“That’s strange.”
“I thought so, too, which is why I stressed there would be no sale until the exact, specific amount was confirmed.”
“Until you’ve counted the money?”
“In essence, yes.”
“What’d he say?”
“He said no problem.”
“Anything else?” Vines asked.
“Did Dixie by any chance say where she was going after she left you?”
“When I last saw her she was with her sister.”
“Good,” Mansur said, sounding relieved. “That’s splendid. You might call B. D. and Sid and inform them of these new developments.”
“All right.”
“Good night then, Mr. Vines.”
“Good night,” Vines said, broke the connection with a forefinger, caught Virginia Trice’s eye and used a nod to invite her down to his end of the bar.
“You have the mayor’s home phone number?” Vines asked.
“It’s unlisted.”
“I know.”
Virginia Trice looked up at the ceiling, back down at Vines and recited the number from memory. After Vines thanked her and began dialing, she moved farther up the bar.
The mayor answered with a hello halfway through the call’s third ring.
“This is Kelly Vines.”
“You must have the wrong number,” B. D. Huckins said and hung up.
Chapter 33
After hanging up on Vines, the mayor returned to her chocolate-brown leather easy chair and smiled an apology at Sheriff Charles Coates, who perched on the edge of the cream 1930s couch, a cushion away from Sid Fork.
Sensitive about his average height, which he felt insufficient by southern California standards, the forty-two- year-old sheriff’s backside rarely occupied more than six inches of anything it rested on. He usually sat as he sat now, leaning a bit forward, hands clasping his knees, heels slightly lifted-obviously all set for hot pursuit.
When standing, the sheriff looked neither short nor tall, possibly because of his glistening black cowboy boots with their one-and-a-half-inch heels. Once reporters had discovered he was height-conscious, they delighted in asking him how tall he was because of his unvarying reply: “Same as Steve McQueen alive and barefoot-five-ten and a quarter.”
As B. D. Huckins sat back down in the leather easy chair, the six-foot-three, twenty-eight-year-old deputy sheriff asked whether she got many wrong-number calls. The deputy was Henry Quirt, who had been relegated to the only other chair in the living room-the one that was really more stool than chair and forced his knees up until they were almost level with his breastbone. The deputy sat on the low stool at the late night meeting in the mayor’s house not only because he policed his section of the county from a Durango base, but also because Sheriff Coates had decided a witness might prove useful-even invaluable.
The mayor answered the deputy’s question about wrong-number calls by replying, yes, she did receive quite a few of them. The sheriff said that although he couldn’t prove it, he thought unlisted phone numbers got more wrong-number calls than listed ones The mayor asked the sheriff whether she could get him and his deputy something, perhaps a beer.
“Not a thing, B. D., but thank you.”
“I’d like a beer,” Fork said, rising from the couch. “But I’ll get it myself.”
“Well, if you’re having one, Sid, I guess I will, too,” Coates said.
Fork looked at Deputy Quirt. “Henry?”
“No, thanks.”
As Fork headed for the kitchen, Sheriff Coates said, “I apologize again for dropping by so late, B. D.”
The mayor looked at her watch. “It’s only ten forty-eight.”
“But since I had to be over here in Durango anyhow-and wasn’t that a terrible thing about Ivy Settles? Just awful. How’s his wife taking it?”
“Hard.”
“If there’s anything at all I can do…” Coates left his offer dangling-incomplete, undefined and, in Huckins’s opinion, meaningless.
“That’s very kind of you.”
“But the real reason I dropped by so late, B. D., is I need to talk a little politics.”
“Who with?”
“Why, with you, of course.”
Huckins kept her expression polite, her voice neutral. “Sid’ll probably want to hear this.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised.”
They sat in silence until Fork returned with two open bottles of beer and handed one to Coates. “Need a glass, Charlie?”
“What for?”
Huckins waited until Fork was again sitting on the cream couch and had drunk some of his beer before she said, “Charlie wants to talk a little politics.”
Fork turned to examine the sheriff, as if for the first time. He inspected the glistening black boots, the tight tan whipcord pants and the forest-green Viyella shirt that was tailored to emphasize the flat stomach, deep chest and the shoulders that seemed a foot thick and a yard wide.
The chief’s slow, careful inspection finally reached the sheriff’s face with its landmark chin, bad-cop mouth, stuck-up nose that never sunburned or peeled and, finally, the blue eyes that crinkled on demand and were shaped like long teardrops. Topping all this was a wealth of dark brown gray-flecked hair that every seven days was trimmed to Marine Corps specifications.
“Politics?” Fork said after his inspection. “Christ, Charlie, you don’t even have any opposition this year.”
Coates nodded, studied the floor to demonstrate the gravity of what he was about to say, and looked up quickly, first at Fork, then at Huckins. “It can’t go beyond these walls.”
“I won’t breathe a word,” Fork said, “unless it’ll do me some good.”
Almost everything in Coates’s face smiled except his mouth. “Still the merry prankster at forty, right, Sid?”
“Thirty-nine. And before you invite yourself into somebody’s house, you oughta know if you can trust them or not.”
“B. D. knows the answer to that, don’t you, B. D.?”
The mayor said, “Get to it, Charlie.”
Coates edged forward another inch on the cream couch, leaned another inch in Huckins’s direction and spoke in the hushed tones of the seasoned conspirator. “Old man Sloop’s going to step down as county supervisor in nineteen ninety.”
“Why?” she said.
“To pursue other interests.”
The mayor shook her head. “Billy Sloop celebrated-or at least observed-his sixty-eighth birthday last week. He’s been a county supervisor for fourteen years and doesn’t have any other interests to pursue. So how much have you got on him, Charlie?”
“Enough.”
“Why tell me?”
“Because I’m going to announce for his job and I want your endorsement.”
