Twilight at Mac’s Place

Twenty-one

In his fourth-floor room at the Madison Hotel, which offered an unspectacular view of Fifteenth Street to the north, Tinker Burns listened, the phone to his right ear, the good one, as McCorkle, lying cheerfully, said that Erika had just called from a gas station between Berryville and Leesburg to tell him that because of the snow she and Granville Haynes wouldn’t make it back to Washington until two or three in the morning.

“Well, thanks for letting me know,” Burns said, put the phone down and turned to the pair of seated men whom he knew only by their work names of Mr. Schlitz and Mr. Pabst.

“Sorry for the interruption,” Burns said, resumed his seat in a wing-back chair and leaned forward enough to rest elbows on knees. After clasping his hands together, he spread a look of deep interest across his face, aiming the interest first at Schlitz, then at Pabst.

“Since you guys didn’t get very far before the phone rang, I wonder if you’d back up and start from the beginning?”

Pabst looked at Schlitz. “Where’d I start?”

“With the horse.”

“Right,” Pabst said and nodded a head that seemed a shade less wide than his nineteen-inch neck. The rest of Pabst was also broad and thick, although not very tall. Probably five-eleven, Burns guessed, still using feet and inches to measure height despite his more than four decades of exposure to the metric system.

Pabst frowned as he tried to recall what he’d already said. The frown wrinkled a pale forehead below a shock of hair so blond it looked almost white. He wore the hair long — too long, Burns thought — as if to compensate for his nearly invisible eyebrows. Below the faint brows were eyes that seemed to be fading from pale sky blue into rain gray. They were set too close to a tiny nose that Burns suspected of having stopped growing when Pabst was five or six some thirty years ago.

“Yeah, the horse,” Pabst said. “Well, we get there, like I already told you, about six in the morning when it’s still dark, and park in the barn. Then this horse starts kicking up a fuss and screaming or whatever horses do—”

“They neigh,” said Schlitz.

“Okay, he’s neighing and kicking with his hind feet and when he gets tired of that he rears up and tries to use his front feet to duke it out with us. So the last time he goes up and comes down, I shoot him.”

“Right between the eyes,” Schlitz said with a strange wide smile. “Hell of a shot.”

Although Schlitz, like Pabst, had a tree-trunk neck, he also had one of those reflexive all-purpose smiles that show too much gum and are used to express pleasure, rage, pain, hope, fear, mirth, approval and sometimes nothing at all.

Tinker Burns had seen such smiles in the Legion and knew that they often belonged to nut cases. He remembered two particular Legionnaires, both borderline sociopaths, who had died two days apart in terrible agony, each of them gut-shot, their all-purpose smiles firmly in place.

In addition to the smile, Schlitz came with popped brown eyes that were divided by a nose that went straight, then left, then straight again. Above was a tangle of thick black curls frosted with gray, while down below, at the face’s bottom, was a jutting chin that Burns thought you could hang your hat on.

“So you shot the horse, huh?” Burns said to Pabst.

“Yeah.”

“That was dumb.”

“He was about to wake up the whole fucking neighborhood.”

“The nearest neighbor is half a klick down the road.”

Schlitz smiled the all-purpose smile. “He’s still dead, Mr. Burns.”

“So he is,” Burns said. “Go on.”

“Well, after I shoot him,” Pabst said, “we go in through the back door.”

“Still dark out?”

“Yeah, and once we jimmy the door and get inside, we wait till it gets light because we don’t wanta turn on any lamps or use a flash in case somebody driving by sees them. So after it gets light, we start looking — upstairs first, then downstairs. We’d just got started in the kitchen when we hear her.”

“Hear her do what?” Burns said.

“Drive up,” Schlitz said. “She makes a hell of a racket on the gravel. Slams her door, bangs her heels on the porch and then comes in.”

“Through the front door, right?”

“She’s got a key.”

“Where were you two then?”

“Still in the kitchen,” Schlitz said. “We hear her go in the dining room and walk around. Then she stops and doesn’t make a sound for about a minute. After that she goes back outside, comes back in and walks right into the kitchen.”

“And sees you two,” Burns said.

“Yeah, but by then we got grocery bags over our heads,” Schlitz said. “Pabst here grabs her and I slap some duct tape across her mouth. Then we tape her wrists and ankles up good and stick her in a closet — the only place that’s got a door we can lock. I still got the key.”

Burns sighed. “Then what?”

“Me and Pabst leave.”

“What’d she look like?” Burns said.

Pabst glanced at Schlitz and said, “Not bad, huh?”

Schlitz agreed with the all-purpose smile.

“Dark hair,” Pabst said. “Good teeth. She’s got on blue jeans and riding boots and a leather jacket. Pretty good muscle tone for somebody her age.”

“How old was she?”

Again, Pabst looked at Schlitz. “Forty — around in there?”

“Forty-two at least,” Schlitz said.

“You steal anything?” Burns asked.

Schlitz’s smile appeared, vanished and reappeared. “What d’you mean, steal anything?”

“A TV set. Her watch. Even her purse. Anything to make it look like a burglary.”

“You didn’t say to steal anything,” Schlitz said, still smiling. “You just told us to go in and try and find something.”

Tinker Burns leaned back in the big chair, rested his arms on its arms, took a deep breath, let some of it out and said, “After you tied her up and locked her in the closet, then what’d you do?”

“We take off,” Pabst said. “But we do it quiet. Schlitz sneaks down to the road first and signals when it’s all clear. Then I drive out of the barn, coast down the drive, pick him up and leave without nobody seeing us.”

“But before you did all that you searched her car, didn’t you?” Burns said.

Schlitz, forgetting to smile, looked puzzled. “What the hell for?”

“You said she came into the house,” Burns said. “Then she went into the dining room and stayed there for almost a minute, very quiet, then went back out to her car and came back in again. It kind of hit me that maybe she knew where to look for what you guys didn’t find. That maybe she found it and took it out to her car.”

Schlitz, smiling again, shook his head from side to side three times. “Never happen, Mr. Burns.”

“Why not?” Burns said, his voice almost gentle.

“Because she wasn’t there for that.”

All gentleness deserted Burns’s voice. “How the fuck d’you know what she came for?”

“You weren’t there, Mr. Burns,” Pabst said. “And you didn’t see it.”

“See what?”

“The horse trailer hitched to her pickup,” Schlitz said, his smile triumphant. “She wasn’t there for what we were after. She was there for the horse.”

“Right,” Burns said. “Of course.” He rose. “The horse.” Reaching into the breast pocket of his gray suit, he withdrew a plain white No. 10 envelope and handed it to the still seated Schlitz, who looked inside, counted the forty $100 bills, smiled his satisfaction and rose. Pabst also got to his feet.

Still smiling, Schlitz stuffed the envelope into his right hip pocket and said, “You ever want us to handle anything else, Mr. Burns, you know how to get in touch.”

“That I do,” said Burns, went with them to the door, saw them out, locked the door and put on the chain. Back in the center of the room he took a slip of paper from his pants pocket. Printed on it in pencil were two names. Mr. Schlitz and Mr. Pabst. Below the names was a telephone number.

Tinker Burns looked around for an ashtray until he remembered he had checked into a nonsmoking room. He went into the bathroom, burned the slip of paper over the toilet, let the ashes fall into the bowl and flushed them away.

Again in the room, he sat down on the bed next to the telephone and took a small address book from a pocket. With the phone cradled between his right ear and shoulder, the address book held open in his right hand, Burns used his left hand to tap out an eleven-digit number.

After five rings it was answered by a woman’s voice. Burns said, “Letty? Tinker Burns. I think maybe we oughta get together and have a little talk.”

“Go fuck yourself, Tinker,” Letitia Melon Haynes said and broke the connection.

Burns slowly hung up the phone, rose, stared down at it for a moment, then went to the desk and poured three fingers of Scotch into a glass. He added tap water in the bathroom. When he came out he crossed to the window, where he stood for a little more than thirty minutes, sipping his whisky and watching the snow fall on Fifteenth Street at night.