Ross Thomas - The Fourth Durango

“We get it all then-Sid, the city and me.”

Vines nodded. “If you succeed.”

“And if we don’t?”

“You get nothing and Jack here probably gets a poorly attended memorial service.”

“Then it’s on what you lawyers call a contingency basis.”

“Which is how we lawyers get rich.”

The mayor’s faint smile was still in place as she turned to the chief of police. “Well?”

Fork gave his wing commander mustache a thoughtful brush with his left thumb, frowned at Vines and said, “I still get the cane, no matter what?”

“No matter what,” Vines said.

The chief turned to B. D. Huckins with a grin. “I think it sounds rich.”

A silence developed, which no one tried to end. It was finally broken when the mayor again looked at the chief of police and gave him an order in the form of a suggestion.

“Why not take Mr. Vines down to the Blue Eagle for a drink while the judge and I go over a few details?”

It was obvious that Fork could think of several reasons why not, but he made no protest. He merely turned to Kelly Vines and said, “Like to go have a couple of quick ones?”

Vines thought of asking if they had any choice, but what he said was, “The quicker the better.”

At 11:26 P.M. on that last Friday in June, the pink Ford van, now stripped of all commercialidentification, deposited a short thick man with a clerical collar in front of Felipe’s Pet Shop at 532 North Fifth Street, just four doors down from the Blue Eagle Bar’s corner location.

The pet shop had closed at its usual time of 6 P.M. In its window was a jumbled pile of four puppies asleep on their bed of shredded newspaper. The puppies were a mixed breed the pet shop owner was advertising as Sheplabs. As the pink van sped away, the man in the clerical collar glanced up and down Fifth Street, saw nothing of interest and turned to the pet shop window.

He smiled at the sleeping puppies, ignoring his reflection in the glass that revealed small, rather gray teeth and a mouth so thin it seemed almost lipless. The mouth was much too close to his small snout of a nose whose right nostril seemed half again as large as the left one. He was bareheaded and his thick black hair was going gray and had been cut, or clippered, into an uneven flattop by an apparently unsteady hand.

To complement his clerical collar he wore black shoes and a too-tight black suit made from a dull synthetic material. The suit was almost the same shade of black as his eyes, which could have been those of some old and unrepentant libertine, dying alone and bored by the process.

The man flicked his middle fingernail twice against the shop window. But when the sleeping puppies continued to ignore him, he stopped smiling, turned left, away from the Blue Eagle Bar, and hurried down the sidewalk on uncommonly short legs. After forty or fifty feet his fast walk slowed to a normal stroll, then to a hesitant saunter and finally to a full stop.

He turned quickly, not quite spinning around, his eyes raking both sides of Fifth Street. He nodded then, as if remembering the cigarettes or the dozen eggs he had forgotten to buy, and retraced his steps, hurrying past the sleeping puppies without a glance. When he reached the corner, he took one last rapid look around and ducked into Norm Trice’s Blue Eagle Bar.

Although 2 A.M. was the legal closing hour, Trice often closed his bar and grill around midnight because by then most of his customers had run out of money and gone home. But if it was payday, or the second or third of the month when the welfare, unemployment, disability and Social Security checks arrived, Trice would stay open until two and sometimes even three or, as he put it, until they drank up the government money.

There were no customers in the Blue Eagle when the man in the clerical collar walked in, took a seat at the bar and ordered a glass of beer. After Trice served him, the man paid and said in a cold thin tenor, “They say the mayor drops by here once in a while.”

“Who’s they?” said Trice, who never gave away anything except unsolicited advice.

“And the chief of police. I hear he drops in sometimes, too.”

“So?”

The man took a swallow of beer and smiled his gray smile. “So this friend of hers, the mayor’s, asked me to give her a letter and I thought maybe I’d give it to you and you could give it to her.”

“Give it to her yourself down at City Hall tomorrow.”

“I’m leaving town tonight.”

Trice sighed. “Okay, but next time buy one of those things they sell at the post office. You know-stamps.”

The man nodded, smiling his thanks, reached into the right pocket of his black suit and withdrew a five-by-seven-inch sealed manila envelope. He slid it across the bar to Trice, who looked down to read the white peel-off label. On it someone had typed: Mayor B. D. Huckins, Durango, California.

Trice picked up the envelope, noticing it contained some kind of stiffening, cardboard probably, and placed it on a shelf beneath the bar. “I’ll see she gets it.”

“You won’t forget?”

“I just said she’d get it.”

The man with the clerical collar smiled, nodded his thanks again and said, “Maybe you could do me another little favor?”

“What?”

“Could you cash this?”

He handed Trice a personal check made out to cash for $50 and drawn on a Wells Fargo bank in San Francisco. The name signed to the check was Ralph B. Farr. Up in the left-hand corner, the same name was printed above a San Francisco address that Trice thought was probably in the Mission District.

Still staring down at the check with something akin to revulsion, Trice said, “Well, maybe if you could get the Pope to endorse it, Padre, or even just a bishop, I might see my way clear to-”

Trice’s elaborate refusal collapsed as he looked up from the check and saw the.22-caliber semiautomatic in the false priest’s left hand.

“I’ll just take what’s in the register then,” the man said in his thin tenor that Trice decided was the only thin thing about him except his lips. Two hundred pounds at least, Trice memorized, maybe two-ten and no more’n five-one, if that. The fucker looks like an eight ball in that priest suit-like Father fucking Eight Ball.

Pretending to consider the demand for the cash register’s contents, Trice frowned with unfelt regret and said, “Well, Your Eminence, there’s really not a hell of a lot in there, not much more’n you’d find in Saint Maggie’s poor box, if that-fifty, maybe fifty-two bucks.”

“That’ll do nicely,” the false priest said and shot Norm Trice in the face, once just below the left eye, and once just above the mouth, the.22 short rounds making scarcely any more noise than two doors slamming.

The short man in the clerical collar hurried out of the Blue Eagle and into the waiting pink van. Diagonally across the street from the bar, another man stepped out of the dark recessed doorway of Marvin’s Jewelry. The other man was in his mid-thirties and had graying hair. He wore a white shirt, faded blue jeans and old high-top Converse basketball shoes, the pro model, even though he was an inch or so under six feet. He also wore a sad, almost resigned look.

After he watched the speeding pink van disappear down North Fifth Street, the man stuck his hands in his pockets, turned and, with head bowed and sad expression still in place, walked slowly in the opposite direction.

Kelly Vines and Sid Fork walked into the empty Blue Eagle Bar eight minutes later.Fork looked around for Norm Trice, called his name, even looked in the men’s toilet and, finally, behind the bar, where Trice lay dead on the duckboards, the $50 check, made out to cash and signed by Ralph B. Farr, still clutched in his right hand.