The Fourth Durango (14 page)

The fifty-one-year-old Durango detective, who had once worked bunco and fraud in
Dallas, looked up from his copy of
People
magazine when the tall elderly white-haired man with the neat tar-black mustache strode into the lobby of the Holiday Inn and headed for the shallow alcove where the house phones were.

Marking his place in
People
by turning down a page corner, Ivy Settles placed the magazine on the table next to the couch and rose, not taking his eyes off the man who stood, pine-tree straight, the phone to his ear, waiting for his call to be answered.

Settles studied the man’s muted brown plaid jacket, deciding it was a silk and wool blend that had cost at least $650—maybe even $700. The deeply pleated fawn gabardine slacks, he guessed, would go for $400, even $425. And those two-tone brown and white lace-up shoes with the moccasin toes—a style Settles hadn’t seen in twenty years—were probably handmade and cost as much as the jacket. Including socks, shirt and underwear, Settles figured the man was wearing close to a couple of thousand dollars on his back and feet.

The detective stuck his hands down into the slash pockets of the Taiwanese-made windbreaker he had paid $16.83 for, including tax, at Figgs’ department store and crossed the lobby on feet shod in penny loafers from Lands’ End. The rest of him was clad in chinos by Sears, a white short-sleeved shirt by Arrow and underwear by Fruit of the Loom. Settles liked cheap clothes and guessed that everything he wore, including his white drugstore socks, hadn’t cost as much as the black lizard strap that bound the thin gold watch to the white-haired man’s left wrist.

With his hands still stuck down into the windbreaker’s pockets, Settles stopped just behind the man, as if the pair of them were forming a line. The man was now talking into a house phone in a crisp and pleasant voice that sounded far too young for his age. Settles thought of it as the man’s up-North voice and remembered how easily it could slide into soft southern tones that sounded remarkably like Charleston.

“Yes, in the lobby,” the man said into the phone. “I thought I might pop up for a minute or two with something that should interest you.”

Finally sensing someone behind him, the man turned to face Settles, who stood, hands still inside the slash pockets, rocking back and forth on his heels. The man frowned and pointed to the other house phones. Settles smiled slightly, shaking his head.

The man turned his back on the detective and again spoke into the phone. “Let’s make that five minutes instead of right away. I have another call to make.”

The man hung up, turned to face Settles again and said, “You queer for this particular phone, friend?”

“It’s been a while, Soldier,” Settles said.

The man frowned again, this time trying to look puzzled. He might have succeeded were it not for the glittering green eyes that could never quite conceal their slyness. “Don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” he said in the nicely chilled up-North voice.

“Dallas,” Ivy Settles said. “February of ’seventy-three. I took you down and put you on the Greyhound to Houston after the stockbroker’s widow refused to press charges.”

“My fiancée,” the man said. “Edwina Wickersham.”

“Who you gave the money back to.”

“Repaid the loan, you mean.” The white-haired man studied Settles carefully, taking his time, starting with the penny loafers and working his way up to the round face, where a delicate nose and a hesitant chin clashed with a pair of know-it-all gray eyes and a thin wiseacre mouth.

“You got fat, Ivy,” the man said. “And you appear to have fallen on hard times—although with you it’s always been kind of hard to tell. What are you now—a Holiday Inn house dick?”

“Who was the call to, Soldier?” Settles asked.

“That’s really none of your fucking business, is it?”

Settles nodded, as if in agreement, picked up one of the house phones and tapped three numbers. When the call was answered he said, “This is Settles down in the lobby. You just get a call from Soldier Sloan?” He listened, glanced back at Sloan and said, “No, no trouble. Just checking. I’ll send him on up.”

After Settles hung up, Soldier Sloan smiled a warm, almost cozy smile and asked, “How d’you like working for Sid Fork, Ivy?”

“It’s nice and quiet and that’s how Sid and I like it.”

Sloan looked around the almost empty lobby. “Graves aren’t this quiet.”

“Well, we got the Fourth of July parade coming up next week.”

“Doubtless a day of revelry and madness.”

“I’ll see you to the elevator, Soldier. Make sure you punch the right button and all.”

As they waited for an elevator, Settles said, “Hear you promoted yourself to brigadier general.”

“And high time, too, don’t you think?”

Settles smiled and nodded happily, not in response to Sloan’s question, but as if he had just arrived at some welcome conclusion. “I sure like that new mustache, Soldier. Reminds me of the one Cesar Romero used to wear before his went white. Now there was a mustache—not like those floppy cookie-dusters Selleck and all the Highway Patrol kids wear nowadays. I bet yours grew in coal-black. Bet you don’t even have to dye it. All that white hair. Black eyebrows. Matching mustache. I’ve gotta say it sure makes you distinguished-looking, Soldier, and how long do I tell Sid you’re gonna be with us this time?”

“Leaving on the evening tide.”

“Sid’ll be sorry he missed you,” Settles said as the elevator doors opened. He watched Sloan enter the elevator, turn and press the 4 button. “Good seeing you again, Soldier.”

“Always a pleasure,” the old man said just before the doors closed.

After half a lifetime in bunco and fraud, Ivy Settles watched the lighted floor indicator of the elevator Soldier Sloan was taking to the fourth floor—just to make sure, he told himself, it didn’t go sideways. The elevator had paused at three and continued on to four, where it now seemed stuck.

The other elevator, to Settles’s right, was on its way down. It, too, had paused at three and Settles decided to ask its passenger or passengers if they knew what the trouble was on the fourth floor.

The doors of the right-hand elevator opened and a very short, very heavy man came out. He wore a giveaway cap advertising Copenhagen snuff, thick tinted glasses and dark blue coveralls that had “Francis” stitched in red above the left breast pocket. In his right hand he carried a large black toolbox that looked old and battered.

“What happened to the other elevator?” Settles asked.

The man stopped, looked up at Settles, then up at the floor indicator numbers and back at Settles. “Beats me.”

“Where’d you get on?”

“Three.”

“You’re not the elevator repair guy, are you?”

The short man turned his back on Settles. An arc of two-inch-high red letters spelled out “Francis the Plumber” across the coveralls. Below the name was a phone number. The man turned to face Settles again.

“I’m Francis and there was a backed-up toilet in three twenty-two and it’s Saturday and I’m on double time. So if somebody wants me to stand around talking about busted elevators, somebody’s gonna get charged for it.”

“Wait here,” Settles said.

“Why?”

Settles brought out his badge and showed it to the plumber. “Because I said to.”

After hurrying to the shallow alcove where the house phones were, Settles snatched one up and tapped three numbers. After two rings a man’s voice answered with a hello.

“Mr. Adair?” Settles said.

“This is Vines.”

“Settles again—down in the lobby. Has Soldier Sloan showed up yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Would you go take a look at the elevator on the fourth floor—the car on your right—and then come down and tell me what’s wrong with it?”

“Come down to the lobby and tell you?”

“Please.”

“All right,” Vines said and hung up.

Settles hurried back to the elevators, where Francis the Plumber had failed to wait. The detective turned and trotted across the lobby to the hotel entrance. He went through it just in time to see a pink Ford van make a right turn out of the parking lot. On the side of the van was a large magnetic stick-on sign that advertised “Francis the Plumber” in big black letters. Beneath them, in smaller ones, was the slogan “Nite or Day.”

Embarrassed and irritated by his own vanity, Ivy Settles fumbled his glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on. But by then, even with the glasses, it was impossible to read the license plate of the pink Ford van.

The elevators were down the corridor and around a corner from Kelly Vines’s
fourth-floor room. When he reached them he found Soldier Sloan lying face-up and half out of the right elevator, whose two automatic doors were gently nudging the old man’s waist every three or four seconds.

It was obvious to Vines that Sloan was dead. Those too-green eyes had lost their glitter and stared up without blinking at the corridor’s vanilla ceiling. Vines knelt to put a hand to the old man’s neck, feeling for the pulse he knew he wouldn’t find.

If there was a cause of death, Vines couldn’t see it. There were no visible wounds or blood, but he did find Sloan’s position peculiar. It was as if the old man had turned to face the rear of the elevator, then fell backward, sprawling halfway through the open doors.

Vines explored the dead man’s pockets almost without thinking of the consequences other than to remind himself he was no longer an officer of the court. He left the watch pocket until last because he was confident of what he would find there.

In the other pockets he found a comb, a Montblanc fountain pen and an ostrichskin wallet, well worn, that contained $550 in fifty-dollar bills. In the other pockets he found a car’s ignition key attached to a Mercedes emblem that didn’t necessarily mean anything; a small pocketknife with a gold case that Vines thought was probably fourteen carat; a handkerchief of Irish linen; and a small combination address book and pocket diary. The address section was almost filled with names and phone numbers, but very few addresses. The diary section was blank and the page for that June Saturday, the twenty-fifth, had been torn out.

In Sloan’s watch pocket, as expected, Vines found a folded-up thousand-dollar bill, issued in 1934 and bearing the engraved portrait of Grover Cleveland and the signature of Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury. On the back of the old bill was some fancy engraving to discourage counterfeiters.

The torn-out diary page was also in the watch pocket, folded up, like the thousand-dollar bill, into the size of a postage stamp. Vines carefully unfolded it, noticing that most of it was for a diary and about an inch at the bottom for a “memo.” At the top of the page were initials and numbers reading, “KV 431” and “JA 433,” which Vines immediately deciphered as being his and Jack Adair’s initials and room numbers.

At the bottom of the page in the space reserved for the memo was another entry that read: “C JA O RE DV.” Vines could make nothing out of this and put everything back where he had found it, including the torn-out diary page and the thousand-dollar bill, both of them carefully refolded. After that he rose and went to tell Ivy Settles that Soldier Sloan was dead.

Settles, the first policeman to reach Soldier Sloan’s body, watched as the Holiday Inn’s young assistant manager used a key to turn off the elevator so its two doors would stay open and stop nudging the dead man’s waist. Settles knelt beside Sloan, checked for vital signs and looked up at Vines, who, like Adair, was now leaning against the wall opposite the elevators. “He’s dead,” Settles said. “Just like you said.”

Because Vines could think of nothing to add to this, he said nothing. Chief Sid Fork arrived a few minutes later, nodded at Vines and Adair, glanced at the dead Soldier Sloan and began questioning Settles. He was still questioning him when the two homicide specialists, Wade Bryant and Joe Huff, arrived and joined the interrogation of Ivy Settles.

The bald, black and professorial Huff asked an occasional question as he used his Minolta to take photographs of the dead man. When he had taken enough, he interrupted Wade Bryant and said, “Let’s turn him over.”

Once Soldier Sloan lay on his stomach, the saucer-sized bloodstain on the back of his muted plaid jacket was visible. With the help of Bryant, Huff removed the jacket and took some pictures of a bloodstain the size of a dinner plate on the back of Sloan’s pale yellow shirt.

Out of curiosity, Kelly Vines asked, “What d’you guys do for a coroner?”

“Because we’re ninety-two miles from the county seat, they named Dr. Joe Emory assistant deputy coroner,” Huff said, pulling out Sloan’s shirt tails and pushing the shirt itself up toward the dead man’s armpits. “The fancy title doesn’t mean much because the county pays Joe on a piecework basis.”

“He likes doing autopsies?”

“He likes the money,” Huff said.

Once the shirt was up around Sloan’s armpits, the small puncture wound was visible. The wound itself hadn’t really bled much and had the diameter, in Huff’s words, “of a fat ice pick.”

As he rose, Huff added, “He died quick anyway,” and aimed his Minolta at Sloan’s bare back.

“If the angle was right and the guy knew what he was doing,” the still kneeling Wade Bryant said, “then he probably didn’t feel much of anything.”

“He felt it,” Huff said. “He felt it enough to turn around, see who’d done it and keel over backward.”

The assistant hotel manager edged over to Fork. “Couldn’t you guys at least pull him out of the elevator, Sid? We’re going to need it.”

“No, you’re not,” Fork said.

“So when can we start using it?”

“In an hour or two.”

“Well, shit,” said the assistant manager and headed for the stairs. Bryant gave the dead Sloan a final close look and rose. “While we’re waiting for Doc Emory, Chief, I thought maybe Ivy here could tell us some more about his new pal, Francis the Plumber.”

“I already told you,” Settles said.

“We’d like to hear it again,” Bryant said, looking for support to Huff, who was adjusting his Minolta. The black detective looked up just long enough to nod and went back to his camera.

“One more time, Ivy,” the chief of police said.

Settles gave Fork a reproachful look and said, “He was about forty and short and fat—five-one and maybe two hundred and ten. Wore dark blue coveralls with Francis the Plumber across the back in red letters—and a phone number I don’t remember. He carried an old beat-up black toolbox. Had tinted prescription glasses, the kind that go from real light gray to real dark gray depending on the light. Had a gimme cap from Copenhagen snuff. Had a thin nasty mouth. Drove a pink Ford van with a stick-on ‘Francis the Plumber’ magnet sign on one side—maybe both sides, but I don’t know that for a fact. And no, I didn’t get the license number this time either.”

“You forgot his nose,” Huff said, still working on his camera.

“Yeah. Right. The nose. Well, it was kind of squashed up, like I told you, and had this one big nostril and this regular size one and they both looked about a mile deep. They were also hairy. He had a regular forest growing in there and most of it was gray.”

“Tell us again why you let him skip, Ivy,” said Wade Bryant, whose increasingly sly tone matched his too-tall-elf looks.

“I didn’t let him. I showed him my shield and told him to stay put while I went and called Vines here. The guy was a plumber and possibly—just possibly—a solid citizen. What you two guys would’ve done, of course, is make him kiss the floor right off. With all your experience you know for a fact that plumbers are automatic suspects.” Settles paused, glared at Bryant, and added, “Oh, yeah. One more thing.”

“What?” Bryant said.

“I watched Soldier’s elevator all the way up. I mean I watched its numbers light up. It stopped at three on the way up and the other elevator, the one the plumber rode, stopped at three on the way down. So I’d say the plumber got on Soldier’s elevator at three, killed him on the way up to four, got out, took the stairs back down to three and rode the other elevator from there to the lobby, where, for some reason, I neglected to beat the shit out of him.”