by Ross Thomas
Dorr watched, obviously fascinated, as Adair removed the handle and the silver-capped cork, lifted out the glass tube and drank. As the whiskey’s glow spread, Adair offered the tube to Dorr, who shook his head. “Not when I fly.”
“Good,” Adair said and had another drink.
After they passed the twin fieldstone pillars at the end of the drive, Merriman Dorr slowed the Land-Rover to a stop, looked both ways for approaching traffic and said, “Want to sell me that thing?”
“The cane?”
“The cane.”
“It’s already promised to somebody else.”
“Who?”
“Sid Fork.”
“That shit,” said Dorr as he fed gas to the Land-Rover’s engine and went speeding off down the winding narrow blacktop road that had no shoulders.
Chapter 29
Because he had stopped to open a can of Budweiser, his third in three hours, Ivy Settles almost didn’t see the pink Ford van as it sped along Noble’s Trace, heading east toward Durango’s city limits and, possibly, U.S. 101.
Settles had spent the last three hours cruising the streets of Durango on his own time in his own car. He was searching for the pink plumbing van and trying, without success, to lose the rage and humiliation that had almost engulfed him after the murder of Soldier Sloan.
The fifty-one-year-old detective had nearly convinced himself it wasn’t his fault that Sloan was dead. But Settles’s powers of rationalization, which, like most policemen, were formidable, had failed him when it came to the short fat false Francis the Plumber. You let him walk, Ivy, he told himself. You. Nobody else. And that’ll make your name in this town from now on. Ivy Settles? Sure. He’s the one Sid Fork hired off the turnip truck.
Such dark thoughts finally had caused Settles to yell at his thirty-seven-year-old bride of six months, storm out of their two-bedroom house on North Twelfth, get into his four-year-old Honda Prelude, stop at a liquor store for a six-pack of Budweiser and cruise Durango for the next three hours, waiting for his rage to subside and his humiliation to go away.
He had begun his search for the pink van at 6:03 P.M. down near the Southern Pacific tracks. He worked his way out toward the eastern city limits, circling every block and driving down almost every alley. By 7:15 P.M., he had reached the city limits so he popped open another can of beer and repeated the search, this time from east to west.
By 9:02 P.M., he was back near the eastern city limits again and had decided it was time for a third beer. He had just opened the can at 9:03 P.M. when he glimpsed the pink van speeding east on Noble’s Trace as it went past the 25th Street intersection.
Settles threw the full can of beer out the window, slammed the Prelude into first gear and chased after the van. When he had shifted into second, he opened the glove compartment and took out his.38 Chief’s Special. Settles had had the revolver for twenty-one years but this was the first time he had ever really believed he might shoot some particular person with it-in this case, the fat false plumber. The thought ended his rage and humiliation and dangerously elevated his mood to one of near elation.
The Prelude had no siren but Settles had bought himself a red flasher that, after shifting into third, he plugged into the cigarette lighter. When he was no more than half a block from the pink van, he switched on the flasher and noticed he was two blocks past Durango’s eastern city limits. It was an area of virtual wasteland that once had been promoted as an industrial park. The only industry ever to express any interest was a Go-Kart racetrack, which later changed its mind. The park had gone into bankruptcy.
After the red light began flashing, the pink van slowed, pulled off onto the shoulder of Noble’s Trace and stopped. Settles parked twenty feet behind the van and got out of the Prelude cautiously, the revolver in his right hand, a foot-long flashlight in his left. When he reached the driver’s side of the van, he noticed that the Francis the Plumber magnetic stick-on signs had been removed, which didn’t surprise him.
He was surprised to discover the van’s driver was a dark-haired woman of twenty-seven or twenty-eight who stared at him with wide eyes that narrowed when the flashlight’s beam struck them.
“Put your hands up where I can see them and get out,” Settles said.
The woman nodded, raised her hands so he could see them and said, “How do I open the door if I keep my hands up here where you can see them?”
“I’ll open it,” Settles said, stuck the flashlight under his right armpit, reached for the door handle, turned it, opened the door two inches and stepped back four feet, his pistol and flashlight again aimed at the van door.
The woman came out slowly, her hands raised, palms forward. She wore jeans and a dark red T-shirt that said “I Shoot Anything” across its front in white letters. On her feet were blue and gray jogging shoes without socks. Her dark brown hair was cut fairly short and she was almost as tall as Settles, nearly five-nine. Her eyes, he noticed, were what he always thought of as “cow-brown.” He also noticed that if she weren’t so obviously frightened, she would be quite attractive, even pretty.
“Turn left and walk toward the rear of the van,” Settles said.
Hands still raised, she turned and walked three steps before Settles told her to stop. “Turn toward the van,” he said. After she had turned, he told her to lean on it. When she said it was too far away, he told her to lean on it anyhow. She almost fell toward the van, catching herself with her hands and forming a sixty-degree angle.
After again sticking the flashlight into his right armpit, Settles patted the woman down, missing neither her breasts nor her crotch. But he did it quickly, impersonally, and the woman neither flinched nor said anything.
“Okay, stand up,” Settles said.
The woman stood up. “Do I turn around?”
“Turn around.”
She turned and the flashlight’s beam caught her in the eyes again. She blinked and narrowed them. “What’s your name?” Settles asked.
“Terri,” she said. “Terri Candles.”
“Terri with an ‘I’?”
“With an ‘I.’”
“What d’you do, Terri?”
“I’m a photographer.”
“What kind?”
“Freelance.”
“Like the T-shirt says, you shoot anything.”
She nodded.
“Where d’you live, Terri?”
“Santa Barbara.”
“What’re you doing in Durango?”
“I don’t think I was speeding.”
“I said what’re you doing in Durango, Terri?”
“I’m on assignment.”
“Who for-the plumber?”
“What plumber?”
“Who were you taking pictures of in Durango, Terri?”
“A couple of kids. I’m good with kids.”
“Where’s your driver’s license?”
“In the van. Want me to get it?”
“Later. Let’s open the rear door first, see what’s inside.”
“It’s locked. I’ll have to get the key.”
Settles thought for a moment and shook his head. “Let’s see if it’s really locked.” He waved her toward the rear of the van with the flashlight.
The handle of the van’s single rear door was on the left. Settles positioned himself six feet away from it. “Open the door and tell whoever’s inside to come out,” he said.
“There’s nobody inside and it’s locked.”
“Try the door anyway, Terri.”
Her hand went to the rear door’s handle and pulled it down. “It wasn’t locked after all,” she said.
“Open it nice and slow, Terri,” Settles said.
She opened it quickly instead, moving with the door as it swung to the right. The flashlight revealed the double-barreled shotgun first and then, above it, the remarkably ugly face of Francis the Plumber who stood, crouched over, holding the shotgun at hip level. Ivy Settles hesitated for a tenth of a second before he began to pull
the trigger of his revolver. But by then the right barrel of the shotgun had fired and its load was knocking Settles backward. As he fell, his Chief’s Special fired up into the air toward the stars and a full moon. The shotgun blast tore away much of the left side of Settles’s chest and he died seconds after he fell to the ground.
The woman who said her name was Terri Candles moved from behind the van’s open rear door and looked up at the short fat ugly man who was sometimes a false priest and sometimes a false plumber.
“Did I do okay, honey?” she asked him.
“You did fine,” the man said and pulled the trigger that fired the shell in the shotgun’s other barrel.
Chapter 30
A thirty-two-year-old Ventura stockbroker, on his way to Durango in his BMW 325i convertible for a dirty weekend, was talking on his cellular phone to one of the women who would compose the ménage à trois when the pink Ford van whizzed past him, heading east, at not less than eighty miles per hour.
The stockbroker thought nothing of it and continued talking to the woman until a minute later, which made it 9:11 P.M., when he saw the two bodies, one a man, the other a woman, lying on the left shoulder of Noble’s Trace at the edge of the failed industrial park. A Honda Prelude was parked nearby with its lights on.
The stockbroker slowed to stare at the two bodies, told the woman on the phone to forget about the weekend, hung up and drove very fast until he came to the first gas station in Durango. There, he dropped a quarter into a pay phone, dialed 911 and, refusing to identify himself, told whoever answered about the two bodies, the Honda and the pink Ford van that had sped past him at eighty.
The stockbroker could have used his cellular phone to make the call, but he dimly remembered someone warning him that all 911 calls are immediately traced-or something like that. And since he was already performing his duty by telling the police about the bodies, the stockbroker could see no reason for further civic involvement with Durango where he didn’t even live anyhow.
He drove east on Noble’s Trace, heading back toward U.S. 101, and looked quickly away to the left as he again passed by the bodies. When the stockbroker was a mile past them, he once more picked up his cellular phone, called a woman in Santa Barbara, mentioned he soon would just happen to be in her neighborhood and wondered if she’d like to go out for a drink and maybe a bite to eat. The woman, without apology or explanation, said no thanks.
The stockbroker drove on toward Ventura and home, listening to a tape of Linda Ronstadt singing Nelson Riddle arrangements and feeling not only very sorry for himself, but also uncomfortably virtuous.
Chief Sid Fork was on the end stool at the bar in the Blue Eagle, eating a cheeseburger and drinking a draft beer, when Virginia Trice pushed the phone over to him. Fork automatically looked up at the clock above the bar. The time was 9:23 P.M.
After Fork said hello, Detective Wade Bryant, the too-tall elf, identified himself and said, “Ivy just got blown away by a shotgun on the Trace two blocks past the city limits. A woman in her late twenties is also down and dead. Same way. Ivy’s Honda is parked with its lights on.”
“Which side of the road?” Fork asked.
“South. The sheriff got an anonymous nine-one-one and called us. The guy that called it in told ’em about the bodies and said a pink Ford van had passed him going like a bat out of hell the other way, east.”
“Who’s the woman?”
“No ID. But she’s around twenty-seven, twenty-eight, short brown hair, brown eyes, five-nine or -ten, and she’s wearing a T-shirt that says, ‘I Shoot Anything.’ Just about everything between her belt and snatch is blown away.”
“You there now?”
“Me and Joe Huff.” Bryant paused. “You know something, Sid? It’s the first time I ever saw Joe throw up.”
“I’ll be right there.”
Fork hung up the phone and pushed it back to Virginia Trice, who said, “What’s wrong now?”
“Ivy Settles.”
“Dead?”
Fork nodded.
New grief seemed to press new lines into Virginia Trice’s face. Her eyes filled with tears. Her lower lip quivered. She sniffed noisily and said, “That’s just not…right.”
“I know,” Fork said. “Let me borrow a key to your house.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to find Vines and if he’s not there, I want to wait for him inside, not out in my car.”
“He’s got something to do with Ivy?”
“Something. But not what you think.”
Sid Fork knew what to expect when he saw the Aston Martin parked in front of the floodlit Victorian house. He sighed, parked his own car in front of the Aston Martin, got out, almost nodded hello to Kelly Vines’s blue Mercedes and started up the serpentine brick walk to the front door.
He used the key Virginia Trice had given him to enter the old house. Some lights were on downstairs, but after a quick look into the parlor and kitchen-both empty-Fork went up the oak staircase to the second floor and down the hall until he came to a door with light coming from beneath it.
He raised his fist to knock, hesitated, then knocked four times, very firmly, the way he thought a policeman should knock. A moment later the light from beneath the door went off.
“Goddamnit, it’s me-Sid.”
The light from beneath the door came back on and the door was opened by Dixie Mansur, who, from what Fork could see, wore nothing but a man’s shirt and it carelessly buttoned.
“We thought you might be Parvis with a lecture,” she said with a grin.
“Sure.”
“What’s up?”
“I have to talk to Vines.”
“Why?”
Before Fork could invent an answer, Vines appeared at the half-open door, wearing only his pants. “Talk about what?”
“We have to go someplace.”
“Where?”
“When we get there, you’ll know what we have to talk about.”
Vines’s face stiffened, immobilizing his mouth and almost everything else except his eyes, which turned suspicious as, not quite realizing it, he turned a question into an accusation. “It’s Adair, isn’t it?” Vines said. “Something’s happened to him.”
“It’s not Adair.”
Vines’s face relaxed first, then the rest of him, and he almost smiled. “I’ll get dressed.” As he turned from the half-open door, Dixie Mansur offered him the shirt she had just removed.
Vines thanked her, accepted the shirt and looked back at Fork, who, leaning against the doorjamb, was inspecting the now naked Dixie with a half-amused, half-exasperated expression that also contained, Vines thought, a trace of paternalism.
“We all leave together, Dixie,” Fork said, “so get some clothes on.”
“Why together?”
“Because if you leave later, you’ll set off an alarm and the cops’ll be here in four, maybe five minutes and arrest you for burglary, or maybe just housebreaking, and Parvis’ll have to drive up from Santa Barbara, bail you out and, if he’s smart, knock some sense into you.”
“Set off what alarm?” she said.
“If you don’t use a key to go in and out, it sets off a silent alarm.”
“I still don’t see what the rush is,” she said, picking up her blue cable-knit cotton sweater from the floor and slipping it over her head.
“The rush is because I’m in a hurry,” Fork said.
“It’d be far more civilized if we all had a drink first,” she said, stepping into her white slacks.
Fork didn’t bother to respond. Kelly Vines, now wearing shirt, shoes and pants, said he was ready to go.
“Wait a second,” Dixie Mansur said, knelt beside the rumpled bed, found her white bikini panties beneath it, stuffed them into her purse, rose and said, “Okay. Let’s go.”
Chapter 31
The chief of police-and his two detectives who had once worked homicide in Detroit and Chicago-kept their eyes on Kelly Vines as he stared down at th
e dead woman who wore the dark red T-shirt with the white letters that read, “I Shoot Anything.”
“Know her?” Sid Fork asked.
“Not exactly,” Vines said, still staring at the woman.
“What’s ‘not exactly’ mean?”
Vines looked at Fork. “It means I saw her once. In Lompoc. She was the one who opened the rear door of the pink Floradora Flowers van and took the pictures of me and Adair.”
Fork nodded contentedly, as if confirming his own private theory, turned to Bryant, the too-tall elf, and said, “How d’you read it, Wade?”
Bryant tugged thoughtfully at his large right ear, which Fork had long thought resembled Mr. Spock’s, shook his head in a small gesture of regret and said, “I think we rode Ivy a little too hard over there at the hotel this afternoon. I think we pissed him off royal. I think he went broody over it, got in his car, bought himself a six-pack, went looking for the pink van and just happened to find it. I think he used the flasher that’s still plugged into his cigarette lighter to pull the van over. I think she was driving it, the girl. I think Ivy made the girl open the rear door so he could see what was inside. I think the plumber and his shotgun were inside. I know a shotgun killed Ivy and I know he got one shot off himself, but I don’t know if he hit anything. I think the plumber was done with the girl and used the shotgun on her, maybe just to shut her up.” Bryant paused, frowned, erased the frown and said, “That’s what I think.”
Fork turned to the black bald detective. “Joe?”
“The same-except I threw up.”
Fork’s sympathetic nod encouraged him to continue.
Indicating the two dead bodies with a nod, Joe Huff said, “They’re nothing compared to what you’d see any Tuesday in Chicago. I got sick because I realized if I ever find that motherfucker, I won’t even try and collar him.”
“Just blow him away, huh?” Fork said.
“You know it. Thing is, I never got that mad before and I guess that’s what made me sick. But when I got through throwing up over there behind Ivy’s Honda, I still felt just as mad and I still feel that way right this minute.”
