Sid Fork stretched, yawned without apology and gave the night sky an inspection. “We heard about that. We also heard about your son-Paul, wasn’t it? A suicide down in T.J. And just this afternoon up there in Lompoc some dude with a funny name got it. From what I hear, he was your baby-sitter.” Fork brought his gaze down from the stars. “Blessing something.”
“Blessing Nelson,” said Adair. “A friend and associate.”
Resting her elbows on the trestle table and her chin on her right fist, B. D. Huckins examined Adair curiously. “Maybe I’m just not tracking you,” she said.
“How so?”
“You’re not offering us a lot of money to do almost nothing extra.”
“No. What I’m proposing-” Adair broke off to look at Vines. “Since it’s your grand design, perhaps you’d best explain it.”
Vines nodded, stared at Fork for several seconds, nodded again, as if at some inevitable conclusion, and turned his stare on B. D. Huckins, who grew impatient and said, “I’m listening.”
Directing his remarks solely at the mayor, and choosing each phrase with care, Vines said, “What we want you to do-is send out word-that you’ll sell Jack Adair-to whoever wants him-for one million dollars.”
The mayor leaned back, picked up her tan coffee mug, had a swallow of cold coffee and put the mug down, not taking her eyes off Kelly Vines. “You want us to fake an offer-”
“The million will be real.”
“-that could damage our reputations.”
“Who with?” Vines asked.
“He’s got a point, B. D.,” Fork said.
“Tell me this,” she said. “Why would anybody pay a million for a Jack Adair?”
“Because of what he knows,” Vines said.
She looked skeptically at Adair. “Which is what?”
Adair sighed. “I don’t know what it is. Or maybe it’s something I do know but haven’t sufficiently analyzed.”
“Must be worth a lot-whatever it is that you don’t know you know.”
“Obviously.”
“Have you thought of faking a blackmail pass at them?”
“Alas, I’m not a blackmailer and I don’t know who they are.”
“I said
“I heard what you said.”
She turned from Adair to Sid Fork. “Then it’d be up to us to set it up, wouldn’t it?”
Fork frowned. “Won’t be easy.”
She turned next to Kelly Vines, her delicate chin thrust out, her gray eyes calculating. “So how do we split the million?”
“We don’t,” Vines said.
It was obvious to Vines that the mayor didn’t like surprises, pleasant or unpleasant. She narrowed her eyes until they were almost closed and pressed her lips into their grimmest line. If she frowns, Vines thought, the deal’s off. But Huckins didn’t frown. Instead, she opened her eyes wide and let her mouth relax into a faint smile.
“We get it all then-Sid, the city and me.”
Vines nodded. “If you succeed.”
“And if we don’t?”
“You get nothing and Jack here probably gets a poorly attended memorial service.”
“Then it’s on what you lawyers call a contingency basis.”
“Which is how we lawyers get rich.”
The mayor’s faint smile was still in place as she turned to the chief of police. “Well?”
Fork gave his wing commander mustache a thoughtful brush with his left thumb, frowned at Vines and said, “I still get the cane, no matter what?”
“No matter what,” Vines said.
The chief turned to B. D. Huckins with a grin. “I think it sounds rich.”
A silence developed, which no one tried to end. It was finally broken when the mayor again looked at the chief of police and gave him an order in the form of a suggestion.
“Why not take Mr. Vines down to the Blue Eagle for a drink while the judge and I go over a few details?”
It was obvious that Fork could think of several reasons why not, but he made no protest. He merely turned to Kelly Vines and said, “Like to go have a couple of quick ones?”
Vines thought of asking if they had any choice, but what he said was, “The quicker the better.”
Chapter 11
At 11:26 P.M. on that last Friday in June, the pink Ford van, now stripped of all commercial identification, deposited a short thick man with a clerical collar in front of Felipe’s Pet Shop at 532 North Fifth Street, just four doors down from the Blue Eagle Bar’s corner location.
The pet shop had closed at its usual time of 6 P.M. In its window was a jumbled pile of four puppies asleep on their bed of shredded newspaper. The puppies were a mixed breed the pet shop owner was advertising as Sheplabs. As the pink van sped away, the man in the clerical collar glanced up and down Fifth Street, saw nothing of interest and turned to the pet shop window.
He smiled at the sleeping puppies, ignoring his reflection in the glass that revealed small, rather gray teeth and a mouth so thin it seemed almost lipless. The mouth was much too close to his small snout of a nose whose right nostril seemed half again as large as the left one. He was bareheaded and his thick black hair was going gray and had been cut, or clippered, into an uneven flattop by an apparently unsteady hand.
To complement his clerical collar he wore black shoes and a too-tight black suit made from a dull synthetic material. The suit was almost the same shade of black as his eyes, which could have been those of some old and unrepentant libertine, dying alone and bored by the process.
The man flicked his middle fingernail twice against the shop window. But when the sleeping puppies continued to ignore him, he stopped smiling, turned left, away from the Blue Eagle Bar, and hurried down the sidewalk on uncommonly short legs. After forty or fifty feet his fast walk slowed to a normal stroll, then to a hesitant saunter and finally to a full stop.
He turned quickly, not quite spinning around, his eyes raking both sides of Fifth Street. He nodded then, as if remembering the cigarettes or the dozen eggs he had forgotten to buy, and retraced his steps, hurrying past the sleeping puppies without a glance. When he reached the corner, he took one last rapid look around and ducked into Norm Trice’s Blue Eagle Bar.
Although 2 A.M. was the legal closing hour, Trice often closed his bar and grill around midnight because by then most of his customers had run out of money and gone home. But if it was payday, or the second or third of the month when the welfare, unemployment, disability and Social Security checks arrived, Trice would stay open until two and sometimes even three or, as he put it, until they drank up the government money.
There were no customers in the Blue Eagle when the man in the clerical collar walked in, took a seat at the bar and ordered a glass of beer. After Trice served him, the man paid and said in a cold thin tenor, “They say the mayor drops by here once in a while.”
“Who’s they?” said Trice, who never gave away anything except unsolicited advice.
“And the chief of police. I hear he drops in sometimes, too.”
“So?”
The man took a swallow of beer and smiled his gray smile. “So this friend of hers, the mayor’s, asked me to give her a letter and I thought maybe I’d give it to you and you could give it to her.”
“Give it to her yourself down at City Hall tomorrow.”
“I’m leaving town tonight.”
Trice sighed. “Okay, but next time buy one of those things they sell at the post office. You know-stamps.”
