The Fourth Durango

Chapter 8

The real bad stuff began a little less than fifteen months ago just after Vines was disbarred and Adair was sent to prison. It was then that Vines had packed one large suitcase, left his native state and driven the blue Mercedes to La Jolla, California, where he moved into a more or less rent-free beachfront condominium at Coast Boulevard and Pearl Street.

The expensively furnished two-bedroom apartment belonged to a former client, the oil exploration firm of Sanchez & Maloney-usually referred to by those in the oil business as Short Mex and Big Mick. When oil was nudging $30 a barrel the firm had bought the condominium as a weekend retreat the two partners could be whisked to by company jet.

They had managed to use it three times before offering it to Kelly Vines at the bargain rent of $3,000 a month, which he was to deduct from the $39,000 the wildcatters’ firm still owed him but couldn’t pay because oil by then was around $15 a barrel.

The $39,000 fee was what Vines-prior to his disbarment-had billed Sanchez & Maloney for persuading a vice-president of one of the majors to drop a $5-million lawsuit. The suit charged that Joe Maloney had knocked the vice-president down in the Petroleum Club bar and stomped him with an almost brand-new pair of lizardskin cowboy boots as a half-drunk Paco Sanchez had olé-ed his partner on.

The major oil company vice-president withdrew his suit after Kelly Vines let him examine photocopies of registration forms obtained from a motel down in Houston near the Intercontinental Airport.

“The young woman who shared these rooms with you on seven different occasions,” Vines had said in what he always thought of as his iced-snot voice, “does, in fact, bear your surname, although she would seem to have been not your wife, but your sixteen-year-old niece.”

Six months after the suit was dropped, which was two days after Vines’s disbarment, Paco Sanchez and Joe Maloney came by to offer him the keys to the condominium.

“You can stay there as long as talk’s cheap and shit stinks,” Sanchez had said.

“Or until oil’s back up to twenty-five a barrel,” said Maloney.

Sanchez smiled sadly. “Like I said, Kelly. Forever.”

Kelly Vines gave away or abandoned most of what he still owned, packed the one large suitcase and drove to California. This was a month after Jack Adair had entered the Federal penitentiary at Lompoc and two weeks and three days after Vines’s wife had emptied her personal E. F. Hutton Cash Management fund of $43,912 and told friends, if not Vines, that she was flying to Las Vegas for a divorce.

She spent only four hours in Las Vegas-just long enough to buy twenty-four Seconal capsules from a hotel bellhop and lose $4,350 at blackjack-before flying on to Los Angeles, where she checked into the Beverly Wilshire. Up in her room she searched the telephone directory and called the first psychiatrist she found who had a Beverly Hills address. With the use of only minimum guile, she talked him into giving her a same-day appointment.

Danielle Vines convinced the psychiatrist during their nine-minute session that she was very nervous, extremely depressed and unable to sleep because of her father’s imprisonment and her husband’s disgrace. The psychiatrist gave her an evaluation appointment for 7 A.M. the following Tuesday, his first free hour, and wrote her a prescription for twenty-four Seconal capsules.

Danielle Vines thanked him, had the prescription filled at the nearest pharmacy, returned to her room at the Beverly Wilshire and ordered up cinnamon toast, a bottle of wine and some Dramamine, the sea-and motion-sickness remedy. She ate the toast first, washing it down with the wine. Then she swallowed some Dramamine. After that she used what was left of the wine to wash down her hoard of four dozen Seconals, confident that the toast and Dramamine would help keep them down. After that she picked up the phone and called her brother, Paul Adair, in Washington, D.C., to tell him exactly what she had done.

Adair said, “So after she called Paul, he called you.”

“No. He called the hotel back and got it organized. Doctor. Ambulance. Name of a hospital. No cops. No press.”

Adair nodded. “I can almost hear him.”

“He called the hospital then, which turned out to be in Santa Monica, and started out by talking money to them, which he said they seemed to appreciate. Once Paul had the hospital squared away-private room, round-the-clock nurses, a specialist, no visitors and all-then he called me.”

Adair examined Vines thoughtfully. “First he told you about Dannie. And after that I’d say he got around to what was really on his mind.”

Vines sighed. “He parceled out the blame, Jack.”

“Who got the most-me?”

“He was very evenhanded. We each got half.”

“Then he flew out here?”

“That same night. I met him at LAX and we went to St. John’s in Santa Monica.”

“The hospital.”

Vines nodded. “They’d pumped her stomach by then and she was out of intensive care and in the private room with a private nurse. But something had snapped or popped or fused because she didn’t know me and she didn’t know Paul. So after a few minutes we left and Paul went apeshit again.”

“Still carrying on about you and me?”

“Still. But by then I was numb and the more he ranted, the more numb I got. It was almost pleasant-something like codeine. Finally, I got tired of listening and told him to fuck off.”

Adair rose, walked to the window and looked out. “This the longest day of the year?”

“Tuesday was.”

Adair turned. “What’d Paul say exactly, during his ranting and raving-as near as you can recollect?”

“He said he was going to ask them for a six-month leave of absence and if they wouldn’t give it to him, fuck ’em, he’d quit. He said he’d use the leave to get to the bottom of the cesspool that you and I’d dragged Dannie down into. He also went on and on about the bribe and old Justice Fuller-but especially the bribe. How much was it really, and did somebody really take it, and who’d I really think put up the money? He used ‘really’ a lot.”

“So what’d you say?”

“I told him I really didn’t know, wished him well, drove back down to La Jolla and waited upon events.”

Adair again turned to the window. “I think we’re going to have one spectacular sunset.” Still staring at the ocean, he said, “How long did it take exactly?”

“To kill him? Thirty-two days.”

Adair turned from the window with a frown that was more thoughtful than puzzled. “Then he must’ve been getting somewhere.”

“That occurred to me.”

“He didn’t do anything half-smart like sending you a report or a letter about what he was up to?”

“He called once.”

“When?”

“Two days before he was killed. He said he was going to meet some guy in Tijuana who claimed to know something. I suggested he meet him instead at the San Diego zoo near the koalas with about five hundred witnesses around. Paul said he couldn’t do that because the guy said La Migra was looking for him at all border checks. I suggested a nice long phone call. He said a phone call was never as good as a face-to-face. I asked if the guy had a name. He said it was Mr. Smith, laughed, hung up and that’s the last thing he ever said to me.”

“So he went down to Tijuana and somebody shot him twice and fixed it up as a suicide,” Adair said. “If they’d shot him once, it might’ve worked, but twice meant they wanted to make it a statement-a declaration.”

“That also occurred to me.”

“Then there’s poor Blessing Nelson and that price on my head.”

“Another statement,” Vines said. “And certainly a declaration.”

“Plus the girl photographer in the back of the pink van. Floradora Flowers of Santa Barbara. When’re we going to check them out?”

“First thing tomorrow.”

Adair looked down at the carpet again. “Was there an autopsy on Paul?”

“A perfunctory one in T.J. I claimed his body. After I called his lawyer in Washington, I had it cremated. It was in his will.”

“Who got the ashes?”

Vines nodded at the window. “The ocean. That was also in his will, although he probably meant the Atlantic. But since he didn’t specify, he wound up in the Pacific. He didn’t leave much-about ten thousand in a checking account, a two-year-old BMW and a hundred-thousand whole life policy some friend had sold him. He left it all to one of those Washington think tanks that’s still trying to decide whether it’s neo-conservative or neo-liberal.”

“Not that it matters much anymore,” Adair said, turning yet again to look at the ocean. “Funny about Paul, though. He never got interested in money-at least, not the way you and I did. If he hadn’t gone into government, he could’ve made himself a ton of it.”

“Maybe.”

Adair turned to examine Vines with undisguised curiosity. “You ever like Paul?”

“I grew up with him and roomed with him for four years.”

“Evasive.”

Vines looked at something just beyond Adair’s left ear. “I don’t suppose I ever liked him. Not really. I respected his mind, envied his looks, despised his politics and very much wanted to fuck his sister.”

“Which you eventually did.”

“Which I eventually did.”

Adair, his curiosity again evident, asked, “You ever like Dannie?”

“Very much.”

“And now?”

“And now, Jack, I just love her.”