Ross Thomas: The Fourth Durango

“I’m a lawyer.”

“Which brand? Corporate? Tax? Criminal? Catch-as-catch-can?”

“Disbarred,” said Kelly Vines.

For not quite four years during the Carter administration, the name of Jack Adairhad been either second or third on a supposedly secret White House list of five names. It was his name and the names of three other men and one woman that were to be given immediate and serious consideration should any of the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices either retire or drop dead while Jimmy Carter was in office.

None did, as it turned out, but if one had, the betting in Washington was three to two that Adair would be nominated to fill the vacancy. Yet the same political bookies who were laying three to two on Adair’s nomination were also offering five to one with no takers that, if nominated, he would never be confirmed by the Senate.

The long odds against Jack Adair’s confirmation came as no surprise. Although it was conceded he was smart enough to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court-too smart, some said-it was also conceded he was far too partisan, much too witty and, most damning of all, the owner of an acerbic mouth that never shut up about whatever interested or engaged him, which seemed to be almost everything.

His ready wit and readier mouth had made Adair the media’s darling and the talk shows’ sweetheart. Only ten days before being indicted he had appeared on the Phil Donahue show and staked out a hyperbolic position on capital punishment (borrowed in part from Camus) that had created a political firestorm down home where almost everyone assumed he was dead serious.

“If to deter murder,” Adair had said in his gravest judicial tones and with calculated disregard for the Eighth Amendment, “the state must instruct by example, then there is no deterrence more instructive than a public execution-and not just some run-of-the mill public hanging either, Phil-but a kind of old-fashioned drawing and quartering with those great big Budweiser Clydesdales pulling the guy apart on prime-time TV around eight in the evening just before the kiddies are tucked into bed.”

The landlocked state that Jack Adair once served as chief justice had always held to the notion that members of its supreme court should run for their terms of office as did the governor, members of the legislature and just about everyone else on the state payroll down to and including the director of weights and measures. This populist method of choosing a supreme court guaranteed that those who sat on the high bench would be glib lawyers of pleasing mien who were also keen students of politics, if not of the law itself.

The often bizarre and always expensive television, radio and print campaigns waged by candidates for the supreme court made further rents and tears in the state’s already tattered reputation, which in recent years had suffered a series of embarrassments, not the least being the almost perennial revelations of graft, corruption and bribery. Other assorted stigmata included the state university’s doped-up and overpaid football teams; a recent plague of bank and thrift failures for which there seemed to be no known cure; and-on a different level-the annual state-financed Panhandle Rattlesnake Roundup, a revered cultural event that environmentalists and the SPCA set up a squawk about every year, much to the media’s delight, and where, on the average, 29.2 persons got snakebit, 9.7 percent of them fatally.

The state’s ultimate embarrassment, however, had been its chief justice, Jack Adair. As the Adair scandal (or L’Affaire Adair, as a few immigrants from back East called it) dragged on and on, many a devout Christian fell to his knees and prayed God to send old Jack a ticket home and, if it wasn’t too much bother, Lord, maybe take some of those snotty out-of-state TV and newspaper reporters with him.

But as faithless lovers do, the media eventually abandoned Jack Adair, much to the relief of those in the state who, quite properly, had blamed them for his giddy rise to celebrity status and, improperly, for his being where he was at 7:05 A.M. on that last Friday in June, which was in the shower room of the discharge area of the U.S. maximum-security penitentiary just outside Lompoc, California.

Located in a mild coastal valley and laid out on a grid, Lompoc is about ten miles east of both the Pacific Ocean and Vandenberg Air Force Base and a few miles south and east of the U.S. Penitentiary. With a population of 26,267 at last count, Lompoc is also 147 miles north of Los Angeles, 187 miles south of San Francisco and only 26 miles north and east of Durango, California, the city that God forgot.

As the “Flower Seed Capital of the World,” many of Lompoc’s streets are named Tulip, Sage, Rose and so forth. Most of them run at right angles to streets that are usually numbered or named with letters of the alphabet. The city’s avenues, however, apparently have been named after whatever was obvious or handy. For example, convicted felons are driven west on Ocean Avenue, then north six miles or so on Floradale Avenue to the U.S. Penitentiary, where, on that last Friday in June, hot water pounded against Jack Adair’s back in the shower room that offered four shower heads on one side, four on the other and was open at both ends.

Located just next to the penitentiary’s discharge area, the showers were available to prisoners about to be discharged or paroled. Most usually took one before changing into their new street clothes that came from either J. C. Penney’s or Sears and were supplied free by the penitentiary.

When Jack Adair had begun his sentence fifteen months ago he couldn’t-when naked-look down and see either his toes or his penis because of the 269 pounds he carried on his five-foot ten-and-a-half-inch frame. Most of this excess lard had settled around his middle, creating the forty six-inch waistline that blocked the view.

But as the hot spray now drummed against his back and neck, he could, if he wished, look down and inspect a flat thirty-four-inch belly, ten unre-markable toes and sexual equipment that furtive comparative glances over the last fifteen months had assured him was still of average size and shape.

He was soaping his crotch when they slipped into the shower room. Both were fully dressed, although the smaller of the pair was already unzipping his fly. In the left hand of the larger one was a knife with a blade fashioned out of a metal spoon and, for a handle, melted plastic from seven toothbrushes.

The smaller one, who falsely claimed to be a member of the Mexican Mafia, was called Loco by everyone because he liked to eat lightbulbs and get sent to the penitentiary hospital where he could sometimes steal paregoric and even morphine. His real name was Fortunato Ruiz and he was serving twelve years for car theft and assaulting a Federal officer with a deadly weapon. The weapon had been a Mercedes convertible; the Federal officer was an FBI agent who correctly suspected the car to be stolen.

“Hey, Judgie,” Ruiz called in his curiously sweet tenor. “You and me and Bobby here, we gonna have one real fine good-bye party, true?”

Bobby was Robert Dupree, the man with the knife and, by trade, another car thief who had specialized in Peterbilts. He had liked to steal the rigs in his native Arkansas and sell them in either Texas or Missouri. Dupree himself had started the rumor that he carried not one but two concealed weapons, the first being the knife; the other, AIDS.

The knife now moved in slow tight little circles as Dupree grinned and nodded at Adair. “Gonna have us some nice clean shower fun, huh, Judge?”

Adair dropped the soap and backed against the shower wall, covering his genitals with both hands. He also smiled his most ingratiating smile, believing it to be the standard disguise for cowardice and fear. “Thanks, guys, but I really can’t spare the time.”