Twilight at Mac's Place

by Ross Thomas

  “I can imagine,” McCorkle said, called a waiter over and asked him to relay an invitation to Padillo.

  By the time Padillo arrived, McCorkle had learned that Ozella Pouncy taught music and art in a District junior high school, was an assistant choir director at her church and that there were two Pouncy children, Graham, fifteen, and Amelia, twelve.

  Once the introductions were made, Padillo sat down next to Sergeant Pouncy. When Ozella Pouncy asked if he would like some coffee, Padillo smiled and said he had already reached his limit for the evening.

  Pouncy leaned forward, rested his elbows on the table and dropped his voice into a conspiratorial murmur. “I could’ve called you guys with what I’m gonna say, but I figured they might’ve tapped your phones by now.”

  He ended the statement with a glance at Padillo. If Pouncy was expecting a reaction, all he received was a polite nod. Pouncy nodded back thoughtfully and turned to McCorkle. “We closed the file on Horace Purchase early this evening. In fact, it was just after I dropped you off at your house with a message for Granville Haynes. He ever get my message?”

  “He got it,” McCorkle said.

  “Haven’t heard from him.”

  “He has a lot on his mind.”

  “Who closed the file on Purchase?” Padillo asked.

  “Maybe you oughta be asking why, not who.”

  “All right. Why?”

  “Because we were told to.”

  “Who told you?”

  “The mayor told the chief and the chief told the captain who told the lieutenant who told me. I didn’t have nobody left to tell so I started closing it out. You’ll have to guess who told the mayor because juicy stuff like that never quite dribbles down to my level.”

  “What’re you closing it out as?” McCorkle asked.

  “Either self-defense or justifiable homicide,” Pouncy said. “They were still arguing about it when I got up and left.”

  “It was both,” McCorkle said.

  “Well, you were there and I wasn’t so I won’t argue. Besides, we got plenty of eyewitnesses who back you up. But that ain’t the point.”

  “What is?” Padillo said.

  “The point is that they’re not gonna go after who hired Horse Purchase.” Pouncy paused, frowned and said, “And that’s why I got so pissed off, excuse me, sugar.”

  Mrs. Pouncy gave him a reluctant nod of absolution.

  “They just say no?” Padillo asked.

  “They don’t ever come out and give you a flat no on something like that,” Pouncy said. “They say it’d be inappropriate or maybe counterproductive or even—and this was a new one on me—nugatory.” Pouncy’s smile was bitter. “Nu-ga-to-ry. Shit.”

  Before Pouncy could apologize to his wife again, McCorkle said, “So you’re dropping Purchase altogether?”

  “Done dropped him right alongside of who hired him. Of course, that still leaves me with Gelinet, Undean and old Tinker Burns—except Undean’s outta my jurisdiction, although me and the Fairfax County sheriff’re trading back and forth on what we got, which ain’t much. But those three are a kind of natural progression. Gelinet, one; Undean, two; Burns, three—and four could be Granville Haynes. Course, I’m not too worried about Granville because he was in homicide out in L.A. and knows how to do. But I thought somebody oughta tell him we’re nugatorizing Horse Purchase and mention that whoever hired Horse is still on the loose. That means—well, Granville can figure out what it means for himself.”

  “We’ll tell him when he checks in,” Padillo said.

  “When you reckon that’s gonna be?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Bet I know.”

  “Okay. When?” Padillo said.

  “When it’s too damn late. That’s when.”

  Haynes watched Erika McCorkle read the final page of his father’s memoirs and place it on the upside-down manuscript that was next to her on the bed. She sighed, leaned back into the four pillows she had piled against the bed’s headboard, locked her hands behind her head and stared at the motel room’s ceiling.

  She was still staring at it a minute later when Haynes began speaking in a clipped, mannered voice whose intonation and timbre bore an uncanny resemblance to that of his dead father:

  “Had it not been for certain operations I conducted at the behest of the Central Intelligence Agency in Africa, the Middle East, Central America and, to a certain extent, in Southeast Asia, at least five—and possibly six—third world countries would still be laboring beneath the yokes of their Marxist-oriented governments.” Haynes paused dramatically. “My only failure was in Southeast Asia. And that was a failure of nerve. But it was America’s nerve that failed—not mine.”

  Erika brought her gaze down from the ceiling, her hands from behind her head, and clapped softly three times.

  Haynes grinned. “A fair summation?”

  “Fair but broad,” she said. “I’ve never read such crap.”

  “Maybe not such well-written crap anyway. No dull moments. Lots of action and lots of gossip. A bit of potted and easily digested history. And you get yanked from one adventure to another so fast you barely have time to wonder what happens next. Isabelle did a great job. She even made it sound like Steady when he’d had two or three belts and was feeling expansive.”

  “You’re still sure she wrote it?”

  Haynes nodded. “I think Steady gave her the blueprints and the specifications and she put it together. Didn’t you notice the wire service urgency? Short punchy sentences with no more than two of them to a paragraph. All villains clearly defined, labeled and outnumbering our paramount hero—Steady, of course—by ten to one. But what’s especially clever is the way the CIA comes across as a bumbling, if benevolent, think tank staffed by nice tweedy chaps who smoke pipes and twinkle a lot. Twenty thousand Allen Dulleses guarding the Republic night and day. Wonderful.”

  “That the Dulles they named the airport after?” she asked.

  “That was John Foster, his brother and also secretary of state under Eisenhower. Allen was Director of Central Intelligence.”

  “Now I remember.”

  “Sure you do.”

  “Well, it’s no steamy exposé, is it?”

  “No.”

  “Then how could the CIA object?”

  “They couldn’t. That’s the point.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of Steady’s very long, very elaborate joke.”

  “You sound relieved.”

  “Wouldn’t you be if you discovered your father was a prankster instead of a blackmailer?”

  “Not if his pranks got three people killed.”

  “Four—counting Horace Purchase.”

  “Okay. Four. But if Steady’s memoirs are some kind of never-ending practical joke, wouldn’t a lot of his satisfaction have come from making sure the CIA knew the joke was on them?”

  “Sure. It would’ve come from that. And from the money. Don’t ever forget the money.”

  “The money turns him into a con artist instead of a prankster.”

  “Still better than a blackmailer.”

  “So when was the CIA supposed to find out they were the butt of a joke?”

  “After they paid Steady the money not to publish. And after they read the manuscript that he’d sent them to make sure they knew what they’d paid to suppress.”

  “And learned they’d been had.”

  Haynes looked thoughtful and, for the first time, a little sad. “He must’ve had it all planned out—everything except the part about his death.”

  “His and the others,” she said, sat up and swung her feet to the floor. “Okay. Now what?”

  “Now we go see Howard Mott, stash the car with him and figure out some way to get what Steady wanted.”

  “The last laugh—or the money?”

  Haynes grinned his inherited grin. “I don’t know yet,” he said. “Maybe both.”

  Chapter 42

  The first shot sounded like a sto
ut stick being snapped in two. Haynes classified the weapon as a .22-caliber rifle and guessed the shooter to be at least fifty yards away because he heard the shot an instant after the round buried itself in the motel room door.

  Haynes spun away from the door he had just closed and tackled Erika McCorkle from the rear, dumping her onto the walk in front of the old Cadillac’s grille. She lost her canvas overnight bag and it skidded beneath the car.

  Still half lying on her, Haynes turned his head to stare up at the bullet hole just as another round smacked into the room’s door three inches to the left of the first one. The sound of the snapped-in-two stick again came a split second later.

  A third shot took out the light above the motel room door. It was as if the shooter needed to prove that the first two rounds hadn’t been misses, but marksmanship. Haynes slipped McCorkle’s borrowed revolver from his topcoat pocket, crawled off Erika and wormed his way to the left side of the car where he peered around the front tire—the one that had replaced the flat.

  As Haynes peered around the tire toward the top of the motel’s U, he glimpsed a dark blue or black sedan speeding off into the night. Haynes rose, stuck the revolver back into his topcoat and helped Erika to her feet. Her mouth was open as she tried to suck great gobs of air into her lungs.

  “You hyperventilating?”

  She shook her head and kept on gasping.

  “I can go get that sack the food came in and you can breathe into that.”

  She shook her head again, even more vigorously, and said still gasping, “Nobody—ever shot—at me—before.”

  “The shooter’s gone,” he said.

  “You sure?”

  Haynes nodded. “He wasn’t shooting at us. He was shooting at the door and the light. He hit both.”

  “Oh, shit, I’ve never been so scared.”

  “You were supposed to be. How is it now?”

  “I’m still shaking.”

  “I mean your breathing.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Then let’s go see Mott.”

  “And where the hell can we go after that?”

  “How do you feel about Baltimore?” Haynes said.

  After retrieving Erika’s canvas bag from beneath the car, they drove slowly toward the exit. Some half-clad motel guests were peeking out of partially open doors, as if trying to decide whether what they had heard were gunshots or backfires. The motel’s owner, shivering outside in his shirt sleeves, gave the old Cadillac an uninterested glance before ducking back into the warmth of the motel office. Haynes estimated that his $100 cash deposit would cover the room and also the cost of damage to the door and the light fixture.

  “How’d we get found so fast?” Erika asked just after Haynes turned onto Wisconsin Avenue and headed south.

  “No idea.”

  “I thought you were a detective.”

  “I was.”

  “Well, suppose somebody like us came to somebody like you and said, ‘Hey, we were trying to hide out from the bad guys but they found us and took a few shots at us. So what d’you think we should do now?’ ”

  “I’m still a cop?”

  “You’re still a cop.”

  “Then I’d probably say, ‘How d’you folks feel about Baltimore?’ ”

  Since there was no polite way to refuse the freshly baked apple pie that Lydia Mott pressed on them, Haynes and Erika each had a piece, plus a cup of coffee, and then followed Howard Mott in his pyjamas and bathrobe up the stairs and into the study-cum-music room.

  Once they were seated, Haynes gave Mott a concise report on the incident at the Bellevue Motel. After Haynes finished, Mott asked his first question. “How long were you there?”

  “Five or six hours.”

  “Any idea of how you were found so quickly?”

  “None—except whoever came looking must’ve had help.”

  Mott pushed back the left sleeve of his enormous blue-and-white-striped bathrobe to look at his watch. “You checked into the motel when—around six?”

  “Closer to five-thirty.”

  “So the shooter found you by eleven—approximately.”

  “It could’ve been a lot earlier.”

  “Why?”

  “Because whoever it was waited for us to come out of the motel room and we were in there for at least five hours.”

  “I went out once to get some food,” Erika said.

  Mott looked at her and asked, “When was that?”

  “Not long after we got there.”

  Haynes leaned forward suddenly, betraying his impatience. “The question is still, how did he find us and where does a shooter go for help? Not to the D.C. cops or the FBI—and who the hell else has enough bodies to check every motel in the Washington area?”

  Mott smiled slightly. “Those weren’t questions. They were the introduction to a theory.”

  “Or an approach from a different angle,” Haynes said. “Answer me this: Who saw and even touched Steady’s old Cadillac other than Erika, myself and Ledell Dark, master mechanic?”

  “Horace Purchase,” Erika said.

  Mott asked, “He was actually close enough to touch it?”

  “Dark claims he was close enough to drool on it.”

  “And that means close enough to slap on a sender,” Haynes said.

  “An electronic transmitter,” Mott said.

  Haynes nodded.

  “But why would Purchase be so interested in Steady’s car?”

  “It was the last place left.”

  Mott frowned. “To do what?”

  “To look for the manuscript.”

  “Please, God, don’t let him tell me there really is a manuscript.”

  “Yes, Howard, there really is a manuscript.”

  “You’ve actually seen it, touched it, maybe even read it?”

  Haynes nodded.

  “Me, too,” Erika said.

  Mott sighed. “All right, let’s deal with the car and its sender first, then come back to the manuscript. Okay?”

  Haynes again nodded.

  “Apparently Purchase was hired to kill you and he also may have been given the additional and earlier assignment of locating and, I presume, buying the Cadillac.”

  “Dark claims Purchase offered him twenty thousand cash,” Erika said.

  Mott gave his right earlobe a thoughtful tug. “So when Purchase inspected the car, he had the opportunity to attach the electronic device.” Without waiting for comment, Mott continued, still tugging at his earlobe. “But all that happened before anyone could’ve known you two would pick up the car. In fact, the idea didn’t occur to me until a few seconds before I suggested it at McCorkle’s. Therefore—and I’m getting a little weary from leaping to all these conclusions—someone was monitoring the car electronically when you picked it up. The someone obviously wasn’t poor Purchase because he was dead. But whoever it was used the sender’s signal to track you to the motel.”

  “Sounds about right,” Haynes said.

  “Have you attempted to find the gizmo?” Mott asked.

  “No.”

  “Then that expert marksman may even now be lurking outside my house.”

  “Want to run him off?” Haynes asked. “Just dial 911 and tell the cops you’ve got burglars. After they notice your Cleveland Park address, they’ll be here in three minutes flat. Maybe two.”

  Mott ignored the suggestions. “When you searched the car for the manuscript, why didn’t you find the sender?”

  “Goddamnit, Howard, I told you we didn’t search the car.”

  “We didn’t have to,” Erika explained. “We had a flat and by pure dumb luck discovered Steady’d hidden his manuscript underneath the spare tire.”

  “But you do intend to look for it?” Mott said.

  “When we leave here, I’ll run the car up a lift in some all-night gas station and find the thing in less than ten minutes.”

  “And the sharpshooter?”

  “Fuck him,” Haynes said.
r />   Mott nodded slowly. “That’s not bravado, is it?”

  “Hardly. He wants me scared, not dead. Otherwise I’d be dead at the Bellevue Motel. Now, can we get on with it?”

  “All right, let’s,” Mott said, paused briefly and asked, “You’ve each read Steady’s manuscript; what’s your assessment?”

  Haynes said, “It’s a snappy adventure tale about how a rather picaresque Steadfast Haynes almost single-handedly saves a long string of tottering democracies—except for a few out in Southeast Asia whose loss isn’t really his fault.”

  “Snappy?” Mott said.

  “It moves right along,” Erika said.

  “And how is the CIA portrayed?”

  “If not with reverence, at least with benevolent contempt.”

  “Nothing offensive, libelous or a threat to national security—whatever that is?”

  “Nothing,” Haynes said and gave Erika a go-ahead glance. She opened the canvas bag that rested on her lap, removed the manuscript and handed it to Mott.

  After leafing through it quickly, as if to make sure he hadn’t been handed yet another collection of blank pages, Mott looked at Haynes and asked, “Innocuous, you say?”

  “Totally.”

  Mott placed the manuscript on the table beside his chair, clasped his hands across his stomach and stared up at the twelve-foot-high ceiling. “So Steady passes the word around town that he’s written a killer exposé of the CIA. But because the agency can’t prove he ever really worked for it, there’s no way it can legally suppress publication. Fair enough so far?” he said, bringing his gaze down from the ceiling to rest it first on Erika, then on Haynes. They nodded.

  “However,” Mott continued, “Steady’s convinced that eventually the agency’ll make him an offer, which, after all the dickering’s done, he’ll accept and sign over all rights to Langley. And with that done and the money safely banked, he’ll furnish them with a copy of the manuscript, whether they ask for it or not, just to make sure they fully understand what dopes they’ve been.”

  “His last laugh,” Erika said.

  “Except Steady died,” said Mott.

  “So did three others,” Haynes said. “Or four, counting Purchase, who also helped spoil the joke.”