“Didn’t seem like the moment,” Bryant said, “what with Condor State Bank on one side of us and Regent Chevrolet on the other.”
“Kind of a wake, was it?” Fork said.
“Kind of.”
Sid Fork turned his head to stare out the window. “I can remember when a guy died, his relatives and neighbors and friends’d gather round after the funeral with a ton of food, a lot of it fried chicken and baked ham, and the widow’d be standing there, all in black, shaking every hand and agreeing that yes, indeed, the late Tom or Harry sure did look natural and weren’t the flowers just beautiful?”
“When the hell was this?” Bryant asked.
“Twenty-five, thirty years ago,” Fork said, turned his gaze from the window and asked Bryant, “So what’d you come up with-if anything?”
Bryant licked his lips, as if pre-tasting his answer. “A possible eyewitness.”
Fork dropped his feet to the floor and leaned forward. “Who?”
“Father Frank from St. Maggie’s.”
“Wonderful,” Fork said, putting his feet back up on the desk. “Our whiskey priest.”
“He’s been dry awhile,” Joe Huff said. “Going to AA and everything.”
“How’d you get on to him?”
“He was hanging around outside the Eagle this morning, afraid to go in, when Wade and I came out.”
“Afraid of the booze, huh?”
“Probably,” Bryant said. “So Joe asks how’s it going, Father? And he says just fine except he thinks maybe he’ll come back and pay his respects when Virginia’s not so busy. Then he looks at me and I can see him telling himself no, yes, no, yes-until finally he says he thinks he noticed something oddish last night. Don’t think I ever heard anybody say oddish before.”
“Me either,” Joe Huff said.
“Anyway, it seems he’d been to a meeting-”
“AA meeting?” Fork said.
Bryant nodded. “But it didn’t take, or something somebody said rubbed him the wrong way, or maybe the bishop’d sent him a cross little note. Who knows? But anyhow he was kind of upset so he decided to walk off whatever was bothering him. And he’s down there on North Fifth when he sees this other priest looking at the puppies in Felipe’s window.”
“Sheplabs, aren’t they?” Fork said. “Cute little fellows.”
Joe Huff took over the report. “Well, you know how Father Frank goes around in a T-shirt and jeans most of the time. But he says this other priest is all in black and has a wrong-way collar on and everything. So Father Frank thinks the other guy’s visiting or just passing through because he’s never seen him before. And he also thinks the other priest might like to drop by Pretty Polly’s for coffee and doughnuts. So he’s about to cross the street and invite him when the other priest turns and almost runs the other way.”
“Toward the Eagle?”
“Away from it. So Father Frank sort of steps back into Klein’s doorway, which is pretty deep, because he doesn’t want the other priest to get the wrong idea.”
“What wrong idea?”
“I’m a Baptist,” Huff said. “How the hell should I know? You want to hear some Bible Belt stuff about what priests and nuns do? Curl your toenails.”
“Just tell me what happened, according to Father Frank.”
“What he claims he saw and heard is this,” Wade Bryant said. “He says the other priest scoots down the sidewalk, stops, spins around like he’s just remembered something, then makes a beeline for the Blue Eagle.”
“What time is this?”
“He thinks about eleven-twenty.”
“What time the AA meeting end?”
“Nine-thirty, but he hung around another half an hour or so for the cookies and coffee.”
“And then went on his hour-and-a-half walk.”
“Walking past bars, I expect,” Huff said. “Testing temptation.”
“But this other priest,” Fork said. “He went in the Blue Eagle.”
Huff nodded.
“So what’d Father Frank do?”
“He hung around some more,” Bryant said, “waiting for the other guy to come out because he still thought they might go have coffee and doughnuts together.”
“Where’d he hang around?”
“Cattawampus across the street from the Eagle,” Huff said.
Fork closed his eyes, as if drawing himself a map of the intersection. “Marvin’s Jewelry,” he said. “Another deep doorway.”
“Father Frank says he uses doorways like that because he doesn’t like to be seen hanging around street corners at night,” Bryant said.
“Let’s get to the odd stuff,” Fork said. “He see anything?”
Bryant shook his head.
“He hear anything?”
“He thought he heard somebody clap inside the Eagle.”
“Clap?”
“Clap.”
“Once?” Fork asked. “Five times? Fifty times? What?”
Bryant grinned. “You know, Sid, that’s exactly what I asked him myself.”
“And?”
“And he said they clapped just twice.”
“Then what?”
“Then the stranger-priest hurries out of the Eagle and jumps in a van that drives off in a hurry.”
“What’d Father Frank do then?”
“He says since he didn’t have anybody to drink coffee with, he went home and went to bed.”
“What’d this other priest look like?”
Bryant nodded at Joe Huff, who pulled out a small notebook, turned some pages and read what he had written. “Short. Very short legs. About five-one. Forty to forty-five. Also fat. Round like a ball. Gray hair, cut short. And ugly. Porcine.”
“Porcine?”
“Piggy-looking. He had one of the noses that turn up and aim their nostrils right at you.”
“What color were his eyes?”
“Father Frank says he wasn’t close enough to tell,” Bryant said. “But he was close enough to see that the guy looked piggy.”
“What about the van?”
Bryant shook his head with regret. “No license number or make because Father Frank says he can’t tell a Buick from a Ford. But he did say it was pink.”
“Pink?”
Bryant nodded.
“Well,” Fork said. “That’s something.”
Chapter 17
The roadhouse where Adair, Vines and B. D. Huckins were to meet the mayor’s rich Iranian brother-in-law at 1 P.M. that Saturday was four miles east of Durango on the south side of Noble’s Trace which, once past the city limits, changed from a boulevard into the two-lane blacktop that curved and twisted its way to
