Ross Thomas - The Fourth Durango

“You got fat, Ivy,” the man said. “And you appear to have fallen on hard times-although with you it’s always been kind of hard to tell. What are you now-a Holiday Inn house dick?”

“Who was the call to, Soldier?” Settles asked.

“That’s really none of your fucking business, is it?”

Settles nodded, as if in agreement, picked up one of the house phones and tapped three numbers. When the call was answered he said, “This is Settles down in the lobby. You just get a call from Soldier Sloan?” He listened, glanced back at Sloan and said, “No, no trouble. Just checking. I’ll send him on up.”

After Settles hung up, Soldier Sloan smiled a warm, almost cozy smile and asked, “How d’you like working for Sid Fork, Ivy?”

“It’s nice and quiet and that’s how Sid and I like it.”

Sloan looked around the almost empty lobby. “Graves aren’t this quiet.”

“Well, we got the Fourth of July parade coming up next week.”

“Doubtless a day of revelry and madness.”

“I’ll see you to the elevator, Soldier. Make sure you punch the right button and all.”

As they waited for an elevator, Settles said, “Hear you promoted yourself to brigadier general.”

“And high time, too, don’t you think?”

Settles smiled and nodded happily, not in response to Sloan’s question, but as if he had just arrived at some welcome conclusion. “I sure like that new mustache, Soldier. Reminds me of the one Cesar Romero used to wear before his went white. Now there was a mustache-not like those floppy cookie-dusters Selleck and all the Highway Patrol kids wear nowadays. I bet yours grew in coal-black. Bet you don’t even have to dye it. All that white hair. Black eyebrows. Matching mustache. I’ve gotta say it sure makes you distinguished-looking, Soldier, and how long do I tell Sid you’re gonna be with us this time?”

“Leaving on the evening tide.”

“Sid’ll be sorry he missed you,” Settles said as the elevator doors opened. He watched Sloan enter the elevator, turn and press the 4 button. “Good seeing you again, Soldier.”

“Always a pleasure,” the old man said just before the doors closed.

After half a lifetime in bunco and fraud, Ivy Settles watched the lighted floor indicator of the elevator Soldier Sloan was taking to the fourth floor-just to make sure, he told himself, it didn’t go sideways. The elevator had paused at three and continued on to four, where it now seemed stuck.

The other elevator, to Settles’s right, was on its way down. It, too, had paused at three and Settles decided to ask its passenger or passengers if they knew what the trouble was on the fourth floor.

The doors of the right-hand elevator opened and a very short, very heavy man came out. He wore a giveaway cap advertising Copenhagen snuff, thick tinted glasses and dark blue coveralls that had “Francis” stitched in red above the left breast pocket. In his right hand he carried a large black toolbox that looked old and battered.

“What happened to the other elevator?” Settles asked.

The man stopped, looked up at Settles, then up at the floor indicator numbers and back at Settles. “Beats me.”

“Where’d you get on?”

“Three.”

“You’re not the elevator repair guy, are you?”

The short man turned his back on Settles. An arc of two-inch-high red letters spelled out “Francis the Plumber” across the coveralls. Below the name was a phone number. The man turned to face Settles again.

“I’m Francis and there was a backed-up toilet in three twenty-two and it’s Saturday and I’m on double time. So if somebody wants me to stand around talking about busted elevators, somebody’s gonna get charged for it.”

“Wait here,” Settles said.

“Why?”

Settles brought out his badge and showed it to the plumber. “Because I said to.”

After hurrying to the shallow alcove where the house phones were, Settles snatched one up and tapped three numbers. After two rings a man’s voice answered with a hello.

“Mr. Adair?” Settles said.

“This is Vines.”

“Settles again-down in the lobby. Has Soldier Sloan showed up yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Would you go take a look at the elevator on the fourth floor-the car on your right-and then come down and tell me what’s wrong with it?”

“Come down to the lobby and tell you?”

“Please.”

“All right,” Vines said and hung up.

Settles hurried back to the elevators, where Francis the Plumber had failed to wait. The detective turned and trotted across the lobby to the hotel entrance. He went through it just in time to see a pink Ford van make a right turn out of the parking lot. On the side of the van was a large magnetic stick-on sign that advertised “Francis the Plumber” in big black letters. Beneath them, in smaller ones, was the slogan “Nite or Day.”

Embarrassed and irritated by his own vanity, Ivy Settles fumbled his glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on. But by then, even with the glasses, it was impossible to read the license plate of the pink Ford van.

The elevators were down the corridor and around a corner from Kelly Vines’sfourth-floor room. When he reached them he found Soldier Sloan lying face-up and half out of the right elevator, whose two automatic doors were gently nudging the old man’s waist every three or four seconds.

It was obvious to Vines that Sloan was dead. Those too-green eyes had lost their glitter and stared up without blinking at the corridor’s vanilla ceiling. Vines knelt to put a hand to the old man’s neck, feeling for the pulse he knew he wouldn’t find.

If there was a cause of death, Vines couldn’t see it. There were no visible wounds or blood, but he did find Sloan’s position peculiar. It was as if the old man had turned to face the rear of the elevator, then fell backward, sprawling halfway through the open doors.

Vines explored the dead man’s pockets almost without thinking of the consequences other than to remind himself he was no longer an officer of the court. He left the watch pocket until last because he was confident of what he would find there.

In the other pockets he found a comb, a Montblanc fountain pen and an ostrichskin wallet, well worn, that contained $550 in fifty-dollar bills. In the other pockets he found a car’s ignition key attached to a Mercedes emblem that didn’t necessarily mean anything; a small pocketknife with a gold case that Vines thought was probably fourteen carat; a handkerchief of Irish linen; and a small combination address book and pocket diary. The address section was almost filled with names and phone numbers, but very few addresses. The diary section was blank and the page for that June Saturday, the twenty-fifth, had been torn out.

In Sloan’s watch pocket, as expected, Vines found a folded-up thousand-dollar bill, issued in 1934 and bearing the engraved portrait of Grover Cleveland and the signature of Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury. On the back of the old bill was some fancy engraving to discourage counterfeiters.

The torn-out diary page was also in the watch pocket, folded up, like the thousand-dollar bill, into the size of a postage stamp. Vines carefully unfolded it, noticing that most of it was for a diary and about an inch at the bottom for a “memo.” At the top of the page were initials and numbers reading, “KV 431” and “JA 433,” which Vines immediately deciphered as being his and Jack Adair’s initials and room numbers.

At the bottom of the page in the space reserved for the memo was another entry that read: “C JA O RE DV.” Vines could make nothing out of this and put everything back where he had found it, including the torn-out diary page and the thousand-dollar bill, both of them carefully refolded. After that he rose and went to tell Ivy Settles that Soldier Sloan was dead.