Twilight at Mac's Place

by Ross Thomas

  McCorkle turned so that his back was to the room’s door. He held his cigarette between his lips and clasped his hands on top of his head. He heard the door open and Haynes say, “Back in.”

  McCorkle backed in, hands still on his head. He lowered them and took the cigarette out of his mouth as Haynes closed the door, shot all of its bolts and fastened the chain lock. Haynes wore only boxer shorts. McCorkle thought his stomach was too flat.

  Haynes turned, noticed McCorkle’s cigarette and said, “This is a nonsmoking room.”

  McCorkle nodded politely and blew smoke at the ceiling.

  Haynes said, “I had a visitor.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  “He came with a small bolt cutter for the door chain and a pass-card—one of those electronic gizmos you can stick in the slot to open any door in the hotel. You can buy them the way you used to buy passkeys, but they’re a lot more expensive.”

  “What kept him out?” McCorkle said.

  “Acting.”

  “Acting?”

  “He was working on the chain with the bolt cutter when I started playing two parts—myself and Tinker Burns. Tinker and I talked about what we’d do to the son of a bitch once we got him inside.”

  Suddenly, an uncanny duplicate of Burns’s voice came out of Haynes’s mouth. “You hold him, Granny, and I’ll reach down his throat and yank his gizzard out.” Haynes paused and resumed speaking in his normal voice. “The guy left and I thought he might’ve stuck a piece in your face and made you come back with him. But you say he’s dead.”

  “Shot dead,” McCorkle said and headed for the room’s small refrigerator. He removed a miniature bottle of Scotch whisky, poured its contents into a glass and drank half of it.

  “Who was he?” Haynes asked.

  “Harry Warnock called him Purchase.”

  “And who’s Warnock?”

  “The guy Padillo and I hired to look after us while we mind you till the auction’s over.”

  “How’d it play out?”

  “Purchase shot Warnock in the side. Then Warnock killed him.”

  “Where were you?”

  “After he shot Warnock. Purchase made a dash for the front entrance. I tripped him, stomped his gun hand and kicked his piece away.”

  “Then turned your back on him, right?”

  McCorkle nodded. “To see about Warnock.”

  “Dumb move,” Haynes said. “You should’ve kicked his face in first.”

  “I thought I had.”

  “What were you doing in the lobby?”

  “Making sure Harry was on the job.”

  “He’s an ex-cop?”

  “Ex-IRA. The Kuwaitis are said to dote on him.”

  “But he got shot.”

  “Right.”

  “And let this guy Purchase make it up to my room.”

  “When Harry gets better, maybe he’ll send you a nice little note of apology.”

  “How hurt is he?”

  “That’s what I have to find out,” McCorkle said. “But there’s no need to drag you into it.” He reached into a pants pocket, brought out a key case, removed a key and handed it to Haynes. “Know where I live?”

  Haynes nodded.

  “The key’ll get you in. You’d better get dressed, get out of here and find a cab not too close by. Once you’re inside my apartment, go down the hall to the last bedroom on the left. In the chiffonier, third drawer down underneath some sweaters, you’ll find a Chief’s Special.”

  “Loaded?”

  McCorkle looked at Haynes curiously. “Of course.”

  “Handy, too,” Haynes said. “Third drawer down underneath the sweaters.”

  “Forget it then.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Haynes said. “Will Erika be there?”

  “Probably.”

  “What do I tell her?”

  “Tell her you’re sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “For all your faults,” McCorkle said.

  Chapter 37

  Darius Pouncy, the homicide detective-sergeant, didn’t get around to McCorkle until after the body of the man identified as Horace Purchase was removed from the lobby of the Willard Hotel. By then it was 11:33 A.M. and Pouncy, after announcing he was hungry, invited McCorkle to join him for what the detective promised to be “a little light lunch.”

  In the hotel’s glittering Expresso Cafe, Pouncy ordered a large bowl of lentil soup and what turned out to be an enormous ham sandwich. McCorkle confined himself to a Beck’s beer and a cup of the soup, which he found to be quite good.

  Pouncy apparently didn’t like to let conversation interfere with his food. He ate silently and quickly with precise movements and frequent, even delicate use of his napkin. McCorkle thought the detective had the best table manners he had seen in years. When Pouncy finished his ham sandwich, he called the waitress over, ordered a cappuccino for dessert and urged McCorkle to join him. McCorkle said he would have another bottle of Beck’s instead.

  After the cappuccino came, Pouncy took a sip, leaned back in the booth and examined McCorkle. “Mac’s Place, huh?”

  McCorkle nodded.

  “Ate there a couple of times. Had us some real fine rack of lamb for two and, the second time, a hell of a roasted rolled pork.”

  “I hope you’ll come again.”

  Pouncy nodded, as if he would have to think about it, and sipped his cappuccino. After putting the cup down, he said, “Understand you tripped him, stomped his hand, kicked his piece away, then kicked his face in. That right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know who he was?”

  “I knew he’d just shot Mr. Warnock.”

  “But you didn’t know who Purchase was?”

  “No.”

  “But Warnock knew.”

  “He called him by name.”

  “What’d he say exactly—Warnock?”

  “He said, ‘Hey, Purchase.’ ”

  “And that’s when Purchase shot him, trotted by you, and you tripped him?” Not waiting for an answer, Pouncy examined McCorkle curiously and asked, “Aren’t you getting on up there in years to be pulling damn fool stunts like that?”

  “Want me to promise never to do it again?”

  Pouncy smiled. “Warnock works for you, right?”

  “Not quite. My partner and I retained his firm to provide security for a friend of ours.”

  “Granville Haynes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Granville doesn’t seem to be up in his room,” Pouncy said. “You think Warnock might’ve been keeping an eye on an empty nest?”

  “I think Mr. Haynes may have decided to go somewhere more secure.”

  “Where’d that be?”

  McCorkle shrugged.

  “Moving your shoulders up and down like that could mean, ‘I don’t know,’ ‘Who cares?’ or ‘None of your beeswax.’ Which?”

  “It means he could’ve gone to see his lawyer, a friend or to another hotel.”

  “But you’re pretty sure Granville was the target Purchase wanted to hit?”

  “I assume so.”

  “Lemme tell you a little about Horse Purchase and who he really was. Horse started killing folks for a living when he was nineteen years old. But it was all legal then because he was with Special Forces in Vietnam. When Horse got killed here today he was forty-five. He went to Vietnam in ’sixty-three and stayed on till ’sixty-nine. After he came home and got out of the Army, he went into the killing business as an independent contractor.”

  “Who hired him?”

  “Folks that could afford it. The street says he charged fifty thousand a job and tried to do at least two a year. He got half up front and the rest on completion. They say he never had a dissatisfied customer and I’d say you’re awful lucky to be alive, Mr. McCorkle.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  Pouncy finished his cappuccino, sighed his appreciation and said, “Ever know a Mr. Gilbert Undean?”

&n
bsp; “No.”

  “What about Isabelle Gelinet?”

  “I knew Isabelle.”

  “Tinker Burns?”

  “I know Tinker.”

  “Seen him recently?”

  “Not since Friday, but my partner had a phone call from him Sunday. Yesterday.”

  “Then he’s probably still alive,” Pouncy said. “Reason I say that is because Mr. Undean and Miss Gelinet were both murdered and Tinker Burns discovered their bodies. Now, there were only four mourners—I reckon they were mourners—at the burial of Steadfast Haynes on Friday and here it is Monday and half of ’em are already dead. What I’m getting at, Mr. McCorkle, is that I sure hope I don’t get another call from Tinker Burns telling me he’s just stumbled across the body of Granville Haynes.”

  “I hope not either,” McCorkle said.

  “If you see Mr. Burns, you mind telling him he oughta call me?” Pouncy paused. “Might even put it a little stronger than that.”

  “You try his hotel?”

  “Been trying all morning. He’s not there.”

  “If I see him, I’ll tell him,” McCorkle said. “Is that it?”

  “Just about,” Pouncy said and looked at his watch. “I got a few more questions but they’re not gonna take much more’n thirty or forty-five minutes.”

  McCorkle leaned back in the booth, took out his cigarettes, lit one and said, “Maybe I’ll have some cappuccino after all.”

  When Granville Haynes slipped out of the Willard Hotel through its rear F Street exit, he was surprised to find the temperature had shot up into the mid-fifties. The mild weather, along with its accompanying sunshine, convinced Haynes that he should walk to McCorkle’s apartment, which he remembered was in either the 2200 or 2300 block of Connecticut Avenue.

  Haynes’s route took him past the Treasury Building and the White House and the Old Executive Office Building to Seventeenth Street where he turned north. By the time he reached the Mayflower Hotel it had clouded over and the temperature had dropped into the mid-forties. Long accustomed to southern California’s weather, Haynes decided his choices were to take a cab, buy a coat or freeze to death.

  Haynes spotted a Burberry shop at the intersection of Connecticut and Rhode Island. Inside, he asked to see a topcoat. The saleswoman said she thought he would look marvelous in a trench coat. Haynes said he would prefer something a little less dashing. She showed him a lamb’s-wool topcoat with raglan sleeves. The lightweight wool had a pattern of small brown and beige houndstooth checks. Haynes tried the coat on without asking its price, looked at himself briefly in a mirror, said he would wear it and handed her an American Express card.

  He walked the rest of the way to McCorkle’s old gray stone apartment building on the west side of Connecticut Avenue. He reached the building at about the same time Darius Pouncy began asking McCorkle the first of the “few more questions” that would continue for another twenty-six minutes.

  Haynes examined the key McCorkle had given him and noticed it was one of the tricky Swiss kind that had “pimples and craters” rather than teeth, and which couldn’t be duplicated, at least not in the United States. Haynes wasn’t sure about Switzerland.

  McCorkle had said his apartment number was 405. Haynes reached it after a ride up on an obviously new Otis elevator. He knocked on the door. When there was still no answer after he knocked a second and third time, he used the Swiss key to let himself in.

  He entered a small foyer with a parquet floor and a wall table that might have been a very good imitation Sheraton. On the table was a large cut-glass bowl full of M&M candy. Hanging above the table and illuminated by a single light were two oil paintings. The first was a rainy-day scene of a cozy-looking European bar-cafe with a small red neon sign that spelled out “Mac’s Place.” The second painting was a rainy-day scene of the same bar-cafe after it had been destroyed by either a bomb, a fire or both.

  Haynes breakfasted on four of the M&Ms as he studied the two pictures, deciding that they must have been painted from photographs. The M&Ms, he discovered, were of the chocolate-covered peanut variety.

  Popping another M&M into his mouth, Haynes went down the long hall, heading for the last bedroom on the left. It was a fairly large room, at least twelve by eighteen feet, with parquet floors, an oriental rug and a huge double bed that had been hastily made up. The room also contained a dressing table, the promised chiffonier and, placed in front of the casement windows, two disparate but comfortable-looking armchairs, each with its own table and reading lamp.

  One of the chairs was of an elegant Scandinavian design and looked particularly inviting. Piled on the table beside it were books dealing with American politics and economics, plus four recent autobiographies of former White House aides who had left the Reagan administration under clouds of varying density.

  The other chair, an old and battered leather wingback affair of impressive dimensions, seemed vaguely familiar until Haynes realized it was very much like the chair in his Ocean Park apartment—the one in which he could sit and stare at the monster pale yellow house across the street.

  On a table beside the leather chair were four books without dust jackets. Haynes picked them up, one by one, and saw they were library books, four days overdue. They consisted of an early Vonnegut, an H. Allen Smith, a Mark Twain diatribe against Mary Baker Eddy and Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, a book that Haynes had never finished.

  He replaced the books, crossed to the chiffonier and opened the third drawer down. Under what seemed to be five layers of cashmere sweaters, he found the short-barreled Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special. It was the airweight aluminum frame model loaded with .38 Special cartridges. Haynes knew the pistol to be fairly accurate within six or seven feet.

  He closed the chiffonier drawer and was about to slip the revolver into one of his new topcoat’s pockets when the sleepy voice behind him asked, “What the hell’re you doing here?”

  Haynes turned to find a tousled, barefoot Erika McCorkle, wearing a flaming red silk robe that looked like a Japanese kimono.

  “Borrowing this,” he said and displayed the revolver before dropping it into the topcoat pocket.

  “Bought yourself a new coat, I see,” she said.

  “You just get up?”

  “What was wrong with Steady’s old duffle coat?”

  “I decided to walk.”

  “From the hotel?”

  Haynes nodded.

  “And?”

  “Halfway here it turned cold so I bought a coat.”

  “That’s a Burberry,” she said. “I can tell.”

  Haynes held the coat open and looked at the inside breast label for the first time. “So it is.”

  “You want some coffee?” she said.

  “When did you get to sleep last night?”

  “Four. Five. Around in there.”

  “Why so late?”

  “I need coffee,” she said, turned and left the room.

  The kitchen was larger than Haynes had expected and filled with intimidating German appliances that looked expensive. There was even a breakfast nook, which measured the age of the apartment and its building as surely as tree rings. To Haynes, breakfast nooks belonged to a prehistoric age of nuclear families with four or five members who sat down to breakfasts of juice, cereal, eggs, bacon and toast. Haynes thought such families to be as nearly extinct as breakfast nooks. None of the families he knew ever ate sit-down breakfasts together. Or lunch or dinner for that matter.

  It took the German coffeemaker ninety seconds to produce a pint or so of coffee. Erika poured it into a pair of Meissen cups, serving Haynes first and then herself. They sipped in silence until she said, “How’d you get in—Pop give you his key?”

  Haynes nodded.

  “Why?”

  “There was some trouble at the hotel.”

  “Is Pop all right?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  Haynes told her exactly what McCo
rkle had told him but left out Horace Purchase’s attempt to break into the hotel room. Erika listened intently, ignoring the coffee and not taking her eyes from his face. When he finished, she leaned back against the benchlike seat and said, “This guy Purchase was after you?”

  “I’m not sure. Possibly.”

  “Pop shouldn’t try that kind of stuff without Mike.”

  “He seems to have done okay.”

  “He could’ve been killed.”

  “But he wasn’t,” Haynes said, drank the rest of his coffee, then asked, “Tell me about Padillo.”

  “Tell you what about him?”

  “Who he is and who he was.”

  “Ask him.”

  Haynes smiled what he hoped was his best smile. She quickly looked away, as if to avoid it. “Was what he used to do really all that rotten?” Haynes said.

  She was frowning when she looked at him again. “I can’t decide.”

  “About Padillo?”

  “About you. Sometimes you remind me of Mike, sometimes of Pop. But you really aren’t like either of them. And maybe that’s why I didn’t sleep much last night.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “That you didn’t sleep much last night although I don’t understand why.”

  “You’re fishing.”

  “I wasn’t aware of it.”

  “Okay. Here it is. I’ve decided I don’t want to care about you too much. But that’s not something I can switch on and off. And that’s why I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What’re you sorry for this time?”

  “For all my faults,” Haynes said.

  The wall telephone in the kitchen rang. Erika reached up and back, brought it down to her left ear and said hello. She listened, said, “Hold on,” and handed the phone to Haynes. “It’s Padillo.”

  After Haynes said hello, Padillo said, “You’d better stay where you are till I get there.”

  “Why?”

  “Tinker Burns. They found him shot dead in Rock Creek Park.”

  Chapter 38

  Even dead, Tinker Burns wore his dove-gray Borsalino homburg at a slightly rakish angle. He sat on a wooden picnic bench, facing out, his back propped against the edge of the tabletop. There were two small black holes in the left lapel of his double-breasted gray suit—the one with the faint chalk stripe.