Ross Thomas - The Fourth Durango

He turned from the entertainment center just as Quirt entered the living room. The deputy now wore jeans, the same T-shirt and a pair of thick white ribbed athletic socks. Although Fork scarcely glanced at the socks, Quirt seemed to think he should explain them. “I don’t wear shoes in the house when the kid’s asleep.”

“Wayne must be what now-two?”

“Two and a half.”

“How’s Mary Helen?”

“Okay if we keep our voices down and don’t wake up the kid.”

They sat on the plastic-covered furniture, Fork taking the chair, Quirt the couch. “Some meeting we had, huh?” Fork said.

Quirt shook his head, as if in appreciation. “That B. D.”

“After you and the sheriff left I went home and went to bed. But it’s been one hell of a long lousy day and I just couldn’t get to sleep. Mostly, I was thinking about Ivy Settles, who was one fine cop even if he didn’t look like much.”

“Ivy was okay.”

“So I was lying there, tossing and turning and thinking about Ivy and Carlotta-you know Carlotta?”

Quirt said he knew Carlotta Settles.

“At least she’ll get a decent pension. Anyway, I was lying there, worrying about her and wondering who in the world I could get to replace Ivy when all of a sudden it just hit me.”

“What?”

“You.”

Quirt leaned back on the couch and studied Fork. The chief of police was pleased that the tall deputy hadn’t said, “Me?” He was further encouraged by the flicker of cunning in Quirt’s dark brown eyes.

“Go on,” Quirt said.

Fork obviously was in no hurry. “If Charlie Coates runs for county supervisor two years from now like he said, who d’you think’ll be our new sheriff?”

“That dickhead Jim Grieg.”

“Don’t get along with Lieutenant Grieg so good, huh?”

“I get along with anybody I have to get along with, Sid.”

“Think Charlie Coates’ll make a halfway decent county supervisor?”

“Supervisor’s just a stop.”

“On the way to where?”

“Coates is forty-two,” Quirt said. “If he gets elected supervisor in ’ninety, he’ll be forty-four. Two years as supervisor and he’ll make a free-ride run at Congress. If he wins, fine. If not, he’s got two years left as supervisor and he’ll be only forty-six. He’ll use those next two years to build up his name recognition and war chest and then make another run at Congress when he’s forty-eight. But if he doesn’t make it to Washington either time, he’ll just give up and get rich instead.”

“He tell you all this?”

“He takes me along to be his rememberer. That’s why I was at B. D.’s tonight. I got an awful good memory, Sid.”

“Charlie ever say anything about taking you along if he gets to be supervisor or goes to Washington? Maybe to carry his bags, meet his plane, do his remembering?”

“He might’ve.”

“How d’you like Durango, Henry?”

“I like the weather.”

“Think you might like it back in Washington?”

“I was born in Washington. My old man was with the Department of Commerce. It was a hundred and three there today. The humidity was ninety-something.”

“Never been to Washington,” Fork said, paused and frowned, as if trying to make some difficult decision. He kept the frown in place, letting the suspense build until Quirt grew restless. It was then that Fork asked, “You said you could get along with anybody you had to get along with, right?”

Quirt nodded.

“Wonder if you could get along with B. D. and me if I offered you thirty-five a year, detective rank, a take-home car, free dental and medical and four weeks annual leave a year?”

“I could get along with you and B. D. fine, Sid, but I’d have to go along to do it, wouldn’t I?”

Fork made himself look puzzled. “Don’t quite follow that.”

“I mean, you want something from me. Right now. Tonight.”

Fork changed his expression from puzzled to hurt. “I don’t play that way, Henry, and neither does B. D. The job’s yours. You can start Monday, like I said, if you can quit the sheriff that soon. But I’d better be absolutely honest with you. If anybody ever dumps B. D., I expect to be the first one fired and the new mayor’ll probably get rid of all my people and bring in his own. But that’s just the way things work, isn’t it?”

Henry Quirt leaned forward on the couch, managing to look both skeptical and wise. “What d’you want from me that’ll help B. D. stay mayor forever?”

“Nothing. Like I keep saying, the job’s yours.”

“No more bullshit, Sid.”

“Well, now that you brought it up, there are those prints Charlie Coates told me and B. D. about-the ones they lifted off of that pink Ford van. Charlie’s already got a make on ’em, right? Despite what he said.”

“Right.”

“You get a look at the make?”

Quirt nodded.

“And with that memory of yours…”

“I remember it, Sid. All of it.”

“Now I’m not asking you to tell me who belongs to those prints. And I want you to understand that it’s got nothing to do with the job and the take-home car and the thirty-five a year because that’s all set. And anyway, I can’t ask you to do something you can’t do in good conscience.”

Looking more skeptical and wise than ever, Quirt said, “I don’t hear my conscience saying much of anything, Sid.”

“Well, now, that’s fine. So when d’you want to come to work-Monday?”

“Better make it the fifteenth of next month-just in case Sheriff Charlie turns up something else B. D. can use.”

At 2:04 A.M. on that last Sunday in June, Kelly Vines and Chief Sid Fork once againsat side by side on the couch with the woven-cane back in Virginia Trice’s Victorian parlor.

Mayor B. D. Huckins sat opposite them, her legs tucked beneath a straight-back chair and crossed at the ankles. Jack Adair sat on the low chair with the worn plush seat-hair mussed, shirttails half-out and bare feet in the cordovan oxfords he still hadn’t bothered to tie because it was Adair who had raced down the stairs at 1:52 A.M. to answer the insistent doorbell. Vines, then only half-awake, had dressed while Adair was in the kitchen, making coffee.

Huckins put her cup and saucer down and said, “Virginia not home from work yet?”

“Not yet,” Adair said.

“We need to talk about something.”

“Something that can’t wait, I take it,” Adair said.

She nodded. “But first I want answers to some questions.”

“First thing I wish you’d do, B. D.,” Sid Fork said, “is quit acting so goddamn mysterious.”

The mayor’s gray eyes were still on Adair when she said, “Shut up, Sid.”

The chief of police opened his mouth to reply, thought better of it, slumped back on the couch, stuck his feet out and jammed his hands down into his pants pockets, looking, Kelly Vines thought, extremely pissed off.

Still gazing at Adair and obviously indifferent to how Fork felt, Huckins cleared her throat and said, “You never told us what happened to the boy and girl-Jack and Jill Jimson-after your supreme court overturned their guilty verdicts and ordered a new trial.”

“They were retried in another county.”

“A change of venue then?”

“Combine Wilson argued for it and got it. The Jimson kids were tried a second time a hundred and thirteen miles from home and acquitted.”

“But didn’t that bribe the old justice took, what’s his name, Fuller-”

“Mark Tyson Fuller.”

“Didn’t that taint the supreme court’s decision?”

“The state decided there was no bribe.”

“What did it call that five hundred thousand dollars in shoeboxes on the dining room table?”