The Fourth Durango by Ross Thomas, Sarah Paretsky Page B

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