“I didn’t get a good look at him.”
“Why not? You don’t wear glasses.”
“It was dark.”
“Felipe keeps that pet shop window pretty well lit and there’s a street-lamp right out in front of the Blue Eagle.”
“He was dressed like a priest-or the way we all used to dress.”
“Can’t swear he wasn’t one though, can you?”
“Of course I can’t. There’ve been all kinds of priests-crazy ones, rapists, embezzlers, thieves, deviates and, of course, drunks. Lots and lots of drunks. So why not a killer?”
“We both know he wasn’t any priest, Frank.”
Riggins sighed. “I suppose we do.”
“Could you recognize him again?”
“Probably.”
“What’d he look like?”
“I can only tell you what I told Joe and Wade this morning.”
“That’ll do fine.”
Riggins thought about what he was going to say, then nodded, as if reassuring himself, and said, “Well, he was short. That’s what you noticed first. No more than five-one, if that. And very heavy-you know, almost round. And he had those very stubby legs and gray hair cut short. Not just a crew cut, but as if somebody’d grabbed a pair of scissors and just whacked it off. I was too far away to see the color of his eyes, but he was no beauty.”
“Why?”
“Well, he had this strange nose that looked a little like a pig’s snout with its bottom all turned up so you could see his nostrils even from across the street.”
“I brought some pictures I’d like you to look at.”
“A rogues’ gallery?”
“Something like that,” Fork said, removed the ten index cards from his jacket pocket and handed them to Riggins, who went through them slowly, stopped at the seventh one and said, “Well…I don’t quite know.”
“Don’t quite know what?”
“He looks so much younger here.”
The chief of police took the index card from the priest and glanced at the face of the man he had cut out of the jumbo print with the X-acto knife.
“That’s because he was younger then,” Fork said, still looking at the photograph. “Twenty years younger.”
Seated in the chocolate-brown leather chair in her living room, B. D. Huckins put down the glass of wine so she could go through the ten index cards Sid Fork had handed her.
“How am I supposed to know which one Frank Riggins picked?” she said.
“You’ll know,” Fork said, drank some of his beer and watched as the mayor glanced at seven of the index cards without expression. She stopped at the eighth, narrowed her eyes and clamped her lips into the thin grim line that helped form her pothole complaint look. Her expression remained grim when she looked up from the photograph and said, “It can’t be.”
“You know better’n that, B. D.”
She tapped the man’s face on the index card with a forefinger. “Where’d you get a picture of Teddy?”
“Remember the day we all moved into that shack he’d rented out on Boatright?”
The mayor nodded reluctantly, as if she found the memory disturbing.
“And the landlord, old man Nevers, came by to see if he could bum a drink and Teddy lined all four of us up-you, me, him and Dixie-and made Nevers take our picture with your Instamatic before he’d give him a drink?”
“I don’t remember any of that,” she said.
“Well, I do. And I also remember getting jumbo prints made of that roll and pasting them in my album.”
“I don’t understand why.”
“Why what?”
“Why you’d even think of Teddy or show his picture to Frank Riggins.” She grimaced, as if at some bad taste. “Teddy. Jesus.”
“What’d I use to call him?”
“Teddy? Snout.”
“And if I didn’t call him Snout, I called him Porky. So this morning, those two ace homicide detectives of mine came up with an eyewitness-Father Frank-who claimed he saw some real short guy of around forty who looked like Porky Pig go into the Blue Eagle and come out just about the time poor old Norm got shot. So I started thinking about whether I knew any short mean guys with piggy noses who might go around shooting people for money or just for the hell of it and I came up with Teddy. I mean, he just popped into my mind.”
“After twenty years?” she said.
“Teddy sort of sticks in the mind-even after twenty years.”
The mayor closed her eyes and leaned back in the leather easy chair. “We should’ve drowned him.” When she spoke again several seconds later her eyes were still closed and her voice sounded weary. “Was Teddy dressed up like a priest?”
“I just told you that.”
“No, you didn’t.”
Fork replayed the last few minutes of conversation in his mind. “You’re right. I didn’t. So who did?”
“Kelly Vines-indirectly.”
“When?”
“Today. Out at Cousin Mary’s.”
“Let’s hear it,” Fork said. “All of it.”
Huckins’s account of the lunch was condensed yet comprehensive and included Kelly Vines’s recollection of his conversation with the doorman who was reluctant to ask a priest for identification. When she had finished, Sid Fork’s first question was, “What’d you all have for lunch?”
“Trout,” Huckins said and quickly recited the rest of the menu, knowing Fork would ask if she didn’t.
“How was it-the trout?”
“Very good.”
“Who paid?”
“Vines, I think.”
“Tell me again what Vines said the doorman said about the short guy in the priest suit.”
“You mean what he looked like?”
Fork nodded impatiently.
“Let me think.” Huckins closed her eyes again, kept them closed for at least ten seconds, opened them and said, “The doorman told Vines the priest was short and mud-ugly and had one nostril twice as big as the other one. He said the nose turned up and aimed what he called the two holes right at you.”
“And that didn’t make you think of Teddy right off?”
“No.”
The nod that Fork had intended to be sympathetic was betrayed by its condescension. “Well, you’re not a cop.”
“But since you are, tell me this. What’ll the cops do about Teddy?”
“Whatever’s within the law.”
“And Sid Fork? What’ll he do?”
“Whatever’s necessary.”
Chapter 23
The fifty-one-year-old Durango detective, who had once worked bunco and fraud in Dallas,
