The pharmacist told her he’d maybe come up with a solution. There were these two friends of his, both real nice guys, one of them a lawyer and the other a CPA, and both of them, like him, members of the Durango City Council. And they, all three of them, he meant, were willing to set up a kind of cooperative.
What they wanted to do, she said, was pay her $150 a month each. The pharmacist would get Monday and Wednesday nights; the lawyer, Tuesdays and Fridays; and the CPA, Thursdays and Saturdays. Huckins said they thought she ought to have Sundays off.
Huckins said she made the pharmacist a counterproposal. She told him she’d agree, providing they’d fix it so Dixie could enter school in September without any hassle about a transcript of previous school records. Her second condition was that since she didn’t see any future in selling aspirins and Kotex, she wanted a job with either the lawyer or the CPA so she could learn something practical.
She said it took a week of negotiations before they agreed. The CPA gave her a job as file clerk and relief receptionist and Dixie enrolled in the seventh grade. Later, she said, when the CPA noticed his new file clerk’s head for figures, he started teaching her basic bookkeeping and even sent her to shorthand and typing classes at the Durango High School’s afternoon continuation program that, due to Proposition 13, got discontinued nine years ago.
After she’d been with the CPA for about three years, Huckins said, he made her office manager. And it was just about then that Sid Fork came back from Vietnam.
“This would be when?” Adair asked. “’Seventy-one?”
“Late ’seventy-one.”
“And you were nineteen or twenty then?”
“Just turned twenty.”
“So how’d it go after he got back?”
“We had a talk and after that it went okay.”
When Sid Fork returned from his three one-year tours with the Military Police in Saigon, she said he had a specialist six rank on his sleeve and a money belt around his waist that contained $15,000 in black market profits. Adair guessed that a specialist six was the equivalent of a staff sergeant in the army he had once served in long ago. Three stripes and a rocker, he remembered.
“Why’d the chief sign over for those two extra tours?” Adair asked.
“He liked being an MP. He also liked that black market money.”
Huckins said Fork wanted to pick up right where they’d left off. He even wanted to move down to Los Angeles, where he figured he could join its police department. She asked him what he thought he’d be in ten years-an LAPD sergeant? Fork said he didn’t see anything wrong with that until she told him he could be Durango’s chief of police in six or seven years if they followed her plan.
B. D. Huckins broke off again to ask Adair whether he would like a brandy or something. Adair said he didn’t want any brandy, but he certainly did want to hear how she’d managed the rest of it.
Huckins said she’d managed it by making herself indispensable to the three members of the sex co-op. All three were still city councilmen, so after she’d learned enough shorthand, she offered to take the minutes of the weekly council meetings. Until then the chore had been rotated among the five members. All of them hated it, she said, because it meant the note-taker had to listen to what the others said.
They snapped up her offer, Huckins recalled, and told her how much they appreciated it, especially since it didn’t cost the city anything. She told them she liked doing them a favor and if they wanted to do the old chief of police one, they ought to tell him how he could hire himself a big tough ex-MP and Vietnam vet for almost next to nothing. And that, she said, was how Sid Fork joined the Durango police force.
Jack Adair decided to ask some more questions. “Who served as city treasurer? That CPA you worked for?”
“Yes. It was a part-time job. Now it’s full-time.”
“He turn a lot of the routine stuff over to you?”
“As much as he could get away with.”
“So you took the council minutes and, in effect, kept the city’s books.”
She nodded.
“Was that sex co-op still in operation?”
“They all still paid and dropped by once or twice a week. But by then it was more therapy than sex. They liked talking to me about almost everything.”
“And everybody.”
“And everybody,” she agreed.
“I assume you remembered what was said.”
“I wrote it down.”
“A CPA, a lawyer and a pharmacist,” Adair said, as if thinking aloud. “They must’ve poked their noses into the closets of every skeleton in town.”
“If they missed any, Sid didn’t.”
“You two were still close?”
“He got Sunday nights.”
Adair nodded his appreciation, if not approval, of the arrangement, looked at her shrewdly and asked, “So which one of them died on you?”
“The pharmacist.”
She said he died in 1973 of an aneurysm not long after her twenty-first birthday. Because it was an off-year, the city charter required the mayor to appoint a successor to the unexpired term, although a majority of the council had to approve the mayor’s choice.
“With only a four-man council left, there could’ve been a tie vote,” Adair said.
“The mayor could break a tie.”
“You must’ve had yourself two solid votes on the council-the CPA and the lawyer.”
“I also had the mayor. The other two council members wanted him to nominate some young, sharp and ambitious lawyer. But my two guys told him he’d be smart to nominate a very young female who’d go on taking the minutes and totting up the books like always.”
“So how long’d it take to dump the mayor?”
Huckins said it took her five years. She served out her appointed term and was reelected to the council in 1974 and 1976. In 1978, she formed a slate and ran against the incumbent mayor, Richard Handshaw, charging that he was superannuated, negligent and incompetent until Sid Fork advised her to boil it down to baby talk.
After that she called Dicky Handshaw old, slow and lazy. She also beat him with a 52.3 percent of the vote and renamed City Park after him just three days before she fired the old chief of police and appointed Sid Fork in his place.
Adair shook his head in awe and admiration. “Named a park after him, by God.”
“It had been a rough election and I thought it would calm things down a little.”
“And maybe serve as a constant reminder of what happened to poor old Dicky.”
B. D. Huckins smiled for the first time in what must have been thirty minutes. “Yes, I suppose it could, but I never really thought of it that way.”
“Of course not,” said Jack Adair.
Chapter 14
Shortly before midnight on that last Friday in June, Kelly Vines and Sid Fork pulled up in front of a floodlit three-storied Victorian showplace that boasted two scalloped cupolas, eight gables (by Vines’s quick count) and a veranda that wrapped around two sides of the house and part of a third.
“What’s she do,” Vines asked, “charge admission?”
“The floodlights stay on till he gets home. She’s in there all by herself and the lights are sort of burglar insurance. Besides, the place is on the city’s scenic tour.”
“You have a scenic tour?”
“Yeah, but it only takes ten minutes.”
The floodlights revealed a new coat of rich cream paint that contrasted rather biliously, in Vines’s opinion, with the two shades of dark green that had been applied to the trim. A fairly new shingle roof had been left to the weather. The house itself sat well back on a deep two-hundred-foot-wide lot and was surrounded by a carefully thinned-out forest of elderly pines. At the rear on the alley was a two-story building, also floodlit, that Vines assumed had once been the stable and was now the garage.