by Ross Thomas
Adair smiled what he hoped was his most winning smile. “I’d be delighted.”
Kelly Vines, lying in bed, looked up from page 389 of his 406-page novel of mild southern decadence when he heard Adair’s voice and Virginia Trice’s giggle as they went past his room. He waited for the now familiar sound of Adair’s door to open and close. Instead, he heard a door open and close farther down the hall. It was, he decided, the sound of the door to Virginia’s room.
Vines smiled, put his book down, took a handful of mixed nuts from the open can on the bedside table, rose and went to the window that overlooked the street. The anonymous sedan was parked two houses down. Glancing at his watch, Vines saw it was a few minutes to one.
He stood, eating the nuts one at a time, as he stared out the window and waited for the shift to change. At one minute past one, another anonymous sedan parked in front of the other car. A very tall man got out, went back to the rear car, bent down-apparently to say a few words-and returned to his own car.
The rear car switched on its lights and left. Vines finished his handful of nuts, returned to the bed, picked up the novel and, sitting on the edge of the bed, finished it. But because the novel had failed to put him to sleep, he reached for the old standby remedy and poured almost three ounces of Jack Daniel’s into a water glass.
He drank it slowly, wondering as he often did on sleepless nights where he would be a year from now, presuming, of course, he told himself, that a year from now you’ll still be around.
He finished the whiskey, turned off the light and lay down. When he looked for the last time at his watch’s glowing dial it was a little past three and Jack Adair had still not returned to his room.
Chapter 39
At a little past 9 A.M. on Sunday, July 3, Dixie Mansur kissed her husband good-bye and drove away in his white Rolls-Royce, heading south on U.S. 101 toward San Diego, where, Parvis Mansur believed, she planned to spend the holiday weekend with their friends, Mr. and Mrs. Reva Moussavvis.
Because of heavy holiday traffic, Dixie didn’t reach Ventura’s beachside Holiday Inn until a little past ten that morning. She removed an overnight bag, locked the white Rolls and checked into a prepaid room that had been reserved for her under the name of Joyce Mellon.
Once in the room she tossed the overnight bag on one bed, sat down on the other, picked up the phone and tapped out the three numbers of another room in the hotel. When a man’s voice answered with a hello, she said, “You ready?” After the man replied he was, she said she would be right down.
Dixie Mansur’s room was 607 and the man’s room was 505. She went down the stairs, along the corridor and knocked at the door. It was opened by Theodore Contraire, who sometimes wore a priest’s outfit, sometimes a plumber’s, and now wore a pale blue smock that could have belonged to either a pharmacist or a hairdresser.
Once Dixie was inside the room and the door was closed, the five-foot-one Contraire reached up, grabbed her by the shoulders and forced her head down to his so he could mash their lips together in a long, long kiss that entailed a lot of wet tongue work.
The kiss ended as abruptly as it began. Contraire wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, “We’re running a little late.”
“I had to fuck Parvis before I could leave.”
“Over here,” he said, indicating a long low dresser with a large mirror. She sat down on a padded bench and Contraire switched on the four lights he had rigged up to illuminate the mirror.
Staring at herself, Dixie said, “Christ, I look awful.”
“You’re gonna look even worse,” he said. “Older. Maybe ten years older. I’m gonna start with the contacts. Here.”
He handed her a small plastic case. She removed the contact lenses from it and inserted them quickly.
“Been practicing,” he said with grudging approval.
“All week.”
“Okay, now you got brown eyes instead of blue.”
“I like blue better.”
“Not with dark brown hair, you don’t.” Contraire stuck four bobby pins in his mouth, pulled Dixie’s blond hair back and expertly pinned it into a smooth helmet. He picked up a shoulder-length brown wig from the dresser, used a brush on it and carefully fitted it to her head.
After inspecting his handiwork with obvious satisfaction, he picked up a squat white bottle with no label, removed its cap, poured a small amount of thick beige liquid onto his fingertips and began working it into her face and neck. “It takes two minutes, that’s all,” he said. When he finished, she had acquired a moderately deep tan.
Dixie inspected herself critically in the mirror. “I look different but not much older.”
Contraire, looking over her shoulder into the mirror, ran the thumb and forefinger of his right hand down the faint parenthetic lines that began at the base of Dixie’s nose and went to the corners of her mouth. “When you get older,” he said, “these get deeper. So here’s what we do.”
Using what appeared to be a well-sharpened eyebrow pencil, Contraire delicately increased the visibility of the two parenthetic lines. The results made Dixie say, “I’ll be damned.”
“Put these on,” Contraire said, handing her a wire-framed pair of green-tinted glasses whose lenses were only slightly larger than half-glasses. She put them on and they promptly slipped down her nose. She shoved them up. They slipped down again.
“When you’re talking to him, keep shoving ’em back up. It’ll drive him nuts.”
Dixie turned her head as far to the right as she could and still examine herself in the mirror. Turning her head to the left, she did the same. “I look almost forty with these dumb glasses.”
Contraire removed the top from a large jar of cold cream. “Okay,” he said. “Take it all off, then put it back on and let’s see how fast you can do it.”
She did it twice before he was satisfied. He placed the wig, the tinted glasses, the contact lenses and the cosmetics in a plain white paper shopping bag. From the pocket of his smock he took a sheaf of hundred-dollar bills bound with a red rubber band.
“Six thousand exactly,” he said, dropping it into the shopping bag.
“What about the map?” Dixie said.
He brought that out from the other pocket of his smock. It was hand-drawn on a sheet of plain white paper. Dixie studied it, nodded and said, “What kind of car?”
“Two-year-old black Cadillac Seville sedan.” He smiled, displaying the gray teeth. “Real conservative.” He stopped smiling and frowned, as if he had forgotten something. “What about your clothes?”
“I bought a frumpy summer suit at the Junior League thrift shop in Santa Barbara.”
“That oughta do.”
“Should I call him from here?”
“Christ, no. From a pay phone.”
“Don’t you want to hear my voice?”
Contraire grimaced, as if he had just been accused of negligence. “Sure I want to hear it. I was just about to ask you.”
“Here goes then,” Dixie said. “Hello, there. I’m Mrs. Nelson Wigmore? Kelly Vines’s cousin? And I’d like to find out if I can do something that’s really rotten?”
Contraire again nodded his approval. “Don’t forget those rising inflections. But it sounds pretty good-like about halfway between New Orleans and Mobile.”
“I practiced with a tape recorder.”
Contraire frowned again, as if trying to think of something else he had forgotten. Nothing apparently came to mind so he asked a question instead. “How’re B. D. and Sid and them taking it?”
“They still don’t know diddly. Except Sid did find out who Hazy was. Why’d you have to fix her anyway?”
“Why? Because you brought her in when we needed a photographer and she could’ve tied you in with me, that’s why. And after she saw me fix that cop from the back of the van, well, what’d you expect me to do except what I did?”
“You could’ve done something different.”
“You’re making it sound like I wanted to fix h
er, like I was dying to or something. Maybe you oughta know that by then Hazy and I had a nice little something going.”
“Fuck off, Teddy.”
“You fuck off, Dixie.”
It was often the way they said good-bye.
Dixie Mansur drove out of the Ventura Holiday Inn parking lot and two blocks farther on found a Texaco gas station with a bank of pay phones. She got out of the Rolls, locked it again, dropped her quarter and tapped out the eleven-digit number. When her call was answered, the operator cut in with instructions to deposit an additional $1.25 for three minutes. Dixie instead dropped in seven quarters.
After the quarters stopped clanging, the man’s voice on the phone again said, “Altoid Sanitarium.”
Dixie shifted into her southern accent and said, “May I speak to Dr. David Pease? This is Mrs. Nelson Wigmore? Mr. Jack Adair’s niece?”
Chapter 40
When his stainless-steel Omega Seamaster said it was exactly 6 A.M. on Monday, the fourth of July, Merriman Dorr grabbed the rope with both hands, pulled down hard and rang the old schoolhouse’s cast-iron bell.
By the ninth pull, which now was more yank than pull, the big bell’s clangor and peal were being answered by the distant howls of at least two dozen dogs. Dorr rang the old bell faster and faster, yipping and howling back at the dogs and occasionally bursting into snatches of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “Dixie” and “God Bless America.”
He rang the school bell for exactly ten minutes. At 6:10 A.M. he marched to the old schoolhouse flagpole, ran up the Stars and Stripes and stood at rigid attention, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Still at attention, Dorr gave the flag a snappy salute and a look of utter adulation. He also gave it a glorious smile that easily could have been worn by either a devout patriot or, as some suspected, a nut.
After a smart about-face, Dorr marched back to the front entrance of Cousin Mary’s, still wearing his Glorious Fourth smile, but thinking now of breakfast that would include fresh orange juice, pork sausages, blueberry pancakes, two or three eggs, lightly basted, salt-rising bread toast, and at least three cups of coffee. After that he would go downtown and watch the parade.
The parade began forming at 9 A.M. down near the Southern Pacific tracks and Durango’s former train depot, which had lost its purpose, if not its usefulness, when the railroad concluded there was no longer any profit in hauling humans.
The depot had been transformed into Durango’s Tourist and Cultural Center. This lasted until the city discovered that it served precious few tourists and provided no culture to speak of. After scrapping the center, Durango rented the depot in rapid succession to a head shop, a sushi bar, an adult bookstore, a Tex-Mex cafe and an acupuncturist. All of them failed. The depot now housed the city’s Venereal Disease Control Center, which Sid Fork and others usually referred to as the clap clinic.
The parade would have begun as scheduled, at 10:30 A.M., if twelve-year-old Billy Apco’s mother, a single parent, hadn’t had to deal with a flat tire on her Ford Bronco that took her and Billy fifteen minutes to change. But since Billy was the one who beat the bass drum in the Kiwanis-sponsored Fife and Drum Corps, the consensus was to delay the parade’s start until he arrived.
The parade’s route would take it straight up North Fifth Street through the heart of the business district until it reached Handshaw Park at around noon, where it would disband and Mayor B. D. Huckins, speaking from the bandstand, would deliver what the Durango Times had said would be “brief patriotic remarks.” The mayor’s audience would be lured to the park by the promise of free hot dogs and soda pop, courtesy of the Safeway and Alpha Beta supermarkets, and five-cents-a-plastic-cup beer for adults, a traditional courtesy of the Blue Eagle Bar.
Jack Adair and Kelly Vines, glasses of draft beer in hand, stood outside the Blue Eagle, waiting for the parade. A little behind them and to their left was Detective Joe Huff, looking far less bald and a bit less professorial because of his Chicago Cubs baseball cap and huge cigar. To the right of Vines and Adair was Detective Wade Bryant, the too-tall elf, whose height enabled him to see over the heads of the parade watchers who were lined up one-deep at the curb.
Leading the parade was a color guard composed of American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars members, all of them old enough to have fought in either World War Two or Korea. After the guard came the Pretty Polly’s Sandwiches and Pies float, one of the nine commercial floats in the parade. Then came “The Wild Bunch,” a geriatric biker’s club whose members all rode Harleys, followed by the Durango Palomino and Philosophical Society, which boasted some beautiful mounts; the Kiwanis Fife and Drum Corps, with Billy Apco banging away on his big bass drum; the splendidly costumed Gay Vaqueros, who were excellent riders and outrageous flirts; more floats; the mayor, riding on the folded-down convertible top of a 1947 Chrysler Town and Country; the chief of police, waving from the back of a 1940 Buick Century convertible; the members of the City Council, riding together and grinning like fools in an open carriage drawn by two fine bays; a troop of Boy Scouts; a bicycle club; fourteen clowns who belonged to the Chamber of Commerce and gave away Hershey Kisses and Fleer’s bubble gum; and, finally, twelve barely pubescent baton twirlers who twirled to the strains of “Colonel Bogie” as played and whistled by the Rotary Club’s Drum and Bugle Corps.
After the parade went by, Adair, Vines and Virginia Trice walked to Handshaw Park, trailed by Detectives Bryant and Huff. They ate free hot dogs and drank five-cent beer while listening to the city attorney introduce Mayor B. D. Huckins.
Quoting Tom Paine, Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower and Bruce Springsteen, Huckins gave what Jack Adair decided was the best eight-minute all-purpose political speech he had ever heard.
“She’s not only got a good voice and a great delivery,” he told Kelly Vines, “but she also knows a secret that ninety-nine percent of today’s politicians have either forgotten or never knew.”
“Which is?” said Vines, slipping into what he was beginning to regard as his customary straight man role.
“She knows how to leave them wanting more,” Adair said. “And any politician who can do that these days can get reelected forever unless, of course, as the ex-governor of Louisiana says, they find him in bed with either a dead woman or a live boy.”
At 12:31 P.M., just after her sister finished her brief patriotic remarks in Durango’s Handshaw Park, Dixie Mansur turned off U.S. 101 at the Kanan Dume Road exit in Agoura and crossed over the freeway to the Jack in the Box where Theodore Contraire had said the black Cadillac Seville would be parked.
As promised, the 1986 Cadillac was parked behind the restaurant. Dixie got out of her husband’s white Rolls-Royce, locked it and, carrying the same plain shopping bag Contraire had given her, went into the Jack in the Box and entered the women’s toilet.
No one in the place noticed the brown-haired woman in the wrinkled, frumpy-looking tan linen suit and the green-tinted glasses who came out of the toilet five minutes later. Nor did anyone ever remember that she went around to the rear of the restaurant and got into the black Cadillac instead of the white Rolls she had arrived in.
The key to the Cadillac was in the ashtray, just as Contraire had said it would be. Dixie started the engine, checked the gas gauge, which registered full, backed out, crossed over U.S. 101 and, after less than a mile, found the winding narrow blacktop road with no shoulders that led up into the brown hills.
Dixie had left San Diego and the home of her weekend hosts, Mr. and Mrs. Reva Moussavvis, at seven that morning, cutting her visit short with the plausible excuse that she was growing more and more worried about the holiday traffic.
At exactly 12:46 P.M., which made her one minute late, she turned the Cadillac into the Altoid Sanitarium, went past the twin stone pillars, up the zigzag drive and parked the Cadillac directly in front of the massive redwood door. She slid over into the passenger seat and inspected herself in the sun visor’s vanity mirror, pushing the tinted glasses up her nose and
watching them slide back down. She also examined her new brown eyes, courtesy of the contact lenses, and her newly lined and tanned face, which she decided was one of modern chemistry’s minor wonders.
Confident that she looked as if she were easily pushing forty, Dixie got out of the Cadillac and rang the bell twice, ignoring the engraved brass plate that asked visitors to please ring only once.
Now seated across the desk from Dr. David Pease, who wore a purple and orange Hawaiian shirt over white duck pants, Dixie Mansur said, “We were just stunned when we got that letter in Aberdeen from Dannie’s mama. Nelson and I had no idea.”
“Nelson is your husband, I believe.”
“Nelson Wigmore? Like I told you on the phone? In the oil business? With Oxy? That’s what we were doing in Aberdeen for four years.”
“In Scotland.”
Dixie pushed the tinted green glasses back up her nose. “Didn’t I say Scotland? I reckon I’m just used to everyone in the business knowing if you say Aberdeen, you mean Scotland and North Sea and not South Dakota. But anyway, Dannie’s mama is my Aunt Lena and Jack Adair’s my uncle, even if they are divorced and have been since way back in ’seventy-two. But this letter I got from Aunt Lena said she heard that Uncle Jack and Kelly Vines-who’s sort of my cousin by marriage?”
Dr. Pease nodded his understanding as Dixie pushed the glasses back up her nose.
“Well, she’d heard, Aunt Lena, I mean, that because of all that trouble Uncle Jack and Kelly had, they might not be able to afford to, well, you know, keep Dannie here any longer. So I talked to Nelson about it?”
“And what did he say?”
“And Nelson said, ‘Shoot, you tell ’em not to worry about their bill.’ So then I talked to you yesterday and you said it would cost six thousand a month? And Nelson said why don’t we just start taking care of it right now? So here I am and do you mind being paid in cash?”
