Ross Thomas - The Fourth Durango

Fork replied with a shrug and finished his martini.

“Suppose you knew something you could blackmail somebody with,” B. D. Huckins said. “Somebody nasty as lye. You’d need a safe place to operate from, wouldn’t you? A sanctuary.”

Fork’s mouth went down at the corners as he shook his head. “I wouldn’t want any sanctuary,” he said. “Sanctuary always sounds to me like some little locked room in the church basement with maybe an army cot and a slop jar. Or like some wildlife preserve with a ‘Keep Out-No Hunting’ sign that’s been all shot to hell. So if I was them, Vines and Adair, I wouldn’t be looking for any sanctuary.”

“Right,” B. D. Huckins said. “So we’ll offer them just what we offered all the others. A hideout.”

After parking the blue Mercedes in one of the four empty metered spaces in front ofFiggs’ department store on Main Street in Durango, they went in just before closing and bought Jack Adair four Arrow shirts, two pairs of Levi corduroy pants, four pairs of socks and six pairs of Jockey shorts, Adair taking great pleasure in specifying his fifteen-and-half-inch neck and thirty-four-inch waist sizes.

Vines paid in cash as a bemused Adair watched the fiftyish woman sales-clerk with the golden beehive hairdo wrap the sales slip around the twenty-dollar bills, stick everything into a metal cylinder and pop the cylinder into a pneumatic tube that shot it up to the cashier’s office on either the second or third floor.

When they were again in the Mercedes, Adair said, “Makes you believe in time travel, doesn’t it? What do you think we warped into back there-nineteen fifty?”

“’Fifty-three,” Vines said, “since that’s as far back as I can remember.”

After a last stop at a liquor store, where Vines bought two bottles of Jack Daniel’s, they drove to the Holiday Inn and went up to adjoining oceanside rooms on the fourth floor. Vines stood at the window in Adair’s room, again staring out at the Pacific that now seemed more green than blue. From the bathroom he could hear Adair splashing around in the tub, taking his first bath in fifteen months and singing in a surprisingly true baritone about leaving on a jet plane.

Vines turned from the window when Adair came out of the bathroom, wearing gray corduroy pants and a blue oxford-cloth shirt that still had the fold creases in it. Adair joined Vines at the window, where they stared out at the ocean for nearly a minute. When the minute was almost up, Adair turned and went to the desk, where the whiskey stood next to the bucket of ice that Vines had fetched from the machine down the hall.

“Want one?” Adair said as he dropped ice cubes into a glass and poured in the bourbon.

“Not yet,” Vines said, still staring at the ocean.

“So. When’d you last see her?”

“Two weeks ago.”

“And?”

Vines turned. “I drove up to Agoura from La Jolla to pay the monthly bill. I pay it in cash every month on the fifteenth.”

Adair nodded. “Where’s Agoura exactly-in relation to L.A.?”

“North end of the San Fernando Valley. It’s hilly out there-low round hills that’re turning brown now but’ll turn green again when it rains. Some nice old oaks. It’s all very-” Vines searched for the word the doctor had used. “Nonthreatening.”

“Soothing,” Adair translated.

“Soothing. From her window she sometimes can see deer and even a coyote or two.”

“Dannie always did like coyotes for some reason,” Adair said. Dannie was Danielle Adair Vines, wife of the disbarred lawyer; daughter of the jailbird justice. The topic of coyotes exhausted, Vines waited for Adair’s next question, confident of what it would be since it was the logical one to ask.

“What do the doctors say?”

“They’re guardedly optimistic,” Vines said. “But they’re being paid six thousand in cash each month, so they would be, wouldn’t they?”

“But you’re not.”

“What I am, Jack,” said Vines, his voice resigned, “is the messenger. I drive up there every month on the fifteenth and hand over the money envelope they’re too polite to count in my presence. While they’re counting it, I go sit in a nice little conference room with a big picture window. They bring Dannie in. She sits at the far end of the table and smiles the way she always smiled, as if you’re the most wonderful thing in her life. Then she says, ‘Who’re you? I don’t think I know you.’”

Adair closed his eyes so he could rub them and the bridge of his meandering nose with thumb and middle finger. “No possibility of her faking it, is there?” he asked, opening his eyes and wincing as he realized that a yes would be worse than a no.

“I wasn’t sure,” Vines said. “So after a couple of months of that who-are-you stuff, I started telling her I was Warren Beatty or Jerry Brown-who she always had half a crush on-or even Springsteen. But all she ever said was, ‘I don’t think I know you.’”

“Well, shit, Kelly,” Adair said, turned back to the desk, started to pour himself more bourbon, thought better of it, put the glass down and again faced Vines. “Think she’d know me?”

“We could find out.”

“I take that for a no.”

Vines nodded.

Deciding he wanted another drink after all, Adair turned, picked up the glass and dropped more ice cubes into it. As he poured the bourbon, he said, “You tell her about Paul?”

“On April thirteenth last year-one day after it happened-I drove up and handed over the money envelope two days early. She and I sat at the table in the little conference room again. There were two deer about thirty yards away and she was looking at them and smiling.”

“When you said what?”

“Something like, ‘Your brother, Paul, shot himself to death last night in a Tijuana whorehouse.’”

“And?”

“Nothing.”

Adair sighed and sat down in a chair, slowly and carefully, as if in great and unfamiliar pain. He sat leaning forward, arms on his knees, holding the glass in both hands and staring at the carpet.

“Darwin Loom,” Adair said.

“The associate warden.”

Adair nodded, not looking up. “He told me it was suicide before he even let me take that La Jolla call from you. Preparing me for the shock, I guess. Know what I told him?” Adair looked up from the carpet and cruelly parodied his own voice. “My son’d never take his own life. Not my son.” He gave his head a self-accusatory shake and resumed his examination of the carpet. After a long silence Adair again looked up and said in a suddenly weary voice, “So tell me what happened, Kelly. Not that crap you told me over the phone.”

“You’re right. It was crap.”

“Afraid you were being taped?”

“Or that you were.”

“Your letters weren’t any better. Same reason?”

“Same reason.”

Adair sighed. “Let’s hear it.”

“The cops in Tijuana claim Paul was alone in an upstairs room when it happened. They also claimed he’d ordered up two girls. After I drove down there from La Jolla, one of the cops showed me what he said were sworn statements from both girls, who by then’d disappeared, apparently forever. The statements said the girls were on their way up to Paul’s room when they heard the shots.”

“Why’d they call you-the Tijuana police?”

“Paul had one of those ‘in case of emergency notify’ cards in his billfold. Your name, old address and phone number had been typed in and crossed out. Mine was written on the back of the card.”

“So how’d they lay it out for you-the Tijuana cops?”

“They said he poked a forty-five in his mouth and pulled the trigger twice.”

“Twice?” Adair said.