by Ross Thomas
“Put Parvis on,” Adair said.
“Mansur here.”
“Can he hear me?”
“No.”
“He wants you to give him the key to the poker room.”
“I know.”
“If you don’t give it to him,” Adair said, “he’ll kill you.”
“Understood.”
“If you give it to him, he’ll also kill you.”
“That’s not altogether certain.”
“Ever play poker?”
“Yes.”
“Well, put your best poker face on because you’re going to need it. I’m going to ask you a question that I don’t expect you to answer. What I expect you to do is say good-bye, hang up the phone and do whatever you think best. Is that clear?”
“Yes.”
“Here’s the question,” Adair said. “If you were to die today, who would inherit your estate?”
There was silence. Adair counted to six before he heard Parvis Mansur gently hang up the phone. After Adair recradled the poker room phone he turned to Vines and said, “What else could I say?”
“Nothing.”
“You think they’ll let Dannie go?”
“I doubt it,” said Kelly Vines.
Mansur rose from the child’s desk and said, “I think my wisest course is to hand you the key without further ado.”
“That’s very wise, Parvie.”
“But to give you the key I must reach into the right pocket of my jacket. In the event you think this is a trick or a subterfuge, you’re welcome to reach into the pocket yourself.”
“Tell you what,” Contraire said. “You go stand over there in front of the safe.”
“Very well,” Mansur said and crossed to the spot Contraire had indicated with a wave of the M-16.
“I’m not gonna reach into your pocket, Parvie,” Contraire said. “The reason I’m not is because I figure that when you were with Savak you learned all sorts of cute and dirty stuff.”
“I was never with Savak,” Mansur said with stiff dignity.
“None of you rich towelheads ever were-just like none of the krauts were ever with the SS either. I don’t blame you. I’d say the same thing myself. But I’m still not gonna walk over there and reach into your pocket because you’re gonna turn around, take the key out of your pocket and put it on top of the safe.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
Mansur turned around, facing the safe. His right hand, neither fast nor slow, dipped into his bush jacket pocket. He spun around, firing through the pocket at Contraire. The round, which sounded like a small caliber, missed Contraire and instead hit one of the two wingback chairs. Contraire shot Mansur in the left thigh and, taking his time, shot him again in the left shoulder. Mansur groaned, staggered and crumpled to the floor.
Contraire bent down and took a nickel-plated.25-caliber Sterling automatic, the old 300 model, from Mansur’s pocket. A purse gun, Contraire thought as he stuck the weapon into one of his own pockets. The same hand went back into Mansur’s pocket again and came out with a key.
“Can you crawl?” Contraire asked.
“Yes,” Mansur whispered. “I don’t know.”
“I think you better make up your mind that you can crawl into the safe there.”
“No.”
Contraire made his voice sound patient and reasonable. “You gotta understand something, Parvie. I don’t mind you taking a shot at me. I’d’ve done the same thing. So I’m giving you a chance. You crawl into the safe and it’ll be the first place Sid and B. D.’ll look for the money. Maybe you won’t even be dead by then, if you take real tiny little breaths. But if you don’t crawl in there, I’m gonna have to put a round through your head.”
It took Mansur nearly five minutes to fit himself into the safe. His knees were up to his chin. His face was a mask of bewilderment and pain.
Contraire squatted down in front of him. “You okay?”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did she do it?”
“Dixie?” Contraire said. “Because she’s nuts about me and has been ever since she was twelve.”
“But why?” Mansur whispered.
“Must be my looks,” Contraire said, rose, slowly closed the safe and, after it was closed and locked, gave the combination dial a couple of spins.
Chapter 43
When the black Cadillac sedan was almost halfway up the narrow twisting road with no shoulders that led to the Altoid Sanitarium, Danielle Adair Vines turned to Dixie Mansur and said, “I’ve had such a wonderful time, Betty, I don’t want to go back.”
Dixie, concentrating on a sharp curve, didn’t look at her. “That’s nice.”
“I don’t think you understand, Betty. Or maybe I didn’t make myself clear-although I’m much better at that than I used to be.”
Dixie gave her a brief glance. “Understand what?”
“That I’m not going back to Dr. Pease. I think I’ll go visit Mr. Vines and that nice Mr. Adair instead.”
“After I drop you off at the entrance, you can do what you want.”
“But if I go back there, Dr. Pease won’t let me leave. So why don’t we just return to that nice motel and I’ll call Mr. Adair? Or you can call him for me. Then I’ll wait for him in the motel.”
“Sorry,” Dixie said.
“You mean you won’t?”
“That’s right. I won’t.”
“Oh dear,” Danielle Vines said, grabbed the steering wheel with both hands and wrenched it to the left just as the Cadillac entered a sharp right-hand curve. Dixie Mansur fought for control of the wheel but the wife of Kelly Vines had either too much strength or too much desperation. Dixie instinctively slammed on the brakes as the Cadillac veered toward the guardrail.
The brakes and the guardrail together slowed the Cadillac but failed to stop it. The heavy car flattened the rail and plunged down the forty-five-degree slope, bursting its two front tires. Neither woman had time to scream or cry out before the car smashed into a large old oak at thirty-four miles per hour.
The old tree, growing on the steep slope, had low spreading branches. Some almost touched the ground. And one of them, a dead branch, shattered the Cadillac’s windshield on the driver’s side. It also penetrated Dixie Mansur’s throat near the base of her neck, killing her almost instantly.
Danielle Vines, shaken, bruised and bleeding from a deep cut on her right cheek and a bad scrape on her left hand, managed to force open the passenger door and scramble out of the car. She was on her hands and knees, still dazed, when she heard the man’s voice call, “You okay, lady?”
She looked up to see the man standing by the flattened guardrail, staring down at her. She noticed he wore a grayish-green uniform of some kind.
“I-I think so,” she said. “But I don’t think poor Betty is.”
Karl Seemant looked at his watch. It was 3:35 P.M. Seemant was an exterminator for the Agoura Pest and Varmint Control Co. and had been responding to a frantic call from the Altoid Sanitarium when, two dozen yards or so behind the Cadillac, he had watched it crash through the guardrail. The sanitarium had placed the frantic call after discovering its patients were afflicted with a mysterious plague of fleas.
Since it was the fourth of July and Seemant was being paid holiday double time, he decided the best thing to do was use his truck’s cellular phone to call either the sheriff or the Highway Patrol, wait around until they showed up-or maybe an ambulance-and then charge the time he waited to the Altoid loony bin, which, everybody said, had more money than it knew what to do with.
Theodore Contraire unlocked the poker room door in Cousin Mary’s quietly. After he opened it just a fraction, he put the key back in his pocket, kicked the door open and charged into the room, his M-16 on full automatic.
Contraire’s eyes raked the room, making full use of their peripheral vision, just as he had been taught at that two-week Reconnaissance and Survival course he had attended in south
ern Alabama at a cost of $4,250 in tuition.
“No games!” he shouted. “I don’t like fucking games!”
The door at the far end of the poker room opened slowly. It revealed Jack Adair, sitting on the toilet, his pants and shorts down around his ankles, one hand resting on the curved handle of the black cane.
“I’ll be out shortly,” Adair said and closed the door.
Contraire raced to the door, banged through it and poked the M-16’s muzzle into Adair’s left ear. “What the fuck’s going on here?”
“I’m discovering why fear is nature’s most reliable laxative,” Adair said.
Contraire chuckled, removed the M-16’s muzzle from Adair’s ear, stopped chuckling and said, “Where’s Vines?”
“Where’s my daughter?”
“By now she oughta be back at the nut farm-so where’s Vines?”
“I don’t follow you.”
“He’s not fucking here!” Contraire yelled.
“But why should he be?” Adair asked. “I certainly wouldn’t ask him to accompany me to the toilet. Nor would he volunteer. So he must be in the poker room where I left him.”
“He’s not there, goddamn it!”
“You don’t suppose he’s done a flit, do you?” Adair said. “Had his own key maybe? And after I was in here and preoccupied, he was out the back door and away. That’s so very like Kelly, who’s never really been one for self-sacrifice. Can’t say I blame him, of course, but still he could’ve invited me along.”
Contraire had long since stopped listening to Adair’s musings. He was concentrating now on the shower stall and the green curtain drawn across its entrance.
“He’s behind the shower curtain there.”
“I assure you he’s not,” Adair said.
“He’s in there with maybe a broken beer bottle or something so when I stick my head in he’ll scoop out my eye.”
“I can almost see it.”
“Hey, Vines!” Contraire called. “Come on out!”
But when Vines didn’t, Contraire switched the M-16 to single fire and sent three rounds through the shower curtain. The shots made Adair’s ears ring.
When nothing happened after several seconds, Contraire said, “Well, maybe he’s not in there after all.”
“Or it was a very quiet death.”
Contraire looked at his watch. “I got three thirty-eight and my lease on this place runs out at four. So we got thirty-two minutes to talk about this and that.”
“Twenty-two, I believe,” Adair said.
Contraire frowned, did some mental arithmetic and said, “Yeah. Twenty-two. That’s plenty.”
“Since you seem to be planning some sort of colloquy, why don’t we hold it in the other room where it’s far more comfortable?”
“I like you just like you are, Judge, with your pants and drawers down around your ankles. No sudden dashes that way.”
“May I at least flush the toilet?”
Contraire sniffed. “Yeah. Maybe you better.”
Adair reached back and pressed down the handle. The old toilet made a roar and a gurgle that Kelly Vines could hear from where he crouched on the hidden three-by-three-foot landing of the wooden stairs that led down to the bolt-hole basement. The toilet’s thunder was also loud enough to conceal the faint sound the shower wall door made as Vines slipped through it into the stall itself and stood, motionless, behind the drawn shower curtain, breathing through his mouth.
Adair looked back up at Contraire and asked, “Could I have a drink?”
“If you got a glass, there’s a faucet.”
“I was thinking of whiskey.”
“You want me to go bring you a whiskey?”
“I have my own,” Adair said, picked up the black cane and shook it so Contraire could hear it gurgle.
“Yeah, Dixie was telling me about that thing.”
“Any objections?”
Contraire shrugged.
Adair twisted off the cane’s handle, removed the cork, then the glass tube and drank. He offered the tube to Contraire, who shook his head and said, “Maybe you put some kind of poison in there.”
“Then I’ll soon be dead,” Adair said, replacing the tube, the cork and the handle.
“But maybe you’ve got an antidote hidden somewhere.” The implausibility of his last statement made Contraire hasten to add, “Anyway, I hardly ever drink on the job.”
“Would that there were more like you.”
Contraire leaned against the wall, the M-16 cradled in his arms, and studied Adair. “You know who I really am?”
Adair nodded. “You’re the guy Sid Fork ran out of town back in ’sixty-eight after he caught you, gin bottle in hand, with twelve-year-old Dixie tied to a bed.”
“That was all her idea, not mine. Dixie’s kind of kinky. Always was. Always will be.”
“You’re also the brother of Marie Contraire who died after her car ran into a cottonwood tree when its steering failed-rather mysteriously, I’m told.”
“Got any idea of how much I’d’ve inherited from Marie if the state’d overdosed those two Jimson brats like it was supposed to?”
“Millions.”
“Millions and millions and millions.”
“I’m curious,” Adair said. “When you were putting together this-well, this scheme to turn Dixie into a rich widow-did she get in touch with you or did you get in touch with her?”
Contraire formed a thin-lipped smile that quickly turned into a smirk. “Since ’sixty-eight, me and Dixie were never out of touch. At least, not for long. You gotta understand-and I’m not bragging now either-but I’m the only one that can keep up with her in the sex department. We both go for the same kind of stuff.”
“And poor Parvis, I assume, is now dead?”
Contraire again looked at his watch. “Has been for prid near an hour. After I shot him I locked him in the safe, so it wouldn’t have been more’n five minutes, ten tops, before he ran out of air or bled to death.”
“How much will Dixie inherit?”
“Ballpark figure?”
Adair nodded.
“Maybe thirty million. That’s not near as much as I’d’ve got from Marie if all that’d worked out. But thirty’s not peanuts either.”
“So what happens next?”
“Well, Dixie comes home from her visit and is all shocked and shook up and sad when she finds her husband’s dead because he let himself get mixed up in some screwy deal the mayor and the chief cooked up. The sheriff’s gonna be all over them two-Sid and B. D.-so they’re gonna stonewall. And you sure won’t say anything, being dead, and neither will Vines when I find him. So that doesn’t leave hardly anybody who really knows what the fuck’s been going on.”
“What makes you so sure about the mayor and the chief?”
“Dixie figures she can buy ’em both for maybe a million or two.” Contraire frowned. “How’d you find out about Dixie anyway?”
“It was Vines who first suspected her-thanks to Soldier Sloan.”
“I kept telling her if she didn’t quit messing around with that old fart, I’d have to do something about him and I did.”
“Did you also have to do something about my son?”
“Now there was one smart cookie. You know he almost had the whole thing figured by the time he got down to Tijuana there. I sometimes think fags are smarter’n people.”
After looking at his watch again, Contraire said, “Doesn’t look like Vines is coming back after all.” He flicked the M-16 to full automatic and aimed it at Adair’s chest.
“One last drink?” Adair asked with an obviously forced smile.
Contraire smiled back, apparently enjoying himself. “Make it a quick one.”
Adair twisted the handle of the cane again. But this time he twisted it to the left rather than the right. He also coughed just loudly enough to prevent Contraire from hearing the cane’s faint click. After the click, Adair shook his head sadly, looked up and said, “I guess I don’t wan
t that last drink after all.”
“Tummy a little upset?” Contraire said, chuckled, but suddenly stopped chuckling when another thought occurred to him.
“That was just bullshit, wasn’t it-about you knowing something that was worth a million dollars? You just cooked that up and fed it to B. D. and Sid after Dixie got Soldier to steer you up here.”
“But who was the steersman and who the steered?” Adair said.
“Maybe it was about fifty-fifty. But you didn’t know squat. Nothing worth a million anyhow. So what was really in it for you and Vines-me? Getting even?”
“You killed my son. Helped destroy my daughter’s mind. Managed to land me in a Federal penitentiary for fifteen months. So, yes, I must’ve had revenge in mind. As for Kelly, well, he’ll have to speak for himself.”
It was Vines’s cue. He shoved the rubberized green shower curtain all the way to the left. Its plastic rings created a racket that made Contraire start and spin toward the stall. As Contraire turned, Adair jerked the handle from the cane and with it came a seven-inch-long stiletto that resembled an ice pick. Now on his feet, but in a crouch, his pants and shorts still down around his ankles, Adair plunged the thin blade into Contraire’s right buttock.
Contraire yelled, shifted the M-16 to his left hand and used his right one to grasp his wounded buttock. Vines burst out of the shower stall and grabbed the M-16, shoving its barrel toward the ceiling. Contraire-or his reflexes-fired a burst into the air. Vines kicked at Contraire, aiming for the short man’s kneecap and hitting his crotch instead. Contraire snorted and Vines, using both hands, tore the M-16 from his grasp.
The short heavy man with the remarkably ugly face sucked in as much air as his lungs would hold and doubled over. He stayed that way for at least twenty seconds, his left hand cradling his balls, his right hand still pressed against the wound in his right buttock. Vines thought it was an extremely awkward posture, which, for some reason, reminded him of a pretzel.
When Contraire finally straightened, all evidence of pain was gone, concealed by a mask of indifference. He looked down at the bloody stiletto in Adair’s right hand.
“How’s that fucker work?” he asked with what seemed to be professional curiosity.
