The Fourth Durango

Chapter 34

The thirty-nine-year-old frame and stucco house was on the southeast edge of Durango in the Explorer subdivision that consisted of three short streets named Lewis, Clark and Fremont. There would have been more houses on streets named after other explorers if the novice developer, a former high school history teacher with a modest inheritance, hadn’t run out of both money and buyers during the recession of 1949.

At 12:20 A.M. Sid Fork was parked on Fremont under a fragrant thirty-nine-year-old magnolia, waiting for the light to go off in the third house from the corner. It was a TV set’s bluish light and, since the house boasted no dish antenna, Fork was almost certain that those inside were watching a rented videocassette on their VCR. With luck, he thought, it might even be a short one-maybe a forty-five-minute X-rated feature.

After the bluish light went off at 12:32 A.M., Fork gave the occupants another twenty-nine minutes to go to bed and perhaps even to sleep. By 1:01 A.M. he was pounding on the front door. It was opened less than a minute later by a sleepy-looking Henry Quirt, the deputy sheriff, who wore a white T-shirt, pale blue boxer shorts and aimed a short-barreled.38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver at the chief of police.

“Christ, Sid, it’s one in the fucking morning.”

“Mind pointing the piece someplace else?”

After Quirt lowered the pistol to his side, Fork said, “I was already in bed myself, Henry, when it just hit me all of a sudden.”

“What?”

“Be better if I told you about it inside.”

Before Quirt could respond, a woman’s voice called from the rear of the house. “Who is it, honey?”

Quirt turned his head to call his answer. “Sid Fork.”

“What’s he want?”

Quirt hesitated before calling his second answer, “Business.” He looked back at Fork, all sleepiness gone, and said in a voice that only the chief of police could hear, “It is business, isn’t it, Sid?”

Fork waited in the living room for the deputy sheriff, who had said he wanted to put some clothes on. Out of habit, Fork inventoried the room, pricing its contents that included a matching couch and easy chair that were protected by clear-plastic slipcovers. Of more interest was the triangular maple whatnot stand in one corner whose five shelves held nine chrome-framed photographs, at least two dozen miniature china cats and kittens and five conch-like seashells that Fork guessed were from Florida.

There were four nicely framed prints on the walls, all of them pastoral scenes, which Fork placed in nineteenth-century Europe, probably France, and decided he didn’t much like. He scuffed the edge of his right shoe along the beige nylon carpet, put its price at $4.95 a square yard wholesale and moved over to the built-in bookcase that contained a Bible, a fairly new set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and nine paperback novels that turned out to be Harlequin romances.

The room’s focus, however, was on its home entertainment center-a large oak stand with staggered shelves that held a 21-inch Sony TV set with an attached VCR and a complicated-looking audio system that could play LP records, tapes and compact discs. Two La-Z-Boy recliners were aimed at the center. On top of the TV set was a boxed videocassette. Fork went over, read the label, which said it was Debbie Does the Devil, and tried to remember whether he had ever rented it.

He turned from the entertainment center just as Quirt entered the living room. The deputy now wore jeans, the same T-shirt and a pair of thick white ribbed athletic socks. Although Fork scarcely glanced at the socks, Quirt seemed to think he should explain them. “I don’t wear shoes in the house when the kid’s asleep.”

“Wayne must be what now-two?”

“Two and a half.”

“How’s Mary Helen?”

“Okay if we keep our voices down and don’t wake up the kid.”

They sat on the plastic-covered furniture, Fork taking the chair, Quirt the couch. “Some meeting we had, huh?” Fork said.

Quirt shook his head, as if in appreciation. “That B. D.”

“After you and the sheriff left I went home and went to bed. But it’s been one hell of a long lousy day and I just couldn’t get to sleep. Mostly, I was thinking about Ivy Settles, who was one fine cop even if he didn’t look like much.”

“Ivy was okay.”

“So I was lying there, tossing and turning and thinking about Ivy and Carlotta-you know Carlotta?”

Quirt said he knew Carlotta Settles.

“At least she’ll get a decent pension. Anyway, I was lying there, worrying about her and wondering who in the world I could get to replace Ivy when all of a sudden it just hit me.”

“What?”

“You.”

Quirt leaned back on the couch and studied Fork. The chief of police was pleased that the tall deputy hadn’t said, “Me?” He was further encouraged by the flicker of cunning in Quirt’s dark brown eyes.

“Go on,” Quirt said.

Fork obviously was in no hurry. “If Charlie Coates runs for county supervisor two years from now like he said, who d’you think’ll be our new sheriff?”

“That dickhead Jim Grieg.”

“Don’t get along with Lieutenant Grieg so good, huh?”

“I get along with anybody I have to get along with, Sid.”

“Think Charlie Coates’ll make a halfway decent county supervisor?”

“Supervisor’s just a stop.”

“On the way to where?”

“Coates is forty-two,” Quirt said. “If he gets elected supervisor in ’ninety, he’ll be forty-four. Two years as supervisor and he’ll make a free-ride run at Congress. If he wins, fine. If not, he’s got two years left as supervisor and he’ll be only forty-six. He’ll use those next two years to build up his name recognition and war chest and then make another run at Congress when he’s forty-eight. But if he doesn’t make it to Washington either time, he’ll just give up and get rich instead.”

“He tell you all this?”

“He takes me along to be his rememberer. That’s why I was at B. D.’s tonight. I got an awful good memory, Sid.”

“Charlie ever say anything about taking you along if he gets to be supervisor or goes to Washington? Maybe to carry his bags, meet his plane, do his remembering?”

“He might’ve.”

“How d’you like Durango, Henry?”

“I like the weather.”

“Think you might like it back in Washington?”

“I was born in Washington. My old man was with the Department of Commerce. It was a hundred and three there today. The humidity was ninety-something.”

“Never been to Washington,” Fork said, paused and frowned, as if trying to make some difficult decision. He kept the frown in place, letting the suspense build until Quirt grew restless. It was then that Fork asked, “You said you could get along with anybody you had to get along with, right?”

Quirt nodded.

“Wonder if you could get along with B. D. and me if I offered you thirty-five a year, detective rank, a take-home car, free dental and medical and four weeks annual leave a year?”

“I could get along with you and B. D. fine, Sid, but I’d have to go along to do it, wouldn’t I?”

Fork made himself look puzzled. “Don’t quite follow that.”

“I mean, you want something from me. Right now. Tonight.”

Fork changed his expression from puzzled to hurt. “I don’t play that way, Henry, and neither does B. D. The job’s yours. You can start Monday, like I said, if you can quit the sheriff that soon. But I’d better be absolutely honest with you. If anybody ever dumps B. D., I expect to be the first one fired and the new mayor’ll probably get rid of all my people and bring in his own. But that’s just the way things work, isn’t it?”

Henry Quirt leaned forward on the couch, managing to look both skeptical and wise. “What d’you want from me that’ll help B. D. stay mayor forever?”

“Nothing. Like I keep saying, the job’s yours.”

“No more bullshit, Sid.”

“Well, now that you brought it up, there are those prints Charlie Coates told me and B. D. about-the ones they lifted off of that pink Ford van. Charlie’s already got a make on ’em, right? Despite what he said.”

“Right.”

“You get a look at the make?”

Quirt nodded.

“And with that memory of yours…”

“I remember it, Sid. All of it.”

“Now I’m not asking you to tell me who belongs to those prints. And I want you to understand that it’s got nothing to do with the job and the take-home car and the thirty-five a year because that’s all set. And anyway, I can’t ask you to do something you can’t do in good conscience.”

Looking more skeptical and wise than ever, Quirt said, “I don’t hear my conscience saying much of anything, Sid.”

“Well, now, that’s fine. So when d’you want to come to work-Monday?”

“Better make it the fifteenth of next month-just in case Sheriff Charlie turns up something else B. D. can use.”