The Fourth Durango (16 page)

By five o’clock that same Saturday afternoon, Jack Adair and Kelly Vines had
checked out of the Holiday Inn and were dutifully following Virginia Trice into the large old bathroom on the second floor of her fourteen-room Victorian house.

The bathroom, at least ten by thirteen feet, separated their two bedrooms and contained a very old six-foot-long tub that stood on cast-iron claws; a fairly new tiled shower; a sink with separate faucets; a chain-flush toilet; and more towels than Adair could ever remember seeing even in the finest hotels.

“Towels,” Virginia Trice said, indicating two large stacks of them.

“Very nice,” Adair said.

They left the bathroom and regrouped in the hall. “What d’you guys like for breakfast?” she asked.

Adair looked at Vines, who said, “Anything.”

“Bacon and eggs?” she said. “Coffee? Juice? Home fries? Biscuits or toast? Cantaloupe maybe?”

“Coffee, toast and juice would be fine for me,” Adair said.

“Me, too,” said Vines.

“You can have anything you want,” she said. “After all, for what you’re paying…” The sentence died of acute embarrassment.

“Speaking of the rent,” Vines said, removed an unsealed Holiday Inn envelope from his hip pocket and handed it to Virginia Trice.

She looked inside the envelope, but didn’t count the twenty one-hundred-dollar bills. “It’s way too much, isn’t it?”

“Not considering the inconvenience we’re putting you to,” Adair said.

“Okay. If you say so. And it sure comes when I can use it.”

“I was very sorry to hear about your husband,” Adair said.

“That’s nice of you. Funeral’s Monday. If you like funerals, you’re welcome. It’ll be at Bruner’s Mortuary because Norm wasn’t much of a churchgoer. The Eagle’ll be closed all day Monday out of respect. Sid Fork says I oughta keep it open. But I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem right. What d’you think?”

Adair said he was certain she knew best.

Obviously grateful for the reassurance, Virginia Trice said, “Well, the phone’s down at the end of the hall near the stairs on a small stand. I put radios in both your rooms—cheap little jobs—but they’ll bring in our local FM station, which sucks, and for some reason an all-news CBS station down in L.A. that’s AM. No TV though. Norm wouldn’t have one in the house because he had to buy a dish for the set in the Eagle and they’d never let him turn it off. Norm really hated TV. Let’s see. What else? Oh. I almost forgot the keys to the front door. They’re in your rooms on the bedside tables. Come and go as you like. If you wanta have a friend spend the night, fine. I don’t get home till around one on weeknights and around two-thirty on Saturday nights like tonight. And I guess that’s about all the rules there are.”

Adair smiled and said there didn’t seem to be any so far.

“Probably because I’m not much of a landlady,” she said.

Vines said he thought she was the ideal landlady.

Virginia Trice nodded at the compliment, tried to smile, didn’t quite succeed and suddenly remembered something. “Jesus. There is one rule. This place is all wired up. But as long as you use your front door key to go out and come in, you’re okay. And don’t open any windows either because they’re wired up, too. I don’t know if you noticed, but the whole place is airconditioned—except the attic. So if you don’t use your front door key going out and coming in, or if you forget and open a window by mistake, the cops’ll be here in three minutes, maybe four.”

“That’s very reassuring,” Adair said.

“Can I ask you guys something?”

Vines nodded.

“How bad is it—your trouble?”

“Moderate,” Vines said.

“Sid said you might help him catch Norm’s killer. Is that straight or was Sid just shining me on like he does sometimes?”

“He wasn’t shining you on,” Vines said.

“Good,” Virginia Trice said, nodded to herself and, a moment later, said “Good” yet again.

By 5:35 that same Saturday evening, Adair and Vines stood beside the Mercedes sedan and watched the four-seat Cessna taxi toward them along the cracked and broken runway of what once had been the Durango Municipal Airport. All that was left of the airport was its disintegrating runway, two roofless corrugated aluminum hangars, a couple of rusting gasoline pumps, from which somebody had stolen the hoses, and the airport “terminal”—a one-story building about the size of a gasoline station office, which had long since been vandalized.

“All part of the trend, I guess,” Adair said as he watched Merriman Dorr cut the engine and climb down from the Cessna. “The small-town train depots were the first to go, then the bus stations and now we’re getting ghost airports.”

“You sure you don’t want me to come along?” Vines said.

“I think one of us at a time’s about all Dannie can handle.”

“Don’t expect too much, Jack.”

“No.”

“Don’t expect anything at all.”

“All I expect is a visit with my last living blood relative.”

Merriman Dorr, now no more than twenty feet away from the Mercedes, wore a brown leather flight jacket that Vines thought was either very old or the kind that was advertised as being “pre-distressed.” He also wore dark aviator glasses, chinos, cowboy boots and a blue Dodgers baseball cap. When he was fifteen feet away, Dorr said, “That runway’s a bitch.”

“That mean we can’t take off?” Adair said almost hopefully.

“I can take off from anything I can land on. You ready?”

Adair nodded.

“Then let’s go,” Dorr said, turned and started walking back toward the Cessna. Adair gave Vines a good-bye shrug and also headed toward the airplane, swinging his black cane.

Vines watched the takeoff from behind the wheel of his Mercedes. The Cessna headed out over the Pacific and turned south. When he could no longer see the airplane, Vines started the Mercedes and drove back to Durango.

He stopped first at a drugstore where he bought a can of Planters mixed nuts and two Baby Ruth candy bars, which would be his supper. To help him sleep, he bought a paperback novel by an author whose previous books had dealt with slightly depraved, extremely sensitive southerners to whom nothing much, good or bad, ever happened. In case the novel failed to put him to sleep, Vines stopped at a liquor store and bought an extra bottle of Jack Daniel’s Black Label.

It was 6:20
P.M.
when he reached the cream and green Victorian house. Vines parked in the street behind the Aston Martin and watched Dixie Mansur get out of it and walk back to his Mercedes. She wore white slacks and a dark blue cable-knit cotton sweater with a deep V-neck.

When she reached the Mercedes she bent down so she could speak to him through the open window. “Parvis made contact,” she said.

“Already?”

“Already.”

“You’d better come in and tell me about it.”

“In the car?”

“The house.”

Dixie Mansur straightened up, looked over the roof of the Mercedes at the old three-story showplace, bent down again and asked, “Who’s home?”

“Nobody.”

“You have anything to drink?”

“Bourbon.”

“One of these days,” she said, “you might buy a bottle of Scotch.”

Vines gave her a tour of the downstairs. She was particularly taken with the parlor’s dark heavy furniture and fat porcelain lamps. “It’s like a movie set, isn’t it?” she said.

“I don’t know,” Vines said. “I’ve never been on a movie set.”

In the kitchen they emptied a tray of ice into a bowl, found two glasses, refilled the tray with water and put it back in the refrigerator’s freezer. As they walked up the old carved oak staircase to the second floor, Dixie Mansur said, “I wouldn’t want to live here.”

“Why not?”

“Too many memories.”

“What memories?”

“Of what happened before I was born,” she said. “I don’t like to think anything much happened before that.”

In Vines’s room they put the whiskey, the ice, the glasses, the mixed nuts and the candy on the walnut dresser. Vines placed the novel on the bedside table next to the small radio. Dixie Mansur looked around, inspecting everything, and said, “Where’s Adair’s room?”

“Down the hall,” Vines said as he dropped ice cubes into the glasses, added whiskey and went into the bathroom for water. When he came back Dixie Mansur was seated on the bed, leaning against its headboard. He handed her a drink and said, “Tell me about it.”

She tasted her drink first. “When we got back to Santa Barbara this afternoon, Parvis started working the phone. He made about a half dozen calls, maybe more, and was about to make another one when the other phone rang—his really private phone.”

“And?”

“And it was them or him. Whoever.”

“You listened?”

“He shooed me out.”

“But you listened to those other calls he made.”

“I got to listen to what he said but not to what the people he called said.”

“What kind of pitch did he use?”

“I only heard one of them.”

“You said you listened to them all.”

“He only spoke English once. All the other times he spoke Farsi—you know, Persian.”

“What about the call that came in on his really private line—the bingo call?”

“It started out in English.”

“And switched to Farsi?”

“I don’t know. He was still talking English when he shooed me out.”

“But you did hear that one call he made in English, right?”

She nodded.

“What’d he say?” Vines asked. “I mean, did he start off, ‘Hey, Al, have I got a sweet one for you’? What I’d like to know is exactly what he said.”

“What’s the matter? Don’t you trust him?”

“Since it’s my neck, I’m curious.”

“I can’t remember exactly what he said. Nobody could.”

“As close as possible.”

“Well, he didn’t ask for anybody after the call was answered. He began by saying this is me—except he said, ‘This is I’ or maybe ‘It is I, Parvis.’ Then he said something about having extremely valuable information about certain officials in a southern California community, well known for its isolation, who were willing to part with two of their—I think he called them ‘guests’—providing they—and I guess he was talking about B. D. and Sid—were reimbursed for their effort or risk or something like that. Then Parvis listened for a while and said, ‘One million firm.’ Then he said, ‘Please see what you can do’ and good-bye.”

“What about when the bingo call came in?”

“He shooed me out, like I said. But when it was over he called me back in. He told me he’d made contact and it was important that you and Adair know so you could get ready. But he didn’t want to call you and go through the hotel switchboard. And since he had to stay by the phone, he told me to drive over and tell you and Adair that he’d made contact. I asked him what if I couldn’t find either of you, and he told me to keep looking till I did. Where is Adair anyhow?”

“Los Angeles.”

“Doing what?”

“Seeing some people.”

“When’ll he be back?”

“Late.”

“Mind if I wait for him?”

“Where?”

She patted the bed. “Here—unless your landlady objects.”

“She won’t.”

“When’ll she be back?”

“Around two-thirty.”

“Then we’ve got plenty of time, don’t we?” Dixie Mansur said, putting her drink down and slipping the dark blue cotton sweater off over her head and dropping it on the floor.

Convinced, for some reason, that she had never worn a brassiere in her life, Vines sat down next to her, put his own drink on the bedside table next to the small radio and kissed her. After the long bourbon-flavored kiss finally ended and Vines was unbuttoning his shirt, he said, “Is this also Parvis’s idea?”

“Would you care if it was?”

“Not in the least,” Kelly Vines said.