The Fourth Durango

Chapter 36

After he gave the pan a small flip, Jack Adair’s first omelette in eighteen months folded over perfectly and Virginia Trice said, “Mine always falls apart right about now and I wind up with scrambled eggs.”

Adair glanced over his right shoulder to find her standing in the kitchen entrance, leaning against the doorjamb, her arms folded tightly against her chest, as if to keep the quivering at bay. Adair thought the smudges under her eyes were larger and darker than they had been that afternoon when she’d played reluctant landlady. Three-way exhaustion, he decided, confident of his diagnosis. Physical, mental and emotional.

“Better sit down and have some,” he said. “I got carried away and used six eggs.” Turning back to the gas stove, which he guessed was as at least as old as he, Adair asked, “Long day?”

“The longest,” she said and sat down at the pickled-pine kitchen table.

Adair moved a few steps to his right, keeping an eye on the omelette as he poured coffee from the Bunn automatic into a mug. He placed it on the table in front of her and went quickly back to the stove.

“Now comes the tricky part,” he said, “which’ll turn out to be either a breeze or a disaster.”

The omelette slid, as if trained, from pan onto plate. Adair quickly cut it in two, placing half on another plate, which he served to Virginia Trice along with silverware and a paper napkin. “Toast is in the oven,” he said.

“There’s a toaster over there by the can opener.”

“I know, but I like to do it in the oven under the broiler.”

He opened the old stove’s high door, used a pot holder to pull out the broiler grill and speared the four pieces of toast with a long-tined cooking fork. He served the toast on a plate along with a small open tub of margarine. “I couldn’t find any butter,” he said as he sat down across from her with his share of the omelette.

“We don’t use butter because Norm worried about his cholesterol,” she said, spreading margarine over a piece of toast. “But I guess he could’ve gone ahead and eaten all the butter he wanted, couldn’t he?”

“I guess.”

She tasted the omelette and said it was perfect. Adair said he thought it could use a little salt and pepper. She said she didn’t use much salt anymore. They ate in silence after that, Adair trying to think of something to say that didn’t sound like forced small talk. He was rescued from what was beginning to seem like an insurmountable task when Virginia Trice said, “When’s the last time you fucked a woman?”

Adair went on spreading margarine over his last small piece of toast. “Seventeen months and four days ago.”

“How long were you in Lompoc?”

“Fifteen months.”

“You didn’t have one final fling?”

Adair used knife and fork to pile the last bit of omelette on the last of his toast, vaguely pleased that they had come out even. He ate the final bite, swallowed and said, “My legal problems prior to incarceration were such that sex became a matter of supreme unimportance.”

“Something like saltpeter, huh?”

“Possibly.”

“What’d you do for sex in jail?”

“I did without and two hundred sit-ups a day. Of course, there was also a normal amount of masturbation. At least, I trust it was normal.”

She put her knife and fork down, pushed away the plate with its half-eaten omelette, and leaned on the table with folded arms, staring down at its waxed surface. “I feel like I’ve just been sent to jail.”

“That won’t last.”

Still staring at the table, she said, “I must’ve had four or five hundred customers in today. I opened at eight and closed at two-fifteen, two-thirty, around in there. Nine of the guys who came in to say how sorry they were about Norm tried to hit on me. Married guys. Good friends of his. When I was showing you and Vines your rooms this afternoon, I’d almost decided not to go back to the Eagle.”

“You learned an invaluable lesson today,” Adair said. “The assholes are everywhere.”

“I’ve lived in this town four years now, going on five, and that’s longer’n I ever lived anywhere. I know a lot of people because I’m Norm’s wife and before that I worked in the Eagle for him. But he’s the only real friend I had here and now he’s dead. So after I closed up tonight, I was sitting there at the bar with a gin and tonic that I don’t even like and wondering how I was going to last till morning when somebody knocks at the door-and it’s like two forty-five by then.”

She looked up at Adair, as if for either comment or encouragement. Adair nodded and said, “You answered the door?”

“Well, I go and ask who’s there first because, you know, it’s late and I’ve got all the day’s cash and I don’t wanta take any chances. So guess who it is?”

“No idea.”

“It’s B. D.”

“The mayor.”

“Yeah, and she comes in and wants to know if I’d like to stay at her place tonight or as long as I want to. So you know what I do?”

“You cry.”

“Bawl like a baby. But she’s just as nice as she can be and seems to understand when I tell her I can’t stay with her.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. But I guess it’s because I kept thinking, What’ll you tell Norm? Does that make any sense?”

Adair said he thought it did.

“Well, when I finally get in the car and start home, it’s all of a sudden like I’m going to jail. I mean it’s like I’ve gotta spend a year or two all by myself up in that room on the second floor. Like it’s the law or something.”

“It’s not, of course,” Adair said. “At least, not yet.”

“Well, it sure feels like it,” she said, looking away and up toward the kitchen’s most distant corner. She was still inspecting the far corner when she said, “So d’you wanta sleep with me tonight?”

“Why me?”

She looked at him-rather gravely, he thought-and said, “Well, you’re nice and you’re older and since I’m asking you, instead of you making a move on me, it means it’s my choice, doesn’t it? And if I can make a choice, then I must not be in jail after all.”

“It also means you can choose somebody else,” Adair said.

“We don’t have to-do anything-unless you want to. I just wanta wake up and find somebody there. Somebody nice.”

“I’m very flattered,” Adair said.

She smiled for the first time-a very slight smile. “I think you just said no thanks, Virginia.”

Adair smiled back. “But if you’re still feeling the same some other night, well…”

She rose slowly and stood, staring down at him curiously. “What you’re doing is giving me one more choice, aren’t you?”

“I can’t give what you already have.”

She smiled again, more confidently this time. “I’ll think about it, Mr. Adair,” Virginia Trice said, turned and left the kitchen.

Adair rose, picked up the plates, mugs and silver and carried them to the sink. As he ran the water and added the Ivory Liquid, he promised himself to wash and dry everything slowly, concentrating on each plate, mug, fork, spoon and knife. This would keep him from thinking of what it would be like, sitting on the edge of the bed up in Virginia Trice’s room, slowly taking off her clothing, one item at a time.

After she left the studio apartment of the tall young uniformed policeman who had directed traffic out on Noble’s Trace where Ivy Settles and the woman photographer had been shot to death, Dixie Mansur drove home to Santa Barbara and its Montecito enclave. It was there that she and Parvis Mansur lived in the sprawling fieldstone house with the blue tile roof on an acre of ground that was surrounded by a twelve-foot-high chain-link fence.

As she slipped the coded plastic card into the slot that opened the sliding steel gate, she tried to remember the young policeman’s name. It was either Sean or Michael, she thought, deciding he was just about young enough to have been born at a time when most male babies seemed to be named either Sean or Michael. But what she remembered best about him was the mess his apartment had been.

She drove the Aston Martin through the gate and on up the concrete drive to the four-door garage. She pressed the switch beneath the dashboard that signaled her garage door to rise. Once it had risen, she drove in and parked next to Parvis Mansur’s white Rolls-Royce.

As she entered the library, Mansur looked up from his book, down at his watch, and up again. “You might’ve called,” he said.

Dixie went over to the bar and poured herself a glass of sherry. “I started to,” she said, taking a sip, “but after I talked to Vines and told him what you told me to tell him, I went over to B. D.’s and after that things got a little hectic.”

“In what respect?”

“Remember that photographer-the one who wanted to do a freelance feature on the house for some grubby monthly?”

“I remember that you talked to her and turned her down. A Miss Hornette, wasn’t it?”

“Hazel Hornette-although she liked to be called Hazy. Anyway, she’s dead.”

“An accident?”

“She was shot dead out on the Trace about two blocks east of the city limits. A Durango cop was also killed. One of the out-of-town ones that Sid hired. Ivy something.”

“Ivy Settles,” said Mansur, who had made it a point to learn the names of all four detectives Sid Fork had hired for what Mansur thought of as the chief’s personal Savak.

He put down his book, Palmer and Colton’s A History of the Modern World, the fifth edition, rose and walked over to the bar, where he mixed himself a weak Scotch and water. After a swallow, he turned to Dixie and asked, “You saw them then-the remains?”

“I was with B. D. when the sheriff called and told her about it. She was in a hurry to get there so we went in my car. They hadn’t been moved so, yes, I saw the bodies.”

“I’d like you to tell me the rest of it, Dixie, and do take your time. You might start from when you first saw Kelly Vines.”

She gave him a concise and reasonably factual account of how she had spent the afternoon, evening, night and morning hours, and also of what she had seen and heard and done, leaving out the sex she had enjoyed with Vines and the sex she had experienced, if not enjoyed, with the tall young uniformed policeman whose name, she now remembered, was Sean and not Michael.

After she had finished, and after Mansur had asked all the questions he thought he needed to ask, she said, “This is tied in somehow with that deal you’ve arranged for the fourth, isn’t it?”

Mansur thought about it, nodded and said, “It would appear to be.”

“Then on the fourth I’m going to be out of town.”

“Why?”

“Because if anything goes wrong, or if anything happens to you or Sid, I want to be with somebody someplace else.”

Mansur smiled approvingly. “You want an alibi.”

“You could call it that.”

“I really can’t blame you. Whom d’you have in mind?”

“I thought I’d drive down to San Diego Saturday, stay with the Moussavvises and come back late Monday when it’s all over.”

“They’ll be glad to see you, especially Reva, but the traffic’s going to be bloody awful.”

“That’s why I thought I might take the Rolls-unless you plan to do your go-betweening in it.”

Mansur chuckled. “I can think of nothing more inappropriate.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Take it, of course,” he said and looked at his watch. “We’d best get to bed, hadn’t we?” He paused to smile at her-a smile full of hope. “Would you like to sleep in my room tonight, or are you too tired?”

“I’m not tired at all,” Dixie Mansur said.