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The stockbroker drove on toward Ventura and home, listening to a tape of Linda Ronstadt singing Nelson Riddle arrangements and feeling not only very sorry for himself, but also uncomfortably virtuous.

Chief Sid Fork was on the end stool at the bar in the Blue Eagle, eating a cheeseburger and drinking a draft beer, when Virginia Trice pushed the phone over to him. Fork automatically looked up at the clock above the bar. The time was 9:23 P.M.

After Fork said hello, Detective Wade Bryant, the too-tall elf, identified himself and said, “Ivy just got blown away by a shotgun on the Trace two blocks past the city limits. A woman in her late twenties is also down and dead. Same way. Ivy’s Honda is parked with its lights on.”

“Which side of the road?” Fork asked.

“South. The sheriff got an anonymous nine-one-one and called us. The guy that called it in told ’em about the bodies and said a pink Ford van had passed him going like a bat out of hell the other way, east.”

“Who’s the woman?”

“No ID. But she’s around twenty-seven, twenty-eight, short brown hair, brown eyes, five-nine or -ten, and she’s wearing a T-shirt that says, ‘I Shoot Anything.’ Just about everything between her belt and snatch is blown away.”

“You there now?”

“Me and Joe Huff.” Bryant paused. “You know something, Sid? It’s the first time I ever saw Joe throw up.”

“I’ll be right there.”

Fork hung up the phone and pushed it back to Virginia Trice, who said, “What’s wrong now?”

“Ivy Settles.”

“Dead?”

Fork nodded.

New grief seemed to press new lines into Virginia Trice’s face. Her eyes filled with tears. Her lower lip quivered. She sniffed noisily and said, “That’s just not…right.”

“I know,” Fork said. “Let me borrow a key to your house.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to find Vines and if he’s not there, I want to wait for him inside, not out in my car.”

“He’s got something to do with Ivy?”

“Something. But not what you think.”

Sid Fork knew what to expect when he saw the Aston Martin parked in front of the floodlit Victorian house. He sighed, parked his own car in front of the Aston Martin, got out, almost nodded hello to Kelly Vines’s blue Mercedes and started up the serpentine brick walk to the front door.

He used the key Virginia Trice had given him to enter the old house. Some lights were on downstairs, but after a quick look into the parlor and kitchen-both empty-Fork went up the oak staircase to the second floor and down the hall until he came to a door with light coming from beneath it.

He raised his fist to knock, hesitated, then knocked four times, very firmly, the way he thought a policeman should knock. A moment later the light from beneath the door went off.

“Goddamnit, it’s me-Sid.”

The light from beneath the door came back on and the door was opened by Dixie Mansur, who, from what Fork could see, wore nothing but a man’s shirt and it carelessly buttoned.

“We thought you might be Parvis with a lecture,” she said with a grin.

“Sure.”

“What’s up?”

“I have to talk to Vines.”

“Why?”

Before Fork could invent an answer, Vines appeared at the half-open door, wearing only his pants. “Talk about what?”

“We have to go someplace.”

“Where?”

“When we get there, you’ll know what we have to talk about.”

Vines’s face stiffened, immobilizing his mouth and almost everything else except his eyes, which turned suspicious as, not quite realizing it, he turned a question into an accusation. “It’s Adair, isn’t it?” Vines said. “Something’s happened to him.”

“It’s not Adair.”

Vines’s face relaxed first, then the rest of him, and he almost smiled. “I’ll get dressed.” As he turned from the half-open door, Dixie Mansur offered him the shirt she had just removed.

Vines thanked her, accepted the shirt and looked back at Fork, who, leaning against the doorjamb, was inspecting the now naked Dixie with a half-amused, half-exasperated expression that also contained, Vines thought, a trace of paternalism.

“We all leave together, Dixie,” Fork said, “so get some clothes on.”

“Why together?”

“Because if you leave later, you’ll set off an alarm and the cops’ll be here in four, maybe five minutes and arrest you for burglary, or maybe just housebreaking, and Parvis’ll have to drive up from Santa Barbara, bail you out and, if he’s smart, knock some sense into you.”

“Set off what alarm?” she said.

“If you don’t use a key to go in and out, it sets off a silent alarm.”

“I still don’t see what the rush is,” she said, picking up her blue cable-knit cotton sweater from the floor and slipping it over her head.

“The rush is because I’m in a hurry,” Fork said.

“It’d be far more civilized if we all had a drink first,” she said, stepping into her white slacks.

Fork didn’t bother to respond. Kelly Vines, now wearing shirt, shoes and pants, said he was ready to go.

“Wait a second,” Dixie Mansur said, knelt beside the rumpled bed, found her white bikini panties beneath it, stuffed them into her purse, rose and said, “Okay. Let’s go.”

Chapter 31

The chief of police-and his two detectives who had once worked homicide in Detroit and Chicago-kept their eyes on Kelly Vines as he stared down at the dead woman who wore the dark red T-shirt with the white letters that read, “I Shoot Anything.”

“Know her?” Sid Fork asked.

“Not exactly,” Vines said, still staring at the woman.

“What’s ‘not exactly’ mean?”

Vines looked at Fork. “It means I saw her once. In Lompoc. She was the one who opened the rear door of the pink Floradora Flowers van and took the pictures of me and Adair.”

Fork nodded contentedly, as if confirming his own private theory, turned to Bryant, the too-tall elf, and said, “How d’you read it, Wade?”

Bryant tugged thoughtfully at his large right ear, which Fork had long thought resembled Mr. Spock’s, shook his head in a small gesture of regret and said, “I think we rode Ivy a little too hard over there at the hotel this afternoon. I think we pissed him off royal. I think he went broody over it, got in his car, bought himself a six-pack, went looking for the pink van and just happened to find it. I think he used the flasher that’s still plugged into his cigarette lighter to pull the van over. I think she was driving it, the girl. I think Ivy made the girl open the rear door so he could see what was inside. I think the plumber and his shotgun were inside. I know a shotgun killed Ivy and I know he got one shot off himself, but I don’t know if he hit anything. I think the plumber was done with the girl and used the shotgun on her, maybe just to shut her up.” Bryant paused, frowned, erased the frown and said, “That’s what I think.”

Fork turned to the black bald detective. “Joe?”

“The same-except I threw up.”

Fork’s sympathetic nod encouraged him to continue.

Indicating the two dead bodies with a nod, Joe Huff said, “They’re nothing compared to what you’d see any Tuesday in Chicago. I got sick because I realized if I ever find that motherfucker, I won’t even try and collar him.”

“Just blow him away, huh?” Fork said.

“You know it. Thing is, I never got that mad before and I guess that’s what made me sick. But when I got through throwing up over there behind Ivy’s Honda, I still felt just as mad and I still feel that way right this minute.”

“Who doesn’t?” Fork said, again looked at the dead woman, then back at Huff. “See if you can find out who she is.”