The Fourth Durango

Chapter 14

Shortly before midnight on that last Friday in June, Kelly Vines and Sid Fork pulled up in front of a floodlit three-storied Victorian showplace that boasted two scalloped cupolas, eight gables (by Vines’s quick count) and a veranda that wrapped around two sides of the house and part of a third.

“What’s she do,” Vines asked, “charge admission?”

“The floodlights stay on till he gets home. She’s in there all by herself and the lights are sort of burglar insurance. Besides, the place is on the city’s scenic tour.”

“You have a scenic tour?”

“Yeah, but it only takes ten minutes.”

The floodlights revealed a new coat of rich cream paint that contrasted rather biliously, in Vines’s opinion, with the two shades of dark green that had been applied to the trim. A fairly new shingle roof had been left to the weather. The house itself sat well back on a deep two-hundred-foot-wide lot and was surrounded by a carefully thinned-out forest of elderly pines. At the rear on the alley was a two-story building, also floodlit, that Vines assumed had once been the stable and was now the garage.

As they followed a serpentine brick walk to the veranda, Sid Fork explained how Norm Trice had inherited the house from his father, who had inherited it from his father, who had built the place in 1903.

Fork rang the bell. The woman who opened the door was younger than Vines had expected. When she saw that her late night callers were the chief of police and a stranger, she assumed the worst and automatically denied it by slowly shaking her head. It was an “I don’t want any whatever it is” gesture that went on and on until Sid Fork said, “I’m sorry, Virginia, but I’ve got bad news. Norm’s been shot and he’s-well, he’s dead.”

At the word “dead,” Virginia Trice’s head stopped shaking and her eyes began to blink rapidly as she fought the tears. They were large dark brown eyes, very wet now, and spaced far apart in a narrow tanned face that was crowned with short thick straw-colored hair. The face also offered a small, possibly pert nose and a firm, possibly stubborn chin. In between nose and chin was a perfect mouth whose full lower lip was being bitten. Virginia Trice stopped biting her lip, opened her mouth, sucked in an enormous breath, stopped blinking and held the breath until it finally escaped in a long sad sigh. When the sigh was over, she said, “Come on in.”

They followed her down a wide hall, past an elaborately carved oak staircase, through a pair of sliding doors carved from the same wood, and into what Vines thought must once have been the parlor. Much of the polished oak floor was covered with a red and purple rug-the purple so dark it seemed almost black. The red in the rug clashed with the pink in the tiny climbing roses that formed the pattern on the wallpaper.

Also on the walls were what Vines assumed to be California seascapes, painted in oils by obvious amateurs who, while competent, were less than gifted. In two corners of the room were heavy carved tables with ball-and-claw feet and round marble tops. Fat porcelain lamps sat on both tables, wearing orange silk shades that had faded and now looked more quaint than gaudy.

Virginia Trice was tall, at least five-ten, and wore tight old jeans that made her long legs look even longer. She also wore a man’s white button-down shirt with its tails out and its sleeves rolled up above her elbows. The collar was frayed. On her bare feet were scuffed Topsiders.

She lowered herself slowly into an armless chair with a worn plush seat. With knees together and hands folded primly in her lap she seemed to listen carefully as Sid Fork introduced Kelly Vines as “a friend of mine.” She greeted Vines in an almost inaudible voice as he and Fork sat down side by side on a couch with a cane back.

The short silence that followed ended when Virginia Trice cleared her throat and said, “Who shot him?”

“We don’t know yet,” Fork said.

“Was it a stickup-a robbery?”

“I don’t think so, but it could’ve been.”

“Well, was he shot once, twice, lots of times-what?”

“Two times. In the head.”

“Must’ve been quick then. I mean, Norm didn’t have to lie there, hurting and bleeding and yelling for help.”

“It was quick, Virginia.”

She sighed again. “What a shitty thing to happen.”

Fork nodded his solemn agreement and asked, “Is there anyone you’d like me to call? Maybe somebody you’d like to come over and stay with you.”

Instead of answering Fork, she looked at Kelly Vines. “You and Sid old friends?”

“Not really.”

“I’ve lived here four years and I don’t know hardly anybody I’d like to come over and stay with me. We’ve only been married three years. I’m his second wife. What he calls squaw number two. I used to be the waitress at the Eagle and I guess that’s why people didn’t like us getting married.”

“Who didn’t like it?” Fork said in mild protest.

She ignored him and continued speaking to Vines. “They didn’t like it because of me being a waitress and our ages. I was twenty-three and Norm was forty-three. Twenty years difference. You think that’s too much?”

Vines said no, he didn’t think it was too much.

There was a silence until she looked at Fork and said, “Now what the fuck do I do, Sid?”

Fork edged forward on the couch, rested his elbows on his knees and let a look of compassion spread over his long face. “First thing you do is get a good night’s sleep.”

“What’s sleep?”

“I’ll get Joe Emory to send over some pills.”

“Even with pills I won’t sleep.”

“You’ve got to so you can get up in the morning.”

“What for?”

“I don’t much like mentioning money at a time like this, but everyone’s gonna want to see where Norm got killed. You go down there and open up in the morning and you’ll take in a thousand, even fifteen hundred.”

Not even avarice could erase the grief and sadness from her face. “That much?” she said and quickly answered her own question. “Yeah, I guess maybe we could take in that much.” She frowned at Fork. “You think Norm’d mind?”

“Virginia,” Fork said, his tone kind and patient, “Norm won’t give a damn one way or the other.”