Twilight at Mac's Place

by Ross Thomas

  “When was it supposed to have been finished?”

  “Eight days ago. He wanted it delivered to the Hay-Adams Hotel, but when I went there today, they told me he was dead.”

  “He died a week ago Thursday,” McCorkle said.

  “That’s what the hotel people said. So when I asked them where I could find Isabelle Gelinet because, you know, she was with him when he delivered the thing—”

  “Delivered it where?”

  “To my place in Hyattsville. Here.” She reached a gloved hand into the pocket of her raincoat, brought out a business card and handed it to McCorkle. It read: “Reba Skelton, Professional Typist, Word Processor & Calligrapher (Eleven Years Experience!), 4706 40th Ave., Hyattsville, MD, 20781.” There was also a telephone number with a 301 area code and, below that, a last line that boasted: “FAST! ACCURATE! PROMPT!”

  McCorkle dropped the card into a desk drawer and asked, “What’d the hotel say when you asked for Miss Gelinet?”

  “Well, they went all, you know, funny. And then they told me she was dead and right after they told me that, they went all snotty and said if I wanted to know anything else about her, I’d have to ask the police. So I left and went to a pay phone and called them.”

  “The police?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “Well, they pretended they didn’t know anything about any Isabelle Gelinet and kept transferring my call from one person to another until finally they transferred me to a Sergeant Pouncy, who was colored—”

  “How could you tell?”

  “Well, you can just, you know, tell.”

  “I didn’t know that,” McCorkle said. “So what’d the sergeant say?”

  He said the Gelinet woman was, let’s see, the subject of an ongoing homicide investigation. And then he wanted to know who I was and why I wanted to talk to her and all that. And I, well, I just hung up on him.”

  “Good thinking,” McCorkle said. “But why come here?”

  “Because I’m looking for Mr. Haynes’s son.”

  “Granville?”

  “Yes. At least that’s what he’s called in the manuscript.”

  “I still don’t understand why you’d expect to find him here.”

  “Well, after I hung up on that Sergeant Pouncy, I started thinking. So I called the Hay-Adams back and told them a fib. I told them I was Miss So-and-So with American Express and that we had some outstanding charges on Mr. Steadfast Haynes’s account and wanted to know who was handling his estate. I was talking to the hotel accounting people this time, and they weren’t nearly so snotty as those stuck-up things on the desk.”

  “When did you talk to the accounting people?”

  “Today. Just before noon.”

  “What’d they tell you?”

  “They told me to call his lawyer, Howard Mott. So I called his office right away, even if it is Saturday, but by then it was beginning to snow and nobody answered. So I looked up his home number and called that, but he wasn’t there. I did get to talk to Mrs. Mott and told her I was looking for Granville Haynes and she was very nice. She told me to try the Willard Hotel and, if young Mr. Haynes wasn’t there, maybe somebody at Mac’s Place might know where I could find him.”

  McCorkle leaned back in his chair and studied the woman in the red knitted cap. “You’re quite a detective, Miss Skelton.”

  “What I am, Mr. McCorkle, is broke.”

  “You want me to give Granville a message?”

  “No, what I’d like you to give him is this.” She lifted the white package an inch or so off her lap.

  “That’s the typed manuscript?”

  “Plus all the original stuff. And my bill’s right on top where he can’t miss it. Three hundred and eighty-two pages at a dollar fifty a page comes to five hundred and seventy-three dollars.”

  “Granville’s out of town,” McCorkle said. “But he’ll probably be back later today.”

  “Will you see him then?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Can you make sure he gets this?” Again she lifted the white package a few inches from her lap.

  “Yes, I can do that,” McCorkle said, anticipating the expression on Haynes’s face when confronted with yet another true copy of Steady’s memoirs.

  “I’d hate to see it get lost or misplaced or anything,” she said. “It’s the only copy.”

  “I just happen to have a safe.”

  “Oh, wow! A safe would be great!” she said, obviously relieved. “Could you also give me a receipt?”

  McCorkle nodded, rose and went to the old safe. “What’d you think of it?” he said, giving the combination a turn.

  “Of what?”

  “The manuscript.”

  “Oh, well, I thought it was awfully complicated. All those different countries and funny foreign names. I don’t follow the news much anymore and—” She stopped when McCorkle tugged open the old safe’s door.

  “Please turn around, Mr. McCorkle,” she said in a new voice that McCorkle found cold and hard and full of authority.

  Instead of turning, he said, “I know that voice. That’s the one they always use when there’s a gun in their hand.”

  “It’s a thirty-two-caliber Sauer semiautomatic with a one-shot silencer,” she said.

  McCorkle slowly turned around and took in the small semiautomatic with its four-inch silencer. The gun was aimed at his chest, a fairly large target. She held it in a gloved right hand that showed no sign of a tremor. The sealed white package that had been on her lap was now on the partners desk.

  “There’s no money in the safe,” he said. “Although you’re welcome to look.”

  “But there is a brown paper sack in there. I want you to take it out and place it on the desk. I want you to do that now.”

  “Maybe I keep a gun in the safe.”

  “Maybe you do.”

  McCorkle faced the safe again and removed the brown paper sack that contained the mostly blank manuscript Howard Mott had given to Granville Haynes. McCorkle turned yet again, went slowly over to the desk and placed the sack on it.

  “Now pick up the package I brought,” she said.

  “And after I pick it up?”

  “You lock it in the safe.”

  “Sort of a trade, right?” McCorkle said and picked up the white package.

  “Right.”

  “Now we take it to the safe,” he said as he turned and went back to the old Mosler. “Now we place it just inside.” Slowly, almost tenderly, he put the package inside the safe. “Now we close the safe’s big door.” When that was done, he gave the combination a spin and asked, “So now what do we do?”

  “You’ve locked a bomb in your safe,” she said in the same matter-of-fact voice. “It’s powerful enough to blow the safe door and do considerable damage to your office and anyone in it. But the bomb is easily disarmed. All you need to do is remove the package from the safe, unwrap it carefully and lift off the lid. It will then be disarmed. That should take you approximately three minutes. You may wish to look at your watch now because the bomb is timed to go off exactly”—she glanced at her own watch—“three minutes and twenty-two seconds from now.”

  McCorkle, still at the safe, his back still to her, looked at his watch and said, “Good-bye, Miss Skelton.”

  “Good-bye, Mr. McCorkle.”

  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. Withou
t 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.”

  Chapter 23

  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, w
ho 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—”