Twilight at Mac’s Place

Fifteen

Erika McCorkle picked Haynes up in front of the Willard Hotel at exactly 7 A.M. that Saturday, each of them surprised at the other’s promptness. After muttered good mornings, she handed him a plastic container of Roy Rogers coffee and sped them to Pennsylvania Avenue and M Street, then across Key Bridge and onto the George Washington Memorial Parkway in what Haynes suspected was record time, even for a Saturday morning.

After passing the road sign that beckoned passersby to CIA headquarters, Haynes ended the long silence with a question: “You usually eat breakfast?”

“Never. Do you?”

“No.”

“You’re not much on morning chatter either,” she said.

“Turn on the radio.”

She said it was broken.

Another silence began and lasted until she turned off to take the Old Georgetown Pike that dipped and curled its way through rolling Virginia countryside. They were now in a holdout exurbia of wintry browns and grays where a faded bumper sticker on an old Volvo station wagon begged for propertied recruits to enlist in a rearguard action against unnamed developers. Haynes guessed it was a skirmish the exurbanites had already lost.

In some of the deeper brush- and tree-protected gullies — or runs, which were what Haynes remembered arroyos were called in Virginia — he could see patches of dirty snow. And since the sky was overcast with dark wet-looking clouds, he asked Erika McCorkle if she had heard a weather forecast.

She glanced at him, frowning at his tweed jacket, gray slacks, blue tie-less shirt and absent topcoat. “Fifty percent chance of snow — or can you remember what snow is?”

“I saw some two weeks ago.”

“Where?”

“Big Bear.”

“Where’s that?”

“Up in the mountains a couple of hours east of L.A.”

“You went skiing?”

“I did a commercial.”

“You were in a TV commercial?”

“Right.”

“What’s a homicide cop doing in a TV commercial?”

“Selling mustard.”

“That yellow hot-dog stuff?”

“Grey Poupon. And I’m no longer a homicide cop. I quit. Three weeks ago. Almost four.”

“And now you’re what — security consultant to the rich and famous?”

“An actor.”

There was another silence that lasted long enough for the Cutlass to accelerate from fifty to sixty-eight miles per hour. “An actor” she said. “Steady was an actor, which is probably why I believed everything he said — some of the time.”

“You’re doing seventy-three,” Haynes said.

She slowed the car to fifty. “Did it just happen?”

“You mean like cancer?”

“You know what I mean.”

“A TV producer’s fourteen-year-old daughter was killed and raped in that order. I nailed the guy, and the producer was so grateful he decided to make my dreams come true by offering me a one-line part in his cop series that was about to be canceled.”

“Was it your dream?”

“No. But he thought it was everyone’s. So I did it. An agent caught the episode, called up and asked if I’d like to do more TV stuff. We had lunch and she said I might make a bare living at it because the camera was kind to me. But if I wanted to make a decent living, I’d have to go against the box.” He paused. “She talks like that.”

“What’d she mean?”

“That there’re an awful lot of blond guys in Hollywood who want to play lifeguards and fighter pilots because they look like lifeguards and fighter pilots are supposed to look.”

She glanced at him. “You could play a fighter pilot. An older one.”

“I’d rather play a bank teller turned embezzler”

“You look too honest.”

“Exactly her point.”

“When’d you get the big break?” she said, slowing down for the red light at the intersection where the Old Georgetown Pike met the Leesburg Pike. “The one that let you quit the cops.”

“About three weeks ago,” he said.

“What’s the part?”

“I get to play a working stiff who wins a million-dollar lottery.”

She sniffed. “Not too original.”

“No,” Haynes said, “but I think I’ll enjoy it.”

By the time they reached the outskirts of Leesburg they were hungry and Erika McCorkle claimed to know an old diner, a real one, where the food was cheap, fast and good. But the old diner had been demolished to make way for a discount appliance store and they had to settle for a Denny’s a little farther on.

Inside, Haynes pretended to listen to Erika McCorkle’s diatribe against the destruction of places and things that composed her memories. She stopped only when the waitress came over, handed them menus and waited until they both ordered chicken fried steaks at 9:16 in the morning.

A little more than an hour later they reached Berryville, the Clarke County seat. Its four- or five-block-long Main Street offered two traffic lights, two banks, two restaurants (one open, one permanently closed), the usual antique shops and too many marginal-looking businesses. Haynes thought the closed restaurant must have been the place where Berryville’s establishment once gathered for morning coffee.

After he asked Erika McCorkle to double-park, Haynes got out and bought a newspaper from a vending machine. The paper’s masthead said it was an independent publication established four years after the Civil War and published every Thursday.

Back in the car, Haynes turned the page until he came to the obituaries. “He made it.”

“Who?”

“Steady,” Haynes said and began reading aloud. “ ‘Steadfast Haynes, 57, of Route 1, Berryville, died Monday in Washington, D.C., where he was to have attended the inauguration.’

“Paragraph. ‘Born in Philadelphia, Haynes served in the Korean conflict, later attending the University of Pennsylvania, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He subsequently joined the U.S. State Department, serving in Africa, Central America, the Middle East and Asia. Mr. Haynes had lived in the Berryville area for the past several years.’

“Last paragraph. ‘He is survived by his son Granville Haynes of Los Angeles, California. Interment was scheduled for Arlington National Cemetery.’ ”

As Haynes refolded the paper and placed it on the rear seat, Erika McCorkle pulled out into the traffic and said, “I didn’t know he was Phi Beta Kappa.”

“He wasn’t. Turn left at the next light, go one mile, turn right and go another mile.”

She glanced at the odometer, turned left on green and said, “But he did serve in all those places.”

“I’m not sure ‘serve’ is the operative word, but he was there, although not for the State Department.”

“The CIA, right?”

When Haynes only shrugged, she said, “That’s what I figured,” and, one mile later, turned the Cutlass onto a narrow county blacktop that ran straight as a knife past small farms of not much more than thirty or forty acres. Some of the farms boasted orchards. Others seemed to grow mostly alfalfa, now baled into fat rolls that would feed the dozens of horses who, standing behind barbed wire or split-rail fences, marked the car’s passing with indifferent stares.

Exactly one mile from where they had turned off was a crooked, left-leaning oak post that supported a small box on whose side someone had painted “S. Haynes” in neat black letters. The mailbox was at the foot of a long drive that could have used another load or two of gravel.

The drive swept up a gentle slope to a srx- or seven-room two-story house. Painted white, although not recently, the house was shielded by a stand or grove of winter-bare trees at least forty or fifty feet tall. To the left of the house was a large pasture of ten or fifteen acres. Behind the house was a sturdy-looking brown barn built of wood. A white board fence, in need of both paint and repair, marked the property lines.

Dead grass and weeds decorated the center of the long drive that ended in front of the house, where a big blue Ford pickup was hitched to a horse trailer.

“Whose truck and trailer?” Erika McCorkle asked.

“I don’t know,” Haynes said.

She drove slowly up the drive, which was at least seventy-five yards long, and parked behind the empty horse trailer. They got out and went up seven steps to a covered porch. As Haynes took from his pocket the front door key Howard Mott had given him, he noticed a large thermometer. Its reading was thirty-one degrees Fahrenheit.

Out of habit, Haynes tried the door before using the key. It was unlocked. He looked at Erika McCorkle, who shrugged. Haynes opened the door and they went in to find themselves in an entry hall. To the right was the living room. To the left, an old mirrored hatrack, possibly an antique. From it hung a duffle coat. Just ahead were stairs that led to the second floor.

Haynes called, “Anyone home?”

He was answered by a thumping sound that seemed to come from a closet built beneath the staircase. When they reached the closet door, Haynes tried the knob and found it locked. He knocked on the door and was again answered by the thumping noise.

“Pick the lock,” Erika McCorkle said.

“With what?”

“A credit card.”

He ignored her and inspected the door, which seemed to be a thick, solid one that had been hung by a craftsman who had left the usual three-quarters-of-an-inch clearance at the bottom.

He looked at Erika McCorkle and said, “Ever change a tire on that car of yours?”

“Sure”

“You know the thing that takes the nuts off the wheel?”

“The lug wrench.”

“I could use it.”

She was back with the lug wrench in less than two minutes. Haynes was relieved to see that one end of it formed a jimmy, useful for prying off hubcaps. He used the lug wrench to knock the pin out of the door’s top hinge, then repeated the process on the lower one. After slipping the fingers of both hands beneath the bottom of the door, he gave it a tug and it came off its hinges.

A woman lay on her back in the closet among the rubber boots, old shoes and two pairs of ancient galoshes. She wore a blue knitted watch cap. Across her mouth was a two-inch-wide strip of industrial duct tape. She also wore an old zipped-up leather flight jacket and a pair of straightleg blue jeans that were stuffed into expensive riding boots. The boots were taped together at the ankles. Her obviously bound hands were beneath her.

“Take the tape off her mouth while I go find something to cut her loose,” Haynes said.

Erika McCorkle nodded and knelt beside the woman, Haynes turned and entered the living room that contained mismatched pieces of sixty-to-seventy-year-old furniture, much of it gathered around the fireplace. A pair of open sliding doors could divide the living room from the dining room, which had been converted into an office furnished with two battered metal desks and a pair of fairly new four-drawer metal file cabinets. There were also a couple of phones, one on each desk, an IBM Wheel-writer and a personal computer. A swinging door led from the dining room/office into the kitchen, where Haynes found a paring knife with a sharp blade.

He hurried back to the staircase closet. The tape had been removed from the woman’s mouth and she now sat leaning against the closet wall, her feet still bound, her hands still behind her back. She stared up at Haynes and whispered, “My God.”

Erika McCorkle said, “Mr. Haynes, may I present your former stepmother, Letitia Melon. Letty, this is Steady’s son, Granville.”