Twilight at Mac's Place m-4

by Ross Thomas

  Haynes joined her at the window to inspect the snowfall. They stared at it silently until she said, “I was sure you’d tell him about Letty and the two guys with sacks over their heads.”

  Still watching the snowfall, Haynes said, “It’s really coming down.”

  “Why didn’t you tell him?” she asked. “Because you never break a promise—or because you only make the kind you won’t have to break?”

  “I make and break them all the time,” he said. “Especially the ones I make to myself.”

  “Well, I think it’s awfully sweet that you didn’t tell him.”

  Moments later, Haynes found himself wondering whether it was Erika McCorkle’s mild flattery or mere impulse that had caused him to tell her about the missing memoirs. Whatever it had been, his normal caution prevented him from telling her about those who were anxious to buy them, sight unseen.

  Erika seemed to ponder what he had told her before she asked, “So you think, or maybe just suspect, that somewhere, maybe even here, there’s a true honest-to-God manuscript chock-full of political dynamite and shocking revelations and other assorted hot stuff?”

  “Right,” Haynes said and watched a sudden thought streak across her face, which, he realized, would never be any good at dissembling.

  “Then that’s what those two guys were really after, wasn’t it?” she said. “The ones who tied up Letty.”

  “That doesn’t exactly follow.”

  “Sure it does,” she said. “And the same two guys who shot Zip and tied up Letty must’ve threatened to drown Isabelle unless she told them where the manuscript was. But after she told them it was here at the farm, they drowned her anyway.”

  “You just set the new indoor record for intuitive leaps.”

  “I take it you’re not buying.”

  “I might,” Haynes said. “If everything checks out.”

  “What the hell’s everything?”

  “Let’s start with Letty and why she was here.”

  “She was worried about Zip.”

  Haynes stared at her for a moment, turned, went back to the phone, picked it up and tapped out a long-distance number. When the phone began to ring, he said, “Get on the extension.”

  After Erika McCorkle lifted the extension phone to her ear, she heard it ring two times before a woman answered with, “Mott, James, Lovelandy and Nathan.”

  “Mr. Mott, please. This is Granville Haynes and it’s important.”

  After a brief pause, Howard Mott came on the line with, “Nothing can be important on a Saturday morning.”

  “I’m at Steady’s farm.”

  “So?”

  “Did you call Sheriff Shipp and ask him to find somebody to take care of Steady’s horse?”

  “Sure,” Mott said. “When I called to tell him Steady was dead and that I was sending a guy out to pick up the Cadillac, I also asked if he knew anybody who’d feed, water and exercise the horse for twenty bucks a day. He said he did.”

  “How’d you know about the horse?”

  “Steady told me about—what’d he call him, Zip?—a year or so ago. But I forgot about him till Steady’s ex-wife called me.”

  “When?”

  “The morning after Steady died. She was worried about the horse. I told her I’d take care of it and to stop worrying. What’s wrong?”

  “Somebody shot the horse.”

  There was a brief silence until Mott said, “What d’you want me to do about it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Good,” Howard Mott said and hung up.

  Chapter 18

  They began the search upstairs, where they discovered three bedrooms, one bath, two old mirrored wardrobes and a lone closet. Haynes’s inspection of the bathroom medicine cabinet revealed an empty bottle of St. Joseph’s aspirin, a new toothbrush still in its plastic package and somebody’s diaphragm.

  The smallest of the three bedrooms was meanly furnished with a thin mattress on a brass bed that was little more than a cot. An oval rag rug lay beside it on the pine floor that had been stained a dark brown. A chest of drawers, painted Chinese red, was empty. The other furniture consisted of a 1940s bridge lamp, a straight-backed wooden chair and an ancient wardrobe whose mirror was turning silver-gray. Haynes looked inside the wardrobe, found two wire coat hangers and decided he was in a guest room that had been deliberately furnished to discourage long stays.

  They found little of interest in the next bedroom other than a short stack of explicit sex magazines in a bedside table drawer. The magazines featured photographs of pairs of naked women, fairly young, who groped and grabbed each other while apparently trying to decide whether to fix hamburgers or meat loaf for dinner.

  Erika McCorkle flipped through one of the magazines and called it a sexual crutch. Haynes went through another issue more slowly and said nothing. As he put the magazines back into the table drawer, Erika McCorkle gave the room a further inspection and said, “I don’t know why, but this doesn’t look like Steady’s room to me.”

  “Maybe it was Isabelle’s.”

  Erika McCorkle nodded at the table that held the magazines. “Those were hers?”

  “Maybe,” Haynes said, went to the wardrobe and opened it, revealing some neatly hung dresses, blouses, pants, skirts and, below them, a half dozen pairs of women’s shoes. He closed the wardrobe door, turned to Erika McCorkle and said, “This must’ve been her room unless Steady was into cross-dressing.”

  “And the magazines?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe when Steady got the urge, he’d hurry down the hall, hop into bed and they’d lie there, flip through the magazines and get it on. But if you’re really curious about which way Isabelle went, ask Padillo.”

  “Go to hell,” she said and stalked out of the room.

  Haynes caught up with her in the third and last bedroom, the only one with a closet. She was standing near the double bed, sniffing at something. “This was his room,” she said. “You can still smell the cigarette smoke.”

  Haynes opened the two doors of the wide shallow closet. There were six blue shirts and six white shirts from Paul Stuart that had been bought in New York or Tokyo or, more likely, by mail order. The shirts were on hangers and looked as if they had been washed and ironed by loving hands.

  A row of tweed jackets, all remarkably alike, took up another yard of closet space. The rest was occupied by a dozen pairs of gray and tan trousers, which were followed by a dark blue suit, a windbreaker and a Burberry raincoat with raglan sleeves.

  Haynes knew he was viewing a collection of the semi-uniforms his father had worn throughout his adult life, even in the hot countries. He remembered color photographs—mostly Polaroids—obviously taken in one tropical clime or other, where Steadfast Haynes’s dress code had been either a blue or white long-sleeved oxford button-down shirt, but no tie, tan cotton pants and shoes that didn’t have to be laced up. If it were only hot, the shirt sleeves might be rolled up two full turns; if sizzling, they might be rolled above the elbows.

  “Steady’s room,” he agreed and shut the closet door.

  Turning to give it all one final look, Erika McCorkle said, “Not much, is there? No watercolors on the walls or oriental rugs on the floor. No snapshots of you at seven or nine. No souvenir ashtrays from Djakarta or assegai spears from Africa.”

  “They didn’t use assegais where he was and he traveled light.”

  “And alone?”

  “Nearly always.” Haynes gave the room his own final inspection. “This must be the only house he ever owned.”

  “What’d he do with his money?”

  “Lived well, spent it on alimony and sent me to expensive schools.”

  “Which university?”

  “Virginia.”

  “Huh,” she said. “That’s where I went.”

  Downstairs, they searched the kitchen first, Haynes using a kebab skewer he had come across to probe sacks, bags and cartons of staples, not at all sure of what he expected to find. He found noth
ing.

  While Erika McCorkle searched the living room, Haynes put on the old duffle coat that hung from the hall hatrack and walked through the falling snow to the barn. He spent twenty minutes searching it, saving Zip’s stall until last, but found nothing beneath the oats or under the straw or in the half barrel of water.

  He finally knelt beside the dead horse and looked closely at the entry wound. There was no exit wound and Haynes guessed that the single round had been fired from either a revolver or semiautomatic handgun of 9mm caliber or less.

  It was snowing even more as he walked back to the house, entered through the jimmied kitchen door, hung the duffle coat back on the hall hatrack and found Erika McCorkle in the dining room/office, standing beside the two gray steel filing cabinets.

  She pulled out a top drawer and said, “Empty. All empty.”

  Haynes opened and closed a couple of the drawers, glanced around the room and indicated the personal computer that was next to the IBM Wheelwriter. “How friendly are you with computers?” he asked.

  “Chummy,” she said, sat down, switched it on, studied its keyboard and tapped out a demand for entry. The computer promptly requested a password. Erika first tried “Steady” without success, then several others with the same result. She looked up at Haynes and asked, “What was Steady’s mother’s maiden name?”

  “Cobbett with two b’s and two t’s.”

  After she tried Cobbett, the computer lowered its drawbridge and moments later Steadfast Haynes’s memoirs appeared on the screen, line by line.

  “Stop and start over,” Haynes said.

  “Slower?” she asked, tapping the keys.

  “Slower.”

  Once again the title page appeared, followed by the four lines of Housman, then the father’s cryptic dedication to the son and, finally, page four and Chapter One, containing the two sentences that composed what Haynes had come to think of as the false manuscript:

  “I have led an exceedingly interesting life and, looking back, have no regrets. Or almost none.”

  There was a short gap on the screen until one word began appearing in capital letters, filling the rest of the fourth page and all of the fifth, sixth and seventh with, “ENDIT ENDIT ENDIT ENDIT ENDIT ENDIT…”

  “Shut it down,” Haynes said.

  After the screen went blank, Erika McCorkle said, “What’s an endit?”

  “Cablese. Steady used to sign off his cables with it when I was a kid: ‘Arriving Tuesday Air France 1732 GMT meet me endit Steady.’ Ten words exactly.”

  Erika McCorkle’s face shone with what Haynes suspected was yet another revelation. “That’s why the house is so damned neat. Those two guys with sacks over their heads knew just where to look. In the computer.”

  “Unless they weren’t here to find but to plant something. Maybe a dead end.”

  “The endits?”

  Haynes nodded, rose, went over to the computer and bent down to unplug it. “Let’s put this in your car.”

  “Are you stealing or borrowing it?”

  “Neither. I’m inheriting it. Howard Mott says Steady left me all of his keepsakes, souvenirs and memorabilia.”

  “There aren’t any.”

  “Right, but should the question arise, Mott can argue that a man’s personal computer is as much a part of his memorabilia as his diary.”

  “That’s bullshit trying to be sophistry.”

  Haynes nodded agreeably. “So it is.”

  They were going down the slippery snow-covered front porch steps, carrying the computer, when the sedan silently emerged from behind the curtain of falling snow. The sedan, a large Ford with chains on its rear wheels, came to a stop and a lean man in his fifties got out. Staring at Haynes with blue eyes that looked as if they would stay well chilled, winter or summer, the man let his right hand stray toward the holstered revolver on his hip just before he used a hard baritone voice to say, “I sure as hell hope that’s you, Granville.”

  It took five minutes under the shelter of the covered porch to convince Sheriff Jenkins Shipp that the son and heir of Steadfast Haynes was carting off the computer only because he hoped it would contain his dead father’s last thoughts.

  Finally, the sheriff nodded his narrow head in half-convinced agreement. The head was topped by an abused Stetson that once must have been pearl gray but was now the color of old city sidewalks. The sheriff’s face seemed to be mostly cheekbones and chilly blue eyes, but there was also an assertive chin, an interesting nose and a thin-lipped mouth that would have looked cruel if it hadn’t curled up at both ends.

  “You’re saying a computer’s like a man’s diary?” the sheriff asked, his skepticism still evident.

  “Exactly,” Erika McCorkle said.

  He acknowledged her answer with a small neutral smile that said he didn’t believe her, then studied Haynes for a moment or two before he posed another question. “Know why I don’t ask you for any ID, Granville?”

  “Because I look so much like him.”

  “Spittin’ image,” Shipp said, gave Erika another small but more friendly smile and added, “Or is that spit and image, Miss McCorkle?”

  “Authorities disagree,” she said. “But in this case it’s irrelevant because he sure as hell looks like Steady.”

  “Don’t he though?” said Sheriff Shipp.

  After he helped Haynes carry the computer to the Cutlass and put it in the trunk, the sheriff, now back on the porch, carefully wiped his boots on the doormat. Once inside the house, the first thing he said was, “How come that door’s off its hinges?”

  Haynes said it was because of the snow. He had left his topcoat in Washington and needed one to go to the barn. He thought there might be one in the closet but it was locked.

  “And was there?” Shipp asked. “A coat?”

  “Right behind you,” Haynes said.

  Shipp turned to eye the old duffle coat that hung from the hall coat-rack. He touched the coat, as if to make sure it was damp, nodded, turned back to Haynes and said, “Want some help with the door?”

  Once the door was back on its hinges, the sheriff, apparently musing aloud, said, “Wonder if I’d best take a look upstairs?”

  “You think whoever shot Zip might’ve left some clues up there?” Erika asked.

  “Never can tell,” Shipp said, turned toward the stairs, then turned back. “How’d you all know his name was Zip?” Before either could answer, the sheriff said, “I didn’t tell you, did I?”

  “You must have,” Haynes said.

  Shipp frowned, as if recalling their telephone conversation. “Believe I did, at that,” he said, headed again for the stairs and mounted the first two steps before he stopped and again turned back. “Aren’t you all coming?”

  “We’d only get in the way,” Haynes said.

  When the sheriff came back down the stairs five minutes later his tanned cheeks had turned dull red and Haynes knew Shipp had found the sex magazines. He also knew the sheriff would never mention them.

  They trailed Shipp through the living room, the office/dining room and into the kitchen, where it was obvious that the sheriff made mental notes of the three coffee cups on the kitchen table, Letty Melon’s whisky glass and also the three cigarette butts she had ground out in an ashtray.

  As Shipp went through the kitchen door, heading for the barn, he noticed the gouged-out doorjamb. “What happened?”

  “When we went out to the barn that first time,” Haynes said, “we locked ourselves out and had to use a lug wrench on it.”

  As he inspected the damage, Shipp asked, “Either of you happen to smoke?”

  “Sometimes,” Haynes said.

  “Luckies?” the sheriff said hopefully.

  Haynes recalled Letty Melon’s gold Zippo and the pack of cigarettes she had taken from her flight jacket pocket. “Sorry,” Haynes said. “Camels.” His right hand dipped into his jacket pocket as if to make sure a pack was still there. “Want one?”

  “Quit thirteen years ag
o,” Shipp said and gave the ruined doorjamb another look. “Better get some boards and nail that sucker up.”

  “I plan to,” Haynes said.

  In the barn, Shipp knelt beside the dead Zip and, like Letty Melon, ran a commiserative hand down the dead animal’s neck. “Talk to your daddy’s insurance man yet, Granville?”

  “I’m not going to file a claim.”

  Shipp rose. “Then I don’t reckon you shot him.”

  The sheriff helped Haynes and Erika McCorkle carry some old boards, nails and a hammer from the barn to the house. But when Haynes, who couldn’t recall the last time he had driven a nail, kept bending the first one he tried to hammer, Sheriff Shipp began to fidget. When he could no longer stand it, he said, “Lemme try.”

  Shipp nailed the boards over the back door in less than ten minutes, driving each nail home with no more than four blows of the hammer and sometimes only three. When done, he stepped back to admire his work and say, “That oughta hold her.”

  His audience thanked him, praised his skill and walked him back to the Ford sedan, where Shipp gave Haynes, Erika and the farm one long last curious look. “You all planning to drive back to Washington today?”

  Erika McCorkle, the driver, said they were.

  The sheriff looked up at the falling snow. “That deputy I was gonna send out here went off the road, hit a tree and busted his left leg. And when I was driving out here the weatherman was talking blizzard. I was you, I’d find me a place to spend the night real quick. Maybe even right here.”

  “You don’t think they’ll be back?” Erika McCorkle asked.

  “Who’s they, Miss McCorkle?”

  “He. They. Whoever killed Zip.”

  “Can’t kill a horse twice,” Sheriff Shipp said, touched the brim of his old gray Stetson, climbed into the Ford, started the engine and drove off into the snow.

  Chapter 19