Ferragamo, Johnston & Murphy, Bass, Allen-Edmonds and Gucci. One of the Gucci boxes was at the bottom of the near stack. The other Gucci box was second from the top of the far stack. Vines automatically removed both of them, certain that Adair would go barefoot before wearing anything made by Gucci. He carried the two shoeboxes out of the closet and placed them on the king-size bed. When he lifted off their tops he discovered that again someone had used red rubber bands to bind the one-hundred-dollar bills into packets.
Vines called down for his car. When he came out of the condominium building, he opened the Mercedes’s trunk and carelessly tossed in a green plastic garbage bag. After that, he drove around aimlessly for fifteen minutes until he was reasonably sure he wasn’t being followed. From a phone booth he called a client who was a senior partner in the wholesale marijuana concern.
They met an hour later in the State Historical Museum, which was only two blocks from the state capitol. They met in the museum’s basement where the century-old stagecoaches, buggies and covered wagons were kept on display. The client was a lanky thirty-two-year-old who wore jeans, scuffed cowboy boots and a white oxford cloth button-down shirt with its sleeves rolled just above his elbows. The client had quit smoking both tobacco and marijuana six months before and now kept a toothpick in his mouth. Four or five times a day he dipped the toothpick into a small vial of cinnamon oil.
“What’s up?” the client asked.
“I need to use one of your laundries.”
“No shit?”
“Which one do you suggest?”
The client dug a forefinger into his right ear, which always seemed to help him think, and said, “Well, Panama’s not bad, but you can’t be sure everybody down there’ll speak English, although most of ’em do, but I still sorta like the Bahamas because all of ’em speak English there, even if you’ve got to work at it sometimes to understand what the fuck they’re saying. How much we talking about?”
“Five hundred thousand.”
“Oh,” the client said, as if the amount were scarcely enough to fool with. “Well, it’ll cost you.”
“How much?”
“First off, we’ll take ten percent and our pet bank down in Houston’s gonna take another ten, so what you’ll have left by the time it gets where it’s going is about four hundred K.”
“Then let’s do it,” Vines said.
“When?”
“Today. Right now.”
When Kelly Vines walked into the reception room of the chambers of the chief justice of the state supreme court on the third floor of the state capitol building, the fifty-four-year-old secretary looked up with an apprehensive expression that dissolved into relief when she saw that her visitor was the boss’s son-in-law and not the police.
“He’s been asking for you,” said Eunice Warr, who had been Adair’s secretary for thirteen years.
“How’s he doing?”
She shrugged. “About like you’d expect.”
Vines smiled slightly. “You think he took it, Eunice?”
She shrugged again. “Says he didn’t.”
The chief justice’s large chamber was paneled in pecan and carpeted with woven wool and filled with a huge teak desk, two brown leather couches and at least six brown leather easy chairs. Maroon velvet curtains decorated three wide ceiling-high windows that looked out on the Japanese-designed executive office building across the street where the governor worked.
Adair sat in a high-backed leather swivel chair, his feet up on the massive desk, listening through an earphone to a small gray multiband Sony radio, the ICF-2002 shortwave model.
Adair took the earphone off and said, “Well, at least it didn’t make the BBC yet.”
“What else have you heard?” Vines said as he sat down in one of the leather easy chairs.
“Just what’s on the local all-news station,” Adair said, reaching for his black cane. After removing its handle and cork, he poured two drinks into a pair of glasses that he took from a desk drawer.
“I was holding out till you got here,” he said as he rose and handed Vines one of the glasses. “Didn’t quite seem like the time to be drinking alone.”
Vines tasted his whiskey and said, “Anyone call you?”
“Not a soul.”
“Or drop by to commiserate?”
“Be like commiserating with an ax-murderer.”
“Paul didn’t call-or Dannie?”
“Paul’s off doing the Lord’s work in Cyprus, I think, and as for Dannie, well, your wife and my daughter doesn’t seem to be paying much attention to current events these days, which, I assume, you must’ve noticed.”
“But you did hear about the Fullers and the suicide note?” Vines said.
Adair nodded and sipped some of his whiskey. “They say you found the bodies.”
“I also went to your apartment.”
“Well, you’ve got a key.”
“I looked around.”
“Get to it, Kelly.”
“I looked in that big walk-in closet-the one in your bedroom.”
“You’re saying, for some reason, that you looked there first, right?”
Vines nodded.
“And found what?”
“Two Gucci shoeboxes. The first one contained two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills. The second one contained the same fucking thing.”
Vines knew that no one, not even a great actor, could feign the shock that widened Adair’s kitten blue eyes, dropped open his mouth and produced the violent sneeze, a powerful hay fever-type blast that made him fumble for his handkerchief and blow his nose. After he was done with that, he remembered his drink, gulped it down and, in an almost conversational tone, said, “Son of a bitch.”
After that, Adair stared down between his knees at the wool carpet, looked up at Vines and said, “I never bought a pair of Guccis in my life.”
The anger came then-a slow cold rage that narrowed Adair’s eyes, drained his plump cheeks of all color and caused the three chins to quiver angrily when he again spoke. “It still there?” he demanded. “In my closet? In a pair of fucking Gucci shoeboxes?”
Vines looked at his watch and said, “It should be on its way down to the Bahamas right about now.”
Adair’s anger evaporated. Color returned to his cheeks and curiosity to his expression. “I thank you, Kelly,” he said with careful formality. “But I’ve got to say it was a goddamned dumb thing for you to do.”
“It’s also a felony. You were set up, Jack. But without the money, they have no case. At least not one they can win.”
Adair swiveled around in his chair so he could look across the street at the almost new building where the governor worked. “They’ll try, though, won’t they?”
“Yes.”
“And what d’you suppose they’ll poke around in first?”
“The usual: your bank accounts, safety-deposit boxes, assets, investments, tax returns.”
“Tax returns,” Adair said to the building across the street.
The silence began then. It was one of those ominous silences that seldom lasts very long because somebody coughs or clears his throat before somebody else screams. Kelly Vines ended the silence in the chambers of the chief justice with a murmured question. “What’s the problem, Jack?”
Adair swiveled around to face him and spoke in a voice without inflection. It was a tone Vines instantly recognized because he had heard it often from clients who, when all hope was gone, used it to describe their transgressions without emotion or embellishment. It was, Vines had learned, the voice of truth.
