Adair nodded his appreciation of the visiting wildlife. “Did you ever get a visit or a call from Soldier Sloan?”
“Who?”
“Soldier P. Sloan.”
“Whatever does the ‘P’ stand for?”
“Pershing.”
“I remember him.”
“Then he did visit you.”
“He died.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Before I was born.”
“Who died?”
“John Joseph ‘Blackjack’ Pershing. Born eighteen sixty. Died nineteen forty-eight.”
Danielle Adair Vines rose slowly from her chair, clasped her hands loosely in front of her and, Adair thought, suddenly looked closer to thirteen than thirty-five. She cleared her throat, lifted her chin slightly and began to recite.
“‘I Have a Rendezvous with Death,’ by Alan Seeger, born eighteen eighty-eight; died nineteen sixteen.” She cleared her throat again. “‘I have a rendezvous with Death / At some disputed barricade / When Spring comes back with rustling shade / And apple-blossoms fill the air.’”
She smiled shyly at Adair. “I know another one about the war your friend General Pershing fought in. It’s called, ‘In Flanders Fields.’”
“I think I know that one,” Adair said. “It’s also very nice. Very moving.”
She sat back down in the chair and placed her still folded hands on the table. “Will Mr. Vines come to see me again?” she asked. “He’s such a silly man.”
“I’m sure he will.”
“And will you be coming back?”
“If you like.”
“I’ll have to think about it. You’re not silly like Mr. Vines, but I still have to think about it. And I am so very sorry about your friend.”
“Who?”
“The one who died. General Pershing.”
“Thank you, Dannie,” said Jack Adair as he rose. “That’s very kind of you.”
The resident psychiatrist was Dr. David Pease, a forty-three-year-old twice-divorced Jungian, who held a twenty-percent interest in the Altoid Sanitarium. He wore a green jogging suit and had a wedge-shaped head, some thinning curly gray hair and a pair of sooty eyes that blinked so rarely that Adair was almost willing to believe they had been painted on his face.
“Dr. Altoid still with you?” Adair asked.
David Pease shifted in the chair behind his desk, didn’t blink, twitched his mouth and said, “Like Marley, Dr. Altoid has been dead these seven years.”
“Died rich, I bet.”
“Comfortable.”
“How many more months do you think my daughter will have to spend here at six thousand dollars per month?”
“We can’t provide you with a timetable, Mr. Adair.”
“What about a guess-even a wild surmise will do.”
Dr. Pease shook his head, the unblinking eyes never leaving Adair’s face. “If I guessed, you’d take it as prediction. And if it were wrong, you’d understandably hold me to account.”
“She’s out of it, isn’t she?” Adair said. “She’s floating around out there in her own private galaxy.”
“She’s much better than she was.”
“She doesn’t recognize her own father.”
“She must have her reasons.”
“Or her husband.”
“She recognizes Mr. Vines now. But not as her husband. She thinks of him as a harmless eccentric who visits her once a month.”
“Can you cure her?”
“We can help her. We obviously have helped her.”
“What if the money runs out?”
That made Dr. Pease blink. “Is that likely?”
“Considering that her father’s just out of jail, her husband’s disbarred and her brother’s dead, it’s what you might call a real possibility.”
“What about her mother?”
“Her mother can’t come up with seventy-two thousand a year.”
“We’ll keep Danielle as long as we can, of course. And if it should ever prove to be no longer possible, we will, if you like, see that she’s accepted by a well-managed state facility.”
“I didn’t know there were any well-managed state facilities.”
“Some are better run than others-like everything else.”
“How long would the state keep her?”
“Until it’s determined she’s no longer a danger to herself or to others.”
“That could be a week or ten days, couldn’t it?”
“I wish you wouldn’t try to pin me down, Mr. Adair.”
Adair rose. “Either Vines or I will be here with the money on the fifteenth as usual.”
Dr. Pease also rose until he reached his full height, which was a stooped six-foot-four. “She’s worth every cent, Mr. Adair.”
Jack Adair studied the unblinking Pease for several seconds, nodded and said, “Well, I suppose none of us reared our daughters to be bag ladies, did we?”
Adair waited for Merriman Dorr in the sanitarium’s reception area, which resembled the lobby of a very expensive residential hotel. As he sat, shifting restlessly in a deep wingback chair, Adair fretted about his daughter, longed for a drink and repeatedly ran Soldier Sloan’s cryptic notation through his mind: C JA O RE DV. But he could come up with nothing better than his original interpretation: See Jack Adair alone regarding Danielle Vines.
At exactly eight o’clock he hurried out the sanitarium’s front door just as the Land-Rover pulled to a stop. Adair climbed into the front passenger seat and was turning around, reaching for something in the rear, when Dorr asked, “How’d it go?”
“Lousy,” Adair said, facing the front again, the black cane in his right hand.
“So we don’t stay overnight or anything?”
“No,” Adair said, twisting the cane’s handle to the right rather than the left. “We go back.”
Dorr watched, obviously fascinated, as Adair removed the handle and the silver-capped cork, lifted out the glass tube and drank. As the whiskey’s glow spread, Adair offered the tube to Dorr, who shook his head. “Not when I fly.”
“Good,” Adair said and had another drink.
After they passed the twin fieldstone pillars at the end of the drive, Merriman Dorr slowed the Land-Rover to a stop, looked both ways for approaching traffic and said, “Want to sell me that thing?”
“The cane?”
“The cane.”
“It’s already promised to somebody else.”
“Who?”
“Sid Fork.”
“That shit,” said Dorr as he fed gas to the Land-Rover’s engine and went speeding off down the winding narrow blacktop road that had no shoulders.
Chapter 29
Because he had stopped to open a can of Budweiser, his third in three hours, Ivy Settles almost didn’t see the pink Ford van as it sped along Noble’s Trace, heading east toward Durango’s city limits and, possibly, U.S. 101.
Settles had spent the last three hours cruising the streets of Durango on his own time in his own car. He was searching for the pink plumbing van and trying, without success, to lose the rage and humiliation that had almost engulfed him after the murder of Soldier Sloan.
The fifty-one-year-old detective had nearly convinced himself it wasn’t his fault that Sloan was dead. But Settles’s powers of rationalization, which, like most policemen, were formidable, had failed him when it came to the short fat false Francis the Plumber. You let him walk, Ivy, he told himself. You. Nobody else. And that’ll make your name in this town from now on. Ivy Settles? Sure. He’s the one Sid Fork hired off the turnip truck.
Such dark thoughts finally had caused Settles to yell at his thirty-seven-year-old bride of six months, storm out of their two-bedroom house on North Twelfth, get into his four-year-old Honda Prelude, stop at a liquor store for a six-pack of Budweiser and cruise Durango for the next three hours, waiting for his rage to subside and his humiliation to go away.
He had begun his search for the pink van at 6:03 P.M. down near the Southern Pacific tracks. He worked his way out toward the eastern city limits, circling every block and driving down almost every alley. By 7:15 P.M., he had reached the city limits so he popped open another can of beer and repeated the search, this time from east to west.