out if I can do something that’s really rotten?”
Contraire again nodded his approval. “Don’t forget those rising inflections. But it sounds pretty good-like about halfway between New Orleans and Mobile.”
“I practiced with a tape recorder.”
Contraire frowned again, as if trying to think of something else he had forgotten. Nothing apparently came to mind so he asked a question instead. “How’re B. D. and Sid and them taking it?”
“They still don’t know diddly. Except Sid did find out who Hazy was. Why’d you have to fix her anyway?”
“Why? Because you brought her in when we needed a photographer and she could’ve tied you in with me, that’s why. And after she saw me fix that cop from the back of the van, well, what’d you expect me to do except what I did?”
“You could’ve done something different.”
“You’re making it sound like I wanted to fix her, like I was dying to or something. Maybe you oughta know that by then Hazy and I had a nice little something going.”
“Fuck off, Teddy.”
“You fuck off, Dixie.”
It was often the way they said good-bye.
Dixie Mansur drove out of the Ventura Holiday Inn parking lot and two blocks farther on found a Texaco gas station with a bank of pay phones. She got out of the Rolls, locked it again, dropped her quarter and tapped out the eleven-digit number. When her call was answered, the operator cut in with instructions to deposit an additional $1.25 for three minutes. Dixie instead dropped in seven quarters.
After the quarters stopped clanging, the man’s voice on the phone again said, “Altoid Sanitarium.”
Dixie shifted into her southern accent and said, “May I speak to Dr. David Pease? This is Mrs. Nelson Wigmore? Mr. Jack Adair’s niece?”
Chapter 40
When his stainless-steel Omega Seamaster said it was exactly 6 A.M. on Monday, the fourth of July, Merriman Dorr grabbed the rope with both hands, pulled down hard and rang the old schoolhouse’s cast-iron bell.
By the ninth pull, which now was more yank than pull, the big bell’s clangor and peal were being answered by the distant howls of at least two dozen dogs. Dorr rang the old bell faster and faster, yipping and howling back at the dogs and occasionally bursting into snatches of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “Dixie” and “God Bless America.”
He rang the school bell for exactly ten minutes. At 6:10 A.M. he marched to the old schoolhouse flagpole, ran up the Stars and Stripes and stood at rigid attention, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Still at attention, Dorr gave the flag a snappy salute and a look of utter adulation. He also gave it a glorious smile that easily could have been worn by either a devout patriot or, as some suspected, a nut.
After a smart about-face, Dorr marched back to the front entrance of Cousin Mary’s, still wearing his Glorious Fourth smile, but thinking now of breakfast that would include fresh orange juice, pork sausages, blueberry pancakes, two or three eggs, lightly basted, salt-rising bread toast, and at least three cups of coffee. After that he would go downtown and watch the parade.
The parade began forming at 9 A.M. down near the Southern Pacific tracks and Durango’s former train depot, which had lost its purpose, if not its usefulness, when the railroad concluded there was no longer any profit in hauling humans.
The depot had been transformed into Durango’s Tourist and Cultural Center. This lasted until the city discovered that it served precious few tourists and provided no culture to speak of. After scrapping the center, Durango rented the depot in rapid succession to a head shop, a sushi bar, an adult bookstore, a Tex-Mex cafe and an acupuncturist. All of them failed. The depot now housed the city’s Venereal Disease Control Center, which Sid Fork and others usually referred to as the clap clinic.
The parade would have begun as scheduled, at 10:30 A.M., if twelve-year-old Billy Apco’s mother, a single parent, hadn’t had to deal with a flat tire on her Ford Bronco that took her and Billy fifteen minutes to change. But since Billy was the one who beat the bass drum in the Kiwanis-sponsored Fife and Drum Corps, the consensus was to delay the parade’s start until he arrived.
The parade’s route would take it straight up North Fifth Street through the heart of the business district until it reached Handshaw Park at around noon, where it would disband and Mayor B. D. Huckins, speaking from the bandstand, would deliver what the
Jack Adair and Kelly Vines, glasses of draft beer in hand, stood outside the Blue Eagle, waiting for the parade. A little behind them and to their left was Detective Joe Huff, looking far less bald and a bit less professorial because of his Chicago Cubs baseball cap and huge cigar. To the right of Vines and Adair was Detective Wade Bryant, the too-tall elf, whose height enabled him to see over the heads of the parade watchers who were lined up one-deep at the curb.
Leading the parade was a color guard composed of American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars members, all of them old enough to have fought in either World War Two or Korea. After the guard came the Pretty Polly’s Sandwiches and Pies float, one of the nine commercial floats in the parade. Then came “The Wild Bunch,” a geriatric biker’s club whose members all rode Harleys, followed by the Durango Palomino and Philosophical Society, which boasted some beautiful mounts; the Kiwanis Fife and Drum Corps, with Billy Apco banging away on his big bass drum; the splendidly costumed Gay Vaqueros, who were excellent riders and outrageous flirts; more floats; the mayor, riding on the folded-down convertible top of a 1947 Chrysler Town and Country; the chief of police, waving from the back of a 1940 Buick Century convertible; the members of the City Council, riding together and grinning like fools in an open carriage drawn by two fine bays; a troop of Boy Scouts; a bicycle club; fourteen clowns who belonged to the Chamber of Commerce and gave away Hershey Kisses and Fleer’s bubble gum; and, finally, twelve barely pubescent baton twirlers who twirled to the strains of “Colonel Bogie” as played and whistled by the Rotary Club’s Drum and Bugle Corps.
After the parade went by, Adair, Vines and Virginia Trice walked to Handshaw Park, trailed by Detectives Bryant and Huff. They ate free hot dogs and drank five-cent beer while listening to the city attorney introduce Mayor B. D. Huckins.
Quoting Tom Paine, Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower and Bruce Springsteen, Huckins gave what Jack Adair decided was the best eight-minute all-purpose political speech he had ever heard.
“She’s not only got a good voice and a great delivery,” he told Kelly Vines, “but she also knows a secret that ninety-nine percent of today’s politicians have either forgotten or never knew.”
“Which is?” said Vines, slipping into what he was beginning to regard as his customary straight man role.
“She knows how to leave them wanting more,” Adair said. “And any politician who can do that these days can get reelected forever unless, of course, as the ex-governor of Louisiana says, they find him in bed with either a dead woman or a live boy.”
At 12:31 P.M., just after her sister finished her brief patriotic remarks in Durango’s Handshaw Park, Dixie Mansur turned off U.S. 101 at the Kanan Dume Road exit in Agoura and crossed over the freeway to the Jack in the Box where Theodore Contraire had said the black Cadillac Seville would be parked.
As promised, the 1986 Cadillac was parked behind the restaurant. Dixie got out of her husband’s white Rolls- Royce, locked it and, carrying the same plain shopping bag Contraire had given her, went into the Jack in the Box and entered the women’s toilet.
