by Ross Thomas
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.”
Chapter 25
Seated in leather armchairs before three blazing pine logs that occasionally spat and hissed at the fire screen, McCorkle and Padillo resembled nothing so much as a pair of senior club members listening with mild interest to a younger member’s account of the so-so polo match he had just witnessed.
What they were actually listening to was Granville Haynes’s theory of how his dead father and the equally dead Isabelle Gelinet had conspired to sell Steadfast Haynes’s nonexistent memoirs for large sums.
“Sums?” McCorkle said.
“Steady would’ve figured out how to sell them more than once.”
“And Isabelle?” Padillo said.
“If she and Steady were working a con, and if Isabelle decided to solo on after he died, she could’ve made some basic mistake. Steady was always very cautious, very secretive, and he might not’ve told her what step two was. So it could be that Isabelle skipped from step one to step three, missed step two, tripped, fell and drowned.”
Padillo rose, looked at his watch, saw it was 12:32 P.M. and asked, “Who wants a drink?”
Both Haynes and McCorkle asked for Scotch and water. Padillo turned and headed for the small dining room that was really an extension of the living room. To the left of the dining room was the kitchen and, beyond that, the tiny snow-covered backyard. The yard was divided between a ten-by-twelve-foot garden, in which Padillo grew roses and basil, and a one-car alley garage, in which he kept his 1972 Mercedes 280 SL coupe.
His small white brick Foggy Bottom row house sat on a thirty-foot lot and would have had a flat front were it not for a bay window that McCorkle said made it look seven months pregnant. The house had two bedrooms and a bath upstairs. Downstairs were the living and dining rooms, kitchen, a half-bath and another flight of stairs that led down to the full basement, where there was a regulation Brunswick snooker table, at least sixty years old.
The snooker table had come with the house and nobody remembered how it had made it down the stairs and into the basement that also contained the furnace and a washer and dryer. The basement was a place Padillo tried not to visit more than three or four times a year.
He had bought the house the day Richard Nixon resigned and furnished it the following Saturday morning by walking through an upscale furniture store out on Wisconsin Avenue and pointing to floor samples that could be delivered that same afternoon. He had wound up with a lot of leather, tweed, teak and pine stuff that McCorkle told him made the downstairs look like a psychiatrist’s waiting room. Padillo had replied that that was exactly how he wanted it to look.
The only memorable pieces in the house were the dining room’s refectory table, reportedly four hundred years old, and the intricately carved mahogany sideboard that Padillo used as a bar. A young candy heiress, now more than twenty years dead, had given him the refectory table as a birthday present. He had bought the sideboard from a former first secretary at the Finnish embassy who needed the money to pay off some poker debts.
Padillo returned with the drinks, carrying two in his left hand and one in his right. He served McCorkle first, then Haynes and said, “What makes you so sure Steady’s memoirs don’t exist?”
“You saw the so-called manuscript I left in your safe?”
Padillo nodded as he sat back down in the leather chair, but McCorkle said, “I never saw it.”
“Three hundred and eighty-odd mostly blank pages,” Padillo said.
“That should miff the lady with the Sauer,” McCorkle said.
Haynes said, “Let’s come back to her.”
McCorkle shrugged. “No hurry.”
After tasting his drink, Haynes said, “When Erika and I reached Steady’s farm yesterday, his ex-wife was there. The fourth and last one. Letitia Melon. You two know her?”
“We know Letty,” Padillo said.
“But not well,” McCorkle added.
“She was locked in a hall closet under the stairs, bound and gagged.”
“She hurt?” Padillo asked.
“No.”
“Who’d she say did it?”
“Two guys with grocery sacks over their heads. She said they were already in the house when she got there.”
McCorkle asked, “Why was she there?”
“Because of Steady’s horse. She claimed she was worried nobody was looking after it.”
“Why do I get the impression you don’t believe her?” Padillo said.
“Because after she left I called Howard Mott. He told me Letty’d called him right after Steady died to remind him of the horse. Mott told her not to worry, that he’d take care of it, and he did.”
“Where’s the horse now?” McCorkle said.
“Dead.”
“How?”
“Shot. Either by Letty or the guys with sacks over their heads.”
“Why would she shoot him?”
“Why would they?”
Padillo said, “Then what?”
“I reported the dead horse to the sheriff, who seemed to be a member of Steady’s fan club. Then Erika and I searched the house, looking for a true manuscript.”
“You told her what you were looking for?” McCorkle asked.
“Why not?”
McCorkle frowned first, then shrugged and said, “Go on.”
“Erika discovered a new version of the manuscript in Steady’s computer. This new version reads just like the one I left in your safe except for one thing. Instead of three hundred and eighty-odd blank pages, this one has line after line and page after page filled with just one word: endit—spelled e-n-d-i-t. I think of it as the long version of the false manuscript. The woman with the Sauer got the short version.” He smiled slightly at McCorkle. “It would be awfully neat if she were Letty Melon in disguise.”
“It wasn’t Letty,” McCorkle said.
“Tell me about her—whoever she was.”
“I didn’t see her hair,” McCorkle said, “because she wore a red knit cap pulled down almost to her eyebrows. I didn’t see her hands because she wore red knit gloves. I didn’t see her feet because she wore rubber boots. I can’t tell you much about her build because she wore a man’s old London Fog raincoat, probably with a zip-out liner. I know it was old because the waterproofing was gone—maybe dry-cleaned away. That leaves her face. She wore yellow-tinted glasses and her eyes were a blue that could’ve come from contacts. She had a regular nose, mouth, chin and no makeup. She had two voices. One was her flibbertigibbet voice. Her other voice was the convincer—uninflected, exact, experienced. It and the Sauer made me do exactly what she said I should do.”
“No scars, moles or tattoos?” Haynes said.
“No, but she did have nice skin,” McCorkle said. “Very few lines and no wrinkles—although she could’ve rubbed her face with Preparation H just before she came through the door. That can tighten things up for an hour or two.”
“She had two walks,” Padillo said. “One was shy and one was bold. She used the shy walk when she came in—a pigeon-toed shuffle, almost clumsy. On the way out: long strides, graceful, ev
en athletic.”
“How old was she?” Haynes asked.
“More than thirty,” McCorkle said. “Less than fifty.”
Haynes finished his drink and turned away from McCorkle to put it down on a side table. Still turned away, he asked, “How’d she know the manuscript was in your safe?”
McCorkle winked at Padillo and said, “That’s been bothering me. It’s been bothering me so much that when I woke up this morning the first thing I asked myself was: Who knew I’d put the thing in my safe?”
“I knew,” Haynes said. “You knew.” He indicated Padillo with a nod. “And so did he.”
“Did Mott know?” Padillo asked.
“He knew I had the manuscript. He didn’t know it was in your safe.”
“Remember when I got out of the cab Friday afternoon and mistook you for Steady?” McCorkle said. “You were headed for Howard Mott’s office empty-handed.”
Haynes nodded.
“The next time I saw you was at the bar—just you, me, Tinker Burns and Karl. And by then you were carrying that folded-over grocery bag.”
Haynes again nodded.
“But when you left with Erika, you weren’t carrying anything. A fairly observant person might’ve noticed this and concluded you’d left the grocery bag with me for safekeeping.” McCorkle paused to sip his drink. “Safekeeping suggests a locked box of some kind. Maybe even a safe.”
“Someone had a tail on him,” Padillo said.
“Maybe,” Haynes said. “I wasn’t in Howard Mott’s office more than ten minutes before he got a call. By then he’d handed me all those blank pages. The call was from a lawyer, some ex-senator who wants to buy all rights to Steady’s memoirs for an anonymous client. He offered one hundred thousand. On my instructions, Mott told him I wanted five hundred thousand because I claim to know where I can raise enough offshore money to turn Steady’s life into a film I’d write, direct and star in. Mott may even have told him I was going to produce it.”
“What’d the ex-senator say?” McCorkle asked.
“He moaned and groused, then said he’d have to consult his client and get back to Mott on Monday. Tomorrow.”
“Any other offers?” Padillo said.
