“Today.”
“Where?”
“Lompoc.”
“Who took ’em?”
“A girl photographer from the back of a pink Ford van with a green sign on it that said, ‘Floradora Flowers, Santa Barbara.’”
“You hid and Adair stuck out his tongue.”
“A metaphor, you think?” Vines said.
“Beats me,” said Fork and bent over to look more closely at the photographs of Mayor Huckins and himself. “This one of me and B. D.’s not bad.”
Vines heard a car door slam, then another one. He scooped up the photographs, stuffed them into the ripped- open manila envelope and shoved it down into his right hip pocket just before the Blue Eagle’s front door banged open and two men in their forties strode in, wearing the proprietary air that marks a policeman almost as plainly as his badge or uniform.
Vines assumed they were the two homicide detectives Fork had recruited from Detroit and Chicago. He also recognized them as the pair of mock-drunks from the Holiday Inn cocktail lounge. One was of average height, black, scholary-looking and egg-bald. A leather gadget bag hung by a strap from his left shoulder. The other resembled a too-tall elf with nimble brown eyes and a long sly face. The brown eyes walked up and down Vines as the man moved slowly toward Fork. Vines remembered the too-tall man as the one who had climbed down from the barstool and said, “Fuck California,” in a clear and pleasant voice.
When the tall man reached Sid Fork, he said, “Old Norm, huh?”
“Shot,” Fork said. “Twice.”
The detective leaned over the bar and peered down at the body on the duckboards. The bald detective didn’t bother to look. Instead, he put the gadget bag on the bar, unzipped it and took out a Minolta camera with a built-in flash. He went behind the bar and began photographing the dead Norm Trice. After taking six or seven photographs, he looked at the tall detective and said, “Looks like somebody with a twenty-two.”
Fork decided it was time for introductions. He indicated the detective with the camera and said, “Joe Huff, Kelly Vines.” They nodded at each other. Fork then introduced the too-tall detective as Wade Bryant. After the tall detective and Vines exchanged hellos, Fork said, “We got here about seven, maybe eight minutes ago.”
“Where was the check then?” Bryant asked. Although the check still lay on the bar, Vines couldn’t recall Bryant even giving it a glance.
“It was in Norm’s hand,” Fork said. “The right one.”
“Take a look in the till?”
Fork nodded. “About a hundred and fifty there.”
Bryant shook his head and frowned, as if disappointed so far by what he had seen and heard. He reached into the pocket of his white short-sleeved shirt, took out a pack of Lucky Strikes and lit one, blowing the smoke to his left and away from the others. “It doesn’t parse,” he said.
“Why not?” said Fork.
“Guy comes in and orders a beer,” Bryant said, giving the two-thirds-full glass of beer a brief look. “He drinks a swallow or two and then asks to cash a personal out-of-town check. That means he sure as shit didn’t know Norm. So when Norm turns him down, the guy takes out a twenty-two or maybe even a twenty-five and plinks Norm twice in the face, which is pretty fair country shooting. Then the guy takes off, leaving behind what’s in the till and also the check with his name, address and phone number on it just in case we want to call the San Francisco cops and have ’em go pick him up.”
Joe Huff, the detective with the camera, came around the bar, glanced at Vines, started putting the Minolta back into the gadget bag and said, “You have any theories, Mr. Vines?”
“Does Trice have a wife?” Vines said, more or less answering the question with one of his own.
“He’s got a wife,” Sid Fork said and looked at Huff. “You want to go tell Virginia?”
“Not me,” Huff said.
“That’s what they pay chiefs of police for,” Bryant said. “To bear the bad news-especially when it’s to Virginia Trice.”
Fork looked at Vines. “You want to come along?”
“No, but I will.”
“Before you go, Sid,” Bryant said, looked closely at the Wells Fargo check, went around the bar, picked up the phone and tapped out a long-distance number. He waited through what Vines decided were five rings before the call was answered.
“May I speak to Ralph B. Farr, please?…Mr. Farr, this is Detective Bryant with the Durango police department…Durango,
After five minutes of conversation, most of it spent reassuring Ralph B. Farr that if his stolen wallet and checkbook were found, they would be promptly returned, the call ended. Bryant turned to Sid Fork.
“Somebody lifted them out of his hip pocket somewhere on Geary two weeks ago. He reported it to the cops. Which means what we’ve got here is either a wacko or a pro. If it’s a pro, he’s long gone. If it’s a wacko, well, who knows?”
“Maybe he’s both,” Vines said.
Bryant’s eyes again made their trip up and down Kelly Vines. “A professional wacko? Now that’s something to bite into.”
“I like it,” Joe Huff said.
Fork looked at his watch. “Well, we’ve got to go. You guys know what to do.”
“Yeah, we know.”
“While I’m consoling the widow Trice, get Jacoby down here and see if he can lift some prints.”
“Prints,” Bryant said and chuckled. “Prints,” he said again, as if repeating a punch line, and laughed out loud as he turned to Joe Huff. “Hear that, Joe? The chief just got off another of his zingers.”
“I’m not laughing,” Huff said, “but only because a loud laugh bespeaks a vacant mind.” He paused. “Goldsmith.”
“Paraphrased,” Vines said.
“And improved,” said Joe Huff with no trace of a smile.
Chapter 13
When they went from the kitchen into the living room after doing the dishes-he washed, she dried-B. D. Huckins waved Adair to the long cream couch and asked whether he’d like a brandy.
“No, thanks.”
Adair waited until she was seated in the chocolate-brown leather club chair before he lowered himself to the couch. When she crossed her legs, not carelessly, but indifferently, he glimpsed the tops of the stockings she wore instead of panty hose, which made him wonder whether garter belts had made a comeback during his fifteen months in prison.
“Tell me about that cane,” she said. “The one Sid wants.”
“It was my grandfather’s.”
“An heirloom?”
“A curiosity. He won it off a gambler in nineteen twenty just after Prohibition began. The handle unscrews and there’s a stoppered glass tube inside that holds about four ounces of hooch. That’s what he always called his liquor-hooch. After repeal in ’thirty-three our state stayed dry and my grandfather passed the cane on to my old man, who eventually passed it on to me. I would’ve given it to my son except he thought it was dumb.”
“So you passed it on to Vines.”
“For safekeeping.”
“He was more reliable than your son?”
