Twilight at Mac's Place (15 page)

When Padillo looked up from his dinner and saw the woman hurrying across the dining room, carrying the brown paper sack, he murmured a quick excuse to the impoverished widow, rose and hurried after the woman with the sack.

Padillo came out of Mac’s Place in time to see her climb into the driver’s seat of a black Mercedes sedan that had tinted windows and a license plate whose numbers had been hidden by packed dirty snow. The Mercedes, its headlights off, rolled away silently and disappeared into the snowy night.

Padillo raced back into the restaurant. As he burst into the office, McCorkle was removing the last of the white wrapping paper from the package. Without looking up he said, “Get out of here.”

“How much time’s left?”

“None,” McCorkle said and peeled off the last piece of white paper, revealing a cardboard box that once had held five hundred sheets of Southworth bond paper. Padillo dropped to the floor. McCorkle turned his head to the right, squeezed his eyes shut, bared his teeth in a snarling grimace and lifted off the box top. When nothing happened, he opened his eyes, looked down and said, “Okay. You can get up.”

Padillo rose, went to the desk and stared down at the open box that contained half a red brick and a Big Ben alarm clock of Chinese manufacture that no longer ticked. The brickbat and the clock were nestled in a bed of the universally despised white plastic packing nodules.

Padillo lowered himself carefully into the chair that Reba Skelton had recently vacated. “Maybe she was just trying to scare you to death.”

McCorkle made no reply until he had located his pack of Pall Mall cigarettes, two glasses and the bottle of Irish whiskey. After assembling them on the desk, he poured two drinks, handed one to Padillo, lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, blew the smoke out and said, “Then she came goddamn close.”

Erika McCorkle left the engine running as she and Haynes kissed good-bye at
9:27 that Sunday morning under the amused gaze of the Willard Hotel doorman. After the kiss ended at 9:29, the unshaved Haynes opened the Cutlass door and had his right foot on the curb when he turned back with a smile that raised goose bumps on her forearms.

She replied with a bawd’s grin that ratified the Treaty of the Tall Pine Motel where the question of sexual congress had been raised and settled. Once Haynes was out of the car, she sped off toward the U.S. Treasury Building that, shimmering in the snow-polished sunshine, looked as if it didn’t owe a dime to anyone.

After she drove away, Haynes entered the hotel and was heading for the concierge’s desk to check for messages when Detective-Sergeant Darius Pouncy rose from one of the lobby’s huge high-backed chairs that apparently had been built with guests the height of Lincoln in mind.

Pouncy’s dark blue vested suit was so well tailored it took at least fifteen pounds off his weight. A red and blue foulard tie used a half-Windsor knot to fill the collar of a beautifully ironed shirt that had never seen the inside of a commercial laundry. On his feet were plain black shoes with glossy toes.

With only a nod of greeting to Haynes, Pouncy turned to retrieve his dark gray Chesterfield topcoat from the back of the huge old-looking chair. Once he had the coat draped just so over his left arm, he turned back and said, “I was about to give up on you.”

“I was snowbound,” Haynes said.

“Where?”

“Twenty miles this side of Berryville.”

“That’s where they lived for a while, wasn’t it? On a farm near Berryville. Your daddy and Miss Gelinet.”

“Nobody ever called him my daddy, but that’s where they lived. For a while.”

“Find anything interesting?”

“A dead horse and a stepmother I’d never met. I think she may have come for the horse.”

Pouncy nodded solemnly, as if Haynes had just said something profound, then glanced at his watch. Haynes was vaguely relieved to see that it was a gold-plated Seiko.

“It’s nine thirty-three now,” Pouncy said. “And I gotta carry my wife to church about ten-thirty, so I expect we just got time for coffee and a jelly doughnut or two.”

“Sounds good,” Haynes said.

The Willard’s glittering Expresso Cafe was one of those glass, chrome and black-and-white-tile places with neon accents that Haynes always avoided in Los Angeles. But its coffee was good and if the menu was devoid of jelly doughnuts, it did offer fresh strawberry tarts in January. Pouncy ordered two of them and coffee. Haynes settled for coffee.

After disposing of both tarts, Pouncy gave his mouth a couple of dainty wipes with a cloth napkin and announced: “The autopsy says she drowned.”

“Was she conscious?”

“Probably. There wasn’t any concussion. No scrapes or bruises except where they wired her up. We found the gag they must’ve used to keep her quiet. It was in the trash. But no sign of opiate use and no alcohol to speak of.”

“She had a glass of wine at lunch,” Haynes said. “A vermouth.”

“Well, using that lunch to measure by, the coroner figures she wasn’t dead long when you and Burns showed up. So it looks like they wired her up, filled the tub and drowned her.”

“They?”

“Not too easy for one person to wire somebody up with coat hangers. You gotta use two hands to straighten the things out. So if you don’t bop your victim over the head first, how you gonna do it? Especially if the victim’s young, fit and—” Pouncy paused. “I was gonna say: and don’t wanta be drowned. But who the hell does? So I’m guessing it took two of ’em. At least two. Bathroom floor wasn’t even wet. Mop was dry. No wet towels.” He paused again. “She wasn’t raped or sodomized.”

“Anything missing?” Haynes asked.

“TV set, VCR and CD player are all still there. So’s that nice new personal computer. Her watch was still on her wrist.”

“That was a thirty-two-dollar Swatch.”

Pouncy praised Haynes’s memory with a tiny smile and said, “Don’t know if she had any diamonds, gold, pearls or stuff like that because we didn’t find any. But she did have a nice full-length mink and it’s still hanging in her closet. So if it wasn’t rape or robbery, it’s gotta be something else and I figure there’re two possibilities. One, somebody hated her to death. Or two, she wouldn’t tell somebody something they wanted to know.”

Pouncy finished his coffee, pushed the cup and saucer away, again used his napkin on his lips, leaned across the white marble-top table toward Haynes and said, “So that’s why you and me’re having strawberries and coffee at a quarter to ten of a Sunday morning.”

“Because you’ve decided I might know what they thought Isabelle knew—providing there was a they.”

Pouncy nodded.

“I saw Isabelle for the first time in almost twenty years at my old man’s grave at Arlington. She said maybe fifteen or twenty words. Then she, Tinker Burns and I had lunch at Mac’s Place, where she said maybe another fifty or seventy-five words. If that.”

“Talked about a book, I believe.”

“You’ve been busy.”

“Talked about your daddy’s autobiography. Memoirs.”

“They were mentioned.”

“She either wrote the thing or helped write it.”

Haynes nodded.

“What kind of book you think it is?”

“The story of his life.”

“Well, shit, I know that. I mean is it one of those red-hot exposé books? You know: Bill stole this. Tom stole that. But I didn’t steal nothing.”

“Some might think so.”

“Even worry about it?”

“Possibly.”

“Maybe even try to hush it up? Put a lid on it?”

“Who d’you have in mind?”

Pouncy shrugged. “The CIA. Who else?”

“Then ask them.”

“Your daddy worked for them, didn’t he?”

“A lot of people say he did, but you’ll have to ask the people out at Langley.”

“Already have,” Pouncy said. “At least, I got somebody to ask for me. Somebody with a little more clout than I got since mine’s right down there next to zero. Know what they told him, this deacon of mine with all the clout? Told him they got no trace of any Steadfast Haynes ever working for them.”

“I’m not surprised,” Haynes said.

“Not surprised at what? That they didn’t have any trace of him? Or that they’d lie about it?”

“Take your pick,” Haynes said.

After Sergeant Pouncy left to take his wife to church, Haynes checked with the concierge and found that he had eight messages. Six of them were from Mr. Burns. The other two were from Mr. McCorkle, who had called at 8:42
A.M
., and Mr. Padillo, who had called at a quarter past nine.

Up in his room, Haynes called Tinker Burns first at the Madison Hotel and listened to the phone in room 427 ring nineteen times before the hotel operator suggested that Mr. Burns must not be in his room. Haynes agreed, thanked her, broke the connection and called McCorkle.

When his daughter answered the call, Haynes said, “Your dad left a message for me to call him. Is he apoplectic?”

“Apologetic,” she said.

“Why?”

“I’d better let him tell you.”

Although she obviously had covered the mouthpiece with her hands, Haynes could still hear the yell. “Pop. It’s Granville.”

There was the sound of an extension phone being picked up, followed by McCorkle’s voice. “Granville?”

“Yes.”

McCorkle was silent for a few seconds until he sighed and said, “Okay, Erika, hang it up.”

Once his daughter did so, McCorkle said, “I’ve got rotten news.”

“How rotten?”

“I was stuck up last night by a false frump with a dummy bomb and a silenced Sauer thirty-two.” He paused, sighed again and said, “She got Steady’s manuscript. I’m very sorry.”

There was a long pause that Haynes finally ended with, “A silenced Sauer is what a pro would use. But the dummy bomb’s a new touch. I’d like to hear about it after you answer one question.”

“What?”

“Was anyone hurt?”

“Only my pride.”

“Then you must’ve done everything exactly right.”

“Padillo doesn’t think so.”

“She take both of you?”

“Just me. But Padillo’s even more burned than I am. He saw her heading out the front door, carrying that grocery bag the manuscript’s in. He thinks he should’ve stopped her.”

“I think he’s lucky he didn’t try.”

“We’d like to get together,” McCorkle said. “The three of us.”

“That must be what he called about,” Haynes said. “When?”

“Noon today?”

“At the restaurant?”

“His place,” McCorkle said and recited an address. “It’s a small town house in Foggy Bottom. The best way to get there is—”

“I’ll let the cabdriver find it,” Haynes said.

“Just one other thing,” McCorkle said. “I want to thank you for looking after Erika last night. I was worried about her being out in that blizzard.”

“It was my pleasure.”

“Yes,” McCorkle said. “I imagine it was.”

The nine-hour blizzard had dumped eleven inches of snow on Reston, Virginia,
the carefully planned new town that was no longer new and had been built twenty-four years ago not far from Dulles International Airport and—depending on the traffic—within reasonable commuting distance from the District line.

Reston’s eleven inches of snow would lie undisturbed for a day or so before it was either melted by the sun or, less likely, shoveled and plowed away by removal crews. Meanwhile, Reston residents could ice-skate on Lake Anne, the thirty-two-acre artificial pond that had been named for the daughter of the town’s visionary founder, who, pressed for cash, had sold out to Gulf Oil, which in turn had been swallowed by Chevron.

Whenever this much snow fell, some Restonites got out their skis to test weak ankles on gentle slopes. Others hauled out the $65 Flexible Flyers they had ordered by phone from the Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue during bouts of nostalgia, and went coasting down the steepest slopes they could find.

One skier, well bundled up against the cold in sweater, ski pants, ski mask, dark glasses and knitted cap, glided expertly down the center of the sloping Waterview Cluster Drive and came to a neat stop in front of 12430, a three-story town house that was almost at the end of the cul-de-sac.

The town house, one of the first built on the shores of the artificial lake, featured a small wooden dock, a loggia, two bedrooms, two baths, two fireplaces and an outside steel spiral staircase that went from the dock up to a second-floor balcony. When new in 1965, the town house had sold for $32,500 with ten percent down. Its mirror twin, three doors up, had sold a month ago for $225,000.

After leaning the skis against the house, the skier rang the door chimes. The door was opened two minutes later by Gilbert Undean, the sixty-seven-year-old Burma expert, who had had to walk down two flights of stairs from his third-floor office-study, where, dressed in an old blue flannel shirt, khaki pants and fleece-lined slippers, he had been reading a gloomy editorial in the Sunday
Washington Post.

“I think you’d better let me in,” the skier said.

Undean, staring down at the small silenced semiautomatic pistol in the skier’s right hand, nodded and backed away. The skier entered, closed the door and used the gun to indicate the stairs. Undean started up them with the skier close behind.

On the second floor, they made a quick tour of the living room, dining alcove and kitchen before climbing the second flight of stairs to the third floor, where they inspected the master bedroom that had a view of the lake.

They then went down a short hall to the smaller bedroom that Undean thought of as his office. Except for the space taken up by two closet doors and a window that overlooked the street, the walls of the smaller room were covered from floor to ceiling by crowded bookshelves.

Again using the pistol to issue instructions, the skier waved Undean into a swivel chair behind an old golden oak flat-top desk. Once Undean was seated, the skier opened the closet door to reveal a pair of gray metal filing cabinets but no clothing. The rest of the closet was taken up by back copies of the
New York Times
that were piled in two five-foot-high stacks.

A wingback brown leather chair was the only inviting piece of furniture in the room. A brass floor lamp was positioned just so on the left-hand side of the chair. The skier, still wearing ski mask, gloves, dark glasses and knitted cap, sat down in the chair, aiming the pistol at Undean with both hands.

“You don’t seem surprised,” the skier said.

Undean shrugged. “You really going to do it?”

The skier nodded.

“There oughta be some way we could work it out.”

“Don’t beg.”

“Well, what the fuck,” Undean said. “I’d’ve been dead soon anyway.”

The silenced semiautomatic coughed almost apologetically. A small dark hole appeared in the lower left quadrant of Undean’s forehead. He rocked back, slumped forward and since there was nothing to prevent it, toppled out of the swivel chair onto the floor.

Tinker Burns sat behind the wheel of the rented Jeep Wagoneer, trying to decide whether he could make it through the two- and three-foot snow-drifts that blocked Waterview Cluster Drive. Burns had hoped to find pioneer tire tracks made by braver drivers and was disappointed that there weren’t any.

He did see footprints in the snow. But they only led from front doors to parked cars whose owners apparently had come out to brush snow off windshields before ducking back inside. Burns also noticed that someone had skied toward the bottom of the Waterview Cluster cul-de-sac, but he couldn’t quite make out where the ski tracks ended.

With little faith in the Wagoneer’s snow tires and four-wheel drive, and even less in his snow-driving ability, Burns got out of the station wagon and stepped into seventeen inches of drifted snow that came up over the tops of the rubber boots he had bought that morning at a Peoples Drugstore.

Having spent much of his adult life in hot countries, Burns detested snow, which he equated with famine, flood, plague, earthquakes and other natural disasters. As he slogged down the slope, cursing the white stuff, he noticed someone in a skiing outfit come out of a town house that was almost at the end of the cul-de-sac. After shouldering a pair of skis, the skier began plodding up the slope.

Burns noticed that the skier wasn’t very tall, no more than five-nine or -ten, if that, and was so masked and bundled up that the only distinguishing features were the lack of them. When they were almost abreast, Burns smiled and asked, “Know which house Mr. Undean lives in?”

The skier replied with a headshake and trudged on. Burns growled, “Thanks a lot, friend,” and resumed his inspection of the house numbers. When he found the one he was looking for, 12430, he realized it was the house the skier had just left. It was then that Burns, ever wary, almost turned and went back to his Wagoneer.

But because he had driven for nearly two hours on unfamiliar, snow-slick highways, most of them with only two lanes open to crawling traffic, Burns decided he should at least ring the doorbell to see who answered it. He rang it six times at ten-second intervals. When there was no response, he tried the doorknob. It turned and Tinker Burns went inside.

Through a glass door that led to the loggia he could see a fireplace, a redwood picnic table, the attached dock and, beyond that, the frozen lake. Burns stamped the snow off his boots onto the pebble-studded concrete floor, making as much noise as possible. But when no voice called down, demanding to know “Who’s there?”, Burns shouted up the staircase, “Hey, Undean! Anybody home?”

The answering silence increased Burns’s wariness. As he climbed the two flights of stairs, his wariness also mounted and, by the time he reached the third-floor landing, it had turned into trepidation. Panting slightly from the climb, Burns entered the master bedroom, found nothing, left it, walked slowly down the short hall and into the book-lined office-study, where he found Gilbert Undean dead on the floor.

After squatting down to make sure Undean was really dead, Burns rose and looked at his watch. It was exactly noon. He picked up the telephone on the oak desk, called the Willard Hotel and asked for Granville Haynes. Burns let the hotel room phone ring eight times before he broke the connection and called Mac’s Place. There the call was answered on the first ring by Karl Triller, the bartender, who said, “We’re not open yet.”

“Karl? Tinker Burns. I—”

Interrupting, Triller said, “Hold it a second, Tinker.”

Burns could hear Triller’s slightly muffled voice talking to someone. “Okay, here’re the car keys. When I get off the phone you guys get one bloody mary each but that’s the absolute limit.”

Burns heard some kind of protest, also muffled, which he couldn’t make out. And then came Triller’s normal voice. “Yeah, Tinker?”

“I need to find Granny Haynes because it’s an emergency and I don’t need any of your usual dumb questions.”

“What kind of emergency?”

“The bad-jam kind, asshole.”

There was a long pause—which anyone but Burns might have taken for a hurt silence—before Triller said, “Try Padillo,” recited a telephone number and hung up.

Burns tapped out the number which Padillo answered on the second ring with a neutral hello. “It’s me, Tinker. And I need to talk to Granny Haynes.”

“Why all the hard breathing?” Padillo said.

“I’m standing next to a dead body.”

“I’ll put him on.”

Burns heard an extension phone being picked up just as Haynes came on the line with a question. “Whose dead body?”

“Gilbert Undean’s. One neat shot to the head. Small caliber. In his house out in Reston.”

“You shot him or found him?”

“Found him.”

“What were you doing at Undean’s?”

“I was going to talk to him about Steady’s book.”

“Why would Undean know anything about it?”

“You saying he didn’t?”

“I’m not saying anything, Tinker. It’s your dead body. Your second one in three days.”

“Okay, right, it’s mine and I’m calling you because I may need a lawyer and thought maybe I oughta get what’s his name that Steady had.”

“Howard Mott.”

“Yeah. Mott.”

“No chance of walking away from it?”

“I already made three calls on Undean’s phone.”

“You’re fucked then.”

“I already know that, Granny. Now gimme Mott’s number.”

Haynes recited Mott’s home number only once and Burns said, “Now lemme talk to Padillo.”

“You’re out in Reston?” said Padillo when he came back on the line.

“Right.”

“Okay. That’s Fairfax County. Dial 911 and tell whoever answers your name, the address and that you’ve found a dead body. Then hang up and call your lawyer. In fact, you’d better call him first.”

“Christ, you’re making it sound like I got something to worry about.”

“Tinker, the D.C. and Fairfax County cops are going to climb all over anybody who finds two dead bodies in three days. So keep your mouth shut until your lawyer gets there.”

“You don’t think I oughta tell them how I saw the hitter coming out of the dead guy’s house wearing a ski mask, dark glasses and carrying a pair of skis over one shoulder?”

There was a long silence until Padillo said very softly, “I really wish you hadn’t told me that.”

Burns chuckled. “That’s what I figured you’d wish.”