The Fourth Durango (12 page)

The letter was signed, “Sincerely, Mark Tyson Fuller.”

Kelly Vines used his ballpoint pen to push the false teeth back to where they had been, went to the phone in the living room and called a newspaper reporter he knew. He then waited exactly five minutes and called the police. The reporter, accompanied by a photographer, arrived first. The photographer, having quickly taken pictures of the dead justice, his murdered wife and the suicide note, was taking pictures of the two shoeboxes full of one-hundred-dollar bills when the police arrived.

“There were four of them,” Vines said. “Two homicide detectives and two uniforms. First, they threw out the reporter and the photographer. Next they yelled at me for a while. Then they made sure that both Justice and Mrs. Fuller were really dead. After that, they read the suicide note. And finally, they counted the money. But no matter how many times they counted it—and it was at least six or seven times—the total still came to only four hundred and ninety-seven thousand dollars.”

As Vines expected, it was Parvis Mansur who asked the first and most pertinent
question. “Were two enough?”

“Two shoeboxes? Yes.”

“Is that an estimate—a guess?”

“Neither.”

“May I ask how you knew?”

“From some ex-clients who carried large chunks of cash around in shoeboxes.”

“How much American money will fit into one?”

“In hundreds?”

“Yes. In hundreds.”

“The average shoebox is twelve inches long, six inches wide, three and a quarter inches deep and can hold up to three thousand U.S. bills, if they’re tightly packed. But the people I knew didn’t pack more than twenty-five hundred bills into one. By using hundred-dollar bills, they had a convenient, portable container that held a quarter of a million dollars and weighed only five point one pounds.”

“How do you know how much it weighed?” B. D. Huckins asked.

“Because there are four hundred and ninety U.S. bills to the pound.”

“You also learned this from your former clients?” Mansur said.

“Where else?”

“They must’ve been exceedingly prosperous.”

“They were pot smokers who became dealers, grew into major wholesalers and eventually took in so much cash they had to weigh it to count it.”

“What happened to them?” Dixie Mansur asked.

“Who cares?”

“Let’s return to the reporter and the photographer,” Mansur said. “As soon as you read the suicide note and looked at the two shoeboxes, you realized they could, in fact, contain no more than half a million dollars, right?”

“Right.”

“So to preserve everything on film before the police arrived, you called the reporter and urged him to bring a photographer along. Also true?”

Vines nodded and Mansur nodded back contentedly. The silence that followed was finally broken by B. D. Huckins with an exasperated sigh. “I don’t understand.”

“Don’t understand what?” Vines said.

“Any of it. Especially the money thing. Was there a million or only five hundred thousand? Did the judge, what’s his name, Fuller, kill himself and his wife, or did somebody else do it? And finally,” she said, turning to stare at Jack Adair, “did you take the half million or not and, if so, who from?”

Vines also looked at Adair and said, “Well?”

Adair decided to examine the ceiling. He was still examining it when he came to his decision and said, “Tell ’em, Kelly.”

“Everything?”

“Everything.”

After infuriating the two homicide detectives by refusing to answer any of their questions unless he had legal counsel present, Kelly Vines enraged them even more when he handed each a business card and suggested in his most imperious tone that if they wished to question him further, they should call his secretary and arrange an appointment.

The two detectives were still sputtering when Vines walked out of the Fuller house, got into his car and drove immediately to a three-year-old, seven-story condominium building that now occupied the site of the demolished grade school he had attended for seven years. The apartment building, advertised as offering “the ultimate in luxury and prestige,” overlooked the twenty-acre park that Vines had crossed daily to classes that had begun with kindergarten and ended with the sixth grade.

A drive now looped up through ten acres of expensively landscaped grounds to the condominium’s entrance. Vines got out of the Mercedes sedan, the same sedan he would later drive to California, and turned the car over to the doorman, who, Vines remembered, had dropped out of high school halfway through the eleventh grade in 1965 to enlist in the Marines. The doorman never seemed to remember Kelly Vines.

After taking the elevator up to the top floor, the seventh, Vines used a key to let himself into his father-in-law’s apartment that occupied 2,600 square feet. He crossed the living room, went down a hall and entered what the architect had decreed to be the master bedroom, which featured an enormous walk-in closet next to the bath. The closet’s twin sliding doors had been covered by full-length mirrors until Jack Adair had had them removed, explaining that the last thing he wanted to see first thing in the morning was a naked or half-naked fat man.

Vines entered the closet, turned on its light, knelt down and found twelve of them stacked in a corner, hidden—or at least concealed—by two old Burberry topcoats that were then too small for Adair but far too good to throw away.

The twelve shoeboxes were divided into twin stacks of six each. The boxes bore the brand names of Ferragamo, Johnston & Murphy, Bass, Allen-Edmonds and Gucci. One of the Gucci boxes was at the bottom of the near stack. The other Gucci box was second from the top of the far stack. Vines automatically removed both of them, certain that Adair would go barefoot before wearing anything made by Gucci. He carried the two shoeboxes out of the closet and placed them on the king-size bed. When he lifted off their tops he discovered that again someone had used red rubber bands to bind the one-hundred-dollar bills into packets.

Vines called down for his car. When he came out of the condominium building, he opened the Mercedes’s trunk and carelessly tossed in a green plastic garbage bag. After that, he drove around aimlessly for fifteen minutes until he was reasonably sure he wasn’t being followed. From a phone booth he called a client who was a senior partner in the wholesale marijuana concern.

They met an hour later in the State Historical Museum, which was only two blocks from the state capitol. They met in the museum’s basement where the century-old stagecoaches, buggies and covered wagons were kept on display. The client was a lanky thirty-two-year-old who wore jeans, scuffed cowboy boots and a white oxford cloth button-down shirt with its sleeves rolled just above his elbows. The client had quit smoking both tobacco and marijuana six months before and now kept a toothpick in his mouth. Four or five times a day he dipped the toothpick into a small vial of cinnamon oil.

“What’s up?” the client asked.

“I need to use one of your laundries.”

“No shit?”

“Which one do you suggest?”

The client dug a forefinger into his right ear, which always seemed to help him think, and said, “Well, Panama’s not bad, but you can’t be sure everybody down there’ll speak English, although most of ’em do, but I still sorta like the Bahamas because all of ’em speak English there, even if you’ve got to work at it sometimes to understand what the fuck they’re saying. How much we talking about?”

“Five hundred thousand.”

“Oh,” the client said, as if the amount were scarcely enough to fool with. “Well, it’ll cost you.”

“How much?”

“First off, we’ll take ten percent and our pet bank down in Houston’s gonna take another ten, so what you’ll have left by the time it gets where it’s going is about four hundred K.”

“Then let’s do it,” Vines said.

“When?”

“Today. Right now.”

When Kelly Vines walked into the reception room of the chambers of the chief justice of the state supreme court on the third floor of the state capitol building, the fifty-four-year-old secretary looked up with an apprehensive expression that dissolved into relief when she saw that her visitor was the boss’s son-in-law and not the police.

“He’s been asking for you,” said Eunice Warr, who had been Adair’s secretary for thirteen years.

“How’s he doing?”

She shrugged. “About like you’d expect.”

Vines smiled slightly. “You think he took it, Eunice?”

She shrugged again. “Says he didn’t.”

The chief justice’s large chamber was paneled in pecan and carpeted with woven wool and filled with a huge teak desk, two brown leather couches and at least six brown leather easy chairs. Maroon velvet curtains decorated three wide ceiling-high windows that looked out on the Japanese-designed executive office building across the street where the governor worked.

Adair sat in a high-backed leather swivel chair, his feet up on the massive desk, listening through an earphone to a small gray multiband Sony radio, the ICF-2002 shortwave model.

Adair took the earphone off and said, “Well, at least it didn’t make the BBC yet.”

“What else have you heard?” Vines said as he sat down in one of the leather easy chairs.

“Just what’s on the local all-news station,” Adair said, reaching for his black cane. After removing its handle and cork, he poured two drinks into a pair of glasses that he took from a desk drawer.

“I was holding out till you got here,” he said as he rose and handed Vines one of the glasses. “Didn’t quite seem like the time to be drinking alone.”

Vines tasted his whiskey and said, “Anyone call you?”

“Not a soul.”

“Or drop by to commiserate?”

“Be like commiserating with an ax-murderer.”

“Paul didn’t call—or Dannie?”

“Paul’s off doing the Lord’s work in Cyprus, I think, and as for Dannie, well, your wife and my daughter doesn’t seem to be paying much attention to current events these days, which, I assume, you must’ve noticed.”

“But you did hear about the Fullers and the suicide note?” Vines said.

Adair nodded and sipped some of his whiskey. “They say you found the bodies.”

“I also went to your apartment.”

“Well, you’ve got a key.”

“I looked around.”

“Get to it, Kelly.”

“I looked in that big walk-in closet—the one in your bedroom.”

“You’re saying, for some reason, that you looked there first, right?”

Vines nodded.

“And found what?”

“Two Gucci shoeboxes. The first one contained two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills. The second one contained the same fucking thing.”

Vines knew that no one, not even a great actor, could feign the shock that widened Adair’s kitten blue eyes, dropped open his mouth and produced the violent sneeze, a powerful hay fever-type blast that made him fumble for his handkerchief and blow his nose. After he was done with that, he remembered his drink, gulped it down and, in an almost conversational tone, said, “Son of a bitch.”

After that, Adair stared down between his knees at the wool carpet, looked up at Vines and said, “I never bought a pair of Guccis in my life.”

The anger came then—a slow cold rage that narrowed Adair’s eyes, drained his plump cheeks of all color and caused the three chins to quiver angrily when he again spoke. “It still there?” he demanded. “In my closet? In a pair of fucking Gucci shoeboxes?”

Vines looked at his watch and said, “It should be on its way down to the Bahamas right about now.”

Adair’s anger evaporated. Color returned to his cheeks and curiosity to his expression. “I thank you, Kelly,” he said with careful formality. “But I’ve got to say it was a goddamned dumb thing for you to do.”

“It’s also a felony. You were set up, Jack. But without the money, they have no case. At least not one they can win.”

Adair swiveled around in his chair so he could look across the street at the almost new building where the governor worked. “They’ll try, though, won’t they?”

“Yes.”

“And what d’you suppose they’ll poke around in first?”

“The usual: your bank accounts, safety-deposit boxes, assets, investments, tax returns.”

“Tax returns,” Adair said to the building across the street.

The silence began then. It was one of those ominous silences that seldom lasts very long because somebody coughs or clears his throat before somebody else screams. Kelly Vines ended the silence in the chambers of the chief justice with a murmured question. “What’s the problem, Jack?”

Adair swiveled around to face him and spoke in a voice without inflection. It was a tone Vines instantly recognized because he had heard it often from clients who, when all hope was gone, used it to describe their transgressions without emotion or embellishment. It was, Vines had learned, the voice of truth.

“Four years ago,” Adair said, “I told the payroll folks to start taking double state and Federal withholding out of my salary. I figured the additional withholding would make me come out about even with the tax people at the end of the year and take care of whatever tax I might owe on interest, dividends and other outside income.”