with that. So the more I thought about it the more it seems like you don’t get to make the big choices, just the little ones.”
“Such as?” Adair said.
“Such as crossing the street almost on an impulse that later turns out to be the biggest choice of your life.”
“Because of subsequent events,” he said.
“Yeah. Because of what happens. So I decided to make a choice. I don’t know if it’s a big one or a little one. But I decided to ask you, no strings attached, if you’d like to go to bed with me tonight?”
Adair smiled what he hoped was his most winning smile. “I’d be delighted.”
Kelly Vines, lying in bed, looked up from page 389 of his 406-page novel of mild southern decadence when he heard Adair’s voice and Virginia Trice’s giggle as they went past his room. He waited for the now familiar sound of Adair’s door to open and close. Instead, he heard a door open and close farther down the hall. It was, he decided, the sound of the door to Virginia’s room.
Vines smiled, put his book down, took a handful of mixed nuts from the open can on the bedside table, rose and went to the window that overlooked the street. The anonymous sedan was parked two houses down. Glancing at his watch, Vines saw it was a few minutes to one.
He stood, eating the nuts one at a time, as he stared out the window and waited for the shift to change. At one minute past one, another anonymous sedan parked in front of the other car. A very tall man got out, went back to the rear car, bent down-apparently to say a few words-and returned to his own car.
The rear car switched on its lights and left. Vines finished his handful of nuts, returned to the bed, picked up the novel and, sitting on the edge of the bed, finished it. But because the novel had failed to put him to sleep, he reached for the old standby remedy and poured almost three ounces of Jack Daniel’s into a water glass.
He drank it slowly, wondering as he often did on sleepless nights where he would be a year from now, presuming, of course, he told himself, that a year from now you’ll still be around.
He finished the whiskey, turned off the light and lay down. When he looked for the last time at his watch’s glowing dial it was a little past three and Jack Adair had still not returned to his room.
Chapter 39
At a little past 9 A.M. on Sunday, July 3, Dixie Mansur kissed her husband good-bye and drove away in his white Rolls-Royce, heading south on U.S. 101 toward San Diego, where, Parvis Mansur believed, she planned to spend the holiday weekend with their friends, Mr. and Mrs. Reva Moussavvis.
Because of heavy holiday traffic, Dixie didn’t reach Ventura’s beachside Holiday Inn until a little past ten that morning. She removed an overnight bag, locked the white Rolls and checked into a prepaid room that had been reserved for her under the name of Joyce Mellon.
Once in the room she tossed the overnight bag on one bed, sat down on the other, picked up the phone and tapped out the three numbers of another room in the hotel. When a man’s voice answered with a hello, she said, “You ready?” After the man replied he was, she said she would be right down.
Dixie Mansur’s room was 607 and the man’s room was 505. She went down the stairs, along the corridor and knocked at the door. It was opened by Theodore Contraire, who sometimes wore a priest’s outfit, sometimes a plumber’s, and now wore a pale blue smock that could have belonged to either a pharmacist or a hairdresser.
Once Dixie was inside the room and the door was closed, the five-foot-one Contraire reached up, grabbed her by the shoulders and forced her head down to his so he could mash their lips together in a long, long kiss that entailed a lot of wet tongue work.
The kiss ended as abruptly as it began. Contraire wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, “We’re running a little late.”
“I had to fuck Parvis before I could leave.”
“Over here,” he said, indicating a long low dresser with a large mirror. She sat down on a padded bench and Contraire switched on the four lights he had rigged up to illuminate the mirror.
Staring at herself, Dixie said, “Christ, I look awful.”
“You’re gonna look even worse,” he said. “Older. Maybe ten years older. I’m gonna start with the contacts. Here.”
He handed her a small plastic case. She removed the contact lenses from it and inserted them quickly.
“Been practicing,” he said with grudging approval.
“All week.”
“Okay, now you got brown eyes instead of blue.”
“I like blue better.”
“Not with dark brown hair, you don’t.” Contraire stuck four bobby pins in his mouth, pulled Dixie’s blond hair back and expertly pinned it into a smooth helmet. He picked up a shoulder-length brown wig from the dresser, used a brush on it and carefully fitted it to her head.
After inspecting his handiwork with obvious satisfaction, he picked up a squat white bottle with no label, removed its cap, poured a small amount of thick beige liquid onto his fingertips and began working it into her face and neck. “It takes two minutes, that’s all,” he said. When he finished, she had acquired a moderately deep tan.
Dixie inspected herself critically in the mirror. “I look different but not much older.”
Contraire, looking over her shoulder into the mirror, ran the thumb and forefinger of his right hand down the faint parenthetic lines that began at the base of Dixie’s nose and went to the corners of her mouth. “When you get older,” he said, “these get deeper. So here’s what we do.”
Using what appeared to be a well-sharpened eyebrow pencil, Contraire delicately increased the visibility of the two parenthetic lines. The results made Dixie say, “I’ll be damned.”
“Put these on,” Contraire said, handing her a wire-framed pair of green-tinted glasses whose lenses were only slightly larger than half-glasses. She put them on and they promptly slipped down her nose. She shoved them up. They slipped down again.
“When you’re talking to him, keep shoving ’em back up. It’ll drive him nuts.”
Dixie turned her head as far to the right as she could and still examine herself in the mirror. Turning her head to the left, she did the same. “I look almost forty with these dumb glasses.”
Contraire removed the top from a large jar of cold cream. “Okay,” he said. “Take it all off, then put it back on and let’s see how fast you can do it.”
She did it twice before he was satisfied. He placed the wig, the tinted glasses, the contact lenses and the cosmetics in a plain white paper shopping bag. From the pocket of his smock he took a sheaf of hundred-dollar bills bound with a red rubber band.
“Six thousand exactly,” he said, dropping it into the shopping bag.
“What about the map?” Dixie said.
He brought that out from the other pocket of his smock. It was hand-drawn on a sheet of plain white paper. Dixie studied it, nodded and said, “What kind of car?”
“Two-year-old black Cadillac Seville sedan.” He smiled, displaying the gray teeth. “Real conservative.” He stopped smiling and frowned, as if he had forgotten something. “What about your clothes?”
“I bought a frumpy summer suit at the Junior League thrift shop in Santa Barbara.”
“That oughta do.”
“Should I call him from here?”
“Christ, no. From a pay phone.”
“Don’t you want to hear my voice?”
Contraire grimaced, as if he had just been accused of negligence. “Sure I want to hear it. I was just about to ask you.”
“Here goes then,” Dixie said. “Hello, there. I’m Mrs. Nelson Wigmore? Kelly Vines’s cousin? And I’d like to find
