“Because,” Trice had explained in a patient voice, “B. D. didn’t name that park after Dicky Handshaw so folks’d remember him. She did it so guys like you’d remember what happened to him.”
Kelly Vines said, “Seen enough?”
Jack Adair nodded, took one last look and settled back down into the leather seat. “About two dozen streets running east and west,” he said, “and maybe two and a half dozen running north and south. Too many vacant lots. No architectural landmarks to speak of, unless you count a lot of Victorian piles all tarted up in that green and cream they like to use. Probably bed-and-breakfast inns now-or lawyers’ offices. Wonder why they always use cream and green?”
After Vines said he didn’t know, Adair asked another question. “And since I sure as hell didn’t see any of them down by the tracks, where do you think the rich folks live?”
“Up here in the hills,” Vines said as he drove slowly down the cul-de-sac called Don Emilio Drive. “Where they always live.”
At the end of the dead-end street they could see Mayor Huckins’s neat blue two-bedroom bungalow and admire her fine stand of jacarandas. The other six houses that lined the short drive were no more grand than the mayor’s. Appraising each house as they drove by, Jack Adair said, “Well, if this is how the rich live, God help the poor.”
It was the mayor herself who opened the door after Vines rang the bell. She wore a black skirt, a gray silk blouse and not much makeup. Her jewelry consisted of a man’s gold tank watch that may have come from Cartier and a pair of plain gold earrings that may have come from a drugstore. Vines thought she looked as though she didn’t much care where either came from.
B. D. Huckins looked first at Adair, then at Vines and back at the older man. “You’re Jack Adair,” she said, holding out her hand. As they shook hands, she said, “How’d you like to be called-Judge, Mr. Chief Justice or Mr. Adair?”
“Jack, if it won’t make you uncomfortable.”
Huckins smiled a noncommittal smile and looked at Kelly Vines. “Mr. Vines,” she said, holding out her hand.
“Mayor Huckins,” said Vines, accepting the hand and finding that it reminded him strangely of the blond Dixie’s. The mayor’s hand was as slim and cool and firm as Dixie’s, but the handshake didn’t last nearly as long because it was of the quick squeeze and even quicker release variety favored by seasoned campaigners.
She led them from a small foyer into the living room, whose principal piece of furniture was a long cream couch from the 1930s in remarkable repair. There was also a chocolate-brown leather club chair, which, from a carefully positioned brass floor lamp, was obviously where she did her reading. Both chair and couch were drawn up to a coffee table that was actually an old steamer trunk, laid on its side and plastered with bright labels from ancient European hotels and extinct steamship lines.
On the well-polished oak floor was a large and gaudy woven wool rug that Vines suspected of being from the Yucatan. There was no television set but plenty of books and on the walls were three Monet prints and two posters.
One of the posters displayed a tasty-looking bunch of wet purple grapes with a slogan that read: “The Wrath of Grapes. Join the Boycott Again!” The other poster showed a highly stylized worker banging away at something with a couple of hammers. Below him was Bertolt Brecht’s forlorn hope: “Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.”
Vines followed Adair and Huckins around the dining area’s glass and chrome table, into the kitchen, out the back door and onto a used-brick patio where Chief of Police Sid Fork, wearing an apron made out of what looked like mattress ticking, presided over the charcoal grill.
They talked first about the weather and, after exhausting that, turned to the presidential primary campaigns whose earlier stages Adair said he had followed from behind the penitentiary walls. He introduced his fifteen-month stay in Lompoc by referring to it as, “When I was in jail.” With that out of the way, Vines noticed that both Fork and Huckins relaxed, although he thought the bourbon everyone was drinking could have had something to do with it.
“When I was in jail,” Adair had said, and went on to describe his informal, admittedly unscientific sampling of the inmates’ political preferences. He confessed he was somewhat surprised to find an overwhelming majority rigidly conservative and almost morbidly patriotic.
Sid Fork said he wasn’t surprised. “If you’d’ve asked them to come up with an ideal ticket for either party, they’d’ve said John Wayne for President and Clint Eastwood for Vice President. And if you’d’ve mentioned that Wayne was dead, they’d’ve said that’s all you know because of what they’d heard from a guy who knows a cousin of Wayne’s bodyguard. And this guy who knows the bodyguard’s cousin swore on a stack of Bibles that the Duke’s holed up in Rio Lobo, not dead at all, but just waiting for the right moment. And if you’d’ve asked them where the hell Rio Lobo is, they’d’ve said exactly twenty-nine point four miles west of Fargo.”
His analysis delivered, the chief took a long drink of his whiskey and water, set the glass down, turned to the grill, gave one of the steaks an almost vicious stab with a fork, flipped it over and turned back to Adair.
“What’d you really think of those assholes they had you locked up with?”
“I sometimes found their thought processes interesting and oddly entertaining. But then I’m partial to the odd.”
“Most of ’em stupid?”
“None too bright anyway.”
“Any of ’em smart-maybe even brilliant?”
“A few.”
“How about charming? You run into any charming assholes?”
“An even rarer bird.”
Fork seemed prepared to continue the colloquy but changed his mind when B. D. Huckins asked whether the steaks were ready yet.
“If everyone likes ’em rare, they are,” Fork said and looked at Kelly Vines, as if daring him to ask for well done. But Vines said he liked his steak rare and the ex-Chief Justice said he never ate his any other way.
They ate at the redwood trestle table on the patio, not talking much except to compliment Fork on the steaks, the Caesar salad, his scratch biscuits and the baked Idaho potatoes. When Jack Adair, a master of small talk, asked whether the potatoes had been baked in a real oven or in a microwave, Fork said a real oven because B. D. wouldn’t have a microwave in the house. He said she still thought they caused cancer although he’d bought one for his own house because who the hell wants to wait sixty minutes for a potato to bake when a microwave’ll do it in ten?
Conversation died then and nobody, not even Adair, could think of anything pertinent to say. Just before the silence grew uncomfortable, B. D. Huckins rose and asked whether everyone wanted coffee. Everyone did, so she went into the kitchen and returned a few minutes later with a tray that held a Thermos carafe, four tan mugs, cream and sugar. As she poured she announced without apology that there was no dessert, although if they’d like something sweet, she could offer Benedictine and brandy. No one wanted any.
Mayor Huckins sat back down at the trestle table, had a sip of her coffee and smiled politely at Kelly Vines. “I believe you ran into my sister, Dixie.”
Vines tried, with fair success, to conceal shock behind mild surprise. “I don’t think she said her name was Huckins.”
“Well, she wouldn’t, of course, since her name is Mansur. Dixie Mansur. She married an Iranian. One of the rich ones, thank God.”
Vines nodded, as if approving of Dixie’s wise choice and good fortune. “There’s not a lot of family resemblance.”
“We had different fathers. Mine was Huckins; hers was Venable.”
“I assume Dixie turned in a report.”
“She gave you an A-plus. If she hadn’t, we wouldn’t be talking.”
Sid Fork rested his elbows on the table and leaned toward Vines, his expression perhaps a trifle too friendly.
