The Fourth Durango by Ross Thomas, Sarah Paretsky Page B

into it. As he poured the bourbon, he said, “You tell her about Paul?”
    “On April thirteenth last year—one day after it happened—I drove up and handed over the money envelope two days early. She and I sat at the table in the little conference room again. There were two deer about thirty yards away and she was looking at them and smiling.”
    “When you said what?”
    “Something like, ‘Your brother, Paul, shot himself to death last night in a Tijuana whorehouse.’”
    “And?”
    “Nothing.”
    Adair sighed and sat down in a chair, slowly and carefully, as if in great and unfamiliar pain. He sat leaning forward, arms on his knees, holding the glass in both hands and staring at the carpet.
    “Darwin Loom,” Adair said.
    “The associate warden.”
    Adair nodded, not looking up. “He told me it was suicide before he even let me take that La Jolla call from you. Preparing me for the shock, I guess. Know what I told him?” Adair looked up from the carpet and cruelly parodied his own voice. “My son’d never take his own life. Not my son.” He gave his head a self-accusatory shake and resumed his examination of the carpet. After a long silence Adair again looked up and said in a suddenly weary voice, “So tell me what happened, Kelly. Not that crap you told me over the phone.”
    “You’re right. It was crap.”
    “Afraid you were being taped?”
    “Or that you were.”
    “Your letters weren’t any better. Same reason?”
    “Same reason.”
    Adair sighed. “Let’s hear it.”
    “The cops in Tijuana claim Paul was alone in an upstairs room when it happened. They also claimed he’d ordered up two girls. After I drove down there from La Jolla, one of the cops showed me what he said were sworn statements from both girls, who by then’d disappeared, apparently forever. The statements said the girls were on their way up to Paul’s room when they heard the shots.”
    “Why’d they call you—the Tijuana police?”
    “Paul had one of those ‘in case of emergency notify’ cards in his billfold. Your name, old address and phone number had been typed in and crossed out. Mine was written on the back of the card.”
    “So how’d they lay it out for you—the Tijuana cops?”
    “They said he poked a forty-five in his mouth and pulled the trigger twice.”
    “Twice?” Adair said.
    Vines nodded.
    “You saw him, I guess.”
    “I saw him, Jack. Most days I still see him. It was twice.”
    Shaking his head in disbelief, Adair gave the carpet a final inspection with blue eyes that once had seemed as innocent as a nine-day-old kitten’s. But when he looked up now it was obvious all innocence had either died or moved away. They look like blue dry ice, Vines thought, and if he moves them fast enough, I’ll get to hear them click.
    Below the bleak eyes and the meandering nose was Adair’s wide mouth that, in the past, was always twitching its ends up, as if at some cosmic joke. Now the joke was over and the mouth was clamped into a thin line that Adair pried open just wide enough to say, “Okay, Kelly, now you can tell me the real bad stuff.”

Chapter 8
    The real bad stuff began a little less than fifteen months ago just after Vines was disbarred and Adair was sent to prison. It was then that Vines had packed one large suitcase, left his native state and driven the blue Mercedes to La Jolla, California, where he moved into a more or less rent-free beachfront condominium at Coast Boulevard and Pearl Street.
    The expensively furnished two-bedroom apartment belonged to a former client, the oil exploration firm of Sanchez & Maloney—usually referred to by those in the oil business as Short Mex and Big Mick. When oil was nudging $30 a barrel the firm had bought the condominium as a weekend retreat the two partners could be whisked to by company jet.
    They had managed to use it three times before offering it to Kelly Vines at the bargain rent of $3,000 a month, which he was to deduct from the $39,000 the