for seven years. The apartment building, advertised as offering “the ultimate in luxury and prestige,” overlooked the twenty-acre park that Vines had crossed daily to classes that had begun with kindergarten and ended with the sixth grade.

  A drive now looped up through ten acres of expensively landscaped grounds to the condominium’s entrance. Vines got out of the Mercedes sedan, the same sedan he would later drive to California, and turned the car over to the doorman, who, Vines remembered, had dropped out of high school halfway through the eleventh grade in 1965 to enlist in the Marines. The doorman never seemed to remember Kelly Vines.

  After taking the elevator up to the top floor, the seventh, Vines used a key to let himself into his father-in-law’s apartment that occupied 2,600 square feet. He crossed the living room, went down a hall and entered what the architect had decreed to be the master bedroom, which featured an enormous walk-in closet next to the bath. The closet’s twin sliding doors had been covered by full-length mirrors until Jack Adair had had them removed, explaining that the last thing he wanted to see first thing in the morning was a naked or half-naked fat man.

  Vines entered the closet, turned on its light, knelt down and found twelve of them stacked in a corner, hidden-or at least concealed-by two old Burberry topcoats that were then too small for Adair but far too good to throw away.

  The twelve shoeboxes were divided into twin stacks of six each. The boxes bore the brand names of Ferragamo, Johnston & Murphy, Bass, Allen-Edmonds and Gucci. One of the Gucci boxes was at the bottom of the near stack. The other Gucci box was second from the top of the far stack. Vines automatically removed both of them, certain that Adair would go barefoot before wearing anything made by Gucci. He carried the two shoeboxes out of the closet and placed them on the king-size bed. When he lifted off their tops he discovered that again someone had used red rubber bands to bind the one-hundred-dollar bills into packets.

  Vines called down for his car. When he came out of the condominium building, he opened the Mercedes’s trunk and carelessly tossed in a green plastic garbage bag. After that, he drove around aimlessly for fifteen minutes until he was reasonably sure he wasn’t being followed. From a phone booth he called a client who was a senior partner in the wholesale marijuana concern.

  They met an hour later in the State Historical Museum, which was only two blocks from the state capitol. They met in the museum’s basement where the century-old stagecoaches, buggies and covered wagons were kept on display. The client was a lanky thirty-two-year-old who wore jeans, scuffed cowboy boots and a white oxford cloth button-down shirt with its sleeves rolled just above his elbows. The client had quit smoking both tobacco and marijuana six months before and now kept a toothpick in his mouth. Four or five times a day he dipped the toothpick into a small vial of cinnamon oil.

  “What’s up?” the client asked.

  “I need to use one of your laundries.”

  “No shit?”

  “Which one do you suggest?”

  The client dug a forefinger into his right ear, which always seemed to help him think, and said, “Well, Panama’s not bad, but you can’t be sure everybody down there’ll speak English, although most of ’em do, but I still sorta like the Bahamas because all of ’em speak English there, even if you’ve got to work at it sometimes to understand what the fuck they’re saying. How much we talking about?”

  “Five hundred thousand.”

  “Oh,” the client said, as if the amount were scarcely enough to fool with. “Well, it’ll cost you.”

  “How much?”

  “First off, we’ll take ten percent and our pet bank down in Houston’s gonna take another ten, so what you’ll have left by the time it gets where it’s going is about four hundred K.”

  “Then let’s do it,” Vines said.

  “When?”

  “Today. Right now.”

  When Kelly Vines walked into the reception room of the chambers of the chief justice of the state supreme court on the third floor of the state capitol building, the fifty-four-year-old secretary looked up with an apprehensive expression that dissolved into relief when she saw that her visitor was the boss’s son-in-law and not the police.

  “He’s been asking for you,” said Eunice Warr, who had been Adair’s secretary for thirteen years.

  “How’s he doing?”

  She shrugged. “About like you’d expect.”

  Vines smiled slightly. “You think he took it, Eunice?”

  She shrugged again. “Says he didn’t.”

  The chief justice’s large chamber was paneled in pecan and carpeted with woven wool and filled with a huge teak desk, two brown leather couches and at least six brown leather easy chairs. Maroon velvet curtains decorated three wide ceiling-high windows that looked out on the Japanese-designed executive office building across the street where the governor worked.

  Adair sat in a high-backed leather swivel chair, his feet up on the massive desk, listening through an earphone to a small gray multiband Sony radio, the ICF-2002 shortwave model.

  Adair took the earphone off and said, “Well, at least it didn’t make the BBC yet.”

  “What else have you heard?” Vines said as he sat down in one of the leather easy chairs.

  “Just what’s on the local all-news station,” Adair said, reaching for his black cane. After removing its handle and cork, he poured two drinks into a pair of glasses that he took from a desk drawer.

  “I was holding out till you got here,” he said as he rose and handed Vines one of the glasses. “Didn’t quite seem like the time to be drinking alone.”

  Vines tasted his whiskey and said, “Anyone call you?”

  “Not a soul.”

  “Or drop by to commiserate?”

  “Be like commiserating with an ax-murderer.”

  “Paul didn’t call-or Dannie?”

  “Paul’s off doing the Lord’s work in Cyprus, I think, and as for Dannie, well, your wife and my daughter doesn’t seem to be paying much attention to current events these days, which, I assume, you must’ve noticed.”

  “But you did hear about the Fullers and the suicide note?” Vines said.

  Adair nodded and sipped some of his whiskey. “They say you found the bodies.”

  “I also went to your apartment.”

  “Well, you’ve got a key.”

  “I looked around.”

  “Get to it, Kelly.”

  “I looked in that big walk-in closet-the one in your bedroom.”

  “You’re saying, for some reason, that you looked there first, right?”

  Vines nodded.

  “And found what?”

  “Two Gucci shoe
boxes. The first one contained two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills. The second one contained the same fucking thing.”

  Vines knew that no one, not even a great actor, could feign the shock that widened Adair’s kitten blue eyes, dropped open his mouth and produced the violent sneeze, a powerful hay fever-type blast that made him fumble for his handkerchief and blow his nose. After he was done with that, he remembered his drink, gulped it down and, in an almost conversational tone, said, “Son of a bitch.”

  After that, Adair stared down between his knees at the wool carpet, looked up at Vines and said, “I never bought a pair of Guccis in my life.”

  The anger came then-a slow cold rage that narrowed Adair’s eyes, drained his plump cheeks of all color and caused the three chins to quiver angrily when he again spoke. “It still there?” he demanded. “In my closet? In a pair of fucking Gucci shoeboxes?”

  Vines looked at his watch and said, “It should be on its way down to the Bahamas right about now.”

  Adair’s anger evaporated. Color returned to his cheeks and curiosity to his expression. “I thank you, Kelly,” he said with careful formality. “But I’ve got to say it was a goddamned dumb thing for you to do.”

  “It’s also a felony. You were set up, Jack. But without the money, they have no case. At least not one they can win.”

  Adair swiveled around in his chair so he could look across the street at the almost new building where the governor worked. “They’ll try, though, won’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what d’you suppose they’ll poke around in first?”

  “The usual: your bank accounts, safety-deposit boxes, assets, investments, tax returns.”

  “Tax returns,” Adair said to the building across the street.

  The silence began then. It was one of those ominous silences that seldom lasts very long because somebody coughs or clears his throat before somebody else screams. Kelly Vines ended the silence in the chambers of the chief justice with a murmured question. “What’s the problem, Jack?”

  Adair swiveled around to face him and spoke in a voice without inflection. It was a tone Vines instantly recognized because he had heard it often from clients who, when all hope was gone, used it to describe their transgressions without emotion or embellishment. It was, Vines had learned, the voice of truth.

  “Four years ago,” Adair said, “I told the payroll folks to start taking double state and Federal withholding out of my salary. I figured the additional withholding would make me come out about even with the tax people at the end of the year and take care of whatever tax I might owe on interest, dividends and other outside income.”

  “Very prudent,” Vines said.

  “The thing is,” Adair said, “I forgot to file my state and Federal returns that first year. When I finally remembered, I just kept putting it off. And when nothing happened, I just kept on putting it off.”

  “For how long?”

  “As I said, four years now.”

  “They’ve got you, Jack.”

  “I know.”

  “You could’ve gone to H and R Block, for Christsake. You could’ve let Eunice handle it for you. You could’ve-aw, shit-it just doesn’t make sense.”

  “Procrastination rarely does.”

  There was nothing ominous or threatening about the new silence that developed. Rather it was the sad kind sometimes experienced at graveside services when no one can think of anything to say, good or bad, about the dead. Finally, Kelly Vines said, “Maybe I can make a fancy move or two and rig up some kind of a trust that’ll salvage something, if we’re lucky.”

  “Can you keep me out of jail?”

  “I can try.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “I’m not in the miracle business, Jack.”

  “Would it take a miracle to find out who stuck those shoeboxes in my closet?”

  “No,” Vines said. “That won’t take a miracle.”

  Chapter 21

  After Parvis Mansur had listened to what Adair and Vines had to say about disbarment, Lompoc penitentiary life, the death of Blessing Nelson and murder in the Blue Eagle Bar, the Iranian took over the discussion and aimed it right at what obviously disturbed him most.

  Making no effort to disguise his skepticism, he said, “In effect, Mr. Adair, you’re saying that nobody really wants to kill you-at least not yet. If they did, they could easily have done when they photographed you from the rear of that pink van. After all, an Uzi’s as simple to operate as a Minolta. Some say simpler.”

  “Or they could’ve had me killed in prison.”

  “But since they didn’t, you believe you’re still alive because of what you know, correct?”

  “Because of what they think I know.”

  “Is there a possibility that your memory might improve at some propitious moment?”

  “If there really is something to remember, it could come to me one of these days. Or nights.”

  “What if someone were to put a gun to your head and say, ‘Reveal or die’?”

  “That might jog the memory. Then again, it might not.”

  After permitting himself a fleeting look of utter disbelief, Mansur turned to Vines. “I assume Mr. Adair’s enemies are also yours?”

  “That’s a safe assumption.”

  “Not exactly pussycats, are they?”

  “Apparently not.”

  Mansur grimaced and closed his eyes, as if at some sudden pain, which Vines thought was probably mental. When he opened them to look at Vines again, they still appeared as skeptical as ever. “If I understand my sister-in law correctly,” Mansur said, sounding almost bored or possibly resigned, “you want me to winkle these enemies of yours out of their concealment. And to do this I’m to spread the word that the pair of you can be purchased from your putative protectors, Mayor Huckins and Chief Fork, for one million dollars in cash. Correct so far?”

  “So far,” Vines said.

  “May I ask how you arrived at that nice round sum?”

  Adair said, “I decided a million’s just small change to them. Respectable change, of course, but still small.”

  “One other item,” Vines said. “We also want you to make it look like a setup-as if you’d tricked us into it.”

  “Well, now,” Mansur said, sounding interested and pleased for the first time. “A touch of humbug. Marvelous. It could work nicely, providing…” The sentence died as he gave Huckins an amused look. “Well, B. D.?”

  “Sid and I want a straight switch, Parvis,” she said. “You pass the word and Mr. Mysterious makes his approach. When the time and place are agreed to, you trade Adair and Vines for the million any way you can. After that, they’re on their own.”

  Mansur cocked a questioning eyebrow at Adair. “Satisfactory?”

  “Sounds fine.”

  Mansur leaned back in his chair to study Adair. “For some reason, neither you nor Mr. Vines look like a couple of guys who’d willingly walk through death’s front door.”

  “We’re not,” Adair said.

  “So you have some…contingency plan.”

  Adair only stared at him.

  “Which is none of my affair, of course. My only task is to establish contact and make sure no one is cheated or harmed-at least until the money is safely in my hands.”

  “That’s what you’re good at, isn’t it?” Vines asked.

  “Arranging things?” Mansur said. “Yes. That’s what I’m very good at.” He looked around the table, wearing a bright smile, and said, “Any other questions, comments?”

  “Only one,” Adair said. “I’m always curious why a man takes on a lousy job. Since we’re not paying you anything and, as far as I know, the mayor and the chief aren’t either, my question’s the usual crude one: What’s in it for you?”

  Mansur turned to his wife with a fond smile and covered her hand with his. “Continued domestic bliss,” he said.

  “Which we all know is beyond p
rice,” said Adair.

  “Precisely.”

  Dixie Mansur withdrew her hand from her husband’s, looked at Kelly Vines and said, “You forgot something.”

  “What?”

  “You told the judge-or said you told him anyway-that you thought you could find out who put those two shoeboxes full of money in his closet. Well. Did you? Find out?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “I asked the doorman at Jack’s condo building.”

  “The one you went to high school with who didn’t remember you?”

  “He remembered me,” Kelly Vines said.

  The doorman looked down at the fifty-dollar bill in his right hand, then up at Vines. “What’s this for, Kelly, old times’ sake?”

  “Some friends played a joke on Judge Adair and he’d like to find out how.”

  “What kind of joke?” the doorman asked. “Sick? Funny? Practical? What?”

  “Practical.”

  “Tell me about it. I could use a giggle.”

  “They put something in his apartment-or had somebody put it there.”

  “What?”

  Vines used his hands to indicate something about the size of a breadbox. “About this big-maybe a package.”

  “You’re a lawyer now, right? I remember in school how you were always on the debate team. I even remember how you got to go to Washington, D.C., one time and debate some other team from Wisconsin. I think it was Wisconsin. Is that how come you decided to be a lawyer-because you like to get up in front of everybody and argue about stuff?”

  “Probably,” Vines said.

  “Something about yea-big, huh?” the doorman said, using his hands to shape his own breadbox. “What was in it that was so funny?”

  “Dead fish.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “It had to do with a fishing trip the judge had to cancel at the last minute.”

  The doorman frowned, as if he still couldn’t quite appreciate the humor. “So the guys who went on the trip dropped off some of their catch to show him what he missed, right? But by now the fish’re kind of old and beginning to stink.” He thought about it some more, nodded grudgingly and said, “Yeah, well, I guess some people’d think that was funny.”