The Fourth Durango

by Sara Paretsky

Ross Thomas inhabited a world of romantic cynics—people who made no bones about living on the shady side of the street but who wouldn’t tolerate true malevolence. Bribery, sure, blackmail, yes, but not the murder of innocents. Sometimes he killed off a beloved hero, but good did triumph in a way it usually doesn’t in the world the rest of us live in.

In person Thomas seemed like Clark Kent—his mild, unassuming manner concealed a pen of steel. In fact, like Clark Kent, Ross Thomas did start his writing life as a reporter. He was a sports journalist before serving with the U.S. infantry in the Philippines during World War II; at war’s end he was a diplomatic correspondent for the Armed Forces Network, in Bonn and Washington. He worked in public relations and then turned his hand to managing election campaigns.

Thomas’s clients were as odd a collection as ever existed outside the pages of one of his own novels: a Nigerian tribal chief trying to become the country’s first post-colonial prime minister (the man lost and spent a lot of years in prison); the president of the National Farmers Union, running for re-election (he also lost but didn’t do time); and George McGovern.

Thomas said of his own work that he’d “sat in the room where the deals were cut.” His experience in politics and journalism shows up again and again in his fiction, and the deals that are cut are unusual ones indeed.

The Fourth Durango
features an entire cast of tricksters, molesters, and hustlers. When Jack Adair, an honest politician who’s been framed on a bribery charge, is released from federal prison, he knows he’s a murder target: whoever set him up wants him dead. Until he can figure out who’s behind the frame-up, he needs a place to hide. His longtime lawyer, friend—and son-in-law—Kelly Vines, finds just the place: the tiny town of Durango, California. The fourth Durango, “The City That God Forgot,” is run by two vintage Thomas con artists: Sid Fork, the chief of police, and Barbara Diane Huckins, the mayor.

Because God forgot the fourth Durango, Mayor Huckins has to raise money for public services in unusual ways. She and Fork do a deal with Adair and Vines—privacy and protection for a large sum of cash—but before anyone can blink, Durango has become an international crime hub. Suddenly, Chicago in the Twenties has nothing on this tiny town for drive-by shootings, holdups, people dropping dead in elevators.

To say more would be to give away too much. All I can do is warn you that every word in this book counts. If you are surprised at the end—as I was—it’s because you read it the way I did: you wanted to see what happened next, and who was going to say what clever offhand thing, and you forgot that Ross Thomas’s hand was quicker than your eye. So pay attention: every casual anecdote in this story is there for a reason. Every walk-on character mentioned over the vast quantity of booze they’re all drinking plays a role in the con.

Ross Thomas came relatively late to the world of fiction. He wrote his first novel,
The Cold War Swap,
when he was forty and had six free weeks between jobs. In the next twenty-nine years he wrote twenty-five novels and an autobiography, several screenplays, and a constant stream of essays and reviews. He was a man of intense passion, indeed, a deep rage for the foulest deeds people do to each other—often in the name of ideals like liberty or religious faith. He somehow managed to disguise his rage beneath a patina of irony, but he never let readers forget that true villainy doesn’t lie in sex or even money. True villainy lies in betrayal, torture, and violation of the spirit.

Stephen King once called Thomas “the Jane Austen of the political espionage story,” an odd compliment from one thriller writer to another. But it’s an apt one: despite the deaths and misdeeds in Thomas’s work, we aren’t treated to graphic erotogenic violence. Everything is done almost politely; like Austen, Thomas could skewer a character, and a society, in a seemingly innocent throwaway line.

Thomas wrote in the long tradition of the American crime novel, with its roots in the American western: justice, real justice, has been taken over by those with money, power, and no regard for the common good. Into this world comes the eccentric outsider, or in Thomas’s case, a whole gang of eccentric outsiders, who outwit and overturn the money-and-power boys. Raymond Chandler described this kind of hero best when he said, “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid…. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man.” Thomas’s heroes—and heroines—had plenty of tarnish on them, but they were never mean.

Thomas’s experience in the world of the real, from the Pacific islands (brought beautifully to life in
Out on the Rim
) to Nigeria (featured in
The Seersucker Whipsaw
), kept him from sentimentality. But his loner, loser, down-on-their heels heroes do triumph, in wonderful, almost surreal fashion. And the triumph leaves us readers feeling a little more hope than we did when the story began. As the master trickster of us all wrote in
Twelfth Night,
“If this were portrayed upon a stage now, I could condemn it as improbable fiction.” How much I wish Thomas were here today, now, taking the horrors of our age and turning them into more of his improbable fiction.

When the white bedside telephone rang at 4:03
A.M.
on that last Friday in June, the
thirty-six-year-old mayor answered the call halfway through its fourth ring and kicked the thirty-nine-year-old chief of police on the ankle to make sure he too was awake.

After a muttered hello, the mayor listened silently for a minute and a half. She listened with mouth grim and eyes narrowed, forming what the chief of police had long regarded as her pothole complaint look. Once the ninety seconds were up, the mayor ended the call with a peremptory “Right” that was little more than a farewell grunt.

As the mayor listened, the chief of police had occupied himself with another inspection of the bedroom’s textured ceiling, wondering yet again why the sprayed-on stuff always wound up looking like three-week-old cottage cheese. The moment the mayor put down the telephone, the chief closed his eyes and asked, “Dixie?”—sleepiness and the hour robbing the question of any real curiosity.

“Dixie,” the mayor agreed.

“And?”

“She just tucked him into bed.”

“How much did he drink?”

“Dixie says the bar.”

“Then it’s all set, isn’t it?” the chief said, opening his eyes to give the yellowed ceiling a final inspection while awaiting the mayor’s reply. When none came, he nodded—as if at some unspoken but reassuring answer—and apparently went back to sleep.

Lying on her left side, the mayor examined the chief with mingled wonder and resentment. Soon tiring of the examination, she rolled over onto her back and closed her pale gray eyes, but they popped open almost immediately and she found herself posted to ceiling sentry duty from which sleep failed to relieve her until just before dawn.

Kelly Vines awoke at 10:09
A.M.
on that same last Friday in June. He looked first for the black cane then for the blond-all-over woman who had said her name was Dixie. Vines couldn’t remember her last name or even if she had mentioned it, but he did recall those mocking blue eyes and her wry observation that they were checking into the only money-losing Holiday Inn west of Beirut.

Although the blond Dixie was gone, leaving behind a trace of memorable perfume, the black cane still hung from the shade of the lamp with the chartreuse ceramic base. It was a thick cane, a bit more than an inch and a quarter in diameter, fashioned out of Macassar ebony and decorated at its tip with a chrome ferrule that was now just a bit worn. An inch or so below where the cane’s handle began its curve was a silver band with the initials
JA
engraved into it in small interwoven Gothic letters.

The hangover attacked in earnest when Vines sat up in bed. Diagnosing it as a crippler of some rare and possibly fatal strain, he sucked in four deep breaths, praying without faith that the additional oxygen would do what folklore claimed and ease the pain and perhaps enable him to go on living. But when the hangover and its attendant despair grew only worse, bringing on vague thoughts about sweet death, Vines rose, steadied himself with a faltering hand on the back of a chair, and made his way to the black cane.

After unhooking it from the lampshade, he gave it a shake, sighed with relief at its faint sound and twisted the curved handle to the right instead of the left. After three full turns the handle came off, revealing the small silver cap that held the cork.

Vines pulled the cork out of the glass tube embedded inside the cane, lifted the no-longer-disguised flask to his mouth and swallowed an ounce or so of Jack Daniel’s Black Label whiskey that made him shudder all over with what the cane’s rightful owner had liked to call “shame, horror and all-around nastiness.”

The morning bourbon reminded Vines of the first time he had ever drunk from the cane. And that, arithmetic told him, was exactly fifteen years ago when he had been a senior at the university. It was in June of 1973 and less than an hour before graduation ceremonies when the three of them had first sipped whiskey from the black cane together, although no one got much more than an ounce because the thing only held four ounces.

Vines recalled how the cane’s owner had chuckled his most vindictive chuckle and smiled his most partisan smile as he proposed the prescient toast: “To Watergate, lads, and all who sink with her.”

The three of them had then drunk an ounce or so each: Kelly Vines first and after him the man whose cane it was and, finally, the man’s son, who was also Vines’s college roommate, and who, not quite fourteen years later, would allegedly shoot himself to death in a moderately expensive Tijuana whorehouse.

Vines stood, still naked in the Holiday Inn room, waiting for the whiskey’s balm and leaning with both hands on the black cane as he peered out the fourth-floor window at the Pacific Ocean that always had seemed so idle, or maybe only languorous, at least when compared to the busy and constantly grumbling Atlantic.

Then, as he had almost known it would, the drink from the black cane forced his memory back to the much more recent past, to that night more than a year ago when the sorrowful Tijuana homicide detective had telephoned him in La Jolla to say that the ex-roommate was dead.

Vines had driven down to Tijuana in what he still regarded as record time; found the whorehouse after a frustrating twenty-five-minute search, and identified the six-foot four-inch body, noting without any particular revulsion (it would come later) that much of the once handsome head had been splattered across a lithograph of the Virgin of Guadalupe that hung on the room’s south wall.

Vines had been staring at the lithograph when the homicide detective began to describe in Spanish how the dead man obviously had poked the old .45-caliber Colt semiautomatic into his mouth and pulled the trigger
dos veces
. Suddenly mistrusting his own usually adequate Spanish, Vines had offered a tentative translation: “Twice?”

The detective’s broad Indian face had slipped on a pious mask as he replied, “Yes, twice,” in English and, switching back to Spanish, murmured that only God himself could understand to what mad lengths suicides resorted when they truly desired to destroy themselves.

When Kelly Vines asked whether he really believed that shit about the ex-roommate pulling the trigger twice, the detective had closed his eyes and smiled beatifically, as if thinking of God or money or both. The detective had then reopened his eyes to reply that yes, certainly he believed it, as who would not?

Vines at first wasn’t sure whether it was the fading memory of his dead ex-roommate’s brains and blood or the breakfast bourbon that made him turn from the Holiday Inn’s ocean-view window, hang the cane back on the lampshade and not quite hurry into the bathroom where he threw up the Jack Daniel’s he had just drunk and much of whatever it was he had drunk the night before. But later, after he was all through throwing up, he quite sensibly blamed it on the Jack Daniel’s.

At 11:04 that morning, his stomach soothed by Mylanta-II and his nakedness clothed by a wrinkled beige linen jacket, dark gray worsted slacks, also wrinkled, and a clean but tieless white shirt, Kelly Vines sat on a stool at the bar of the Holiday Inn’s almost deserted cocktail lounge, a medicinal bloody mary at his elbow, and carefully poured two two-ounce miniatures of Jack Daniel’s into the hollowed-out black cane.

Three stools down a tall man of about Vines’s own age sipped a draft beer and watched with undisguised curiosity. Except for the thick side-wings of pewter-gray hair that had been swept back to rest on his ears, the man’s head was bald and both it and his long shrewd face were nicely tanned.

Perhaps to compensate for his baldness, the man had grown a pewter-gray mustache that Kelly Vines recognized from old British films as being of the wing commander variety. The man’s eyebrows were a matching pewter-gray and almost bushy enough to shade hazel eyes that seemed more brown than green. There was also a fine big nose that poked out and down toward a thin wide mouth that looked, if not generous, at least friendly. Beneath the mouth was the cornerstone chin.

The man with the wing commander mustache pursed his lips and frowned, as if worried lest Vines spill any of the whiskey that was still trickling into the cane. But when Vines, his hands vise-steady, finished without spilling a drop, the man grinned, revealing large off-white teeth that could only have been his own.

“Want to sell me that fool thing?” the man asked in a pleasant baritone.

“It’s not mine,” Vines said, turning to hang the cane on the bar. After Vines turned back, the man said, “Think whoever owns it might sell it?”

Vines examined the man thoughtfully, as if considering the question. “I could ask.”

The man nodded, obviously pleased by the answer. “For some dumb reason, I’ve just got to have it,” he said, reaching into a pocket of a faded blue chambray work shirt that might have been bought years ago at Sears. From the pocket he removed a business card. His work shirt and scuffed driller boots were in studied contrast to his well-tailored blue pinstripe pants that obviously belonged to some absent but equally well tailored vest and coat. Despite the old work shirt and stomp boots, Vines thought the bald man looked like a suit. After reading the business card, Vines discovered he was right:

SID FORK

Chief of Police

Durango, California

(Pop. 9,861)

The City That God Forgot

Below the motto—or epitaph—in the card’s lower left corner were the numbers of a telephone Vines could call and a post office box and zip code he could write to.

Vines looked up from the card with his first smile of the day. “Why would God bother to forget Durango, Chief?”

Sid Fork finished his last inch of beer and wiped the mustache with the back of his hand. “It wasn’t God—well, not exactly anyway. It was old Father Serra who passed through here on his way south from Monterey in 1772 and forgot to found us a mission, which we sure as hell could use now to draw the tourists.”

“Did he forget—or just not get around to it?”

“You Catholic?”

Vines shook his head.

“When a bunch of Franciscans came back through here ten years later in 1782 and still didn’t found a mission, well, that’s twice, right? And wouldn’t you say that sort of makes it look like God forgot to give Father Serra and them the nudge?”

“It would seem to,” said Vines, who long ago had made it a point never to argue in bars about religion, politics or baseball’s designated hitter rule.

“The other mistake they made—the Franciscans and God—was founding that mission over there in Santa Barbara where the weather’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”

“I always thought Santa Barbara had great weather,” Vines said, almost beginning to enjoy his straight man role.

“Not compared to here,” Fork said, signaling for another beer. After the gray-eyed young Mexican bartender served it, Fork drank two swallows, gave the mustache another quick brush and said, “If you want absolutely pluperfect weather, Mr.—uh—don’t believe I caught the name?”

“Kelly Vines.”

“As I was saying, Mr. Vines, if you’re looking for perfect weather, then the hunt’s over because this town’s got what the World Health Organization itself claims is the most salubrious climate on God’s green earth.” Fork paused. “Except for some tumbledown village on the Italian Riviera nobody ever heard of.”

Vines nodded a polite, even interested nod, took a cautious swallow of his bloody mary and looked around the still almost deserted hotel bar. “I’ve been to the Durango in Colorado, the one down in Mexico and the one in Spain, but never here to this one, the fourth one—until now.”

The corners of Fork’s wide mouth turned down, as if at expected bad news. “Well, that’s no real bulletin since about the only way to get here—unless you swim—is through the mountains over that killer two-lane state blacktop that peels off of One-Oh-One—providing you spot the turnoff sign in time, which not many folks do.” He paused, sipped his beer and asked, “How’d you get here—drive?”

“Drove,” Vines said. “But I had a girl guide.”

The chief of police grinned. “If you’d said you flew in or took the train or bus, I’d’ve said you were dreaming because the Feds closed down our so-called airport two years back for what they claimed were safety reasons, and the last passenger train stopped here eleven—no, by God, twelve—years ago now, and even Greyhound called it quits after GE boarded up the steam-iron plant two years ago next month.”

“Sounds like splendid isolation,” Vines said, this time taking two swallows of his bloody mary.

“You a hermit?”

“Not yet.”

“We’ve got a few of those—folks who don’t mind being kind of cut off from the rest of the world.”

Vines nodded his sympathetic understanding and waited to see what came next.

“The rest of us keep up pretty good, though,” the chief continued after another taste of beer. “We’ve got our almost daily paper that’s owned by some chain out of London, England. For culture, there’s our one-hundred-percent automated FM station that plays nothing but commercials and root-canal rock from dawn to dark and then shuts down. As for TV, well, we can’t get any reception to speak of because of the mountains and because no sane cable company’ll touch us. But a man can always buy a dish to catch the news and maybe rent himself a slasher flick or two for his VCR—or even one about some rich high school kids fucking each other.”