The Fourth Durango

respectability and stuffiness of its tenants. Its coffee shop was said to serve the best chicken salad sandwiches in town and its cigar stand prided itself on the quality of its contraband Cuban cigars.

The lawyer gave Obie Jimson a patronizing old-money smile and asked, “And just what do you consider to be stinking rich, Mr. Jimson?”

“Sixty, seventy million maybe-around in there. But not all at once, of course.”

Parmenter abandoned his patronizing air. “And the source of all this new wealth?”

“Natural gas.”

“Well, the deep stuff is bringing nine dollars per thousand cubic feet now,” Parmenter admitted.

(“You have to remember,” Jack Adair told his audience, “that this was all back in early nineteen eighty-four.”)

“Won’t stay up near that high,” Jimson said.

“Oh?”

“It’s gonna come down ass over teacup ’fore long.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Read in the Wall Street Journal where that Saudi Arabia guy, what’s his name, Sheek Yamani’s predicting it, and I figure he’s gotta know something I don’t.”

“The geology on your land’s been done, of course.”

“Don’t think I said that.”

“Then how can you be certain the gas is there?”

“Because the best doodle-bugger in the Osage Nation says so.”

“A doodle-bugger,” Parmenter said. “I see.”

“No, you don’t, Mr. Parmenter. It just so happens I’ve got me a fairly new wife, although it turns out I don’t much like her, and I also got me two young kids, a boy and a girl by my first marriage-she died, my first wife, ten years ago-and I had to raise Jack and Jill practically by myself-at least until I married Contrary Mary two years back. And I’m much obliged to you for not smiling at my kids’ names the way most folks do. Jack’s twenty and Jill’s eighteen-I married late the first time and not late enough the second-and I wanta divide up the revenue source before the gas gets proved out because I read in Money magazine that if you do that, you can save a ton on taxes.”

Parmenter leaned back in his tall wood and leather chair and peered at Jimson through a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. Jimson, who had never worn glasses, noticed they were trifocals. “Money magazine?” Parmenter said, unable to keep the horror out of his voice.

Jimson nodded.

“Well, it is true that if you distribute your real property before certain natural resources are proved to be within or beneath it, you can avoid significant taxes. However, the IRS regards such prior distribution schemes with considerable skepticism. Are you quite sure there haven’t been other geological explorations or seismographic surveys done of your property?”

“Not that I remember,” Jimson said.

“Has there been any recent interest?”

“Well, some old boy from a wildcat outfit they call Short Mex and Big Mick dropped by the other day. But I played the fool and he went away.”

“So you flew down to see me solely on the faith you have placed in this Osage doodle-bugger’s proficiency?”

“It’s not a question of me having faith in him, Mr. Parmenter. The question seems to be if the IRS would.”

When he finally understood the elegance of Obie Jimson’s reply, Parmenter allowed himself the day’s first smile. Still smiling, he reached for a yellow legal pad, uncapped a fountain pen and said, “So how would you like to carve it up?”

“I wanta keep two-fifths of everything for myself. I want my wife, Marie Elena Contraire Jimson, to get a fifth and I want my two kids to have a fifth each. When I die, I want my two-fifths to go to the kids since they’re blood kin and I’ve known them a hell of a lot longer than I have old Contrary Mary. And that’s about it except for one or two other things.”

After completing his notes, Parmenter looked up and said, “I’ll need some additional details, documents and-”

Jimson didn’t let him finish. “Got everything right here,” he said, bent over, picked up a Wal-Mart shopping bag from the floor and slid it across the lawyer’s desk. Parmenter quickly examined the papers inside and smiled for the second time.

“It seems you’ve brought exactly what I need. Money magazine again?”

Jimson nodded. “It’s plumb full of useful tips.”

“I’ll have to buy a copy one of these days,” Parmenter said.

Jimson finally accepted an offer from one of the major oil companies and flew Parmenter up from New Orleans to handle the negotiations. A little less than six months later, Obie and his son, Jack, were out quail hunting when Jill tracked them down in her old Volkswagen.

“He just called!” she said.

“Who?” her father asked.

“That guy from the oil company.”

“What about?”

“He said we’ve got production.”

“Didn’t say how much, did he?”

“He said to tell you it’s a barnburner. What’s a barnburner, Daddy?”

“It means we’re stinking rich,” Obie Jimson said, gave out a rebel yell, threw his hat to the ground and did a credible jig around it.

That night the four Jimsons celebrated at the Stack Boys Ranch Inn with what Roy Stack later testified were “great big porterhouses, lots of eighteen-dollar-a-bottle California champagne and maybe a glass or two of whiskey apiece.”

Then all four Jimsons-Obie, Contrary Mary, Jack and Jill-went home and went to bed. At some time between midnight and 3 A.M., Obie Jimson rose and went to his office in the old ranch house. A loaded shotgun, one of the same guns he and Jack had used to hunt quail that afternoon, was taken from the locked gun rack. Its muzzle was inserted into Obie’s mouth and the trigger pulled. He was found by his wife, the former Marie Contraire, who screamed and rushed off, still screaming, to find Jack and Jill.

When the deputy sheriff who responded to Marie Jimson’s frantic telephone call finally thought to ask where she had found her two stepchildren, she said she’d found them where they always were at night, in bed with each other.

The only fingerprints found on the shotgun that ended Obie Jimson’s life belonged to his son, Jack. He and his sister, Jill, by then twenty-one and nineteen respectively, were arrested and indicted for first-degree murder. Bail was set at $1 million each and posted by the president of the bank where Obie Jimson had done business. The bank president demanded and got an 18.9 percent fee on the pledged $2 million, explaining to Jack Jimson it was the same rate he’d pay if he’d put it on his Visa card.

Barred from the ranch by their stepmother, who announced-through a recently hired media consultant-that she would not “sleep under the same roof with the incestuous fornicators who murdered my dear husband,” Jack and Jill Jimson checked into a suite at the county seat’s Ramada Inn, fired their local attorney and called Randolph Parmenter in New Orleans, who strongly recommended that they retain as defense attorney Combine Wilson of Austin, Texas, who was notorious for his brilliance, flamboyance and enormous fees.

“Well, I reckon we can afford him, can’t we?” Jack Jimson said.

“Jill still on the phone?” Parmenter asked.

Assured that she was, Parmenter reminded the brother and sister of the legal documents he had drawn up for Obie Jimson, which they had both signed, as had their stepmother, Marie Contraire Jimson.

“If Obie were to die, which, unfortunately, he has,” Parmenter said, “you two were to inherit his forty percent