Ross Thomas: The Fourth Durango

Although the blond Dixie was gone, leaving behind a trace of memorable perfume, the black cane still hung from the shade of the lamp with the chartreuse ceramic base. It was a thick cane, a bit more than an inch and a quarter in diameter, fashioned out of Macassar ebony and decorated at its tip with a chrome ferrule that was now just a bit worn. An inch or so below where the cane’s handle began its curve was a silver band with the initials JA engraved into it in small interwoven Gothic letters.

The hangover attacked in earnest when Vines sat up in bed. Diagnosing it as a crippler of some rare and possibly fatal strain, he sucked in four deep breaths, praying without faith that the additional oxygen would do what folklore claimed and ease the pain and perhaps enable him to go on living. But when the hangover and its attendant despair grew only worse, bringing on vague thoughts about sweet death, Vines rose, steadied himself with a faltering hand on the back of a chair, and made his way to the black cane.

After unhooking it from the lampshade, he gave it a shake, sighed with relief at its faint sound and twisted the curved handle to the right instead of the left. After three full turns the handle came off, revealing the small silver cap that held the cork.

Vines pulled the cork out of the glass tube embedded inside the cane, lifted the no-longer-disguised flask to his mouth and swallowed an ounce or so of Jack Daniel’s Black Label whiskey that made him shudder all over with what the cane’s rightful owner had liked to call “shame, horror and all-around nastiness.”

The morning bourbon reminded Vines of the first time he had ever drunk from the cane. And that, arithmetic told him, was exactly fifteen years ago when he had been a senior at the university. It was in June of 1973 and less than an hour before graduation ceremonies when the three of them had first sipped whiskey from the black cane together, although no one got much more than an ounce because the thing only held four ounces.

Vines recalled how the cane’s owner had chuckled his most vindictive chuckle and smiled his most partisan smile as he proposed the prescient toast: “To Watergate, lads, and all who sink with her.”

The three of them had then drunk an ounce or so each: Kelly Vines first and after him the man whose cane it was and, finally, the man’s son, who was also Vines’s college roommate, and who, not quite fourteen years later, would allegedly shoot himself to death in a moderately expensive Tijuana whorehouse.

Vines stood, still naked in the Holiday Inn room, waiting for the whiskey’s balm and leaning with both hands on the black cane as he peered out the fourth-floor window at the Pacific Ocean that always had seemed so idle, or maybe only languorous, at least when compared to the busy and constantly grumbling Atlantic.

Then, as he had almost known it would, the drink from the black cane forced his memory back to the much more recent past, to that night more than a year ago when the sorrowful Tijuana homicide detective had telephoned him in La Jolla to say that the ex-roommate was dead.

Vines had driven down to Tijuana in what he still regarded as record time; found the whorehouse after a frustrating twenty-five-minute search, and identified the six-foot four-inch body, noting without any particular revulsion (it would come later) that much of the once handsome head had been splattered across a lithograph of the Virgin of Guadalupe that hung on the room’s south wall.

Vines had been staring at the lithograph when the homicide detective began to describe in Spanish how the dead man obviously had poked the old.45-caliber Colt semiautomatic into his mouth and pulled the trigger dos veces . Suddenly mistrusting his own usually adequate Spanish, Vines had offered a tentative translation: “Twice?”

The detective’s broad Indian face had slipped on a pious mask as he replied, “Yes, twice,” in English and, switching back to Spanish, murmured that only God himself could understand to what mad lengths suicides resorted when they truly desired to destroy themselves.

When Kelly Vines asked whether he really believed that shit about the ex-roommate pulling the trigger twice, the detective had closed his eyes and smiled beatifically, as if thinking of God or money or both. The detective had then reopened his eyes to reply that yes, certainly he believed it, as who would not?

Vines at first wasn’t sure whether it was the fading memory of his dead ex-roommate’s brains and blood or the breakfast bourbon that made him turn from the Holiday Inn’s ocean-view window, hang the cane back on the lampshade and not quite hurry into the bathroom where he threw up the Jack Daniel’s he had just drunk and much of whatever it was he had drunk the night before. But later, after he was all through throwing up, he quite sensibly blamed it on the Jack Daniel’s.

At 11:04 that morning, his stomach soothed by Mylanta-II and his nakedness clothed by a wrinkled beige linen jacket, dark gray worsted slacks, also wrinkled, and a clean but tieless white shirt, Kelly Vines sat on a stool at the bar of the Holiday Inn’s almost deserted cocktail lounge, a medicinal bloody mary at his elbow, and carefully poured two two-ounce miniatures of Jack Daniel’s into the hollowed-out black cane.

Three stools down a tall man of about Vines’s own age sipped a draft beer and watched with undisguised curiosity. Except for the thick side-wings of pewter-gray hair that had been swept back to rest on his ears, the man’s head was bald and both it and his long shrewd face were nicely tanned.

Perhaps to compensate for his baldness, the man had grown a pewter-gray mustache that Kelly Vines recognized from old British films as being of the wing commander variety. The man’s eyebrows were a matching pewter-gray and almost bushy enough to shade hazel eyes that seemed more brown than green. There was also a fine big nose that poked out and down toward a thin wide mouth that looked, if not generous, at least friendly. Beneath the mouth was the cornerstone chin.

The man with the wing commander mustache pursed his lips and frowned, as if worried lest Vines spill any of the whiskey that was still trickling into the cane. But when Vines, his hands vise-steady, finished without spilling a drop, the man grinned, revealing large off-white teeth that could only have been his own.

“Want to sell me that fool thing?” the man asked in a pleasant baritone.

“It’s not mine,” Vines said, turning to hang the cane on the bar. After Vines turned back, the man said, “Think whoever owns it might sell it?”

Vines examined the man thoughtfully, as if considering the question. “I could ask.”

The man nodded, obviously pleased by the answer. “For some dumb reason, I’ve just got to have it,” he said, reaching into a pocket of a faded blue chambray work shirt that might have been bought years ago at Sears. From the pocket he removed a business card. His work shirt and scuffed driller boots were in studied contrast to his well-tailored blue pinstripe pants that obviously belonged to some absent but equally well tailored vest and coat. Despite the old work shirt and stomp boots, Vines thought the bald man looked like a suit. After reading the business card, Vines discovered he was right:

SID FORK

Chief of Police

Durango, California

(Pop. 9,861)

The City That God Forgot

Below the motto-or epitaph-in the card’s lower left corner were the numbers of a telephone Vines could call and a post office box and zip code he could write to.

Vines looked up from the card with his first smile of the day. “Why would God bother to forget Durango, Chief?”

Sid Fork finished his last inch of beer and wiped the mustache with the back of his hand. “It wasn’t God-well, not exactly anyway. It was old Father Serra who passed through here on his way south from Monterey in 1772 and forgot to found us a mission, which we sure as hell could use now to draw the tourists.”