“Darwin Loom,” Adair said.
“The associate warden.”
Adair nodded, not looking up. “He told me it was suicide before he even let me take that La Jolla call from you. Preparing me for the shock, I guess. Know what I told him?” Adair looked up from the carpet and cruelly parodied his own voice. “My son’d never take his own life. Not my son.” He gave his head a self-accusatory shake and resumed his examination of the carpet. After a long silence Adair again looked up and said in a suddenly weary voice, “So tell me what happened, Kelly. Not that crap you told me over the phone.”
“You’re right. It was crap.”
“Afraid you were being taped?”
“Or that you were.”
“Your letters weren’t any better. Same reason?”
“Same reason.”
Adair sighed. “Let’s hear it.”
“The cops in Tijuana claim Paul was alone in an upstairs room when it happened. They also claimed he’d ordered up two girls. After I drove down there from La Jolla, one of the cops showed me what he said were sworn statements from both girls, who by then’d disappeared, apparently forever. The statements said the girls were on their way up to Paul’s room when they heard the shots.”
“Why’d they call you-the Tijuana police?”
“Paul had one of those ‘in case of emergency notify’ cards in his billfold. Your name, old address and phone number had been typed in and crossed out. Mine was written on the back of the card.”
“So how’d they lay it out for you-the Tijuana cops?”
“They said he poked a forty-five in his mouth and pulled the trigger twice.”
“Twice?” Adair said.
Vines nodded.
“You saw him, I guess.”
“I saw him, Jack. Most days I still see him. It was twice.”
Shaking his head in disbelief, Adair gave the carpet a final inspection with blue eyes that once had seemed as innocent as a nine-day-old kitten’s. But when he looked up now it was obvious all innocence had either died or moved away. They look like blue dry ice, Vines thought, and if he moves them fast enough, I’ll get to hear them click.
Below the bleak eyes and the meandering nose was Adair’s wide mouth that, in the past, was always twitching its ends up, as if at some cosmic joke. Now the joke was over and the mouth was clamped into a thin line that Adair pried open just wide enough to say, “Okay, Kelly, now you can tell me the real bad stuff.”
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 ole-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
