The Fourth Durango

Chapter 17

The roadhouse where Adair, Vines and B. D. Huckins were to meet the mayor’s rich Iranian brother-in-law at 1 P.M. that Saturday was four miles east of Durango on the south side of Noble’s Trace which, once past the city limits, changed from a boulevard into the two-lane blacktop that curved and twisted its way to U.S. 101.

The roadhouse was called Cousin Mary’s and owned by Merriman Dorr, who insisted it was a supper club and not a roadhouse at all. Dorr was a fairly recent immigrant from Florida who claimed to have taught geography at the University of Arkansas, flown as copilot for something called Trans-Caribbean Air Freight and, before all that, played two seasons at second base for the Savannah Indians in the double-A Southern League.

Not long after Dorr materialized in Durango, the ever dubious Sid Fork made a series of long-distance calls and discovered Dorr had done everything he claimed and more. The more included being held without bail for three months in the West Palm Beach jail on a vaguely worded fraud charge.

The alleged fraud had involved two and possibly three shipments of M-16 rifles and M-60 mortars. Dorr was said to have been paid for them by a Miami export-import firm called Midway There, Inc. The firm claimed it had never received shipment.

All charges against Dorr were suddenly dropped when Midway There, Inc., went out of business one Thanksgiving weekend, never to be heard from again.

After that, Sid Fork made no more investigatory long-distance calls about Merriman Dorr because, as he told the mayor, “It was all beginning to sound pretty much like spook stuff.” But Fork still considered it his civic duty to preserve Cousin Mary’s excellent menu and reasonable prices even though the roadhouse lay just outside his jurisdiction. So he paid Dorr a cautionary semiofficial visit eight weeks after the roadhouse opened for business.

“Why here?” he asked Dorr.

“When I was down in that West Palm Beach jail, I heard talk about your easy ways.”

“You hear about our rules?”

“No.”

“Well, the rules are no dope and no whores unless you want the Feds or the deputy sheriffs dropping by.”

“What about a nice quiet table-stakes poker game on weekends?”

“That’s different,” Sid Fork said.

B. D. Huckins drove her three-year-old gray Volvo sedan into the roadhouse parking lot and followed the gravel drive that led to the rear. Kelly Vines, noticing the small blue Neon sign that spelled out “Cousin Mary’s,” asked if there was indeed a Mary who was somebody’s cousin.

“Merriman Dorr,” said Huckins. “He owns the place.”

“Food any good?” Jack Adair asked from the backseat.

“The portions are too big.”

The final question came from Vines, who asked why there were no customers’ cars in the front parking lot.

“Because he doesn’t open till six,” the mayor said.

Cousin Mary’s had been an abandoned eighty-one-year-old two-room schoolhouse until Merriman Dorr bought and remodeled it, doing much of the work himself, even the wiring. He also added two wings and painted the place barn-red except for the roof. Every morning-although often it was barely before noon-Dorr ran the Stars and Stripes up the old but newly painted and still sturdy flagpole. When he first opened the place, Dorr had rung the old school bell at sunrise on all holidays. And even though his nearest neighbors lived a quarter of a mile away, all of them (except for one deaf woman) had called, written or come by to protest the dawn clangor. After that, Dorr rang the bell only on the Fourth of July and Veterans Day.

He also kept a wide yellow ribbon, almost a sash, tied around the trunk of the huge old oak that still grew in the middle of what had been the school playground but was now the roadhouse parking lot. The yellow ribbon, Dorr had told a twenty-three-year-old reporter from The Durango Times, memorialized all Americans still held hostage by assorted terrorists and “every other American who languishes in some foreign prison just because those airheads in Washington forgot to juice the right people.”

Some considered Dorr a patriot. Others thought he was a nut. He did a nice business.

Huckins parked her Volvo behind the roadhouse at the end of a row of five almost new and remarkably plain sedans of various American manufacture. Kelly Vines thought all the sedans might as well have worn vanity license plates that read: RENTED. B. D. Huckins caught his inspection of the overly anonymous cars and answered his unasked question. “They’re what the players drive.”

“Poker?”

“Poker.”

The back door of the roadhouse was familiar to Vines because he had had one just like it installed in the apartment of a client who had had good reason to believe that someone was trying to kill him. The door was at least two inches thick and consisted of a solid aluminum core wrapped with steel sheathing.

Huckins raised her fist to knock but before she could the door was opened by a lean six-footer with lively green eyes and a face rescued from male-model insipidness by a thin eggshell-white scar that ran from his left eye back to his left earlobe. The scar gave him a pleasantly sinister look that Vines thought was probably good for business.

Merriman Dorr’s green eyes flickered over Vines, tarried on Adair and came to rest on B. D. Huckins. He smiled then, letting perfect teeth gleam, and said, “I swear, B. D., you get prettier each and every time I see you and that surely’s not often enough.”

It was nicely put and softly said, but Huckins ignored the compliment and instead made minimal introductions. “Jack and Kelly. Merriman.”

“Gentlemen,” said Dorr, turning sideways so his guests could enter. As Huckins went by him she said, “I don’t see Parvis’s car.”

“Must be because he’s not here yet.”

Dorr and the mayor went down a hall, followed by Vines and Adair. They passed a closed door. In front of it in an armless wooden chair sat a watchful man in his fifties who rested a pump shotgun across his knees. From behind the door came the unmistakable click of poker chips being stacked or tossed into the pot.

Halfway down the hall they stopped at another closed door, which their host opened, almost bowing them into the room. “What an extraordinary cane,” Dorr said as Adair went by.

“An heirloom,” said Adair.

Dorr entered the room as B. D. Huckins was turning to inspect the large round table with its starched linen cloth, artfully folded napkins and four place settings of heavy silver, gold-rimmed china and crystal goblets, into which the napkins had been tucked. Vines noticed the room had no windows and guessed the almost silent air-conditioning kept the temperature at a permanent seventy-two degrees.

In one corner of the room were three tan easy chairs, a dark green couch and a coffee table. On the floor was a brown carpet woven out of a synthetic fiber. On the pale cream walls were seven interesting watercolors of the old schoolhouse. Not far from the couch and easy chairs was a wet bar. A half-open door advertised the bathroom.

“How’s this sound, B. D.?” Dorr asked. “Some really great trout, wild rice, maybe a little broccoli and a Cousin Mary salad followed by a flan for dessert?”

“Fine,” she said.

“Chief Fork not joining us?”

“No.”

Dorr nodded, as if at mildly disappointing news, and gave the wet bar a wave. “You all just help yourselves,” he said and left.

The mayor was examining a fingernail on her left hand, Kelly Vines was inspecting one of the schoolhouse watercolors and Jack Adair was sipping a glass of beer when the door opened nine minutes later and the blond Dixie Mansur entered, followed by an elegant man in his late thirties who, for some reason, made Vines think of a ceremonial dagger, just waiting to be drawn.

Dixie Mansur wore fawn slacks that looked expensive and a dark brown silk blouse whose price, Vines guessed, had been exorbitant. Her eyes skipped over Vines and Adair and stopped at her half-sister, the mayor. “I invited myself along,” she said.

“I’m glad,” Huckins said and turned up her cheek for the kiss her sister bent down to give her. “I don’t think you’ve met Judge Adair. My sister, Dixie Mansur.”

After they shook hands and said hello, Huckins said, “You know Kelly Vines, of course.”

“Of course.” B. D. Huckins smiled up at her brother-in-law, who stood with a pleasant, if unsmiling expression, his right hand deep into the pocket of his tan raw-silk bush jacket, his left hand holding a cigarette down at his side. “How are you, Parvis?” Huckins said.

“Splendid, B. D. You keeping well?”

The mayor nodded her answer and introduced him to Jack Adair and Kelly Vines. Parvis Mansur shook hands first with Adair and then with Vines, thanking him for “rescuing my wife.”

“It was nothing,” Vines said.

“I’m in your debt.”

“Not at all.”

“At least accept my gratitude.”

“Of course,” said Vines, wondering whether the pleasantries would ever end. They did when the door opened and a Mexican busboy hurried in with a new place setting. Right behind him came a frowning Merriman Dorr, who glared at Mansur’s wife and said, “You could’ve at least called, Dixie.”

She ignored both the scolding and Dorr, who was now supervising the busboy. After the place setting was laid, Dorr moved a salad fork a quarter of an inch to the left, turned to give no one in particular a charming-host smile and said, “I do hope you all enjoy your lunch.”

“I’m sure we will,” B. D. Huckins said.

“Good,” Dorr said and left, shooing the busboy ahead of him.

After the door closed Parvis Mansur turned to the mayor and asked, “Have we time for a drink?”

Huckins indicated the wet bar. “Help yourself.”

On his way to the bar Mansur asked, “Dixie?”

“Sure.”

All watched as Mansur dropped ice cubes into a pair of glasses, poured the Scotch and added the water. He did it with an economy of movement that was almost miserly. Vines suspected it was how he did everything, except talk, since Vines also suspected Mansur enjoyed the sound of his own voice, which was a deep baritone, verging on bass, and unaccented except for its British vowels and inflection. Wondering how early the British overtones had been acquired, Vines had a sudden mental picture, not quite a vision, of an elderly retired British Army officer, eking out his pension by spending long afternoons in Teheran, teaching received pronunciation to a squirming six-year-old Parvis Mansur, who never forgot anything.

After everyone was settled into either the easy chairs or the long couch, Mansur looked at Adair and said, “Tell us about it.”

“Hard to say where to begin.”

“Perhaps with the case itself-the one involving the million-dollar bribe.”

“The false bribe,” Adair said.

“Very well. The false bribe.”

Jack Adair drank the rest of his beer, put the glass down, clasped his hands over the black cane’s curved handle and examined the ceiling for a moment or two, as if gathering the threads of his narrative. He then looked at Parvis Mansur.

“Well, sir, it came to us on appeal, of course, and it involved murder, a touch of incest and maybe a few trillion or so cubic feet of natural gas. So you could say, as such cases go, this one was kind of interesting.”

“Yes,” Mansur said. “I can see how one might say that.”