know Paul. So after a few minutes we left and Paul went apeshit again.”
“Still carrying on about you and me?”
“Still. But by then I was numb and the more he ranted, the more numb I got. It was almost pleasant-something like codeine. Finally, I got tired of listening and told him to fuck off.”
Adair rose, walked to the window and looked out. “This the longest day of the year?”
“Tuesday was.”
Adair turned. “What’d Paul say exactly, during his ranting and raving-as near as you can recollect?”
“He said he was going to ask them for a six-month leave of absence and if they wouldn’t give it to him, fuck ’em, he’d quit. He said he’d use the leave to get to the bottom of the cesspool that you and I’d dragged Dannie down into. He also went on and on about the bribe and old Justice Fuller-but especially the bribe. How much was it really, and did somebody really take it, and who’d I really think put up the money? He used ‘really’ a lot.”
“So what’d you say?”
“I told him I really didn’t know, wished him well, drove back down to La Jolla and waited upon events.”
Adair again turned to the window. “I think we’re going to have one spectacular sunset.” Still staring at the ocean, he said, “How long did it take exactly?”
“To kill him? Thirty-two days.”
Adair turned from the window with a frown that was more thoughtful than puzzled. “Then he must’ve been getting somewhere.”
“That occurred to me.”
“He didn’t do anything half-smart like sending you a report or a letter about what he was up to?”
“He called once.”
“When?”
“Two days before he was killed. He said he was going to meet some guy in Tijuana who claimed to know something. I suggested he meet him instead at the San Diego zoo near the koalas with about five hundred witnesses around. Paul said he couldn’t do that because the guy said La Migra was looking for him at all border checks. I suggested a nice long phone call. He said a phone call was never as good as a face-to-face. I asked if the guy had a name. He said it was Mr. Smith, laughed, hung up and that’s the last thing he ever said to me.”
“So he went down to Tijuana and somebody shot him twice and fixed it up as a suicide,” Adair said. “If they’d shot him once, it might’ve worked, but twice meant they wanted to make it a statement-a declaration.”
“That also occurred to me.”
“Then there’s poor Blessing Nelson and that price on my head.”
“Another statement,” Vines said. “And certainly a declaration.”
“Plus the girl photographer in the back of the pink van. Floradora Flowers of Santa Barbara. When’re we going to check them out?”
“First thing tomorrow.”
Adair looked down at the carpet again. “Was there an autopsy on Paul?”
“A perfunctory one in T.J. I claimed his body. After I called his lawyer in Washington, I had it cremated. It was in his will.”
“Who got the ashes?”
Vines nodded at the window. “The ocean. That was also in his will, although he probably meant the Atlantic. But since he didn’t specify, he wound up in the Pacific. He didn’t leave much-about ten thousand in a checking account, a two-year-old BMW and a hundred-thousand whole life policy some friend had sold him. He left it all to one of those Washington think tanks that’s still trying to decide whether it’s neo-conservative or neo-liberal.”
“Not that it matters much anymore,” Adair said, turning yet again to look at the ocean. “Funny about Paul, though. He never got interested in money-at least, not the way you and I did. If he hadn’t gone into government, he could’ve made himself a ton of it.”
“Maybe.”
Adair turned to examine Vines with undisguised curiosity. “You ever like Paul?”
“I grew up with him and roomed with him for four years.”
“Evasive.”
Vines looked at something just beyond Adair’s left ear. “I don’t suppose I ever liked him. Not really. I respected his mind, envied his looks, despised his politics and very much wanted to fuck his sister.”
“Which you eventually did.”
“Which I eventually did.”
Adair, his curiosity again evident, asked, “You ever like Dannie?”
“Very much.”
“And now?”
“And now, Jack, I just love her.”
Chapter 9
It was still light that last Friday evening in June when they stopped along the outer edge of the seventh hairpin turn up on Garner Road. By raising himself slightly in the front seat of the Mercedes, Jack Adair could inspect most of Durango down below, including its five-block-long, three-block-wide business district, or downtown, which was bounded on the west by the Southern Pacific tracks. Just beyond the tracks were the ocean and what Chief Sid Fork liked to call “the longest one-foot-wide sharp-rock beach in the entire state of California.”
As Adair had predicted, the sunset was spectacular, its last rays bathing the business district, including the lone seven-story skyscraper, in a soft warm light a stranger might have compared to gold-a more knowledgeable native to brass.
Adair was still taking in the view when he asked, “How much’ve we got left in that Bahamian bank?”
“Around three hundred thousand.”
Adair turned to stare at Vines with disbelief and even shock.
“We had expenses, Jack. Your legal fees. The high cost of money laundering. Dannie’s treatment. Blessing Nelson’s mother. And me-since I ate and drank some of it up.”
“We’ll just have to make do then,” Adair said, remembered something and added, “Keep sending that five hundred a month to Blessing’s mother.”
“For how long?”
“Until we run out of money,” said Adair, and resumed his inspection of Durango down below.
Five blocks east of the SP tracks, the city’s business district had failed in its attempt, many years ago, to flow around Handshaw Park, which was two city blocks of pines, magnolias, coral trees, eucalyptus, green grass when it rained, nine concrete picnic tables, a children’s broken slide, some swings and a gray bandstand that once had been painted a glistening white.
Back when the bandstand still glistened, select members of the Durango High School marching band made a few vacation dollars by playing concerts in the park on summer Sunday afternoons. But as the city’s tax base shrank, the budget ax fell first on the summer concerts, then on the marching band itself and, finally, on its director, Milt Steed, who had also taught art and, when last heard from, was playing cornet down in Disneyland.
Handshaw Park had been called simply City Park until B. D. Huckins was elected mayor. She renamed it after Dicky Handshaw, who had served four terms as mayor until Huckins beat him in the 1978 election, which was still remembered as the most vicious in the city’s 148-year history.
Renaming the park had seemed at first like a nice conciliatory gesture. But that was before word got around of an exchange in the Blue Eagle Bar between Norm Trice and a prominent local attorney who regarded himself as a budding political savant. The attorney had claimed that next time out B.D. Huckins could easily be defeated by almost any candidate with balls and a few brains.
“Like you, huh?” Trice had asked.
“Sure. Like me. Why not?”
